Brit Atheist Postscript + Hollywood Hajj

Disparate data on self-programming and faith:

This New York Times story goes nicely with the previously cited London Times op-ed about religion's ability to transform people's minds and therefore their realities. Research shows that religious people (those who actively ritualize their lives, not just reflect 'pon matters ethereal) have higher levels of self-discipline and-- I would add a "therefore"-- higher levels of happiness and satisfaction. It's likely, given the areas of the brain typically activated by religious ritual, meditation, etc., that this self-control is less a product of commandments and moral precepts than a by-product of exercising brain regions related to "self-regulation and control of attention and emotion," in the words of Dr. Michael McCullough of the University of Miami. I'm a Gator myself, but from my experience and observations I can endorse their findings, which are based on a review of "eight decades of research."

The brain evolves just as species and star-systems evolve. Cognitive pressure serves as the do-or-die influence, and we all know of those calamities, personal or social, that can darken our worlds like a Yucatan meteorite. These are the times when we grow or we die--but you can add to those times the slow, steady growth given by regular practice or the riskier, more steroidal growth afforded by hardcore sadhana, and there are plenty of stations between. John Lilly called it "metaprogamming"-- the practice of accessing, reviewing, and rewriting one's mental scripts. Lilly, of course, was aware that he was only the latest neuronaut in a long, long tradition of conscious evolution: meditation, magick, dhikr, twelve-step programs, Kabbalah, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, bhakti, contemplative prayer, dreamwork, satyagraha... brain-editing software goes by many names.

One recent hajji is also aware of the interplay of ritual and neuroplasticity: the screenwriter Kamran Pasha has blogged a fascinating and moving account of his journey to Mecca, including some perceptive comments on pilgrimages in general and their ability to re-program us (I'll link to the latter, but track back to see all the posts).

With my constant emphasis on skepticism and the neurological aspects of spirituality, I imagine I would sound like damn near an atheist to the former fundamentalist me, the ancestor who began this journey 30 years ago not knowing where I was going, just trying to trust my Heavenly Father to keep the trespasses to a minimum since the daily bread was taken care of by my earthly father. And I probably would sound like a simp to the post-fundie atheist me, the least self-confident of my incarnations but the most fired-up... but to Dead Christian Me I'd have to say, "Get off your ass! [quoting Andrew Harvey] Reading is great; the Bible and Bible commentaries and church and C. S. Lewis and St. Augustine and all that stuff is fine, but live your faith. You can't do that in books and you can't do it very well in a pea-pod of like-minded religious lazy-asses."

To Dead Atheist Me I'd say, "You're not sure of yourself because, unlike your shriller counterparts, you actually know a few things about religion. And not just the Abrahamic strain-- you've connected the dots between voodoo and shamanism and the Dreamtime and you can't unconnect them now. You have tasted the fruit, you have seen the dharmakaya light. And even if you hadn't, all you'd have to do was some serious spiritual practice and the doors would open a crack. Then you'd be free to conjure all the neurology you wanted to, invoke "the power of suggestion" until half-past dawn, but the reality would be there to do what thou wilted with. If you've been made aware of ways to brainwash yourself into being happier and leading a better life, don't you have a duty to use them, regardless of their ultimate origin?"

Looking back on it, this is pretty much what I did... engaged in spiritual practice sans belief or expectation until, one day, *poof!*: God sprang into door-yard existence. No worries with "duty" or any of that nonsense; I was just curious and wanted to keep an open mind. But... does this mean I was smarter then than I am now?? I'm supposed to be evolving!!!

British Atheist Prescribes Christianity for Africans

It sounds incredibly condescending, perhaps, and you'd expect the guy to get--I can't help it!!! --crucified by his fellow atheists and the PC crowd alike. Still, Matthew Parris makes a good case, and any jingoist Hindus or Thelemites reading his editorial can replace "Christianity" with "bhakti" and the argument still holds. Indeed, when he describes the "direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God...smash[ing] through" any socio-political "framework," however oppressive or omnipresent, you'd think he was describing the very K&C of the HGA...

The obligatory Kalibhakta disclaimer: I'm not an expert on Malawi or any other part of Africa, or Africa as a whole. I can't speak to Parris's argument from that standpoint. But, he's a valuable witness to the fact that spiritual practice changes people for the better, helps them to evolve into better selves who are better in tune with the world. This miraculous fact is easy for me to forget, and it's easy to forget to be grateful to Kali for pushing me to evolve, and so I thank Her for sending me reminders, especially in the deliciously unlikely form of a Times op-ed vaunting evangelism.

