Heresies, issue 5: The Great Goddess

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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.