mystic bourgeoisie

we have always lived in the castle

2008-07-05T19:07:00.002-06:00

Andre Breton was among the originators of Dada, and the founder of Surrealism. In his magisterial study, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (p. 835), Henri Ellenberger tells this story about him...

As a medical student, Andre Breton was mobilized to work in a military psychiatric unit. Among his patients there was a man who had stood on a trench embankment during battle and, like a policeman directing traffic, had "directed" the flight of the shells around him. The man was convinced that it was a simulated war, with fake weapons, and faked wounded and dead; a proof was that he had always escaped injury. Breton was impressed to see how a young and well-bred person, who appeared lucid, could live in a fantastic world to such a degree.

Well-bred and lucid myself (making certain allowances, and if not young), I am also impressed -- though granted, living in a much larger fantasy, and fantastic to a far greater degree. No, "impressed" is hardly strong enough. I am, to say the least, amazed.

But that's not how I found that story. I got there searching for a particular slice of background about Herbert Silberer, an early member of Freud's circle in Vienna. In the same paragraph, Ellenberger continues...

Once he heard the words: "There is a man cut in two by the window," and he saw the corresponding image. Breton seems to have been unaware that this type of dream had been thoroughly investigated by Herbert Silberer, who had shown that the hypnagogic image was a symbolic representation of the state of the dreamer who was halfway between the states of waking and dreaming.

The reason I was researching Silberer will emerge. But perhaps this is as good a place as any to insert a passage I found in his Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism (Kessinger Publishing reprint, 2006, p. 151).

The service of having rediscovered the intrinsic value of alchemy over and above its chemical and physical phase, is to be ascribed probably to the American, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who published his views on the alchemists in the book, "Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemists" ...

Because, you see, it was in Ethan Allen Hitchcock that I was primarily interested, about whom Silberer says a page later, "The discoveries made by Hitchcock are so important for our analysis, that a complete exposition of them cannot be dispensed with."

These are clearly precursors to -- and undoubtedly sources of -- Carl Jung's later fascination (nay, obsession) with alchemy. In the case of Hitchcock, I would have to say "much later," as Ethan Allen Hitchcock was an advisor to Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. Were I not opposed in principle to the overuse of exclamation marks, I would add several to that last sentence.

That Wikipedia page also adds that "Hitchcock was a Rosicrucian and a member in [the] Washington D.C. club along with Lincoln."

Along with Lincoln? (making an exception: !!!)

Is this one of those weird internet conspiracy theories we hear so much about infecting the populist online encyclopedia? Or am I just impossibly naive about these matters? Clearly, some more digging was in order.

Well, here's something.

President Lincoln possessed no directive, authoritative power, due to his public office, and was under the Law of Silence. General Hitchcock did possess authority and made no effort to hide the fact that there was an active center of the Fraternitas in Washington, DC, which he and other members attended. The three: Abraham Lincoln, General Hitchcock and Dr. Randolph were known as The Peerless Trio, or Unshakable Triumvirate.

Well... not very convincing, as that appears on a site called "soul.org" (pardon my skepticism). It is glossed by a note that says: "Refer to the book about General Hitchcock, Fifty Years in Camp and Field, p.484." While this book does indeed exist, searching it for "Law of Silence," "Fraternitas," "Peerless Trio," and "Unshakable Triumvirate" yielded precisely nothing. Oh well. So as far as I can determine without much deeper research, the jury is out on Abe's alleged Rosicrucianism.

However, I found something far more credible in Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography, which Publishers Weekly calls a "richly documented and sympathetic study." Library Journal calls it "the definitive account." These assessments are important to note, so that the following is not taken as gratuitous bad-mouthing.

Her introduction to spiritualism had probably taken place first in Lexington from the household slaves and then in Springfield from the white prophets who appeared in the Midwest during the early 1850s. Thereafter rarely a season passed without a spirit conveyer standing on the stage of the Masonic Hall and answering, with suitable melodrama, immensely difficult and intimate questions about the local persona being exhibited. As early as 1842, when the Lincolns boarded at the Globe, a mesmeriser using some sort of apparatus had drawn electrical power from the heavens and cured the spasms of a fellow boarder's facial tic....
No matter when Mary Lincoln became a believer, by 1862 she had so many spiritualist friends that she lacked only a medium for a séance -- and had that sometimes.

But the way I found this Lincoln connection was by poking around in a chapter titled "Swedenborg's Sanity" in Emanuel Swedenborg: Scientist and Mystic (Yale University Press, 1948), where author Signe Toksvig writes on page 157...

In brutal brevity: Was Swedenborg insane?

The book's later (1983) publication by the Swedenborg Foundation provides a big clue that Toksvig answers that question in the negative. Note that the closer one gets to Swedenborg, and to all that has devolved from him -- via, for instance, Blake, Emerson, William James, et al -- the more elastic become definitions of "sanity." But never mind that. On page 160, we get this...

...another champion of Swedenborg's sanity was Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the scholar (and incidentally soldier) who was called to be President Lincoln's and Secretary Stanton's adviser during the Civil War. Hitchcock wrote a clear and well-documented book, in which he noted the similarity of many of Swedenborg's ideas and expressions with those of the "hermeneutical" writers -- the very ones whom Swedenborg once had stigmatized as "occult" -- writers who in all ages out of the Kabbalah, nature mysticism, and various kinds of Neoplatonism had constructed "secret" systems, sometimes crudely "magical," sometimes of elevated religious philosophy, disguised from heresy hunters by "occult" terms.

btw, the "well-documented book" was Hitchcock's Swedenborg, A Hermetic Philosopher. Despite this argument for the Swedish seer's alleged sanity, Toksvig had previously told us (p. 156)...

