A is for Arctic



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A is for Arctic:
The basic polarities of the human brain and of the ground of existence that generates the cosmos are reflected in the differentiation of human culture. World culture can be divided into East, West, North, and South. The East, basically the river valley culture of China, represent the social polarity. The West, basically the mountain and ocean culture of the Americas and Australia, represents the private, the individualistic, the shamanistic alternative.
The South is represented by tropical areas, most important being those of South Asia. This is the holistic polarity of human culture, the mystical. The North, the science oriented culture of the cool temperate areas of North America and Eurasia, is the realm of South Asia materialistic and empirical opposite.
It is no accident that all the populous nations with areas reaching into the Arctic; the USA, Canada, Russia, and Sweden have made important contributions to science and technology. The Arctic and the Antarctic are both places that are closed to civilization without significant assistance from technology.
In contrast the tropical realm of Africa is the realm of “zamani,” is the realm subject to the higher rule of the “dreamtime.” The cold of the Arctic and the tremendous changes associated with the seasons set divisions in nature that isolate objects and events. The heat and moisture of the tropics recycle everything into a common fecundity.

British Isles:


Temperate islands like the British Isles may be contrasted with the continental tropics of places like Kenya and India.

Britain encourages the naturalistic and utilitarian temperaments and Kenya and India, their supernatural and magical opposites. The tremendous energy of the weather and the tropical heat in Kenya and India may be contrasted with the temperate climates of places like Ireland and Scotland where temperature remain uniformly cool.


Island provide isolation and set limits, in contrast to the relative unlimited landmass of the continents. Rapid changes can take place in the vegetation following tropical rains in contrast to the slow and controlled group of temperate vegetation.
The great contribution of British culture has been the development of the empirical and utilitarian ideas, the notion of limited government, the physics of Newton, the naturalism of Darwin and the naturalistic philosophy of Spencer. In contrast, India’s contribution has been the Upanishads and Sankara, has been Vedanta and Yoga.

One clear is concerned with the limited and the parsimonious and the other with the magical and the inexhaustible.


The persistence of concern with magical ways of relating to existence in Kenya, as opposed to Britain, is not unrelated to climatic differences. Belief in the magical is encouraged in an environment characterized by tropical energy.

C is for Continental:


The great law giving cultures, rule-giving cultures, are the continental cultures. The world’s legalistic holy books, Koran, Torah, Christian Bible come from areas near where Africa is joined to Eurasia. From here the Koran has spread across the deserts and tropical areas of both continents and the Bible across the grasslands, woodlands, temperate, and subarctic realms.
The idea of judgment, the idea of dividing everything between heaven and hell was a Persian idea invented by Zoroaster and spread by the Persian Empire.
Imperialism and militarism are a continental idea perfected by the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians of ancient Eurasia and passed into the holy books of Christian, Jews, and Moslems as a result of the experiences of the Jews when held captive by these empires.
The legalistic approach to Christianity, Calvinism, was developed in Geneva in the mountains of Switzerland.

The Baptist, Congregationalist, and Unitarian alternatives to this legalism were maritime in origin. They reached their finest development in Boston, Rhode Island, and places in coast New England.


The Pacific, the Polynesian Islands, represent the polar opposite of the continental concern with law, taboo, and holy doctrine. Here we find emphasis on the holy energy (Mana).

D is for Desert:


Desert areas are the great places of the law, of the fixed polarity just as ocean islands are great places of the arts, of the game and energy polarity. It is the difference between Mecca and Bali, between Persia and Japan.
You can see the difference between legalistic, conservative, moralistic Salt Lake City and liberal, multicultural Hawaii.

The laws, judgment days, and rulebooks of the world come out of the great deserts, out of Mecca, Babylon, and Jerusalem. The deserts look to the dry word of ancient books and holy places. The oceans look to the energy of new things endlessly appearing across the ocean waves.


The deserts believe in a jealous God that sends rain in some places and withholds rain in other places. The ocean islands believe in the endless energy of all things as the mana of the Polynesian gods or as the power of the Kami, the spirits of Shinto temples of Japan.
The deserts believe in reading the dry word of the ancient law. The ocean islands believe in daily rituals and dances as in Bali or Japan. The deserts believe in the power of God’s wrath to withhold rain and allow everything to wither. The ocean islands believe in the power of a dance or a tea ceremony to capture the ancient harmony of the flow of energy that vitalizes all things.
The contribution of the deserts is in moral theology and scholarship. The contribution of islands is in art and craft.

