************************************************************************
The following first appeared in the private email list IVy-subscribers,
which was available to all those who subscribed to the
printed magazine, International Viewpoints.
************************************************************************

The sound of two hands clapping
By Phil Spickler
9 Nov 98

Dear Friends,

Having just emerged from a period of deep darkness, punctuated by
moments of healthy despair, I was most gratified to find a wonderful
communication from Magister Barkley.  I do not use the term
"Magister" lightly.  I should like to once again send large
quantities of appreciation and admiration for the quality of the
aforementioned communication, which brought further light to
questions concerning Grades 5 and 6 and their history, as well as
more information about the incredible John McMaster, and excellent
illumination regarding the generally-misunderstood area of human
existence called homosexuality.  Once again, let me say "Thank you
very much" to Barkley for his excellent offering.

Being at best a poor historian, I yet seem to remember in my few
readings that there have been past societies on this planet in which
male homosexuality, at least, was looked upon with great favor.  It
is fairly well-documented in history that Alexander the Great
practiced both heterosexuality and homosexuality, as did many of the
men of his armies.  Such practices are also spoken about in the
history of Greece, and included relations between older men and
younger men, even boys, as a part of that which comes under the great
heading of "being normal."  Let us not forget, in the great saga of
the Trojan War, the pain and grief that the epic hero Achilles
suffered at the death of his male companion and lover.

Thanks to Barkley, and to L. Ron Hubbard, and the axiom about
goodness and badness, beautifulness and ugliness (just to get you
started), we can see that notions of what is normal very much fall
under the heading of the opinions of different places at different
times rather than being engraved in the marble of fixed ideas that so
beset the many who have not taken advantage of higher understandings.

It is perhaps worthy of note that the much-edited document known as
the Old Testament and the additional hallucinations and attitudes of
the New Testament set the stage for the Western world's later
abominations and highly undeserved attacks upon fellow human beings
whose major and perhaps only "crime" in the eyes of the unenlightened
was that of being different, in this case homosexual rather than
heterosexual.  We find that in the history of Christianity, when the
Roman emperor Constantine converted to this faith, in order to endear
himself to the church fathers he set in motion a number of edicts and
orders against the Hebrews that became such an essential part of
Christian practice and so implanted in the hearts and souls of
Catholics and Protestants that it is not all that surprising after
centuries of inquisitions and pogroms and massacres against those of
the Hebrew persuasion that finally the Holocaust should take place,
and that even in present time, as almost a genetic transmission,
there are still millions of educated people and otherwise in the
world who feel that Jews are a race, a biological race, rather than
Judaism is a religion.

Barkley's comments regarding Hubbard and the notion of races of
thetans not only makes interesting reading but suggests that there
may be a purely spiritual second dynamic that we should all get busy
taking a look at and seeing to the possibility of experiencing same,
or possibly remembering that we already have or even earlier checking
out which race we may have descended from.  Bodywise, on the planet
Earth, there is the consideration that there are only three or
perhaps four true physical races (depending on which biologist or
zoologist you're talking to), and color, in this case, seems to be
one of the important distinctions, since along with the blood of
gorillas it is possible to transfer from one race to another that
vital fluid, thus suggesting that there is something called the human
race, to which gorillas, at least at the level of blood, seem to be
closely aligned.  (I may be wrong about the gorilla blood, but it
seems to me that I've heard this to be true on good authority, and
also looking at some of the members of my own family feel that it
can't be far from the truth.:))

It is my continuing hope that many more of the erudite subscribers to
IVy will put their 3 cents into such matters (adjusted for
inflation), and let more light shine on what is the full nature of
that strange, stunted, and twisted and deformed creature, master of
all others on this planet, Homo sap, with the possibility still ahead
of changing sap to sapiens.

Others are returning me now to the locked chamber from which I am
permitted to come forth occasionally, where I might continue this
dream -- Best to all, Phil