fever state

1.

I really wanted to write something here

today,

but I woke up with

a fever.

Aching, coughing, miserable,

the whole nine yards.

I felt really crappy

about the fact

I could barely move without 

crying,

until I heard a story about this man

on  National Public Radio's  "This American Life." 

Here's a link to the whole story:

Held Hostage

There are at least four stories in this radio program,

but the one that made me think I'd better get my ass out of bed

is called "I've Fallen In Love and I Can't Get Up."

This is a story about Chris Higgins,

who has something called 

Narcolepsy with Cataplexy.

I would not like what Chris has.

Narcolepsy, as you probably know, is a neurological disorder

wherein you fall asleep while you're going through your daily life.

Add cataplexy to it, and you lose muscle tone when you receive certain emotional stimuli.

Generally good emotional stimuli.  

So if Chris is gazing at his grandchildren, happy that they're 

beautiful and happy and healthy, he has an attack - ie: he loses all muscle tone and falls

asleep.  In the radio show, he talks about how he goes to his brother's wedding, and instructs people to just lean him against the wall so he looks attentive.  And that's what he did.  There are pictures of him,

propped up against the wall, I guess.  Looking at the pictures, or even just talking

about them will also give him an attack.

The result of this disorder is that the sufferer has to make every attempt

to avoid happy situations.  

This, as you might imagine, makes life very difficult

for his wife.

Love, itself, is debilitating for him.

2.

Now I'm a blogger who sings 

the praises and power of love,

so I felt a deep sadness for Chris Higgins,

and it really kind of woke me up,

and made me think of a thought that I've had

several times over the past six to nine months:

Love, itself, for living creatures,

can be absolutely debilitating. 

Love sickness causes us to

lose our minds,

and the conditions that can occur when you lose the thing you love

can be even worse,

especially if you are a sensitive person.

Having the person or object you love begin to treat you badly

can actually lower your resistance to a number of other illnesses,

and absolutely losing the beloved sometimes changes a person's health

and happiness forever.  It can be incurable.

Despite the fact that I continually

conclude my channelings and ramblings with

the concept that love is the only answer to all our woes,

I also often wonder if,

as long as we live in our earthly avatars,

we might be better off without love.

3.

Consider, for instance,

the psychopath.  I have encountered the idea recently that the 

psychopath might actually be the next stage in

human evolution:

"The goal of evolution is to maximize a specie's chance of survival, and there is evidence to show that the basis of psychopathy is an heritable predisposition to the disorder, a disorder which enhances the psychopathic individual's chance of survival. Therefore, is psychopathy indeed the result of human evolution?"  ( Psychopathy:an Evolutionary Perspective )

(kari'sblog)

After all, it is love, and emotional connections, that will cause a human to go back into a burning building to retrieve a baby, or a dog, or a bird.  Love causes women and men

to stay in destructive relationships; love also produces martyrs.  Consider, for instance,

the case of Jesus Christ and Noor-un-nisa Vilayet Kahn (I've written a bit about her earlier in this blog.)

Love is the primary motive of their martyrdom.  Love and the willing loss of selfhood 

for the sake of the collective human race.

Now, in this day and age,

many people may think that's just plain crazy.

If a species intends to survive, 

it's best off just leaving its emotions at the door.

If this is the case, perhaps Mr. Higgins' Narcolepsy/Cataplexy

actually marks an advancement of the species

which happened in his brain 

during this lifetime.

4.

Now I'm the first to admit that this is a troubling concept,

and that I find the human capacity to love to be

 the thing that makes us divine;

otherwise, we're little more than animals.

But after all, we are only animals - right? 

And as I've argued elsewhere, we were born into our animalistic avatars 

(these bodies)

in order to live on this earth.

I've also contemplated elsewhere the concepts of

creation,

the Fall,

evolution,

the soul

and a bunch of other really heady stuff like that.

In fact, much of this blog is about heady stuff like that

and I'm absolutely stunned and thrilled to see

there are a couple people out there in the world

who have actually returned to this blog and read

more than one of my rambling, channeled entries.

I thank you.

In a few of my entries, I contemplate what happened

when Adam ate that apple.

And here I would like to add another thought to that

theme:

when Adam ate that apple

(of course because Eve made him do it)

he became, as the Book of Genesis tells us

more like God.

Being more like God 

is being able to look at the creation

and love it.

Before Adam ate the apple,

I'd venture to suggest,

he and Eve were really nothing but

animals.

Happy animals, at that, 

and animals who were given the 

ability to use words,

but animals, nonetheless.

So it is possible that one of the effects of eating

the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge

was the man suddenly had the capacity to look at his mate,

and fall in love.

Love is an emotion that is God-like;

love requires an all-encompassing gaze

and absolute forgiveness, 

which man, in his earthly avatar

and its limited function,

is incapable of doing.

Following this line of thinking,

love is what makes us God-like,

but it is also the thing

that can kill us,

as individuals

and as a species.

5.

In the realm of the undead and undying,

which is where Makropoulos lives,

most human entities 

have something akin to Narcolepsy with Cataplexy.

