Zeitgeist and the Global Mind

We are in an age of unbelievable inter-connectedness...

On a day about three weeks ago I had encountered for the second time the German word Zietgeist...

It was again, through the oddest of coincidence while driving through the coastal hills of Malibu, California. Graffitied on a road-sign was the word Ayra... About a month earlier, I had met with an upcoming producer outside of Los Angeles who goes by the name of Ray Izad.

There is some back-story to all these events leading up to my meeting with Ray at a Starbucks and exchanging novels:

It had been an initial meaning to discuss the prospects of a teaser trailer for a partially written, but extensively revised novel, A Toy Box in a Funhouse... I think the novel has been on a shelf live of over a year by now, unfinished...

For me, this novel has had a kind of nostalgic lingering around since its beginnings. I had written it in three parts, publishing the first two on the website some 7-8 months prior. I had even contacted the beautifully talented graphic artist Judit Tondora. I had even bought all these stickers and posters and started running around Hagestown posting them on every telephone pole and in every public restroom.

Okay...

Maybe I had gone a little overboard with the random marketing... When it was all said and done, I for some unapparent reason had finally stopped writing in the latter part of 2014.

But the eerie DRAMA doesn't end there.

The novel had been placed back on an artistic backburner, while I took a creative sabbatical to recuperate and start again.

Seven Months go by...

I mostly stop writing and training for competitive boxing, quit my job, left my house, car, and family, entering Reach homeless shelter in downtown Hagerstown, MD, devoting all my efforts toward spiritual growth, i.e. Bhakti Consciousness.

Not only was this the first time I had heard about the word Zeitgeist from a fellow attendee of Reach, Adrian, who slept diagonally in a cot from me and who wore ripped faded denim with his hair in a pony tail... He was middleaged, from Clear Springs, MD, traveled with a wife, and knew  himself a thing or two about the workings of politics and the corrupt monetary structure of contemporary churches of ALL denominations...He introduced the Zeitgeist Films such as the one below:

I watched it on my Ipad from the free Wi-Fi at a Mcondalds where most of the homeless people spent the time in the period in the morning between 6 am and 9 pm when the temperatures were still freezing and the library hadn't yet opened.

Centering around the corruption of church and state...including the extensive punishments for apostasy against Catholic Doctrine...as well as the pandemic money laundering as President Eisenhower in his Farwell Speech famously coined the military-industrial complex:

That video is no joke, and now, we have the military--industrial--media complex which works around the clock to make sure white and mostly conservative Americans remain bigots and hateful toward toward all Arabic influences, so taxpayer dollars continue to flow into companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other Billion-dollar defense contractors.

Medal of Honor Recipient Major Smedly Butler even wrote the famous book detailing this grotesque corruption, War is a Racket.

A president and a medal of honor recipient saying the same thing...

Guns and Brass; Money for Blood.

Right from the Horse's mouth, if you ask me.

But that's not even the icing on the cake...

At that time, I was keeping my mind very open to the widespread sadism and blatant egotistical masochism of our modern American System, men and woman alike, children and old, all races and colors, a country that is eating itself within environmentally as well as a setting that is Orwellian and a twenty-first century technophobe's worst nightmare.

Obviously at that time, I was going through some profound personal changes...

All I did during that time in my life was meditate five hours a day, read scripture (Eastern and Western Schools of thought), and attend churches and community functions, no eating meat, and spending most of my waking hours toward spiritual insight.

And then shortly after my move to Oxnard, California, I had heard about something which has been resonating with me since, blowing me away, and leading me to return to my Novel, A Toy Box in a Funhouse...
It was the police tazing and eventual death of a Hagerstown Man named, Darrell Lawrence Brown.

The scene mimicks the actual events perfectly, Clay Turner, the protagonist going through a parallel experience of a dirty cop in the town park of Hagerstown, MD (****SEE NOTE ON BALTIMORE RIOTS)...

