EDITOR'S COMMENTS

     This summer issue is dedicated to Ariana. She helped us get The Caldron off the ground and onto the web in a beautiful manner. We are extremely grateful to her for this.
     Ariana has decided to leave her position as co-editor of The Caldron. We will miss her inspiring artistic sense. We wish her continued good fortune in all her future creative endeavors.

     With summer on its way, my thoughts turn to body, back to those balmy summer days in Southern California when I was a young boy. Each and every day then, I would jump out of bed early in the morning, excited to be alive, and run outside barefoot to play. My thoughts turn also to the coming days of summer, when I will be doing more of the same.
     Also, in these coming days, as we become more centered and conscious in our bodies and their play, we will be more able to break free of the TV and media induced falsification of reality that we have all been led to believe is true reality. It is more difficult to fool our bodies. They are always more in tune with what's going on than are our easily led minds.
     These barefoot days of summer will be a perfect time for those of us with experience in such adventures to take the Red Pill, that is, to use the various medicines that can open "the doors of perception" into true reality - to take a look at what is really going on behind the media induced "Matrix" of our day. There are several essays in this issue that address this adventure.

     I have also included in this summer issue several short essays concerning body that are from my book, Ramblings from the Edge. One of them tells of a lesson I learned once about love and the heart. It tells of how Spirit told me to turn the intense anguish I was feeling in my heart into love, and, how, when I did so, it affected more than my heart, it affected my dear but far away loved ones whom I had hurt.
     It has taken awhile for me to remember and apply this old lesson to what's going on in the world today. At first, when Bush and his gang took over this country and then invaded first Afghanistan and then Iraq, I was scared and angry. But finally, remembering my earlier and healing lesson, I once again turned the fear and the anger I had been feeling into love. When I did so, interestingly enough, I began to see an awesome spiritual opportunity in these seemingly threatening events.

     I remembered how Christianity had been able to spread out from its birth home in Judea and throughout the western world of its day. It had simply followed the earlier conquests of the Roman Empire.
     Those same soldiers who helped crucify Jesus were part of the Roman army that had conquered most of the known world. And, as a result of those soldiers and their conquests, Christianity, when it later became Rome's official state religion, was able to spread throughout the entire empire - certainly further than it would have if those Roman soldiers had never conquered Judea and if Jesus had remained merely one of its many high and radical Rabbis.
     Today too, on the heels of the recent conquests of Afghanistan and Iraq, led by the armies of the United States of Oil, the new spiritual uprising that began in the sixties and early seventies, when many of us first took the Red Pill and woke up, will be able to spread throughout this newest of empires, just as Christianity had been able to do back in Roman times. And when it is all over - all the wars and revolutions and failed empires - no one will remember the various self-styled conquerors and empire builders of today. However, everyone will remember, will, in fact, have become an integral part of the great spiritual uprising that will soon lead us to a new and more whole and compassionate way of being.

Eugene Marks, Editor