China

The curmudgeon is off again, this time to China for a two week tour. My usual provocateur, Marietta, seems about as apprehensive as I am. “There are so many people there,” she says again and again. “I’m afraid of being swallowed alive in a world where I can’t read a street sign.”“Treat the trip like a school outing,” I replied. “Imagine a rope connecting you and me and John and Rita and hold onto me as if I were the rope and I will hold on to John and we will follow Rita.”Oh sorry, I didn’t mention that we are fellow travelers with John and Rita Lindell. They traveled with us May of 2013 to Annecy, France for three weeks. (See my report of that trip and our education about Jean Jacques Rousseau).On each of my foreign trips (you might remember from reading my previous travel essays) I create a quest or pilgrimage and I go in search of some sort of spiritual Holy Grail. This trip is no different.My pilgrimage to China is to learn more about the mystical, magical side of myself and of humans in general. I am a modernist thinker. I believe in science, facts and logic. I generally oppose superstition and magical thinking in favor or empirical data.Yet, I am a theist. My version of theism is a form of Jeffersonian deist Christianity. I believe that there is a spiritual force that I don’t understand; that is a mystery to me that connects all things. I can’t believe it is an accident that life evolved on earth, where light, air, and water merged into life and moving creatures, who are all interdependent on one another.At the same time I believe in the spirit, I also live my life as if I can understand people, animals and the world around me through logic and science.I often feel bifurcated into two minds believing one thing and its opposite at the same time. Somehow, I’m confident both are true, that I can understand reality through science and logic and yet I can never understand the, to me, mystical magical forces that are at work in the spirit of the universe.My first impressions of China and its ancient culture are that its whole way of understanding how life operates is based on magic, luck and mystical forces that are beyond human comprehension. The more I read about China, old China of the various dynasties following Confucianism and modern China of Wen Jaibao, it seems China also is of two minds, the agnostic modern communist mind that tolerates no mystical or superstitious thought and Old Chinese Confucianism that believes primarily in using the forces of randomness and superstition and mystical forces to understand life.As I read After the Bitter Comes the Sweet: How One Woman Weathered the Storms of China's Recent History, No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers: The Challenges of Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism, The Man Who Stayed Behind and Huston Smith’s chapter on Confucianism, I am more convinced that the Chinese today still follow basic Confucian principles of believing the world is governed by spiritual forces and that the most successful among us follow the magic spiritual ideals of order, balance, compassion, and respect. Those who do are blessed by the gods and their ancestors. I wonder if the Chinese’s China appropriate superstition and tradition in the daily lives of their people more than most Eastern cultures.This, then, is my quest, to understand and appreciate superstition and faith as a way to live and understand life. I am going to China to learn how it makes sense to believe in magic and nurture mystery as a way of life.Carl Jung, my first mentor in appreciating this way of approaching existence wrote the introduction to the Wilhelm version of the I-Ching. In it he suggests that Western thinkers, like me, need to have our perspective shaken. We become too certain and too confident that we know what to expect of life and how things work when we can’t possibly understand it. The Chinese believe in being students of chaos or randomness. They believe that God or the Heavens speak through randomness and “accidental” metaphors or omens.The I-Ching is a book designed as an oracle using randomness as a way to access practical spiritual wisdom. There is no reason that the I-Ching works to answer our personal painful questions, yet there is no reason to believe that it may not work.Most of us approach life’s challenges with preconceived ideas. Using the I-Ching as an oracle opens the door for us to doubt our preconceptions and it gives us the opportunity to look at our lives and our problems in ways that we could never access through logical inquiry. Having multiple perspectives to understand and explain reality and direct our actions, transforms our inquiry from an ego-driven, acquisitive, consummatory quest into an inquiry that incorporates mysticism and spiritual values.Such superstitious, random research into our personal, spiritual and inner life adds a richness to our deliberations and expands our thinking beyond the confines of our ego-driven, self-serving logic. Jung commends this spiritual chaos to us as a way to free us from our ration selves and open us to the mystical natural forces that rule the universe.Though Jung’s invitation terrifies me, I see our trip to China as an opportunity to observe a culture that uses mysticism as a way to live and act in the world. The object of my travel quest seemed to reveal itself each summer either on our trip to our Deer Valley Condo or while I’m there for six weeks. Marietta and I load our VW Jetta until the chassis rests on the frame, with a space in the backseat reserved for Greta, our dog. This time we set out on Friday, June 26^th, 2015, for our first destination, Dallas, Texas, as guests of my cousin Jerry and his wife Sheralon with a stopover in Little Rock for lunch with my cousin Elisa and her husband Ashley and a mid-afternoon stop in Washington, Arkansas to visit my dear, sick friend, Robert. That was the plan but I had no idea what was to be in store for us on this trip.In Little Rock Elisa told me about her nephews, my cousins, who were suddenly cast adrift on the planet. These are two close brothers, one had been a successful practicing dentist, the other had been progressing well in a doctoral course of study in English at Old Miss. I’ll call the dentist Tom and the grad student Paul. At the end of his program Paul became caught in the cross-fire between two of his advising professors and had to leave the program. So, he went to Arizona where he began to help his brother, Tom, build a dentistry empire. Tom’s health failed. He could not practice dentistry because he could not stand on his feet. Tom luckily had professional insurance policy that would, if necessary, support him comfortably for the rest of his life, as long as his health prevented him from practicing his profession.The two brothers left Arizona for Denver, Colorado.Once in Denver somehow Fate/coincidence or the Devil brought them to a certain bar or restaurant (I’m not sure which) where they met a fellow, I’ll call Peter, about five years older than they. He was a trust-fund child of considerable wealth living in an 8,000 square foot home in the hills above Boulder, Colorado. He was seriously depressed. His mistress had recently committed suicide, jumping off a bridge and he, his wife and children needed to get away from her memory, so they were headed to their home in Bali.As Tom and Paul sat at the bar and talked with Peter, they discovered that they knew someone in common and that was my cousin and their cousin James. James and Peter were best friends in college. James played lead guitar in Peter’s band. Since college James worked hard becoming a successful wealthy entrepreneur and Peter went on to try to write a rock opera and establish himself as new age guru.Peter, it seems, immediately took Paul and Tom under his tutelage, offering them the option to live in his home in the foothills of the Rockies, while he and his family start life again in Bali.I couldn’t come to grips with this set of events, this story, this bizarre synchronicity of Fate and the universe. Was it a cruel joke that God was playing on Paul and Tom, as they proceeded on their journey into their wilderness? Was it a gift? What would they learn? Would they get lost in this good fortune and a haze of marijuana smoke, as I feared? Or would they discover the secret of the universe? Or would their retreat into the decadent wilderness teach them great wisdom? Or would they become Peter Pan’s lost boys?I have and had no idea what to make of this story, except to observe Fate at work. When we left Little Rock, I was preoccupied by my cousins’ bizarre turn of events that I had just been told. We drove on to Arkadelphia, Arkansas, where I grew up and my family is buried. We stopped at the cemetery and found the head stones of my Mother, Father, my two brothers and my sister. This visit to their graves felt profound and heavy to me, but I wasn’t sure why or what I was supposed to think and feel. I thought about China and how the Chinese worship their ancestors. I remembered the way I often use images of my family. I talk often to my dead mother. I watch her looking down at me, sometimes disapproving and sometimes amazed at what her ADD lazy, lovable, good-hearted but no-count son, David, had become.I often hear my father cough just before he proceeds with his next lecture. But mostly, when I commune with my father, I feel regretful. I regret that I let my contest with him for my mother’s love get in the way of our relationship. I regret that I could not soften his high level of fear and anxiety that quickly and easily transformed into anger. I knew how kind and generous he could be. I also knew that his anger hid his sweet spirit. I wish I could have healed him, like I heal many people like him, whom I see today in my practice. I see myself in him and know how trapped he must have felt by his defensive armor and his character flaws.I’m angry at my mother for being such a self-contained paragon. I’m very angry at the times my mother lived in, the Great Depression and its aftermath, that kept her captive in her difficult marriage and did not allow her poise, brilliance and talent to have a chance to be in the game and let her swing, even at one pitch. She would have hit several homeruns had she the chance.I cry when I think of how much I adored and worshipped my five year older brother Bill, who died when he was nineteen, Bill, who protected me from my angry father; who fed my narcissism, who loved me and believed in me and who left me defenseless to deal with my hurt, sad, wounded and resentful brother, Toney and my angry father.I wince when I think of my brother, Toney. Even today, after he has been dead for some years, the thought of him frightens me. He didn’t like me. I was an ADD mess. He was not. I was transparent. He was hidden. I craved attention and got it. He sulked in my wake and fed my detractors with stories of my outrageous behavior.When Bill died, I transferred my older brother worship to Toney, but I could never seem to please him. He used my adoration to make me his lackey. I gladly played the part, but never well enough for him.Somehow my parents loved me in spite of the flaws Toney advertised for me. Toney and my parents believed I would never be able to support myself, that I would never find any self-discipline or focus, that I would always be a lost boy that my parents and when they were gone, Toney, would have to rescue.I’m sad for my brother’s hurt. I’m sure that my unconscious narcissism added to his pain and sullenness. But of all of us, Toney has descendants, two wonderful healthy boys and they each have children. Kevin has two boys and a girl and Carter has two girls. Both are fortunate in their marriages. Toney was a great granddad.And then there on the ground in my family’s burial plot I see Betsy’s headstone. Betsy was born when I was six with Down syndrome. I joined my mother in caring for her. At ten I told mother I would take care of her when mother was gone and I did. I began that role while mother was still alive and Betsy came to live near me in Tennessee in a group home.Betsy resented me. “You are not my daddy,” she would say. Betsy did not make the job of taking care of her easy. She had my father’s angry temper and she felt often wronged by the world. The truth was that she was often a victim. The world and life did sometimes give her the last crumb of the loaf.I did my best to take her part and advocate for her. Sometimes I succeeded, but I never heard her say thank you. She brought out my worst self, my impatience, my need for control, my desire to find a permanent solution. When she was fifty, one came. She died. I thought I would feel relieved on that day. I didn’t. I miss her today. Now that she’s gone, I see how she grounded me, gave me a sense of purpose, connected me to my family. Today, when I talk to Betsy I ask for her forgiveness. I could have been a much better brother, a much more patient and forgiving caretaker.I talk to these people, my deceased ancestors often, just as I suspect the Chinese do. When I do, I feel connected to things transcendent. These conversations feel like prayer to me, like some version of talking to God, maybe better than talking to a God that I can’t comprehend. Maybe that’s why Christian’s need Jesus. But me, I think I might get more from the talks I have with my dead family. We left Rosehill Cemetery and traveled on to Robert’s house in Washington, Arkansas. He had just returned two hours earlier from seeing his cardiologist in Little Rock. He was confined to his bed, except when he gets up to go to the bathroom. He was on oxygen, tubes in his nose from an oxygen tank. His father and mother died of heart disease, when they were fifty. His brother and sister died the same way, when they were in their fifties. Robert never expected to live past sixty. His heart has been failing since he was in his early fifties. And he was still here, on this earth at age 76.Robert was one of Bill’s best friends. Robert identifies himself proudly as gay and bi-sexual. He has been married and divorced. Robert is a good friend to me and so many others.He loves me. I am as close to family as he has. I love Robert and he is a precious link to memories of my family and my childhood.And there he was in front of me, lying on his bed, feeble, weak, breathing heavily, able to say only a few words between each breath. I felt I was watching him  drift away. Again, I was not sure what seeing Robert like this meant, what was the message I was receiving here. It had something to do with mortality, Roberts and my own. I was curious about how Robert felt about dying. I asked him about it.Robert had given much thought to this and he had developed a theatrical event around his death. (Robert was a theatre major in college and loved acting). He had a giant headstone already placed in a Deaton family cemetery in Curtis, Arkansas. Can you imagine how Robert’s, mostly Republican, rifle in the back of their pick-up cousins, will feel about Robert’s giant headstone and he plans to write the names and dates of birth and death of many of his family members on that stone. We laughed together at this picture.Marietta and I didn’t stay long. As we left, I was sad, trying not the cry, thinking that this might have been the last time that I would see Robert.We were back on I-30 to Dallas by 3:00 P.M. We hit the outskirts of Dallas at about 5:30. As we approached the Dallas skyline, we saw its giant building reaching into a black sky sparkling with lightning.We saw a dark blanket of rain in from of us and in minutes we were engulfed in it, under buckets and sheets of torrential rain. We could barely see the tail lights of the car in front of us. We had the task of following the GPS on our phones almost blind, only able to see glimpses of the road signs. Our car sounded like we were parked directly under a water fall. We could barely hear one another shout over the din.The word terrified does not begin to capture how we felt. Thoughts went through our minds of a car plowing into us from behind or from the side or us veering into the oncoming traffic or us hitting the car in front (though that was less frightening because our pace was a crawl and we would not do much harm to a car in front of us if we did hit it).We called my cousin, Jerry, to tell him our predicament. It was not raining at his house. We felt as if a wicked witch had cast a spell and placed us in some mythical torrent. The amazing play nature performed for us made us frightened actors, a bewildered audience and weary travelers.We took wrong turns and the torrent turned with us. Water in the flooding roads lapped our hubcaps. Thunder and lightning struck only feet from us.Magically when we turned on the street that took us to Jerry’s neighborhood, the rain stopped. When we got to his house, his street and driveway were dry.Again, we were bewildered. Fate seemed to be playing with our heads. We had traveled through so many different psychological spaces in just a few hours.I believed I was being given a message about what I was supposed to learn on my trip to China. But I wasn’t sure what the message was.We had a wonderful dinner as guests of Jerry and Sharrylon at a comfortable fine restaurant where Jerry and Sharrylon are regulars. We were treated well, fed well and finally tucked safely into bed inside the womb Jerry and Sharrylon created for us. The next day Jerry and Sharrylon fed us breakfast and we were off to the Bishop Ranch Hotel in Santa Fe. This was a four star hotel in Santa Fe that Marietta found for us at $150 a night rate. We most dreaded this part of the trip across the hot desert plains of Texas. As we imagined, it was a 100° plus day. I drove in the morning. We ate lunch and then Marietta got behind the wheel. I napped as she drove. (As a passenger, I’m a backseat driver and I am critical of Marietta’s perfectly fine driving. So instead of being her critic I put my seat back, closed my eyes, put my hat over my closed eyes and enjoyed lying there, listening to the voice of an accomplished reader/actor read/perform a book on tape).I had been in mid-reverie for a couple of hours into the afternoon, when I heard a siren. I didn’t think much of it, until Marietta began to slow down and pull off the road to the right.A very polite female sheriff’s deputy gave Marietta a ticket for traveling 85 MPH in a 75 MPH zone. The ticket told Marietta to report to a courthouse in Wichita Falls, Texas.No matter that two years ago she got the same ticket in New Mexico. No matter that the policemen then told her that he gives people grace for 5 MPH over the speed limit but 10 MPH or more above, he won’t allow. No matter that then she said she had learned her lesson. No matter that she purposely put the car on cruise control, knowing she was 5 MPH above what she knew to be the safe range. And no matter that cars with Texas license plates seemed to be going as fast or faster, passing us.Here was another message from the Fates, I thought and again I wasn’t sure what the message was, except that it was time for me to drive. Marietta in spite of her ticket had moved us well along on our journey. We could easily make Santa Fe by 5:00 P.M. We met up with the great artery across America, I-40 or Route 66 and we turned west toward the Texan Panhandle, and New Mexico.Hours later, as we were about to exit I-40 north to Santa Fe we saw a desert storm west and north of us and headed directly into it, giving it no mind.In about fifteen minutes the sky above turned black. Giant raindrops began to drop infrequently on and about us. I barely needed my windshield wipers. Then “Bang.” It sounded as if a rock or bullet hit the car hood. A ball of ice ricocheted from the hood to the windshield right at my head. I put up my arm reflexively to protect myself. Then Bang, Bang… Bang Bang Bang… Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang and the banging continued. I slowed down but the banging didn’t.  