two fish

 
 
depression
may be defined as
an experience of ‘loss of significance’
that there is no there there
- rather different than
     say
meaninglessness

in that meaninglessness impends with significance
depression seems a difficult state or zone precisely for
its psychological sense (or landscape)
of no landscape.
there is no there there means
there is nothing to work with - the psyche
works with and through images - not necessarily
visual, but made of substances
here there are none.

                   

a word for depression might be anomie
taking a process approach
in looking at depression -
as depression is
at times extreme suffering,
most extreme pain -
it’s worth working towards an answer - from within
the landscape of depression (a non-landscape)

    – even in a black hole, there remains
the imprint of the falling, and it’s this falling
that may have set the gravity well
in motion

                   

following this logic, one of the psychological
approaches to depression works with the question
of triggers. To try to think or find the beginning of the feeling
of being depressed, and look to what was happening
or happened just around the time before that
– it may have
been incidental thoughts, may have been
a day of suck-off work a day
of freedom

the important thing is not to judge but just
to jot – so, a diary or journal is useful,
because it’s not nearly so useful to interpret later
(a slippery business) as to look back and see
the thing happening in writing,
and to write the transits out.
In the above,
what may or may not be found
is that there are
absolutely real and important concerns
that are triggers;
if these are known precisely these can be addressed.
these concerns do not cause depression, but, as mentioned
are triggers – this is one notion.

                   

if the cause of depression
remains mysterious, still one can usually find
triggers, if observing carefully, in a workable manner
without aggression.

Another mode of psychological thought concerning depression
is related to emotional process
there is an aspect of frustration and anger which is healthy
in that, separated from blame, anger for instance is often
     smart –
the sense of knowing in your bones that something
(situation or theme) is wrong , that
     you won’t put up with it,
     whatever that may be –

                   

not ascribing blame means, psychologically, it’s not
that it is wrong, so much as
staying with the self which feels

     – however, say, politically speaking,
     the thing may be wrong.
– But often we can’t change the thing,
reasonably or quickly,
looking at how to work with anger is important here.

the point is that anger (even frustration alone) left to brew
and stew, may turn later
to resignation.
one cannot
get out of the situation
change
the thing
or
change oneself
in relation to it
and so
there is defeat

                   

this sense of defeat i’m talking about happens beneath the awake mind
even beneath the subliminal
it is unstoppable
it may happen in both extremely minor, or major ways;
- working in this mode: to consciously
recall and list truthfully those things
that are really pissing you off
this would not be any ‘approved’ list of
what should rightly be pissing you off,
but an idiosyncratic list.

      it may be
Egg McMuffins and the size of one’s living room
     the color of a carpet:
the list must be honest, or it’s a useless exercise
in other words, depression must be taken seriously
as all really true and complete things are
which is a way of ‘attending upon . . .’

                   

     (all psychological means have to do with
proper attendance, to attend upon psyche,
a key to the nature of how healing happens)

   a ‘not’ or a ‘non’ -
beyond the issue of friend or enemy;
i mean, one can rail against depression
or try and befriend it, but neither works.
actually, coping doesn’t work well either

one issue about depression,
a mild or minor episode of depression may seem manageable
but this is a false impression of depression, based on
a seeming transience or brevity, a
‘lighter’ level of psychological suffering.
     When depression becomes chronic (incl. episodically chronic)
when this cosmos of depression becomes
   a powerful sense, a real element of life
it cannot be ‘managed;’ some seek
amelioration via drugs or vacations or changes of
scene – at times to a certain effect,
though these treatments
often prove to be disturbingly temporary – and as such
may be interpreted as failures, thus reinforcing the depression,
because one of the truisms of depression, as every depressed person
absolutely realizes, is that
nothing works

                   

another mode of working with depression is cognitive
     – based on an RET approach (rational-emotive therapy)
represented in the book, “Feeling Good,” by Burns. it
is a skillful approach, presenting an
‘applied contemplative-philosophical lens’ to daily life,
     and
deals with what we are saying to ourselves, moment-to-moment -
As we honestly look at these moments:
     i was surprised
very
     surprised
–
in this way of working,
by teasing out momentary
thought,
we may find
depression is
a cascade effect, with
beginnings
that don’t feel
at all like
depression
–
it’s not
so much
about anger or frustration
as seemingly ‘rational’
messages
to ourselves,
which might include
a thought
somewhere
already down
the cascade
like:

‘I can’t do anything.’ or
‘I’m a failure.’
This is the sort of
globalized,
black-and-white thinking
that marks depression.

                   

the point isn’t to change that thinking – which doesn’t work –
so much as to track it: back, on the one hand, and, to redirect, on the
other. for instance, when a thought occurs like, “I can’t do anything,”
you think of something you can do – cook an omelet perhaps.
and it helps to actually cook one.
so
then,
maybe
you
can’t
do
anything,
but
you
can
cook
an
omelet,
and
you’ve
proved
it
– this may seem
a bit innane, but it’s not,
it’s
quite serious

                   

RET or cognitive psychology (done right)
is quite effective in that it’s a
powerfully direct awareness practice.
the point is that depression is
a cascade-effect of certain kinds of thoughts, and each minutae of
thought

triggers an emotion, and that emotion encourages a further thought(s)
which triggers a further emotional environment(s), and so it goes
through the cascade – until the landscape is more solid
than a planet.
Burns’ book articulates depression
diagnostically, presents a means to self-examine, and outlines
a series of processes by which a person can basically work with
and often cure their depression. a self-help book in the
real sense.

there is another aspect to depression, which is archetypal,
something that western psychology and certainly medicine
do not touch on or really agree with. This involves the necessity
of depression.

In other words, depression may not be at all
like a bad cold you get rid of or wait to get out of.
When the universe pulls apart falls apart,
when you have no energy, when all of life is drained
from life. When even despair is an energy which seems
impossibly lively

                   

we can ask, but cannot know, wish to leave but be completely
stuck, or sunk in a quicksand, a morass. Something is
binding us, and we cannot rise, we cannot return to
easy ideals, cannot move on, go to the next step,
    so
we lose all that is cavalier. In the pain of no significance.
this itself, unbearable, is a destroyer of everything that is
cheap and american, so to say, every bullshit romantic
movie, every cheery, false newscaster on TV; every smile
hurts as does every grief

depression also eliminates death-metal gothic-fantasy overlays -
this is because depression cannot be willfully sublimated
into images and story – if it can, it’s not really depression but
something else.

So, galling limitation, as the I Ching says. such galling limitation
may be complex, composed of outer, inner and relational
(inter- and intra-psychic) realities;

the point is,
we can always work with
our mind
with depression –

                   

     an aggressive attitude doesn’t seem to work:
the ‘let’s get rid of this’ attitude – the fighting against, the
battle to ‘remove’ depression.
actually, depression is unworkable
this is why it’s called depression, what the word means
and not something else,
so we don’t work on depression per se,
but on how we think or feel, and what’s happening in our life
situation – depression feels totally solid, but the moment, like
the conscious mind, persona, isn’t at all solid, there’s space;

     the situational factor is likewise important
as are the social-cultural factors
and we can track, and in gathering certain valuable nuggets of
thought, information, process, a certain psychological horizon
may appear (no guarantees, but generally speaking)
often, related to depression is a deep and profound despair, grief,
pain. These we can know. find and know and attend.
But depression itself cannot really be found and known in the
same way.

