Wrapt In Her Wings

2012-01-17T11:35:00.001-05:00

Reading Ulysses

2012-01-04T16:08:00.000-05:00

A teen Joyce phase got me a fraction into it; I think back then I read more of finnegans wake (but not much of that, either). I wasn't going near a class in college or grad school where it was read: those people were annoying. I knew enough about it and was familiar enough with it to think it was one of the great novels in English, maybe the greatest, but now, having finally sailed the odd oceans of Ulysses, I'm thinking: This isn't just a great book. Reading this book might be one of the great experiences you can have as a human being.

Did Robert Anton Wilson proclaim Ulysses "the first psychedelic novel" or did I make that up? Or was it Tim Leary? Wilson's attachment to Joyce's masterpiece always seemed a little precious to me, possibly a micron too "Kiss Me, I'm Irish," but now I feel like a bonehead and see, of course, why Wilson, why Leary, why Jefferson Airplane, why Carl Jung, why even T.S. Eliot grooved on this book. They were psychonauts, people adept in their various ways at navigating mind space, diving below familiar waves and journeying to hidden caves, sunken cities, unheard-of treasures-- like Wilson's renegade submariner in the Illuminatus! trilogy. Wilson, I'm sure, was attracted to Joyce's language, which no matter what you think of Dublin trivia c. 1904 is to most other English writers, even the really good ones, what a space plane is to a Toyota Tundra. I think, though, what really sent Wilson over the moon for Ulysses was its VALIS-like superimposition of mind and matter, its chest-thumping assertion that the world is made of consciousness.

Consciousness creates reality in Ulysses, creates and shapes it via language, and Joyce couches the novel as a series of stylistic games revealing the thin film of "normal," consensus reality-bound thought (often represented by hilariously trite public prose styles) floating atop seas of chaotic, daydreamy mind-stuff. In the narrative, chaos and order struggle for primacy as layers of various characters' and social groups' consciousnesses are superimposed on space-time (sorry, but there's no other way to put it, given Joyce's play with mind, style, reality) and, in turn, shaped by it. Finally, in the climactic, surreal and, yes, psychedelic "Circe" episode, various characters' consciousnesses are layered atop one another in a bewildering, baroque display of such virtuosity that one starts to feel we should date all subsequent English literature from 2/2/22, the date the novel appeared, after seven years of composition.

Ulysses is, then, through its focus on the interplay between matter, mind, and personality, a spiritual novel. Yes, it raps religion: Catholicism, missionary Protestantism, colonial C of E-ism, and, most humorously, Theosophy and occultism come in for an Ali vs. Liston beat-down. Religions are like spoons we use to try to catch the sea, Joyce seems to say (if he's "saying" anything), and the "sea" here isn't God or a higher power or ultimate being; the sea is consciousness, the golden sun of pure awareness that descends to earth as love, as compassion, as caring-- or sinks into mud of attachment, as grabbiness, swinishness, patriotism, Christ-ism, us-ism, violence and stupidity of all kinds. Joyce's sense of outrage towards religion and his tenderness and compassion come out in earlier works, it's true, like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, "Counterparts," and "The Dead," but in Ulysses he gives us Arjuna's vision of ultimate godhead, gives us microcosm and macrocosm all at once in every moment, from Bloom's morning dump to his rescue of Stephen in a David-Lynch hellish brothel to scattered starling thoughts as day and night and mind and self slip into sleep.

It's not for everyone. I can easily see someone being turned off by the wordplay, the allusions, the idea that to enjoy this work of art one should have at one's elbow two or three reference books. I mean, even The Tempest and Moby-damn-Dick don't need a dozen footnotes a page! You'll know if Ulysses is for you the same way you do any book: read a little and see what you think. If you like it, read more and get some crib notes. Only someone who actually lived in Dublin in 1904 could read the novel without them, and even that person would have to be one helluva well-read Dubliner, familiar with world history, religious history, the history of the English language and literature, and of course the history of the Irish struggle for independence.

The good news is, you don't have to know that much about any of these topics to enjoy Ulysses. It's not difficult for the sake of being difficult; Joyce wants you to break into the story, like Bloom and Stephen breaking into the house at two in the morning. By casing the joint and gauging access points and hoisting yourself over the railing, you create a new room in your brain that, TARDIS fashion, takes the fractal shape of Ulysses' meandering ways. Ulysses is one of those engaging (or irritating) works of modernist art that asks us to co-create it. Remember that a) Joyce is a musician and this work needs to be read aloud or listened to, and b) most fiction you've read has presented a cartoon version of the mind, a "stream of consciousness," if any, about as complex and true to life as a dream sequence in an old Hitchcock film.

Joyce, on the other hand, delves into Mind as we really experience it: chaotic, disjointed yet associative, fantasy-prone yet rooted in our hungering bodies; Mind as swirl of sensations, memories, fear, prejudices, quotes, half-formed thoughts and images, shadows, clouds, shimmers. Importantly, though, he takes the narrative beyond individual consciousness to the vast spaces where individual minds meet like rain-rings on a pond, to spaces of collective mind and culture and those of myth. Joyce didn't like Jung's reading of his novel, but at times the novel sounds like Jung wrote it (with help from Mark Twain).

Ulysses is a novel not just about consciousness but about how we become who we are, how centrifugal and centripetal forces mold our mind-stuff into personalities, identities, nationalities, and other -ities of which Joyce was an arch-skeptic. As big a prick as Stephen Dedalus can be, for example, and he rivals Nelson's Pillar, we know why he's that way--and not because Joyce "explains" it to us via flashbacks or exposition, and certainly not because Stephen knows, but because, in a sense more intimate than any novelistic experience I can think of, we have felt Stephen's guilt, his frustration, his anger, his loss, and his subliminal pre-dawn sense that despite it all he's going to win his place in the world or destroy himself in the attempt. That Stephen's quest is simultaneously noble, absurd, self-involved, Christ-like, arrogant, and pitiable gives you a sense of how deeply Joyce is able to portray a character, while at the same time giving his characters full freedom to surprise and disappoint us.

Joyce manages to limn the social, economic, historical, religious, and cultural forces shaping his characters as if he were an anthropologist, but this isn't one of those guilt-trip novels hectoring you about the wrongness of your bourgeois existence. If you were nerdy or felt under-appreciated in your youth, you'll see yourself in Stephen, even as he aggravates you. If you've been a worried, working spouse or parent, you'll see yourself in Leopold Bloom. Joyce judges neither, nor anyone else in the novel. Ulysses is not a book you can put a populist spin on, but every page speaks the gritty marvel of the present moment or the utter preciousness of every human soul (even those belonging to aspiring hangmen, self-righteous priests, and deadbeat dads).

It sure ain't an easy read, but it might be easier than you think. One thing is, a lot of art is done this way now (and we partly have Joyce to thank for the Tarantinos and the Larry Davids and the Lil Waynes). Philip K. Dick is now, at least according to the Spectator, "the most successful writer in Hollywood." As I write this I'm listening to Mos Dub, an album of Mos Def songs that have been remixed on top of old 1970s reggae classics; footnotes, if they existed, would have to catalog the songs originally sampled by Mos Def, the reggae songs that replaced them and the significance of all of the above, plus the slang of the lyrics, their hip hop allusions, and the social, cultural, and political references in them as well, which range from the Vietnam War to--yep, old-school reggae. Multi-layered stuff like this-- non-linear stories, raps based as much on wordplay as on narrative, allusions wrapped in shibboleths wrapped in puns-- is the mainstream now. New York magazine calls Mos Dub "Perfect summer BBQ music."

That's not a comparison I can take too far-- Ulysses is not beach reading. It demands your attention and reading it takes work. The farther you get into the novel, the more of a hobby or obsession it will become. Stay with it and you will find it's one of the funniest books you have ever read, and hands-down the most dazzling. In the movie-review meta-cliché, you will laugh and you will cry, sometimes on the same page. When you're a fifth of the way in, you'll find yourself "hearing" your own thoughts as if Joyce were writing them. When you're about halfway through, you'll finally get the hang of Joyce's style and probably not need the crib notes so much.When you're done, you'll likely feel a sense of relief and a desire to repeat the experience. Like all the greatest art--Beethoven's music, the cave paintings, Chartres-- Ulysses will charge your soul with awe and an ardent gratitude for being alive. Every day is Bloomsday.

What You'll Need

A copy of Ulysses. The Gabler edition is best.
Some background reading in classic English lit: dip into Beowulf, some other medieval stuff, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Bunyan, Samuel Johnson, Addison and Steele, Burke, Gibbon, and some nineteenth-century newspapers and sentimental fiction (Ulysses contains a riff on The Lamplighter). You don't have to be anything like an expert on this stuff but it will help if you can tell various historical prose styles apart.
Read the Wikipedia entry "Irish Home Rule Movement."

Strongly Recommended

The audio book of Ulysses read by Donal Donnelly. Donnelly's reading is almost as much a tour de force as Joyce's writing, and listening to this after you've read a chapter is both enlightening and extremely enjoyable.
The New Bloomsday Book by Harry Blamires. Read these chapter summaries (after you're done with a chapter) and you'll have the pleasure of saying "Hah! That's what I thought was going on!" and, not infrequently, "Oh. That's what happened??"
Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman. These guys tracked down all the easy stuff (biblical allusions, translations of Latin quips) and also trainloads of arcana, like "23 Wicklow Street, on the corner of William Street, where the pork butcher was located" and "Arabic and Mediterranean slang for copulation."
Sheila O'Malley has blogged her way through Ulysses with much wit and insight. Reading her posts will inspire "civilian" readers (non-scholar, non-English major) that they can read and enjoy this novel.
Ulysses: A marked up version color-codes the text according to parameters like "External narrative," "External dialog," "Internal narrative," and the all-important "Fantasy and hallucinations."
Searching for #ulysses on Twitter will lead you to an active community of Joyce readers.

Not Necessary But Really Awesome

James Joyce by Richard Ellman. Word is, this is one of the best biographies ever written, and I'm not arguing. This exemplary work of scholarship humanizes its subject without sensationalizing, and makes a case for Joyce's significance without descending into hagiography. It's beautifully written, offers a staggering level of detail, and provides brief but valuable introductions to Joyce's works.

Sri Daytona Sutra

2011-09-25T12:32:00.002-04:00

Like potter's hands on spun clay, he rests firm on the turning kalpas. Still it's hard to tell: is it they or Shiva that moves, the spinning ages or the helmeted Lord -- master of the wheels of dharma, serene #1 as cars of illusion shark behind him?

Heedless drivers surf the track that dips and rises like rough waves; a few have wiped out already, when steep Turn 3 tossed them four stories down or the Wall accepted their hasty offering. In that sea of heat and din one flinch, one luckless blink ends the game, if not in flames then sudden crush: 160 to nothing in half a second, weight of galaxies punched into a teaspoon.

As the starter's stand sails past once more, Ganesh perches atop waving a blue flag. Shiva checks his mirror, sees the black Fusion cut across his tail-- she's back: red-silk warrior girl, hot fury with flaming fenders. She tries to knife her way between him and the Wall--impossible, suicidal stab. He squints ahead at the gray unfurling road, he can't bother with her--remain in bliss--but she nudges forward, backs off, nudges forward again, keeps coming, coming so close and so fast a touch would smash them both. He guns it, finds a hole, and moves over, rocking on his own forward motion and the tides of her speed.

She's swishing her ass side to side, spoiler ablur, daring him to retake the lead. He feels a stirring: anger? battle thrill? lust? Are these possible for the Lord of Dharma? He should just lay back, let her chase her illusion: he is complete in himself. He lets off the gas a little and inertia tickles his groin. Right then #83 slams past, hurtling into the next turn, bursting the Lord's reverie. Shiva stomps the pedal through the floor.

The grandstands shimmer with waving hands, flags, cans of beer; the crowd is on its feet dancing, cheering the duel -- a cyclone of kazoos, bells, vuvuzelas joins the engines' giant Om in a roar that shudders the roof beams of the cosmos. 83 angles for position like he's sliding in oil, but however swiftly or subtly he tries to edge around the Fusion, she fends him off. It's Kali, then 83, then Shiva into the Superstretch, all other contenders carlengths behind as the stands pulse and writhe with one life, one voice. She's getting away now, pulling so far ahead that Shiva thinks she's doped her gas or welded a nitrous tank in her trunk. The Lord's hands tighten on the wheel.

He rockets to a hand's breadth of the second-place car, eases off-- at this speed, a tap of bumpers could tangle them into jagged flame, wrench them into ruin. He'll dance on 83's tail, psych him out, force him over or into a mistake, into the Wall if that's his fate. Shiva doesn't see her anymore, doesn't see that way up ahead she's had the same idea in reverse-- but no restraint, no care for calm or Lordship. She's doing the one thing you don't do: her foot's off the gas, she's in horizontal free-fall, looking dead still as Shiva shifts his gaze from 83, who, too eager, grazes her, then jerks away in panic, nearly sideswiping Shiva.

He whips out and around 83, half in the grass, wheel in rock-wall grip as, just behind now, she floors it. Cars piling up behind them: 83 t-boned, plowed before a surge of twisting metal as smoke rears up like Vishnu's cobras. Tires, fenders fly; a yellow Dodge vaults porpoise-like over the massing ruin and tumbles away across the infield as, above, the sky pinks with sunset.

A few cars make it around the pile-up, but Shiva isn't worried about them--it's Kali he wants. Not winning, not the checkered flag; order must be restored. Shiva must smooth the waves, must rise above them to take his throne once more in serene Himalayan cool. She's back in front but not for long.

Easy motion, add pressure on the gas, hands firm on the wheel but not locked. He speeds up to catch her as she nears the next turn. The turns are banked 31 degrees, steep enough that drivers coming in too fast climb the track and hit the Wall, and those coming in too slow slide down into other racers or onto the grass. He knows her MO, knows she's going to enter the turn low, edge up the incline, then shoot out faster than she went in.

She slows as the turn looms, he closes the gap between. They go in like beads on a chain: Kali in front, Shiva just behind. He eases up a little as she starts to climb, miming loss of nerve. He has five seconds: give it some gas, climb closer, nudge her fender, then let off and slide down to safety, smoothly accelerating out of the turn as Kali spins out behind him. No other cars near; she'll bang the wall and it'll look accidental and she'll try to right herself and then fishtail and wipe out in the time it takes a yokel in the stands to whoop or sip some beer.

Four seconds: they're neck and neck in the turn: track lights strobe through Shiva's window net, the stands crackle and spark with a hundred thousand flash bulbs. He drifts up, closer; Kali swerves his way in warning. He backs off to psych her out, just enough time now to come back up fast and wallop her. He glances over to begin the assault but the black Fusion fills his window as a cricket bat smacks his solar plexus.

The chest punch wrenches him over and aloft and balls-dropping high, wavering, floating as the car's thin metal catches air, wavering aloft as blood catches up with car mass and threatens to squirt out his eyeballs. His flying car slows, drops, and with spine-crunching thump lands an instant, bounce-whirls, smashed and flying again in skies of lacerating noise. She's with him, must have hit him when he landed; he's hammered to pieces by what must be the ground and the Fusion. Eyes burning and blurring with sweat and smoke, he sees raceway lights and moon spin into streaking sparks as his mind's eye plays a video of their cars locked in tumbling embrace across the track, across the grass, into the night, over all walls and into eternal, black Nothing.

The crowd roars, yawps, wails--not to mourn, not for mirth, not for blood, but because they are here, here now, together, wavelets who rise and flow in matrimonial joy of this night, of moon, of Mom and Dad whose flames light their hearts-- the crowd cries for Now, brief now, now so soon it can't be said, just shivered in like skin.

"Cultivate Grace"

2011-08-26T14:42:00.000-04:00

Narada, in his essential, monumental -- are there adjectives for such a thing?-- Bhakti Sutra, after speaking of the immense blessing of "the company of great souls," advises us to, above all, "cultivate grace."

But, wait. How the heck are we supposed to "cultivate grace"? Isn't grace, by definition, unexpected, unwarranted, and undeserved by worms like you and me? Doesn't grace always already elude our grasp? In mainstream American Christianity it might, but this is bhakti, where we dance with our chosen deity (think about that--) in mutual joy, mutual seduction for some of us, but at the very least: She wants you. She will do anything to get you to Her breast, Her lap, into Her infinite loving arms... but it helps if you're paying attention.

The re-direction of attention is, in fact, the main subject of the Bhakti Sutra; it's a medieval meta-programming manual, as a look at its Spark Notesy Wikipedia entry suggests. Narada depicts the mind as a feedback loop that can either be left alone to spiral ever deeper into obsession with ego and sense objects, or that can be harnessed and repatterned until "God... becomes manifest in the awareness." His formula basically works out to:

Spend more time loving God and singing His/Her/Its praises than doing anything else.
Put real passion and intense emotion into your worship, and worship as frequently as you can, in whatever ways your circumstances permit.
Stop hanging out with people who are fixated on wealth, status, and negative emotions; start hanging out with people who are high on God.
Get picky about who or what you rent your mind to-- the Hare Krishnas pricelessly translate: "One should not find entertainment in news of women, money, and atheists." (More sensitive translators unpack the metonymic "women" as "sex"; for "atheists" you usually see "worldly people," and I've even seen "celebrities"!)

As people like Aleister Crowley and, well, yours truly have demonstrated, you don't have to believe in a deity for this formula to work. Belief, when it comes down to it, matters very little in most religions outside the Abrahamic bubble. To paraphrase a famous guru: do or do not, there is no believe. As the Sufis say, "Beat the dog and the lion will obey," or, more prosaically, discipline your body and your habits and your mind will follow along. DIs at Parris Island don't yell at recruits and call them names and wake them up at 4:00 a.m. because they don't like them; the Corps, like military outfits going back before the Iliad, knows that bombarding the senses and moving the body re-shapes the mind.

Religion itself is not immune from Narada's version of "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Narada urges us to "[Renounce] even the scriptures," for, as translator Prem Prakash puts it, "The great lovers of God leap from the edifice of social consensus and religious identity in order to soar in the sky of God's love. They have rendered unto God what belongs to God, and having found that everything belongs to God, they are unfettered in their minds and hearts." Kali wants everything, including your religion. In sum, Narada maps out a way for us to transform ourselves by love and surrender, demonstrating the great Ramprasad Sen's observation that "The substance of your thoughts becomes the reality" that you experience.

Eventually, Narada says, you'll get to a state where God is all you want to think about and talk about. Your body will literally shiver with delight at the thought of your Beloved; you will cry when you think about Her or when you read the scriptures. Giving things up to Her-- sensual delights, success, the esteem of your peers, anything-- will seem sweeter than gaining these things for yourself. Muggledom is now permanently replaced by a new, Her-centered self-organizing system, a love-spiral that sustains and reproduces itself. As Narada says, "Spiritual devotion is its own fruit," or, alternately translated, "Bhakti begets bhakti." This is all true. It works.

In the life of Jadunath Sinha, author of what is still the only complete translation of Ramprasad into English (and thus the source for most 'versions' on the market), we see the fruit of bhakti and of the company of saints. I just stumbled on an excellent, brief biography of Sinha that spoke to me deeply as a Shakta and as someone who, like Sinha, has walked a labyrinthine spiritual path. It's all the more interesting because Sinha didn't put his spiritual experiences out there for public consumption; his son uncovered them in his diary after the older man's death. Sinha's experiences will sound "paranormal" to some, but they are really the result of his shifting his attention to a parallel realm that is just as real and just as "normal" as this one.

Sinha, particularly late in life when he dedicated himself to spiritual practice, lived part in our world and part in Her world. He was a professor, college administrator, and accomplished scholar who was elected President of the Indian Philosophical Congress -- yet he frequently fell into ecstasies and trances, he saw visions and heard voices, and he interpreted every moment of his life as another step in the dance with Kali. As a young man he had the odd experience of being initiated by a guru simply with one glance, that is, he experienced what in the West we would call a "psychic" or "telepathic" initiation. I myself have experienced drik diksha (the technical term for this) and I can tell you it's quite real and quite unsettling. It isn't "supposed to" happen; it seems as though it should be easy to explain away or recover from, yet one's entire life can change from a single glance and one, it seems, is powerless to alter the fact. Sinha didn't even spend that much time with his guru, meeting him only a handful of times, but he knew this man oversaw his spiritual growth. At times Sinha beheld deities as if they stood in front of him and, like Ramakrishna, his visions went beyond the anthropomorphic to a more refined, esoteric plane: "The entire universe," Sinha wrote in his diary, "became a sea of light-- light, light, moving, surging light."

Sometimes Western skeptics single out such blessed individuals as Sinha, oddly, as examples of a putative deity's ill will. "Why them?" the plaint goes. "What makes them so special? I guess God doesn't care about the rest of us schmoes." No, I would hazard the guess that, as in any other field of endeavor, spiritual practice makes perfect, or near so, and Sinha benefited from a combination of practice, natural ability, and persistence-- the same things that made, say, Richard Feynman a math whiz. Imagine saying to a Dawkinsite, "Why Feynman? Why can't I revolutionize physics!? Why is science so unfair?" Any such person with any sense would tell you that maybe you could; you don't know until you sit down with some calculus and physics books and get crackin'. Don't blame Maxwell if you don't get Maxwell's equations; if you don't turn on the radio, you can't hear the music.

But--

don't get me wrong. Grace can just happen, too, of course. It happens all the time, it falls upon us like luminous snowflakes, as Andrew Harvey saw once while wide awake and sober. It feels like stumbling across that Sinha bio was grace, and really it feels like a lot is grace if I just slow down and breathe deep and get my mind off my current wants and ouches. It's all grace, they tell me. Since I couldn't believe this even if I wanted to, I'm going to keep practicing.

From an Assignment I'm Working On

2011-08-12T15:55:00.002-04:00

--for my writing students. It's a "technology memoir," about their use of and relationship with technology. I don't know why I'm posting this other than my blogger's license is about to be revoked for inactivity. So here's my filibuster 'gainst dispersion and silence--

For example, I have been a music fan my whole life. When I was a college freshman, I had a collection of vinyl albums (uh, maybe look that up on Wikipedia?) that took up a lot of space and weighed a lot. If I wanted to take that music with me on a trip out of town or even to the grocery store, my best bet was to make a cassette tape of each album (look that up, too!), which took at least 45 minutes per tape. There were albums I searched for, for years, just because I’d read a review of them. I had no real idea what they sounded like, since there was no way to listen to song samples unless—you already had the album. Most of the music I liked wouldn’t have been played on the radio in a thousand years, and there was no way other than albums, tapes, or radio to hear new music. I skimmed obscure catalogues and zines and drove to faraway towns, hoping to find new, interesting music, and often did. But then I had to order it via US Mail or haul it home with me. Once I heard from a guy who knew a guy who had an album I was looking for; a meeting was set up in his dorm (by word of mouth—there was no text messaging, and the guy I knew wasn’t sure of the other guy’s phone number. Plus, he’d have to be in his dorm room at the exact time we called—there were no cell phones). Somehow we met and the album was mine.

Now I have 75.3 days of music on my iPod. That’s 1807 hours. 1807 hours of music, 23,497 songs, more than 2000 albums; it would take up 20 linear feet of shelf space in vinyl form and weigh about half a ton. But with the iPod I can plug my 23,000 songs into my car stereo, I can take all 23,000 of them anywhere I go, I can listen to them as I wash dishes, I can bring them to work, much to some of my co-workers’ chagrin, much to the delight of others. My 75 days of music take up less space in my pocket than my wallet or my phone. I can get new albums in seconds by clicking a mouse. I can listen to snippets of thousands of albums on the Web and decide if I like them or not. I can do more music shopping in one day than I could do in a year in 1985.

I know we're supposed to interrogate late-capitalist narratives of technologically-mediated identity and critique the notion of progress and all that stuff, but I'm damn grateful for my iPod!

The Company of Great Souls

2011-06-16T13:49:00.001-04:00

Narada, in the Bhakti Sutra, says that the company of great souls is the most efficacious route to higher consciousness and union with God. We normally interpret this as "you should hang out with saints, gurus, sages, rishis, mahatmas, swamis, aghoris, avadhutas, and other extremely spiritual people."

Such people, of course, are vanishingly rare and tend to reside on the tops of mountains, in cremation grounds, in caves, and at ashrams far, far away. If you're in Calcutta, they're in Kerala; if you're in East Podunk they're in Napa -- "always somewhere else," to quote Terence McKenna on daimonic happenings. I have to agree with Narada that the company of a genuine saint can do more to aid one's evolution in a shorter time than anything else but a direct zap from God, and I have to get down on my knees to Kali Ma (I'll literally do this once I hit "Publish Post") and thank Her and thank Her for the many saints She has allowed me to meet and learn from.

But--

I was driving to school this morning, as I do nearly every morning, singing along with some bhajans on my iPod. It was the song "Radhe Govinda," and I was thinking that Radha, in all her meekness and prim beauty, is scarier than Kali, scarier than all the fierce faces of the Mother, for Radha embodies pure love to the point of total negation of self. She is so devoted to Krishna that She loses Herself in Him, asks nothing from Him but His glance, though She wants so much more. Radha, like Christ, calls us to the Abyss, and I have to steel myself even to sing these beautiful songs to Her; I feel like lightning will strike at the mention of Her name and I will be called on, that instant, to give Kali everything I am, give Her everything I have and want and don't want and everything I can be -- everything I know and love, all of it rushing up, up in a hideous cloud of surrender-smoke.