Though frightened by the hail and the noise, we could see in front of us. Then the banging softened and slowed and the rains came in sheets just like in Dallas and we were almost blind. And then the sun shone brightly in our faces as we turned west and we drove on as if nothing had happened.Stunned and dazed, we found ourselves on an interstate moving into Santa Fe proper, exiting onto Bishop’s road, as instructed by our GPS and in minutes we were parking in the parking lot of the Bishop Ranch Hotel, a quaint adobe complex of buildings. Marietta checked us in. I got our bags and Marietta led us to this palatial suite, where we fell on our beds in a heap, puzzled and shell shocked.Once we regained our composure, we went to the hotel’s version of supper and found out why we got a cheap rate. The hotel was about to close for renovations and they had no kitchen. Supper was a hamburger or chicken sandwich cooked on the patio grill with potato chips and baked beans with a candy bar for dessert.The sun was still up when we finished eating. We walked around the hotel campus. In addition to buildings with rooms to rent there was the chapel and the horse corral with about twenty well cared for horses. Our dog, Greta, was not sure what to make of those giant animals. She kept her distance.Exhausted from the day, we went to sleep when the sun went down, wondering what message the hail storm was sending about our China trip.Our destination the next day was a bed and breakfast in Escalante, Utah. The GPS calculated that it would be an easy day’s drive, about seven hours. Marietta planned the “obstecher” to Escalante as our usual do-something-on-the-way diversion from constant travel. She had reserved a guide to take us through one of the slot canyons in Escalante. We wanted to arrive early enough so that we could get up refreshed at 5:00 A.M. the next morning. The guide told Marietta that the early light was best and that it would not be so hot. The sand on the slot canyon floor can rise to 140°.I didn’t want to go straight from Santa Fe to Escalante. I wanted to go to Nucla, Colorado by way of the gold highway toward Durango.Nucla is the home of Don Colcord, who was featured in a New Yorker article by Peter Hessler. Nucla was founded in the 1890s by idealistic utopians who hoped Nucla would become the “center of Socialist government for the world.” The founders believed that “If a small colony of outlaws and refugees could build Rome and maintain a state for twelve hundred years, who could guess what a well-organized colony of intelligent humanitarians may accomplish.”As you might guess, this experiment failed. Nucla, as a town in the desert, somehow survived with a dwindling population of currently around 700 people.What attracted me to Nucla was how the community organized around Don Colcord, the local pharmacist and the only source of medical care or advice in a fifty mile radius of Nucla. Don organized the Fourth of July celebrations and is the President of the bowling league and is the home game announcer for Nucla High School Friday night eight-on-eight football games. He owns the apothecary shop which has shelves filled with rows of groceries, a row of gift cards, a Pepsi fountain and is decorated with two mounted mule deer heads and an antelope head.Don gives shots, takes blood pressure, recommends over the counter arthritis remedies of hydrocronic acid made of rooster combs. He mixes tincture of benzoin for rodeo riders to put on their hands to make them tacky so they can hold on to the halter of a bucking bull without getting blisters and the same ointment for diaper rash.Don is in his early sixties, according to Hessler and “the most talkative friendly person for four thousand miles.” In describing Don, Hessler wrote that Don’s experience seemed to have taught him that “there is something solitary and unknowable about every human life. He saw connections of a different sort. These people (the folk of Nucla) and incidents (described by Don to Hessler of events in Nucla) were more like spokes on a wheel. They didn’t touch directly, but each was linked to something bigger, and Don’s role was to try to keep the whole thing moving as best he could.”Peter Hessler described Nucla as the place where, “Highway 96 dead-ends into Main Street…The nearest traffic light is an hour and a half away. When old ranching couples drive their pick-ups into Nucla, the wives leave the passenger’s side empty and sit in the middle of the front seat, close enough to touch their husbands. It is as if something about the landscape – those endless hills, that vacant sky – makes a person appreciate the intimacy of a Ford F-150 cab.”Peter Hessler, you may recognize, is the author of Oracle Bones and River Town. He is a noted China expert. He lives in a small Colorado town about 150 miles from Nucla. I wanted to see this idyllic community for myself and see if I could find something in common with the beauty Hessler described in Nucla and what I might later see in China.So we were off, first to drive the Gold Highway, then to Nucla and then to Escalante. I figured a ten hour drive or so.The gold highway wound about on a ledge of a canyon dug over centuries by a fast running stream. The road had several drive out viewpoints with historical markers describing gold and silver mining and Native American trade routes.The views were spectacular. The curves and other sight-seeing drivers slowed the traffic. We were later than I expected when we turned west toward Nucla.We drove through a desolate desert. We arrived at about 4:30 on a Sunday. Hessler was right. Nucla had no stop light. There was also no life, no cars moving on the road and only a few were parked on the streets. The small homes looked like square trailers scattered about desert lots. Some homes were fenced and a few dogs barked when we got out of our car. I had difficulty finding the beauty that Hessler describe. The only store open was a liquor store that doubled as the home of its owner, a sixty year old grandmother, named Dot. Her store was also the closest thing to a public restroom that we saw and Marietta and I, both, had to go.We parked the car in the shade side of the deserted street for my dog, Greta, and when we opened the car door, we felt a sudden blast of heat. We walked across the street to the liquor store, opened the squeaky front door and entered an empty store. Dot entered through a back opening in the store. I asked to use the restroom. She frowned, said, “I guess it will be okay.” And she showed me into her apartment, where she had some well worn children’s toys and an old high chair. “These are for my grandchild,” she said. “I keep him most weekdays.” She showed me a closet door, opened it and pulled a string. A light flashed on to expose a commode, a sink and a concrete floor.I felt as if I was intruding into a place I did not belong, but I had to go. When I emerged back into the store, Marietta had introduced herself and was buying a couple of cokes and some peanuts and had explained our interest in Nucla and Doctor Don and The Apothecary across the street.“I worked for ten years for the Doc across the street,” Dot said. “I know ‘bout that article. Since that came out, they’ve done a documentary on him and they are planning a television show with the main character patterned after Doc. I would call him and tell him to come talk to you and open his store for you to see, but he is having dinner at the Junction (Grand Junction, Colorado) with some friends. It’s his birthday.”We left this deserted lifeless town at about 5:00 P.M. The contrast between the warmth and sense of community that Hessler saw in Nucla and the spiritless empty town we saw, raised several questions in my mind. Is this testimony to the power and ability of a writer to manufacture or magnify reality? Was this just an off day for Nucla? Are we such poor appreciators of life and beauty that we missed many obvious things that others see in Nucla? Was Nucla like a poor African village where the one wealthy chief runs things?The GPS estimated our travel time to Escalante to be about seven hours. I was dumbfounded. This was not my plan. I hoped to arrive no later than 8:00.Marietta looked at the map and confirmed that Escalante was indeed a long way from Nucla.  Panicked, we did not process our Nucla experience. As I write this it occurs to me that possibly the poverty and the sense of family may be what Nucla and China share. Nucla deserved more time and thought then we gave to it.My foot pressed the accelerator and I pushed us down the road as fast as I could. We got onto I-70 in no time. We ate a fast supper in Green River, Utah. It was still daylight when we exited I-70 onto Highway 24 South. On the Interstate our average speed was about 85 MPH. On deserted Highway 24, where I could see for miles in front of me, our average speed was closer to 90 MPH. The sun was setting when Highway 24 veered west into Capital Reef State Park.This land was reserved as a park because of its bizarre landscape. Highway 24 twists its way through the park’s rock formations called “Hoodoos”. These are sometimes giant rocks stacked on top of one another or towers carved away from the mountains that look like giant totem poles that one sees carved by Eskimos in Alaska. But these giant edifices were carved by nature.Traveling among these rocks, which to us looked like some mixture of gargoyles and sentinels, was like going on a frightening Halloween ride at a theme park. Our anxiety was already high because of the speed with which I took the Highway 24 twists and myriad of turns.  The shadows cast by these towering sculptures and the sometimes horrific expressions that seemed to be looking down on us from the rock faces we imagined were eerie, mystical and added to our fear. It was like driving fast through a never-ending grave yard with ghoulish giant headstones surrounding us. Marietta loved this mysterious place. Me not so much. It was 10:00 P.M. when we emerged from Highway 24 and Capitol Reef State Park to turn on famous scenic Highway 12.Marietta had called our bed and breakfast in Escalante to warn them about our late arrival. The proprietor was none too pleased. This made me even more anxious to hurry there. But Marietta had to have a rest stop. We were about an hour and a half from our destination. We had been traveling for about thirteen hours.A word about Highway 12, that is scenic Highway 12, a much narrower two lane road than Highway 24. While Highway 24 was straight and open until we turned into Hoodoland at Capitol Reef, Highway 12 was a narrow two-lane, winding, ribbon of road threaded on top of mountaintops with 90° drops of 500 feet on both sides of the road. I had driven this road in daylight before and was well aware of the precipice we would be traveling along in the now, dark, moonless night. I was exhausted, irritable and awake only because I was so anxious. I wanted to do all in my power so that our hosts did not have to wait up for us any longer than necessary.Once Marietta returned to the car, we were off into rural Utah at 10:00 at night. “Oh, it is so dark you can see the stars so clearly. They are magnificent aren’t they?” Marietta said. My hands choked the steering wheel. My neck and shoulders tightened. My foot pushed the accelerator to the floor and our marvelous diesel engine propelled us across this up and down winding road at 90 MPH and I couldn’t give a damn about the stars.In about five minutes I was alarmed by a herd of ten deer crossing the road 50 yards in front of us. I slowed, some, worried that one more deer left behind was about to jump into the road just in front of our car. Once past the deer, my hands merged into the steering wheel and my back muscles became granite. Soon after that, I saw cows lying on what shoulder there was of the road. I reassured myself with some self-talk that said, “Oh this was a mistake. These cows have broken out of their fence.” My pace did not slow and my anxiety remained.We rounded a curve and I saw them ten feet in front of me. I had no time to stop or brake, a mother skunk and six babies ambled across the road. I heard a “thump, thump, thump” and I felt the floor board vibrate under my feet. I waited for that smell but it never came. I can’t imagine they survived. A half mile down the road we passed a car heading for the skunk spray that surely came in our wake.Ten miles outside Escalante the highway cows again lay just off the road about three or so feet. This did not fit well with my previous self-talk about the cows being there by mistake. This fact was not a source of calm for me.Once in Escalante we drove around this two street town passing our destination three times, yelling at one another because we didn’t know where we were, and frustrated because we knew we were so near.Finally, we drove into the right driveway. I had to will my fingers to let go of the steering wheel. When I got out of the car, my body felt rigid and immovable. My humped shoulders would not fall. My lower back was so knotted that I felt I had to walk like Frankenstein.Of all the travel days on our trip, through the story of the lost boys, our confrontation with mortality, torrential floods, a reprimand from the sheriff’s deputy and maddening hail, this day’s journey was the most difficult and possibly the one most filled with opportunities to listen to what Fate was telling us.The next day was as sublime as the previous day was stressful. Our guide to the slot canyons arrived at 5:30 A.M. He waited until we finished a delightful breakfast of pancakes, eggs and bacon. We left Greta in our room, loaded into our guide’s truck and we were off by 7:00. We got in his dusty fifteen year old Toyota truck and he drove us on a country dirt road that was mostly passable by car. Only in a few places would a truck or another high clearance vehicle be an asset. After a rain, no car, only high clearance trucks would have been able to negotiate some of the road’s low places.As we drove, I told our guide about the cows next to the road the night before.“Oh,” he said, “that’s how it is here. This is free range territory. Ranchers set their cattle out on the government range land without any fences. The Utah legislature passed a law that says if you hit a cow, you owe the rancher for the loss of their cow.”I couldn’t believe how I had been more reckless than I imagined, driving 90 MPH on Highway 12 with cows all about and possibly on the road. Not only might we have been killed if we had hit a cow, we would have to pay to fix our car and pay for the cow.We arrived at the slot canyon parking lot. The area offered several options for slot canyon hikes. I’m not sure which one we took.We walked a mile to the opening of the slot canyon. Slot canyons, for those who don’t know, are passages created by sudden flows of water that cut through sandstone creating crevices in the ground some twenty to fifty feed deep and eight inches to twenty feet wide. You’ve likely seen pictures of light shining deeply into the ground illuminating extravagant pink, orange, red and blue/gray sparkles of sandstone reflecting this rare precious light.Marietta had provisioned us for our slot canyon hike with a cowboy hat, bottled water, and rock-climbing gloves. Her reading of descriptions of physical demands that might be placed on the hikers during this three to four hour trip intimidated her a bit, especially the eight inch clearance at places between canyon walls and the requirement of considerable upper body strength one needed to lift one’s self out of very tight spaces.After taking just a few steps into the canyon, it became clear that cowboy hats were a nuisance and gloves only marginally helpful. Our guide, however, was essential. Marietta was often stuck and unable to pull herself out of a cavern and into the passage. I too was sometimes confounded by the puzzle of where to put my foot or what rock to grab that would serve as secure purchase for my next move forward. Our guide either directed, pushed, pulled or lifted us through the two mile slot canyon.The beautiful colors discovered by the arrows of light made us forget for a time about the dangers that our canyon hike created. There was the danger of getting stuck and being unable to get one’s self out of one of the pockets inside the canyon, as well as, the danger from a flash flood coming from a rainstorm in the mountain miles away from the canyon, filling the narrow space with as much as fifteen feet of rushing water.Our guide knew the weather and where rain in far off mountains would create a stream headed for this particular canyon. There had been storms that created a canyon flood recently. In September of this year eight people drowned in a slot canyon flood. We were happy to be armed by our guide’s local knowledge and physical strength.When we emerged from the canyon, we met about ten other hikers entering our exit. When we got to the parking lot, several cars provided evidence that many more people had followed us into the canyon. Though we had passed four or five people going the opposite way, we were glad not to be any longer in those tight places, having to negotiate space with fifty or more hikers going the opposite way.Our guide was a naturalist, an expert on the desert plant life. He pointed out desert poisonous and nutritious berries. They looked exactly alike to us but he could discern the difference by looking at the different leaf patterns.On our way back our guide told us about a restaurant in town that he liked, Escalante Outfitters Café. He said that they had good pizzas.Once back, Marietta and I negotiated leaving a day early. Marietta had planned to stay two nights and explore other sites in this beautiful desert topography. Salt Lake was only five hours away and I was ready to finish our journey.Our compromise was to eat our last meal on the road at Escalante Outfitters Café and head home to our Deer Valley Condo. The café eluded us at first. It was further down from the town center on Highway 12 than we imagined.There were two parts to this business/café, one half-filled with ropes, guide books, fishing and hiking gear and the other half served as the café with six four-top tables and a bakery counter. We found an empty table next to the bakery counter. We saw someone come in and buy a beautiful, shinny loaf of braided bread. The sight of that gorgeous loaf of bread and the smells coming from the bakery counter pulled us out of our seats. We stood to look in the glass counter case filled with  giant apple pies, strawberry/rhubarb pies, berry pies, a variety of freshly baked artisan breads and bagels, pastries filled with custard and chocolate. I have no words to describe the sensuality of the bakery counter’s contents.Eventually we found our seats, now with menus to peruse. Enclosed please find the Café menu:StartersEscalante Bruschetta - $8.95Ovoline mozzarella, slow roasted tomatoes, roasted garlic &fresh basil served on toasted focaccia bread, toppedwith balsamic vinaigrette & olive oilSourdough Breadsticks - $8.95Homemade sourdough bread sticks topped with garlic &parmesan cheese, served with marinara dipping sauceThe Accidental Tourist - $10.95A plate of toasted focaccia bread, prosciutto slices, kalamata olives,artichoke hearts, pepperoncini, ham, tomato & garlic infused olive oilHouse Salad - $5.95A bed of mixed field greens & fresh veggieswith your choice of dressingChips & Salsa - $2.95If you find yourself stuck in the middle of Utah &you just wanna hang out, chips & salsa might be the answerArugula Prosciutto Rusk - $10.95A thin sourdough rusk, covered with an artichoke spread &topped with arugula tossed in a lemon vinaigrettewith prosciutto & grated parmesan Salad DressingsHouse Balsamic Vinaigrette, House Classic Caesar, Raspberry Vin­aigrette, Ranch,Blue Cheese, & Olive Oil and VinegarSignature SaladsClassic Caesar Salad - $12.50This is the way a Caesar should be served, with a virgin olive oilbase & this house crafted dressing packs a punch, with romaine lettuce, red onion &topped with your choice of chicken or Spanish anchovy filetsThe Homesteader’s Delight -$10.50Fresh ovoline mozzarella, vine ripe tomatoes & kalamata oliveson a bed of field greens that have been tossedin our homemade balsamic vinaigrettePosey Lake Smoked Trout - $12.95Smoked trout on a bed of field greens tossed in homemadebalsamic vinaigrette, served with sour-dough toast, cream cheese,capers, fresh tomato, onion and lemonFarmer’s Market Veggie - $10.50Spinach, red onion, goat cheese, slow roasted tomatoes tossedwith our house raspberry vinaigretteHouse Salad - $5.95A bed of mixed field greens & fresh veggieswith your choice of dressing Salad DressingsHouse Balsamic Vinaigrette, House Classic Caesar,Raspberry Vinaigrette, Ranch, Blue Cheese, & Olive Oil and Vinegar Baked ZitiZiti - $12.95Our ziti locks in traditional American-Italian flavors under layers ofcheese sauce, marinara, baked pasta and, of course mozzarella SandwichesAll sandwiches are served with a house salad, your choice of dressing or kettle chipsSheep Creek Chicken Salad - $9.95Classic chicken salad with almonds & grapes, served on a toastedbaguette with lettuce & tomatoSweet Water Tuna Sandwich - $9.95Served on a toasted baguette with lettuce, tomato & onionEscalante BLT- $10.50Applewood smoked bacon, lettuce, tomato on toastedfocaccia bread with spicy aioliPurple Hills Spicy Chicken - $10.50Grilled chicken & jalapenos covered in marinara sauce,mozzarella, & pepperoni, served hot on focaccia bread& drizzed with balsamic vinaigretteSunset Flat Veggie - $9.95Fresh sliced ovoline mozzarella cheese, vine ripe tomatoes,diced pepperoncini, tapenade dressing with lettuce & onion,served on toasted baguetteMuffaletta Hogs Back Rustica - $10.50Ham, prosciutto & provolone, lettuce, tomato & onion. Served on a toasted baguette & dressed with our homemade tapenade spreadCalzoneAll calzones are served with a house salad and your choice of dressingPersonalized Calzone - $12.95Build your own calzone, your choice of three toppings to bestuffed in your very own calzone creationNeon - $12.95Pesto sauce, chicken breast, onion, mushroom,tomato & mozzarella cheeseDay Hiker - $10.95A classic. Cheese & pepperoni. If you don’t think you caneat a whole pepperoni pizza, this is choice for you!   