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Announcing 
New Original Sime~Gen Novels 
by
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Jean Lorrah

From
Meisha Merlin Publishing Inc. 

Sime~Gen Inc. Presents

ReReadable Books

December 2005

"Into the Spirit Realm: An analysis of our group mind"

By

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

 

 

 To send books for review in this column email Jacqueline Lichtenberg, jl@simegen.com for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file.  
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Schindler’s List feature film produced by Stephen Spielberg, 1993

Into The West, TV Miniseries, produced by Stephen Spielberg, 2005

Special Report: Spirituality 2005: In Search of The Spiritual Newsweek, Sept 5, 2005 issue.

After all these years, you know I don’t review books in December to avoid adding to the artificial buying frenzy.

There is however, a mystical aspect to giving – be it a gift or a bit of charity. A well thought out and carefully chosen gift can create a connection that will last forever. So take care what you give to whom, when and why.

Here are some suggestions for a gift that would create such a bond. This year, Stephen Spielberg produced a TV miniseries epic – to my mind an instant classic like his Schindler’s List.

Schindler’s List spoke up for the plight of the persecuted in Nazi Germany.

Into the West speaks up for the plight of the Native Americans who were run over by the European juggernaut settling this continent.

Read Spielberg’s credits here: www.imdb.com/name/nm0000229/#producer

Read all about Into The West here: http://alt.tnt.tv/itw/  and you will see the core elements of any great science fiction story woven through this epic: the technology that conquers (wheel making), the spiritual group mind (Native American) shattered by foreign technology, violence erupting when diplomacy fails, and the friendship and love that crosses cultural lines.

Into The West opens on the image of a map much like the map image that opened the TV show Bonanza. West’s map shows where the settled territories of the States end in "Indian Land" – and night after night of this miniseries, you watch that map change.

Today, there are a few isolated puddles of "Reservations" which are governed by Native American law, and a serious dispute in Congress over attempts by Hawaiian Natives to gain the same concessions granted to the mainland Natives.

Spielberg seems to be making a stellar career in speaking up for the plight of the underdog and has more such projects in the works.

But there’s more here than meets the eye.

At a recent Convention, CopperCon in Phoenix, Arizona,(www.casfs.org/ ) I was on a panel on the History of Tarot which caused me to think about various points I’d made in my book, The Biblical Tarot: Never Cross A Palm With Silver.

To write that book, I researched the source of the Tarot, I learned about the Aryan migrations south into India, and subsequent migrations north into what is now Afghanistan. Viewed from a certain perspective, history is the story of mass migrations.

When a mass migration happens, the resident peoples are overrun, displaced, absorbed by the new dominant force, or simply killed off.

The Biblical stories of migration of the Israelites around Judea, then down into Egypt where they flourished until enslaved, then up through the desert, and on into the promised land are stories of extermination. Certain cultures when they opposed the migrating hoard, were simply wiped out and the ground strewn with salt, while others were left to themselves.

In China, mass migrations flow into the land and the incoming migrants are absorbed by the local society – a stone slicing quietly into a pond then sinking out of sight.

In South Africa, the British and Dutch arrived and shoved aside the resident peoples, separating the cultures so they could make their farms and mines and export South Africa’s wealth, thus becoming wealthy themselves and leaving the Natives in poverty.

In Australia, the scenario went a little differently because the incoming population clung to the lush coastlands and the natives had most of the interior of a continent for a very long time.

But in the continental US, the incoming population perpetrated two vast injustices both similar and dissimilar to those recorded in pre-history and documented in history. The resident natives were slaughtered and the survivors were pushed onto poor reservations where they had their culture ruthlessly dismantled. And the natives of South Africa were imported to serve as slaves, which required that those strong and proud people be stripped of their cultures as well.

How do you strip away and incinerate a whole culture? Attack at the root. Attack at the level of spirituality. Take the children away from family and school them in a different world view, a different religion. Then watch the culture crumble. But watch out for what happens to you as a result of your chosen action.

Note that the Indian Wars culminated in the middle of the 19th century during and right after the era of the Civil War, a spiritual paroxysm of family, roots, philosophy, and a cultural reformation – the beginning of the "melting pot" of American culture.

That anything of the Native American cultures has survived is a testament to the deep native roots – the spirit of the land itself.

Today, that spirit may be rising through the ashes and into the group mind of America, possibly to prevail in some subtle way, a trend noted by the award winning producer, Stephen Spielberg.

The August 28th to September 5th issue of Newsweek Magazine carried a large, multi-part Special Report: Spirituality 2005: In Search of The Spiritual which can be bought for $2.95 on the newsweek.com website.

The thrust of the article is that Americans are in search of an experience of the divine which is up close and personal, tangible and real. There is not much growing interest in organized and established religions, but the majority of Americans pray daily, and care much about their relationship to their Divinity.

This is an excellent article full of statistics from a web-based research project – and another appropriate gift for someone who needs to gain perspective on themselves and on life in these United States.

I read recently that Europe in general and France in particular (a birthplace of Kabbalah and hotbed of the Inquisition) is riding a trend toward secularism. Currently that European trend is surfacing in Ontario, Canada where Premier Dalton McGuinty supports banning all religious arbitration of family disputes to settle the furor over Moslem communities using Sharia, the court of family law reputed to violate women’s rights. Catholics and Jews are objecting strenuously as their family courts have functioned in Ontario for centuries. Secularism seemed to me to be ruling the day.

So I was astonished to see the statistics in Newsweek on the American search for God. 64% of us pray, and 80% believe that the universe was created by God. 79% believe that someone of another faith can attain salvation and go to heaven. 70% are married to someone of the same faith.

The article lumps "Fundamentalists" in with the Evangelical Christians, and Evangelical Christians compose only 33% of the respondents. Only 58% of Evangelical Christians are Republican. That means that less than 20% of all Americans are "Fundamentalists," not a voting majority.

Wiccans and Kabbalah even got mentioned along with an excellent description of the diversification of American Moslems plus a vast array of types of Christians.

But 79% of the respondents described themselves as "spiritual" but only 64% call themselves "Religious."

The older the respondent was, the more likely the person was to say spirituality was important in their daily lives. 66% of people over 60 felt spirituality was of daily import, while only 44% of those 18-39 found spirituality important. "There are no atheists in a foxhole."

Considering the aging trend in our population, an increase in spiritual seeking and even religious practice may be just a natural demographic trend.

On the other hand, I can’t rid my mind of Spielberg’s images of the stone Medicine Wheel on the sacred ground out of my mind. I cried when the Conestoga wagons drove right through that medicine wheel while at the same time my writer’s mind admired the perfection of the imagery, and the power and relevance of the magic it represented.

Into The West is the story of the Wheeler family, a family of wheelwrights from Virginia who scatter into the West seeking gold and other fortunes. They intermarry with Indians and have children who grow up to come to various fates. The Conestoga wagon wheel destroyed the Medicine Wheel. That is exactly what happened in history.

Now perhaps the wheels of progress are turning in a new direction. Perhaps the rise of spirituality will counter the commercial forces whipping up a buying frenzy for every sacred occasion.

To send books for review in this column email Jacqueline Lichtenberg,  jl@simegen.com for snailing instructions or send an attached RTF file.  

 

 

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