It may turn out that real changes are necessary
but these needs may be quite small, nearly infinitesimal
it may be that a subtle pattern of thought can be reframed

                   

                   or

                   /

                   and
other changes may be necessary
– something inimical to
depression –
a plan – a later stage of work
may be formed and implemented
over months or even years of time.
Sometimes
the honest formulation
of a reasonable plan
is an antidote
(though usually not the antidote, alone)

The I Ching says,
“Galling Limitation should not be persevered in.”

                   

Why did the band Harvy Danger decide to release their entire September, 2005 album, Little By Little, for free P2P distribution and download, on the net? Read the full statement here. The precis begins:

Why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Of course, the CD will also be for sale on the site, as well as in fine independent record stores across the country, in a deluxe package that includes a 30-minute bonus disc that serves as a companion piece to the record proper (retail price for the package is $11.99).

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record. However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign . . .

Also of note,

Tanya Andersen, a 41 year old disabled single mother living in Oregon, has countersued the RIAA for Oregon RICO violations, fraud, invasion of privacy, abuse of process, electronic trespass, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, negligent misrepresentation, the tort of “outrage", and deceptive business practices, Ms. Andersen’s counterclaims demand a trial by jury. (List of 65 allegations against the RIAA follows, in original article)

(As reported by isohunt:) This follows another recent US court ruling that mum can’t be held responsible for 13-year old daughter’s file sharing. While the RIAA’s lawsuits to protect its copyright is not “illegal” and are within their right (under laws they lobbied for), perhaps this case will shed some light on their extortionist behaviour.

Emory College hosted a debate on war, between James Hillman and Deepak Chopra. Here are a few summations, reported online:

Psychologist James Hillman based many of his arguments on the theory of basic personality types proposed by psychologist Carl Jung, whom Hillman studied with in the 1950s.

Hillman said people in general, and Americans in particular, lack imagination, which causes conflicts to lead to violence. He said more creative solutions to conflicts can be found, [and that] part of the blame falls on lack of education. “If we don’t imagine, we get Iraq, we get New Orleans, we get criminal irresponsibility,” Hillman said. “Where does imagination go to school in the U.S.?”

A sold-out crowd of about 1,200 people, mostly local residents not affiliated with Emory, packed the pews of Glenn Memorial. Jean Houston, a researcher in human development from New York, moderated. According to both speakers, aggression is so ingrained in human nature that war might be inevitable.

Chopra said the “fight or flight” response originates in the limbic system, the same part of the brain responsible for instinctive behaviors such as eating or the urge to procreate.

Hillman mentioned that the prevelance of wars outnumber years in recorded history.

Chopra said peace might be more likely to occur if nurturing female archetypes replaced the violent male archetypes now dominant in much of human popular culture and mythology. But Hillman saw no such reason for hope. “Why are we talking about evolution, about the future?” he said. “We don’t know what the hell’s coming. It’s pretty bloody serious, what’s here. It does no good to be hopeful.” He added that humanity must be mindful of the struggle it faces in attaining peace to make peace possible.

Chopra and Hillman also disagreed in their definitions of peace. When Chopra identified the passive resistance of figures such as Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi as peace, Hillman said such actions constituted strength, not peace. “That’s a Judeo-Christian interpretation,” Chopra said. “Peace in the East is a transcendence of opposing energies that allows one to dwell in a state of pure consciousness.”

Both participants and the moderator offered numerous criticisms of President Bush and his administration’s foreign policy, and Hillman called for “doves” in the audience to take over the business of war. “You must turn to war and give it deep thought,” he said. “Otherwise, it will be left to the hawks, to Kristol and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.”

Tuesday’s event was organized by the Mythic Imagination Institute, which seeks to foster understanding and respect through stories and archetypes, as well as the Alliance for a New Humanity — a forum co-founded by Chopra — and the Emory Public Issues Forum.

   N’Kisi

“Fascinating story about Alex, but there is another grey parrot even more amazing than Alex, called N’Kisi. Why is Alex now a star and N’Kisi still obscure after years of amazing scientific results? Simply because the scientist who studies N’Kisi happens to be named Rupert Sheldrake, and the scientific establishment has quietly agreed to ostracize and marginalize Sheldrake as much as possible. N’Kisi is not only the most highly accomplished animal speaker known today — of any animal species — he is also very gifted telepathically — at least with his owner, a woman with whom he has a unique bond. Check out this link: sheldrake.org/nkisi” – JR

Hear N’Kisi Speak!          Interview, and more about Sheldrake
  

Interspecies Telepathy Experiments
N’kisi would often describe what Aimee was thinking about, reading, or looking at in situations where there were no possible ordinary clues. When Aimee saw Rupert Sheldrake’s book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home she contacted him, and they collaborated in designing an experiment to try to replicate and document this phenomenon under controlled conditions. . . .N’kisi has already shown aspects of intelligence that animals were thought to be incapable of, particularly a species that shares so little genetic similarity with humans. Globally, parrots are the most endangered of all birds, with the greatest number of species currently facing extinction due to poaching and habitat destruction. We hope our work will help people to realize the amazing abilities and awareness of these intelligent birds, and encourage greater care of these precious beings and the planetary environment we share.

The BBC reported on N’Kisi, Chatty Parrot Stuns Scientists ( 26 January 2004).

Interview, and more about Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake is best known for his controversial theory of “formative causation ” which implies a non-mechanistic universe, governed by laws which themselves are subject to change. Born in Newark-on-Trent, England, Rupert studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He took a Ph.D in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967, and in the same year became a Fellow of Glare College, Cambridge. He was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology there until 1973. He was a Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society and at Cambridge he studied the development of plants and the aging of cells. From 1974 to 1978, he was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, and he continued to work there as a Consultant Physiologist until 1985. Rupert is the author of A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past, in which he presents his theory for explaining the mysterious process of morphogenesis. In 1981 the British science magazine, Nature described A New Science of Life as “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years, ” while the New Scientist called it “an important scientific inquiry into the nature of biological and physical reality. “

Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness
($10 new, under $5 used)
by Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Jean Houston
(2001).
  
  

ONE VERSION OF INFINITY

You run so fast, round and round and round, that finally the fastest way to
run is to stay still. You run so fast that you begin to see your own back,
and you begin to become still. At that point, the whole thing begins to
become infinite. When you hold still, you supercede any kind of speed at
all. You become the ultimate and utmost winner of that particular race.
From that point of view, being back to square one is one version
of infinity….In this case, back to square one is the infiniteness of
immense immeasurable space and expansion that you experience. Therefore, it
is absolutely absurd to try to search further – and the only way not to
search further is to be, to stay, to stand or sit still.

From “Cosmic Disaster,” in GLIMPSES OF REALIZATION: THE THREE BODIES OF
ENLIGHTENMENT page 14. Edited by Judith Lief. Published by Vajradhatu
Publications.

Afraid I’m more of the “seraching further” type (d monk)

           Moog Modular

Thank you Robert Moog!

Moog died today, age 71. In rememberance, the beginning of a piece on Moog (rhymes with ‘vogue’) published April, 2000 in salon.com.

Robert Moog
His invention had an extraordinary impact on how musicians create, and radically changed the way music is made.

