Three conclusions on mysticism

Further Questions of Culture

This blog was created with the vague, perhaps competing notions of showcasing a portfolio of original creative and philosophical thought on the one hand, and venting the unspeakable on the other.  It's not impossible that an intellectual idiom can be hammered out by the white-hot fire of frustrated logic, but dissatisfaction with the discourse of peers, friends and family does not guarantee a more successful expression in angry isolation.  Highfalutin obscurantism is an inviting refuge for the disappointed intellect.  Striking a balance between the limits of the herd and the excesses of nature's dangerous experiments may be a fool's errand, but how else do society and the individual proceed forward together?

I safely and lazily retreated from either honing my craft or sharpening my knives. It seemed sufficient to simply mark the passing absurdities of our day, as if they could speak for themselves, but the pace of unbelievable things has accelerated beyond my means to document.  The things that are shocking, ridiculous, unprecedented, ingenious and idiotic have become too numerous to even point to, much less comprehensively comment upon, even less still to interpret into any sort of artistic form.

We are living in a self-generating satire, a comic construction so sublime as to offer proof of the Divine Comedian.  Parallel realities compete for dominance, gods and priests old and new battle for people's souls, and history is upended.  Opinions are cheap, truth is costly, evidence is abundant and arguments are counterfeit.  It is a comedy of errors, if only to observing disembodied eternal spirits.  It's frequently a hellish slog for those of us who must navigate it on the ground.

It's my preference and inclination to locate these incompatibilities of meaning in the airy arena of our thoughts, values, and culture. This has been my cultural and academic education.  The magic dirt of Canada makes us all Canadian.  My Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon heritage makes me see the world in a certain way, but I could see it differently, if not for the last several thousand years, and I would still be the same person.  Given enough time and the right presentation, any true idea can be communicated to anyone, once the language barrier of culture is overcome.  Right?

The idea works well enough on its own, but it does not permit expansion.  Where did the culture come from?  The people.  Where did the people come from?  The environment.  These values permitted these people to persist in this place.  Such adaptation is not arbitrary, but it may be more or less suitable to a different environment.

But what actually is an idea?  Where does it come from?  Does it bubble up from the neurons, or float down from the ideal world?

If the brain produces consciousness, and the brain is a product of evolution, and every other product of evolution expresses variance based on environment, it would be reasonable to expect different capacities to conceive, communicate and comprehend ideas among groups that have developed with different social and environmental pressures.  As an opposable thumb permits one to grasp an object, there are many heavy, slippery, misshapen ideas that one must exercise extra mental appendages in order to pick up.  Why should that capacity be universal?  The human form is highly variable in every other way.

If psyche and soul are indeed one, and all our thoughts emanate from a voice that ultimately resides in a higher realm, our truth must be found there too.  Assuming greater control of destiny attendant to a greater perception, our souls might be expected to shop for vehicles with the features necessary to satisfy our way of driving.  Speed, handling, gas mileage, all must be considered by the discerning driver.  A soul with any self-knowledge would pick the brain best-suited to its personality.  Even accounting for the possibility that we all have the same origin and destination, we are nonetheless taking different routes at our own pace.  Even the most cosmic perspective problematises universalism.

These are the further questions of culture.  Are perception and action profoundly informed by cultural differences?  Certainly.  Does that culture exist in a special space containing nothing but culture?  No.  Acceptance of either a biological foundation or spiritual roof to the house of culture forces the consideration that cultural perspective cannot be the fundamental source of difference.  Perspective comes from where you stand, and how tall, and how good your eyes are, not only where you turn your head.  You can try to walk a mile in someone's shoes, but you can't wear their feet.  If culture does not exist in a vacuum, it must be tied to things more or less tangible.

Whether biological animals invented culture to connect as a group, or God invented culture to separate into individuals, we have arrived at an impasse.  There is a traffic-jam of meaning, and road rage is getting scary.

