"Well, New Orleans just went through a spin and wash cycle, man," said Homeless Jack. "The big Swastika in the sky came roaring in. That's the way nature works. We have cleansing events that come along every so often. It's completely natural. Sometimes it's water, sometimes it's wind, sometimes it's shaking, and sometimes it's fire. In fact, these things are going on all the time, but every so often we have a bigger event than usual or we have one in an area that is different than we've come to expect. When we can't hold 'em back we run around like the ants we are and bitch and moan and act like its the end of the world.

"It's like when a bunch of western forests were burning a couple of years ago. All the numbnuts were running around saying it was a horrible tragedy and that it would take generations to recover. In fact, new growth started as soon as the fires were out, and everything became incredibly green as the cycle started all over again. Plants that had once been forced out by the old growth trees made a comeback. It's their season, man, and they'll flourish for a time, then they too will be cleansed by the growth of the larger trees. We have cycles of growth and we have cycles of destruction. In growth there is destruction and in destruction there is growth.

"It's all about spinning and turning and circling. It's cycles and spirals, man.

"I don't want to make too much of this in a prophetic sense, because there are all sorts of Chicken Littles throughout history who have predicted doom and who were then proved wrong, but I will tell you that this business in New Orleans is not inconsistent with what Arman teaches."

"Arman teaches that God works by spinning. He builds and He destroys through the spinning. All of creation is made by spinning and all is destroyed by spinning. It's the same in all the vast universe as it is here on earth. Existence as we know it, owes its, ah, existence, to the spinning and turning.

"Evolution? It's all about spinning. God sorts things out by spinning. He's the great shuffler in the sky and His shuffling machine is the spinning itself. He loaded all the basic cards of existence in at the start of existence and then he caused the whole thing to spin. You can see the spinning in the Swastika and a circle and a ring and an orbit and cycles and spirals and everything else that turns. That's the self-ordering way of existence. And, whatever God does in the largest spheres of existence are reflected in the smallest spheres of existence. There is a cosmic link between what you see in space and what you see in a single cell. Our strands of DNA are like the spinning of entire galaxies. Shuffle a few DNA cards one way and you have a frog. Shuffle them another way and you have a man. It's the order that is important, man. God has an endless supply of cards each printed with one of the four bases of DNA and he spins them around and they sort themselves out constantly. Arman teaches that we can enter God's game of solitaire and help shuffle things to our advantage by struggling in the right way and that we have now evolved to the point where we must do this or risk getting a bad hand. This is part of the eternal struggle. Do we let the blind shuffle take us the wrong way, or do we use our brains to stay on the shining spiral path to our highest possible destiny?

"The way this works inside us is the same way it works with hurricanes and all other storms and the formation of stars and galaxies. There's no real difference in the principles involved. And, when things are destroyed, they are not really destroyed in the sense that they have no more existence. They are just transformed into their more basic ingredients. So, what was destroyed in New Orleans? Nothing, really, just the artifices and conceits of man. A building was torn apart into its constituent parts but those parts still have existence. And, when these constituent parts eventually turn to dust, they still exist but in an even more basic form. Then, God will use them for another shuffle.

"See, man, if you can't think of things on this type of cosmic scale, then you're thinking all wrong about existence and you might get all depressed about things such as storms and catastrophes. Look, I know that for the people involved in such things this isn't much solace if they have the wrong level of consciousness, because we normally do think on a very low level, but if it helps, this is as God willed. It's all part of the big struggle. Hate the struggle and you'll never be happy. Love the struggle and you'll always be happy. No, I don't think that God willed that this or that home would be destroyed or that this or that person would die, What I mean is that He set it all in motion and the trajectory is continuing--the big spinning is just going on and on. We need to see it for what it is and, if we want to survive as individuals, we need to be on the right side of the spinning.

"Arman has spoken of the Swastika in the sky that builds and destroys. And, what is a Hurricane or a tornado or a storm? Look at them. It's plain."

"Jack," I said, "I have to go. Do you want to leave me with one final thought again?"

"Yeah, man, I going to leave you with the same thought I did before. You might have heard that this week the Pope even said the same thing. The thought is this: Multiply."