The soul of man is immortal, and its future is the future of a thing whose growth and splendour has no limit.

The principle which gives life dwells in us, and without us, is undying and eternally beneficent, is not heard, or seen, or smelt, but is perceived by the man who desires perception.

Each man is his own absolute lawgiver, the dispenser of glory or gloom to himself; the decreer of his life, his reward, his punishment.

--From The Idyll of the White Lotus, attributed to the Master Hilarion

A few days ago I saw Persepolis, an animated film based on a graphic novel (or rather memoir) by a woman who grew up in Iran during the revolution. It's a fine piece of work, though I wouldn't recommend it if you need a few extra drops of sunshine in your life.

One thing that struck me was the hypermodest attire inflicted on the women of Iran by the inevitably tyrannical "revolutionary" regime. The West was denounced by the "revolutionaries" on the basis of its depravity, allowing women to run around in all sorts of provocative clothing.

It's true, of course: women in the West do run around in all sorts of provocative clothing, and standards have inexorably been relaxing more and more over time.

My question is, what exactly constitutes depravity here? Which is the more depraved society--the one in which women can run around in sexy clothing without fear of molestation or one in which women must shroud themselves in black robes and veils to protect themselves from the lusts of the men?

In a strange way, the permissive attire of the West attests to a remarkable level of restraint on the part of its citizenry. I certainly wouldn't argue that a woman in provocative (or for that matter modest) attire is safe in every conceivable circumstance in this country, but the level of safety is remarkable even by our own past standards. After all, in the U.S. a century ago, a glimpse even of a woman's ankle or calf was titillating and scandalous.

--Stacy Bannerman, When the War Came Home: The Inside Story of Reservists and Their Families They Left Behind

The immediate response to such a state of affairs is to root out a culprit. Certainly there are many to be found. But in any case it would be imposslble to stop them from perpetuating the situation.

My own suggestion for a solution: simply make the resolution "I am not for sale." To answer one possibly instantaneous objection, this has nothing to do with earning one's way fairly and honestly and being compensated for it. One can work hard and earn even a lot of money without being for sale.

But then you know the difference between working for payment and being for sale. I would even say that everyone who has been in the workforce for more than a very short time understands it viscerally from his or her own experience.

So the solution for a country where everything is for sale is to resolve personally and for yourself not to be for sale. You can even make an affirmation out of it, since people seem to love affirmations these days. It is probably a far more important one to make than "I am in the flow of perfect abundance" or "I am at my perfect weight" or the other usual attempts at self-programming.

At any rate this is my personal choice for a meme to introduce into the bloodstream of American consciousness at this point.

This morning a rather unpleasant item appeared at the door of the otherwise pleasant Los Angeles hotel in which I was staying.

It was a copy of today's U.S. News and World Report. Of course, the news was bad. It was all bad news. It always is. I need not plague you with the specifics.

It led me to think why the news media are increasingly intensely hated these days. Everyone, of course, believes the news media are flunkies to THEM--whoever THEY are, i.e., the people you hate. The media are in THEIR pocket.

Be that as it may--and it is not a point that I would care to dispute--I think the disgruntlement with the media ultimately comes from a different source. It comes from the media's reinforcement of what I've described in an earlier posting as "the circle of fear"--the subconscious stratum of anxiety, dread, and discomfort that sits under the collective mind of humanity like an underground lake of poisoned water.

The circle of fear was not created by the media, and it would seem that most of those who work in it are as unaware of this phenomenon as everyone else. They simply do it because it works.

I saw an idealistic tabloid not long ago entitled Positive News--based on the idea that a paper should report good news ("Canada Preserves Enormous Wilderness Area"). A worthy sentiment, but somehow I have the impression that Positive News is not exactly flying off the stands like the proverbial hotcakes.

The reason for this is that we like the circle of fear or are at any rate addicted to it. We are so used to this background hum of anxiety and worry (to be attached randomly to practically any disturbing event) that we literally do not know who we are without it.

Those of you familiar with A Course in Miracles will recognize the general concept here--that the ego is essentially the creator and creation of fear. I think one needs to be very careful about demonizing this ego, but even so it seems to be true that our identity, at least in the narrower sense, is largely composed of fear in all its manifold hues.

An interesting question to contemplate: who or what would I be without my fear?

The statement "God is unknowable" is self-contradictory in the way that the statement "this sentence is false" is self-contradictory.

To say that "God is unknowable" is itself to say that one knows something about God--viz., that he cannot be known.

A review of a couple of new books on the Gospel of Judas in the current (May 1, 2008) New York Review of Books inspires these thoughts.

The review quotes a new book by Elaine Pagels and Karen King entitled Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, which speaks of the efforts of the early proto-catholic bishops to "consolidate scattered groups of Jesus's followers into...a single, united organization." One of the leaders of this movement was the late-second century bishop and heresiologist Irenaeus of Lyon. It was these bishops who created the Catholic and Orthodox church as we know it, with its centralized hierarchy, dogmatic certainty, and so on.

More and more scholars are coming to see this as a gradual movement that crystallized in the second century rather than something that can be traced back to Christ or even to his disciples.

This transformation is particularly strange in that the teachings of Christ, taken at face value, are more against the establishment than in its favor. There are not too many statements in the Gospels that speak well of priests or scribes or rabbis. How and why, then, did the Christian church come to take its subsequent form?

The story in factual and even theological terms has been widely told. Another angle that suggests itself to me is that proto-Catholic Christianity molded itself, to some degree unconsciously, on the Roman Empire, which was, like the church that would to some degree supplant it, at once rigid and hierarchical on the one hand and comparatively flexible and decentralized on the other.

But why should the church model itself on the Roman Empire, which hated and oppressed it? It makes me think of Bruno Bettelheim's concept of identification with the oppressor. Bettelheim, a concentration camp survivor, wrote about this phenomenon on the basis of his own experience. It seems that certain prisoners whose personalities are under severe stress accommodate by identifying with their captors. Probably the most famous instance of this in comparatively recent times was Patty Hearst, who started out as a prisoner of the Symbionese Liberation Army and ended up as a member.

Could something similar have taken place, on a much larger scale, with the Christian church? Certainly its identification with Rome is bizarre, given the empire's hatred of the Christians as well as the un-Christ-like cruelty that characterized so many of its actions. But as the review mentioned above suggests, much of the impetus toward the church's centralization in the early centuries came from--you guessed it--Rome and the bishops thereof (who around the fifth century began to call themselves popes).