With thanks for the privilege of many lives in a lifetime

LIVING MANY LIVES IN A LIFETIME

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

January 12, 2018

                As Jill nears retirement from Ohio State next August, and we prepare to move from my 1957 family home in Rush Creek Village in Worthington, Ohio, the town where I started first grade in 1951, to our new home near (grand)children in Durango, Colorado, I think of our good fortune, in effect lived many lives with many relations in many places.  I remember growing up thinking that I as an academia brat had grown like military brats—moving with parents from place to place.  Born as I was just before World War II ended, when housing was short and my dad, having been denied a faculty appointment because he was Jewish, moved alone to East Lansing, Michigan, to find housing for my mom and me, who lived with grandparents in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and in Haverford, Pennsylvania, for most of my first year of life.  It took two more university jobs for my parents to move with me to Ohio.  Spending my last year of secondary school as the only foreign (language) student in my class profoundly influenced my social perception…then college and law school and grad school and three jobs to keep one in Bloomington, Indiana, where our daughter Katy was born and lived all the way through high school.  In a word, my life, has been nomadic in all my relations save one:  My life with Jill since 1973 with a few years of commuting in between, in a town where I lived nearly half my life, where Katy was born, grew up and retains childhood friendships, and our pending return to a life with our only child and her family, where I expect to die close to my nearest and dearest lifetime companions.

                There have been times in my life when I envied, felt left out from, those who were more rooted, close to home—looking for ways to belong, most acutely as an isolated foreigner in a new language, wanting a home.  Now, rooted in an enduring marriage and (grand)parenthood, I have found privilege in having been able to live with and learn from people in so many times and places in my life, now always with a family to come home to…and as I’ve been able to do in U-Hi, in Worthington, and in returning to neighborhood life in Rush Creek Village, and often continue to do on visits back and forth, to stay connected.

                My mother sent me up the road from our Worthington apartment to “learn about the Bible” at the Methodist Sunday school now just 3 blocks from home, where I got focused on the question of life after death.  I came to realize that, as Elise Boulding put it, I had a window of living memory that extended from the great grandparents, refugees from Eastern Europe whose remains are interred in the Jewish cemetery in Evansville, Indiana, to my grandparents and (great)great aunts and uncles from Mississippi/Louisiana, now to Jill’s and my grandchildren, Mila and Evan.  Mila and Evan now also have visited cousins in Poland and seen ancestral Prague…AND the many people I have known and learned with and from outside extended family, from colleagues living and now long dead in and around, and students past and present, and the many people who have shared their worlds with me.  It is true that many of my relations have been transitory.  In that sense, I know more people perhaps more shallowly than those of us who never leave home know our neighbors and local friends, but some do linger, as with my high-school classmates, and with those I have taught and worked with.

                I’m open to the possibility that the souls of my parents and all my relations somehow live on in their own right as in their consciousness.  Meanwhile, instead of dreaming what I might do in a next life, I feel as though each place I have lived has in a single lifetime given me the adventure, the experience and the learning and teaching that go with it, of single lives in different places among different people in a lifetime…quite a teacher, a series of adventures, a privilege.  As to immortality, I expect my name and some writings to appear for a while after I die—already do—and when that passes, hope that the blessings and learning I’ve passed on, toward making peace out of conflict, richness out of diversity, will pass on under names and practices to come.  In that sense, in relations I have lived and learned, my life and sense of value I have received, and the safety and security of enduring relations, remains immense.  Will my consciousness return in another human being, and if so will my memories be loaded in a single being?  That comes up against my agnosticism, but I don’t expect to suffer in any hell, and leaves me to recognize what a wealth of experience, love, friendship and learning life has already, long since, brought me.  What a privilege my lives have been, and the relationships I’ve enjoyed.  Most of all, I’d like my neighbors, fellow singers, schoolmates and new friends to know what a pleasure it has been to live back home in Central Ohio, and what a wonderful community Rush Creek Village remains to live in.  Come next September, Jill and I will have room for visitors in Durango…come on by.

I can’t help thinking these thoughts just as I have managed to pass my eye test and renew my Ohio Driver’s License for the last time, as my 73^rd birthday approaches.  Love and peace, hal

Due Process for Salvadorans and State-Managed Marijuana Production and Sales

DUE PROCESS FOR LIBERTY OF SALVADORAN PARENTS OF US CITIZENS, AND FOR PROPERTY RIGHTS STATES HAVE GIVEN MARIJUANA PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS v. THE PRESIDENT’S ENFORCERS OF IMMIGRANT AND MARIJUANA PROHIBITION

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

Two stories of challenges to fundamental right of “persons” (including corporations and governments) not to have “life, liberty or property” taken without due process under the US constitution (state constitutions too).

