In November 2018 fire ripped through the wild lands around my town, eventually burning almost 100,000 acres of my beloved Santa Monica mountains.

A few weeks later I ventured out to a hill where I often run. Seeing the charred hills and valleys, I felt I was picking up some kind of message from the land, from the Earth. The message was something like: “stop burning stuff to live, or it’s going to burn you back.”

Hominids have been burning stuff to live for as long as 1 million years, depending on what scientist you ask. Although our use of fire has rapidly become more sophisticated since the development of the steam engine 200 years ago to our high-tech gasoline engines and natural gas power plants today, we are still just burning stuff to live like our barely-not-chimp ancestors did.

It’s easy to overrate our accomplishments. Lewis & Clark took months to get from St. Lewis to Portland, a trip we can make by airplane now in a couple hours. Just don’t think too much that you made the modern crossing in a vehicle that uses fire to burn 25 gallons of kerosene every minute.

We humans have burned too much stuff by now, forgetting to move beyond our primitive ways. We’ve burned so much that it’s warming up the whole planet. Drying out crops and wild lands, changing weather patterns, killing plants and animals and humans, and causing big fires.

I hope we get the message soon. All of us. I hope we get the message that it’s time to grow up. Time to move beyond what served us so well as a baby race. It’s time to stop burning stuff to live.

My daughter has a check-up today. The pediatrician’s office is a short walk up a hill from Borderline Bar & Grill, where a dozen people were murdered last night. Pretty close to home.

How does a society fail to vaccinate against the disease of gun violence? How do people continue to allow themselves to be manipulated into fearing and hating brown people, when the most horrific violence is being done by white US citizens on home soil? Not that brown fear and hate should be replaced with white fear and hate, but you don’t treat a viral infection with antibiotics. 

How do we allow anyone prescribed a psychotropic med to own a firearm? How do we allow one person to accumulate an arsenal of weapons? Of course it only takes one gun to kill a room full of people, but owning an arsenal is an encouragement and a red flag.

How do we allow people who have been on psychiatric lock down to own a firearm, or people arrested for domestic violence, or people who’ve been caught drinking and driving, or people with an outstanding restraining order? 

Owning a firearm is a legal right that we are unlikely to rid our society of, but at least we can imbue our laws and even our culture with the grave responsibilities that go along with guns. We cannot continue to let toddlers play with razor blades in the name of freedom.

I just realized something about immigration. Most people, when faced with even the direst of circumstances, are too afraid to break out of their set patterns and known surroundings. “Better the devil you know” is a powerful psychological motivator.

So that means people who have come here, to America (or any other country that looks promising) are committing an act that requires incredible strength. These are people who have faced great uncertainty, danger, stigma, and have left everything familiar. What an incredible test of character!

Aren’t these exactly the kind of people that you would want in your country, in your economy, creating new businesses, creating new opportunities for themselves and their descendants? They have already passed the harshest of tests of determination and courage. Maybe we should be giving these tough survivors priority immigration status and a $10,000 starter loan!

I had a talk with my 90-year-old mother yesterday about Charlottesville. Her mother, born in Texas, was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy. I asked my mom what she thought grandma’s views were on the South, and on racism. Grandma Del was by all accounts a proud Southern woman born in 1893, but without any overt racist attitudes or intolerance.

I wondered how this could be, with the primary cause of the South in the Civil War being the preservation of slavery. When I did some reading on the Daughters of the Confederacy I found out that they were the organization responsible for fundraising and activism that led to the erection of many of the Southern Civil War memorials.

Then I thought of post-World War II Germany. I thought of the collective shame that the country felt for its role in the war, having lost, and having been on the wrong moral side. There are no memorials to German war heroes. How did the South escape this same psychological fate after the Civil War?

Apparently there was something called the “Lost Cause.” Revisionist writers morphed the psychological sting of losing the Civil War, downplaying the role of slavery in the conflict, while emphasizing the genteel Southern culture of honor and chivalry. This laid the groundwork for the denial that would allow my grandmother and many like her to be proud Southern women, honoring their relatives who lost their lives in the war, without facing the moral self-judgment of slavery.

Now I can better understand how two groups – Southern blacks and Southern (non-racist) whites – could view Confederate symbols (like statues) from completely different perspectives. Perhaps it’s like how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each ascribe their own meaning to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, while holding conflicting views on God.

