The late Chicago artist Bill Sawicki’s illustration of “The Iron Phoenix”, an article by Brock in Bills’ magazine, The New Spirit. Bill and Brock shared a love of Chicago and Mark Twain.

The Native American name for Chicago is “Chikagou” or “wild onion”, Gaia (“One Mother Earth”) – which is also descriptive of NYC, Gaia; Paris, Gaia; Islamabad, Gaia; Tokyo, Gaia and Capetown, Gaia. It includes Michael Jordan,Gaian; Amir Awan Malik Khan, Gaia and Brock Elk Horn, Gaian.

Science, industrial technology and democracy from the 19 th to 21 st centuries have removed social, religious and political barriers. Body, mind and spirit mobility nurtures our East-West holistic health. A multi-cultural identity synergizes on Inner websites. Harmony among Mother earth’s tribes, related to a technological infrastructure, transcends a divisive oppressor-victim myth with democratic Self empowerment. We‘re becoming aware of our Spiritual Oneness as holistic healing accelerates on our personal websites.

Chicagou, Gaia is a handbook for understanding our 21 st Century Internet, CNN-TV persona on America’s and the world’s “wild west”, opportunistic frontier. The Chicago Bulls, McDonald’s, soccer, libraries, Japanese automobiles, Islamic classes and India’s yogas are “online” resources for self-educated entrepreneurs e-mailing their resumés and emigrating by jet airplane around the planet.

In the Chicago Area, Brock lived in bluecollar, suburban, African-American and Pakistani communities. And moved from a United Methodist minister and later the New Age to a Universal Spirituality in a Chicago neighborhood of streets surnamed Muhammed Ali Jinnah Way, Gandhi Marg and King Sargon Blvd.

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Chapter 1

Chikagou Totems

The Bear...

...is a cosmic (Ursa Major/Minor) totem of Gaia (Mother Earth), the Universe – and our (Higher) Selves. The Inner Bear is god/goddess of her domain: steps aside for no one, eats what she chooses and goes her own way. If you happen upon her in the wilds of your own growth, she'll rear up on her hind legs and growl, "What the hell are you doing here? Friend (god/goddess) or foe (oppressor/victim)?"

The Russian bear is life itself, a vast journey painted upon an eternal landscape by Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace) and Boris Pasternak (Dr. Zhrivago). The California bear is the mountain, ocean and redwood spirit of U. of California Berkeley radicals, Hollywood pioneers and New Age forty-niners.

The Chicago bear is a working-class monster of the Midway (Earth) astride a magnificent Prairie and a big watering hole ( Lake Michigan ). In one paw, she guzzles Milwaukee 's beer vats and in the other hammers big Johns (Hancocks, that is) out of Gary , Indiana steel (mills).

It's as if some raw, untamed Spirit broke loose from crowded Eastern cities, from European civilization, smelled the wild onion (Chi-ka-gou) and strong-armed a natural habitat out of the wilderness. This Mid-West/East portage was (and is) toward the spirit of the Earth goddess (Gaia) – of Native Americans, the American Frontier and Aquarian Age.

According to ancient mythology, the bear mother was venerated as Gaia's totem before civilization imprisoned her solitary, independent spirit. Artemis (bear) and Demeter (grain of the bear mother, a form of Gaia) were wild and unruly goddesses whose cosmic energy wouldn't fit into a patriarchal society. So, they went underground with pagans and gypsies.

"Living beyond civilized life, sexually and boldly aggressive, the bear gives vent to a massive and uncontrolled appetite, upsetting rule and restriction .... moves through space tuned to the needs and possibilities of the seasons, as deliberate as the celestial rhythms... departs from the earth into the ground, seeming to know the way and time to enter the underworld, as well as when and how to return from it" (The Sacred Paw, Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders).

During an annual death and rebirth journey into the underworld, she transforms herself with Gaia's energy and births Chicago Cubs for frolic and play in the "friendly confines" of Wrigley Fields. Her maternal instinct grows Chikagou Bears who dig tunnels (the deepest) and sanitation plants (the largest) for skyscrapers (the tallest). When the joint burned down, she ripped open her fiery heart\h and galvanized earth, air, water and fire into world-class architecture.

"Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders

.... Flinging magnet curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall / bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities; / Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted / against the wilderness, / Bareheaded, / Shoveling, / Wrecking, / Planning, / Building, breaking, rebuilding..." ( Chicago by Carl Sandburg).

Young writers (Nelson Algren), clergy (Vivekananda), comedians (John Belushi), athletes (Mike Ditka) and politicians (Carol Mosely-Bruin-Brawn) who dialogue with the big brute are knocked down and transformed. "The most artistic characters in the strong-arm industry as well as the world's most muscular poets get that way just by growing up in Chicago" (Chicago: City on the Make by Nelson Algren).

The bear has no sympathy for the co-dependent losers, religious pimps and social barflies she snacks on for supper. The vision quest for this totem is a barroom brawl with an Inner bruin who don't get hooked into being second city to no one. Our sacred paw grips salmon and soft little cities in its Self loving jaws.

The omnivorous bear devours a whole Earth – of berries, fish and deer in a Buddha-like belly fattened by an inland portage of Asians, Africans, Europeans and South Americans. Chikagou, Gaia is a frontier tavern of bluecollar Irish Catholics running church casinos and a Democratic machine; Polish Grabowskis and African-American Paytons slurping up a 1985 Super Bowl; an up-from-slavery Johnson Publishing House and Oprah Winfrey seasoned by Martin Luther King Jr. Drive soulfood; a Theosophical or Vedanta Society with the 1893 Parliament of Religions in her all inclusive gut.

The Chicago Bear reads Mike Royko's Slats Grobnik, curses hog belly futures and slobbers over beer and pizza at a neighborhood tavern. Like the Chicago Bear's Refrigerator Perry, she has a fullback's power, speed and reflexes to satisfy a voracious appetite -- for life. Her prairie breadbasket and big heart(land) nourishes a global village.

As Marc Chagall said of the colorful lovers, workers, mothers, streets, boats, animals and angels on his 3,000 square foot, 4,000 ton Chicago mosaic, "I chose the subject of the four seasons because I felt this represents the four seasons of all of life and of life itself".

The bear's universal persona is present in the ber, bher and bar etymological roots of birth, bury, bier, burden; in childbearing, bearing burdens, bear watching. Her self-healing abilities, recognized by the Cheyenne, Chinese and French, is present in such herbs as bearbane (Aconitum), bear's weed (Eriodictyon) and bear's garlic (Allium ursinum).

Ursa Major's cosmic connection to Gaia was understood among prehistoric Siberian Ostyaks, Finns and Inuit Eskimos. And among the Algonquin Indians, who gave us the word Chi-ka-gou. Some portrayed her as the cosmic hunter who, in crossing the heavens daily, represented Gaia's death and rebirth cycles. The Hindus used a turning spiral or cross to symbolize this heavenly source of our elan-vital.

"The rising of the sun, the turning of the seasons, the passages of a human life all require human action. But the basic process is always that of a wheel of existence whose movement is epitomized as a genetrix - the work of a metaphysical mother. A feminine principle of birth, growth, death, decay and rebirth lies at the heart of the veneration of the bear, for the bear is the supreme model – and therefore the guiding spirit – of the theme of renewal" (The Sacred Paw).

