There continues to be a philosophical discourse about whether actions have more significance than thoughts. The correlation between both is perhaps at the center of this dialogue.

Actions can be seen and measured by others, provoking numerous consequences with a wider impact then first imagined. Thoughts on the other hand are less open to observation. They are part of one’s private introspective world but can have great influence through meditation and prayer. Although they cant be seen and are usually difficult to articulate, they also influence behavior.

Conceivably, thoughts are actions on a less tangible plane. Perhaps they converge at the point where motivation saturates a new perception with curiosity. Thoughts that create ambivalence are likely to remain thoughts; those that are focused become a catalyst for a plethora of actions.

Random Thoughts can  appear unexpectedly out of nowhere. Some are “good”, others are “not.” Should we be held as responsible for random thoughts as for those that have conscious motivation since random thoughts are not as controllable, or are they? Then, the question becomes, are we as accountable for the thoughts we have as for the actions we initiate?

Most things follow patterns of order, often imperceptible, hidden within harmonious arrangements of time and space, obvious but invisible until something disruptive appears attracting attention because its intrusive.

As an individual, the easiest way to stand out is by creating chaos, mainly to attract attention since one doesn’t get anywhere by doing what is expected. Too much time is focused on what others envisage for us at the expense of finding our own heart’s desire.

All are capable of creating disorder in their lives but it takes practice to learn how, over time, to use it to engage attention in a good way, although defining something as good or bad, positive or negative is subjective, talent and hard work may not be enough unless one is willing to take the plunge, now and then, by braving disorder, hoping it will be just enough to invite positive scrutiny, but never being sure that it actually will.

Perhaps, being sensitive to the mood of all the surrounding currents helps one learn how to direct chaos with insight and hopefully, its all interpreted as confidence rather then as some kind of atmospheric disturbance. But how disorder is in the end perceived, depends largely on the temperament of those perceiving it.

Ignite a match in a room without light, and darkness recedes; what was once a black place is now revealed containing all sorts of objects to stimulate the imagination. Depending on the size of the match and the length of time its aglow, light will leave impressions upon the memory of things that existed before its presence.

Light, it seems, is needed to see a path across whatever space is perceived although some claim that another sense is at work during the play of the collective five senses thought necessary for insight and consciousness. However, when pressed to be more specific, no one has been able to categorize  them as anything more then some kind of extra sensory perception open for interpretation until the level of instrumentality allows science to verify and reproduce the results, suggesting more questions.

In a group of three, a scientist would argue that without the presence of these two conditions, an occurrence cannot be classified as a fact. The theologian might point out that belief and faith can be as real as any fact, while a  philosopher might say, “listen”, from a theological prospective, darkness is associated with evil rather than the unknown suggesting that the course of action to eliminate darkness is to destroy evil, rather than transmute it and make it part of the light and by so doing, changing the balance between good and evil. Perhaps a more appropriate description for this process is illumination which is why you need the match to create the light in the first place.

“So, who or what created the match?”

As November 18th, 2011 approaches and the premier of Twilight, Breaking Dawn, part 1, draws near, the excitement of Bella’s marriage to Edward Cullen is intensifying as she approaches her  destiny, fated in Stephanie Meyer’s four part novel, The Twilight Saga. As with the Harry Potter series, the fulfillment will not be in discovering what will happen, as the outcomes have already been revealed in the Novel; but how well the film adaptation visually portrays memorable events from the book. With that in mind, I have decided to re-post an essay I wrote after reading all four installments, seeing the first three films but before the release of the last two. I am not a fan of Stephanie Meyer’s style of writing, since I found The Twilight Saga written like a romance novel  encountered on the supermarket check out counter next to The National Enquirer. Never the less I did notice similarities to several ancient myths which made up for any of the story’s shortcomings.