Salad DressingsHouse BalsamicVinaigretteHouse Classic CaesarRaspberry VinaigretteRanchBlue CheeseOlive Oil & VinegarCalzone SauceHomemade Red SauceOlive Oil & GarlicPestoKalamata TapenadeCalzone ToppingsPepperoniUtah SausageCanadian BaconGrilled ChickenRed OnionBell PeppersJalapeno PeppersBlack OlivesSpanish Green OlivesKalamata OlivesMushroomsFresh TomatoesPineappleArtichoke HeartsRoasted GarlicSpinachSpecialty ToppingsSlow Roasted TomatoesApplewood Smoked BaconUtah Goat CheeseFeta CheeseSpecialty PizzasNeon - 12” $17.95 | 16” $25.95Pesto sauce, chicken breast, onion, mushroom,tomato & mozzarella cheese.Devil’s Garden - 12” $17.95 | 16” $25.95This is a veggie pizza has got some serious toppings. Tomato sauce, on­ion, mushroom, tomato, black olive, bell pepper, artichoke heart, feta, mozzarella cheese on top of homemade red sauceKing’s Mesa - 12” $17.95 | 16” $25.95Step aside because we are bringing on the meat, grilled chicken, ham, pepperoni, smoked applewood bacon, & locally made Italian sausage. Your choice of sauceDay Hiker - 12” $13.95 | 16” $17.95Mozzarella, homemade red sauce & pepperoni,something to dream about while on the trailMoody Creek - 12” $17.95 | 16” $25.95Tomato sauce, fresh tomato, cloves of roasted garlic,mozzarella, feta cheese and finished with fresh basilPeek-A-Boo - 12” $16.95 | 16” $22.95For the pizza aficionado. Our homemade red sauce topped withmozzarella and Spanish anchovies. Pure brain foodChop Rock - 12” $17.95 | 16” $25.95This pizza is designed for a thin crust connoisseur. Olive oil & garlic sauce drizzled over a hand-tossed sourdough crust, topped with chicken & bacon, artichoke hearts, slow roasted tomatoes, feta and fresh basil.Big Horn - 12” $17.95 | 16” $25.95We have taken the classic muffaletta sandwich & converted it into a fantastic artisan pizza. Ham, goat cheese, & mozzarellaserved over a kalamata olive tapenade spreadSilver Falls - 12” $17.95 | 16” $25.95A mainstay on the pizza menu. Start with red sauce thenadd fresh spinach, feta, mushrooms, slow roasted tomatoes& red onions, topped with slices of ovoline mozzarella  CrustsHand-tossed thin crustTraditional sourdoughGluten-freePizza SauceHomemade Red SauceOlive Oil & GarlicPestoKalamata TapenadePizza ToppingsPepperoniUtah SausageCanadian BaconGrilled ChickenRed OnionBell PeppersJalapeno PeppersBlack OlivesSpanish Green OlivesKalamata OlivesMushroomsFresh TomatoesPineappleArtichoke HeartsRoasted GarlicSpinachSpecialty ToppingsSlow Roasted TomatoesApplewood Smoked BaconUtah Goat CheeseFeta CheeseFresh BasilSpanish AnchoviesSmoked Trout Personalized Pizza - 12” $12.95 | 16” $16.95Be the captain of your destiny & build your own masterpiece. Start bychoosing your sauce & let your imagination run wild. For the 12” eachadditional topping 1.00 or for specialty toppings $2.00,For the 16” each additional topping 2.00 or for specialty toppings $2.75  The menu doesn’t do justice to the presentation and the taste of the food. Wewatched dishes pouring out of the kitchen for Highway 12 bikers and travelers. Each dish looked like a painting. I ordered the Posey Lake Smoked Trout salad. Marietta ordered the Escalante BLT and it was the best BLT either of us had ever tasted.  The breads were especially good, the BLT’s focaccia bread and the bread and the bread stick assortment that came with my salad.The delicious mixture of tastes of these unique dishes delightfully merged in our mouths. And we split a hot piece of rhubarb/strawberry pie alamode for dessert.This was the best food I have ever eaten in my life from any restaurant. Marietta’s feasts are best best, but this is best restaurant meal I have ever had and I am sixty-nine years old and I have eaten in restaurants in Sante Fe, San Diego, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Germany, Italy, France and England. I can’t say enough about the food I ate and saw here and I haven’t mentioned the amazing pizza’s we saw coming out of the kitchen.Once we rolled out of the café and into our car, we had a uneventful trip back up Highway 12 to 70 to I-15 to I-80 to Park City and our condo. We arrived about 7:30 P.M., hit the grocery store and unpacked. Supper and our bed at 9:00 marked the end of our journey. That was our trip out. One other notable event happened, while we were in Park City for our six week stay. John and Rita, our good friends, our travel companions to China and our upstairs neighbors in our Fawngrove Condo had made many plans to prepare for our trip to China. Each of us hopes to be an expert in some area concerning China. Marietta, John and Rita worked on the language a bit. John along with Rita developed a historical perspective on China, John on more current history, Rita on China’s dynastic history.I hoped my contribution would be learning about Chinese thought and religion. I was especially interested in the Chinese custom of throwing coins and consulting the oldest known religious book in the world the I-Ching. The I-Ching has been used by the Chinese as an oracle for centuries.The oldest form requires the throwing of small sticks that resemble the sticks in a game of pick-up sticks. It has evolved into throwing three coins with sides we would call “heads” or “tails” and what the Chinese would call masculine (yang) or feminine (yin). Heads equals 2 and tails 3.I used the Wilhelm version of the I-Ching, because it had Carl Jung’s aforementioned preface. To get an oracle reading one asks a question and throws the coins. One throw of the coins produces and odd or even number. An odd number represents an unbroken straight line and even number represents a broken line or a straight line with a space in the middle. The lines form from the bottom up. To form what’s called a “hexagram” one throws the coins six times, producing six lines.  If the coins produced a six or a nine, one looks specifically at that line, ready for more information from that line, e.g., 6 at the top. One looks for the hexagram and the reading that comes with the hexagram to find the answer to one’s question.I have a version of another oracle in my office and I enjoy playing an oracle game with my clients. It is amazing how wise I have found the oracle’s answers to be.I hope to suggest to our small traveling group that we consult the I-Ching everyday of our trip. To that end I offered myself as a demonstration. For some time I have been trying to collect a group of writers interested in writing about the soul and mind of the South.I have already written about fifteen essays myself. The interest has evolved into an idea to write another version of the famous book of Southern essays published in 1936, I’ll Take My Stand.I don’t know how to approach this project. So in front of John, Rita and Marietta I asked this question, threw the coins, built a hexagram and found it in the book to be hexagram 17. I thought the reading it gave was on the nose for what I needed to do. I had to put myself last and others first. I had to gather friends around me. It suggested that I had heavy load to carry. (Yes, I agreed this was a monumental project to undertake), that would reach distant regions (I hoped so). As the strong element, I must place myself under the weak to obtain a following. I must follow the laws of nature or the Tao. To me this meant follow the best spiritual values of compassion, integrity and respect for others.All this made great sense until I discovered that I had read the wrong hexagram. Actually the correct hexagram was number 57.When I read this hexagram, it seemed relevant as well. The title of the hexagram was “The Gentle.” Go forward, penetrate slowly and cautiously. This requires character and judgment. By being gentle I can weigh things better, remain unnoticed and take special circumstances into account. It would further me to have a sense of direction and to consult a great man. (It was as obvious to me that this great man must be Ray Waddle, whom I hoped would take a leadership role).The bungling of my I-Ching consultation proved the old social psychology principle about fortune-telling. Fortune tellers give people what social psychology calls “Barnum statements.” These are general statements that a person can easily imagine may be true and applicable to themselves.Here were two distinctly different readings that Fate gave to me. When I told John and Rita about my mistake, they laughed. This must have demonstrated to them the silliness of this idea, but they were glad to play this game with me, just as they were interested in playing Ma-Jong with us as well.Me, on the other hand, still felt that Fate had played through my mistake, giving me two pieces of wisdom that could be useful to me in my project. Two weeks before I was to depart for China I was asked to attend a seminar by Polly Young-Eisendarth, a Buddhist psychotherapist from Vermont. I had to go to represent an organization sponsoring the workshop. Once Polly began to speak, I felt Fate had brought me to hear her. She outlined the five basic Buddhist principles. I had already planned to study Confucianism through Huston Smith’s book on world religions completing my assignment on Confucianism and being exposed to Polly’s version of Buddhism prepared to go to China.I want to examine how the Chinese spiritual values fit with my liberal Southern Calvinist – light version of Christianity. For this purpose I will lay out my understanding of Buddhism and Confucianism principles.  If you are not interested in Chinese Religion, you might wish to skip this part. BuddhismThe Three Marks of Human ExistenceDukkha:

1. Life is filled with dissatisfaction, anguish, stress, discontent, restlessness, gaps in clarity, confusion and imbalance or off-centeredness. Perfection is a silly irrelevant goal. Acceptance of life in confusion and emotional distress is a product of spiritual growth.

Dukkha has four truths:

1. All experiences which we believe we control or can control are ultimately dissatisfying.
2. The origin of Dukkha is our desire to ennoble, defend and extend our power and influence, our desire to please ourselves and our attempts to avoid life’s pain. These desires result in an inner life filled with painful cycles of death and rebirth.
3. When we can detach from our cravings and observe them without becoming their slaves, we find freedom and peace.
4. The path of liberation from Dukkha is to behave responsibly, cultivate discipline, practice mindfulness (equanimity and emotional balance) and meditate.

 Annicca:

2. Life and the universe is filled with ceaseless change, impermanence at all levels. Our spiritual goal is to accept and join with grace and equanimity the changing nature of things and to observe life as it changes. These changes come to us in ways we cannot predict or understand.

  Annata:

3. Though we sometimes experience ourselves as separate beings, we are not. There is no inner being or separate soul, no self. Everything is connected to everything else and things don’t exist apart from all that is. There is no birth or death, no good or evil, only the natural order of the universe.

 We must learn to live with Dukkha because everybody is captured inside this life force. It is through our brokenness that we discover wisdom. Embracing our brokenness is the door to peace.Anicca is the source of Dukkha. Impermanence and the constancy of change dashes all of our expectations and hopes. If we can walk into life’s chaos, rather than seeing change as loss, we can discover true freedom.We can do this with a powerful emotional tool that I call “grace” and Polly calls “equilibrium.” By this she means to be a friendly accepting audience to our experience, being aware of an emotional/psychological/spiritual spot that is a fulcrum or balance point between impermanence and the distress and pain it causes.We delude ourselves when we believe we are suffering alone or that we are unique and no one can understand us. We are like ants in an ant colony. We are trapped in an illusion of separateness, in a body, in attachment relationships and in a point inside an aging cycle. (If I believe my delusion, I am 69 years, four months, and 29 days). What we don’t see is that, as long as we see ourselves separate and are reactive to our emotions, we suffer death and rebirth over and over. We like to see ourselves as unchanging and continuous, but that is not true. We develop our narrative, defend our egos, excuse and rationalize our behaviors, but the truth is our lives and our deaths serve our species and are part of the natural way of all things. We are never separate, never alone. The more separate we see ourselves, the more pain we feel. We cannot control our lives. There is no such thing as security or safety. There is no ground. All is in process. This softens questions of blame causality and responsibility.Ideas of happiness, self-esteem and perfection are all traps that will increase our suffering. Our ideals of perfection are irrelevant and silly, and can cause great suffering because we are all broken and can never reach our ideal goals. The key to contentment is letting go of one’s self importance, stop struggling for self-esteem; do not fight shame; do not pursue happiness. These are only emotions and emotions cannot be captured and held or avoided. Emotions change like everything else.Mature spiritual growth requires an awareness that we are being cast about and in this casting about, we discover how broken we are and have become, broken beyond fixing. This discovery introduces us to humility and to a compassion for others whom we now see as broken too. It is in our shared brokenness that we discover our royal road to peace and this discovery is compassion. All of us are engaged in this search for meaning. We are all caught in a tragic world we do not control. Grounded in the reality of our brokenness, we value one another, not because of talent, wealth, or wisdom, but because that other person can never be replicated and we will eventually lose them.While this seems like a tragic view of life, it is not. Because once we realize that we don’t have control and life is like a game that always changes, we see the irony in our existence and we can laugh at ourselves.There are several ways we might respond to this realization that life and the universe is in constant flux. We can respond with fear. We can respond with denial or false bravado, believing that we can control life. Or we can see the changing universe’s invitation to us humans to join life’s changes and flow with the natural order or Dharma.There is an order to the constant change in the universe.  Life has cycles.  Everything is in balance. There is a natural harmony that we can discover through discipline practice and meditation. We humans often push into life’s wilderness or climb life’s mountain by imagining our own straight line and following it. But just think how easy it would be if we followed an already developed path or way. There is such a life path. In Buddhism it is called the middle way. It is the practice of non-extremism, a path of moderation away from the extremes of self-indulgence. It requires a tolerance of opposing ideas, seeing validity in both sides. It is an awareness that dualities are all false and that the truth integrates opposites into paradoxes. The middle way acknowledges both the appearance of permanence and the appearance of impermanence and understands how to bring these appearances together into one truth through meditation and mindfulness. The path is not straight. It winds about.It is by following this middle way that we find Nirvana or enlightenment or oneness with all there is. Confucianism developed as China’s response to Buddhism. In China Confucianism goes by a different name, Ruism. The reason is that Confucius did not originate this philosophy. He and his disciples merely codified it around 551 BCE.Westerners debate whether or not Ruism is a religion. It is not a religion with a god or gods. It’s more pantheistic or humanistic than it is theistic.  The Jesuits of the 16^th and 17^th century saw it as an ethical system quite compatible with Christianity. And clearly after looking closely there is great merit to this proposition. If this had remained the West’s view of Chinese religious thoughts and if Catholicism had continued to see Christianity and Confucianism as compatible rather than competitive, the history of the world might have been very different, but such was not to be. Pope Benedict XIV saw Catholicism and Ruism as incompatible and ordered a ban against Ruist rituals.Some today call Ruism a moral science or philosophy, not a religion. Others see it as a religion because it offers a means of ultimate transformation. It is certainly a socio-political doctrine with religious qualities.However it is defined, it has been the most influential system of moral thought in China for centuries. Some blame it for China’s failure to become powerful modern state in the 1800s. Other’s credit Ruism with China’s and East Asia’s strong work ethic and China, South Korea and Vietnam’s modern resurgence in the twenty-first century.Many in China encourage the government to make Ruism China’s state religion. In contemporary China Ruism is in resurgence. Schools, temples, new rites and Ruist communities are forming. There is a rebirth of new forms of Ruist popular activity everywhere. Old temples are being rebuilt and old cults of China’s pantheistic past are re-emerging as part of Ruism. Hong Kong Ruism has expanded to the mainland. Ruist hospitals are being built. Businesses are following Ruistic principles, as they recognize their social responsibility to build ethical business practices.It is not surprising that Ruism has re-emerged so strongly today, because, since the 12^th Century A.D. until the twentieth century applicants for important government posts had to score well on an examination of their knowledge of the five books that Confucius wrote or compiled over 2,000 years ago.Ruism was admired by Enlightenment philosophers, Voltaire and Diderot because Confucius had “no interest in falsehood (miracles or God); he did not pretend to be a prophet (to speak to God) he claimed no inspiration (from God); he taught no new religion; he used no delusions…” Voltaire.Leibniz appropriates some of his ideas from Ruism such as his term “simple substance” and “pre-established harmony.” The tenets of Ruism are consistent with Buddhism in that neither philosophy advocates the worship of a God. The nature of life is God, not an entity or an anthropomorphic deity. Buddhism and Ruism use different terms to describe their veneration of the natural order, but both have a pantheistic base.They differ significantly in the way they conceive Nature. While Buddhism considers life and the universe to be in constant flux and beyond human comprehension, Ruism considers there to be a natural order that humans can understand and trust. This is an order based on compassion, justice and respect for humankind. The cosmos is an interaction and balance between the forces of yin and yang. Everything revolves around relationships, the relationship of one human to another, of a son to his parents, a family to its community, a citizen to his government.There are natural rules or laws or customs that govern all relationship and if we understand them and live in harmony with them, we can find success, security and happiness.Buddhism also believes that there are natural ways of living but that one of nature’s principles is that all things are impermanent.  