In 1746 after a year's social experience with spirits, [Swedenborg] noted privately that, "in company with other men, I spoke just as any other man, so that no one was able to distinguish me either from myself as I had been formerly, or from any other man; and, nevertheless, in the midst of company I sometimes spoke with spirits and with those who were around me; and perhaps they might have gathered something from this circumstance."

Gathered something? You think?

But none of these concerns about possible psychosis seems to have discouraged Henry James, Sr. (father of Henry, the writer, and of William, the <koff> psychologist), who recovered from his spiritual "vastation" of 1844 by deeply devoting himself to the twisty wisdom of Emanuel Swedenborg.

In fact, Ralph Waldo Emerson -- who introduced Henry, Sr. to his pal Thomas Carlyle (see Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question) and stood as Godfather to the precociously paranormal little Willie (see The Varieties of Religious Experience) -- included Swedenborg as one of only six so-called Representative Men (full text here) in his essay Swedenborg or, The Mystic.

As happens in great men, he seemed, by the variety and amount of his powers, to be a composition of several persons,—like the giant fruits which are matured in gardens...

Well, at least I can agree with that much.

Oy.

----

I've taken you through all this backwards, of course. But it shows, I think, that we have always lived in the castle. Which is to say, Shirley Jackson and Kafka aside: America, in its soul and essence, has always been completely barking mad.

happiness is a warm gun

2008-07-04T13:48:00.000-06:00

Astute reader and frequent provider of nifty news items, Austin Kelley, just send me a pointer to an AlterNet article posted today titled The Science of Happiness: Is It All Bullshit? It's about the appearance on The Daily Show (posted 8/10/2007) of Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar, author of Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. Unfortunately, the article isn't very insightful.

Compared with the dangerously dehumanizing stuff in the mental health business, positive psychology is so innocuous that I almost felt sorry for Ben-Shahar.

Well, sorry no, but thanks for playing.

Better to watch the interview itself. Comedy Central prefaces the video with the note: "Jon is amazed that professor Tal Ben-Shahar gets away with teaching happiness at Harvard."

As most of you know, Positive Psychology is a subject "dear" to my heart, and about which I've written previously in a post called Positively Fourth Street. Have a look at that too. There's more to come on this front. One of these days.

NOTE: For best results, play this concurrent with the above.

monkey see

2008-07-01T23:34:00.000-06:00

I don't often quote this much at a whack, but when you read it you'll see why I made an exception. I've only read as much as I'm giving you here, but I do want to read more. Perhaps you will too. The book is titled The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments, and the rest of the Prologue is here.

Ready? OK, here's how it starts...

There was once a famous population of Japanese monkeys — the irrepressible macaca fuscata — living on the island of Koshima in 1952; incidentally the year I was born. Scientists provided the monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand, and observed that they generally seemed to relish the new treat in spite of a certain unpleasant grittiness. One day an enterprising young primate named Imo discovered that if she took her potato down to the water's edge, she could rinse off all the dirt and enjoy a much tastier meal. Imo taught her mother and playmates the trick, and gradually, over the course of six years, one monkey after another adopted the practice.
Then in 1958, a remarkable event occurred: the number of potato-washing monkeys reached what is called a "critical mass," and suddenly, not only did the entire monkey population on Koshima Island start performing the new procedure, but all of the monkey populations on neighboring islands spontaneously began washing their potatoes as well!
"The Hundredth Monkey" became the name futurists used for this unusual phenomenon, and they extrapolated from monkey-experience to show that this is also the way the human community makes dramatic, collective paradigm shifts into new ways of thinking, being and behaving. Once a critical mass of people have transformed their essentially materialist world-view to a spiritual one, for example, the entire population of the planet will spontaneously choose to come along for the ride. The dirty sweet potato of being a self-centered, acquisitive, power-hungry creature, blindly bent on the destruction of life as we know it, will be gently washed in the stream of loving-kindness, peacefulness and the desire to serve God and humanity, ushering in a Golden Age of peace and prosperity for all people.
***
Fat chance. Not with the likes of me around. I am the 99th Monkey. If you don't get me, you don't get your critical mass, and it screws up the whole works. I seem to be single-handedly holding back the Great Paradigm Shift of the Golden Age through my simply continuing to be a resistant little putz most of the time. My apologies.
(If it makes you feel any better, I recently heard somewhere that this whole story about the monkeys and the potatoes is not true, that it didn't really happen that way at all. That really annoyed me, considering that I'd just based a whole book on it.)
***
I met Ram Dass, my first spiritual teacher, in 1975 in New York when I was 23 years old, several weeks after completing the est training in Boston, which was several months after having spent one and a half years screaming my head off in Primal Therapy. I was desperately trying to cure myself of being me, a futile pursuit that would continue for three decades, and would take me all around the world to meet shamans, healers and gurus, stay in ashrams and monasteries, sit for long hours on meditation cushions, chant in foreign tongues, and live up to 40 days in primitive huts on solo retreat.
I experimented extensively with psychedelic drugs, ancient spiritual techniques and outrageous new ones. I was massaged, shiatsu-ed, and rolfed, took hundreds of consciousness workshops, human potential seminars, and self-improvement courses, sat with psychics, channels and tarot readers, experienced Primal, Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Object Relations, generic talk therapies and anti-depressants. And that's the short list. (The complete one gets embarrassing. Suffice it to say that it includes learning the Tush Push exercise in a Human Sexuality weekend — you don't want to know — as well as having an obese female therapist sit on my head at Esalen Institute, so I could re-experience being smothered by my mother.)
As Editor-in-Chief of the New Sun Magazine in the ‘70s and the Wild Heart Journal more recently, and through being a freelance spiritual journalist, it has often been my job to do all these things. Like a scout sent ahead to report back, I often saved others a lot of time: "You don't have to go deep into Brazil to do all-night rituals involving the ingestion of ayahuasca, chanting in Portuguese to Oxum, the Mother of the Waters, and throwing up out of a church window at four in the morning — I already did that."

