Choose, Are you YOU or are you Everything

What I have noticed in Popular Culture, even in regards to Spirituality, is that the emphasis is on INDIVIDUAL wellbeing… it is as though the Business of Spirituality was addressing itself to the Market of Individual Needs and Desires.  Well, we all do live in a Capitalist Society where success is measured on the ability to sell products to Individual Consumers, and so we can’t be much surprised when even Spirituality begins to address its appeal to the Individual – the Ego, when, really, isn’t the entire point of Spiritual to transcend the Ego and Identify with the Universal.  But, apparently, the Marketing People within the ranks of the Spiritual Community haven’t yet been able to resolve that contradiction…  apparently they have all borrowed money from the Banks to fund the Business of Spirituality , and, well, they are honor bound to pay it back… but it is questionable whether they are doing it honorably.      

Yes, it may seem just like a small point of confusion… not so much the Blame of Spirituality as the Culture we now live in, so addressed to the Individual Consumer.  I forget who said it, but it was a very wise quote, regarding the good and moral men from past ages, that “their virtues were their own, but their vices belonged to the Age in which they lived”.  Anyway, all our vices belong to this Capitalist Age where Greed and Selfishness are accounted the Primary Virtues.

So we really need to look at Spirituality, and what we expect of it. Try to drown out the drumbeats of our Selfish Consumer Driven Culture , and look at Spirituality itself, in its purity.

This introspective Look  may not be pleasant.  Well, it WON’T be pleasant.  Humanity, the World, the Collective, the Universe are all in sad shape.  If you are at all Spiritually Connected, well, you should  be sad.  If you are into Spirituality to find Peace or Bliss, well maybe you are in the wrong place.  Maybe you should turn to Drug Addition  or promiscuous sexual activity to get what you are really after.  

Tara the Hero Cat, An Evolutionary Milestone

At first Man and Dog had been Symbiotic Species – two Species living together in cooperation for their mutual benefit – Dogs, because they were so well adapted for locating food-game at close proximity and being able to bring it down, and Man, because he was able to stand up on his hinder legs and look over the tall grasses and spot food-game at long distances.  Their Partnership gave them Hunting Abilities that combined the best of both worlds.

 

But, at the onset of Civilization, where Mankind would have to live on Surplus Grains – foodstuffs stored away for Tomorrow, well, Dogs could do nothing.   Rats and Mice, too small for dogs to care about, would get into the food stores and barns and eat away all they could find.  Civilization based upon Surplus Stores seemed impossible.  Then, two things happened.   First, somebody had the good sense to invent the Wheel… not just the wheel we use for wagons and such, but perhaps even more importantly, the Industrial Wheel, in this case the Wheel used for Spinning Clay Pots.  With the Clay Spinning Wheel, Storage Pots could be somewhat Mass Produced, and inside of Play Pots, grains and surplus food-stuffs could be kept safe from rodent predation.    But while the long-term Storage of Grains was thus made secure, Civilization still had the problem of protecting the Grain while it would still be in the Field, and while being gathered at Harvest, and then again when it would reach the Kitchens and Bakeries for end use.   And the rodents would not just bring with them their seemingly bottomless little appetites, but also Dirt and Disease.   Civilization was still vulnerable.   But Rescue was at hand – enter what became our new little friends, the Cats.   If Humans would only be cordial and welcoming to Cats, that is, pose no threat to them, then the Cats could come out of the Forests and Jungles and into the Fields and Barns, and then even into the Kitchens, and then confront and defeat, and have for dinner, those little maraudering rodents that had been such a problem.   Anyway, to help advance this end, in early striving Civilizations, the local Priesthoods and Shamans gave to Cats something of a Divine Status, especially in Egypt.   Cats therefore, nearly everywhere, got a boost up on Humanity’s Totem Poles and were given various new degrees of Protection.  Like Dogs before them, they acquired a special status – they became recognized as, well, ‘Pets’.

 

Now, dogs were brought into Symbiotic Relationship with Man perhaps more than 10 Thousand years ago, and, incidentally, may have actually contributed to our Language Skills.  Consider that no other Primate (monkey or ape) finds it necessary to speak to one another, but Man, who found it necessary to give commands and direction to Dogs, DID have to learn how to stretch out the Voice Box to elaborate a whole inventory of Sounds connected to expressing Conceptual Meaning through phonics.  There is no denying it – Dog was obviously ‘Man’s Best Friend’.  But Cats and Civilization came later, perhaps 5 to 7 thousand years ago, and so the Symbiotic Process with Cats has lagged a bit behind that of Dogs.  We can see some of the differences, for instance, Cats are not quite so willing to obey commands… at least not so promptly, and there are even some breeds of Dog that have evolved a kind of a ‘smile’, that serves, no doubt, to make them more ‘agreeable’ to Human Beings.    Cats still have their unexpressive ‘poker’ faces.  But they purr for us, and quickly learn to recognize words, and vocalize back to us when we speak to them.   Cats are indeed coming along.   But who really was expecting THIS… The Hero Cat!?

 

This whole Tara the Hero Cat Thing is certainly a huge Evolutionary Milestone Event – that a Cat went beyond its original contract of simply eliminating pests and being a Pet Companion, to actually committing itself to a dangerous Fight to Protect its Human Patrons.  Yes, it must have certainly happened before, but what is different now, is that it was captured on camera and went on line, became ‘viral’, and then hit the Television News Rotations, which sent people back on line to add to the ‘viral spread’.   Now I’ve heard that Magazines and Big Corporations are jumping in to get a ‘piece’ of Tara, so to speak.   That Cat has become Famous.   Everyone I have spoken to on the street knows about and has ‘checked out’ the story of Tara the Hero Cat who saved little boy from Dog.  With all the trouble in the World right now, it is really, for the moment, the biggest story out there.   It hit a very powerful Cultural Nerve… and Globally… All of Humanity seems to be cheering for Tara.

 

So what will be the repercussions?   Cats, who many had formerly seen as merely overly proud and opportunistic partners in their relationship with Humanity, and as mere ‘pussies’ when compared to the more macho-seeming Dogs, well, all that has changed overnight.   Cats have now faced off Dogs and come out victorious.   And Dogs, who had once been thought to be ‘friendly’, well, obviously their Breed Lines have been corrupted by the interventions of Human Gamblers who had bred dogs to bring out traits for Crazy and Unconditional Violence – so that their Dogs could thoughtlessly and automatically attack and kill Bears and fight and kill Each Other, just so their owners could win wagers.   Oh, and the modern idea of Police Attack  Dogs… was it ever a very smart idea to breed dogs that would excel at attacking Human Beings?  For such small advantages, we turn our Best Friend into a Feared Enemy.  So it has come to this end, that now the World sees, sadly, that No Dog… or well, No Dog without a solid Pedigree for Peacefulness, can fully be trusted.   And the World now sees that Cats are now the NEW Protectors of our Families – selfless and brave little Protectors.   And when they are not ferociously defending us from our enemies, they are affectionately curled up on our laps, or close by on the arms or backs of our chairs… loving us, really, before we truly loved them – that is, giving them the respect that we now know they deserve.

 

Well, what can be said, now, but that ‘Cats are the new Dog’.   It took thousands of years, but cats have finally caught up and surpassed that other, older Pet – the Pet that had been so useful before We became Civilized.   Oh, and, what’s more, cats are so much cleaner.   A dog will pee and poop on the floor, but cats will naturally ‘go’ in a box of kitty dirt and then bury its business to minimize the unpleasant hygiene smells.

 

Anyway, stand back at the Pet Stores and don’t dawdle in front of the Cat Cages… or you may be trampled in the stampede to buy up members of Man’s New Best Friend – the intrepid and fearless Kitty Cat!

  

Problems with the Immortal Soul and Reincarnation

 

I’ve been reading Professor Mark W. Muesse’s book, “Age of Sages” and it has served as something like grist for the mill in regards to this essay.  Professor Muesse was writing about the rather important and transformative time in History called the Axial Age (which ran roughly from 800 to 200 B.C.), in which Religious and Spiritual Ideas underwent radical change.   In Persia there arose an awareness of Morality and Individual Moral Responsibility that had not existed before, and almost World-wide there was a shift toward believing in Individual Immortal Souls.  The Aryans from the Euro-Asian Steppes were the primary drivers behind these new Belief Systems, bringing Morality to Persia, as well as the doctrines of the Immortal Soul, which later came to influence Jewish, Greek, and still later, the thinking of Christian Civilization.  In India, however, thinking on Immortality turned toward Reincarnation.   Now, this essay is not for quarrelling which doctrine is right, and which is wrong.  Indeed, both ideas are wrong.  But I would like to present some opinions regarding why these mistaken notions arose in the first place and what has kept them going.