This is very uncomfortable business.  The residues of old religions and the seeds of new ones overlap with science and politics in ways barely perceptible.  Knowledge of history and understanding of philosophy are inadequate to the volume of our rhetoric.  Passionate displays of moralising mask ignorance and apathy.  Some are emboldened, others terrified.  It is the best of times and the worst of times for truth.

It's a time for new stories, new ideas, new voices, new media.  The format will continually evolve, but this endeavour cannot continue as a quixotic catalogue.  My need to practice word-using must be brought to the task of considering the challenges of this crazy age, and to engage with them in a mode more real than bemused observation, sarcastic astonishment, or detached horror.

I Chose To Believe

The Dangerous Unconscious

Monoliths and Lighthouses

Space-Awe For Health

The replicability of the overview effect, whereby seeing the Earth from space induces a life-changing sense of wonder, could lead to virtual reality awe machines.  Alternatively, this may just tell us that those who go to the heavens come back lighter.

Eisenhower Eats

Ike's great-granddaughter recommends a diet not far removed from Cathar or Vedic practice to facilitate contact with sky beings.

This could prompt us to reflect deeply on the mysterious resonances between religious revelations spanning the centuries, or perhaps to enjoy an amusing piece of fluffy journalism with a condescending smirk on our smug faces.

Sun Ra: Showman or Shaman?

Dreams come true, I know they do
If you believe in love
Mine came true and yours will too
I swear by the stars above

Dreams come true, they just have to
True as the Sun above
Mine came true and yours will too 
If you believe in love

Dream of romance
Strolling down Lover's Lane
In a trance
And dream it over again

Dreams come true, they just have to
To prove they're so supreme
Mine came true and yours will too 
All you have to do is dream

-"Dreams Come True," Sun Ra 

~~~

Sonny had a vision.  His body was transfigured.  Up he went, and down to a stage on Saturn.  They told him to leave school, to speak through his music.  The world was due to become a more chaotic place, and there would be trouble in the schools, but music was a language that would be heard.

Ten years later, in 1947, people began to talk about flying saucers.  Sonny was always ahead of the curve, but now his private epiphany had some kind of cultural currency.

~~~

Ten years after that, Herman Poole Blount had become Le Sony'r Ra.  He had an independent music label, El Saturn Records, and a big band, the Arkestra.  With his manager and various associates and pen pals, he traded books and ideas about symbols and religion, ancient times and extraterrestrial encounters.  Strange packages would arrive from corners unknown, holding secrets and clues.  Long before the Internet, the esoterica of the day all got funneled through Sun Ra, listening to Long John Nebel on the radio when he wasn't writing and rehearsing.

His band were affordably dressed as Egyptians and space men, a silly expression of serious preoccupations of the bandleader. The costumes also helped to undercut the self-conscious rigour of the music.

Sonny was intense about discipline.  When his band moved to New York and the music moved further into the avant-garde, he rejected the label of "free jazz."  There was nothing free about it; this was music about mind and cosmos.  This was space jazz.

~~~

It would be another twenty years before the zeitgeist was ready, and George Clinton produced a flying saucer funk that approximated Sun Ra's aesthetic.  Outside of a rewarding cross-pollination that resulted in a series of approachable fusion albums, Ra's music remained a more dangerous, uncanny animal.  It was not uncommon for a show to begin with a twenty-minute expression of the creation of the universe as explained by a wall of horns, or end with Ra snaking through the crowd and shouting in people's faces.  This was music to change minds.

~~~

He is said to be a pioneer of Afrofuturism, and early on he closely identified with Black struggles.  As time went on, he came to see blacks and whites alike as subject to the lies and illusions of a nefarious archontic power using us as pawns for its own amusement.

