"Some Kind of Beautiful" (2014) Another sunset with Salma Hayek for Peirce Brosnan in a silly but at times charming love story.
"Stuck in Love" (2012) Greg Kinnear as father of a family of writers estranged from his wife, but nevertheless waits for her and sets a place for her at Thanksgiving each year.
"The Best Offer" (2013) living with a woman, Geoffrey Rush finds, is like one of his auction sales, you never know if yours will be the best offer or if you will be ripped off. A DON’T MISS HIT! ! !
"Instructions Not Included" "(2013) It takes a daredevil to fall in love with a baby girl dumped in his lap. A DON’T MISS HIT !
“The Red Army” (2014) The Hockey Captain relates the pressures on the Soviet’s ice hockey team to perform, excel, and stay red at all costs.
“Night Train to Munich” (1940) Rex Harrison sings a German tune as he rescues Czech scientist from Nazi clutches and gets the girl. A DON’T MISS HIT! !
“The Longest Week” (2014) After the longest week of his life at the age of 42 Conrad was beginning to grow up. A DON’T MISS HIT !
"The Night of the Hunter" (1955) "The Lord abides the little children" and Bob Mitchum gets hung.
"Jackie & Ryan" (2015) make a reluctant duet.
"The Man From UNCLE" (2015) a Bond-type American spy teams with and against a Bourne-type Russian spy and all kinds of Hell-O! breaks out. Has the look of a new franchise in movies. Look for more UNCLES coming out of the Hollywoodwork! A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! ! !

"River of No Return" (1954) Bob Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe spark romantic fires on a raft fighting to navigate a frigid rushing river to safety. A DON'T MISS HIT!
"The Ref" (1994) Denis Leary stars in this "Home Alone" for adults where the bad guy helps the good guys straighten out their lives and gives the audience a ROTFL ball of fun. Remember Kevin Spacey in this one? A DON'T MISS HIT ! ! ! !

"Voices" (2014) OFFAL! Hop and chop.
"Vacation" (2015) swimming in OFFAL! A Lampoon in a Shit Lagoon! FUGETTABOTIT!
"Goodbye to All That" (2014) — enough said.
"20,000 Days on Earth" (2014) a slideshow with boring narrative by Nick Cave. Better than Sominex.
"The Salt of the Earth" (2014) stunning beauty in mind-numbing repetitions.
"Dope" (2015) Nope. A DVD STOMPER ! ! !

"The Missouri Breaks" (1976)" are few and far between for cattlemen and rustlers where the land breaks up the Missouri River and vigilante justification breaks up pardners. Brando, Randy Quaid, and Nicholson in this tiresome Western.
"Eden" (2015) becomes hell when soccer teamwork falls apart and they fall upon each other with vengeance more important than survival.
"The Journey Home" (2014) Teenage boy drowned his snowmobile and nearly killed himself twice and led several other people to near death because he wanted to re-unite a polar bear cub with its mother. A frozen journey to melt bleeding hearts. YUCK! Lousy story, good scenery.

For our Good Readers, here are the reviews and articles featured this month. The first and second reviews this month will be ones which were never published in early DIGESTWORLD ISSUES and will be of interest to our DIGESTWORLD Readers. The rest of the items will be new additions to the top of A Reader's Journal, Volume 2, Chronological List, new additions to A Reader's Treasury, or Essays previously unpublished.

NOTE: some Blurbs may be condensations of long Reviews, possibly lacking footnotes and some quoted passages. For your convenience, if you wish to read the full review or to print it out, simply CLICK on the Book Cover or choose Printer Ready option on the top line of a review page when it opens.

1.) ARJ2: From Limestone to Lucifer, GA# 349 by Rudolf Steiner

Steiner begins his first talk with a discussion of the various elements and minerals: how they are helpful to the human body. First he covers silica. I can't think of any medicines off the top of my head that incorporate a compound of silica. I had to look up the chemical constituency of aspirin to check if it contained silica, and it doesn't. The salicylic acid is an organic compound named for the genus of willow trees in whose bark the active ingredient of aspirin was first discovered.

[page 10] The head goes furthest towards cosmic space. It can therefore be healed most easily with silica. The belly comes closest to earth, and we therefore can most easily heal it with mica. And the parts that are more in the middle, the lung and so on, can be treated to good effect with feldspar, if we prepare it in a suitable way.

As for another hard mineral, limestone, it was once part of a living creature and is now mostly dead matter, but it will arise again into living matter. To understand how this might be so, we must look at the sun cycle of 25,920 years during which the Sun completes its path through all the signs of the zodiac, spending 2160 years in each one. While we humans live and walk upon the solid Earth, it is sleeping, a sleep of 15,000 years, and a mineral like limestone is hard and lifeless, a residue of life. When the Sun returns to Libra or the Scales again, the hard minerals of Earth will be flowing again, "and a state of life will exist again, only at a higher level of evolution." (page 15) I know all this sounds silly to materialist scientists with their radioactive carbon and uranium-decay dating methods that claim a life-time of over three billion years for the Earth. However their methods have not been in existence for three billion years but a paltry hundred years or so when things haven't changed much. They project backwards in a fashion much like the doctor who inspected the changes in a patient's heart over several years, and projected backwards from the changes he observed claimed that he could describe the state of the patient's heart at a time three hundred years in the past. His methods may be exact, but there is one small problem: the patient had not been born at that time! (Steiner has used this metaphor in several lecture series to show the folly of projections backwards as to the life of the Earth by materialistic scientists.)

What does all this mean? It means that the tiny bit of residual life in limestone may be administered as medicine, both homeopathically and allopathically, with good effect.

On page 16 he details the case of malnutrition involving a child with a bloated belly who is unable to digest food anymore. We've seen photos in our lifetime from Ethiopia, Somalia and other regions of such children. Steiner says for those children we must first make their "organs fit again to take in food."

[page 16 -17] This is where the little bit of life in the limestone serves us well. If the limestone, or calcium carbonate, is used as a medicine in the right way, we can wake those sleeping digestive powers up again and the child will live. . . . Given in allopathic doses, it acts on the digestive organs, given in very high dilution it acts on the head. And we can arrange things accordingly. But we can also know what we are using when we give calcium carbonate in very high dilution. We are using powers of the future. These are still in there and will be active in the future.

The next lecture he covers two basic parts of color theory: why the sky is red at dawn and dusk and yet is blue in the middle of the day. When the Sun is below the horizon, at dawn and dusk, there is dark around us, and when the light from the Sun hits clouds in the sky near the horizon, the light bouncing off the clouds towards us travels as light through the dark and thus appear to us to be red. In the middle of the day the sky above us is full of light from the Sun and yet above the Earth the realm of space is black. The result is that when we look up into a clear sky in daytime, we see darkness through light, which will always appear blue.

To me, a trained physicist, this seems prima facie to be poppycock and addle-headed foolishness. Everybody knows that all the colors of the rainbow are contained in a single beam of light and one only needs a prism in a dark room to prove that to be the case. Ah, but I am now hoisted on my own petard because my previous sentence presupposes an image schema of light being "a container of colors." To quote my review of Mark Johnson's fine book, The Body in the Mind:

What is an image schema? It is a "dynamic pattern that functions somewhat like the abstract structure of an image, and thereby connects up a vast range of different experiences that manifest this same recurring structure."

