More here – Hollyweird High:

Described in a school brochure as a course that facilitates and honors each student’s passage into adulthood…, “Mysteries” (a required Grade 6-12 course within the unique Human Development Department) has sparked much controversy on, and off campus. Mandalay Entertainment film executive/Mary Tyler Moore Productions original owner Mel Blumenthal’s heir, Jason Blumenthal (’86), loved “Mysteries,” benefiting from all its guided imageries and self-discovery rituals that culminated into a senior class rite of passage retreat to a hippie commune in Ojai. While developing Jean-Claude Van Damme and Brad Pitt vehicles for company President Peter Guber, he actually pines for the time as a teenager spent meditating in class “in the middle of a crazy high school day.”

Blumenthal’s contemporary, writer, Jim Gibson (son of Laugh-In joke man, Henry Gibson), regards Mysteries as “a crock of shit.” “It was so bizarre,” says Gibson. “We would pass around this gourd, and everyone would have to say what they were feeling.” Although this course is required, at least one kid got out of it because her parents felt it “interfered with her analysis.” A decade later, Gibson still resents having been “force-fed” Mysteries as a requirement, keeping him out of elective courses he preferred to take….

The Mysteries Program was originally developed in 1983, and run by Jack Zimmerman, who had previously professed at The Oakwood School — “a little Crossroads in the Valley.” After leaving Oakwood under questionable circumstances (rumors of illicit sex with students abound) in 1975, he founded the experimental school, Heart Light in 1980, which at it’s peak, had no more than thirty students. After three years of experimenting on children, Zimmerman’s vision unfolded. “I didn’t realize what Heart Light was about until about 1983,” says the Ph.D. “Then I began to see that what it was really about was this program which we called The Mysteries Program. You know, it was a full school, but the real juice of the school was this program.”

Crossroads President, Paul Cummins taught under his guru, Zimmerman, at Oakwood before he founded Crossroads, and when Zimmerman’s Heart Light dissolved, Cummins invited him to Crossroads to help the students get in touch with themselves. The bone thrown to Zimmerman was that he could direct the on-campus program, and run the excursions that concluded each senior year at The Ojai Foundation — a hippie commune where the kids would camp in yurts for five days, and learn how to chant.

Most of the people in that (admittedly incredibly cynical) article are from my brother’s graduating class. The article also gets to how the mixture of Hollywood and religion might have warped my mind a little bit – and why I see the devotion to Hollywood glamor no different than the devotion to any religion. I’ll admit as well that the Foundation experience wasn’t all that terrible. It was a time when the jocks and the nerds put aside their differences and hung out together. Unfortunately, that feeling of solidarity collapsed as soon as we got back to school.

Over 10 years ago, on the 20^th of April 1999, two teenage boys, Eric Harris (18) and Dennis Klebold (17) walked into their school, murdered 12 of their fellow students, one teacher and injured 24 others.  Although the media attempted to blame their acts on being bullied, police reports show that this was not the case.  In fact, for over a year, the boys had been planning the total destruction of their school.  They did not target any particular enemies, but had targeted humanity as such.  Along the lines of the suicidal Aleskei Nilych Kirillov in Dostoevsky’s Devils or The Possessed, they hoped to become the models of an apocalyptic revolution of other disaffected self-aggrandizing teens that would spread like contagion. They even fantasized about crashing a plane in New York City, two years before September 11. In their writings, it appears that both Klebold and Harris each believed that they were the incarnation of the mind of God, directing world events from inside of their own heads.  The impression that one is absolutely alone in the universe, while everything else is merely a projection of one’s own mind, is called panenanthropism, literally meaning “the All is in the person.”  This paper is an attempt to understand how panenanthropism functioned and could develop in children like Harris and Klebold….

For Harris, objective reality had become an illusion.  In a diary entry, he addresses it to the ‘survivors’ of his apocalyptic mass murder:  “If you recall your history the Nazis came up with a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish problem.  Kill them all.  Well in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I say ‘KILL MANKIND.’  No one should survive.  We all live in lies.” In another entry, he talks about the possibility of a car crashing into a school bus and killing all of the children inside.  He says that the incident is not a tragedy, because it only took place inside of someone’s mind; it is a tragedy only relative to the observer. He writes:  “Why cant we learn in school how we want to, why cant we sit on desks and on shelves and put our feet up and relax while we learn?  Cause thats not what the ‘real world is like’ [?] well hey f…heads, there is no such thing as an actual ‘real world.’  Its just another word like justice, sorry, pity, religion, faith, luck and so on.” He believed that the Earth should be given back to the animals and longed for the elimination of all laws, rules, obligations so that so-called ‘human nature’ could take over and destroy itself, leaving only the fittest to reshape the world.