Ursa (bear) Major and Minor both have seven stars. The first two stars in Ursa Major and the Earth's axis points to the Pole Star in Ursa Minor. India 's Rig Veda says the seven stars represent the seven rays connected to the seven chakras in the Earth and our bodies.

The Bear totem builds a self-empowering body, mind and spirit infrastructure for spiritual sky-scrap(p)ers. After a long winter's sleep, our Aquarian Age Bear tribe is waking up, letting go of the Piscean Age's sacrificial-martyr illusion and re-owning our happy hunting grounds.

The Bull

This Chikagou, this wild bull, is the Caesarean section of a Self-empowering Spirit whose time has come. Chicago was never the renaissance or urban renewal of an old world city. In 1812, old Fort Dearborn 's population was massacred by Potawatomis in a prairie wilderness. In 1871, the town burned down. In 1893, a metropolitan colossus of over one million people hosted a world's fair.

During the 19th century, a rampaging herd of Irish, Italians, Polish and Africans jumped their oppressive stockyards and forged an Industrial Revolution's steamships and iron horses for transportation to freedom and opportunity in wide open spaces. The hell with looking for handouts from old world landlords.

Chicago was an inland portage of blacksmith shops, taverns, grocery stores, blast furnaces, hog butchers, whore houses, freight trains and – a stampede of oxen-yoked prairie schooners to Oklahoma wheatfields, Abilene cattle drives and California gold mines. And God help any polite reformers or slowpoke intellectuals who got in the way. "Hustlertown", as Nelson Algren said, is a drunken brawl of Self-reliant fighters, "a woman with a broken nose" in a "neon wilderness".

" `A church and a W.C.T.U. never growed a big town yet,' Old Cap Streeter contradicted [the reverend] flatly, `Hit's still a frontier town.' Where the gouging and the cunning and the no-holds-barred spirit of the Middle Border still holds as true as rent day.... And with a driving vigor and a reckless energy unmatched in the memory of man" (Chicago: City on the Make).

Chikagou, Gaia remains a frontier portage for rugged individuals to an Inner Wild West and Far East where Self love is the only law. The vision quest for this totem is in Haymarket Riot, Billy Goat Tavern, group therapy, Board of Trade, Democratic Convention, Zen meditation and Rolfing sweat lodges.

India 's Krishna , Shiva and Rudra are bull-gods in the ego's china shop, the creator and destroyer function of our Higher Selves. They charge into our karmic bullfight rings and knock the hell out of any fear or illusions that keep us from inseminating our selves and the planet with prana.

"The bullfight is in essence a reaffirmation of the worth of the individual in the face of great familial, political, economic and religious restrictions. The Spaniard is severely restricted in all of these areas yet breaks their confining bonds with his identifying participation in the bullfight. To him the corrida is a rare and precious battle where a brave man and his sword may stand alone against the horns of authority and emerge victorious (The Horn and the Sword by Jack Randolph Conrad).

Taurus' lessons on the astrological wheel of karma include the practical expression of feelings, ideas and spirit in a career and relationship. By "taking the bull by the horns", we remove obstacles that interfere with our creative (fertility) and financial (power) success.

Taurus, ruled by Venus, has a circle and lines, male and female symbol for the creative power within us all. In Shakti Woman, Vicki Noble illustrated how Taurus' head and horns is an ancient facsimile of a woman's womb and fallopian tubes. The Egyptian symbol for life (ankh) represents an Inner balancing of male (yang) and female (yin) energy that inseminates and gives birth. Osiris, the bull of the West, creates through Isis ; Ra, the bull of heaven, creates each day's sun by copulating with his mother.

The bull was considered divine throughout the Fertile Crescent . The Phoenicians made its symbol (A) the first letter of their alphabet. Taurus was also venerated in Crete , Italy ("land of cattle"), Nubia , by the Celtic Druids, Scandinavia , Greece (Dionysius) and among Native Americans (the buffalo).

In the Midwest , its spirit was present in Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe; in John Deere, the Illinois blacksmith who tempered steel to plow a prairie; in the logsplitting sodbuster (Abraham Lincoln) who hitched his wagon to a star – and in Chicago 's Union stockyards.

They may have torn down our totem's Southside stomping grounds. But not before a forty-ton winged bull with a human head got wind of three million kindred souls a year feeding a young country's spirit. The stone sculpture was a sixteen foot palace guardian in a city, Dur-Sharrukin, built by King Sargon (721-705 B.C.).

In 1929, it jumped from a Mesopotamian grave into the hands of archaeologists from Chicago 's Oriental Institute. It inspired them to get permission for setting it free in a natural habit of empire-builders. One wall of the new Oriental Institute was left unconstructed in order to move it in. Additional stone sculptures from Sargon's palace and a colossal bull's head from Xerxes' Throne Hall soon followed.

King Sargon ("wild bull") Boulevard, a surname of Western Avenue from Devon to Peterson, boasts about the winged bull's creative power. The Tigres-Euphrates river valley was once a midland portage of the then known world. Engineering and architecture skills were developed to harness a flooding river, drain a marsh and irrigate the land. The Assyrians also codified the first legal system and developed astronomy, astrology and cuneiform writing.

King Sargon's inscription on the stone bull is all Chicago : "I constructed a city .... abolished forced labor .... laid out a great park .... built awesome shrines, firm as the mass of the mountain .... There under a single administration I settled peoples from the four quarters of the world, of alien tongues and different speech, mountain dwellers and lowlanders, as many as the Light of the Gods (Shamash), Lord of all, has shepherded".

The Chikagou bull is a winged, rock-hard Michael Jordan hurdling stockyard pens, charging through seven foot warriors, leaping high rise Loop power brokers and slamdunking his way through NBA fines, Shaq attacks and New York nicks with an "I Will" spirit ( Chicago 's motto). It's a death-defying bull market plunge into unknown futures.

Sooner or later, everyone has to fight for their freedom in a frontier cowtown, in a "vast way station where three and a half million bipeds swarm with the single cry, one side or a leg off, I'm gettin' mine!' .... if you're not a bull then you'd better be a fox. Wise up, Jim: it's a joint where the bulls and the foxes live well and the lambs wind up head-down from the hook ( Chicago : City on the Make by Nelson Algren).

It's not safe to daydream on the streets of Pamplona , Spain when the bulls are loose. Nor in Chi-town where they're on the rampage – all year long. Punch-drunk after getting off the barroom floor, after goring yet another fear/illusion, the Chikagou bull snorts a warrior's "be-here-now" fire, stares death in the face and charges into another tomorrow.

The Black Hawk...

... vision quest lifts the hood of an Inner falcon who flies directly to its target. There are no frills, no excess weight on this bird of prey. Like Picasso's Loop sculpture, s/he is a steel-ribbed phoenix, nose askew from many battles, who rises through karmic fires with larger, more powerful wings.

The Chicagou Black Hawk is steel on ice, a Stan Mikita or Bobby Hull who at high velocity and with deadly accuracy slashes a goal(ie)'s jugular. Or a Jean Baptiste Point duSable, part Native American, part African-American gun-sighting an inland portage for a fur trading post settlement. Or Chief Blackhawk's spirit soaring through Loredo Taft's 48-foot high Rock River sculpture.

