I woke up this morning with the distinct sensation that I had returned to a station after being away. Halfway dreaming, I was standing in a sunny room in my house which seemed somewhat unfamiliar, as when you walk into your home for the first time after a long vacation trip.

The word “station” was the term insisted upon in the phrase, “distinct sensation I had returned to a station. . .” which came into my mind almost as soon as I woke up. It was about 4 a.m.

I’ve never had that experience before. I really felt as if I had returned to this "station" after being a long way from my body and bed and house. The implication was that there was more than one "station".

Experiment Earth?

So many millions of eyes opening as dawn sweeps like a tsunami of light around the planet. Billions of eyes, trillions of eyes. Bird eyes, human eyes, cat eyes, dog eyes, fish eyes, crab eyes, lizard eyes, insect eyes. Blue eyes, green eyes, dark eyes, yellow eyes. Eyes that are round, that are slits, that are multiple, that are on the front of the head, on the sides of the head, on stalks. All opening and turning to welcome the light.

Flights of white ibises above the Everglades, the beauty of great blue herons against the glowing sky. Night creatures become still and silent and close their eyes to the sun as alligator eyes sense the new warmth and long tails slowly stir.

A small plane drones above my bedroom -- a flying man, eyes turned toward the brightening Atlantic twenty miles to the east. Porpoise eyes roll above the water’s surface near the beaches, pelicans glide in long formations above the snowy sand, sandpipers dance to and fro with the rhythm of the waves. Barnacles cling to pilings, oysters cling to rocks. A human delivers newspapers along my street. A mole tunnels just beneath the soil, raising a long mound in the grass, while a possum waddles back into the woods after its nocturnal rounds.

As I evoke the diversity of life, I’ve hardly begun. I’ve covered the first inch of a thousand miles. I haven’t even mentioned the plants. The insects alone are a universe of ingenious designs. Undersea life, from whales to microscopic, includes marvels that can hardly be imagined – fins, tentacles, pincers, claws, poisons, smokescreens, lights,camouflage, mimicry and more and more and more.

Life is everywhere, even in the most unlikely places -- icy or steaming or eternally dark – and everywhere it presents itself in fabulous variations. And each life is a point of view different from all the others.

Some time ago I asked myself questions: “Why are there so many different forms of life?” “And why are the forms so radically different that many seem to have nothing at all in common?” “Wouldn’t fish have sufficed?” “Wouldn’t just one kind of fish have sufficed?” “Why the multiplicity?”

One theory was that the Earth is a kind of spaceship whose purpose is to preserve life during a very long time, and the best insurance is to develop as many varied forms of life as possible in the hope that at least one will prove itself able to pull through.

But the answer that appealed to me the most is that life on Earth is an experiment. I even pictured cosmic-sized scientists in white coats looking down into a glass box, like an aquarium, to observe how their experiment was progressing. The experiment is a kind of game to make the maximum number of different life forms evolve from simple beginnings with the greatest possible variation -- the end goal being to see which form will be most successful in mastering or outlasting the others.

Of course I don’t know what the end goal is, if there is one, and it probably has higher aspects than what I’ve mentioned here, but the irony of the evolutionary process is that if there is a “last species standing” aspect to the experiment, a “who will be the survivor?” quest, then the winner is likely to be a simple creature of the kind which began the process, because all the life forms depend on those below for survival. Humans would like to think they will win because they are the smartest, but not only are they the most likely to make themselves extinct through war, but also they are so dependent on so many other life forms that they could not possibly end up the sole survivor on Earth. Sorry, intelligence, you lose.

I don’t know who will survive or for how long, but I hear the betting is heavy on the roaches.

(Photo, snail on gerbera, by Julia Lee)

Hunting in the Grass

Having settled that objective reality is whatever most people vote for, and that subjective reality is whatever seems real at the moment, we can now move on to other things.

As I smile at my first sentence I wonder what the second sentence should be. There have been a number of distractions here recently that have kept Pegasus mooning in his stable. First a sick cat who is “miraculously” getting better thanks in part to Herculean struggles by Julia and me designed to send two pills and a squirt of liquid down Buffy’s throat rather than onto the tabletop, the floor, or Julia’s blouse. The daily romp of catching him would make a slapstick movie.