Young Salvadorans, parents too, bore children in the US, making the children citizens.  I find myself returning to the confidence I had in President Obama’s knowledge and respect for constitutional law, especially for limits on executive power, both literally and in spirit.  And so by now, Salvadoran refugees have become homeowners and fully employed, supporting the children, many grown up and well educated, who are US citizens because they were born here.  (I’m reminded that the question was raised whether George Romney was eligible to run for the president (you must have been born one) because he was born in the US embassy in Mexico City.)  That was supported in the Obama administration by a moratorium on deportation.  That became the law, accepted by US attorneys (i.e., prosecutors) across the country.  Which is to say that Honduran parents were given authority to work and pay taxes and bear and raise their American children.  They depended on it, as by investing in home ownership, education, secure employment.

When the state gives people the right to invest their lives to raise families, and people invest heavily on enjoying that right (and liberty too), it becomes a government-granted right which, constitutional cannot be taken away, cannot simply be reversed by executive order, without “due process,” which includes providing a legitimate, newly emergent, defensible reason for the change, subject to public input and judicial challenge if necessary…as a just reason for taking liberty or property (including taking parents from their children, at the child-citizens expense).

So far there has been no US executive action, nor attempt, at deporting Salvadorans.  If they try, I can’t imagine federal courts striking their attempts down, nor US attorneys backing up federal law enforcement’s attempts at detention and deportation.

The same goes even more strongly for any US attorney trying to go after any state’s lawful administration (including taxation) of marijuana production, distribution, and use.  Here, the US Justice Department would face off not against individuals, but against entire state governments as, in effect, corporate managers/owners of the entire marijuana economy.  Not surprisingly, the US Attorney for Colorado became joined by other US attorneys in declaring that far as they are concerned, the Obama hands-off-marijuana-enforcement policy remains in effect.  No president or his agents can take away the property they have given the states and their licensees…without due process.

Rights in which people have heavily invested, on which they have become heavily dependent, cannot be taken away save by due process (equal protection too).  When the personal and economic damage caused by sudden reversals in federal law enforcement are as substantial as they are here, when the people and their governments have invested so heavily in enjoying rights to life, liberty and property, with no new evidence of an unanticipated problem at hand, the US attorney general needs an unimaginable abundance of evidence that justifies taking so much away.  I can’t imagine what that would be.  We may see some enforcement turmoil, but thus far, federal law enforcers seem to know better than trying.  Love and peace, hal

"We have got to do what we said we would do"

“WE HAVE GOT TO DO WHAT WE SAID WE WOULD DO”

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

October 9, 2017

 

                On September 22, North Korean Party Chair and President Kim Jong-un called President Trump “a dotard,” someone in dotage, in today’s usage, senile, his latest retort to a president who most has since called him “Rocket Man.”  Usually, he speaks for the Party, for the people, speaking of what “we” say.  This time, Mr. Kim made a point of speaking in the first person, for himself alone.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Tillerson has persisted in expressed willingness to talk (as perhaps via the Chinese), backed presumably by the Defense Secretary, to arrange a new truce on the Korean Peninsula, with the tacit backing of President Trump.

                Two days ago, Trump tweeted “only one thing will work.”  Just now, to reporters, he has simply said, “We have got to do what said we would do,” and when asked to clarify, simply repeated the phrase, and walked away.

                It comes across like a covert game of diplomacy, where it has been agreed, and I’m thinking affirmed by a code Tillerson has arranged for the US president to confirm “secretly” that Tillerson has his full trust and authority to negotiate a stand-down, and arrange dependable, covert diplomatic communications (if indeed that hasn’t already been arranged via China or Russia, for example).  And Tennessee US Senator, the Foreign Relations Committee chair, who is due to retire from office, tweeted of the president, “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning [meaning those he trusted to Trump has put in charge of State, Defense and National Security]”