In Egyptian mythology, Hawk is "Horus, the divine son of the birth goddess, Isis, and her husband, Osiris, god of death and the fecund earth. He represents our highest aspect, and his eye is the eye of the sun, which illumines all things. As the reflection of our highest selves, Horus is all seeing, all knowing, all being. He helps us aspire to our goals in accordance with our highest potential. .... The eye of Horus shines light through the darkness of infinite space, giving us clear vision to see through all dimensions into the essence of things (The Golden Cauldron by Nicki Scully)".

Horus looks from a cosmic perspective at the shortest distance between two points. What's practical? What works? "Less is more", Mies Van der Rohe said in designing his steel and glass high-rises. Frank Lloyd Wright used the natural lines of the prairie.

"Form follows function" (Louis H. Sullivan) in Chi-town. She don't give a damn what the joint looks as long as the job gets done. Tear down old landmarks, re-route a river, jack up the downtown, build steel X frames on the outside of a skyscraper (John Hancock) and an el train on the doorstep of Loop offices.

It's a working-class portage for log-splitters (Abraham Lincoln), newspaper hacks (Ben Hecht), brass-knuckled poets (Gwendolyn Brooks), back of the (stock)yard politicians (the Irish Daleys), street-wise social workers (Jane Addams), bootleggers (Al Capone) and blues singers (Sunnyland Slim).

They gather over a shot and a beer in astral taverns and sing "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight". Hell, they had to burn the joint down. Chi-town's haphazard foundation wasn't practical for the job that lay ahead. "Burn 'er down. Start over again. Rise like a phoenix on a rock-solid foundation. Time's a wastin'. There's a whole planet to prey upon".

"They tell me you are brutal .... so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my / city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: / Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. (Chicago by Carl Sandburg)".

Leave your high falutin' credentials behind when you fly onto this Mid-Way battleship. Even the University of Chicago's John Dewey said so (Pragmatism). Dump your morality off at the door of the football stadium. There's a knock-down, drag-em-out atom smashing chore below. Know a faster way to end World War II?

The future is now. And "It's every man for himself in this hired air. Yet once you've come to be part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real (Chicago: City on the Make by Nelson Algren).

Let California dabble with illusions. The Chikagou hawk streamlines its body with first class sewage treatment (colonics and acupuncture), installs telecommunications (meditation and computers) equipment, sharpens its vision with natural foods and balances his yin/yang wings an East/West philosophy for Starship Enterprise missions.

Hatha Yoga, Jungian Therapy and Tai Chi work well here. Wicca, of course, is centuries old and astrology is measurable, less prone to error. African-American and Roman Catholic churches prosper because of their connection to working-class immigrants and the Civil Rights movement. But any bullshit Christian or New Age gurus are ignored.

The Chikagou Black Hawk keeps a sharp eye out for hustlers, a .38 revolver under his wings and a nose for a profitable killing in hog belly futures. Its talons attack the jugular of fear and illusion, rips to shreds any wind drag, any ego games that interfere with expanding its consciousness and cutting a fast deal in a global marketplace.

"Short wings. A falcon's short wings! That's the answer! .... He climbed two thousand feet above the black sea, and without a moment for thought of failure and death, he brought his forewings tightly in to his body, left only the narrow swept daggers of his wingtips extended into the wind, and fell into a vertical dive.... [He closed his eyes to slits against the wind and rejoiced.] A hundred forty miles per hour! And under control! If I dive from five thousand feet instead of two thousand, I wonder how fast... (Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach).

J. Livingston Hawk studies the akashic records, reviews his past-lifetime data-bank, consults a natal astrology chart, counsels with birds of a feather, hires flight engineers (spirit guides), buys meditation tapes for a Walkman, telephones by satellite, fires up a computer modem, faxes reports to London and Tokyo and boards a jet plane for a New York seminar.

Horus masters aerial maneuvers to O'Hare, Internet and astral air-ports with a simplistic design, karma-tized by truth. Unencumbered by illusion, he soars to Self fulfilling heights. Chicago is a jet-age body, mind and spirit portage to a global village (Gaiatown, Uni-verse).

The Chikagou Black Hawk (Malcolm X, Clarence Darrow, Eugene Debs and Martin Luther King Jr.) has a cosmic vision of our United Nations, a light and shadow knowledge of the human spirit and a razor-sharp beak for Self expression. He is a fighter escort for the planetary phoenix rising from Kitty Hawk eggs -- to an Eagle landing on the moon, to a rocket with telescopic Hubble-eyes streaking through the heavens.

Their fierce courage is sculptured into Richard Hunt's black and steel "Eagle Columns" (Jonquil Park). Emblazoned on one is a tribute by Vachel Lindsay to Governor Altgeld, "A 100 white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons / The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming began / ... O brave-hearted, O wise man, that kindled the flame--" (The Eagle That Is Forgotten)".

The Chikagou Black Hawk is a nocturnal Batman who stalks fear in our back alleys and most dangerous streets. In the dark night of his soul, the sun rises, daylight appears. The Inner Hawk is a spiritual phantom, a phoenix in a black cape, a cosmic shroud of death (and rebirth) in whom the Self illuminating stars appear.

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Chapter 4

The W/est – E/ast Frontier

Mohammed Ali Jinnah Way ...

... is the name of the Devon Avenue block on Chicago 's Northside where I lived in the 1990s. If you walk west, commemorative King Sargon Boulevard, Gandhi Marg, Golda Meir Boulevard and Croatia Way signs-of-our-times appear in a neighborhood of African-Americans, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, Indians, Iraqis, Vietnamese, Mexicans and Koreans. Devon Avenue (and Chicago ) is an encounter with a global village – and ourselves.

"Asalamu `Alaikum" (the peace of God), I say to my Pakistani friend at the 7-Eleven where he works.

"Assalamu `Alaikum. How is the world famous writer?" he chuckles.

"Same old bullshit! And with you?"

"Same old bullshit!" It is a ritual that has gone on for many years as Amir, a middle-aged college graduate who managed a factory in his native country and drove oil tankers in Saudi Arabia , dreams of saving enough money to buy a goat farm near his village or bring his family here. And I dream of book contracts that would enable me to travel and write full-time.

As the world walks in and out of the Japanese owned store, we talk of CNN television in Pakistan and 140 other countries, of Islam and Hinduism, of astrology and the world economy, of cable television and the Asian film industry, of our Chicago Auto Show trip and the British Land Rovers, Japanese Hondas and American Buicks he has driven. I tell him Mike Royko mentioned Pakistani cab drivers in his Chicago Tribune column. We laugh as they come into the store throughout the night to buy milk for their tea. Amir says the Qur'an is on computer disk – with sounds, graphics and animation for learning Arabic.

One morning, another sign appears on our street, " Devon Avenue : The International Marketplace". Chikagou, Gaia is a work-shop for an Aquarian Age we-ness. In the 1800s, it was a portage for Irish Roman Catholics, Polish Jews and African-American Protestants to a democratic frontier. In the 1990s, it is a planetary West-East O'Hare Airport and telecommunications terminal.