What does it mean for a beam of light to be a container of color? Rightly understood, the whole statement is a bit silly. Color is a process, the result of the path taken by a particular ray of light, not a thing is contained in a light beam. But what did Newton say to himself?

[page 24 -25] Newton said to himself: 'There the white light is coming in; the prism gives me the seven colours of the rainbow. The seven colours of the rainbow are therefore contained in the white light and I only need to lure them out.' You see, that is the simplest explanation. You explain something by saying it is already present in something from which I then draw it out.

And, as silly as it may be in truth, this explanation of light is still being taught to physics majors some forty years after I learned it in college. No wonder I was unable to understand the subtleties of light and color — I was always using the container image schema, so I was unable to notice by dint of my cognitive processes that the color of a white coffee cup could be white, gray, beige, green, yellow, pink, or any combination of those colors depending on the toils undergone by a ray of light from a given spot on its path into my eyes. Not only could I not see the cup as it really was, but my cognitive blindness made it impossible for me to render an accurate color image (painting) of such a simple object as a solid white cup! Armed with the explanation by Steiner that when using a prism we "see light through darkness on one side [namely, red], and darkness through light on the other [blue]," I would have been better prepared to understand that color is an emerging property of the path that a light beam takes, not something that exists in a container to be extracted!

When a bull sees red, it gets angry. We even call getting mad "seeing red." When we see a blue sky, we feel peaceful. If color is just something that is extracted from a container, how is this possible? Steiner says that when the eye comes up against the color red, light seen through darkness, the blood in the eye is a little bit destroyed as are the nerves in the eye. The oxygen drawn in from the body leaves the eye and the rest of the body vitalized. On the other hand, darkness seen through light, or blue color, does not destroy our blood and it leaves the nerves intact, and we feel peaceful with a sense of well-being. As for the other colors, yellow is a shade of red and green is a shade of blue. (from page 27 to 29)

How does one obtain color pigments for painting? I grant that this has been a mystery to me as well, up until now. So it was with great interest that I read this section on pages 30 and 31. To produce red shades of color [red, orange, yellow], one can use the flower of the sunflower plant.

But if one wants to get a blue color, one uses a plant that produces a blue flower, but the material from producing the color is located in the roots of the plant. The example he gives are the chicory plant, which gives a shade of blue, and the indigo plant, which gives a darker shade of blue, only from the roots of these plants.

[page 31] And so I must develop a live chemistry in which I imitate the flower processes of plants to get light colours and the root processes of plants to obtain dark colours. You see, what I have been telling you is something that real common sense can discover. This business with the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet of the rainbow, on the other hand, is not something real, fundamentally speaking.

Next Steiner takes us into the human body, how the body is affected by colors and how the body affects colors in itself corresponding to its condition of health and vitality. Basically he says that in the presence of red colors the destruction of the blood calls up oxygen in us and this leads to a robust healthy condition. On the other hand, if we are surrounded by darkness or shades of blue all the time, we grow pale due to the excess of carbon dioxide. This is not something that Newton's image schema of a prism and rainbow to explain light would ever lead us to.

Consider for a moment the face of a shepherd, someone who works out of doors tending his flock and sleeping under the stars. What kind of a face do you see when you think about this shepherd? Tanned face, piercing eyes, peaceful countenance? Yes, peaceful is probably the most universal demeanor that one thinks of when one thinks of a shepherd, perhaps due to the many pictures of Christ as the Good Shepherd, or is it the other way around? Perhaps Christ was portrayed as a shepherd because of the universally accepted view of a shepherd as peaceful. Read what Steiner says below and decide for yourself.

[page 37] Think of the pastoral peoples of earlier times who drove their herds and slept in the open. In their sleep they were exposed not to the blue but to a dark sky. And stars beyond number were shining up there in the heavens. From the dark sky came a calming influence, and the people felt inwardly at ease in their sleep. The whole human being was penetrated by the darkness, growing inwardly calm. Sleep came from the darkness. But there were those stars shining on the people. And wherever a star's ray shone down, the human being became a little bit excited inside. Then a ray of oxygen would go out from the body. And the star rays were all met by rays of oxygen, with the human being having such oxygen rays running through every part of him. He then became an inner oxygen-mirror image of the whole starry firmament.

[page 38] All human beings everywhere on the earth have come from that pastoral state. And in their bodies they have inherited as much as has still come down to them from those pastoral ancestors.

A major debate in physics and chemistry raged for many years over what happens during combustion. The materials burned were obviously smaller after burning than what they were before burning, indicating that something was given off. That was called phlogiston. Then clever scientists began to weigh all the products of combustion and found that, instead of something being given off, something was added. That something, they called oxygen and it could be weighed. That was how materialism came about: people began to believe only in those things that have weight. There is a stark consequence to this belief only in things one can weigh, however, as Steiner tells us bluntly:

[page 50] But remember, this earthly human being will be a corpse one day. Everything that has weight, that can be treated with scales, will be a corpse. Then the corpse lies there. You will still be able to live in the part that does not have weight, the part that exists around this earth and which materialists say does not exist.

To exist as an individuality after death is to be human. What is it to be human while one is on the Earth? How are human different from animals? The answer is as simple as 1, 2, 3, 4. Humans can 1) Walk, 2) Talk, 3) Think, and 4) Learn. Do animals walk? Yes, but the easy way, on all fours, not erect for any long periods of time. Do animals talk? No, they bark, make noises and give signals to each other. Do animals think? Steiner says, yes, but their thinking is not personal but cosmic. Humans first learn to walk upright, something animals cannot do, only approach doing in some species. Then humans learn to talk by imitating others, which does not requires thinking. Thinking only comes along later by which time they are capable of talking. Walking requires combustion, which means that combustion products or ash are formed in our body. If we did not replenish the things burned up in our bodies, we would decompose like corpses. The ether body in us replenishes our physical body while we are sleeping. The astral body provides us with our ability to talk, which goes away when we are sleeping and the astral body departs the physical body. Do animals learn? No, they are born with instincts and apply them as they mature to adapt to unique situations. Our ability to learn, above everything else, distinguishes us from animals and makes us truly human; our ability to learn comes to us because we have a fourth body, an I. That rounds out the four bodies that comprise the human being: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I.

In this next passage Steiner reveals something about himself, about how it is that his lectures are always so fresh and informative, even when he is talking about a subject he has dealt with many times before.

[page 65] Now when one wants to come into anthroposophy, then, I'd say, one has to learn one's language all over again. For you'll find that when someone gives a talk nowadays — wow, it's as if it comes from a machine. Observe it — you'll find it is as if it were coming from a machine. It is different from the way it is when someone gives a talk about something out of the science of the spirit, out of anthroposophy. There one must all the time try and find the words, take them up again in a new way inwardly. And then, having shaped the words, one really begins to worry that they did not really present things correctly. In anthroposophy, the relationship to these who listen to one is very different than it is with academics today. Modern academics no longer take care with their speech. In anthroposophy, one must always take care of speech and language.