Then we had two human colds to get through (quickly, thank heaven), camcorder demise, still camera breakdown, three days of almost completely nonfunctioning Internet connection, and presently a failing home water heater.

I hesitate to touch any other appliance or get into the car.

The happy news is that the catarrh is gone, the Internet modem and router have been replaced, and a new water heater will arrive tomorrow. Not to mention the good news that after many cold days we are now up in the sunny 70’s. Young squirrels are racing around in circles, bright-breasted robins are pecking in the grass (this is just a stopover for them on a journey to I don’t know where), and the omnipresent azalea shrubs are coming into bloom.

I’ve found myself hesitant about a post for this blog because I don’t know where to go from here. I want PEGASUS come from my head and soul rather than from research projects, and I’ve used up a lot of internally stored subjects since I began FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS in mid-January. Fresh material isn’t as easy to bring to light as it once was. I feel that some really fascinating topic is about to come along, possibly something about prayer -- but it’s not quite here yet.

I can’t resist writing that like a robin, I am hunting for something in the grass during a journey to I don’t know where.

I’ll try to do better. Maybe some kind reader will provide a stimulating comment.

Psychotic Reality

On the subject of reality, I sent a question to my sister-in-law, who has a doctorate in psychology and treats psychotic patients every day. I asked her about the “sense of reality” in her schizophrenic patients. I still haven’t found any studies on that particular point, but then I haven’t been doing much of anything useful for three days as I fought off a cold. Commands, visualization, prayer – all those good things worked and made the cold very mild.

Here’s what my sister-in-law wrote:

“Hallucinations actually are real - depending on how you define real. The area of the brain which reflects listening actually lights up (on brain scans) when a mentally ill person is experiencing an auditory hallucination.

“As to the person with psychosis.... while he recognizes that the delusion sounds preposterous to the listener, it is more believable to the speaker than any other explanation of events.....Jack believes that he mustn't purchase the last 2-liter bottle of 7-Up on the shelf because it is likely contaminated. He knows that his mother and therapist don't believe it is contaminated, but, as far as he is concerned, his belief that it is contaminated overrides their beliefs about its safety.

“[I don’t] mean that he is more sure of his delusion than we are of our reality. (How many of us question our reality - don't most of us take it for granted?) He can intellectually comprehend that we believe differently than he does, but he holds a fervent belief in the authenticity of his perceptions/beliefs. It rings more true to him than other people's differing perceptions of the situation....This scenario is reflective of a person whose psychosis has partially remitted. When a person is deeper into a psychotic state, the ‘voices’ he hears, or his delusions, are unquestioned by him.

“A big issue in neurology now has to do with the sense of self...how I recognize me as me.”

Detective Inspector Lovey Ponders Reality

by Julia Lee

Reality? Happy Hunting!

It seems to me that there are people who -- because of their personality makeup, shall we say? -- perceive the everyday physical world of sound and color and form and movement around them and take it at face value, while others instinctively question the nature of reality and feel that there is some reality beyond what their five senses present to them. The first says, “This is reality and there’s nothing more”, while the others feel, “There’s an ultimate reality behind this,” and ask “What is reality?”

(In writing this piece I’ve avoided wordiness by calling the first group “Nothing More” and the latter group “Other Realities”.)

To look at what is in front of you and accept it as all there is: Is that a gift or a limitation?

The Other Realities group might ask a question asked in VALIS, by Philip K. Dick, “How many worlds do we exist in simultaneously?”, or “Do we exist simultaneously in more than one time?”, questions which would cause the Nothing More group to smirk.

The Nothing Mores see dreams as “just dreams”, while the other group senses that dreams may have a reality beyond mere imagination. In the morning experiences about which I wrote recently, the dream world definitely seemed more “real” than my everyday world. Which gives rise to the question, in passing, why would a “merely imaginary” world ever seem MORE real than the everyday world? One would think that if there is a single reality, an imagined reality would always seem inferior in quality, less convincing . . . that is, the brain could not manufacture a counterfeit reality which would seem superior to that “objective reality” which is presumably fed to the brain by our five human senses.

To the person who feels “there may be a reality behind this one” the concept of “maya” (“the sense-world of manifold phenomena held in Vedanta to conceal the unity of absolute being”) makes sense because it is seconded by his own feelings, while to the Nothing More the maya notion is a groundless way of unnecessarily complicating things.