In this global neighborhood, Jinnah Way defiantly abuts Gandhi Marg as Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), the father of Pakistan , did in confronting Mahatma Gandhi during the 1940s. For many years, they fought in the India legislature for independence from Great Britain . But Hindu oppression led this Chicago-style politician to work out a deal for a Muslim land partition.

In 1947, many Muslims and Hindu castes migrated to the new country. The 1973 Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan says "Wherein the principles of democracy, freedom, equality, tolerance and social justice as enunciated by Islam, shall be fully observed .... Now, therefore, we the people of Pakistan .... faithful to the declaration made by the founder of Pakistan , Quaid-i-Azam [great leader]', Muhammad Ali Jinnah, that Pakistan would be a democratic state based on Islamic principles of social justice".

Islam's message of equality is a powerful one. If you saw Spike Lee's film X, you heard "Assalamu `Alaikum" and learned of Malcolm X's devotion to Islam. Forty-two per cent of American Muslims are African-American. Those roots go back to slavery days and the 1913 founding of the Moorish Science Temple in Newark , New Jersey .

Of more than a billion Muslims in the world, the five million in the United States are expected to number more than six million by the year 2,000 A.D. There are one million Muslims in California , 800,000 in New york City and 420,000 (with over fifty mosques) in the Chicago Area.

Islamic practices include Shadada (The Creed of Islam), the Commitment and pledge that there is only one God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God; Salat, the performance of the five daily prayers; Saum, fasting or total abstinence from food, liquids and intimate intercourse from dawn to sunset during the month of Ramadan (observes the Qur'an coming to Muhammed); Aakat, purifying tax, annual payment distributed to poor; and Hajj, Pilgrimage to Makkah (Mecca). The pilgrimage, required once in a lifetime, is in memory of the trials and tribulations of Prophet Abraham, his wife Hagar and his eldest son, Prophet Ishmael.

God's Message of Peace, i.e. Islam, came to Muhammed when he was 40 years old. The revelation he received is called the Qur'an; his sayings, the Hadith. Born in 570 C.E., Muhammed is considered the culmination of such prophets as Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Islamic principles include angelic messengers, a lunar calendar and a final Judgment.

During Ramadan, a Burger King manager from India invites me to Friday prayers at the Muslim Community Center . A taxi cab driver hands me a copy of The Pakistan Link, a Los Angeles newspaper. On Saturday mornings, I watch a Muslim program on Cable Television, Channel 26. Islamic scholars are discussing ancient and modern practices for sighting the New Moon – which begins and ends Ramadan. They stand watch in the Sears Tower and adjust the calendar accordingly.

At the 7-Eleven, a Chicago police sergeant studying world religions at a Lutheran School of Theology asks about the Unity Church . A Pakistani with a Master's degree in Public Health Administration questions Gandhi's motives. A Christian Nigerian talks of discrimination toward Muslims. I explain the Hindu god/goddesses as manifestations of one God. And we go on from midnight until three in the morning.

This dialogue has accelerated with more freedom in a CNN television, Internet computer and AT&T satellite marketplace. Gaia's yin/yang (East-West) spiritual identity is working itself out in neighborhood factories, taverns and stores among common folks with a planetary mobility.

Gaia's electronic arteries bring answers as soon as we ask them. Amir gives me a brochure on Ramadan with an IslamInfoNet "menu", (312) 829-4262. A catalogue of books and Audio-Visual Tapes on Islam from Chicago 's Iqra' Book Center has correspondence courses on Islam. Their books range from "Jesus and the Ahmadiyya Movement" and "Muslim Husband and Wife: Rights and Duties" to Islam dictionaries, prayers, law, history, worship, philosophy and politics.

The inner/outer dialogue along Chikagou's I-We frontier is perhaps eternal. What about Gandhi's fasting for Muslims? Can Islam's final judgment be related to Hindu karma and Christian mysticism to the Sufis? What about Muhammed as the final messenger? Does a god/goddess identity unify or divide us? And what about women?

As with Christianity, the attitude toward women varies among Islamic countries and sects. I learn Muhammed was married for 20 years and took other wives for political reasons – only after becoming a widower. He said, "All people are equal, as equal as the teeth of a comb. An arab is no better than a non-Arab, nor is a white person over a black person, nor is the male superior to the female. The only people who enjoy preference with God are the devout (Hadith)". The Prime Minister of 90 million Pakistan Muslims is Benazir Bhutto, a woman.

One learns that ninety per cent of Muslims in the world are Sunni's whose beliefs contrast to the Shiites and a clergy hierarchy in Iraq , Yemen , Iran and Lebanon . The Sufis, popular in the West, practice a mystical death of the lower self or ego for becoming One with God.

Amid neighbors reading and speaking Russian, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic, Korean, Chinese and Urdu, I take the #155 CTA bus to the el station next to Roman Catholic Loyola University where Muslim students now have a center in the student union. On the el platform, I look at the Sears Tower and the John Hancock building, both designed by Fazlur Khan, a Muslim. Amir has invited me to Eid Al-fitr, the festive ending of Ramadan. And I wonder – at how this Chikagou, this Gaia is becoming a user-friendly home.

King Sargon Boulevard ...

...intersects Mohammed Ali Jinnah Way and Gandhi Marg at Western and Devon Avenue . In the Chicago Tribune Magazine (May 17, 1992), William Aldrich said "From the windowless Assyrian-American Association Building at 1618 W. Devon to the Orthodox synagogue Congregation Chesed L'Avrohom at 3135, the street ... is possibly unrivaled anywhere in the United States ". The Chicago Sun-Times ( 4/1/1994 ) said Chikagou's Far North Side is "the most diverse neighborhood in the continental United States . Fifty languages are spoken on Rogers Park's bustling streets".

And in a Time magazine issue (Fall, 1993) on "The New Face of America", Pico Tyler wrote "A common multiculturalism links us all – call it Planet Hollywood, Planet Reebok or the United Colors at Benetton. Taxi and hotel and disco are universal terms now, but so too are karaoke and yoga and pizza. For the gourmet alone, there is tiramisu at the Burger King in Kyoto , echt angel-hair pasta in Saigon and enchiladas on every menu in Nepal . But deeper than mere food, it is souls that are mingling. In Brussels , a center of the new `unified Europe ', one new baby in every four is Arab".

My own Rogers Park – West Ridge neighborhood included Roman Catholic Loyola University , Devon Avenue 's international boulevard, the leftist Heartland Cafe, Unity Church , Oasis Center , Assyrian social clubs, low income apartment buildings, upper-class high-rises, middle-class single family homes -- and a telecommunications highway.

In the 1800s, Chikagou was a frontier trading post for Irish, Polish, Germans, Italians and African-Americans emigrating to a free marketplace, a land of opportunity. As we travel in a 21st century global village toward an unknown future, an ultimately spiritual question emerges, "Who are we?"

..."You must be Assyrian!", I say to the bank teller wearing a gold locket, a winged bull, around her neck. "Did you know one of the original stone bulls from King Sargon's Temple is at the Oriental Institute by the University of Chicago ?" "No!" She is pleased with the information, then tells me of an Assyrian radio station and the Ashurbanipal Library, 7055 N. Clark , Chicago .

