Metapsychosis

Journal of Consciousness, Literature, and Art

How to Live in the Future (Part 2)

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“Sexual selection would appear to be a search engine for [compression algorithms] in the implicate order, an ecstatic browsing for patterns that will increase the capacity of any system to produce ever greater amounts of entropy.”
– Richard Doyle

If you plan to live in the future, you have failed already: one of its defining traits is that it’s unpredictable. We don’t need a technological event horizon for this to be true (but they are actually quite frequent). The real Singularity that Church of Kurzweil devotees displace into the fruiting moment of today’s still-juvenile Ecology of Stuff—that sharp discontinuity between what is and what can’t be imagined, lives right now and always now, and we’re inside it. It’s the canopy of stars we pierce when we embody old alchemical engravings, poking our explorers’ heads out through the sky-as-limit-of-the-known. It is the Bardo of Tibetan mysticism, that chaotic space between our incarnations in which everything occurs at once—and every moment is the Bardo, since our lives are tunnels made of gates, and every day’s a new year. Every moment’s an inflection point between the end and the beginning of innumerable stories flowing in all possible directions. (If you don’t agree, just sit and listen long enough, and evidence will come.)

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this Day That Changes Everything is that we’re swimming in it all the time. If some Omega Point in hyperspace, the Eschaton that waits for us at history’s end, draws all mundane phenomena into its all-embracing unity, we’re implicated in that vast conspiracy already. We can celebrate. But particles apparently pop in and out of being all the time, each moment a Creation. All of it occurs at once, a party more than a parade. So point me to “the” Singularity, again?

That said, the future seems to have a character that holds up to the deconstruction of our histories: it’s more of everything. Defining time as the apparent movement of relationships between entangled objects—space as measure of entanglement—“time’s arrow” points to greater entropy, an isotropic, isomorphic cosmos in which every game’s been played and all can come to rest at last. But en route to that final moment, entropy-as-evolution seeks the best-fit path to oceanic stillness, and contrives the paradox of order-as-a-means-to-emptiness: the metabolic flurry of our intricate ecologies, no niche unoccupied, the fractal map of river deltas fitting neatly over our phylogenies and food webs. Winding tributaries and the “tangled bank” of Darwin’s evolutionary wilderness take shape as the inevitable system-seeking-rest, its filaments forever reaching from the trauma of explosive origins to grasp at peace in full and evenly distributed disorder.

Every action has its equal, opposite reaction, though. The liberating “march of progress,” Eros constantly transcending limitation by devising and inhabiting more brilliant and adaptable new bodies, is actually the very definition of conservative: the conservation of momentum, energy, and information as the cosmos rearranges its components to achieve a quicker peace by “stepping on the gas” and dissipating everything more rapidly. The answer to the ever-loving question of how order comes from chaos is that order is just more efficient chaos—an accomplice, not an adversary. Every tidied desk results in larger landfills; every landfill is a mine awaiting artificially intelligent trash harvesters; the ecosystem that matures to weave together DNA and carbon nanotubule microprocessors in an Anthropocene beyond the over-simple categories “man” and “nature” is itself one giant dissipative structure, functioning as an excretive organ of the Sun as it assists in the accelerated burnoff of the Big Bang.

So: two things collide to make a third. The third thing causes a more intricate relationship between the now-three things that make a fourth. Each novel species founds new niches that are filled as soon as luck mutates a nearby organism up the slope of fitness to become a key to fit the lock. The whole thing drives itself, the ever-deepening complexity of Gaia just a crystal growing in solution, ratcheting on up the double helix, just the natural consequence of radiating heat.

(Intelligence is implicated in this: more complex environments create the need for teams of “individuals” to form and endosymbiotically enfold their members into larger creatures—smarter creatures that have more sophisticated needs and new dependencies—and these conditions favor more diverse and intricate societies, which count toward the increasing intricacy of the whole ecology, which favors teamwork as a strategy, and on we go until the Internet appears to link each nucleus of nation-state and corporation into one great planetwide amoeba, and beyond, our pseudopods already reaching into extraplanetary space…)

And so it is that evolution tilts the narrative toward more of everything. We didn’t leave bacteria behind when we got into bigger, and then bigger, huddles and grew tissues, organs, spines, societies; we made a hundred billion previously undreamed jobs for germs to do. It was (and is, in that eternal and apocalyptic light infusing all of time) a transmutation of the flesh: the simple taken up into the great complexity of something both ineffable and vast, and unimaginably generous. No evolutionary layer left behind, each one the platform for and beneficiary of the next. And when we fuse with our machines completely, we will not render humankind extinct; but will explode in our diversity to offer every variation possible upon the theme of “human,” most of which do not exist today.

The permeable membrane of the atmosphere, so wider than the borders of our nations, just as they were wider than the walls of cities, means a bigger social body, made of far more kinds of people, than were necessary to sustain the spirit of a fatherland or motherland. When cities came they made us all a little dumber, as they made us smarter—specialists in pottery or farming or religion lose a little bit of each as far as knowledge was, before, connected through and through to everything, and pottery was farming and religion, all of it one motion, not the purview of an educated expert. (Presumably, and likewise, DNA was once more flexible than it is now, more potent but less realized, far less speciose.) Now, we have so many kinds of jobs, they do not all have names, so myriad are human economic functions; and when our society has stabilized to know itself at global levels as a day-to-day sensation of each local human life, our tasks will be so fluid, numerous, and partial that we will have moved beyond the modern experts in both hyper-specialization and increased awareness of how miniscule our knowledge is to that of the entire Commons. Each of us will be so much more, such empowered emanations of the Biosphere, and so much less, tiny in the corner of our wide experience, compared to egocentric ancestors with relatively static “jobs” and personal identities. Eventually we will take new bodies with each thought, the epistemic line erased between the-generation-as-experiment by blind selection forces and the-metamorphic-flesh-as-proposition by machinery of spirit, assuming selves to take on certain tasks. The arrow is toward more life, more apparent choice, more radiant and dangerous diversity—all hung together, maddest-ever symphony, admired all at once.

This order, which we organize and make explicit, the “invisible environment” of the cosmos’s distributed intelligence as manifested in the Biosphere’s webwork of thoughts-as-species, is already “out there” waiting to be recognized and drawn down from the heavens (metaphorically). That is one way the Singularity is here already—it hasn’t gathered, coalesced, and focused into history yet, but all of it already lies in wait, the Eschaton at history’s end impressing every moment with its tugging yearning, showing itself to us in and as a universe compelled to speak.

And it can be no other way. The game was rigged “from the beginning,” which here means the origin beyond the Alpha and Omega, not “t = 0” but the architecture of the vacuum, in which past and future happen simultaneously, and the end and the beginning codetermine which of all nows swaddles us between. We are a path drawn from all possibilities, the likeliest of pasts and futures shaking hands to meet as now, and that’s why we get so confused about causality—because we haven’t caught our talk of time up to the networked and nonlinear epistemology of ecological, electric modern thinking.

That’s the essence of “time’s arrow”—echoing Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the narrative that our spacetime-projecting minds derive from pure unboxed experience in light of our best scientific work, the best-fit story to survive in this World-Wide-Webbed age is this: time moves from Singularity to “Intertwingularity,” and all the while The Great Perfection is and isn’t waiting round the bend for us.

The evolution of self-organizing parts to weave together an Omega Point that wakes up to itself at every level is the equal, opposite momentum to the involution of the already-and-always order ever seeking novel ways to manifest in form, not just potential. Nothing new exists, except new ways of saying it—the future is a dream we apprehend as best our tiny mammal bodies can, the poetry precipitating out of Holographic All to shape and wag our tongues and typing fingers. And as we approach the Eschaton to recognize it as the Self we’ve been this whole time, categories like “new” and “familiar” explode beneath the weight of our original experience, the only thing that ever was, as it unweaves and weaves us and our grand predictions.

So, in short: in some sense it is hard to be completely wrong about the future, if you say, “This thing will be remembered and repeated in some way.” A universe in which all possibilities occur is more entropic, thus more likely. And that makes the only certain thing that we can say about the future, that it is. (And also isn’t.)

∞

Read Part One

Is Myth Dead?

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To anyone who winces at the thought of a story being just fiction, the relegation of myth to the status of untruth should appear unfortunate. The modern definition, “a commonly accepted but untrue belief,” is not at all what we mean when we say “myth” within this project. However, the common definition tacitly defines a predominant myth of our times.

The value that myth provides is demonstrated in the fact that it has been with us since the birth of civilization. In fact, it is because of myth that we were able to birth civilizations. The myths, art, and religions of antiquity sprung into existence together, and were a way for us to relate to one another as populations grew beyond small wandering tribes. The earliest artistic artifacts are religious, or is it the other way around? It is hard to say. Myth and art, still nearly inseparable terms, provide a distorted mirror for us to regard ourselves in. We see ourselves in a new light, the best artists showing us existential truths through the distortion or even complete abandonment of empirical truths. Thus artists, and the myths they weave from their own lives, direct our eyes inward, both as individuals and as a culture, in a new way.

It is a self evident fact that myths speak to our humanity. They convey meaning. This was clear to me from an early age. As a youth I remember staring at the television in befuddlement as documentaries would attempt to discover the supposed “historic truth” of a myth. Did giants actually walk the Earth before the time of King Arthur’s court? How did Noah manage to get every species of animal aboard a single ship? These are the wrong questions to ask, and for the wrong reasons. Myths speak to the narrative, the qualitative, to the side of us which quite simply need stories and images, both grand and mundane, for us to relate ourselves to. It can provide psychological nourishment, and cultures that are devoid of the ability to distinguish myth from literal truth suffer for it. Such a thing could hardly be called a culture at all.

If you bear with us a moment in the premise that myth is something vital to our nature, then an absence of it, or more accurately, an absence of the ability to recognize it, would be a deep cultural and existential crisis. A quick glance at current events makes it clear that we are in just such a position, even though no solid connection between the two has yet been drawn. This is a feeling that I experienced strongly as I passed through adolescence, and I discovered that it was something many others were feeling, though few were inclined to voice it. I tried to convey this in my first novel, Join My Cult!,

Spiritual, cultural apocalypse is much more subtle than mushroom clouds, fallout, and radiation burns. People can deny it. No statistics can prove it. The only evidence we have is a feeling of profound loss, and hope for a future that does not reduce the qualitative values of life to quantities, and for companions to share these stories with so that they can have value, and pass on to our children in the next world.

Apocalypse literally means “lifting the veil.” (Greek: Apokálypsis.) I’m using the more modern version, but maybe not without a hint of the possibility for great transformation in times of uncertainty and turmoil. Lurking in even the most mundane hearts lies the possibility for transformation, however distant. The symbolism of the Blasted Tower in the Major Arcana of the traditional Tarot deck reflects this idea: moments of revelations most often occur at the points when all previous expectations have been utterly destroyed. Emmanuel Kant even hints at this with his aesthetics which include the sublime. The sublime could be the beatific vision, but at the same time, it can include the powerful, horrific forces of nature and the psyche. This is apocalypse, and it is an idea closely linked with the sacred, as we will see moving forward.

Neil Stephenson’s novel Anathem deals with the modern crisis of the sacred as well. The following passage is especially relevant,

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same each day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer other to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.

An obvious conclusion of modernity is that we have no unifying myth, as Georges Bataille proposes1“If we state simply, for the sake of lucidity, that today’s man defines himself by his avidity for myth, and if we add that he defines himself also by the consciousness of not having the power to gain access to the possibility of creating a true myth, we have defined a sort of myth which is the absence of myth.”  we live in a myth which is an absence of myth. Our world is a fast-paced, materialistically oriented, cultural melting pot, in which it seems that any need for mythology would quickly boil away. We are, at the same time, untethered from any common shared myth, so that the task of simply creating a new mono-myth that possess the collective imagination is generally less fruitful than the artist may hope, as Bataille himself discovered in his rather ill-conceived idea of re-instituting human sacrifice.2See the introduction to The Absence of Myth written by Michael Richardson.

Even amongst the ranks of those who are generally most sympathetic to the psychological value of myth, there has been increasing question of if myth has any place in our modern lives. For instance, Michael Vannoy Adams presented this material at the “Psyche and Imagination” conference of the International Association for Jungian Studies,

Recently, one Jungian, Wolfgang Giegerich, has argued that, at this stage in the history of consciousness, myth no longer has any psychological function… Ancient mythological figures, he contends, “do not suffice.” They are insufficient because, he says, “even though they may display certain formal similarities” to the modern situation, “they are incommensurable” with it. …Giegerich, however, maintains that the modern psychological situation is utterly without precedent, without parallel. It is so radically different — or, as he says, so logically different — from the ancient mythological situation that any similarity is merely formal and thus insignificant. Giegerich says that the modern situation has “fundamentally broken with myth as such, that is, with the entire level of consciousness on which truly mythic experience was feasible.”

The most obvious conclusion is often not the most poignant one. We do have myths, though they often exist in mediums not surrounded by the aura of the sacred. This will be demonstrated time and again throughout this work, as it is demonstrated in our daily lives if we know what to look for. Modern myths are so pervasive that they are nearly invisible. Those that are considered archaic, that is, they have ceased to function in the manner that they were meant to, become more apparent to us. We call our relics “myth,” but they are not. They are the myths that have died.

On its face it certainly feels more accurate to say that we have lost touch with an understanding of the sacred rather than with myth, though exactly what that means, and whether it is ultimately accurate, also remains to be explored. It is far more likely that we have lost a sense of the sacred, but we cannot as a race lose our myths — certainly not before such a point that we have no beliefs or culture whatsoever.

It is not easy to draw a distinction between myths that participate more in what we might consider the sacred, and those that do not. This is a crisis that I hinted at in Is Myth Dead? although I avoided confronting it directly for a reason. We cannot so easily separate myths from the sacred, nor can we extricate either of them from the biases of a specific culture, least of all the ones we are immersed in. Artistic movements such as the Surrealists did move in this direction. There was a general desire to rediscover, reconnect with some primal, sacred source.

Consider this quote from Bataille’s essay The Surrealist Religion,

Everything Breton has put forward―whether it concerns the quest for the sacred, the concern with myths, or rediscovering rituals similar to those of primitives―represents the exploration of the possibility we again discover, possibility in another sense; this time it is simply a question of exploring all that can be explored by man, it is a question of reconstituting all that was fundamental to man before human nature had been enslaved by the necessity for technical work.

It is easy to make this distinction, and feel a need to somehow return to a state of sacredness, real or imagined, which seems to have been stripped from or lives, from our very psychological beings, by the realities of global industrialization. Let’s resist the urge to see it as such a clear dialectic, and instead move forward under the supposition that we are exploring an ideological history through the unfolding of a select few of the legion of mythic ideas that differentiate the world now from the world four thousand years ago. A multiplicity of myths, not clear, opposed opposites. If new myths are born, re-tethered to something sacred, they must be brutally immediate, possessing unavoidable gravity, poignant, fragile, they must be anything but contrived, planned, and developed with the intention of bringing us the sacred. (She does not come to us on a platter. More likely, the platter will have your beating heart on it.)

For our purposes at the moment it should be enough to highlight that the sacred represents not a single idea, but rather an entire category of ideation — a world-view. It is a world-view that perceives the world manifest to our senses as itself symbolic of an invisible world. The history of civilization is, at one and the same time, the history of myth. Mircea Eliade explores this subject in The Sacred & The Profane,

By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to be itself. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguished it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality.

This conception of the sacred seems to demand the transcendent, the invention of the supernatural. This category is required for no other reason than to draw a contrast with the profane.

It stands to reason that everything is natural; even if the universe is unexplainable, it would still remain “natural.” Forgive the tautology: nature is what is. The distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” is only relevant, only meaningful, in the context of the profane when contrasted with the sacred. Needless to say, inventing the “supernatural,” a new category of being to house the sacred, creates its own slew of problems that must be dealt with, such as superstition.

In Eliade’s conception, and I believe it is a point well taken, a sacred object is so because it is a symbol, a link, with the archetype standing “behind” the physical, profane object. A sacred canoe is not just a canoe, it is “canoe,” or it is a canoe within the context of a specific myth pertaining to canoes, or the sacred river, etc.

This distinction also cuts across experiential boundaries. The sacred and profane show themselves not only in the perception of things but also in the perception of time. For instance during a sacred festival — a concept that we have mostly lost touch with in our purely profane holidays3All of the major holidays in the United States, for instance, are profane: means of re-enforcing consumer behavior or an excuse to drink. They borrow iconography, of course, most commonly from Christianity, many of those symbols themselves taken wholesale from Pagan sources. — one enters into the time before time, recapitulating the birth of the world, or some other mythological event which occurs outside of profane time. The phrase “time before time” is an odd approximation, a metaphor created from within the field of time. Sacred time and sacred objects do not truly stand “outside,” “behind,” or “before” their profane counterparts; they are distinguished as occupying two separate ontological categories simultaneously, and there may even be some kind of exchange or interplay between the two, as sacred festivals and rituals demonstrate.4This is to some extent shown in the distinction between kairos and chronos, the time of experience which stands on its own, divine or sacred time, perhaps even an “eternal” moment, and chronological time.

It is to that point, the crossroads of the sacred and profane, that this work is ultimately aimed; for it is in this intermediary zone that myth actually occurs. The constructed supernatural realm loops back into the otherwise inaccessible elements of our own being, as a piece of psychological sleight-of-hand that allows us to conditionally stake a claim in the ever-shifting, dark chaos that is nature itself, un-sculpted by human sensation, consideration, organization and expectation. The condition we must accept when engaging with myth is that we pretend the shadows on the wall, the image on the screen, or the entities in our dreams represent some type of reality.

The realm we call the sacred cannot be left to sociologists, even if … the use of this word has become questionable if we do not frame with reference to sociology. … Science always abstracts the object it studies from the totality of the world. … It might in turn be pointed out that the sacred can just as easily be envisaged on its own. … But a question remains: suppose that the sacred, far from being like the other objects of science, subject to separation, is defined as the exact opposite of abstract objects (things, tools, and clearly definable elements), precisely as the concrete totality itself is resistant to it.5ibid

It may come as a surprise to some that we are never too far from the trappings of mythology in our daily lives. They are in movies, books, our mutually created narratives on the Internet, even on television. They permeate our ideas about ourselves, our relation to the world, and our relationships with others. They can be insightful or vapid. The very drive for people to make complete fools of themselves on reality TV is also the attempt to fulfill a mythic need. To be famous is to be externally mythologized. The thing that many of us find so repellent about these trends in pop culture is the complete and utter lack of the sacred. Myth is not absent.

We relate with these stories differently than people who lived in a world before the computer, television or typewriter. There seems to be something different about how we experience stories, even though the analogy of campfire storytelling and Internet communication is occasionally drawn.6The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking, Jennifer Ryan.

Modern myths of this nature often don’t strike their audiences as deeply because they are perceived as just stories, or movies. The lights come up in the theater and the illusion is dispelled. Or, more frequently nowadays, we lose attention entirely mid-stream and surf to another channel or web-page, to take another fragment into the bricolage of our wandering consciousness. In a capitalist society, myths too take on a capitalist bent. Further, they serve its ends. They are more readily consumed than engaged with, but this does not mean that they do not leave their mark. All of this hearkens back to the lack of the sacred, rather than of myth. The formative or even subliminal effect of the media we’re steeped in is hard to say, but certainly the multi-billion dollar industries of marketing and advertising would be useless if it was not far-reaching.7A note about characterization, and the usage of terms such as “capitalist society.” It should be obvious that, within the contexts we are beginning to explore, “capitalist society,” “existential philosophy,” “corporate culture,” and so on are all myth-structures that were at one point posed, and which have since been presupposed so frequently that they are taken for granted. Like any other myth, they may or may not relate to a series of facts, but more important the effects of the characterization is real. In other words, there are sufficient people that believe in such a thing as “capitalist society” as to make it worth talking about, even if, speaking very strictly, there may be no such thing. Even “culture” can be considered a myth in this sense. This applies equally to phrases like “world-view,” a term which has become fairly commonly even outside anthropological writing. Terms like this sometimes create more questions than they answer. What exactly does it mean? Is it a passive or active process? Can it be willfully changed, or is it provided fully-formed? We will attempt to engage with as many of these terms as possible, but there must be a level of approximation in using such terms, or else we would be footnoting every couple words, and the book in front of you would be thousands of pages long. Let us say that it could be either of these things, in different contexts, and move forward.

There are many examples of what could be considered modern myths embodied in media. Rather than saying that The Lord of the Rings is a modern myth, though clearly it is, it is more relevant to say that every piece of media available contains layer upon layer of myth. Any given myth is implicitly built upon other myths, and myths are used to make them readily accessible to us.

For instance, there are a variety of common myths which allow access to the viewership of a news broadcast with a particular political agenda. The broadcast can further establish or re-establish these myths, and build new ones, but it is already working upon certain expectations. So, you don’t find many polyamorous bisexuals watching Fox News in rapt attention. This is an example of myth acting both as amplification and sorting device.8Many rhetorical devices of modern news broadcasts utilize a knowledge of the power of mythology with startling effect, crippling the rational capacity of the audience with the use of a few well times key words and some ideological hand-waving. Fox News is most well known for this approach, but it is at its core a methodology without any inherent political stance. A “liberal agenda” is as easily served by this approach as any other. If you’re preaching to the choir, amplification both further indoctrinates and further excites the converts. Myths even affect our evolutionary selection processes, but that’ll have to wait.

In the case of the myths that resonate with the multitude on a level deeper than entertainment, the anxiety that underlies the wholesale exchange of the profane for the sacred can produce a nostalgic throwback to the “old time religion.” The mythic aura of a yesterday that never existed drives such cultural movements as we see demonstrated in the movie Jesus Camp, and this trend is evident in many revivalist and reactionary groups across the world, not just Christianity. It is also the basis of many American myths that sprang out of the 1950s, of idyllic family values, which reach from that time, and before, right up to the present.

This defensive reaction, to look backwards in times of chaos, cannot be restricted to one ideology. It is one of the forms of modern mythology that we most frequently encounter. As Samuel P. Huntington explores in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the coming world conflicts will be driven along ideological and cultural fault lines, even if underlying motivational factors in some cases include more material concerns, such as territory or overburdened resources. In other words, even resource-driven conflicts are likely to be painted in ideological terms, especially in regard to the motivating force presented to the people who make up the backbone of any military force. The idea of the US as a “global peacekeeper” is such a myth as well, as much as the idea that jewels could be cut from the bellies of Muslims, a story ostensibly propagated during the third crusade.

In the Third Crusade, after Richard the Lion-Hearted captured Acre in 1191, he ordered 3,000 captives — many of them women and children — taken outside the city and slaughtered. Some were disemboweled in a search for swallowed gems.

The drive behind fanaticism, and fascism — which is an affliction not unlike fanaticism — is psychological, not material. William Reich explored this in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Consider this, taken from a chapter appropriately named Ideology as a Material Force,

Those who followed … the revolutionary Left’s application of Marxism between 1917 and 1933 had to notice that it was restricted to the sphere of objective economic processes and government policies, but that it neither kept a close eye on nor comprehended the development and contradictions of the so-called ‘subjective factor’ of history, i.e., the ideology of the masses.