Conspiracies!

I love 'em... each a mini-laboratory of human cognition, an ant-farm map of the intersections between mind and matter-- and of the co-creative properties of the two...

surely a crowning wonder of nature is the endless ductility of the human mind, able to stretch, bend, twist-tie, and pretzel itself through, around, under, and beyond all possible beliefs... like taffy through a radiator... regardless of evidence... in fact, for the True Believer evidence against is always evidence for, and vice versa.

As my Christmas present to you, here's a round-up of some of the newer conspiracy theories that have come across the desk here at WiHW:

Beethoven and the Illuminati! I don't think of old Ludwig Van as much of a team player, so he probably wasn't on the front lines of the conspiracy. Still, like the Beatles 130 or so years later, he lent his considerable tunesmithing talents to the cause.

Obama's birth certificate! A meta-conspiracy story with commentary by Michael Shermer and other wacko-watchers.

The appropriately-named Jim Marrs is one of the grandaddies of con-think, and unlike the majority of his brethren, he can write. Interestingly (or frighteningly?), as I've watched his career over the years he's drifted nearly into the mainstream, and is now published by Harper Collins...so obviously They got to him!

YOU SHOULD NEVER * EVER * OPEN EMAIL ATTACHMENTS! So we are told by Cryptozoology.com... this useless advice is supplemented by scores of sea serpents, bigfoots, bunyips, and assorted dragons and ABCs. I used to shun cryptozoology as a wanna-be conspiracy-- it seemed so er, fluffy... but this was before I understood the tie-ins with creationism. Believing in the continued existence of pterosaurs actually makes you a cognitive radical!

...but--there really WERE no dinosaurs, you dodo-head! Jurassic... FAKE!!!!

It's all TRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUE!!! Well, not really, but human history has given us enough self-interested cooperation in the name of squashing The Other Guy that it's no wonder that people try on conspiracy theories like pullover sweaters.

Good Overview of Tantra

Article by Swati Chopra...

...but no bricks for me, please... :)

Soul Wars, Part II (The Caliphate Strikes Back)

"we haue neuer as yet opened vnto any man the truth of our dwelling, neither of our ruling, neither what our power is, neither haue we giuen any man any gift, or learned him any thing, except he promise to be ours."
--A demon, qtd. in The Historie of the damnable life, and the deserved death of Doctor Iohn Faustus

"An Egyptian Coptic Christian woman has been sentenced to three years in prison for failing to uphold her Islamic identity—an identity she did not know she had..."

So sayeth a news story reprinted in Christianity Today. Bahia Nagy El-Sisi and her sister were both imprisoned last year because their dad briefly converted to Christianity--in 1962.

The result of dad's quickie convenience conversion? "All of [the sisters'] children and grandchildren would be registered as Muslims," their lawyer said. I'm not sure Christianity Today would agree, but consider the benefits, by comparison, of selling one's soul to the devil:

1. kids and grandkids not damn'd
2. unlimited wealth
3. " " power
4. " " knowledge
5. classic poems writ about ye
6. possibility of leveraged deathbed buyout by JC, Unlimited
7. Mormons probably don't posthumously convert soul-sellers

Before anyone in Provo or Teheran goes, er, ballistic, it's not my point to unfavorably compare one religion or other to an eternity of bondage to the Evil One. But--it's interesting how the Faustian bargain mirrors salvation, and how both soul-selling and soul-saving use commerce as their model. I'm not the first person, by a couple of millennia, to note these similarities, but what fascinates me are the circumstances under which one can and cannot make a trip to the celestial return counter and undo the deal. (Or, in the case of those Mormon conversions of the dead--the celestial T. J. Maxx??)

But then again--it is fascinating how just plain alike they are. You sell your soul to Jesus for the Get Out of Hell Free card, you sell your soul to Satan for Heaven in the here and now. The commercial motif, though, obscures the real meaning of the transactions: surrender. What is supposed to horrify us about Faust is how cavalierly he treats his immortal soul, how readily he pimps it off to Mr. D--but we're also meant to cringe at how we, too, lust for what we cannot have and how close we, too, are to doing such a deal. We may not care for knowledge; it could be any one of a number of material objects we price higher than our soul, and the object ultimately doesn't matter for it is merely an idol, a golden calf standing in for God. The Faust story's warning seems to be: giving up your soul is shockingly easy when it's for the wrong reasons and damnably hard when it's for the right One (and as material beings we shouldn't be so surprised at how suasive for us is the tangible).