So our great nation wants to pull out of Paris Agreement. Fortunately states and corporations are picking up some of the slack. Individual Americans and families can pick up some slack too by getting serious about electric cars.

Of course electric cars don’t yet match gas-powered vehicles in their range and refueling convenience. But by changing the way you think about your car, the electric cars of today are made more practical.

Our individualistic American culture has us thinking in a family about “his car”, and “her car.” What if we shift that thinking to having one car for short range/low capacity use, and another car for long range/high-capacity use?

A family can then have one electric car and one gas car, and by discussing who needs what car for a given day or week an electric car can be used effectively with minimal restriction on freedom.

Even a single person who is dedicated to reducing their “gasoline guilt” can put their money where their mouth is and get a second car that is electric. It ends up less expensive than you might think because of the large fuel savings.  The cost can also be offset by reducing the mileage on the insurance of the gas car, and there is practically zero maintenance on electrics.

Your new electric car doesn’t have to be a Tesla. Even one of the 80-100 mile range cars can be effective when another vehicle is available (BMW i3, Nissan Leaf, VW eGolf, Mercedes B-class, Fiat 500e). The next generation of more affordable electrics have 200 mile plus ranges (Chevy Bolt, Tesla 3, 2018 Leaf).

So if you are really serious about reducing pollution, reducing pipeline and offshore oil spills, reducing cancers for people living around oil refineries, and of course reducing the chance of ever more dramatic climate change, make a few adjustments to your lifestyle and go lease an electric car.

As a side note, if you want to learn some interesting electric car history, watch the documentary “Who killed the electric car?”

I often have mixed feelings on Memorial Day.

My father was a mechanic in the Navy in World War II. He did not die while serving. He died many years later at the age of 73, of cancer. I wondered whether his cancer could have possibly been caused by his exposure to toxins or radiation during his service.

I recognize and honor the service and sacrifice that so many have made for their country, for my country. I honor their spirit of service, and I honor the belief so many of them had that they were part of something important and larger than themselves.

Those feelings of patriotism and the honor of service are tinged with the knowledge that too many of our young people have been sacrificed for ignoble purpose.

Some have died due to failures of military intelligence, botched tactics, poor strategy, or failures of diplomacy. Though sad, these deaths seem an unavoidable part of the human drama that includes war, and still noble.

When the sacrifices of life and health really gets to me is where diplomacy wasn’t attempted, intelligent suppressed, or conflict started from the impulses of fear or greed. Too often we humans go to war for economic gain, for imperialist impulses, to settle a grudge, or to prove we are tough. These deaths are without purpose, a pathetic testament to our animal nature.

I pray for the powerful to reach for their highest integrity in every act. I hope for our leaders to realize how small our planet is, and how we are all the same, and how fighting and killing are misuse of our gifts. I pray for citizens to look within to see where their fear comes from, and to use their courage to face their primitive fear of “other” within their heart so our young people don’t have to face their fear of death on the battlefield.

Let’s hold our leaders and ourselves to a higher standard of humanity. A standard where we use the mind we’ve been blessed with to moderate our primitive selves.

For a decade or so, I haven’t really enjoyed or wanted to see movies that are thrillers or heavy dramas. Since that time I have thought it was my desire to live a life more connected to spirit that made me shy away from that kind of entertainment.

Recently I watched a couple of episodes of the original “Twin Peaks” with my teen daughter. While I didn’t prefer the ominous musical tones and the theme of demon possession, I also didn’t much feel affected by what I was seeing. Maybe there was just enough cheese in the production to keep me from suspending disbelief, but I did notice something I hadn’t noticed before.

I found a little corner of my awareness that was looking for meaning in what I was watching.

I realized that this little corner of my mind is always looking for meaning when I’m watching any kind of filmed entertainment. I don’t think I’m unique in this; I suspect that we all have this part of us that is looking for meaning in story.

Storytelling is an extremely powerful thing for humans. For a hundred generations it is how we built our cultures, passed on our history, and taught the young. It would make perfect sense that we developed some part of us that looks for meaning in the stories we are exposed to.

What is it doing to our internal “meaning machines” to be exposed to stories we consciously think are mere entertainment? Particularly when those stories make us feel emotions. Emotions that drive the meaning of the story deep into our psyche.