Homer Ashurian, a former Assyrian Representative at the Iranian Parliament (1976 - 1979), is now editor of the Assyrian Universal Alliance Foundation newsletter. Their Social Services Department provides job placement, language classes, scholarships, health care and housing services. He hands me a copy of The Assyrian Star magazine and shows me the library which opens to the public on Saturday and Sunday.

King Sargon's winged bull at the Oriental Institute is a forty ton, sixteen foot high colossus amid artifacts from a Tigres-Euphrates valley that historians call the "Cradle of [Western] Civilization". They invented writing with cuneiform wedge-shaped characters, irrigation, glassware and wheel-driven chariots. They also established a law code and library, charted the sun's ecliptic and named the twelve astrology signs. Astrology as "practiced by us today derives originally from ancient Mesopotamia . The Greeks and Romans tended to call astrologers Chaldeans or Babylonians.... the Babylonian priests assigned constellations, planets, zodiacal signs and a few major stars to particular countries and specific gods. The events they forecast were limited, but included invasions, war, crop failure, or a fine harvest.... The first written astrological maxims we possess date back to almost 3000 B.C. The most famous are the predictions of Sargon the Old" (The History of Astrology by Zolar.

One wonders if the Bible's Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11:1-9) is a Judeo-Christian prejudice against creating one's own reality. Ziggurats or "cosmic mountains", 270 feet high with seven terraces for the seven known planets, were astronomy observatories used for astrology prediction.

In the first century, the Assyrians embraced Christianity and introduced it throughout Asia . A neighbor once invited me to the baptism of his daughter at the Assyrian Pentecostal Church on Devon Avenue . Aramaic, the language of Jesus, is spoken at the (Assyrian) Apostolic Church of the East.

By contrast, the Muslim majority in Iran and Iraq relates their history to the Prophet Muhammed and Islam. In recent years, the Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Husseim regimes have continued a centuries old persecution of Christian Assyrians by Muslim Arabs, Median Persians and Turks.

Of more than 3 million Assyrians on the planet, approximately two million are in Iraq ; 350,000 in Syria ; 60,000 in Turkey ; 50,000 in Iran . Many fled to refugee camps in Greece , Spain and Cyprus . Some 290,000 made an exodus to the United States , including 80,000 in the Chicago Area.

On April 1st, 1994 or 6,744 on the Assyrian calendar, they celebrate their New Year with a parade along King Sargon Boulevard . As floats representing Assyrian churches, social service agencies, social clubs and businesses pass by, thousands lift their voices to salute those still fighting for freedom in their ancestral homeland.

An opportunity to establish their own country in Northern Mesopotamia was lost in the post-World War I creation of Iraq and Iran . During the Gulf War, they were as sensitive to unfair identification with their oppressors as Japanese and German Americans during World War II.

And yet, they are not a large enough group to communicate the differences between them and the Muslim majority in Iran and Iraq they are mistaken for. Congresswoman Anna Eisho from California and tennis champion Andre Agassi are not as well known for their Assyrian heritage as other ethnic minorities. Nor are such restaurants as Al Khayam with a menu of dolma, kipti, gurdoo, harissa, and kadi.

Survival in a war-torn land does give them a streetwise advantage in America . There are few gang-bangers on the Devon Avenue turf of veteran guerilla fighters – whose friends and family have been wounded or killed. In storefront social clubs, fierce warriors are secretive and alert to any hostile movement on the street. It was more than a year before they trusted me.

One night, the “legend” of Devon Avenue or so I call him, takes a slingshot out of his pocket and hits a sign, dead center, across a parking lot and street. It is a weapon he used to hunt small animals in Iran. At the store where he works, his arsenal also includes a baseball bat, tear gas spray and a .357 magnum gun.

I call him "legend" because of the stories about him on the streets, and because he mastered the language and customs in such a short time. Now married to an Anglo-Saxon, he has a suburban home and two jobs, one as a security guard. Because of the Gulf War prejudice, he identifies himself as Hispanic on a Chicago policeman application.

In the 1960s, I was a student assistant at a Japanese, Hispanic and English speaking church near Devon Avenue's then Jewish neighborhood. As second and third generations acculturated, other ethnic groups moved into the church and along Devon. In the 1990s, we are becoming multi-cultural Gaians.

On the #155 bus, I say hello to an invisible nation of warriors on the way to jobs unavailable to Assyrians in their native countries. The freedom to proudly parade their heritage and the freedom from fear and want is accelerating their good neighborliness. Perhaps, this is a characteristic of the new “we-ness” in Chikagou, in Gaia.

Gandhi Marg...

...or Devon Avenue from Western to California Avenue, is named after India's Mahatma Gandhi and includes the Hyderabad House, Kanval Palace and Moti Mahal restaurants; India Sari Palace, Resham's Sarees and Sari Sapne sari stores; Vitha, Jewelry and Siddharth jewelers; House of Laziz and Jai Hind Plaza grocery stores; Gandhi and East-West Electronics and Al Sabah Video movies, made in India.

Those several blocks are also the headquarters of the Himalayan Institute, Vedanta Society, Ram Dass, California School for Integral Studies, New Age magazine, Esalen, Association of Transpersonal Psychology, many New Age bookstores, hatha yoga studios, Deepok Chopra and over 1000 holistic health practitioners – to name a few.

Gandhi Marg, in other words, is a planetary phenomenon. For while these groups draw upon many resources, they would not be the same without yogas, chakras, the Bhagavad Gita, Ram Dass' guru, Krishnamurti, Vivekananda or India's mountaintop neighbors in Tibet. In contrast to Pakistan and Assyria, many Americans know as much or more about the religion and customs of India as the natives who move here. New Age pilgrims have made vegetarian fare a specialty on Gandhi Marg.

Mahatma Gandhi's influence on Martin Luther King Jr. and world peace is well-known. During the recent elections in South Africa (1994), Coretta King stood at Nelson Mandela's side. And his granddaughter, Ela, was elected to a congressional seat in the country where, one hundred years earlier (1894), he helped found the Natal Indian Congress which fought for political recognition of Indian workers and the Phoenix Settlement, a utopian society where people of all races could live and work together. During his 21 years there, Gandhi developed ahimsa or spiritual non-violence to "banish violence from the heart of the individual" – which motivated Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and other African leaders.

The India Consul in Chicago estimates 150,000 in the nine Midwest states it serves. Cable television Channel 53 has two weekly India programs. The consul assists in visas and other services mentioned in the bi-weekly India News from the Embassy of India in Washington, D.C. Because Chicago's 75,000 Indians disagree on so many issues, they have two parades.

The more than 70 groups affiliated with India include the Association of Indians in American. Chicago Raja Yoga Center, Consultative Committee for India Muslims, Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago, India Catholic Association of America, Jain Society of Metropolitan Chicago, Sikh Religious Society of Chicago, Vivekananda Vedanta Society of Chicago, Zoroastrian Association of Metropolitan Chicago and Federation of India Associations.

In the West's left brain, the sub-continent of India has likewise been a bewildering array of many gods, sensuous Tantric Yoga sculptures, sacred cows, non-attachment to others' pain and the mystery of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. The Indus Valley was a crossroads for Alexander the Great (Greece), Mongols, Muslims, Christians and other invading armies. Unlike America's early European (Judeo-Christian) heritage and Pakistan's Islam identity, India has always been a religious/philosophical melting-pot.

