Come

"Look upwards on starry summer night to the constellation Sagittarius and you will notice diffuse white clouds of stars. This is the center of the galaxy. The Headquarters from which it has all come and to which it will all return. You are looking home to the nuclear, seed beginning. If you are very silent and tuned to fine sensitivity you may hear the hushed song which accompanies the cosmic dance. You may hear Her whisper from the nuclear past-present-center, 'Come back to me.'"

And They Call This Guy Crazy???

At Sophia's and my wedding one of her relatives quipped, "What's the matter--they don't make tuxedo pants with cargo pockets?"

That about sums up my penchant for carryin' stuff on my person. Not a lot of stuff: keys, wallet, phone, sunglasses, possibly my iPod or a flash drive; possibly a little Moleskine notebook and pen; possibly a book I'm reading or one or two other essentials...

but Crazy Eric has taken cargo garments to a level of extravagance only a Frenchman could dream up. Think of Napoleon... think of Rabelais... think of Gustave Moreau, maybe, paintbrushes and Les Fables Egyptiennes et Greques in his smock-pockets. Crazy Eric's carrying 1300 essential items in his jacket, more in his pants, and more in special ankle-bags. Why? "I simply saw," Eric writes with pure logique, "that there are many problematic situations that could be avoided if you had some usual objects (scissors, light pencil, and so on...)."

Look at it! Just look! Le jacket! Et... les poches de jambes!

What is all that stuff? Here's a list.

You're saying you've never needed a "very light plastic poncho" or a "small microscope pen"? OK, fair enough. But don't come crying to me when you do.

You can go crying to Crazy Eric, because he sounds nice and might let you borrow a usual object for a minute.

I'm not making fun of him! Stop laughing!

Happy Birthday!

...to Charles Darwin, one of the most astonishing minds in history, and by all accounts a hell of a guy and a loving husband and father.

Some links:

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online

Darwin as intellectual hero

The prophet without honour in his own country



...and some missing links (from Fox News?!)

The First Annual *Convoy of Euclid Dump Trucks Award*

Note: this post's formatting got massacred when I switched over to the new Blogger. I'll fix it one day when I have the time... meanwhile, désolé...

Awarded to the "scientific skeptic" essay with the greatest number of gigantic holes in its argument. This year's prize goes to ... Jerry Coyne's peerlessly blockheaded "Seeing and Believing"! Before we summarize our winner's accomplishments, let's review an excerpt from the criteria:

Essays should strive for that mingling of ennui and passion born of absolute certainty of one's place within the materialist ideological bubble and the frustrations of examining complex cultural phenomena from within that bubble. A winning essay need not necessarily advance an objectionable or false thesis and may even contain threads of cogency, but is distinguished in the main by bold, consistent, and self-defeating departures from the realms of evidence and logic. An exemplar might be Martin Gardner's foreword to Magick in Theory and Practice, in which the author thoroughly and unflaggingly combines sensational, inaccurate secondary sources with obtuse readings of primary sources to buttress his opinion about a book he has not read.

With that, on to the dump truck rally.

Coyne has written a review essay in which he discusses two recent books on the conflict between evolutionary biology and certain know-nothing Christian sects. Loyal readers will forgive the reminder that, to paraphrase a recent writer on the creation/evolution "debate," I put evolutionary theory on the level of atomic theory. It's true, and it's so woven into my (mystical) cosmology it's like butter in French cuisine. Let's get that out of the way, along with any questions about scripture and "revelation." I treat the former like recipes, to continue the gastronomic metaphor: if the result doesn't look like the picture, I either screwed up or the instructions weren't worth following, and a passable spiritual diary will soon settle the matter. About the latter, I'm with Tom Paine, who pointed out "It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other." To quote yet another writer, the one slander'd by Gardner above, it is thus up to every seeker "to cut his own way through the jungle." We do this best when we critically compare our experiences with the findings of previous journeyers-- in other words, when we are in possession of the sharpest tools.