The extremists driving ideological conflicts are borrowing from mere echoes of myths originating thousands of years ago, catalyzing the existential fear, hate, or desire latent in a culture, and more pointedly, within the individuals that comprise that culture. Again borrowing from Reich’s study on fascism, or Deleuze and Guittari’s examination in Anti-Oedipus, the principles of personal psychology also control mass-psychology. The fascist of the state is the fascist within. This alchemy produces poisonous splinter factions, fundamentalist groups that cause many of the pathological habits our cultures otherwise exhibit, in concentrated form. The atrocities perpetrated by the State far exceed those any one individual could account for, but the will to those ends must be spread through a sufficient public body for any of them to occur.

Far from being an exception, these splinter groups have been responsible for much of the history of the 19th and 20th centuries that has made its way into the books, whether we are speaking of the rise and fall of Soviet communism, the second World War, or the ongoing strife in the Middle East.

Exploring politics or even religious ideology as the only lens to gaze at myth in modern forms is misleading. We want to look at the very mechanisms of myth, not how it manifests in just the relation of nations, or corporations, or individuals, or the religio-politics of previous eras. It is nevertheless worth noting that the mythologies utilized by these groups have all been re-purposed, whether we speak of the selective use of scripture by religious fundamentalists, or the more bizarre relationship between National Socialism and occultism, which underlined the rise of the Third Reich despite Hitler’s professed abhorrence for the occult. These fringe elements are at most times culturally inert, but have the potential to overcome the whole of a culture during crisis points, as the Nazis did after World War I.

However, myth as a whole cannot be considered a result of such use. Nor can myth be “killed,” in any event. It can be a healing, as well as destructive, force. But we’ve only given the most tentative glimpse at the many roles myth plays in our lives.

Excerpted from The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized Press), 2010. This edition slightly edited. Originally published at Modern Mythology.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ “If we state simply, for the sake of lucidity, that today’s man defines himself by his avidity for myth, and if we add that he defines himself also by the consciousness of not having the power to gain access to the possibility of creating a true myth, we have defined a sort of myth which is the absence of myth.”
2. ↑ See the introduction to The Absence of Myth written by Michael Richardson.
3. ↑ All of the major holidays in the United States, for instance, are profane: means of re-enforcing consumer behavior or an excuse to drink. They borrow iconography, of course, most commonly from Christianity, many of those symbols themselves taken wholesale from Pagan sources.
4. ↑ This is to some extent shown in the distinction between kairos and chronos, the time of experience which stands on its own, divine or sacred time, perhaps even an “eternal” moment, and chronological time.
5. ↑ ibid
6. ↑ The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking, Jennifer Ryan.
7. ↑ A note about characterization, and the usage of terms such as “capitalist society.” It should be obvious that, within the contexts we are beginning to explore, “capitalist society,” “existential philosophy,” “corporate culture,” and so on are all myth-structures that were at one point posed, and which have since been presupposed so frequently that they are taken for granted. Like any other myth, they may or may not relate to a series of facts, but more important the effects of the characterization is real. In other words, there are sufficient people that believe in such a thing as “capitalist society” as to make it worth talking about, even if, speaking very strictly, there may be no such thing. Even “culture” can be considered a myth in this sense. This applies equally to phrases like “world-view,” a term which has become fairly commonly even outside anthropological writing. Terms like this sometimes create more questions than they answer. What exactly does it mean? Is it a passive or active process? Can it be willfully changed, or is it provided fully-formed? We will attempt to engage with as many of these terms as possible, but there must be a level of approximation in using such terms, or else we would be footnoting every couple words, and the book in front of you would be thousands of pages long. Let us say that it could be either of these things, in different contexts, and move forward.
8. ↑ Many rhetorical devices of modern news broadcasts utilize a knowledge of the power of mythology with startling effect, crippling the rational capacity of the audience with the use of a few well times key words and some ideological hand-waving. Fox News is most well known for this approach, but it is at its core a methodology without any inherent political stance. A “liberal agenda” is as easily served by this approach as any other. If you’re preaching to the choir, amplification both further indoctrinates and further excites the converts.

The Fall and the Eschaton

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As much as Western society has become secularized over the course of the past couple centuries, the Judeo-Christian mythos still forms a backdrop to the predominant modes of thought in our society. Two myths predominate: the myth of the Fall, and the myth of the eschaton.

The Fall is the story of how we have been exiled from Paradise, struck down from spiritual perfection to a mundane, corrupt materiality. The eschaton is the story of where we are going: that the pain and suffering we experience has an ultimate meaning that will revealed; that what has been lost will be recovered; that the conflict and misery in this world will be reconciled; that evil will not have the last word. One looks back to a glorious past whose ways we have lost and to which we must return. The other looks forward to a bright and hopeful future, in which there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and good will triumph over evil. The prevailing scientific materialism would suggest that both of these are nonsense, and that history is nothing but “one damn thing after another.” However, I would suggest that few people, even committed materialists, actually believe this. Most of us have, in some form or another, if not a philosophy of time, at least a mythos of time.

MODERNITY

06 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 03 (CC BY-ND 2.0)

06 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 03 (CC BY-ND 2.0)

The eschatological view has dominated modern thought. Though ostensibly throwing off the yoke of religious superstition, the secular humanism of this time had a fervent eschatology in which religion itself was part of a barbaric past that would be superseded by a future in which humanity would soon be perfected through the power of reason. The Whig view of history, as it came to be known, suggested that the history of humanity was one of ascent. We began as savages, fighting one another for dominance in a world that was, as Hobbes put it, “nasty, brutish, and short,” and arose into intelligent beings capable of reason, virtue and invention, throwing off the shackles of ignorance, subservience, and superstition. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection seemed to reinforce this view, or at least it certainly did so in Herbert Spencer’s sociological interpretation of it. The belief that advances in science and technology would create a brighter future for all resonates with us to this day, and is in many cases so sacrosanct as to provoke mockery and ridicule toward anyone who dares question it. There are more liberal and conservative versions of it, but the myth of progress is one of the defining features of modernity.

This has provoked a whole series of reactions. Along with the Enlightenment came a Counter-Enlightenment. For “throne and altar” conservatives like Joseph-Marie de Maistre, this upheaval in science, politics, and philosophy was nothing but chaos threatening to destroy an order that had kept society together for centuries. This so-called “reason” of this age was simply an eagerness to overthrow the wisdom of the past. Romantics such as Percy Shelley or Lord Byron saw in the industrial revolution not a march of progress toward a technological utopia, but a corruption of the natural world, in which the beauty and elegance of nature had been replaced with a cold, mechanistic, instrumental logic that commodified the world and turned society into one large factory where everything is mass produced and everything is standardized and robbed of any uniqueness.

In response, figures like Hegel developed a more nuanced approach. For Hegel, history was not so much constantly getting better, but rather unfolding dialectically, with the ideas of one era negated by their antithesis, which in turn are negated by another antithesis. Through this tension of thesis and antithesis, a new synthesis emerges, and the cycle continues on. For Hegel, this is the process by which Spirit becomes self-aware. Karl Marx posited that it was not ideas but material conditions that drove these historical processes, with each era having its own form of class struggle. Yet both of these approaches shared in the eschatological tendencies of modernity. They both saw an ultimate “end of history” toward which world events would eventually lead.

POSTMODERNITY

Another “end of history” was announced in the twentieth century by postmodernism. In this case, however, it was the end of history as a process toward some goal. Modernism, with all its hopes of human perfection and the triumph of reason, had seemed overturned by the brutality of fascism and two world wars. The myth of progress, faith in reason, the perfectibility of man—these could no longer be maintained. We were instead left with a matrix of floating signifiers that only pointed to other signifiers, never getting us any closer to the Real.

Teilhard de Chardin (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Teilhard de Chardin (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Others begged to differ. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw in evolution a trend toward increasing complexity, with a corresponding increase in consciousness, leading toward the creation of a “noosphere” that would span the globe as a network of ideas and technologies connecting humanity to one another. Henri Bergson conceived of an “elan vital,” a vital force that moved evolution and history forward in a process of ever-expanding value. Alfred North Whitehead developed a metaphysics in which events were the fundamental unit of reality, with each moment contributing novel information not found in its predecessors in a process called “appetition.” Jean Gebser saw an evolution in different modes of thought from early humans to the present day, going from archaic to magic to mythic to rational, and toward a new mode of consciousness he dubbed “integral,” which moved from the three-dimensional spatial awareness of rational thought to a new four-dimensional temporal awareness. Disciples of Gebser such as Ken Wilber and William Irwin Thompson have spawned a new generation of “spiritual evolutionaries,” who see the expansion of consciousness as not merely a personal goal as mystics, but as a trajectory toward which the cosmos is unfolding.

Oswald Spengler (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Oswald Spengler (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Not so fast, warn a chorus of naysayers. Against the secular modernists, post-modernists, and “evolutionaries,” these pessimists saw in this alleged expansion of consciousness only a loss of ancient wisdom. Oswald Spengler, in his famous book The Decline of the West, wrote of a process by which civilizations are born and grow, but eventually decay from a “Culture” rich in art, music, and religiosity, to a civilization of base materialism, in which economics, technology, and politics are the driving factors. Spengler proved a major influence on one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers: Martin Heidegger. Best known for his work Being and Time, Heidegger challenged the Cartesian view of mind-body duality and the correspondence theory of truth, suggesting instead that knowledge and Being should best be understood in terms of a kind of “unconcealment.” His later works, however, presented a further challenge to modernity, seeing in modern technology the conversion of the world from a mysterious realm of possibilities to be revealed into a “standing reserve” of matter and energy to be used instrumentally for human consumption, leading toward an era of nihilism and total war, which he predicted would ironically be celebrated as a glorious and enlightened era.

Rene Guenon (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Rene Guenon (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Perhaps the greatest prophet of this brand of pessimism was René Guénon. Seeking to bring a Hindu perspective to the West, he conceived of time in terms of yugas, in which time did not advance uniformly, but rather accelerated as it reached its zenith. This zenith, however, was not some glorious endpoint like Chardin’s noosphere, but an abyss of base materialism. The acceleration of time occurred because of a downward fall in which we reached peak velocity as we lost the lightness of spirit. He sought to shed light on the ancient understanding of the cosmos, emphasizing the numerous ways in which the ancients understood the world in qualitative rather than quantitative terms. Even numbers themselves were not merely quantitative, each having its own archetypal quality. He critiqued modernity’s neurotic reliance on quantification. Through quantification, we lose our sense of what is unique. Everything becomes standardized, mass produced, broken down into the lowest common denominator. In politics, economics, and religion, he saw in this a kind of misguided egalitarianism that assumed the replaceability of individuals. Through this kind of egalitarianism, we had lost the sense of initiation, in which the wise and learned counsel those below them, and lift them up.

Guénon also criticized the modern lens through which ancient wisdom was interpreted, such as Jung’s understanding of mythology. Of course, he conceded, mythology is symbolic, carrying multiple meanings. But, he cautioned, we would be missing something crucial if we interpret it as merely symbolic. We assume it is so because the archaeological record does not match what these ancient myths tell us. However, he postulated, this is because the world itself has solidified into the shape we see it today, including the fossil record that has been left for posterity. The ancients dwelled in a world that was much more open, more porous in relation to other realities. There is an interesting parallel here with Gebser, who saw magic and mythic consciousness as having their own worlds of perception, so to speak. The difference is that for Gebser, the rational ego is in a sense adaptive, creating a new dimension of perception, even if it suppresses some of the other perceptual modes, whereas for Guénon, this is purely a loss—a fall from grace.

RECONCILIATION

Between the fall and the eschaton lies a messy mixture of sin and grace. There are aspects of our society that are getting better. Medical advances are allowing people to live longer. Society has become more inclusive of different races, creeds, gender identities, and sexual orientations. Yet this inclusion has largely come at the cost of meaning. We are able to tolerate multiple religions by acting as if they were all mere language games with no actual wisdom to impart on their followers. We include people from across different races, genders, and sexualities as faceless members of the same cold and uncaring society where they exist as a number, a statistic, log entry in a vast bureaucratic mess of mediocrity and anonymity. The equality we achieve is a flattening of all that makes us unique. The freedom we attain is the freedom to consume the options society sells us. Even spiritual transcendence has become a consumer commodity. So-called “New Age” spirituality has promoted a culture in which spirituality is a matter of accessorizing: a few mantras here, a little sacred geometry there, sprinkle in some sage, some misinterpretations of quantum physics, and solipsistic belief in the power of one’s own mind over the entire universe, and we call the result “spiritual.” It seems that the modern world has sacrificed a great deal of depth for a rather superficial breadth.

Yet it seems a bit rash to so readily dismiss modernity without appreciating the moment in history it represented. While the Copernican revolution is often seen as “decentering” humanity, or “dethroning” us from our privileged position in the cosmos, it was if anything an indication of humanity’s ascendancy. Aristotle’s cosmology placed earth in the center not because it was special or exalted, but because it was the heaviest of the elements, toward which all other things fall. The sun, representing royalty and divinity, held a privileged position in the celestial spheres. Far from decentering humanity, Copernicus scandalized his contemporaries by demoting the sun to a more gross and undignified position, while the Earth was exalted to the celestial realm. What a perfect metaphor for the emerging humanism of the time, which elevated humanity to a godlike status, moving Icarus-like ever closer to the sun. The traditional forms of authority which had given the world a sense of order and certainty were coming undone, and humanity was becoming the new cosmic center. Humans sought new ways to control nature and engineer society. The world became an object to be molded according to our own vision. A Promethean spirit of invention and exploration began to dominate.

In the twentieth century, this edifice itself began to crumble. Science and technology continued to advance as fast as ever, but the costs of this way of life were becoming apparent. The power of the atom had been harnessed, only to create the most destructive weapon ever. An era of unprecedented economic prosperity was giving way to mindless consumerism. The industrial technology that had propelled humanity into this new era of dominance was now found to be causing an ecological crisis that increasingly threatens to undo civilization as we know it.

Thus, we are now in another crisis, much like the one that created modernity as we know it. From the Promethean spirit that had exalted humanity, we find a new need for humility. The Cartesian world of quantification and extension had rendered nature into an object we could dominate and manipulate. Now, it’s becoming apparent that we need to enter a new way of relating to nature, based on partnership rather than domination. In doing so, we may rediscover some of the old wisdom of the ancients, who had no choice but to negotiate with their natural environment and respect its wisdom. We must look again to ancient wisdom with humility and reverence, but we must do so with discernment. We cannot return to a pre-Copernican universe with its order and certainty. Even if we wanted to, we would only have a surface-level understanding of their teachings, which were handed down through processes of initiation to which outsiders were excluded. We must therefore adapt this rediscovered wisdom to the cosmos revealed to us by modernity. This discerning blend of ancient wisdom and modern knowledge is how a new paradigm can emerge—one that is appropriate to the new era we find ourselves in.

History, I suggest, is neither a long decay from a golden age nor a linear ascent toward perfection, but a cosmic story unfolding with surprises at each turn. Each turning of the age moves us forward, but not as a progressive accumulation of what has come before. We must think of each age in archetypal terms, not merely as good or bad, but as posing a unique set of challenges to be answered. Modernity has exhausted itself as a force and is now in a state of degeneracy, but it served its own purpose at the time, and we should appreciate its collective lessons. Each age brings about a new form of wisdom, and in the process there is often a tendency to discard the wisdom of the previous age. As we enter a new age, we may find ourselves too quick to dismiss the wisdom of modernity even as we seek to revive the wisdom of the ancients. Yet we must remember that our age will have to find its own wisdom, which will itself be superseded. The past shall guide us, but the future awaits.

Banishing the World: Conner Habib on Postmodern Philosophy and the Occult

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Editor’s Note: I spoke with Conner Habib about his new course, “Banishing the World: Postmodern Philosophy and the Occult,” and learned about the surprising ways in which the most interesting and sophisticated philosophies coming out of humanities converge precisely with occult ideas. Conner’s course is happening this Sunday, October 30th at 3 p.m. EST / 12 p.m. PST. You can register here.

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So in a word: What is the occult?

I’ll give you the best but totally incomplete definition I can: The occult is a web of traditions that recognizes the values and qualities of Everything. You might think, “hey, that’s not the cauldrons and tarot definition I was looking for!” But that’s it. The occult takes seriously the unlit underrepresented, ridiculed, and ignored aspects of life—that could be superstition, it could be dreams, it could be a folktale–and works to fold them all into a view of reality.

Who’s your favorite occultist?

These questions are always so much easier to answer when they’re framed as “who’s your favorite right now?” So let me go that route: I’m pretty enamored with the Greek esoteric healer Stylianos Atteshlis (1912–1995), also know as Daskalos. A great introduction to him is The Magus of Strovolos written by Kyriacos Markides; it’s a chronicle of Daskalos’s healing wisdom and acts, as well as his esoteric philosophy. Healers may not be the obvious place to go when naming occultists, but as my friend, chaos magician Gordon White reminds us, occultists must be healers because that’s the urgent work of magick in the world today.

Favorite philosopher?

It’s always in flux, but I’d say right now it’s Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and Felix Guattari (1930–1992). It’s not cheating to name two since they’ve done a lot of work together! I’ve never read philosophers who were quite so radical in their vision of existence: they started off by refining (and destroying, in some senses) psychoanalysis and then got deeper and deeper; more and more profound until reality itself became a vast plain that needed a whole new map. I’ve read around them quite a bit in the past twenty years, but now I’m getting more intense in my study and they’re on my mind all the time; I feel such a great love for them right now!

…Philosopher occultist?

Glad you asked this, since I don’t really accept the divisions above. My answer is Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), whose work—referred to as anthroposophy—I’ve studied and practiced for years. Steiner is a Da Vinci-like figure, but even more brilliant. He created a new system of agriculture (biodynamic agriculture), education (Waldorf schools), jewelry-making, medicine, and more. And he expressed an entirely new approach to spirituality and science in his philosophy. A big burden for one person, and he bore it from the start to the end. One of the best things about Steiner is that if you get him, the postmodern philosophy/critical theory stuff comes a lot easier, since much of it is already contained in his work.

What will this class be like? What are people going to learn?

The class is going to be a fun, plain language exploration of how certain philosophies intertwine with the occult. You sign on and there I am, live, talking to you. It’s an hour or so of me talking, a thought exercise or two, and then discussion afterward. It’s an awesome format via Zoom webinar room, so you can ask questions and chat with other participants while it’s going on. Participants will leave with what I hope will be a really great paradox: they’ll understand more and less at the same time. More because the occult illuminates philosophy and philosophy makes way for understanding the occult. Less because when you start getting this stuff, the world appears new. What is this world? I guess that’s another way of saying, participants will get a new path into the world that they can take a walk on whenever they’d like.

Do you need to know anything about the occult and/or postmodernism to receive value from this class?

No! All you have to know is that you’re interested in either one or both! That’s the great thing about a course like this: If you’re a beginner, you get an intro. If you’re further along in your study in one or the other, you get a new layer added by the side you don’t know much about—the occult or postmodern philosophy. If you’re good with both, you get to engage in conversation and be a part of an interested community for a couple hours. So, really, good for all.

So you’re talking about how the occult and postmodern philosophy actually do get along. Surprisingly well. In 120 characters or less, can you describe how and why this is happening? Why are occultism and postmodern philosophy so well-matched?

Both seek to remind/reveal to us how consciousness & matter are related—once you figure that out, a new way of being unlocks!

What books are you reading now?

I’m doing a lot of re-reading for the course. Right now going back into Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s excellent, baffling book, Cannibal Metaphysics. Also for fun: Reading Ulysses and Us by Delcan Kiberd. Joyce was a wizard, for sure. And I’ll also throw in here that I’m working my way through Jamie Delano’s Hellblazer run for the first time.

…And what are you writing now?

I just finished a screenplay which was kicking around in my mind for 11 years; a Patricia Highsmith-style thriller/drama. I’m working on an essay about consent, a book on pornograpy, and reworking an old essay I wrote about the phenomenology of time (which needed reworking since our sense of it is changing). You know, when I answer questions like this, I feel self conscious, because I’m like, what the fuck Conner, eat a donut and chill the fuck out.

You know, it may not be the healthiest thing, but donuts make excellent fuel for writers. Thanks Conner. 

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REGISTER

Taking the Waters

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The hills are cut open
and out pours orange dirt
yellow machines, like bugs,
crawl over the flesh of the land.

But here once was the land of our grandfathers,
slow men with weary eyes, and hearts heavy
with northern smoke, planting rows of orange
trees in heat so thick it blurs minds.
So they grew, and kept growing,
bellies fruit full, they multiplied,
tending their vast gardens,
while the dazed animals of the marshes
shuddered and fell away,
dissolving into the fever dreams
of those that came to take the waters.

The citrus trees are torn away now too,
cancers we grew and then excised,
their fruits fall swollen and bleeding,
useless, onto the scraped and shredded earth.
Now aqua and coral
colored stucco houses sprout instead,
groves and groves of them,
grinding their foundations deep
into the unsteady ground.

We are lost and strangers to this place,
this mother of terrors and wonders.
We are not wanted here:
the venom of that
unheeded knowledge
rises up and twists in our veins.
Every creature here
avenges the lands
we have enslaved,
tooth and claw,
ray by ray,
we whither in a world
that was never for us.

There is a rising in the springs
where shade gathers.
There is a snake sleeping
under the steps.
there are things watching
the cars that
flow like eluvium
between billboards
of half formed fetuses
with eyes like reptiles.
They are asking
whether it is better
to grow or
be destroyed.

Vis Imaginativa: The Power of Imagination in the Theory of Magic and its Relationship to The Jungian Collective Unconscious

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“Alchemy provides the psychology of the unconscious with a meaningful historical basis.”1 Jung, C.G., Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1970), xiii.

Academic discussions of magic are controversial. Occultism is often viewed as deviant.2Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008), 3-4. What is forgotten is the huge influence of magic on modern chemistry, medicine, and psychology. Our rational and skeptical modern world has dismissed magic as superstition; it is difficult (if not impossible) to prove the existence of God, ghosts, and demons scientifically.

Carl Jung once noted that “rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the unconscious.”3Jung, C. G., “Foreword to Moser : “Spuk : Irrglaube Oder Wahrglaube?,”” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 144.In popular culture, there is still a thriving interest in ghosts, demons, and other sorts of undead creatures like zombies and vampires, as well as aliens. Scientific method has been established as the way to “truth,” yet these irrational constructs of the imagination have not disappeared. Indeed, throughout history, the more rationalism is established as the basis for society, backlash occurs in the revival of religious and spiritual movements.4Goodrick-Clarke, 173-174.

I would like to take a step back from “superstitious” assumptions and focus on imagination and magic, particularly on the relationship of these concepts to Jung’s ideas about the collective unconscious. Thinking about D. P. Walker’s concept of vis imaginativa, I hope to demonstrate the relationship between the philosophy of magic and some basic Jungian psychoanalytic ideas.