It is more similar to 19th century Chicago, the planetary trading post which hosted an 1893 Parliament of Religions. And to 20th century Chikagou, an O'Hare and telecommunications air-port terminal to a more democratic, less authoritarian, more holistic, less linear multi-cultural world.

The merging of Gaia's left and right brain synergizes an intuitive (East) and practical (West) spirit in black, red, brown, white and yellow colors using push buttons, remote controls and digital instrument panels with fast forward, past life rewind and present time in a marketplace of moving circles, triangles, squares and infinity loops. In an interdependent global village, Internet access to information has made spiritual pilgrims of us all.

"Pilgrimage is a highly conscious and evolved activity in Mother India. Most of her children know they are transmigrating through ceaseless rounds of birth and death – the soul's pilgrimage through countless forms...Traditionally, a Hindu or Buddhist goes on pilgrimage from time to time, journeying all over the vast, sacred landscape of the Mother. Millions of pilgrims are always traveling about and being fed at countless dharmsalas (pilgrim's hostels) and ashrams" (A Pilgrim'sGuide to Planet Earth, edited by Parmatma Singh Khalsa).

During a pilgrimage around his native India and later the United States, Vivekananda envisioned a unifying bridge between East and West. India's practical spirituality includes the demography of energy centers or chakras and a body-mind-spirit holism. America's democracy, industrial technology and Western Frontier facilitated the use of such Inner tools as common sense and intuition for individual enterprise. Those Self empowering characteristics have globalized McDonald's hamburgers, Japanese cars and Eastern religions.

The spiritual paradox of Gaia's new “we-ness” is a new “I-ness”, a camaraderie of strong individuals, spiritual warriors, standing as equals with "spaces in our togetherness" (Kahlil Gibran). Instead of compromising one's power for a co-dependent religious ideal in a relationship or group and giving one's power away to authoritarian clergy, counselors, educators and medical doctors, there is a co-facilitating of one's Inner Healer, the god/goddess within.

Mahatma Gandhi said, "I ask nobody to follow me. Everyone should follow his own inner voice" (Non-Violence in Peace and War). As one person's Inner Light shines upon the world, it enlightens us all. Because Self-empowerment is non-attached to any change by others, it nurtures spiritual Unity.

At the 1893 Parliament of Religions, Vivekananda said "The whole world of religions is only a traveling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal.... It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns.

".....If there is ever to be a universal religion, it must be one which will have no location in place or time; which will be infinite, like the God it will preach, and whose sun will shine upon the followers of Krishna and of Christ, on saints and sinners, alike; which will not be Brahminical or Buddhist, Christian or Mohammedan, but the sum total of all these, and still have infinite space for development; which in its catholicity will embrace in its infinite arms, and find a place for, every human being ...

"It will be a religion which will have no place for persecution or intolerance in its polity, which will recognize divinity in every man and woman, and whose whole scope, whose whole force, will be centered in aiding humanity to realize its own true, divine nature" (Chikagou, Gaia, September 19, 1893).

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8

Gaia University

The Marketplace

Gaia is a university without walls that educates our body, mind and spirit. We learn lessons (karma) in a school of hard knocks, market our knowledge (dharma) and graduate to another classroom (lifetime). During the 20th century, that curriculum has accelerated.

In Small Town America , James Demuth said syndicated newspaper columnists Finley Peter Dunne, George Ade and Ring Lardner developed their anecdotal writing style in a global microcosm. "Chicago in 1890 was not a city but a frontier boomtown, having exploded in population from 368,000 in 1871, the year of the Chicago Fire, to nearly 1,300,000 in 1893, the year of Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition.... Roughshod, belligerent, and uncultured, this rude city had sprung from the grandiose ambitions of the Davy Crocketts, Mike Finks, Henry Clays, and Stephen Douglases of an earlier frontier, expansionist region.

"Yet, for all of its frontier swagger, the Chicago of 1890 was distinct from its immediate past. It was cosmopolitan. The city contained a complex, bewildering variety of ethnic cultures. The census of 1890 records 41 percent of the population as foreign-born, with the Irish, German, Bohemian, Polish, and Scandinavians constituting the major groups. It had also begun to create those institutions which would make it cosmopolitan in civilization, as well as in population. The Newberry Library and the Chicago Auditorium were built in 1889, the University of Chicago in 1892, the Chicago Art Institute in 1893, and Orchestra Hall was completed in 1904. Chicago , then, in 1890, was a society of immigrants, widely diverse in cultures, classes, and education".

Chicago's Loop (named after the el train's downtown route) was (and is) a boxing ring harbinger of Gaia's 20th century neighborhood brawls, bull sessions and love feasts; an international village discovering its Self on an Bhagavad-Gita battlefield, a "no-holds-barred... frontier town" ( Chicago: City on the Make by Nelson Algren).

Social (labor, women and civil rights), religious (Reformation, New Age) and political (American, French, Russian) revolutions have been manufactured, in part, by worldwide trade, industrial technology and the scientific method in London, Paris and New York City university/marketplaces. Self-educated Middle Class merchants, immigrants and revolutionaries, moving up the socio-economic ladder, used intuition, common sense and practical experience (from their Inner Teacher's past lifetimes).

In Chicago , that democratic balancing of power was supported by the philosophies of Vivekananda, Jane Addams, John Dewey, Annie Besant, Eugene Debs, Louis H. Sullivan, John Altgeld – and later by the Human Potential Movement, Eastern religions and the New Age. "The best preacher is the heart, / say the Jews of faith. / The best teacher is time. / The best book is the world. / The best friend is God" ( The People, Yes, Carl Sandburg).

William Wrigley – who was expelled from a Philadelphia school at age 12 and worked in a soap factory – decided to sell chewing gum in this university/marketplace. John Dewey and Francis Parker chose Chikagou's wide open spaces to implement their ideas on progressive education. To learn about manufacturing, John Dewey had students picking cotton and spinning it into cloth on machines they often designed themselves.

Pragmatic education "turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins... towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power... It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth" ( Pragmatism by John Dewey).

Bertha Palmer who supported the Women's Pavilion at the 1893 World's Fair – also encouraged her millionaire Chicago friends to buy French Impressionist art which was displayed at the fair and revolutionalized the art world. Looked down upon as "vulgar" by the Eastern establishment, their Monets, Renoirs, Cezannes, Toulouse-Lautrecs and Van Goghs (eventually donated to the Art Institute of Chicago) were of a sensuous, non-linear nature, more true to the spirit of Chicago, the American frontier and Gaia.

"What is art?"d, Bertha Palmer asked. "I cannot argue with Loredo Taft who is a pundit, but in my limited conception it is the work of some genius graced with extraordinary proclivities not given to ordinary mortals. Speaking of art...my husband can spit over a freight car" ( The Chicagoization of America by Kenan Heise).

To Francis Parker, the principal of Chicago 's teaching-training Normal School from 1882 until 1899, "No separation or isolation [of the rich and poor]... also meant no separation of the sexes from kindergarten on, an unheard of idea in his day. It meant elimination of the European system of education, where everything came down from the minister of education... it has been said of Parker's pedagogy: `The essence of the new system was that there was no system about it; it was marked by intense individuality .... Francis parker wanted everyone responsible: administrators, educators, parents and the children' " (Heise).