 

Before the very transformative Axial Age, Religions were largely amoral, that is, people were not judged on whether they were good or bad, but by other more practical criteria – how successful they were, in such things as Business, Battle, and in procuring women and livestock – both valuable commodities at the time.  The primary virtues were in Strength, Valor, Prowess and Cunning, although the Most Successful People tried their best to convince those beneath them that Loyalty too was a virtue.  Oh, and related to Loyalty, we also have the Higher Ups preaching the merits of ‘Bravery in Battle’… yes, and who wouldn’t give vast praise to somebody willing to die fighting your battles for you.  But, putting cynicism aside, for a moment, whether the Pre-Axial Virtues served for just furthering personal ambition or for contributing to maintain the Hierarchical Social Structure, in isolation to these individuals or groups, these ‘Virtues’ did have their utility.  It is when Individuals or Groups clashed that problems with such ‘virtue’ arose, where we would have the paradox of Virtue being good from some but very bad for others – those on the receiving end of the other groups ‘virtue’.  Just think how many people had to die throughout History so that some could prove how brave they could be in battle… and nowadays they are trying to prove it with suicide vests.       

 

The Religions of those Pre-moral times were not yet Monotheistic, but rather there was envisioned a huge Pantheon of Gods and Divinities of various Rank and Relation.   These Gods, with certain exceptions, were Immortal.  Of course, the Gods of conquered and collapsed Civilizations somehow had to be killed off, and so the Legends account for ‘Dead’ Immortal Gods.   It was in this way that the Greek Pantheon had displaced that of the Cretan Civilization  (which was highly unfortunate, as Crete had been the center of a Very Advanced Civilization (think Atlantis), while the Greeks were still a patchwork of warring Barbarian Tribes – a state of affairs that they never were able to much transcend, even today).

 

So, the Pre-Axial Gods were immortal, while it was understood that Human Beings all died and stayed dead, at best sinking down into the soil to be ghostly earth spirits, no longer with Human Consciousness, but more or less the way we think of ghouls today.  Ancient Man had the good sense to correlate good conscious and cognitive functioning to healthy bodies and minds, and so it was simply assumed that the Faculties of Dead People would be rather severely impaired.   But in their Legends the Ancients did work in Exceptions to this Rule of Death being Final, and they probably did it only to enhance their Entertainments and Dramas – the Story Tellers and Poets, after all, had to make a living too.   They Created ‘Heroes’.  A Hero was some Human Being so exceptional in the Virtues of that Time – Strength, Valor, Prowess and Cunning – that even the Pantheon of Gods would be impressed and grant that particular Human Being the Status and Condition of being Immortal.  Hercules and Theseus had both been ‘Heroes’ that had attained Immortality.  But wasn’t the granting of such privileges to some bound to stir up envy and ambition among all the other Mortals?   It seems that the Poets may have taken a bit too much license with the Real Truth of Things.

 

Well, at first the damage could not get too much out of hand, because, well, given the Virtues that could Win Immortality at that Time, remember – Strength, Valor, Prowess and Cunning.  Such martial Virtues didn’t give ordinary people much of an Opportunity to advance toward Immortality.  Just think about it  – to prove their Worthiness, wouldn’t they have had to at least subdue their own Tribe and then others, and all without ever encountering Defeat or Setback?  That would be almost impossible.  Most aspiring Heroes would get killed, by other aspiring Heroes, the moment they started making their Move.  

 

But when the Idea of Moral Responsibility was introduced to Religion; when the List of Virtues underwent a radical change, swinging over to the appreciation of  attributes such as Love, Kindness, Charity, Selflessness, Service and Self Discipline; then suddenly the imagined door to Heroic Immortality swung wide open, relatively speaking.  Yes, to practice perfect as Love, Kindness, Charity, Selflessness, Service and Self Discipline, well, that would seem almost impossible too, but, yet again, there would be none of those dangerous demands from the Old Barbarian Virtues that involve  killing thousands of people who would probably fight back quite earnestly, and most likely kill you first.  No, the New Civilized Virtues, if difficult, were not ‘that’ impossible, and so people could HOPE for Immortality on the grounds of Moral Perfection, or, rather the more likely condition of being Morally ‘Good-Enough’ to please a God with a sunny and forgiving disposition.  

 

Of course, leave it to the Greeks to cheat the System there also.  When the True Christian Church was annihilated with the Destruction of Jerusalem in 71 A.D. the heterodox and unauthorized ‘Christian’ Church of Greece, introduced their own cheap Doctrine for Immortality, claiming that one only had to ‘believe’ in Jesus, go through a few cheap rituals, and then one would be forgiven for all past and future sins and get heavenly Immortality as a matter of course, with no real moral effort or moral practice at all.  It was a Doctrine that,  from then on, True Christians were ever at extremes to guard against and to try to suppress.   But Darkness won out, and with Martin Luther, a defeated and subjugated Catholic Church, and Modern Protestantism, the Doctrine of Cheap Amoral Immortality won out, and so it is today that Modern Protestant Globalized Civilization is largely Selfish, and Amoral and on the verge of ruinous collapse.  As Jesus said, “One knows a Tree by its Fruits”, and it does not take a very discerning look to see that World Civilization is rotten to its core.

 

But, where the Greeks weren’t involved, the urge for Individual Immortality through the Path of Moral Perfection, made some wonderful strides.  Zoroastrianism rose up in Persia as the first Moral Religion, and its doctrines later spun off to create the Sufi Orders – extremely pious, virtuous and spiritually talented individuals.

 

But what happened in India where the emphasis on Immortality took the bazaar turn toward Reincarnation?  It was more or less the same Aryan People involved.  But in Persia nearly all of the interactions between Peoples were between other Aryans.  You see, in most cases when there are ‘Invasions’ of Pastoral Nomadic Peoples, the Invading Forces consist of a confluence of Several Allied Tribes, and they work their successes by taking on only one Native Tribe at a time, pushing them out of their territory before moving on to another.  Most of the time the confronted Native Tribe will not care to stand and fight, as they see the Land at their backs as just as good as the Land they would be giving up.  Their only inconvenience is that must pack up their tents and move, that is, outside of their usual schedule .   You see, Pastoral Nomadic Tribes move about anyway.   As Hunters they must keep moving because if they stay in a certain area too long  they will either deplete the Game or they will scare it away or the animals will learn how to avoid them.  And as Pastoralists, they must keep moving because their animals will eventually overgraze the area or attract an influx of wolves and big cats, which are just as dangerous to them as their sheep.   So it is no inconvenience worth dying for, for a pastoral nomadic Society to pack up and go down the road, seeking fairer pastures.      

 

Anyway, as first one then more Native Tribes are displaced, they themselves, the Displaced Natives, form Alliances so that in their own turn they can displace Peoples further down the line.   So it is that when China built their great Wall, it started a push of Pastoral Nomadic Peoples to the West, like dominos, the Victims of One Day being the Invaders of the Next, and it ended in the Invasion of  Europe and contributed much to the decline of Roman Civilization. 

 

One wonders why the Victims never formed Alliances to attack those who attacked them first.  There did not seem to be much appeal for Revenge.  Well, apparently it was seldom conceived that it would be practical that they should turn and fight their Original Enemies, as, since their Enemies were already in a Strong Alliance, they would be a tougher fight then simply going to fight those, down the line, who are united and unprepared.  So, in regards to our present Essay, the Aryans largely had Persia to themselves, and all their squabbling was between each other. 

 

But the Aryan Invaders in India came upon settled Cities – what was left of the declining Indus Valley Civilization.  These Settled Natives did not run away before them, and they were too many to kill, and besides, since they were already pacified by the habits of Civilization, it appeared as though they were willing to submit themselves to the service of the Aryan Predators.  Apparently these Natives had been slaves before, and they didn’t mind so much being slaves again… like working for a company that has been ‘taken over’… one assumes that the new boss won’t be much different from the old boss.  

 

So, anyway, to account for the differences between Persia and India, we can guess that the Urge for Morality on the Persian Steppe was influenced by the repugnance for the violence being done between Aryan and Aryan – they saw each other as One People and it probably did not require of Zoroaster, the Founder of the First Moral Religion,  much Moral Imagination to define a Teaching  that would see Harming one another as Evil, while being kind to one another would be seen as  Good. 