By Frank Houston

In the 1920s a Russian inventor named Leon Theremin unveiled the first purely electronic instrument. You played the theremin by waving your hands in the vicinity of two metal rods, controlling pitch and volume, that were attached to a nondescript wooden cabinet. Between the strange arm motions and the instrument’s invisible machinations, the theremin’s overall effect in performance was theatrical and mysterious.

But like the 200-ton telharmonium, the world’s first mechanical music synthesizer (invented by Thaddeus Cahill around 1900), the theremin was difficult to play. In 1955, four years after the theremin’s eerily weepy sound was employed in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” RCA introduced the first modern synthesizer. The machine made sounds by manipulating electrical waves to denote timbre, pitch and volume. Like early computers, it filled a room and was tended by men in lab coats.

Moog Sonic 6

A few years later Robert Moog, a graduate student in physics at Cornell University, published a magazine article explaining how to build a theremin, offering do-it-yourself kits for $49.95. Orders poured in, and Moog sold 1,000 that year. “We had $13,000 in the bank,” he recalled recently, “a humongous cache of wealth for a graduate student back then!” The windfall enabled a career that helped bring electronic music out of the realm of novelty acts and university labs. A decade after the first RCA machine, Moog introduced the first widely adopted electronic instrument – the synthesizer that bears his name.

When Moog (rhymes with “vogue") unveiled the Moog music synthesizer in 1965, his engineering skills combined with a bit of business luck to radically change the way music was made. Synthesizers went from being computers to instruments that could be found in any music store. The flowering of rock music may have come via Leo Fender, Les Paul and the Gibson Guitar Co., but the innovative music of the early 21st century owes far more to Moog and his imitators and successors.

Mini Moog

After getting some exposure to the liberal arts at Columbia University’s Engineering School, Moog began graduate education in the engineering physics department of Cornell University. He took eight years to get his Ph.D., largely because of his part-time hobby: building theremins and other electronic instruments. The degree came in 1965, a year after Moog launched his synthesizer business. Moog built his synthesizer in 1964 after a composer told him about the need for user-friendly electronic instruments utilizing new solid-state technology. The Moog was modular: You used patch cords to select your waveform (the sound’s timbre) and frequency (pitch), and plugged in the interface – a keyboard, instead of the binary code on paper that had defined the first RCAs. Moog’s engineering wizardry did the rest.

Significantly, Moog’s was the first synthesizer to use attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes, set with four different knobs, which control the qualities of a sound’s onset, intensity and fade. Like many of his designs, Moog’s envelope generators became a basic component of later synthesizers. . . RCA synthesizers, intended for an elite market of labs financed by universities and record companies, had cost $100,000 and up. In 1967 the new Moog sold for $11,000. It wasn’t the only synthesizer around; many experts also commend Donald Buchla’s modular synthesizer, built around the same time. But the Moog became prized for its utility and elegance, making Moog the name that brought synthesized music to the masses.

The Moog’s biggest break came in 1969, when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos had a huge, Grammy-winning hit with “Switched-on Bach,” . . . The Beatles introduced a new Moog in the majestic “Because,” on “Abbey Road,” . . . In 1971, Carlos brought the Moog to cinema, scoring Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” with electronic Beethoven [she also scored The Shining, and played Moog synths for TRON] . . .

The synthesizer also boasted the voltage-controlled lowpass filter that came to be known as the Moog filter, capable of making a variety of full horn, string and vocal timbres. The filter was patented in 1968, much to the envy of the competition, who “ate their hearts out,” Moog says. They “all came up with voltage-controlled lowpass filters, but most of them sounded like shit, if I do say so myself.” . . .

         
Wendy Carlos & her circa 1971 Moog studio



Robert Moog
 
 

     Halfway squared equals twice back to zero. Primordial rhythms surge against the neonate. Blue hall, blue wall, blue crystal ball. I don’t know yet what I am. Always returning, resurging, resurgence. Gathering documents from an internal realm. Ali Akbar Khan showed his tabla player how to become more powerful, how to pulse with a new beat in the midst of metaphysical ecstacy. Damaged hands re-enact helplessness.

Past life):

     I sit there with my fallen self, heiroglyphic belt trapped outside. Dark tall cell, golden wall, window-slit of light above. The room is a three-dimensional trapezoid. A woman dances in red on a stone-covered courtyard. Children with golden halos, around their small heads. Was it a priest, lost them

         –  remainders .

James Hillman in “A Terrible Love of War” (PDF review here) writes of America (pp. 127-28):

Mars is battle rage, an insane red fury in a field of action. Firing the weapon brings Mars immediately into the scene, saving a man from cowering and trembling, from feeling himself a victim, and shakes him from his self-occupied inertia at a loss to himself and to his unit.

Since the god is in the gun, the passionate love for these weapons may express less a love of violence than a magical protection against it. Handgun – a fetish or amulet to hold at bay the fear of injury or death, the passivity of inertia, and, in ordinary civilian life, to have in one’s hands a charm against the paranoid anxieties that haunt the American psyche. The continent is filled with roaming revenants, giant spirits of destroyed forests, buffalo spirits, slaughtered tribes, drowned valleys behind dams, ghosts of the lynched hanging from trees, miasma hovering over rapacious levelings and extractions, unjust executions named “due process,” knifings, abattoirs. The land not only remembers, it is humming with agonies, a pulsing layer of the collective unconscious deposited there by American deeds recorded as American history.

“Iron all of itself works on a man.” The automatic in my hand brings Mars to my side. God in his heaven may not smile on me or deliver me from the valley of death; he might long ago have forgotten my name and I may not be among the chosen, but so long as my gun is within my reach the ghosts can’t get me.

Caputo in Vietnam remembers one of his men who suddenly pops an old woman they were holding. The man later explains, “Phil, you know the gun just went off by itself.” Automatic. The autonomy of the god. Because a god is in the gun it is demonic, so that control of the gun in your hand is not altogether in your hands. The question remains whether control of weapons by humans can ever be achieved without a more radical appreciation of the inhuman factor.

Zero is an abstract notion
that humans don’t typically understand
until ages 3 or 4.

Parrotic Zero

Alex, a 28-year-old African grey parrot, lives in the lab run by comparative psychologist and cognitive scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg. The parrot spontaneously and correctly used the label “none” during a testing session of his counting skills to describe an absence of a numerical quantity on a tray.

The discovery prompted a series of trials in which Alex consistently demonstrated the ability to identify zero quantity by saying the label “none.”

The findings, published in the current issue of The Journal of Comparative Psychology, add to a growing body of scientific evidence that the avian brain, though physically and organizationally different from the mammalian cortex, is capable of higher cognitive processing than previously thought.

Girls with Guns in Cinema

Joseph Rowe writes
In all the excellent material that has been published and broadcast (notably by Bill Moyers) about stories and myths of the hero figure in Campbell, there seems to be little awareness of the fact that the hero archetype is really one pole of a dialectic, one which I also overlooked in my previous post. It cannot be complete without its Other, the Hero’s complement (and in a sense, his opposite) which I shall call the Sage, though there are other possible ways of describing it.

Campbell himself is keenly aware of this dialectic. He continually discusses and alludes to it in many ways in his writings. He associates the strong emphasis on Hero archetypes mostly with Western traditions, and with the masculine pole; and strong emphasis on the Sage archetype with the Eastern traditions, and the feminine pole. Of course this is a generality, with commonsense caveats against reductionism – after all, these poles exist within each of us, psychically. But the historical and cultural manifestations are fascinating, and can perhaps be helpful for dealing with them in our own lives.