Elements Of Mythology And Bella’s Journey

When Twilight, the four part novel written by Stephanie Meyer first appeared as a book in 2005, then in film in 2008, similarities between this story and other legends and myths were evoked. One tale that comes to mind is of the young maiden Persephone, kidnapped by Hades and brought to the underworld to be his consort and queen.
The legend has always had the appeal of an epic conflict that proliferates over her abduction. Demeter, her mother, goddess of fertility, is so overcome by emotion, she becomes vengeful, refusing to let anything live or grow. Begrudgingly, Hades agrees to let Persephone go but not before she tastes Pomegranate, the fruit that will forever bind her to the underworld forcing her to return for part of the year, delineating the four seasons.

Another tale describes a king with three beautiful daughters. The most attractive was the youngest, Psyche, who was so dazzling that people began to neglect the worship of Venus, goddess of love and beauty. Venus, a jealous god, asked her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with an ugly creature. When he saw her beauty, Eros dropped the arrow meant for her and pricked himself instead, falling in love with her, marking the beginning of her long journey of trust, betrayal, sacrifice, redemption, transcendence and rebirth, told from her perspective.

In Twilight, Bella travels a similar path to Psyche as she describes in narrative her experience of herself as flawed, idolizing Edward but wondering why “a perfect god” would be so drawn to her. When he abandons her in New Moon, using a pretty flimsy excuse, she  articulates in vivid detail her feelings of isolation and the depths of profound depression. So severe is her pain that she flirts with danger and death to evoke Edwards presence even though she finds it difficult to utter his name, a common reaction when one is faced with unexpected rejection.  Finally, after finding redemption by offering to sacrifice her life to save Edward, traveling underground to face the gods of the undead, the Volturi,  she still experiences severe trials of strength and character as Bella and Edward marry and her transformation into an immortal begins when she discovers she is pregnant.

Bella’s unnaturally rapid pregnancy brings her close to death in the last novel, Breaking Dawn, and Edward is forced to change her after she gives birth to a beautiful, angelic and gifted child they name, Renesemee. A central theme of the last part of her journey, told in diary narrative, chronicles her rebirth as a vampire who is in total control of her blood lust, contrary to the behavior expected from “newbies,” suggesting that the Cullen’s, who carry the burden of being “damned,” are by their actions not. They have chosen out of free will not to feed on humans. This conscious choice and love made it possible for Edward, a vampire, to produce a child of beauty and warmth, and contrary to what is believed, redemption is possible even for vampires who exhibit compassion and prove by how they live their lives that they are not without souls.

Breaking Dawn will be filmed in two parts and is currently in production. The journey of Kristen Stewart, the actress who portrays Bella in all five films is how she will emote her narration in her performance in the last two films so that the audience can identify what it might feel like to be immortal. Rarely in literature is the opportunity presented to covey the evolution of both perspectives, before and after, from an autobiographical point of view.

Unrequited Love And The Twilight Saga

The recent execution of Troy Davis, convicted of murder twenty-two years ago in Georgia has  reawakened the issue of the death penalty and brought it to public consciousness. Does termination of life constitute a rational way of averting murder, a form of retribution felt to be based more on revenge than justice.

Many who support the death penalty are also pro-life when it comes to abortion. Mr. Spock would submit that this is illogical. Life is life, whether it’s a sinned life or an innocent one. Kirk might respond, “But life is not logical, Mr. Spock, the truth lies somewhere between instinct and unknowable forces that come to play when conditions are right.”

Scotty would say in a heavy Scottish accent, “Aye, but ya gotta look at this as a mechanical problem. Society is like a star ship floating around with all the  gravitational forces pulling the hull in all sorts of directions. If one system in the ship fails to work the way its supposed to, then it can run adrift and get caught up in unidentified cosmic things like a wormhole, losing control of navigation, pulled into that black demon and spit out in an alternate reality where people are put to death because of overpopulation. How do you choose who lives and who dies?”

Gandalf might say, “Many that live deserve to die. Some that die deserve life, can you give it to them Frodo? Do not be so eager to deal out death and judgement. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

The Bible says in Matthew 5:38-40 “You have heard that it was said, ‘eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”

If a child asks , “But suppose the person who was struck on the right cheek hit someone else first, where does it begin and where does it end?  Society might say, “Listen to the sermon and when you grow up, you can be the one to decide what is the truth and what is not.” On the other hand a wise person might add in a calm reassuring tone, “But keep all hailing frequencies open.”