 

But in India, the Aryans had no concern for those they conquered, except that the defeated should completely submit, and perhaps they needed some salve for their own Guilty Consciences.  So they taught Themselves and those they predated upon that some were born to Conquer and others born to Submit, and that the Aryans who did their duty in suppressing Native Rights would be rewarded in future life times by being permitted re-birth back into the Aryan Fold, and that those Underlings who submitted and groveled the best, would be permitted to be born ‘fully human’ someday, that is, as an Aryan.  Oh, yes, the Aryans were supreme racists.  Take a look at the Ramayana.  In the Ramayana, we have the Aryans, and then we have their portrayal of the Native People of India, whom we find are literally described as Monkeys – walking talking Monkeys with their own Cities and  Palaces and diplomatic services, but they are called Monkeys.  Nowadays, when we see paintings of the scenes from the Ramayana, they don’t paint in the short and dark People of those ancient times – the Natives to which the Ramayana was obviously referring – no, we pictures of actual Monkeys… we are to believe that India was a land ‘peopled’ by little Apes, and, consequently, that all the Non-Aryan peoples who form the majority of People in India must have come along later, very quietly and unobtrusively, from somewhere else.  Then, one has to wonder why the people of India never wonder where all the Walking Taking Monkeys went.  What a Virtue it must be in India to believe everything and to question nothing.

 

Anyway, Reincarnation provided both Justification and Excuse for Social Injustice.  And it largely worked.   Using both the Threats and Promises of Reincarnation to reinforce Caste Duty – Suppression from Above, and Submission from Below – there was created a very Stable Society.  It persisted like that for over two thousand years and still has not been thoroughly discredited – we can assume that one of the most pervasive problems in India today is with Caste Identification – People who think they were Born to Have their Own Way, and People who can’t pull themselves out of the Hole for thinking that they were born to grovel, bow and die to be of utility to those born above themselves.   It must all lead to a horrible misapplication of Human Resources as Unqualified but Self-Entitled ‘Aryans’ still capture many of the most important jobs, while the Native Indians are too busy maintaining their perpetual cringe and bow to exert their Talents and claim their Due – ostensively waiting to take their Promotions in some Next Lifetime.  It must be odd to be in a Religion where one is enjoined to Serve Evil, and then one’s final Reward is to be allowed to Become Evil.  Well, being Evil has always paid better than being Good, if that is where one’s priorities are.  But it is not really Religion, is it?     

 

But, even still, back to our Essay.  No matter that the Idea of Reincarnation turned out to be such brilliant Propaganda, we need to wonder how such a seemingly ridiculous idea was ever able to take hold in the first place.   After all, Reincarnation doesn’t explain anything about the Individual Soul that Biological Reproduction does not explain so much better, and with so much tangible Proof!  If we are Reborn at all, it is that we are the Reborn Versions of our Mothers and Fathers.  And yes, in the most sanguinary biological terms, virtue is rewarded and vice is punished, that is, Good Breeding leads to good healthy, strong Blood Lines, while careless breeding leads to a thin and spotty herd – ‘common’ people as they are called.   Look within ourselves and it is plain to see that both our Strong and Weak Points run in our Families.  We do not have to thank or blame some Spiritual Past Lives for our Merits or Problems, no, not when we can see it all plainly coming from our Parents and Grandparents, and shared by our brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins.   It is simple Common Sense that our origins, Physical and Spiritual, are entirely Biological.  

 

But, to be fair, I need to admit that there are certain phenomena that can give some imaginary credence for the Idea of Reincarnation.  Dreams, for one thing.   Take for instance when Grandfather dies and then he is seen in the Dreams of many of those in the Family, well, that leads one to suspect that Grandfather survived the Grave, and that his Spirit continues to live in some Spiritual Afterlife.   But, as life goes on, and the years and generations recede, these dreams of Grandfather become fewer and finally cease altogether.  Well, what then?  Either Grandfather finally ‘died’ – his being in the Spiritual World slowly running out of whatever Substance keeps an Individual Spirit coherent and identifiable -- or we can imagine that he must have been reborn.    Those who Hope for Grandfather’s Survival, go along with the silly explanation of reincarnation, because they find alternative too stark -- the final annihilation of Grandfather’s Soul… and eventually their own soul as well.   Sometimes to feel good, we suspend our critical faculties.   And, then what about when a child is born looking just like old Grandfather, well, doesn’t this support the notion that Grandfather may have been reborn?

 

And then there are dreams of Other Identity.  Have you ever had a dream of looking into a reflective glass window or a mirror, and not seeing ‘your own self’ but seeing a different persona altogether?  Or one may dream way outside one’s ordinary life conditions and customary expectations  – a farmer dreams of being a Knight in battle, or a tradesman dreams of being a Sailor on a boat.  To us today, these would only be considered dreams rich in symbolic content, but, several thousand years ago, the Local Aryan Priest might have been quick to claim it as positive ‘Proof’ of past lives.

 

Well, I have not finished Professor Muesse’s book yet, but I have gotten as far as Buddhism, and have found that the silliness does not stop there.  To be fair to the Buddha himself, he carefully negated Everything, so it is surprising that any Buddhist in the World should counter the Buddha by positively affirming Anything at all, let alone something as intrinsically flighty as the notion of Reincarnation, but they nearly all do.  Buddha specifically declared that there is no fixed Self, no fixed Identity, not even some constant and eternal Transcendent God or Higher Self.  Everything to the Buddha was in constant flux, endless change – Reality was a Process where Everything interacted with Everything else – Brains trying to keep up with a Reality that would never stay the same from one moment to the next.  So his answer was to just go with the flow and not expect much.  But how does anybody see Reincarnation in any of that.

 

Buddha had probably plainly said that if you Know the Truth, then you will Know that there is no Rebirth, and that Reincarnation was just one of those Stupid Mental Constructs that any amount of True Awareness should make short shift of.   But Generations of Ignorant Followers have remembered Buddha entirely differently, pretending that he had said instead, “if you Know the Truth, you will no longer be Reborn”… you know there is a big difference there.  We do not have to be ‘Liberated’ from rebirth.  There simply is no rebirth.

 

You know, Liberation Theology is so strange, with the assumptions It makes and then with the directions it takes, versus what would seem the Logical Conclusions that one would assume just from common sense.   For instance, we have people who will spend years in quiet meditation all so they can supposedly drop their desires and attachments to all the Material Things of Life, so that they will not have to be Reborn.   Well, to prove conclusively that they are no longer attached to the Things of Life, why do they not simply just commit suicide?  Isn’t it the most perfect and definitive Statement in that regards?   Isn’t Suicide the Supreme Renunciation?  So why would anybody who commits suicide ever be re-born?  Oh! From Justice, they would be called back … that they owe some other soul and can’t get away until the debt has been paid?  Well, if this is true, then no amount of Meditation could liberate one either, no, not if all the tets and tats of debts and credits and crimes and punishments are all added up and one is forced to wait until the Karmic Slate was finally becomes completely clean.  Five minutes or five years of meditation can’t wipe out a morally justified grudge against you – you can meditate your own head clean, but not somebody else’s, especially if the grudge comes from a Past Life.  In this sense, it makes no sense to try to escape from the Wheel of Rebirth at all, especially by the Do Nothing Path of Meditation.   If the Doctrine of Karmic Rebirth is True at all, then the Logical Conclusion would be to simply live your Life totally open to Karmic Retribution, while at the same time to do nothing to contract any new instances of Bad Karmic debts.   Oh, and here I assume that one can renounce the Fruits of Good Karma, just as Creditors are always entirely free to forgive their loans, and so one should not be in any danger of doing too much good. 

 

Oh, there was the ridiculous doctrine that one could do Evil and not suffer the Karmic Consequences as long as one Surrendered that Karma to God.  It’s in the Bhagavad Gita, a Post-Axial Age Document, and so goes to show that even in the Modern Age Hinduism is still largely an amoral Religion.  Being Free of the Moral Consequences of doing Evil, because one lays it all at the Feet of God.   Please!  Has anyone ever believed that?   All that Corporate CEOs and all those Used Car Salesmen and all those sordid Lawyers would have to do is ‘surrender’ their Evils to God, and they could just keep going on doing all that awful crap they do, and all without Karmic Consequence.  But then, what about God.?  What good is a God stained by so much Sin.  It would become a stinking putrid God, and the big problem there would be in differentiating it from the very Devil himself.

 

Anyway, if your biggest worry in life is being Reborn because of the mechanisms of Karmic Reincarnation, well, you literally have nothing to worry about.   You don’t have to seek Liberation – you already have it.   When you die, rest assured, you will stay dead.  Likewise for those who expect Immortality in Heaven, well, it should not come as too much of a disappointment  for you that the Peace of the Grave will last Forever.  

An Objective Look At Crimea, The Ukraine and Russia

 

We hear so much about how Russia has violated International Law by accepting the will of the majority of people in the Crimea to be annexed into Russia.  But really, before 1954 the Crimea was in fact part of  Russia.  The decision to partition out Russia was made back then by that devilish Soviet Union, and so you would think that with the end of Soviet Union, that the International Maps would have or should have been rolled back to the way they were before, and that would have meant re-incorporating the Crimea back into the Russian State.

