I said the blog was going on hiatus, but we had one more public event we were committed to before that.  We had another homeless outreach at the Civic Center today.  The last one was in September, and who knows when the next one will be.  Rachel remembers it very well because after we did out outreach last time, we drove out into the Central Valley near Modesto to buy our dog.

“Nancy” from the blog entry below was the organizer, and she brought some of her church friends, and we partnered with them.  I dispensed mostly coffee and hot chocolate, while Nancy gave out homemade chicken soup, Lorie supervised the clothes giveaway and miscellaneous items, like granola bars, and Rachel gave out socks and Gatorade.  There must have been 100 people in all who came by in the two hours we did it.  I took some pictures, but we were super busy and almost didn’t even have a second to take any pictures.  The police buzzed us a couple of times, even asking if we had a permit, which we didn't but are honestly checking into to see what kind of permit we would need if we needed one.  It was momentarily scary, but they did the right thing by letting us help the poor.  That's the way it should be.

I had a great conversation with Chuck who said he was semi-friends with Francis Chan!  Talk about a small world.  Chuck is involved in the Adopt-A-Building ministry where FC and some local ministers are trying to set up a prayer group/mini-church in each of the Tenderloin’s 500 apartment buildings/hotels.  Chuck was carrying two guitars, one to give to someone who was buying it from him, and his own personal guitar.  He told me the story how he learned guitar very suddenly and recently, after he prayed for God to gift him with the ability to play.  I said I’ve been trying to learn for a long time but can’t seem to do it.  So Chuck laid his hands on my head and prayed for me to have the gift of guitar!  I’m going to practice tonight to see if it worked.

Here's a picture of "Nancy" spontaneously blessing the people who came by (I said she was a Saint):

Here's Lorie making some coffee or hot chocolate for a client:

And here's "Nancy" serving some homemade chicken soup (they call her the "soup lady"):

This blog might be on hiatus for a while.  We’re dealing with some major legal insanity, and it’s taking over our ability to do anything else.  I can’t talk about the details of it, but I can tell a similar story of something that happened to a friend’s wife.  This is a true story, and happened about three years ago:

“Ben’s” wife “Nancy” worked for the Federal government in the Medicare claims department.  She was the most efficient worker.  Her favorite part of the job was talking to clients who had complicated problems, and then reorganizing their profile to be the most economical and efficient.  She had a college degree from a State university in the South, and her supervisor was from an Ivy League school.  Her supervisor was always teasing her, “Did you go to college?  Is that an accredited school?”  Nancy was passed up for promotion, and younger colleagues were given supervisor positions that Nancy was due.  Nancy was into her 50s, and was still an overworked low-level manager.  Her boss began piling more and more clerical work on her, keeping Nancy from talking to and helping clients.  When Nancy tried to help clients, her boss reprimanded her.  Nancy often worked 10 to 12 hours a day to keep up with the work piled on her.  Nancy became sick from the overwork, and frustration from the mistreatment and lack of respect from her bigoted supervisor.  Nancy decided to retire, and never complained to her boss’ boss or any other employee protection division.  When Nancy retired, they hired three people to do the work that she did alone.

As a friend of Nancy’s I’m upset at how she was treated.  As a taxpayer I’m upset at how the government allowed this weasel of a manager to mistreat Nancy and not take more advantage of her obvious talent for helping people.  I wish I could bump into the Director of Medicare in an elevator and get them to give justice for Nancy.  But what would that be?  What’s done is done.  Nancy can’t get back to her job.  She’s moved on.  Government is filled with people who exercise power in ways that serve their own needs and disregard the needs of the public.  If you get mad about that, then you’re going to die from stress, and you won’t solve anything.  I think Nancy should have complained, but she isn’t that kind of person.  She’s a real Saint.  But her suffering hasn’t helped her clients.  They now have to deal with three new novices and the same old bigot supervisor. 

A couple years ago I stressed myself out trying to get some homeless services manager to do something logical to help people, and he wouldn’t, because he didn’t have a heart for the homeless, he was just a bureaucrat whose current job was overseeing the homeless.  Now he’s moved onto something else.  I always felt if they had hired someone who had a proven heart for the job they were about to become director over, then they would care more for the quality of work the line workers were doing.  Someone like Nancy would have been rewarded instead of teased and overlooked.  The director would have felt shame when Nancy retired and he had to hire three people to do her job.  He would have been embarrassed that he didn’t do more to hold onto Nancy.