Of course that damnable word, "surrender," hath been placed at the heart of my spiritual path by None other than Kali herself, my personal God, the particular beam of light that's shone through the treetops and down onto my path through this forest of signs, this material selva oscura. To trust Her has been the meaning of it all; to give to Her--not even sell or be saved, for there's no Hindu souk of ultimate knowledge or final redemption--has been the way revealed to me. Give it all to me and I won't promise you anything, She sexily coos--but that's not really true, for our surrender opens the way to the clearing the woods where Her light is all, and though we are naked and no trees shelter us, Her enfoldment waxes absolute...

For me as Her child there's been no moment of conversion, no contract or bill of sale, finalized or otherwise. It's been more like how transactions work in practice, not on paper--I think of when Sophia and I bought our house, how it was sort of "ours" when we made the offer, but then the paperwork had to be approved by the mortgage company, but then everyone had to sign it at the closing...but then it wasn't "final" until it was entered at the courthouse... and of course the mortgage isn't paid off yet, so--we live as though we own a house, drilling holes in the walls and taking down the horrid old window treatments...

Jewcy: Why Ramakrishna Matters

Dude... awesomeness!!!!

Wonderful overview/judeo-view of one of the founders of my spiritual tradition (though he was chronologically last, I always think of him as first among equals with Ramprasad Sen and Krishnananda Agamavagisa)...

any time I spend ranting about what a great article this is would be time taken from reading it...

Spiritual Warfare

I don't do much battling with principalities and powers these days, but the war goes apace. The good old USA was, about a week ago, 8 million popular votes away from electing a demon-fightin' veep, and skirmishes extend (we shouldn't be surprised) beyond the voting booths and thawing tundra and into the hereafter. Mormons are baptizing dead Jews and Catholics (and God knows who else) to try to annex them into Mormonhood, while live Jews and Catholics bridle at this incursion upon their soul-territories.

"Jews are particularly offended by baptisms of Holocaust victims," we are told, "because they were murdered specifically because of their religion." No, really???? Makes sense to me, but then again I'm from a non-proselytizing religion so goofy that it teaches that all the other religions are true, too (just don't tell a Hindu fundamentalist). Meanwhile, the Mormon Department of Defense is sounding defensive: "We don't think any faith group has the right to ask another to change its doctrines"--meaning, I'm pretty sure, "Shut up, Jews," since if the shoe were on the other foot and mass giyurim for dead Mormons were being held in Jerusalem, I doubt the LDS would wax so ecumenical.

The Mormon spokesperson went on, "If our work for the dead is properly understood ... it should not be a source of friction to anyone."

But--if you accept the idea of a soul that can be converted/ won/ redeeemed/ atoned for/ whatevered only by certain approved methods, you have opened the door to just the kind of "friction" that's going on here. What many people buy into without knowing it is a system in which their religion's technology of soul-washing is implicitly salutary and protective, and everyone else's technologies are a sham or, worse, demonology--a spiritual attack. And if you buy into the Mine Is the Best (or One True) Religion game, then just by "properly understanding" the Other Side's motives, you've conceded valuable real estate, opened the gates to the Trojan horse. This is why the refusal to understand has such cognitive status and such honor attached to it (secularists never get this), and it's how real wars of all kinds start. The cure begets the disease...

It all reminds me of a Burroughs routine from The Place of Dead Roads:

The most arbitrary, precarious, and bureaucratic immortality blueprint was drafted by the ancient Egyptians. First you had to get yourself mummified....Then your continued immortality...was entirely dependent on the continued existence of your mummy....

Mummies are sitting ducks. No matter who you are, what can happen to your mummy is a pharaoh's nightmare: the dreaded mummy bashers and grave robbers, scavengers, floods, volcanoes, earthquakes. Perhaps a mummy's best friend is an Egyptologist: sealed in a glass case, kept at a constant temperature... but your mummy isn't even safe in a museum. Air-raid sirens, it's the blitz!

The whole hilarious meditation can be found in a Google Books search and, if I'm remembering right, is included in the WSB documentary Commissioner of Sewers.

And now, a clever, neatly-packaged ending... hmmm... well, I found when I Googled "spiritual warfare" that nearly every phenomenon from arrogance to tornadoes can have a demonic cause. Still, I'm actually very sympathetic to the point of view expressed by one of these sites, especially its list of "The main ways of fending off the Devil."