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Some significations…

Vis imaginativa

“Power of the imagination,” which refers to the method used in magic for interacting with the collective unconscious and its symbols. Walker uses the term to describe an element that runs through all magical theory.

Magic

Refers to a method for enacting change, either in the operator or something external, through techniques incorporating natural influences and imagination. The results of such operations are usually psychological in nature.

Psychology

A broad term describing a very varied field; I am focusing on psychology as a “science of the soul,” and particularly on Jung’s case studies and writings on psychoanalysis.

Soul/ Spirit

These terms have many meanings, and are sometimes used interchangeably. Jung believed they were different, and suggested that one’s “soul” was more akin to a person’s ego, whereas “spirit” referred to “unconscious autonomous complexes which appear as projections because they have no direct association with the ego.”5Jung, C.G., “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 116. Marsilio Ficino also connected the idea of “soul” and “mind.” In his treatise on the mind, he believes that all life has a “motion” towards a particular end. He refers to the motion of the human mind as “the continuous motion of the soul,” and surmises that “in the opinion of some Platonists, the soul is always set in motion and always lives.” While Ficino does not agree with this position, he does connect the soul with the motions of the mind.6 Ficino, Marsilio, “Five Questions Concerning the Mind,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1948), 198. For our purposes, it is safe to say that “soul” refers to the individual, and “spirit” refers to something larger than the individual.

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"Evocation” by Odilon Redon - The Athenaeum, Public Domain

“Evocation” by Odilon Redon – The Athenaeum, Public Domain

The Way of Magic According to D.P. Walker

D. P. Walker’s book, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, provides a general theory of natural magic that I think is useful when discussing its relationship to psychology. Ancient philosophers believed in the influence of the planets on human life. The idea of a spirit world was taken a priori, and often planets and stars were associated with either angelic or demonic spirits. The magician could command or use these influences through a variety of means: talismans (vis imaginum), incantations (vis verborum), sympathetic magic and music (vis musices), and through elemental qualities of things (vis rerum).7Walker, D.P., Spiritual and Demonic Magic (University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 1975), 76. However, all of these have as a central force the vis imaginativa through which the magician uses the powers of his mind and imagination along with planetary influences to achieve a result. Walker suggests two kinds of magical operations—subjective and transitive. Subjective operations are meant to promote spiritual growth and enhance the virtues of the operator. Transitive operations are meant to influence someone or something else; they are an attempt to control nature or an individual.8Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008), 173-174. In both cases, the effects of the operation are either psychological or psychosomatic in nature. The imagination of either the operator or their subject (if it’s a person) is affected.

Walker notes that Ficino makes a distinction between natural magic and demonic magic.9Walker, 75. Natural magic is more subjective, about gaining knowledge, spiritual and psychological enhancement. Demonic magic is more transitive, aimed at manipulating natural forces to create a material result (money, power, downfall of enemies, winning a desired partner). More modern practitioners of natural magic see one as cooperating with nature, the other as going against nature, but that was not originally the case in the strictest sense. One type of magic dealt with angelic beings, the other with demonic beings. In a society dominated by the Catholic Church and its cosmology, philosophers created a wide gulf between the two classes of “spirits.”

It was important for occult philosophers to demonstrate the piety in their work when it was published. Often within such writings you will find apologetics, and vehement rebuttals against those who accuse the writers of impiety and dealings with the devil. Ficino gives a rather strong invective in his book on alchemy:

Tell me by the immortal God, what is more unjust than for men to hate what they are ignorant of? What more abject? Or what greater madness and potage is there, than to condemn that science in which you have concerned yourself just nothing at? Who hast never learned Nature or the majesty of Nature…Let these crabbed fellows and their followers remain perpetually in their opinion, who know nothing. Which is honest, which is pleasant, which is delightful, which lastly is anything elevated above a vulgar doctrine: and who have attained nothing glorious and famous, but perhaps some plebian business from the black sons of Cadamus.10Ficino, Marsilio, “Liber De Arte Chemica,” in Marsilio Ficino on the Alchemical Art(Amazon Digital Services, 1702).

It is clear, however, that this strict separation between good and evil was not so strict, and attempts to create such boundaries are more like dubious disclaimers than convincing arguments. Walker very aptly states:

We must remember, first, as with astrology, my magic is always good and pious—only other people’s is every bad and diabolic; secondly, that there is nothing necessarily unorthodox in addressing prayers to angels, planetary or otherwise—for this the authority of Thomas Aquinas could be invoked, nor in hoping that they might do something to help you; it is merely perilous, because, as we shall see, it is difficult to distinguish good angels from deceiving demons.11Walker, 89.

The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and Renaissance had an uneasy relationship with magic. Ritual acts such as transubstantiation and the veneration of relics were considered “magical” in intent, and this was a point of criticism from Protestant writers like Johann Weir.12Ibid., 153-154. Pope Urban VIII believed in astrology, had his horoscope cast, and was alleged to have carried out magical operations with Tommaso Campanella.13Ibid., 209-210. The question over what type of magic was considered “acceptable” on some level was clearly not settled in the 1500s. Current catechism is unambiguous in denouncing magical practices on the grounds that they violate the First Commandment.14“Catechism of the Catholic Church, Section 2, Chapter 1, Subsection Ii, 2116 and 2117,” (2003). It is clear that the Church assumes that magic deals with external spirits, and assumes that any spirit involved in an operation is not “of God.” This creates an interesting psychological situation for the faithful, as I will demonstrate later on. But suffice to say, the current catechism removes the ambiguity by forbidding any and all magical operations.

Moonlit Landscape by Arnold Böcklin - Sotheby's London, 23 November 2010, lot 4, Public Domain

Moonlit Landscape by Arnold Böcklin – Sotheby’s London, 23 November 2010, lot 4, Public Domain

Psychology and Magic

The study of psychology originated as a means of scientifically studying the mind and its often irrational behavior. The empirical study of mental phenomena has a set of rules different from other sciences. Psychological “truth” is something that can’t reliably be measured statistically, unless it follows a consistent pattern. Psychological theory only goes so far when evaluating individuals. As Erik Erikson noted, “psychoanalysis for historical reasons often occupies a position on the borderline of what is demonstrably true and of what demonstrably feels true.”15Erikson, Erik H., Young Man Luther (W.W. Norton: New York, 1958), 21. Jung points out repeatedly in his writings that the psychiatrist has little interest in whether or not a psychological perception has any basis in “reality”; they are only interested in the authenticity of the psychological experience. If someone sees a ghost, psychology is not there to determine if ghosts are real, only if the person authentically believes in what they saw.

Psychology comes from the word psykhe, which is the Greek word roughly translated to mean “soul.” Jung notes, “…no one knows what psyche is, and one knows just as little how far into nature psyche extends.”16Jung, C.G., “The Soul and Death,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 131. It is a convenient framework for thinking about human consciousness. It is important to remember that it is only a framework; the psyche is not something located in a part of the brain.

Analytical psychology has generally accepted three “levels” of consciousness in humans: the conscious mind, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The first deals with our everyday thoughts, feelings, and awareness. The personal unconscious consists of our personal memories and complexes—things we have forgotten about or repressed. The collective unconscious is much bigger—it is a collection of memories, myths, and images that we inherit from all of humanity.

Jung defines the collective as having contents that “are not personal, but collective; that is, they do not belong to one individual alone but to a whole group of individuals, and generally to a whole nation, or even to the whole of mankind. These contents are not acquired during the individual’s lifetime but are products of innate forms and instincts.”17Jung, “Psychological Foundation”, 117. In his treatise on death, he notes another quality of the collective—getting outside of the constraints of space-time (synchronicity).18Jung, “Soul and Death”, 134-135.

Jung was deeply influenced by esoteric writings and their symbolism in developing his own theory of the unconscious. He describes mythology and its symbols as “referring to something psychic.”19Jung, C.G., “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Pantheon Books: New York, 1959), 6. It is known that Jung studied occult literature extensively, and was interested in Gnosticism, alchemy, astrology, and the I Ching.20Goodrick-Clarke, 246. He was also the first to delve into “parapsychology,” which he defined as “the science of dealing with those biological or psychological events which show that the categories of matter, space and time (and thus of causality) are not axiomatic.”21Jung, C.G., “The Future of Parapsychology,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 156-57.

The collective unconscious represents the best theoretical framework we have for why magic and divination work, or seem to work. Jung states with regard to primitive magic:

This was the purpose of rite and dogma; they were dams and walls to keep back the dangers of the unconscious, the ‘perils of the soul.’ Primitive rites consist accordingly in the exorcizing of spirits, the lifting of spells, the averting of the evil omen, propitiation, purification, and the production by sympathetic magic of helpful occurrences.22Jung, “Archetypes”, 22.

Dealing With the Shadow

It is interesting to note the parallels with magic in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In dealing with spirits, there was some ambiguity about whether one was dealing with angelic or demonic beings—one would seek the help of the angelic, and banish the demonic. In Jung’s terms, this is a means of juggling the collective unconscious. “Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself.”23Ibid., 20. This confrontation is with the archetype of the Shadow, which was often confused with the unconscious itself, and was a justification for avoiding it. Jung says that the unconscious was “commonly regarded” as “source of all evil thoughts.”24Ibid., 6. “In the chambers of the heart dwell the wicked blood-spirits, swift anger and sensual weakness.” It is a mistake, however, to avoid this confrontation: “The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness.”25Ibid., 6.

It is not a far jump from the notion of the Shadow to the notion of the “demonic being”. Religion serves the function of shielding us from our own “demonic beings.” The above quote suggests that we need to integrate our inner demons, not banish them. However, Jung considered magical operations to be dangerous because they are “insidious.”26Jung, C.G., “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomena,” in Alchemical Studies (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1967), 118. He uses Paracelsus as an example. Paracelsus was a successor to Ficino philosophically, and pioneering physician, who did not shy away from any type of magical practice, but made many enemies through his arrogance. “Paracelsus was a little too sure that he had his enemy in front of him, and did not notice that it was lodged in his own bosom.”27Ibid., 120. The magician seeks to conquer the unconscious, and this is fraught with dangers. In Jung’s discussion of Paracelsus and alchemy, he quotes Paracelsus regarding the “difficult Adech” who “hinders our intentions.”28Ibid., 170. “The difficulties of the art play no small role in alchemy. Generally they are explained as technical difficulties, but often enough . . . there are remarks about the psychic nature of the dangers and obstacles that complicate the work. Partly they are demonic influences, partly psychic disturbances such as melancholia.”29 Ibid., 6.

“Mere” Psychology

Returning to the vis imaginativa—the “power of imagination” is another way of talking about the power of interacting with the collective unconscious. All of the methods used by magicians are designed to bring about a psychological result, which may occur strictly within the mind, or may have an external (psychosomatic) result. There is a temptation to be reductive, to say that rites and rituals, either religious or magical, are “merely psychological.” However, there is nothing “mere” about psychology. The unconscious is the storehouse of human mytho-archaeology, and with it all of our collective potential and terror. Thus, the psychological results of magic and ritual are very real and powerful. Their power is in the complexity and depth of their symbols.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ Jung, C.G., Mysterium Coniunctionis (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1970), xiii.
2. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008), 3-4.
3. ↑ Jung, C. G., “Foreword to Moser : “Spuk : Irrglaube Oder Wahrglaube?,”” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 144.
4. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, 173-174.
5. ↑ Jung, C.G., “The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 116.
6. ↑  Ficino, Marsilio, “Five Questions Concerning the Mind,” in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1948), 198.
7. ↑ Walker, D.P., Spiritual and Demonic Magic (University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, 1975), 76.
8. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, The Western Esoteric Traditions (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008), 173-174.
9. ↑ Walker, 75.
10. ↑ Ficino, Marsilio, “Liber De Arte Chemica,” in Marsilio Ficino on the Alchemical Art(Amazon Digital Services, 1702).
11. ↑ Walker, 89.
12. ↑ Ibid., 153-154.
13. ↑ Ibid., 209-210.
14. ↑ “Catechism of the Catholic Church, Section 2, Chapter 1, Subsection Ii, 2116 and 2117,” (2003).
15. ↑ Erikson, Erik H., Young Man Luther (W.W. Norton: New York, 1958), 21.
16. ↑ Jung, C.G., “The Soul and Death,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 131.
17. ↑ Jung, “Psychological Foundation”, 117.
18. ↑ Jung, “Soul and Death”, 134-135.
19. ↑ Jung, C.G., “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Pantheon Books: New York, 1959), 6.
20. ↑ Goodrick-Clarke, 246.
21. ↑ Jung, C.G., “The Future of Parapsychology,” in Psychology and the Occult (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1977), 156-57.
22. ↑ Jung, “Archetypes”, 22.
23. ↑ Ibid., 20.
24, 25. ↑ Ibid., 6.
26. ↑ Jung, C.G., “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomena,” in Alchemical Studies (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1967), 118.
27. ↑ Ibid., 120.
28. ↑ Ibid., 170.
29. ↑  Ibid., 6.

Is Friendship Limited? An Inquiry into Dunbar’s Number

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When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy — that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

— Mark Twain, Letter to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 1867

•

Friendship is one mind in two bodies. —Mencius, third century BCE

Earth may be the friendliest place in the universe, if Facebook is any indication. Worldwide, every day, around 5 billion “likes” are generated from 1.13 billion users reaching out to their “friends.” Five new Facebook profiles are generated every second. The friendliest demographic appears to be the 25 to 34 age group, which comprises around 30 percent of users. Craving friendship, 50 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds go on Facebook when they wake up. Overall, people generally seem friendliest mid-week between 1 to 3 pm, when peak usage occurs. No other social media site comes close to Facebook’s popularity. It has more active users than Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp combined. Each Facebook user is allowed up to 5,000 friends.1The top 20 valuable Facebook statistics – updated July 2016. Zephoria.com. https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/. Accessed 30 July, 2016. That’s a lot of friendship. Or is it?

BILL GORE’S REALIZATION

W. L. “Bill” Gore, the chemical engineer who invented Gore-Tex, the waterproof, breathable fabric used in wetsuits, hiking boots, ponchos and tents, as well as inventing vascular grafts and surgical meshes, was one of the first individuals to focus on the limits of friendship in industrial settings. In 1957 Gore left a promising career with DuPont. On January 1, 1958, he and Genevieve, his wife, started their company W. L. Gore & Associates, in the basement of their home in Newark, Delaware. The company was successful and expanded into a large factory. One day Gore walked onto the factory floor and realized that he no longer knew who everybody was. His gut instinct told him that the bigger a company got, the less friendly workers became and the less likely they were to work hard and help each other out. Gore calculated that after putting more than 150 people in the same building, things ceased to run smoothly. People couldn’t keep track of each other, and a sense of friendly community was lost. At the magic number of about 150, everybody knew who was the manager, the accountant, who cleaned the sinks, floors and toilets, and who made the sandwiches for lunch. So Gore made the decision to cap his factories at 150 employees. When the company needed expanding, he would just build another factory — sometimes right on the parking lot next door.2The Gore story. Gore.com. http://www.gore.com/about/the-gore-story. Accessed 30 July, 2016.

Gore’s vision translated into worker satisfaction. His basement operation grew to become one of the 200 largest privately held companies in the US. The company earned the number three spot on the World’s Best Multinational Workplaces list by the Great Place to Work Institute in 2015. Gore’s company was also named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, earning the number 12 spot in 2016. The Gore company has offices and manufacturing operations in 25 countries, and is cited as a best workplace in China, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Spain, Sweden and the UK. (2)

DUNBAR’S NUMBER

A friend to all is a friend to none. — Aristotle

Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at the University of Oxford, was paying attention to Bill Gore’s decisions about work force size. Much of Dunbar’s research has focused on why the Gore model was such a spectacular success. The key idea, Dunbar finds, is that humans can hold about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Dunbar has researched this idea so thoroughly that the number 150 has come to be known as “Dunbar’s Number.”

Ironically, “Dunbar’s Number” was first coined on Facebook, where a mere 150 friends are often considered a drop in the bucket. Dunbar reports, “There was a discussion [on Facebook] by people saying, ‘I’ve got too many friends — I don’t know who half these people are.’ Somebody apparently said, ‘Look, there’s this guy in England who says you can’t have more than 150.’” Soon Dunbar’s Number was off and running.

Dunbar kept bumping into the number 150 in his anthropological research. This number appeared to be a sweet spot for hunter-gatherer societies and Neolithic farming villages all over the world. He found that, from the Bushmen of Southern Africa to Native American tribes, a typical community is about 150.3Don’t believe Facebook; you only have 150 friends. Npr.com. http://www.npr.org/2011/06/04/136723316/dont-believe-facebook-you-only-have-150-friends. 5 June, 2011. Accessed 13 August, 2016. The number persists in modern societies. Dunbar found that the self-governing communes of the Hutterites, an Anabaptist sect similar to the Amish and the Mennonites, always split when they grow larger than 150. 4Bennett D. The Dunbar number, from the guru of social networks. Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks. 11 January, 2013. Accessed 8 August, 2016

Dunbar realized that military organizations worldwide reflect the same pattern, from Roman antiquity to modern times. A company, a basic military unit, typically consists of 80–250 soldiers commanded by a major or a captain. Although armies are also organized as large battalions, regiments, and divisions, their subdivision into companies helps maintain a greater sense of unit cohesion and community.

Dunbar argues that 150 would be the mean group size for communities with a very high incentive to remain together, such as groups that are under intense survival pressure due to severe environmental and economic factors. But why should this be so? The main underlying reason for 150, says Dunbar, is neurological. The number of social group members a single primate can keep track of appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex. He contends that, for every species, the ideal social group size can be computed from the mean neocortical volume of that particular species. In humans, Dunbar states, the size of the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language limits us to managing about 150 friends.5Dunbar RIM. Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution. 1992; 22 (6): 469–493. Through countless generations, our primate ancestors found that 150 was the optimal community size. In groups this size, people could work together to solve problems and evade predators. Even today, Dunbar states, “150 seems to be number at which our brains just max out on memory.”(3)

Dunbar is no rogue scientist. He has been showered with honors. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (1998) and a recipient of Huxley Memorial Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (2014). The simple arithmetic of his argument — that bigger brains correlate with bigger social groups — gives it academic heft. As a consequence, he is now seen as the father of what’s known as the social brain hypothesis.(5) “It’s been very influential,” says Simon Reader, an evolutionary biologist at McGill University. “It has been the dominant hypothesis.”6Reader S. Quoted in: Bennett D. The Dunbar number, from the guru of social networks. Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks. 11 January, 2013. Accessed 8 August, 2016.

THE CHRISTMAS-CARD STUDY

Much of Dunbar’s work has been done with groups of primates, where it is comparatively easy to estimate the size of stable social networks. Primates spend a lot of time grooming each other in social groups, picking fleas and parasites out of each other’s fur. Although humans today don’t have much fur and usually not many fleas, there may well be flea-picking equivalents that might serve as proxies to grooming in primates.

Dunbar, working with R. A. Hill, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Durham, chose Christmas-card lists as one such equivalent. Sending Christmas cards sheds light on how many friends an individual actually cares about. As one commentator says, “[Sending a holiday card] is an investment. You either have to know the address or get it; you have to buy the card or have it made from exactly the right collage of adorable family photos; you have to write something, buy a stamp, and put the envelope in the mail. These are not huge costs, but most people don’t incur them for just anybody.”(4)

Hill and Dunbar published their paper “Social Network Size in Humans” in the journal Human Nature in 2003. They state, “[Sending Christmas cards is the] one time of year when individuals make an effort to contact all of those individuals within their social network whose relationship they value.” Their findings: A quarter of the cards went to relatives, nearly two-thirds to friends, and 8 percent to colleagues. “Maximum network size averaged 153.5 individuals, with a mean network size of 124.9 for those individuals explicitly contacted; these values are remarkably close to the group size of 150 predicted for humans on the basis of the size of their neocortex…. These findings suggest that there may be cognitive constraints on network size.”7Hill RA, Dunbar RIM. Social network size in humans. Human Nature. 2003; 14(1): 53-72.

Dunbar acknowledges that it is misleading to talk about a single, absolute Dunbar number. He actually describes a scale of numbers applying to ever-widening circles of connection. The innermost is a group of three to five, our very closest friends. Then there is a circle of 12 to 15, those whose death would be devastating to us. Then comes 50, “the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of Southern Africa,” Dunbar writes in his book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? 8Dunbar R. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2010. Beyond 150 there are widening circles. Fifteen hundred is the average tribe size in hunter-gatherer societies, the number of people who speak the same language or dialect. These numbers, which Dunbar teased out of surveys and ethnographies, grow by a factor of roughly three. He isn’t sure why this is so.(4)

ARE FRIENDSHIPS EXPANDABLE?

There are no strangers here; only friends you haven’t yet met. —William Butler Yeats

Like a pioneer in any area of science, Dunbar has his critics. Among them are the architects of social network sites, most of whom are less than joyful about the concept of numerical limits to friendships. Still, many of these cheerleaders of unlimited friendships are interested in the pros and cons of his work.

Dunbar has responded to criticism by continuing to add data fortifying his premise. For instance, a 2011 study found that on Twitter the average number of people a user regularly interacts with falls between 100 and 200. And though the limit on how many Facebook friends one can have is a generous 5,000, statistics show that the average user has 190 — more than 150, but within what Dunbar sees as the margin of error.(4)

The burning question among social network enthusiasts is whether social media sites such as Facebook stretch the size of manageable friendships. In search of an answer, Dunbar compared the online traffic of people with thousands of Facebook friends with those with only hundreds. He showed that there is no discernible difference in the traffic of the two groups. As Dunbar says, “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world. People obviously like the kudos of having hundreds of friends but the reality is that they’re unlikely to be bigger than anyone else’s.” Dunbar found significant gender differences. His analysis suggests that women are better than men at maintaining friendships on Facebook. He states, “Girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together.”9Loveys K. 5,000 friends on Facebook? Scientists prove 150 is the most we can cope with. Dailymail.com. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245684/5-000-friends-Facebook-Scientists-prove-150-cope-with.html. 24 January, 2010. Accessed 31 July, 2016.