Expectations of others and the future create human suffering and that human suffering is inevitable.These two philosophies reflect the two different versions of how the Bible describes the birth of human existence. The first Biblical creation story (exactly opposite the second) is that the universe and earth and its creatures were all God’s creation and all good. And that man was created in the image of God and that men and women were good.The second version was that man (Adam) and woman (Eve) ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and their need to judge others and the world, as God does, dooms humankind to lives of suffering.The first Biblical version of creation agrees with Ruism that man and life is good, while the second Biblical version of creation agrees with the Buddhist notion of Dukkha, i.e., life is scary. There is no safe harbor. Our desires bring us pain. Confucius supposedly wrote or compiled five texts that are the Ruist holy books. They are the aforementioned I-Ching, the Book of Songs i.e., the earliest anthology of Chinese songs and poems, the Book of History, a compilation of speeches and records of events that embody the ethical way to govern. This book proposes a very Christian and psychological way to govern based on responsibility and trust, not on fear and punishment. Government is formed around a social contract (see Rousseau) of harmony where cooperation, not competition, is emphasized and rules of conduct based on trust and social accountability and compassion are taught. I presume that Confucius advocated that governors treat misconduct as you would an ADD child, admonish, remind, extract a promise not to behave that way again and be compassionate and patient until the person learns. (No need for capital punishment).The fourth book is the Book of Rites which defines norms, rules and laws responsible for the four functional occupations farmer, Scholar, artisan, and merchant.The fifth book is the Chronicle of the Spring and Autumn Annals which describe the seasonal rites that are used to reanimate the old in order to attain the new. The ultimate goal of human existence is to join the harmony of the heavens or Tian. The principle of Heaven is the order of creation and the structure of universal authority. The essence of this universal authority is seen in the character of the human compassionate mind. Compassion is the virtue endowed by Heaven. It is the path to the oneness with Tain (heaven), the way to join one’s body with all things. Tain or Heaven or God is the “Great Whole.” It is the key concept to Ruism.Confucius says that it is possible to know the movement of the Tain. We humans can find where we belong in the universe. Tain gave humans life and the innate understanding of virtue. This innate understanding is compassion.Religious rituals provide a means for overcoming the ego and to generate the proper spirit of compassion necessary for a good life.Ruism’s strongest emphasis is ethics and is characterized by the promotion of virtues expressed in the Five Constants. These are: Rén (humaneness), Yi (righteousness, fairness and social justice), Li (rites, symbols and rituals), Zhi (knowledge of how to behave in daily living), Xin (integrity, respect for authority and reverence). Rén (Humaneness)Rén is the feeling one has when one has behaved in an altruistic manner, exemplified by an adult’s protective feelings toward a child. Heaven or Tian has endowed nature with this care, consideration and compassion and to join Heaven is to behave humanely. When Confucius was asked to describe Rén, he said, “One should see nothing improper, hear nothing improper, say nothing improper and do nothing improper.” When following the rules of Rén one enlarges himself, first by enlarging others. One establishes himself, first by establishing others. Yi (Righteousness)Yi represents righteousness, an innate sense of fairness and a desire for justice. Yi seeks to treat people equally. In Yi there is a sense of shame and honor and a willingness to correctly attribute honor to the deserving and shame to others who act to harm others or the public good. Li (Rites)Li has two meanings. One refers to cosmic law. In that context Li means ratio or the right order or harmony or reason. In the context of the second meaning, relative to individual behavior, Li means mores, custom and rules for appropriate behavior. Confucius, a student of government, imagined that governors would and should encourage all people to seek human perfection in behavior and in spirit. If governments encouraged and nurtured Li, Confucius believed that punishment would become less relevant. Zhi (Knowledge)I am unclear what Zhi represents. Perhaps this is the place where appropriate behavior and attitudes are described. In his writings Confucius discusses such subjects as tea drinking, titles, learning, mourning, lamentation, preparing and eating rice, fasting clothes, couches. Confucius believed that humans could achieve perfection if they followed the rules of appropriate behavior.This is much like the book of Leviticus in the Bible where writers got carried away defining precise norms for human conduct. Confucius makes clear that compassion is the law’s guiding force, but he often overemphasized the design for how humans were to behave. (I will comment on this tension between the law and the heart later.) Xin (Integrity)I am also not sure what this means. I suspect it means modesty, cleanliness, not over-promising, accountability and personal responsibility. Confucius is best known for his emphasis on loyalty (Zhong) and filial piety (Xiao). LoyaltyOften the phrase, “Might makes right” is attributed to Confucius, but that is not what he said. Rather he said a superior should be obeyed because of his moral rectitude. Loyalty does not mean subservience, because reciprocal loyalty is demanded from the superior as well. Confucius wrote “a prince should employ his minister according to the rules of propriety; ministers should serve their prince with faithfulness.” A Ruist scholar, Mencius said, “When the prince regards his ministers as his hands and feet, his ministers regard their prince as their belly and heart; when the prince regards his ministers as his dogs and horses, his ministers regard him as robber and enemy.” An incompetent ruler should be overthrown.With that said, a good Ruist is expected to remonstrate to his superiors and a ruler should accept a minister’s advice. In later times more emphasis was placed on the obligations of the ruled to the ruler. Filial Piety (Xiao)This is the respect of one’s parents and ancestors. It is central to Ruist ethics. It means be good to one’s parents and bring honor to their name by one’s behavior. One should not be rebellious and should show love, respect and support. One should ensure male heirs, uphold fraternity among brothers, advise parents well, display sorrow at the death of one’s parents and carry out sacrifice in their honor after their death.While China has always had a diversity of religious and philosophical thought, filial piety has been central to all of them. Knowing One’s PlacePart of the idea of loyalty and filial piety is the notion of knowing one’s place and performing inside one’s role. Everyone’s job is to play well the role they are given.When asked about how government might bring about social harmony, Confucius said, “There is (good) government, when the prince is the prince and the minister is the minister; when the father is the father, and the son is the son.”Juniors owe reverence to their seniors and seniors have the duty of benevolence and concern toward juniors. The same is true for husbands and wives.There are five relationships that create iconic roles. They are: Ruler to ruled, father to son, husband to wife, elder brother to younger brother, friend to friend. Specific duties are prescribed to each role in these five relationships. In all relationships high reverence is reserved for elders. In Rusim there is much emphasis on human perfection or the superior man (Junzi). In our world the term might be “gentleman.” Junzi in Chinese society is second only to the sage. There are many characteristics of the Junzi. They don’t have to have wealth or high status. They tend to speak less and do more. They are loyal, obedient, knowledgeable and self-disciplined. They gain inner peace through virtue. It is the Junzi who sustains the functions of good government and social status based on ethical values. The Junzi enforces his rule over his subjects by acting virtuously. Government behaves like a family, the Junzi being a beacon of filial piety.   Rectification of NamesRuism makes a big deal over calling things by the right names. Many mistakes are made in human communication by misspeaking and mishearing. Knowing the proper words to use is important to the Chinese.Social disorder comes from the failure to perceive, understand and deal with reality. The Jinzu considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately and also what he speaks be spoken in the right tone or voice.Of great significance is Ruism’s emphasis on advancement according to merit, not pedigree. This replaces nobility of blood with nobility of virtue. This was the purpose of giving examinations on the five books. The person’s who merited a high score were given significant responsibilities in government and guaranteed a good life. The practice of meritocracy still exists today in Chinese culture, including Taiwan, Singapore, Viet Nam and Korea. Now I have laid out most of the foundation for my quest. They quest has many parts. The first part is to listen to the I-Ching. The second is to place the pieces of our journey to Utah on a metaphorical table and try to put the pieces together as if these pieces formed a mystical message to me about the current state of my life, my next set of challenges and its ultimate meaning. The third is to piece together Chinese metaphysics with my own version of Christianity.I will begin with the third first. I am a Buddhist in that I believe Dukkha or suffering is a part of life, that we make most our own misery by wanting, expecting, hoping and believing. I am a Christian who believes that we worry over the silliest things, making ourselves unhappy, when we could be like the lilies of the field.I am Ruist, who believes that we should discover our talents through life’s tests and that we should be given our roles in life based on our merit.I am a Christian who believes in the certain Salvation that comes from following the teachings of Jesus. This salvation, for me has nothing to do with eternal life. It is the salvation that redeems shame and transforms it into honor; that takes the status ladder of social hierarchies and lays it flat on the ground; that uses mistakes and failures as opportunities to learn and create, not as reasons to punish and blame. Salvation comes when we confess our brokenness, our confusion, our ineptness. It comes when we see the hopelessness of achieving perfection for ourselves and also see that everyone is the same, broken and unable to be fixed in this life. It is when we see our shared imperfection that we understand that all humans are the same, none better than any others. This vision of compassion and social justice is our salvation and it can happen right here on this earth, in this life. When we see this and confess our sins, we are saved from the better than/less tortuous world that comes from a competitive, perfectionistic, damning society, and we are free to look anyone and everyone in the eye with equanimity and compassion. Once we discover compassion for ourselves and others, we are free.And this is what Buddha said. Our greatest human emotion/virtue is compassion. When we discover this place, we are free. Buddha and Jesus both tell us that we cannot control life or hold onto the perfect feeling of compassion. It comes to us by grace and just as it comes, it goes and we begin again our search for this magic place where we belong, standing equal to all others, broken and open and understanding. This place again is compassion.I am a Ruist and a Buddhist in that I am not focused on life after death. I too see my ego as the problem and believe that death will eventually rescue me from my need to defend it and that my escape from my ego will indeed be a blessing. In the meantime, the more I can focus on understanding empowering and loving those around me, the more peace and love I will find on this side of the river Styx. And that’s all I can know and all that I can have any influence over and even then I know very little and can find self-restraint and self-control only for fleeting moments.I am a Ruist in that I connect to the eternal by talking with my ancestors. I believe I carry on the genetic gift/burden of my parents and ancestors. I do the best to find ways to use my gifts to contribute to others and I do my best to overcome my inherited character flaws in hopes that I can move the character needle a tick or two forward and pass on this genetic piece as an improved version of my genes to the next generation.In the process of struggling with the worst of myself, I find it helpful to imagine my father, his father and his father having a conversation with one another and me. Each of them know exactly what it is in myself that I aim to conquer. They also know I will certainly lose, yet they advise me, root for me and take delight in the improvements I make over their version of the genetic archetype.In my conversations with my mother, brothers and sister, I have many regrets. I made life harder for all of them. Sometimes I see my mother watching over me, admonishing me to do better. And of course she is right. I can.I think my conversations might be similar to the Ruists conversations with their ancestors. Like them I hope to bring honor to my ancestors and do my duty to serve my family and those I love.I am a Christian who is grateful for the Bible and all its contradictions. I don’t believe the Bible makes very many clear statements. To me it is a compilation of oral history that came from many generations of retelling stories around tribal camp fires, until eventually, centuries after the fact, the stories were written down by authors who tried to demonstrate that the spiritual quest is confusing and that spiritual reality has room for many points of view. Hence, the two stories or creation contradict each other. The first says that man is made in God’s image and he is good. The second says that man sinned against God by eating from the fruit of wisdom and that because of that man will forever suffer and struggle with evil.Both can’t be correct and yet I believe they are. Like the Buddhists, I believe that real spiritual truths are paradoxes with propositions that contain their opposites. Buddhists believe that all religions are good and that there is no one true way. Buddhists and Ruists see their religions as compatible with most other religions whose aim is compassion, civility and kindness.My Christianity is Buddhist and Ruist in that my version sees that they are all paths to the same place and tolerance is essential to any true religion.Buddhism and Ruism form a paradoxical truth for me. They oppose one another, just like the two versions of the Creation story in Genesis. Ruism contends that we are good and life is a blessing. Buddhists contend that life sucks and that we make ourselves miserable. Ruists say that we can be perfect and find the path to righteousness through correct behavior. Buddhists say that we can never comprehend the infinite and that perfection is impossible and existence is constant chaos.Both Buddhist and Ruist contend that there is something in the infinite that provides a way to live. The Buddhist suggests that it is something like Aristotle’s “Golden Mean” or what the Buddhists call the “Middle Way.” The Ruist suggest that it is a prescribed path of playing correctly the role we are assigned in life.Christians too believe in “A Way: Study the Bible; listen to Jesus; love others; know God is love and join God by embodying God’s love in our daily lives.”I am a Buddhist who believes that we are not separate beings. We cannot be separated from our context. Our individual egos are an illusion or delusion. Our best path is to stop defending and protecting our egos, put our weapons down and open our arms.I am Ruist in that I believe our preconception with competition and punishment is the problem and that seeing our mistakes and those of others as mistakes, not definitions of character is how we should help one another learn to behave. I see all of us as wanting to do our part, contribute to the good and that if we look for this part of humanity in others, we will find it. We can appeal to that part and make suggestions for better ways to behave and contribute.I think this is what Christ taught when he said, “Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.”I am taken by the Buddhist concept of equanimity in the face of change. We are going to feel all our emotions strongly from time to time. Our emotions will change. Our circumstances will too. If we can simply be patient, detach ourselves a bit, observe and not judge, see our wants as silly and not a way to any kind of lasting happiness and know that love, not happiness is our goal, then we can have some measure of peace.Part of the concept of equanimity is to avoid judging and evaluating. Rather than take a side, Buddhists describe their experience and avoid judgment.My reading of the Adam and Eve story is similar. We humans get in trouble when we take on God’s role of determining between good and bad and judging how others behave. When we take on this role of judge/evaluator, we can become punitive and competitive, taking us away from compassion and cooperation. With this interpretation of what a bite of the apple means in Genesis, Buddhist and Christians agree. Again, this is Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount.I am a Ruist in that I too believe it is all about relationships. What matters in life is how we treat other people and how we play the roles that life gives us. I too believe that life’s crises don’t define us as much as how we fix and serve tea, how we dress, and in the tone of voice we use to speak. It is in these small tasks of daily living where we define our character and reveal our true selves.My grandfather had a small clay molded paper weight of three monkeys. One with its hands over his eyes, another with his hands over his ears and the third with his hand over his mouth.One day, my five year old self was playing at his house with my cousins. I was the loudest, most demanding and complaining of the group of children. He pulled me aside, showed me this statue and said, “David, you should behave like these monkeys, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”What he said puzzled me. I wondered why he would want me to be like a monkey. I didn’t give it much thought until five years ago at the age of 64, my cousin Ann reminded me of this story that I suspect she overheard and she gave me this paper weight that she gathered from his house after both of our grandparents were dead.And now here I am reading what Confucius said about how we should treat others and if we can do this, we will find “The Way.” Remember Confucius wrote: “One should see nothing improper, hear nothing improper, say nothing improper and do nothing improper.”I’m beginning to understand what my grandfather told me. And I agree with both him and Confucius.I also especially appreciate how Buddhism transforms what seems to be a tragic view of life into an exciting opportunity. Yes, things are always changing. The universe is constantly expanding and we have no control over what happens in our lives. And silly us, we try to influence and control the future, which causes us great pain.Here is what we miss when we try to control life and fail and want to give up. Yes, the game always changes and we are often frustrated. But if we can see reality as it is, in the moment, we can play. We can do things that change and co-create along with the Heavens. These things that we can do and create do not amount to much, nor do they have much influence in the cosmic picture, but when these things join with compassion and equanimity which are eternal, we can feel what it is like to be part of the infinite and join with the eternal. Buddha, this makes sense to me. These are the principles I want to use on this trip to examine myself, challenge myself and investigate what the universe is saying to me in our mystic conversation on the trip to Utah. This sums up what I consider to be the spiritual foundation for my quest. Now, I want to put the pieces of the puzzle on the table that came from our four-day trip to Utah.These are they: 1. The story of the lost boys, Paul and Tom. 2. My visit to Rose Hill Cemetery. 3. My visit with Robert who appeared to be close to death to me. 4. The deluge of rain in Dallas. 5. The speeding ticket we got crossing the Texas plains. 6. The hail beating our car like a drum. 7. Poor planning of the trip to Escalante. 8. Disappointed in Nucla. 9. The journey through the ghosts of the Hoodoos in Capital Reef State Park on Highway24. 10. The dangerous joining on Highway 12: (a) the deer crossing the road (b) the cows next to the road (c) the skunks we ran over on the road. 11. The hike through the slot canyon. 12. The exquisite meal at Escalante Outfitters Café. I set these out on the table now.  After we return from China, I will go back to them and see if I have any better way to understand them.  