 

There has been much disingenuous propaganda against the Russians.  We have Secretary of State Keary saying that the Crimean Referendum was held under the “barrel of a gun”, that the Russian troops were under arms, and therefore must have made the Crimean People vote under armed duress.  Honestly, we must remember, if he should ever run for higher office, that he is comfortable at twisting words and events around to suit his own pleasure – he argues like a lawyer and so we only get the one side out of him.  So, what really happened in the Crimea?  Well, the Russians were there to assure that the Ukraine and its police and military did not interfere in the Crimea People’s Referendum.  After all, we see that it was the Ukraine that claimed that the Referendum was illegal, and the Ukraine would have stopped it going forward if the Russians had not stepped in to prevent them.    Oh, and about the Americans and the Europeans claiming that the Referendum was ‘illegal’, well, ‘illegal’ does not mean ‘immoral’, and it was only illegal because Ukraine, an interested and opposed Party to it all, made it ‘illegal’, with a vote, just to suit their own ends.

 

Oh, and WHAT Ukrainian Government?  The Majority of Ukrainians had voted for a Government that was clearly Pro-Russian.  It just so happens that the Capital of Ukraine is situated in the West of Ukraine, where the people hate Russia and had, incidentally, fought on the side if Hitler in World War II.   These people, displeased with how Democracy had worked out for them, started protests which became ever more violent and revolutionary.  They began taking over Government Buildings and murdering police.  To keep these Riots from spinning up into a full civil war, the Elected President of Ukraine decided to defuse the situation by leaving town.  He did no resign.  The Protestors swept in and took over the Government, and the United States and Europe, so fussy about International Law in regards to the sacredness of  borders, had no problem at all with the violent overthrow of a democratically appointed Government.   Well, should we, then, really care what an unelected and illegitimate ‘Government’ calls ‘illegal’.  My God, that we should take such irony seriously!   Rather than catering to their whims, true justice could only be served if these usurpers where hanged for armed rebellion and treason.  But I guess to the United States and the European Union, there are good terrorists and bad terrorists, and they are measured by just how much they contribute to American and European national interests.   

 

Oh, and did it help that the first thing the Usurping Protestor Government  of the Ukraine did was to strip away the rights of Russian Speaking Ukrainians.   You see, the Russian Speaking Segment of Ukraine, the ones who fought against Hitler in World War Two, well, they appear to be in the majority and have been stifling the efforts of the Pro-German Ukrainians to capture political power for themselves.   Therefore we see this attack on the Ethnic Russians and their Language.

 

You would think the Pro-German  Ukrainians would therefore welcome the opportunity to cut off the Crimea and give it over with pleasure to the Russians, for without the large Pro-Russian Vote coming out of the Crimea, well, the right wing nationalist Ukrainians could probably actually win an election, and take the  Government without having to resort to Violence, Riot and Mayhem.

 

Oh, and about the sacredness of borders.   The Americans and Europeans complain that the Big Lesson of World War Two was that borders were to be treated sacredly, as though God Himself had descended upon the Clouds and drawn them upon the map with his own Hand.   Well, really?  They are referring to Hitler having annexed into Germany certain counties that had been reassigned to other Nations by the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War, or earlier, by the Treaty of Paris after the Battle of Waterloo.   At first nobody minded.  Remember, that the American President, Woodrow Wilson, had come to international fame by preaching the Doctrine of Ethnic Self-Determinism, that Democracies would eventually resolve into fighting over issues lined up in regards to purely Ethnic considerations unless the Ethnic Composition of  the Democracies were uniform enough to preclude inter-ethnic hostilities.  So for Democracies to work in regards to purely political Issues, they would have to be formed in regards to Ethnic Self-Determination – borders would need to be ‘re-districted’ in regards to Ethnic homogeneity , just as American Congressional Districts are now re-districted for political homogeneity.  Ethnically Uniform Countries could put Democracy to practical uses, whereas, Ethnically diverse Countries would only use Democracy to keep up a constant electoral battle between the different language groups and ethnic factions.   So, yes, Hitler was annexing various German Speaking counties bordering on Germany, all the while quoting Woodrow Wilson , and nobody much objected.   So, what changed? Well, when Hitler signed the Berlin-Moscow Pact in 1938, it was perceived by Britain, France and America that Germany had gone from being Pro-Western and Anti-Soviet to being Pro-Soviet and Anti-Western.   While Hitler had been considered Pro-Western, he could do no wrong, but after seeming to align himself with the Soviet Union, well, then, apparently he could do no right.   World War Two was therefore declared by Britain against Germany simply because Hitler had annexed one small German speaking city in Polland, and without firing a shot.  According to the West, that had constituted an ‘Invasion’ of Polland… just as now they speak of Russia having ‘Invading’ Crimea. 

 

Just a few years back, well, the United States did not technically ‘invade’ Serbia, but they did take over the Serbian Skies and bombed Belgrade and bombed and strafed the Serbian Military that was fighting to keep its territorial integrity together.  When the Serbians had been bombed and machine-gunned by the Americans into a state of helplessness, then, what did the American’s do?  They partitioned out Serbia, creating the new State of Kosovo.   So, why is it that International Borders need to be sacred to the Russians, but only a matter of political convenience for the Americans?

 

Actually, I am only half-hearted in my defense for Ethnic Self-Determinism.  Whether Nationally or Internationally, Ethnic Divisions, Language Divisions, Religious Divisions, and even Class Divisions, well, none of these Divisions are healthy, and I wish some advanced Civilization, such as one from from Outer Space, would take over and impose a new order on everybody, and that everybody would hate it equally, and then be united in Heart by the common hatred of the Outsider… that is, for about 3 generations until the Children would inevitably be Co-opted by the New and Superior Civilization, much to the grumbling of their Grandparents.   And so against our Will, fighting and kicking against it, we should eventually be lead to Civilization and Perpetual Peace.   Yes, I can only imagine how the Tea Party would hate that.

Prosecuting War Crimes only Prolongs War

 

When Napoleon Bonaparte was still a young General, not yet 30 years old, commanding his first Army, the Army of Northern Italy, it was almost his first Battle when he trapped the Austrian Army between his own forces and a river.   His underlings, most of them older with more actual combat experience were seemingly delighted.  Defeating Austria here would deprive them of one of their major Armies and seriously weaken them for years to come.  Advance, advance, advance!

 

But Bonaparte hesitated.  He assembled his Staff and told them that most battles are won when the men on the losing side get the feeling, the suspicion, that they are beginning to lose, and that this ‘feeling’ becomes a contagion that runs through the ranks, and then the men break and run, and then their Officers have no recourse but to immediately wave the White Flag for Truce and then to apply for conditions of surrender.   But with their backs against either Mountain, Cliff or River, then the dynamics of a Battle change in the extreme.  If there is nowhere to run, then they won’t run.  They will have to stand and fight.  And those on the other side who are pushing them where they cannot go, well, they feel the desperate resistance, of men scratching and clawing for their lives, and can’t help but sense that if they did not push quite so hard, they would not be in nearly so much danger themselves.  “After all, where is the greater motivation here”, asked Napoleon, “To fight for the mere vanity of a Victory as our men would do, or to fight for their lives as they will?  So, it is that the Army with clear room at its back is the most likely to break and run.  And THAT would be us”, Napoleon finally told them.

 

So, sobered by these second thoughts, the French plan went forward, to harass the Austrian forces while not impeding their move up river until they could get to a town with a bridge.  He allowed the Austrian Army to cross over the bridge, and while the Austrians did put up a significantly valiant fight to keep the French Army of Northern Italy from crossing over themselves in pursuit of an all-out attack, still, once the Austrians had room at their backs, they felt the inexorable pull of fallback and retreat, and with Napoleon sending riders forward, under White Flag, to assure livable terms to the Austrian Commanders, they soon stopped the rear guard actions and surrendered.   Beaten and Humiliated on the Field, still, the bulk of the Austrian Army were back eating and drinking, singing and dancing in Vienna before the month was over.   

 

What lesson does this teach us?  To win a Battle it helps in a significant way if your Enemy feels as though they have a better Future in Running then in Fighting, and that if they do Surrender, that they know they will be able to walk away, and not be executed or tossed in Prison. Soldiers and Generals surrender much more easily if they realize it is not a fate worse than death.

 

When this kind of Battlefield common sense prevailed, Wars could sometimes come to quick conclusions.