In a nutshell, the Hero says : “I will.” The Sage says “I am.”

Action vs. Being.

There is an ineluctable tension, and sometimes even a conflict between these two. This tension will always return sooner or later, no matter how many times we think we’ve “solved” it with truisms such as “true action is non-action.” We can verify this in our own lives. Of course the two poles of the dialectic can (and must) be reconciled. Figures like Jesus and the Buddha are great inspirations. But it’s not as easy as we think! And it’s a process, not a static formula or solution.

It reminds me of something Ram Dass once said (quoting approximately):

“Our human predicament seems to be that we must live with two truths simultaneously: that all Being is One, absolutely and mind-bogglingly perfect, just as it is; and also that there is an experience of suffering, and of wrongness, and that compassion compels us to do something about it, to try to make things better.”

The poles of Hero and Sage have always existed, of course, but different cultures and different epochs of human evolution have placed very different emphases on one or the other. Historically, heroism comes into its fullest expression, according to Campbell, with the advent of warlike, patriarchal cultures, who give priority to masculine, sky-gods. These religions replaced the older Bronze-age, goddess-oriented religions, and their emphasis on wisdom, acceptance of impermanence, and the cyclic, cosmic order of time. Campbell is worth quoting at length here, from the chapter called “The Serpent’s Bride” in Occidental Mythology:

“For its is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth, but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of both wealth and joy. In the older mother myths and rites the lighter and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature-powers the character mostly of darkness — to which, also, a negative moral judgment now was added. For, as a great body of evidence shows, the social as well as mythic order of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed. Where the goddess had been venerated as the giver and supporter of life as well as consumer of the dead, women as her representatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as well as in cult. Such an order of female-dominated social and cultic custom is termed, in a broad and general way, as the order of Mother Right. And opposed to such, without quarter, is the order of the Patriarchy, with a ardor of righteous eloquence and a fury of fire and sword.”

He then goes on to discuss the figure of the Serpent, which was associated universally and intimately with the goddess, and which also represented, in its coiling movement, and its shedding of skin, the ever-destroying, ever-renewing, cyclic nature of Time. It is very significant that a number of patriarchal god-heroes — the three best-known are Yahweh, Zeus, and Indra — do battle very early in their careers with a cosmic Serpent, vanquishing that figure (seen as a monster), and thereby instituting a new, heroic order of things. Not the least of this new order of things is a new concept of time. When Yahweh whipped old Leviathan’s ass, Zeus did likewise with Typhon, and Indra with Vritra, they were not just getting rid of monsters associated with the old Mother Right religious order, they were vanquishing, according to Campbell,

“daemons that formerly had symbolized the force of the cosmic order itself, the dark mystery of time, which licks up hero deeds like dust: the force of the never-dying serpent, sloughing lives like skins, which, pressing on, ever turning in its circle of eternal return, is to continue in this manner forever, as it has already cycled from all eternity, getting absolutely nowhere.”

To me, this brings us close to the heart of the tension between the Hero and the Sage, as well as the related tensions between West and East, and between the Masculine and the Feminine. For the Sage, time is characterized by eternal cosmic cycles and the implacable Law of Impermanence. For the Hero, on the contrary, time is actually GOING SOMEWHERE … there is a purpose, a goal, a meaning in its story, its evolution, and its outcome. It seems to be more linear than cyclical — it may contain cycles, but they are subservient to its over-arching, linear story.

How can these be reconciled? Apparently we are faced with a paradox which cannot be solved intellectually, for this dual aspect is inherent in the very nature of the way we think about time. Campbell’s great virtue is that (like Ram Dass, in his comment about our “predicament") he never really takes sides, though he is fearless in pointing out deluded cultural and religious exaggerations on either side (which has led to a number of misconceptions and fatuous charges against him by some critics). And for anyone who is tempted to take sides, and find easy solutions, he offers copious material for deeper reflection, bringing us always back to the paradox.

I am tempted to leave things here, because this paradox is something that each of us must work out in our own lives. But I can’t resist closing with another short quote (with a delicious allusion to Wm. Blake), one which sympathizes with the Sage and the goddess-oriented aspect. This may seem like taking sides — but after all, we live in an age of unprecedented planetary crisis, when the hyper-masculinization of culture, politics, and economics is so imbalanced in its worship of competition, elevating the market to the status of divinity, and those whom it favors to the status of heroes, that it has become pathological, threatening all life on Earth. In speaking of the exquisitely beautiful figures of Cretan and Mycenaen goddess-figures consorting with serpents in a Garden of Paradise, a Garden which appears in many Bronze-age cultures, and which is much older than the Garden of Genesis which was derived from it, he says:

“… [these figures still] stand as a shrine to this goddess of the early Garden of Innocence, before Nobodaddy made her serpent lover crawl, and locked the Tree of Life away for all time.”

Watching The Source, there’s a moment when Norman Mailer appears (in 1990s present), offers a short poem to Allen Ginsberg, and says

He may be the bravest man in America.

Jay Stevens

The hipster, Mailer wrote, was the man who understood the central role Death had come to play within life—in the Fifties death was personified by the concentration camp (cultural death) and the H‑Bomb (species death)—and as a result had decided “to divorce” himself from society, “to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” But for Mailer these rebellious imperatives did not include looking into the face of God, which was the whole point as far as Ginsberg and Kerouac were concerned.

In Storming Heaven, Stevens continues
It was ironic, but … at the height of their fame the Beats already were mutating toward what a later generation would call hippies. But a few heard a peculiar siren song amid all the bad poetry and smelly feet. Writing in Playboy, Herb Gold, who was considered an expert on the Beats largely because he lived in San Francisco, was reminded of some lines that William Yeats (another nineteenth‑century man who had thought Homo sapiens was in the process of climbing the evolutionary ladder) had written:

What rough beast, ifs hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Could the beatniks, Gold wondered, be Yeats’s proto‑gods? Naw. “When Yeats looked into the future to find a terrible savior, an evolution up from animality into something strange and wonderful—he did not mean James Dean. Perhaps, as they claim, the tunneling hipster’s avoidance of feeling can lead to a new honesty of emotion. Perhaps a ground hog might someday learn to fly, but man O man, that will be one strange bird.”

Precisely the point Yeats was making.

In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s second Beat novel, there is a moment when the Gary Snyder character experiences a vision of the future comparable to Yeats’s. What he sees is “a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh … wild gangs of pure holymen getting together to drink and talk and pray.”

That was the Beat fantasy, and it was one that Allen Ginsberg was using all of his market research skills to bring about. Ginsberg became the public relations director of the Beat movement, which irritated some of the more self‑reliant poets. He badgered the intellectual journals, particularly hostile ones like Partisan Review and Hudson Review, to publish the work of his friends; he contacted agents and editors and was rarely without a selection of manuscripts that he was trying to place. If the Beat movement was a modestly glowing goal, he was going to do everything within his power to make sure it burst into flame. Years later Ginsberg described the potential of this moment this way:

We’d already had, by ‘48, some sort of alteration of our own private consciousness; by ‘55 we made some kind of articulation of it; by ‘58 it had spread sufficiently so that the mass media were coming around for information, and by that time I realized that if our private fancies, our private poetries, were so serious that they absorbed the attention of the big, serious military generals who wrote for Time magazine, there must be something strange going on.”

