Ten Years Apocalypse-Free
Happy ten years since Judgement Day! Remember, living as a nukaholic means taking it one day at a time - every day that you wake up and don't accidentally start World War III is a success.
Oh, and also happy tenth birthday this week to Sluggy Freelance, grand champion of webcomics.
Project Love
The reason why I am interested in nonviolence is because it appears to be intertwined, at a deep sub-molecular level, with spirituality, and particularly the pragmatic, results-oriented kind of spirituality which manifests itself in literal miracles. It's annoying and awkward but there you are. Here's Agnes Sanford in 1947 in 'The Healing Light':
He had seen, for the first time, the working of that force that will eventually take the place of bombs and shells upon this earth. For as soon as enough people are able to use the power of love in such a way as to create thereby a perfect self-defense, wars will be outmoded. When one can obtain justice and right and friendly cooperation without money and without price, without bloodshed and without pain, it will no longer be sensible to fight for them.
"If an armed burglar broke into your house with intent to kill," the old question goes, "What would you do? Fight him, or lie still and let him kill your wife or child?"
Silly old question. One would do neither. One would project into the burglar's mind the love of God, by seeing him as a child of God and asking God to bless him. And if one were strong enough in faith and love, the burglar's mind would change. He would leave the family unharmed and go away.
"But hardly anyone can do that!" the answer comes.
Obviously. For if we could, we would not need to resort to war in order to defend ourselves. And we had best learn to do it, for until we do, we must suffer. Until we know the method of love and brotherhood, our choice of weak non-resistance or self-defense is only a choice of evils.
Project love. How do we go about doing that? How do you even begin to start training? What's the equivalent of basic martial arts? Are there dojos you can learn this stuff? Courses where one can practice? And what kind of politics - or metapolitics perhaps - does something like this translate into? It doesn't really map onto either Marxism, religious conservatism, libertarianism, or even law-abiding liberalism. I feel naked and alone pretty much everywhere on the political spectrum - about the only party anywhere that has nonviolence as a principle are the Greens, and some varieties of anarchist.
(This is in the context, mind you, of a practical how-to manual for literal physical healing using the power of your mind, not an abstract philosophical text. The existence of anomalous powers for healing is taken as a given.)
Stranger
I'm sorry baby
Your dreams never come true
But your nightmares maybe
Minuit
I find this disturbing.
I remember growing up in the late 70s/early 80s at school, hearing the 'Stranger Danger' mantra at school and vague warnings about adults trying to lure children into cars with lollies. Never, ever, ever get in a car with someone you don't know. Run! It was never really explained exactly what Very Bad Things would happen to us if we got abducted, so of course we tended to imagine the worst. At least, I know I did. It was a scary time in my life for other reasons - religion, family, and nuclear war all lining up for a piece of my sanity.
I suppose as an adult I've got fairly blase about this stuff, since child abuse by family and trusted caregivers rather than in-broad-daylight abduction by outright strangers has saturated most of the headlines since the 1990s. There's been a sort of assumption - at least in my conscious mind - that it really doesn't happen here, or not anymore, and maybe that the Stranger Danger scare in my childhood years was just an urban myth, a few big cases blown out of all proportion, and then a fiction publishing sub-industry of grim 'serial killer' police procedurals solidifying the Twisted Lone Psycho myth into a sort of 1990s/2000s morality play.
But I don't think my subconscious ever really forgot. I mean, I know it didn't. The idea of just getting snatched out of the blue haunted me for years, and is still there, pretty much. And I guess I never did grow up that much, since I still can't really parse out in my head just what kind of dynamics are going on in a situation like that.
And now, three times. In my city. My safe, ordinary, boring city. Three times a child at or near school (the same school, even) has been accosted, in a situation right out of the Stranger Danger 'duck and cover' scenario that seemed so laughable. In each case, it seems the kid was smart enough to run and get help.
I don't know why this creeps me out as much as it does. Why it bothers me more than the horrific cases of domestic violence to children that have happened in NZ recently. The whole betrayal of trust from family thing is one of the most basic fears there is - why doesn't it reach me like this does?
Maybe it's because I grew up feeling unsafe in my own head, and my gut's take on it is that danger from family is bad, but it's something you can get to understand, predict, live with. It's not good, but you can cope, for some factor of coping. You build structures of emotional walls, segregate the weirdness, keep it under control. You go into combat mode, lock down hard, go quiet and cold and precise inside, and do what needs to be done. The true realisation of the damage, the aftermath, comes later in life, when you look back at what you should have had and what you got instead. What you are.