Dunbar does not deny that humans might be able to reset or expand the cognitive limits on our social interactions. After all, we’ve done it before, as when we taught ourselves to talk in our distant past. This made it possible, he argues, for humans to function in much larger groups than our primate cousins. “Whereas baboons bond by taking turns picking each others’ nits, we have rhetoric and gossip and half-time speeches, not to mention singing and storytelling and jokes, to bring and hold us together.” Language, he says, is how humans used their brains to get to 150. And until something as revolutionary as that comes along, 150 is where he thinks we’ll stay.(4)

Most people are fascinated by the fact that Dunbar himself has zero Facebook friends. As one Dunbar watcher says, “He occasionally peers over his wife’s shoulder when she logs on at home, but he isn’t on the social network.” He has a LinkedIn account, he says, “by mistake.”(4)

FRIENDSHIP ADDICTION

If you have one true friend you have more than your share. —Thomas Fuller

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“Connection” by Giulia. (CC BY 2.0)

David Smallwood, an addictions expert and author in the UK, believes that many Facebook users become hooked on the urge to acquire more friends in an attempt to appear popular and successful.10Smallwood D. Who Says I’m An Addict: A Book For Anyone Who Is Partial To Food, Sex, Booze Or Drugs. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House; 2014. He and other psychologists warn that Facebook is driving a worrying trend of “friendship addiction” that causes insecurity in those who use it. Smallwood suggests that at least 10 percent of the population is vulnerable to friendship addiction. According to him, you know you’re suffering from friendship addiction when “(1) you judge yourself by how many online friends you have; (2) you believe people with more friends than you are more popular; (3) you regularly comb through your friends’ friends’ lists for people to add to your own; (4) the first thing you do when you get home from a party is add all the people you just met as friends; or (5) you have at least 20 people on your friends’ list you actively dislike.”11 Cooke T. Help! I’m a Facebookaholic: Inside the Crazy World of Social Networking. London, UK: John Blake Publishing Ltd.; 2011: 101. 12Goodchild S. The women addicted to Facebook friendships. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/the-women-addicted-to-facebook-friendships- 6827630.html. 22 October 2008. Accessed 14 August, 2016.

DEMONIZING FACEBOOK

One man’s god is another man’s devil. — Folk saying

A growth industry has developed that is dedicated to criticizing social media. Many critics view social media not only as a threat to traditional forms of friendship, but also as a menace to one’s psychological and spiritual health. There are numerous Internet warnings along the lines that social networking “kills the creative spirit.”13Ellison JT. How social networking kills the creative spirit. Jtellison.com. http://jtellison.com/how-social-networking-kills-th/. Accessed 28 August, 2016 This warning is mild when compared to websites such as “Facebook and How Satan Is Using It to EAT YOUR SOUL,”14Van A. Facebook and How Satan is Using It To EAT YOUR SOUL. http://newmediarockstars.com/2012/03/facebook-and-how-satan-is-using-it-to-eat-your-soul/. 28 March, 2012. Accessed 28 August, 2016. “Satanic Covens Use Facebook to Curse Your Family,”15 Tashman B. Pat Robertson: Satanic Covens Use Facebook to Curse Your Family. http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-satanic-covens-use-facebook-curse-your-family. 17 February, 2015.Accessed 28 August, 2016. and “Shamans Using Sites like Facebook for Black Magic.”16Bhagat R. Cnet.com. http://www.cnet.com/news/shamans-using-sites-like-facebook-for-black-magic-says-malaysian-official/. 9 March, 2016. Accessed 29 August, 2016.

If Facebook has spawned a lot of friendship, it has also generated a considerable amount of hate, especially toward Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Out of curiosity, I Googled the term “Mark Zuckerberg is evil.” The result was more than half a million hits. Many of these websites are redolent with bigotry and anti-Semitism, and are too vile to mention here by name. Condemning Zuckerberg as evil is ironic, considering that he and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, have promised to donate 99 percent of their fortune to various social causes about which they care. Even this extraordinary gesture has evoked criticism, with one scold complaining about “the potential adverse economic consequences of too much philanthropy.”17Hendrickson M. Let’s hope not all billionaires emulate Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy. Forbes.com. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2015/12/08/lets-hope-not-all-billionaires- emulate-mark-zuckerbergs-philanthropy/#3738f8843705. 8 December, 2015. Accessed 29 August, 2016.

Thoughtful criticism of social media is healthy, of course, and should be encouraged. An admirable example is Dunbar himself, who laments the fact that touch, which has been important in building close relationships among primates, is completely lacking in social media networking.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL FALLACY

We live in an era when rapid change breeds fear, and fear too often congeals us into a rigidity which we mistake for stability.

—Lynn Townsend White

"Networking" by Andrew Malone. (CC BY 2.0)

“Networking” by Andrew Malone. (CC BY 2.0)

Can Facebook destroy the social fabric? In his fascinating book Paper, an exploration of the history of the development of paper, author Mark Kurlansky examines what he calls the technological fallacy, the idea that technology changes society.18Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016. “It is exactly the reverse,” he says. “Society develops technology to address the changes that are taking place within it.” His observations about paper may be relevant to our concerns about the impact of the Internet on friendship. He elaborates:

Technological inventions have always arisen from necessity. Numerous inventions preceded paper. First came spoken language, then drawing, then pictographs, then alphabets, then phoneticism, then writing, and then paper. Paper was then followed by printing, moveable type, typewriters, machine-driven printers, and electronic word processors and the electronic printers that go with them. As needs present themselves, solutions are found. Every idea engenders a need for another.19Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv

New innovations do not always eradicate earlier technologies, says Kurlansky, but they may reveal them in a new light and often invigorate them.

The invention of gas and electric heaters has not meant the end of fireplaces. Printing did not end penmanship, television did not kill radio, movies did not kill theatre, and home videos did not kill movie theaters, although all these things were falsely predicted. Electronic calculators have not even ended the use of the abacus, and more than a century after

Thomas Edison was awarded a patent for a commercially successful lightbulb in 1879, there are still four hundred candle manufacturers in the United States alone, employing some 7,000 workers with annual sale of more than $2 billion. In fact, the first decade of the twenty-first century showed a growth in candle sales, though the uses of candles have of course greatly changed…. New technology, rather than eliminating older technology, increases choices. Computers will no doubt change the role of paper, but it is extremely unlikely that paper will be eliminated…20Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv.

Kurlansky describes how, after Gutenberg invented moveable type in the fifteenth century and books began to be printed rather than handwritten by scribes, this transition was regarded in some quarters with great suspicion. “Was there a dangerous political agenda? Were [the printers] in league with the devil? When … Gutenberg’s ex-partner went to Paris with cases of books to sell, he had to flee, accused of being sent by the devil.” Critics of the new typeset books said they were unnatural and inhuman. They said that “a certain human touch was missing in the way the letters and the words all had exactly the same spacing… It was rigid and uncreative.”21Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: 116-117.

Within only a few decades, however, sentiments had changed. Kurlansky:

By the end of the fifteenth century, Europe, with its paper and printing presses, had for the first time in history become the most advanced civilization in the world. In science, music, art, mathematics, architecture, literature, geography, philosophy — in fact, in most any field imaginable…22Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: 117.

It is a constant in social evolution that new ideas, no matter how worthy, commonly face a storm of criticism when introduced. A fierce debate of this sort concerned another innovation in fifteenth-century Europe — the artistic technique of perspective, the rendering a three-dimensional representation on a two-dimensional surface. Although the perspectival technique makes possible a truer image of what the eye sees, many rebelled at this possibility for greater accuracy. They considered this new development as too real and they shrank from it. The rebellion against realism in art had been present for centuries. As Alan MacFarland and Gerry Martin observe in their intriguing book Glass: A World History:

It is well known that Plato felt that realist…art should be banned as a deceit, and most civilizations have followed Plato for other reasons. For the Chinese (and Japanese) the purpose of art was not to imitate or portray external nature, but to suggest emotions. Thus they actively discouraged too much realism, which merely repeated without any added value what could anyway be seen. A Van Eyck or a Leonardo would have been scorned as a vulgar imitator.23Macfarlane A, Martin G. Glass: A World History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; 2002: 59.

This was not just a Western objection. In parts of the Islamic tradition

…realistic artistic representations of living things above the level of flowers and trees are banned as blasphemous imitations of the creator’s distinctive work. Humans should not create graven images, or any images at all, for thereby they took to themselves the power of God. Again, Van Eyck or Leonardo would have been an abhorrence. Even mirrors can be an abomination, for they create duplicates of living things. (22)

So although the perspectival approach gave the world a more realistic form of representation, much of the world turned away, often with a vengeance. Perspectivism was impugned, maligned, slandered, and defamed, and those espousing it were denigrated as heretics, blasphemers, and usurpers of divine authority. Fidelity in art was seen as a threat, a replacement of the sacred by the profane.

Much of the current rancor over digital devices and social media strongly resembles the denunciation of printing and perspectivism. Things haven’t changed all that much. Wholesale endorsement of these developments is unwise, but so too is sweeping condemnation. I’m not suggesting that we let digital devices and social media off the hook, but that their influence is hugely complex and demands unbiased appraisal. And we should always bear in mind that, as Kurlansky states, “The history of technology shows that Luddites always lose.”24Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv.

WHITHER?

friend: noun. Origin: Old English frēond, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch vriend and German Freund, from an Indo-European root meaning “to love.” 25Friend. Dictionary app, Macintosh OS X. 3 September, 2016.

The shallowness, superficiality, and lack of satisfaction in thousands of digital friendships should remind us that we are forfeiting something vital in the drive to accumulate 5,000 Facebook friends. As a result, perhaps we will regain an appreciation of old-fashioned friendships. Traditional friendships, like the lingering charm of candles, may be seen as a treasure hidden in plain sight, unseen because so common. In this process, we might stop objecting to the evidence that we have the capacity for “only” 150 close friends, and begin to celebrate 150 as a mighty achievement and a treasured indicator of what it means to be human.

It is easy to criticize the digital friendship craze and its sad variations. Everyone by now is familiar with the restaurant scenario of a man and woman ignoring each other, each riveted by their individual smartphone, their faces illuminated by the device’s eerie light, each silently cocooned in their downward stare. But these cartoonish expressions conceal something that should be respected — the deep need in modern life for connections with others, an unfulfilled hunger for a unity that has gone missing in people’s lives. This desire should be honored, not ridiculed. And if the current compulsion to amass digital connections is crude and stumbling, well, it is still early days and no one knows for sure how the digital friendship game will play out.

The primordial need for friendship and connectedness with our fellow humans is a wonderful urge, even if it has become deranged by the digital confusion of quality with quantity. Just as our ancestors’ fate depended on friendship and mutual cooperation in a hostile, predatory world, our fate as a species likely depends on how deeply we engage and honor one another and the planetary biota in general.26Dossey L. One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House; 2013.

So let the friendship circus continue. We will sort things out. Meanwhile, I’m betting on more than 150.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ The top 20 valuable Facebook statistics – updated July 2016. Zephoria.com. https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/. Accessed 30 July, 2016.
2. ↑ The Gore story. Gore.com. http://www.gore.com/about/the-gore-story. Accessed 30 July, 2016.
3. ↑ Don’t believe Facebook; you only have 150 friends. Npr.com. http://www.npr.org/2011/06/04/136723316/dont-believe-facebook-you-only-have-150-friends. 5 June, 2011. Accessed 13 August, 2016.
4. ↑ Bennett D. The Dunbar number, from the guru of social networks. Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks. 11 January, 2013. Accessed 8 August, 2016
5. ↑ Dunbar RIM. Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution. 1992; 22 (6): 469–493.
6. ↑ Reader S. Quoted in: Bennett D. The Dunbar number, from the guru of social networks. Bloomberg.com. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-10/the-dunbar-number-from-the-guru-of-social-networks. 11 January, 2013. Accessed 8 August, 2016.
7. ↑ Hill RA, Dunbar RIM. Social network size in humans. Human Nature. 2003; 14(1): 53-72.
8. ↑ Dunbar R. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 2010.
9. ↑ Loveys K. 5,000 friends on Facebook? Scientists prove 150 is the most we can cope with. Dailymail.com. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245684/5-000-friends-Facebook-Scientists-prove-150-cope-with.html. 24 January, 2010. Accessed 31 July, 2016.
10. ↑ Smallwood D. Who Says I’m An Addict: A Book For Anyone Who Is Partial To Food, Sex, Booze Or Drugs. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House; 2014.
11. ↑ Cooke T. Help! I’m a Facebookaholic: Inside the Crazy World of Social Networking. London, UK: John Blake Publishing Ltd.; 2011: 101.
12. ↑ Goodchild S. The women addicted to Facebook friendships. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/the-women-addicted-to-facebook-friendships- 6827630.html. 22 October 2008. Accessed 14 August, 2016.
13. ↑ Ellison JT. How social networking kills the creative spirit. Jtellison.com. http://jtellison.com/how-social-networking-kills-th/. Accessed 28 August, 2016
14. ↑ Van A. Facebook and How Satan is Using It To EAT YOUR SOUL. http://newmediarockstars.com/2012/03/facebook-and-how-satan-is-using-it-to-eat-your-soul/. 28 March, 2012. Accessed 28 August, 2016.
15. ↑ Tashman B. Pat Robertson: Satanic Covens Use Facebook to Curse Your Family. http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-satanic-covens-use-facebook-curse-your-family. 17 February, 2015.Accessed 28 August, 2016.
16. ↑ Bhagat R. Cnet.com. http://www.cnet.com/news/shamans-using-sites-like-facebook-for-black-magic-says-malaysian-official/. 9 March, 2016. Accessed 29 August, 2016.
17. ↑ Hendrickson M. Let’s hope not all billionaires emulate Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropy. Forbes.com. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markhendrickson/2015/12/08/lets-hope-not-all-billionaires- emulate-mark-zuckerbergs-philanthropy/#3738f8843705. 8 December, 2015. Accessed 29 August, 2016.
18. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016.
19. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv
20, 24. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: xiv.
21. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: 116-117.
22. ↑ Kurlansky M. Paper: Paging Through History. New York, NY: W. W. Norton; 2016: 117.
23. ↑ Macfarlane A, Martin G. Glass: A World History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; 2002: 59.
25. ↑ Friend. Dictionary app, Macintosh OS X. 3 September, 2016.
26. ↑ Dossey L. One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House; 2013.

Call for Submissions – Intensification

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It’s that time again. Events around the world are heating up, from the refugee crisis to Brexit to the US elections, there’s a heck of a lot going on right now. The editors at Metapsy are interested in receiving creative, unique, and non-academic (as in: don’t send us your papers) submissions around the theme of intensification. Check out what we wrote about this six week publishing cycle in the Letter from the Editor:

For the next six weeks our publication will be examining the theme of intensification as creative response to cultural crisis. Intensification implies a new way of seeing—not at objects but through them. Transparency is a mode of perception that involves us in the world and permits that world to speak to us, perhaps with us as we also learn to listen. It may apply to any creative, artistic, intellectual or physical activity.

The cultural philosopher and poet Jean Gebser used the word “intensification” as a marker for growth, being, and presence. Distinguishing it from mere expansion, which implies an event or process that can be measured or quantified, Gebser saw an intensification of consciousness as one that led us back to our own primordial and spiritual natures and forces us to pierce through the limitations of the rational mind. Intensification implies clarity, transparency—seeing through without the need to dissolve the boundaries that constitute our lived experience—and most of all, diaphany.

For the next seven weeks—as the political election heats up and our world’s political and ecological crisis continues to come into focus—Metapsy will explore this theme through writing, artwork, and mixed media.

Themes and Prompts

We are especially interested submissions—artistic, visual, audible, literary, philosophical and otherwise—pertaining to:

  • Transparency as an expression of “intensification”
  • Relations in networks: biological, digital, and nonhuman
  • Technological disruptions and their relation to the human life world
  • Political revolution, restructuring, and new modes of relating
  • Surges of creativity as response to crisis
  • Art and aesthetics as doorways for intensified consciousness
  • From supernovas to singularities (to be interpreted by the reader) and…
  • The spiritual dimension

Please see our submissions page to read more about our process and send us your work. We look forward to hearing from you!

— The Metapsy Editors

Letter from the Editor – Intensification

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For the next six weeks our publication will be examining the theme of intensification as creative response to cultural crisis. Intensification implies a new way of seeing—not at objects but through them. Transparency is a mode of perception that involves us in the world and permits that world to speak to us, perhaps with us as we also learn to listen. It may apply to any creative, artistic, intellectual or physical activity.

The cultural philosopher and poet Jean Gebser used the word “intensification” as a marker for growth, being, and presence. Distinguishing it from mere expansion, which implies an event or process that can be measured or quantified, Gebser saw an intensification of consciousness as one that led us back to our own primordial and spiritual natures and forces us to pierce through the limitations of the rational mind. Intensification implies clarity, transparency—seeing through without the need to dissolve the boundaries that constitute our lived experience—and most of all, diaphany.

For the next seven weeks—as the political election heats up and our world’s political and ecological crisis continues to come into focus—Metapsy will explore this theme through writing, artwork, and mixed media.

Unguided Meditation

Creative director Marco Morelli offers a signature note for Week 1 with this piece, an “Unguided Meditation” if you will. “The Loneliest Road (Intensification)” is an experimental soundscape invoking planes of ambience and conversation, memory and monologue along solitary roads. Some of the voices sampled are fellow Metapsy editors, speaking to the importance of art, meaning, chaos and “a-perspectival” creativity as forms of reply to seemingly insurmountable crisis and complexity. If the problems we face are ineffable, perhaps it is the role of “intensification” to invoke that ineffability in ourselves.

Genesis

Perhaps it is poetry, rather than essay, that better speaks to intensification. We begin our publishing cycle with author, philosopher, cultural critic, and poet John David Ebert’s “Poems of Genesis.” Some readers in our community are already familiar with Ebert’s prolific output of books spanning mythology, religion, philosophy, pop culture, cinema analysis and his YouTube lecture channel spanning hours of content. If you aren’t, go check them out right now. Of special relevance to Metapsy’s editorial mission is Art After Metaphysics. In his featured poetry, Ebert lends his voice to an intensity of consciousness:

what is the birth of a sun or a living form to you and I?
We are made of fire and blood
Woven out of earth and sea
And we swarm
Over the earth
Starlight burning in our veins.

Submissions

We are, as always, accepting submissions around cycle themes. See our dedicated page for Intensification – Call for Submissions, then go ahead and read our submission guidelines page. Artists, writers, and scholars—we look forward to hearing from you!

Creatively,

JDJ
Editor-in-Chief (aka Mutation Engineer)
Metapsychosis Journal

Psychoanalysis, Art and the Occult: Cutting Up a New Conversation

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Dr. Vanesa Rawlings Sinclair, a tall beauty in black with ivory skin and scarlet stained lips, unassumingly graces the worn-in wood floors of The Candid Arts Trust. Artwork which she meticulously curated punctuates the white walls of the industrial studio space where a public art opening is being held to kick off the weekend-long symposium “Psychoanalysis, Art and the Occult.” Dr. Sinclair was up all night carefully arranging the pieces with her co-organizer Carl Abrahmsson—a quiet man humbly observing the scene through the lens of a camera hung so comfortably around his neck it seems to be another limb. In a way, the gallery is an invocation of the cut, an idea developed famously by poets William S. Borroughs and Bryan Gyson, which Dr. Sinclair will address in depth tomorrow alongside Katlyn Foisey, her co-author of a project1See Chaos of the Third Mind: https://chaosofthethirdmind.com from which this conference was birthed. Along the gallery’s walls, each artist’s work seems to intervene in the space between those positioned alongside of it, altering the context of the gallery space and framing the podium from which the presenters will speak over these next three days.

Dr. Sinclair, a psychoanalyst in private practice and founding member of the free association for psychoanalysis Das Unbehagen, together with Carl Abrahmson, a freelance writer and lecturer, organized the symposium to stitch together the ongoing split between psychoanalysis and the occult—two ethical disciplines which raise specific questions and assert possible answers about what it means to be in the world. Hosting this pre-conference gallery opening was a way of lending art as the subject of the discussion as a representation of that which both systems take as its object: the human experience, the human mind.

 

With a glass of wine in hand, I scan the room. My eye lands on a cream surface, the work of Steingrimur Eyfjord, a conceptual artist based in Iceland. Writing inscribed upon it in red, some of it redacted by a heavy stroke of solid black paint, reads:

“Look at the numbers…and start counting in silence…Keep counting until you go to sleep. The day after you…will reach temporary state of psychosis.”

image-1-steingrinmur-eyfjord

On the wall opposite this painting is the work of Roberto Migliussi, which suggest the inverse of Eyfjord’s work, that is, a return to meaning from madness. Across an orange surface, chaotically rendered black lines approaching a kind of hieroglyphic lettering repeat again, and again, as if attempting to create a kind of referential system.

image-2-roberto-migliussi

Next to this, the work of Annete Rawlings—Dr. Sinclair’s mother, an accomplished artist in her own right—depicts a blue and green surface demarcated by a yellow line, suggesting the inextricable ideas of finitude and infinity.

image-3-annete-rawlings

In another, blocks of blue and lavender paint toned with heavy grey create the form of a seated woman from behind, outlined by the lines these blocked colors make when they meet on the page.

image-4-annete-rawlings

Dr. Vanessa Rawlings Sinclair’s cut-up art appears next in the series, like a semi-colon, an unconscious extension of, and intervention in her mother’s work. Against a white background, segments of text from her own academic and creative writing are positioned in a poetic sequence amidst spontaneous gestures of red, black, and beige paint. The lines are reminiscent of those in Annete Rawlings’ work but, rendered fluidly, evoke less the extreme edge of negative and positive space than they suggest a communicative gesture at this same edge.

Each piece seems to be created at the boundary of meaning and meaningless-ness, chaos and order. Some, like Sinclair’s or Eyfjord’s work explicitly invoke symbolic systems. Others evoke concepts inherent to the visual medium, raising the oppositional and inextricable ideas of negative and positive space, color and line, content and form. Together, the works of these artists raise a question about meaning and madness. These artists create from this edge, a line their work crosses, it seems, in order to define. The positioning of Dr. Sinclair’s work next to her mother’s situates this question within a psychoanalytic context. If Rawlings’ paintings represent two infinitudes divided by a line—the boundary between one color and another, one self and one other—Dr. Sinclair’s work represents the system of meaning which must emerge in this space between two bodies.

image-5-vanessa-rawlings-sinclair

For Freud, this space is demarcated by the bodily drive, and by the repression of it, which invokes the division between self and other. For Lacan, a theorist who followed him, it is organized in language punctuated by grammar and syntax. For Jung, it is to be found in projections—in images. If Jung’s focus on the imago as the domain of subjectivity invites a discussion of the occult, the theoretical implications of mapping the mind at the level of both the body and language are perhaps helpful to consider when to traversing the space between these two disciplines, one embodied, the other ideational.

The historical exclusion of the occult, from psychoanalytically informed discourses, has its origins in the split between Freud and Jung. The cause and consequence of this split was addressed by two panelists, Dr. Steven Reisner, a clinical psychologist and activist currently running for President of the American Psychological Association, and Gary Lachman, a writer formerly of the band Blondie. While Lachman believes that Freud’s resistance to the occult stemmed from his personal neurotic fear of the dissolution of rational thought, Reisner argues that Freud’s hesitation was ethical and concerned the occult being incorporated into his theoretical system as a rejection of the death drive—a fear which, in Reisner’s estimation, was “practical and temporary.” As a creator of discourse, Freud was very concerned with the integrity of the system he was creating. Interestingly this discursive dimension is also that which lends an entrance point for this new discussion. These words from an audio clip played before the first panel took the stage echo:

“writers and artists, in that they work with the manipulation of symbols, are the closest thing to shamans you will find in modern culture.”