Whether or not I consciously believe in something like a demon possession, my subconscious meaning machine is going to find and attach some sort of meaning to the story that I just experienced. Americans watch a lot of stories about violent crime, cruelty, war, good-vs-evil, and broken relationships. How might this be warping our subconscious patterns of meaning, affecting how we see others, what we fear, what we aspire to, and what we feel?

In our anthropological past, stories were selected by the tribe to reinforce the values and meanings of the culture of the tribe. Stories to help the tribe survive, ultimately.

Our “tribe” of entertainment consumers is exposed to so many different stories, often with conflicting meanings, or meanings that do not support a generative human experience. Could this create a subconscious dissonance that is manifest in depression and anxiety?

These two aspects, the emphasis on the human shadow experience, and the multiplicity of story meanings, are good reasons to take more care when selecting filmed entertainment. I believe it is possible to develop an internal gauge of when story is having a positive affect, and when it is not.

It’s not always easy, especially for people who appreciate well-crafted entertainment. A show or movie can be “great” from the perspective of the writing, direction, acting, sets or locations, design, cinematography, and still be hitting your meaning machine in a way that doesn’t support you as a person who wants to have a positive focus in life.

For me that’s meant skipping “Breaking Bad,” “House of Cards,” and other well-crafted shows. I guess I’m missing out on some good art, but I’ve gotten to where I can feel those stories coursing through my emotional veins for a long time after watching, so I will keep on with my practice of skipping most of those.

Reading recently about prison rates in the United States I got to thinking about crime and punishment. Why is it exactly that we put people in prison? I’m not even going to talk about capital punishment, which is a ridiculous vestige from a barbaric past.

As far as I can tell there are four reasons why we put people in prison. First, we believe suffering is a deterrent for that individual committing the crime again once they get out of prison. Second, the specter of imprisonment is also a deterrent to others who might commit that crime. Third, we want to protect society from harm by taking the perpetrator out of circulation, which prevents them from doing it again to someone else. Lastly, imprisoning someone fulfills an inner need for justice. We believe this someone has to pay for their crime.

Reviewing the four reasons I believe that they can all be boiled down to spiritual problems either in the perpetrator or in the people wanting to the punishment to happen.

The belief that suffering is the only deterrent to someone committing a crime again is an admission that we don’t believe that someone can be otherwise rehabilitated. If instead we focused on methods of improving a person’s self-esteem, improving their standard of living (if in poverty), and changing their motivations we could (at least sometimes) create a spiritual state that would keep them from committing a crime in the future.

The idea that people in society need the specter of punishment to do the right thing seems to me like an outmoded “carrot and stick” belief system. What if people did things because they knew internally that it was right? What if people didn’t do things because they knew internally and had a strong sense that something was wrong? The very fact that there are so many people in prison who were willing to risk punishment shows that this idea of punishment as a deterrent to others is not working.

On the face of it, the need to protect society from harm seems like a legitimate reason for incarceration. However, prison terms for even violent offenders aren’t forever. What if the person didn’t “learn their lesson” in prison? When they’re finally released on good behavior or at the end of their normal sentence, they could go out and do it again. So without a belief that rehabilitation is reasonably possible, the only logical course would be to imprison all violent offenders for their entire life. This is something even our punishment-bent society does not do.

But let’s say that we can rehabilitate. In this case no matter how violent the offense we should be able to change the perpetrators spiritual maturity so that they have no desire to commit further crime. In the case of severe mental illness, where rehabilitation doesn’t seem practical, the person doesn’t belong in prison anyway. The best place for them would be a psychiatric care facility. Unfortunately a lot of people like this are currently in the prison system, because it’s the less expensive way to take care of them and to get them out of everyone’s way.

So what about the need for justice? I can’t help but think that justice is another word for retribution. Or another word for revenge. Deep down, we probably feel that when something bad happens to us we need to make the world right. We feel out of control, we feel like something that we couldn’t control has happened to us. Perhaps by demanding and getting justice we allow ourselves to feel once again that life is within our control. It eases the horrible fear that random things can happen to us that we can do nothing about. This doesn’t seem to be the perpetrator’s fault, however.

Taking the spiritual perspective further, what about forgiveness? Rumi said forgiveness is the fragrance left on the foot that crushes the flower. Perhaps a more mature spiritual perspectives reflected in the criminal justice system would allow the concept of forgiveness to replace the concept of justice. We could perhaps even feel a little better about it if we knew that our society was set up to spiritually rehabilitate criminals rather than exact retribution from them.