                I’m reminded of the “good cop/bad cop” police interrogation method.  In this case, the US president’s insistence on saying and repeating one phrase, period, to say nothing of covert diplomacy—that the US president has just assured the North Korean leadership that Tillerson—backed and supported by the Secretary of Defense—has the power and authority to arrange a nuclear stand-down.  I hope this turns out to be a mutual accommodation, relief from threat on all sides.  It appears to be another indication of the limitations of assuming that the US president has a great deal of individual power to get done whatever he (or someday she) chooses, on a whim.  I’m also thinking that governmentally naïve US president may have been drawn into the intrigue and power of sending secret signals that his secretary of state represents him in coming to terms he is prepared to agree to, no matter his tweets.  Today I hear reports that sources from other national governments are also prepared to trust what Trump’s agents say and do more than what the president says…unless perhaps it comes in code.  In the social and political sciences as in real life, we do play games.  I hope this one works out.  Love and peace, hal

Why did Stephen Braddock commit the Las Vegas massacre?

WHY DID STEPHEN BRADDOCK COMMIT THE LAS VEGAS MASSACRE?

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

October 3, 2017

 

                In the fall of 1993, thanks to a protective mother, Debbie Dugan, who had lost custody of her children to an apparently sexually assaultive father, and her mother (Mary Cunningham), a pair of with 3 other protective parents were referred to for assistance by similarly parents in fighting to maintain or retain custody of children who reported similar sexual assault, who agreed for free to team up with me to focus a “seminar on feminist justice” on “children’s rights and safety.”  By the second semester, Mary and Debbie provided me and other seminar members with visits by two survivors born to intergenerational, Satanically, Luciferian religiously grounded intergenerational participation in rituals up to and including daughters of cult leaders who were impregnated at age 13, with sons delivered by caesarian section to have the heart ground and blood drained into the satanic literal equivalent of Christian communion by bread and wine.  One, a friend to this day, was Jeanette Westbrook, ritually tortured like so many others I came to know into “multiple personalities,” later called “dissociative identities.”  Like other survivors I met who have found safety, who became “co-conscious” with the programming they had received to carry out a mixture of private and government organized crime, including getting video of sexual activity with minors on people, principally white men, with private and public power and prominence, from local and trans-national law enforcement and espionage activity, and programming some of them instead to kill or to carry contraband, or classified information in a personality/identity that could be called out by a specific handler or signal.  I met survivors who had “reintegrated” their memories and found safe companionship livelihoods, often as therapists, first at “Survivorship” (www.survivorship.org) and then at “SMART” (Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today) conferences organized by survivors, www.ritualabuse.us , organizer Neil Brick became a regular seminar visitor beginning in 1998) conferences, from where many of my seminar guests came from across the US and Canada, plus therapists who worked with survivors, until I retired in 2009. A more detailed account of the seminar and what students and I learned there can be found in an article, “Sharing and Responding to Memories, [“Sharing and Responding to Memories.”  Pp. 1360-1374, American Behavioral Scientist 48 (10) (June 2005)].

                Jeanette and other survivors pointed to the 1962 film, “The Manchurian Candidate,” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manchurian_Candidate_(1962_film)], saying it reflected their own experience at being trained by early childhood torture to split into secret parts to perform any of the various jobs mentioned above.  Tortured into splitting, being trained to “switch” into a covert world, to do as trained; whether perhaps with a phone call with a certain number of rings or other form of contact or signal like a bit of graffiti, the equivalent of the Queen of Diamonds in the film—not by Korean Communists, but by their own kind.  To survivors and in turn to me, in the case of mass shootings when out of nowhere, people with no record of violence suddenly launched mass shootings, in cases like Las Vegas where relatives deny any suspicion that the shooters to be were accumulating stores of weapons (given that among survivors I have known, they alone among siblings have been singled out as especially capable of dissociation and therefore candidates to inherit and serves the sacred, covert cause, or who have been experimented on and programmed as prisoners and mental health patients, as by the CIA, then the NSA in the US and Canada.

                What would be the motive for programming, then triggering, Stephen Braddock to come out of nowhere to commit mass murder/suicide?  In satanic terms, the followers of Lucifer, who have learned to hold supposedly honest power to bring about the day when the followers of extreme violence prevail over the God of love and trust.  Promoting mass fear and punitive, fear-induced security measures becomes the religious calling.

Like Jeanette, many who are tortured and shaped into dissociated violence find safety and support sufficient to escape and survive in safety and openness.  They find and report that others fail the test of becoming Satanists either self-destruct or are put away as dangerously insane when they act out on their own.  Finding safety and healing can be a long and hard process, but I know a remarkable number of well-healed, strong and compassionate survivors, especially when they are believed and trusted by safe and loving friends and companions.