But violence out of nowhere is just weird and leaves you shocked, gasping, no place to turn and no-one to come and save you. You don't even have that inner smirking voice saying you silly silly person, you knew that was coming didn't you. You should have been smarter, harder, older.
No, I think more likely it's because I used to think the world was a scarier place than it turned out to be, so flashes of seeing that some of those old fears weren't entirely wrong leave me sweating. What if all the others turn out to have been true too? And after all the emotional work I've gone through to try to get away from them?
It's like finding out that the bogeyman was real, after all.
Stranger.
You know who he is. Your parents talk in hushed voices about him when you're around. But never quite hushed enough that you can't make out the words, here and there, no matter how much you wish you couldn't. The words are how he finds you. He's that dark figure beside your window. You see him crouch in the bushes. He loves bushes. He's wearing dark clothes, loose fitting. There's a hood over his head. You can't quite make out the face - and you never will. He has a van. Maybe it's an unmarked van. They don't have unmarked vans in this country, but the Stranger lives in the country of dreams, and there he is the police. Kids who see him - who get seen by him - who meet those black holes he has for eyes - they just vanish, and don't come back. Ever.
And no matter how you try not to think about it, each night as you fall toward sleep, you feel him out there. Waiting.
He doesn't ever have to move. He just stays there, night after night, in that dark shadow in the bushes beside the window beside your bed. You know he's not really there but it doesn't help. You know you don't want to, but you won't have a choice. Because he's like gravity. Sooner or later, you're going to come to him.
Everyone does, in the end.
Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave
Woohoo! A serious article about the history and influence of the first-ever Adventure Game, Colossal Cave!
And discussion on the venerable rec.arts.int-fiction .
I did some web-digging a year or so back about the real Mammoth/Colossal/Bedquilt cave system. It's Pretty Darn Interesting.
Settling back to enjoy a good read.
Extraordinary Knowing
I've finally finished Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind.
If I were putting together a short introductory reading list about the state of scientific ESP / psi / anomalous cognition research in the 21st century (leaving the deeper spiritual implications for the moment in the too-socially-awkward basket), I would include at least Irreducible Mind, Entangled Minds, Mind-Reach, and this book. But if I only had one book with which to capture the attention of an interested layperson, it would be this one. Mayer writes lucidly, engagingly and in the first person, but she also writes from the viewpoint of a staunch scientist who has had to come to terms with the reality of anomalous human knowledge and is willing to confront wherever this strange journey takes her.
This includes a journalist-like roundup of the current leading researchers (Puthoff, Radin, Jahn et al) and methodologies (Zener cards, Remote Viewing, DMILS, SPECT, ganzfeld and the PEAR/Noetic Science autonomic entrainment setups), plus an outline of the major skeptics and historical controversies. Most of these I've encountered previously, such as in Radin's work, but Mayer brings a few new angles and a new perception, as a psychologist and a human being with a passionate interest in both the reality of psi and why the subject still remains so taboo in mainstream science.
Of all the books on the subject of psi or spirituality I've read so far, Mayer's comes across as one of the freshest and most exciting. Her comments about psi-knowing being like gestalt visual perception ('daytime eyes and nighttime eyes') are intriguing and something I had not heard previously, and the four-quadrant matrix comparing psychology to physics (conscious vs unconscious / tangible vs intangible) looks like an interesting way of approaching the similarities and differences between the two worlds. Her remarks about Freud's personal belief in telepathy sit nicely alongside the Irreducible Mind focus on Myers' broader treatment of the 'subliminal' as opposed to the 'unconscious'. I especially like her interest on 'what does psi feel like' (and her conclusion that it's a very similar state to 'flow experiences') - as it's a long-neglected but vital element of the puzzle. But it's her stories about the suppression (self-suppression, often) of discussion of anomalous cognition in the scientific and medical world that seem the most human and compassionate, and give me the greatest hope for the future.
It is a sad footnote to this wonderful book that Mayer died (of complications from a long-term illness) shortly after the manuscript was completed. I would have loved to have read what else she might have written on the subject.
A Youtube video of Mayer talking about the book before her death.
The Mutations of Time and Sense
... In particular, we'll need to identify how the contours that turn rational thinking into a thinglike figure... might be contours that, viewed differently, render anomalous experience visible. We'll need to examine how those contours might constitute literal boundaries between states, boundaries that could turn states of mind that appear mutually exclusive into foreground and background for each other. If we can start to specify how that happens, we might be one step closer to comprehending how a loss that strikes most of us as unimaginable and even dangerous could turn out to be tolerable. We might become more comfortable with the idea of deliberately, temporarily letting go of rational thought in order to see something we wouldn't otherwise... How we get to experience of that state is a separate question, and one to be taken up later. But we increase the likelihood that we'll at least be open to getting there if we know that going back and forth is built in. We need to know that getting there doesn't mean giving up our grounding in rational thought for good.
-- Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer
Detach sense from the body, or matter, which is only a form of human belief, and you may learn the meaning of God, or good, and the nature of the immutable and immortal. Breaking away from the mutations of time and sense, you will neither lose the solid objects and ends of life nor your own identity. Fixing your gaze on the realities supernal, you will rise to the spiritual consciousness of being, even as the bird which has burst from the egg and preens its wings for a skyward flight.
-- Mary Baker Eddy
I want to live above the world,
Though Satan's darts at me are hurled;
For faith has caught the joyful sound,
The song of saints on higher ground.Lord, lift me up and let me stand
By faith on heaven's table-land,
A higher plane than I have found:
Lord, plant my feet on higher ground.
Agnes Sanford
I'm reading Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing (which I'll write about in full later, because I'm loving it), but a name she threw out at random in the chapter on healing struck me as familiar in a Pentecostal/Charismatic context.
Yep, there's a link there all right, and I think it's a big one. Agnes Sanford (or at least her Inner Healing technique) is associated with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship (with which I'm very familiar, mostly in a good way), with not a little controversy attached. She also apparently was a prime mover in the Charismatic wave of the 1950s-60s (as opposed to the Pentecostal wave earlier in the century). Her book, The Healing Light, was a how-to manual.
Most of the controversy in evangelical Christian circles that seems to be associated with her centres around her being 'too New Age'. And given this description I guess I can see why:
Agnes Sanford began a healing ministry in the '40s; received Pentecostal exp., in '53/54; pioneered teaching for the "healing of memories"; part of the "positive thinking" movement she presented God's healing work as following the laws of nature and positive thinking; she believed that God could work through "good" spirits as well as the spirits of people who have died; she taught that God used some mediums to heal; she believed that angels and dead saints could "speak and act in and through us."
What fascinates me most, though, looking at this now, is that she represents a line drawn right down the middle of the cluster of Spiritualist, New Thought and Pentecostal phenomena that I've been following from the Fox sisters and Mary Baker Eddy, through Azusa Street and taking in Jungian psychology, Walter Russell, A Course In Miracles and Star Gate remote viewing along the way.
I've been looking for a person who would intersect the set. She looks like being that, as well as a huge historical influence on the Charismatic movement. Interesting indeed.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Finally finished it! The ten year hype bubble is over.
I should probably post a spoilerful review at some point, but I'll just note for now that I found Book 7 the best written of the whole series and I think I can finally forgive Rowling for her giga-fame. When the movies started up while the series was still in motion, I wasn't at all sure that she could pull it off, but she seems to have stuck to her guns, delivered a multi-volume story with a clear beginning, middle and end, and increasing emotional resonance. The series still isn't anywhere near the best writing of its genre - calling it derivative would be kindly, Rowling made a whole new art form out of a sort of deliberately misty-eyed retro pop-cultural remix - but. Well. Somehow, despite all odds, she made the style her own, and made the darned thing in all its Frankensteinian glory work. And somehow resurrected the young adult fantasy genre so lots of better writers (and plenty worse) could at last put something interesting on the bookshelves again after the dreary waves of grim Real Life Issue (tm) teen melodramas that flooded the 90s.
For that alone, the publishing world owes her a debt. But fortunately the last book is a good read, it's intelligent, it moves fast, and takes a few risks, and it ends... in the way it needs to.
And that's that.
Irreducible Mind
I've finally finished reading Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century.
It's a hefty tome, just published this year, tracing the outlines of mainstream cognitive psychology/neuroscience versus the evidence for various forms of anomalous cognition, altered states of consciousness and extreme psychophysical interaction, with a view to proving that mind is demonstrably not a function of the brain but is something entirely elsewhere. The authors (apparently mostly involved with the Esalen Center as well as University of Virginia) recap over a century of data from hypnosis, meditation, trance mediumship, dissociation/multiple personality, psi and near-death experience studies, and seem particularly taken with the turn-of-the-century ideas of William James and Frederic Myers, both of whom were involved with the Society for Psychical Research in the 1880s to early 1900s.
The idea that the soul/spirit/mind/psyche has a separate existence from the body is not news to many religious believers, anyone who's had any kind of anomalous experience, or even anyone who's read any pop-science New Age book about the philosophical implications of quantum physics in the last twenty years, but coming even from the fringes of the scientific world it's a bit startling to see stories of the kind that have long circulated in the underground laid out all in one place with real footnotes.