One of the things that always puzzled me as a child was where was I before I was born. Nothing in catechism was any help. Nothing that I read anywhere was any help. I seemed to have just popped up, "Hey, World! Here am I!" at birth. Some years ago it began to occur to me that if reincarnation were true that would mean that I had lived before this lifetime. But that meant that the whole fabric of the story by the Church was rent in two — you know, the story about eternal bliss in heaven with harps and angels. Thank Goodness, I thought, what a boring prospect for spending eternity! I came to understand that life after death must also mean life before death even though I had never encountered the concept elsewhere. So, it was not surprising to me to encounter the following thoughts expressed by Rudolf Steiner about why the Church taught the dogma that life before life did not exist for us.

[page 74] So what happened when the dogma was established that one should not consider life before life on earth? People's view of the supersensible was cut off. But does it serve a purpose for the Church to cut off this view of the supersensible? Oh yes, it serves a purpose, for since human beings desire to have life after death, the Church is then able to make itself responsible for everything to do with death. People will not be able to know what happens after death, and have to depend on what the Church tells them. And this will make people long to believe above all in the Church. It was therefore a good thing — that is, for the Church — to establish the dogma that human beings go on living after their life on earth. For with this the Church took control of everything connected with death and dying.

In the next lecture Steiner talks about "cat asthma" by which he means an asthma that is triggered by the presence of a cat in the room whether the person knows a cat is present or not.

This reminds me of the dog allergy that my sister-in-law had. I suggested that she do a doyle trace and she did one in under 60 seconds following the simple instructions I gave her. When she went from 5 to 4, she said, "Woo! What was that?" She told me later that she felt this enormous rush in her chest's midline. Suddenly she could breathe freely again. The trace was over! Her difficulty breathing was gone, and within five minutes the puffiness around her eyes had abated. When I asked her, "What's a plausible thing that could have happened to you at the age of four?" [the Plausibility Question], she recalled that a large Labrador retriever, a big black dog, had eaten her kittens when she was four, and she cried a long, long time. I asked her what kind of dog was it that her boss had brought to the office the day before that triggered her "dog allergy" and she said, "Omigod! It was a Labrador retriever!" Over the 35 years since that childhood incident she had thought she had a "dog allergy" and all her doctors agreed and prescribed drugs for her. What she really had was a doylic event stored that consisted of puffy eyes, difficulty breathing, and these were triggered by the presence of a big, black dog, a Labrador retriever. So she had a "dog allergy" that was specific to Labrador retrievers, and had actually had other types of dogs as pets in her past.

Read Steiner's description of the cat asthma and note the similarities to the dog allergy I described above.

[page 138] The child then recovers from his whopping cough, but sometimes a strange thing remains behind. If the child has not been used to having a cat around before, and a cat has come to live in the house whilst the child had whooping cough — this will not happen when he has just recovered, but later on the condition will develop which people call asthma, a breathing difficulty that repeats itself over and over again.

And further along Steiner talks about buckwheat asthma — a young student who only got asthma when buckwheat was present in the house, whether he knew it consciously or not. The cooks were all instructed that no buckwheat should ever come into the house.

[page 139] A new cook had come who did not know this. She had had some buckwheat down below on the ground floor, and the young student up on the second floor developed asthma. These seem like fables. But they are completely true.

Of the veracity of the stories, I have no doubt, especially after my experience with removing my sister-in-law's dog allergy. The human being has senses that are extremely sensitive and that operate outside of awareness, outside of consciousness, outside of cognition. Lawrence Weiskrantz discovered the presence of such senses and gave it the name 'blindsight'. In blindsight, a man who has a lesion in his cortical region that processes visual information is still able to identify visual objects that he says that he cannot see. In other words, without any consciousness of seeing, he is able to pass tests with almost perfect scores that confirm he is, in fact, able to see the objects. If, as I suspect, the amygdala provides the storage and retrieval mechanism for storing triggers, such as the visual information about the cat or the smell of the buckwheat, then these sights and smell would be able to trigger the physical body states (doyles) in the person's lungs that we call asthma that were stored and associated with these triggers before the person was five years old. With the science of doyletics we are able finally in the 21st Century to provide an explanation for these 'strange' phenomena that Steiner reported in the first quarter of the 20th Century.

We all know that red blood is highly oxygenated blood and blue blood is blood with an excess of carbon that must be processed by the lungs to remove the carbon dioxide. Couple that knowledge with Steiner's explanation that the lips are actually an expanse of inner skin and you have a way of understanding certain kinds of plant poisoning, e. g., from opium or belladonna, the deadly nightshade. The person who is poisoned gets a red face and blue lips. With the poisoning the breathing is held up, preventing the removal of the carbon, and you get the red face, blue lips syndrome. An interesting aspect is the origin of the expression "blue blood" as it refers to the nobility.

[page 158] This is something else primitive peoples once knew, this business of the blue blood going inside. When someone had too much blue blood inside they would say that someone who has too much blue blood inside him is in the first place someone who has little soul; his soul has gone away.

'Blue-blooded' therefore became a term of abuse. And when members of the nobility were called blue-blooded, people wanted to say their souls were not there. It is strange how these things live in a most marvellous way in popular wisdom. You really can learn a tremendous amount from language.

You can also learn a tremendous amount from Rudolf Steiner by reading all the lectures in this book. This paltry review can do little but give hints of what insights are contained within. It would be fitting to close with a view of Christianity that he shares with us that he says would allow Christianity to be "understood everywhere on earth."

[page 228] The divine spirit we should venerate is not in a particular place on earth but is connected with the power of the sun, the living nature of the sun which the Christ has taken into himself. And the sun is truly for the whole of humanity. No one in Europe can say, when the sun is shining on his head, that this is a different sun from the one that is there for the Egyptians, or the Chinese, or the Australians. Anyone who truly accepts that the Christ power comes from the sun has to accept the general religion that is for all humanity.

Read/Print at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/fltlrvw.shtml

2.) ARJ2: Michaelmas and the Soul-Forces of Man, GA# 223 by Rudolf Steiner

This series of lectures answers the question, "How shall man, the earth citizen, once more become a citizen of the cosmos?" It also answers the question, "How shall humanity rightly address the chaos of our social systems?" A hint: the answers will not come about from an intellectualized view of the spirit world, one that does not fill the human heart with warmth which is the essence of the German word "gemüt" in the original title of these lectures. Gemüt has no direct equivalent in English as it refers to a blending of thinking, willing, and feeling that one can feel with one's whole body, but is centered in the region of one's heart. The translator gives this poetic translation, "the mind warmed by a loving heart and stimulated by the soul's imaginative power" and this more intellectual one, "the soul in a state of unconscious intuition arising from the working together of heart and mind." Steiner was speaking to his native Austrians in these lectures and was undoubtedly filled with gemüt as he celebrated his last Michaelmas festival in Vienna before his death.

To counter the claim that anthroposophy is too intellectual, Steiner gave these lectures, and begins Lecture 1 with these words:

[page 1] It is true that today one never tires of insisting that man cannot stop short at what the dry, matter-of-fact intellect can comprehend. Nevertheless, when it is a case of acquiring knowledge people depend exclusively upon this intellect.