Peter Grey, a writer and co-founder of the occult publishing house Scarlet Imprint, offered another perspective, one from the other side of this conversation: the occult. For Grey, the root of the problem in psychoanalysis’ rejection of the occult is not Freud and Jung’s split regarding its legitimacy, but in each theorist’s failure to seriously take the body into account. Because the body is the thing that inquires, he argues, its nature must be taken seriously. He poetically explains the significance of the human form: “The human body is a gnomon, the shadow placing us in time and space. By reading the shadow we know both who and where we are in relation to the light.”2Read Peter Grey’s paper here: http://scarletimprint.com/2016/05/fly-the-light/ The idea of the shadow in relationship to the physical body is analogous to the idea of the unconscious mind in relationship to the conscious mind. If the unconscious is the repository of memory, repressed, the shadow is the negative of the body in which those experiences live and is evidenced.

Alkistis Dimech, a dancer and artist who, together with Grey, runs Scarlet Imprint, expanded upon this idea. Dimech insisted that while psychoanalytic theory once held an understanding of desire as corporal, the body became alienated in an over-emphasis on discourse which has since been treated as primal. Through her practice, Dimech “reaffirms the authority of the body,” a movement which represents a return to Freud by re-contextualizing his ideas within the body of his own work. For Dimech, who dances in the Butoh traditon, the body of flesh is the body of desire, much like for Freud, “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego.” Although deeply informed by philosophy, Dimech’s ideas3Dimech’s writings can be found here: http://sabbaticdance.com/corpus/dynamics-of-the-occulted-body/ give primacy to her practice as a dancer and in so doing demonstrate a reverence for the creative process. This perspective was shared by those contributors speaking from their experience as creators. This perspective—one rooted in the body and the creative process which emerges from it—lent this conference an uncommon depth. For Dimech, the important question to ask when framing a psychoanalytic question in relationship to the occult is if language emerges from the body or is imposed upon it.

Val Denham, a multi-media artist and musician, expanded the context within which this question is asked. For Denham, much like Dimech, the creative process emerges from the body. And like Gray, Denham situates this body within a world. Importantly, this world exists in a universe which came out of the collapse of another universe—from its dark matter. The black hole out of which emerged the world as we know it is analogous to memory, to the repressed, as is Grey’s conception of the human being who belongs to this world. Against the backdrop of this portrait of a world, Denham proposed the principle which informs her creative process of “proclaiming the present time over.” To ‘proclaim the present time over’ means to give primacy to the reality of the present as something which we cannot grasp in any way other than retroactively. What follows is the idea that we are always dreaming—the idea that we are always remembering in an unconscious way.

The body positions us in relationship to darkness and light, space and time, life and death. Human subjectivity is that which emerges on these axes and requires symbolization to demarcate them. These symbolic systems, as Denham points out, relate always to the past; they emerge from embodied memory and orient us to our personal and cultural history. While the professional artists in the room offered insight into the process of creativity and its relationship to self-making, those practitioners speaking from a position rooted in occult traditions understood the importance of cultural context and history. These practitioners understood the function of initiation—that each of us is initiated in this life into an ancestral history; that we are born into the traditions that have been built to perpetuate this story; that we are burdened with continuing the narrative. This notion about our origins is the essential idea with which psychoanalysis grapples. Thought of in this way, psychoanalysis is nothing other than the meta-theorization of occult ideas.

Speaking from a perspective informed by formal clinical training as well as his initiation as a shaman in the Maori tribe of New Zealand, Dr. Ingo Lambrecht addressed the relation between psychoanalysis and shamanism. For Dr. Lambrecht, both intervene at the level of symbolic discourse regarding personal and cultural history to influence the unconscious organization of self-structure. Dr. Lambrecht expressed how the Maori people conceptualize health as an affiliation between the self and the ancestors. Illness, therefore, does not so much emerge from one’s being, but rather between oneself and one’s ancestors. “The ancestors”, he explained, “wake you up with symptoms”—an idea echoed by Khi Armond, Jesse Hathaway Diaz, and Demetrius Lacroix.

The impartation of the body—its desire, the lineage it is born to—through our ancestors complicates the question raised earlier about the direction of this relationship between the body and language. It does so by acknowledging that it’s not just one’s own body, corporal or otherwise, that mediates subjectivity, but the bodies of others, many others, the whole lot of our ancestral lineage. By addressing the esoteric—the shadow—as real, this notion of illness also makes the ethereal space between waking and sleep, past and present, seen and unseen, part of the question. Each representative from this diverse community offered a multiplicity of perspective so nuanced it would be impossible to provide a summary of them here. What I believe we each felt as we stepped out of the gallery space and onto the unusually sun-soaked London streets is an open-hearted desire for an on-going discussion. Just like it is the psychoanalyst’s job to listen to the story of how the analysand came to be who she is in the world, any discipline which takes the study of psychology seriously has an ethical responsibility to listen to the story of the earth—to the histories, beliefs, and practices, of her people and their cultures.

I think of Dr. Sinclair’s painting depicting overlapping and concentric circles, some in continuous, others in fragmented strokes of the brush. These delicate, but deliberate, smears of black and red paint frame cut-up fragments of text that read:

“as a fictional
don’t belong to one
AN ABSOLUTE
We communicated very well.
Sorry to be absent so long.”

The three-day long symposium initiated a long absent dialogue that will continue through a series of events Dr. Sinclair will curate in conjunction with The Morbid Anatomy Museum. Join us. We have so much to discuss. A street-art installment on the corner of Torrens’ street, where the conference was held, is illuminated in my memory. It greeted us with these words as we left after the symposium had ended: “All You Need is Love.”

If you were unable to attend the symposium, you can visit it’s official page on Facebook.

The next event in the Psychoanalysis Art and the Occult lecture series hosted in conjunction with The Morbid Anatomy Museum will be “Event on the Dance of Occult and Unconscious in Freud,” held on October 6th in NY.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ See Chaos of the Third Mind: https://chaosofthethirdmind.com
2. ↑ Read Peter Grey’s paper here: http://scarletimprint.com/2016/05/fly-the-light/
3. ↑ Dimech’s writings can be found here: http://sabbaticdance.com/corpus/dynamics-of-the-occulted-body/

The American Metaphysical Majority

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We’ve all been force-fed the idea that the United States of America began as and remains a profoundly Christian nation. The Salem Witch Trials, we’re told, prove that the Puritans ruthlessly stamped out any sign of pagan or metaphysical beliefs in New England. In Pennsylvania the Quakers and other Pietist cults are said to have practiced purely Christian devotions. The more radical Virginians may have been Deists, but that still puts them squarely in the realm of Protestant Christian dogma. In Appalachia superstitions may have abounded but Christianity ruled the social order.

From this perspective America’s flirtation with the metaphysical appears to have surfaced only during infrequent eruptions of the irrational such as Spiritualism in the 19th Century and the New Age movement in the 20th. However in the last two decades a revolution in academia caused by books like Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion reveal a different historical narrative. Astrology, alchemy, communication with spirits, use of omens and sigils, have been a constant and pervasive theme of American culture from the first establishment of the colonies down to our own time.

For example, a leading Puritan, John Butler, commented on the Puritan preoccupation with alchemy as a natural science. He approved. John Winthrop Jr., first governor of Connecticut, and eldest son of the governor of Massachusetts Bay, brought a huge alchemical library to the colony, that included many books from the Elizabethan magus John Dee’s own collection. Winthrop was a practitioner of healing by herbal alchemy. One of the most famous of all Puritans, Cotton Mather, may have been obsessed with keeping Satan and his witches out of New England but his affectionate nickname for Winthrop was “Hermes Christianus,” the Christian Hermes, an unusual reference for a strict Christian, whether the Hermes involved was Hermes the ancient Greek god or Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary founder of western civilization’s spiritual counterculture.

In the early days of Harvard College alchemical studies flourished there. Perhaps the most famous of the Harvard alchemists was George Starkey, better known by his pen name Eirenaeus Philalethes. He wrote many popular books of the day, especially works on alchemy and the Hermetic philosophy and arts. John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton admitted to being influenced by his writing. Another well known Harvard alchemist was Gershom Bulkeley, a Harvard minister, and son in law of the president of Harvard.

Like many New Agers of the 20th century Puritans contemplated the beauty and justice of Nature, believing if they could conform to cosmic order, they would be not only healed and saved, but also blessed to enjoy the fruits of a successful life. A far cry from the stoic suffering of many of the most popular forms of Christianity practiced in Europe. Puritans weren’t above consulting the cunning folk when in need of advice or a healing, though they might be scolded for it.

Meanwhile in the Virginia colonies astrology was quite popular. The average gentleman farmer sought to decipher his fate, and manage his life, according to the aspects of the moon and stars. These descendants of royalists rewarded by the crown gambled not only for fun, but to divine the current state of their luck. They worried over dreams and omens, visited fortune tellers, and employed witches to control weather. They carved ancient signs of protection on their houses and barns. William Byrd, member of the Virginia Council of State, practiced the conjuring of angelic power and openly discussed it with his friends.

Meanwhile in Pennsylvania while the Quakers were trying to convince members of their own denomination as well as other locals to give up divination by geomancy, palmistry and astrology, they were themselves experimenting with communication and raising of the dead, foreshadowing the table-tapping ectoplasm craze of the next century’s Spiritualist movement. Even the most pious Quakers in practice and theory owed much to Jakob Boehme, the Kabbala, and Rosicrucian and alchemical undercurrents, here and there blatantly practiced by splinter groups. The healing power of spirit was a constant theme.

Samuel Lancaster Gerry, "Appalachian Mountain Sharecroppers," 1870s

Samuel Lancaster Gerry, “Appalachian Mountain Sharecroppers,” 1870s

Further south, Appalachian farmers performed every action with meticulous attention to the moon phases and to other signs of nature, for example, a baby born with an equal number of folds on each leg meant the next baby would be a girl. Their knowledge of their terrain must have appeared magical. Watching how wasps built their nests in spring they predicted the weather. Of course, the line between superstition and meticulous observation of nature blurred. The first tick found on a child had magical importance. If a parent wanted a child to be a hard worker the tick was crushed with a shovel. If the parent wanted the child to have a beautiful singing voice the tick was crushed with a bell or banjo.

We can see the four basic flavors of American Metaphysical Religion here. Puritans resemble our scholars of esoterica. The Pietists are our ghost hunters and frequenters of mediums. The Virginians are our astrologers and horoscope readers. Appalachia practiced something close to today’s gone native shamanistic approach to spirituality.

So don’t let anybody tell you that America is, has always been and will always be Christian. America has always been incubating a religion that represents the melting together of the spiritual traditions of every continent. The streams of forms of Christianity, Islam, Native American religion, the shamanism of Asia and other indigenous spiritual paths, every form of Buddhism, Taoism, Yoga, Tantra, African religion and its Afro-Caribbean variant, idiosyncratic hybrids like Theosophy, and the streams of Neoplatonic, mystical and magical doctrine of Europe and the United Kingdon, all flow together in America.

A conservative estimate of the number of Americans with an interest in American Metaphysical Religion is ten million, making it bigger than the American Mormon Church or the American Methodist Church. 45% of Americans believe in astrology according to a poll from 20121See, “More and More Americans Think Astrology is Science,” Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/02/public-opinion-astrology-dumb, which would put the number of Americans involved in that particular aspect of American Metaphysical Religion at over one hundred million. Could this be a new religion in process of creation or is this respect for all traditions the eventual renaissance of a more ancient spirituality? What’s another word for melting pot? Cauldron.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ See, “More and More Americans Think Astrology is Science,” Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/02/public-opinion-astrology-dumb

Colin Wilson and “The Robot”

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This is an excerpt from my new book, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson.

Wilson woke up to universal acclaim one morning in May, 1956, when his first book, The Outsider, a study in creativity, alienation, and extreme mental states, was published. The twenty-four year old had no idea of the effect his existential explorations would have, nor of the sudden u-turn the critics would take about his work. No sooner did critics and journalists in the UK and US sing his praises, then they did a speedy about face, and Wilson became literary Public Enemy No. 1. Wilson endured the reversal with dignity: he retreated to a cottage in Cornwall, in the far west of England, and for the next half a century produced an enormous body of work in a dizzying spectrum of fields, focusing on a single question, what he calls “the paradoxical nature of freedom.” Wilson analyzed this paradox in books on crime (A Criminal History of Mankind) sex (Origins of the Sexual Impulse), existentialism (Introduction to the New Existentialism), the occult (The Occult), the paranormal (Mysteries), and in a series of philosophical novels in which he appropriated a variety of genres to achieve his aims, writing science fiction classics such as The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone, and existential thrillers such as Ritual in the Dark and The Glass Cage. In a career spanning more than half a century, Wilson wrote well over a hundred titles. He died in 2013 at the age of 82.

I knew Wilson; he was a friend and a mentor. My book is the first full-length biographical/critical study of one of most important thinkers of the last two centuries. The excerpt presented here recounts the first appearance of a key theme in Wilson’s writing, “the robot,” an evolutionary “labor-saving device” that, unfortunately, we have allowed to take on more duties than it should.

∞

Wilson first wrote about the robot in an essay that appeared in Challenges of Humanistic Psychology, an anthology edited by the psychologist James Bugenthal, who founded the Journal of Humanistic Psychology with Maslow in 1961.1James Bugenthal, ed. Challenges of Humanistic Psychology (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967). In “Existential Psychology: A Novelist’s Approach,” Wilson wrote “When I learned to type, I had to do it painfully and with much wear and tear. But at a certain stage a miracle occurred, and this complicated operation was ‘learned’ by a useful robot that I conceal in my sub-conscious.”2Colin Wilson “Existential Psychology: A Novelist’s Approach” in Wilson The Bicameral Critic ed. Howard Dossor (Salem: Salem House, 1985) pp. 38-54. This robot, Wilson tells us, is very helpful. He drives his car, speaks passable French and “occasionally gives lectures at American universities.” The robot is very versatile; Wilson even jokes that he sometimes makes love to his wife. The robot is a labour-saving device. He takes over repetitive tasks so that we can focus our attention on other things. Alfred North Whitehead knew about the robot when he said that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” If I had to think about how to type each time I wanted to, I could never think about what to type. Once I’ve learned a skill, my robot takes care of the how, so I can focus on the what. We all know the story of when the ant asked the centipede how he could move so many legs. The centipede says “It’s easy, I do it like this,” and then finds himself unable to do it. His conscious mind has interfered with an unconscious or subconscious process, what in psychology is called “hyper-reflection.” The same thing happens when we become self-conscious, and start to bungle things we normally do easily. We then are getting in the way of the robot.

The robot is absolutely necessary. But there is a problem. “If I discover a new symphony that moves me deeply,” Wilson writes, “or a poem or a painting, the robot insists on getting in on the act.” After a few times, the robot takes over, and he is listening to the symphony or reading the poem, not me. We say it has become “familiar.” What does this mean? Why should a Mozart symphony sound less beautiful or exciting after we’ve heard it several times? After all, it hasn’t changed. We say we have “got used to it.” But what does this mean, other than that we have allowed the robot to classify it with repetitive tasks and, as T. E. Lawrence lamented, “become typical through thought.” Making things “typical” is the robot’s job; the problem is that he does this to things we don’t want to be “typical.”

Animals, Wilson says, don’t have this problem. They can’t learn languages or how to type, having only a rudimentary robot. But when he takes him for a walk, Wilson’s dog experiences the sights and smells each time as if it was the first. Wilson tells us he is often oblivious to the scenery because his robot has taken over the task of cutting out irrelevant details so he can get through a day’s work. Yet when his day is over and he wants to relax, he often finds that he can’t. His automatic pilot—the robot—is in gear and won’t let go. Wilson is not alone in this; it is a central human problem, the central human problem. Descartes believed that animals were really robots. Clearly he was wrong. We are the robots. Or rather, we are like people who allow their servants to do everything for them, and subsequently feel they have lost touch with life, but don’t know exactly why. Wilson is fond of quoting T. S. Eliot’s line from Choruses From the Rock: “Where is the life we have lost in living?” It’s with the robot.

The problem with the robot is the same as with the evolutionary devices we have developed to enable us to filter out “irrelevant” input and focus our consciousness on the task at hand. It works too efficiently. Children experience life with a freshness we envy and try to recapture as we get older, because their robots are undeveloped. Yet it is no advantage to the child to retain an undeveloped robot. The exigencies of life demand one; without it, we would not be able to perform the simplest tasks, from tying our shoelaces to riding a bike, or more demanding ones, like learning a musical instrument. The robot is absolutely essential and our evolutionary intentionality would not have developed it if it wasn’t. If we have allowed it to overstep its duties and have become too dependent on it, this is not the robot’s fault. It is a result of our accepting the “passive fallacy,” believing that life is something that happens to us, rather than something we do.

Now when we want to turn off the robot, we often resort to crude methods, like alcohol or drugs. These can shut the robot down, but at a price. As Wilson observed, they inhibit our ability to act. Drugs or alcohol allow us to feel the richness, the deeper meanings —the “absoluteness of self-enjoyment”— that the robot dampens, but our will and ability to act effectively is dampened too. Threat, inconvenience, crisis can also free us of the robot. Hence the Outsider’s penchant for “living dangerously,” in Nietzsche’s phrase. The robot recognises that the threat requires us to “take control” and briefly exits the driver’s seat; or rather we recognise the need for this and push him out. This is why Sartre paradoxically felt most free when in danger of being arrested by the Nazis, and why many older Londoners remembered the Blitz as the best days of their life. As Wilson notes, Gurdjieff’s method of “induced crisis” is aimed precisely at the robot. Yet once the threat recedes, the robot returns to its job of economizing on energy and doing things for us.

Outsiders feel the effect of the robot more than others; hence their desire for “life more abundant.” They are willing to take enormous risks in order to throw him off, to “cast the spectre into the lake,” as William Blake says. But “living dangerously” is most often counter-productive, as many of Wilson’s Outsiders discovered. The idea is not to get rid of the robot nor to keep administering “shock treatments” so that we can be free of him for a moment. These soon cease to work and fall victim to the “law of diminishing returns,” with greater shocks with less effect. We need to understand how the robot works and why we developed him in the first place. We need, that is, to develop a phenomenology of the robot.

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References   [ + ]

1. ↑ James Bugenthal, ed. Challenges of Humanistic Psychology (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967).
2. ↑ Colin Wilson “Existential Psychology: A Novelist’s Approach” in Wilson The Bicameral Critic ed. Howard Dossor (Salem: Salem House, 1985) pp. 38-54.

On the Borderlands between Philosophy and Esotericism: An Interview with Gary Lachman

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Gary Lachman first came to the public eye in the late 1970s as a founding member of the seminal New Wave/Punk Group, Blondie. Since the early 1990s, however, he has carved out a unique career as a prolific researcher and writer on the borderlands between philosophy, esotericism, and consciousness studies1See Lachman’s most recent publication, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson . When Gary contacted me about my biographical work on the German poet and Kulturphilosoph, Jean Gebser, I naturally took the opportunity to explore his work.

A.C. Your creative path has spanned both a professional music career and a professional writing career focusing on research into esoteric philosophy. Could you elaborate on your personal journey in this regard, i.e. the overlaps, synchronicities, or circumstances that mediated between these two realms? Were there any particular influences, experiences, or events that lead you from one domain to the other?

blondiebw

Blondie. Left–to-right: Clem Burke, Jimmy Destri, Chris Stein, Debbie Harry, and Gary Lachman (a.k.a. Gary Valentine).

G.L. I first became aware of and interested in the ideas I write about in 1975, while I was a musician, playing in Blondie and living on the Bowery [New York City]. I had read a great deal before then, mostly in existentialism, people like Nietzsche and Sartre, and had absorbed a lot of counter-cultural ideas from reading Hesse, Alan Watts, D. T. Suzuki, the Beats, Jung, and that sort of thing. I had no interest in the occult, or only as an element in the weird fiction of which I was a fan, writers like H. P. Lovecraft and the Weird Tales school. We shared our Bowery loft with a wild, flamboyant artist who was interested in Aleister Crowley and who gave impromptu Tarot readings using Crowley’s Thoth deck. Chris Stein and Debbie Harry, who I lived with in the loft, also had a kitschy interest in magic, voodoo, and witchcraft. And there was a lot of cultural debris left over from the previous 60s generation having to do with the occult. I read Crowley and became interested in magic and the Golden Dawn, but the book that made the most impact on me was Colin Wilson’s The Occult. It impressed me because, firstly, it was so well-written, but also because he approached the occult from a philosophical perspective. It wasn’t just a book about ghosts and spells, but a survey of the history of the occult from the perspective of a philosophy of consciousness. I am still deeply indebted to that book and at the moment I am writing a book about Wilson and his ideas. His ideas about what he calls “Faculty X,” our inherent but mostly unrecognized ability to step “out of time” and grasp the “reality of other times and places,” had a great impact on me because in them I recognized similar experiences I myself had had.

Russian mystic and philosopher, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866/77–1949)

Russian mystic and philosopher, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866/77–1949)

These ideas began to influence me and they were expressed in the songs I wrote. One Blondie hit, “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear,” was about the telepathic communications my girlfriend at the time and I were experiencing. We found that we were sharing dreams; while on tour we called each other at the same time or knew when we were calling each other, and so on. When I left Blondie in 1977 I started my own band, the Know. The name came from my interest in gnosis and gnosticism, and the songs I wrote were more and more informed with “esoteric” ideas, mostly coming from the Gurdjieffian tradition and the concern with “waking up” (a few years later I became involved in “the work”). Sadly these songs—which were really good pop songs, not dreary, earnest “spiritual” stuff—are not as well known as I would have liked them to be and because of their “positive” character, they were out of place in the pop nihilism of punk. I disbanded the Know at the end of 1980 and after a year working as a guitarist for Iggy Pop, I retired from rock and roll in 1982 at the hoary age of 26. Because of some song royalties I was able to turn my attention fully to my reading. Gradually what started as a naive enthusiasm became a more serious study of what we might call the lesser known realities of the mind and the history of the people who pursued them. Experiences of my own confirmed the reality of this.

It must have been a fascinating time. Were there any other significant artists that you encountered during this period who were exploring genuine esoteric or gnostic elements in a meaningful way? I know Debbie Harry later worked with H. R. Giger, whose work is famously replete with occult symbolism. Did any of this ever go beyond the pop/kitsch level, in your opinion?

I didn’t meet anyone else on the New York scene at that time that was interested in esoteric or occult ideas, although I did have a run in with David Bowie and was asked to leave his mid-town Manhattan loft because I corrected him about some mistaken ideas he had about Colin Wilson. I tell the story in my memoir of the time, New York Rocker, and a shorter version can be found here. Debbie sometimes consulted the I Ching about the band’s future and she and Chris were convinced that the spirit of a child that used to work in the loft when it was a doll factory visited them sometimes. I didn’t see it so I can’t confirm their sighting, nor can I confirm that building had been a doll factory. But no, I can’t say anyone else I knew then was interested in this sort of thing in a meaningful way. In fact some jokes about it were aimed in my direction. But I was out of the band by late 1977, so I can’t comment on their later career.

