Jorge Garcia has a....Jedi Moment...

---

Leave it to me to wait until the end of the series to not only find what is possibly the greatest cast-member blog on Blogspot from LOST, but to find the two entries in which Jorge Garcia realizes that he used the Law of Attraction to end up on the cast of the show.*

Here they are: Write It Down...and be specific.

Way ahead of you, dude.

---

(*even if he doesn't call it that by name....a jar of DHARMA-Initiative Ranch Composite by any other name would smell as sweet....)

Something Wicked This Way Comes...Part I

***
(LS Ratio: 4:10. Mood: Sleepy)

Anthropologist-turned-brujo Carlos Castaneda, in A Separate Reality, writes of an instance in which he and his mentor, Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus, are on their way to a house where a group of Don Juan's associates will be seeking out Mescalito, the spirit figure accessible only through consumption of peyote. The road in Sonora, Mexico, that they drive at night rises and falls over a series of hillsides. Cresting one of those rises, Castaneda looks back and sees two lights, which he initially perceives to be a car that's been following them for some time.

"Not so," says Don Juan (paraphrasing here, of course). "The lights are Death. Death follows us, all the time, and it may catch us." Castaneda, at the time, was unclear on his teacher's meaning: Don Juan never spoke in metaphors. To him, the world was literally filled with deities and spirits, demons and angels, so whenever he spoke of them, they were as real as anything in our daily experience. To Castaneda, they were just car headlights.

Was Death really following Castaneda and Don Juan on that hot, dry desert night in Sonora? Conjecture still follows the late Castaneda, a former anthropologist who "went native" with the Yaqui, as to whether or not he'd just invented Juan Matus and Don Gennaro for narrative purposes.

Then again, I recently read a great quote - can't remember it now, can't find it now, either - that says that it's frightening to think of what's actually possible in the world, so we choose to believe that many of those things that scare us can't exist. I believe Don Juan existed. And I can say that if it were me in that car, I would have likely given the Yaqui sorcerer the benefit of the doubt. A death omen is a death omen. Keep driving. Don't stop.

I believe in what late Holographic Universe author Michael Talbot called "a participatory universe", in which the boundaries we in the West believe separate the human mind from the human experience do not exist, and are themselves constructs that we can dismantle at will. That's what all that "physicists' blackboard" stuff was about in my past few entries.

Physicists share a number of things in common with shamans: taking themselves out of the world to redefine and study, in their own way, what is possible in that world, and returning to find that the world has, in fact, grown from their studies. Working on oneself, by oneself, ends up redefining our perceptions and feelings, and both serve to re-shape the outside world after their own images.



I've been experiencing omens. We all do, but most of us dismiss them as coincidences, if we notice them at all. Then again, the Law of Attraction presumes a participatory reality, meaning that your mind and emotions influence external events. This is where the process loses many would-be believers: after all, thoughts can't make things happen in reality, right?

I've heard almost all the arguments and "explanations" for how these supposedly supernatural, meaningful synchroncities can all be either accounted for as psychological tricks of the mind or by explanable empirical phenomenon. And all of them miss the point. By light years.

The one that concerns me here, for this purpose of this post, is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which, LOA skeptics assert, accounts for the meaningful synchronicities that occur whenever we are looking for something in particular (i.e. why, if you're shopping for a particular Corvette, you start seeing Corvettes or Corvette references everywhere in your daily experience.)

(Strangely enough, in Googling the term Baader-Meinhof for this link, I found a definition on 1000 Awesome Things, a website and book I only first heard about yesterday on French-language Radio Canada as I drove into work. Spooky.)

That's the trick, though: it may be all in your subjective experience, but that's the only thing that matters, isn't it?

After all, you don't subject your daily experience to empirical testing: you just live your day. The Law of Attraction, the Path of the Beam, are not about what the happenings are, but about what they mean to you. And yet, others experience omens of their own, making this a distinctly transpersonal phenomenon.

Is there the possibility that this stuff is "real", in that the results can be eventually measured by scientific instruments? I'd like to think so, considering that other forces previously dismissed by the leading thinkers of the day as "mystical" - notably electromagnetism, speaking of attraction - are now powering our cities and iPods.

Anyone who kept an open mind back then is now thought of as a pioneer, since time and study proved there was quantifiable evidence of these phenomena. In their own times, without that evidence, others thought they were off their collective gourd, much the same way that we dismiss today's psychics and parapsychologists, alien abductees, and believers in life after death. Faith was and remains the key word. And wouldn't it be nice to be ahead of the game?

So yeah, I believe in omens, same way I believe in gravity, electricity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, and all the other energies that make up our daily lives in the first half of the 21st Century A.D.

What omens have I been getting lately? Stay tuned....

Why the LOST Ending Works (and why some of you forgot why it works)

***
(Logic-Stoopid Ratio: 8:10. Mood: "Duuude.....")

Preamble: I started watching LOST during the height of my Lord of the Rings obsession, when I learned that trilogy cast member and Hobbit Dominic Monaghan was starring in the ABC pilot. I caught it from the very first episode onwards, missed the second, but was really hooked when I saw the fourth episode Walkabout, revealing that (highlight to read)the only way wheelchair-bound John Locke was able to walk again was for Oceanic Flight 815 to crash on the Island. It was pretty damned compelling for this creative personality.

So I've been there from the beginning, and though I spent last Sunday night driving through New Jersey on the way home from Manhattan, as soon as I was rested and able, I watched the ending with my family on Monday morning.

And it was worth it. The entire series was worth it.