E is for Eastern:


The Eastern polarity is centered in the river valley culture of China. It represents the social polarity that puts emphasis on family, community, and the state as a pillar of the social order. Its great exponents are Confucius and Mencius. Its great contributions are in literature, economics, business, education, and political theory. Its approach tends toward the collective rather than the individual, tends toward ideology rather than philosophy.
Its opposite is the individualistic culture of the West. Its opposite is the culture of mountains, islands, and deserts. Its opposite is the culture of high places rather than the low places of valleys, the culture of islands rather than continental river valleys, the culture of dry places without water rather than river valleys full of water.
The great problem of China is that it is surrounded by its opposites, by its enemies. Off shore is the island culture of Japan. To the West, is the desert cultures and the mountain cultures of Mongolia and Tibet. As with all valley culture, it absorbs all. It has drawn in mystical Buddhism from the south. It is has drawn in shamanistic ideas from the outlying areas and their influence can be seen in Taoism.
Even so this Eastern polarity is still the opposite of the Western polarity, of the emphasis put on the individual in the maritime and mountain regions of North America.

This emphasis on the individual pervades the West. It can been seen in ancient shamanism and modern capitalism.

F is for Farsi:
Farsi is Persian, the language of Iran. The Persian highlands have always been the centers for the Eurasian notion of moral order, judgment, and empire. It began with the development of the idea of the “judgment day” by Zoroaster and the attempt of the Persian Emperor’s to conquer the known world.
The polar opposite of this continental concern for law and order is the maritime concern for democracy and freedom. The polar opposite of the imperial ideas of Persia is the concern for democracy and personal liberty found in the Baptist tradition in Rhode Island and the Congregational and Unitarian traditions of Yankee New England.
The desire of the continents to control the world is endlessly opposed to the desire of the maritime states to break that control and restore freedom.
The contributions of the continents are to totalilitarian political theory, to militarism, to morality, to law, to collective literature and belief. The contributions of maritime areas are to science, technology, craft, democratic political theory, maritime trade, commerce, business, etc.
When the maritime culture of Japan imitated the military empires of the continents their attempts failed. When they attempted to conquer through business and trade they succeeded. Business and trade are the natural weapons of a maritime nation.

G is for Greece:


It is not surprising that “atomism” is a philosophy the originated in the city-states of ancient Greece. Dry areas, island areas, coastal areas tend toward the individualistic and the analytic. It is not surprising that philosophy and democracy developed in ancient Athens.
The polar opposite of the dry ocean island is the wet continental river valley. It is not surprising that the contributions of the Ganges River Valley, the Congo, and the Amazon are very different from those of Greece.

In these warm wet valleys we find emphasis on the mystical rather than the individual, on magic rather than on science and reason, on meditation and ritual rather than on reason.


Greece gave us philosophy, logic, and the rule of reason. The Ganges gave us Vedanta, Brahman, and Yoga.

Greece was concerned with the individual and his personal reality. The cultures of the Congo merge all in the universal Zamani, the dreamtime eternal that creates and absorbs all things.


The great river valleys, the Nile, the Yellow of China, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus, are places of synthesis, places that generated imperial cultures that absorbed and drew in surrounding peoples. The islands of Greece generated colonists, adventurers, sea going ships, that carried Greek culture outward. The Greek attitude was analytic, focused on adapting to the individual cultures they encountered.

H is for Haiti:


Haiti is an example of the tropical emphasis of the magical as opposed to the temperate emphasis of the scientific. Haiti is also an example of the emphasis on violent energy in ocean island cultures exposed to violent oceanic storms such as hurricanes. Haiti is a place of revolution just as Switzerland is a place of Calvinistic Law.
Islands look at global culture from the standpoint of their isolation. Haiti, although French, long ago rebelled and sought its own independence. Its chaos and disorder can be compared to the rigid order of continental powers such as Germany or China. Haiti is a place associated with rebellion, chaos, revolution, primitive magic. This is a result of its tropical island geography.
The chaos of Haiti, as an ocean island, may be contrasted with the order of Germany as a continental power.