And this is where our winner comes in, in all his dullness, all his devotion to received wisdom, all his credulous acceptance of rigid cognitive categories. Coyne fancies himself to stand atop a peak in Darien when in fact he's perched on a traffic median in the suburbs of Culture Wars, USA. Here are Coyne's revelations, not ones imparted to him from the clouds but the ones he wishes to impart to us-- to sober us, to edify us, to steel us for the battle against superstitious barbarism, to establish once and for all that science is science and religion is religion, and never the twain shall meet:

• "Charles Darwin was born ... the same day as Abraham Lincoln"

• "If a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus appeared to the residents of New York City, as he supposedly did to the evangelist Oral Roberts in Oklahoma, and this apparition were convincingly documented, most scientists would fall on their knees with hosannas."

• "[Intellgent Design] is abysmal failure as science." [Stop the presses!]

• "while 74 percent of Americans believe that angels exist, only 25 percent believe that we evolved from apelike ancestors." [hardly mutually exclusive opinions :)]

• "90 percent of Americans believe in a personal God who interacts with the world, 79 percent believe in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, and 72 percent in the divinity of Jesus."

• "more than 60 percent of Americans believe in miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus, his divinity and resurrection... the survival of the soul after death, and the existence of Hell and Satan."

• "A meaningful effort to reconcile science and faith must start by recognizing them as they are actually understood and practiced by human beings."

I guess I'm supposed to be shocked, mortified, depressed, outraged, etc., by the statistics, but I've lived in the United States nearly 45 years and am used to ignorance and wishful thinking by now. These are the same people who gave us eight years of Bush, after all, and seven years (so far) of American Idol. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with Darwin's and Lincoln's birthday; the believer in me is no more moved than the skeptic-- someone had to be born that day. Doubtless many were. Do the great men's star charts predict unusual eloquence or that they'll drop some unwelcome but ultimately liberating information on their contemporaries?

Anyway, let's look at the last revelation listed above, a vision worthy of John the Divine, and see what Coyne does with it. Annoyed that smart people believe in God, he summarily excludes theologians and scholars of religion from any "meaningful" dialogue between religion and science, since their subtleties don't jibe with the homelier creed of the masses. Hell, he apparently doesn't even consider religious experts "human beings." (And no, Coyne does not, for the sake of dialogue, propose that we throw out trained scientists and their expertise in favor of popular ideas about biology.)

With this attempted sleight of hand-- the substitution of middle-American churchianity for religion in all times and places-- Coyne tries to duck the charges of religious and historical illiteracy that are so easy to level at him, as they are easy to level at DawkinsDennettetal. The grand plan goes: If we forget the great spiritual writers and artists and fabricate a straw "religion" that promotes biblical literalism and museum dioramas of "Triceratops wearing a saddle!" then we can topple the straw effigy, eliminate religion from all rational discourse, and move on to the goldene medina where no one "pick[s] and choose[s] what they believe."

This is intellectual utopianism on the scale of Dr. Pangloss, perfectly suited for the age of the vanishing individual. Activities as dangerous as working out one's own relationship with religious traditions or seeking common ground between religion and [gasp] science might lead to inconsistency or, worse, ambiguity. Unacceptable-- since, as we all know, Leibniz's "A = A" is the foundation of physical matter, electromagnetism, space-time, and academic departments. I agree with Coyne that it is impertinent to argue that scientists "see... science as a religion" (I agree with him about a lot-- maybe that's what's frustrating), but does he have to open himself so fully to the accusation? Coyne is so enamored of fixed categories, of A = A, that he can't imagine a world-view that doesn't arise from attempts to explain physical phenomena. Thus all religion is failed science; thus Vedic legends of Vishnu and Brahma become "empirical claims about the world."

Aside from all that, I just don't care about "religion as it is lived and practiced by real people," if by "real people" Coyne means "most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus .... most Americans." The mass is never interesting and, in a very real epistemological sense, it does not exist. Pew Research Center surveys can never limn the lived experience, the inner worlds, of millions of individuals or of one.