Then he proceeds to speak to the human gemüt in the remainder of the lectures, how one may achieve an understanding of one's place in the cosmos by a balanced celebration of the four key festivals of the seasons, Christmas, Easter, St. John's, and Michaelmas. Particularly he focuses on how the battle of Michael with the Dragon is to be understood, not as a fairy tale, but with the human heart. The forces of materialism would have us believe that if spirit exists, it is only because inert matter has evolved into life upward until spirit has been reached. Steiner says that the exact opposite has occurred (page 3), and anyone who has understood his description of the evolution of the Earth and humankind can not doubt the veracity of evolution from the spirit downward into matter as the proper and only reasonable direction of evolution.

What is the battle of Michael and the Dragon? I know Michael is an Archangel, but who is the Dragon? Where does the battle take place? How come I've never seen this Dragon? These are good questions and ones that immediately pop into my mind. This book answers these questions definitively, and in this review I will summarize the answers. Steiner's definition of sin is "a good out of its time." With that in mind, let's review the great sin that occurred in certain divine spirits, one of which we know now as the Dragon.

[page 4] In superhuman pride, certain beings revolted because they desired freedom of will before the time had come for their freedom to mature; and the most important one of these beings, their leader, was conceived of as the being taking the shape in the Dragon that Michael combats - Michael, who remained above in the realm of those spirits that wanted to continue molding their will to the divine-spiritual will above them.

This rebellion took place long before the form of humans or even higher animals came into being; as a result, a unique form that did not correspond to any animal on Earth was created, the form we know as a dragon, "a cosmic contradiction," in Steiner's words. This being could no longer remain in the realm of the higher hierarchies and had to be "placed among beings that would evolve in the course of physical development." (page 5)

[page 5, 6] It was Michael's deed, this bestowing of a form that is supra-animalistic: supersensible, but intolerable in the supersensible realm; for although it is supersensible it is incompatible with the realm of the supersensible where it existed before it rebelled.

The Dragon found its only home, not in the divine realm, not on the physical Earth, but in the heart of man, the gemüt of the human being, in the human nature. Whereas formerly, in pre-human times, the battle between Michael and the Dragon occurred in outer objectivity, now the battle has moved inside to the struggle with human nature. The imaginative picture Steiner says an 18th Century human would have drawn is the Dragon "coiling through the animality in man, thereby representing an earth-being." But a change settled into humanity around that time so that thenceforth "the intellect has become the only recognized autocrat of human cognition." The evolution of consciousness which accompanied humanity's fall into materialism obscured our ability to perceive this Dragon that constantly pulls humanity down into a sub-human condition. And the remedy for this sad state of affairs is to buttress our gemüt with the help of Michael in order to overcome the forces of the Dragon that wraps itself invisibly around our hearts.

[page 15] So the content of the human Gemüt can be this: The power of the Dragon is working within me, trying to drag me down. I do not see it — I feel it as something that would drag me down below myself. But in the spirit I see the luminous Angel whose cosmic task has always been the vanquishing of the Dragon. I concentrate my Gemüt upon this glowing figure, I let its light stream into Gemüt, and thus my illumined and warmed Gemüt will bear within it the strength of Michael. And out of a free resolution I shall be able, through my alliance with Michael, to conquer the Dragon's might in my own nature.

Every year on September 29, Michaelmas occurs. During Michaelmas festivals around the world, the battle of Michael and the Dragon is re-enacted and the Dragon is slain during the ceremony. Children are given toy swords, and they are encouraged to slay the Dragon, chop its head off, dismember its limbs, and completely destroy the Dragon. These are powerful images that work in the gemüt of children. In the unfortunate event that the instructions to slay the Dragon are abridged by squeamish adults who would instruct the children merely to subdue the Dragon, not kill it, such children are taught to live with a temporarily subdued Dragon wrapped around their hearts. Such folly no doubt pleases the Dragon enormously, up until now.

In my essay The Childhood of Humanity I discuss the evolution of our human memory capabilities, how our cognitive memory developed into full bloom around the same time our abilities to perceive supersensible realities faded. Early humans possessed a native clairvoyance that allowed them to bring to mind pre-natal experiences, especially the events of previous lifetimes. With the loss of that clairvoyance, we have become as "hermits" — isolated in one lifetime, unaware of the connection of this lifetime with our previous lifetimes and thus of the very nature of our spiritual reality in the cosmos. While there was something lost, there was also something gained in the process.

[page 18] This phase of human evolution was indispensable for the development of what we experience in the consciousness of freedom, the feeling of freedom, in order to arrive at full self-consciousness, at the inner strength that permits the ego to rise to its full height; but necessary as was the hermit life of man in relation to the cosmos, it must be but a transition to another epoch in which the human being may find the way back to spirit, which after all underlies all things and beings.

The all things needs a bit of elaboration, of specification, and Steiner attacks this task on page 21 when he tells us that "in every plant there is concealed — under a spell, as it were — an elemental spiritual being." We only observe a plant rightly, he says, if we realize that the beauty of the plant is only the sheath, the outer and visible covering, the vesture of a spiritual being in the plant, a spiritual being low on the scale of cosmic beings, but one intimately related to human beings. When we stop and smell the roses or closely admire any plant or flower, we move the elementals in that plant a step closer to breaking its spell and moving on its way into the spiritual worlds. In essence we perform for those spiritual beings the favor that was bestowed on us as human beings in earlier stage of our evolutions by spiritual beings higher than us.

[page 22, 23] All about us are these elemental spirits begging us, in effect, Do not look at the flowers so abstractly, nor form such abstract mental pictures of them: let rather your heart and your Gemüt enter into what lives, as soul and spirit, in the flowers, for it is imploring you to break the spell. — Human existence should really be a perpetual releasing of the elemental spirits lying enchanted in minerals, plants, and animals. . . . In the present epoch of civilization — that of the development of freedom — man's attitude towards the flowers is a mere sipping at what he should really be drinking. He sips by forming concepts and ideas, whereas he should drink by uniting, through his Gemüt, with the elemental spirits of the things and beings that surround him.

If one sips, but does not drink, what is the result overall? The plant elementals, instead of being released, are captured by the Dragon in one's lower nature where they perish. People talk about big plans to create an improved society and civilization on the Earth, but there is another equally important aspect of our life on Earth, and that is furthering the development of the elemental beings by entering into an intimate relationship with them. Part of our slaying of the Dragon is starving it. We can do this by cutting off its nutrients in the form of the elementals that we have thrown careless into the maw of the Dragon by our careless disregard of the beauty of minerals, plants, and animals, up until now.

If we do not slay the Dragon, but instead allow it to gorge itself on elemental beings, three things happen to human beings: spiritually, psychically, and physically.

1: Spiritually — humans arrive at a belief in a materialistic world to the exclusion of a spiritual world.

2: Psychically — humans become cowards, weaklings who are unable to do the right thing even when they know it is the right thing to do.

3: Physically — humans are beset by disease germs of all kinds.

Attacked thus from three sides, millions of human beings are unable to experience the potency of their spirit within and lead debilitated lives, up until now. (page 25) Under this fierce, encompassing attack, we require Michael power; it is the only way that thoughts about spirit will grip us powerfully enough to win the day over the pervasive forces of the Dragon.

