The Ghost in the Cloud Chapter 8: Future Conditionals

When I was a child living at our little house in Mooresville, Indiana and our television was in black and white, I watched many things that I have not forgotten. The funeral procession of John Kennedy, the first landing on the moon with Neal Armstrong stepping out, intending to say, “One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind”, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and about three seconds of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show before my parents' shock led them to switch the channel. Notice that I did not put these events into chronological order. I don’t remember things in chronological order. They all blur together in a strange collage of associations.

Among the things I saw in black and white sometime in the early sixties that changed my life, and my thinking, perhaps forever even if I was a child, was Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. (I had the privilege of seeing the whole movie intact. Now entire chunks are missing from the movie and are lost forever.) I remember wanting to believe that such a place as Shangri-la really existed. I wanted to go there. I remember, in particular, the ending where the protagonist returns to replace the dying leader of this utopian land, and he reflects that the world is not yet ready for Shangri-la, but one day when human beings have had enough of war, poverty, and social problems, perhaps Shangri-la would emerge and offer the world another way. Needless to say Suri Sangala of the Ghost in the Cloud series is modeled after Shangri-la with a few differences. It is a place of healing, of dreams and possibilities and thus it is a place of future conditionals, what might be, what could be.

In my heart, I am a native of that land even if it is a dream—it is where I ultimately belong. I have been searching for that place since I was a boy, thought I found it in a church movement, might have found it at Padanoram in southern Indiana and am still looking for it. The old testiment records that Abraham went looking for a city whose builder and maker was God. I think that people of faith or spirituality are all looking for Shangri-la. We still believe in fairy tales, I guess and shout along with Mary Martin as Peter Pan, "I do believe in fairies" and we clap our hands. Cynics have given it up and say it is all fairy tales, child's play, that we should all leave it behind and live in the real world.

What is a fairy? The thing that spoils the milk, or causes the cheese to go all wrong, or stings us in the night because they are naughty little things. A notion that is an antiquated, but quaint way of looking at the world. Another lost mystery that people no longer believe in on the road to a world that believes in nothing--only dust and atoms and random events that have no meaning.

But it does have meaning. You know this don't you. If you want to, you can just place your hand flat on the ground and sense the life that is there, if you try, you can. You can feel the pulse of the earth itself, a beat of life. And you know it is alive and aware--conscious.