The primitive magic of Haiti, as a tropical island, may be contrasted with the science and technology oriented order of Germany. The constant change and danger associated with the tropical energy of Haiti may be contrasted with the long traditions of law and security in temperate continental highlands such as Switzerland. The emphasis on useful arts, dance, music in Haitian culture may be contrasted with the emphasis on scholarship in continental cultures such as those of Germany and Tibet.


The rebellious character of island Haiti may be contrasted with the submissive river valley life of Confucian China.

I is for Island:


Island nations are generally associated with individualism and valley nations are generally associated with collectivism. Islands are generally aristocratic and capitalistic and valley nations are generally communistic and totalitarian in basic mind set.
Contrast the individualism of North America (basically a big island between the Pacific and the Atlantic), of Australia, of Great Britain with the collectivism and communism of the Yellow River valley in China, of the Volga river valley under Stalin and the Soviet Union. Contrast the aristocracy and capitalism of 18th century England with absolutism of the Seine River valley under 18th century France.
The individualistic mindset began with the island cultures of Greece. The collectivistic and totalitarian mindsets began in the river valley cultures of Egypt and ancient Iraq.

Island Japan is basically capitalistic and aristocratic in comparison with communist river valley China.


The developments in island England during the Puritan Revolution put emphasis on individual salvation. Religion in the Ganges river valley of India puts emphasis on the disappearance of individualism within the total nothingness of nirvana and Brahman.
The duty of the citizen in river valley China was to obey the emperor. The duty of the citizen in England is to vote.

J is for Japan:


Japan is a temperate ocean island. Its culture emphasizes rituals and art forms such as the tea ceremony. Persian culture is a culture of continental deserts and mountain plateaus. Persian culture puts religious dogma ahead of ceremony, scripture before art forms, morality ahead of gardening and dance.
The emphasis in ocean island Japan is on correct energy, correct action. The emphasis in continental desert Persia is on correct purpose, correct morality, correct ideal.

Because Japan is a temperate island, it values science, and the natural as opposed to the emphasis on the magical in tropical Haiti and Bali. Because Japan is an island it places emphasis on aristocratic characteristics, as opposed to the collectivism of river valley cultures like that of China.


The proximity of river valley China pushes Japanese aristocracy in the direction of the imperial and the collective, just as the proximity of peninsula Spain, Scandinavia, Italy and island Greece pushes English aristocracy in the direction of individualism.
This individualism and naturalism have influenced the emphasis on individual nature spirits in Japanese Shinto practices. The oceanic influence has brought an emphasis on practice and ritual as opposed to doctrine and scholarship. The emphasis on scholarship in Tibetan Buddhism can be contrasted with its opposite in Zen.

K is for Kenya:


Kenya is a good example of the importance of the primitive supernatural in tropical areas. This can be contrasted with the importance of the natural in temperate cultures such as those of Germany and England.
Kenya, Uganda, and other places in Africa, put emphasis on the idea of a “Zamani,” of a dreamtime that is superior to all local reality and absorbs all local time and space in a ground that transcends time and space. This is a way of looking at life that emphasizes dream over perception and mythology over fact.
In India the tropical magic becomes the Brahmin or nirvana that is the ultimate union of all things. The influence of the highlands of Persia and the Persian notion of an ideal order has entered into the thought of India in respect to this Brahmin as the universal law of duty: “Dharma.” Action itself now becomes something vaguely evil: “karma.”
This can be contrasted with the Newtonian physics developed in England, a temperate island nation, that looks at action as something to be studied empirically that represents a natural and measurable order in the form of Newton’s laws of motion and gravity. The scientific point of view developed in England put as much emphasis on facts and observation as the beliefs of the native cultures of Kenya and Uganda put on mythology, ceremony, magic, dreams, etc. It is not just a polarity between modern and primitive, but also between tropical and temperate visions.

L is for Lake:


The lake centered culture of Detroit and Chicago can be contrasted with the xeric, the dry island culture of Greece.

