When I was in college in the early 70's, the term metaphysics emerged to encompass phenomenon outside the realm of science's understanding. Yet, what was considered voodoo and magic by medical science in those days is now regularly found in pamphlets you can pick up in your doctor's office today; Helping the heart oxygenate the blood by deep breathing exercises, stress reduction by visualizing you're sitting in a clover field in the country, and relaxation techniques to improve the overall health and well-being of the body. Meditation years ago meant some form of scary spiritualism to most people. Today, enlightenment is intertwined in our daily lives and accepted without a second thought as to its origin.

Wonderful works of art have been created in the middle of the night by composers and authors who awoke with a storyline or a musical passage, and jumped out of bed to get it on paper before it drifted from their mind. It is here, in a special level of the mind, that extraordinary things can happen. We'll call it the subconscious for lack of a more descriptive term. But IT is where, I am sure, Samuel Clemens along with other great artists such as Beethoven and Mozart, found much of their inspiration - The Dream State… a labyrinth of mystery, virtually endless in its possibilities. When Hans Zimmer wrote what is, in my humble opinion, the perfect music score for the movie Gladiator, he surely must have been pulling on resources beyond the conscious. The mind, with its virtually infinite levels of conscious and subconscious, still remains a great mystery, patiently waiting for us to fully realize its potential.

Lucid dreams, nightmares, fleeting out-of-body experiences and mysticism with all of its unexplainable possibilities need more study to allow mankind to better understand. We are as a child struggling to understand calculus. Science tells us that we only use 10% of our brains. If that's true, then the mind is certainly one of the final frontiers and begs to be explored. Breakthroughs in understanding are imminent.

That is, if we are given time to solve the puzzle. As a people, we are treading too heavily on Mother Earth, and we can only pray She continues to tolerate our ignorance and selfishness. While we blindly race to own that larger house and drive a bigger SUV, we are using up resources that took millions of years to develop. And we've done it, essentially, in a single generation.

For thousands of years, Man lived in harmony with nature and our host, the Earth. But now we are running out of oil, there are food shortages worldwide, drinking water is becoming evermore precious, and the oceans are being fished out to feed the exploding population. It is a sobering thought when one thinks just a few years ahead, to what the next generation will face. I hope you share my concern for our children and their children.

I strive to write from that zone in which we understand so little. Much of my inspiration of glimpsing forward comes from dreams and during meditation. I sincerely hope that the scenarios depicted in fiction never come to pass. But polarization of opinions, intolerance of one society toward another, political manipulation for world dominance, and religious extremists of nearly all beliefs threaten our continued existence on Mother Earth. Whether we will suddenly wake up as a society and collectively work to solve the problems we've created, or blast each other to dust, continues to be the most important question facing us all. For the sake of future generations, let us pray we awake from the fog of ignorance - and that those prayers are answered by whatever Higher Forces exist in the universe.

Peace on Earth, good will toward Men. Or Mankind certainly faces a self-fulfilling prophecy.