What I find especially interesting about your work is that you engage esoteric thinkers as participants in the history of philosophy proper, something that is often neglected both from the purely esoteric perspective, and from the mainstream philosophical perspective. Could you comment on this relationship between esoteric and mainstream approaches to the philosophy of consciousness?

At the same time as I was reading esoteric literature—as well as books on the paranormal, consciousness studies, psychology, mysticism, literature and so on—I was also deeply interested in philosophy, and my next career move after music was to get a degree in philosophy with the intent of teaching it. I did this in the mid-to late 1980s. While getting my degree I worked at the Bodhi Tree Bookshop in Los Angeles, which at the time was the most well-known and successful “metaphysical bookstore” west of the Rockies. Sadly it no longer exists. There I saw the rise of the “new age” from a concern limited to eccentrics on society’s margins to being a mass commercial enterprise. I studied Wittgenstein, Hegel, and Heidegger by day and helped people understand their chakras and the I Ching by night. I was attracted to the esoteric because it seemed to be concerned with questions about the meaning and purpose of human existence that mainstream philosophy more or less ignored, but I valued the rigor and critical thinking that philosophy demanded and which is unfortunately absent from a great deal of “alternative” literature. For a while I put my esoteric interests on hold and devoted myself to understanding the popular philosophical schools of the time, approaches like deconstuctionism, postmodernism, the Frankfurt School, Adorno, and Benjamin. Very quickly I saw that aside from some elements of Benjamin’s work, these really weren’t satisfying—today I find them all pretty useless—but I still retain influences from that time, people like the literary philosopher George Steiner, whose writings on language and culture continue to inform my work, and the literary critic Erich Heller, whose essays on Goethe, Nietzsche, Rilke and others I return to again and again.

I see myself as inheriting both traditions and in my work I want to show that we, now, are in an ideal position to bring the two together. I don’t mean in some pedantic “system.” But the kinds of questions that obsess me have been addressed by people within both traditions. And if you look at the history of philosophy, some major figures have been influenced by ideas coming from the esoteric tradition. Hegel, for example, was influenced by Jacob Boehme and Hermeticism—Glenn Magee has a book about this. Heidegger’s Gelassenheit has its roots in Meister Eckhart. Rudolf Steiner wrote about Kant and Nietzsche, and his anthroposophy is drenched in German Idealism. And as I point out in The Secret Teachers of the Western World practically all of the western esoteric tradition is rooted in Plato and Neo-platonism. So there is less of a distance between them, or at least some aspects of them, that might at first seem to be the case.

More specifically, I see very clear similarities between, say, some of Alfred North Whitehead’s ideas about perception and René Schwaller de Lubicz’s notion of an “intelligence of the heart,” Henri Bergson’s intuition, and the ideas of Iain McGilchrist on the differences between the left and right cerebral hemispheres’ ways of interacting with the world. I write about these in The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus and The Caretakers of the Cosmos. They are all talking about the same thing, and that’s what matters. We need to be able to draw on whatever material is available and can help us understand what it is we are trying to grasp. The way Whitehead talks about “meaning perception” in his little book Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, is very much along the same lines as how Schwaller de Lubicz describes the “intelligence of the heart.” This should not be surprising, as they are both talking about consciousness. We need to forget the kind of snobbishness that can infect both traditions, the esotericists who turned their nose up at “mere philosophy,” and the philosophers who say all this esoteric stuff is rubbish. Again, people like Henry Corbin who introduced ideas about the “imaginal world” and Persian mystics like Suhrawardi started out as a phenomenologist. There is a great deal in common between the phenomenological approach and the Gurdjieff work; Heidegger and Gurdjieff share a lot of territory. The stepping back from the “natural standpoint” that is the essence of Husserl’s work is not vastly different from esoteric approaches to altering consciousness. Some of William James’ insights into consciousness are echoed by Gurdjieff, especially his study of “second wind” in his important essay “The Engeries of Man.” Again, all these people are talking about the same thing. I find it very profitable to understand what they are saying and connect the dots.

French Hermetic philosopher, René Schwaller de Lubicz (1887–1961)

French Hermetic philosopher, René Schwaller de Lubicz (1887–1961)

One thing that intrigued me about Schwaller de Lubicz’s work is his emphasis on perception and consciousness. Despite being an experienced laboratory alchemist, his ultimate focus, certainly at the end of his life, was on the Great Work as a “metaphysics of perception”: how our most vital moments of consciousness were all that survived, all that mattered. They were permanently “inscribed,” according to Schwaller, on our immortal mineral remains—our salts or mineral ashes, which would survive the death of the body (putrefaction, combustion) to influence higher bodily forms. Consciousness for Schwaller was the hidden link in the evolutionary chain of being. I know a lot of people with a background in the Gurdjieff Work find numerous points of affinity between Schwaller de Lubicz and Gurjieff’s ideas. How do you see the issue of consciousness playing out in relation to the reality of death and the potential survival of consciousness, individual or otherwise?

Well, Gurdjieff believed that not everyone has a soul or astral body that survives physical death. This could be accomplished but only through repeated efforts to “crystallize” something within us, and this happens through our repeated efforts to “remember ourselves,” and to create a kind of spiritual “heat” that would fuse our many different selves into one. This heat was produced by the struggle between yes and no, by self-discipline and a kind of sacrifice, by going against our immediate inclinations and desires, by not living mechanically or habitually, as we are prone to do. A similar scenario informs ideas about the “diamond body” in Chinese alchemy. I have to say though I am so focused on what our business is here, in this world, that I rarely think about the next. I believe that “higher worlds” exist and that in some sense we may have “descended” from them, but I don’t believe our descent was a fall. We can say we’ve parachuted into this difficult material world, where our freedom is greatly constrained, in order to colonize it. The other realms are more free perhaps, but they offer less opportunity for achievement, in the same sense as, say, air or water is more free than solid matter, but one can’t sculpt with a cloud. This colonization takes the form of increasing our inner freedom, our capacity to inhabit what Teilhard de Chardin called the “noösphere,” a realm of meaning and purpose that we now occasionally glimpse through great works of art, literature, philosophy, and it has an obvious connection to resisting mechanical living. It is a peculiarly human realm. I believe it is a new dimension of reality and that it is our job to bring it into being. I am very fond of Whitehead’s remark that “Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.” With Bergson, Shaw, Kazantzakis, Nietzsche, Wilson, and others, I think our job is to spiritualize this realm, to invest it with more life, more consciousness, “life more abundant” as the Gospels say. We may pass to higher, freer realms upon death, but in one form or another we are sent back here in order to carry on the work. I don’t necessarily mean in the sense of reincarnation or eternal recurrence—I am interested in both but not a devotee—but in the sense that the “life force,” as Shaw calls it, continuously sends its troops back here to secure new beachheads. I know this language sounds a bit aggressive for our more sensitive ears, but I think we could do with more of a sense of “spiritual warfare,” and less concern for our “health and well-being.”

How did you first come across the work of Jean Gebser, and were there any particular synchronicities or circumstances that brought his work into your life?

Swiss poet and phenomenologist of consciousness, Jean Gebser (1905–1973).

Swiss poet and phenomenologist of consciousness, Jean Gebser (1905–1973).

That’s a good question. I must have seen a reference somewhere. I think the first work about Gebser I read must have been George Feuerstein’s book Structures of Consciousness, which I cam across in 1987. The Bodhi Tree had a used book branch that I often worked in and a copy of Feuerstein’s book came in. I then saw other references and lo and behold, a copy of The Ever Present Origin—the Barstad and Mickunas translation—appeared too and I settled down to read it, twice. It was exactly the kind of book I love reading. It’s scope was enormous, the writing was clear, passionate, and urgent, it made convincing arguments and offered new perspectives—or aperspectives—from which to look at the history of western consciousness. I was and am still fascinated by the question of language and of course that is Gebser’s starting point (as it is Owen Barfield’s who I also discovered around the same time.) I know that people like Ken Wilber and William Irwin Thompson wrote about Gebser. I never read much of Wilber but I did read William Irwin Thompson but I can’t say that his approach influenced me a great deal. But Gebser seemed to bring the philosophical and mystical (spiritual?) tradition together in this magnum opus. That the book is full of references to Nietzsche, Rilke, looks at developments in art, music, social theory, psychology, and speculates on possible alterations in our perception of time made me feel quite at home with it.

Jean Gebser is always careful to avoid slipping into the modalities of esoteric philosophy, which he regards as a “falling back” into what he calls the “mythic structure of consciousness.” At the same time, for a number of reasons, his work has been sorely neglected in western esoteric and western philosophical circles. What is your approach to Gebser, and how do you see him fitting into the wider narratives of esotericism, philosophy, and consciousness studies?

I know Gebser is critical of the esoteric or magical approaches. I do think that in some cases he didn’t really understand some of the people he mentions, like Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, or at least was perhaps understandably misinformed about them. And it is unfortunate that his experience of the “magical structure of consciousness” came in the form of Nazi rallies. We need, of course, to avoid falling into the uncritical acceptance of “magic” in that way or in other “group mind” phenomena, many of which make up a great deal of today’s “alternative” milieu. But the esoteric thinkers I am interested in had very critical minds and were not afraid to use them. Ouspensky’s Teritum Organum, written before his encounter with Gurdjieff, deals with many of the same ideas and insights as Gebser does. As far as I can tell his speculations on “higher dimensions” relate very closely to “aperspectivalism.” I think we need to avoid dogmatism, whether from a Gebserian or an esoteric perspective. I’ve written about Gebser in the context of other philosophers of consciousness, some esoteric, some not. In A Secret History of Consciousness I point out the great similarities between Gebser’s “structures of consciousness” and Steiner’s own reading of the evolution of consciousness, and in The Secret Teachers of the Western World I look at the history of the western esotericism through the lens of Gebser’s structures, as well as that of Iain McGilchrist’s re-reading of the right/left brain dialectic. In The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus I see the revival of Hermeticism in the Renaissance as a result of the new perspectivism that Gebser argues was inaugurated by Petrarch’s celebrated ascent of Mount Ventoux. And in The Secret Teachers of the Western World I suggest that we can understand the “occult revival” of the 1960s, which grew into our own “new age,” as a symptom of what Gebser calls the “breakdown of the mental-rational structure of consciousness”. I think there are more links between Gebser’s ideas and some esoteric ones than he might have recognized.

One thing I found particularly interesting in my biographical researches on Gebser is the influence that Frederico García Lorca had on Gebser’s understanding of the “magical” structure of consciousness. (As you know, Gebser knew Lorca personally, and worked closely with him in Madrid before the Spanish Civil War rent things asunder in 1936). Lorca’s world was, for Gebser, a nocturnal, matriarchal, and feminine world, replete with the symbols of the underworld and the night-side of existence. I have always felt this is a much more evocative expression of that particular consciousness structure than the more “anthropological” or “sociological” character that Gebser gave to it in The Ever-Present Origin. It calls to mind a number of connections with contemporary themes in Surrealism, for instance. Also, the general theme of left/right as matriarchy/patriarchy is obviously relevant to Gilchrist’s (and Gimbutas’) work.

I guess it would be matriarchy/right and patriarchy/left, a polarity Leonard Shlain develops in his book The Alphabet vs. The Goddess, about the demise of an earlier, image-based feminine consciousness at the hands of our more verbal masculine one. Certainly there is a great deal of common ground between poetry and magic. Good poetry affects us viscerally in the same way that Gebser says the magical structure does. It “moves” us. The Austrian writer and occultist Gustav Meyrink said that magic is “doing without knowing,” something that another occultist and writer—poet even—Aleister Crowley agreed with when he said that the best magic occurs unconsciously, in the same way that we can make an incredible shot at billiards but not know how we did it. It was this “unconscious” aspect of poetry that troubled Plato and led him to make his critical remarks about poets, how they do their best work by entering a trance of some kind and having a voice not their own speak through them. They were “possessed” and for the rational mind, such possession is dubious. And of course it was this that interested the surrealists, with their attempts to by-pass the critical mind through automatic writing and the kind of stream-of-unconsciousness poetry they produced in hypnagogic states, between sleeping and waking. The poet Peter Redgrove wrote a fascinating book about this, The Black Goddess and the Unseen Real, about how our sight-oriented culture has marginalized our other senses and how through these we can enter areas of being of which we are usually ignorant. The psychologist and paranormal theorist Stan Gooch made the same argument, and believed that poets and psychics have a lot in common. I think though that it is clear that although inspired, the best poetry is a result of a fruitful co-operation between our conscious and unconscious minds. This is something Friedrich Schiller spelled out in his Letters on Aesthetic Education, where, put simply, he argues for a creative collaboration between the imagination and reason, the creative inspiration and the critical articulation of it. The kind of word-salad that Andre Breton, Philippe Soupault and other surrealists produced is of more historical interest than literary, I think.

How has your research into the history of esotericism in general, and the work of Jean Gebser in particular, influenced your life and work personally?

For the last twenty-five years I have been focussed on trying to get a clear idea of the narrative of western consciousness, its story, as well as how this is expressed in ourselves, our own consciousness. The two clearly are related. Before this—before I started writing about these ideas in the early 1990s—I spent a good fifteen or so years reading constantly and experimenting with different practical approaches; this included a period of being a practicing “magician,” some years in the Gurdjieff work, some time spent in a Jungian context, and other approaches. Throughout this time I studied philosophy as well. So it would not be an exaggeration, I think, to say that have devoted my life to trying to get a decent grip on those fundamental existential questions: who am I, why am I here, and what am supposed to do now that I am? I do not consider myself a particularly “spiritual” person. I don’t like the term particularly, because it has acquired connotations that I find unhelpful. The historian Jacques Barzun—another mainstream thinker whose work has influenced me—once made a handy distinction between “spiritual” and “things of the spirit.” Barzun feels himself to be ”obedient to ‘spirit’, knowing that from it alone come the things that justify life —things, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘transfiguring, exquisite, mad, and divine.’” I know how Nietzsche and Barzun feel. Part of this “obedience” involves developing a trust in life, a bottom-line knowledge that, although it is a grim and difficult business, life ultimately means well by us. Gebser called this trust Urvertrauen, “primal trust,” as opposed to the angst we feel most of the time. You can say that I try to make this primal trust the default setting for my attitude toward life. This doesn’t let us off the hook. We still have to do the work. I’m not a believer in “letting go and letting God.” God has enough on his plate and passing the buck on to him only makes us lazy. Anything of value is achieved through our own efforts, including our own evolution. Having a primal trust in life helps us to make those efforts.

I’m glad you mentioned Primordial Trust. It’s probably one of Gebser’s most important ideas, in my opinion, because it requires a lived attitude of accepting the uncertainties of existence. It is also one of the most direct ways of going beyond rational consciousness, which obsessively seeks certitude in all things. Of course, it is no coincidence that Gebser personally knew Werner Heisenberg, whose “Uncertainty Principle” brought this approach to the very heart of the constitution of physical reality. What do you think this suggests about the connection between the fundamental realities of consciousness and our understanding of the cosmos at large?

Zentralbild Prof. Dr. phil Werner Kar. Heisenberg, Physiker, geboren 5.12.1901 in Würzburg, Professor für theoretische Physik, Direktor des Max-Planck-Instituts für Physik in Göttingen, Nobelpreis für Physik 1932 (Aufnahme 1933) 39049-33

Zentralbild
Prof. Dr. phil Werner Kar. Heisenberg,
Physiker, geboren 5.12.1901 in Würzburg, Professor für theoretische Physik, Direktor des Max-Planck-Instituts für Physik in Göttingen, Nobelpreis für Physik 1932 (Aufnahme 1933)
39049-33

I agree with Owen Barfield and Rudolf Steiner when they say that the world we perceive is determined by our consciousness, and so ultimately our consciousness and the cosmos are the same, or at least are deeply and intimately related. At the risk of cliché, they are two halves of one whole. I do think that the kind of uncertainty Heisenberg speaks of is different from the kind Gebser’s primal trust concerns, although of course they are related. It is of course important and welcome that the kind of absolute certainty nineteenth century scientists were keen on has turned out to be something of a pipe dream. But uncertainty about my life is not the same, I think, as uncertainty about the position or speed of a particle. In fact, that kind of uncertainty can produce more existential uncertainty than trust. T. S. Eliot asked “Do I dare disturb the universe,” and according the Heisenberg, we are disturbing it all the time. The knowledge that some act of mine may upset the cosmic apple cart can lead to paralysis. Fundamentally I think we are faced with the challenge of believing that life, the universe, means well by us, even if there is scant evidence to back this up. We can’t sit on the sidelines and tally up reasons for or against trusting life. We are in it whether we like it or not and have to act. Thus spoke existentialism. And of course there are many certainties that are absolutely needed. It was David Hume’s radical skepticism, which even excluded cause and effect, that woke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber” and led to his philosophy. I tend to look at Gebser’s primal trust in the same way that I do William James’ “will to believe.” James makes the helpful remark that we have a better chance of accomplishing some act if we believe we can do it than if we believe we can’t. There is no proof for our belief, so we can’t justify it with evidence—it would not be belief then but knowledge—but the belief itself informs our capacity to act, supplements it, and the successful act provides the justification. Of course we may be wrong. There are no guarantees. But the risk involved makes life an adventure and a worthy recipient of our efforts. And life itself in a sense takes note of this and responds. I think it is also true that much of what we consider life’s animus toward us is really a result of our own unconscious assumptions. We think life is “out to get us,” and so in some way this belief becomes self-fulfilling. Real trust is not the same as intellectual assent. It goes deeper down. When we can achieve this I think things begin to go better for us.

∞

This interview was originally published on the Jean Gebser Society blog.

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ See Lachman’s most recent publication, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson 

A Mind Altogether Stranger

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Can we be certain that mind, or consciousness, is just an epiphenomenon of neurophysiological activity, that it is little more than a byproduct of brain function? How do we know that our current models are accurate explanations, even descriptions, of what consciousness is? The computer model of the mind and brain, with consciousness as software, is clearly outdated and oversimplified. The behaviorist assertion that consciousness does not exist is inaccurate. The history of science reveals a continuous succession of models and theories repeatedly replacing one another in light of new observations, discoveries, realizations and eventual paradigms of understanding.

My contribution to this debate, drawing from my own ethnographic observations, is to ask a simple question: what if consciousness actually is something akin to the way it is experienced? That is to say, perhaps taking heed of experience itself might tell us something about the nature of consciousness.

I am not simply referring to our everyday waking consciousness here, but am striving to be inclusive of the broadest range of conscious experiences—from the mundane to the sublime. Yes, for most of us, most of the time, consciousness is experienced as something that is fairly stable and continuous—a stream of uninterrupted experience, usually characterized by intentional purpose. When we go to work, for example, we are usually clear and deliberate in our actions and experiences, we feel in control. But this narrow form of consciousness is not the only way we experience our minds.

What about dreams, for example? In dreams consciousness is let loose. We can create whole worlds in our minds. Then there are mystical experiences, where consciousness is experienced as expansive and connected to all else in the universe (unity), and maybe even to God.

What about astral travel and shamanic soul-journeys? Here consciousness is not confined to the physical body, but is something much more mobile, something capable of traveling through space and time to distant locales.

Then there is spirit possession, and mediumship. Here consciousness is experienced not so much as a single bounded ‘thing,’ but rather as a conglomeration of minds, as made up of many different porous, interconnected, parts that coexist to form a whole.

There are many more examples we could draw on to illustrate the fact that consciousness is often experienced in ways that are at odds with the dominant explanatory models of mind—time-slips, past-life experiences, precognition, psychedelic experiences, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, and so on.

Are we to assume, then, that such experiences tell us nothing at all about the nature of consciousness? Must we conclude that these experiences are purely illusory? I don’t think that we do. Indeed, it seems, to my mind at least, that these experiences point towards an understanding of consciousness as something that is profoundly complex, deeply mysterious and altogether much stranger than the dominant reductionist accounts seem to want to admit. We like things to be easily classifiable. We like simple explanations. But nature doesn’t have to play by our rules—why would it?

Sam I AM: Green Eggs and Ham as Secret Mystical Revelation

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In 1960 Dr. Seuss published his classic text Green Eggs and Ham. The book was the product of a bet with his publisher1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Eggs_and_Ham as to whether he could write a book using only 50 words. Like a great bluesmen, the ability to work with so few words and such repetitive rhythm brought out of Seuss a classic for the ages.

Some friends of ours kindly gave a copy of the book to my daughter for her second birthday last year and she and I have been reading it frequently ever since. I hadn’t read it in years prior to reading it with her but the more times we read it I started to discern a deeper underlying message and pattern.

I came to see in Green Eggs and Ham a very sophisticated theology of incarnational nondual spirituality, with the book acting as a modern re-telling of great spiritual texts like The Bhagavad Gita. This essay is an attempt to reconstruct this mystical reading of Green Eggs and Ham.

Though people remember the famous catchphrase “Sam I Am,” the opening words of Green Eggs and Ham are in fact “I am Sam.” The text opens simply with a radiant, beaming creature, tipping his cap and announcing his being–I am Sam. Astride a Seussian pony-like creature Sam appears as a yogi atop a lion. This opening salvo, “I am Sam” is a pronouncement of the highest order, a declaration of profound realization.

I am Sam. Sam I am.

Sam is short of course for Samuel, which literally means “Name of God.” “I am Sam” means literally “I Am [The] Name of God.”

In Judaism the Name of God (Ha-Shem) is a euphemism for God’s Presence. The Name of God is a way of speaking of that which cannot be named. So the first words out of the mouth of this enigmatic character are “I am the Name of God.” Or more directly, “I am God.”

This being, Sam, who has no backstory, no history, no context, very clearly articulates from the first that he is awake, a Buddha (from bodhi, wakeful). Sam has realized his oneness with the Divine. For all we know, within the Seussian cosmology, perhaps he is an Avatar, a spontaneous incarnation of the Divine in corporeal form (I will return to this hypothesis in a moment).

Perhaps by synchronicity Dr. Seuss’ real name was Theodore Seuss Geisel. His first name meaning God’s Gift, Theo = God, Dore = Gift. And his surname Geisel interestingly ends with the name of God (El), Geis-El, in the same formation as Samu-El.

I am Sam.

If we now understand Sam[uel], what does the statement I am indicate?

Here we see a further example of the nature of Divine Consciousness at work in this story. In the Biblical book of Exodus The Prophet Moses famously sees a burning bush and hears the voice of God telling him to go to Pharaoh and command him (Moses) to release the Hebrews whom Pharaoh had enslaved.

But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you’, and they ask me, ‘What is God’s Name?’, what shall I say to them? God said to Moses, ‘I Am Who I Am. Thus you shall say to the Israelites, I Am sent me to you.” (boldface mine) Exodus 3:14

When God is asked God’s Name, God replies, “I Am.”