What was happening, Ginsberg thought, was an alteration of consciousness that was filtering up through the young into all levels of society. It was as though the country was just catching up to where the New Visionaries had been back in 1944. “That year on the literary scene in New York it was all in fashion to go crazy,” remembers Barbara Probst Solomon. “It was the fashion to push things to their ultimate extreme—all kinds of sexual and drug experimentation. Once, at a party, someone put LSD in my drink, and I went home and woke up seeing things. I thought I was going crazy until someone phoned later in the afternoon and asked how I liked my acid trip …. It was the beginning of the Sixties, really, and I used to say to Larry Roose, a Freudian friend of mine, that it was all very violent, that I didn’t like being part of it.”

America, thought Ginsberg, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Yesterday I received an eloquent and fullsome reply to the post Hero As Myth: The Freedom To Live, from Joseph Rowe, whose recent artistic activities over are worth taking the time to view, read, and listen to. Visit the website Natural Chant and Rhythm, and have a listen to some of the CD tracks here; Natural Chant and Rhythm is led by

Catherine Braslavsky
 
 
and

Joseph Rowe

Joseph Rowe
Thanks for posting William Indick’s very useful resume and structural analysis of Campbell’s archetypal heroic voyage.

Also, thanks, Richard, for a superb reborn blog, so full of rich images and interesting themes!
For me, Joseph Campbell himself is a hero — and more importantly, a great spiritual, psychological, and literary teacher. I would even go so far as to say that for world culture in general, as well as American culture in particular, he has functioned as a kind of trans-cultural healer, helping (often in an indirect, unacknowledged way) to reconnect alienated, modern (postmodern, paramodern, whatever) humanity with our ancient, universal psychic and mythic roots … and leaves! Ever since George Lucas brought Campbell’s mythic insight to Hollywood with the first episode of Star Wars, cinematic art has perceptibly changed (notwithstanding the usual wasteland of mediocrity and routine mass entertainment, of course) — since that pivotal event of the 1970’s, movies have begun more and more often to dare to attempt the great themes of mythic, archetypal imagination, something which (with some exceptions, of course) was done before only in the most routine, predictable, stereotyped ways.

Strangely, Campbell’s writings are neglected, and mostly out of print here in France, where I’ve lived and worked for over 15 years — yet his indirect, invisible influence is still there, mostly through some of the best films and books of American culture (yes, there ARE a few good American influences in Europe, though I grant you, many more bad ones). But it never ceases to amaze me that only university scholars seem to have read or even heard of Campbell in this extremely literate country. I am certain this doesn’t reflect any lack of potential interest — still less intelligence, or imagination — among general readers in France. (Everyone seems to have read or at least heard of Mircea Eliade, for example.) Rather, it reflects the typical lack of imagination and intelligence of big publishers, which we see more and more of now, on both sides of the Atlantic…

However, what I really want to write about here in relation to real-life heroes is something very often overlooked: the question of the value of hero stories and myths for ordinary people. I perceive a serious and widespread confusion here, and it centers around the issue of amplification. Virtually all lives of heroes we hear about are amplified in some way. They exist on a larger scale than that of ordinary lives — maybe only a little larger, maybe vastly larger, as in myth, but almost always larger. This amplification is necessary for many reasons, but it must not be confused with the essential message. The problem is that many people — perhaps most — mistake this amplification aspect as having something to do with the real value, message, or teaching of the heroic story. This is a serious mistake, as bad as that of a would-be musician who yearns to have the same megawatt equipment as a famous rock group, so as to become a better musician. It also often leads to arrogance, inflation, and megalomania — or their shadow-opposites, lack of self-esteem, self-aggression, shame, nihilism, etc…

Modernist literary fashion sensed something of this, and created the anti-hero, with all the ironic and tragicomic aspects. But this threw out the baby with the bathwater.

What these heroic stories are always whispering to us, and the main reason they move us so deeply, is because they remind us that even the most ordinary and humble human life is inherently heroic — if only because we human beings are the only animal on this planet who are called to live in the conscious knowledge and certainty of our (and our loved ones’) inevitable death and pain. Unfortunately, instead of embracing and living up to this noble birthright (which is ours, whether we like it or not), most of us seem to want to flee it like the plague, and distract ourselves at any cost.

I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced that there are many real-life heroes whose scale of action is not at all amplified like that of the ones we hear of, and is often deceptively humble. Yet their “ordinary” heroism may be just as authentic and grand as that of a Neo, a Frodo, a Luke Skywalker, or even a Christ or a Buddha. I’m reminded of Henry Miller’s claim (I’ve never tracked down his source for this) that there is a Buddhist tradition which says that the greatest Buddhas have come in the form of countless human beings through the ages, who work quietly and in anonymity, so that their names never appear in the annals of the Sages, yet their influence is actually greater than all the famous Saviors put together, and that humanity would long ago have perished if not for their actions … I’m also reminded, somehow, of Wordsworth’s little jewel of a poem, “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.” Strictly speaking, the latter is not about heroism, but it suggests something I’m trying to get at…. that the people who truly get the message of the hero stories, and incarnate that message, are not the kind of people you are likely to hear about in “lives of the rich and famous….”

I’m interested in perusing the meaning of heroes for individuals these days. A couple weeks ago I sent out an email asking for personal stories – if you have personal, intimate and honest reflections of who your heroes are, and reflections on why, please send them, if inspired.

The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again–if the powers have remained unfriendly to him–his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).
– from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces

The text below, which I hope to comment on in the future, is exerpted from:
Classical Heroes in Modern Movies: Mythological Patterns of the Superhero
(Journal of Media Psychology, Volume 9, No. 3, Fall, 2004)
By William Indick, Ph.D.
Dowling College

The hero is the integral archetype in the collective unconscious of American culture. He is at once a collective and personal encounter, as each individual in the audience identifies personally with the hero’s story, while the hero simultaneously embodies the collective hopes and ideals of the culture that creates him. It is this compound phenomenon – the personal identification with the collective hero – that makes the hero archetype so psychologically powerful. This compound identification with the hero fulfills what Carl Jung called the “transcendent function” of myth and dreams.

In Jungian psychology, myths are collective dreams, the communal expression of a culture’s goals, wishes, anxieties and fears. Dreams, on the other hand, are personal myths. They are the individual expression of personal unconscious issues, amplified into visions and projected onto a screen in the “theater of the mind,” in the form of a personalized movie. Experiencing a modern myth in the form of a film is, in a Jungian sense, a transcendent experience, because when we identify with the hero and vicariously experience his journey, we transcend our own private conscious existence and integrate a collective cultural archetype. Furthermore, as a function of the film-going experience, we transcend our own individual neuroses, allowing ourselves to commune with the rest of the audience through a shared understanding, integrating the collective encounter on a personal level.

Joseph Campbell: The Hero’s Journey

Campbell’s model of the mythological hero, from his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), is by far the most influential, especially in the field of screenwriting, for several reasons. First, Campbell himself delineated clear stages of the hero’s journey, providing a distinct structure for screenwriters to follow when devising their plots and character development. Secondly, Campbell’s model is the most eclectic of the major studies, integrating Freudian, Rankian, Jungian and Frazerian theory into a cohesive pattern of heroic elements. And finally, Campbell arranged his model in three broad units, (“the nuclear unit of the monomyth”), which corresponds quite nicely with the three-act structure that most screenplays follow.