It’s a blessing to have a boss and director who really cares for the business you’re in and the clients you’re serving, and preferably has a track record of caring before becoming the director.  And it’s a curse to have someone with a fancy degree who only wanted the job because it pays the most and gives them the most power to play with.

Lorie and I recently saw The Descendants.  It was amazing.  Whoever did the marketing for this film didn’t send the right message.  I had no idea what to expect, other than “Clooney stars in a family drama.”  Plus, I have never been a big Clooney acting fan because whenever I see him in a movie, I don’t see his character, I see Clooney as himself playing some guy. 

But The Descendants’ greatest asset wasn’t its acting, it was its story line.  It revolves around a family accident:  the wife goes into a coma in the first 5 seconds of the movie.  But unlike other “family drama” movies which take place in some nowhere place, this one takes place in Hawaii!  And the King family (Clooney’s) is descended from Hawaii’s last ruler, which makes them very rich and influential. I'm not saying rich people and Hawaii are always interesting (not at all), but the family drama is more interesting when it takes place in Hawaii, and the rich people here are mostly local royalty, which is the interesting part, to offset the medical drama part.

The family is on the verge of selling 25,000 acres in Kauai, their undeveloped family estate which is going to be turned into hotels and golf courses.  But Matt (Clooney’s character) has turned his back on his heritage and even his money, and works hard as a lawyer, and keeps his wife and children from becoming spoiled rich people by never spending his family money.  It’s his way of rebelling against that 1% life, and even his royal life.  But he damages his family relationships by going to that extreme and being too cheap.

The movie shows all sorts of compare and contrast examples of royal v. common, control v. out of control, good parent v. bad parent, and on and on.  For example, toward the end of the movie they had this part where they showed aerial scenes of scenic Hawaii, about 8 shots, beach, grass, cliff, flowers, hill, etc.  I was thinking “They should have had this at the beginning to give you a taste of Hawaii, just like the 5 minute beginning of Midnight In Paris where they showed 100 shots of Paris in all sorts of variety, rain, sun, night, dusk, day, etc.  But then I remembered, they DID have a succession of shots at the beginning, but I forgot because of the narration.  They showed all these gritty and grimy shots, and narrated about how Hawaii wasn’t a paradise like everyone thinks, but has poverty, cancer, pollution, etc.  But that’s just one of the many contrasts, this one showing Matt’s change from pessimistic, out of control, bad parent, (the "ugly Hawaii"), into what he becomes (represented by the beautiful vista pictures).  When you finally see Matt embrace his heritage and gain his wisdom from the journey he’s taken, it has a real sense of accomplishment, and it all came about from really horrible circumstances, that got worse and worse, and then he starts confronting and fixing his personal flaws, and becomes a good parent too. 

I’ve only seen a few of the movies up for Best Picture this year, and my favorite so far that I’ve seen is Midnight In Paris.  MIP was a great movie, but it had a couple of minor flaws.  One of the flaws was its repetitive jazz soundtrack, playing the same piece of music whenever the main character went back in time.  But The Descendants had all kinds of native music, and it seemed to switch back and forth from Hawaiian singing to pure instrumental at the right times. 

MIP also had some strained acting performances, and The Descendants equivalent would probably be Clooney’s acting as himself.  But he wasn’t really that bad.  He seemed like a normal parent sometimes, and he was helped by a perfect screenplay, and excellent support actors, especially the two girls who played his daughters, aged 10 and 17.  I have a 10 year old and a 20 something year old.  Lorie and I caught ourselves recognizing behavior on the screen as happening in our children’s behavior.  Sometimes, often actually, it was scarily similar, like the screenwriter either lived with children, or researched the roles really really well.