So I'm thinking all of this and of course my family comes to mind; first and foremost, they are what I do not want to give up, cannot imagine letting go of. I think of my dear, brave step-daughter Molly -- a surpassingly wise soul, a soul who loves with all of her, an artist of astonishing depth, a young woman I admire more than anyone, save her mother. I think of James, and there are tears in my eyes again as I write this, James whose wit at age nine is sharper and sports more sideways angles than most New Yorker writers ever sprout, James who can race to the top of a tree fast as a squirrel and with as little fear, whose heart is as wide as the worlds he draws, filled with flying sharks and laser-eyed chimeras.

I think of Sophia, mother of these children and image of The Mother; I think of Sophia whose love and trust nearly shame me, whose beauty is itself a song -- to Radha for love, to Kali for power, to Matangi for sidereal vision. I think of Sophia who is a miracle; "only in the sense that we all are," she protests, but if you were to ask James and Molly and the people whose lives Sophia has touched with her art, her organizational genius, her teaching, and her friendship, I think the answer would be "there are miracles and then there are miracles." I think of Sophia and the thousand big and little ways she loves us, every minute, the thousand ways she Creates and Sustains, like the One from whom she flows; I think of Sophia and James and Molly and I think, "I have the company of great souls, every day." Kali, with the devious loving gravity She uses to pull us all in, has brought me to Vrindavan in the American South, has brought me to the feet of rishis in my own home.

Vrindavan has been suffocatingly hot lately, as always in June. Today, though, a soft, almost cool breeze is blowing. I need to be working, chained to my computer, not going outside; I shouldn't even be writing this-- so I wasn't going to leave my office. But my computer had a conniption and I decided to walk across campus to return a book while it restarted. So I went outside my plastic bubble of busy-ness and walked over to the Science building, hoping like hell I wouldn't run into the book's owner (there's no time to talk!), which of course I did.

And what did the book's owner do when she saw me, but summarize this very post I'd been writing this morning: "Wow, your life is so different now. I used to think of you as the guy who would just go to Paris whenever he felt like it. But now you're married and you have kids -- how is that working?"

It's working like the unexpected soft breeze caressing my face, a breeze that "shouldn't" be there in any normal world and that, as a bhakta, I feel as my Lover's touch. It's working like the soft glow of seven billion years, galaxy fire sped across oceans of space to land one night on your front lawn as you pause to look up at the stars.

Eleusis, Gods, Angels

2011-06-14T19:51:00.000-04:00

Erik Davis's podcast hosts poet and translator Charles Stein for a fascinating and very well-informed conversation on the Eleusinian mysteries. Normally I would tweet something like this, but Stein is worth dropping everything for if you're interested in technologies of transformation, the Greeks, or Goddess stuff.

Somehow the Greeks crafted a ritual that freed its celebrants from the fear of death. This ritual is one bit of glass in the vast rose window of spiritual practice that humans have made in response to the immensity of beauty and mystery surrounding us always, and most importantly, dwelling within us-- "closer than your own jugular vein," as the scripture says.

[Angels get a passing but very insightful mention at 57:10, though the etymology given is much more true in lived experience than it is in historical linguistics.]

Now Optimized for Mobile Phones!

2011-06-14T14:17:00.000-04:00

Image by Joydeep Mukherjee

Yes, children of Kali, WiHW is now mobile-ready. I just checked 'er out on my Droid and things look great! You can access pictures, links, etc. just like on the web, and the text is very readable.

Now you can take me to the car wash, the checkout line at Wal-Mart, the waiting room at the doctor's office-- all your favorite places! (I recommend the beach, but that's just me.) (Or your favorite graveyard, at 3:00 a.m. -- maybe I've been listening to too much Coil lately.)

(Thank you for reading. The divine Shakti -- Her infinite unfolding, Her infinite love -- flames all around you, blossoms within you. Don't forget ♥)

How Did a Nice Suburban White Boy End Up Worshiping Kali? Part 4

2011-05-03T03:07:00.004-04:00

I'm reading Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati yet again, this time with my Spiritual Autobiography students, who are the age I was when I first read it. I don't have to tell you it's a different book now; I'm not 21 or 31, I'm close to 50; I have my own Angel (in the day, I could only read of Wilson's and Crowley's with puzzlement or cautious envy); I have my own family, my own history, my own map of the world, made with my own hands. What also makes this very formative book different is I have to explain it to people who wouldn't have chosen to read it, which means I have to understand it in 4D: Leary and the field of psychology, Crowley and the Western magical tradition, quantum mechanics, Fortean phenomena, conspiracies, the 1960s and 70s, where it all came from and how it all fits together...

and the big Venn diagram of all these ideas and happenings links with my personal oval, and my oval links with others and others in a braid that adds up to Kalibhakta's cultural DNA. Cosmic Trigger and the work of Wilson and Leary and Crowley have been part of my genome for so long, yet still cast such long shadows, they're like the Age of Reptiles. [Right now, in fact, I feel I should apologize to the Shade of Wilson for not writing this in E Prime.] My more recent DNA comes from from Andrew Harvey, Shree Maa, and from my Angel (are those last two different? I'm not sure--). I've evolved from a confused vision-haver into a neurologician and now into a devotee, a child in the lap of Kali. Wilson's mind trip, on my evolutionary branch, has become Ramakrishna's heart trip, stirred with rock n' roll and splashed over ice from Walden Pond.

I wrote to Wilson in the late 1990s, at a low point, codependent and scared and trying to keep the earth turning on its axis, asking him how to do the Sufi heart chakra exercise that saved his life when he lived in the slums, on welfare, trying to feed his kids and keep his Sirius-struck head. He didn't write back and, having heard of his generosity, I wonder(ed) if his silence wasn't, at least tangentially, on purpose-- the kind of "correct mistake" sages make. Had I got the Word from The Master, I might not have pursued my own tantric experiments or joined Al-Anon, might not have had to jimmy the heart-lock myself ...I might not have been pushed into the arms of Shree Maa, and Kali-- unthinkable! --but then again all it took for me to end up in Her cremation ground was one book and one month of experimental mantra-saying. Had Wilson written me back, I could well be a Sufi now, writing a blog called On Tenement Roofs Illuminated... not that there's anything wrong with that...wherever you go, there you are.

Where I was, in the 1980s, the first time I read Cosmic Trigger, was in the rayon depths of the Reagan years, 2 a.m. and three hits of acid, on a roof staring down at trees morphing into Chinese dragons-- solemn, twisting parade dragons breathing gold fire-- well, not for the whole decade. Many nights I worked at my best-ever McJob, night watchman all alone in university buildings reading books, snooping in labs, bread-crumbing my way through forgotten passages and basements, a Columbus of derelict worlds. One day in the 1980s I agonized, so poor was I, over whether to buy a used paperback of Rimbaud someone had used as a joint-rolling aid, pages filled with enough pot to stuff a bowl to accompany my reading once I came to my senses and bought it. In college, out of college, always trying to learn and always confused; in relationships, then free and happy but wanting validation of being owned; tripping, drinking, wake n' bakin', early a.m. scrub-the-sink speedin'; up four days on post-shroom high, Burroughsian arcana in the Rare Books Room, green hair, SST Records, slam-dancing, Milwaukee's Best, Lake Country Red, combat boots and flannel shirt, junkie friends, friends straight out of Demian up talking 'til 6:00 in cherished trust, soft shadows in candle light and street glare; lusting always, though laughably repressed, wanting, wanting what I didn't know, save it was knowledge and sex and sustenance and derangement all fried into one grilled cheese... envying the confident, the "together," mistaking their projected selves for their lived realities, which I could have known no better than a random ice lump from the rings of Saturn.

Myself I saw as deformed, always awkward and wrong, yet a friend later said, "You were intimidating. You were the bohemian ideal." What?? All that altered perception and I couldn't see how altered my own self-perception was, couldn't imagine there was something of worth in me besides "potential" that would ever sleep beneath cold tundra. I wouldn't live long enough to be who I was supposed to be, or some disaster would overtake me, or They wouldn't let me. Some nights in the 1980s I was high and afraid because the chemicals that let me peer into Canaan also sunk me into rodential fear, taping construction paper over the windows in the door so They couldn't see in, sensing demons at my back about to scalp me with three-inch claws.

Back in my twentysomething Dreamtime, I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of failure, afraid of girls, afraid of pain, afraid of pleasure, afraid of Reagan, afraid of flunking out of college, afraid of germs, afraid of the future, afraid of commitment, afraid of being alone, afraid of the Religious Right, afraid of normal people whose nonchalant gliding through life pointed to my ill-at-ease incompetence, afraid of money, afraid of violence (but less afraid after I was violently mugged one night), afraid of the police, afraid of my parents, afraid of clinging out there on the last branch in the stormwinds of mind as the dark chews me into dust, scattered like Osiris by mad thunder... afraid of the loss of self I sought in acid, in reefer, in pain pills crushed and snorted while knocking back red wine... afraid but I pressed on like a fool, like The Fool, not knowing what I was doing until one night a much-accustomed hit of weed and the same old chaser of nitrous oxide took me past all experience and memory, a place so far out of normal highs and normal normals that now, 25 years later, I am still on the path that began that night.

Fear maps onto the axis of ego like the arc of a Stinger missile, and until you have a perspective on who are you and what you are, you will likely spend much of your time afraid, worried, or manifesting fear and worry as cruel tangents, taking them out on other sentient beings or on yourself. My neurotic fears and basic confusion persisted for a decade after what happened; it's not like I was "cured" or even "converted" that night-- far from it. I did, however, catch a glimpse through a Window out of those negative minds, which I won't call God or Kali, though Kali is the name I now see over the window. What I saw that night was a window out of all the ways I'd ever known a person could experience the world; I was pushed out the window, really, having looked through it once or twice before, in my teens and on LSD in my 20s-- but this was so far beyond those experiences I was blasted out of myself and this reality completely, for one brief, eternal gnostic instant.

I wasn't looking for gnosis. I'd lit up and done whippets a hundred times and it was fun and mildly obliterating, very predictably so. This night, in August, 1986, it was like I lit a firecracker and leveled a whole city. I breathed in the cold nitrous and shot up into black space, looking down on Earth, and-- Earth-- She was alive, wobbling in ecstasy, floating in consciousness. She was alive, She was aware, if on a scale so vast it made me an atom, and it seemed She wanted me to see Her as I floated there, Her little satellite. I stared, I almost gasped but had no breath, I tried to breathe, to form a thought, but -- whap! slammed back to the floor, to the waking world, to Reagan and the "Papa Don't Preach" and the scared, inadequate life that was already changing because Something had broken through, alien as horses in the New World yet more real than the floor I was sitting on.

But if I went to bed that night buzzed and confused, jittering with mystery, it was nothing compared to what happened next. For a week, the world turned all gauzy, another world quite visibly shimmering just beneath it. On the second or third day, I got an intuition to work with anther plant spirit, morning glory, and took about 60 seeds. It was similar to LSD but milder and more "organic"-- the trip was more centered on the world around me and not my flanged and phase-shifted thoughts about that world. Incredibly, I began to hear the voices of two female spirits, one of whom did most of the talking and said, "We're going to show you some things that will make sense now, and some things that won't make sense until later." These girls took my hand and waltzed me through the gauzy world billowing around me and showed me It was alive, It is Her, and all women reflect Her, and everything is alive and nothing dies. I didn't learn until years later that the Aztecs believe that eaters of morning glory seeds are visited by two female spirits...

The girls initiated me: into what, I didn't know. Some kind of ageless cult where one worships God through every act, including-- especially-- deliciously-- but so, so difficultly-- sex. And just as hard, eating and drinking and, hardest of all, working, coping, doing things you don't want to do... though at the time they presented it a little more glamorously. At the end of my week in the astral girls' care I was reset to zero, and then naturally spent years running away from the experience and years making sense of it, in turn as an atheist, a Catholic, an amateur Buddhist, a pagan, an agnostic experimental philosopher who had to admit he had come face to face, tongue to tongue with the Infinite and could not deny it or reason it away and had no idea what to do with it. Every box I tried putting Her in-- box of hope, box of Mary, box of Goddess, box of Brain Is -- Wider than the Sky -- every box was a little bigger and explained a little more, but none was adequate, none served, none made sense in Light of what She was and what She had burned into my heart. But I kept looking, kept after Her, even, eventually, when all hope was lost.

I wasn't looking for gnosis, but I'd seen good claims that it was possible. I have to thank Robert Anton Wilson, Aleister Crowley, et al., for that, for the fact that when the universe broke open I had another way of understanding it besides "I'm crazy" or "I'm possessed." People who lead us out of ourselves to better selves are called guru-- in the words of the Upanishads, one who leads from dark to light. Maybe in English there's no better term than Illuminati.

"Princess of the Underground"-- Sufis, High Art, A Kali Devotee, and the Path of Paths

2011-03-25T15:54:00.000-04:00

This might be the best piece of religious journalism this year: a must-read. Lex Hixon makes an appearance, as does Walter de Maria's Lightning Field and that cultural lightning rod, the "Ground Zero mosque" [sic]. At the center of it all is Sheikha Fariha al-Jerrahi, née Philippa de Menil, "a strikingly beautiful spiritual seeker and youngest scion of the Schlumberger oil fortune."

In addition to its many other charms, the article contains some uncommonly perceptive remarks re the fuzzy borders between "Western" and "Eastern" and "sacred" and "secular."

Why We Love Him

2011-03-24T14:14:00.000-04:00

Swami Saradananda, in Sri Ramakrishna and His Divine Play, recounts a Vaishnava hymn the Master was fond of singing, one that begins "Brother, joyfully cling to God; / Thus striving, someday you may attain Him..."

Saradananda says, "sometimes the Master would quote the second line of the song .... While singing that line he would suddenly exclaim: 'Fie on you, rascal! What is this 'someday you may attain Him'? One should not have that kind of lukewarm devotion. Have self-confidence and cultivate this attitude, 'I shall realize God right now; I shall see Him at this moment.'"

Ramakrishna: my rock n' roll rishi.

LOL

2011-03-23T12:14:00.000-04:00

New York Times article on celebrations of the Hindu spring festival Phagwah (Holi) in Queens:

In India, Holi festivities often include drinks laced with bhang (cannabis indica), but in the United States, “we stick to bourbon,” said one woman, who would not give her name because, she said, Hindu women traditionally do not drink alcohol, even on Phagwah.

The Tired Sutra

2011-03-14T16:34:00.001-04:00

World falls, neck snaps, and, in between, noctilucent clouds of bliss.

Neck snaps, the world returns: computer or wobbling book or, God forbid, steering wheel and dark road.

Not again. Establish intent. This world will stay, you'll keep it palmed in spite of yourself. Grip tight those rubber nubs and hold the ball like death, as sleep's small forward slaps at you, slaps soft and unseen, slaps and steals. And once more purity, wholeness.

This time for sure. Thrust eyes open with all your blue might, Shiva, or you'll kill the universe.

Samsara, ananda, samsara, ananda, samsara, ananda. Eternity just a beat of the cosmic heart, the bounce of a ball.

From the Kularnava Tantra

2011-03-01T10:26:00.000-05:00

"...parrots and mynah birds recite before people sacred words with delight. Are they to be regarded as great scholars from such talk?"

"Animals like pigs bear the winter cold and summer heat and for them food fit or unfit is alike, are they Yogis thereby?"

"... such privations and self denials are only for deceiving the world while direct knowledge of truth alone is the means for liberation."

Kalibhakta Sutra, Part Five

2011-02-18T23:57:00.005-05:00

Verse 5:
Trace Her waves and clefts; know with Her, in Her, never ceasing to know Her until you are One.

Sanskrit:
Vibhanga vibru.

Comment:
Kalibhakta's MS shows his first translation of these words as "You can't help trying to make sense of it all and you can't help being wrong when you do." The present editor is grateful to him for his perseverance in creating a finer version. He also experimented with the translation "Chase Her that She may overcome you," which, while more poetic, still lacked precision. (One wonders sometimes at Kalibhakta's free hand, so to speak, with the Sanskrit language.)

Vibhanga means "waves" or "furrows." Again, the Kabbalah is alluded to: successive emanations of divine light, waves of divinity creating space, time, consciousness, matter, and evolving into a self-reflecting intelligence that yearns for union, for oneness with its source. As the Masonic tradition says, "Gather what is scattered" -- just remember that we inhabit a scattering universe, so don't fall in love with your own model of that universe. Vibhanga implies a chaotic emanation, fittingly, since Kali's essential nature is play, which leads to a different model of divine love--not based on separateness (lost purity, sin, and redemption) but on a game, a chase, with deity and devotee pursuing one another towards the eventual oneness that is the object of these sutras and of all spiritual aspiration.

According to Monier-Williams, vibru means both to "posit" or "argue" (e.g., to advance an interpretation of the universe) but also "to be mistaken" and "to disagree." The verse calls us to interpret the universe at the same time that it remarks upon the need to constantly question and revise our interpretations. In short, the verse is a call for spiritual knowing according to both the scientific method--"scientific illuminism" à la Crowley, "info-psychology" à la Leary-- and the "picking and choosing" so despised by the orthodox. "Make your own Bible," as Emerson wrote. The verse is a call to empiricism, observation, whether through science, Thoreauean natural philosophy, or combining the method of science with the aim of religion.

Implied therefore is the great advantage of arriving at one's own conclusions, independent, if need be, of all previous (alleged) sages or experts. Indeed, individual modeling of the divine totality is essential, for in Kalibhaktian theology the aspirant's attempts to understand the Divine Mother and Her creation and to act on this understanding constitute the second half of creation. "Creation never ended; chaos never died," goes the aphorism scrawled in Sharpie above the door to Kalibhakta's study-- or so legend says, though the Hakim Bey allusion seems too perfect.

Note that, in English, the first five verses of the Sutra begin with V; Kalibhakta intended this as an allusion to the downward-pointing triangle of the Kali yantra and to the five downward-pointing triangles of the Sri Yantra--symbols, of course, of the waves of Shakti creating the cosmos in every moment.

Separated at Birth?

2011-02-02T14:23:00.000-05:00

I simply don't know what to say (and as you know, for me that's almost unheard of)...

but here you have, on the left, the symbol of the Ordo Templi Orientis, Uncle Al's magickal order, and on the right, the official emblem for the Boy Scouts of America's 2011 Scout Sunday observation.

I'm not saying the Illuminati have taken over Boy Scouts or anything. The real question is, who would be more offended by this, The Beast or your average Ned Flanders scouter? Or is BSA taking ecumenism to new heights???

I realize the OTO adapted their lamen from earlier sources-- some very early sources... and that the dove and the chalice and the sun are all time-honored symbols... but someone at BSA is surely having a bit of fun. The BSA emblem (inside the "0" in "2011") as All-Seeing Eye is a bit much-- though if you've ever been involved with BSA you know there's some truth to it!

Look!

2011-01-31T14:57:00.000-05:00

An 1860s-ish photo of the Kali temple at Dakshineswar! You can see it here, along with a link to a photo of the Durga temple at Ramnagar and some other views of Calcutta, including this Ramakrishna-era shot.

That Voodoo That You Do

2011-01-27T14:43:00.001-05:00

The last straw was a financial crisis: in 2009, Romania’s economy shrank by 7.1 percent. To pay state wages and pensions, the government negotiated a 20 billion-euro loan with the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and the World Bank. To close the deficit, new sources of revenue were needed. Last September, Alin Popoviciu and Cristi Dugulescu of the ruling Democratic Liberal Party drafted a law wherein all witches and fortune-tellers would have to produce receipts. More problematic was the law’s specification that witches would be held liable if any predictions they made failed to pass. The senate initially voted down the legislation and Popoviciu accused his fellow legislators of being afraid of hexes. Instead, the witch tax was worked into new labor laws for 2011. --Religion Dispatches

So let's see: to pay for the failed prophecies of a group of government-authorized, MBA-bedecked wizards, another group of wizards is annexed into government supervision and told that if their prophecies fail, they will have to pay.

But can the witches force, say, weather forecasters to fund their bad calls? And then the weathermen could get reimbursed by-- I don't know, public-health types whose bird flu predictions go south? And... soon they'll have to hit up lotto players whose kids' birthdays don't pan out. No, I know-- high-school graduation speakers! For each graduate who never joins the high fliers who soar to great heights, that'll be 500 bucks.

"There Is Grandeur in this View of Life," Interlude

2011-01-14T23:19:00.002-05:00

"I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim."

What if we don't all die in a blaze of existential tragedy? What if we aren't little mind-modules adrift in cold space? What if each of us, if everything, down to the last bacillus and baobab, is a filament of the same Being, and what if we're at home right here and right now? What if we don't need to be redeemed, or spared from the Angel of Death?

I wrote (at length, alas) about Tennyson's view of death and the cosmos because it's close to the way most people in our culture see the world, whether they know it or not, whether they're believers or atheists or faitheists or what have you. Like Tennyson, most of us see death as anomalous, as a disease in search of a cure, whether the pill be heaven, cryogenics, self-sacrifice, or the stiff upper lip of materialist reason. It's fitting that In Memoriam uses the Christmas season as a marker of the passage of time: not only does Christmas signify the redemption that Tennyson craved--a cure for death-- but Christmas is also for many of us the closest we'll ever get to gratuitous grace: a faerie season of charm and surprise, of magic and mystery, and if the child's saturnalia gives way to the adult's headaches and social woes, it is the child's vision we can't escape and that goads us on to Christmases yet to come. And since we don't see grace as perpetual but as a rarity bestowed like a costly gift, and since in the back of our minds we think we have to earn grace and love (and new toys), and since those things live on the high shelf, for the worthy and not perhaps for us-- Christmas grace gets grabby and the magic morning slides into dull dinners revved up by too much booze. It's that way with all holidays, all escapes.

Of course we don't want to hear that death is inescapable, that death is the way of things, and much of the time we can't: our nervous systems congeal the world into a seductively stable "It" even as they hoodwink us into thinking we're an "I": separate from the world, in it but not of It-- unique, ineluctably ourselves and utterly Other from all else. Every human who's ever lived, save some bodhisattvas and avadhutas and a few plain old crazies, has walked this earth utterly convinced of his or her specialness, wondering how It could have existed before them, refusing to believe It could persist one picosecond without them. This illusion of separateness and specialness is what allows us to navigate the world long enough to pass on our genes and memes, and it is what keeps us from the lap of God and causes us untold suffering. It is the lie that makes us, the lie that keeps most of us enslaved until the verge of that last breath, that moment when we know without question that It will outlast us, is outlasting us already and speeding far past even as we try to cling.

Afraid to die and afraid to admit it, atheists make much of the evils of religion, and religionists, also afraid, make much of the evils of other religions (their own evils belong to a safely remote past or arise from simple doctrinal error). I think, however, that much of religion's evil stems from the urgency inspired by that last breath: bitter fear, the misguided wish to rescue, dimwitted innocent joy in one's own salvation/specialness, hindbrain overload at the thought of The End, all overflowing into the fantasy that there is some way out of death, The One True Way. If death is so terrible, if the world is so jumbled and if ruin is a perpetual half-second away, then there must be that one perfect tree to climb to escape the leopard of chaos. There must be a way to keep going, to not have to face It going on without us.

That fantasy of safety and salvation is the social contract's big lie, exposed in the Third Degree of Masonry and in every true relation of the dealings of God with men and women-- the tree is the leopard, life is death, there is no safety save that of pure surrender, pure loss of self. Oneness with All means your personal bulb merges with the great Broadway, thus there can be no heaven, no afterlife reunion with Aunt Gladys and Mom and Dad. Easeful death means death of self, absorption by a Peace so immense that we need no one, nothing, no past, no love. As waves arise in the ocean and dance and disappear, so do we arise and live and dance and return to the One Thought, our waveness evanescent, all others we have loved and danced with evanescent too. It doesn't mean you can't dance. It means: the dance isn't all there is, the waves aren't the whole deep ocean, life and death are not the antipodes we make them out to be... dying of throat cancer, Ramakrishna saw Kali with a glowing, golden wound in Her throat.

"There Is Grandeur in this View of Life," Part 1

2010-12-19T14:28:00.001-05:00

Just in time for Christmas: meditations on In Memoriam...

I beg your leave, Squires and Squiresses in Readerdom, whilst I 'umbly quote two nineteenth-century writers at some length, to help spin out some thoughts on life, death, and evolution... not old hat about new atheists, but ground-level stuff about the "problem of evil" and why life sometimes seems to suck so much. I don't think there is a problem of evil... but we'll get to that.

I've mentioned the class I taught earlier this year on American Spiritual Literature, and one of the good things that came out of that class was, I turned a student on to Augustine (not American, I know, but I had occasion to talk about him more than once), to the point that the young man has now not only read Confessions but has sculpted a likeness of the saint (!). Another blessing was: a passage from Walden about death and violence really rocked my world this time reading it... I couldn't help contrasting Thoreau's thoughts with Tennyson's much better-known remarks on "nature red in tooth and claw" and the tragedy of the pain and suffering that surrounds us in what David Tibet, perfectly describing the Vision of Sorrow, called the "endless wheel of suffering... the final crystalline structure of misery... the great, bloody and bruised veil of this world."

Tennyson knew that veil, and famously uses the word in his grand elegy In Memoriam (1850), his exploration of doubt, death, and cosmic order written in the shadow of the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's bosom friend, classmate, compadre in poesy, and the fiancé of Tennyson's sister. Hallam died unexpectedly at 22, having inspired Tennyson and many others with his brilliance and his grace that made him seem "to tread the earth as a spirit from some better world." Quite understandably, not only was Tennyson devastated by the death of his friend, but he struggled to find meaning, any meaning, in such a disastrous, random event.