[more...]

the feldenkrais method

2008-06-30T18:34:00.001-06:00

I'm so excited I can hardly contain myself. Unpacking that expression could itself generate a small volume, but let's not get sidetracked so early on. Because from July 25 to August 1 the 2008 Feldenkrais Method® Annual Conference, Bridging Worlds, will be happening right here in Boulder, Colorado. Wow.

So what is The Feldenkrais Method? Here's the Wikipedia page. However, this opening sentence from the organization's "PR Kit" PDF titled The Feldenkrais Method® of Somatic Education may be far more instructive...

The Feldenkrais Method is for anyone who wants to reconnect with their natural abilities to move, think, and feel.

OK, then. If you aren't already wearing your Official Mystic Bourgeoisie Decoder Ring, put it on now, then re-read that. You see how the Significant Words now pop out at you?

The Feldenkrais Method is for anyone who wants to reconnect with their natural abilities to MOVE, THINK, and FEEL.

Now set your ring to DECODE and you should see the following...

MOVE = BODY
THINK = MIND
FEEL = SPIRIT

I suspect the Feldenkraisers may have some good ideas about the BODY stuff. However, when such people attempt THINKing, they're in danger of seriously injuring themselves. A herniated frontal lobe is no laughing matter. And when they get into the SPIRIT portion of the program, all bets are off.

Don't believe me? Let's have a little look-see.

I was most interested in the workshop titled A Meeting With Remarkable Ideas: G.I. Gurdjieff's Teaching and the Feldenkrais Method. Here's the description on the site...

Many people are unaware of Gurdjieff’s influence on contemporary philosophy and personal development. From the Ennegram [sic] to the Law of Attraction, much of his teaching has spilled into pop culture without his name attached. Moshe Feldenkrais often referred to G.I. Gurdjieff’s system of self-study and movement.

Now look, Gurdjieff may have been a world-class mountebank, but he was not a fool. It is beyond ludicrous to associate him with the so-called Law of Attraction, a hollow wish-fulfillment fantasy trumped up by "Abraham" and his side-show charlatan channelers, Esther and Jerry Hicks -- well were they named.

The person presenting this workshop is one Lavinia Plonka. Her bio says "She has written two books," so naturally, I went haring off to find them. Aha, here's one now! What Are You Afraid Of? A Body/Mind Guide to Courageous Living.

I was immediately drawn to Chapter 7, "Fear of Abandonment" -- that being a subject about which I know more than I wish I did. Let's begin with this graf from page 109...

Krishnamurti stated that when one goes against the tribe, one risks being alone. Loneliness for many people is death. And yet the root of the word alone is all + one, originally meaning that to be by oneself was to be complete. Being without others is lonely, yet to be truly complete you must be alone!

That would be the Krishnamurti who was scooped up as a young boy in India by the known pederast C.W. Leadbeater and groomed to be the Theosophical messiah or "World Teacher," and who later cuckolded his best friend for many years.

Well, OK, maybe that's just me. But the etymology bit sent me upstairs to consult my 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary for the first time in recent memory. Here's a bit of what I found there under the lemma (as the OED likes to call headwords) for ALONE...

[orig. a phraseological comb. of ALL adv. 'wholly, quite' + ONE; emphasizing oneness essential or temporary, 'wholly one, one without any companions, one by himself.' ...]

That doesn't quite seem to support the Krishnamurti reading, though one could stretch it, I suppose. But then the OED offers this, from the 1382 Wycliffe Bible, Genesis 2:18...

It is not good man to be alone.

To me, that (very early) usage seems unequivocally not to rationalize some latter day campaign for being Codependent No More -- which is precisely what Nelly Plonka and her Metaphysical Chocolate Factory are on about, despite the fact that I could find no references to "codependent," "co-dependent," or Melody Beattie anywhere in the book. On the other hand, such MIA status is unremarkable, as the concept has long since passed into the Psychological Bullshit Canon of suburban legend.

A page later, I thought the author might have redeemed herself, however, where she writes: "When we go back to the essential principles of love and fear, we can see that fear of abandonment is not simply about survival but about loss of love."

But the redemption was short lived. The next sentence says: "Ask any comedian. She will tell you that the absolute worst feeling in the world is when people start walking out on your act."

Uh huh.

And it gets worse, considering that the same page begins with this thoroughly predictable bit of code-dependent wisdom from a guy who, hey, should know!

In his book Quantum Healing, Deepak Chopra uses the terms self-referrent [sic] and other-referrent [sic]. When you are other-referrent [sic], your value is based on how others perceive you. If you are self-referrent [sic], your value comes from within yourself. As long you are other-referrent [sic], you need to please your father, your boss, your wife before you please yourself. You can't make decisions for your best interests because you might get thrown out of the family, fired, divorced. By becoming self-referrent [sic] you run the risk of feeling abandoned and rejected.

You'd think if she was going to use the word "referent" so fucking often, she'd at least learn how to spell it. Even more curiously, searching Tupak Okra's Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine on both Amazon and Google Books yields the following hit counts...

self-referent 0
self-referrent 0
referent 0
referrent 0

Caveat emptor, sportsfans. That means, from the ancient Anglo-Saxon: the Emperor has no cavities. Brush often.

Atlas Shvooged

2008-06-26T15:30:00.001-06:00

“I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to
The Fountainhead and
Atlas Shrugged.”