The lake centered culture of Detroit and Chicago puts its emphasis on public commerce, on democracy, science, and public education. It is a culture in which communication and transportation play and important role, in which journalism is more important than philosophy and sentiment is more important than reason.


Ancient Greece developed the culture of reason; it was where philosophy was born. Ancient Athens valued education, but that education was for individuals, it was aristocratic in its nature. The democracy developed in Ancient Athens placed great importance on debate and argument. The democracy of Chicago and Detroit is the democracy of the factory owner and the union boss.
Journalism, literature, communication are key elements of a lake culture which draws things together and associates them rather than pulling them apart and disassociating them as in a culture like that of ancient Greece. The cool temperate climate of the Great Lakes of the United States brings out an emphasis on science and technology. Thus, it is not surprising to find major scientific work associated with the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan.
This is the homeland of Henry Ford and the assembly line production of automobiles, of pragmatism and commerce.

M is for Mountains:


If lakes pull things together, and cold lakes pull things together to develop practical solutions, mountains isolate, differentiate, provide fixed and idealistic alternatives. Contrast the impractical idealism of Tibetan Buddhism with the vulgar capitalism of Chicago.
Tibet is interested in scholarship, in meditation, in taking the influence of tropical India and exploring its inner meanings. Tibet isolates ideas on mountaintops and searches out the existential meaning of the soul.
Chicago dissolves these meanings in practical commerce. It buries ideal considerations in great outpourings of industrial waste. Cool lowland lakes are public and vulgar, just as isolated mountains are pure and private.

The coolness emphasizes the technical and the scientific. The collective character of a lake facilitates the public character of scientific and technical developments.


The coolness of a mountaintop cannot support science in the same way because science does not prosper on isolation. Isolation supports shamanism and yoga, it supports the existentialist concerns of meditative Buddhism.
A mountain lake town, like Geneva Switzerland, will support a legalist scholarship like Calvin’s. Here we find an isolated community in pursuit of its private holy truth, its notion of the salvation of the soul through holy law.

N is for Northern:


The Northern part of the globe is the site of the scientific and technical emphasis in global culture. The centers of this emphasis are in Russia, Germany, Scandinavia, France, England, the United States, Canada, and Japan. This Northern development is the polar opposite of the Southern which is best developed in India and South Asia.
Just as the Northern emphasizes the empirical and the technical, so the Southern emphasizes the religious and the mystical, the holistic and the absolutistic. The Northern puts emphasis on the atomic and the quantum, the Southern upon Brahman and Nirvana. The way of the North is the way of physics and chemistry. The way of the South is the way of Vedanta and Sancara, of Gandhi and Lord Shiva.
The way of the North is the way of the factory and of the South is the way of the temple. The sacred objects of the North are the telescope and the microscope. The sacred objects of the South are the Vedas and the tooth of the Buddha. The disciplines of the North are those of medicine, of science, of engineering. Those of the South are those of Bhakti, of Yoga, of Tantra, of meditation and astrology.
Motion for the North is in the mechanics and quantum mechanics of physics that obeys the laws of motion, of thermodynamics. Motion for the South is karma subject to the divine law of dharma. The North studies the body, the South, the soul.

O is for Ocean:


The way of the land is the way of law, of taboo, of the fixation of all things. The way of the ocean is the way of energy, of mana, of the fluid aspect of all things. The way of the ocean is the way of the dance (as in Bali, as in Polynesia). The way of the land is the way of the law, of the Torah, of the Koran, of Tibetan scholarship, of Persian morality, of Swiss Calvinism.
The land packages things and the ocean dissolves the packages as the Zen Buddhism of Japan dissolves the Tibetan tripitaka, as the Unitarianism of Yankee New England dissolves the Calvinism of Holy Geneva. The land packaged the holy Vedas that Bali dissolved into temple dances.
The Catholic Church packaged Christian morality that Haitian waters dissolved into Voodoo magic and Voodoo ritual and London commerce dissolved into capitalism.

Persia packaged holy empire that the Mediterranean dissolved into Christianity and the Atlantic Ocean dissolved into mercantilism and the Pacific Ocean dissolved into free trade.


The package of the Holy Koran was dissolved by the Mediterranean into the Crusades and finally into the Renaissance which was dissolved by the Atlantic into the Enlightenment and by the Pacific into Pragmatism, and the Atomic Age. The Empire of Mohammed broke into the hydrogen and carbon atoms of its petroleum deposits.