Oh, so there's my moral! Stay open, trust God, and you never know what She'll show you. I didn't go into this post thinking I'd end up recommending (unironically) a web page about sluggin' it out with Satan...

My Limits of Achievable Reality

My Al-Anon sponsor, one of several mind-blowing spiritual teachers Kali has seen fit to send me, called me the other day. "We were sitting around before a meeting, talking about you, and no one could believe what's happened and where your Higher Power has taken you--it really goes to show that we don't write the script--" for our lives, for the universe...for the next five minutes. Oh, we collaborate with the Author sometimes...but...

A lot has happened since I started this blog, some of it on schedule and some of it just plain unscripted and, if the writing were left to me, unscriptible. During the worst times--not that I've had bombs dropped on me or been diagnosed with metastatic cancer, but we all have bad times...during the worst times I fell back on the childish mantra God has a plan for me and it's better than anything I can imagine. I'd say this over and over, not believing, just repeating, begrudging the Deity Who (my teachers assured me) endorsed such contemptible platitudes, such infantile trust. I'd say it and say it and say it and somehow I started believing it enough to keep going, though a wolf pack of voices in the dim mental wilds still howled that I was fooling myself, that doom would rise as sure as the sun...but as the Mundaka Upanishad advises, I strung the arrow of my Self on the bow of mantra and let fly. The wolves fled, the sun rose, but no doom. It's not, it turns out, so bad being God's child...and in fact, Her plan has turned out to be as improbable and miraculous as a Bollywood romance.

Saturday Sophia and I are getting married. For years she was my friend and I dared not even think about her in any other way (though it took everything I had not to think those thoughts). The first full post I ever wrote on WiHW has Sophia's name encoded in it; she was the one I could tell about weird experiences and weird ideas that I'd share with no one else save Grigorss (and he's safely 3000 miles away, ensconced in his Hollywood mansion). Being with her was sheer heaven, no matter how stressed we were or what private hells we were enduring (we never talked about those)...but nothing was ever going to happen between us. It was too late and we'd made choices that were too different. So there was no point thinking about it... but I did, chastely (listen, people--for me, that's saying a lot!!!), hopelessly...and when it unexpectedly did become possible for something to happen, Sophia very kindly but firmly told me that it wasn't going to, ever.

And my Guardian Angel said the same thing, but Her version had an "unless." At first, all I could hear was the no... because the "unless" involved all those horrid spiritual disciplines centering on giving up, surrendering, trusting God, placing no expectations upon people or events, facing the fact that the universe owes me nothing--that my fondest, deepest desires might be nothing but self-defeating daydreams. My dear Angel, infinitely loving but strict as hell, seemed bent on turning me into an Aghori, and, ya know, eating charred remains from a skull-bowl might not have seemed half-bad compared to the mini- Dark Night I felt falling around me (at least it would have been more colorful than sitting down at the computer every day to work on the research project I had going).

To make it short, I had to completely surrender Sophia, give her away to God, release all wishful claim to her and any expectation of any future anything involving the two of us, down to an innocent cup of coffee at Starbucks. We didn't talk or see each other for months, and I surrendered and surrendered, aided by a magnificently apocalyptic Kurse Go Back song whose refrain goes "Every human has the right / to be mentally free." Sophia had that right, and I did, too--free of my obsession with her, free of my need to find a Beloved, a soul-mate, The One. I flung my heart against the iron gate of my wants, against the black bars of what I thought should be, could be...hammered the black iron until...it didn't shatter. It just wasn't there any more. And I was outside the walls, the walls I'd mistaken for a horizon.

Sophia and I started talking, and we started hanging out (I know I'm tellling the story at cartoon speed), and we found that hanging out or talking on the phone or chatting online or emailing each other was all we wanted to do. She was depressed and I wrote her a horoscope every day (unfailingly accurate since it always covered whatever she'd just told me she was going through). She wrote me staggeringly insightful emails and elegant, witty cards--and even poems! We found out the hard way that pay phones in Paris automatically disconnect your call after an hour. We skittishly, gingerly began to weave our lives, our hearts together...and the strands held, strong as spider's silk, and so we wove more. Sophia gave me the immeasurable gift of her trust, I still don't know how, and...we're getting married Saturday. She is her Divine Mother's image--well, actually, we are, together, creating this love, this life, hand in hand, heart in heart.