Campbell’s term “monomyth” is a reference to a term originally created by James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake (1939). It refers to the basic elements of myth, the archetypal qualities of all legends and heroes, that transcend individual cultures and specific periods of time. The monomyth is universal and timeless. Hence, the hero that Campbell explains is not one particular hero from one particular myth, but the universal qualities of all heroes from all myths… the “hero with a thousand faces.” The monomyth is universal and timeless because its basic form fulfills a psychological function for both the mythmakers and their audiences. Campbell explained it as follows:

“The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.”

The formula of the monomyth is then summarized as follows:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

And the specific actions within the three parts of the formula are explained as follows:

“The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle is lured… to the threshold of adventure… then the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of his mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), or his own divination (apotheosis)… The final work is that of the return… At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread… The boon he brings restores the world.”

Campbell went even further in his account, breaking this three-part, (or three-act), formula down into seventeen specific stages, each of which he explains in detail. The stages of the hero’s journey are as follows:

Act One: Departure

1. The Call to Adventure

2. Refusal of the Call

3. Supernatural Aid

4. The Crossing of the First Threshold

5. The Belly of the Whale

 

Act Two: Initiation

6. The Road of Trials

7. The Meeting with the Goddess

8. Woman as the Temptress

9. Atonement with the Father

10. Apotheosis

11. The Ultimate Boon

 

Act Three: Return

12. Refusal of the Return

13. The Magic Flight

14. Rescue from Without

15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold

16. Master of the Two Worlds

17. Freedom to Live

   Dying Hope

You’ve been dreaming of this moment all your life. An entire city and its beleaguered citizens are in desperate need of heroes. You have the powers. You have the talent. You have the heart. You are a hero.

Dual Identities & Anonymity

Dual identities and anonymity can be found in modern day comic book heroes. Some would say that their masked identity intrigues us because we want uncommon heroes with virtues and powers we only dream of; that like the Greeks and Romans, we must have our minor gods too, even if belief in them sprouts only in the entertainment of our imagination. However, it is possible the real appeal of these dual-identity heroes is something else. . . we have an opportunity to imagine ourselves in yet another role. And since nobody is supposed to know who the masked one is, it is easy to believe for the moment it could be us. (The Ant/Henry Pym)

Avatar Lawsuits

Is it a violation of copyright to make up a character in the virtual world or is that fair use? This is really untested ground in the courts.

.

Views of this movie around the net:

Havana Journal
Che Guevara and The Motorcycle Diaries
“‘In a way, 1968 began in 1967 with the murder of Che,’ says the author and political journalist, Christopher Hitchens, who describes himself as ‘a recovering Marxist, not ashamed, not unbowed, but thoughtful’. Like many who came of age politically in the late Sixties, Hitchens was in thrall to the personality cult that attended Che. ‘His death meant a lot to me, and countless like me, at the time. He was a role model, albeit an impossible one for us bourgeois romantics insofar as he went and did what revolutionaries were meant to do - fought and died for his beliefs.’”

Commonweal
EASY RIDERS

Slate
Don’t Applaud this Movie
“In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”

Salon
Lefties demanding their Che or the highway may be disappointed . . .

New York Metro
Che Sera Sera – “The Motorcycle Diaries may be a sophisticated snow job, but it’s also true that the brutalities it serves up are not fictions and, in many ways, still exist in Latin America.”

Interviews

The Guardian
Interview with the director Walter Salles

Film Journal
Interview with the director Walter Salles

THE CUBA DIET
What will you be eating when the revolution comes?
Posted on Monday, June 6, 2005. Originally from Harper’s Magazine, April 2005, by Bill McKibben.

Cubans have as much food as they did before the Soviet Union collapsed. They’re still short of meat, and the milk supply remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to normal—they’ve gotten that meal back. In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping vast quantities of food back and forth.

Today
It was reported that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay tortured prisoners with the music of Christina Aguilera.

A study showed that the world military budget was about $1,035,000,000,000 in 2004; the United States accounted for nearly half of that.

Scientists in Los Angeles created a fusion reaction at around room temperature using a pyroelectric crystal.

Scientists studying the Devils Hole pupfish, of which only 180 remain, accidentally killed eighty of them.

Police in Nigeria arrested a cow for murder.

    Black-footed Albatross or False Killer Whale? You decide.

From Harper’s Weekly Review:

Saudi Arabia was considering whether women should be allowed to drive.

In New York City, a nine-year-old girl stabbed an eleven-year-old girl named Queen Washington to death. The girls were fighting over a pink rubber ball.

The American Family Association called on its members to boycott Ford, saying that the auto-maker promotes the homosexual lifestyle.

Ralph Nader called for the impeachment of George W. Bush based on reports of the Bush Administration “fixing” the intelligence over Iraq, while John Kerry wondered why the intelligence-fixing, which came to light in a leaked British memo, has received so little attention in the United States. “Is there a way for this to break through,” he asked, “ever?”

    

Five Buddhist monks in Nong Khai, Thailand, were defrocked for brawling with other monks from a rival temple. “When an ordinary person is given a middle-finger sign he will be mad; so am I,” said monk Boonlert Boonpan.

The US Supreme Court ruled that marijuana cannot be used for medicinal purposes.

Seventy-four false killer whales (which are less aggressive than true killer whales, but, like true killer whales, are not whales but dolphins) beached themselves in Australia. One thousand five hundred volunteers worked to return seventy-three of the whales to the sea; one whale died. A volunteer described the whales as “very heavy.”

     

It’s a bit tragic that, if glimmers become dreams and dreams become social realities, if the realities are consuming enough, the manifestation appears as organic, simply part of the existing landscape, thus relatively unnoticed. The glimmer of a dream - instantly being able to freely access those most-condensed fonts of human wisdom: books, works of intense labors, devotion – just beyond reach. No more! A panoply of sacred texts translated, straight no chaser.

Just now the golden-sandled dawn has called.

(Sappho, Fragment 18)

Sacred Texts Online

Sacred Texts: Timeline

World Mysteries dot com

Bibliography of Sacreds Texts - with online links

Comparative Religion dot com

Some 2000 free eBooks - relating to Asian cultures and and cultural studies generally

here at the U Virginia eText Center

Beyond Reading: Papyrology Links

Sappho and

Other Women’s Voices: Translations of Writings Before 1700

What greater good can be done for the future without learning, growing into knowledge. Even without a friend, impoverished, with only food, an Internet Cafe and a few bucks – open your mind.

A napkin dripping.

(Sappho, Fragment 110)

Several friends of mine are associated with the Zen teacher Cheri Huber. I’ve heard some of her lectures, and will be doing a 5-day retreat at The Zen Center, in March. Speaking of which, The Peacemaker Institute will also be hosting a workshop with Cheri Huber, titled “There is Nothing Wrong with You,” February 18-19, in Boulder, Colorado. Although I am not, strictly speaking a Zen practioner or associated with these groups, I support their work wholeheartedly and want to call your attention to their excellence.

One of the exciting and interesting projects Cheri Huber is doing, The Peace Project: Assisi is worth checking out. They are asking for one-dollar donations, and you can read more about it here and here and here.