They can't be happy; they can't love;

they have to maintain a certain level of misery and pain and predatorial lust

in order to survive.

The problem with Makropoulos

me

is that I was damned by a selfish man

to live forever young,

but I was not wired to not love.

I can love;

I do love;

it is essential to me.

A prerequisite of love is the capacity to be selfless.

I will love you

if I let myself,

like I can read your mind

if I let myself;

I've simply learned how to not let myself do either,

because if I permit myself to do 

one or the other or both,

if I open the barriers I've learned to put up,

the pain and horror of what I encounter

is so horrible and heartbreaking,

I know I will surely go insane.

I won't go on with that; 

read other parts of the blog

if you want to know who Makropoulos is.

6.

Sometimes I look at the young people today.

Either from being in a family where love didn't exist,

or from being subject to loveless media stimuli,

they have learned that loving 

is fatal, and so they don't do it.

Some are just born with the incapacity to love.

Perhaps, as a new generation,

they mark the evolution of humankind,

as well as the guarantee that we will survive as a species.

But if that is true, what of love,

and what of God?

This line of thinking marks the essence of the historical juncture at which we currently live:

we can either work, as a species,

to find a way to maintain the place of love on this earthly realm,

or we can make it a myth, an old magical tale long past its currency

and let the new generations of the loveless assure

the ongoing existence of our species.

Noor-un-nisa

She is a diva too.

Could I be her?

(or am I too great a coward)

Could you?

woman of great light

1. 

Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan.  

"Noor-un-nisa" in and of itself is a name to conjure with.  Noor means light - I was always under the impression it refers to a very great light - nisa means woman.  I really do not know any Arabic, but it appears this name would end up signifying something like "woman of great light."

Appropriately so.

I just finished reading a book called Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan, and I am absolutely silenced by it. And I want to read it again. This is the first book I've read cover-to-cover in over five years.  It is a story about a saint, a woman of superior light.

 (from the BBC )

Noor's life was full of ambiguities and contradictions; her father was Hazrat Inayat Khan, founder of the "Sufi Order of the West."  Her mother was an American, Ora Ray Baker of New Mexico, who took the name Ameena Begum.  (Ora Ray was half sister to the father of yoga in America, Pierre Bernard, who was also known as quite a philanderer and con man.  Noor's brother Pir Vilayat Khan was the head of the Sufi Order International until just before his death in 2004. 

I met Pir Vilayat around 1981, in Cleveland, Ohio.  At the time, I was dating a man whose father was very involved with the Sufi movement.  One day, I walked into the family kitchen and this little, white-haired man in a brown cape-like wrap was sitting at the table.  We did not exchange any words, that I remember.  But I was struck by his calmness, and how he appeared to be glowing.

Only recently did I begin reading Pir Vilayat's works, though I have been interested in Sufi thought for quite some time.  Reading his book Awakening, I kept encountering references to his sister, who was killed at Dachau.

2.

There is quite a bit about Noor on the internet.  The picture just above this was found at scrapbookpages.com Her story on wikipedia isn't bad.  But most impressive is the story as presented by Shrabani Basu, in the book I just completed.  Basu uses a very plain, straight forward language to tell the story of this shy young woman raised in a mystical household who, upon fleeing France during W. W. II, vowed to go back and help fight with the Resistance.  She became a radio operator for the British, and returned to Paris working with a highly dangerous espionage operation.

Within days after her arrival in Paris, the espionage ring called Prosper that she was working with began to be dismantled by the Germans, who had infiltrated its ranks.  Noor soon found herself alone, the only radio operator in Paris for the British.  Rather than return to London, she stayed on, dodging the Germans for months, until they finally caught her.  She was considered highly dangerous when they caught her. She fought and bit the man who captured her.

3.
The entire time I read the book, I felt an incredible affinity to her.  All her life, she was very shy, and a bit of a day-dreamer -- a bit, in fact, like me.  She was an idealist who wanted to leave a positive mark on the world.  While in training, many felt she was too delicate and emotional to make it as a spy.  One person said she wasn't very smart.  She took things too literally, they felt. And her emotions ran too high.

But she did fine, very fine, escaping the Germans several times before she was caught, and then attempting two escapes before she was finally shackled, tortured, then executed, at the age of 30.  

Noor ignored all religious and national lines to advance the end of a miserable war, against a miserable enemy.  Once captured, she reportedly never lost her composure.  

For at least the first 100 pages of the book, I kept thinking that she was foolish. Couldn't she see, as clearly as I could, that she was basically walking into her death?  Perhaps she did and refused to accept that fact. 

However, by the end, I could see the thin line that runs between foolishness, heroism, and brilliance.   Yes, she was foolish, and perhaps she was used by the British military.  But she made her own choice to go, and to stay, when she was urged to come home.  And she never gave in to her interrogators, right up to her tortured death.

This entry is not doing her the homage I hoped to give her.  I'll write more later.   For now, here's a link to a story that was published in the London Sunday Express on June 5, 1949.