The Burden of Self

An American Chameleon

2010-10-22T15:13:00.000-05:00

An American Chameleon: The story of the making and unmaking an American citizen Part I
Part I: Mr. Nobody?
The story, An American Chameleon is a story of a middle class American, or it’s the story of “making it” in middle class America, or it’s the story of “taking it” in middle class America, either way it’s a story of self, a story of losing self, and a story about reclaiming self. The main character Shawn Ramon Moore wants to be “left the hell alone” in America and at the very same time he wants to be a productive middle class American. The only problem is he can’t seem to be left alone and still live the American dream. Every where he turns, he tends to find people demanding things from him, his boss, his wife, his kids, his everything. Deep down Shawn realizes that the demands are not demands at all but responsibilities. Responsibilities that Shawn took on without duress, he longs for a sense of community, but shutters at the idea of loss of self. Shawn is a middle class American who struggles with his life and dreams. He is a man who has a strong constitution, but finds out that his constitutional beliefs are as solid as jello at times. He is well aware of what happens when a person’s philosophical beliefs and actual chaotic events crash into each other. He learned this when he was a cop. It was in law enforcement he learned that schooled him to understand that most people take the path of least resistance; which meant that most people tend to compromise their beliefs, even if it’s for a short period of time for the reward of self betterment. He has witnessed this time and time again, but more importantly he has done the same thing. Shawn believes that he is a self made man, but he begins to suspect that he is not a self made man, but a societal made man. At first glance, he appears to have made it. He has a loving wife, two beautiful kids, a decent job, and is well educated, but first glances can be misleading. As Shawn begins to search himself, he finds that he is not satisfied. The problem is Shawn doesn’t know what he is unsatisfied with. Every time he believes he has found the source of the problem, it turns out not to be the source, but just a symptom. Shawn has made an art of treating the symptoms of his un-satisfaction, but finding a cure tends to escape him. He comes to believe that everything could be better: his relationships, his job, his wife, his kids, his everything could be better. He finds himself in a constant state of flux. If he could just find the cure everything would better. When he was younger he knew what happiness was, but that doesn’t keep Shawn from questioning if he ever knew what happiness was, is, or can be. Because of his set of circumstances he believes there’s seen and unseen systemic structures in place that hinder his betterment, this seems to come and go based upon his emotional and financial well being. Shawn is certain that these structures exist, but he is not confident to what degree they hinder. He holds on to the idea that he will someday be able to answer the question, “what’s best in life”. Shawn is looking for a change, the type of change that will place his universe in order. As he recalls his anxieties and the sources that cause his anxieties, he is not sure that he would change, or even if he is willing to change, in light of the possibility of making his anxieties and the sources of those anxieties go away. He is consistently perplexed by what has been done for him and what has been done to him. This makes it possible for him to always be the hero or the victim, but never the perpetrator. Shawn is starting to believe that his life is not his own. That leaves him wondering who “he” is in light of what he is “supposed” to be.

The Race Card, deal with it!!!

