JANUARY 22 – JANUARY 28, 2012

All times/dates are PST.

Last week I suggested that we’re all self-regulating, and that karma, God and destiny emerge from within us, or, at least, access us through our subconscious.

This leads us close to the New Age concept that we are divine, that we are all God, and we only need to evolve more, blossom more fully. I suspect we are all God, but not individually. We are all one God, the God – and so, probably, are all animals, plants, etc. Individually, we are nodules of God. Everything is an expression of the God-ness. For millennia in Christian and Islamic societies we have tended to see God as “over there” and us as separate, “over here.” This concept is so removed from an easy, flowing intimacy with God, that when a person or society “breaks through” to glimpse the God-ness, he/it usually does so in a substitute image – for example, the visions of God in the Bible. It might be that the more insensitive we are to God-ness, the more powerful will be the occurrence of a vision or other “concrete” experience of God – as though the pent- up energy, held back by the fence of ignorance, finally bursts through in a blazing invasion we call a “miracle.” Perhaps we do not see huge, blatant miracles today because we are, in general, closer to God. (We certainly are more loving toward our fellow humans and creatures.)….

On another note: Television is a medium of recognized types. It does not foster growth; it rarely even accepts growth. It only wants the essence, the epitome, of a trend, fashion, zeitgeist or recognizable personality type. It doesn’t matter if the celebrated type is stupid (Homer Simpson) chirpy (Ellen Degeneris), intelligent, beautiful – even ordinary (Joe the Plumber during Obama’s election campaign) – so long as he/she is the epitome of ordinary, a more magnetic ordinary than every other Joe – all that’s required is that the celebrity project a strong essence. Snookie’s tattooed cohorts are promoted because they so faithfully project lower class strut. Johnny Carson and Regis were archetypes (though differently) of the reasonable, affable gentleness in us all. Larry King and Oprah: the essence of hopeful, balanced inquiry. Television is the greatest source of archetypes on earth.
But the actors we love as the epitome of a type are seldom the same off screen. Gillian Anderson, whose (X-Files) trademark is quiet, sultry aloofness, becomes friendly, even flirty, in person. Many screen personalities are very shy.

It’s fascinating to watch actors on talk shows. On Leno, half the actors seem to stick to their on-screen essence, and half are almost frantic to display their “real” humanity. (And the third half struggle between these two states of being.) I saw Simon Cowell on Leno. He was obviously aware of this choice, and didn’t know how to act. So he crossed his arms and sulked..