October 10, 2008

"Now we find out what it is" - a reader responds from heart and brain

Lovely, and congruent with perhaps the most
mis-quoted verse of all the New Testament, viz.,
1st Timothy 6:10

For the love of money is the root of all evil

which makes the critical distinction that it is
not money, but the love thereof, which is the sin,
and that such love begets consequent evil, as is
underscored by the many, many verses which remind
us, as does Exdous 20:5

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor
serve them: for I the LORD thy God [am] a
jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and
fourth [generation] of them that hate me;

that when the love of money supplants God as the
first and guiding love of our heart that that love
of money, just like terminally complexified
derivatives, wreaks damage not limited to the
sinner but to others innocent of that sin.

Posted by Thieme at 08:09 PM | Comments (0)

Consequences of Greed - a reader responds to Autumn Thoughts

One thought that stuck me this week was how ironic it is that greed has accomplished what the 9/11 attacks could not--and the 9/11 attacks were a response to western greed. And like the 9/11 attack, it is the innocent and the undeserving who are once again victims of the violence while those who are ultimately responsible relax under a deep massage...

Again ironic that perhaps many who were angry about 9/11 might be the people cleaning their guns now....

Posted by Thieme at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)

October 09, 2008

An Ezra Pound poem in response to "Autumn Thoughts"

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.
Come, let us pity the married and the unmarried.

Dawn enters with little feet
like a gilded Pavlova
And I am near my desire.
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness
the hour of waking together.


Posted by Thieme at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)

October 08, 2008

Autumn Thoughts

It is raining, leaves are falling, and the sky is dark, oh, dark.

A friend, despairing over the heart of corruption beating visibly through the skin inside the current financial meltdown, wrote:

"And things will only get worse, not better. I don't even want to go on a rant regarding how Washington discourages me as a small businessperson while failures like AIG get huge tax breaks."

As someone who set up a small business of sorts fifteen years ago as a wrapper for professional speaking, the shock was how many obstacles, penalties, and general “screw you's” were embedded in the process. I asked an accountant if honest people had a chance. He said, not compared to his many clients whose evasive tactics stretched gray areas into black.

After my best year of income, he called on one fateful April 14th and told me to sit down. Every single penny of the surplus I had set aside on top of normal cash flow, he told me, was due in a single check for estimated state and federal tax, extra tax payments not calculated, and above all, both sides of social security which is a huge hit for entrepreneurs. I emptied my "extra" money market account and sent it to the state and federal governments. Every single penny.

I am so glad they have used it wisely.

The far right wing anti-foreigner anti-Arab and Jew (what's up with hating both?) political parties in Europe have gained strength in Austria, Flanders, Switzerland, Italy, even Spain where Jew-hating is a bias of 50% of the population (although Arab-hating is higher). In Russia and most Slavic countries, you don’t even have to take that pulse; it is always visibly throbbing in the vein. Even Japan, with a dearth of real Jews, registers anti-Semitism. The simplistic hatred and scapegoating of “the other” is apparently a very contagious meme.

When people feel out of control, as so many now do, the projection of false patterns onto incomplete data intensifies. They think they see causes, evil doers, bogeymen, behind the REAL evil doers, causes, and bogeymen, who in turn encourage them to see the mirage and not themselves. Cheney hides in a bunker and Bush does what he has done for eight long years. Then their cronies slouch away to the spa for a government sponsored retreat from anxiety and fear.

The rest of us are advised by news anchors to breathe deeply, take walks, and eat and drink moderately. The same advice applies when we listen to pundits, eight heads in a row, shouting at each other, shouting down all and any voice that contends with their own.

In light of a recent “this is the first-step” exercise to use the United States Army to ensure domestic order, the posse comitatus law is becoming as obsolete in practice as guarantees against search and seizure in a panoptic state that justifies vacuuming up all communications, foreign and domestic, at the source. I am always chagrined when my predictions of how societal structures will follow the contours of enabling technologies do in fact come true. What were scary stories of a haunted house told around the fire on a dark night have become the headlines and all of the stories inside, too, the wrapper of our lives.

As a former clergyman who has listened to the heights and depths of human experience, I know that if people can do something, they will, someone will, and then those who think they are good will respond with similar actions. You can not stare long into the abyss before the abyss in turn stares deeply into you, as Nietzsche said.

He ought to know.

Now I am not a violent guy. I read a lot, think, talk, write, listen, love energetic interaction with people of all kinds. I have a generosity of spirit that is generally ready to forgive and connect. I relish life and the people I love. But the dangerous options that occur to me now will also occur to people less inclined to be law-abiding. Somewhere in America, someone is listening to his television, feeling helpless and growing enraged, and cleaning his gun.

We are through the looking-glass. Those of us who saw that we built a house of cards have scant consolation from its tumbling. Knowing we were living an illusion, I still preferred knowing it and employing irony to illuminate it to this dark time which signals the end of irony altogether. As Tina Fey is showing on Saturday Night Life when she impersonates Sarah Palin, there is little difference between the thing itself and the caricature. The ironic commentary collapses, and the level of deceit by our leaders, political, economic, other kinds, begins to creep out of the shadows.

This is when I return to things I wrote years ago, trying to bootstrap my optimism and faith. Things like Ferg’s Law. Ferg said, “When things can go right, they will, and at the best possible moment.” I reread that Islands in the Clickstream and hope that he was right.

As the sheriff said in Fargo, contemplating how many people died for stupid reasons, "... and it's a beautiful day.” She looks at the bad guy who did much of the killing and adds, “And all for a little money. There's more to life than money, you know."

Now we get to find out what it is.