The democratic thrust in Chicago 's Public Schools by Parker, Dewey and Jane Addams was interrupted by ethnic minority discrimination, a Depression and a post-World War II suburban exodus – and resurrected in the 1960s by student protests, Civil Rights marchers, interstate highways, satellite television and computer modems.

" Columbia is a distinctly urban, commuter institution whose students reflect the economic, racial, cultural and educational diversity of contemporary America . Columbia conducts education in close relationship to a vital urban reality and serves important civic purpose by active engagement in the life and culture of the city of Chicago.... faculty and staff of working artists and creative educators [approximately 140 full-time and 590 part-time faculty] .... ( 1992-1994 Columbia College Chicago catalogue).

We are virtual reality computer terminals, interactive with Loop (and global) City college, Art Institute, Field Museum and Board of Trade resources. NovaNet connects the City Colleges of Chicago to universities throughout the country. Our neural, computer and astral pathways are uniting, astrologers say, during a 1993-1994 Uranus (electrical) - Neptune (spiritual) conjunction.

Chicago Tribune news item, November 7, 1994 : Dr. Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University Teachers College said, "There will be liberal arts colleges and research universities.... The rest of the students would go to school electronically through personal computers, with classes coming from a national communications hub, transmitting classes from the nation's top teachers".

In a CNN-Internet world, we are more knowledgeable, more in dialogue with our neighbors (and our selves/Selves), more in touch with self-empowering resources than at any time in history. "With the Internet, the whole globe is one marketplace" former executive director of Commercial Internet Exchange said to Business World (Nov. 14, 1994).

In one century, Chicago 's 1890s marketplace/university has become a whole Earth phenomenon – a melting-pot of ethnic neighborhoods (United Nations) in a 1990s trading post (telecommunications free-for-all). Universal access to self-empowering resources on a Mid West/East frontier reflects our spiritual Oneness.

The Broken Nose

"Stand up, sandstone slabs of red, / Tell the overland passengers who burnt you. / Tell 'em how the jacks and screws loosened you. / Tell 'em who shook you by the heels and stood you on your heads. / Who put the slow pink of sunset mist on your faces" ( Slabs of the Sunburnt West, Carl Sandburg).

Richard Hunt's bronze forms welded upon a large metal plate ("Slabs of the Sunburnt West") are a University of Illinois-Chicago Circle memorial to the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and historian, a son of Swedish immigrants. Hunt, whose childhood memories include Sandburg's (and his mother's) Galesburg , Illinois hometown is an African-American from Chicago 's impoverished Woodlawn.

His "Farmer's Dream", now in a White House garden, was inspired by his father and grandfather's sharecropper experiences in Georgia . "The learning and blundering people will live on. / They will be tricked and again sold / And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds" ( The People,Yes by Carl Sandburg).

The spiritual steel in Chicago's outdoor sculptures is forged from a slagheap of rough-hewn pioneers: Sandburg, a self-educated prairie lawyer (Charles Mulligan's bronze "Lincoln the Railsplitter" in Garfield Park); a poor shoemaker from the slums (John Gelert's Hans Christian Andersen in Lincoln Park); a Norwegian explorer (Sigvald Asbjornsen's nine foot memorial to Leif Ericson, Humboldt Park); a revolutionary Polish astronomer (Nicolaus Copernicus, Burnham Park); and an African-American Civil rights leader (the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial at Chicago State University).

To help Picasso understand Chi-town, he was handed a fire chief's helmet, a Bears and White Sox uniform, and a photograph album of Chicagoans. His Daley Center Plaza sculpture, dedicated in August, 1967 by Mayor Richard J. Daley (from a back-of-the-stockyards Irish neighborhood) one hundred sixty-two tons of rust-red cor-ten steel fifty feet high – an iron phoenix rising, nose askew, from the Chicago Fire.

Our death and rebirth journey chisels a down-to-earth wisdom (mind) into the weather-worn face (body) of Chicago 's art, music and literature (spirit). As Nelson Algren said, "Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well have loved other lovelies but never a lovely so real" ( Chicago: City on the Make). The phoenix is the symbol of the University of Chicago and the name of Loyola University 's student newspaper.

And Chicago's Algren, Mike Royko, George Halas, Howling Wolf, Studs Terkel, Gwendolyn Brooks, Mayor Richard J. Daley, Long John Wentworth, "Hinky Dink" Kenna, Bertha Palmer, "Bathhouse" John Coughlin, the Everleigh Sisters, "Bet A Million" Gates, Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, Mike Ditka, Paddy Bauler, Oprah Winfrey, Ben Hecht, Cap'n Streeter, Clarence Darrow, Jane Addams, John Altgeld, Eugene Debs, Harold Washington, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Hack Wilson are the "stormy, husky, brawling" ( Chicago, Carl Sandburg) broken nose of humanity.

Richard Hunt transforms discarded junk into "an art which need not seek strength in revolt, but in the creative pulse of its makers; an art having sinew and gut, as well as heart and soft fresh.... forms nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her" ("Statement by Richard Hunt" in The Museum of Modern Art New York's The Sculpture of Richard Hunt).

Governor's State University's sculpture park includes Mark di Sunero's tank cars dangling from cables and girders ("For Lady Day"), John Henry's steel beams 134 feet long, 24 feet wide and 36 feet high ("Illinois Landscape") and Mary Miss' steel towers, grassy earth mounds and wooden posts ("Field Rotation").

Socrates ("Know yourself") was a broken-nose boxer. Beethoven's music, Goya's art and Pucinni's operas express humanity's passion in turbulent, changing eras. Picasso and a Chicago friend (Ernest Hemingway) were affected by European wars. Conductor Sir Georg Solti's success with the Chicago Symphony was related to his fleeing Austria when Nazi Germany invaded – and to Chi-town's blood and guts spirit. As was Louis Armstrong ("Gut-bucket Blues", Chicago, 1926), upriver from a Colored Waifs Home for Boys in New Orleans .

We are Chikagou's persona – Gaiatown alumni coming back from past lifetime hangings, broken noses and failures, the spirit in Chicago's outdoor sculptures, plowing and axing our way through a prairie or neon wilderness in male, female, merchant, farmer, artist, scholar, prostitute, pirate, clown, priest, pagan, soldier, king, slave, African, Chinese, Native American, European, mountain, desert, seaport, war, famine, peace and prosperity classrooms.

Those, who get up from this Loop boxing ring, this Gaia, and fight back, are battered and bruised but triumphant, "Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs, / Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle, / Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs / the heart of the people ( Chicago by Carl Sandburg).

Alexander Calder's "Universe" in the Sears Tower lobby is all Chikagou in its "big bang" theory of creation, a massive explosion of gasses which launched the celestial bodies on their outward-moving course with a mammoth 55 by 33 feet moving mural. In 1974, Calder rode into the Loop with a circus parade, atop a bandwagon drawn by forty horses, for the dedication of his steel, 53-foot high "Flamingo" at the Federal Center where Mayor Richard J. Daley cut a rope with a five-foot pair of cardboard scissors and released hundreds of balloons.