 

But then, there was the non-sense of the First World War, what they called the Great War, before there was a Second World War.  They also had called it, stupidly enough, “The War to End All Wars”.  Being so optimistically oriented they decided to invent the Concept of War Crimes (and why not, since if there were to be no more Wars, then they could make up any such silly feel-good things, and never have to worry about how they would actually apply and take effect).  The War Crimes scheme would set up a framework of consideration whereby there would be legal and illegal ways to conduct Wars and that after Wars were ended, then all actions taken during the War would be reviewed for Legality and those individuals found having committed War Crimes would be subsequently prosecuted, tried and hanged.  Now, the practical effect of that was to completely dissipate the Utility of the Idea of Surrender, that is, the concept that with the acceptance of certain terms, there would in effect be a blanket and universal Amnesty covering all combatants.  By insisting on War Crimes Prosecutions, hangings and Imprisonment, well, nobody in their Right Minds would ever surrender to That.  By insisting on War Crime Prosecutions, Wars are made endless, up to the point of the complete devastation of the vanquished Society.  Every soldier would understand that it would necessarily be a fight to the death – the choice being to die now somewhat honorably on the Battlefield, or later on the hangman’s gallows as a humiliated prisoner.   And the Politicians and Government Officials would not feel any safer – The Power Structure of the Country would pull together and fight with everything it got, until there would be absolutely nothing left.  Now, wouldn’t it be nice if we could Evolve to the Point where we could end Wars by allowing the Combatants to sue for liveble Terms and then Surrender.  It once worked.  It could work again… and does still work as I will point out later.

 

I saw on the News that while they are trying to set up negotiations between the Government of Syria and all of the bands Terrorists, Anarchists and Opportunists that started the War, that some silly U.N. Commissioner came out and announced that there would be numerous indictments for War Crimes against the President of Syria and those up, down and throughout the Chain of Command.  Okay, now think for a second.  What good would a negotiated peace be to any Syrian Official, now that they have been explicitly told that once hostilities cease, then they will all be arrested, tried and hanged.   That silly U.N. announcement was in effect a Declaration of Total and Unending War.   And once damned for War Crimes,  as the Syrian Administration is now, well, “in for a penny, in for a pound… might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb”.  It simply makes common sense now to use any weapon at their disposal.  They are already considered guilty (and when in the History of War Crimes has anybody ever been acquitted?), so refraining now will get them nothing, but hitting with a harder punch might get their Country back.   As long as they don’t surrender, the U.N. War Crimes arrests can’t go forward, and there is hope.   Well, hope in War is the enemy of Peace, just as much as a hopeless Peace would be.    

 

And even without U.N. Announcements, everyone in the World can see what is going on… what the going Trend is.   Iraq was devastated by a War, and then, disarmed, its leadership was gathered up, shot and hanged, and the middle and lower levels of Officialdom, Police and Army were dismissed, and placed in the status of an official Persecution that would hamper their ability to get business licenses, own property,  live their lives, etc.  There would be a Democracy, oh yes, except that the Political Party, of all those who had fought for it, as it was their sworn duty to fight, and of all those who had governed and administered Iraq for the last quarter century, well, that Political Party would be outlawed  and dissolved – disenfranchising  that major segment of the Population who had surrendered and laid down their arms in Good Faith that they would be treated equitably.  The lesson there?   Well, we can all see now that they would think that they should have fought harder and dirtier, if such capabilities had been at their disposal… even using their Mass Weapons of Destruction if they had any.  Not only should they have fought the Americans with such more zeal, but after-sight would show them that they should have also done their best to clear the board of their internal enemies who did their best to betray the Country over to the Americans and who would subsequently take the Victory from the hands of the Americans and cash it in for themselves by leading all of the prosecutions and persecutions against all those who had been Loyal to their Country.   In short, their lesson would be that they were far too laid back, and it might have ended for them better, or more honorably as they would see it, had they fought harder, more ruthlessly, and more illegally – more totally.  This probably isn’t the best lesson we can be teaching the Roque Regimes of the World.

 

We saw it again in Libya.  If the Regime’s men only knew how they would be treated after Surrender, maybe they would have put up a stronger fight.   And it is difficult to wonder what the West learned about Libya, because there can’t be a single coherent person on earth that would not trade the Libya of After for the Libya of Before.   Pushing for the total destabilization of Libya that had been one of the primary pillars of strength on the African Continent, well, it caused a Geo-Political Earthquake that still hasn’t stopped shaking.   

 

So, anyway, all of these annoying Countries that the West does not care for and would wish to topple over with ‘Regime Change’, well by now they all know that their ‘Backs are against the River’, and there will be no equitable or even livable Terms for Peace.   Our Modern Structure of War Crimes and their Prosecution will end up giving us the most Extreme and Endless Wars.  It is ironic, but because of War Crimes, now Belligerents are forced by the most desperate necessity… fighting for their Lives… to use the most Terrible Weapons at their disposal to keep ahead of arrest and execution.   That’s progress for you, and what they have come to call “unintended consequences” – but so easy to anticipate by anybody with the least bit of experience, or even just reading… and a dash of discernment.

 

And I am not alone here.  Look at South Africa and Northern Ireland.  The only way those conflicts were finally resolved was that there were explicit guarantees issued that there would be full Amnesties issued and absolutely no vindictive pursuit of War Crimes Charges issued later to Cloud the clear blue skies of vb        Peace.   It tells us something when the only way peace can be achieved is when we purposely decide to ignore the idea of War Crimes.

 

Besides, think of the most important point.   If you know that a neighboring people of a different tribe, culture, religion or race has over-crowded its own land and feels the itch for more, and has launched an invasion into your country and obviously plans to kill you and all of your people to take the land and settle it for themselves, well, could you possibly imagine anything that would be ‘criminal’ in stopping them.   How could there possibly be any excess in fighting for your own or national survival?  In such a context the idea of War Crimes simply looks silly and effete.  

 

And then, afterward, what of those who do commit the most atrocious ‘War Crimes’… can we just let them get away with it?   Well, do the Monsters of War necessarily survive into the Peace, or do their desperate actions done in the time of War lose their meaning and coherency in Times of Peace?  Really, in Peacetime are these people still monsters?  Do they represent a continuing threat?  Perhaps the Monster of War ends when the War does, and then the Man of Peace takes over from there.  We can’t ignore the possibility that there is something Life Affirming in Peace, and that, given a New World, people can make themselves anew. And then, perhaps it is the eternally resentful and vindictive, the War Crimes Investigators and Prosecutors, who become the monsters, scraping back up the stink of War and stomping down the green shoots of Peace.      

 

Problems in Studying Collective Consciousness

 

 

Just how Collective is Collective Consciousness?  I had read up on Cross Cultural Psychology and its conflict with Cultural Psychology (the war between those who recognize Collectivity versus the strict materialists who insist upon an entirely isolated individuality for every soul) and all the studies are almost entirely bound up in Behavior.  Well, what does Behavior have to do with Spirituality these days?

 

The problem with Behavior is that it may be opposed to the Inner Spiritual Impulses.    Behavior may be dysfunctional or neurotic.  But the trend in Psychology is to simply itemize behaviors and endorse those Behaviors that have large followings – if enough people participate in a certain Act, it becomes Normal only because it has become Popular.   And remember how Society works – “To get along one has to go along”.   Behaviors reinforced by the positive loop of Social Conformity.  So it is that the exterior Culture can exert a very powerful influence against any inner collectivity in spirituality in regards to its influence on behavior.

 

Remember that the domain of Collective Spirituality only becomes apparent during dreaming, or during deep meditation trances, or within psychotic delusions.  Well, we know that most people are dismissive of their dreams, and that many people don’t remember their dreams at all.  Most people never achieve any deep state of meditation.  And the vast majority of people will never have a psychotic delusion, except those working class people who consistently vote Republican.   With most people, Culture, Societal Influences, Peer Pressures and Family Dynamics will have more effect on Behavior than any Inner Spiritual Impulse.  Yes, one might suppose that if ones Behavior is totally at variance with one’s Inner Spirituality, that there will be some conflict, some resistance.  But in this Day and Age we could probably expect the person to simply pop an Anti-Depressant, have a strong cup of coffee and march on in the Paths of Materialistic Glory.  Several decades ago it would have been a stiff  drink and cigarette… and a cup of coffee.

 

What needs to be done is that Cross Cultural Psychotic Experiences should be studied.  Dreams too, but my experience there is that Dreamers, because of some popular fads in Lucid Dreaming, and the wide availability of Dream Literature, well, these dreamers are suspect to be prone to a great deal of exaggeration, or even absolute lying, as there is simply too much awareness of a difference between ordinary dreams and really cool neat dreams.  Psychotic Episodes may present more honestly than Dream Questionnaires.  But of course Dreaming is more prevalent.  Maybe Dreamers could be interviewed while some kind of Lie Detection can be applied to standardize the information received.  

 

Once we know what the Collective Spiritual Impulse is trying to tell us, then we will be able to recognize exactly to what extent that the various Cultures, particularly Globalized Western Culture, go toward suppressing this Spirituality.  What makes me believe there has been some Suppression?  Well, many Societies once had distinct Spiritual Components, where Spiritual Impulses arose and were not substantially modified because of social, economic or cultural demands and conflicts.  Such Spirituality was allowed to focus itself and intensify.  And we had documented Miracles and Saints from all that.  Nurtured and gathered Spirituality had some actual Power.  But the Forces of Western Materialism has all around the World largely suppressed these Zones of Spiritual freedoms and liberties.  When Spirituality is beaten down, well, it becomes beaten down.