The title The Descendants doesn't say much to the person who knows nothing of the film, but it does describe the essence of what the movie is about, getting in touch with your heritage, which includes your ancestors, plus your children.  There are several family gatherings and reunions in the film (cousins as common descendants), and each time it shows how people can be related but be extremely different from each other, usually because of their life decisions and personal attitude and philosophy.  Matt’s attitude was obviously successful and destructive at the same time, and the film shows how with the right people around you, and the right relationships, and with maturity across all levels of character, you can have your cake and eat it too.  You can survive disaster and save your family and grow into a more perfect person.

UPDATE:  Another great part of the film is the stoner boyfriend of the eldest daughter.  He's really annoying at first, but he's symbolic for some kind of lost native person.  The proof of this, in my opinion, is this moment in the film when Clooney wakes him up in the middle of night, and Clooney is worried about what he should do next, and he asks the stoner for advice.  The exchange some ideas over who's smarter, but what I think was happening was Clooney waking up to his royal heritage, and how everyone, all natives, are part of his responsibility, heritage-speaking, and consulting with the boyfriend was surrealistic in that 200 years ago Clooney might have been the King, and this guy just another subject giving him an alternate view of his kingdom.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies and documentaries online.  I have this current fascination with the “hallucinations” that come from various possibly-related sources:  Near Death Experiences, DMT use, Ayahuasca use, and spontaneous visions such as experienced by Philip Dick and Carl Jung. 

One documentary I watched was DMT The Spirit Molecule.  I’ve blogged before about DMT, and this documentary confirmed what I said before and what’s known about it.  DMT causes people to have a similar kind of hallucination, where geometric shapes surround you, and the Universe because a Matrixy kind of mathematical world.  And for deep trips people commonly experience angels or aliens introducing themselves and offering the knowledge of the collective unconscious.  The documentary was especially fascinating because it spent a lot of time interviewing a doctor/scientist that was given government permission to inject people with DMT and have them describe their experiences, thereby giving a scientific credence to the urban legends about the similar “trip” which have all now been scientifically documented.

Ayahuasca is a tribal mixture of DMT-like chemicals which shaman from South America and other places brew and then give to people to drink.  The hallucination that these users commonly experience is a leaving their body and feeling connected to the Universal Intelligence which includes all life, people, animals, plants, and the entire ecosystem.  Many are communicated with as if Mother Nature herself was scolding the person for not being “Green” enough, taking care of the planet, and threatening retaliation if modern people don’t stop destroying the rain forests, etc.  Another documentary I watched 2012 Time For Change included a very compelling and revealing interview with Sting who said he had tried Ayahuasca 20 years ago on sort of a whim, and had such an experience that he felt so guilty for not being a better custodian of the planet that he immediately became a leading rain forest advocate.  The same documentary also interviews lots of leading experts in the field of renewable energy, green technology, etc, and their motivation sounded very much like the reasons given by the Ayahuasca users.

I’m not saying anything negative about taking herbal drinks, or being green, or trying to save the planet.  I’m actually very much in favor of those.  What I’m saying is that there is a strange, bizarrely common vision that is metaphysical in nature, and is primarily concerned with people getting connected to the Spirit of the planet.  I’m glad that people are being to acknowledge a metaphysical reality, be it through Near Death Experiences or through major herbal hallucinogenics. 

I’ve mentioned before how one of my big frustrations is arguing with an atheist who denies any existence outside of what they can physically experience.  But now an atheist can take Ayahuasca and be completely transformed into feeling there is more to life than their 5 senses.  But I’ve often wondered to myself “What’s spiritually worse, from a Christian perspective, “being an atheist” or “believing in a metaphysical world different from Judeo-Christian teachings as a result of other religious beliefs or now hallucinogenics”? 

In the past I always believed that for a person to make the leap of faith is a worthy spiritual accomplishment meriting some kind of praise in the afterlife.  God doesn’t want us to experience all of Life and not have our spiritual eyes opened and make use of them.  If someone opens them and somehow gets the wrong answer, the at least they opened them right?  But what if they are opened for a bad reason?  That’s the kind of thing that is difficult to judge, and maybe God judges it on a case by case basis.  People should know if their motivation to be connected to the True Reality is based on a pure motive or on a selfish motive.

I’m having a hard time nailing down what is being revealed here, and I almost decided to not post this entry because it’s so incomplete.  Instead I decided to just put it out there and see if others have any ideas.  Maybe it’s just to preserve my current thoughts because next week I’ll be onto something else.