In some combination of inspired revelation, divine disclosure, informed intuition, and self-mythologising bullshit, Sonny told people that he was a member of the angel race.

~~~

He never changed his story about the time he went to Saturn, but no one saw him dissolve.  The historicity of his prehistoric alien abduction is a moot point.  It can be judged only in its possible effects.

Sun Ra pioneered the use of electronic keyboards and free improvisation in jazz, but that proves nothing.  He was one of the most prolific recording artists of his century, but that proves nothing.  He lived and breathed his music, living in a big house with his band and catnapping at the piano, but that proves nothing.

What might actually mean something is that today, twenty-three years after the man's transition, the Sun Ra Arkestra still tours in his name.  Ninety-something Marshall Allen dresses as a wizard, blows an electronic whistle, and the band sings the old songs.  The crowd and the performers enter a magical space in which a dead man is still alive.  They dream of the future, of the boundlessness of infinity, of love in outer space.  This is perhaps the greatest proof that Sonny was touched by something, reaching down to make a prophet of a man.

He warned of doom in the grand old tradition, but he used his every day on Earth to wake people up where he could.  That he did so without arousing much recognition from the jazz or the flying saucer communities suggests he was right about that evil unseen force of injustice in the world.

~~~

They plan to leave this world one day
In sundry rocket ships to sail away

They plan to go to somewhere there
In splendid ships of models rare

They plan to find another place in the sky
Without saying farewell, without saying goodbye

They plan to put the White House on the Moon, soon
And the Kremlin on a satellite

-"They Plan to Leave," Sun Ra

~~~

Further reading

Confessions of an Idiot

~~~

I had a prolonged, traumatic birth, as a terrible winter storm raged outside.  I eventually arrived on the leap day of 1984, with a scar on one cheek from the doctor's forceps. 

~~~

When I was a couple of years old, the neighbour boy knocked me unconscious with a lead pipe.  He was pretending to play baseball.  The stitches left a scar on my forehead over my third eye.

~~~

When I was six or seven, I saw a flashing electric blue rectangle descend from the night sky.  It was outside my window and behind some trees, but nothing about it looked like anything I'd seen before or since.  I thought it over, and couldn't see any good coming from discussing it with the adults.  The experience was never integrated, only occluded by being ignored.

~~~

When I was twelve or thirteen I began to develop a neurotic melancholia.  My brother was gone from the house, and my parents' marriage had started the slow and quiet march to dissolution.  I had gleaned from my social studies classes that my nation had no identity of its own, and it was increasingly clear that my education was a boring waste of my talents.  I had every opportunity to develop the bad cognitive habits and bodily environment for a pernicious and persistent depression.  These behavioural and biochemical ruts can be overcome, and the thought of quitting made a friendly gadfly, but any mental illness leaves a mark that never fully leaves.

~~~

I went to Trent University to learn how to be academically critical of my society.  The unheralded Semitic cynicism of the theorists on offer neglected the constructive responsibilities of philosophy.  We only destroyed.  It was understood but never justified that an egalitarian communist utopia would fill the resultant void.

I could only do well in philosophy and cultural studies by keeping them strictly delineated and compartmentalised in my mind.  Cultural studies selected from every discipline, but its critique was beholden only to pissy projection.

~~~

When I returned from Ontario in disgrace and confusion, and without Honours, my feeling of affinity for the moustache man and his project had become so acute that I took myself to have my head checked.  The NS Hospital was no help.  They deemed me sane.  This would be a valuable tether in the years to come.