P is for Pacific:


The Pacific is the greatest concentration of water on the planet and the greatest concentration of the fluid element of global culture. It is the ocean that was used to develop the hydrogen bomb and it is the ocean that bombers flew over when the atom bombs were dropped on Japan. Pearl Harbor in Hawaii is the place where the bombs fell that brought the United States into that war. It is the place where the culture of the East is dissolving into the culture of the West.
Its opposite is Tibet, Persia, and Switzerland; its opposite is Buddhist scripture, the Shiite interpretation of the Koran, and Calvinist Christian Fundamentalism. Its opposite is the law of Dharma, the law of Allah, and the law of Jehovah. These resist all attempts to dissolve them. The Torah, the law of the Jews, when ripped from the mountains of Palestine and thrown on the world’s oceans has reappeared as modern Zionism and as Israel. Reborn in Palestine, it now makes war with the law of the Koran.
Unlike the culture of the land, the Polynesians put energy, put mana, before taboo, made God a thing of energy before he or she was a thing of law. Ocean cultures, like Bali, worship God with dance, just as continental cultures worship God with scholarship.
The oceans dissolve the science of the North and change it into the business and commerce of the world. Its laws of motion become the dances of commerce, of global media.

Q is for Quebec:


Quebec is a cold part of North America that communicates with the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence River. From the North it takes its emphasis on science and technology and from the ocean its emphasis on business and commerce, from the valley of its river and the Great Lakes to which the river is connected; it gets its interest in politics, in society, in journalism and public media.
It is the polar opposite of warm tropical places like Haiti. Haiti has given French culture a totally different twist. French culture in Haiti courts the dangerous, the rebellious, the supernatural. French culture in Quebec attracts the scientific, the political, the secure, the constitutional compromise.
The commerce-oriented culture of Quebec is the opposite of the ideology-oriented culture of Persia and the caste oriented culture of India. The Northern cold freezes the magic of the South and it shatters into local atoms. The concern of Persia is the holy book of Allah. The concern of the St. Lawrence Valley is the English language and the French language. The river valley absorbs and dissolves different languages and local communities resist these dissolving forces.
Always there is the presence of the ocean pulling all into the energy of world commerce and world trade. Nova Scotia and the Maritime provinces exert their island influence emphasizing individualism and enterprise.

R is for Rhode Island:


Oceanic, individualistic, temperate and practical, Rhode Island represents the democratic opposite of imperialistic Persia. In Rhode Island, the ancient Zoroastrian idealism that inspired Catholic Christianity and its Swiss Calvinistic derivatives was dissolved into the Baptist faith of Roger Williams and Ann Hutchinson. The Imperial State was shattered on the rocks of New England and the church and state were split apart upon Rhode Island’s knife like rocky shores.
The cold shores of temperate island and harbors provide the individualistic, the public, the democratic, the vulgar, the practical complements to the warm, dry, continental idealisms, the imperial idealisms of Arabia, Persia, and Pakistan.
These cool shores are places where education, science, business, technology, democracy, pragmatism, engineering, and journalism replace the imperialism, idealism, religion, mysticism, prayer, meditation, magic, ritual, legalism, and scholarship that are the emphasis in continental places like Tibet, hot dry places like Mecca, continental dry places like Persia, and tropical places like India and Sri Lanka.
A warm ocean shore like that in Bali will dissolve things into dance and ritual. A cool ocean shore like that in Rhode Island will dissolve things into public commerce and public politics and public journalism. A cool ocean shore will bring out the individual atoms and their motions.

S is for Southern:


The way of the South is the way of India, is the way of the tropical sun and the tropical rain. It is the way of magical energy that dissolves everything into the one. Since India is firmly attached to the continent, its ways hook the energy of Brahman to the law, the Dharma of the continent. India subordinates the energy of the ocean, its karma, to this continental Dharma law.
The presence of the mountains also brings out the emphasis of the individual, of the inward as well as the outward. This shamanistic turn is seen in the emphasis on meditation, is seen in the discipline of Yoga.