This last weekend Lorie and I got to see the national touring play of “The Screwtape Letters” by CS Lewis, but written for the stage by these New York theater folk who are doing the tour.  The basic plot of TSL is a one-man show, Chief Demon Screwtape, giving the dialog of his letters to his nephew Junior Demon.  The letters are about how junior is assigned long-term to a man in order to make sure he sins and doesn’t become a Christian.  The dialog is filled with all sorts of demonesque advice like “If he starts to do something Christian, like pray, distract him with something worldly, like how hungry he is, or something on TV.”  The point is to show how people in the world are constantly in spiritual battle, especially on the inside.

After the play, which ended right at dinner time, we headed to the Hayes Valley restaurants in search of a nice meal without reservations.  Believe it or not, it was very busy for a Saturday night in San Francisco among one of its trendiest restaurant districts.  We headed first to a very nice French restaurant (it was actually one of our anniversaries, 12 years since we met), and we were told that we could have a table in 45 minutes.  So we walked in the very cold air, and looked at where else we might have eaten, or where we could spend our 45 minutes.  We tried going to a very popular German restaurant just for some German beer, but the wait was one hour just to get inside to drink!  So we walked some more and ended up in a cute, half-full bar and had some drinks.  I don’t remember the name, but it was very chique with lots of folk art on the walls.  (UPDATE: It was Momi Tobys.)

We eventually made our way back to the French restaurant, and got seated at a miniature bar table in the middle of all sorts of waiter/patron traffic!  I asked why we weren’t being seated in the nice section with the cushy chairs and tables.  The hostess had a “Oh silly you!” smile and said you need reservations way in advance for those seats!  I said I wasn’t going to spend $100 a meal for a mini-table in the middle of traffic.  She said we could wait some more for a different bar table, and at that point we left.  We walked around a little more and found the cutest little Italian restaurant Stelline.  If one were to describe Hayes Valley restaurants using Occupy terms, the French place was 1% food, and Stelline was for the 99%.  I was under the gun for not planning the meal part of our evening-out better, but it worked out so that the best meal was at a place we wouldn’t have expected or looked for.  We even had extra money for dessert, and then after dessert drinks at The Grove, another great coffee/food hangout that I blogged about a year or so ago, but the Mission street location then as opposed to the Hayes now.

We had an interesting conversation during dinner about the difference between Christianity and pantheistic religions.  I’m not sure how it started.  It might have been because during the play they make a reference to Madonna the singer switching her religious beliefs around.  And then by coincidence the guest pastor at church the next day gave a sermon that referenced Madonna and her “spiritualized God”.  Since I’ve studied a lot of Judaism and some Kaballah by proximity to my studies of the Hasidic movement, I felt I had some position to comment on what the play might have been trying to say, and later what the pastor was trying to say.  And during all of that it must have come out how it all boils down to whether you believe in a Personal Friendly Jesus-like God, or some Ethereal Universal Power Source that sends spiritual power down to all people to follow back to the EUPS God.  I use the term pantheism to very generically refer to the EUPS religions, of which there are many.  And I’m not sure I would put Kaballah in there, but there are some strange similarities.  For example, “super knowledge” and hidden teachings and magic words and secret traditions are usually part of EUPS practices, and you find that in some Kaballah.  When I studied the 100 different Hasidic rebbes from 1736 to 1840, each had a different way of emphasizing that, or not at all.  One of the historic spiritualists that the Hasidim pointed to as a founder/leader in their practice of Kaballah was Isaac Luria who lived around 1500, so a couple hundred years before.  I know that Madonna is a big fan of his, so maybe the play and pastor were right to call her practice spiritualized?  I don’t know.