~~~

Cannabis had made the existential ache endurable, so it had been no great leap to obey the cultural script and proceed to other psychoactive substances--only to discover how at-home they made me feel.  I learned the warp and woof of tryptamines and phenethylamines, of illumination and The Void.  On a summer off from school, down by the brook, on a bottle of cough syrup, some mushrooms, and a beer, I became aware of a consciousness greater than myself.  In the morning, I cast Him out as only chemical.

~~~

When those chemicals no longer had as much to teach me, I moved on to the hard stuff: exopolitics, the New Age, and conspiracy theory. 

I had exhausted my education; there were still too many missing pieces in my understanding before I would be able to make psychological and philosophical sense of those classes. 

I had exhausted entheogens; absent a proper initiation by a carrier of a wisdom tradition (or the time, security, stability, and supplies to rigourously develop my own tradition) neo-shamanism seemed to be a pie-eyed dead end, in terms of obtaining reliable and consistent information. 

Cultural studies had at least made me cognizant of our capacity for self-delusion, and of the cultural mediation of reality.  Psychedelics had made me aware of dimensions normally unseen.  With the hope that my philosophy classes in logic and reasoning were still working for me, it seemed the right time to cross my Rubicon--and try to learn profound things from the scary, dangerous, and untrustworthy Internet.  After all, those disreputable drugs hadn't been so bad!

I made vast strides into the unknown over a very short period.  In a flurry of cheap documentaries and questionable interviews, I caught up with ten years of paranormal, spiritual, conspiratorial, and batshit insane conversation.  Much of it was remarkable, most was incredible, and all of it was far beyond the pale of polite conversation.  I began to get comfortable with a constant consciousness of the limits of other people's realities.

There were certainly a lot of well-spoken people convinced of nefarious plots and epic cosmic battles.  They referenced the same undocumented fancies, and it was easy to get swept up in excitement over the imminent disclosure of alien life, and our imminent ascension into fluffy rainbows.  It was a strange time.

~~~

My pseudo-shamanic forays had finally begun to yield fruit.  My mystical readings had begun to cohere and come alive.  I was beginning to experience synchronicities.

I would hold conversations with an ethereal DJ.  It selected the songs in my extensive playlist that would answer with uncanny insight the question I was pondering.  First, the astonishment at such magic.  Second, the slow recognition of its ubiquity.

As the new year approached, I made a resolution to undertake an experiment.  It required a leap of faith.  I decided to take up the provisional acceptance of a series of dubious claims. 

If it was true that all existence is the fragmented consciousness of the One, all awareness must be made of the same stuff.  If we're all reaching higher levels of consciousness on our climb back to wholeness, there are probably intermediary conglomerations of awareness of which we can be a part.  If we're all connected through our common Source, it should be a simple matter to contact other intelligences by means of the very intelligence which seeks to make such a contact.

I resolved that in 2009 I would see a UFO.

~~~

I didn't step outside without looking up.  I didn't look up without asking to see.  Everywhere I went, everything I did, I held the thought in my mind that I wanted to make contact, I wanted to witness, I wanted to experience.  I asked in earnestness and humility.  I projected friendly compassion and curiosity.  I wanted to see a flying saucer and I meant it.

~~~

On the night in February when I signed for an apartment with my girlfriend, I walked to my warehouse night shift down a darkened road.  I was distracted from my feeling of relief and anticipation by a bright light in the sky straight ahead.

Before I had time to think about it, the word "angelic" popped into my mind.  This word wasn't really in my vocabulary, so it surprised me enough that I immediately took a closer look at the light.  It was too large and bright to be a planet, but it wasn't in motion except for a slight waver.  Something about the luminous shimmer convinced me that it was suitably angelic, and in a moment I found myself asking it in my head if it was a UFO.

The light gently winked at me in a seeming affirmation.

A pregnant pause; one-two-three.  A mugging double take wouldn't have been out of order.  That really happened, didn't it?  Another slow blink, after the same measure as the last question.  The light hovered still, now resolutely unblinking.

I tried to command it, telling it to do it again.  Instead, the light shrunk to the size of a faint star, and suddenly began moving to the right.  It quickly expanded to a large black shape with lights on it that passed almost overhead.  It was just enough like a plane that I could believe I had been fooled, and I spent the rest of the night laughing at the ambiguity of the sighting.