Why? Why, when a series notorious for unanswered questions, for supremely strange puzzles and occurrences, left so many of them still unanswered by the climax, would LOST be worth purchasing on Blu Ray and DVD for those who are wondering what it's all about? Why, when so many bloggers, fans, and critics alike are positively black with vitriol over the finale?

First, there is always that cadre of people who aren't happy with anything. Evidence for the existence of these people ranges from the bitter nature of their Facebook updates and Tweets - bitching about the only cloud on a beautiful summer day, typically - the trends set by past reviewers of the episodes to date (the Vulture reviewer, in particular, readily admits to her own vitriol since the final season started), to, well, who they are as human beings on a daily basis.

It goes to your personality type. If you're a rational, by-the-numbers person (and not 4-8-15-16-23-42, BTW) who typically likes to label everything in life and sort them into nice little boxes....what the hell were you doing watching LOST??! You were bound to be disappointed by everything that didn't make sense, so you deserve to be pissed. You've probably been pissed since Locke and Jack managed to blow open the Hatch.

For those fans who are, by nature, open-minded, upbeat, optimistic, and positive -or at least neutral - who still find themselves legitimately disappointed in the ending, fear not. The last six years of investment in this show will not go the way of your average Miami hedge fund.

LOST, and its finale, are worth it because both were what the show has always been about: the characters.

This was a show whose entire first season was about the survivors: the weirdness of the Island was simply the backdrop to learning about their secrets, seeing how they interacted with each other, see the human side of survival. We grew to love and care for, and at other times hate and fear, these people as if they were real, in the spirit of any good drama.

The Oceanic 815 survivors - most of them, anyway - are what drew most of us to the show, but remember the frustration many fans felt in Season 2 when they kept introducing new cast members beyond the original 815 crew that we all loved. The series couldn't just keep going on a character-centric basis, so they evolved the story: who is the DHARMA Initiative? How did the Black Rock end up so far inland? Who were the Others?. Once they shifted the focus on the story, they had to maintain the mystery as best as they could, introducing all of the mysteries designed to keep you guessing, and bringing in new characters - like Juliet and Widmore and Richard - only within the context of the new storyline.

But never forget that it all started with our core favorites: Jack, Kate, Locke, Sawyer, Hugo, Boone, Shannon, Michael, Walt, Sayid, Jin, Sun, Claire, and Charlie.



Sure, along the way, they created anomalies in the storyline - what was the real deal with Walt? How was Jacob able to leave the Island while Smokey couldn't? The true secrets of the Hanso Foundation? What was the Light, really? - that never got decisively answered, but I'm glad they didn't.

If they had answered all of the questions, we would have inevitably been disappointed even moreso by the answers, much like how the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica felt so rushed, overwrought, and really thin given the context of the show (Seriously, how do you have "angels" appear in a show based in gritty realism? ), because Ron Moore tried to tie up all the loose ends in three hours. No, it wouldn't be good, and it wouldn't be LOST, without a little bit of mystery left to it.

Oddly, not answering everything made the show more like real life. LOST began as a fraud, in many respects: it was a science-fiction and fantasy show posing as a primetime drama. It was a convincing drama that even attracted fans who hated sci-fi/fantasy, real enough to be believable at first, and then gradually taking us down this path to the point where guys who talk to dead people and time travel one day became acceptable parts of the show's reality.

The sense of realism from the show applied to the narrative as well. As horror writer (and LOST fan) Stephen King said, real life doesn't tie up all of its loose ends. Somebody dies, and there are threads that never get picked up again. The endings aren't convenient, not even all meaningful. Similarly, you can't solve all the mysteries in a story if you want it to retain that sense of verisimilitude, because strange things happen in real life to which nobody gets all the answers.

Ultimately, what got me about the finale was the drama, the spectacle and emotion, learning about the real nature of the alternate universe . I watch TV to feel good, as I do with other things, and I felt damned good watching this episode, if a little misty throughout.

Some critics panned the "goopy" New Agey aspects of the reunion of the castaways in the Afterlife, and while I'm partisan on the New Agey-count, I nonetheless found it deeply moving, and I'm very grateful that the writers chose to return to the relationships between the characters instead of just sticking to the plot. You would have had to have had a heart of uranium-235 not to have teared up, even a little, during the episode's final moments.

LOST managed to integrate nearly every story you can imagine - romance, sex, horror, sci-fi, comedy - into a single, coherent, for the most part believable epic. And it worked: why else would so many of you be pissed?

So, LOST is what it is, and what it is is a unique, wonderful, compelling, and intelligent story - far more intelligent, admittedly, than most of the audience members, myself included - that I will gladly share with any willing novice (or unwitting captive). It is a novel for TV combining a surreal story with a believable verisimilitude and emotional core that that no show will ever again be able to match. And the ending suited the series quite well.

Yes, I'm done gushing. Now, off to get some dinner....

"Light Up The Fire", by Rumi

One of my favourite poets....(yes, I have favourite poets...I'm an English major and a writer, hello?).

---
"Light Up The Fire".

I gaze into the heart, lowly it may be,
Thought the words be higher still.
For the heart is all the substance,
The speech an accident.
How many phrases will you speak,
Too many for me.
How much burning, burning will you feel,
Be friendly with the fire, enough for me.
Light up the fire of love inside,
And blaze the thoughts away.

By: Rumi

From The Love Poems of Rumi by Philip Dunn

A Beautiful Journal from Author Whitley Strieber

...



I've been reading Whitley Strieber's books ever since I was eleven years old, and when you read my writing, the influence of his non-fiction, moreso than his fiction, stands out in my work. Especially the non-fiction passages that read like the following link.

Here is his journal entry from today, about a recent experience he had. It's simply beautiful.

...