I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

I just finished reading Elie Wiesel's Night for my summer session, and it raised a whole series of very uncomfortable questions for me. I am well aware that my personal cosmology consists of some fairly provable and repeatable tenets, but has as of yet been untested in truly dark circumstances. I have walked through violence, addiction (others'), divorce, death, and grief. My cosmology has held. I believe we are all connected, though I don't know quite HOW that works yet. Maybe string theory will finally yield a glimpse into the field where matter and psyche are connected, through vibration. I don't know.

I also know that there are a great many people wandering around that have no sense of that connectedness at all, and find Otherness a very comfortable place. I'm me, and that means I am also fine, but you are Something Else. That Something Else might need to be contained. Or perhaps eliminated. I get it. There are plenty of instances just in the past decade: Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia, the Sudan, Rwanda...I get it.

My cosmology works even in those dark places I have hit through now because I can see it at the level of individual struggle. Addiction is displaced psychological trouble. You can't resolve the trouble, you turn somewhere else to deal with it. How long will you stay on this path? See, the cosmology works....

And it works in divorce. We were just working on each other, see? It was karma. It was needed for my growth. For his. I should thank him for what we went through because through him I unlocked my shadow and became aggressive in business, and sure of my step. I stopped being so fearful. And we have the most gorgeous child, and she was meant to be.

See? It still works.

But I have this small, yet decidedly uncomfortable finger prodding persistently in my side that whispers I have not truly walked into a real hell. A hell of genocide, or war, of people shooting babies for fun, of torturing one another for the satisfaction of a mild curiosity...see, these places I didn't go yet. And I don't know what they truly mean in the question of what's it all about anyway? When I read Elie Wiesel's book, or see Schindler's List or read about Serbia, Rwanda, Iraq, and the Sudan, I don't know what framework to establish here. Is it the dark side of God experiencing for itself just what it is capable of? Is it a major defect in the human soul, that once in a while, darkness just takes over and rules the day en masse? Is it that we are just not far enough along in our evolution from animals, and delude ourselves otherwise?

Can you hear the scientist in me wondering what possible hypothesis of humanity could be put in place that provides adequate explanation here?

And what if I myself were caught in such a horrible place? Would my cosmology work then? Would I still be given that quiet voice that tells me when to act and what to do at the moment needed to save myself? Could I save my daughter? Or would I be reduced to such a survival-based existence that I would need to concentrate on saving only myself? This happens in the direst of circumstances, you know. I hate even contemplating this, but sense that I will spend some time worrying about this for reasons yet unknown to me in my life.

And it's the oddest juxtaposition of life that I should sit here writing this right now in what is purported to be the freest country in the world....until you go to the airport, that is. Then you start seeing that somehow, we have started looking just like Yugoslavia did when I went through there in the 1980's - at the height of the Cold War just before its collapse. My good friend Jimschweizer, for whom I have the utmost respect, and I talk about this a great deal. What to do? Where to go? Why are we thinking like this? Are we seeing danger where none exists? Or is this the Weimar Republic about 1935? Rome about 390 AD? Have we been around so many times by now that the patterns of a society in rapid decline are so evident one can't fail to miss them?

Don't know. That's for another essay. I think for now I will have to continue to sit in discomfort while that finger still prods my side insistently, quietly whispering that I haven't quite got it all figured out just yet, now do I? There are places in the human heart, at the collective level, that I am still afraid to travel....