On further consideration, I couldn't remember a sound from an aircraft that came very close, nor a green light on the starboard side that faced me.

~~~

About a month after that first sighting, in a time of alienated despair, the floodgates were opened.  After noticing a series of strange aerial things one night, I saw a nearby flying object instantly reverse on its course without turning around--and there was no going back.

Over the course of 2009, forever to be remembered as That Year, I saw multiple daytime discs, luminous saucers, and glowing orbs, as well as countless suspicious lights that were surely almost all conventional.  Often enough, the more striking appearances seemed to interact with me and my expectations.  I found them to be playful, but also seemingly compassionate, sometimes responding to my emotional need to see them at a certain time or place, sometimes performing a novelty when I asked nicely.

It culminated in a pink saucer shrouded in mist going past my apartment window one afternoon like it was going for a Sunday drive.  This time our requisite exchange of recognition manifested as the orange-pink light of the object brightening responsively, and then the trail of vapour behind it got correspondingly longer.  Somehow this simple physical logic was too much.  Weird phantasms passing over populated areas are fine, but if they behave like they're real?  I had seen enough.

It was around this time that I was becoming preoccupied with my soul's mission, and beginning to suspect that my favourite singer-songwriter might be an evil sorcerer.  I had to grudgingly admit that it might be a good time to pause and reflect.

I reflected in retreat for years, exploiting the goodwill of friends and family to survive, struggling not to succumb to this new madness I didn't understand, or an old sadness I knew all too well.  I went back over everything; every experience, but also every fact and argument that led me there, and every one that followed from it.  I adopted more nuanced perspectives on secrets and mysteries.  I became more sure of some things and less sure of others.  Mostly I languished.

~~~

There is still no idiom sufficient to take account of reality.  Not science, not religion, not the left or right, not the high or straight.  Mostly there is insular confusion.  A vast spinning cosmos surrounds us, and we're too ridiculous to assume our inherent dignity and face that universe.

I have fled from my experiences even as I struggle to understand them.  The truth is that I have to let them be. I don't understand everything, and I have to let that be.  Most people are ignorant dumbasses without a shred of passion or curiosity, and I have to let that be.  There's too much to learn and teach and explore and discover to be held back by not knowing the destination, or not getting everyone to take the journey.

Beyond Synchronicity: Mind ≠ Brain

Scientists love to throw out evidence. It makes them feel powerful and important. They especially love to throw out evidence from mushy fencesitters who come to them, cap in hand, tail between legs, begging for validation for someone's pet obsession, whether it's ancient lost civilizations or psi or NDEs.

‘Magic’ Will Replace Normcore, Trend Forecasters Report

How does this all relate towards brands and the fashion landscape? "In the broadest strokes, it is saying, 'This is about people’s experiences.'" Segal says. "It is saying, ‘What’s important is how people are experiencing the world, experiencing their spirituality, experiencing anxiety, so there is a motion back toward the emotional landscape of consumers instead of their pocketbooks."

Where are the missing mystics of the revolution?

"To the extent that opportunities for these interactions are spread through larger communities, social mysticism has the potential to undermine the wider social order in truly radical ways. Those who are used to looking up to see if collective action is successful should also look out and in to understand the power of change that’s inherent in mystical experience."

When Things Happen That You Can't Explain

"I’ve talked to hundreds of people who have had remarkable, unexpected experiences that startled them profoundly. Some see them as clear evidence of the supernatural and others do not. And there are those who come to a conclusive view of what these events mean, and those who hold them as evidence of the mystery of the human imagination itself."

Monkeys can learn to see themselves in the mirror

The ability to identify oneself in a mirror is held as a defining characteristic of sentience, distinguishing humans, dolphins, elephants, and great apes from the naive masses of unreflexive animals.  For Lacan it signified a key element in the development of subjectivity.  For most it is an unremarkable ability not worthy of mention.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered that rhesus monkeys, who don't have a natural tendency to recognise themselves in a mirror, can nevertheless be trained to perceive the monkey behind the glass as "me."  This means that a fundamental tenet of selfhood is a latent capacity that can be drawn out of an intelligent being—and cultivated.

What are the consequences for our own vaunted and lauded brilliance?  Although there is probably no appreciable difference in brain structure or chemistry, the test monkeys have entered a new vista of experience.  Is it possible that there are similar potentials of perspective waiting untapped in the human animal?

A cursory glance at our literature suggests there is a rare experience shared across cultures, in different times and places, permitting one the perception that all external surroundings are a reflection of a singular inner reality.  This is anecdotal information, not verifiable except by special training, but if the monkeys can expand their horizons, why can't we?