The opposite of all that pantheism is belief in a Personal God.  The pastor gave a great sermon on the continuation of 1 John, and he talked at length on the references to Jesus’ fleshiness and material reality.  Early Christianity had been besieged by several major heresies within the first 100 years of Jesus’ death, and Gnosticism was a strong heresy even during the life of John, perhaps 50-60 years after Jesus was crucified.  So the pastor gives multiple examples where believing in a physical bodily resurrected Jesus helps up to have greater faith and confidence when going through life’s challenges.  The pastor pointed out how Jesus went out of his way to eat in front of the apostles after the resurrection when they met the first time in the upper room.  Jesus had fish and honeycomb.  If a ghost tried to eat that, it would fall through their mouth and onto the floor!  The pastor also gave a nice insight into the Holy Spirit, which admittedly is the hardest part of the Godhead to understand (even Francis Chan wrote a book on the subject).  When Jesus rose to Heaven at the Assumption, a few days later he sent the Holy Spirit to teach and gift the apostles and believers.  The Holy Spirit is God’s presence since Jesus in up in Heaven, but serving the same function Jesus might be serving if He were bodily with you.  “If only Jesus was here so I could ask for such and such.”  Why not rephase it and seek help from the Holy Spirit to guide, assist, help, and empower?  The challenge would be to make it personal like it would be with Jesus, and the pastor was saying that it should be the same as with Jesus, which is pretty personal!

Well 2012 is one week old.  51 more weeks left, unless you believe in that Mayan thing, then only 50 weeks left.

I happened upon a new philosopher that I like, Freeman Dyson.  Not sure how I surfed to his Wikipedia page.  I know his name from a famous Star Trek TNG episode (that’s the series with Capt. Picard) where Scotty from 1966 Star Trek (TOS original series) reappears in the new series as himself because he crashed into a “Dyson’s Sphere” which was a way of bringing real 20^th century sci-fi ideas into 24^th century fictional Star Trek.  The real Dyson theorized that a very advanced alien race would eventually build a giant sphere around their sun so that you could live on the inside and let all the sun’s energy be captured and used, let alone the benefit from having the internal acreage living space of a billion Earths.  It personally think it’s a bad idea, but it’s interesting and worth thinking about.  Personally if my species was that advanced I would advocate just colonizing the existing planets, all 20 quintillion of them. 

Anyway, what interested me was what else the real Dyson had to say about science and religion, and apparently he has a lot of ideas that merge the two together, where science and religion complement each other.  Sadly we live in an age where Science is pitted against Religion because of stupid things like Evolution v. Creation, or Age of the Earth (6,000 years v. 4 billion), or Size of the Universe (why so many galaxies and stars if Earth is all that’s important?).  The original scientists at the beginning of the Age of Reason, people like Newton, felt that science helped explain the power of God, that there were two books to understand God—the book of Nature, and the Bible.  That there was no contradiction, only that we didn’t understand completely how they worked together. 

There were other things that made the relationship between the two strained, like the Catholic Church siding with very wrong Aristotle and his scientific ideas, and saying that not to believe in them was a sin.  Then every time Aristotle was shown to be wrong, it made infallible Church look stupid.  Also, Darwin and his ideas have contributed to "Nature is right and the Bible must be wrong" black-and-white world view, and no third possibility or understanding synthesized from the two.

Here’s a Dyson quote about Science and Religion from one of his works as found on Wikipedia:

Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect. Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute. The media exaggerate their numbers and importance. The media rarely mention the fact that the great majority of religious people belong to moderate denominations that treat science with respect, or the fact that the great majority of scientists treat religion with respect so long as religion does not claim jurisdiction over scientific questions.

The 20^th century brought in a whole new science, Quantum Mechanics.  I don’t even want to begin giving my ideas about how that could be right or wrong, since I know next to nothing about it.  But here’s where Freeman Dyson has some ideas.  Here’s a quote from one of his works as found on Wikipedia:

"The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is the level of elementary physical processes in quantum mechanics. Matter in quantum mechanics is [...] constantly making choices between alternative possibilities according to probabilistic laws. [...] The second level at which we detect the operations of mind is the level of direct human experience. [...] [I]t is reasonable to believe in the existence of a third level of mind, a mental component of the universe. If we believe in this mental component and call it God, then we can say that we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus"

I’m planning on getting a copy of this book where the quote comes from.  I don’t like the “pantheistic” tone at the end, if it is indeed pantheistic, since what can you tell from such a limited quote.  But he is right, and I’ve said this in several blog entries, and that is our spiritual existence seems to all hinge on our decision making, the opportunities to pursue belief and action in infinite world circumstances.  It seems to me to be what is always in our faces when living, and what much of our energy is devoted to, and what defines us in many ways.