                At a time when no “expert” can identify what led Stephen Braddock to set up and emerge from nowhere suspect to die in the glory of having killed so many, I offer the possibility that somehow, in some remaining network of raising children to commit mass murder of innocents and die, he was raised to be one more Manchurian candidate.  We’ll see if Braddock’s “motive” ever comes to light.  For myself, many of my colleagues think I’m an irrational conspiracy theorist in this and other cases.  Still, it’s a plausible hypothesis to me, the only one I’ve heard.  Love and peace, hal

 

Justice or fairness?

TO SEEK JUSTICE OR FAIRNESS?

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

July 31, 2017

 

                “That’s not fair!” come across as a child’s outburst.  It takes a lot of adult training to learn and internalize what “justice” requires, to many it requires a legal education, to know the difference between right and wrong behavior toward others.

                Doing “justice” in moments of conflict implies that some human agent has greater authority than others involved to reach the right result, backed up by the power to impose it.  Imposition entails exerting power over others.  It begins with the authority we grant adults like parents and teachers to teach children to “do as I say, or else…”  It evolves into legal institutions, both public and private.  In moments of rule violation, it implies the need for confinement, confiscation, or teaching a lesson both to the violator and to others who might consider doing wrong, as by punishment, or to sound gentler, penalty or loss.

                I call myself a recovering lawyer.  I have spent time in criminal and civil courts as defense counsel, civil counsel, and as a party to a failed civil lawsuit to build a “justice facility” including an expanded jail, and qualified as an expert witness especially in child custody cases on behalf of the best interest of the children.  But as I found myself dabbling in diplomacy—an aspiration that failed when I become persona non grata as a critic of US legal defense of the war in Vietnam during my internship in the US State Department Office of East Asian Legal Affairs in 1967—so as I got settled teaching criminal justice, I turned to victim-offender mediation, to me, a legal form of the response to conflict Richard Quinney and I came to call “peacemaking.”  As I look back now on that departure from “the rule of law,” I see it as a return to that childhood sense I shared: that what matters most is not doing justice, whose results may hurt or offend me, but seeking fairness.

                It is common for us to seek “solutions” to social problems, human conflict included.  They are by definition final, as in a “final solution.”  As Gregory Bateson noted, in mathematics as in everyday life, only closed systems have solutions, meaning that the solution is tautological, true by definition, as when an “offender” is defined as “guilty” in criminological research as in law by virtue of a “lawful verdict.”  True by definition, whether by courts or as presented and coded by victim and self-report surveyors.  Solutions are found in deterministic models, models of human interaction included, subject at law to appeal, generally on matters of legal procedure, seldom on “questions of fact,” until the verdict becomes “final.”

                And as I have recently written, seeking fairness is what Les Wilkins taught me to call “stochastic” process, where the focus of one’s interests from one moment to the next depends on the unpredictable, independent response of the other.  In the case of mediation as it seemed to work for parties I heard, Resolution—the content of any agreement parties reached—where terms of agreement were created by the parties themselves, as they moved from expression of fear and pain, acknowledgment and regret, to working out what satisfied all concerned.  There were times at the latter stage that I as mediator threw out an idea that to me encapsulated a particular issue, but to me, the most promising “agreements” were on terms the parties themselves made up as they got to know each other, as they reached for terms.  Ideally, they became the agents of their own change.  Realistically, coming to ownership of terms of settlement didn’t always happen.  Practically, the challenge was to make it feel safe for parties to open up, to feel safe.

                Thinking deterministically, we “hold people responsible.”  Thinking stochastically, we invite parties to assume responsibility for resolving their problems with others concerned.

Basic rules of safety were to ask for no name-calling, no interruptions, and to express my willingness to continue the process, reconvening if necessary, until everyone in the room--“victims” and “offenders,” parents or companions, principals or teachers, co-mediators—felt that everything that needed to be said, had been said.  Otherwise, there were no rules as to what was admissible, no directions as to what evidence to consider, no instructions as to terms on which parties can speak.  Like Quaker meetings, ideally, mediation ended by mutual consent.  Terms of resolution, like resolving a chord in a musical piece, are momentary to be sure, while whether terms of settlement are following through in any continuing relationship, objectively, remains in principle unpredictable—a matter of reciprocity of trust.  To borrow from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s aspiration for facing one’s own impending death, the aim of the process of mediation is to make it open and safe enough for parties to move from anger and denial to acceptance, by assuming mutual responsibility for moving forward.