The philosopher Bishop George Berkeley asserted that the only real existence of anything is the perception we have of that thing in our mind. When Dr. Johnson was asked how he would refute Bishop Berkeley, he kicked a heavy stone and said rather stupidly, “Thus, I refute him!”

I’ve lost the URL, but I was looking the other day at a website which discussed the concept of virtual reality: “Just what do we mean when we use the term virtual? It generally is applied to something that is not conceived of or perceived as real but yet acts like a real thing. Then what is reality?”

I’ve written in this blog that we might compare our state to a person who becomes so immersed in a virtual reality computer game that she forgets there is anything else. Her 3-D perceptions of the game, and herself as the seeing participant in the game, become reality to her. Without memory of sitting down and hooking up the game apparatus, without memory of herself as a person who is playing a game, she has no means of finding her game reality secondary to a “higher reality”. If someone in the game asks her about “other realities” she might say scornfully, pleased with her down-to-earth common sense, “This is obviously reality, and it’s all there is.” She’s going to be quite surprised when the game ends and the goggles come off.

What if we’re in a similar situation? What if, as Plato says in his “Allegory of the Cave”, we accept as reality what are merely shadows cast by the true reality? What if – as many have said – life is but a dream from which we will wake to reality.

I must quote Robin Williams, who exclaimed in one of his comedy routines, “Reality! What a concept!”

I feel like writing, “Reality is whatever seems real to us at the moment,” but that sounds like cheating. How about: “Reality is whatever seems real to us unless and until a superior reality is shown to exist?”

The fact that I would ask those questions puts me squarely in the Other Realities group and brings me back to the point of this little essay – that there seems to be one type of person who feels that the everyday world of the five sense is obviously the only reality, and another type of person who feels that there is a superior reality behind the one we perceive in the everyday world, and --- who knows? -- perhaps an even more superior reality beyond that one.

Because I like FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS to be personal and spontaneous rather than researched in advance, I don’t know what studies – psychological or epistemological – may have been written on the subject of the two kinds of personalities I’ve discussed . . . but I would like to find out.

Victory of Light

Fire Rainbow, Northwestern U.S.


I've never seen a fire rainbow, but it is so nice to wake up at a time which would have been ruled by darkest night only a few weeks ago and see the oak trees outlined against the glowing eastern sky. The Sun is reclaiming its kingdom.

Dreams Breaking Through? Unidentified Aerial Phenomena?

No. This happens every time a jet breaks the sound barrier, or so they say.
(The omnisicient "they" we hear so much about.)

Dreams Breaking Through

I’ve been reading “VALIS”, by Philip K. Dick, a writer whose books I’d never read until a few weeks ago. He is often described as insane but brilliant. I won’t go into any of that now, except to say that “VALIS” is supposed to be a kind of autobiographical account of his madness. I find it completely absorbing and very well written.

"VALIS" often touches on subjects that I’ve discussed in this blog, including the writings of schizophrenics. I was startled when I read the particular quotation I’ll give below because it relates so closely to my experiences of being overwhelmed by a dream world while awake. “My Strangest Dream Experiences”

From “VALIS:

It has been said of dreams that they are a “controlled psychosis,” or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.

Ann's Art, Julia's Flowers, Victor's Zoey

Evil

Yesterday morning we went out for a walk and found that during the night a vehicle had swerved off the street onto the bottom of our driveway, slammed down its brakes -- leaving black tread marks on the cement -- and skidded along the front of the lawn taking out a long swath of grass. Instead of solid green grass there is now a curving, ugly rut -- along with other tracks showing that the driver turned again, drove up toward the house, backed away, and drove across again

Before paranoia took over, we discovered that we had not been singled out. Several other lawns along the same street had been vandalized in similar fashion. This morning we looked at half a dozen on other streets that had been conspicuously damaged.

Some person, late in the night, deliberately and repeatedly harmed property whose only purpose was to be beautiful.

I call that “evil”. I call it evil because it was not only done knowingly but was willed with desire that the damage be done.

I propose that the distinction between “bad”, and “evil” should be based on the state of the will of the perpetrator rather than the degree of harm done.