I Am means Eternal, beyond past, present, and future linear-based time.

I Am, Utterly Awake, Conscious, Being.

To tie this all back then to Green Eggs and Ham the opening lines are:

I Am Sam. Sam I Am.

Given everything we’ve investigated, that translates to:

I Am The Name of God. The Name of God I Am.

I AM is The Name of God. (I Am Sam).

When Moses asked God for God’s Name, God said, “I Am.” Samuel means Name of God.

Hence the first statement of the book is a kind of mystical mathematical hypothesis.

I Am = Name of God

I Am = Sam

The reason Sam can and does say, “I Am Sam” and then “Sam I Am” is because as in any good equation you can reverse the order and the statement works out to be the same.

Returning to the story, Sam next passes by an unnamed character–a character whose name we never in fact get in the story. This character is the ego, is humanity (or more correctly creaturehood) symbolized in a singular character. Though not so named in the text, convention has sometimes named him “Grouchy Guy,” which is a fairly apt description of the ego. I will refer to this character as Grouchy from now as it’s unclear that the character can be identified as male.

Sam comes to Grouchy and declares, Sam I Am. Recall that Sam is riding his steed, a sign of awakening in multiple traditions.

With no backstory, context, or understanding the unnamed character (aka Ego, aka Grouchy) yells out, “I do not like Sam I Am.”

In saying so, Grouchy-Ego shakes their fist. This is the first of multiple times (four) that Grouchy will clench his/her/their fist in the story.

The clenched fist is highly meaningful. In the 5th century the great Christian theologian St. Augustine called the self/ego, “incurvatus se,” literally curled in on itself. The egoic self for Augustine was a serpentine identity, coiled in on itself. By curving in on itself, the ego was rejecting relationship and intimacy. The self was a deep fundamental no to life.

“I do not like them,” an almost perfect description of the ego in its negative, reactive, unconscious form.

The curved-in-on-itself ego, according to Augustine, rejects relationship with its Creator (Sam I Am), with Life itself (which we will see in the story shortly), with others, and even with its own individual depths.

Contemporary spiritual teachers speak often of the ego as the “self-contraction,” not typically acknowledging Augustine’s original recognition of the fact (nor for that matter Seuss’ understanding of it either).

So the stage is now set. We have two characters: God and Ego. In this way Green Eggs and Ham harkens back to the Bhagavad Gita (The Song of the Lord), one of the great classics of Indian spirituality. In the Gita, Arjuna enters into dialogue with his charioteer, who turns out to be none other than Lord Krishna. The dialogue then between Arjuna and Krishna becomes a dialogue between the self and The Lord.

In the Christian tradition, in the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks in the voice of I AM. He speaks directly as God’s mouthpiece in human flesh. In John’s Gospel Jesus declares “I Am the Light.” In John’s Gospel–much like the Bhagavad Gita–Jesus is speaking through a human voice articulating Divine Speech. Jesus is The Word of God Incarnate. The little w words that come out of his mouth are exteriorizations of his interiorized reality as The Word (The Speech, The Utterance) of God. The words Jesus speaks carries the transmission of Divine Consciousness (that transmission being the Holy Spirit). Christian theology speaks of Jesus Christ as The God-Man. In the theology of Green Eggs and Ham we have The God-Sam.

In exactly the same way as both The Gita and The Gospel of John, in Green Eggs and Ham Sam is God, the great I AM, and now the dialogue with Grouchy-Ego takes on a revelatory affair. The entirety of this divine-creaturely conversation revolves around God (Sam) seeking to give a gift of green eggs and ham. Sam is God. Sam desires to give gifts, that is gifts from God (i.e. Theodore or God’s gift remember was Dr. Seuss’ real first name).

Grouchy-Ego clenches his/her/its/their being in response to the Divine Gifts of green eggs and ham, the clenched first being the outward sign of the inward reality of egoic self-contraction.

Grouchy spends almost the entirety of the book turning down God’s (Sam’s) offer of divine food. Sam (God) is unrelenting in seeking to persuade Grouchy to say yes. Many religious and spiritual traditions speak of God as a Lover trying to seduce the individual soul into a Love-Union with God.

For example:

On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads She (Wisdom) takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she (Wisdom) cries out:
‘To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.” (Proverbs 8: 2-4)

Grouchy-Ego however begins a long litany of denying the gifts of Wisdom—Wisdom being another name for the Unnameable Name of God’s Presence immanent in all creation—aka Sam.

On the Nature of Space, Duality

The first set of questions has to do with the nature of space, location, and where precisely might these green eggs and ham be consumed (or not). Sam begins by asking Grouchy if he would like the green eggs and ham “here or there” to which Grouchy famously retorts:

I would not like them here or there/I would not like them anywhere.”

The conditional world arises as a series of binaries. Up or down. Left or right. Here or there. In Buddhism this is known as dependent co-origination. Namely a term, a concept, a thing only has meaning in relationship to another, which itself only has meaning in relationship to another (or others). For example there is no up without down but there’s also no down without up. They are dependent on one another and co-originate.

Same with here and there. There’s no here without there and no there without here.

When Sam asks whether he would like the divine gift of green eggs and ham here or there Sam (God) is inquiring of the ego (Grouchy) whether it wants to receive divine gifting anywhere, within space itself, which is always demarcated by some “here” and therefore some other place being “there.”

Here and there turn out to be the proper arch question. All dualities are plays upon this primary one.

I do not like them anywhere.”

The first realm of closing in on itself for the ego then is space. Grouchy does not want the green eggs and ham anywhere, that is anywhere in space. As Einstein observed space is actually space-time, so Grouchy not only is denying the desire for divine green eggs and ham anywhere but also any-when. No-where and no-when.

The next binary the Sam will explore with Grouchy is nature and (so-called) civilization. Basically the natural-animal organic world versus the human fabricated inorganic world.

The organic/inorganic pairing runs throughout the text:

Would you like them in a house/Would you like them with a mouse?”

Further such pairings are:

Goat/Boat
Rain/Train
Fox/Box

The animals here symbolize community, friendship, and relationality. Food is the primary means of forming community (we’ll return to this point in a moment vis a vis eating with God.) The boat, trains, boxes, houses all speak to the realm of humanity (either domestic or travel-based). The idea here being that the food that unites a community will take place within well structured contexts: homes, boats, trains, etc.

In traditional teaching the human is the summation of the entire creative process. The human includes the physical, the biological/animal, as well as the self-conscious human possibility. Sam (God) is trying to reach the human on any and all levels of its being.

And yet still Grouchy-Ego is having none of it: “I do not like them with a goat, I would not eat them on a boat…I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere.”

Grouchy has denied divine grace through space and time and through all levels of being.

Grouchy’s last sense is the perfect summation:

I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam I Am.”

Full stop. No qualification. I do not like them. Period.

That last half-verse translates of course to: “I do not like them God.”

Which raises a classic theological conundrum for Sam/God. How does Sam/God respond to the free will of it’s very own creation particularly when the creature is denying communion with said Creator?

In process theology2See: http://www.ctr4process.org/publications/audio-video/process-theology-introductory-introduction, flowing from the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, God may only work (so to speak) through persuasion. In this view God may never override the creative free will of all beings. God therefore may inspire, allure, beckon, romance, seduce. God, it may be, pushes the envelope but never (at least according to process thought) overrides the core freedom of any creature.

In just that manner, Sam-God through simply repeatedly offering a gift of food, in ever changing locales, with an ever changing retinue of characters, overcomes the resistance of the ego. Finally Grouchy exasperated, relents and says:

If you’ll let me be/Sam I will try them you will see.”

What now takes place is a revelation, literally an “uncovering.” In the great reversal, Grouchy turns out to love green eggs and ham. Grouchy is no longer grouchy but truly surprised. Surprised by Joy as C.S. Lewis would say. Surprised by the Grace of The God-Sam.

Grouchy immediately proceeds to negate their earlier negations. Whereas before Grouchy would not eat the green eggs and ham on a boat or with a goat, on a train or in the rain, in a box or with a fox, now Grouchy will. Grouchy will eat them in a house, with a mouse and will eat them here and there. Lo and behold, Grouchy will eat green eggs and ham everywhere.

In the world of dualistic samsara (prior to awakening) the pairs of existence create suffering. They are always built out of desire and revulsion, likes and dislikes. We want to be successful but not failures or we seek to be happy but not sad and by always seeking one side rather than another we perpetuate endless suffering.

But in the great reversal of awakening everything comes back into view as radiance. Grouchy experiences redemption by eating the green eggs and ham and in that redemption the world undergoes sanctification. The world of boats and goats, boxes and foxes, a house and mouse, all these become expressions of divine radiance in light of the deep surprise and joy Grouchy experiences by tasting the delicious green eggs and ham.

In nirvana, samsara ceases to be samsara but becomes nirvanic.

By eating the green eggs and ham Grouchy basically sees the world through the eyes of Sam, which is to say the eyes of God. And God’s eye are Love, they see everything in The Light of Love. Which is why Grouchy would eat the green eggs and ham (and remain in a deep start of joy) anywhere. For God is all-wheres and every-wheres.

The green eggs and ham then are divine sacraments, they are according to the logic of the story, the food of the gods (or rather God). The green eggs and ham function very much like the bread and wine of the Catholic mass. The green eggs and ham are a food one consumes and in so doing one communes with the god (or rather God). When Grouchy eats the green eggs and ham Grouchy finally enters into true relationship and communion with Sam, who is after all God. Grouchy has finally embraced God’s Gift. The green eggs and ham are the means, the medium, the physical tangible, consumable reality of the divine offering. They are the sacramental means of entering into devotional relationship with God, not unlike ceremonially drinking the ayahuasca brew and thereby communing with Mother Aya herself. Or again eating and drinking the presence of Christ which is communicated through and as and with the bread and wine.

All that is to say that the green eggs and ham are a divine sacrifice. In the ancient understanding a divine sacrifice was a meal held by a god (or gods) at which humans were invited. Divine sacrifices in the ancient world were joyous occasions. In our world spiritual sacrifice has become a dismal, puritanical, even grim affair. Spiritual sacrifice to us means having to cut off some part of ourselves and send it away to appease some vengeful deity.

But in the ancient world a sacrifice was a celebratory meal shared with a deity. It was a feast, typically involving food and drink. A portion of one’s harvest or perhaps a piece of a slaughtered animal were burnt on fire as a gift to the god(s). So in one sense it was true that the sacrifice was a gift from the human side to the spiritual realm. It was just as, if not more, true however that the god was seen as offering the food to the humans. The sacrifice was then the gift of the god(s).

Sam sacrifices, that is Sam offers green eggs and ham. The only thing Grouchy has to “sacrifice” is his reluctance to trust, their closed off-redness and posture of outright rejection. What Grouchy gains in return is the loss of an identity as Grouchy and a transformation into joy.

As Divine Realty incarnate, Sam reveals the Path of Wisdom. Sam, as God, offers words of Wisdom. Sam offers the way of Life. Sam also offers the bread of Wisdom or rather the green eggs and ham of Wisdom.

Green Eggs and Ham then is a revelation. Under the guise of a children’s story (which it of course also is) the Divine Voice speaks. This Divine Voice of Wisdom engages us in a dialogue-with the unnamed character standing in for all of us (Everyperson).

In the face of such grace, all that is left for Grouchy (and us) to say is:

I do so like green eggs and ham,
thank you, thank you,
Sam I Am.”

Thanks be to the God Sam.

References   [ + ]

You Keep the Marvel Alive: Three Poems

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Surrender the Life

It isn’t you behind the veil
that your mother wore so well,
that keeps the flies away. It doesn’t
succeed in hiding your porcelain face,
in the way that lace inevitably masks

only a portion of one’s vision at a time. This
variation, this betrayal of ancient melody
is out of mind, but not out of rhyme, not yet,
not entirely. Time rolls away with precision;
a craftsman’s greatest work doesn’t creak

or snap from the increase
of pressure. You, however–you knob along
in large curds. You belong two-hundred feet
from where you stand, no matter where
your seat. Here, he says, lifting his

comically large white candle, light the way.
You have already ballooned. Twice, now,
you have clotted your way out of a promise.
There are hearts in museums less gunked-
up than you. Still, we only catch the faint

brush of light from your tear as it appears
and then vanishes behind the knit rose
dancing in front of you. The tail behind you
is endless– it thrusts you forward, into
a molded life of pointed windows and pain.

You asked for a fast catastrophe, for a kiss
that lasts decades. That vow is bone-
dry and left half-buried. White flag, I wave
to you; when your colors finally bleed,
they will turn your lips a very serious pink.

Terra

What else could be said here
–the grass is kept short, the old gutters
clear as quick rivulets, dishing out rust
in flakes to the fish; vacancy is more

than an empty word. This crispness,
this color of ether, meandering from
ripe to rotten, fills your open mouth
with laughter. You can feel it coming,

that approaching sterility; from what
prehistoric land does it hail? When
primordial birds, legs like helicopter
blades, toppled over the rolling slopes

in search of larger, more useful arms;
when bees were not quite as small
as these? That one surveys the abandoned
house, abandoned, not by him like we thought,

but by children who had outgrown their taste
for snails and butterscotch. The deepest, most ancient
metaphors are much like this; a moment that is
only a moment, and only for a moment.

It’s death means nothing to the blue
and luminous sky, even if it means a great deal
to you (and your honeyed, hopeful eye).
You keep the marvel alive. You see magic

in the lowest of places. You always double-
knot your long, brown shoelaces. There was
a good reason we gave this place a name,
and it is a miracle we have not forgotten it.

Only in other languages could the word
“dirt” sound so beautiful. Be prepared to go
mining when chasing a dream, for they lie
buried beneath us like ancestors and ingots.

If gold is coveted, it is not because of its sheen;
it is due its natural inability to rot. “Please, do not
step on the grass.” “No diving.”
—this is how they stop you from living.

Second Skin

I watched the bickering vultures
scatter awkwardly from the carcass
that remained, half body half
snow. I slid into its open torso,
filled its limbs with my limbs
and its face with mine, and I walked
behind the scavengers like the ghost
of a family meal. After twenty years
of tasting blood in every sip of stream,
the soft mound finally took hold;
I had vanished behind the eyes
of a frozen beast. I bayed, I bucked.
I twitched my ears at the sound
of snapping twigs. Nature had taken
the inedible and swallowed it whole.
I grew tired of aimless rotations.
I fell asleep in a quiet place, and soon
the bouncing buzzards returned
to rip me out through the belly
and leave me there, half body half
snow, for some other creature
to call home.

How to Live in the Future (Part One)

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I’m going to spoil it for you: how to live in the future is by being present, here and now. But then, it’s not that simple.

What we call “the future” isn’t something out there to be held. It’s an idea that varies drastically between us, and between each one of us one moment to the next. A better way of thinking of the future than as though it’s some approaching comet is to think of it as our horizon to the “West” of now, a moving point of reference that everyone sees differently, depending on where we are standing. Consequently, most of what we call “the future” tells us more about where we are now than where we’re headed. Things are never all that clear from far away, and there’s no guarantee we’re moving toward that point and not some other.

So when the futurists, the real ones, speak of “futures,” what they mean is that there are a myriad of points along that far horizon, and that it makes better sense to talk about the future as a spectrum of potentials than as if it were the preordained and manifested destiny the corporations and the prophets want us to believe.

I have this thing about imagining the landscape of experience in geographic metaphor (example: I just caught myself describing the lump sum of everything we know in life as “landscape”). Our human memories grew out of neural networks that help orient an animal to landmarks (ironically, originally “watermarks,” as this was going down in ancient oceans) – so it’s no surprise that math explores the n-dimensional, or that most human cultures think of “future” as a thing in front and “past” as something back behind us. We don’t visualize time the way we visualize space, unless you’re with me in the radical perspective that time and space are somewhat meaninglessly differentiated, time is space and space is time, and calendars are close-to-accurate reflections of the way time spreads invisibly across the warp and woof of hyperspace.

(I recently discovered that I’m one of 1-in-50 people that has “time-space synesthesia” and reflexively, habitually sees the year in some consistent pattern in my mind’s eye. I am always standing on a giant ring, December/January at the 12 o’clock divide, July and August there at 6 o’clock, and as I write this now I’m moving counterclockwise through the year somewhere around 1:30, since it’s 17 November. This 3D projection doesn’t handle multiverses, parallel dimensions, linear progression, any of that – it’s an idiosyncratic system, opposite of how I learned to read a clock, but totally persistent. This is how I store my recollections: looking up or down the ring, the annum, not exactly a mnemonic “memory palace” but nonetheless a spatial system for organizing and referencing experience. I was not at all surprised to learn the hippocampus grew from some fish proto-GPS.)

When I attempt to visualize “the future” as I learned to think of it in childhood, I see the image of a silvery, metallic, shifting sphere – presumably, the boundary of some 4D portal casting shadows into the mere three dimensions that my pitiable primate eyes can see. Whether this is my enculturated mind presenting something physics experts tell me is the probable appearance of a window into other times; or whether it’s a genuine prophetic third-eye vision of the portal through which we can gaze at all of our innumerable futures; or it’s allegory and the image represents the Noöspheric nanotech that wraps our planet in a skin of thinking mercury; or I am actually observing my own body from the point of view of someone living in the future, someone who has cybernetic eyes and sees the spherical magnetic field projected by my heart, I do not know. Perhaps it’s all of these.

Perhaps that is the point: that our above/below and inner/outer dyads do not serve us in “the future” and the meaning of this image is that time tends toward holistic, holographic, fractal, and recursive incarnations. That the evolutionary arc defined by entropy assembling organisms as a means for moving energy effectively through space results in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Omega Point,” indeed, but that it is already so, the One Thing That We All Already Are just organizing its internal organs to present an ever-clearer and more luminous arrangement on one side, and that’s why New Jerusalem appears in revelations of the “end of time” and our Big Bang mythology so closely imitates the scene of Hell. That all of this is happening at once (that’s what the current state of science seems to tell us, anyhow) and all the psychonautic maps of glass chrysanthemums and god’s-eyes, portals and glass onions, are the intuitions of this universal truth: that we are wound up hyperspherically, precipitating in a giant goldfish bowl with all the other stars and interstellar dust, which we observe as if it were a string of pearls, one moment to the next, but really it’s the whole damn thing at once, a party more precisely than a great parade.

This is why I think that “future equals East, past equals West” when I imagine time along the spinning axis of a shape I only dimly grasp, which simultaneously is the world outside and also me, my eyes the fire projecting shadows of imagination on the cave walls of my unborn and undying consciousness.

The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its own vortex, and when once a traveler through Eternity has pass’d that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind his path, into a globe itself unfolding like a sun…”
– William Blake

∞

Read Part Two

Notes on Wallace Stevens and Animism

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Wallace Stevens’ poem “A Postcard from the Volcano” is a beautiful meditation on matter and memory. It brings to mind the philosophy of Henri Bergson. The poem suggests the existence of memory in inanimate objects. Or more precisely, it proposes a conception of memory that has nothing to do with “information” contained in the mind. Memory must rather be imagined as expansive, extended, material, atmospheric. It is memory that contains us, not we who contain memories. The past is a presence.

The poem’s narrator is reflecting on the mansion in which he lives and plans to die:

We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is …

In the future, the narrator muses, the house as an entity will include all he has said and thought about it. Which is to say that the experiences through which an object manifests to us are constitutive of the object itself as an autonomous entity. Objects take shape in experience (human experience being just one variety), but they do not exist “within” our experience, “within” us as subjects; rather, each experience of an object expands that object, allows it to express its being, objectively.

All of the elements that make up the mansion exist on their own, experienced or not: Stevens is no idealist. But the elements can only constellate as a mansion — a homely one for the narrator, a haunted one for the children of the future — through encounters with human beings who are themselves similarly constituted.

In other words, all things substantiate themselves in encounters, in meetings, as Martin Buber wrote. It is through human experience that a house learns to be a house, that it learns to be homely or haunted as the case may be, just as it is through the strange sentience of the house that we become home-dwellers, which is to say human beings. A person coming upon a house is an encounter, but it is an encounter between equals at the primal level.

A new house feels cold and dead because, as an object, it hasn’t yet learned to be a house. It is a house in form only, which is to say a design, an intellectual ideal, the concept of a house given material consistency. When we say that a house feels lived-in or homely, we are saying something about the house itself, not just about our impression of it. The house has come to life as a house; it knows itself as a house. It has a genius loci, a spirit of place, indistinguishable from it.

Later, having been abandoned and then occupied anew, the mansion in the poem will hold as part of its being all of the memories formed in conjunction with it. My guess is that nine times out of ten, this is what we mean when we speak of ghosts. “Children,” Stevens writes, “[will] speak our speech and never know,”

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls …

The mansion confronts the children with all of its past that is real and, in a sense, ever-present. Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining reveals this with a force equal to Stevens’ poem in the form of the Overlook Hotel.

the-shining-the-shining-16869394-700-530

“Orders from the House, Mr. Torrence.”

Upshot: there is no interiority. Belief in interiority, in private unextended subjectivity, is a modern conceit. It is a human attempt to reclaim the centre that humanity once imagine it occupied. In fact every private feeling, every “mental impression,” is an objective material event. Matter is spiritual. Matter is a thinking substance through and through. Everything is alive. “All things shining.”

∞

This was originally published on J.F. Martel’s blog, Reclaiming Art.

Keeping Faerie Close: Folk Belief as Collective Memory

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Anytime that is ‘betwixt and between’ or transitional is the faeries’ favorite time. They inhabit transitional spaces: the bottom of the garden, existing in a space between manmade cultivation and wilderness. Look for them in the space between nurture and nature, they are to be found at all borders and boundaries, or on the edges of water where it is neither land nor lake, neither path nor pond. They come when we are half-asleep. They come at moments when we least expect them; when our rational mind balances with the fluid irrational.” – Brian Froud [1]

In the myriad alternative spirituality movements that are experiencing an influx of energy and interest these days, there has been a lot of discussion on reintegrating a respect for the numinous within nature. That we could go, at least in some way, home again to where we once came from—the oceans of grasslands, the woods, the creeks, the lakes. These are deep memories that each individual carries an echo of inside of themselves, that we are animals, that there is a wildness in us that cannot be rejected or forgotten, that these things are not evil or wrong, but when embraced give us the ability to harmonize the best of our abstract ideals and desires with the groundedness of embodied experience.

Whether one experiences Faerie as archetypal or actual energetic manifestations of Nature, they represent to us a bridge between the physical and the divine spheres, the world of humanity and the world of true creation, of origin. It is a grim irony the more we lose our connection to the primal, natural state–often described as “animalistic”–we actually lose more and more of our own humanity. To be grounded in the earth gives us the means to grow towards the sky. Yet part of our fall into civilization has meant losing those psychic roots that are in and of the trees. The folk beliefs our ancestors held about Faerie may be a reflection of the ways in which we are violating the sacred trust of our origin. These beliefs and stories, seemingly absurd, are mirrors to ourselves, where we came from. What Faerie rejects, perhaps, is what at least some part of our psyche, the wild part of us, longs to be free from as well. Understanding the folk beliefs of Faeries can give us insight into how humans understand our own liminal state between the animal and the angel, which, in essence, is what a Faerie is.