I'm going to diss Tennyson in a minute, so I want to now disclaim that In Memoriam is one of the greatest works of literature I know, and even if it weren't a masterwork I would hesitate to argue too much with a guy who's mourning his best friend. I'm totally down with Tennyson's asking the hard questions, and have a lot of respect for someone who is that tenacious about asking what it all means, not to mention asking about it in a style so eloquent that it dizzies me every time I read it.

But I've got to argue, if not with Tennyson's style, then with the very seriousness that style imparts to what is at root a self-centered and small-minded view of the world. Its spiritual guise, flirted with by Tennyson, though he's not buying it 100 percent, insists that even though stuff is not the way you want it to be, a wondrously awesome god made it that way in service of some bloody scheme of "redemption" that, in most tellings, still manages to leave out 99 percent of the human species--but might let you in if you're good. Its secular guise insists that even though stuff is not the way you want it to be, you can find other like-minded sufferers and band together and make it all the way you want it to be or, failing that, you can sort it all out for yourself and whatever you come up with will be the right answer, as long as it makes you feel bad. (Feeling good is a sign of shallowness.)

Tennyson ends up somewhere between these two opinions: not a brain-dead believer, not an existentialist, either. He states "the problem of evil" about as well as anyone has, or ever could, state it. Musing upon the pre-Darwinian model of evolution in Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), he presents a picture of Nature as the relentless supplanting of one species by another, from the mindless predation of dinosaurs "in their slime" to the "fruitless" quests of Homo sapiens. What I like about In Memoriam, in addition to Tennyson's sublime style, is that in this poem he seriously and at great length entertains the idea that, in the face of the limitless death and pain of the biological parade, Christianity and all other moral systems might really be wishful thinking, might really be sad, makeshift whistling in the cosmic graveyard.

At a certain point in the poem the narrator enters into a dialogue with a personified Nature. He's been lamenting that she seems to favor preserving the species ("type") with no thought for individual death and suffering. She tells him he's half right: she doesn't care about preserving individuals or species:

"So careful of the type?" but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
[Nature] cries, "A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.

"Thou makest thine appeal to me:
I bring to life, I bring to death:
The spirit does but mean the breath:
I know no more" And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed,
And love Creation's final law--
Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed--

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or seal'd within the iron hills?

No more? A monster, then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!
O for thy voice to soothe and bless!
What hope of answer, or redress?
Behind the veil, behind the veil.

By this point, Tennyson has mourned his friend and has widened his angle to ask the big questions: do our lives matter? Is there any truth beyond atoms and the void? Why must we love, if time is but an arrow pointing to death? Is religion, is every search for meaning, just a death-denying illusion? Fossils of bygone species, some of whom ruled the earth as humans now do, seem to proclaim a ciphered law of chaos and death, the poem says, and we'll join them before long. We chant epics of struggle, redemption, and salvation to soothe ourselves, but the very landscape before us, the very ground on which we stand, stained with the blood of countless generations, gives lie to our proud fantasies: life is too violent, too random, too cheap to admit of justice or ultimate purpose. So, in the end, "The spirit does but mean the breath": once we die, as individuals or as a species, that's it. No meaning, no continuance, no do-over.

For all our brilliance, all our heart-storms, all our visions--all our poetry-- aren't we just another speck of foam in the seas of space, another doomed arrangement of carbon and oxygen? Sounds like it, from these beautiful lines. Ultimately, of course, In Memoriam holds out the promise of redemption, of ultimate meaning: it means something when someone dies, and lives; it means something when an entire species lives, then dies, even if all it means is that its myriad members' bones form the ladder on which some newer, more sophisticated species can climb up to gaze at the stars. But of course for Tennyson it's more than that: hope lies in the perfect world of spirit, in which we escape death, escape our lower, animal nature, having evolved from "broken lights" of the Divine into... the Divine itself?

No longer half-akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod
This planet, was a noble type
Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves.

Really not much to complain about here. Tennyson's tastefully post-Christian, he's resolved the evolution/ creation conflict, and he's even got a little Hegelian/Kabbalah thing going where God's creation evolves into some kind of cosmic singularity. That's true, if you ask me, and I have to applaud the man's doubt, too. I'm with him: hope does reside in the world of spirit. But that whole death thing... mourning is fine, I mean, we've all been there. Years of it? Sure. The rest of your life if you need it. The death of someone you love changes you the same as losing a limb, in the sense that part of your way of being yourself is gone, unrecoverable, you have to learn a new and inescapably worse way of living, living without. And so we mourn, and so some of us write epic poems or build Taj Mahals of other sorts. The mourning for Hallam or any other lost loved one isn't the point; rather I take issue with Tennyson's attitude towards death itself, his assumption that death is some kind of monster, some kind of interruption, anomaly, affront to the order of things.

Death is the order of things.

If saying that sounds odd, it's because nearly all our models of reality are spawned by religions, philosophies, and political systems that arise from and feed on the individual organism's fear of death, which they externalize, eternalize, and super-size into narratives of redemption, salvation, end-of-the-worldism, heavenism, houri-ism, reformism, revolutionism, etc.-ism, mirroring off into infinities of alienation nearly as vast as death itself. How few have thought to turn their backs on these fables, face the Fact, and embrace death! To do that, of course, they had to, like Inanna, cast off everything that made them who they were; they had to abandon themselves and all their desires.

The thing is, and I apologize for sounding a bit like Pascal, you're going to lose everything anyway. That midnight hour is going to come and the masks are going to come off. You may as well, my Teachers tell me, renounce now, and maybe by midnight you'll have the hang of it. Thoreau spoke of lives of quiet desperation, and said the desperation comes from clinging, from wanting, from denying life to its face, refusing to recognize it for what it is: a tornadic whirl of matter, energy, and sensation that, like all tornadoes, one day whirls itself into nothing. Your life and the universe's life are like this. God's life is like this: She withdraws into Herself in mahapralaya--call it "maximum entropy" if it makes you feel better--to sleep for a time, to wake again in blazing cosmic morning, and who knows what beautiful and winged life will evolve then, what atoms, elements, constellations, consciousnesses? But to preoccupy oneself with eternity is to will oneself to forget how big eternity is, to close one's eyes to the eternity that saturates us in every instant.

Heather King Has a Blog!

2010-12-18T15:39:00.001-05:00

... which I have belatedly discovered. It's related to the book she's writing on Thérèse of Lisieux, which is itself an exciting prospect.

I told you about King earlier, and just now stumbled on her blog as I'm sitting here listening to the freezing rain's patter outside and the Paul Mauriat Christmas album's retro sparkle inside, waiting for my banana nut bread to bake and trying to prepare for my spiritual autobiography class next semester. I'm teaching King's "Wonder Bread" early on, as an exemplar of the spiritual essay, along with David James Duncan's "A Mickey Mantle Koan." I'm going to ask the students to write their own short spiritual memoirs, and I figure Duncan and King will be way better models than remote or far-out characters like Augustine or Teresa of Avila or Robert Anton Wilson.

I just hope the students will read Augustine. Hell, I hope I finish reading him. When I was a teenager, Confessions was so marvelous, and now--I'm trying to have more empathy than tossing the book aside, muttering, "Yes, yes, you irritating little man." Still, the text has plenty of gifts that went right over my head when I was kid, and every time I'm about to run out of patience with my old Roman confrère, he says something that brings me down to earth. For example: we're both teachers of rhetoric, Auggie and I, and he said he moved from Carthage to Rome (and this was in the days before U-Haul) because he heard the students were better-behaved there, more eager to learn. Who could read that with a cold heart?

I also had this idea when I read him earlier that he was putting himself out there like some kind of spiritual hero, but as Heather King writes, "any spiritual seeker worth his or her salt has undertaken a journey so full of failure, hardship, and disappointment that no-one would want to follow it." Now I'm seeing a lot more pathos, a lot more cringe-worthiness in Confessions. But I still like Heather King better.

Envy Is Such a Bad Thing

2010-12-02T09:48:00.000-05:00

But I can't help feeling sentence-envy when I read this bombette from H. L. Mencken:

Here, more than anywhere else that I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly – the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, or aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances – is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows. ("On Being an American")

How Did a Nice Suburban White Boy End Up Worshiping Kali? Part 3

2010-11-28T23:10:00.002-05:00

Man Ray, Indestructible Object
(Image: Museum of Modern Art, New York)

[Continuing this series that my lovely, sweet Sophia asked me to write and even helpfully provided the title for... I hope I don't sound completely taken with myself; I just want to tell the "what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now" story they tell in AA, and A.∙.A.∙., the Holy Guardian Angel story that says to you, like the exclamation point: there is something.]

Yeah, yeah, the Maori ancestor voices and gay-guy goddess books... what about that Bible high in the closet? What about religion?

The house I grew up in wasn't religious-- we didn't go to church or claim a denomination, my parents rarely even spoke of God; I don't know where my interest in the subject came from, but it's always been there. When I was four I hauled some 2X4s from the garage out onto the lawn, laid them down, and arranged them into a cross upon which I then arranged myself. My dad said the neighbors probably wouldn't appreciate this game and made me put the 2X4s up. A while later, six months or a year, or maybe the same time, or maybe before (time stood still before school), I took up a plastic sword and became the Conquering Jesus, galloping through the house and over the battlefields of Armageddon towards certain victory. I imagined ignorant, Matchbox-size armies shooting at me, and vocalized their sound effects as I smote them-- I was fifty feet tall!! and dodged their bullets like Neo. "If you're Jesus, why do you need to dodge the bullets?" asked my mom. I couldn't answer that question, and found it embarrassing enough to quit the game, but I still admired Jesus like he was a ballplayer. The certainty of My victory somehow bothered me, too, but I knew Jesus was a nice guy who deserved to win.

After my stint as Jesus, my childhood spiritual path meandered. I loved the Bible stories my mom read me from the Golden Press Children's Bible, and kept reading the book as I grew older, though its stories more and more seemed creepy and the illustrations seemed a civilized hand's attempt to stay the savagery of some crazed dead world. We had many more Frank Edwards and Charles Fort and Erich von Daniken and UFO books than we had Jesus books, and those had their impact on me, too, eventually. In first grade my teacher (illegally) read us Bible stories; I found them dull and interminable, even Samson and those pillars (though I admit I thought the teacher was saying "pillows"). A couple of years later I checked out a book on witchcraft from the library and tried to turn my friend Quentin into a rabbit--with his consent, though he stubbornly remained in human form, there on the front porch in view of the launch pad whence humans still, in those days, traveled to the moon.

In 7th grade I spotted my mom's childhood Bible on a high closet shelf, and schemed to liberate it, that its eternal secrets I might imbibe. I asked her about it, I think, and I think she said something to fend me off like "We'll get you your own Bible some day." What was in that book? I still believed without question that some Book, somewhere, had the Answers or at least a good portion of them, so in some way or other the Bible found its way out of the closet and into my room where it became my companion in many an evening's frustrated reading and in a few evenings' rapt revelations. I knew I was supposed to respect this book (even my seemingly godless parents had drummed that into me), though its pages sagged not under the weight of insight or inspiration but mostly under begats and lepers and dietary rules and one egomaniacal sinner after another. Eventually I wised up and read Good News for Modern Man, which I found much more to my liking... yet as much I as I rooted for Jesus and the Apostles, the New Testament, too, seemed perpetually disappointing, distant, and logic-free. As much as I wanted to believe in something, it wasn't going to be the Bible.

My first taste of bhakti, besides middle-school crushes, happened in ninth grade, after my early career as a pothead was cut short by a bad trip on some really strong-ass sinse that may have had something else in it. [Weirdly, during this trip I saw visions that included a mysterious shadow-woman and a mesmerizing purple anemone-thing I found again 30 years later while exploring the Mandelbrot Set.] Abandoning dope for God, I started attending the Pentecostal church a good friend of mine went to, and buddy, whatever they had there was stronger than a boatload of good weed. Plenty of times I saw the Dharmakaya light in waves, in sheets like pouring rain, all over everyone in that church as they spoke in tongues and communed with Jesus and cried.

I wanted so much to speak in tongues myself, but never did. The doctrines of that church were wacky--they can be found verbatim in any Chick comic-- but there was Something There, and forever after I've figured that there's little worth to anything if there ain't Something There, if the Light isn't bursting through. This belief, back then in ninth grade, had me chasing through the Bible to find the stilled letters of that Something, and later had me reading enough biblical criticism and history to reject the Bible as any kind of historical record, and later had me doing crazy things like driving to Georgia in search of Marian apparitions and hanging out with gurus and metaprogramming my brain with the 12 Steps and the 8 Basic Winner and Loser Scripts. The Something, even when I was in ninth grade, seemed bigger than the Christian god, or any god.

It wasn't there in any of the Baptist churches I went to, which presented themselves as purely verbal-- correct doctrine and quality of "preaching" were paramount-- but It was there winking between the notes of my mom's Thelonious Monk records.... It stared at me from the single eye of Man Ray's Indestructible Object, It rose like perfume from the pages of Augustine and Eliot, It danced in palm trees, steamed from sargassum on the beach, clung to the curves of girls' bodies and animated their steps and rang in their voices. I longed for It, yet couldn't abide Pentecostalism and didn't know enough to even look for It in other religions, not that there were any around to choose from. When I got to college I met hawkers from various cults that promised It and more, but they were all Baptists when you got down to it; even the Hare Krishnas, despite their trippy gods and exotic, delicious food, talked like the smug Sunday-best crowd at the big church downtown: correct doctrine, Holy Don'ts, fantasies of righteous separation from the very social petri dish that bounded and nourished their tax-exempt meme culture.

So religion seemed more and more a wash, which didn't dull my interest but rather set me searching farther afield, though cushioned now by academic aspirations. If I couldn't reliably define It or locate It with any frequency, then what did other people in other places and times think about It? Something my Anthropology of Religion professor said really made me sit up: apparently in the Aboriginal Dreamtime It is everywhere, in every feature of the land, and we all live in It all the time. I received this news, sitting there in a featureless classroom in Central Florida, the way one receives news of a catastrophe or piece of incredibly good fortune-- Pearl Harbor, the polio vaccine: my world changed shape. I had assumed that "religion" involved covenants and sin, scriptures and strictures, that it was a moral poultice applied to an already extant, albeit sick, creation. Here Dr. Jones was presenting me with religions (we also looked at vodoun, almost as striking as the Dreaming) that were not commentaries on life or evasions of it, but universes entire. Of course I'd read about Christian cosmologies from centuries past, but the Christianity I knew first-hand vacillated so aimlessly between geocentrism and the transistor age that its cosmos ended up having no shape at all.

I don't recall any great urge at this time to read up on the Dreamtime, which is good because I was home for the summer taking classes at a local college, and there were no major-league libraries anywhere in driving radius. (Kids, this was about a century and a half before the Web.) That's OK, because the precursor to the Web, Weirdnet, the global information collective of freaks everywhere, was about to come knocking. In fact, it already had: professors I'd had earlier that year had me reading Woman and Nature and The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, and my friend Grigorss was about to demand, as only fellow members of Weirdnet can do: drop everything right now and Read These Books. This demand was going to be serendipitously aligned with a jaw-dropping introduction to psychedelia, which was going to coincide with an immersion in the work of William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Throbbing Gristle, which would then be followed by an introduction to fractal geometry and my own life-changing vision of the Goddess. If none of this sounds particularly Kaliesque, I'm not surprised, but what was happening was, kind of like those primates jumping around at the beginning of 2001, I was being given the "skillful means" with which to assemble my own rocketship.

It wasn't ultimately about the books or the music or the zines or the bootlegged Kenneth Anger films or even the drugs; they were so many ratchets and tech manuals. It was that a parallel cultural universe welcomed me into it and said: you, your mind, and the cosmos are not separate and not static... your mind and the cosmos are both engines that you can tinker with, soup up, and rebuild... come back to me. "In the beginning," I was learning, was right now.

The New WiHW Wordle

2010-11-27T13:10:00.000-05:00

A definite music theme is emerging...

Bhakti, Vol. 2

2010-11-26T21:19:00.003-05:00

The great Clare Torry

I made this CD at a point in my spiritual growing up when I’d realized I had choices about the way I feel, when I’d realized, in the immortal Al-Anon words, that “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” So I decided to create a storyline in song about the oft-repeated cycle of feeling down in the dumps, surrendering to God, and then offering Her more of myself, deepening our love and expanding it (here’s the speculative part) until it fills the entire universe, until it is all that is. "Inflame thyself with prayer!" is the one commandment of Bhakti, and there's nothing like pop music to get those limbic juices flowing.

Reflections of The Marmalade

My Life

The most maudlin song ever? Well, there were 1974’s “Seasons in the Sun” and 1975’s “The Last Game of the Season (Blind Man in the Bleachers),” both of which are so bathetic I burst out laughing every time I hear them. But I think The Marmalade top even these cheez-classics in terms of sheer self-pity. Plus, musically this leaves the other two songs—and many songs of that pinnacle decade of pop—in the dust.

This song, of course, represents negativity and the irrationality, self-centeredness, and absurdity that grow out of it, especially in the lines “The world is a bad place, a bad place, a terrible place to live / Oh, but I don’t want to die.” It’s easy to mock this sentiment but think about it: you ‘ve been there. And it really does feel that way, and it could again, and again, until we keep a door always open in our heart for Her.

“Reflections of My Life,” as I say, is a fine piece of music. The guy who wrote and sang the song penned a couple more hits, but never another this big. He has been successful enough, though, to have spent his entire career since “Reflections of My Life” in the music biz, and has done everything from producing and arranging to scoring TV shows and movies. You may have heard of one show he’s written music for: Thomas and Friends.

I Won’t Back Down Tom Petty

Having elected to live, our hero now embarks on a me-against-the-world struggle to make everything right (in other words, to make the world conform to his wishes). Whatever you do, don’t back down. You’re right, they’re wrong. Go for the gusto. I have a lot of sympathy with the “don’t back down” philosophy, but it can lead further and further into delusion, further into the psychopathology of expecting the world to fit one’s expectations, which always makes a bad situation worse.

Dig Me Out Sleater-Kinney

Everything sucks! I’ve tried to make things better and they just suck more! OK, God, I think I'm ready to surrender!

The Great Gig In Pink Floyd

the Sky

Alan Parsons, recording engineer extraordinaire, knew a wonderful singer he thought should appear on the album he was working on, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Clare Torry, who frequently sang backup vocals for Abbey Road Studios, where the Floyd masterpiece was made, was paid £30 to perform this vocal. After the session, she felt her performance had been too histrionic, but the band members liked her performance and the melody she’d come up with, so she entered rock history as singer of one of the most startling songs on one of the most acclaimed, best-selling records ever made. She later sued the band for songwriting credit and won a deserved out-of-court settlement.

All of that aside, I thought this song, with its impassioned, wordless gales of emotion, was the perfect representation of a soul crying out to God-- not even “save me” or “help me” or “I give up,” but a total abandonment of the self to be, as Hildegard said, "a feather on the breath of God."

Yoshimi Battles the The Flaming Lips

Pink Robots, Pt. I

Having surrendered to God, the aspirant can now attune himself to his True Will and try to evolve—without being so attached to outcomes, without his ego getting in the way every second, without constantly confusing “true will” with “Hey, everyone, give me what I want right now!” Yoshimi, the fictional warrior of the song’s title, reminded me of a saying from Carlos Castaneda’s possibly nonexistent teacher Don Juan, something to the effect that a true [spiritual] warrior sees that his task is impossible but fights anyway, sees himself as already dead and so has nothing to fear. The song’s symbolism is intriguing: Yoshimi is battling robots, creatures with no intention but only programmed responses, but they are “pink robots”—in other words, robots of flesh, humans who are asleep and who live only to act out social scripts and ego gratification. We are all pink robots until we begin the process of awakening, of creating our own cognitive space in the world, whether through art, scientific or philosophical inquiry, spiritual practice, etc.

Silly Love Songs Wings

It’s been a while since we had an “ultimate love song” (see Bhakti, vol. I for about a dozen) so here’s Paul McCartney with one of the most perfect pop songs ever recorded. This is the pop equivalent of Bach or Mozart, with its complex continuo, its contrapuntal harmonies, and intricate structure. It’s also very mushy, to the point that one day it was playing in the car and my darling step-daughter Molly said, “You like this? You’re a sap, Kalibhakta.”

The lyrics to me are important because in them one of the great songwriters of the twentieth century admits: Love giddifies you and makes you feel silly. You can get all clever about it, but the cleverer you get, the less true the song. I embrace The Silly. The lyrics make clear the eternal divide between observer and observed, subject and object: love songs are “silly” to those not in love, yet “when [we’re] in [love] / … it isn’t silly at all.” Bhakti plays with the subject/object distinction in a subtle way, kind of like jnana-yoga does, slowly eroding the ego until one day it's no more than a crust of ice on the deep lake of Self.

This is a song that embraces Feeling Good—not Feeling Good as getting away with something or Feeling Good at someone’s expense, but just plain old FG. Which is why tormented intellectuals always have a problem with Paul and instead prefer John: the latter caters to their inner, bed-of-nails ascetic who e'er whispers that FG comes at a price, you should only FG when everyone else FsG first, and never, ever FG without a dialectical materialist analysis of whatever, in your bourgeois false consciousness, you think makes you FG.

Devotion is love, and this song is an awe-inspiring evocation of being in love, a FG hymn, a psalm, hence here it is, kicking off a whole section of the playlist where the aspirant is crazy about God, walking on sunshine, and seeing Her everywhere. I used to worry that the FG section of the CD was too dominant, that it took over too soon, but, hell, it’s a great collection of songs. The implicit message is, I guess, that if we worked half as hard at Feeling Go(o)d as we do at feeling miserable and then justifying it to ourselves, we’d be a lot happier. Tragedy is infinite but so is bliss, so try tuning your mental radio to a better station.

I Want Your Love Chic

Speaking of radio stations, I used to have to drive to Stonewall College at about 6:45 a.m., before daylight sometimes. That was kind of grim, especially because I often wasn't heading home until dark, but there was this radio station that played cool old songs. Most mornings it seemed they played this song, and I was so happy when its measured, stately post-disco groove came on. I'd be about a fifth of the way to work and had not yet put on the CD of my guru singing the songs of Ramprasad that I listened to every day for three years, and indeed some mornings I thought “Screw Ramprasad, screw religion, I’m tired, I want to party and go back to sleep, work is crap” ... but Nile Rodgers’s cool paean to desire got me back on track. I imagined this song going from my heart to Kali, but I knew She, too, wanted my love.

Tanusree Ananda Shankar

Way back when I’d first heard of Mother Meera (in Sex Death Enlightenment) and was first starting to dip my toe in that mysterious ocean that is Hinduism, I heard this song on the NPR chill-out show Echoes late one night and it sounded exactly like what Mother Meera and Shiva the Destroyer and Kali the Creatrix sounded like to my mind’s ear: stately yet slinky, sensual and sustaining and hopeful and incensey. What Meera and the Upanishads and Ramakrishna taught me is that the shining world of mystery and miracle isn't confined to books and fables and dead saints and heroes, but is this world right now.

Magnet and Steel Walter Egan

A seductively mounting melody, pellucid production, and half of Fleetwood Mac on backing vocals… does it get any better? Theologically, too, I think it’s impeccable: She is the all-attracting, I am a little filament in a sea of filaments aligned according to the interference patterns of Her unfolding Shakti, the animating force of the cosmos from shrew’s hearts to black holes to the self-organizing eon-branches of evolution. This song ushers in the sexy part of the collection; during this period I was starting to understand that tantra, that the worship of the Divine Mother, wasn’t so much about making sex sacred as it was about making all of life into lovemaking with Her, trying to wake up to my essential oneness with Her in each moment.

Lorelei Cocteau Twins

This song has always spelled S-E-X in my musical imagination. It’s not “about” sex and it’s not “evoking” sex, it’s a direct translation of one’s neural impulses in the nonrational, supraverbal throes of carnal delight. Which aren't all that different from the nonrational, supraverbal throes of spiritual delight. Hence all that Shiva and Shakti, Christ and Mary Magdalene, Isis and Osiris imagery swirling deliciously throughout the history of religion.

Custard Pie Led Zeppelin

This song is a goddam saturnalia, a delirious pagan anthem. And it’s about eating pussy. So that makes it the greatest song ever.

Girls Got Rhythm AC/DC

“She got the back seat rhythm”? The Goddess???? In my effort to make a tantric omelette, I was breaking the eggs of convention and propriety, finding the most down and dirty anthem of rut and applying it to a sacred purpose. Of course, “rhythm” has a cosmic meaning, too: several songs in this collection, either lyrically or musically, allude to chaos and order, to rhythm, to Her cyclic unfolding: “Reflections of My Life,” “Silly Love Songs,” “Magnet and Steel,” and this one. I used to play this song over and over while I was writing papers in grad school; it’s very energizing.

Living In the Past Jethro Tull

We move from sex, momentarily, to a more devotional set of songs. This one communicates a “Turn on [to bhakti], tune in [to Goddess culture], and drop out [of mass culture and compulsory Christianity/neo-puritanism]” mentality. “Happy and I’m smiling / walk a mile to drink your water / You know I’d love to love you / and above you there’s no other / We’ll go walking out / while others shout of war’s disaster.” In other words, take the red pill.

She Drives Me Fine Young Cannibals

Crazy

Like “Silly Love Songs,” this one revels in amorous delirium (with a little 80s angst thrown in). The narrator can’t help himself! That’s what it means to love, to be devoted… you’re magnetized, pulled in.