 

If we had a better picture of the Spirituality that was being suppressed, we would have a better idea of how much we have been victimized and damaged by what sees itself only as a kind of benevolent Skepticism (while it ridicules, reduces and even ruins every career which doesn’t pass its test of Skeptical Purity… a kind of Enlightened Materialistic Inquisition aimed at anything with the least nuance of Religion or Spirituality).

 

The greatest obstacle might be from the Scientific Community and its reluctance to examine any hypothesis not based on the severest orthodox notions of materialism… that all human thought and behavior relates purely mechanically, and while almost every dream tells us that we each know more than we had ever officially learned, heard, or seen; still, proper Scientific Doctrine demands a material connection for everything.  Even the suggestion of a Spiritual Undercurrent will have the whole business tossed out as Prima Facie False… False on its Very Face – “we don’t even have to look at it since our Pure Doctrines already tell us that it cannot be True” (a Study of a man in India who hasn’t eaten in years was tossed out, without even being read, only because its conclusions and not its process violated Acceptable Scientific Doctrine).  Gone are the days of going where the Facts lead, if they lead away from Cherished Pet Materialistic Beliefs.   Science has come full circle and now Francis Bacon and even perhaps Galileo would probably be surprised that the Science of simple observation and recording data, Empiricism, is being rejected for the sake of a New Orthodoxy in Belief Systems, this time Materialism.   Putting on Blinders has not become a good thing simply because they look in the Other Direction now.   We should wonder at our Modern Culture that now places Religion and Spirituality in a category that once would have worn he label of evil.

 

If you have any question or comments, then, please, email me or add a comment if you can figure out how.

 

Almuse Electric Coil Electric Mandolins and Mandolas

 

Who knew that Electric Coil Mandolins even existed?   We all know that Electric Coil Pickups are what make electric guitars sound so great.  Yes there are Electric Mandolins, and they have been around for a long time, but they use piezo electric pickups which, if you know about them, they just pick up the vibration of the instrument and send it on to an amplifier circuit.  The piezo pickups are generally placed either on or close to the bridge or somewhere on the body of the instrument where the sound is most pleasing.  Electric Violins also use piezo pickups.  I have an NS Design Viola that uses several piezo pickups and it has a good pre-amp with good sound qualities.  But a violin is a bowed instrument and is an animal all to itself.  I would not have wanted a piezo electric mandolin just as I would not want an acoustic guitar with piezo pickups, as they sound, well, so NOT rock and roll.  

 

Then something happened that would change my life.  Remember the Dixie Chicks?  Well, I was at the local Musical Instrument Store on the Island and they had a video going of one of some old Dixie Chick Concert, and the ‘Chick’ that plays violin and mandolin, Martie Maquire, well, she was playing what looked like an electric coil mandolin.  Wow!  I had no idea that such a thing even existed.  And right then and there I was determined to get one.  That was the middle of November last year.

 

I went home and started Web Searching for ‘Electric Coil Mandolins’.   There did not really seem to be much ‘top of the line’ stuff out there.  Amazon was then selling their Eastwood Telecaster Style Mandolin, which they would not ship to me, as I am not currently on American Mainland soil, but I was able to find a Morgan Monroe Telecaster style at the Mandolin Store, and they were glad to do International Shipping for me.  I got the Morgan Monroe, but in order to review it, I did the review at Amazon under the Eastwood item… you can still read that review… it was very favorable.  Yes, the instruments are not the best quality, but when one factors in the very low prices – from $250 to $350, then one has to consider what one is getting for one’s money, and these cheap things play relatively well, and are a lot of fun. One serious drawback, however, was the very noisy pickups, in regards to power line hum, especially in any room with florescent lighting… you really have to be careful about where you face the mandolin or the line hum can get seriously loud, that is between songs… one would have to be really fussy to pretend one can still hear line hum while in the middle of the song, but during pauses in the music, it can become an issue.  Now, in the Electric Guitar world, one can get what they call Humbucker pickups, that is pickups that are made of two coils, not just one, and each coil is wired in mirror image to the other, so that the noise in one pickup is exactly cancelled out by the noise in the other pickup, being 180 degrees phase opposed to each other.  Or like my Fender base, which has two pickups – a neck pickup and a bridge pickup – that mirror each other, and as long as you keep both pickups on and at the same volume, you don’t get line hum noise.  But my cheapy Morgan Monroe had two pickups but each was wired in the same polarity, and so both pickups gather up noise, and instead of cancelling each other out, they simply add to each other.

 

Doing a Web Search I found that the only people that had Mandolin Humbucker Pickups available were Almuse in the U.K.  (http://www.almuse.co.uk/mandolins.html), and Moongazer Music in Montana U.S.A., http://www.moongazermusic.com/info.html, who sold Almuse Pickups under some kind of licensing agreement with Almuse in England.

 

At first I was reluctant to look at Almuse in England because their Website shows a great many mandolins, but they are all marked “Sold”, and the website says that it takes about between 4 to 6 months for a Custom Order to be completed.  The prices seemed very reasonable (a two pickup instrument going for £465, or about $750), but I was worried about the add-ons, and I was still quite ignorant of what I should ask for.  Buying ‘off the rack’ is easy, but to buy Custom is a challenge I was nervous about taking.

 

But when my cheapy arrived and realized how much fun it was to play – so much Rock and Roll potential.  You know,  I should mention right now that you don’t have to play an Electric Mandolin like a regular Mandolin in that regular mandolin kind of style, that is, with that constant trilling of the strings with some bumble bee quick method of picking … think Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae” at the end of the song where we here perhaps the best or at least the most famous mandolin part in Rock and Roll History.  Well, no, that is not what these Electric Mandolins are really made for… not in my opinion anyway.  What I like about an Electric Coil Mandolin is that the String Pairs drone against each other, offering a full and complicated sound (oh, in case you don’t know,  a mandolin has 8 strings, tuned to GG DD AA EE, and a Mandola is tuned to CC GG DD AA… similar to how Violins and Violas are tuned).  Also the string pairs have a good feel when you are fingering the neck.  After playing a mandolin for a while, electric guitars feel strange with their six separate strings, and the sound,  while having a more ‘clear as a bell’ quality, still, loses out in not being as rich and full as the Mandolin with its droning string pairs. 

 

Now, to get back to what I was saying, when I realized I was not going to quit the Electric Mandolin, and that I wanted to pursue it further, I decided the only way to go ‘Up Scale’ was to contact Almuse in the U.K.   I sent my first inquiry off on the 24 of November of last year.   I just now went back over my email history to remind me of it all.  My worries about deciding on Custom details were misplaced.  It turns out that Almuse Company in the U.K. is for the most part incarnated in the person of Mr. Pete Mallinson, who quickly answered my email, and started a dialogue with me to figure out exactly what I was looking for, and what any of my special needs might be.    Because I wanted Humbucker Pickups, I wanted a mandolin that would look as though the humbucker style belonged to it, and this of course suggested a Fender Jazzmaster style.  I also told Mr. Mallinson that I had a problem with my real Fender Jazzmaster, that my energetic picking style would sometimes whip the strings clear off the bridge.  So Mr. Mallinson suggested that he could shorten the tail between the bridge and the string terminator bar that the strings thread into, which would help to keep the strings in place.  I then told Mr. Mallinson that because of an old nerve injury to my right hand, I was using a kind of ‘Pick Stick’ – pieces of trim wood glued together with picks in between, which I could grip with the fingers that still had decent muscle control and feeling.  But that I was often wild and crazy in the application of these Pick Sticks and had once gone outside the pick guard of a very good Fender Stratocaster and dug into the paint.  So Pete (I started calling him Pete very soon) suggested he could take his usual Jazzmaster Design and modify it to give a bit more pick guard coverage, and that I should use covered Humbuckers, and that he could reposition the switches further back from the ‘strike zone’ so I would not be accidentally changing my setting with that wild pick stick action.  Pete Mallinson was very thoughtful and engaged in the Custom Decision Process.   It did take a while.  Remember, my first inquiry was on 24 November, and it was not until the 23^rd of December that I got very detailed drawing plans, and once I approved these, I got pricing information on the 6^th of January this year.  $750 a piece (this is the base price… so he did not charge me for any of the little changes we agreed upon), and this price is quite reasonable, in fact, the cheapest I have ever heard of for any kind of custom electric guitar like thing on the Market.  Oh, during the deliberation and decision phase, I decided to place ANOTHER order – for a matching Mandola.  You see, as a former violin player that moved up to Viola, I suspected that I might want to do the same thing here, or to at least own a Mandola.  And since there was no place to just instantly buy a Mandola, the wisest course would be to place the order at the same time as the Mandolin order.  That has worked out to be one of the better day to day decisions I have ever made in my life.