Posted by Thieme at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2008

Response from Lux of Erowid to "The Spiritual Journey"

People often explain new experiences by relating them to things that they know. Religious and psychedelic experiences are similar -- they both occur outside of consensus reality. They are visionary events, ungoverned by ordinary laws of space and time, yet they are not arbitrary, in the way that dreams are often arbitrary. There is something real about them.

What is real in the psychedelic experience? What ideas has our culture provided to help us talk about these experiences? Is there more to these experiences than simply a brain malfunction triggered by a drug?

Contrasting religious experience with psychedelic experience is one way of trying to answer these questions.

There are many fruitful points of comparison between spontaneous religious experience and psychedelic experience, but there is also a tendency to explain one in terms of the other. It's a cliche within many contemplative circles that meditation can take you to the same place as psychedelics, but I wonder if anyone who belives this has tried smoking 50 mg of DMT. There are important similarities, but the differences are important, too.

Like a powerful religious epiphany or gnostic insight, psychedelics dislodge perception from the ordinary constraints of continuity and boundedness. We've known since Kant that these are the mechanics by which consciousness organizes experience into space, time, and the ego. The natural order of things is destabilized in a way that can be freeing, allowing people to reframe the relationship between self and world. In our ordinary lives, we probably think we know more than we actually do about who we are and what our place is in the world. Psychedelics help some people explore these issues.

As in religious visions, the mind relies on symbols to shape psychedelic experience -- archetypes which emerge from deep within. Associations of ideas, mediated through symbols, often become a primary ordering principle of psychedelic experience. Such an event is commonly experienced as a visionary crisis, but it is a crisis that generally resolves over the course of the drug experience, leading back to a re-integrated ego. There is a lot of possibility there for discovery.

Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, said it this way:

"Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous-that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego."

There you have it.

Posted by Thieme at 02:14 AM | Comments (0)

October 06, 2008

The Spiritual Journey

A young man experienced an altered state and emailed to ask about its relationship to orthodox modes of spirituality and religious experience. I thought it might be of value to others who are asking the same question to share my response.

I replied:

I have used all sorts of modalities in my life to discover and ideally integrate various unconscious dimensions of my "Self." What religions designate as "spiritual tools or techniques" have generally persisted for so many centuries because they work. The tools are woven into the narrative of each religion but the narratives are cultural media that validate them and enable them to be remembered from generation to generation. In short, religious systems, whatever else they may be, are mnemonic devices fused with interpretations of life that provide meaning or the illusion of meaning (choose one), community, and stabilizing fins in rough winds or training wheels for a tyke learning to ride a two-wheeler - pick your metaphor.

The community part is not extraneous. As I note below, wiser companions are well advised. We do this alone, but we cannot do it alone. We need to do it alone, together.

What you described is one attempt to enter a meditative or altered state, to take the train to the alpha wave central station. It sounds as if it sometimes works. The trick with dissociative states (like what I do when the dentist drills without Novocain but I feel little discomfort) is to be able to return to the center of your own psyche. Otherwise, it's time for a therapist to get to work.

Over the years of my life, I have experienced - prayer, meditation in deeper and deeper states, guided meditations in group contexts (sometimes human potential movements and sometimes Buddhist and Christian communities), automatic writing, mediums, spiritualist trances, self-hypnosis, paranormal games (telepathy, clairvoyance, psychometry), even Ouija boards, in short, many orthodox and non-standard methodologies, and oh yes, the occasional "trip" on a hallucinogen (a recent study suggests that psilocybin delivers a religious experience which is subsequently designated by users as one of the most meaningful religious experience they ever had.. Before taking that trip, however, I suggest a major consult with the erowid web site.)

I don't recommend fringe activities like automatic writing or Ouija boards. What seem to be discarnate spirits or, these days, space brothers in UFOs, are aspects of self that flick off like floaters in our eyes and lead to dissociated states with no controls. Sometimes the doors back home are blocked by falling debris. That can be frightening and dangerous. In addition, channeling of all kinds generally results in bogus testimonies and simplistic spiritualities, seldom specific but often sharing similar vague descriptions of another plane, another life, or another psychic domain. In Christian terms, the routes they suggest are generally around the cross, i.e. reality. In the spiritual domain, there are detours but no short cuts, and there are definitely no free lunches.

All religious traditions state that these practices must be guided by someone more experienced and for good reason - we are playing with powerful and dangerous fire here and like dynamite it can be used to build or to destroy. "Spiritual guides" – real flesh-and-blood people, I mean, not discarnate entities : - ) - or directors are needed for more than the shallowest waters – and that introduces the additional task of finding a good one. It's like finding a good financial adviser - track record, maturity, word of mouth, due diligence all apply. Caveat emptor characterizes this marketplace too. Don't just use the yellow pages. And remember, if you meet the Buddha on the road, shoot him.

The rewards of this journey include hierarchical restructuring of the psyche in ways that include and transcend prior states and deliver spiritual power, and the ability to live with self-mastery, dignity, and resiliency regardless of circumstances. That hard-wired experience is generally contextualized by religious narratives in a particular way – Buddhists experience “a nightmare in daylight,” Christians are “born again,” etc. – but the pluralism of interpretations relativizes them all and suggests an innate predisposition to transformation or conversion that is prior to any story.

The downsides include the trip being interrupted, which secular analysts unfortunately diagnose as mental illness instead of a detour, and of course, grandiosity and inflation of the ego. Think of Alice in Wonderland eating the wafer and growing real big. That’s ego inflation. Then think of Alice eating another and getting real small. That’s humility.

Humility is better.

In the end, one discovers that these practices all lead to diminishing self importance, a manageable and appropriately sized ego, and more surpassing joy in living life than one dares to dream.

It sounds to me like it’s worth it.

Posted by Thieme at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)