Love Is In the Air John Paul Young

Few songs capture that sense of being pulled in, of floating on tides of adoration, better than this lilting disco tune: the rhythm bounces and the melody ascends and ascends and ascends, like the heart of one in love. Like “She Drives Me Crazy,” this song expresses the lover’s absolute surrender, regardless of result. The lyrics are just beautiful, describing the way that being in love transforms one’s entire world, and they certainly relate my own feelings of bewilderment at having found myself in the new world of Hinduism, of devotion, of Goddess as a living Presence rather than just a countercultural hypothesis: “And I don’t know if you’re an illusion / Don ‘t know if I see it true / But you’re something that I must believe in / And you’re there when I reach out for you.”

For the first time, after a lifetime of chasing God, experiencing God, believing in and doubting God and rejecting God and believing again, I felt Her as “something I must believe in” not because someone said so or because it might make me happy, but because I knew she was there. It was like believing in rocks, as Starhawk once put it.
[Pop trainspotting interlude: did you know that this song was produced by the Australian team of Vanda and Young-- the "Young" being George Young, brother of AC/DC's Angus and Malcolm Young?]

More, More, More Andrea True Connection

Now it gets sexy again. I know She is there and I want more of Her. This song seemed impossibly lascivious when I was a kid and it was on the radio, a perception possibly helped by a DJ whose intro to the song included the information that the singer was a porn star who was singing about making XXX movies. Who has ever heard of such a thing??? In this context it’s a song about sex (i.e., the eternal coupling of Shiva and Shakti) but also an allusion to Mother Meera’s saying that no matter how much of God we have experienced, there is always more. Keep seeking Her and loving Her more.

Right Time of the Jennifer Warnes

Night

Three 70s songs in a row? Bad DJ-ing! I can only explain the presence of “Right Time of the Night” by saying, it’s a lovely song, it’s very sweet, and it links the “stars… waking above” to earthly gettin’ it on. It also fits in with this collection’s day/night, light/dark theme.

Deep Blue Day Brian Eno

As does this track, one of my all-time-favorite instrumentals, a song to which I danced with my first spirit guide, the One who prepared me for my Guardian Angel, at 3:00 a.m. one wild night… don’t ask me how, as She was not embodied. This song bodies into sonic reality, as best it can be bodied, the peace which passes understanding. It is one of the collection’s “orderly” tracks (like "Silly Love Songs" and "I Want Your Love"), as opposed to chaotic ones like “Custard Pie,” “More, More, More,” and “Lorelei,” which bespeak delirium.

Can’t Get Enough The Colourfield

of You Baby
When I bought the Colourfield's Virgins and Philistines back in the 80s, what hit me most about this song was its retro 1960s sound, nearly as good a job of mimicry as Elvis Costello's Get Happy!! I also thought it was awesome that they'd cover a Roches song. It seems that every word Terry Hall has ever sung is freighted with enough irony to sink the Edmund Fitzgerald, but maybe that's what drew me to this song--his faux starry-eyed delivery, in its breathless gush, is in some ways better than a straight romantic vocal . [Besides the fact that straight romantic delivery is every bit as calculated as Hall's irony.] The bhakti import is along the same lines as "More More More" above: always seek more of Her.
[Trivia: legend has it that Hall gave his band the name The Colourfield not only as an allusion to the Color Field painters but as an inversive mathematical mockery of The Monochrome Set. Draw your own conclusions.]

How Did a Nice Suburban White Boy End Up Worshiping Kali? Part 2

2010-11-08T12:31:00.002-05:00

When I was three I stuck a screwdriver into a wall socket. I had never used a screwdriver and wasn't sure what wall sockets were; it just seemed like the one should fit into the other-- as it did, but with unexpected sparks.

Thirty-one years after my parents wrested the screwdriver from my hands and replaced it with a cold washcloth I didn't let go of for hours, I got the chance to spend six weeks in New Zealand. A Heavenly Creatures fan, I looked forward to visiting Ilam House and Port Levy, and--I don't know. Drinking beer? Sure... it was a vacation, a respite from years on the job market and an exhausting regimen of scut work for my temporary employers, done in the thin hope I could goose them into becoming my permanent employers. That life had left me tired, cynical, covetous, and with constant back pain. I wanted a real job, I wanted more money, I wanted to use my talents on some masterpiece of something or other, I wanted the world to do me the wholly reasonable favor of conforming to my expectations. I really wanted my back to stop hurting.

Seductively, New Zealand fulfilled most of these wishes. The very favorable exchange rate doubled my limited U.S. dollars; my journal entries grew into interesting meditations and ficciones in response to the intoxicating beauty of the land, the astonishing richness of the food, the wine, the bookstores, the museums... and I endured two pounding, punishing, liberating massages that cured my back pain for good. The shaman-masseur who administered this initiation showed me how I held a burning knot of tension in the middle of my back and thus caused my own misery-- a preview of guru talks and Al-Anon meetings to come. You can only imagine the relief of being pain-free, after years, if you've felt it yourself. It felt like my life began again.

The Mother, in whose existence I no longer believed other than as some archetypal mist of human wanting, used everything around me to clear the decks so I could again meet Her face to face. She took me to an Eden foreign enough and gratified my various desires sweetly enough that I gradually entered an unfamiliar state of wonderment and peaceful receptiveness--and gratitude. Something that happened on my first full day in the country set the stage for this new way of mind and served as a heavenly foot in the door of my heart, allowing the Mother enough gap to wrench the door from its jamb in the coming years.

I'd read by this time the theory that the real-life murderesses portrayed in Peter Jackson's poetic Heavenly Creatures had been zapped by some kind of heavy occult energy while visiting Port Levy, a remote fjord on the South Island, and that this might have led to the violent climax of their folie à deux. According to Pauline Parker's diary, while at Port Levy on holiday she and her Beloved, Juliet Hulme, found themselves utterly swept into an alternate universe as real as this one, "sort of like Heaven, only better." But I wasn't looking for a door to the "Fourth World" as I drove to Port Levy in my rented Holden Vectra, my head awash with the tidal voices of the Maori choir that the hotel clock radio had awakened me with. The film had impressed me deeply and since seeing it I had associated Jackson's "heavenly creatures" with my own two female spirit guides, though my girls, I'm happy to say, abhorred violence. I didn't know what to expect from my pilgrimage, and just getting there in one piece on the tightly winding, dangerously narrow gravel road felt like an initiation.

Port Levy (in Maori, Koukourarata, "the place of the tame owl"--what a metaphor for the Holy Guardian Angel) was my second screwdriver in the outlet. I've posted about it before; the place shocked me into an out-of-self experience like the ones you hear about where the person's floating on the ER ceiling, looking down at herself getting CPR... it wasn't that dramatic at the time, but it was a jarring reminder that there was something outside myself, greater than myself, Something mysterious and powerful that welled up into the world in every instant, like sea water in beach footprints. I heard, quite loudly, a babble of Maori ancestral spirits talking to me; my head spun with the magick of the place, the pulsing gigawatt shakti. I got "lost" on a strip of beach barely bigger than a living room, and the Earth was alive again, aware, looking back at me, kissing me with sunlets on water. None of this was supposed to happen; I knew too well the wishful thinking and mythic archetypes that made people think it happened... but once again reality was outrunning mind, logic and proportion were falling sloppy dead and I didn't even have a dose of chemistry to blame. The alien otherness of the place, its electric embrace, put me on alert again for Her voice, and so a short while later it seemed like a sign that I received that life-altering massage and that I found a remaindered copy of a book about the Goddess in a bookstore in Wellington, sitting lonely on a sale table with pulp novels and history books.

Mark Matousek's Sex Death Enlightenment touched me just as deeply as the massage, smoothing out the inflamed knots of my mind and confronting me with a personality even more suspicious and jaded than mine, who'd had his heart pierced and set aflame by Her. The Divine Mother thus reset me to zero-- psychically, intellectually, and physically, making me ready for Her divine invasion.

How Did a Nice Suburban White Boy End Up Worshiping Kali? Part I

2010-10-31T02:51:00.004-04:00

I didn't know what I was getting into.

The Bible up on the high closet shelf, that's what started it... or was it the drugs? Or-- let's start at the point of no return, the moment when, without knowing it, I took the red pill. Then we'll look even farther back, then forward again.

I'm 34, it's 1998. I've loved the Goddess for 12 years, since I had a startling and unexpected vision of Her as the living, intelligent Earth dancing in black space. Except--She's dead now, or I'm dead to Her, because whenever I think of Her, my Beloved, I feel washed out, like I've got to the end of a night shift at work and just want to have a beer, drag the curtains closed, and go to sleep. Bouncing around in the wake of Her unveiling 12 years ago, I became in short order an atheist, a Catholic, a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhist meditation, and a Wiccan. With every shift of my metaphysical shape, I felt more myself, closer to the supernova I dimly knew dwelt in my heart, the nut uncracked, the universe in a hazel nut like God showed Julian of Norwich...

In 1998 I'd more than fulfilled my ten-year mission to go boldly into libraries and meditation rooms and try to figure out what in the heck had happened to me 12 years previously. I'd voyaged so thoroughly in the realms of books that everything having to do with the Goddess was now a concept, a belief, a word. "Maybe She's not real," I had to admit to myself. There seemed to be so many cultural, neurological, pharmacological explanations of Her that She Herself might be superfluous, and anyway, how could a loving Goddess allow all that suffering, blah blah blah... ? The idea of a personal deity, so gut-true in 1986, was by the late 90s quaint, and anything "spiritual" I did was in the spirit of academic inquiry: reading new scriptures, trying new methods of meditation, fitting them into my or someone else's theoretical (not theological) model.So here I was, just out of grad school, preoccupied with a new relationship and finding a job, my whole life ahead of me, but missing Her, my true love, suffering from phantom heart syndrome.

All but the initial vision had been frustratingly dry. I wasn't smart enough to know you could--had to--create your own path, so I constantly searched for the best path others had cut, but they all lacked in some serious way. Buddhism was dull, Catholicism baroquely silly, Wicca disgustingly well-intentioned, and none of them offered me any room to lose my mind. It had been in delirium I had first met Her, first embraced Her, first been taught by the two female spirits who, years later and with a shudder, I would read always come to those who seek knowledge from the sacred vine tlitlitzin. The two spirits guided me for several days after my initial, stunning vision of Gaia. They said, "We're going to show you some things you'll understand now, and some you won't understand until later. And no matter what happens in your life, no matter how far you think you get from this moment, all you have to do is call on us and we'll be there."

If you believe in Angels, as my friend Mary Daly did, you know that They can intervene violently in one's life. They can whisper in your ear, or They can orchestrate a symphonic explosion of events to get your attention. I've always been somewhat spiritually hard of hearing, so I've tended to get bombs thrown at me, but by 1998 the bomb of 12 years back, the Big Bang of my life and the reason I'm writing this, the reason I've done most of what I've done since--even that had echoed itself out like last year's Fourth of July. I would ask Mary all kinds of questions about the divine--"But if there's Goddess, then how can there be ______" or "But what kind of sense does it make to understand Her as both imminent and transcendent?" and Mary would answer the questions usually but once in a while, and once pretty finally, she said something along the lines of "You're trying to intellectualize something that can't be intellectualized." Yes! The famous--intellectual! With three Ph.D.s! The philosopher who called herself a reincarnation of Aquinas! I know! That's what I said: sounds like a copout.

I could hardly have imagined what was about to happen, there in 1998 in my house in the gentrifying urban neighborhood, wanly thumbing my religion books, resignedly doing pranayama because Robert Anton Wilson said it worked for him when he was out of a job and going through the Dark Night of the Soul and he and his family were on welfare and living in the projects. I wrote to ask him how to do the heart chakra exercise he said made him "come alive" in the midst of all that hopelessness, but never heard back.It kind of hurt that he didn't return my letter, but part of me thinks that he knew he wouldn't need to; if I was that determined to find the doorway into my own heart, I'd find it.

I wanted my heart to open. I wanted Her, but I knew She probably wasn't there. Shakta lore says that if you do pranayama regularly, Kali will appear to you. In 1998 this would have sounded to me like instructions for summoning an alien spaceship to a clambake, but I was doing pranayama as an intellectual exercise anyway, timing my breathing sessions and noting any effects from them in a notebook, adding to my catalogue of other people's beliefs, rituals. Other people had those because they believed in something, and that was fine for them, but I didn't have the luxury of belief, or the foolishness. It was interesting that some people felt like they'd meditated or prayed their way into the company of gods or Angels, but I no longer saw that as a possibility for me.

What I didn't know was, it isn't all in your head. What I didn't know was, "when you're ready, they come for you."

Dream, 10/30/10

2010-10-30T10:11:00.001-04:00

I'm at a conference and there's a party tonight. I'm walking to the hotel with this guy who's very excited about the party and I have to say, I'm looking forward to it myself. We get into the lobby elevator area and this elevator is sitting there open, with several people we know in it. They're in a festive mood, and my friend runs over to the elevator, joyous that party time has begun.

I start over to the elevator and chance to look over to my right as another elevator opens up. In it are my Guru, Ammachi, and Mother Meera, all seated and in saris [I have never seen my Guru in anything other than a saffron robe, and come to think of it I don't think I've seen Ammachi in anything other than her white robes.] I do a double take, and all but run over to this new, astonishing elevator.

Once I'm in it, I sit down with these three saints and say aloud, "Thank you, Kali, for putting me here with these amazing lovers of God. This is going to be the best elevator ride ever." I'm not even embarrassed at the latter gush; it's purely how I feel.

My guru asks the other two, "Have you ever heard him sing the Sri Kali Chalisa?" They say they haven't. "He's quite good, and he even incorporates other influences." The dream ends too quickly for me to react to her saying this--

[What does this mean? I have no idea. It was good to see Her again, that's for sure. IRL I'm not sure I've ever sung the Sri Kali Chalisa except maybe one time when I was hanging out with my Guru. Here is an English translation of the words.]

Read The Sparrow

2010-10-25T15:56:00.005-04:00

You know all those questions I'm always asking, and you maybe are, too-- questions about God, and God's will, questions about evil, questions about doing the right thing and how to live in the lap of God and What Does It All Mean and Can It Really Mean Anything? I just read an astonishing book that asks all those questions, and hints at answers to some of them, and will blow your head apart: Mary Doria Russell's brilliant, disturbing, enthralling novel, The Sparrow.

I don't have time to write a proper review, so I just want to implore you, if you have ever wondered how there could exist a loving God or a divine plan in the midst of suffering, death, and horror: read this book. If you ever wondered how people could be so craven or unimaginative as to use myths of divine purpose to explain evil, read this book. If you just love a good story, love to see a writer strut her stuff, love the way someone like H.P. Lovecraft can build and build a sense of dread to the point of delirium, love the way someone like Elmore Leonard can weave the strands of a tale into a dizzying Persian rug, or love the way someone like Hermann Hesse or Ursula K. Le Guin or J.G. Ballard or Monique Wittig or Ralph Ellison can permanently alter your vision, then read this book. If you've had your reader's heart broken by Dorothy Allison or James Baldwin or Rachel Ingalls, had them burn a story onto your mind like a smoking afterimage while you sit there stunned, in tears, wishing with some medium-sized part of you that you'd never picked up the book in the first place, and you still have the guts to risk it again, then read this book.

The Sparrow re-imagines the first contact of European explorers with the New World: in the year 2019, the interception of music broadcast from Alpha Centauri leads to the formation of a secret, charmingly DIY space mission. A small group of well-intentioned humans (not a conquistador among them) land on the planet Rakhat, where, as you have already guessed, very little is what it seems. Though the mission is sponsored by the Society of Jesus, the participants have varying levels of faith, from zero to mystic, and so all kinds of readers-- atheists, mystics, those in between, and those who aren't sure what they believe-- will find in these pages someone to identify with and a whole lot to push their buttons. The narrative cuts suspensefully, and finally relentlessly, between the mission to Rakhat and the official investigation, decades later, into the mission's disastrous end. Both on Rakhat and on Earth, Russell forces us, Ludovico-style, to witness the struggle within the heart and mutilated body of the mission's only survivor, a priest accused of murder and sexual deviance and blamed for the failure of humankind's first contact with another world. As characters on both worlds see their certainties crumble like the geocentric model of the cosmos, you will find your own certainties -- about what it means to love, what it means to be human, what it means to have faith-- gloriously troubled.

The Sparrow isn't just a novel about faith or love or colonialism (with echoes of the Holocaust--Russell, who is Jewish, was influenced by Rabbi Arthur Green); it's about families, social structures, trust, art, brutality, terror, mystery, courage, despair... in short, like every great novel, it's about everything. In a world where more and more of us crave simpler and simpler myths about this staggeringly complex universe, a work like this is a treasure.

Coming Soon...

2010-10-24T14:12:00.000-04:00

...the long-awaited "how did a nice white boy from the suburbs end up worshiping Kali?" post!

...more Bhakti CD liner notes!

...more Kalibhakta sutras!

...the long-ass post about the problem of evil, or death, or whatever!

It's just that Sophia and I had a conference and our anniversary and then we went camping and I have all these papers to grade and all these T&P files to read, and Sophia's legendary Halloween party is looming... but my thoughts are with you.

Outside the Garden

2010-09-24T13:22:00.001-04:00

It's that insufferable Star Trek episode... the one where they mill around the minimalist villa ringed with flimsy, Doric-columned pergolas, the one where nothing happens but it was written by the smartest guy who ever wrote for the show and so you watch it every time even though you know nothing is going to happen. You know that, weirdly, you won't see the Enterprise, that Jim and the boys won't leave the planet, that the Problem, whatever it is, won't get solved. It's positively, hokily, 1960sly Sartrean.

You know the teen Dhanu girl in the corner (the Dhanus' foreheads are kind of big!) will keep writing in her visibook, keep writing contentedly in the series' most prescient prop, a klunky 1967 iPad. She'll keep writing and somehow be the focus of everything, though she's at best a bit character. The first 99 times you saw the episode you didn't notice Spock and Kirk trying to spy on her, didn't notice the redshirt who stood behind her for a moment then never re-appeared, didn't notice Nurse Chapel's sidelong glances like she's the queen burqa bitch and the kid's rocking a mini-skirt at the local mosque.

Now when you watch, you half-expect Kirk to slap the girl, or rage at her, or at least have an intense, sweaty-faced moment with her, such is her implicit power and such are the murky sexual politics of the series--but he only ever looks at her: first a slight glance when Spock breaks the news that they're not getting off the planet any time soon, then a cut of the eyes when word comes that McCoy has gone over the wall into the Garden of Knowing, and, finally, a slow head-turn in her direction as the music rises before the last commercial break.

"Outside the Garden" is where most of the characters stay, at least in the plodding events of the so-named episode. They stay outside the garden, and out of its sight, yet the very un-Trek lack of resolution makes you wonder where they are after the credits roll--are they still there, waiting, pacing, sneaking looks at the Writing Girl? Who else goes over the wall into the Garden? And what in hell is the Garden? It's not death, because the girl herself has come from there, part of a gypsy tribe who are this planet's outcasts. It's not some kind of Eden, because people are going in, not getting kicked out.

You dug all this from between the lines long before you watched that spittle-flecked interview with the aging writer or bookmarked the mushrooming Wikipedia entry on the episode. You easily connected the girl with the old Gandhi-looking guy in the very first scene, the guy who says "The Garden takes root in us all. You see? A verse on every leaf, a world woven of prayer," smiling his moron Garden-smile as the landing party brushes past him. Jim and the boys don't notice the little key around his neck, sign of the gypsies and their secret byword ("The key of joy is disobedience").

Back at the ranch, Kirk and Spock try to call Bones, try to call the ship, but the communicators don't work; Kirk finally gives up and throws his into the gloaming that always, in this episode, hangs just beyond the muzzy bounds of the ill-lit set. He throws his communicator into the dark and tells Spock he's going after McCoy and going alone, much to Spock's dismay. Spock even threatens to neck-pinch Jim but he, too, as soon as he says this-- and Nimoy carries this off masterfully-- as soon as he threatens Kirk, the words die in his mouth and he drops his hand to his side, the side closest to the girl, and he makes the slightest, "involuntary" gesture towards her. She's not in the shot but he's basically pointing right at her. You think, every time, "She's controlling the planet with her mind!" But if she is, what's she making people do other than pace around crankily, uttering existentialisms? ("The Garden's walls imprison those who live outside them.")

You root for Kirk to judo some Dhanus, bull his way out of the whole mess, trip up an elder or the Writing Girl with a punchy paradox that will make smoke come out of their ears and unravel the whole drama-- tiresome a resolution as that would be-- but you want him, want someone to do something. Spock is sweating over a jerry-rigged communicator, Nurse Chapel is tending to a Dhanu with a big bruise on his big forehead, Spock can't make the parts fit, Nurse Chapel is frazzled, she's swapped her torn uniform for native garb, and Kirk, Kirk is cracking. The third or fourth time Spock gets nothing but static from his Tinkertoy talk-box, the Captain leaps up, seizes on something Nurse Chapel has said, follows her out of the room into a little closet-like area and grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her: we've got to fight while there's a ghost of a chance, and she's just too fagged to perk up and the Captain shakes her again because, damn it, they all face utter destruction.

This is when she delivers the famous line: "This is all just made to order for you, isn't it, Jim? You're home, in your paradise, while we're in he--," at which point he slaps her. The whole exchange has inspired schools of interpreters to say: the events of the episode take place in Kirk's mind. Or some of them do, or maybe the Great and Powerful McGuffin binding them to the planet, to the villa, dwells in Kirk's mind-- a monster from the id. Disbelievers in the Kirk's Mind Hypothesis, in fact, call believers "the Krell," while the Krell, for their part, point smugly to the Writing Girl as their proof: Kirk's anima, female to his male, passive whereas Kirk is active, a silent writer whereas Kirk excels at speech, serene whereas Kirk ever strives, and somehow, with lots of Krell footnotes, human whereas Kirk is alien, perpetually "alien" in the sense that he's the invader trying to win over every culture in every star system to the 'Merican Way of Life, despite the Prime Directive-- a 23rd-century cowboy, an intergalactic John Wayne ambling off into a wrong-way sunset.

One thing's for sure: Kirk isn't Kirk any more by the end of the episode. It's like he and the others have lost their identities: Spock has failed at building a communicator, McCoy has succumbed to woo, Chapel has faded into the surrounding arbors in her native garb, done with the Captain and seeking new allies in preparation for a long stay on this planet. Kirk isn't Kirk any more: without his ship, without an audience for his oratory, he has no one to slug or charm on this shrugging, lotus-eating world. There'll be no death match in a sandy ring, there'll be no slap and tickle with a high-born alien chick that will force the hand of the planetary patriarchs. Kirk's only confrontation can be with the Garden, yet of everyone in the episode, he's the one who's insisted that the Garden is a metaphor, there is no Garden, the Garden exists only in these creatures' mythology. What did he do with the key he found on the floor after the Writing Girl's troupe left the villa? Forget about it? Give it to Spock as a keepsake? Throw it into the dark?

Last we see of Kirk he's walking away in the medium distance on the dirt path from the villa. He has his back to us, a small figure getting smaller, a Howard Hawks sheriff with no town to watch. You fear for him, he'll become a marooned Lear raging at the stars, shaking his fist at the immensities of space as the Enterprise drops a probe into orbit and heads off to the nearest starbase to regroup. In the final scene, in the villa, Spock is preparing to follow the gypsies to see what they know while the second landing-party redshirt picks up the cast-off visibook. He reads and he starts to smile and his breaking smile of delight--babyish, abandoned, borderless-- is the nodding junkie smile of someone untethering from all that is human. With a glance, Spock signals that it's time to go. The crewman turns and his obedient body and disobedient, sporulating mind follow Spock out of the villa. The crewman smiles while the Garden shimmers in his eyes, while joy drips from every petal, while the gypsies walk into night and lift their voices high, lift them on song to play in the orange light of Tau Sagittarii.

Thank GAWD

2010-09-23T16:54:00.000-04:00

It's past time, about 5 years past, and we'll see how it works, but--a new Blogger editor! With a preview function that actually previews!

Altars!

2010-09-22T17:10:00.003-04:00

I'll have to post a picture of my altar once it's set up again... it's taken Sophia and me this long to get the study unpacked and it's only recently that you can even get to my altar. For now, here are some other people's altars. I love this Kali one! And this one!

A Tragi-Goth, Wryly Humorous Meditation on Death, Doom, and Chaos

2010-09-08T18:46:00.003-04:00

The tagline: "The lampshade emerged from the wreckage of Katrina. But was it really what it appeared to be--a Buchenwald artifact made of human remains?"

Mark Jacobson's stunning "Skin," an excerpt from his book The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans.

Bhakti, Vol. 1

2010-08-25T11:52:00.003-04:00

When I was first falling in love with Kali, I made a series of CDs (which Sophia, bless her, is now turning into playlists) called "Bhakti" after the Sanskrit word for devotion. I spent a good part of every day singing her these songs, usually on my morning commute but also while I was holed up in my home office huddled in front of the computer for aeons (the Assistant Professor years)... I took it literally when Teachers like Ramakrishna, Narada, Chaitanya, and Andrew Harvey said "Love Her." Taking it literally and loving Kali like an eighth-grade crush has been the greatest blessing I could have imagined.

I'm grateful to Sophia, my fellow Pilgrim, for resurrecting the Bhakti CDs and especially for the great conversations we're having about devotion and music and God...

"Green Onions" -- Booker T. & the MGs

This has always struck me as a goddess song; it sounds dark and mysterious, like some electro-sacred music played in a temple at 3:00 a.m. by magicians. It is the CD’s invocation.

"Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" -- Edison Lighthouse

One of my favorite love songs! This is wonderfully lo-fi and brilliantly catchy. She is named “Rose” AND “Mary,” “Her hair is kind of wild and free” like Kali’s, and “She’s … got a magical spell,” which could be her all-attracting shakti or the spell of maya. Did I mention this is a musically perfect, great song???

"Annie’s Song" -- John Denver

The ultimate love song. This chick he’s singing to is elemental, man, and he’s just totally into her. In fact, she’s everywhere! “Let me die in your arms,” indeed. We read in the Bhagavad Gita (8:12-13), “Remembering me at the time of death, close down the doors of the senses and place the mind in the heart. Then, while absorbed in meditation, focus all energy upwards to the head. Repeating in this state the divine Name, the syllable Om that represents the changeless Brahman, you will go forth from the body and attain the supreme goal.”

"Kaya" -- Bob Marley

Bob does very spiritual music, and when I got into Kali I got into him seemingly as a side-effect. I used to love to sing this song in the car, at the top of my voice, re-phrasing the lyrics as “Got to have Kali now, got to have Kali now…” The substance about which Bob is singing has a time-honored place in the worship of Kali, too.

"Black Magic Woman" -- Santana

Tantra is associated with black magic and Kali is associated with magic, too. Trying to use divine shakti for selfish ends (mild black magic) or to harm others (serious black magic) are unfortunate paths some of Her children take; bhakti demands that we perform the far more difficult “magic” of transforming every event into a moment of God’s grace, of seeing Her in all of Her creation. Of course, we aren't doing this ourselves--only Kali can (un)weave Her maya into pure grace and highest love (prema), co-creating with Her children. Another song about an irresistible, sexxayy woman.

"Age of Consent" -- New Order

In this pop masterpiece, our narrator is supremely ambivalent: he wants to give the object of his obsession the kiss-off, wants to cut her loose and be done with her, but—he can’t leave her alone for a second. This is like the ambivalence I felt in the early days of loving Kali; She was totally fascinating and beautiful and Her world seemed one of infinite, ornate bliss, yet—did I really want to be “religious” and have to “surrender” and all that yucky stuff? Plus, She, and my first teacher, Mother Meera, were scary! What if They led me places I didn’t want to go? But like this song, She was sweeter than sugar and Her melody wrapped around me like a silk scarf...a Thuggee scarf???

"Dancing Queen" -- ABBA

This might be the ultimate pop song ever. Or maybe the ultimate pop song ever is "Silly Love Songs," but that's on Bhakti, Vol. 2. In myth, Kali not only dances, but She’s the Queen. 3:53 of pure pop ecstasy is the best flower of all to lay at Her Majesty’s feet, short of one’s own life.

"Learning to Fly" -- Tom Petty

During my initial period of devotion, it really did feel like I was learning to fly. Such joy, such divine light at the heart of things seemed impossible, and a fall always seemed imminent. She, however, promised that the more I grounded myself in Her, the more I opened my heart to Her, the higher She’d take me.

"(They Long to Be) Close to You" -- The Carpenters

Another classic love song, one of the best pop songs ever penn’d. This one’s got it all: angels, moon dust, starlight, birds (suddenly appearing). The Beloved in this song is omni-attractive, like Kali: everyone and everything gravitates to Her. As Vivekananda said, when people lust after other people, or after power or money or fame or beauty, they are really desiring God.

"The Caterpillar" -- The Cure

Evolution!

"I Want to Take You Higher" -- Sly & the Family Stone

This is what God is saying to us all the time. When we take Her up on it is when we’re truly happy.

"You Sexy Thing" -- Hot Chocolate

Puzzled yet intrigued by my rock-jawed, smoldering Shakta eroticism, Sophia asked me, very astutely, “How can God be sexy?” I think the classic iconography of Kali as a shapely, naked woman is (uh, kinda patriarchal) shorthand for Her being all-attractive, as God is said to be in Hinduism—no one can resist God. She is sexualized in Shakta iconography because sexuality is one of our strongest, most primal human energies, an energy we must re-direct heavenward if we are to fully surrender to Her. Sex is also a metaphor for our relationship with God: passion, surrender, union, creation, co-evolution…hence, the interlocked tantric triangles. “Did you know, you’re everything I’ve prayed for … I believe in miracles.”

"Pick Up the Pieces" - Average White Band

Mary… Inanna… Freya… Oya… Kali… Isis… the Divine Mother. Not to be too Jungian about it, but I really do believe She has been worshiped and loved across time and space, and to some extent Her mythologies cohere into a grand story of love—She and Her divine consort, the Creation. Kali and Shiva, Isis and Osiris—in both myths, the female is active and the male is passive, the female is order and the male is chaos. She restores us; She brings order, She puts us together. In Egyptian myth, Osiris is dismembered and Isis seeks his body parts far and wide, picking up the pieces and putting them back together, re-creating him (and, significantly, refashioning his phallus) and making him better than before—just as She does for us, for Her creation.

"She’s Got a New Spell" -- Billy Bragg

Since this was the first bhakti CD, I freighted it with some of my very favorite songs, including this one, an ode to a magical woman who “cut the stars out of the sky / And baked them in a pie.” The lines about “the scene and the scenery / The script and the machinery” make me think of the play of maya, how the play of experience is Her whim and subject to change and (per)mutation.

"Strawberry Letter #23" -- The Brothers Johnson

Another great love song, a funkin’ slab of 70s (post-) psychedelia. The lyrics portray a phantasmagoric fairyland while the music creates that fairyland through echo, phasing, and chorused vocals. For me, as a teenager listening to this song, as improbable or as hokey as it sounds, just the simple word "strawberry" conjured up a shimmering erotic vision of peasant-bloused Rock Chicks drifting amid the sickly gauze of berry incense that always burned in that noted Kali temple called The Infinite Mushroom (a head shop in Orlando complete with velvet Dayglo Hendrix posters and bead curtains). Ahh, the mysteries: of paisley, of sweet smoke, of dangerous herbs and long hippie dresses and chunky hippie legs... I couldn't have known these were second-hand mysteries, borrowed or warmed over from a livelier time, Hashbury magic to ward off leisure suit-ism... they shone like fairy lights, like letters on strawberry-scented paper from a far-away lover. Which in a sense they were: Kali was in that smoke, beckoning me beyond polyester, beyond the Bee Gees, beyond Electric Ladyland even, to realms unthought.

"Super Freak" -- Rick James

“She will never let your spirits down,” and “she’s got incense, wine, and candles.” I’m there! Rick James’s über-ho, in my imagination, becomes the wildly dancing, sensuous Lady of the Cremation Ground, worshiped in all acts of love and pleasure, who “is said to be intoxicated all the time” (Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine 89) The song’s hard, relentless groove befits one Who wields sword and trident.

"I Only Want to Be With You" -- Dusty Springfield

I’ve already mentioned about 25 of the “best love songs ever,” so what do I say about this, the great Dusty Springfield’s first single, a song that stomps the emotional gas pedal with the hysteria of a period when love songs knew no ambiguity, no hesitation, no nuance, amen. That makes it perfect for a bhakti collection, and the simple-minded lyrics are perfect for one who wishes to court God.

"All You Need Is Love" -- The Beatles

If you could boil the bhakti tradition down to one line, this would be it.

"Sitting" -- Cat Stevens

This song’s classical beauty and forward-looking lyrics made it a logical candidate to end the CD. Cat Stevens’s passion as a singer is a wonder to hear, and his voice seems to bear all the joyous pain of one whose Beloved is dragging him to “the waterside,” a Lethean place of transformation, of death and resurrection. The song’s punchline (“You’re going to wind up where you started from”) hints that in devotion to God we learn to live where we are, learn to find Her in the here and now; it also echoes Eliot’s Four Quartets. The real mystery, in this song and on the spiritual path, lies not hidden in the Himalayas, but on the other side of the door.

One More Thing I Don't Have to Worry About as a Boring Untatooed Middle-Aged Shakta in the South

2010-08-18T12:56:00.002-04:00

Being hip.

(I'm not complaining.)

Life After Death

2010-08-10T12:56:00.003-04:00

Here is a fascinating and witty review essay about life after death. It strikes me that as a Shakta I am a member of a religion that, while it posits an afterlife (basically the standard Hindu theory), doesn't really give a crap about it. Our "ultimate/intimate reality" to use Mary Daly's words is right here, right now.

Thus, every time I hear the word "afterlife" I'm reminded of that silly Squirrel Nut Zippers song. Which is a fun song, and makes the point that hipsters and ancient Egyptian grain farmers and most everyone else all use the afterlife as a canvas on which to paint their hopes, desires, fears. But those are right here, people, right now... but no Shakta sermon today. Just go pet a kitty or hug and kiss someone you love, and think about heaven.

I'm Just Posting this Because it's Awesome

2010-08-02T16:01:00.004-04:00

Found this while going through some old, old files... all I can say is ♥. Riot Grrrl was an embodiment of Kali if ever I saw one.

Heresies, issue 5: The Great Goddess

2010-07-22T11:02:00.002-04:00

Cruise on over to the Heresies PDF Archive to download the Great Goddess issue, and more.

The old-school [that's a compliment] feminist journal Heresies is online as part of a film project that "uncovers the inside story of the Second Wave of feminism" from the point of view of a member of the Heresies Collective, a group of hundreds of women who were (and are) "artists, writers, architects, painters, filmmakers, designers, editors, curators, and teachers."

Heresies #5 contains a fascinating article by Grace Shinell that, among its newage lunacies, discloses some deep secrets of the Divine Mother, complete with an amazing Shakta diagram of creation.

There's also Carol Christ's classic "Why Women Need the Goddess;" a guide to goddess temples, including one of my personal favorites, Chartres Cathedral; the poem "Isis at the Supermarket"; some lovely home altars; a cool article on spirituality and the body by Deborah Haynes; more classic articles: "The Reemergence of the Archetype of the Great Goddess in Art by Contemporary Women" by Gloria Orenstein and "Finding the Goddess: Finding Myself" by Martha Alsup; an article on the Goddess and menstruation... and mucho más amazing, mind-blowing stuff, and nary a word about "essentialism" or how we're all "implicated."

These women were implicated, alright-- in kicking ass!

Guardian Angels on the Mountains

2010-07-16T21:33:00.001-04:00

Everyone's familiar with stories of mysterious "presences" that appear to people in extreme circumstances. You might remember, for example, The Waste Land's evocation of that shadowy "third who always walks beside you" sensed by Ernest Shackleton in his Antarctic expedition, and bent by T. S. Eliot into an analogue for the Holy Spirit. On the low-brow end of things, there's an entire magazine (subscrib'd to by Yours Truly) devoted to first-person tales of angelic intervention, published, of course, by Guideposts ("Inspiring Stories, Inspiring People, Inspiring You").

Now there's a book about the phenomenon, John Geiger's The Third Man Factor, reviewed admirably by James Allen Cheyne over at eSkeptic. Though Cheyne is provoked into a kind of agnostic Jesuitry by the "vivid and real" nature of "companion experiences" -- he invents an unnecessary and untenable distinction between "hallucination" and "delusion"-- his review lays out the experience in enough detail to satisfy both angelophiles and atheists.

A very common feature of companion experiences is a voice that guides or reassures the experiencer and that sometimes tells him how to extricate himself from the maelstrom at hand. I've experienced this voice and have written about it ad infinitum on WiHW. Who or what is this voice?

Geiger speculates about the bicameral mind, Cheyne speculates that the "voices" are merely the subconscious, telling people things they already know, I speculate about Angels. What's important is getting in touch with your deep self, maintaining a relationship with your own ass, as a character in Apocalypse Now said. You can call it whatever you want, and you don't need a spell of sugar-starved hypoxia in a snowstorm to get there. It is funny, however, how The Third Man Factor's list of physical and emotional triggers (experienced relatively often in the extremes of mountaineering) resembles a list of shamanic deprivations and kick-ass initiation techniques: fear, isolation, hunger (think Lakota vision quest--or Lent), sleep deprivation, long stretches of monotony punctuated by sudden panic, physical trauma (think bamboo staves in Zen, ritual scarification, the cilice in Opus Dei), etc.

Let's say for practical purposes that it doesn't matter whether we alone, no God needed, can jump-start ourselves (or be jump-started) into higher awareness, or whether She has guided evolution to turn certain experiences into doorways to Her starry realm. The important thing is, some states of consciousness are preferable to others, and there are reliable (if sometimes scary) ways of getting to and staying in higher consciousness. Do it! as Jerry Rubin said. Don't dream it, be it, as Dr. Frank N. Furter said; get out there and climb a mountain or do some pranayama or do something nice for someone you despise, or go on a carrots and spirulina diet for four or five days. I dare you, as Bauhaus sang... to go inside your head and turn it inside out.

UPDATE:

Predictably, Kali twits me for my snide remark about C. S. Lewis a couple of posts ago... She directed me quite "randomly" to a book called Desiring God in which the author, John Piper, a "Christian hedonist," argues that the highest Christian calling is to enjoy God and delight in the deity, to intoxicate ourselves with praise--praise being for us as much as it is for God. Piper cites a passage from Lewis in which the Narnian disapprovingly notes that today's number-one virtue is "Unselfishness," whereas for "the great Christians of old" it was "Love."

"You see what has happened?" Lewis asks. "A negative term has been substituted for a positive," yet nowhere in the teachings of Christ do we find adverts for "self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order to follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire....infinite joy is offered us" (emphasis mine). The numerology surrounding the Lewis quote was unmistakable, so that even I would notice I was being chided. I stand chastened, but I'm staying on this side of the wardrobe. And I still think Lewis was a bit of a prat.

But his heart seems to have been in the right place. Dammit. Let's add "wildly and passionately praising God" to our list of consciousness alteration techniques above, for it surely is a powerful one and beats dodging avalanches any day. Here is your homework: make a playlist of the sappiest, most moving, most powerful, catchiest love songs you know, and listen to it daily and send love through your heart chakra to God; sing the songs to Her, or Him, or Them, or Whoever you think is up there minding the store. Belt the songs out, feel them, let them melt your heart like an 8th grade crush.

Do it.

The Lady Twilight

2010-07-16T14:32:00.001-04:00

Killing the Buddha has published a five-part excerpt from William Dalrymple's new book Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India. The focus of the excerpt is tantra in Bengal! Dalrymple tells the heart-breaking, inspiring story of Manisha, a devotee of Tara whose life has been a long, strange trip through "the burning grounds of Bengal, an open-air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad."

Normally I'd greet that kind of purple prose with an eye-roll and a waspish dig about orientalism, but where the Mother is concerned no prose can be purple enough. The truth of tantra is stranger than any fiction. Dalrymple is an excellent observer of people as well as places, and he communicates very well the sense of danger involved in the worship of Tara/Kali.

Heather King Is a Wonderful Writer

2010-07-10T14:51:00.002-04:00

I found this essay in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2008, and on re-reading it for the third time I checked out her web site. But look! She's been in other volumes of the series, too! (I love the web. I love it. I listened to The Leaving Trains yesterday for the first time in 25 years, courtesy of some dude's blog. Anyway--)

True or not, there's an image out there of spiritual writers as, uhh, disembodied, preferring to live in our heads, or on the front porch of Heaven (if there's a difference). One of the best things about Heather King is that she lives right here on Earth. She'll tell you all about her little corner of Earth, L.A., and tell you in loving microdetail. She's not just one of them there embodied spiritual writers, she's emplaced, in a Thoreauian sense, and her love for God seems to sprout heavenward like a palm tree on Wilshire Boulevard, one with the soil where her Lord has planted her.

Amy Welborn, no slouch herself, has a good post on King. I know Kali has sent me King, and Welborn, because they're so admirably struggling with abandonment to divine providence and because they're so nauseatingly Catholic and pro-life. I know Kali wants me to forget theo-political differences and focus on what matters, and She wants me to see that people with whom I disagree can be my Teachers and that I might not have the monopoly on truth I sometimes think I have. She's brought this lesson home in some pretty in-my-face ways over the years, so I'm going to play what Peter Elbow calls "the believing game" with King's and Welborn's writing and leave the sarc to someone else for once.

If you're reading this as what we might call an "aggressive nonchristian," I should warn you that the Gospel makes more sense and finds a more compelling voice in King's writing than in almost any place I can think of. She's what the schlock legions think C. S. Lewis is. If you don't want to be slapping your forehead and saying "I GET IT NOW!" then leave Heather King alone. You might find your beliefs compromised, you might wake up with a rosary in your hands and the taste of wine on your lips.

The Reality Guru

2010-06-11T11:49:00.002-04:00

for Henry Rollins

He takes you shopping, to see the smoking shells of consumer idolatry, the empty souls trying to fill themselves with Ecko and Lucky-- but also to teach you to figure sales tax in your head. He takes you to dodgy tube stations or out to the banlieues to practice the thousand-yard stare that says better left alone. He makes you change tires even when they're not flat; he wants you to be able to do it in the dark, in the rain, with cars slamming past at 80.

The Reality Guru never mentions God. "What are you doing?" he'd ask, when you, in the day, indulged in God-talk, in chit-chat about satori and mountaintops. Then you realized he meant it literally: what are you doing, this second? Sitting, talking about God, hoping someone has it all figured out and that it's all going to be OK.

He has taught you how to cure a hangover and that lies are most believed when they make you look bad or make the victim look good. He has taught you tactics of defensive, evasive, and offensive driving, along with a hefty dose of Krav Maga. He learned it in the ghetto, he says, and you're still not sure whether he means Brooklyn or Kiev.

The Reality Guru wants you to get enough sleep. When you stay up late to read a Gita or wake up early to meditate, he wags a cautioning finger. Like a tough Twelve-Step buddy, he helps you get in touch with your feelings, helps you tease out your hidden motivations and neuroses and reflex responses, but then abruptly says, "OK, enough. Get over yourself." But later he picks up where he left off.

The Reality Guru sends you up and down hospital corridors to find patients too out of it or too far gone to know you're there, and he makes you sit with them and sit with them and sit past boredom and revulsion until you don't want to be anywhere else, until the noise and sadness and smell all bloom in your awareness like lilies. He's had you panhandle at Charing Cross Station and stand around the Musée d'Orsay with a Union Jack umbrella, then lead the assembled British tourists through the galleries, lecturing them on paintings you know nothing about. You've shaved your head, donned the saffron, and shilled for Krishna on the streets of Nashville. Then the two of you caught Danny O'Keefe at the Bluebird, getting sozzled in full Krishna garb, getting bourbon all over your robes, howling along with "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues" and being asked to leave. You are beyond shame.

You pay for all this yourself. The Reality Guru's not rich, doesn't have a compound or Rolls Royces or even another disciple. You work two, three jobs, then hang with him in the slivers of time you hoard from long weekends, holidays, between jobs, when normal people are golfing or going to the beach, when people like you are Ooooommmmmm-ing in Hyatt ballrooms or doing metta in Napa, in Asheville, in Madison. While others Om and golf, he stand-bys and cargo planes you to the countryside near a town near an immense lake in central Africa, to the lip of a mass grave plowed in moist earth, where you and he stand and stare down at your tumbled future, where he recites a short prayer and hands you a bucket of quicklime.

You are making peace with the dead. You can console the bereaved and the dying. You can shine shoes, refuse the service plan, right a sagging hinge, and negotiate a raise. You know how to listen. You and he are walking through a mall, not a Brooks Brothers and Pottery Barn mall this time but a scuff-marked, chromey Sears and Payless mall, and you feel his eyes on you and you look not at him but around you, there's something you're supposed to be noticing-- it's a dollar on the floor. You smile and keep walking. You don't need a dollar, and you're starting to feel you don't need anything else, either.

Daily Grail: "Her Sweet Murmur"

2010-06-03T21:13:00.003-04:00

Straight from the pages of Darklore Volume 1 comes this fascinating, example-filled exploration of "the sounds heard by experiencers" of paranormal phenomena such as near-death experiences, ayahuasca trips, astral projection, visionary trances, Marian apparitions, kundalini awakenings, UFO sightings, and more. The author doesn't mention the HGA experience or directly mention the opening of the heart chakra, but some Beloved Readers will no doubt connect the dots between the bells and music the article describes and the "unstruck sound" that often accompanies heart-chakra experiences.

And speaking of angels, Daily Grail did see fit to tag the article with an image of an angelic embrace on their main page.

I wish all weirdo writing was this detailed and analytical.

It's Hard, But Love Her Even When You're Scared

2010-05-21T23:53:00.001-04:00

Like a moron, I drove my car into a three-foot deep "puddle" the other day during a rain storm (it didn't look that deep!), and as the engine cut off and the car floated to a stop, that awful feeling of doom and disaster washed over me... ohmygod mycarmyday myliiiiiiiiiife whatwillidoooo?

I tried to prioritize: figure out if someone was about to rear-end me (didn't look like it), whether I should try to move the car (no), figure out what stuff I had to take with me to keep it dry (water was seeping around the doors kind of rapidly), and I called Sophia and said she should probably pick James up from school. I had moment of panic-- my car... cars are expensive!!! and the subliminal, pre-conscious I'm alone and helpless... but quicker than I ever had, I thought I'm here, this is what's going on, so I need to be here and do the next right thing, so I yanked myself out of the self-pity, opened the car door, grabbed my stuff, and waded to the side of the street.

I stood in the rain and tried to forget the future, what's going to happen and are they even going to be able to tow the car and will it ever run again, and I felt the rain and heard the lovely thunder and watched the trees blow in the wind and laughed to my Mother Kali about this very stupid situation, and I felt stupid as hell but tried to get over it. I was mad at the circumstances and squinting in hindsight, but Kali is circumstance, Her unfolding is the shit that happens, and in my laughter I embraced Her, made space for Her in my heart, shoved me and mine to the side and let Her flow in.

I didn't stop kicking myself for driving into a mini-pond, at least not right away, but as I forced myself to reach out to Kali and forget my fears and wants, I was aware of just how much there is to be grateful for: Sophia, James, Molly (who was so sweetly concerned when she heard about the imbroglio), rain, love, personal evolution, gurus, and everywhere, always, my Kali-- my sky, my rain, my love, my heart.

Kalibhakta Sutra, Part Four

2010-05-03T20:44:00.006-04:00

Verse 4:
Clothe Her if you will, but always desire Her naked.

Sanskrit:
Vibhakti paramatman, matta bhaktih.

Comment:
The verse is impossible to translate literally. Vi- is an intensifier but also has the connotation of "dissolution." Matta has meanings of, according to Monier-Williams, intoxication, madness, sexual abandon, wild joy.

The verse is a sly parody of a Hindu proverb: Parabhakti paramatman, sukha bhaktih ("The most intense devotion leads to oneness with the highest realm of divinity, but even a little devotion sweetens life."). Kalibhakta, a staunch adherent of the devotional (bhakti) tradition, seems to vaunt that tradition here, even as he reminds us that ultimate Godhead has no form-- the basic tenet of the advaita tradition. Bhakti is almost always focused on some specific form of God, and so it "clothes" the formless Infinite in an image, in personality and emotion. For this reason, bhakti is considered by the sages to be the most accessible and effective spiritual path, as its personalizing of God makes steady practice easier and intensifies the aspirant's spiritual state. Advaita, on the other hand, is a much more difficult path due to the challenge of abandoning all concepts and ideas about God.

The verse hints, however, that as one progresses on the spiritual path advaita is inevitable, as one begins to see God in more and more of the world, finally attaining the sense of Her presence in all phenomena. In the "unclothing" of advaita, it is not only God who sheds all conceptual form, but concepts themselves fall away, as does the aspirant's own self. Kalibhakta seems to say: follow the path you like best, worship the image of God that appeals to you most ("clothe" God with that image), but don't let the particulars of an image, the details of theology, or the rituals of worship deaden your sense of adoration and joy in all of creation. One of Kalibhakta's teachers, Mother Meera, was fond of saying that no matter how much of God we have enjoyed, no matter how exalted a spiritual state She may have graced us with, there is always more, always higher. That itself would be a good translation of the spirit of this verse.

Vibhakti can mean "intense devotion" but also means "grammatical case." As a word in Sanskrit takes on different cases, and therefore different forms, according to its role in various sentences, so do we give God various forms through our religious ideologies. These ideologies, in turn, shape us and shape our world, as the words in a sentence shape its meaning. Somewhat esoterically, the grammatical imagery refers to Kali, "She Who is words," according to the Sri Kali Sahasranamam (1000 Names of Kali). Kali is often depicted wearing a garland of the 50 letters of the Sanskrit alphabet.

Language can serve as a door to the Divine, but not as a substitute for It. Hinduism, like most religions, places much emphasis on scripture, but it is somewhat unusual in that it recognizes that scripture is limited, human-produced, and thus unable to convey or contain ultimate truth. Eventually, the aspirant reaches the stage at which scriptures, rituals, and devotion itself fall away into uselessness. As Ramprasad wrote: "Rituals and devotions have grown profitless for me / My sleep is broken .... For now I am wide awake .... I have discarded, once and for all, / both righteousness and sin." Kalibhakta cautions us, though, in his correspondence, that "Anyone who tells you they're in this state isn't in it." We assume he excused Ramprasad from this dictum.

Of course, the verse's sexual undertone is what makes it controversial and what, ironically, led to Kalibhakta's expulsion from a well-known school of Tantric Hinduism. Kalibhakta here, echoing Sontag, calls us away from endless interpretation of dead texts and towards an "erotics" of religion, as he also does in the next verse. Of course, sexuality is only one side of the verse; the reader is also, very importantly, urged to love the Divine Mother for What She Is, even when Her unfolding is wildly playful or chaotic (see previous verse). Wishful thinking, however comforting, can only lead to distorted and ultimately dangerous religious ideas.