What are we to do if we experience a lack of Michael forces in our lives? Shall we implore them to assist us? Pray for Michael's help? As paradoxical as that might sound to some, such pleading will not suffice to ward off the Dragon. We must avoid the passive stance of prayer and take an active role in joining forces with Michael in this battle.

[page 28, 29] For the Michael forces do not want to be implored: they want men to unite with them. This men can do if they will receive the lessons of the spiritual world with inner energy. . . . If a man will saturate himself more and more with confidence in spirit . . . he will acquire a feeling, a Gemüt content, telling them that every blossom bears testimony to the existence of an enchanted elemental being in it; and he will learn to feel the longing in this elemental being to be released by him, instead of being delivered up to the Dragon to whom it is related through its own invisibility.

Seen this way, each elemental being in a flower is like Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale waiting for a prince to come along to admire her enough to kiss her forehead, by which act she will arise to a new life.

It is easy to imagine the clever ripostes of some readers of this review to the effect that these are mere flights of romantic fancy having no basis in reality. Here's how Steiner would counter such intellectual blather.

[page 31] Cleverness, then, has been furnished in abundance by the last few centuries; but what we need today is warmth of Gemüt, and this anthroposophy can provide. When someone studying anthroposophy says it leaves him cold, he reminds me of one who keeps piling wood in the stove and then complains that the room doesn't get warm. Yet all he needs to do is kindle the wood, then it will get warm. Anthroposophy can be presented, and it is the good wood of the soul; but it can be enkindled only each within himself.

During my physics studies in college, I learned things that none of my friends outside of physics wanted to hear about. How to compute the positions of planets that I learned in astronomy. The sounds patterns I computed on the head of a drum in acoustics. The interpretation of spectral lines from the stars. I was left feeling a little like a hermit when I went home on the weekends from college. As Steiner says on page 33, "But what have all the results of such methods to do with the intimate inner soul life of man?" I didn't even think about my inner soul life at the time, but I certainly felt the emptiness that accompanied my focused studies on such methods of the physical sciences.

[page 38] The nature of our present-day education is such that we are prone to apply to the whole cosmos what we consider true in our little earth cell; but it is obvious that truth cannot come to light in this way.

We perceive with our head the concepts of the physical sciences and all of materialism, but with our heart, our gemüt, we are able to experience the fullness of life in an intimate way. One could conceive of the heart as a sense organ that allows us to experience life to its depths.

[pag 44] . . . the human heart is really a subconscious sense organ: subconsciously the head perceives through the heart what goes on in the physical functions of the lower body and chest. Just as we perceive outer events in the sense-world through the eye, so the human heart is in reality a sense organ in its relation to the functions mentioned. Subconsciously by means of the heart the head, and particularly the cerebellum, perceives the blood being nourished by the transformed foodstuffs, perceives the functioning of the kidneys, the liver, and other processes of the organism.

In the ancient Mithras cult the disciples were taught to have a conscious feeling of the above functions and from that to obtain a knowledge about the course of the seasons of the year. Later the Celts with their cromlechs were able to perceive the spiritual light that filtered into the darkened chambers and from its color determine the passages of the seasons of the year: a yellow tinge in mid-summer and a pale blue shade in winter. (page 41)

Everyone has seen that earthworms come out of the Earth when a heavy rain falls. Steiner compares materialists to earthworms living so deep in the earth that no rain in the form of rays of spiritual light ever reaches them. These "earthworms for whom it never rains" must emerge into the spiritual light of day, and the Michael Festival is the right time for that to occur.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015 Insertion: Reading to this point in this review that I had written in 2007, I was entranced by the above insight about earthworms, and, like a hungry American Ibis, I grabbed this poem I wrote back on 9/3/1971. My hand was actually resting on the faded yellow bond paper that I had typed upon with my 1958 Royal Typewriter at my desk inside 2122 Judith Lane in Anaheim, California. I had no idea what it meant at the time that I wrote it. I had no idea what it mean a half hour ago, 45 years after I wrote it, but while I was reading the above passages in this review, Steiner's words about flowers as a Sleeping Beauty [page 28, 29], sipping flowers [page 22, 23], and earthworms as materialists resounated deep in my soul.

I was exactly such an earthworm-materialist in 1971 when this poem filled with spiritual insights came out of my pen and was later typed into my mechanical typewriter. For weeks this marked-up poem has sat in limbo on my desk. Would I type it into my computer, not knowing whether or not to use the emendations I noted on it over the years? I didn't know. I held that as an unanswered question, up until now. The answer which came was this: DO NOT CHANGE A SINGLE WORD!

I now realize what the poem meant. The reason I had not typed it up with the dozen or so "corrections" I had scribbled on it was simply: I did not know what the poem meant! Now I do, and I hope you, my Good Readers will also know what it means after you read it, in the context of the Review it is embedded within which explains what it means:

            Earthworm of Hindsight

I once found an earthworm of hindsight
       stirring under a log,
Unturned in last spring's plowing,
       blindly moving along.

The magic of yesterday's dreams
       are smashed to smithereens
and our loss is but of our innocence
       in paradoxical canteens.

Follow me closely here by the wall,
       careful of beer cans, watch for a fall;
Love me once more or I'll leave you alone
       and watch all my vapors be gone.

Silence now as we close out the week
       and open the dusty shades,
Let in the light to fill up our souls
       with parsley feelings and marigolds.

                      ~^~

[page 67] During the last three or four centuries mankind has simply acquired the habit of considering all nature, and human existence as well, in intellectual, abstract conceptions; and now that humanity is confronted with the great problems of social chaos, people try to solve these, too, with the same intellectual means. But never in the world will anything but chimeras be brought forth in this way.

A consummate human heart is a prerequisite to the right to an opinion in the social realm; but this no man can possess without finding his relation with cosmos, and in particular, with the spiritual substance of the cosmos.

In Easter we find death followed by the resurrection of the soul; in Michaelmas we find resurrection of the soul followed by death. To close out this review let us listen in as Rudolf Steiner closes out his lecture to his fellow countrymen in Vienna this way:

[page 68, 69] Easter commemorates for us the Resurrection of Christ from death; but in the Michael Festival we must feel with all the intensity of our soul: In order not to sleep in a half-dead state that will dim my self-consciousness between death and a new birth, but rather, to be able to pass through the portal of death in full alertness, I must rouse my soul through my inner forces before I die. First, resurrection of the soul — then death, so that in death that resurrection can be achieved which man celebrates within himself.

Read/Print at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/masfmrvw.shtml

3.) ARJ2: The Martian — A Novel by Andy Weir

I had read so much science fiction by the time I was fifteen that I probably spent more time on Mars than on Earth. It was this thought which prompted me to spend time with a guy who is stuck alone on Mars with modern technology on hand to help him survive. The list of problems Mark Watney has to solve would fill a 368-page book, and in fact it does. Each challenge, if not faced quickly and accurately would mean certain death, sometimes instantaneously, other times certain death if he doesn't survive for the 400 days when the earliest rescue mission will arrive. First long-term problem: the seven billion people on Earth think he's dead, and no one sends an expensive rescue mission to save a man who is already dead. All he has to do is radio Earth, but his antennas were blown away by the huge dust storm which impaled him with the tip of one of the antennas. First instantaneous problem: cleaning and stitching up his own side. These two are related because the metal shaft of the antenna rammed through his space suit and bio-monitor computer while knocking him out in the raving dust storm which obscured him from his five crew members who had only seconds to locate him before their only way home was tipped over and rendered useless. Watney's space suit sent data to his crew about his space suit breach and about the lack of life signs from his bio-monitor, so the crew unknowingly left him for dead on Mars, bleeding like a stuck pig, in minus-120-degree weather, in a near-vacuum atmosphere, unresponsive, and unrecoverable in the dust storm before their emergency departure for Earth.