The Peacemaker Institute is part of the Peacemaker Community. One of the upcoming activities of this community will be Bearing Witness at Auschwitz Birkenau, November 7-11, 2005. “Originally conceived of by Zen Master Bernie Glassman, this is the tenth annual Auschwitz-Birkenau retreat. . . . The retreat will be guided by Bernie Glassman, Andrzej Krajewski, Eve Marko and an experienced group of international leaders representing diverse cultures and religious traditions.”

 

 

Reading my last post, a friend comments:

Do you really think we can’t have definitions and poetry?

I suppose it depends on the spirit of the definition and its type. If the definition is used to erase, abort, short circuit, replace a feeling-sensing soul-process, then it’s truly problematic, i think. Hillman critiqued the Jungians this way, because of their habit of symbolically interpreting dreams, and thus determining the meaning of the dream. Hillman said (as an example, think of a nightmare with a scary monster), to paraphrase, ’stay with the dream figure, re-enter the dream, feel the energy, re-enter the story.’ In other words the reason the figure appeared is to relate to you, there is a ‘face’ of psyche – and the face – the actual FACE in the WORLD is the depth. Not, “oh, that dream figure is actually a figuration of Hades, and you are in the underworld, and, and and – so the dream MEANS, ta da.”

James Hillman:

Both Freud and Jung had enormously rich, huge backgrounds in classical studies. They were engaged in the study of romantic philosophy, they read Goethe. I always used to tell students in Zurich, if you want to study Jung, don’t read Jung, read the books he read. You see, this is completely lost in psychology today. Nobody reads literature and philosophy. They just read psychology . . . what has happened to many Jungians. They’ve lost the capacity or willingness to think very critically. I don’t know. They just read fairy tales. Everything is so damn internal! You especially see this in the way popular culture has come to understand Jung. Everything is literalized. Everything’s about my internal life. The whole point of Jung’s approach is to give free rein to thought, to give the freedom to investigate the different aspects of phenomena. . . . Jung’s gift: the cultural perspective. It [Jungian psychologists] puts it [psychotherapy] deeper into the therapy room. Jung was running around the world talking to Africans and Indians.

I just can’t emphasize enough how much Jung – and Freud – were looking at culture. Jung said psyche is in the world, not inside ourselves. There’s that constantly repeated criticism he made that in modern life, the gods – the voices of the world’s psyche – became diseases . . . This whole idea of “inside” and “projection” is suspicious. Jung knew this. Psyche is in the world. So, the gods are in the world. We are in the world. . . . the way we have banished the gods from consciousness has made what they represented diseases. This is why I have an irresistible urge to attack Christianity whenever I write. Christianity insisted on one god, one voice and everything else is a sin or a disease. The erotic, the Dionysian – all banished to the shadow. I think we all well know the effects of this.

Hillman takes an aesthetically creative, phenomenological approach to psychology. In his books on feeling, he discusses how modern western culture seems to fear hanging out in feeling; meaning can really act as a swift pill, where following feeling and attending to psychic figures and poetic images directly, letting them “speak,” allowing interaction will not always provide the quick solution, or yield a quick meaning.

The point is, when you substitute (literal) MEANING for FEELING the STORY ends. Actually the dream ends, its inroads of communication. Because you have analyzed and “solved” it; you know what it MEANS so the FACE(s) in and of the dream which CAUSE the feeling – become secondary, fade into a background context-category of “solved dreams.”

This story about dreams and dream figures is itself a metaphor for life – in that how we relate to dreams, especially unpleasant ones – the ones that are more difficult to deal with, feel with, stay with – may be similar to how we relate to daily-life experiences.

Normally, DEFINITION is an explanation which determines WHAT SOMETHING REALLY IS. And it implies that whatever isn’t covered by the definition, IT IS NOT. Certainly, FACES cannot be defined at all, and neither can metaphors – they resist definition, as they resist reductions of dimension.

I am not against definitions in all cases, not at all. Definitions clarify and organize concept and thought. They are obviously useful. But the idea of Peck’s psycho-spiritual definition of love – I find that misplaced. It severely reduces human experience – I mean, Shakespeare! That’s where you can get close to definitions of love – in sonnets and dialogues of persons as poems; meetings face to face.

I read Peck on love as pop-psych. of the sort I dislike. At the same time, his concepts, conceived as intermediate organizational structures, may be of aid when a person’s confused, in need of psychological reductions – needing to find a measure of certainty and organized structure in psychological space – but I really detest Peck’s unconditional language – his authorial expressions of certainty seem arrogant.

When Hillman is talking about the faces and figures of (the) psyche, his rhetoric may seem to impart certainty too – but it’s quite a different sort of certainty – because his arguments point towards INDIVIDUAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL PROCESS. This is not a definitional endpoint, it’s about process and experience and facing that, getting into it. Hillman’s, and my interest too, is to point toward living images, towards the non-abstract, the para-conceptual; the poetry of life, which is non-literal, because any FACE is capable of a multitude of definitions. Non-literality (the de-literalization of the ego function) implies that there cannot be ONE DEFINITION which crowds out others on the plane of meaning, as regards the psyche.

So there are definitions which CLOSE YOU IN and definitions WHICH ARE EXPANSIVE, that are indicative. This sort of logic does not exclude scientific definition, but does relativize it. Increasingly, I read how mood is really brain chemicals, how behavior is really genes – are you happy with such mechanistic-deterministic definitions? The idea that presence and the act of psyche is mysterious, and that mystery itself, the mystery of being, is something plain and ordinary and worth our attendance and interest – not newsworthy.

In Zen there is the instruction which says, “don’t mistake the finger for the moon,” and this seems to be exactly the problem with some types of definitions – they intrinsically announce (like Peck’s) I AM THE MOON - I AM IT. THIS IS TRUE. But his stuff is really just a bunch of finger-pointing. What makes it atrocious for me isn’t the ‘pointing out’ aspect, so much as the implied “my finger IS the moon” aspect. Definitions that know they are pointers, that encourage you, intrinsically, to look beyond the finger, past the concept – there is a great expansiveness in these. This is why I like late Heidegger, for instance his, “Poetry, Language, Thought,” composed of poetic definitions of the deepest sort. Each one sends you on. Check it out.

How to poetically dwell upon the Earth (as Goethe and Heidegger and Hillman, and Jung too, speak of).

There are clues, intentions and practical doings, choices of conceptualization, energy and time which can be made. I wish to bring the unique forth, into the central light to be known.

             

Here is a face:

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.

(W. Stevens, from The Idea of Order at Key West)

Stevens is contemplating what is unique, even defining the ‘coming to being’ of uniqueness. To me Stevens’ evocation is beautiful – and mysterious. And demonstrates a way of creating poetic definition and poetic definitions. I think we cannot come away with MEANING (through there is some), because as we read and organize his language, dream his images – any singular logic is defeated. There resides some mystery. And how we need that!
 

Addendum: From another interview with James Hillman (pub., “Creative Loafing,” April 11, 1998):

Q. [Chris Bostock:] I’ve wanted to ask this for a long time. Your famous dictum, of course, is to “follow the image.” You talk about psychology as an aesthetic principle. Instead of analyzing the meaning of an image, you say to “follow the image itself.” I have never understood exactly how this is therapeutic or what resolution means in this approach. Ultimately, what does it matter, what story we bring to the image?