A Classic Post from Martha Beck

2010-04-29T13:30:00.004-04:00

I love this: "Easter in the Year of the Dog."

I have been practicing gratitude lately, just while driving to work, singing the Gayatri mantra to Kali as I send Her love and thanks from my heart... it's easy to let myself get into those toxic spaces where "they" are a bunch of idiots conspiring to ruin "my" life, where I'm not getting what I want because not everyone groks the like, totally perfect wisdom of my every wish, and from there it's easy for me to get resentful, fearful, falling down the sinkhole of doom as "my" dystopian future, in my imagination, enfolds me like a shroud...

but it's not about me, or them, or the future... it's Her, now, always.

Also: Martha gets down with early hominids.

OK, Now SkepChick Is the Greatest

2010-04-16T16:30:00.003-04:00

blog... ever. Or at least has publish'd the greatest reader comment ever.

Is There, Possibly, Hope... Possibly?

2010-04-14T13:33:00.003-04:00

I just read that as late as 1978 Allen Ginsberg had to be told by Chogyam Trungpa, his Teacher, to "Be doubtless. Go ahead and do it, and [don't] be hesitant about what you're doing."

I guess we all have to learn these lessons over and over. I guess it doesn't make me a Bad Student or a Bad Person that I didn't ascend to godhood the first time I chanted the Gayatri mantra. I guess the fact that I worry, get scared, and feel awkward doesn't mean I have about the same chance of "getting there" that a flea has of spontaneously evolving into a racehorse.

Because there is no "there."

Here is there, and the more I am here, the more I am Her.

Sad Yet Cool

2010-04-06T18:40:00.002-04:00

One of my favorite books, one you've heard me rant about for years, is now effectively in the public domain on Scribd.

I can only assume, given Scribd's new, uhh, commitment to the concept of intellectual property, that Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality appears there with its author's blessing. I know that, despite this book's wit, brilliance, and insight--it is truly an important work--it has never topped the charts and Harpur has had trouble "keeping it out there."

If you want a nice summary of Daimonic Reality, read Dr. Snake's interview with Harpur.

But I think you should read the whole book.

This Is Why I Like SkepChick

2010-04-03T11:56:00.002-04:00

At least one of their writers thinks it's possible to be religious AND a skeptic (!!!!!!!∞).

As I never tire of saying (sorry, loyal and Cherish'd Readers), skepticism is the one requirement on the spiritual path, if a person is going to make genuine progress without going insane, dropping by the roadside into a ditch of bitterness (or hubris, if there's a difference), or getting took by some Sally League Jim Jones.

You don't have to believe in anything, you should practice incessantly but you will need breaks now and then, you don't have to subscribe to any single religion or world view, but you need to doubt. Your doubt will sustain you. Your doubt, in the pages of your spiritual journal (OK, there are two requirements) and in your heart, will blossom into some kind of transcendent faith, and even if that faith is in yourself or the laws of physics and you leave all gods behind-- if it is a faith that births the world every day, like the flooding of the Nile or the waxing of the moon, then it is the faith you need.

Even atheists have their Holy Guardian Angels.

Exorcism Update: The Twain Have Met, Dammit

2010-03-24T16:07:00.002-04:00

via Pharyngula:

Don't get a massage, don't stand on your head, and for Christ's sake don't read Twilight.

I can get behind that last churchly demi-commandment, but for different reasons that those offered from the Archbishoprick of Sydney by "auxiliary bishop" Julian Porteous.

The whole teen vampire connection is left rather vague, but as far as "yoga, reiki massages, and tai chi" go, them there things "all come out of religious traditions of the East and [therefore] people can ... find themselves in the grip of demonic forces." Apparently Satan invented the East so he could ensnare innocent white Chrustians, especially those who, like Australians, are unfortunate enough to have East to the right of them, East to the left of them, East in front of them...and lots of Eastern immigrants.

It's OK, though: Sydney will soon have a new exorcist and presumably Satan's going to have to go back where he came from.

Scroll down in the article for unusually direct commentary by a god-hatin' liberalcommiefag English professor. I don't mean "unusually" for a prof, since you hear this sort of thing in the hallow'd halls all the time, but it's unusual for the news media to quote someone like this, since they prefer that their experts give more boring, more considered, more unwittingly-supportive-of-the-status-quo commentary.

OMG-- am I advocating "incivility"???

Previously on WiHW: The Rite by Matt Baglio

The Student Council of Trinity High Proudly Presents...

2010-03-15T16:27:00.002-04:00

...a useful, if staid, list of blogs about religion ... and mucho commentary about mucho things, mostly from profs, including crapophilic spokesmodels like Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor.

The Immanent Frame.... oh dear... the Social Science Research Council's look at the religious world. It's a monochromatic mosaic of varied perspectives that all sound the same (as my fellow academics would suspect), but just because it's scholarly doesn't excuse the drabness, the mistaking of what people are excited about for what matters.

The Framers are very serious. They write, with high seriousness, about a vitally serious topic: religion and "the public sphere." And listen up, yahoos: "The Immanent Frame is a forum marked by civil discourse," with "a high standard of intellectual exchange."

Reading The Immanent Frame is like being teleported back to that high-minded, browline-glasses churchological epoch of the mid-60s, as if Mary Daly, Robert Anton Wilson, and Anne Lamott never happened. We're all earnestly sifting doctrine and seeking relevance and reading Krishnamurti and fretting over our lentils... OK, swap Žižek for Krishnamurti (they're fairly interchangeable) and you're there.

I'm just being--terribly unfair. No one reads this stuff because they're looking for God, any more than people read agronomy journals when they get a taste for mangoes. It's shoptalk, and shopkeepers have a right to talk, right?

Yeah, but this kind of funerary treatment of religion helps define the whole discourse on religion. That list of of around 90 religion blogs? It's going to be linked and meta-linked and forwarded and is going to Stand for Something, and--take a deep breath--it's got one pagan blog, one feminist blog, one spiritual autobiographer, no Hindu blogs, no LGBT blogs, no mystical blogs, no indigenous/Native American blogs, no recovery blogs, and ... five Buddhist blogs, nine Muslim blogs, and twenty blogs by or about conservative Christians. As usual in the American Mall of Religions, Buddhism and Islam stand for all the exotic off-brands, the weird-costume and squiggly- alphabet crowd who haven't yet accepted Jesus.

Naturally (whew) I'm not begrudging anyone's inclusion on this list or the compiling of such a list, which is actually nice to see. It is damned difficult to find decent religion blogs of any stripe, and God knows there are more folks out there wanting to read about Jesus and Mohammed than there are wondering about the latest developments in shamanism. It's encouraging to see Slacktivist on this list--he and the lone pagan are the oddest of this very Wonder Bread lot, and their voices, in their ringing individuality, are much more the kind I associate with the God-kiss'd. I've discovered a couple of interesting writers I'd never heard of from browsing the links, and for this I'm glad.

But... we all see the world through some lens or other, some--frame. The Frame's frame, social science, isn't any worse than any other, but social science is always the science of deviance and fads, and so the squeaky wheels and Squeaky Frommes of jihadism and jesusism end up getting the attention-grease they crave. Religions are boiled down to lists of beliefs that animate little chess sets of believers posted on the various grids of nationality, SES, and political affiliation. The actual experience of religious faith-- presumably what keeps packin' 'em in at the churches, mosques, zendos, and whatever you call the places those other people worship-- is curiously absent. Oh, sure, it's social science and we're all into medians and modes and not individuals, but the Frame has no trouble talking up ethics, politics, the psychology of belief, and all kinds of phenomena that bear on the individual. On the lived experience of religion, however, the Frame reminds me of Monty Python's wink wink, nudge nudge guy, who after all his slinkily self- referential patter finally blurts, "What's it like?"

And they do ask, once in a while. Check out this interview with Ann Taves, whose work sounds absolutely fascinating and addresses exactly this problem of experience that I've just been bending your ear about. A couple of years back, the Frame had a whole seminar on the "cognitive revolution" in religious studies, with quite a bit of excellent material. So they don't suck. But-- damn, people. Sack the professional bloviators and lighten up. "Critique" won't save the world any more than will prophecy or any of that other top-down stuff. Top-down is done.

A Pirate Looks at Infinity

2010-02-13T16:12:00.007-05:00

Few in our time have lived Emerson's words better: "Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imaginations of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil."

Especially that "men" part...

Mary Daly's riposte to Emerson comes in the unforgettable line from her spiritual autobiography Outercourse (don' t you love that title? Say it out loud... I like saying it... ): "I wanted to throw my life as far as it would go." And, shot-put style, reader, she did.

I'm looking back at Emerson's "Divinity School Address" for a class I'm teaching and I'm seeing Mary on every page, seeing her there with Jesus, with Ramakrishna, with Andrew Harvey and Walt Whitman and my dear Guru, She of laughingdark Assamese eyes... Mary thought a cat could be a spiritual teacher--I'm pretty sure the one she's petting in the photo is Ailleolg, her [male] prankster and guide who used to chase bottle tops in the bathtub as single-mindedly as Mary chased etymologies in Skeat's. She acquainted us with divinity at first-hand, Mary did, as provocateuse, as questioner, as pain in the ass (she called Boston College her "little laboratory of patriarchy")... as philosopher, as Witch: magic happened around Mary, coincidences piled up, breakthroughs and breakdowns and double-takes dropped around her like snowflakes.

I knew Mary Daly and I feel compelled right now--by her spirit or by the force of memory-- to tell you something: it bugged the shit out of her that people constantly quoted Beyond God the Father. "That was so long ago," she'd lament, and I must say to you, as quotable as that book is, go read another if you're of a mind to see what radical feminism or old-school (the only school) feminist spirituality are all about. Mary considered BGF a transitional work, not yet "post-Christian" enough and not nearly as incisive as what came after: Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust and the Wickedary--my vote for her best and one of my absolute favorite works of philosophy.

And yeah, Gyn/Ecology, about which a reviewer wrote that reading it was nearly as torturous as the injustices it documented. Mary Daly seems to have been surrounded by such telling ironies, by critics whose words told more about them than they did Mary's books, by the vociferous "yes, but!"s whose vigor reveals that there really are no buts about it: we still live in a patriarchy and supporting and sponging off that patriarchy is easier than most of us want to admit. Naming the game got Mary in trouble--the mere phrase "African genital mutilation" spawned dozens of brainless screeds accusing her of racism, as if all those other woman-mutilating cultures at which Mary leveled her rage meant nothing-- as if slicing up women and girls exists on a cultural par with basket-weaving and kente cloth.

Reading Emerson and thinking about Mary has led me to consider what it really means to Be-Speak, Mary's term for speaking and writing powerfully, life-changingly... "radically," she might have said, til the word got so over-used that at least one academic applied it to chewing gum under theater seats. Emerson can still disturb, so deeply does he confront what we think we know, while most writers, especially the most controversial, wear their expiry dates like Miley Cyrus's tattoo. I've no idea what names Emerson got called, but Mary got called, incessantly, a "man-hater," which she manifestly was not-- and the epithet could not have been more transparent code for "this lady makes me squirm because she just doesn't buy in to the whole sterile, pinky-extended pseudo-intellectual trip the rest of us are on." Turn on to your own gynergy, Mary said, tune in to feminism, and drop out of the whole "phallocratic mind-fuck."

[Speaking of discomfort-spawned distorted perceptions: a women's studies classmate of mine fairly wailed in class one day, "How many times did she have to say 'phallocratic mind-fuck' in this book [Outercourse]?!?" The magick of Google now reveals the answer: once.]

She did make us see the world differently, whether in paranoic defensive shades or glorious auroric hues... and this is the true function of the Seer, the Witch, whether or not we agree with him or her point-for-point, for chants like Pure Lust or "Circles" are not editorials, are not liner notes but symphonies, fantasias, concertos of thought. They disrupt our habits of mind just enough to show us Other worlds, Other possible realities and selves. This is why they're dangerous and must be domesticated, as Emerson was, or damned, as Mary was.

And ya know, I'm just re-membering something: one night years ago, probably 1995 or '96, way back before it could have made sense to me, Mary said on the phone quite earnestly "We need angels." Jolted, I sputtered out some kind of incredulity; I may have even said "What in the hell are you talking about???" Whatever my reaction, it was enough that she very calmly and patiently--despite how scrappy she could be-- repeated, "We need angels. Don't you know-- angels are real. I'm not talking about those tame, churchy ones..." and in my cluelessness I tuned her out and I thought, Well, Mary's finally gone off the deep end. Angels!--sheeeit. But she was right, and if a pagan, radical feminist Pirate can be right about angels, what else could she be right about?

And hadn't I already seen Them around her? Hadn't we-- a grad school friend (atheist, btw) and I, as Mary Be-Spoke onstage at the Tightassed Baptist College we'd accompanied her to? And hadn't we been spooked? Yes, we'd seen two Angels, or spirits, or-- hovering around her as she spoke, as she made us cackle and made the Baptists cringe... and yeah, knowing me as you do, you know I tried to dismiss these Angels as stage-light artifacts, as products of set and setting, of "the power of suggestion" ... substituting one set of magic formulae for another.

Except--why hadn't I seen anything like them before? I'd been to plenty of readings, heard plenty of enthralling words from plenty of powerful talkers on plenty of stages under plenty of lights, and--no Angels. W.S. Merwin hadn't had any, nor had Dorothy Allison nor Angela Davis nor even Kamau Brathwaite. But Mary'd had. And Vanessa, my friend, was no fool, either, and she, too, was dizzied by Whatever or Whoever'd hovered 'round Mary as she spoke into the aether and ravished our souls the way Emerson must have, so long ago, in another America before another war as the children of another Moloch either tuned him out or turned their ears prickling to his new tongue.

Dream, 2/6/10

2010-02-06T18:27:00.003-05:00

I'm in a rather large, old apartment that is furnished and decorated in the spare, 1950s-never-died look of genteel European poverty. A Roma family lives there, and the grandfather and some other members of the family are engaged in some kind of magic ritual. They have soaked a piece of cloth in saliva or urine, and they're burning something, I think, and then the cloth has to be laid across the rest of the ritual items and buried.

At the end of the ritual I can feel a change in the air, I can feel the power of what they have unleashed and I exclaim, "Wow, that was a kick-ass ritual!" I admire the gypsies' skill and discipline, yet feel apart from them, not a member of the clan.

In a living room that starts out as part of the same apartment, but gradually morphs into a room much more doily-nostalgic (now it's American genteel poverty), an old Black woman, very old, is lying on a chaise longue. In the dream she is my fiancée's mother. I walk up behind her, seeing her quaint, Victorian dressing gown and the grey in her hair. I am afraid of her, I feel tremendous, inhuman power and wisdom sizzling all around her and yet know she wants me to reach out to her in love and trust. I put my hand on her shoulder and she reaches back and takes my hand in hers. I feel an immense love from her, feel at home and at peace and free from all want.

* * *

Obviously: Black mother, scary yet loving = Kali. Her domestic, peaceful setting isn't as exciting as the gypsies' magick household, but for my admiration of them I know I'll never belong with them and so don't think of their life as an option for me. This is some kind of dream about my present life of domesticity with Kali's daughter, Sophia--wandering has ceased, the magick is more subtle, but the ocean-deep power is there, all around. If nothing else, the dream has reminded me to be grateful. I don't know what else it might mean. The gypsies' apartment looked like it could be part of "the Ocean place," a dreamscape I frequented in the early 90s, but it didn't have that realm's odd yellow light and it lacked the Ocean place's anachronisms; it felt firmly 2010.

* * *
Sophia as "fiancée" means I have to keep courtin' Sophia in order to have the best marriage with her.

Dream may have been a product of reading Emerson, whose "Self-Reliance" I [finally] see is the supreme Holy Guardian Angel text, containing all of Nietzsche, of Crowley, of evvvvAAHHreeBawdy ever to comment on the True Self...

Girl Groups and the Apocalypse

2010-01-14T16:05:00.005-05:00

Just came across this interview with David Tibet of Current 93, one of my artistic heroes... it's a good one, containing, among other things, the astonishing fact that there are people who never figured out that he's a Christian [!!!!!], the story behind the making of Black Ships Ate the Sky [my least favorite C93 album, but I need to give it another listen], and Tibet's rather low opinion of finnegans wake and Ulysses... and this marvelous take on 1960s girl groups (shout out to Sophia! ♥):

Pitchfork: Finally, I have a question a friend of mine supplied. Someone at her college had a radio show called “Songs of the Apocalypse”, and she was curious what would be on your show, if you put together something called “Songs of the Apocalypse”.

DT: Funny, instead of the obvious choices, the song that immediately comes to mind is "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes; that and “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” by the Shangri La's. I love girl groups-- I particularly love Ronnie Spector-- and the idea of apocalypse, the original Greek word meaning, “unveiling,” is where everything is revealed. Now, of course, it has the sense of Armageddon and total destruction, but I still look at it as a total unveiling, the taking off of all masks, and the return, perhaps after the Armageddon, to that state of pristine purity and innocence and love, which is the natural human condition.

When I listen to "Be My Baby" I hear such yearnings and such love and such beauty-- that absolutely simple, uncynical love that can and should exist between people-- it makes me think of everything [being] stripped away. It's an absolutely naked, heartbreaking plea for love.

Kid Buddha

2010-01-07T12:52:00.000-05:00

So it's 6:15 in the morning and Sophia's daughter is shrieking in anguish upstairs. Her mother has cruelly, cruelly told her for the 29th time to please get out of bed and come down and eat.

Molly is very sweet and is miraculous in uncountable ways, but she doesn't do mornings. Well, she does 'em, but she does 'em the way Mitch and Murray do a sales meeting, the way Republicans lose an election, the way Al Capone chats about baseball.

The shrieks continue. James, 7, is already at the table. He says, in a calculated tone of (mock?) compassion, "That's her level of consciousness."

Did I Say "Nuance"?

2010-01-06T22:09:00.007-05:00

Well, not every song is a hit. I do like Sam Harris, but here's his dumb-assed response to a Karen Armstrong piece in Foreign Policy--which also has its problems, but is that any excuse for this kind of sub- college newspaper schmuckality?

After all, it would be absurd to criticize witchcraft as unscientific, as this would ignore the primordial division between mythos and logos. Let me see if I have this straight: Belief in demons, the evil eye, and the medicinal value of a cannibal feast are perversions of the real witchcraft - -which is drenched with meaning, intrinsically wholesome, integral to our humanity, and here to stay. Do I have that right?

Dude! That's all, uhh, philosophical and shit! Are you like, an English major?

Predictably, the boys in the dorm are slappin' the Sam-meister on the back--yeah! YAYuh! Go us! Karen Armstrong's a day-um cannibal!

It's true that she's the new whipping girl for the Skepticism Lite™ crowd, who, like delirious drunks at a pep rally who glimpse the straw effigy of the Bad Guys' mascot, are whoopin' and hollerin' for blood... well, Blood Lite™, as is obvious from the passage above. Like gridiron combat, it's blood sport for couch-jockeys... but Foreign Policy??? Didn't that used to be sorta like a wonk analogue of Masterpiece Theatre??? But it's all turning into NFL Fox Sunday, the whooooole culture...

Oh: Armstrong never mentions witchcraft. Or cannibalism. Or the evil eye. Or mythos, or logos. But you knew that.

UPDATE: I just got around to reading Armstrong's response to Harris. She makes the very good point (one we apparently will have to repeat until Doomsday, or after) that "To identify religion with its worst manifestations, claim that they represent the whole, and then demolish the straw dog thus set up does not seem a rational or useful way of conducting this important debate."

And then, unless I'm having a very bad dream, Armstrong asserts, of Harris's admittedly wacko screed, "Historically, this kind of attack only serves to make religious fundamentalists more extreme." Um--like they need someone to "make" them "more extreme"?

I think I get what she's saying... I know she's not saying that critics of religion are responsible for the excesses of fanatics, that cartoonists whose homes are invaded by would-be axe murderers actually invited the attack... is she? The Atheibots are united in their claim that Armstrong sometimes blames the victims of religious extremism, but she doesn't really... does she? She's not unwittingly agreeing with atheists that religious people are mindless hosts to mental viruses... is she?????????

UPDATE: Brain Doc Diary Does Boffo Biz

2010-01-01T18:46:00.005-05:00

Carl Jung's The Red Book, a compilation of journal entries and artwork concerning his HGA experiences that began c. 1913, is apparently selling quite well--considering: the thing is a monstrous 11.6 X 15.4 inches, weighs a staggering 9.6 pounds, and lists for a humongous $195.00. You can get it for less--if you can get it. The first three print runs sold out, and even the fourth printing is getting scarce. I'm glad I reserved mine early, but I've barely even looked through it, so busy have I been or so preoccupied with other reading matter...

Sophia said today, after reading of the purges at the Washington Times, "I guess the Zeroes were the last gasp of the newspaper industry," and certainly it's a little disturbing to see Old Media toppling like so many Ozymandiases. Then comes a boutique title like this one, something only a geek could love, with painstakingly reproduced color drawings and a scholarly introduction, and, saith the Times (NY), said tome is "partly hand-bound" and "uses two different kinds of custom-made paper." The Red Book, despite the ascendancy of POD and the pdf, is, for now, the kind of artifact only an old-school commercial publisher could have created...and no, as the Times points out, its sales aren't anywhere near, not in the same galaxy as the sales of schlock icons such as Dan Brown and Sarah Palin. But their books would lose nothing on a Kindle or as a pdf or e-book, while The Red Book's complexity could only attain accessible form as a -- real book.

Hmmm... maybe instead of running away from irrelevance, book publishers should try embracing it more often.

Earlier on WiHW: Jung's HGA Diary

The Rite by Matt Baglio

2009-12-27T18:46:00.006-05:00

Synchronicity I: Ha! Just as I finished typing the title for this post, George Harrison intoned, via my iPod: "Beware of darkness."
* * * * * * * * *

You know my schtick by now: the eggheaded skeptic with the Angel on his shoulder, and I hope I don't do it into the ground, but it's hard to walk the valley of the shadow of the strip-mall and to know at the same time that I'm "really" a child of God, "really" a spiritual being having a physical experience...to know that in fact all things must pass, including cat litter and escrow, to know that there is all around me an oceanic roiling realm of divine energy. It's hard for me anyway, and yet sometimes it's hard to know that there's anything but the fiery swirls of shakti.

The disconnect between modern life and the unseen spirit world forms a major theme in Matt Baglio's The Rite, subtitled "The Making of a Modern Exorcist." Baglio, an American journalist based in Rome, followed a priest through exorcist training and has produced a spiritual analogue to such bildungsreportage as The Right Stuff and The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228. Baglio's book is not as compelling a read as these, though--the style is quite dry and the main character, Father Gary Thomas, isn't drawn finely enough for me to be fully invested in whether he gets smacked down by Asmodeus. I mean, I was rooting for Fr. Gary and all, but Baglio, while he gestures towards the great distance the priest has to travel from a Silicon Valley parish and virtual unbelief in Satan to Rome and spiritual warfare, doesn't quite sell it to me. It may be that, to Baglio's credit, he's working overtime to not sensationalize the topic; the book's tone is rather understated.

Some of what you'll learn:

Real-life exorcism ain't like The Exorcist (except there can be copious quantities of bodily fluid expelled). Rarely does an exorcism play out as a one-time, all-or-nothing bout of single combat, and rarely do the possessed roll on the floor and froth at the mouth. But sometimes they do.
There's a fine line between diagnosable mental illness and possession. In fact, it seems very, very fine. In fact--I'm still not sure where the line is drawn, except that priests predictably suspect demonic influence when the patient reacts violently against prayer, religious icons, etc. On the other hand, exorcists will tell you that the people who come to them claiming to be possessed hardly ever are; the truly demon-haunted usually have no idea.
And yup, demons (at least the ones afflicting Italian Catholics) don't like Jesus, they don't like the mention of saints and popes, and above all they don't like Mary. Baglio himself had a possible Mary encounter; he talks about this and how researching exorcism renewed his Catholic faith in a Beliefnet interview with Tha Crunchy Con. The Rosary is presented here as a spiritual H-bomb, and I can add from my own experience that, although (thankfully) I have not had to use it for counter-demonic purposes, devoting oneself to the Rosary has a weird power whether or not you believe.

Baglio, in fact, cites research that shows that rituals like exorcism tend to have a positive effect on people, independent of belief. It takes him forever to get around to citing what I consider credible sources, but on the other hand at least he does delve into this material, and he pointed me in a couple of interesting directions:

psychologist Michael Hyland's work on "motivational concordance," the observation that therapies work better when they fit with patients' ideals of self-actualization, religious or non-religious.
psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz's work in treating OCD via relabeling, reattribution, refocusing, and revaluing (very reminiscent of John Lilly's metaprogramming).
theologian John Haught's idea of the "layered explanation" (example here).

The latter is Haught's way of blasting out of the phony natural/supernatural dichotomy that is the bane of us all. Haught is, unsurprisingly, rehashing Aristotle's four causes, but ponder 'pon it: public conversation on religion has degenerated to the point that a moldy Greek pedagogue is a breath of fresh air... fundamentalism and positivism have supplanted actual thought to the point that old Ari seems positively nuanced.

* * * * * * * * *

Synchronicity I.5: Sophia got home. We went to Wal-Mart, as we are wont. Cashier was joking about being oppressed by demonic forces. (Then again, this is East Podunk, so whattaya expect?)