At the extreme of personal violence, Murder Victims (families) for Reconciliation, MVFR.org, includes members who have met and made peace with their convicted murderers, and oppose the death penalty.  The process of healing is represented also in the Australian award-winning video of a conference in prison between those convicted of murdering a teenaged worker in a Pizza Hut during an armed robbery and their supporters; the parents, co-workers and friends of the victim, and a police mediator, and a follow-up, “Facing the Demons,” which for instance in the victim’s mother’s terms, led her to remember her son as he had lived rather than as she identified him in the morgue, and the father took on one of the offenders to work with him on educating against violence.  MVFR members have been heard to say that they enjoy a healing that victims who watch their murderers get executed do not.  On the other hand, after Ohio’s first execution of a man who raped and killed his partner’s child, when the warden had read the convict’s statement of apology and appealed for forgiveness, victim’s family members attending the execution told reporters they were relieved of their suffering, granted closure, by their murderer’s being put to death, and surely many other victims gain satisfaction from “bringing their offenders to justice.”  Surely, too, it would provoke consider fear and violence simply to “abolish” legal systems which place limits on how much retaliate and inflict pain (Nils Christie’s definition of the problem of violence) on those who hurt and frighten us, on vengeance, on war.  But for my own safety and the safety of those I love and care about, I hope to redirect our desire to punish and confine those who offend and hurt us, toward feeling safe enough to embrace each other in the face of our differences, violence included—as by making law enforcement and punishment less necessary, and generally, to reconcile violence rather than being limited by responding in kind.  As among nations, groups and individuals, I aim for making our relations—materially and socially—fairer, interpersonally and structurally, where heterogeneity and differences become assets, while confinement and separation in the face of difference and conflict becomes an anachronism, as fighting abroad and incarcerating at home abated in Norway in the nineteenth century, where now the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.  In Darwin’s terms, accommodating our differences and diversifying our human relations, ultimately, promotes survival of our species; while in principle punishment, confinement and enforced segregation aren’t so necessary.   Love and peace, hal

 

 

 

Beyond "crime" and "criminality" (again)

BEYOND “CRIME” AND “CRIMINALITY” (AGAIN)

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

July 21, 2017

 

                On the American Society of Criminology Division on People of Color and Crime listserv, there has recently been a critical outburst against yet another research journal article finding—as Travis Hirschi and Mike Hindelang did in the early seventies—that race is associated with “intelligence” and “crime.” I am reminded of the first 20 years I spent as a criminologist, explaining levels and trends in levels of crime and criminality as behavior of those who recorded offenses and offenders, rather than as indicators of the deviance of those whose behavior they recorded.  I haven’t received much direct response, but Darnell Hawkins has responded by aptly noting the distinction between criminologist who focus on causes of crime and those who focus on responses, on administration of justice.

                At the time the moment when I decided that by all measures, from police to victim to self reports to studies of white-collar crime, “crime” and “criminality” were socio-political artifacts, biased by class, race, gender and age, at a moment when my students in a course required for criminal justice majors challenged me:  “If you’re so critical of the criminal justice system, what do you propose instead?”, Richard Quinney proposed that we solicit contributions for an edited volume on “criminology as peace,” which we agreed instead to reframe as a process of conflict resolution and call Criminology as Peacemaking (1990); which I had at the moment defined as a process in which victims and victimizers alike became “responsive” to one another’s concerns and needs by reorienting them toward creating and negotiating terms of settlement, as against the “violence” of remaining stuck on who had done what to whom, of holding on to the distrust, harm, anger and disregard parties involved brought to the table, from heated or entropic relations to cooperative or synergistic release of social heat.  As I entered a period of victim-offender mediation a decade later, and as I looked across social systems and networks, the process of transforming the intransigence of “violence” in which the actions of some frightened and hurt or threatened others which constitutes the transformation of hurtful exercises of power over others into the “peacemaking” process Richard Quinney and I sought to identify and engender, where attention turns from consequences that have happened toward repairing damage that has been acknowledged by all concerned.  True to a phenomenon chaos theorists call “scaling,” I have proposed that the process that makes peace in the face of violence at one level of our relations, parallels the process by which we make peace intra-personally, interpersonally, at all social levels from dyads to globally, and in our relations with our natural environment.