A. I am talking about a kind of deconstruction of the image. We turn it until it comes to rest.

Q. Well, how do you know when it has come to rest?

A. You simply sense it and you learn it. How does a painter know when the painting is done? Half of being a good painter is knowing when there’s enough on the canvas. You learn to sense when something is complete. The feeling of completion, of coming to rest, is the point. I think motion is a good metaphor for psychology.

Q. You used the word “deconstruction.” It surprises me that you would use it, since it’s a relativizing process, postmodern.

A. Oh, you’re bringing up the question of essentialism.

Q. Well, yes. Deconstruction assumes you can’t know a thing’s origins.

A. Have you ever heard me have any interest in origins?

Q. Actually no, of course not. But I mean “origins” in the sense of the archetypes.

A. OK, that’s at the heart of my difference with Jung. I don’t use that word as a noun. That’s why it’s “archetypal” psychology. I am talking about action, a movement, a process – not about a set of fixed principles. The origins matter nothing to me. Think of what a different world this would be if we weren’t trying to learn the origins of the universe. Can you imagine a more ridiculous undertaking?

Q. You don’t like the word “hope” much.

A. Hope is an evil. It was the one evil left in the box when Pandora snapped the lid back shut. Hope is about the unknown future. It’s like the promise of salvation in the afterlife.

Q. So you’re a pessimist?

A. Not in the least. In fact, I think I’m quite the optimist. I just think we should pay attention to what is here right now. It’s this hope thing that has gotten the planet into such a mess. If we paid attention to what was true right now, instead of what we hoped would be true in the future, the world would look very different. … I’m thinking about something I said at the lectures I gave on aging last week. You experience this thing growing old of having your prostate enlarge and you have to get up in the middle of the night several times to go to the bathroom. Well, you can call this hopeless or you can say you “hope” it will get better. What I prefer to say is that in old age, I “wake up to the night.” Do you see? This is a metaphorical reading of it. I think it’s optimistic. It takes care of the problem and gives my experience meaning. But it’s not a hopeful position.

      

M. Scott Peck writes:

I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or anoth­er’s spiritual growth . . . . Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action.

I have heard that Peck has helped many; a good friend has applied Peck’s dicta with success in her work. This rant is less about Peck then a general observation about definitions of things larger than we are.

Perhaps the first question about love to contemplate is – might not any definition primarily reveal the reductive thinking of its author? Is the very idea of DEFINING love passé? Definitions turn metaphors, sensations, into literalisms, turn the intuitive and ‘irrational’ into rational logical proposals, things you look up. Definitions replace feeling with meaning; image with cause and principles.

When the day comes that we can adequately accept a definition of love there will be no need for poetry, little need for metaphor. Knowing will be secure, that is, securely contained. It may be this is where society’s headed – I choose to resist this sort of existential center.

There may be some aspect of love represented in Peck’s definition, some small part. To me, it’s highly rejectable. I completely disagree with much of what he’s saying–or the way he’s saying it–his totalist certainty. Love is a highly charged word, but if you take a less charged word, like adoration, it’s pretty clear that you don’t choose to adore something. Adoration is an aesthetic reponse to being touched by the world, through the senses. Being touched (a very different perspective than “the will to” do ~); it isn’t something we choose, except in the sense of choosing to be or remain sensitive. To attend to the world (psychology [to find the the ‘logos’ of psyche] is defined, phenomenologically, as “an attending to, an attendance” by Hillman – i like that) as it lives (an animistic possibility); how much more so, for love. And what is love, without the presence of adoration (adoration in its deepest sense). Adoration isn’t a feeling, it’s dissimilar to, say, anger or happiness. It’s related with value . . .

Without a sense of adoration, is “caring” about the environment enough to “save” it? And, what are we trying to save – if not that which we adore? And, not adoring, is rational logic alone enough to find us truly caring, with power and intent and sticktuitiveness? That is, to value not from the head merely, nor merely from the heart (that’s right), but from our guts as well? It’s an ecocritical question; so far, social results suggest “No.” The idea of love, its extension, feeling, sense, is as much about a leaf as the cosmos as another human being or bug or rock or tree – as Heidegger said, the revealing of existence in its essential being through “projecting into nothing.” If we don’t have a love of that, what’s the point, really?

It is only through “projecting into nothing” that our Dasein [an attunement with Being, but as being-in-the-world] relates to what-is, in other words, has any existence . . .

(Heidegger, Essence & Being, Regnery Press, 1967, pp. 336-340; Wallace Stevens & the Seasons, Lensing, U, Louisiana Press, 2001, p. 140).

The first principle of psychological method holds that any phenomenon to be understood must be sympathetically imagined. No syndrome can be truly dislodged from its cursed condition unless we first move imagination into its heart (James Hillman, A Terrible Love Of War . Penguin, 2004, p. 2).

Returning to the 2005 edge.org question, mentioned in my last post,

WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?

Joseph LeDoux
Neuroscientist, New York University; author, The Synaptic Self, reminds us of how little science can prove with judicious veracity, regarding consciousness and feelings. He writes,

For me, this is an easy question. I believe that animals have feelings and other states of consciousness, but neither I nor anyone else has been able to prove it. We can’t even prove that other people are conscious, much less other animals. In the case of other people, though, we at least can have a little confidence since all people have brains with the same basic configurations. But as soon as we turn to other species and start asking questions about feelings and consciousness in general we are in risky territory because the hardware is different.

Because I have reason to think that their feelings might be different than ours, I prefer to study emotional behavior in rats rather than emotional feelings.

There’s lots to learn about emotion through rats that can help people with emotional disorders. And there’s lots we can learn about feelings from studying humans, especially now that we have powerful function imaging techniques. I’m not a radical behaviorist. I’m just a practical emotionalist.

 
 

 

The 2005 annual edge.org question, with some answers recently reported in the New York Times is:

“WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?”

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the esprit de divination). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

David Buss, Psychologist, University of Texas; author, The Evolution of Desire, answers

True love.

I’ve spent two decades of my professional life studying human mating. In that time, I’ve documented phenomena ranging from what men and women desire in a mate to the most diabolical forms of sexual treachery. I’ve discovered the astonishingly creative ways in which men and women deceive and manipulate each other. I’ve studied mate poachers, obsessed stalkers, sexual predators and spouse murderers. But throughout this exploration of the dark dimensions of human mating, I’ve remained unwavering in my belief in true love.

While love is common, true love is rare, and I believe that few people are fortunate enough to experience it. The roads of regular love are well traveled and their markers are well understood by many - the mesmerizing attraction, the ideational obsession, the sexual afterglow, profound self-sacrifice and the desire to combine DNA. But true love takes its own course through uncharted territory. It knows no fences, has no barriers or boundaries. It’s difficult to define, eludes modern measurement and seems scientifically woolly. But I know true love exists. I just can’t prove it.

A friend recently asked the question,

“What’s the least expensive reasonable espresso machine
and grinder that I can buy for the home, to make
a decent espresso?”

I’ve tried to provide some answers, and
also wanted to research the field, with a thought
to what I would like to own, at each given price point –
and more definitively, what I hope to purchase myself.

In researching the list below I’ve included a full range of recommended equipment, from least expensive to the “ultimate,” reading the many reviews, comments and tutorials available online. I apologize in advance for omissions; I’ve tried to keep only highly recommended machines with several reviews. At the high end there are many great machines, usually of interest to aficionados who do their own extensive research, so I have included only a sampling of very popular machines, offering