* * * * * * * * *

On the other hand, I was disappointed that Baglio let priests and cops convince him that Italy is rife with Satanic cults -- the whole underground-hideouts and infiltrating-high-political-offices kind of thing that was debunked years ago in the States. It could be true in Italy, but such enormous allegations require evidence and all Baglio offers is vague testimony by people with something to gain. A big question, "What are demons?" is answered with the standard Christian mash-up of Revelation 12 with Isaiah 14 (Lucifer and his bad angels cast down from heaven) ... which I'm sure would come as big news to Isaiah himself, who was talking about Nebuchadnezzar and who couldn't really have used the word "Lucifer" since Latin didn't exist yet. If you ask yourself why there are reports of demons that long pre-date the Old Testament and the existence of the Hebrew tribes, or for that matter why demons aren't mentioned in the Old Testament at all, or why the older Greek concept of the daimon is much more ambiguous than the white/black Christian version, or why in fact most cultures' tales of the spirit realm are richer and more ambiguous than the rather downsized Christian mythos... then you are placing yourself outside the borders of respectable, Catholic belief-- naughty, naughty you-- and this book will in some sense let you down.

Baglio doesn't go far beyond the "fallen angel" model of demonology. Another, more empirically-based model has it that the possessed are enacting their frustrations, 'airing their grievances,' if you will, in a socially acceptable way. Those susceptible to possession tend to be those at the most disadvantage in a given society, and the theory goes that by dramatically acting out their society's discourse of the sacred these people are rewarded with positive attention and possibly in other ways as well: prestige, charity, starring in narratives of redemtion, etc. This model has been kicking around for decades; I remember hearing it in college in the 1980s, which means my profs probably learned it in grad school in the 196os... which means it was probably au courant in say, the 1940s... but in terms of sheer parsimony this social gospel of possession deserves some props, and Baglio doesn't mention it at all.

Not that Baglio means to construct an all-purpose, cross-cultural account of possession. I can't fault him for not doing what he didn't set out to do, and this book is a thoughtful introduction to a fascinating and highly elaborated spiritual technology, one that ironically is suspect even on its home ground. The funniest moment in the book comes when Fr. Gary's bishop, the one who sent him to Rome for exorcist training in the first place, is talking with him about his experiences and is stunned to hear that Fr. Gary has "actually seen an exorcism"! (By this point he'd attended 60 of them.) It won't please the spirit-skeptics that the Church is so conservative about exorcism, because of course for some people Christians will only gain respect when they publicly announce that God doesn't exist--except they tried that a while back and it didn't make much of a difference...

All of the above begs the question, "Are there such things as demons?" Sure there are, just like there's Truth, just like there's Intelligence, just like there's Will and Beauty and nightmares utterly real-- and a universe of other realities spawned by the folding of physical reality with culture, perception, belief, emotion, and the subconscious, realities that inspire or goad people into all kinds of actions. But I think demons may even be more concrete than that. My Guardian Angel says so; her idea is that eddies of consciousness, begat by our intense emotional states, are always swirling into little dust devils of sentience, and that some of these last long enough to start looking at nearby humans as hosts, and that some wax fat on whatever limbic goodies they can scam and attain a separate existence-- kind of like memes, except still there with eyes open when you're dead asleep. Lon Milo DuQuette tells a harrowing exorcism story about this kind of entity in My Life with the Spirits, a book you need to buy and read right now.

I can add to both Baglio's and DuQuette's accounts that I have experienced entities, both purely loving and purely evil, that no amount of neuropsychology could convince me were figments of my imagination, which is why I'm drawn to books like The Rite. For me it's ironic, given the "reality" (in whatever dimensions) of these encounters, that Baglio tries to promote the Church using the experiences of a priest who's dedicated to fighting spiritual wickedness seemingly in spite of the Church's inertia and best intentions. But of course certain experiences exist on the margins, always, wildly at odds with the world we imagine we inhabit, with the selves we assume.

* * * * * * * * *

Synchronicity II: Sophia hung out with her best friend today and received her Christmas present: artsy/creepy angel and devil salt and pepper shakers.

Have I Totally Lost My Critical Perspective?

2009-12-27T15:50:00.001-05:00

Or does this guy sound really cool?

A Christmas Thought from Stuart Kauffman

2009-12-24T13:04:00.002-05:00

"Is it, then, more amazing to think that an Abrahamic transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient God created everything around us, all that we participate in, in six days, or that it all arose with no transcendent Creator God, all on its own? I believe the latter is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe. It is this view that I hope can be shared across all our religious traditions, embracing those like myself, who do not believe in a Creator God, as well as those who do. This view of God can be a shared religious and spiritual space for us all."

-- Revinventing the Sacred

My Crackpot Theory of Everything, Part II

2009-12-18T15:31:00.004-05:00

Or is it Part CCXX??? At any rate, I have been providing comic relief to Sophia (and to myself, I have to admit) by musing 'pon the question of whether the universe is conscious or not. The proposition of a conscious universe used to be a given for me, but I've steeped myself in so much materialist thought of late, purposely, that it now seems rather silly.

Mind you, the idea that the universe is conscious is central to my cherish'd spiritual path. I just don't know if I believe it.

Oh, the weight! On one shoulder Richard Dawkins jostles for position with PZ Myers, who is cheek-to-cheek with Rebecca Watson, who is looking over Jerry Coyne's shoulder as he texts Sam Harris. On my other shoulder stands my Angel, who argues quite persuasively for the resolution before the chamber and who sends me, just as I slip into cognitive overload, stuff like:

Henry Stapp: "Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics"

Dennis Bray: Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell

and this oldie but goodie from Tim Leary, who explicates Blake's tyger:

"...What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"

The answer is DNA. And what enduring intelligence burning bright in the forests of the night-time sky designed DNA?

The genetic code is surely not an accidental adhesion of molecules. It is an instrumental message, an energy directive created by a meta-biological intelligence.

This intelligence is astrophysical and galactic in scope, pervasive, ubiquitous, but miniaturized in quanta structure. Just as the multi-billion year blueprint of biological evolution is packaged within the nucleus of every cell, so may the quantum-mechanical blueprint of astronomical evolution be found in the nucleus of the atom.

I'm not saying he's right, you understand... and yes, he veers perilously close to creationism, but he's really saying the same thing the others are: a) consciousness is an emergent property of matter, and b) the same thing my Angel is saying--you have to expand your definition of "consciousness" beyond the folds of the brain and perhaps beyond living beings as we understand them. The harder I try to demolish this conscious universe idea, the harder it pushes back. It's pretty sad when you lose an argument to the voices in your head.

Beauty <3

2009-12-12T09:43:00.001-05:00

Google Image Swirl searches

Blogger #@&* Twitter *&^%#

2009-12-06T11:44:00.004-05:00

I fixed it for now... but you might have seen that, due to some subspace anomaly, my Twitter feed on this page was tweeting other people's twits... sorry. It's a "known issue" for Google but they're taking their time doing anything other than knowing about it... but for now I don't have to migrate my blog to LiveDrama™ or somewhere... :)

"Twitter is boring," sez Molly...

thanks to Molly, btw, I spent part of this morning joyously singing Christian hymns in a Baptist church... not even kidding... why do they show videos in church now???? But I felt Her there... as enfolding love...

iPod Idolatry

2009-11-25T11:48:00.001-05:00

today's the day my new ipod comes, yay yay yay yay... i love my ipod and this new one is gonna be awesome it's 160 gigs and like i can get so much music on dat mutha... IT'S HERE!!! omg..... the box is dented! did it get crushed? amazon fools only put one bubble pack in the box... people this is an ipod...

ok, let's fire up copytrans n get all the old stuff off troubador... what should i call my new ipod? lemme see lemme see... matangi, she's a real sweetie, inspires all that bad-ass musical wildin'... can't wait til all my stuff's on here... omg... but "matangi" isn't as catchy as "troubador"... hmmm... tara...? saraswati???

how long'll this take? i want it all on there now... blue lotus! cuz matangi's the color of a blue lotus... ♥♥♥ ok, it'll be like 2 ^1/2, 3 hours.... what if it doesn't work?? what if there's that song i don't remember i have and i lose it and i only remember it six months from now but i can't download it again... debora by t rex... took forEVer to find that... it has to work... i'll make it work... please work...

16,000 songs... omg, they're transferring... can't sit here all 3 hours... have to get songs off the work computer, too... and the laptop... hope it works... OMG the new ipod doesn't fit the old dock!! craaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAP!!!... what am i going to-- have i listened to any of these lectures by alan watts??? songs still copying, still copying... why doesn't it fit????????????

still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying... still copying.............

IT'S DONE! 16,000 songs... ! now get them all on the new ipod... should take about... not as long, probably hour and a half ... ok... select all... drag.... and... and... AND? AND? NOT RESPONDING!!??!!! got-damn apple idiots, hire some google programmers... seriously!!!

reboot... goddamit... apple... sheesh... ok, let's try dragging about, like, 3000 songs over...surely that won't tax itunes' little brain, RIGHT????? draaaaa-g-ing... they're loooaaaading... my songs! onto my new ipod! let 'em load... come back in a few minutes--

WWWWWTTTTTFFFFFFF????????????????????

NOT AUTHORIZED?????????

oh great, 93 problems identified! 93 songs not copying over-- !!! how the HELL am I supposed to-- thank you, apple!!! fearless defenders of corporate music! leaving no half-assed software code untweaked in your quest to enrich sonyuniversalemiwarner hydraheaded media monster............. dammit!!!!!!!!! auuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugggggggghhh--

sophia says just authorize the computer and start over. that'll work.

highlight... drag... come back in a few minutes... highlight... drag... come back, do something to take my mind off it, god's sake empty the trash or something, make a tuna sandwich, it's going to work, it's working, my music, all my music, on my new ipod... it's happening... i need a case for this thing... i haven't seen a good one online anywhere, or in the apple store... maybe bodyglove.com... highlight... drag... down to the last 3000...

oh. it does fit the dock after all.

Skeptic Who's Skeptical of Skeptics

2009-11-20T23:53:00.007-05:00

Elyse over at Skepchick has an excellent post about reflexive, jingoist Skepticism Lite. The comments are really good, too. I spend so much time reading Pharyngula (which I like a helluva lot, don't get me wrong) that I forget sometimes that there are skeptics out there who seriously entertain the possibility that they, too, could be wrong and that (in the words of Skepchick commenter Chasmosaur) not every religious person is "a slack-jawed, neo-con jackass."

The skeptic in me is clamoring that what I'm about to say sounds totally essentialist, but: isn't it interesting that ♀ Skepchick ♀ seems so collaborative, and such a tolerant forum for diverse points of view? It's a blog that shuns ex cathedra pronouncements and instead often asks its readers to supply the content--as if valuing multiple perspectives... no, no, none of this has anything to do with the blog's heavily female editorial staff... impossible! Just--a-- coincidence! [omg there's a <3 in Skepchick's Twitter feed...

UPDATE: Ladies and Unicorns

2009-11-19T19:32:00.001-05:00

In a post about my pilgrimage to the City of Our Lady, I mentioned another lady, namely that Lady who hangs out with the unicorn. The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries housed in the Musée de Cluny in Paris are one of the great artworks our species has produced, and rather predictably I interpret them as an allegory of the spiritual path (exhaustive exegesis forthcoming).

Now, Nina Shen Rastogi, in a wonderful essay, seeks to answer the timeless question, "Why Do Girls Love Unicorns?"

If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, Rastogi's subtitle is "It's more than just the horn."

Rastogi jets from ancient Greek lit to Rabelais to "sticker and stationery queen Lisa Frank" to trace the devolution of the once-fierce, once-sexy equine into a universal symbol of schlock, and she ends up decoding a pivotal moment in the cartoon epic The Last Unicorn. Much like the tapestries, this sub-Disney narrative points to hidden or lost parts of the self and dares us to reunite with them, to become whole, to gather what is scattered.

Kalibhakta Sutra, Part Three

2009-11-04T09:15:00.001-05:00

Verse 3:
Her play begets star-play begets neuron-play begets All.

Sanskrit:
Vimala-lila tara-lila manisha-lila nitya-lila.

Corollary:
We begin to evolve beyond our individual and cultural limitations when we appreciate that play [lila] is the source of existence and that flux, not stability or hierarchy, is "the way things are." Vide the quantum world, vide the rise and fall of civilizations and of the universe itself. As Kalibhakta puts it in a marginal note to the MS: when we expect the universe to conform to our wishes, "We are like a bandit extorting a penny from a queen who sits astride a hill of rubies." [Note menstrual imagery.]

Comment:
Some have called this the "fractal zoom verse" after the way it zips from the ultimate macro-level of being to the micro level and back again. Note that the words for "star" and "neuron" [mind] are also names of goddesses, thus emphasizing the all-pervading, all-encompassing nature of Godhead. The verse also refers to the fact that stars and neurons arrange themselves into similar, fractal structures. Manisha has the connotation of desire, an allusion to our arching upward to Her even as She bends downward to us: the interlocked triangles of Tantric iconography, as seen in symbols such as the Sri Yantra and the Masonic compass and square.

The epithet Vimala ("pure") for the Divine Mother calls to mind the book of Titus: "To the pure, all things are pure." The reader is thus recommended to keep the mind pure via devotion to God, since an impure (i.e., self-centered) mind creates suffering. Vimala also evokes Bollywood, and a certain controversial guru.

On the topic of externally-created suffering, implied by the verse's consideration of the individual's place within the cosmos, Shaktism unravels the perennial and overblown “problem of evil” with the advice to “Stop wishing things were some other way. This is what you have been waiting for” (Sayings of Kalibhakta, vol. 1). [The latter phrase has been traced to the poem "The Gate," by Marie Howe.]

Though our perceptions do not literally create the universe, they are all we have of it, directly or indirectly, and they provide the only "order" in an infinite sea of chaos. The verse portrays matter, mind, and Divinity as a feedback loop, creating one another in an embrace that never ends. Its depiction of creative chaos can be seen as a synthesis of verses 1 and 2.

Nightshade Honey

2009-10-21T11:12:00.000-04:00

Golden glows the jar as it stickily sucks the spoon to its depths... bubbles swirl slow with bits of comb as the spoon settles, floating just above the bottom.

But beauty lies: you know you can't take even a taste, you don't want this-- this poison, this sweetness of molten gold... this escape, this dream.

You don't want the honey. You're not some kid sailing a dragon kite across skies of story. It's just plain dumb to try to step outside your life, plain stupid to think of being saved, of chasing unicorns. The honey is real, the jar is real, and the spoon, and what happens to those who taste seems real, but their mind-- their own story-sky-- is where it all happens. Nothing changes even if you do raise the woozy flowing spoon to your tongue-- only a collision of alkaloid and acetylcholine, a fever-fantasia of delirium. That people could mistake this un-real for new life, for revelation-- sad, but the hunger for dreams, for cheap comfort, never dies.

Nudging the silver handle you shift the sunken spoon and see it grows a second self, a fat honey-ghost that sheathes, amplifies it. Light hits the jar and flows down and around the spoon, throwing, twisting dull beams through the ooze. Lovely like ocean sunset is the sugar-sluggish gold, and you wonder if your pupils dilate at the beauty; you think of involuntary wide pupils and how contagious they are, like a yawn, how card sharps wear sunglasses to hide them. You know this honey would give its own forced dilation to your eyes, would flood them with light past endurance and past reason.

But: what you get from an experience depends on what you bring to it. The danger is too great to suck the spoon dry, but you'd like to be able to say: I have tasted it, I have faced it down, and the power is not there. Dreamers, you gave it the power that was rightfully yours. The jar is empty.

You want to show them, want to kidnap them from heaven and bring them to the true earth of opened eyes. But you don't speak their language. You could tell them that honey is nothing more than thrown-up nectar and enzymes, you could tell of all the joinings implicit in a honey jar -- bee with flower, bee with bee, nectar with enzyme, bee-keeper with hive, honey with jar-- and they wouldn't hear. All they know and want to know is honey joining mouth in simple sugar joy. All they want is sweetness, sleep.

From the back of your mind comes a thought, funny but with heft: you can leave it to settle in its amber or you can wield this spoon like a sword. You can taste beyond the sugar-kiss and steal the veil from the temple. A taste, then a few hours' riding the storm, is all it takes. Fear is punier now, a gulp in a distant throat that's never spoken up for itself--unworthy. And before you can think again, you lift the spoon, watch its ooze spiral lazily back into the jar, turn the spoon to gather the stream, careful not to spill a drop, gathering the ooze into the spoon and raising the spoon to your lips and parting your lips and taking the spoon and closing your mouth around its brimming gold.

And like parachuting in reverse, it begins: crunch of impact, electricity enfolding tongue with rot-green tentacles, composty yet sweet as a lover's secret scent. And the dreadful pull up, up, yanking brain miles above gut then colliding them somewhere in a cold, gray fright-cloud, thoughts scattered, sight scattered, the ground gone away. You--who are you? --scattered, the sky in fragments and the spoon dropped and the jar a far wobbling smile of eventide in the harsh nova of now. Light like knives, operating theater grim bright: mouth dry, eyes aflame, honey and honey-bee gone like dreams at midday, you stumble, struggle to stand, to live now in your choice, in this blurring, heart-skipping breathless world. Who knew it was pain they sought, death to self-- who knew sugar could be venom, could twist your tongue and your eyes out of your head?

Touching, grasping as you haven't since birth, grasping table edge, grasping table leg, grasping air, empty-handed, grasping with fingertips at the floor as it smacks you onto its smooth, hard newness... who knew they befriended fear and open sky this way? Who knew a fall could awaken the soul, raise it to its true territory?

Gimme a Break

2009-10-19T13:09:00.001-04:00

This has been the topical season on WiHW... who knows why...

But check this out. Moneyed interests have hijacked Great Britain's courts to the point that, under that country's silly libel laws, you can be sued for calling BS on bad science. Or for reporting on toxic waste dumping. Or alleging that rich Saudis fund terrorism. Or making snarky comments about a soccer team.

Want to sign a petition? Sense About Science has one for you. You don't have to be British--Penn and Teller signed it. You don't have to be a scientist or even give a farthing about science. As Guardian columnist George Monbiot asks, "Why is this 13th-century law still permitted to stifle legitimate dissent?"

You Mean I Can't Just Make Shit Up????

2009-10-15T12:12:00.005-04:00

Pro-Proposition 8 Lawyer: "Gay marriage endangers traditional marriage and endangers the family."

Judge: "How?"

Pro-Proposition 8 Lawyer: "I don't know."

Judge: "FAIL."

One Year

2009-10-04T06:43:00.002-04:00

Today is Sophia's and my first wedding anniversary. It feels like it's rushed by in weeks, and it feels like it's been years, not years of tedium or angst, but years of building a life and living it. Perhaps appropriately, given all my life in death/death in life jazz, we spent the weekend at a family funeral which, given the personality of Sophia's family, was much more like a happy reunion. There was laughter and a sing-a-long at the graveside service--I definitely landed in the right place.

Sophia and I, separately of course, consulted her high-school freshman daughter Molly about what each of us was getting the other for our anniversary. Sophia in particular had a hard time finding me something because, as she put it, I don't want anything except iTunes gift cards and the books on my amazon wish list and those aren't very romantic presents. So she asked Molly what she thought I'd like, and Molly said, "Just get him a book about evolution or some weird religion, and he'll be happy." :) I hope they feel like they landed in the right place...

A Kaliesque Video

2009-10-02T18:43:00.002-04:00

Henry Rollins isn't everyone's cup of chai, but here he is in Calcutta in a video directed by the great Peter Christopherson, of Coil and Throbbing Gristle fame.

Rollins has said of his time in the city of Kali, "Spending time in Calcutta really did a number on me. The way life and death are almost the same thing, the way poverty is dealt with, the sheer number of dead bodies you see, it's all pretty overwhelming. I will be back there soon."

Ahh, yes... death in life and life in death... the "Illumination" that She wants to give us. Rollins is even seen in the video doing a Templar gesture (2:37 -- Christopherson's direction?). I can't tell you how much I love this... Hank has been an artistic hero of mine forever.

Blasphemy Day International

2009-09-30T08:45:00.001-04:00

It's today. Let's get to it!

For civil libertarians, blasphemy is an act of conscience. For atheists and skeptics, blasphemy is recreation. For lovers of God, blasphemy is an obligation.

Think of it as an idolatry vaccine.

Inspirational Quotes
"You are God's beauty." -- Sri Chinmoy (emphasis added)

"One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms." -- H. L. Mencken

P.S. Let me admit that I can't bear the thought of saying anything truly scurrilous about my Mother Kali. So-- I'll let the infamous toilet seat do my talking for me.

P.P.S. Can you blaspheme a Goddess who isn't imagined to be "pure," who resides in all things, "good" and "evil" alike, and whose worship and iconography explicitly confront the worst as well as the best of existence? I guess it's all in the intent, finally.

Jung's HGA Diary

2009-09-18T13:35:00.006-04:00

Wow... The Red Book, Carl Jung's account of protracted wrestling with his Holy Guardian Angel, is about to see the light of day. There's a meticulously detailed and dryly funny New York Times article about the twisted history of this document, and it couldn't have a better title: "The Holy Grail of the Unconscious."

Apparently Jung's family feared that the old man comes off like a nutjob in the pages of The Red Book, so they hid it in a safe deposit box for decades. I guess I can see their point, but I'd wager that most people who'd be weirded out by the diary are already weirded out by Jung's work on dreams, UFOs, synchronicity, Eastern mysticism, the collective unconscious, and alchemy.

Jung's autobiography has a pretty fair account of what went on 'twixt him and Philemon, the wingèd Gnostic sage, but apparently the story is woolier and wilder than we knew. Also, Jung drew and painted dozens of images of his inner journey, whose painstaking reproduction explains the book's near-$200 price tag. New York's Rubin Museum is presenting an exhibition based on The Red Book, and you can see several of Jung's paintings here.

This post is in danger of turning into a miscellany, so I may as well throw something else out there and sign off. (I'm working on my department's spring schedule today and so I have about the brain capacity of a European hedgehog.) But... maybe you knew this, but I didn't: Jung hung out with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who apparently was into major woo himself. They wrote a book together, and now a book has been written about their friendship (interview with author here).

Sample quote: "The two sat for hours on end in Jung's gothic-like mansion on the shores of Lake Zurich, dining on fine foods, drinking vintage wine and smoking the finest cigars while discussing topics from physics and whether there is a cosmic number at the root of the universe to psychology, ESP, UFOs, Armageddon, Jesus, Yahweh and Pauli's dreams."

How do you say "Awesome, dude!" in German????

Update: Crunchy Con gets all Jungian. I jest not.

Cha Cha Cha

2009-09-09T15:45:00.000-04:00

"the secret to spiritual practice is doing it precisely when you don't feel like doing it."
--Jay Michaelson

Ballroom ... dancing...! The words fall 'pon the male ear as fatefully as the word Voldemort falls 'pon the ear of the wizard... yet for some reason I've always felt smaller because I can't dance. All I have to do is hear an old song like "Dancing Machine" or "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" or "Long Tall Glasses (I Can Dance)" and the ancient agenbite bites once more, as it did in [choke] middle school ... the wallflower psychology, ya know, learning the truth at seventeen and all that. It's still there, many years after seventeen, though mercifully attenuated by maturity (or premature senility).

One either ignores this sort of thing or one faces it down. When Sophia and I got married, the ignoring days were over, since we planned to dance the first dance at our wedding. We took a few lessons with this Russian guy who was Bolshoi-punctilious but who made it fun, and we whirled a credible go of it after our vows as Ella Fitzgerald sang "I Could Write a Book." It was wonderful. Once wed, we talked about dancing more, talked about finding black tie galas to attend. I mean, I have the tux now. And I'll take any reason to hold Sophia close to me and look into her stunning blue eyes...

So we're taking this ballroom dance class. In a hot-as-hell gym in another town with a semi-professional dancer who reminds me of the Heaven's Gate guy. Not private lessons but a class with--how can I say this?? --undergraduates. About 20 of them, with whom of course we have to practice dancing. And I like holding Sophia close, but-- those other chicks aren't Sophia. And I danced with a guy at the last class because all the girls were taken. Not that there's anything wrong with that... but...

I haven't told you about the alcohol wipes. They're not as big a factor now, not in my new life of elementary school and Cub Scout camp. But for years they were my crutch, my graviton shields against a disgusting world. The germs... the viruses... the... other people's sweat! Like the chick I had to dance with the other night, a very good dancer but sweaty as hell and not wearing enough clothes and ... can't the gym have some nice delousing showers?

But microscopic bugs aren't the real issue. Dancing bring up my whole Quasimodo complex-- That Feeling of Perpetual Unworthiness that I've done battle with for years and have all but defeated... but you know demons don't die easy. The body image issues... the feeling of clumsiness... the 40-foot-long mirrors running down both walls reflecting 20 svelte youngsters and-- my aging, cetacean form. That stuff.

So instead of Being Here Now or trying to see the divine in the class, the students, the teacher, the dance steps... I was letting the loser scripts ("I can't do this," "This is stupid," "I have better things to do") get the better of me. Hell, I could at least have remembered that Kali dances in Shakta mythology, that Shiva dances, that She's my Beloved and He's my role model. (At least we're taking Ballroom and not classical Indian dance...)

Sophia is a lot of things. She's a mom and a poet and a photographer and a scholar and an institutional hard-ball playa and a teacher... and a Teacher. This is what she had to say about being the old person in the dancing class in the hot gym at night after a long day: "I'm here because I want to be. And I don't have to be the best dancer in the class, I just have to learn it the best I can. It feels weird to be 20 years older than the next oldest student in the class, but I don't care what they think. I don't care what the teacher thinks. I don't have to make a good grade. I'm doing this for me."

Sound familiar? Do what thou wilt.