 

Pete Mallinson kept me informed of the progress of the build.  On January 20^th he was already planning the Paint and Finish phase of the operation… he had found an Auto Body Shop that could scale down and do mandolin paint jobs.  But by March there had been reversals in Mr. Mallinson’s relations with this Auto Body Shop.  Apparently after having done a few good jobs for Mr. Mallinson, they decided to speed up their process and save on their costs, and so quality began to suffer.  You see the trick to very fine painting finishes is to have the finest atomized spray aerosol for the thinnest possible coats, and then to allow each coat to completely dry before adding more coats, taking as many as seven or eight color coats even before getting to the Clear Coats.   In that way the paint does not pool or blob up.  But to save time a lot of Car Paint shops use Paint Guns with large apertures, and use thick paint and globby paint mixtures with very little thinning solvent, and they just try to blast it all on in just one or two coats.  That is why in many car paint jobs, when you get up close to the car, you can see the pooling and blobbing… that the paint surface is not smooth with a uniform mirror finish.  A good example of this kind of paint job is a brand new $35000 American Motors Jeep – the paint jobs are so bad, up close, that one gasps in horror and disgust.

 

Anyway, to get back to our primary narrative, we can guess that the Auto Body Paint Shop had ruined a number of finishes for Mr. Mallinson and that he had to take a number of instrument all the way back ‘down to wood’ and then paint them all over again himself. 

 

 And this brings us to one of the Coldest and Dampest Winters (and Springs and Early Summers) in all of English Recorded History.   Yes, Global Climate Change is REAL.  You see, how this applies to us is that even a very thin coat of paint needs to dry relatively quickly, or stray particles of dust will land on the surface and stick… and that looks simply awful.  Some paints can be sanded, such as expensive dope finishes.  But most paints, well, you just need to keep them out of the dust while the paint dries.  Mr. Mallinson does have a clean room for painting and drying, but such rooms are extremely difficult to perfectly seal off.   Then with all the added cold and damp, the room would have to have been heated like a furnace to dry the paint coats in time to minimize the dust particle problem, and that would have doubled his Utility Bill, and he would have had to operate at a significant Loss.  So he kept begging off completing the job because of the Weather, and I agreed that it was indeed a problem and I understood and that I could wait.  Practice with the Cheapy Mandolin was still going well but I saw I still had some way to go, so why should I be in a hurry to get the best instruments, when the cheapy instrument I already has was still teaching me plenty of tricks practice session after practice session. 

 

Oh, but I was not just trusting what Mr. Mallinson was telling me… I even started going to BBC Weather to get the Monthly Forecasts for the entire British Isles, and, yes, Mr. Mallinson was telling the complete truth.  It had never been colder or damper.  It would have even discouraged Winston Churchill – weather that could break even his most famous Will and make him grovel in abject surrender before  the Elements.   Yes, I would have to wait.

 

Oh, in May, after having steadily practiced with the cheapy Morgan Monroe Mandolin since November, as well as keeping up on my Bass and guitars, I had worked myself into another one of my Repetitive Motion Injuries, and would have to lay off of my stringed instruments for a while and go to just the Keyboard and Harmonicas which require different muscles, tendons, and joints to punish, while the other muscles, tendons, and joints have a chance to recuperate .  So I wrote to Pete and told him that I expected to need about six weeks to recover, and so if he was backed up with other clients as well as myself, that he had my leave to put others in line ahead of me.

 

But the dampness continued into the summer and I began to wonder if these Instruments could ever be finished, at their present price point… that perhaps Mr. Mallinson would need to find a quality paint-shop in Southern Italy, in arid Spain in even in North Africa, where it could reliably be supposed that the weather would be reasonably dry and warm.   Or he would have to set up a Dust Free Dry Climate Controlled Oven Paint Room of his own.  But the added expense would have to be taken up by somebody – we would no longer enjoy such affordable prices.  But I kept these thoughts to myself and simply waited.  I came up with a cute pun to express my concern… I would say to myself that that my mandolins were ‘Almuse finished’… get it? Like ‘almost finished’…

 

Then there was an ‘Oooops Email’.  Somehow one of my instruments got ‘nicked’ and so it had to be taken ‘down to the wood’ and re-finished.   I had thought so or something like it.  Checking the English weather, it had been warm and dry for several weeks in a row.  What could be the hold-up, I thought.  I imagined in my mind’s eye that he must have found a rat in his workshop and had thrown a rasp file or something at it, but the ad hoc weapon had missed the rat, bounced off the floor, hit a corner, and ricocheted into my poor defenseless Mandola.  Well, I admired Pete’s honesty.  What can one say… “rats happen”.

 

But then in July there was word that photos would soon be taken, and then in August there were emails asking me to clarify string sizes and tuning, and tips on setting up a Pay Pal account so I could pay across International Exchanges.  The mandolins were not just ‘Almuse finished’… they were READY!  

 

DHL shipping added to the cost, but they were here in just over the weekend.  They arrived on August 24^th, nine months to the day I had sent in my first inquiry… like having a Baby!  Two Babies!   In Pete’s emails he was calling them Little and Larger.  

 

Wow!  They are Beautiful.  Superb quality.  Excellent perceived value.  One improvement could be with the large screws that fasten down the String Termination Bar under the tail of the bridge – they are not chromed.  I could not get perfect intonation at first, on the larger Mandola, and I am so happy that I did not jump in and do Truss Bar adjustments right away (yes, the Mandola has a truss bar, just like a real quality electric guitar), because, after a few days of  being tuned up and practiced with, I noticed the intonation kept getting better and better until the intonation, without any intervention from myself, simply LOCKED ON.  This made me realize that Custom Instruments are not just New, but VERY VERY VERY New.  They need to settle in for a bit.  When I wrote to Pete about it, he said “Of Course! From dreary England to the lush tropics, my poor babies (yes, he called them his “babies” ) would have to settle in for a while before they could fully realize their great good fortune and slap into perfect intonation (oh, Intonation is determined by how well the Open Tuning of the instrument agrees to the tuning once you start pushing down on the separate frets.  Usually if the Open Tuning agrees with the Double Dot tuning, being exactly one octave higher, then it passes the test.   You know, pressing down on strings naturally sharpens the pitch, and so if I find an incurable case of bad intonation on the sharp side, then I resolve it by instead of tuning on the Open I tune at the 5^th fret (guitar) or 7^th fret (mandolin) so that every fretted note will agree.  But then, while actually playing, I have to seriously hesitate before playing any open note (it will be flat in whatever degree the intonation was off), preferring to play the same note down on the neck of the next lower string.       

 

Oh, I did have one funny problem not a week after the ‘babies’ arrived .  Even though Pete had set the slide switches back a bit, I was still sometimes accidentally turning off one of the pickups, and so because my nerve damaged hand had gotten a bit better in the last 9 months (thank you God) I moved my finger picking from between the pickups to over the bridge (rear) pickup where I would be working further away from the controls.  Well, after several hours of practicing like that, all Rock and Roll, and drinking London Dry Gin in celebration to the Great U.K. that had brought me my new wonderful instruments, I looked down and found that the bridge pickup was sunk into the body down on one side.  Bringing out my Tool Kit and taking up the Pick Guard to get a closer look, I found I had smashed out the bracket of the pickup that goes to the height adjust screw.   The bracket was made out of PLASTIC!

 

Plastic!?   Oh, God, that was obviously going to be a weak link in the chain.  I am famously ROUGH on my musical instruments.  Anything made out of plastic, that starts out brittle enough in its Life but then gets more and more brittle with each passing minute, well, it is simply marked for death the moment it goes into my Music Studio… it may last a while, but ultimately, certain death awaits for anything made of Plastic.  Pete, well, now, I saw him as a friend.  We exchanged stories. Christmas Cards.  We made jokes.  Yes, I was annoyed about plastic pickup brackets, but I was not going to fire off some nasty email to my friend.  First I would examine the problem and think of a good ‘fix’.   After I cooled off and got positive, then I would let him know what was going on.