The Journey BeginsOur plan was to fly to Atlanta, then to LAX. We were to spend the night at an airport hotel and board a plane to San Francisco at 6:00 A.M., then a plane to Beijing at 11:00 A.M. on November 1, 2015.Flight to Atlanta, no worries. We sat opposite the gate for our LAX flight. I cleared my email & Marietta read a book on her I-Pad. At ten minutes before the flight was scheduled to leave, I looked up to see the host Delta airlines start to close the door to the gate. I raced over to the gate. Marietta’s head remained in her book. The host closing the door said, “Sorry, the plane is loaded you can’t get on.” I screamed, “Marietta.” She came. Another man the host recognized came to get on and she let us all on the plane. (Another omen? Or a warning about how easy it is to lose one’s way) The flight went well. I wrote and Marietta watched a movie.The plan landed. We met John and Rita at the hotel, had dinner, got up at 4:00 A.M., made the 6:00 flight to San Fransisco and the Beijing flight at 11:00 A.M. Marietta bought us a seat with more leg room. I took Benadryl and slept most of the way. Marietta, not a wink. She read books the whole way. When we arrived in Beijing I felt drugged and Marietta was exhausted. We had to wait inside the airport for two hours for our group to gather. We were Bus 5.Our bus took us to a dinner restaurant. There, the restaurant served us authentic Chinese food. I’m not sure how to describe the food. Waiters brought dishes full of one type of food, always a large bowl of sticky white rice, always spinach, often strips of delicious braised eggplant, sometimes bits of chicken, pork or beef mixed with a vegetable, usually ten dishes or more. Three or more dishes were some form of noodle dish. Never any dessert. Sometimes watermelon. Only once did the watermelon taste sweet and similar to July/August melons I love. But it was November after all. We were part of the table 15. We sat at a round table. Dishes were placed on a lazy Sarah and we spun the lazy Sarah and served ourselves. We conversed some with our table mates, but not much.After eating, Bus 5 took us to our hotel. The hotel was an excellent, modern new four-star hotel. Its only problem was that the air-conditioning was turned off for the year and our rooms were 78°F. We usually sleep at 68° or below.Though our exhaustion brought on sleep quickly, we were awake and restless after about four hours sleep. Morning wake-up call came at 6:30 and we awoke barely refreshed.The morning of the first day, our guide loaded his twenty nine jet-lagged weary travelers on our large greyhound size bus, Bus 5, for our trip to Peace Park, Beijing’s version of Central Park. Our guide informed us that the Chinese prefer communal exercise to exercising alone and they prefer to exercise outdoors, rather than in a gym. Once at the perk, he told us to expect to see many Chinese engaged in their daily exercise routines.As we unloaded from our Bus 5, we were confronted with people moving. A seventy year old man in a sweat suit sat on the ground, one leg curled under him and another extended straight in the air above his head. He moved from that pose to the splits. Ten feet from him, an older woman used a rail fence as a prop for stretching, but not just as a ballet bar, but for glut stretches and as a rigid brace to push against for a hip and back massage.A group of musicians and onlookers formed a circle, surrounding a dancing woman in her fifties, dressed in a colorful knee length green skirt with black stockings, a red jacket and a royal blue silk blouse. The musicians played and she danced a graceful set of slow steps and poses.Another group of women stood next to a boom box that played a, to them, familiar Chinese song with which they sang along. One sat in a wheelchair holding a microphone with a yellow handkerchief attached by a rubberband to the top of the microphone.Further into the tree filled, well manicured park a group of about 30 women danced a choreographed dance with what looked like a cloth paddleball racket, balancing a ball. Their movements were graceful, slow and synchronized to music.Two men played catch with what looked like a foosball, but they only used the backs of their hand to throw and catch the ball.Hundreds of people walked through the park. I only saw one man practicing Tai Xi. When I was taught Tai Xi the goal was to coordinate my movements with my breathing. This twenty something year old slowly, very, very, slowly picked up a foot and raised the opposite hand and placed it back in place and repeated the same motion with the other foot and opposite hand.I recognized this particular Tai Xi movement because Hank, my Tai Xi teacher from New Orleans, taught it to me. I stood some fifty yards from this man and tried to move in rhythm with him. I coordinated each of my movements with my breath, as I was taught. It took me five seconds or so between my exhaling and picking up my foot to inhaling and placing it down again on the ground. His foot and opposite hand were in the air for at least thirty seconds. He had begun his movements before I got there. I meditated in this way for fifteen minutes or so. When I finished, he was still at it and when I came back to this spot forty-five minutes later, he remained in the same movement trance.Our guide explained that most of the people in the park were older, retired folk, coming to Peace Park for exercise as part of their daily ritual.It was comfortable sweater weather, 55° F on this November morning. Our guide said that most of these people would be here on a cold 20° F day in January, bundled in warm clothes and following the same routines.Everywhere I turned in the park I saw women with brooms sweeping sidewalks and picking up gum wrappers, cigarette butts and other litter. The park was clean and well kept.(In addition to opium in the 1800s and McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chickens of today, we have exported cigarettes and most of the Chinese adults seem hooked.)After about ninety minutes in Peace Park, we loaded back onto Bus 5. This was the day we were to go to the Great Wall. The second day we would visit Tienamen Square and the Forbidden City and a neighborhood in Beijing where families lived in small quadrangled communities sharing a courtyard and toilet.I don’t want to waste time trying to describe these sites. Others have described much better than I can. I do want to write about how the 6000 years of Chinese civilization impacted me. The Chinese invented paper, gunpowder, iron and printing. They were the first to sail to America and around the Pacific. They were the first to use money as a medium of exchange. They had the first written holy books. Their religions are not necessarily competitive. Ruism is not considered by most Chinese as a religion. It is a description of how to live a moral life. Buddhism and specifically Taoism is a religion that was imported from India. It too did not consider itself to be the one true religion, but merely one path to the divine.Over the thousands of years of consistent symbols, rituals and traditions, the Chinese built layer upon layer of civilization, using Buddhist and Confucius thought as a guide for life.Ancient Chinese believed that there were nine layers in the universe with earth at the bottom. The universe consisted of three major parts: heaven, earth and people. Nature had repetitive cycles and an order of how things were arranged. Feng Shui described the proper natural way that humans should organize form and color in their towns, homes, farms, factories and government buildings.If humans imitate nature in their creations and designs, they will live in harmony with the gods. Yes, there were gods, but not one god. There was a pantheon of gods that were associated with nature. The sun god, the rain god, the ocean god, the mountain god, the god of the harvest, the river god, etc.Each god had a temple. The Chinese believe, like Odysseus, that the gods must be attended to properly if one was to have success. The Emperor’s primary duty was to attend properly to the gods on behalf of his people.Imagine how easily the Emperor was manipulated by his ministers and the priests. The Emperor surely felt overwhelmed from time to time by the burden of ruling. So he might gladly be distracted by his ceremonial duties so that the ministers could make decisions on his  behalf and the priests could receive sacrifices (or booty) from the Emperor.The point of all of this is that ideas like the nine layers of heaven were replicated over and over in Chinese buildings and art. For example, the doors to the forbidden city have nine bolts in rows across the doors, nine animals on each gable of the roof of the Emperor’s palace and nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine and a half rooms in the forbidden city. Everything created symbolized something in their metaphysical view of nature and the universe. Each generation embraced these symbols and then added another layer of creativity that used the symbols in another way.Mao, in his little Red book, adapted Ruist sayings for his purposes. And still the basic message is the same: persevere, don’t blame or judge others, all people deserve respect; the superior person shares and has compassion; and revolution will come when rulers fail to respect their people.Even today Chinese ruist work ethic and respect for authority dominate Chinese life. A twenty-story apartment building is built in six weeks. Their Olympic stadium, called the Bird’s Nest is an architectural marvel. Chinese cities are tearing down miles of blocks of old post World War II buildings and rebuilding rows of prefabricated high-rise apartment buildings. Major highway, subway or electric power plants are being built at an amazing pace.The Chinese culture has clearly supported an intelligence capable of overtaking the rest of the world, now that Deng Xioa Peng decided to open China to the world. No country has ever moved so many people out of poverty so fast. Their art may be hurt by censorship and oppression of the free flow of ideas, but their science and ingenuity is just beginning to demonstrate what it can do.As to mystery and the superstition that I came here to understand, it is not clearly evident. I don’t see it in modern China so much. The Emperor who buried himself with the clay figures of his army and court clearly is not enjoying eternal life as a god in heaven. Modern archeology makes the superstitions of dynastic China silly to its own people.Chinese schools teach calculus, science and accounting instead of Confucius.The principles of design found in Feng Shui and in nature still hold sway in Chinese architecture and design. The work ethic, the principles of emotional restraint, disciplined living, and the promotion of gracious kind and respectful behavior remain prominent in Chinese life.Chinese, according to our guides, Sharp and Peter, and our Chinese fellow travelers, remain very class conscious, even more than we in the U.S.All life is organized around the family, the education of the children (or child since often there was only one child per family for a time) and the care and support of parents.I told one of the Chinese, eating with us every day at our table, about the      I-Ching and she didn’t know what I was talking about. So as to my quest to try to understand life through mysticism, I have not yet found my teacher yet.This is not to say that the mystical approach to life is not powerful. Even a non-believer like Rita was affected by my daily consultation with the I-Ching. Two days ago I asked the I-Ching for guidance about how to approach the day. I was very tired. My back and hip hurt. I was wondering whether or not to stay in the hotel for the day.The I-Ching’s answer was hexagram number three, Difficulties pile up. Horse and Wagon part. The traveler is forced to unhitch. The I-Ching clearly told me not to go. But my mother went to visit the Terra Cota Soldiers in 1991 and liked that part of her visit to China better than any other. That was to be this day’s excursion. So I decided to go. I went. My back and hip were no worse for wear from the walking about the museum buildings. I was glad I went. For me the I-Ching clearly gave me wrong advice.Rita’s response to the reading demonstrates the power of suggestion that can come from a superstitious thought. All day on the trip she worried that our bus was going to wreck or break down. It didn’t.For me this demonstrates that using mystical ideas can open us to new ideas, ideas we might never have considered. And when we do, we are likely to combine our fears with superstitious suggestion.If we can avoid the knee-jerk response to focus on our fears, however, I still believe that perhaps mystical ideas can expand our mind and our perspective. November 9, 2015, I threw the I-Ching for this day. Sharp, our guide, had promised that today’s trip into the three tribes gorge on the Yangtze would be the highlight of our trip. We would see a mock wedding in full wedding dress. We would see monkeys and waterfalls and exposed sheer cliffs. The I-Ching agreed. I threw hexagram one, the Creative. It said, “the creative works sublime success… The creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony…”Not for me. My back hurt. Walking in the middle of hordes of people took the magic of this place away from me. Yes, there were photo ops, but most of them were in some way staged by actors, pretending to live here. We all stood in line with our cameras to take our turn at snapping the shutter. The pace was back breakingly slow with lots of standing and looking.Hexagram #1 addressed the great man and promised him success. Perhaps I am not a great man. Yes, this place had its own unique charm and beauty I suppose, but it took a man superior to me to enjoy it among the some 2000 tourists that descended upon this spot that had more in common with Dollywood than it did with the Appalachian Trail.I felt like either I was failing to appreciate the mystical relationship I have with the universe or the I-Ching was failing to live up to its billing.I’m beginning to wonder if I’m missing the point of a tour like this one. I am traveling on a boat carrying 300 paying passengers and most often in a bus with 29 passengers plus two guides and a driver. I eat each meal at table 15 with the same nine people.Perhaps China is not the point of the tour. Perhaps it is the story of my fellow travelers. As Confucius and Buddha say it is all about relationships and family and how we show interest and appreciation for one another.I find the people at my table to be among the most interesting people on our trip. There are nine of us, as I mentioned, me and Marietta; John and Rita, our dear friends from our condo in Fawngrove, Park City, Utah; Karl, Sarah and Marty, father, mother and daughter, Karl a fifty-plus year old computer programmer working for IBM, Sarah, his wife, a hospital radiological nurse and Marty their recently divorced thirty-year old daughter working as a radiology programmer in Holland. They are second and third generation Korean Americans. Tim and Angela, complete our table. They both migrated to the U.S. from China, met at the University of Texas, married and settled in Austin. Tim is seventy now, retired as an engineer. Angela is a retired nurse.  Tim serves public schools in Austin as a volunteer tutor. They love to travel and have been on many tours all over the world. This is their eighth tour of China. They are bi-lingual in English and Chinese and they know well Chinese food and culture. (Except Angela never heard of the I-Ching.)Rita and John married almost fifty years ago. John worked for Dupont and Rita taught school, until their son and daughter come along and when Rita saw that John’s bonus check was more than her teaching salary. Dupont moved them from Texas to Denmark, to Geneva, to Pennsylvania, to Connecticut to Wilmington. John retired from Dupont and worked for a Korean mining company. He managed a mine in Rock Springs, Wyoming. That is when they discovered and fell in love with Park City.They love art, culture and good food. They are always excited about travel. Rita’s back and hip are about as bad as mine. She carefully plans and organizes each trip she takes. She has never met a stranger. When I am avoiding social contact, Rita and Marietta are working the crowd with John right with them. I sit in the back of the room, writing, looking up from time to time.They struggle to balance their roles of grandparents and parents with their obligations in Park City with their love for travel. They yearn to love their in-law children and can’t exactly find the recipe but that won’t stop them from trying. They are a complete success as grandparents with four grandchildren, all girls, the oldest is eleven, the youngest less than a year.They are full of energy, you can’t wipe a smile from their faces and like us, they are close to 70 and love to ski.Somehow Rita and Marietta get along, even though they are both alpha females and both need to be in control. John rolls with the punches. Me, I’m self-absorbed and anxious and try not to show it. The two couples are comfortable with each other and seem to do well together.I will leave our fellow travelers for a moment to note two things from the trip. Yesterday, when we saw the Three Tribal Gorges and the falls, the guided pointed out to us two caves along a sheer cliff wall with boxes in them about 500 feet above us. These were family graves. Below, there were others. It seemed impossible that coffins might be lifted up to these caves thousands of years ago. The guide told us that no one understood how this was done. “It is a mystery,” she said. “It means they very important family. The higher they are, the more protection and the closer they are to the gods.”Today, we docked in a small town and on the mountain above the town were several mausoleums built into the side of the mountain above the square vegetable plots carved into the mountain. Again the same explanation. The higher up the mountain, the more prestige of the family. The other graves in the caves could not be tended but these could be with some great effort. It is a family’s duty in China to tend to the graves of their ancestors. One of the forces holding people on the land and away from the cities was the cultural expectation that they tend to these graves.Another matter of note, today the I-Ching regained some credibility. I ate some lychee fruit for dessert last night and I was awakened in the night by the fierce train it created in my stomach. This morning, when contemplating whether or not I should leave the boat and go on the excursion on a small flat bamboo river boat, I consulted the I-Ching. Its response was hexagram 9, The Taming Power of the Small. “The hexagram presents a configuration in which the strong element is temporarily held in leash by a weak element. It is only through gentleness that this can have a successful outcome.”So I ate cereal and banana for breakfast and stayed in my room and wrote while the others went on an adventure up one of the Yantzee tributaries. This was a good choice.  That day my colon still suffered with aftershocks from the night before. Now I will return to John and Rita. Last night something strange happened. We still don’t understand what happened. Like us, John and Rita bicker sometimes, but generally they are very warm and kind to each other.Last night our boat was in the first lock down the Yangtze River. Most of the passengers were out on deck watching the lock open giant steel doors to let our boat into the lock chamber, close the doors, fill the chamber with water, lifting our boat up some 100 feet to the next river level above. John and Rita stood on the top deck by the rail, awestruck by the engineering marvel in front of us, when Rita disappeared without a word.We watched for some ten more minutes before we returned to our cabin. We opened our door with our room key as usual. John inserted his key but his door wouldn’t open. He knocked. He knocked again. No one answered. He tried his key again. He used our phone to call Rita in the room. No answer.“She’s in there,” John said. “I must have done something to make her mad. But I have no idea what I did.”“No, she’s not in there,” I said. “Let me try to use your key and see if I can open it.” I tried. The red light came on, the sign for no admittance and I said, “You must have demagnetized your key. Go check with the front desk.”The manager came with a master key and opened the door.Rita sat on the bed working on pictures she had taken that day on her computer. Ten minutes later there was something else happening with the river lock that we wanted to see. We all traipsed back to the upper deck.Neither John nor Rita offered an explanation for what happened. John walked about with a countenance similar to my typical self. “You get what you get. I’m not making any effort to be nice unless I’m so moved.” His face had lost his usual smile.Not another word was said about it. We, for once, were wise enough not to bring it up.The next day, the smiling enthusiastic John and Rita knocked on our door to go to breakfast with us. At breakfast I sat next to Marty, who sat next to her father, Karl, who sat next to her mother (Karl’s wife), Sarah. Sarah began to talk about their 26-year-old son, Kenny, living in Boston.