Germs can't stop you, sweat can't stop you, even false self-images from the past can't stop you, if you decide to do your Will. But doing it means doing it, acting with your whole self. This is what I see Sophia do every day: act with her whole self even if she's just pulling weeds. I admire her for it and I love her for it, and I love myself when I am that way, when I heed Krishna's words and cut away doubt with the sword of knowledge, turn to God, and stand up!

It's funny how our fears can divide us from ourselves, lead us away from what we want to do. But it doesn't have to be that way. Our fear-born self-obsession can turn the world into a tragedy, a horror show, a bland Becket farce, but it doesn't have to be that way. Krishna had to fight in a war. All I have to do is dance-- and seek my Mother.

Vultures, Part II: The More Personal Stuff

2009-09-06T12:24:00.001-04:00

In the previous post I mentioned the Shakta concept of the interlacing of, the inseparability of, life and death. One of the cognitive changes that Shakta spiritual practice aims at is establishing a gut awareness that life is filled with and depends upon death, while death in its turn inevitably flows from and begets life... that life and death are finally the same.

I remember when this truth first hit me in a visceral, deeper than intellectual way: early in my Shakta career, probably in 1999 or 2000, I was driving some back road here in East Podunk, a lovely twisting road through endless emerald woods and fields. I turned a rather sharp corner and came upon a dead deer lying partly in the road, with a couple of vultures chowing down, shaded by trees that bent over an old fence.

The birds were so black, so lovely and regal, and one bird's beak shone with blood. The whole scene took on a jewel-like completeness: death, life, blood, beauty. I shivered; I saw Kali in that blood, in those black feathers.

I'd never been this close to a vulture before; I grew up in Florida near some of the wilder parts of that state, and had seen hundreds of vultures from afar, usually gliding in their stately holding pattern above some future meal. (It's not true, though, that vultures circle because they're waiting for animals to die. Or, rather, that's not the main reason. I've read that they circle to attract other vultures to the site and to make sure some bigger, badder animal isn't lurking on the ground to snatch their dinner.)

Me and Sophia and the kids just went to Florida a few weeks ago, and it was vulture central, as usual, but we had some fairly close encounters. At Kennedy Space Center the sky was black with them at times-- KSC occupies what has to be one of the largest (mostly) unspoiled areas in the state. About 5000 alligators live there, if that gives you any idea. We also went to a zoo and around sunset the trees filled up with a large venue (yet another collective noun) of vultures. The walkways were heavily dotted with the birds' past contributions and one walked beneath those trees mindfully and briskly. But the sight of them, perched in the dying light, was shiver-making and I kept taking pictures, hoping for one that did justice to the birds' dark majesty.

We didn't get pooped on, and Sophia laughed in her sweet, teasing way at my "goth" obsession-- Sophia, my Nekhbet, my personal "Mother of Mothers." It felt so good: I was home-- in Florida, with my Beloved and her kids, and under the dark and somewhat dangerous wings of the Goddess.

I Like Vultures...

2009-09-04T16:22:00.002-04:00

...and you should, too.

Did you know that they're a symbol of the Goddess-- of, as we Shaktas say, "Life in death and death in life"?

And they're just cool. Did you know that Old World vultures evolved from raptors, while New World vultures evolved from crane-like birds? Did you know that the collective noun for vultures is a "wake" of vultures? (I've also heard "committee of vultures," which is even more appropriate.)

Did you know that Zora Neale Hurston wrote part of a chapter in Their Eyes Were Watching God from the point of view of vultures?

Saturday, September 5, 2009 is International Vulture Awareness Day.

I want you to go hug a vulture.

Fast Becoming My Favorite Spiritual Writer...

2009-08-26T11:32:00.003-04:00

Jay Michaelson rocks! I pointed you to his "Why Ramakrishna Matters" a while back, and I sauntered back over to that essay again today... I'm sloooowly writing a post about miracles, which has resulted in my consulting some of Ramakrishna's sayings, which reminded me of Michaelson's piece... so I looked at some of his other stuff, and--I'm thinkin' maybe I oughta retire from blogging and just periodically link you to Jay's articles and the other cool stuff on his cleverly titled web site Metatronics. He's going to say it better than I can, anyway.

Before I sign off for good, though, let me share something from the Jaymeister that really got my attention earlier this week... after a brief preface, of course.

Brief Preface
You know me: Mr. Figure It Out? Dr. Fausto-I Shall Possess the Lost Word? Swami Formulananda? It's always been a given for me that faith and reason could not only abide together as lamb and lion, but have really great interspecies sex, too. And so much of the time I spend thinking about the Divine Mother and Her unfolding is time spent modeling Her, working out the "lines of force" that link dynamo to Virgin, mind to cosmos.

"What is She?" I ask myself. "Does She even exist? What is the universe?" Clutching my toga with one hand, I point to the shooting star with the other, asking, "Was the star-fall ordain'd from before time, was it part of Her plan, or is it mere foolishness to seek a plan among Her glorious chaos?"

Trust me, it's not hubris that leads me thence (though it sounds like it), it's a relentless drive to know, to understand... as if understanding were my True Will. It doesn't matter that understanding is a pain in the rear or (in the case of a limited, embodied mind attempting to grasp the infinite beyond conception)... finally impossible.

I just want to.

The Thing I Was Going to Share
Then here comes Jay Michaelson, pouring cold water and maybe some beer on my pretentions, playing 'pon the saxophone of Dionysus the rollicking tune "Stop Seeking"... or maybe it's a klezmer clarinet... and the lyrics go something like: you don't adore Kali and pray to Her and collect images of Her and try to breathe your life through your heart chakra in order to-- understand the universe!

You do it 'cuz you like it... 'cuz--

you want to.

Quote:

since spiritual practice takes a lot of time and effort, and since it gets sneered at by many smart people, those of us who do it spend a lot of time explaining why it's so important....Thus one hears all the time that "the purpose of our being here is to awaken to who we are," or that people who aren't "awake" aren't truly happy. Nonsense. That's just the New Age version of Jews thinking they're the chosen people, or Christians thinking that only Christ can save you....

when I'm able to sit back and let be whatever will be, then real receiving (kabbalah) can take place. Then God... really does show up....Stop looking somewhere else for God. Really--stop looking in every way. Stop seeking.

And I think: sheeeeeeeeeeeit, Jay. You boiled it down to the philosopher's stone there, homes. It isn't enough to free ourselves from materiality, from small-mindedness, from synthetic fibers-- we have to graduate from "spirituality," too, and eventually from the entire false "self" propped up by McEgo. We have to detach from the tree of received wisdom and, like October leaves, find our handstanding way to the Ground. I've heard this lesson so often before, and my dear Angel hath bespoke it... but it sounds so fresh now, like I'm ready for it.

Maybe...

Afterword (Dammit--does this mean I'm still seeking?)

What is a leaf, anyway? A light and CO₂ gathering node supporting a tree's carbon cycle? This might sound like the barest set of facts, but it's already an interpretation: we've narrowed a forest of possibility down to one preferred spot of shade. And what if I say: a leaf is a tree in miniature, its veins tiny branches, a microcosm of the fractal whole? Just as "true," yet more abstract... and if I were to bring in other, more metaphorical trees-- Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life-- and call the leaf their child, their signature in physical space... then we've departed totally from the realm of fact, as myths expire and carbon is forever (or at least until entropy ≈ ∞). But in another sense, interpretations and metaphors and myths are what we are; they form one of the surest distinguishing marks of the species: its compulsive symbolizing.

If I see the leaf as more than it "is," am I seeking? ... with my theorizing, am I fobbing off God into the waiting room of my heart? Or am I just being me, Homo dialecticus? Or-- well, how would I know what a leaf looks like in the light of pure consciousness? I'm exaggerating, anyway-- in practice I'm more and more likely to greet leaves and the rest of the world with the mantra "This is You" ... this moment before me and around me and within me is all I have of my dear Kali-Ma. The theories used to be crucial-- finding the right one, formulating the right one, relentlessly distilling it in the alembic of intellect... but though I'll never be an anti-intellectual, I'm inclining Jay's way much more now. I never really "got" that the Tree of Life could be me as well as the cosmos, but I'm getting it, I think, with the help of the Mother and with the help of teachers like Sophia and her kids, and Jay Michaelson.

And if some mystic blogger can yank me that far above the topiary maze of my own intellection and the Campbell's Soup of pop-cultural maya, and push me that deep into what matters, then I say he's one hell of a guy. But he (and you, Long-Suffering Reader) will have to forgive me if sometimes I still seek the Lost Word under lettuce leaves or in tide traces in sand, or (Jay would approve more) in the arms of my Beloved.

If Atheists/Skeptics Were Rock Stars

2009-08-15T01:59:00.001-04:00

Jerry Coyne: Dire Straits

Good even when he misses the mark. Craft matters.

Richard Dawkins: U2

Life will be splendid if we all follow my simple plan. La la la la la laaaaaaaaa.

Daniel Dennett: The Rolling Stones, 2009

If he can't rock you, someone else will.

Sam Harris: Elvis Costello

The thinking man's atheist. Nuance never goes out of style.

Christopher Hitchens: The Rolling Stones, 1969

Others write about it; he's lived it. Lots of it. Eclectic, electric, elemental.

Penn Jillette: Billy Joel

You may not know what I mean when I say "piano." A "piano" is a large musical instument containing many strings, which, when the corresponding keys are pressed, are struck by small wooden hammers....

Hemant Mehta: Jonathan Richman

Is he supposed to be enjoying himself this much?

P. Z. Myers: The Ramones

To some: loud, crude, repetitious. To others: sophisticated, allusive, one hell of a lot of fun.

Michael Shermer: King Crimson

High-concept but rockin'; serious yet entertaining. Doesn't care whether you buy the T-shirt.

woo, n.

2009-08-06T13:18:00.005-04:00

1. [Amer. slang, obs. ] Flirtation, sexual overture, physical caresses (often pitch woo).

2. [Internet slang] Anything spiritual or "occult"; all things counter, original, spare, strange; any phenomenon lacking a differential equation or imprimatur from a Bishop of Positivism: Kalibhakta's blog covers all manner of woo, from tarot reading to Timothy Leary to bhakti yoga.

Notice:
As an Illuminatus Dirigens and as an ordained minister of the Church of the SubGenius, I hereby reclaim the word "woo" on behalf of all the weirdos of the world. I like it because it's sexy, I like it because it's the name of a great filmmaker, and I like it because Nature Boy Ric Flair said it a lot.

Woo as you will.

The Blazing, Uproaring Church of This Red-Hot Minute

2009-07-22T23:47:00.000-04:00

My children, welcome to the only church you need and the only Church there is... the Church that preaches no doctrine, asks no faith, yet offers boundless saving grace, and sooner-- not later. Welcome to the Church you never leave because it's all around you all the time and behind your eyelids when you drop off and snooze in the pews.

This minute! This is all you have and all the time there'll ever ever be-- to figure things out, touch the sky, find yourself. Can't do it tomorrow-- tomorrow never comes. Yesterday's gone and you might not be here next week. Now is the time I'll serve the Lord, the only time, the only only any of us has...

Talk.origins my hind end. That big bang of life blowing up right under your nose is as close as you get to Eden. End of the world? Don't hold your breath.

So come on into the Church. The door stands open, so open up this moment. Greet it, see it as it is: alive. Alive with you, a creation-partner with God by your very attempt to open your eyes and join with Now. She's looking back at you, She wants to lovingly strike you, drag you sputtering across bumpy sensation, rough circumstance until you spark to life, come ablaze in incandescence entrained.

Don't miss the train but if you do another's coming. Every moment, every instant this Church renews anew. This second in every direction is Her: "Everything is Your desire," the bard sang to the listening Cosmos. All of it is your Beloved, all of it, now, even your distraction, your whim and urge, all of it holy, all of it firelight. Join Her, enter Her, be Her, be Her now, blaze and roar out by drawing Her All into your heart, by greeting Her, praying the prayer of faith: This is You, I am Yours.

Kalibhakta Sutra, Part Two

2009-07-19T12:18:00.001-04:00

Verse 2:
Evolution happens.

Sanskrit:
Vakvabrahman.

Comment:
Here the chaos of Verse 1 is companioned with order. It is important to understand, however, that "order" here little resembles its Euclidean or Cartesian counterparts-- it is not a state of perfection or freedom from irregularity, but rather a set of interconnected, self-similar patterns that form part of a larger, cosmic pattern. Though a picture of the entire universe must ever be elusive, Kalibhakta reminds us in an undated journal entry that, like the Mandelbrot Set with its interconnected, infinitely iterated mini-versions of itself, the macrocosm also mirrors itself endlessly. In a moment of intellectual crisis, he is said to have asked his Holy Guardian Angel if there could be such a thing as an ultimate pattern or tendency in the universe, to which She replied "Yes. Evolution." Of course "evolution" is understood as distinct from "progress."

Again we find it valuable to consult Monier-Williams. We are reminded that the very name of the Deity in Sanskrit, Brahman, means "'growth,' 'expansion,' 'evolution.'" The choice of the adjectival vakva ("winding about, rolling, bubbling") underscores the sense here of evolution as a nonlinear process and may be a product of Kalibhakta’s fascination with dissipative structures and the concept of "maximum entropy production," in which seeming disorder is synonymous with extravagant creativity and diversity. Vakva is also used in the Rg Veda to describe the divine libation Soma. Soma, like evolution itself, represents a bridge between matter and spirit. Kalibhaktian exegesis tends to interpret Soma not as a drug but as the upward flow of shakti within the devotee as he or she evolves in consciousness to become one with God.

One must remember that Kalibhakta's translations tend toward the pithy and are at times burdened with the colloquial. This verse might be more thoroughly translated as "The nature of Godhead is a nonlinear evolutionary unfolding which is mirrored throughout and indistinguishable from the cosmos."

Excellent Interview with Terry Eagleton

2009-07-12T19:31:00.010-04:00

...the most trenchant critic of the "new atheists." Laurie Taylor of the New Humanist hit this one out of the park.

Eagleton's new book has been slow going for me, as I am thoroughly in summer mode and enjoying fare like The Urban Hermit and Wikipedia entries on dead pop stars... but I love some of what Eagleton has to say and I love the way he says it. The situation's somewhat analogous to the rhetorical pickle a lot of lefties get into when they try to criticize the Right: so many liberals (and non-stupid religious people) buy so thoroughly into ideals of tolerance and compassion that they can't break the shit down and mount a decent vituperative assault. Those guys got cred --the unspoken fear goes-- they got family values, they got Einstein... and who wants to knock kids and cookouts, or The Same Empiricism That Brought You MRIs and Artificial Hearts (as Ditchkins' epigones weirdly chant)?

Nothing wrong with tolerance and compassion, but if you can't sum up why they're wrong and you're right then there's not much point taking issue with anyone, is there? Here's an example of Eagleton's style, quoted by Taylor: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is The Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology." Eagleton exposes many of the lacunae, invalid assumptions, contradictions, and plain old non sequiturs in self-proclaimed rationalist thought, and does so with admirable wit and style.

The interview takes a turn that, for me anyway, raises the ghost of Stephen Jay Gould. When someone like Eagleton accuses a "new atheist" of near-total ignorance of religion, the latter tends to respond, with some justification and as Richard Dawkins does here, that "I [don't] think theology is a subject at all.... it is like someone saying they don't believe in fairies and then being asked how they know if they haven't studied fairy-ology." Fine, but-- with this desire to be both in the fray and above it, haven't we journeyed once again to the land of non-overlapping magisteria? Not where Ditchkins wants to be, as it makes it hard to preach to the savages... and if you won't stoop to grab the other dude's gauntlet then you end up, like Quixote, warring with imagined foes.

I Could Take Beliefnet More Seriously If...

2009-07-01T13:50:00.003-04:00

...well, the picture says it all.

I tried reading it many times but it always seemed to swirl down to celebrity gossip, myriad riffs on the Law of Attraction, and canned "debates" (doctrinal hairsplitting ... other people's sex lives...) ...

...though damn it if today, as I surfed the site for the first time in about a year, there wasn't a story in the Hinduism section about my beautiful Mother Kali--rare for this site and as if put there to say "get off your high horse, son, there's people needs this stuff." The article's author, another avatar of Attraction, makes the very valid point that to invoke Kali is to say, in effect (I'll use his wording), "I want true spiritual advancement by the most powerful and direct route, the consequences to my ego notwithstanding." You're standing in the storm, holding up the big metal rod, asking for a boost... about the hear the resounding cosmic Yes.

So thank you, Mother, for nudging me off the horse (thankfully not with lightning this time), but is it still OK if I ask--why all the celebri-porn on a site that's meant to "help people ... find, and walk, a spiritual path that will bring comfort, hope, clarity, strength, and happiness"? Do "the hidden health secrets of lemons" do any of that? How about Beliefnet's "Hot Topics" for Sunday, June 28, 2009: Michael Jackson * Mark Sanford Affair * Farrah Fawcett * Jon and Kate...? How much hope and clarity am I going to get from that freak show? I get the concept of ministering to the spiritually needy in their present, broken state, blah blah blah and yeah, Christ was down there in the dives with the publicans and sinners... but I bet he wasn't urging them to get all stalkerishly obsessed with Caesars and gladiators.

It's always hard for me to find the line between legitimately having (not to mention voicing) an opinion or falling over into either hushed-up nudnikism or blociferous blowhardism. I have the ex-fundamentalist's horror of sermonizing, the rhetorician's fondness for the joust--the high horse--and the Vedantin's conviction that the words don't matter, that all paths lead to God, and that, in the words of Sriharsha, "all propositions can be made to appear ridiculous." I therefore often want to smite, yet just as often fret that smiting is for the unevolved, those falling down on the spiritual job. Ever since the Coming of my Guardian Angel, the biggest bolt of vidyut-shakti ever sent my way, I've felt newly and strangely emboldened to speak my mind, yet I've never lost that sense that ... whatever stupid crap people might be into, it's workin' for them, and if it ain't workin' then too bad because it ain't my job to save anyone.

And... OK, great. Now I'm reading "My Childhood, My Sabbath, My Freedom" by Michael Jackson, writ exclusively for Beliefnet in 2000, and I'm overflowing with compassion for the f***head. Thanks, Kali.

And now [I'm not saying any of this for rhetorical effect, this is really happening!!!] I'm looking at the "Crunchy Con" column, long in my mind a locus of idiocy, and I'm agreeing (mostly) with it!!! And the Con is waxing eloquent about the Himalayan challenge of loving deeply vs. the dimwit laziness of letting the small self drive the bus-- in one guise or other, the very seesaw on which we all totter in a world of maya and bling.

I'm too harried to look it up, but both Crowley and Ramakrishna talked about a state in which the second you step off the path, God socks you one upside the head. Instant karma... I kind of hope I'm not in that state-- I'm not on the shores of the abyss yet... but Kali is dealing with me on this whole spiritual pride thing, again, and I thank Her. She'll do it again (and again) until I straighten up and fly right. But--in true tantrick fashion--I want it both ways. I want to fondle and sniff that Martha Stewart Italian Cream Cake, and gobble it all up, too. I want to be Shiva, I guess--Her lover, Her creation, Her ecstatic interlocutor-- I want a hand to wield the trident, a hand with which to bless, a hand to touch the Now like Raphael's Aristotle and another hand to point to the sky like Plato. I guess I do have all these, to the extent that I allow myself to, to the extent that I perceive each moment and each irritating person not as fitting into some category but as divine... as Her... or if that's too hard, as a wave in the storm of Her unfolding, as a filigree of glorious maya embodying Her beauty, Her supreme evolutionary energy by which even "Religious Kitsch" may vault us to heaven.

Try This!

2009-06-25T15:33:00.007-04:00

André Michelle's ToneMatrix... you don't have to spell words with it, and in fact random mouse walks around the grid sound best. Reminds me of an old Spacetime Continuum album...

Kalibhakta Sutra, Part One

2009-06-11T13:06:00.002-04:00

Verse 1:
Shit happens.

Comment:
In Sanskrit the verse reads "Varcaska." This noun, according to Monier-Williams, has the meaning of both "power, vigour, brightness" and "excrement." Thus, a fuller translation of the verse would be "The infinite and infinitely complex unfolding of Kali produces an effulgence of light and circumstance that appears chaotic but tends toward a hidden pattern." This seemingly creative translation is suggested by the verses that follow. The reader is reminded of the Emanations of Primoridal Light spoken of in the Kabbalah and of the infinite ocean of light seen by Ramakrishna as he perceived the Divine Mother in Her fulness.

Cliff's on It!

2009-05-28T16:06:00.000-04:00

I still don't have a good handle on who in the hell he is or what he's up to... I first met him somewhere in the Mandelbrot Set, to whose endless vectors he gave his own quirk and twist back in those shimmering days of Fractint...

think of Cliff Pickover as a collector of weird information designed to blow your mind, or at least nudge its jelly-gray shores a bit... he's got this web site, you've probably heard of it, but GO THERE... (I'm a connoisseur of esoterica, OK? one of the true dandies... and if weird is wine, then RealityCarnival is France, baby.)

Cliff might be the world's greatest evangelist for panentheism: the Universe is God's evolutionary Self-revealing, and our attempts to know it are part of Her own Mind... hence the repeating patterns, the spirals, the self-similarity, the branches... Her reflections... but what I like about Cliff is that, where I would get all mystical and mushy about this stuff, he's just like "Here's a scientific study. Here's a data set. Here's an artist doing something wack. Here's a map."

... until the combined weight, the connected dots, the colliding and parallel curves-- all coalesce into... into...

New Angel Books

2009-05-02T15:11:00.001-04:00

By T. Thorn Coyle: Kissing the Limitless (and whatta perfect title...)

This looks as good as Jason Augustus Newcomb's 21st-Century Mage, though with a different constituency in mind. Coyle is doing something totally logical yet, in today's niche-marketed counterculture, deliciously heretical: bridging the Ginungagap between the flame-warrin' boys' club of Thelema and the tree-huggin' herbal tea klatsch of witchcraft. Put down the books, boys! Get your heads out of your astrological charts, girls! And that's just the beginning: this is a spiritual book for everyone, and Coyle presents myriad methods to see, hear, smell, touch, taste God everywhere.

The Holy Guardian Angel, since Its wings span the universe, is kind of hard to write about, but in my skim-through of the book Coyle seems unfailingly elegant and, in keeping with her subject, draws from a dizzyingly diverse range of sources, including but ranging very far from the usual esoteric suspects. To read this book is to be brush'd by angels' wings: you will lift your senses from what waste-land might sprawl before you and glimpse a verdant, laughing oasis of possibility, one you slowly realize is everywhere, always.

By Carmel Reilly: True Tales of Angel Encounters

Purports to gather stories from all over the (mostly anglophone) world of mysterious and unexpected encounters with guiding entities (not all the respondents call them "angels"). Are these stories real? On the one hand, several of them have given me those very strong, all-over chill bumps that accompany the lovely helplessness of being seriously spooked. Like dreams, angel encounters have their own kind of logic (see Harpur's Daimonic Reality for much more on this). On the other hand, many of the stories feel so familiar in a narrative sense (I suspect some urban legends have found a home between these pages)-- but they also hum with that off-kilter, intimate yet searing vibe that often seems to sizzle the praeterhuman phone lines.

Maybe angels have adopted a 12-step approach of late, or maybe we seraphic groupies are all plugged into the same frequency of the collective unconscious, or maybe there really is a bicameral mind or ... something... but a lot of these angels sound a lot like my Angel. Unlike the drill-sergeant angels of old, these angels are engaging their earthly charges in Socratic dialogues and then sending them to figure things out for themselves; they're telling them to search out their True Wills, all the while communicating in a mostly prosaic yet totally compelling vernacular; and they're leaving scant trace of their visit save (sometimes) a single physical object or an incontrovertible, undeniable change in physical space--just enough, it seems, to keep you wondering, keep you chasing your Divinity.

As William James pointed out, it's not all that remarkable for people to hear inner voices or to see visions; the human nervous system lends itself to such phenomena. What we must take notice of, James said, is when a person's entire life and personality become permanently altered by such visions or voices. At that point we have to admit that, in spite of the constant caviling of positivist ween-dogs, something real happened. Part of what happened certainly was neurological (since part of everything is), but since many visionaries are masters of observing, creating, maintaining, and altering their own neurology, it won't do to suggest that they've all been suckered by a particularly vivid bout of hypnagogia... apophenia... hangover... what have you.

By Lorna Byrne: Angels In My Hair

I haven't thoroughly perused this book; I've read excerpts and read a couple of interviews with Ms. Byrne, who says she's seen and spoken with angels her whole life. Even British journalists find her charming, disarming, and energizing--you will note that Ms. Byrne is not a bottle of gin, so there's something. Byrne's angels are more down-to-earth, so to speak, than Aiwass or Gabriel; they might not dictate new scriptures to you but will tell you that you need to "live each moment of [y]our life to the full" or that you don't need to live an "extraordinary" life to have found your "life purpose." All of which, you are thinking, is utterly banal, and that's fine, as long as you grant also that truer words were never spoken. Just because we're tired of hearing something, or someone we don't like says it, doesn't mean it's wrong (q.v. most of what your parents ever said to you).

"The angels make me laugh and smile a lot," Byrne writes. As bringers of God's light and power, I would imagine that they do: different people are going to handle 100,000 volts of shakti differently, with some laughing and some crying, some shivering in ecstasy and others speaking in tongues or singing epic songs. Angels don't necessarily fly you up to heaven, but they do try to turn your eyes to the heaven around you, exhorting you to "bud forth and flourish with virtue" in the ground where you're planted, in the here and now.