When Watney miraculously awoke later, he said three sentences which will live right up there with famous first lines, like Dickens' "It was the best of times; it was the worst times."

[page 1] I'm pretty much fucked.
       That's my considered opinion.
       Fucked.

These words are descriptive of Watney's situation and not in any way obscene; he was just talking as a mechanical engineer- and biologist-trained astronaut would talk in the presence of his crew mates. I've worked on very difficult projects, and when we got into a jam, that is exactly how we talked. We might have disguised our cuss word in acronyms such as SNAFU or FUBAR, but we all knew what the FU stood for, and we could politely answer, 'Fouled Up' when asked what the words meant. But we knew what they meant, and we talked like Watney among ourselves, maintaining a veneer of political correctness only when strangers were about. On one project we had a Cuban crewman named Jorge, pronounced Hore-Hay, who could not create a sibilant 'sh' so when he got really mad, he'd say, "CHIT!", and we would all chuckle at his attempt to cuss in English. He never got upset over our reaction; it seemed to lighten his own anger.

With that prologue, you'll be ready for some other colorful expressions our hero uses to describe his situation to us:

[page 3] And now we come to the real trick of Mars exploration: having all of our shit there in advance.

If you're an engineer, biologist, physicist, or any manner of technical person, my advice to you is this: READ THIS BOOK. And do it before watching the movie if possible. The movie will show you what Watney does to survive; the book will take you inside his head as he lays out the problem confronting him and you can work out the solution along with him. See if you predict how he's going to proceed, and do the calculations in your head along with him. If doing calculations in your head is not your forte, maybe you should watch the movie; but for me and others like me, this was the most fun! Consider these challenges: How you do make water from rocket fuel? How do you grow anything edible on Mars without any seeds? Watney can either use his solar power take a long drive or to keep warm — how can he do both? Just a hint of the kinds of life-saving obstacles Watney must overcome or die. A slight dust storm is moving overhead, if he guesses the wrong way around a large crater, his Rover will halt and he will die. How Watney calculated ingenious solutions for these and many other problems are glossed over by the movie-makers who show mostly only what he did. READ THIS BOOK.

Do you have children or grand-children who ask, "Why do I need algebra, geometry, trig, biology, physics, etal?" Get them to read this book, so they experience how the study of math and sciences saved this man's life.

This Mars mission, described fictionally, is very similar to what is currently being planned for USA Mars missions, and some of the lack of redundancy revealed by Watney's various life-threatening dilemmas will likely feed forward into improving the design of future Mars' missions. Yes, your offspring are unlikely to become astronauts, but the ability to calculate and use one's available resources will challenge them at some point in their lives. If they have no solution, then they are doomed, if they have two possible solutions, they have a dilemma, only if they have at least three possible ways at their disposal, can they be said to have an option. Studying math and science gives them viable options, in other words, a way to stay vital and alive when faced with a desperate situation. Tell your offspring, "I won't be around to help you if you encounter life-threatening situations as an adult, but what you learn in school will be around, so study well. Making good grades means nothing unless you actually learn to use your knowledge."

The list of "if's" required for Watney to survive are as long the tail on a February kite in New Orleans, about three old tee-shirts torn into inch-wide strips tied into a long streamer. If he had access to a MAV, a Mars Ascent Vehicle, he could rendevous with a Hermes ship like the one he and his crew mates rode to Mars, if a Hermes were available, which none are! By the next planned Hermes trip, Watney will be long dead. Algebra was all it took for him to discover that. He'd die from a lack of, pick one: food, oxygen, water, or heat. And here's another "if": that's only if everything goes well!

Watney is an optimist. You know what that is? Two guys falling down the side of a hundred story skyscraper. The pessimist yells, "We're doomed!" The optimist thinks, "So far, so good!" Watney thought that way, and strived every minute of the Sol to live another Sol. Oh, what's a Sol, you ask, it's about the length of an Earth day and change, 24 hours and 39 minutes. That's the time Mars revolves once on its axis. More math to do, if you calculate how many Earth days something will take, you need to multiple that amount by 0.9736 to get the number of Mars Sols it will take. If you can't do simple algebra, you'll never even know on which Sol you'll die from lack of air or food or heat. How on Mars can Watney survive? Thereupon hangs the tale, a prehensile tale which grips you and won't let go until the last stinking line of the book.

If there were any bacteria in the soil of Mars, which there ain't, Watney could grow plants to provide food calories to keep him alive, if there were only any seeds aboard for anything but dumb grass experiments. As Watney might have phrased it, "One just can't shit bacteria, can one?"

After regaining consciousness Watney found himself near death from oxygen toxicity due to backup system called bloodletting during the breach which let in Mars air and filled it with nitrogen, depleting the nitrogen Watney needed to breath normal air. How ironic, he thought, to die from a surfeit of oxygen on a planet which has almost no oxygen! (Page 5)

Watney's humor keeps his spirits up as well as ours. My wife told me that she never heard me laughing out loud so many times as I read a book before.

Why on Mars would his crew leave Watney? All signs said he was dead, and like in Vegas, what happens on Mars stays on Mars. The rules said if a crewman dies on Mars, he stays on Mars.

[page 7] Leaving his body behind reduces weight for the MAV (Mars Ascent Vehicle) on the trip back. That means more disposable fuel and a larger margin of error for the return thrust. No point in giving that up for sentimentality.

As Watney surveyed the "raw materials" at his disposal in the HAB and the MDV (leftover base of Mars Descent Vehicle), he found enough soil for a window box and seeds for grass and ferns, nothing edible, no way to create food on Mars, so far as he could see. But he had a large cache of hope.

[page 12] But I'm a botanist, damn it. I should be able to find a way to make this happen. If I don't I'll be a really hungry botanist in about a year.

He laughed at his fellow botanists who were hippies trying to compost everything. They seemed to spend a lot of their time trying to find better ways of growing pot. He thought, "Look at the silly hippies! Look at their pathetic attempts to stimulate a complex global ecosystem in their backyard." (Page 13) And now he was being forced to do the same thing. Saving every scrap of biomatter in a compost bucket. He even did an EVA (went outside) to retrieve his own freeze-dried shit to add to his garden soil, adding it as manure to the sterile Martian soil.

[page 13] The Hab has sophisticated toilets. Shit is usually vacuum-dried, then accumulated in sealed bags to be discarded on the surface. Not anymore. . . . Adding it [recovered freeze-dried shit] to water and active bacteria would quickly get it inundated, replacing any population killed by the Toilet of Doom.