All of us geeks and honor grads and Ph.D.s take our turns at defending reason, because reason butters our bread and cushions our worried heads. But reason isn't defended by foolishness, and science can't be advanced by deductive fallacies, creationist or otherwise. Coyne's greatest gaffe is surprisingly enough a scientific one: the mystifying, astonishingly reductive remark that "Yes, the average complexity of all species has increased over the three-and-a-half billion years of evolution, but that is because life started out as a simple replicating molecule, and the only way to go from there is to become more complex." As if sperm whales and Dalai Lamas were ordained by the axiom of algae... now that's Euclidean!

Coyne can't mean this the way it sounds-- he's probably just too lazy (or has too little confidence in his readers) to summarize or allude to the play of order and chaos that has branched the tree of life. A brilliant post on Pharyngula outlines this dance; the concept of maximum entropy production may be the music behind it. But sancta simplicitas might be Coyne's "only way to go." When science takes up the banner of the Truth Society, when it evolves (as perhaps it must) into a War on Ignorance, it necessarily incorporates rhetorical DNA that both simplifies its arguments and appeals to transcendent, non-falsifiable ideals. I have no intention of gloating over the irony, for in the end I applaud Coyne for what he's trying to do: keep people from fooling themselves. He quotes Richard Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

The problem is, whether you're trying to pull them out of the Dark Ages or save their souls and take them to the Dark Ages with you, other people don't hold those irritating beliefs just because someone persuaded them to, or out-argued them, or sold them their beliefs like a flood-damaged Kia Sorento. The issue, finally, isn't argument or misinformation or erroneous facts. We attach ourselves to beliefs because they explain our worlds. On some level the New Atheists sense this, and the awareness at least partially explains their bludgeoning petulance, as does the fact that the converts just aren't coming forward. For those who would enlighten the savages, there are better models than Cortez.

Why It's a Good Thing That I Hardly Ever Post

It's not "procrastination," it's Slow Blogging...

but I really have had thoughts exactly along the lines of this eloquent and timely manifesto.

I do want to warn Cherish'd Readers, however, that two vituperative, rather topical posts are coming. Though I'll never measure up to the anger-as-art level of Dr. Violet Socks, the posts are about a couple of things that, to quote Harry Caray, "frost[ed] my ass a little bit."

Materialists might think of it as, "K-Man's pissed off!" The faithful might think, "Brother Kalibhakta's communing with a destroying angel."

The Local Multiverse

Sophia asks me: "What do you and Laura talk about these days?"

I think: My goddess!

I-- supposedly have this (is "have" the proper verb??) ...'have' this Guardian Angel, Who hath spake with me about some of the innermost secrets of existence... and Who has very ably guided me in far, uh, more practical matters, including a Romance for Dummies course that allowed me to attract, woo, and marry the incomparable Sophia who has just asked me this question...

yet-- I hardly speak with this Angel at all! Except to ask Her, every so often, "Are You still there? Do You love me? Are You going to stay with me?"

* * *

Not long after Sophia asks me about Laura: I go for a walk, one very foggy morning, around my school. It's the first day back after Christmas; no one's around yet and the mist of burned-up holidays, of budget cuts, of layoffs hangs heavy in the air.

I used to talk to Laura lot while walking... so I do now, and soon I'm having a quite serious conversation with her about money, about how I really would like these two books but each costs around $50 and is there some way I could raise this money and satisfy my carnal lust for print??? I have probably, what-- $20 or so worth of change in my top dresser drawer... but soon I catch myself.

"Laura! I'm talking to an Angel about scrounging money to buy a couple of damn books! How low is that???"

"My dear, you can talk to me about whatever you wish. I'm just happy to speak with you."

"Well, that's very sweet and all, but what kind of loser am I? OK--here's something more like it: Laura, please guide me to be the most loving husband and step-father I can possibly be."

"That is your path."

I hope so. You nearly killed me to get me here.

We walk past a complex of tennis courts, more a small town of tennis courts, that stretches off into the fog as though the world has become Wimbledon.