~ Clarence Thomas
Associate Justice
U.S. Supreme Court
(Reason magazine, November 1987)

Welcome to what is perhaps the most questionably titled episode of Mystic Bourgeoisie ever. What can I say? The devil made me do it. Well, that and maybe having so recently re-read James Ellroy's masterpiece, The Cold Six Thousand, which (as you can see on that page) opens: "They sent him to Dallas to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee." Not to mention -- but I will, thanks to the miracle of SearchInside™ -- the following instances of how various ~~goomba mob guys~~ Italian-American gentlemen talk about what we, in these more politically correct (if no less racist) times, might be more inclined to call African Americans.

1-3 of 3 pages with references to shvoog:

on Page 242:
"His kid killed three shvoogs and walked on the beef." "Sonny Liston?" "Drunk, hophead, whore chaser. Pal of the aforementioned shvoogkiller Wayne Tedrow Junior. Jesus, ..."

on Page 250:
"Milt went on. Milt did Lenny Bruce shtick. Lawrence Welk auditions a junkie. Pat Nixon bangs Lester, the priapic shvoog."

on Page 569:
"Right now, the shvoogs want their civil rights, so they burn a few buildings and make some woop-dee-doo."

These informal obiter dicta do not, of course, follow the principle of stare decisis, which this 2004 article on Law.com tells us Clarence Thomas doesn't believe in anyway. It also tells us...

His favorite movie is "The Fountainhead," based on the Ayn Rand novel about a fiercely independent architect who dynamites his own building rather than see his ideas compromised; each year Thomas hosts a required screening of the movie for his law clerks.

On July 9, 1949, the New York Times ran a review of this movie (subscription required) by one Bosley Crowther. It contains many wonderful passages, such as...

A long-winded, complicated preachment on the rights of the individual in society...

Wordy, involved and pretentious...

...a more curious lot of high-priced twaddle we haven't seen for a long, long time.

...the architect is simple, direct and literal, and when left alone he apparently does all right by himself — though why we cannot imagine, for his work, from what we see of it, is trash.

But that is the sort of reasoning that Miss Rand has written into this film and King Vidor has hotly illustrated in a vast succession of turgid scenes.

"The Fountainhead" is a picture which you don't have to see to disbelieve.

I did see it, unfortunately. And btw, I'm changing my name to Bosley Crowther as soon as possible!

disclaimer: It would be a mistake for readers to infer that I mean any disrespect to this lowlife Uncle Tom motherfucker. Or his bitch, Ayn Rand.

for extra credit: from Celebrity "Rand Fans" - Clarence Thomas

Last year, when the Supreme Court was, in effect, called upon to decide the Presidential election, Clarence Thomas cast one of the votes that narrowly tipped the scales to George W. Bush. As we ponder the awesome implications of that election, it is astonishing that the rise of Clarence Thomas to that pivotal position was in no small measure fueled by the ideas and inspiration of Ayn Rand.

stank - an acausal asshat

2008-06-25T16:39:00.003-06:00

I am LMAO over here. Har har. I was going to begin this in a more rationally linear way, marshaling my brief for the prosecution in a sedate and objective manner. As usual. But wtf, let's just jump straight into the Fool Pool. Here's the latest bit of super-effluvia that has me in stitches.

Re: Sick And Tired Of People Saying Sting Sucks
Pam and Linda -
Thanks for the thoughtful answer. A lot of these guys are probably jealous of Sting (and me) because we, unlike them are 1) handsome (people have told me that I look like a young Tom Sizemore, but more ripped) and 2) wealthy. It's a shame when people judge you for what you have or dont have. Why cant we all just treat each other as equals?
Gene

Why indeed, Gene? You're a real man of the people, bro. OMFG! Please, please! Make it stop!

This was evidently in response to lin-ann796, who had opined...

I think many men are jealous of Sting for many reasons... his looks, his sensitivity, the emotions he's not afraid to show thru his songwriting, his intelligence, his appeal to women, the fact that he'd wear a skirt to an awards ceremony(!) and not give a crap what others thought of him, that he adores women and puts them on a pedestal, and the list could go on and on.

Oh, I just bet it could.

The cross-dressing aside, you'll get no argument from me that he's a right sensitive little tosser -- as attested to by the prominent Deutsche Grammophon logo on his Songs from the Labyrinth album, whereon he plays the fucking lute and sings songs by John Dowland ("1563 — buried February 20, 1626" -- but clearly not deep enough).

As an astute one-star Amazon reviewer remarks: "What's next? Joe Cocker sings Schubert?"

Oh, flow my tears!

Speaking of which, have I ever mentioned why I love YouTube? The comments. The comments! Appended to that last link is this:

where can i find Stinks version of robin hoods theme tune?

Surprisingly, no one (that I saw) said, "This is gay, dude."

Ah, but poor Sting. Never may his woes be relieved / Since pittie is fled...

Whatever. I fled. That's for sure. But let me back up a bit. The way I found the post I quoted above was googling sting police narcissi*, via which I found another post titled Sting: Why He Now Sucks that quotes the post I quoted. Confused? Why bother? But here's what the guy replicated ...

"The other day I was cranking 'Sacred Love' - is there any song more stirring than 'The Book of My Life'? - in my car, and I pulled up to red traffic signal. The guys in the car next to me started laughing amongst themselves. I just looked straight ahead, paying them no mind. But then the guy in the passenger side says something like 'nice tunes, dude'. The light turned green before I could respond. Aaaarrgh! I was pissed, and I wished I had a perfect zinger to put them in their place.
Maybe they were jealous - Im cruising in a Jaguar S-TYPE, and these dirtbags were driving around in some kind of filthy piece of garbage, playing their (c)rap music."