And in 1981 Mayor Jane Byrne dedicated Spanish sculptor Joan Miro's 39 feet high warrior woman (steel, concrete, bronze and ceramic tile) across from her City Hall domain. Another Jane (Addams), toughened by political street-fighting and wounded by friends abandoning her during a World War I pacifist stance, "knew that Chicago 's blood was hustler's blood. Knowing that Chicago, like John the Baptist and Bathhouse John, like Billy Sunday and Big Bill, forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers; one for hustlers and one for squares.... And since it's a ninth-inning town, the ball game never being over till the last man is out, it remains Jane Addams' town as well as Big Bill's. The ball game isn't over yet. But it's a rigged ball game" ( Chicago: City on the Make by Nelson Algren).

Her Hull House art gallery, theatre and music classes were educational and vocational centers for poor immigrants (Benny Goodman got his start there). In Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams said democracy "constantly raises the value and function of each member of the community, however humble he may be... We are gradually requiring of the educator that he shall free the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life... every human being is a creative agent... we are skeptical of the moral idealism of the few and demand the education of the many, that there may be greater freedom, strength, and ... an increase of dynamic power".

In Chicago 's new Gateway Park , "Rather than a traditional statue or bust of Addams, the memorial will include six large granite sculptures by internationally acclaimed artist Louise Bourgeois. Each work will depict hands of varying ages, sizes and types in interlocking and welcoming gestures" (Mary Ann Johnson, director of the Jane Addams Hull House Museum ).

The Loop El Train

In the 19th century, the railroads ran their iron horses, pedestrian accidents and fire-igniting sparks down the center of my Corning , New York hometown. In Chicago , over 500 pedestrians a year were killed (and others maimed) by trains. Further west, cattle were herded through main streets to railroad station corrals.

In a "Form follows function" (Louis H. Sullivan) and "Less is more" (Mies van der Rohe) universe, the working-class shout is "Build train tracks and a stockyard on the doorsteps of Loop office buildings! Design el train crossbeams on a big building (John Hancock)! Reverse the flow of the Chicago river ! Jack up the downtown ( Loop ) to build a sewer! Smash atoms in a squash court underneath a football stadium! And transform the Palace of Fine Arts from the 1893 World's Fair into a Museum of Science and Industry. In 1964, Mies Van der Rohe said "It was my growing conviction that there could be no architecture of our time without the prior acceptance of the new scientific and technical developments".

Chicago architects invented the balloon frame (in order to erect new buildings within a week), the skyscraper (1885) and winter bricklaying by adding salt to mortar. Today, the busiest expressway in the world (Dan Ryan) takes passengers from the world's busiest airport (O'Hare) to the world's largest convention center (McCormick), the world's most powerful atom smasher (Fermilab) and – comfort stations, courtesy of the world's largest waste water treatment and water filtration plants. The landmark Water Tower probably survived the Chicago Fire because of its utilitarian value.

One 15 year old high school dropout, who became a World War I Red Cross driver in France, said another Chicagoan (16 years old) was rather strange. "While we chased girls, all he wanted to do was draw animals". But Walt Disney creatively combined his Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and el train(ing) mechanics in a new medium. The other fellow (Ray Kroc) did the same with McDonald's hamburger franchises.

The first blood bank, first trauma center and first all-frozen blood bank were in Chicago . Dr. Daniel Hale Williams (1856-1931), the first black member of the American College of Surgeons, founded the first black hospital in the U.S. (Provident) – and was the first surgeon to successfully operate on the heart.

John Dewey said, "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference" ( Pragmatism). Vivekananda said "Anything that is secret and mysterious in this system of Yoga should be at once rejected" ( Raja Yoga). He illustrated body-mind-spirit mechanics with scientific and industrial exhibits from the 1893 World's Fair –

– "like one of the cars of the Ferris wheel. The car is in motion all the time, but the occupants change. A man gets into the car, moves with the wheel, and comes out. The wheel goes on and on. A soul enters one form, resides in it for a time, then leaves it and goes into another, and quits that again for a third. Thus it goes on, till it comes out of the wheel and becomes free" ( Jnana-Yoga).

"The vast open country, the great out-of-doors, breeds its minds, its hearts, as it brings forth its wheat, its trees, its rains, its rivers and its lakes, its mountains and plains and forests, its glories of the seasons, its poems of the night and the day, its expanse of the heavens, and its repose of the earth .... The country, the out-of-doors, is the prime source of power; and the city, the arena in which that power is dissipated for good or ill; or to broaden the view, that Nature is the true source of all power of the heart and the spirit, and likewise the source of the power of the great cities. ( Kindergarten Chats by Louis H. Sullivan).

Mother Nature's sublime artistry and power in flowers, the human body and electrons are in the architecture of Wright, Sullivan and Mies Van der Rohe; Virginio Ferrari's Tool and Die Institute statue "Being Born", Hunt's "Eagle Columns" and Rottblatt-Amrany's "The Spirit" (Michael Jordan soaring toward a basketball hoop, Unity Center) and –

– the Museum of Science and Industry's six Transportation, Communications, Energy and Environment, Human Body, Manufacturing and Defense exhibits which include a coal mine, five story high Omnivax Theater, computers, Apollo 8 spacecraft, machine tools, German submarine (captured during World War II), a 1910 Chicago street replica, a Boeing 727 airplane, a sixteen-foot-tall walk-through replica of the human heart and 22,000 animated hand-carved circus figurines.

Our body, mind, spirit are computer-interactive with the Loop and Gaia via acupuncture meridians, chakras, ley lines, computer chips, Feng Shui architecture and orbiting satellites. Meditate, get a colonic and take the el train with your Walkman, cellular phone and laptop computer to a college, museum or yoga class. The "eltrain" infrastructuring of our body (Tai Chi, Hatha Yoga, Shiatsu, Rolfing); mind (Oasis Center, Jung Institute and Himalayan Institute) and spirit ( Unity Church , Vedanta Center , Theosophical Center ) moves prana through our earthly machines –

– "To manifest this divinity within by controlling nature: external and internal... The science of Raja-yoga proposes to put before humanity a practical and scientifically worked out method... two nerve currents in the spinal column called the Pingala and the Ida, and a hollow canal called the Sushumna running through the spinal cord. At the lower end of the canal is what the yogis call the 'lotus of the Kundalini' ( Raja Yoga by Vivekananda).

Cyberspace "Internauts are logging on from Brooklyn to Bangkok . From 3.2 million computers around the world today, the Internet is expected to swell to more than 100 million machines in five years. Already the network reaches 75 countries with full service. Computer owners in 77 more countries are able to send and receive simple Internet E-Mail. The number of Web servers is doubling every month" ( Business Week, Nov. 14 1994).

John Dewey illustrated his educational philosophy with Swami Vivekananda's wisdom. "Separation is not simply overcome by the One, it is denied to exist. There is no many. We are not parts of the One; It has no parts; and since in a sense we undeniably are, it must be that each of us IS the One, indivisibly and totally, an absolute One, and I that One, – surely we have here a religion which emotionally considered, has a high pragmatic value; it imparts ... security. As our Swami says in another place: `When man has seen himself as One with the infinite Being of the universe, when all separateness has ceased, when all men, all women, all
angels, all gods, all animals, all plants, the whole universe has been melted into that oneness, then all fear disappears' "( Pragmatism).

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