“He majored in restaurant and hotel management,” she said. “He is very charming and social.”“Last year,” Karl said, “We took our family on a Caribbean cruise over the Christmas holidays. I stayed in a room with my son. After one day, girls came knocking on our door looking for Kenny. The boy is talented that way.”“Yes, he’s adorable,” Sarah said. “But he has trouble with money. He’s not like Marty. She is very careful with money. Alex, he may let his bank account balance get as low as $14. His father doesn’t know how often I check his bank account and add money so he won’t have to pay late fees. When he comes for a visit, I have to pay him what he would’ve made at work, because he’s not earning any money visiting us, and of course, I have to buy his ticket.“In graduate school he was at the top of his class and he had the choice of interning at any hotel in the world he wanted. He chose a five-star $650 a night hotel in Bali. His second choice was a hotel in Switzerland. We had to pay his plane ticked to Bali and his living expenses there.“He made no money as an intern and the average monthly wage at the hotel was $200 per month. He found a tiny apartment for $300 per month. He has no idea about money.”“He shops only in New York at Barneys, “Karl said. “His jeans cost $270.”“He had my credit card until last year,” Sarah said. “I took it away from him and said you are 25 now, an adult. You should pay your own bills. He was fine with that. He just doesn’t worry about money. He loves what he does. He consulted with a restaurant entrepreneur last year developing a food truck restaurant business in New York. He was on Good Morning America demonstrating the operations and service of the food truck. He’s not making much money but he’s having fun. He works hard and loves what he’s doing. Marty likes her independence.”“And you like to take care of your children,” Marty fired back, betraying a rare flash of emotion in her face. “You paid for my ticket on this trip. You pay for me to fly back to L.A. You would pay me like you do Alex if I didn’t have six weeks paid vacation. You love being Mom.”“What do you do in Denmark?” I asked, thinking a change of subject was in order.“I’m a cardiac sonographer.  I take sonographic movies of the heart.”“I’ll bet you are better at reading sonograms than most cardiologists,” I said thinking about operating room nurses who only do surgery day in and day out and often know more about surgical procedures than some doctors who may only do surgery once a week.“No, it’s not like in the U.S. where cardiologists may only read my reports and not look at the sonograms. In Denmark, doctors look at the sonograms. They are very smart and careful there. I have a lot of respect for the doctors I work with.” As we got up from the table Karl sidled up to me and in a soft voice asked, “Do you ever consult families with adult children?”“Yes, I often do,” I answered.“Would you talk with me, Sarah and Marty?”“Of course, you can come to my room. I can pull a chair in from the balcony and Marietta can give us some privacy there.”“When can we do that?” he asked.“I’m not feeling well enough to go out on today’s excursion. If you can tolerate me taking a bathroom break when I need to, then you can come by my room, 505, at say 10:00 if you don’t mind missing the outing.”“No, this would be worth it,” he said. At 10:00 I was in my room writing. I had just finished a trip to the bathroom and felt emptied out. I heard a knock on the door, opened it and found father, mother and daughter at my door.“Come in,” I said. “Sarah can you and Karl take the small couch; Marty you can have the desk chair and I will take the aluminum chair from the balcony.”We took our respective seats and I began with my usual, “How can I help you?”“Marty and her mother,” Karl said, “are having some trouble, as you might have surmised from our conversation at breakfast. I wondered if you could help them work out their hard feelings.”“You are in this too,” Sarah said. “You take her side.”“I try not to take a side,” Karl said. “That’s why I wanted us to talk to Dr. McMillan.”“This is all nonsense,” Marty said. “I’m a thirty year old divorced woman. I’ve been married five years. I don’t need parents taking care of me anymore. I don’t want or need your advice or money.”“We don’t give you money,” Sarah said.“You paid for this trip and for all my plane tickets home,” Marty said.“Well yes, that’s because we want to see you,” her mother answered. “And you wouldn’t come because you couldn’t afford the ticket and we could. So that’s all.”“But mother, we talk on Skype every day. I don’t need to come home.”“But we miss you,” Sarah answered.“This is why I don’t want to have children,” Marty said.“Why is that?” I asked feeling that we were about to embark on a path well-worn between Marty and her mother.“Because, I don’t want to use guilt on them to make them be how I want them to be and I know me. I am just as controlling as she is. I would do this to my children too.”“You don’t know what you are saying,” Sarah said. “Children are such a joy. You and your brother have been the lights of our lives. You are my heart.”“I don’t want to be your heart,” Marty said. “I want to live my own life. I want to find my own way, a new way, not your way or your parent’s way. I don’t know where I’m going. I admit I’m lost. I failed at my first marriage because I was so tied to you and because he thought like you did. He wanted children and I didn’t. I want my life to be an adventure. You taught me to love travel. You gave me my wandering spirit, my longing for something new. I wanted to be an artist and major in art. You convinced me to major in biology and train for a medical job, like the one you have, reading MRI’s for doctors. I do more or less the same. I’m tired of living your life. I want to live my own.”“I have a good life,” Sarah said. “I love my husband, my job and my children. My parents were poor. We have worked hard to give you opportunities and to allow you to have a childhood that I didn’t have. I’ve worked since I was fifteen. I never asked my parents for anything, because they didn’t have it. What’s wrong with my life?”“Nothing, but it is your life. You chose security first. And you have done well. But I am a single woman. I don’t want to be tied to a husband. I don’t want children. I don’t want my longing for adventure to disappoint another man. You’ve told me not to give milk away, because a man, who can have milk for free won’t buy the cow.”“Yes, that’s true,” Karl said.“Well I’m not for sale and I don’t see why I have to buy a pig when from time to time I want a little sausage. I don’t need ‘a man’.”“I don’t understand you,” Sarah said. “My parents brought me to this country so that I could have a better life and so that I could give a better life to you. And here we are. I give you a better life and you reject it.”“You came to America to be free,” Marty said. “That’s what America stands for, Freedom. And I am free to make my own choices.”“Free to reject generations of family values,” Karl said. “We live for our family. You have been our purpose. We have assumed you would carry on for us, like we have for our parents.”“I will take care of you, when you need me to,” Marty said.“Yes, but who will take care of you when you are old?” Sarah asked.“I don’t know. That’s part of my adventure. I’m taking a risk, I know. But it is my risk to take.”“Dr. McMillan,” Karl said turning to me. “You have been awfully quiet.”“Yes, I have,” I agreed. “I’m taking in the love I see you have for each other. You care so much that it hurts. From what I heard about your son at breakfast, it’s my guess, Karl, that you want to stop subsidizing his extravagant lifestyle. Is that right?”“Yes.”“Is that why Sarah says you are not on her side, because you seem to agree with Sarah when it comes to Marty?”“Yes and no,” he said.“I want both of my children to be free and independent like we are. I feel strong as a man that we have been able to take care of our children and our parents. I want my children to have this feeling.”“I’ve said I will take care of you when the time comes,” Marty said. “I can’t speak for Alex.”“Yes, I know,” Karl responded. “And I know that if you are to be independent, you will make choices that I don’t support. So I didn’t support your choice to divorce. These has never been a divorce in either of our families. You are the first.”“But I won’t be the last,” Marty answered.“Perhaps and you are right. Your life is yours, not ours. But we can’t help but worry.”“I know you tell me that all the time. You have your life. Live yours and let me live mine,” Marty said.“I’m trying to do that,’ Karl said, “but I can’t satisfy your mother. I built her a master suite addition on our house. We have a 4,000 square foot house in L.A.. That didn’t make her happy.”“Yes, we have a big house,” Sarah said. “But our children are gone and the house is empty now.”“We go on several trips like this a year. We both love travel. But you still are not happy.”“A mother is as happy as her saddest child,” Sarah said.“Yes, I’m said. I deserve my sadness,” Marty said. “I deserve to make decisions and have my regrets, learn and try again. I don’t want to be happy. I want to live, grow and learn. I married too quickly because I didn’t want to give my milk away, like you told me. That was a mistake. I divorced a man who never got me. He got you. He liked you, but not me. He didn’t support my interest in art. He only wanted me to work, cook, clean and have babies. At least you, Dad, understood that if mother was to work as hard as she does that you have to help around the house. It didn’t take me long in that marriage to realize I didn’t want to have children with him.”“He is not all men,” Karl said.“No, but I never played with dolls as a girl,” Marty said. “I’ve never loved babies or children. I’m not that maternal.”“I wasn’t either when I was a child,” Sarah said.“But mother here are the facts. I’m not very maternal. I’m divorced. I’m thirty years old. My eggs start becoming infertile at 35. What chance do I have of meeting the right man, like Dad? What chance do I have of meeting him, solidifying a marriage with him and becoming pregnant with a child before I’m 35? And why should I fret about this and feel this pressure when I don’t think I would enjoy being a mother? It just doesn’t make sense to me. Who knows what will happen. I can’t read the future. But for now, this moment, I would like to be satisfied with my real life prospects and I would like for you to support my position.”“I too am sad that Marty may not have children,” I said. “I don’t have children and I regret that. But I’ve found ways to have children in other ways.“I think you have discovered the American dream. Your parents came here to give you options you would never have had in Korea, especially you Karl since your parents came from North Korea. You made the most of their choice and you are prosperous and you have given your parents grandchildren. You have done your part.“Now your daughter is free to make choices you never contemplated. She can develop her artistic talents. She can take risks for her creativity. Babies are not the only things she can make. She is smart, beautiful with a unique style and taste. She can explore the conversation between her work demands, her creative demands and her social needs in ways that were never an option for you. Marty said it. You came here to be free and to give your children choices. Now she has them. You can’t expect her to be really free and make the same choices you would. And if she takes a path never taken by anyone in your family before, you must know that she will have her share of failures. She will often feel lost. These frightening painful feelings are the result of real freedom and this is the gift you have given Marty. She is taking your gift and transforming her life with the pain that comes from risking.“I think, if you choose, you can be proud of her and happy that she is on her hero’s journey.”Sarah began to cry. She got up from the couch, come to Marty’s chair, collapsed on the floor in front of it, put her head in Marty’s lap and between her sobs said, “I can’t help but worry. You’re right. You have to go your own way. And you are. I’m proud of you for standing up to me. I don’t think I could’ve ever done that with my mother.”Marty stroked her mother’s hair and said, “I don’t’ know where I’m going, but you have made me strong. I know I will be alright. Of course, you can worry. But I would like your support.”“You have it,” Sarah said. She stood and Marty stood and they hugged. I wrote this story after that breakfast. I made up the story about the therapy session. At the lunch table the next day Marty stood behind her parents. I motioned with my index finger for her to come over to where I sat. Her face frowned, her shoulders moved back and up. I could tell I did something wrong. She walked around the table and said, “Motioning with your finger like you did is very offensive to Korean people.”“I’m sorry,” I said. I knew she had my narcissistic number. I told her that I wrote this story with her as the protagonist and asked her if she wanted to read it.She showed the obligatory interest, but I felt like I had just made an unforgivable social faux pas and I did not expect that she would show any real interest in my story. Of all the women on the trip she had the greatest feminine power. She was smart, well-dressed, young, beautiful and mysterious. Her oriental look magnified her allure. She frightened me and I promised myself to give her a wide berth for the rest of the trip. I sat next to Angela and Tom at dinner. I asked Angela, “Do you have any children?”“Yes,” she answered. “We have two, both lawyers and both in their thirties a son living in Seattle and a daughter in London. Both began working with big law firms out of law school. My daughter quit after four years, went back to school in England to get certification in education. She works for a non-profit in London to help poor children learn successfully. My son left his law firm to work as an in-house counsel for Amazon. Law firm work demands so much. They expected 100 hours a week. They are much happier now with their work.”“Do you have any grandchildren?”“No, we want grandchildren, but we don’t say anything. They know we want this. We don’t need to say. Do you have any children?” she asked me.“No, we tried to adopt and the birth mother changed her mind and ran off with our money and the child. This devastated us. When we recovered, we felt too old to be parents. We were 45 then, the age of many grandparents. We didn’t think it would be right for us to push two people with bad backs on a child.“How many tours have you been on?” I asked.“Oh, over 50.”“More than that,” Tom said, overhearing my question. This is our eighth trip to China. We’ve been to Europe several times, to Africa, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, Viet Nam, and Korea. We’ve been to every continent except Antarctica and we have a tour booked there next November. We go abroad several times a year.”I wondered if travel filled an empty spot in their lives that otherwise would have been filled if their children gave them grandchildren. They were our age, but to me they seemed older and a bit more frail. They seemed to be a devoted couple pushing the life they had for all it was worth. You may or may not remember that in my discussion about Ruism that Confucius had five principles. I tried to describe them. In my research I found only a few sentences about two of the five, Zhi and Xin and I was not sure that I correctly defined them. I asked Sharp, our tour guide, if he would read my description of them and tell me whether or not I understood them correctly.He took what I wrote and promised to get back to me later. He read my metaphysical descriptions and made time to discuss them with me after our group talent show rehearsal. As we began to talk Debbie, a part of our bus five tour group, overheard us and asked if she might listen in on our conversation“You use the word ‘knowledge’ for Zhi,” Sharp began. “I think the more right word is ‘wisdom.’ Yes, it is wisdom in all things, especially the small things, just as you said. Zhi is about balance and remaining detached or neutral, taking no side but understanding both sides at the same time.“It is about humility, understanding that you are better than the worst and not as good as the best and aspiring to hold this middle place. It is especially about being humble in the face of the Great Nature. Zhi focuses on discovering harmony between man and nature and understanding one’s place in that harmony.“We Chinese have a god of time. The god of time helps us understand our place in nature. Nature’s day is like a human lifetime. While an ant may have a life span of a month, to an ant that may be a long time. We humans are like ants to the Great Nature and the god of time. We are inconsequential, yet part of the Universe. We cannot see clearly the infinite nature of reality. That is Zhi. And yes it includes instruction about small parts of daily living, making menial parts of daily life into a spiritual rituals that unite human living with the wisdom of nature. This is why Confucius was particular in his description of such things as drinking tea and wearing clothes. The superior man follows these rituals in every part of his life.”“What about Xin?” I asked.“You got that right,” he said. “There is not much to say about it.  It is how you do business. It has to do with credit or trust. It requires honesty, integrity, accountability and personal responsibility. You don’t blame others before you blame yourself. It has to do with loyalty as well.“This is how I understand these things. I am not a serious student of Confucius. You use the word Ruism. I have never heard of that. I am a Buddhist. I study Taoist philosophy. We believe in karma and past lives. We humans are here because we have failed. There are many levels of the universe. The earth is the last and lowest level. Our earthly existence is our last chance to get it right.”“This is like what Jews and Christians believe about Adam and Eve’s great fall from the Garden of Eden,” Debbie said.“Yes, exactly,” Sharp answered. “You understand. We missed many chances in our other lives because of our ego.”“What you call ego, Christians might call ‘man’s sinful nature’,” Debbie said.“Yes, that is correct again,” Sharp responded. “And we Buddhist believe like you that if we miss our chance to get it right in this earthly existence, we go to Hell. Christians have Hell too.”“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t believe in Hell. I can’t believe a loving God would condemn people to Hell. That’s one of the things that drew me to Buddhist thought was that I thought Buddhists didn’t believe in Hell.”“There are hundreds of versions of Buddhism,” Sharp said. “Some do not believe in Hell or in good and evil, but see all existence as a whole with every piece having a part, all behavior and things fitting into the same whole.”‘Yes, that’s what I read,” I said.“In my version of Buddhism there are many gods,” Sharp said. “They are all connected, like the parts of a gear box. We need help from each of the gods from time to time. These gods are part of the greater God, and subordinate on the level below the Great Nature. We have lived at these other levels before. For every day we have lived on earth, we have lived a thousand years in heaven on one of its various levels.”“In Buddhist thought how do we make our way back to heaven?” Debbie asked.“Buddhist believe that life has four stages,” Sharp replied. “The first is Chen or birth. The second is maturity. The third is decline and the fourth is death. Everything, even the Yangtze River, goes through these stages.“As we humans move through our lives, we begin very attached, full of desires and wants. Through the struggle to survive, the Great Nature gives us the opportunity to learn the futility of striving. When we mature, we have felt many disappointments. If we have paid attention, we have learned that our desires and our attempts to promote ourselves and our wants are the cause of our suffering. In the moments when we release the ego, detach from our wants and share in the future of our community, friends and family, rather than ourselves, we find Nirvana, real peace. If we discover this place, we find if inner harmony before we die and we develop a meditative practice that keeps us in this place of letting go, then we can move back up onto one of the other levels of the universe, when we die.”