To which the "why he now sucks" guy comments: "Cruising in a Jag? Well, bully for you, mate." He also captioned that photo: Narcissus in one of his "thoughtful" poses.

Granted, this sort of "research" is beneath me. I think. But maybe not. Perhaps I am beneath it. As you may have noticed, it is very difficult to gauge one's own level of ... immersion. Which is precisely why -- and here we come to the essence of the rationale for all this; here we grasp the very nettle! -- we need Depth Psychology.

And we're back! Because you see where it says "Foreword by C.G. Jung"? Uh-huh. It's the goddam Eternal Return, sportsfans. Right back to where we started.

And how did we get here? Well, I can tell you how I got here. Via Sting's home page, where he shares with us this precious quote, Quote of the Day, unquote.

"I read a lot of Carl Jung's psychological essays and was very intrigued by him. In fact I used to go and meet with one of his pupils who was called the Baroness Vonderheit and she used to try and analyse my dreams, and of course I couldn't remember my dreams and so I would make them up. She'd look at me quizzically and 'Are you sure you dreamed that?' I was trying to please her I suppose."

Oh Sting, you badboy, you! And and of course you couldn't remember them. You're so hip!

Curiously, aside from that page, I was able to find only one other reference to the Baroness Gesundheit, who, this x-random passage informs us...

...was a disciple of Jung's, [and] wrote, "A creed can act as a protection against the onslaughts of immediate experience for those whose ego position... is too weak to tolerate loss of certainties, or against the despair and confusion generated by feelings of isolation."

Aha. That tells us a lot. It tells us, for one thing, how strong Sting's "ego position" truly is. Strong like bull!

It also explains the whole Synchronicity thing -- another Jung lift, naturally. You see, things are not just random. Oh no. There's a reason why Sting is rich and famous and you're not. And, as an earlier generation was once taught by its spiritual leaders: that's the way God planned it!

Well, this has to end somewhere, I suppose. Sadly, it will have to end before it reaches any conclusion. Life is like that sometimes. And so here to play us out (thanks and a tip-o-the-hat to Bill O'Reilly) is Sting doing just the poetry to Synchronicity I...

with one breath, with one flow
you will know
synchronicity
a sleep trance, a dream dance,
a shared romance
synchronicity

a connecting principle
linked to the invisible
almost imperceptible
something inexpressible
science insusceptible
logic so inflexible
causally connectible
yet nothing is invincible

if we share this nightmare
then we can dream
spiritus mundi
if you act as you think
the missing link
synchronicity

we know you, they know me
extrasensory
synchronicity
a star fall, a phone call
it joins all
synchronicity

its so deep, its so wide
you're inside
synchronicity
effect without a cause
sub-atomic laws, scientific pause
synchronicity...

It's so deep. It's so wide. You're inside.

Wow, huh?

lunatic fringe

2008-06-24T19:08:00.002-06:00

I was heading over to see Don yesterday. Don is my therapist. I've been seeing him for seven or eight years now, and in the middle of that, for some while, it was seven days a week. Back then, I was eating Ativan and thinking a lot about what it would be like to hit a concrete bridge abutment at 100 miles per hour. Seat belt or no seat belt? Which would be better? Thanks to Don (and with a little help from my friends – feel free to take a bow), I never found out.

Don did the full course at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, which is where perfectly normal Americans sometimes go to learn how to be anal-retentive Swiss burghers ("comfortable or complacent members of the middle class") with a strong proclivity for the psycho-spiritual. Sehr gemütlich und etwas ZPOOKY!

Miraculously, Don wasn't infected with that peculiar disease. Lately, we've been talking about my writer's block with respect to what you're reading right here right now. It was supposed to come together into a book long before now. But I despair of that. Is it relevant? Is it too arcane? Too obvious? Too erudite? Too boring? Too goddam complicated to jam into a couple-three hundred pages?

Ah well. Fuck it.

We also often talk about Carl Jung, in the same register in which I've written about him here (see e.g. The Jung-Eliade School). I often send him stuff about Jung, like these two clips just last week. The first is from the pre-WWII TIME magazine issue of November 9, 1936 (may require subscription).

"There are two kinds of dictators – the chieftain type and the medicine man type. Hitler is the latter. He is a medium. German policy is not made; it is revealed through Hitler. He is the mouthpiece of the gods as of old."

The next is also from TIME, a couple years later: May 8, 1939.

Adolf Hitler, said Dr. Jung, "belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man..."

So, as the first sentence above says: I was heading over to see Don yesterday. I had on the local Classic Rock station. And this song comes on. If you're reading this on the web, it's the song you're hearing now (unless you chickened out and dumped the volume, in which case, you're doing it wrong).

I'd heard it before, but not often. And now I was really tuning in. Damn! This is a great song! I had no idea what the lyrics were saying. All I could glean and force myself to remember was the phrase "in the twilight's last gleaming." When I woke up this morning, the first thing I did was to Google that. It took a while, but I finally discovered that the song is Lunatic Fringe by a Canadian band that was called Red Rider.

The Wikipedia page on the album says...

"Lunatic Fringe", the band's most famous song, is about what composer Tom Cochrane saw as an alarming rise of anti-Semitism in the 1970s, and was inspired by a book he read about Raoul Wallenberg.

This Wallenberg bio page adds...

During the spring of 1944 the world had awoken and realized what Hitler's "final solution to the Jewish problem" meant. In May 1944 the first authentic eye witness report reached the western world of what happened in the extermination camp Auschwitz. It came from two Jews who managed to escape the German gas chambers.