Since the waste is labeled, he could use only his own and not be subject to others' pathogens. He began hauling in sterile Martian dirt and mixing in his bacteria-rich manure creating a fertile garden soil which he filled the Hab with. Where did he get seeds? Thanks to Thanksgiving Day falling during their planned stay on Mars, some real, not canned potatoes were in the Hab's larder, and he would cut the potatoes with one eye in each piece and plant them. His comment during this process was, "My asshole is doing as much to keep me alive as my brain." (Page 14)

What about the smell? He commented, "That smell's going to stay around for a while, too. It's not like I can open a window. Still, you get used to it." (Page 16) Would his gardening efforts allow him to survive until Sol 1412 when Ares 4 is scheduled to land? No. With as much potatoes as he can grow, he can stretch his food to last until Sol 490, only 90 days longer than without potatoes, but he had little else to do, so he grew the potatoes.

[page 18] Remember those old math questions you had in algebra class? Where water is entering a container at a certain rate and leaving at a different rate and you need to figure out when it'll be empty? Well, that concept is crucial to the "Mark Watney doesn't die" project I'm working on.

He works out how to create as much farmland as possible and calculates that he can just barely reach survivable levels of food, but he will need 250 liters of water. Where will he get it? Can't drill a well on Mars. He needs a magic spell for creating water. He slept on it and came up with a simple and ridiculously life-threatening plan.

[page 24] I have an idiotically dangerous plan for getting the water I need. And boy, do I mean dangerous. But I don't have much choice. I'm out of ideas and I'm due for another dirt-doubling in a few days. When I do the final doubling, I'll be doubling onto all that new soil I've just brought in. If I don't wet it first, it'll just die.

Mars has an atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide, one atom of carbon attached to two atoms of oxygen. Watney has an oxygenator whose job is to convert CO2 into O2, so he can create oxygen, mix it with hydrogen and BANG! Water! I mean the bang literally. To mix the two elements is easy, you burn hydrogen in the presence of oxygen and you get water. Too much hydrogen or too much oxygen you get a Big Bang, an explosion. Great, he's got a plan. Now where are the matches? None on a space ship; none in a Mars Habitat, of course. A spark will do the trick, if he had some kindling; one spark and you have a flame to start the hydrogen and oxygen burning. Another Sol, another problem for Watney: no combustible material for kindling. He went on a scavenger hunt for wood and found a small wooden crucifix one of the crew left behind. Where's the hydrogen to come from? The hydrazine, a very volatile compound of nitrogen and hydrogen, is the rocket fuel used in the MDV and there's plenty left. Rob a catalyst from the MDV's engine and you can release the hydrogen. But it produces ammonia as an intermediate step into becoming hydrogen and the smell of ammonia will make his Hab a living hell. Smell stinky stuff or die? He chose the former.

[page 27] The chemistry is on my side. The question is how do I actually make this reaction happen slowly, and how do I collect the hydrogen? The answer is: I don't know.
       I suppose I'll think of something. Or die.

He comes up with a plan for making water by burning the hydrogen as it is being produced, so there'll be no need to store either the oxygen or the hydrogen and the water can drip directly into the arid soil to bring it to live. As he set up the equipment to create water out of rocket fuel (hydrazine), his most important item was duct tape to seal and attach the parts.

[page 28] Also, I have duct tape. Ordinary duct tape, like you buy at a hardware store. Turns out even NASA can't improve on duct tape.

He worked out a solution to get rid of the excess hydrogen using short bursts of oxygen at a time.

[page 43] I was elated! This was the best plan ever! Not only was I clearing out the hydrogen, I was making more water!
       Everything went great right up to the explosion.

He is dazed, breathing pure nitrogen in a space suit, to which he has to quickly add oxygen or pass out and die, and then he has to clean up the Hab and get out to the rover.

[page 45] I'm in the rover again tonight. Even with the hydrogen gone, I'm reluctant ot hang out in a Hab that has a history of exploding for no reason. Plus, I can't be sure there isn't a leak.

He finally figured out where the excess oxygen came from: his own breathing out was adding oxygen. Yes, we breathe out oxygen or else how could CPR breathing into someone's mouth work? With that adjustment he got his water for this potato farm and then he did some astronaut work. He hatched a plan to take the Rover on a journey to retrieve the Pathfinder and its rover which had been sitting abandoned on Mars for many years. After he cleaned the dust off its solar cells, the Sojourner rover quickly reestablished its radio contact with Earth. Packing them on top his Rover, he drove home, towards the Hab. As he drove, he needed some Celestial navigation help and that came from Phobos, the larger moon of Mars which sped by overhead East to West twice a Sol. He mused over conquering his fear of losing his way on Mars by using Phobos, whose Greek name means Fear.

[page 106] It just feels nice to be an astronaut again. That's all it is. Not a reluctant farmer, not an electrical engineer, not a long-haul trucker. An astronaut. I'm doing what astronauts do. I missed it.

With Pathfinder's help, he establishes a crude method of texting messages to Earth using hexadecimal coding of ASCII characters, but NASA soon gives him a patch which enables him to be able type messages, basically inter-planetary email. Now he realizes he needs to be careful with his words because the whole world is reading what he writes, hanging on his every word as they pull for him to survive, but he still gets carried away at times.

While Watney enjoys doing astronaut stuff again, I'll skip my astronaut thinking and calculating for a while and do my poetry stuff. He apparently remembers the Bond movie Die Another Day and decides that his adventure on Mars would make a great Bond movie called Live Another Sol, only with him as Q instead of James Bond. That inspired me to write this poem in Watney's voice.

Live Another Sol

There's not another Soul
       around for 35 million miles
       and 35 million years
But I hope to live another Sol.

A Sol is like a Day and change
       on Mars from Night to Sol.
What can I do with the extra 39 minutes?
       Try to live another Sol.

I think I'm going for a stroll
       I know I'll never see another Soul
Whether I go out by Night or Sol

My only hope is to live another Sol.

I say, "I think I'm going to live after all,"
       which is quickly followed by,
       "I am fucked, and I'm gonna die!"
Everything went great on this one Sol —
       right up until the explosion.

And yet, I think I'll get to live another Sol.

I am driving without a compass
       on a planet without a magnetic pole
With Fear as my only Guide —
       if there's a God on Mars —
I pray that I may live another Sol.

"Please watch your language,"
       the folks at NASA tell me,
But I'm too astro-naughty to care.
       So I type: Look! A Pair of boobs! — > (.Y.)

LOL! I'm the funniest guy on this planet!
If I could only get to live another Sol.

I'm awake: another Sol, another Problem,
Another cup of Martian Coffee
Another Sol here on Club Mars —
If only I could live another Sol.

Every step I take outside my Rover
No one has stepped there before,
Every step I take to stay alive
Helps me to live another Sol.

A dust storm is coming —
Dimmed skies mean less power —
Less power means not getting rescued —
If it gets dark enough to kill me,
       I will not get to live another Sol.

Live Another Sol
        — sounds like a James Bond movie
        — or a Bobby Matherne poem.

~^~

Watney gears up for the long drive to the Ares 4 area where a fueled up Mars Ascent Vehicle MAV has been staged for a future crew. A plan is evolving where he will escape from Mars and be picked up in a very dangerous maneuver and returned to Earth. The details in the book of how this happen are more realistic than the Iron Man stunt used in the movie. As a practical joker in my teens, I quickly learned that you can have more fun thinking about a practical joke than actual doing one. Watney in the book describes the thought he had of doing an Iron Man stunt, but reasoned scientifically that it had too little a chance of succeeding. Hollywood, reasoning box-office-ly, loved it!