“I wonder what you think about this, Sharp,” I said. “In a commentary I read, it said that Confucius wrote his books as a reply or rebuke to Buddhism. Buddhism asserts that happiness as a goal is folly and that the Universe and reality is unknowable and constantly changing in ways we humans can never predict or understand. Striving for success is futile and as long as we strive and want, we will continue to create our own misery. What you just said had some of these elements.“Confucius wanted to say that success and happiness were possible. That life was good and nature was knowable. The path to happiness came from the principles of nature like the cycles of all life. And that if we lived by Nature’s rules, we would find happiness and success.“These two very different versions of life, life as dark, incomprehensible, and often painful versus life can be good if we follow the rules. This presents life as a puzzle solved by righteous living. These two versions of life are similar to the two versions of the creation story in Genesis. The first creation story agrees with Confucius. Life is good. We humans are good, made in God’s image. The second story agrees with Buddha. We humans can’t seem to help ourselves. We create our own suffering and the more we want to be like God, the more miserable we become. This is the ego problem and the fall from the Garden of Eden.“The Bible keeps presenting its readers with these contradictions, asserting each one to be true. It supports slavery in one story and frees slaves in the next. It sets out specific rules to live by in one place and in another says that righteous living, following the rules is not enough.“It seems to me that Buddhism and Confucius are having a conversation like this one. What do you think?”“There are two gods in the Bible,” Sharp said. “Jesus created heaven and earth. That’s one god and a second god threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden. Different gods do different things. This is not mystery to me.“The main path to peace is the same. It is detaching from the ego.”Debbie reentered the conversation, saying, “I’ve been reading a novel by J. M Forester and he said something that appeals to me that seems to be the opposite of this notion of peace through detachment. He said the meaning of human existence comes through connections. It is the connections we make in life that matter. It is how we make these connections, how we nurture and maintain them. It is about caring, loving and connecting, not detaching.”“I don’t disagree with that,” Sharp said. “It is a matter of emphasis. You cannot connect in a healthy way and at the same time try to control others. Your desire for what you want will always compete with what others want. You can love so much easier if you don’t judge or persuade, but instead listen and understand.  The goal of Buddhism is to discover compassion for others instead of convincing others of your way. This leads to better connections.“There are two kinds of connections, good connections and bad. We Buddhists try to have good connections. When we try to have good connections, but they remain bad, we tolerate without judging or reacting. As Jesus says if they slap one cheek, we turn the other cheek and offer that cheek to be slapped.“We do this because we know that the person who slapped us, may still be angry at us for something we did to them in another life. So, we must accept their insult graciously, until they can trust us again.”Marietta motioned for me to join her, John, and Rita for a drink, as I had agreed earlier. I thanked Sharp and left the depth of our metaphysical ruminating for a lighter conversation about the cliffs that rose above us, as we used the Yangtze River to pierce the great mountains on either side of us. Reflecting on this conversation.I was amazed at how fluidly Sharp moved through various metaphysical views, merging them into his own. Karma and past lives are Hindu concepts, yet they are part of Sharp’s religious topography. He used Biblical images and stories, weaving them into his religious landscape. His views of Buddhism and Confucianism merged with all of the above. He, and I think other Chinese, freely borrow from a variety of religious thought to build their own particular version of the metaphysical universe.In Sharp’s view there is no one path, or one right way. Sharp is a Baptist in his way, contending that he has a much right as anyone else to speculate about life after death and how to construct a meaningful human existence. Traveling on a tour puts us in a cocoon of the hospitality industry. The Chinese we meet are paid to serve us. And we are only one of thousands that come into and out of their lives. Something about the expression on the faces of these Chinese discomforts me.Yes, as you imagine, they smile at us a lot. One might think from observing them that the Chinese are happy people. Many foreigners have said this about the Chinese and many people coming to the South of the United States in 1840 said the same thing about negro slaves.The crew gave two talent shows for us during our four nights on the ship. The cast of the shows smiled as they performed, but their smiles seemed false to me. I wondered what feelings were behind these smiles.And why should they genuinely enjoy performing for us. Most of their audiences were overweight and or over fifty. While they were young, beautiful, women and handsome men in their twenties, dressed in costumes from thousands of years earlier.Our tour guide kept emphasizing that we were given authentic Chinese food, as we grazed one buffet after another with german potato salad or french fries or some form of rice noodles that one could find at any Pei Wei restaurant in the U.S. At breakfast they served some Chinese dishes but they also had corn flakes, cheerios, granola, fried eggs and French toast.I felt we got to know authentic Chinese people on the tour just as much as we were offered authentic Chinese food.There was one exception and this was our cabin attendant, Navy, the name he gave himself for us to call him. Of course, he worked for a tip from us. But he was diligent in his work. He eagerly talked with us and seemed to appreciate our interest. He was seventeen. He had worked on this ship for a year. He hoped to work his way up on the ship. He like this job for now, but he hoped for better in the future.He wanted to know my name. He asked questions about Nashville. His broken English didn’t hinder his desire to communicate. I felt he genuinely liked us. The other Chinese seemed to tolerate and manipulate us with a false smile and courteous words.  I couldn’t help but feel that there was so much more to them than they shared. When I finished writing my summary of our conversation with Debbie, I asked her if she would let me read these hand written pages to her to be sure I captured the essence of Sharp’s words. She agreed. I met her in the bar at the same small bar table where we spoke with Sharp the day before. She brought her husband, David with her.I read them my eight hand written pages. She confirmed that I had captured the gist of what was said. She asked about my purpose for writing this. I explained my quest to them. She told me that she had a mystical cosmic story that still puzzled her.Many years ago, she commissioned a four foot tall painting of her father standing in front of a chest of drawers. Several things from her life and her half-brother’s life were sitting on top of the chest of drawers, her silver hair brush and mirror, her brother’s baseball glove and trophy. One top drawer was open, but you couldn’t see what was inside.Her father had five wives. He abandoned three families. He abandoned his first wife while she was pregnant with her half-brother. He abandoned her and her mother, never to pay a penny of child support. He died owing her mother $20,000 of back child support.She had not had any contact with her father for years when she commissioned the painting. It was a gift to her older half-brother. She met her older brother years later when her mother encouraged her father to re-connect with him. Soon after this connection was made, her father abandoned her and her mother.Somehow her father’s absence from her life created an idealized image of him and a longing to know him. She thought her brother shared this longing. She drove the painting from Canada to Pennsylvania in her hatchback. She was right. Her brother loved the painting. She hoped someday that in her imagination she would be able to look inside that top drawer of the chest in the painting and find something meaningful from her father to her.After her father abandoned her (and repeatedly abandoned others) she had no contact with him, until she received a call from a social worker at a nearby hospital many years later. Her father was in need of a heart transplant. He needed a place to live until a donor heart could be located.She went to see him and agreed he could live with her for a few weeks, until he had his operation. He lived with her, had his operation and disappeared again. She didn’t hear from him for years, until one day she received another call from a hospital. Her father was dying. This time he was a long way from her home. She did not like to drive Canadian roads in winter. She took a train, then a bus that stopped at several small towns, until she got to the town of his hospital. She got off the bus and walked to his hospital. She sat in the waiting room for an hour before she found the courage to go to his room.When she opened the door, he thought she was her half-sister. Once he figured out who she was, she said to him, “I forgive you.”He replied, “And I forgive you.”These words stunned her so, that she turned and left. These were the last words they spoke to each other.“I kept wondering,” she said to me, “what the cosmic message was that the painting was sending me. I wanted to get the gift from my father that was in the drawer. I finally got the message after our last conversation. The drawer was empty.” We disembarked from the boat, flew from Chaing Chong to Shanghai, boarded a new bus and rode three hour to Suzkou. Two things of note happened in transit. One was a fight between Marietta and me. The second was a powerful bonding event for our tour group, Bus 5.First, to my fight with Marietta. I was practicing detachment. My mother used the practice of detachment to cope with my father when he embarrassed her, which was often. (In Marietta’s defense, I embarrass her more than she does me).Marietta has a behavior that irritates me. She can’t seem to promptly get out of a car or off a bus, an airplane or leave a restaurant, etc. She sees no purpose in standing in line and on this trip she has constantly lagged the group.I try to cope with this by detaching, by not nagging or being responsible for her to keep up. We have a tour guide, Sharp. He gathers the group and makes a count. It is his job to keep Marietta and the group connected, not mine. So I gave the job to him. I respond quickly when the group makes its next move and I leave Marietta to her own devices. This seemed to work pretty well, I thought. I don’t nag. I’m not embarrassed as I might be and I thought Marietta was fine taking care of herself.I was wrong. As we were about to leave the airport in Nanghui, we took one last “happy room” (bathroom) break. Sharp had us all gathered, except for one. That one was Marietta. We waited and waited. Sharp sent Rita in the bathroom to see about Marietta.My detachment defense faltered. I was embarrassed. When she finally emerged, I walked on a bit irritated, just behind Sharp with Marietta at the back of the pack as usual.When we got to the baggage claim, Marietta came up to me and said, “That’s a stupid way to carry the carry-on luggage.”I replied, “Are you enjoying admonishing me?”“Yes,” she said. “You won’t walk with me. You just go off on your own and ignore me.”“You were doing your usual passive aggressive routine of not keeping up,” I said. “And it embarrasses me.”“My plumbing’s no working. It took a long time,” she said.“It embarrasses me for you to always be the last one in the group,” I said. “Well, you will just have to be embarrassed.”“This is just one time,” I said. “How many times has this happened?”“Twice,” she said. “It hurts my feelings that you won’t walk with me.”“It hurts my feelings that you won’t walk with me and keep up with the group.”“They aren’t going to leave without us,” she said.“Yes, but we could try to cooperate.” No more was said. But I knew Marietta was right. She has a right to tend to her comfort and she was right. I had been ignoring her.The next morning Marietta was up and packed before I was and we walked together down the hall. The second event of note happened on the bus trip between Shanghai and Suzhou. Our local tour guide, Kathy, was holding forth about the history of the locale, something about Marco Polo thinking Suzhou was the pearl in China’s oyster.The night before at the ship talent show, our group sang a round of Frère Jacque, Brother John, morning bells are ringing, adding a verse with the Chinese dynasty lineage as words to this tune. The program would only allow one act per group. Sarah and Karl had offered to sing a duet the Everly Brothers song, Let It Be Me. They were bumped by the Frère Jacque option and didn’t get to sing.In our local guides’ talk she broke into song. One of us responded with a round of the Chinese dynasty lineage. She loved it. She had us all sing it for her. We performed the whole round three times. Then we had Sarah and Karl sing their song and the group sang the chorus along with them.We laughed and laughed. Sharp and our local guide, Yuan Yen, said that we were their best group ever. We were proud of ourselves. Laughing, singing and performing together brought us closer. Our guide, Yuan Yen, (her preferred given name, or her professional name, Kathy), told us something about her background.“I was born in a small village in the north of China on the Yellow River,” she said. “First born of three children. My grandmother was, how you say, thorn in the local communist’s party’s side. She bought products from farmers outside the communist (communal) farm system. She grind her own wheat, bake bread and sell food on road to hungry travelers.“She raise six children. My mother was one of them. I was born in 1981, two years after China begin its one child policy. Mother work as an accountant in the local factory. My father work as a laborer in the factory. Two years after I was born, when my mother pregnant with sister, she had to quit job and disappear. If her pregnancy had been discovered, she would have been forced to abort baby. She had a son two years later. Again she disappear. My grandmother, she take care of me. I spend many weeks without seeing my mother. I remember being taken out into the middle of a cornfield where my mother hid. She explain to me that she play a game of hide and seek and that why she couldn’t come home.“My parents had to pay a fine when they registered the birth of their two children, big fine. My mother could no longer work inside the communist system, because she, how you say, violate one child policy. So, she join her mother in shop selling farm products farmers sneak from the communist farms. She then sold ice cream. Ice cream has big mark up so we could afford the fine. My mother saw I was good with English in school. So she sent me to university in Shanghai. My sister was not so good with school. She good with, how you say, beauty, hair. She own her own cosmetology, is that the word, cosmetology shop. My brother, he join the army. After fifteen years he will move up in army and can get a good job with the government.“When I near to graduate from university my mother consult a marriage arranger. She take my resume with my education, my size, my picture, many things about me, many details. She arranged for me to have blind dates. I had three blind dates. The first I like but he didn’t like me. The second I didn’t like him. The third, my husband, I like so/so and he liked me so/so. We continued to date for two years before we married. He from same village. We not know each other, though we went to same grammar school and the same university in Shanghai. We did not meet until blind date.“I have a six-year-old son now. I don’t get to see my parents much. They live seventeen hours away by car. My parents-in-law help me take care of my son. My husband work as an engineer building tunnels and bridges. It is not like in the states. Engineers don’t make much money.“He’s become a Shanghai man, not like men in the north. He helps with cooking, laundry and cleaning. In Shanghai women look for men with the five C’s, Character, Career, Credit Card, Car and Cook.“In my job I am gone from my son for days. He is very proud that his mother speaks English and is a tour guide. My husband’s father take him to school and pick him up. My mother-in-law take care of him. She want me to have another child, but I’m not so interested.”Frank, one of our group, raised his hand and asked, “Can I ask you a question about another subject?”“Sure,” Yang Yen answered.“Does Jack Ma have much influence with the Chinese government?”“Who is Jack Ma?” she asked.“He is the founder and CEO of Alibaba?” Frank answered.“Oh Alibaba. I know that. On shopping day in China. You know about Chinese shopping day?”“No,” was our shared answer.“It is a lucky day. It is 11/11. All ones. Only good things happen on that day. It is a Chinese holiday. On that day Alibaba sold 94 billion yuan online. Jack Ma. Is that his name? Yes. He very happy that day.”“Sharp do you know Jack Ma?” she asked.“Yes,” Sharp said. “He is the son-in-law of a former Prime Minister. He is one of them, part of the government. The rich government officials use him and Alibaba to launder money.”“Sharp. I will have to talk to you later about that,” Yuan Yen said. Perhaps it was serendipity or perhaps it was synchronicity, but whatever it was, as I packed in Nashville, I looked about for a book to take with me on the trip and quickly, without much thought, I picked up E.O. Wilson’s book Biophilia. I read it on the bus like I was taking a final exam on Wilson’s ideas.The more I read, the more I felt that Wilson was speaking directly to me and my quest. Remember I am in China to study the notion of awe mystery and wonder through the Chinese philosophy and superstitious approach to life and life’s meaning. I am trying to decipher what I think is a mystical message from the universe that came to me during our trip to Utah in late June.The message came in a sequence of events I described earlier. There was the story of my thirty year old cousins who seemed to me to be lost in Boulder, Colorado Then there was my visit to my family cemetery and conversations with my ancestors, followed by my visit to Robert, who seemed so near his last breath on earth; then there was the Dallas flash flood; the next day’s speeding ticket for Marietta outside Wichita Falls, Texas and the hail storm that pounded us as we approached Santa Fe; the next day’s poor trip planning that kept us on the road for fourteen hours and within that fourteen hours there was our failure to discover the magic Peter Hessler found in Nucla, Colorado; then there were the twists and turns through the hoodos of Capital Reef and the passing by the cows next to the road, missing hitting the deer and hitting the skunk and her pups; ending in our climb through the slot canyon in Escalante, Utah and our sublime meal of a lifetime at Escalante Outfitters Café.What did all this mean? Can China unravel this puzzle and deliver me a cosmic message. If my China quest into the mystical works to solve my puzzle, then God must be. By God I don’t mean a man on the throne sitting and reigning in heaven. I simply mean there must be an order in the universe that is not random in which humans, animals and nature participate, some organizing principle that creates a meaning to existence. If there is such a thing, then that is what I call God and it is that organizing principle that I wish to worship.And I am testing this principle on this trip to see if it somehow speaks to me. Theoretical physicists near Geneva, Switzerland conducted an experiment in I think 2013, with the nuclear collider there. They burst an atom into pieces. Some predicted that the atom would have say 20 parts and if it had only twenty parts, to them, this meant that the universe had a predictable mathematical order, implying that there might be some organizing principle to life. Others predicted 80 parts and if it had eighty parts, this meant, to them, that the universe was completely random, chaotic and unknowable, implying that life is an accident and there is no God. In my apocryphal version of this experiment, they counted forty parts.The results didn’t make a case for an ordered universe or for a completely disordered world.The Chinese seem to have an interesting version of God. There is no God as westerners think of God. There is nature, The Great Nature and some small gods that are part of The Great Nature. These gods represent aspects of nature like the ocean, the wind, time, the sun, etc. But they really represent values. The god of time helps us understand that time is relative to the person and the species. What is a long time to a child, is a short time to an old person. Each god teaches a lesson. It is the lesson that the god represents. To worship the god, one really worships the value it represents.This make sense to me. I too want to worship compassion, respect for life, integrity, accountability, social justice and equality of opportunity. Though I am a Christian, I don’t worship Jesus. I worship his ideas, which have a lot in common with Buddhism and Confucianism.This is where I am now in my quest. It is 4:48 A.M. I sit here writing, awake in Los Angeles hotel in a bathroom on a commode, waiting for Marietta to wake up so we can begin the last leg of our trip home.I had been trying to stay asleep until the sun rose in L.A. hoping to re-establish my biological clock so that I can return to work tomorrow recovered from jet lag.As I laid trying to sleep, my mind whizzed in thought. I recalled the story of Marty and her mother and father. They told me only a few facts about themselves and their son, that Sarah and Karl were hardworking second generation Koreans; that Marty divorced a year ago; that their son lived extravagantly, still on their dime. The rest I made up.In the middle of our tour I told Karl that I had written a story using the facts about his family that I had learned from them. I asked him if wanted to read it. He said maybe on the last day of the trip. I sensed that he didn’t want to read it and find himself angry at my intrusion into his family and have to spend the rest of the tour with me at his table. A wise choice, I thought.On the last day, as we waited with our bags to board the bus to the airport, he sought me out and asked if I would read my story to him. I did.When I finished reading, I looked up at Karl and he was taking off his glasses and wiping away tears.