'cause you gottta blame someone
for your own confusion
but we're on guard this time
against your final solution

Well, that was an optimistic reading in 1981 when the song hit the charts. Since then, the lunatic fringe, far from diminishing, has accumulated huge power, in both the obvious political sense and in the far more subtle cultural dimension. Sadly, the lunatic fringe is not only alive and well, it has cloaked itself with an aura -- so to speak -- of respectability. And as ever: an on-going attempt at spiritual seriousness. Political fascism and this kind of bogus spirituality have been strongly linked for at least the last two hundred years. Look for this linkage to get even more painfully obvious as we "progress."

pursuant to the foregoing

2008-06-20T23:31:00.003-06:00

You find the weirdest shit on Wikipedia. If you know what you're looking for, anyway. This is from the entry for Mabel Dodge Luhan.

D. H. Lawrence, the English author, accepted an invitation from her to stay in Taos and he arrived, with Frieda his wife, in early September 1922. He had a fraught relationship with his hostess and wrote about this in his fiction. Mabel later published a memoir about his visit entitled, Lorenzo in Taos (1932).
Mabel Dodge Luhan died at her home in Taos in 1962 and was buried in Kit Carson Cemetery. The Mabel Dodge Luhan House has been designated a national historic landmark and is a historic inn and conference center. Natalie Goldberg frequently teaches at Mabel Dodge Luhan House, where Dennis Hopper wrote Easy Rider.

See notes in side panel.

Madame Tinkertoy's House of Blue Lights
(collect the whole set!)

PS...

2008-06-20T15:24:00.001-06:00

gnoxic

2008-06-20T14:11:00.005-06:00

I just stumbled across this site that looks as if it was built in 1994. It introduces itself thusly...

This is the GNOXIC nexus: where gnosis dances with logic along the stream of semiosis.

I see.

There's a complicated explanation of the neologism here, but (while the site may contain quite a lot of deeply profound shit; I didn't really look) never mind all that. Here's the deal: I am hereby appropriating "gnoxic" as a wonderful portmanteau for

toxic gnosticism

Rather than define what I mean by that -- you can probably guess -- let me unpack how I got to that page. Maybe I should number the steps so I don't get lost and go off on a dozen tangents. It's bad enough as it is. In fact, I may have to refer to my history (though as you know, my history is not your history, just as My Truth is not Your Truth, but don't get me started on that one).

For some reason I can't remember now, I looked up Black Elk on Wikipedia.

Then I noticed there was a link to a University of Nebraska full-text PDF of Black Elk Speaks.

So I went and poked around in it. I found a bit in the Preface to the 1972 edition that says the first edition, published forty years earlier (1932), had been pretty quickly remaindered, but that...
Somehow a copy found its way to Zurich, Switzerland, and was appreciated by a group of German scholars, including the late Carl Jung, the famous psychologist and philosopher.

"Aha! Carl Jung, the famous psychologist and philosopher," I thought to myself.

So I fired off a google search for...
Black Elk Jung Cary Baynes

And that's how I found that GNOXIC page.

But that hardly explains my search terms, does it? I hear you saying "Cary Baynes? WTF?" I feel your pain.

It helps to know that Cary F. Baynes translated the I Ching or Book of Changes into English from Richard Wilhelm's German translation of the Chinese. (You can read the full text here.) And oh yeah, C.G. Jung wrote the Foreword.

It also helps to know that, before she did that, Cary Baynes was married to Jaime de Angulo, a sort of Spanish caballero proto-hippie dude who lived at Big Sur and was heavy into anthropological and and linguistic studies of Western American Indians. See, inter alia, Rolling in Ditches with Shamans: Jaime de Angulo and the Professionalization of American Anthropology.

You can read more about Cary Baynes and Jaime de Angulo in Jung: A Biography by Deirdre Bair, and in detail here on Google Books.

Now, it turns out that Jaime was hanging in New Mexico with Mabel Dodge Luhan, who figures among a long historical list of narcissist salon freaks and "high-status people" collectors. She had already collected D.H. Lawrence, and Jaime helped her to collect C.G. Jung, who zipped over from Zurich to Taos in 1925 to catch the Wild West Show.

And that's how I knew that searching for "Black Elk Jung Cary Baynes" would probably bring up some curious shit. It may well have done, but then I lost interest.

So anyway: gnoxic.

dangerous character with Egyptian ray gun

dreamworld

2008-06-19T13:12:00.000-06:00

Listen: your body feels heavy... you are getting sleepy...

An African politician recalled that in 1952, a man returned to his home area in central Kenya, much to the surprise of his neighbors: "He had been missing since 1927. We thought he had been slaughtered by the Nairobi Fire Brigade between 1930–1940 for his blood, which we believed was taken for use by the Medical Department for the treatment of Europeans with anaemic diseases." In 1986, however, a man in western Kenya told my assistant and I that it was the police, not the firemen, who captured Africans ("ordinary people" just "associated firemen with bloodsucking because of the color of their equipment") and kept their victims in pits beneath the police station.
Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa

Bachicabo, a hamlet in Alava, was one of the first places to reproduce the visions. Located in the valley of Valdegovia on the border with Burgos, it was beyond the zone from which buses took people to Ezkioga. The first to see the Virgin there was the fourteen-year-old son of an emigrant to Sestao, a Bilbao industrial suburb; the boy was back in the village for the summer. On about 2 August 1931 he was tending oxen a kilometer from the village near a spring called Petrás, where the villagers often stopped on their annual pilgrimage to the shrine of Nuestra Señora de Angosto. In a cavity of a large boulder he saw a flower, and when he went to touch it, the Virgin Mary appeared in its place.
Visionaries: The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ
Group trance might take violent forms, as when maskers impersonating Rangda the Witch or Barong the Dragon "would go wild, rush out of the accustomed performance place into the crowd... then fall unconscious and have to be revived." In Gianjar district, the temple court would at times be filled with wild figures brandishing krisses, leaping, and shouting, as they enacted the giant Pig, Lion, or Witch that possessed them, and the rapt followers of Barong, men and women alike, would stab themselves with their krisses and frenziedly "hurl themselves forward to suck the gushing blood" from a fellow trancer's wounds.
The Spiritual Quest: Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science

“I am driven with a mission from God.”

Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?

2008-06-18T12:26:00.001-06:00

Ah, but that's so '60s!

“I am God’s beloved creation,
and I rely on God’s provision
to fulfill every good desire.”

~ Unity® Prosperity Prayers & Affirmations

“New in 1995, the Azure was priced at $347,645.”

“Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes”

~ Karl Marx

neural puerilism

2008-06-15T22:46:00.003-06:00

puerilism. n. Childish behavior in an adult,especially as a symptom of mental illness.
~ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

If you've been playing along at home, you know we have already mentioned the Jill Bolte Taylor phenomenon -- for such it surely is -- more than once: in Better Living Through Brain Damage and in Reading Between the Synapses. What I only recently learned is that the New York Times jumped the bandwagon (and quite possibly the shark) even earlier than I had thought: on May 13 in the form of an op-ed piece by David Brooks titled The Neural Buddhists.

Brooks makes the following points, verbatim. I've only numbered them so I can interpolate my reactions to each (in red).

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships.

Agreed, and this is crucial, not a throwaway line. Brooks is clearly aware of advances in attachment theory, as evidenced, for instance, where he writes, "Love is vital to brain development."

Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions.

This is a succinct restatement of the old "perennial philosophy" trope, which is largely suburban legend promulgated by Mircea Eliade, Aldous Huxley and that general ilk on a gullible generation of postwar baby boomers. Yes, like me. Plus, it's pretty freaking hard to determine what anyone might actually be "intuiting," morally or otherwise.

Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love.

Says who? Well, says Jill Bolte Taylor and her "liberating" neural dysfunction! Q.E.D. Except it's a circular argument. Same as it ever was.

Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

Objection! Calls for speculation. In fact, constitutes speculation of the wildest sort got up as certain knowledge. In a word: bullshit.

By enumerating these points, Brooks implies that they follow on one another. They do not.

To cut to the chase in the fewest possible words, I would like to belatedly comment on David Brooks's column...

For another take, less humorous than mine, perhaps, but more damning, see Donald Lopez's post titled The Buddha according to Brooks (thank you, Annie). Unlike Brooks and so many of the self-elected neurotheologians, Lopez knows a little something about Buddhism, as demonstrated by his many books on the subject. In that blog post, he writes...

Although it is always risky to speculate about authorial intention, one might imagine that by Buddhism, Brooks means an ancient Asian tradition that is largely free of beliefs, dogmas, and rituals; whose central form of practice is meditation; which focuses on the here and now rather than the past or the future; which has no personal deity; which is fully compatible with Jewish and Christian mysticism and, especially, with science. Each of these characteristics is historically dubious when one surveys the various forms of Buddhism that emerged across Asia over the past 2,500 years. Those characteristics, however, are all central tenets of something called Buddhist Modernism, which emerged as a result of the colonial encounter.

But do read the entire post. It's... enlightening.

As a sort of footnote here, though not unrelated to our larger theme, I never realized that Brooks, whose columns I've noticed from time to time in the Times, is the selfsame David Brooks who wrote Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

Bobos are what Brooks defines as the bohemian bourgeoisie -- not altogether unlike my NewAge++ class. Of them, he writes...

Everything the old gentry tried to make smooth, we in today's educated gentry try to make rough. They covered over ceiling beams. We expose them. They buried bulky stone chimneys in plaster and paint. We unearth stone chimneys and admire massive rocky hearths. They prized delicate narrow floor planks. We like broad sturdy ones. They preferred marble. We prefer slate....
More broadly, they liked polish and high civilization. We like indigenous spirituality.

Emphasis mine, because, boy howdy, do "we" ever! I howled at Brooks's Death Comes for the Yuppie routine, which is seriously brilliant. But I was not impressed by his conclusion that these New Agers 2.0 are essentially innocuous, doing no one any real harm with their ludicrous "lifestyle choices" and laughable belief systems.

Plus, I don't much cotton to former editors of The Weekly Standard, especially those who make statements like this...

DAVID BROOKS, NEW YORK TIMES: Obama‘s problem is he doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24948994

Me, I don't think this new class is so innocently nontoxic. I think there's a dark side. Darker than most of these well-meaning white-bread Bobo motherfuckers even guess.

Dr. Feelgood and the Silence of the Lambs

2008-06-12T15:58:00.001-06:00

In I Can Get It For You Wholesale I wrote: "I'm looking forward to getting many engaging and insightful posts out of this fabulous set" -- the set being the five volumes I have taken to calling The Library of World Bullshit. In keeping with that threat, today's text is a book whose very title is a demonstrative lesson in prolixity: 50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do; Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books.

Perusing the table of contents, I see the usual suspects listed: Freud, Adler, Jung, Maslow, William James, B.F. Skinner, Steven Pinker -- including many I hate: Adler, Jung, Maslow, William James, B.F. Skinner, Steven Pinker.

Then there are those I really hate: Nathaniel Branden, Fritz Perls, Martin Seligman. There are also (literally) a few I like: Harry Harlow and William Styron.

But what is surprising are (to no one's surprise) the surprises. To give just a couple examples...