This energy freezes when it is drawn into the North. The North congeals its energy into the atoms of its physics and the empirical laws of its sciences and technologies. Yoga becomes psychology in the North. Vedanta becomes sociology and the Vedas become the classical myths.


Toward the equator from India, Brahman dissolves even further into the endless dreamtime of global subjectivity.

Even though Jung, from his high seat in the uplands of Switzerland attempted to find the empirical laws that rule this dreamtime, it ultimately resists any attempt of the North to chain it an rule it. It bursts out in a chaos that confounds all attempts to the North to assault it with the tiny strings of string theory and the linear threads of the countless mathematical formulas of its physics. The South remains unconquered.

T is for Tropical:
The South is the gateway to the Tropical realm that is the holistic aspect of the world’s culture. This tropical aspect is the primitive center from which local temperate and desert cultures have radiated. It holds the key to human origins.
The decay of Africa back into its precolonial state of chaos and local tribalism shows the failure of the North. The tropics yields to commerce rather than to science and empiricism. Commerce and trade belong to the ocean and its is the ocean that the tropics opens to. It accepts the goods and money of the North, but not the empirical prejudices of the North. For, the dreamtime continues to rule.
The tropics are quite willing to accommodate some of their rituals to intrusions from the deserts or the oceans in the form of Islam or Christianity, but the tropics absorb the outer form only. For the tropics, Islam and Christianity are but new gates to the ancient dreamtime of their ancestors which continues to rule all, as the ancient heat and rain rule all.
But, it is the missionary cultures that are deluded. They fail to recognize that the kingdom of heaven they bring to the tropics is actually the ancient dreamtime of the tropics dressed up in local northern, or desert garb, as the Heaven of Allah, or Jehovah. The tropics recognize this as simply another tribal god, another face of the ancient one.

U is for USSR:


The Soviet Union was a good example of the way that continental river culture are drawn toward collectivistic solutions. The dialectical materialist emphasis of the old Soviet order was simply a reflection of the cold climate of the Russian part of the Eurasian continent. Russia is a piece of the Northern emphasis of science and technology. But, her river valley culture pulls her toward the socialist, the communist, the collective approach to the scientific and the technical.
The development of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the emphasis of Siberia, the rising importance of Moscow, pulled Russia, under the Soviets, toward the continental, toward the attempt to develop a continental order, and imperial socialist order. The reaching out toward the West and toward the individualism of the West represents a rising importance of St. Petersburg and of Russia’s oceanic outlets.
The failure of the Soviet Union represents a failure of revolutionary energy brought form the cold Arctic Ocean to dissolve the dry crystals of Islamic, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian moral dogma. Cold materialism was not able to penetrate deeply enough into these thought systems nurtured by dry tropical heat.
The materialistic ocean of the North failed against the mountains, deserts, and uplands to the south. Semitic tribalism penetrated from Persia, Iraq, and Arabia.

V is for Valley:


There have always been two forms of Arabic thought. The great valleys of Iraq and Egypt have always nurtured a more socialized version of Islam, one that is more worldly and global. This Sunni version of Islam can be contrasted with its more idealistic Shiite rival on the plateaus of Persia. It is the Turkish model of the Sunni that has reached out most to the external world from its perch in Istanbul beside the gateway to the western seas.
But, always the true desert remains to the south in Arabia and across the Sahara. Here the original fundamentalist version, rooted in the Koran itself, resists any intrusion into the continent by the oceanic revolutions of the West.
The great valley systems develop their own social forces, the Rhine, the Danube, the Volga, the Ganges, the Yangtze, the Mekong, the Yellow, the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence.

The Mississippi and St. Lawrence converge in a North American synthesis, the Volga, Danube, and Rhine in a European. The Yellow and the Yangtze look east, the Indus and the Ganges look to South Asia. The Mekong is a frontier where influences out of China and India fight for control.


The fusion of the North American and the European system has produced a Northern Hemisphere complex with emphasis on democracy, science, technology, and free trade. This complex has used the oceans of the world to power its revolutionary programs.