That sort of spiritual and emotional rehabilitation would require much deeper look into why people commit crimes. Some emotional models suggest that all negative emotional experiences reduce to a desire for approval, a desire for control, or a desire for security. If we look at crime through this lens we can see that there are a lot of reasons people would commit crimes that boil down to these three emotions.

For example, young troubled teens could easily commit crimes even violent ones, because they want the approval of their peers. If they could be taught instead to trust their inner moral compass, which we all have, then they can leave behind the weight of wanting approval and instead seek their own inner approval. This might help them to make better decisions.

Approval can be seen in another hypothetical case. A man who wants the love and approval of his wife could embezzle funds at his business in order to continue to provide a lifestyle that he would otherwise not be able to provide.

The world has a long history of petty theft and other financial crimes being committed because the person was concerned about their own physical survival. Stealing food or stealing money to buy food are legitimate security and safety motivations for certain crimes. If we did a better job of providing for the needy among us, if we did a better job of helping the needy educate their children in a better way, then this sort of crime would happen much less frequently.

Drug possession is another matter entirely. People taking drugs either are doing it to fit in with their group of friends, are doing it to have some control over the feelings they have in their environment, or they’re just trying to feel good. I don’t believe this should be even included in the category of criminal activity, and I think it’s a horrible shame that so many people are incarcerated in our country for minor drug possession. It’s an incredible waste of money and life.

So, if we spend more energy on ourselves changing our relationship to how we feel about so called criminals, and we are able to provide a better spiritual education for all people, and more specifically rehabilitative spiritual education for criminals, the entire criminal justice system can be changed to a more positive looking one. The way we view crime and punishment is archaic way, that needs to change if we want to move beyond our puritanical roots.

Mainstream medicine is not at it’s best with chronic health issues. One problem is an symptoms-oriented approach, where drugs are designed to reduce the outward signs, or the immediately measurable biochemical signs of the disorder. This approach can mask the underlying cause of the disorder allowing it to remain unchanged, or to become worse.

Another problem at the root of mainstream medicine is that drug companies make the most profit on drugs they can protect legally, so they don’t make hardly anything they can’t patent. To get a patent it must be unique, so they have to invent it in a lab. Drugs made in this way are essentially chemical compounds that are unnatural to the body, and therefore have varying levels of toxicity when metabolized. This is why the third leading cause of death in the United States is the consumption of prescription medication.

Pharma profits are also driving medical education, with companies sponsoring and organizing continuing education for doctors, and even influencing curricula at medical schools through donor and partnership arrangements. It’s not the doctor’s fault; they just aren’t getting exposed to any other treatment modalities or philosophies than what AMA tradition and pharma dictate.

Mainstream medicine is very good at some things, of course. Diagnostic techniques are good and it’s the best for treating broken bones, severe cuts, burns, and internal ruptures.

The main problem with alternative medicine right now is there is no “general practitioner” or “primary care” person to go to for diagnosis and specialist recommendations. If you have a chronic condition, how do you know which alternative modality is best for treatment? Currently the best option is to talk to various practitioners, do research on the internet and in books, use your intuition, and try some treatments to see if they work. Fortunately, many natural or alternative treatments are relatively inexpensive, and have little or no side-effects, so the only downside is that you may have to endure the condition while searching for the right treatment for you.

Finally (and most difficult for many people to grasp), many chronic health issues have their roots in our emotions. Study after study, and thousands of anecdotal stores, show that chronic anger, depression, and anxiety have serious detrimental influence on our health. Even low levels of these emotions over a long time can cause harm. Easily observed, day-to-day experiences point the way to this fact. Ever notice how your heart can speed up by simply thinking of a stressful situation in your life? If one thought can set in motion the biochemical reactions that can speed up your heart, then what else could thousands of angry, sad, and anxious thoughts be doing to all the systems of the body. Even studies of primates have shown that a stressful social environment is linked to heart disease.

An excellent book on this topic is “The Biology of Belief” by Dr. Bruce Lipton.

Fortunately, there are a lot of techniques that have been discovered or developed to dissipate negative emotional energy, without long-term psychotherapy. It turns out that it’s not ultimately necessary to know where the emotions come from in order to release them. Some techniques are EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), Centerpointe (progressive binaural beats), meditation, and yoga.