At some time or other, everyone has heard of I'm OK - You're OK, the foundational handbook of Transactional Analysis first published in 1969. Yes, but how many are aware that Thomas Harris went on to write the fabulously successful series of novels about Hannibal Lecter?

It was a rush to find this one listed, as I had totally lost touch with the far-famed Queen of the Speed Freaks sometime back in the late '60s. Without further ado, this is your brain on Benzedrine... or I guess, vice versa.

Let's hear it for Psychology, then...

keep telling yourself that

2008-06-06T14:40:00.001-06:00

(methinks the bag lady doth protest too much.)

may we have the envelope, please

2008-05-30T15:01:00.001-06:00

and the answer is...

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!

reading between the synapses

2008-05-28T13:55:00.004-06:00

This post is a little demo of what I call "reading bookstores." The shelf is more than the sum of its books. The store more than the sum of its shelves. The supply chain more than the sum of its outlets. Synergy. The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th Edition defines it as: "The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects." Something like that, but in a context where you weren't expecting it.

I had half an hour to kill this afternoon. This is how I spent it at the Boulder Barnes & Noble. I had never seen any of these books before today.

Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others
by Marco Iacoboni
Given the subtitle, I was surprised to find no entries for Attachment in the index. Lots for Autism, of course. I suppose it's naive of me to be shocked that the sales of so many science books these days are driven by the ever ongoing meme popularity contest. Perhaps attachment has nothing to do with autism, if the latter is a purely congenital aberration of neurophysiology. But it sure as hell has a lot to do with "How We Connect with Others."
One Bruce Gregory writes a funny, less than enthusiastic review, including the parenthetic admonition: Don't anthropomorphize neurons; they hate it when you do that.
Relational Theory and the Practice of Psychotherapy
by Paul L. Wachtel
Important! But unfortunately, at $38, also the most expensive of these three books. Informed by recent attachment studies and theory. Sadly, not much historical discussion, as far as I could see on brief inspection (aside from bib cites), of Steven Mitchell's work (e.g. Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis and Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis). Mitchell is well represented in the author index, however. This one is strictly for professionals (hot tip: refuse to be discouraged by such caveats; be a professional).
Quantum Mind: The Edge Between Physics and Psychology
by Arnold Mindell
This one is the comic-relief entry. Whenever I hear the word quantum, I reach for my devolver. Of course, as in so many such cases, Jung is prominently invoked.
From Mindell's Wikipedia page: "While in Zurich, Mindell became aware of the work of psychiatrist C.G. Jung and shifted his emphasis to study Analytical Psychology at the C.G. Jung Institute, where he graduated as a Jungian analyst."
From the Amy and Arny Mindell website: The video linked below must be seen to be believed. Finally! Proof positive of quantum entanglement!
The attached short video sent by Susan Cogan is a brilliant and organic example of one of the most mysterious and wonderful parts of process oriented psychology: namely, the mystery of quantum entanglement and role switching.
Multi-species Role Switching Video. (WMV file 3.9MB)
(do not be drinking anything)

Plus (no surprise here), the Mindells are among the growing horde of I'm-not-really-New-Agers jumping on Jill Bolte Taylor's brandy-new brain-damage bandwagon.
Listen to what she says about her right hemisphere, it sounds like what we have been calling, dreamland's nonlocality and essence levels.
Your Brain's Left and Right Hemispheres
(or) Your Consensus Reality and Dreamland Minds

Dreamland's nonlocality and essence levels. Right. Check.

See also:

The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex
by Murray Gell-Mann.
The author won the Nobel prize in physics in 1969 "for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions." The bit most relevant to Mindell's Quantum Mind is Gell-Mann's Chapter 12: "Quantum Mechanics and Flapdoodle." There he explains how many bogus New Age memes such as "nonlocality" -- (im)pressed into service to rationalize paranormal notions such as "remote viewing" -- are based on willfully brainless misreadings of Bell's Theorem.

and for
extra credit...

better living through brain damage

2008-05-25T19:23:00.002-06:00

isn't it just like a dream
sirens and people and everything
the driver tried to swerve
but he just didn't see ya
now you're buried 'neath the wheel
just like a tortilla

beck - sucker without a brain

“JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.”

Thus begins an article in today's New York Times titled A Superhighway to Bliss. Significantly, it's in the Fashion section.

And appropriately so. She has spoken at TED. She was listed among TIME magazine's 2008 roster of The World's Most Influential People. She's been on Oprah, where it says that "her consciousness shifted away from reality... and into a place of inner peace and Nirvana." The intended inferences having been drawn, she's also been featured on What is Enlightenment?, the website of self-proclaimed enlightened master, Andrew Cohen. Here's a clip from that last one...

Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke one day...and paid attention to what was happening every step of the way, including sensations and insights that could only be described as mystical. Her powerfully moving story raises important questions about the relationship between the mind, the brain, and the nature of spiritual experience.

Thus, in Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, we have yet another book on neurotheology (or spiritual neuroscience), joining the likes of...

The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul

Our Spiritual Brain: Integrating Brain Research and Faith Development

Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge

The New Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experience, Neuroscience, and the Transcendent

...and so on, ad nauseam.

No less august a journal than Scientific American chimes in with an article titled Searching for God in the Brain. Though the image depicting this is now evidently missing in action, the first paragraph explains that...

Supercooled giant magnets generate intense fields around the nun’s head in a high-tech attempt to read her mind as she communes with her deity.

Oh wait... I think I found that missing graphic.

I wrote this merely to go on record that I find Jill Bolte Taylor incredibly tedious and annoying...

("Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the Singin' Scientist,
performs The Brain Bank Jingle!")

...even if she did go to Harvard.

"place the prepared brains in a medium-size saucepan..."