2010-09-15T12:15:00.002-05:00

As I reviewed the syllabus, I believe this class will deal with the Middle Class American ethos, and those who find themselves in the mix of what some call the American dream. As I think about the current assignment and the final project, I find myself dealing first with the “hows”, when it comes to discerning, analyzing, and exegeting the readings. Because it’s impossible to see what you don’t see, and you only know what you know, the power of this course will rest in the many views that come from the collected group. As we journey together these insights will encourage, challenge, and sometimes fuckin piss us off. I believe we are smarter as a whole than any one of us. Because of that, it’s import to bring as many views to the forefront as possible. The view that I bring comes out of the camp of Post-colonial and Liberation theory. As an out-group person who has had to navigate the American dream or the American nightmare, I have a view on the “why’s” and “how’s”. I will explore and seek out these issues within the readings that almost always get passed over or minimized, when we ask questions that pertain to the “whys” of Middle Class America and the formation of the self within a class of people that have power and at the same time seem to be powerless to save themselves from what they created. It is most certain that topics will arise like politics, gender, sexual identity, and religion. This is not a preemptive race card strike, it’s a heads up. Race also has a place in this conversation!
One of my foundational beliefs is that the empire and its colonies are oppressive in nature. That statement tends not to ruffle feathers, based upon history, but I also believe that the empire and its colonies are still in place and very active. They just look and function differently, that statement tends to do the ruffling. A key component in the European Empire is race (placing value on physical characteristic & culture, and then placing people into categories based upon their worth according to the value); again history (the America’s, India, West & South Africa, and Australia) which means we live in a racialized society, which is not the same as saying it’s a racist society. Racism is a tool to stigmatize and stifle a person or one group for the benefit of another. For the purpose of this assignment, I’m saying that race matters and it needs to be looked at when dealing with Middle Class America.
At no time am I saying that there are not Middle Class Americans who are black, or Hispanic, or Asian, or any other race. Again, race was a factor in forming this country (What racial group was moved off their land? What racial group worked the land in the south and the north for free? What racial group worked the rail roads for less and held the most dangerous jobs? What racial group was place in internment camps?). The forming of this country has laid the foundation for the American dream. The American dream is at the core of Middle Class America. This is a country where we believe these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, In God we trust, God bless American, the land of the free and home of the brave, a place where a man can be a man, the land of opportunity, the land of milk and honey. With all this awesome shit around, you’d think there would be no problems with the middle class self and the collected self. Unless, unless, unless maybe there’s a problem within the matrix. Maybe something really goes wrong when you create a utopia based upon superiority and dissidence. Maybe there is something very fucked up in the DNA of Middle class America that goes back, way back. Kelly said in class, there is a story being told in these books, and I completely agree with that. My contribution to analyzing this story will be to make sure that the concept of “racialized society” is place on the table and that it impacts the ideologies, philosophies, and practices of middle class America. (Questions are below).

Caucasian, age 31, Education: Masters

1. How do parents, teachers, peer-groups, and story tellers shape our social character?
Parents shape social character in their children primarily through conscious and unconscious modeling going along with the idea that kids learn primarily from what is caught (observed), not from what is taught (instructed). Similarly, teachers, peer-groups, and story-tellers provide stronger formation influences on character through their conscious and unconscious examples rather than through their words...this is why social norms, as good or bad as they may be, do not change easily with simply words, beliefs, or theories but rather through modeling and action.

2. How does the language of the dominate group shape our social character?
The language of the dominant group, whether through words, symbols, or metaphors often shapes social character through emphasizing formation of a type of social character that will fit in with the norm and keep the status quo going in various arenas off life even to the point of minimizing and/or making very untenable other possible character options or ways of being formed/living. This is a result of the need for the dominant group to maintain power, control, and safety to stay in power in society because systems, especially dominant systems, function to maintain their own survival as best they can.

3. How does TV and Movies shape our social character?
TV and Movies shape our social character by either trying to break minds out of their normal ways of seeing and interpreting society and the world or by re-emphasizing certain normal ways to see and interpret society and the world. In this way, these forms of media can be used to either challenge a society's form of social character or be a supporter of the current way of forming social character.

White male 34, Education: Masters
1) How do parents, teachers, peer-groups, and story tellers shape our social character?
These are the most intimate sources that from an early age start to shape how we see the world and what things we view as important. These sources are the most influential because they are the faces that we see time and time again in spaces that are most intimate and during our most vulnerable times of our lives. In many ways we grow up to replicate whatever these sources give us.
2) How does the language of the dominate group shape our social character?
The dominate culture is the force that shapes what public conversation is about and how that conversation is had. We choose to either fight against it, or to go along with it, but either way we are reacting to what the agenda that the dominate culture sets. Also most of the time dominate culture is not named but called “normal” which deeply affects how we see ourselves. We either see ourselves as “normal” (being a part of the dominate culture) are as being “abnormal” (not being a part of the dominate culture). Both of these realities affect how we see ourselves and how we act towards others.

3) How does TV and Movies shape our social character?
In many ways I see TV and Movies as being the means that the dominate culture uses to influence society. It is through these forms of storytelling, images, content, that what the dominate culture sees as being normal gets communicated to society as a whole. There are a few spaces where TV and movies critique the dominate message and share other perspectives, but these sources are so few that for the most part if there are not Parents, Teachers, Peer-groups, and story tellers in a person’s life these messages will not be heard.