                As for policing, recent experience in such cities as Cincinnati, Dallas and Richmond, California, indicates that as administrative leadership shifts toward getting to know and respond to needs of community members for safety, security and service, overriding emphasis on reporting crime and making arrests, happens implicitly, if not explicitly as I proposed more than thirty years ago drawing on citizens to define police performance on their own terms, subject to legal limitations on power over those entering communities from outside, on “strangers.”  As for researchers and policy analysts, I continue to advocate transforming our criminological assumption that levels and trends in “crime” and “criminality” are the ultimate indicator of the problem of our social relations—to transcend politically loaded criteria of for evaluating response to social discord, including evaluating police performance—a matter of building trust and cooperation among police and those they police, superseding attention to finding “crime” and catching “criminals.”  In effect, this has the effect of extending what Jerome Skolnick in 1968 called the “service” style of policing prominent originally in white, middle-class and wealthy suburban communities, to poorer urban communities of color.  Ironically, in the criminology mainstream, the fundamental problem of “crime” and “criminality” are defining “crime” and “criminality” as the primary problem of social conflict—a source of violence and its perpetuation in itself.  Love and peace, hal

my faith

A friend recently asked me to explain my own spiritual/religious beliefs.  My response:

I suppose I'm pretty spiritual too.  I certainly feel energy as trust, or fear or any number of underlying feelings that we have, which includes phenomena like remote viewing which the CIA experimented with, later the NSA, on subjects including survivors of intergenerational ritual abuse (I don't know whether you've heard about my years of bringing survivors and advocates to my classes, and close involvement with survivor activists, where early on I wandered into an active satanic site with a human grave marker, sacrificed animal, and all kinds of stuff two blocks from home).  I often find myself having thoughts that others, particularly my wife, often express.  So...for starters, esp is acceptable to me.
  My father was a non-practicing Jew from Minnesota, my mother a WASP from Louisiana.  I was sent to Protestant Sunday schools by my mom to "learn about the Bible," and I knew believed (as you can see below accepted for myself) that "God is love," until I reported to my mom that my Sunday school teacher, a Batelle scientist, had drawn a picture of the Nautilus nuclear sub and told us it was God's work (my mom was a pacifist; I think married my dad during WWII in part because he was 4-F for nearsightedness, my mom did all the driving, my dad rode a bike or took a cab to work).  In college (U of Michigan) I joined a de facto Jewish fraternity, where it was made clear by brothers during initiation and from Jewish sorority girls who wouldn't date me that since my mom was Gentile, "my parents wouldn't approve of my dating you," while of course I didn't get a bid from my grandfather and uncle's Sigma Chi because my name is Jewish.  So that kind of took care of my formal religiosity (and Jill fell out with the Catholic church in Poland after first communion).
   The summer after my first year of college, I got a scholarship to get my start on becoming a Chinese language and literature major.  (I knew I wanted to become a lawyer like Clarence Darrow, and law schools didn't care what I majored in.  In fact, my major got me into Harvard Law School, where Jerome Cohen had moved from Berkeley after becoming the first US law prof to specialize in Chinese Communist law; and where my third year of law school was paid by an NDFL scholarship, which in turn got me my legal internship in the State Dept.'s legal advisor's office for East Asian Affairs.   And I recall thinking at the time that Laodze's Daodejing was my first spiritual guide.  I also embrace Buddhism, which as the Dalai Lama puts it compassion becomes the highest value across formal religions.
   As I turned toward Asian Studies, I had the feeling that the spirit of love I embraced came from a Chinese general.  Decades later, I discovered that Japanese WWII supreme commander Isoroku Yamamoto had been shot down, later found lying strapped to his aircraft seat holding his samurai sword, nine months to the day before I was born, April 18, 1944.  I also accept that the spirits of people with whom I have lived, such as my parents, live on in me, as I expect to see my will to love informed and strengthened in those who live after me, and sometimes procreate too.
  As to life after death for myself, who knows whether it will take any form in which "I" become aware of this life of mine, or disappear?  As to earthly immortality, I concluded long ago as I sang in nursing homes that any of us is lucky to live latter years aware that we have made a significant difference for the better in at least one other person's life.  I know I have that, and also that I have been blessed to live many interesting, in many ways rich and sometimes reckless lives in one lifetime, which I expect to be doing once more in a year when Jill and I move to Durango.  I have experienced so much, I have enjoyed so much love and respect and appreciation: I am so lucky simply to have lived at all, and yes, I can even imagine enjoying another lifetime of consciousness even if that part of me turns out to be unaware of our history together.  Call me an agnostic believer:-)  l&p hal