Putting aside the criminal justice system and its flaws, many would agree, if not swayed by prejudice or anger, and in the privacy of their own thoughts,  that putting someone on trial for murder with the death penalty as an option for the jurors to choose isn’t the best way insure that justice is served. The only thing worse is executing someone without a fair trial even if they are innocent. “Someone has to pay for this.” In this instance, guilt or innocence becomes less important than the process of putting the whole thing to rest until another compelling case again reawakens the issue once again.

In the film, BUtterfield 8 (1960), there is a tense moment when Elizabeth Taylor who portrays Gloria Wandrous shouts in a confrontational outburst with her mother. “Mama, face it, I’m the slut of all time.” A moment of clarity from a woman who was judged “loose,” or perhaps it reflected one persons attempt to live a passionate life without the constraints of guilt.

Many scientists question whether the guarantee of confidentiality and anonymity are enough to get people to answer inquiries about sex, honestly. Usually, the most  unconventional of fantasies, the thoughts that flirt with danger and border on the taboo, urges played out in mental privacy, are the ones that are most exhilarating although not for public scrutiny, let alone personal acknowledgement.

Looking at sexual behavior candidly becomes difficult when one is caught in the theologically defined battleground of good and evil, provoking a tendency to view oneself with the noblest of motives and thus compromising objectivity especially when compartmentalizing sexual events becomes a basis for privacy..

Scientific surveys may not be reliable measure of the way fantasies translate from scenario into behavior because they are frequently influenced not only by how moral boundaries are defined and socially appraised but also applied differently for each sex.

Men and women are not treated equally when it comes to morality, and exploring these differences has been the subject of great literature, cinema and controversy. Women who express their sexuality openly are viewed as sluts while men under the same circumstances are portrayed as sowing their oats, unless they are gay. Imagine how Elizabeth Taylor as Gloria Wandrous would have been treated if she were a man.

An essential part of communication with others is a function of the ability to vocalize sounds, write symbols and use body language. If physical conditions altered radically, we would be forced to adopt new techniques to break the isolation. In such a case a broad imagination could create infinite possibilities if we are able to suspend our disbelief of what can change.

Imagine waking up in a completely underwater existence while all our recollections from living on land are conscious, and we fully remember breathing and speaking. There is no memory of how we got here, nor is an explanation given for the transformation, what it means, or how it could have happened. Then, the challenge is being left alone with others in the same conditions to figure out ways to communicate with each other. Where would you begin?

When the late grandma Seydee Sedit-Best was eulogized at the Boyardee funeral home, there were many who shed tears for this pioneer. She was a philologist and Biochemist educated at Oxford who was well known for translating many cookbooks into French. A life well lived, her crowning achievement was her recipe for mystic chicken soup.  She had been struggled for years, using precise and painstaking research, documenting her groundbreaking discovery in her first book, A Lil’ Bit Of This And A Lil’ Bit Of That, on the new york best seller list for three consecutive years.

She was born on December 31, 1899 and died January 22, 2001, living in three centuries and two millenniums and she never let anyone forget it, for she was like one of her soup ingredients, an old hen, as close to death as they come before being cut down and plucked after  a century.  She had built a reputation for being a healer,  as her false teeth glared, immersed in a glass of brown water on top of the coffin covered with the flag of France.

As I glanced at the teeth, recollections, long submerged, rose to the surface. My first memories of Sedyee now held the answer to a family mystery. I was distantly related to her and now sat in the second row to the left of the hand crafted box carved from a tree that grows only in the forest just north of Dijon, France.

Seydee was still alive and perky when I grew up. I remember her in the living room, declaring that the mystic receipe had transcendental properties. From my part, whether this was true, not or just a crock was always a point of contention. I never believed her because she never came off as the scientific type, but rather with the essence of a peasant immigrant who migrated from an obscure village of France and always seemed a bit odd resembling more a character in a Parisian fairy tale, so I never took very her seriously. Little did I know about who she really was until her papers were found buried in the backyard, dug up by our beloved family dog, Mustard, a canine that was bred in the famous Dog farms of Dijon and whose descendants were sent to the royal houses of Europe as companions first to Queen Victoria then her many children, married to most of the major houses of European royalty .

