(no subject)

[jcsbimp01]

This (LONG!) blog entry (copied from Facebook) contains one of my frequent dream-journal entries, but it is more than just that, because my dreams early this morning became more than that, due to their leading to avenues of thought I found it profitable to travel, and perhaps even to share. Because of the subjects of the dreams, it might be of interest to people who knew me from my Ridgecrest summer (1978), my

Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Center Summer Staff Alumni

friends who became so like a family back then, but I don't know - it also might become too emotionally or politically edgy. We'll have to see. Don't shoot me just yet.

Last night's dreams started out with a large indoor business, part of a multi-level shopping mall, set up as a kind of buffet restaurant, specializing in sandwiches and other meals made with their own brand of premium sliced ham, and maybe beef also. I was there with the family of my upbringing - Mom and Dad have made appearances in several of my most recent dreams, for some reason - and we were trying to determine among us who wanted what, and who would place the order. I was going to use the funds I had to order sandwiches for me and Mom, but it was becoming a typical stress-dream in the way the story made it difficult for me to track down Mom.

I woke from this dream at the insistence of Daisy and Lucie, because it was time for their early morning Dental Chews. When I returned to bed and to sleep, the indoor space had become part of the Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Center space, and it was now one of my dreams of returning to that place, the site of what was for a long, long time the Best Summer of My Life [TM]. But now, the weird workings of my dream mind had transformed the place into an altogether unfamiliar setting, with unfamiliar people. In fact, the decor was garish, circus-like. It was kind of like a parody of the last dream I had had of returning to Ridgecrest, where the large cafeteria in Rhododendron Hall (?) had been converted into this candy-colored sort of rotunda room with desserts and items resembling a Candy Kitchen store on the beach more than an eating place for a Baptist assembly. This new space my dream-mind was identifying in today's early morning hours as Ridgecrest was basically a noisy circus, and I actually actively resisted the notion - to the point that I woke up. My arthritic shoulder was twinging now, but I returned for a little more sleep and a somewhat more lucid and sane dreaming, in which the Ridgecrest environment, though filled with people I still don't recognize from real life, was more sensible: an outdoor, grassy area set up with seating platforms for a reunion assembly. Some of the meaning of what I had been dreaming - which I will explore subsequently - was sinking in and leading to thoughts of how much I had cherished the 1978 summer, as well as my subsequent SEVERE nostalgia for that whole experience, and I began to get teary-eyed as I described my feelings to the dream-fiction version of a female Ridgecrest friend who was marveling that, here we were at just the beginning of an Alumni weekend, and I was already crying.

I was not firmly implanted in the dream world by that time, which made this all more of a daydream, and I woke up for good soon after. But some of the symbolism of the Ridgecrest-transformed-beyond-recognizability dreams I've had recently started to come through, a little bit, or at least I think they did, and here is how and why.

What has transformed beyond recognizability is not Ridgecrest, but me, in a spiritual and, importantly, ideological sense. Actually, regardless of who actually has done the changing, there is a vast philosophical distance between where I was as a Southern Baptist young man of 21 and the self-described "Christian Zen Discordian" I am now... so much so, that I can use words like that to describe myself, words which would have horrified me back then with their ostensible sacrilege.

I was really kind of bummed last night before bedtime, so much so that my zazen practice was much briefer than usual, with a glumness that had a hot, impatient sort of irritation mixed in. I had commented a bit contrarily to a posted memory my wife

Wendy

made about life being short, and I responded as I did because, in the days of 45 in office and this whole mismanaged pandemic, and their effects on life in my retirement years that is already fairly different from what I had hoped it might be (though I had plenty of reason to expect the differences), life does not seem short or quickly-passing at all: It has slowed down to an uncomfortable crawl. It's not just that I miss Wendy being here when she's up North helping with grandkids - I definitely do! - but there are ways in which, to quote Joseph Heller, "I would not have picked this way for the world."

