Hi E,

Nice to see you chime in every now and again ;-)

I agree wholeheartedly. While Tom and I both are conservative, we differ clearly in the more, how shall we call it - abstract - facets of life.

Carl Barks last Uncle Scrooge comic was called 'King Scrooge the First' I believe, and is keen insight into his parting shot after 30 years of storytelling. Tony Strobl inked it, yet the story by Barks was very telling.

Scrooge is taken by a phony swami and hypnotized to re-enact the past where Scrooge and his ancestors (who are identical to Scrooge, Donald and the boys) replay the past to discover where a secret treasure was located.

The story is as close to 'reincarnation' as Barks could get without saying it in so many words. The ducks supposedly had the 'memories of their ancestors locked in their genetic structures'.

Did Barks believe in reincarnation? Well, the Barks Library says he wrote it because it was vogue at the time.

However, if you know a story is going to be your last one...you would tend to put a strong statement in it - I know I would! I believe this was his. The immortal prince laments he has watched his "slave girls turn to dust" and wants to find the antidote for the immortality serum he took centuries before.

Barks, like Twain, and many other simple storytellers saw the folly of wealth, riches and power. In Twain's piece de resistance, The Mysterious Stranger he utterly crucifies religion, sheepishness, violence, prayer, hypocrisy, god, humanity and everything else.

He came close to piercing the veil - but although he realized the true illusory nature of material life - he could not see the infinite purpose behind all the suffering - infinite learning - as well as the fact that 'nothing' does not exist.

Finale from "The Mysterious Stranger"
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"And you are not you -- you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream -- your dream, creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me....

"I am perishing already -- I am failing -- I am passing away. In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever -- for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!

"Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago -- centuries, ages, eons, ago! -- for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane -- like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell -- mouths mercy and invented hell -- mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!...

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks -- in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream -- a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -- a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.
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That is Twain unchained...that is the sum and total of what he understood of life.

Too bad he couldn't have added:

And as I stood there, now seemingly alone, I could see the majesty of it all. I could see the infinite vistas which awaited my exploration, the other thoughts - each unique and awaiting to make this same discovery;

I am infinity.

Take care E!

SDAI-Tech1