When I had heard this while out in California in light of the Baltimore riots, thirty minutes down interstate 70 from the City of Hagerstown, I was deeply astounded by the interconnectedness of my fiction, mere imaginative ideas 'to make' stories--and money.

Hagerstown is a relative small and peaceful community.

For this to happen, it seems out of place in the context of these happenings and my protagonist.

So then, I returned to the story, writing more, adding more dimensions to the main plot...

And then that's when I met Ray-Izad through posting a craigstlist ad with the Art from Judit Tondora... He felt he was drawn in by the historical allusions within the book cover of A Toy Box in a Funhouse, the juxtaposition between the patriotism of Martin Luther King, Lincoln,  the victorious rising of the flag on Iwo-Jima, with the polar opposite destruction of Al Capone,  Bin Laden, and lives by the American Government toward millions of Indians at the trail of tears:

Judit Tondora's Artwork for A Toy Box in a Fun House.

At our Starbuck's meeting, we exchanged scripts, I giving him the first two parts of the novel, and he handing me an exclusive copy of his screenplay for the future feature film, Arya...

Out of respect, even if we decided not to go forward with a trailer for my novel, I wanted to read his screenplay and give honest constructive criticism to a fellow writer...

Arya was great, the story was thrilling, and even the Ray's trailer blew me off my feet:

And on that sunny afternoon when I drove through Malibu with my Aunt, I had seen that Arya squiggly spray-painted on a sign and I just had to contact Ray and ask him the connection.

Had he been like me when I first got those promotional posters and went balls-to-the-wall posting stickers around Hagerstown?

"Zeitgest, my friend..." Ray had started by saying... He proceed to explain to me the word's origin and how it meant 'spirit of an age.'

A Toy Box in a Funhouse, an unfinished novel, had been the link between me recognizing the relative proximity of several seemingly unrelated events... I had first heard of Zeitgest from Adrain while at the Reach shelter. After journeying 3000 miles, if it hadn't been for an over-zealous Catholic Evangelist who I had met at the library during the time staying through the shelter, I'd of never learned of the death of the Hagerstown man Derrill Brown... And without this piece of knowledge, I'd of never regained the motivation to finish the piece and post a craigslist ad searching for a movie producer. I'd of never met Ray: Never learning of the significance of Zeitgeist and the incomprehensible interconnectivity of life with the questions every single person can have on a daily basis...

You.

Me.

The fly zipping around your monitor or screen.

ALL of it is interconnected...

And it seems, especially pertaining to information exchange and culture, there is an unbelievable second to second 'Oneness.'

All you have to do is look...

As for me, I may or may not continue to go forward with publication of the novel. It seems appropriate, especially to 'the spirit and questions of our age.'

It seems as if the Global Mind, the force behind the workings of the Universe are moving toward publication of it...

I have always thought the internet, information technology, and even culture such as the Smashing Pumpkins and their post-Bush anti-fascist album, Zeitgeist, is truly a by-product of the symmetry and order naturally found in nature, and therefore, arises in a global force so intertwined into human action that it can become apparent for an observer within the system...

Again, all you have to do is open to it, the Sudra of Life.

Fry,

*This was at about the same time that the Baltimore Freddy Gray riots gripped downtown Baltimore. Hagerstown had expected a similar chaotic retaliation. And the story I had written was so provocative at the time that a Catholic Evangelists named Bill Fisher, who is responsible for introducing me to the wonderful stations of the cross and I had previously mentioned in other writings in a positive light during my stay at the homeless shelters in Hagerstown before moving to Oxnard, California, that same Bill had called my phone over and over repsaeatedy because I had decided not 'to convert' to his religion after my departure to the other coast. He left me over thirty,  forty voicemails telling me I was 'a fake,' and that I was not welcome back in Hagerstown because he had given my story to the police department and they 'knew' about my scene with Clay Turner. I have unpublished both the first two parts of the novel as well as my investigative essays involving this unstable Bill character.