The biggest change in me lately, and the change that might have the most believable, direct change in how my mind serves up dreams of a return to a cherished Baptist conference center, is in the political awareness and opinion I have gained as a result of watching the rise of 45 to power. I have always been a proponent of environmentalism, speaking truth to power, gender and racial equality, and other liberal ideas. I have always had a fascination with both hippie culture and spiritual enlightenment. These existed in me indeed even back when I was a Southern Baptist working that summer in the North Carolina mountains, and the summer before that in Northwest Indiana churches. Much has occurred since, much that has been transformative: Federal employment with its 33-year and 5-month direct view into the corrupting forces of money, loyalism, and "Running Government Like a Business"; three marriages, two divorces, fatherhood, times of plenty, and times of having less; becoming Roman Catholic as an adult (through RCIA) because I saw value in my (first) wife and me belonging to the same church and I knew she would not change her denomination; attending Presbyterian and Episcopalian congregations after that; growing to love "sacred space" and the feeling of reverence and awe in more formal forms of liturgy; dealing with $1032.79/month child support payments for the better part of two decades; discovering the amazing ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, ideas which frightened the daylights out of me at first; going into psychotherapy for anxiety that was crippling me as far back as Freshman year of college; discovering the path to a still mind through seated "meditation" practice, and finding the wisdom of American and classic Zen masters; exploring mystical ideas from sources I am still a bit bashful about just listing outright here, other than my father being a member of a Masonic Order and the apple not falling too terribly far from the tree.

Those departures from the path I was on at 21 were significant, but their effect on my dreaming was merely that, during those years, I don't think I had *any* dreams of returning to Ridgecrest then. They just didn't happen, but that may simply be due to their being no symbolic need for them. During my first marriage, in fact, I had become disgusted with my frequent deep pangs of nostalgia, and the effects I believed at the time they were having on my ability to be a good, industrious husband to my first wife, and so I did the unthinkable one day: I took my "Cakira," the Ridgecrest yearbook from the summer 1978, outside to the curb, where several lawn-leaf bags of yard clippings sat waiting to be picked up by the garbage man the next morning, placed the book inside one of those bags, and never saw it again. Even nagging wife #1 was shocked that I did that, though I had done it, in my mind, for her, for us.

No, the big jump in psychic territory came during this past decade, though it indeed has some roots going further back. The

GOP

obstructionism of Obama, the rise of 45, and the Religious Right's alarming support of him awakened me, as it awakened many, to damage not yet repaired in this nation. Ava DuVernay's "13th" documentary and

Ibram X. Kendi

's anti-racist works, particularly "Stamped From the Beginning", have turned my attention to the years - centuries - of manipulation by (to use some well-worn alliterative turns of phrase I like a bit too much) powerful profiteers, paying prominent politicians, who pad the pockets of pundits and preachers, to keep us just okey-dokey with corruption and evil in high places, much as their ideological ancestors kept multitudes of early Americans happy with genocide and exile of Natives as well as enslavement of Africans.

I had begun noticing - and heeding words of people and organizations concerned with - manipulation by broadcast and published entertainment and journalistic media, manipulation to Manufacture Consent. Robert Anton Wilson's voice was among those raising angry awareness of this, but Noam Chomsky became a voice to heed as well. Also, social media had come into my life, a subset of the bigger trend of instant Internet access to news, fact-checking, and variety of opinion I had not had before. And friends. And e-mail lists. And the computer-enhanced exchange of ideas, even dangerous ones.

I could see the evidence of the dovetailing of a significant subset of Evangelical Christianity with @GOP talking points, through televangelists,

The 700 Club

, and others. And if I failed to see the hand of Jesus Christ being the primary mover in all of this, it may have been a lack of "spiritual discernment" on my part, but I certainly wasn't alone. Also, as I said, I had seen some of the corrupting effects of loyalism and "Running Government Like a Business" in my

U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)

career, and had already felt some of the sting of backlash that comes when one resists the manipulative/manipulated masses and begins to discover one's voice in Speaking Truth to Power. (It's not for the career-advancement-minded!)

Anyway, you get the idea by now, presented as it is in my usual long-winded way.

It's no wonder that Ridgecrest has returned to my dreams, and is becoming ridiculously unrecognizable even as it does so. That is a psychological metaphor my mind is creating as to how far I've moved, due to circumstance, conscious decision, and one or two or a dozen genuine American political/spiritual crises, from where I was back in the summer of 1978 at age 21. Life *is* ridiculous and unrecognizable, despite the forces making it so having been active for a long, long time.

My mind was just realizing that I'm not wholly at peace with all that has transpired. But that sort of realization, together with what I do in response, are what life is for.