There seems to be a a bit of a 21st century psi / anomalous cognition publishing renaissance happening right now, what with Dean Radin's Entangled Minds, and Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing (next in my read pile). Irreducible Mind, though, has the weight and feel of a textbook. It's not a book you'll necessarily lend to a friend over coffee. It took me a solid two weeks to plough through it.
Myers' theory, published in his book 'Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death' in 1903, centers around the idea of a 'Subliminal Self', which is different from the Freudian or Jungian unconscious in that it is conscious (but of which we are not normally aware in our usual cognitive stream). More of a 'superconsciousness', perhaps. The theory appears to have emerged in response specifically to 19th century multiple personality studies, which apparently showed a cluster of hypnosis / enhanced psi / MPD connections, to the point where it seems Myers believed that the most progress in uncovering the true nature of human psychology and the keys to enhanced human mental/psychic abilities would be found by studying MPD patients - and possibly even, though I'm not sure he went so far as to say this out loud, deliberately inducing alter personalities through hypnosis in a lab setting. (This will be ringing familiar loud bells to anyone who's read Rigorous Intuition and delved a bit into the underground MKULTRA mythos out there on the net. Not something I personally want to turn out to be true, but it resonates strongly here. Perhaps the creators of the 'Bluebird' story are themselves big fans of Myers and the SPR, and that's how the same material has seeped into the underground? It seems a very steampunkish sort of retro-obsession to share, though.)
Leaving aside the MPD/DID weirdness - and there's plenty of weirdness left to go around - the other main feature of the Subliminal Self theory is that it seems to cover a continuum of multiple 'selves', whether manifesting in one person (trance/possession/alter) or potentially across multiple people (telepathy/clairvoyance/synchronicity). By the way, Myers was the person who first coined the word 'telepathy', so perhaps he knew a thing or two about the subject?
An analogy of Myers of a possible cognitive spectrum, akin to the electromagnetic spectrum - ranging from 'infrared' autonomic processes through 'visible' conscious state to 'ultraviolet' higher-level super-consciousness of whatever sort, made me sit up and take notice, because again it's spookily similar to P J Gaenir's Rainbow of Soul. Perhaps she's also a Myers fan?
What intrigued me most, though, were the absences. Despite lots of mention of faith healing, hypnosis/mesmerism and placebo effect in the late 1800s/early 1900s, there was not a peep about Christian Science (who surely were some of the first to document case studies of this sort of thing?) The authors sketch out the vague outlines of two possible lines of cognitive synthesis in the final chapter, a dualist and a monist approach, and mention that they find the monist one more challenging but ultimately more attractive. But no mention of the monism of A Course In Miracles - itself an artifact of high cognitive strangeness - which seems to me to slide neatly into a few holes in the cognitive psychology field at right about this point. Extend the idea of the Subliminal Self to its logical extent and you seem to get something very similar to a One Self. But the authors stop short of this, presumably figuring they've burned enough karma as it is and don't want to get into religion and philosophy as well. But I do, because otherwise what's the point? Still, I'm not really even pretending to be scientific about my approach.
No mention of Walter Russell's ideas about genius and divine inspiration either, though they parallel Myers' and the author's stance (and though his self-reported 'illumination' experience includes levitation, which they admit as a known side-effect). Bertrand Russell, yes, gets plenty of footnotes. But not the other one.
I have a few new leads to follow up having read this. The philosophy of David Bohm, for one, feels familiar and worth exploring. Human Personality itself, I guess, though I'm really less impressed by sheer bulk of data at this point than by philosophies that somehow seem to internally resonate. What exactly I'm looking for I'm still unclear about; this kind of research seems to skim to one side, being almost but not entirely irrelevant, though still useful as a sort of brute-force tool. I'm almost afraid of coming too close to material of too high strangeness in case it leaves me psychically burned; I'm certainly very wary of attempting to process it using strict waking-mind logic like a dutiful little scientist. That seems like a good way to give oneself a headache and get lost in strange loops.
But, on the other hand, it is very nice to see that there are people willing to think seriously about approaching weird psychological states with an open mind and risk exposing both it and themselves to reproducible experimental protocols. I don't think psi will yield to scientific examination of the old 'we're humans dammit and we'll smash God Himself to find out what's inside' kind, because we're dealing with systems that are observer-dependent, sentient and smarter than us -- but there are, I think, perhaps ways of approaching this stuff humbly and wisely with the intent to catalogue and learn and not getting burned.
At least, I hope so.