We English-speaking humans classify many actions as “bad”, but we reserve the word “evil” for actions that transcend badness. Many acts which are inconvenient to society, or disruptive of the social order, are labeled bad, or criminal, but “evil” has a cosmic dimension.

In criminal law class I once proposed, tongue-in-cheek, that all crimes should be punishable by death – whether shooting someone or just willfully speeding. My argument was that minor crimes, being fully under the control of the person committing them, would immediately cease when the population learned that execution would be the consequence. Speeding might be worth a $50 fine, but not the electric chair. Spinning tires in someone’s garden would not be worth a lethal injection.

My serious opinion is that the ill will of the criminal, and not the severity of the damage he does, should be judged and punished by appropriate penalties. I think that a person who shoplifts because she’s poor, or who steals cars to support himself, should be judged less harshly than a person whose only motive and only profit is the satisfaction of hurting other beings. I believe that a man who tortures a cat is guilty of a much greater crime than a person engaged in the criminal enterprise of stealing money from banks. Of course the shoplifter and the bank robber are criminals, but their crimes are lesser than those motivated by evil.

Reading Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and some of his other works was one of the most pleasant experiences of my life. Kant is most known in the area of moral philosophy, of course, for his Categorical Imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." But I also gleaned from Kant that in judging what was good or evil in human behavior, it was the ill will or good will of the actor which should be determinative. I’m probably oversimplifying and distorting Kant, but I don’t have time to reread one of his books before posting this, and that was the general impression I’ve carried around for years.

At any rate, that principle is the thrust of this post. We can classify degrees of evil if we like, but the starting point, the threshold of evil, is an act based on ill will, on a desire to do harm for the sake of doing harm.

Prison

This is one of those times when I can’t get away from the feeling that the earth is a prison, a place of torment. Even in my own nice American town the widespread anxiety, fear, sickness, pain and discomfort cry out for notice. One can’t avoid the sadness of loss. One can't avoid seeing the hospitals and animal shelters and funeral homes, the cemeteries, the blind and the hobbling people, the dead animals on the roads, the shoppers on electric carts breathing with tubes up their noses, the horribly twisted man on the oversized tricycle with his pitiful hoard of aluminum cans.

Because you are reading this on a computer you probably exist on one of the relatively few comfortable spots among the many more uncomfortable spots on the planet, but you are nevertheless aware of the hunger and deprivation, misery and torture and oppression which, though they may have become numb clichés to us, nevertheless dominate the lives of millions at this very moment.

Worse, nobody knows why this has happened or what is really going on. As if we’d been dragged out of our sleep in the middle of the night and dumped into a prison camp on unknown charges, we wonder why. What have we done to deserve this? What’s going to happen next? Is there any life beyond this prison? Who’s behind it all? Is there even anybody in charge?

We humans on Earth speculate and speculate and speculate about our state and fate, and we know no more now than the philosophers of ancient Greece and those before them who speculated about the same things. Well, we do seem to know more about the nature of matter and the Sun and Moon and stars, but that’s about it. Essentially, we know nothing. We go about in a daze, hoping we will wake up someday.

Now I hear someone who, advocating a more cheerful attitude, is pointing to the pretty flowers and the birth of babies -- but Devil’s Island had beautiful views, and a baby’s first day on Earth is its first day on death row. I don't like to sound negative, but I am beginning to experience the psychological advantages of facing the facts.

William Butler Yeats described himself as a soul attached to a dying animal. As I get older my body reminds me more and more of that even though I am thankfully in much better shape than many people my age. At least I and Yeats developed a sense of soul, of “a real me”. You may put it down to wishful thinking, but I am glad that I see myself in the almost humorous position of sailing a small boat while bits and pieces break off and fall into the water. . . rather than seeing myself as the boat.


An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress. . .

Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

My Strangest Dream Experiences

I’m not even sure these should be called a dream experiences because they actually occurred when I had been wide awake for a hour or so after a night’s sleep.

On at least three mornings, all several years ago, these things happened. For the sake of the scientific record I must state that on each occasion my wife and I had sex just before the “dream” episode; I wouldn’t mention that except that may be significant, for I never had such an episode on duller mornings.