“You wrote words, words we have spoken, just as if you were there,” he said. “I couldn’t tell the truth from fiction. How did you do that?”Exactly how did I do that? And how far might I go predicting the future of these two parents and their adult children. I saw Marty’s leather backpack when we got off the bus to enter the airport. Its back was embroidered to look like a cat’s face.So here we have a thirty year old with a backpack like a twelve year old girl and a son in a Peter Pan universe in which his parents support his excessive lifestyle. These two parents are only doing what their parents did for them, give their children all they had to give. But Sarah and Karl’s parents didn’t have so much to give.Now, you, as a reader, can imagine with me the rest of the story. How much is it like other second generation children trying to find their way in two worlds? Can you understand why Susan, the mother, said she would like to go to Korea and live there for a couple of years?Does she yearn for the life in Korea, where it worked well for generations to love your children giving all you have to give? But for her, she may think that it hadn’t work for her as a parent and she didn’t understand what happened. She had followed the family script. But her children did not have her family’s values.I could go on and predict further and so might you. And the closer we are to the present the more accurate our predictions would be.How can we know these things about one another? Often after my first session with a family, I will make guesses about their past and current situation and they will be amazed at how well I know them. It is a fortune teller’s parlor trick. I am not that wise. I have just read from the script of human existence, my own personal pain, our universal nine basic emotions and how they work and I come up with their version of the human story.Why in my writer’s class can my fellow writers say to the writer that we have just read and are critiquing the following:“That doesn’t ring true.”“But it is true,” the writer often replies.And our teacher, Darnell Arnoult and the other more sophisticated writers in our class will look around at one another, knowing what Darnell is about to say.“It doesn’t matter if it really happened that way or not,” she says. “What matters is that it doesn’t work well in the story. Readers won’t believe it. You have not created enough of a context in the story for a reader to believe it or suspend their disbelief and fall into your trance.”How can any of us say of fiction, that it is true? Yet when we have read a good book, we believe it is true.It is because we all participate in the human drama. We all know how it makes us feel to read a story, because inside us we have that same story. How do I know my client’s experiences before they have shared them with me?I know because, their story is my story and the story of all of us. There is some order to the universe and to our lives that we all share. This is what E.O. Wilson said about art and science. He said that art and science work on the same thing, the discovery of the truth. Art searches for meaningful universal truth in human existence. Science searches for truth in nature. Both truths inform one another. Nature provides the context for human existence and we cannot understand human beings and how they think and behave unless we understand the context.For Wilson there is such a thing as the truth and it is not relative like post-modern philosophers believe. Post modernists quote Foucault and cite the physic’s experiments which demonstrate, that from one perspective, matter is a solid particle and from another perspective, matter it is a wave of energy. Post modernists believe that truth is defined by a person and is adapted to a person’s needs and desires. So they conclude that there are multiple truths and never one absolute truth or if there is, only God knows what that Truth is.Wilson believes there is absolute truth and that it is our privilege to be able to search for its discovery. We have intelligent brains and the scientific method as one of our tools for exploring the truth. The problem (or blessing) with the scientific method is that once it discovers a part of the truth, each discovery creates tens or thousands of more questions about the truth. So rather than our search leading to the discovery of The Truth, it leads us to an ever expanding truth that will always lead us to more unknowns. The more of the truth we know, the more we find we don’t know.Some believe the same is true about art. Artists search for human truth and as they discover one version of it, other questions are raised and new art explores those questions and sometimes art finds an answer that is the truth only to have that answer create more questions and more to explore about the truth of the human condition.I appreciate Wilson’s description of the truth, because I too believe that we can form a consensus around what is and that people are able to be honest with themselves and others. Truth is not just relative. It is also absolute. And in this quest, I have found my truth about God, superstition and mystery expanding rather than contracting. Wilson understands that truth as a proposition, once properly understood, contains its opposite.Thank you Wilson for adding to my certainty and at the same time expanding my confusion.With Wilson’s understanding of Truth as the foundational philosophy of my inquiry into mystery, superstition and wonder, I am now ready to attempt to solve the riddle I posed for myself at the beginning of this essay.I had hoped that the I-Ching would work for me to help me understand and appreciate the challenge that each day presented to me in China. Basically, I found the I-Ching to be unhelpful and only accidentally accurate. A clock stuck on 12:00 is right twice a day. The I-Ching was a disappointment.In this book the Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler told the story of the Emperor who consulted the I-Ching about going to war. He interpreted the I-Ching’s answer to his question to mean that he should fight rather than negotiate a peace. He did and he and his army were slaughtered. That was it for me and the I-Ching.Now to the riddle. Are the events that happened to us traveling to Utah in June giving me a cosmic message or are they simply the happenstance of random events?The Chinese taught me something about superstition and it is that it is easy to corrupt God’s cosmic messages (if there are cosmic messages) for our own purposes; Chinese emperors from the first dynasty through Mao did this.Today the Chinese economy is made up of over 50% of what are termed SOE’s or State Owned Enterprises. The parks, the hotels, the museums, the cloisonné factory and the pearl farm store, the silk factory store and the clay warrior facsimile store all had more employees than any well run business should. The government uses their businesses to keep people employed. They corrupt the capitalist model of business efficiency in order to serve another purpose, i.e., that of keeping its people busy. The ship that floated us down the Yangtze, owned by an SOE also had more employees than it needed.For thousands of years the Chinese currency has been counterfeited. Remember the saying “The Americans are the creators, the Japanese are the makers and the Chinese are the imitators.” The Chinese can copy anything. They have an eye of how things look. This presents a problem for merchants in China. Every local vendor, when paid in cash, held the money up to the light to see if it was counterfeit. There is a flood of counterfeit money in China, both Chinese Yuan’s and American dollars in China, another example of the problem of Chinese corruption.China has always struggled with corruption. This was Chang Kia Shak’s problem. It is now the main complaint against the current economy and government. It is what Confucius warned against centuries ago.I think that the Chinese, who are superstitious, may also have trouble with boundaries. They may wish to be able to move beyond our human boundaries and know what only the gods can know and we humans cannot. This trouble with boundaries may also extend to copyrights and patents for which they have little respect. It may also extend to family and to the choice of who their son or daughter marries. This issue of moving beyond boundaries has good and bad implications for China as a nation, I think. Who knows how this issue will empower or impede China’s future?This makes me think that superstition and corruption may be related. It is easy to use superstition for one’s own purposes. If chance plays such a role and one can know the will of the God’s in advance, why not try to use one’s power for one’s own purposes? Or why not try to fool people into following a path that their superstition tells them is God’s way.In my second marriage I watched as my, then wife, used astrology, the I-Ching and psychics to reinforce her already formed feelings. She had been especially enamored with psychics like Edgar Cayce and Jane Roberts. Jane Roberts wrote a book, Seth Speaks, in which she channeled a spirit from past centuries named Seth. My ex-wife was intoxicated by Seth and she insisted that I read Seth Speaks. Eventually, I did and when I shared with my wife the part where Seth said married couples should have regular sex, two to three times a week at least, she lost complete interest in Seth.Superstitions lend themselves to corruption and manipulation. We can to easily use them to reinforce what we wish were true and use them, as if we could know God’s will or speak for God. We can use selective perception and confirmation bias to select out of life events, the metaphors and symbols that serve us to confirm our already held beliefs.Remember, Jung suggested that superstition, like the use of an oracle like the I-Ching, can free us from the rigidity of our logical reductionistic thinking. It can break that mold and open us to new perspectives. Yes, perhaps, but I-Ching readings can also be corrupted for our own selfish purposes. We can selectively pick from the I-Ching (or other random accidental events) messages that we attribute to Nature or God and create a false authority that serves our unclaimed preconceptions. While we can appear to be open and curious, we are actually unaware of what we think and feel and we uncover our prejudices and preconceptions in our “random” “magical” messages and we empower ourselves as prophets speaking God’s truth, when we are using metaphysics to manipulate others and build a false reality.I would rather have the scientific method with all its problems. Thank you very much.So what did these events of late June 2015 have to say to me? A lot actually. The Lost Boy’s story confronted me with how quick I am to judge and how little information I need before I develop a theory from facts that confirm my biases. These boys in Colorado may have found themselves there and may not be lost at all. So who is lost? I am. Are they broken? Yes, but so am I.As to my conversation with my deceased family members, I learned how much I need to continue talking to them, how helpful I feel it is to have them as a frame of reference.My sick friend, who appeared to me to be dying, told me something that I want to deny, that I need to face and that is that we are all dying and that I, at sixty-nine, can’t be far behind him.The torrential rainfall in Dallas and the hail storm outside of Santa Fe reminded me of how powerless I am in the face of Nature. Perhaps I needed a double dose of humility. One was not enough to blunt my narcissism. Oh and the message from the woman sheriff was to slow down.The long, long travel day from Santa Fe to Escalante through Nucla taught me that I create my own misery with my poor planning. And the deer, skunks and cattle seem now to me to be just what happens to travelers on Utah Scenic Highway 12. The Hoodos of Capital Reef State Park weren’t ghosts, but they were images upon which I projected my fears.The slot canyon journey into the earth taught me that we needed a guide when we are in unfamiliar territory. The amazing meal after we left the slot canyons was just that, an amazing meal and did not have the holy significance of the last supper and that having no expectations delights.Oh and Nucla. Nucla, Colorado taught me that a great writer like Peter Hessler can find magnificent beauty in the mundane, but the mundane is still the mundane and high expectation often disappoint (a la Buddha).So yes, there were important messages being sent, but I did not find a mystical thread that wove a consistent theme strong enough to be a message from God to me.In my trip to China I learned again that where ever I go, I am still there and that it is the people that I meet and the relationships I form that give me the most meaning.When we returned to our homes in the U.S. and Canada, our table 15, group of nine, exchanged photos on the internet. It became clear that Rita, John, Tim and Karl used photographs to reflect their pilgrimage, much as I used words.I expect that they wonder who in the world might be interested in their images and memories that are so meaningful to them, just as I wonder who will ever read these words. Yet, I am compelled to write and they seem compelled to take and post their pictures.So what do I conclude? It seems that I have made a case that God doesn’t exist and that mystery and wonder are silly superstitions.But was it an accident that I grabbed E.O. Wilson’s book that I read as I traveled in China? Was it an accident that I sat at a table with over half of its diners were oriental? Was it an accident I had such a candid and honest tour guide? Was it an accident that I was studying mystery and wonder, as I floated beneath the foggy mountains on the Yangtze? Was it an accident that Debbie joined me and Sharp in our discussion on religion and I got to hear her story of the painting of her father and the empty drawer?What I concluded for myself was this. I am not a very good instrument through which God speaks. Don’t ever trust me if you hear me saying that I-Ching told me this or that. Don’t ask me what message God is sending. Knowing me as I do, I will distort God’s so called message to suit myself.That doesn’t mean to me that God doesn’t exist or that God doesn’t speak to us. It means I can’t be sure how or if God speaks to me, but I can’t be sure God doesn’t and that I just don’t know how to listen.I am not dismissing wonder or mystery. E.O. Wilson taught me that learning the truth only creates more wonders and more mystery. The universe of reality is constantly expanding and only fools believe they know the whole truth because truth expands with the universe and it is our privilege to explore this truth and to constantly learn and grow. EpilogueIn February of 2016, I attended another NPI workshop similar to the one I mentioned earlier, where I learned about Buddhist philosophy.  One segment of the workshop focused on dreams and it was by my ex-wife of the Seth Speaks story I told earlier.  She is an excellent therapist and an experienced expert at helping people discover spiritual messages in their dreams.With about 20 people in a circle, she worked her magic again and all of us in the small group were able to decipher some meaningful message from our dreams. After being immersed in the atmosphere of mystical metaphysical alchemy that she created, I began to reflect on my Utah trip puzzle.And it came to me. Of course, it was about the last portion of my life, my march to the River Styx.  I, like my mystical (not necessarily real) lost boy cousins, I feel lost. I wonder often, what might my life’s purpose be now, now that I have the money to retire and feel the push from my younger colleagues to let go of my place and give it up to them. I’ve lost my drive and ambition that once gave me a sense of direction. I don’t want to be famous anymore or to have the guilt and obligations of the uber-rich. I’m well enough off. But I’m not completely physically well. My back aches. I pee every hour and a half. I’ve lost my throwing arm. I can’t remember names. (But I never could). I know I’m slipping. I wonder when I should give up pretending I can help and when I must be the one asking for help. I see this in my future, but I don’t know when or where. This frightens me.The mythical image of the lost boys in my mind reaches this part of my insecurity.The visit to the cemetery was an awkward time. I feel guilty about surviving. I long to connect, but I don’t know to what or to whom. I see these graves of dead ancestors and I feel a chill coming over me, knowing I will be dust and ashes or worm-food soon enough.I know this is good medicine. Making peace with death, feeling it sitting on my left shoulder, can make the rest of my life more meaningful and precious.Then, Robert, my dying friend (who, by the way, eight months later is still alive and talking) showed me what one path to the river looks like. That might be me sooner than later. It is him now and I’m sad for him and sad to lose him, yet loss will be the mark of this part of my life.The storms, torrential rains in Dallas and rain and hail in New Mexico, those are in my aging path. Fear, feeling attacked. This could be cancer or pneumonia, for me or Marietta. Surely age will bring this same fear to us. Yet, the spiritual point is that the rain and hail are really of little consequence.The speeding ticket is the warning that because we are aging, we must slow down.The trip to Nucla tells us not to over-do or over-reach, that finding beauty in the desert is a refined skill and it must be cultivated. Finding beauty in aging might require a certain skill as well.The extremely frightening roller-coaster ride on Scenic Highway 12 may be how the descent toward death will feel, with monsters (herds of deer, cows next to the road and skunks in our way) next to our path. But though, again, we probably can’t help but be frightened, the monsters are of no consequence. And then there is the ending part of the journey, when we are alive but underground (beneath our once highly functioning selves) where we found beauty and challenges, where we needed help from a guide. And then the last moment, when our journey ended and we began a new journey home. Death, could that be the last meal on our trip, the amazing bread on our table, the beautiful trout, the rhubarb strawberry pie alamode. Will this be what death is really like?I’m amazed. I found an answer to my puzzle. It came from the most unlikely place, not from China as I expected, but from metaphysical, mystical trance that my mythical Medusa ex-wife created for me. What a surprise. But it feels exactly right to me.