Age 34, African American, Education: 2 masters

1. How do parents, teachers, peer-groups, and story tellers shape our social character?
These people above significantly shape our social character because they are the elders/leaders in our communities who have influence. Many (if not all) of these people have real life experience and/or social status within the community which gives them permission to influence the ways we view the world. In the communities I come from these people used a relational approach to connect with us and shape us a people. They used the history of black people to remind us of where we have come from and where we need to be headed.
2. How does the language of the dominate group shape our social character
The language of the dominate group is used to shape our social character by creating in and out groups. In an American context the dominate group has used language to control people. Historically language limited people of color and women ability to access privileges/rights that only white males were afforded (voting, poverty owing, traveling, etc.)
3. How does TV and Movies shape our social character?
In America TV and Movies shape our social character by using the means of mass and popular media to do several things: educate, continue to create consumers, manipulate/distort the truth, use to create fear of the other, and possibly liberate those who are oppressed. Media has been and still is a powerful tool to express ideas which in essence shapes our social character.

so long and thanks for all the fish

2010-05-14T12:48:00.003-05:00

Thanks to everyone for a fantastic class--it was a real pleasure interacting with all of you every week. If you want to get a hold of me I'm on facebook or you can email me at rohde.t@gmail.com.

2010-05-14T10:55:00.001-05:00

If anyone would like the link to the blog that I read from last night you can email me at kjmuggli@gmail.com and I'll send you the link.
Happy summer! (there's even sunshine today!)

Location location location

2010-05-12T15:40:00.003-05:00

Here's the location for our final meeting:

1533 Fairmount Avenue
Saint Paul, MN 55105
651-699-1523

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no answer

2010-05-06T17:39:00.000-05:00

My apologies for the late posting!

I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop training session for my job a few days ago. It was an all day event discussing motivational interviewing. It was insightful and educational, helping those in the position to be of service to help their clients find the way to get to where they need to be, whether it be achieving an education, getting over an addiction, or coming to terms with an internal dilemma. Our class kept coming up in my mind throughout the day. I don’t have the patience or the time currently to dive into the wonder that is motivational interviewing, but a key component is, as the person who is playing, for the circumstances of our course, the teacher, a key component is empathizing and understanding that at no point do you rush the process of change and transformation. Change must occur internally from the individual seeking change. I had a slight... “yeah that sounds about right” moment.

In Bare Bone Meditation, it amused me how Joan first felt, attending one of her first retreats at Toni’s center. How she felt she was beginning to accomplish this “being present” meditation and yet internally felt Toni still watching her. This leading to her wanting to impress Toni, having the expectations of what a teacher should be, then the roller coaster ride of Joan’s spiritual decisions. I thought of her life. What she went through, her addictions, her sexuality, and her political roles in the movements. I agree that our lives condition us to put significance into these ideas. I see how we become entrapped in them. Yet now with the awareness, how do you just unarmor yourself? I sense that even Joan herself, found herself still entrapped in the labels and the images and ideas at the end, or at least she wasn’t quite to the point of stopping.

I wonder if it’s that simple. Toni says it’s simple. That’s supposedly when all of it begins to make sense, with emphasis on the BEGINS. Can I stop and be present? I’ve never sat in a Zen Center, mediated until my limbs were sore and my back ached, I’ve never sought out a spiritual guru or master of any sort. Maybe I feel I don’t have the resources to even begin to be present or maybe I just haven’t put enough effort into attempting to stop and be present, or maybe my lack of desire is the only thing holding me back. In all honesty, I think it would be an extremely difficult process for me. Our wants and desires fog our thoughts and Toni mentions in one of her earlier talks how “the brain can continue for hours, days, or years going over internal videotapes and sound tracks, playing back what happened, why it happened, and what could have happened, should have happened instead…” (42). This is exactly how I feel sometimes. The constant replaying of your life and the constant wanting of your future. This obviously defeats the purpose of trying to be in the now. ? I feel the act itself would be a want and Toni mentions this in her books as well, but the wanting of a change, the desire for the enlightenment can be a trap in itself. In addition, I get frustrated from the attempting to actually do the act of stopping. You’re just suppose to…stop? I know my response isn’t really an answer. It’s more of a rant of confusion and frustration, a thinking out loud session. My thoughts are in a whirl wind.