The first episode was the most overwhelming. As I lay in bed around 8:30 a.m. gathering strength to dress for work I began to have a feeling which words cannot describe adequately. It was as if I were beginning to remember an extremely realistic and powerful dream without quite remembering what had happened in it. The dream world expanded and grew. A strange, disoriented feeling came over me. The dream world began to overwhelm the real world of the bedroom and the sunny windows. It was as if I had earlier been in a world which was much more real than the one in which I lay, and as I began to remember it, it overwhelmed everything else.

The key is that the dream world somehow overflowed its bounds and swamped the “real” world. The overpowering dream world was much more vivid than my physical surroundings had ever been, so that I actually felt – with alarm – that what I had thought was the real world was not the real world, and that a more real world was rising up to take over, making my ordinary surroundings seem unreal. And yet the content of any dream remained tantalizingly just beyond my reach. I could sense faces, voices, colors, but only as teasing hints; I was like a person with amnesia grasping at fleeting clues about his life.

My head was swimming as I tried to get emotional control of myself. When I had dressed and gone to my car, I realized that the thing was not fading away. I was like someone who had been plucked from the past (the dream) and thrust into an unfamiliar future.

I felt uncertain that I was following the simple route from home to the interstate highway, after which I had to drive fifteen miles to Daytona Beach and five further miles to my office. As I began the drive through west Daytona I found that intersections and turns I had negotiated hundreds of times now were unfamiliar and confusing. “Do I turn here? Is it further down? And then which direction?” I felt my way hesitantly past traffic lights and streets that may or may not have taken me to work.

I was quite frightened by now, and I pulled into a walk-in medical clinic. The doctor who examined me studied my eyes with a bright light, checked my heart and blood pressure, and said he could find nothing wrong. He had suspected a stroke, or ministroke, but could find no sign of one. He told me I had probably just suffered from panic because of some mistake on the road.

After that rest I was calmer, and I did find my way to work. As I walked through the court building to my office I felt somewhat as if I were floating rather than walking – I don’t mean literally floating, but with some such sensation affecting my consciousness and body.

Only after I’d sat at my desk for awhile with a glass of cold water did the mighty flood of the dream world begin to subside. My sense of disorientation and unreality gradually faded, and the world of bookshelves and fluorescent light fixtures and computers regained the upper hand. The dream world continued to recede, and within another hour I was feeling what passes for normal.

The same thing happened on at least two other widely separated mornings, but each time it was a little less extreme.

Sometimes after that I felt the flood rising and became lightheaded and concerned, but I fought against it, got out of bed immediately, splashed cold water in my face, and got through without an extreme episode. I began making sure that I had some breakfast before any physical exertion, thinking that perhaps low blood sugar had been a factor.

For whatever reason, nothing like those episodes has happened to me for several years except for a mild version which passes in a matter of seconds. Even so, the extreme experiences were so strange and disorienting – though at the same time fascinating and tantalizing – that even a hint of them is enough to start emotional red lights flashing.

The unavoidable consequence of those episodes is that I feel, based on personal experience, that there is another reality superior to this reality. I wish I could say something more insightful, but that’s it.

Tornado,DeLand,Florida: Photos I Took Very Close to Home

Tornado aftermath across the street from our house



Near a school a few blocks away


Homes after the tornado



Police at entrance to Hawthorne Hills mobile home park









It's trite but it's true: Pictures just cannot capture the impression of walking through the devastation in person.

Tornado, DeLand, Florida: Pictures I Took This Morning

These were taken within half a mile from home today. Most of the roads are open now after being closed for a couple of days after the tornado.

It's worth clicking on the pictures of the bicycle and the chandelier for an enlarged view, even though it takes awhile to show up.

The ABC store, Sonny's Barbeque, and Mi Mexico still stand! Damage is to the exteriors and not the structures . . . although the businesses haven't reopened yet.

Finding Home

This morning I came across this quotation, which made me think of my recurrent “trying to get home” dreams.

“He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where,
He sayes it is so far
That he hath quite forgot how to go there.”

Henry Vaughan, “Man”

---

The Tornado: We still look out at our peaceful lawns and trees and wonder what the scenes are like a few blocks away. Although we felt the outer part of the tornado strongly at this house, we have seen no more of the aftermath than people in Oregon or Wisconsin. We scour the pictures in newspapers looking for familiar builldings. I keep wondering when the police will reopen the roads.

