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 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)
February 16, 2008
Why Some Younger Voters Support Obama
Aaron Ximm" is the name of my son a.k.a. Aaron Thieme whose new and
artist name evolved from the date of his wedding anniversary. He works
with a fine tech company that takes most of his time
(http://www.spcontrols.com/) but also maintains a wonderful web site in
found sound, Quiet American, which has marvelous posts like one minute vacations
(http://www.quietamerican.org/)
Because my wife and I are going to have dinner with Hillary and Barack
tonight (and 1700 of our closest friends at the Dems' Founder's Day
Dinner, Feb 16 2008) and we're the two who will vote in our primary
Tuesday, I took a family poll among our seven kids and five spousal
units. This is what my son Aaron wrote:
My own vote is for Obama, in fact I coughed up money for him for the
first time this week, not so much because of policy points -- I think
Edwards' health plan was better, and so on -- but because he clearly
has the same impact on others that he does on me: he inspires
something I had almost forgotten was possible, to have true pride in
and actual hope for our country.
A month or so ago I was debating the "experience" issue with someone
and first articulated clearly (to myself as well) something that
informs my feeling on this, that the role of President is one of
leadership first and foremost. If I understand leadership (as I do) to
mean to speak for, and to speak to, the nation, it seems clear that
Obama is able to do that in a way that my generation has never seen or
heard. If the President is the face and voice of the nation, there is
no politician I can remember with a better face or voice.
My biggest concern is the open question of whether he would be able to
delegate matters beyond his ken appropriately, to assemble a functional
and healthy and honest team behind him.
That, more than the lack of specific personal experience, is what I would worry about.
It's not that I don't think there is a real risk of disappointment;
it's more the distinct but unshakable sense that I would never forgive
myself if I didn't take a chance on him. I kind of think that's the
sentiment in the nation, at least, among those energized by him.
As we discussed I was among those who dreamed that an Obama/Clinton
ticket could actually happen. Clinton would make the perfect
Cheney-analog -- and as I said only half in jest, with her as VP, any
nutcase who might be tempted to take a shot at Obama would be in a
true double bind... as someone said to this idea, he wouldn't even
need any secret service protection...
I would love to think that this was the beginning of the great
turnaround. With Clinton I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be. With Obama I
don't know... but I dare to hope.
Posted by Thieme at 10:12 PM | Comments (0)
December 17, 2004
A Few Responses to Gary Webb's Death
I too think there was a black cloud that swept over the internet yesterday and stunned everyone.
Gary is in peace, he finished his work, an accomplishment. His children can be proud of their dad.
Our work is still on-going and ahead.
Webb should have his name written in large face on the museum to reporters killed in the line of duty. What his spineless newspaper and the agency did to him was slo-mo-murder.
It remains true though, that while the more vocal among us are criticised and can be marginalised through manipulation of the facts, by some or other uncanny force, just when one starts to believe the battle has been lost to whatever oppressing force, suddenly more support becomes visible, and others rise up to lift the 'Aquila' of freedom and truth. And somehow, there are always more 'Aquilifers' to keep on going.
You must have noticed that somehow, despite the best efforts of those wielding the dark cloud of censorship, lightning bolts of truth keeping flashing through, and in this sign we can base hope and draw support. They keep trying, but they never quite win, and I don't believe they ever will win.
Many of us live life on the edge... your own words I'm sure... and what is marginalisation by definition? Our only challenge is to remain on the front edge and not the rear edge, ahead of the storm, not crumpled, tossed and torn in its wake. It seems that the 'oppressors that be' do not realise how in many ways their actions may just be helping to keep us where we actually belong - on the edge.
"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually
to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly
preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic." John LeCarre
He was/is one of my heroes, too. What the LATimes did is unforgivable, and typical.
Posted by Thieme at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2004
Comments to The Battle Not to Rage or Despair
I guess some people often prefer to respond directly to posts sent as Islands in the Clickstreams rather than register and add comments to the blog. So long as people do that, I'll add selected relevant responses to posts.
Response:
Hi Richard,
I've been getting your e-mails for years and have never commented, but this one struck such a nerve, I have to. For a while now I've been saying that the biggest problem we face is not the economy or even the war, but the increasingly pervasive distortion of reality. It's like screaming into a strong wind.
Even a few short years ago, when Bill Clinton lied about sex, the lying was considered an impeachable offence. Now the same people who so relentlessly drove that horse don't even bother to cover up the fact that they are lying--about things of much greater import than b.j.s in the oval office--and no one seems to care. The other night I saw a drug ad on television. There were heartwarming pictures of people holding hands and laughing and running on the beach. The soundtrack behind it was a full twenty seconds of a voiceover stating all the horrendous side effects, including kidney failure and death. It was chilling. But Americans don't notice that. They run in droves to their doctors to demand the latest pastel pill.
Over and over, the talking heads on the nightly news casually refer to spin doctors--people who are paid big bucks to turn truth into lies--and no one finds the fact of this outrageous. It is terrifying how quickly the abnormal becomes normal.
When you take the lies and mix in the bloodlust, it all starts to feel like Germany in the thirties.
Second response:
What you say about "history of this country through the twentieth century is largely not known by many of its citizens" is something I heard a couple of months ago from my 84 year old mother. It struck me
then, just as your article did now.
She lives in a retirement community and told me how she was appalled at seeing this in her contemporaries! The interesting thing is that she in a diehard Republican, so her 'despair' is in a different directions than yours.:-o Before you might dismiss her as an 'old lady', you should know that she is like her mother who lived to be 103 and was sharp and kept up on what was going on in the world almost until the day she died. My mom is even more educated and follows even more closely our current social, political and economic events.
So that kind of dichotomy from two experienced and well informed people concerns me. Are we, as a country, heading down a road where the side that has the most rage will win power?
A third response:
Those words make me feel less insane for whatever that is worth.
Posted by Thieme at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)