X is for Xeric:


The Xeric areas of the world assert their separateness against the ocean’s tendency to dissolve all in the energy of world commerce and communication. Centers of eccentric separatism can be found in local desert areas like the Mormon areas around Salt Lake City in Utah. The dry western areas of the United States will persist in viewing the United States through the lenses of moral imperialism, will see it as a new version of the ancient Zoroastrian notion of Persian Empire, as the noble messenger of the rule of the good.
The world’s oceans will attempt to dissolve these local orders in the revolutionary trust of global communication and global commerce. Already Christian fundamentalism has been captured by the global media and seems oblivious to the way that the global media are reframing its xeric Semitism.
The separate way of Islam is under attack as the commerce of the global ocean and its media penetrate Arabia in pursuit of petroleum. The energy from the Indian Ocean draws it toward irrational revolutions, toward violent thrusts against existing order. Yet the desert separates it and the continent gives it the will to resist penetration by foreign ideas. The heat of the tropics causes it to focus on the supernatural origins of its holy, holistic point of view.

Islam’s western edge lies on the Mediterranean and that edge pulls it toward the rational commerce, the media of Western Europe in the rational tradition of Greece.

W is for West:
The New World is a great island between the Atlantic and the Pacific. A great mountain chain runs from the tip of South America up the western back of both North and South America and connects with the mountains of East Asia. This mountain system is the heartland of shamanism. These mountains systems form the true West with its emphasis on the self, particularly the inner spirit of the self, in contrast with the emphasis on public society made by the river valley systems of the East.
This West is the homeland of transcendentalism, of Emersonian and Jeffersonian individualism. Its true essence can be found in movements like Christian Science, Unity School of Christianity, and the Religious Science movement based in Los Angeles. These movements emphasize the spiritual individual, the private inner self that connects with the transcendent spiritual powers.
Similar ideas can be seen developing in the mountains of Tibet. But Tibetan meditation is influenced by the tropical ideas of India that emphasize the individual as a temporary Buddha enlightenment at the edge of the dreamtime nothingness of nirvana.
The presence of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans pulls the West toward its own eccentric revolution, toward its own creative interpretation of the dreamtime experience.

The mountains of the West push it toward its own existentialism, its own private vision of existence.

Y is for Yankee:
New England took this rugged individualism of the West out on to the oceans of the world as a Yankee revolution. But, the revolution brought by the West was the revolution of commerce and trade, the revolution of Western inventions such as the telephone and the electric light.
These, in the end, have had a more radical influence than any philosophy or missionary doctrine. The missionaries have always been the advanced arm of Western commerce, Western free trade, and the industrial, electronic, and systems revolutions encouraged by Western creativity.
Los Angeles and San Francisco are the outposts of this Western version of liberty and liberation. From these ports, Yankee ideas and inventions sail out into a storm of change that is dissolving the ancient crystallized systems of socialization. The ancient orders are opened up to Yankee freedom, to the liberties brought by Yankee media, Yankee systems for communication and transportation.
Some of this generates chaos and tropical energy generates dangerous mixes of this chaos. The powerful combination of desert Islam and this ocean born revolution has exploded in various forms in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.
This Yankee power has penetrated the world in a series of Wars including World War I and II. The atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb are examples of its dissolving force.

Z is for Zamani:


Zamani is the African word for the dreamtime, the spiritual timeless realm that emerges in Confucianism as Heaven, in Taoism as Tao, in Hinduism as Purusha and Brahman, in Buddhism as Nirvana and Buddhamind, in Islam as Allah, in Judaism as Yahweh, in Christianity variously as Heaven, God, and the Holy Spirit. This tropical belief in the supernatural as the source of the natural, as the timeless eternal as the source of space and time, persists as the predominant force of the world in spite of the attempts of the materialism of the North to master it and overcome it.
The tropical vision is the core that powers Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. All are rooted in a tropical vision of Moses or Jesus or Mohammed in some hot desert wilderness, of gurus and Buddhas in the valley of the Ganges. This hot tropical sun overpowers all other forces.
The long tradition of science and technology of the Great Lakes region and the Atlantic coast is constantly overpowered by the tropical southern vision of the magical power of heaven. Again and again New Orleans triumphs over the University of Chicago and Harvard. Again and again some radio preacher wins the hearts of students carefully educated in the Enlightenment traditions of the North.
The oceans provide the energy for the spread of this ancient magical revolution out of Africa and tropical Asia.

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