The British Isles lends us some interesting examples of what Faerie rejected and what it embraced. If a housewife wanted to attract a Faerie helper to her farm, she might put out a bowl of milk with honey. And yet should she want to keep Faeries away, she might hang an iron bar or horseshoe over the doorway. Faeries were understood to hate iron. Iron was not something understood as having arisen organically in Nature–created by humanity, it was considered something like an aberration to the world of Nature and Faeries would shrink from the sight of it.

Thomas Maybank, “The Court of Faerie,” 1906.

Some stories relate that a helper Faerie might become well beloved by a family of farmers, and, noticing that it wore no clothes, the woman of the household would sew a set of clothes for it. This would inevitably enrage the Faerie, who would leave the service of the home and may kill a few cows or sheep before they moved on. But why? The common understanding was that Faeries were prideful beings who were insulted by the idea that whatever they were wearing, or not wearing, wasn’t good enough for humans. But I think there’s more to it than that–like iron, clothing was a creation of humanity, something that did not occur in Nature. Faeries weren’t just rejecting these things out of pride, but as a reminder of our own origins as creatures of the woods.

Another supposedly effective deterrent for Faeries was, of course, religion. Crosses, holy water, and just the mere presence of a Priest was said to make Faeries flee. The belief in Faerie predated Christian Britain, but Faeries were slowly absorbed into its understanding as something akin to demons. The natural world in general was considered sinful and fallen, so the purest manifestations of this world would inevitably be considered such as well. And yet it could be argued that Faeries again were not evil beings fleeing from symbols of good but beings of nature fleeing from a distortion, an aberration. The patriarchal, top down hierarchy of that form of Christianity was the same as the iron, the clothes–something seen as grotesque and wrong by the denizens of Nature.

Indeed, it wasn’t as often that men got kidnapped and brought to the land of the Faerie. Faeries much more often would take children and young women and never bring them back. It was children and women who were the victims of civilization as it had been designed by men, where they had few rights and freedom of expression. In Faerie, these women and children could be eternally happy and blissful with these beings, who treated them well, like one of their own. In a way, it was Faerie that was their true home, and not the “world of men” that, in that age, seemed to hurt them far more than anything else. Children and young women were thought to be innocent and pure, their connection to the harsh realities of civilization more tenuous than men, and yet far more likely to suffer by its hand. In some ways, their kidnapping could be seen more as a rescue. Unlike the realities of the world of civilization, in folklore it was much more common for greedy men to be punished by Faerie than rewarded. A man seeking out the treasure of Faerie without any regard or respect could find himself trapped, tricked, or worse. There’s a sense of justice to these stories that was probably lacking in the day to day lives of the storytellers–often older women–who related them. A justice that repaid this patriarchal society for all of the harm it had done to the energies of the Feminine, both to the creative matrix of Nature and in the lives of ordinary women.

Image-Dadd_-_Fairy_Feller's

Richard Dadd, “Fairy Fellers’ Master Stroke,” 1855-64.

Understanding this, we can see the continued folk belief in Faerie was the “keepsake box” of old beliefs of ecological and proto-feminist justice that was passed down for generations even under the crushing weight of the destruction of natural habitats and the dehumanization of women. Faerie kept the doorway open to a better world where those things were remembered, cherished, and defended, even if it was only in stories. Because of the commitment of the storytellers across cultures to keep these memories alive, they planted the seeds for those stories to grow into realities in the hearts of the children that heard them, even if it was a slow, steady growth like a tree. Now that we seek to create this world for our own children, it’s important that we don’t delegitimize Faerie as something flippant and trivial, just glitter and decorations for birthday party favors. We should seek out these stories and reexamine them critically, find their meaning and the truths that were hidden inside them, find a place for Faerie in our spiritual landscape once again, and treasure deeply and earnestly the eternally untameable within nature, within womanhood, and within each of us.

Notes

[1] See Brian Froud, Good Faeries, Bad Faeries.

Revealing the Culture of the Current: an Interview with Conner Habib

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Editor’s Note: As I’ve recently stated elsewhere, Conner is a man of many hats: philosopher, esotericist, writer, gay porn star. He has spoken widely about subjects like sex worker advocacy, gender and culture, occultism, and the evolution of consciousness. We talked about his upcoming workshop, “The Culture of the Current,” (starting next Sunday, July 31st), and discussed how art, imagination and emergent thinking can help us tackle the challenges confronting us in this complex historical moment.

Jeremy: I’m very drawn to what you’re implying in the description for your workshop. It speaks to our deepest anxieties and hopes right now, doesn’t it? Corrupt powers are consolidating into global behemoths of themselves just as new, revolutionary, political forces and conversations are taking hold. Amazing technology surrounds us, but we’re filled with that creeping anxiety, the dread of living at the edge of a cliff—in our case, the Anthropocene, climate change, etc. The glass is half-full and half-empty, collapsing into a singularity. A new world seems entirely plausible and yet it often feels like we’re about to implode before we get there.

It’s hard to keep this all in your head at once. Especially in your mentioning that some of the very structures of our reality, things we take for granted in modern society, like representative governments and even “religious impulses” are “relics” crumbling in the face of an entirely new way of doing things. So, I might start out by asking you the most preliminary of questions. It’s the big question we’re exploring here at Metapsychosis. How do we even begin to think about all this? What does that kind of thought even look like?

Conner: A kind of downward spiral can happen when you approach the state of the world: The disastrous US election! Mass shootings! Police Brutality! Taken alone, they’re bad enough, but they can build and build until you feel utterly overwhelmed and helpless. So as for how to begin, there are two ways: One is kicking and screaming, which is the tendency (and the one that many people and institutions in power feed on), the other is with some clarity. So that’s how we begin, or how not to begin. We don’t begin with fear, and we understand that whatever is happening is necessary for and even, perhaps, asked of us in this moment. That’s the foundation. If you can’t dispel the fear entirely (and who can?), you notice it, and let your thoughts run parallel to it rather than letting it intrude so much.

Then, one by one, you examine the phenomena. Not just with data — although of course data can be useful — but with an eye for patterns. These might be patterns in the phenomena themselves; for instance, that activist movements such as identity politics movements and Occupy both have profoundly important messages of resistance. It’s clear through them what is being resisted. But alternative positive politics are not articulated in them (that doesn’t make either of these movements lesser movements, by the way; it’s just an observation of what they are). Or there may be patterns in yourself; the expression and limits of your feeling and empathy during crisis events, for example. Why should I feel deeply moved when certain events happen, but not others? Where is that framework coming from? The individual is everyone’s starting place, so it’s ridiculous to look at world events without inquiring into the self, and vice versa.

Which thinkers have contributed to your thought? You’ve got a few listed on your event page, like the biologist Lynn Margulis, and the anthropologist Bruno Latour. I’m interested to know how they helped to develop your ideas.

Lynn was my mentor and like a second mother to me, and I owe some of what I’ve already said to her. She studied two things, really: bacteria and earth systems. And she studied how they intersect. In other words, her view was both microscopic and planetary. Lean forward, stand back. As above, so below. So her perspective and approach was as helpful to me as the content of her work (which was also mind-blowing).

The anthropologist Bruno Latour and some of his colleagues have brought me a long way to understanding how important experience is. Since anthropologists have to take experience seriously, they are, in some ways, the foundation of all other sciences, because all science springs from human sense and experience. Of course, it’s not just my own experience that I need to take seriously, but the reported experiences of others. You can’t just dismiss someone else’s sufferings, desires, beliefs, etc as stupid or “un-evolved.” Anthropology had a tough time with that in the beginning, but has caught up with itself in many ways. But it’s even more than that. Anthropology insists we question our own beliefs and experiences and prejudices, not just of political concepts or whatever, but of reality itself. You have to (here’s a fun academic buzzword, but I think it’s really useful) decolonize your mind; Latour’s particular emphasis is in decolonizing our minds from the phony objectivity claims of scientism. You have to undo yourself to come close to anyone else. What would that mean in encountering not just the indigenous person, as anthropologists are typically thought of doing, but the religious fundamentalist? The Trump supporter? What might you learn if you engaged with them seriously? Anthropology is the science of compassion and real engagement.

I’m glad you picked out these two thinkers to ask me about, since, if I’m going to try to figure out what’s going on in the world, Lynn’s macro/micro perspective — and more importantly the tension between the two — as well as real listening and inner decolonizing, are key.

How does spirituality, or mysticism underpin all of this for you?

Spirituality underpins everything I do. The culture of materialism and consumerism is a specific kind of spirituality, after all, and it’s played a huge part (though it’s not wholly to blame) in getting us where we are now. To keep moving and changing, we’ll have to readdress our spiritualities, even if it’s the spirituality of not having a spirituality.

Does art, or imagination, play a role in this new way of thinking?

Yes, especially fiction and poetry. Poetry is obvious to me: Poetry is a refusal of the world, particularly the names of the world and everything in it, as it is. Poetry demands things be said on new terms, on the terms of the poet first, and then the reader. A poet does not have to accept that a table is a table, they exercise understanding of that object as a relation to their own individuality, and write accordingly. Poets have been saying this for a long time, though not enough people have listened.

Fiction is important, though I wasn’t always so sure why. Once Daniel Pinchbeck asked me what role I thought novels had in the upcoming world (this was before 2012, of course), because he couldn’t see any. He thought — back then, at least — that they were a distraction. I love fiction, but it took years and years for the answer to arise. Now I see clearly that it cultivates compassion and vision. When I read, I have to co-create the world using the symbols in front of me, and in fiction, those symbols are of a non-existent world.

Co-creating the world with the symbols laid out in front of us: What could be a better description of what is needed right now? We need to see what’s before us, learn to read it, internalize it, and then create it by combining it with our individuality. Fiction that pushes on the boundaries of the real is what is most instructive, since what is “real” and “possible” is basically owned by people in power. So we need to start our training in the impossible. As soon as, um, possible.

Was Rudolf Steiner saying something about the Culture of the Current in his own way?

Rudolf Steiner, as your readers probably know, was a late 19th—early 20th Century philosopher, scientist, mystic, etc. He created biodynamic farming, Waldorf schools, and more, directly out of his spiritual-scientific worldview. He wasn’t a prophet, but he had plenty of warnings for us about our time, which was his future. His idea was that the world was going to be slowly permeated by the influences of something called Ahriman. Steiner thought of Ahriman as a literal being, and I think that’s a good way to consider him. But to describe in totally secular terms: Ahriman names the vast realm of materialistic impulses. The dependence on technology, the dampening of feelings, the belief that love is just chemicals in the brain, the idea that we’re biological robots. I mean, he pretty much nailed it long before these ideas were popularized. Not a bad warning. The thing he also said about the age of Ahriman is something I take to heart and that is present in my course: there’s no way to stop Ahriman from coming. There’s no way to stop these impulses from growing and growing. They will do so on their own, with or without our consent. What matters instead is how we meet these impulses. How do we move with them, and eventually redeem them?

Thank you, Conner.  

∞

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Readers, do check out Conner Habib’s upcoming online workshop, “The Culture of the Current,” (starting this Sunday, July 31st) where you’ll be able to unpack a lot of what was shared in this interview through in-depth conversation and collaborative study.

Check out Conner’s homepage and follow him on Twitter.

Coda – A Short Film of Life and Death

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I found this beautiful animated gem as a randomly generated suggestion for my Youtube account. The Irish have always had a unique, thoughtful, and sometimes humorous relationship with death, so it comes as no surprise that this portrait of the psychopomp comes from artists from the Emerald Isle. Many of us never feel as if our time here is enough. What would you wish for more of in your last moments?

 

Subterranean Chambers

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A part-time producer from Johannesburg, South Africa, Crystalis is pretty much unknown. His work is what today’s hipsters like to term “underground,” and to some extent this can be considered a good thing. His sounds are the kind that you keep to yourself, and don’t share with anyone. Crystalis mixes elements and features from just about any genre you can think of with his own unique style. While he is still rather young at producing, the evolution from one track to another and technical progression is obvious.

“To Thee Homage”: Planetary Intensification

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Philip K. Dick remarked that the right series of words could destroy you [1]. It’s also true, I feel, that the right combination of light, sound and vision could recreate you. In the electronic surround of social media, the right link could function as a portal—a virtual hierophany—breaking through slogging clickbait to confront you with an encounter with the bonafide Other. This video, “To Thee Homage,” is one such slipstream. It pulls at you with its felt presence. Perhaps it’s the subject matter, that is the “Matrimandir” or “Universal Mother”; a building that functions as the “soul” of the budding city called Auroville [2], intended to be a “living laboratory” for the esoteric experiment of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa. They called their spiritual practice “Integral Yoga” and intended it to be something other than religion as we know it.

So, what is it about this video? I have never visited Auroville, located in Pondicherry, India, but I intuit the sense from this and other images that Matrimandir isn’t just some strange architecture that catches the eye, merely a distraction from the digital mundane, but an interruption from the conception of human culture as we have known it. The philosophical and spiritual message of Sri Aurobindo’s work had been about latency; about unfolding futures and the planetization of human consciousness. Places that explore this future function are “living laboratories”, what William Irwin Thompson called “planetary demes”. Mutational spaces where innovation and social intensification could take place. These demes, according to Thompson, extended beyond Auroville to be bound up with Findhorn, Esalen Institute, the Lindisfarne Association and many others to do the messy, laborious work involved in imagining something beyond civilization. In Darkness and Scattered Light, Thompson refers to these kind of places as meta-industrial villages:

The metaindustrial village is such a deme; it is a place in which the four cultural forces are completely expressed. [The planetization of nations, the decentralization of cities, the miniaturization of technology, the interiorization of consciousness.] The metaindustrial village is a turn on the spiral back toward the preindustrial village, but it is not the preindustrial village; for with electronics, complex informational flow on a global level, and higher states of consciousness from a contemplative education, it is not a return to the “idiocy of rural life.” [3]

I could argue these mutational wellsprings are needed more than ever in our time. They take on a new form, presently—sublimated into distributed efforts, much like the structure of the web itself. This is an intensification. Most important for this phase of experimental culture building is the necessity to interiorize these ideas and bring them with us into our networks. Into the multitudes that make up the body of a world bursting at the seams and breaking open at the edges of the Anthropocene. Maybe through watching this video—uncanny iconography for our LCD screens— we can take something back into our hearts that just might evoke the spirit of Matrimandir, to allow us to relate to each other differently in our local, global, planetary efforts.

Do you feel it? Does this video pull at something hidden within you?

Notes:

[1] See Philip K. Dick, VALIS.

[2] See “Building Matrimandir, a labor of love”

[3] See William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light

[4] Check out the wonderful documentary on Auroville, “Journey to the City of Dawn“

Benjamin, Literacy and the Stars

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Editor’s note: Jenn Zahrt, fellow Metapsy author and publisher at Rubedo Press, is hosting a new course with Kepler College. “Benjamin, Literacy and the Stars” explores the lesser known role that astrology played in German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre.

Benjamin’s classic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” as well as the part-philosophical, part-theological literary fragments collected in popular anthologies like Illuminations, are well established as foundational contributions to the body of work known as “critical theory” (as well as our own literary venture here at Metapsychosis). Few knew, the editor-in-chief included, Benjamin’s thoughts on astrology and how pivotal the tension between astrology versus astronomy played in voicing the bifurcating pressures of the 20th century.

∞

In his work, Walter Benjamin returns again and again to a stellar or cosmological spatiality as perceived by humans to theorize language as well as create his critical concept of the dialectical image. In this way, he sublimates an astrological way of reading into a broader form of cultural interpretation. While his direct writings about astrology surface in 1932 and 1933, an astrological hermeneutics suffuses his work – as early as 1918 with his research into German tragic drama and allegory and all the way to the Arcades Project (specifically in Konvolut N), which he left unfinished before his death in 1944.

For Benjamin, the figure of the astrologer serves as an index of a specific type of reader, who synthesizes information and reveals a mimetic affinity which is no longer directly legible to other readers. Writing can only ever contain traces of an experiential mode of reading, what critic Irving Wohlfarth has referred to as “reading what was never written.”

Benjamin’s attraction to early modern signification practices, wherein baroque allegory unhinged the dominance of symbol and symbolized, was related to the tensions and anxieties surrounding reading and meaning production in his own time. Moreover, his concern with technologies and their effects on the creation and consumption of culture gain new valence when his work is viewed against the astrological mode of reading. What emerges is a discussion that wanders through experience and image, imagination and interpretation, and generating contexts of stimulating gnosis rather than rote replication of analogies and information.

We have no evidence that Benjamin himself practiced astrology, but we would be misreading his work and missing critical pieces of his philosophical contribution, if we ignore the nuances he found in the philosophies of astrological reading and how he engaged with them to develop his own theories of cultural production. In the academy, many who read are not taught how to read astrologically, so when they read Benjamin, they overlook what they have not been taught how to see. My course at Kepler will seek to remedy this oversight.

The Culture of the Current: A Workshop for Facing the World We Live in Now

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Conner Habib is a man of many hats, but if there’s one thing he’s been at the forefront of,  it’s been his sharp, philosophical appraisals of the cultural pulse of Western civilization. I first discovered Conner through our mutual interests in the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, and the late biologist and Lindisfarne fellow Lynn Margulis (known well for her work on symbiogenesis and her collaboration with James Lovelock on the Gaia Hypothesis). Conner has recently put together a four-part online workshop, “The Culture of the Current: A Workshop for Facing the World We Live in Now.” It’s kicking off Sunday, July 31st.

Reflecting on the development of his class, he writes:

One of my great ambitions is to create new models of education that work in and are relevant to the world we live in. To be honest, I was always a little afraid to construct my own long-term course. But after years of work, I’ve finally gathered the vision and confidence to do it. The Culture of the Current is my in-depth, intimate, interactive, and network-creating online workshop on creating a politics and theory of the present day. The description below will lay it all out for you (and I’ve included some photos of thinkers whose work I’ll be drawing on). It’s limited to only 20 participants and it’s going to be great. So read the description below and sign up here. Onward!

Many of the points on Conner’s workshop page align strongly with what we’re doing here at Metapsychosis, creating a platform for conversations to take place around said “culture of the current.”  So, read the event page and consider grabbing yourself a virtual seat for the workshop  (who wouldn’t want to take a workshop where Latour, Steiner, and Margulis are drawn from, together?).

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Introducing Microdoses

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The time has come dear readers. “Microdoses” is our latest addition to Metapsychosis, featuring short creative pieces, multimedia art, literary fragments, micro-rants, tiny manifestos, etc. Get your kicks with our first lineup of publications including a gallery from artist Digital Mack, a spiritual riff on the Auroville video, “To Thee Homage“, ambient drips and drops from the underground by artist Crystalis, and a passage to the beyond with “Coda.” There are a few more up there, and like a microdose, you’ll be receiving more throughout the week.

∞

On the Literary Fragment…

A brief mention, here. The literary fragment has its origins in Romantic poet-philosophers like Novalis, or the critical theorist Walter Benjamin. These are typically shorter pieces—no more than a few paragraphs—which nevertheless distill a tremendous amount of thought, reflection, or creativity for the reader. We’d like to humbly imagine that what we’re enacting here— actively resisting our tendency to write essays and treatises and instead attempting to instill insights like messages in a bottle—is continuing the art of the fragment for the digital age. We believe that fragments have a unique potential in digital publishing. Especially with our social-media sized attentions (including yours truly). We want to reach people with tiny tinctures, poetic-philosophical rants, aesthetic arrests. When we put these fragments together, when we gather them up, we come around to another related idea: that of the “florilegium,” (literally translated into “a gathering of flowers”). We’re searching our collective art and idea making for emergent nuggets of combinatorial creativity.

Relaying message; are you receiving?

∞

We’re Coming For Your Facebook Rants

This is where you come in. Send us your Microdoses. The only way to grow our garden is pick good seeds, and you can help us find what’s good out there.

We’re looking at all those people who will publish mind-blowing rants on Facebook, only to have them evaporate in the avalanche of their newsfeed (again, guilty as charged).

We’re here for your rants, your invocations, your manifestos. Bite sized drops of wisdom splattered across social media digiphrenia. Give them homes in the hypertext, the garden of ideas that might just produce some tasty fruits of wisdom.

∞

Submit your Microdoses on our forum, Infinite Conversations, and we’ll see about picking them up, with full credit to you.

A Letter from the Editor

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We’re live. After many months of preparation, design, planning and team assembling, Metapsychosis: Journal of Consciousness, Culture and Planetary Thought has flickered into existence from the digital protosphere.

Our wish is for this publication to flourish from the collective intelligence of its readers, artists, and writers. We dreamed it up, but the dream belongs to everybody. The dream belongs to you.

We wanted to create a space, a literary space, where art could respond to global, technological, and political overload. Where spiritual wisdom could interface with critical thinking. Where knowledge could mutate into an art form. Most importantly, a platform where we could mix and mutate our ideas into emergent conversations about the future; about what it means to relate with another in a planetary context. Our journal asks: what can we become? How might we realize potential futures? Can we do so with both the arts and the sciences? Knowledge-Art?

Surely any kind of change must first occur through the art of conversation, and literature, one might argue, is a form of conversation with its host culture.

Metapsychosis attempts to speak to and with art, facilitate a space where inquiries can be made and critiques brought forth, but also functions as an open studio where experimental acts in creative and philosophical inquiry can yield insight into a systemic and often times overwhelming planetary crisis.

My friend and artistic director (AKA “shadow government“) Marco V. Morelli has provided this video invocation as both an explanation of our project and an expression. Where our descriptions trail off, muse-filled invocations follow…

For my own invocation, I offer a constellating act of starry night, which in an earlier draft became the creative inception for my part in developing the journal.

We’re looking for artists and writers who have a unique sensitivity to intuit latent possibilities in the present. As Radiohead recently put it: “The future is inside us, it’s not somewhere else.” Metapsychosis is interested in working with individuals who have their finger on the cultural pulse, as it were. For this launch week, Kingsley L. Dennis writes about the convergence of digital gnosticism and planetary problem-solving. Vanessa D. Fisher explores the hidden world of gender and sexuality. Ania Chapska exposes our literary senses to the smokey flames of Varanasi. William Irwin Thompson offers that often rare and direct poetry that pierces through the veil of the larger ecology of consciousness into human life.

Joining the Infinite Conversation

Some of you may already be familiar with our platform project, A Theory of Everybody, which dreamed up Metapsychosis as well as its complementary book club, #LITGEEKS: an unusually hardcore book club, a podcast network, Infinite Conversations, and our community forum by the same name. These are all part of one, big, cohesive conversation we’ll be having together about literally everything, and everything literary. As Marco described it, our dream was to put together a “depthosphere” to explore what it means to truly live, create, and survive as a planetary denizen in the 21st century.

We hope you explore this inquiry with us. Infinite Conversations await.

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