A Splinter in Your Mind © 2004 by Jonathan Zap ...

STOP THE HOTTIE ! Copyright 2004 Jonathan Zap Stop the Hottie! The title, Stop the Hottie, and the writing that follows were largely determined by a synchronicity that happened in the last hour. I was walking in the parking lot of King Soopers, the setting Colorado sun illuminated everything in an orangey-yellow light that made every complexion, every hub cap, glow with the glamour of Boulder high dessert mountain town orangey-yellow sunset lighting. Metal flake paint on the late model SUVs sparkled like fairy dust. Even King Soopers itself seemed imbued with a larger than life all-American vitality, as if it were seen through the eyes of a Hudson River School painter while Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring played in the background. I had just left a friend’s basement, the lighting in there was terrible, but he provided me with something that enhanced my appreciation of colors and turned the ...

Time and Tolkien’s Elves © Copyright 2004 by Jonathan Zap Note: Most of the following concerns time, but in the first section, I introduce Tolkien’s elf mythology which is often counter intuitive to people who have seen the movies, and even for those who have read the trilogy. In the ring trilogy Tolkien vividly describes particular elf characters as so exemplary and heroic that it often comes as a surprise to discover in his notes and letters that he considers the elves as almost developmentally disabled. The first section explains Tolkien’s ambivalent and paradoxical ...

Tolkien and the Developmental Need for Evil © Jonathan Zap, 2004 >Satan Smiting Job Satan Smiting Job by William Blake Yes, dark, shocking events may feel like an affront to our sense of rightness and our wish to see consciousness advancing in a perceivable way against ignorance, but we also need to recognize that these are ego judgments and the way of evolution is diverse and roundabout, a weird zig-zag path that confound discernment. From the point of view of the I Ching and Taoism, the universe is unfolding as it should, but its way of unfolding may not be perceived as satisfactory to the supervisory ego. Evolution seems to require evil as a developmental necessity and forces of darkness often paradoxically advance the light. The I Ching tells us that some things do ...