Today was Moses' last visit to his Sixth Street hotel.  He had some things left in his room that he couldn’t carry when he officially moved out a couple of days ago.  I helped him by providing moving transport with my car.  Moses was disgusted with the lack of help from management and their strict rules about the time allowed to get his stuff.  Plus, one of the notorious residents kept hanging around him, poking into his room, asking for things that Moses might leave behind.  Finally Moses had to promise her a dollar if she kept quiet and helped move a bag or two, which she did.  But when Moses tried to pay her, it was with a ripped-in-two dollar which Moses insisted was legal tender!  I gave her a dollar to move things along, which Moses rebuked me for and later said she was one of the crooks he was happy to be leaving behind.  I said it was a good reminder to think of if he ever thinks of going back there. 

I mentioned how Moses got a last minute offer from his brother to live in his house while the brother was on vacation.  When Moses and I got his final bags to the house, I got to look around and see more of where Moses was getting to stay.  The house is over 3,000 square feet.  It’s so big that the brother split off part of the house to become an “in-law” apartment.  That was all locked up, but we could see inside some of the windows.  The house is two stories, but there’s a roof access and spiral staircase, and on the roof is artificial grass and plenty of space for sunbathing.  Today was a sunny day in the South Bay, while SF was overcast, and Moses lamented how much of his recent life was spent in the shadows of buildings away from the sun, and now a sunny day reminds him of how he’s missed it.  I said he should go up on the roof and sunbathe.  The house is so high and on a hill that no one can see onto the roof.  He could be naked and no one would notice. 

The house also has a very nice 8 foot pool table!  Pool is one of my vices, though I haven’t played much in the past several years.  I played a quick game while Moses was putting some clothes in the washing machine.  Moses said he loves having such easy access to laundry cleaning.  I also noticed a large Oleander bush in the yard, thanks to my recent self-training!  There’s also a 50 inch TV with DirectTV , except the video is blanking out after one minute, and sometimes it won’t work at all.  Today we listened to audio only of Anderson Cooper interviewing some boy who had leg cancer while we were unsuccessfully trying to fix the picture.  Part of the problem might be that there’s an input device on the TV I’ve never seen before, something like “Master Amp” that I guess is necessary when you have so many video/audio devices hooked up that you need a separate power source other than normal house voltage.  In Moses’ “old” hotel, he used to have a couple of power strips hooked into each other and plugged into one or two plugs in the room.  And apparently every room had that:  one outlet, and several power strips feeding off of it.  Talk about a fire hazard times 100 rooms in an already tinderbox hotel with old substandard wiring probably.  I’m surprised you don’t see more fires in cheap hotels as a result of that reality?  I guess the wiring is stronger than it would appear?

Moses has 6 weeks of living in the house left.  After that he may have to move to Oakland to that hotel room I checked out the other day.  When Moses came back from Spain he was very depressed to go to his hotel after living such a vacation life.  I hope he doesn’t go through another depression after having moved from 100 square feet of hotel space, to 3,000 square feet of mansion space, back to 150 square feet of slightly nicer hotel space? 

One thing for sure, the Sixth Street hotel was causing all sorts of problems that people don’t know about, most of all the dangerous type of people always getting high around you, or being sick, or being violent and crazy around you.  It’s a horrible lifestyle that I’ve only heard of.  Fran the filmmaker spent 3 days living with Moses the other week, filming some hardcore hotel living before Moses moved out.  Fran said it was one of the worst experiences of his life, and he was genuinely freaked out by it.  Like living in a haunted house for 3 days.  It’s all for the Moses Documentary, so it will be coming to a movie theater near you someday, and everything I’ve been describing will be in living color for you to verify.

It did get me wondering, how can one hope to fight the evil inside these hotels?  The addictions, the lifestyle, the criminal leeching element, etc.?  And it reminds me of Francis Chan's latest project to start a "church" inside each of the Tenderloin hotels.  You know, there's actually some real wisdom in that.  Getting some people in each hotel to represent some kind of spiritual fight against the evil forces that are trapping people in their depression, which I said is VERY real.  That could be an important step.