Similarly Klebold began to question the veracity of objective reality.  In one entry, he wrote:  “My existence is shit to me – how I feel then.  I’m in eternal suffering. In infinite directions in infinite realities – yet these realities are fake…” From Klebold’s entries, we do get a more detailed picture of their metaphysical outlook.

I know nothing about this writer, but this sentence leaps out at me: “Although Littleton Colorado at the time of the shootings was known as a bastion of white, middle-class evangelical Christianity, neither the Harris nor the Klebold family had been particularly religious.”  As if saying: if only they were Christian and its separation of God and man, this wouldn’t have happened.

I’m no crystal-wearing New Ager – though if anything was to describe my spiritual worldview, it would probably be New Age – i.e. everything else. But this whole argument seems fairly absurd. Blaming “God” on what people have done in the name of God makes little sense. This is no different than blaming abortion clinic bombers on the teachings of Christ, or Islamic terrorism on all of Islam. The logic goes: the sun causes skin cancer and makes things grow – therefore, the sun causes cancer.

There is no doubt people can do horrible things with religion. But we’re living in a time of interpretation, not certainty. Anyone who believes that “all is one” “life is a dream” is a reason to kill a school bus full of children is a lunatic. It has nothing to do with the concept of “life is a dream.”

I spent the last couple of (humorless) posts talking about the (possible) necessity of war or legislating morality.  There are times when war can be justified – even useful. If you combine this with the New Age idea of death=a “return to Source” or we are all one consciousness – then, yes, there could be a terrible genocide. But equally there could be a terrible genocide if people take the Book of Revelation as gospel truth.

I don’t know what would happen during a time of certainty about the nature of God. Imagine if UFOs landed and somehow proved that “all is one” is a literal concept and life is a dream. In order to see this, our brains would probably have to evolve to see these changes in motion – or else it would just be another idea. Would this make people think that life is equally worthless, or would it increase its meaning?  Maybe they’d prove as well that there was life after death. This could, yes, lead to genocide because people would see no problem with sending others to the afterlife. But maybe at that point we’d have a totally different conception of mortality and the reasons people are alive. In other words, killing people would be the gift, life is the punishment.

That concept in itself could lead to terrible scenarios. The Sufis have a phrase, “The wound is the gift,” which is comforting in times of crisis, but could justify wounding people when in the hands of a lunatic.  But if we could actually see a spiritual dimension and understand implicitly via literal spiritual laws about why bad things happen, it would change our attitudes towards abuse. This would be a much different scenario than a despot torturing people based on a deranged belief.  If there was proof of a spiritual dimension and we were suddenly part of it, chances are we would act in a more “spiritual” manner. All we have to do is evolve so we can see these other spiritual dimensions.  That’s all.

In short, if we had a literal understanding of the nature of God, it would change the fabric of society totally. Right now, what we have is fundamentalists using their interpretation for horrible ends. But you can’t blame the message for the interpretation.

Greetings!

I’m an advocate of your immediate progression in life. Do receive the utensils of life which are my words of wisdom. Not sent to diminish your accolades of self grown life experiences, but to assist in nurturing a sound train of thought that will only serve a greater purpose of the experiences in life that you have yet to become fortunate enough to know. To think is to awake your thoughts from an abyss of stagnations. The greats have mastered this in their due time of life’s evolution and they have remained great in our time. Thinking smart satisfies the choice of a wise decision of thought. The breakdown is apparent but the direction of a smart thought while hardly thinking is just the kind of progression that exerts hard educated change. Knowledge is indeed what I seek, knowledge is what I profess for you, and knowledge is what I exhale holistically upon mankind… DAILY. NO DISCRIMINATION.

Just as your heart beats rhythmically, and your brain throbs synchronically, always remember that the sum of your life’s equation will only equal to the measures and efforts of your personal attainment. Your evolution of elevation thanks you in advance.

Think around the box… Control the box!

Best Regards Never Less Regards,