Then there were her medals we found in an old shoe box in her closet next to the numerous girdles she washed by hand and kept hidden behind the wood paneled door next to the portrait of  Empress Josephine. France had bestowed her the grand legion of honor with the grade of chevalier in 1956. Two years later Italy awarded her the Knight Grand Cross of the order of merit.  Also found was an ornate scroll written in calligraphy of her nomination for the Nobel prize in Biochemistry. The day her shoe box was discovered my family and I  sat on the table and looked at each other and said, “Who new.”

Grandma Seydee had always said that the event making it possible to find the answer to her recipe came from an ancient Tibetan text she discovered quite accidentally in the old Strands Book Store on Broadway and twelfth street just south of New York’s Union Square while doing her doctoral dissertation on Medicinal Elements Of Mushrooms And Herbs. Her theory was simple: there was a direct correlation between the mode of delivery of herbs and their potency in the body.

Her scientific approach was highly controversial, and she was dismissed by her contemporaries “as a tribal medicine woman who plucked mushrooms in to basket, one marked poisonous and the other,  edible but hallucinogenic.” Her theories however were never disproved, and by using Vitamin B-12 as a baseline comparison, she speculated about how her chicken soup would bring someone back from the brink of death. From her experimental techniques she came to several clues about various components of long life in her first major paper, Vitamin B-12 Levels , Sleep Deprivation and Dreams. In the paper she claimed  Its well known that taking vitamin B-12 was poorly absorbed in the gut to be of any value. Injecting it directly into the blood stream yielded much better results. Perhaps. her hypothesis followed,  smoking herbs or using them as ingredients in soup were far more effective. Unfortunately, she experimented on herself, which resulted in some mental confusion that raised many questions about her methods and effected her reputation within the scientific community. Some of her peers claimed she was too addicted to her own methods to be truly objective about her research or the conclusions she drew from the results.

During the early part of her life Grandma Seydee traveled across Asia, India and the Near East. Her father had been a traveling Buddhist monk who by happenstance met her mother one day at an outdoor Paris Flea Market where they eventually married. In an unpublished book, he said, “When I saw the way she carried the chickens by their neck, I instantly fell in love,”  and Seydee was born seven months later. Perhaps this was the first indication that chicken was her destiny and in her blood.

Her father was simply called He as his full name was unpronounceable in French  He was well known in many ancient monasteries across China, and He left her the only copy of his unpublished autobiography, Mystic Curiosities And Inventions with several clues underlined using invisible ink. One was a hand drawn map of the upper Siang valley in Tibet.

As a child, He took little Seydee to The Bronx Botanical Gardens, and among the numerous rose bushes that bloomed in early May, while teaching her to meditate, he first told her the story of his ancestor Miri, shaman of the Adi people. The medicine woman was long lived, but myth and legend still resonates within hundreds of tribes that exist to this day. Her name was also found etched on walls of many underground caves discovered in the Gobi desert of Mongolia that were long rumored to house the remnants of scrolls rescued by monks from the Alexandrian Library before it was burned.

When she was in Egypt studying meditation in one of the secret chambers of the great pyramids   she met Akmid Sedit who became her professor in the mystic arts and her first husband. Together, as man and wife they studied many degrees of Freemasonry and had a shared interest in Herbology experimenting with many mushrooms from a variety of cultures until his untimely death. After the mourning period, Seydee was determined to follow in Akmid’s footsteps which led her to the first two major ingredient of chicken soup: water and chicken; although she reasoned that water was in everything and therefore  a medium for soup rather than a true ingredient. However,  chicken was more specific and when she used different kinds cooking chickens, she realized in order to cure sick people, an old hen had to be used, “as close to death as they come.” This became her mantra that set her on the path of  her most important discovery: Grandma Seydee’s Mystic Chicken Soup.

Its clear there was more to grandma Seydee then the appearance an old bent woman who wore black orthopedic shoes and had purple tinted hair, always in the kitchen struggling with an old hen mumbling to herself incoherently.