Meanwhile, back on the surface of Mars, Watney may never survive to get to the MAV at all because a light dust storm is in his path. What's the problem with a light dust storm? The light part. The reduction in light. Light is the fuel which generates the electricity in the solar panels which powers the wheels of his Rover. If his Rover stops, he will miss the rescue mission completely and die on Mars.

Watney calculates again.

[page 301] So right now, the sunlight in this area is dropping by 4.5 percent per Sol. If I were to stay here another sixteen Sols, it would get dark enough to kill me.

Out of touch with NASA, Watney has to burn precious fuel triangulating the path of the dust storm. If he drives around this large crater into the path of decreasing light, he dies. Another Sol, another Problem. Will Watney live to die another Sol, or will he live to die another Day on Earth? Inquiring minds, 7 billion strong, want to know.

Read/Print at:
http://www.doyletics.com/arj/martian1.shtml

= == == == == == == == == == ==

In this section I like to comment on events in the world, in my life, and in my readings which have come up during the month. These are things I might have shared with you in person, if we had had the opportunity to converse during the month. If we did, then you may recognize my words. If I say some things here which upset you, rest assured that you may skip over these for the very reason that I would likely have not brought up the subject to spoil our time together in person.

Padre Filius, the cartoon character created by your intrepid editor and would-be cartoonist, will appear from time to time in this Section of DIGESTWORLD to share with us some amusing or enlightening aspect of the world he observes during his peregrinations.

This month the good Padre Notes the Difference in Prices:

2. Comments from Readers:

NOTE: I love hearing from all my Good Readers and including your missives here (slightly edited).
If you prefer any comments or photos you send to be private, simply say so and they will not be published.

• EMAIL from Anxious Good Reader on Dec 1 at 12:38 AM:
  I have not received the December 1st issue of Digest World Please take action to send it to me.
  Thanks
  Rom Wicks
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ REPLY: A NOTICE TO ALL GOOD READERS
  Our DIGESTWORLD REMINDERS are often sent out the day before the 1st of each month, but this month they were sent out at 8:54 AM on Dec. 1. We strive mightily to get them to you before the end of the first day of each month. [An email was sent to Rom saying the Reminder will be sent out shortly.]
• EMAIL to Good Reader Lawrence Kurzius on his Dec. 1 promotion to CEO of McCormick and Company:
  Dear Lawrence,

  Congratulations on your promotion!

  I guess for you "Spice is the Variety of Life" . . .

  Hope to you see soon,
  Bobby
  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  

• EMAIL from Kristina Kaine in Australia:
  

  Subject: Steiner mentioning Doyletics "We have often spoken of the ancient mysteries that wanted to awaken in human nature that which permits the human being to look up into the super-sensible. And we have spoken of the fact that the Mystery of Golgotha, perceptible for all human beings on the stage of history, has presented the super-sensible mystery. There is something that fundamentally unites us with the true Christ thought. We have this by virtue of the fact that we are able to have moments in our life (I am now speaking directly, not in a pictorial way) in which, despite everything we are in the outer world, we can bring alive in us what we received as a child. We can do this by going backward, feeling ourselves back at the child's standpoint? we can do this by looking toward the human being as he develops between birth and death, so that we are able to sense within us what we received as a child." - Read rest of Steiner's Lecture at: CLICK HERE!

  Hope you are well Bobby and enjoying preparations for this special time.
  LLL
  kk
  ~~~~~~~~~~ REPLY ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Thanks for sending this along. A Speed Trace involves holding a feeling in the present and then placing yourself back in successive decades till you reach five years old, and somewhere below that age you will encounter some feeling. If it's a negative (unwanted feeling) it will be converted into a cognitive (declarative) memory and never return. Good feelings are reinforced so often they remain unchanged. Essence of doyletics and Steiner already knew how to do it. Unfortunately just telling people about it is rarely affective in helping them to be able to do it for themselves. My Introduction has a video which describes the easy process of the Speed Trace.

3. Poem from Freedom on the Half Shell: "Head Trip"

Give me your poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free and I will give them taxes, regulations, restrictions, and every manner of unfairness ever created by persons saddled with the illusion that they can decide what is best for someone else's welfare. The individual, like the business professional, knows what's best in a given situation and, given the freedom, will take that action. The forces of coercion are prying open the shell that contains the living muscle and spirit of the American people — will we resist those forces and keep our muscles and spirit alive, free to open at will, or will we give up like the oyster and settle for "freedom on the half shell?" Here is another poem from Freedom on the Half Shell:

Head Trip

Beat the bush
With a pack of lies
Up'll pop a quail
Or two of roasting size.

Seize property freely
From Columbus Land
Burn constitutions
Made of sand.

Decapitate the druggers
And be rid of them
And you'll never get rid of the buggers
Who decapitate them.

~^~

The Economist magazine announced Dec 12th that Daniele Faccio of Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh has created a device which allows us to see around the corner in real-time. It's still primitive, but can create real-time movies of who or what is coming at us around the next corner. It does this by bouncing light on other objects until it reaches the target object and extracting only photons which have bounced back from the target object. Involves some complicated processing, but like so many complicated things, they should soon reach our hand-held devices.

So, the good news is that you no longer have to wait to see what's coming around the corner!

I know Letters to the Editor are not supposed to be funny, but I nearly fell out of my chair when a letter appeared in my morning newspaper which claimed that the South tried to "defeat the North" during the so-called Civil War. What I would like to know is what the South was planning to do with the North after it defeated it? Was there anyone in the South who would really wanted to be a part of a country which included New England? No way, the South wanted to be left alone.

When some country wants to control another country, they invade it and try to defeat it. The South did not want to invade anybody. In my opinion, the South wanted to decide when to eliminate slavery, do it in a peaceful and economically feasible manner, and to be left alone to do that.

Did the North invade the South? The facts are clear and no other answer than yes is possible.

Keep letters like that rolling in — they provide a welcome respite from real world issues.

Thanks to all of you Good Readers for providing the Chemistry which has made this site a Glowing Success. — Especially those of you who have graciously allowed us to reprint your emails and show photos of you and by you on this website — you're looking good! As of June 1, 2019, it enters its 20th year of publication. The DIGESTWORLD Issues and the rest of the doyletics website pages have received over 21.6 MILLION VISITORS ! ! !

We have received over ONE MILLION VISITORS per Year to the Doyletics Website since its inception June 1, 2000, over twenty years ago. Almost 2 million in the past 12 months. We are currently averaging about 150,000 visitors a month. A Visitor is defined as a Reader who is new or returns after 20 minutes or more has passed. The average is about one visitor for every 10 Hits.

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My reviews are not intended to replace the purchasing and reading of the reviewed books, but rather to supplant a previous reading or to spur a new reading of your own copy. What I endeavor to do in most of my reviews is to impart a sufficient amount of information to get the reader comfortable with the book so that they will want to read it for themselves. My Rudolf Steiner Reviews are more detailed and my intention is to bring his work to a new century of readers by converting his amazing insights into modern language and concepts.

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