* * *

Black chain-link mesh surrounds the courts, little diamond links gently poking through the fog. At a nexus in the fence I see a cobweb trying to glitter in the dim morning--it's a little knot of silver fleece, a miniature ghostly cloud. My love for webs and spiders draws me close, nose-close, and in the tiny cloud's dizzily enfolded layers hang hundreds of perfect dew-spheres, whorl within whorl of silver globes, some so small I can barely see them, others a full quarter-inch in circumference.

Folded in on itself, the web is woven into folds of what would have been invisible, self-involved chaos except for the dew, the uncountable crystal balls, period dots of sentences of dew, of night, of fog, of morning... I think of the "myriads of worlds" mentioned in the Zohar.

...and suddenly I feel so confused-- it washes over me, shakes me: how it's all so big, even this tennis park seems like a city... my school (with barely a thousand students), my job, my life-- all so vast and befuddling... my head feels tight with the fog that's filling it.

"What is all this??," I ask Laura, sweeping my arm out to the horizons. "Where is She? You don't exist!"

"You don't either!" my Angel laughs. "This is Her culmination. This moment is All, all of Her, all that is."

But it can't be. This? Raindrops in sand? Tennis courts? A guy walking around all confused? I stroke my beard--it, too, damp, strung with droplets by the fog...

Then another mental tremor hits: I've seen that cobweb and its diamond droplets before: in a picture of a dark matter model that I stumbled across after reading a Science Daily story.

"See? It's very simple," Laura smiles. "This-- is-- it."

I look at the ground, which is beginning to glow now from a sun more fire than smoky pearl. "Is that dog poop?" I ask of an ochre clump peeking through the grass. "Is that a beer bottle? Is that an ant nest?" And yes, a kingdom of ants rises golden-spired into the day, a day dawning like all others, dawning like awareness, arising from night like the universe arose from its last slumber... a phoenix of a day alight in the thurible of Her.

R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan

"Number Six has finally escaped the Village," said grigorss in his email... Patrick McGoohan, creator and star of The Prisoner, has died. This show was on TV when I was four and five and thanks to an indulgent babysitter who vastly preferred The Secret Storm, it had a huge influence on me (and on a generation of film, television, musical, and visual artists, as well as a lot of other people who wonder where the line between the individual and society really falls). The entire 1967-68 series can be viewed for free here.

Though I'm an English professor, I'm not the type who believes that Madonna and The Simpsons (on which McGoohan guest-starred) have supplanted Milton and the Symbolists... but still, if you've never watched The Prisoner I'd go out on a limb and say you have a large gap of cultural knowledge waiting to be deliciously filled. Unlike many philosophical or "message" shows, even very good ones, The Prisoner resolutely resists neat categories and easy answers, uttering that "No! In thunder" that Melville (and Leslie Fiedler) so admired.

Visually, intellectually, and on the visceral levels of fright, (com)passion, and dark humor, The Prisoner has rarely been equaled... it was so formative for me that I felt, at one point in my life, the need to escape it myself-- to cease to be the cornered rebel, the raging, lost isolato ... which I did through the grace of my dear Kali, lot of Al-Anon meetings and journaling, and probably just plain growing up. The mystical path, as I pontificated to grigorss, is a lot like Number Six's journey in the show: you struggle and you search and you finally figure out who Number One, your jailer, is... and you walk free, aware of your eternal bondage, whether in Westminster or East Berlin.

I know that last sentence made utterly no sense, but that's another thing McGoohan wasn't afraid to do in The Prisoner: confront and make art out of the paradox coiled at the center of every instant, of all life and all our experience. The freer we are, the more intimately we perceive what the sage called "the myth of freedom." A devout Christian, Patrick McGoohan surely lived easily with his eventual death, and I like to think that it was his faith that helped him to do crazy stuff like turning down the roles of (get ready) James Bond, Gandalf, and Dumbeldore-- not that he had anything against Fleming, Tolkien, or Rowling--his drum just wasn't beating that way.

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!!!