 

One thing I did not want to do was replace the pickup.  It sounded fine, and it is made out of, really expensive magnets and really good wire.  I did not want to have to simply throw that stuff into the trash bin… Carbon Footprint and all that.  What I wanted do was to re-bracket the existing pickup and continue to use it.  I scratched my head and drew up plans and took them to my Friendly Island Guitar Repair guy, a Japanese Gentleman.  He looked at it for 5 seconds and said, “Oh, I just cut out piece of firm sponge or foam and lay it down in that groove under the pickup, and it all be as good as fixed”.  It was that easy.  I felt stupid  and silly for having made up my elaborate plans.  However, to be fair to myself, I had not undid all the strings so I could fully take up the Pick Guard (it had already been late the night before when the problem occurred and I had to put the investigation off until later and catch up on my beauty sleep).   When you look at the internal carvings and cutouts (of surprisingly good quality by the way.  I have had Chinese Instruments where the carved out sections had been done by hammer and chisel, and apparently with no more care than could be taken in just 5 or 10 minutes), and see how everything had been laid out, it becomes obvious that you only need to stick a sponge in the groove directly under the pickup.  Oh, but it did not end there, as there is something funny about the Japanese Mentality… when I got the Mandola back the next day, the screw hole was empty.  Huh!?  What!?   The Friendly Japanese Repair Man said, “Oh, screw hole broke, and Pickup up on foam pad.  You don’t NEED screw.”    My God, it took 5 good minutes to convince him that an empty screwhole next to a pickup makes it LOOK like something is broken, and that LOOKING LIKE something is broken is, well, almost exactly the same as actually BEING broken.  ”So we super glue screw in hole”, he finally says.  Well, thank God… I was thinking we would have to take out the dozen or so Pick Guard screws, loosen the strings, lift out the pick guard and find a nut to roll onto the end of that ‘missing’ screw to take up space and to make everything seem Right with the Universe.  But with super glue, the job was completed in less time than it takes to talk about it.

 

Oh, next morning, when I had indeed cooled off as I know I would have,  I had emailed Mr. Mallinson about the break, and asked for his suggestion for fixing it, and then by that same evening had emailed him again about the rather easy and elegant fix that the Japanese Gentleman had been able to apply.  Mr. Mallinson confessed that he had been thinking of a complicated bracket fix too, but then after learning of the Foam Pad idea, he recalled that a number of instruments on the Market come with Foam Pads arranged in the instrument body underneath the pickups,  so that if a bracket ever does break, no one would ever know the difference.  But until now, he hadn’t thought about it much.  We all learn something new every day.   And you know the Pickup Height Adjustments really aren’t all that important.  You see, the Height Adjustments on these pickups are there so that the pickups can be interchanged between various instrument, but that if they are slid into their position and brought up to the stop presented by the cut-to-fit hole in the pick-guard then they are at their optimum height to begin with, and you never need to adjust what is perfect to begin with.  So, anyway, if you order a mandolin from Almuse, that is, my friend Pete Mallinson, then clarify what the construction of the pickup is, and if the bracket is plastic, simply remind him to cut a pad and insert it into the slot under the pickup… I am sure he will know what you are talking about.

 

Let me sum up by saying that these are splendid Mandolins, but you should buy soon because I can’t see how Mr. Mallinson can hope to keep prices as low as he has been setting them.  As word gets out, he will see more orders come in, and he will simply have more work than he could ever hope to handle.  At that point he can do one of two things – he can raise prices to reduce demand, or he can go to the Bank and get a loan for more capital equipment and to hire on a staff of skilled workers, so as to expand his capacity.  At least for the mean time, I don’t see Mr. Mallinson significantly expanding his operation.  I expect he will first raise his prices, and THEN if demand continues to increase, he will be forced by Necessity, that Great Mother of Invention, to go to the Bank and get the means to turn his present little shop into an out right Factory.  Hey, Leo Fender, had started in his basement too.  

 

Oh, but before I finish, let me add a word on Mandolin Coil Pickup history.  Electric Coil Pickups for Mandolin never used to exist.  As I recall from having read about it somewhere, Pete used to have a real job but he worked on instruments as a hobby and it intrigued him that no one had ever built an electric coil mandolin before.  Guitar pickups are readily available but Guitar pickups are larger and longer, and so he tried turning them almost criss-cross  to cover only the distance required of a Mandolin, but they sounded ‘funny’.  And so he decided that there just needed to be special Mandolin pickups… requiring different sized magnets and wiring… all to fit into the smaller scale.  It took a lot of trial and error, but finally he was getting the sound he wanted.   Then he lost his Day Job.  Capitalism was going through one of its Necessary Corrections which, we are told, would ultimately benefit us all, but temporarily throw a lot of us out of work. But Pete saw it as an opportunity to put his hobby pickups on the Market.  He would make his pass time activity pay the rent.  Pete then became a One Man Musical World Revolution.   I can bet that my favorite Dixie Chick, Marty Maquire, was playing one of the first Almuse electric pickup mandolins ever made when I saw her on the concert tape.

 

Now about the Future of  Electric Coil Mandolins.  They sound so, well, Rock and Roll, that I really hold out little hope for the Future of Electric Guitars. The Mandola with its High Enough and Low Enough Range is sure to captivate the World and sweep the Guitar into the dusty corners of the Rock and Roll Museums.   Oh, yes, people intuitively think that the Guitar has more range, as it has six strings, against just the four pairs of string that the Mandolin family has.   But you need to consider that the Guitar Family tunes its strings 5 semitones apart, but that the Mandolin (and Violin) Family of instruments tune their strings at 7 Semitones apart, so that the Mandolins have 140% more notes per string that the Guitar Family, so that when you finally compare the guitar with its Six Strings to the Mandolin’s 4 stringed pairs, after the advantage the Mandolin has in Note Per String, the Guitar only enjoy an advantage of a measly 7% in its range, and all of that range comes at the low side, and when have you ever seen a fantastic guitar solo done on the low side top of the neck?  Uh, never.   And now think about how large and clumsy a guitar is when compared to the sleek little mandola.  Rock and Roll Mandolins and Mandolas offer an advantage that will not long be ignored. 

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Update January 2014.  I was emailing Mr. Pete Mallinson of Almuse in the U.K. and was placing another Custom Order and was detailing how we could work around and help secure the pickups against their weak plastic brackets, remembering that I had had one bracket break, oh, and incidentally, after 5 months of very strenuous practice, I had not been able to break a second bracket.  Well, Mr. Mallinson told me that the problem should not be an issue in the future as he had instantly set out to procure stronger brackets of better material, and had re-built his existing stock and new pickups being built will be of the stronger materials.

Remembering that I use a pick-stick (two slats of wood glued together with picks at their tip) because my thumb and forefinger had been weakened sufficiently by a nerve pinch that I can not really hold and control a pick in the traditional manner, and in using a pick stick the lateral forces exerted on the strings is much higher than ordinary, well, I started experiencing a problem where the middle strings would jump the Nut.  Often on guitars where the head stock comes straight off the neck, they install string trees or string guides or string guide bars in order to exert downward pressure on the strings after the Nut to keep them in place.  This had not been a problem with the Mandola, which I mostly play and had not been aware of it till I started practicing with the Mandolin.  Unfortunately there are not String Trees on the Market for Mandolin, nor are there specifically made String Guide Bars.  You would probably have to do a little work to get them made in a local machine shop.  But if you order a Custom Mandolin, or buy one 'on spec' from a catalog selection, look for the feature of the Head Stock being angled back.  Mr. Mallinson wishes that people would ask for that feature, but when they ask for little Fender Look-a-like copies, well, he makes them with a straight head stock in order to be faithful to the Fender Design.   Well, as they say, "consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", and so when ordering a Custom design, whatever it is to look like, get him to angle back the Head Stock, as it will perform better, and NOBODY will notice that it is not exactly like a Telecaster or a Stratocaster.  Oh, in regards to my Mandolin, well, I have secured the problem for now, first by placing string loops around the string pairs coming off the tuner pegs so that the strings will align straight to the Nut, and not at an angle (the strings always jump in the direction of the angle), and then between the first and second tuner pegs I had run a string over the center four strings and pulled it tight and tied it off under the head, to keep downward pressure on the strings behind the Nut... yes, it is an ugly fix, but it will work until I can get to a machine shop with drawings... OH!  I got an email from Mr. Mallinson, and he informed me that he is sending me out some brass things he found in his Work Shop.  When they arrive, I will take them to my friendly neighborhood guitar repair man and have them installed and let everybody know how they are working.   But, after a week or so of playing the Mandolin with just the 'quick fix' strings tied in place (oh, use heavy string), well, I have quite gotten used to the ugliness, and rather think that it gives a certain look of lived with character.

Oh, more news.  Mr. Mallinson has passed word... see his Facebook, I hear... that he is cutting off his Custom Order List and will begin to make instruments 'on spec', that is, for catalog selection.  He explains that he uses up a great deal of time in consulting with customers on each and every detail of their Custom Instruments, and this same time could be used in simply turning out generally good and desirable instruments.  Besides, I suspects he gets many inquiries which ask whether he just doesn't have any mandolins that can be purchased NOW.   He hopes to start answering "Yes, and various Models to choose from".   Now, I suppose I might have been lucky to have gotten there in time for my 'Custom' Mandolas, as I am not sure that Mandolas will be included in his catalogue.  We all shall see.