DeLand is a relatively small university town, and so the loss of certain businesses -- such as Dunkin' Donuts (my source of coffee beans), the ABC liquor store (my source of martini ingredients), or Sonny's Barbeque (my source for satisfying basic Southern nutritional needs), or Mi Mexico (essential source of enchiladas and chiles rellenos) -- is much more significant than in a city that sprawls over miles.

Tornado

Half a mile from home.



If you follow the U.S. news, and you’ve noticed in my Profile that I live in DeLand, Florida (which is near I-4 between Daytona Beach and Orlando), you’ll know that I’m in one of the central Florida areas that was hit hardest by a tremendous tornado last night.

My wife and I were awakened by continuous lightning and thunder a little before 4 o’clock this morning. Rain thundered on the roof. We live in a brick, well insulated house with windows that shut out much exterior noise, and the fact that we heard such sounds so clearly shows how loud they were. I went to the kitchen to watch the lightning through a skylight, and it was like hundreds of giant flashbulbs flaring in the sky without a second’s pause.

Julia said, “That’s what happens when there’s a tornado.”

It was only a few minutes later that we heard a sound like the swish swish swish of cosmic helicopter blades, and then a sound like gravel being hurled against the side of the house.

At that point the power went out. All we knew was that the peak of a powerful storm was passing over us. The nonstop lightning continued but moved on to the east toward New Smyrna Beach and the Atlantic Ocean, leaving just rain and wind to enliven our night.

In first light of daybreak I saw that a tree was down in front of the neighbor’s across the street. The power returned and -- horror of horrors – I found that I couldn’t connect to the Internet! Here I am with my dawn coffee (thank heavens) but none of the email and Internet sites that have come to fill the first couple of hours of my mornings.

My sister-in-law called from Ohio to ask if we were all right. I didn't know what she was talking about. She said she was watching television coverage of tornado damage in our area. Our television gradually revealed to us, as first videos arrived from news helicopters, that there had been devastation at New Smyrna Beach, and then that our own town and areas west had been hard hit.

It emerged that the worst of the destruction in DeLand was near our house. In the mile or two north of us hundreds of homes (especially mobile homes) and commercial buildings had been destroyed. There were blocks of structures without roofs. It was almost impossible to recognize anything familiar in the videos because the buildings affected were torn up so badly.

It turned out that Taylor Road, the street at the bottom of our back yard that parallels the street we live on, is the south boundary of the territory which has been closed off as the main disaster area. The north boundary of the stricken area is at least a mile to the north of that. Those south-north boundaries mark the sides of an east-west corridor of damage that extends from mid-Florida through DeLand to the Atlantic Ocean. At least nineteen lives were lost in the rural areas toward the middle of the state, while none are believed lost here.

It’s so strange to watch video of buildings flattened or torn apart in places within two minutes’ drive from our house, places where we’ve gone shopping, and then to walk out in our front yard and see no signs of violence except for the scattered oak leaves that carpeted our driveway overnight. We saw so much worse in our neighborhood during the multiple hurricanes of 2004 that the one downed tree across the street supplied little drama.

We tried to drive down Taylor Road to the damaged areas but the police checkpoint stopped us a couple of blocks from home. A couple on bicycles told us that on the main street Dunkin’ Donuts and a popular old ice cream store “were gone”. We could have walked to the nearest demolished mobile park if it hadn’t been for another police checkpoint.

The couple on the bicycles live in a subdivision few blocks northeast of us, and they expect to be without power for at least 48 hours. A tree limb speared their roof.

I was being prepared for admission to a rehab clinic as a result of Internet withdrawal symptoms when, marvelously, the Internet connection reopened this afternoon. I ravenously devoured emails and information like a starving person given his first meal in days. My next move was to write this post. I thought it might be of interest, especially for people who know I live in DeLand.

Interstate 4, which cuts southwest across Florida, is known as Lightning Alley, but after last night, and a destructive tornado in north DeLand around Christmas of last year, and the hurricanes of 2004, not to mention a multi-tornado attack in this area in the 1990’s, I think that we may have earned a more comprehensive title.



A few blocks away.