Shedding Memories

2010-05-06T17:00:00.002-05:00

This whole idea of shedding memories (as Toni Packer has set forth) has started to really dig into my skin and bother me. While I can see (perhaps only partially) from the outside that this idea of letting the past be in the past can be a refreshing way to enter a situation or react, I can't help but feel like at the very core it negates the many things that come with this calling up of past experience. (holy run on sentence, batman!)
Even the most terrible of experiences being brought back to life in mind and memory must be followed, and are followed (at least in my case) with the memory and realization that I lived through those moments well enough to have found myself back there again. I moved past it, kept breathing, kept moving, and am set back at square one again. For the past two years more often than not I find myself back at my parents house and my home town to attend a funeral or wake. Part of the oddness of the small(ish) town that I am from is that all of these funerals and wakes have been at the same funeral home and church. Whether it was friends, or family members or close family friends I would shake my head and take a deep breath before entering the funeral home. If I were to have been fully present or aware or in the moment without knowing that I have made it through these past experiences I would have absolutely lost it. That is a form of armor that I don't think I would ever wish upon anyone to be without. It is human to lug around these card catalogs of things that we have been through before, both good and bad. There are certain situations, at least for me, in which I will never leave them behind.

No, I cant!!

2010-05-06T16:24:00.001-05:00

No.. I can’t!!!
Before this class started, I’d probably said yes, but at this point I’m not sure, Unlike Tom I’m not present at the moment . I’m writing about being present, but I’m really thinking about the finale, and how it continues to creep into my mind. “What is the self”? I don’t mind speaking in front of crowds, it comes along with the Preacher man stuff, but I don’t like talking about rabbit hole stuff, things that seem to never end type of stuff. I’m starting to lean toward it’s impossible to just be present in the moment. When I’m around others it’s game time, the play begins and I have a role play. When I’m by myself I respond to nothingness like I’m being watched (panopticon). I believe the reason for this is; I want to survive. I want my ego to survive when I’m around others, and when I’m not, I want what I want to believe about myself, to survive. This is just a guess, but I’m probably present when I’m sleeping and not dreaming. In this state I’m completely caught up in the present. It’s just breathe in and breathe out, no concern about who I am and no concern about how other view me, but that’s like being dead. I’m unaware of me, and unaware of others. That can’t be ok. So, I keep the Armor most of time, that’s what warriors do. They fight to survive or their dead. I liken this type of survival to being tossed in the water and not being able to swim (even though I can swim). I can kick, scream, and paddle for my life until it can’t do it anymore, or just give way and be present in the drowning. It’s my belief that to just stop and be present without concern about how others see me is to tap into the prime mover of who I really am, and then I have to be willing to stay in that place. To leave that place means being concerned all over again. That’s it, I don’t know if it makes sense, and I don’t care, again I’m not here, I working on the finale in my head.

Protection provided by... myself

2010-05-06T16:18:00.000-05:00

Letting go - of forms, self, ego, protective armor - seems so deep, spiritual and, frankly, unattainable. Particularly in the final half of our course, our authors seemed to strongly perpetuate the idea of release but never seemed to get concrete about what it means to let go. Finally, in Bare Bones Meditation, we hear from a woman who is clearly motivated to let go and yet deals with concrete fears and hesitations about what that would mean for her. Luke mentioned, rightly so, that this book was frustrating in its inability to convincingly take us to a conclusion. It lacked clarity of purpose. While I agree, I did not find that aspect of the book frustrating as much as "real." It seemed to move the concepts of formlessness and no-self to a concrete, pratical level and bore witness to the struggle of adopting such concepts within the real messiness of life.

Tollifson is dead on about the ways we construct our identities in an effort to protect ourselves in a harsh world. But she also realizes that these constructed identities are limiting and keep division and separation between all things. Letting go seems irrational in the light of her identities. How can she work to make the world a better place and let go of her attachments simultaneously? Is not this good work? How can she be safe in the future while letting go of injuries of the past? Isn't it wise to learn from your pain?

I think Tollifson brings us back to Goffman on some level. She shows how she has constructed a self for external and internal display. She has carefully manufactured her identities to be congruent with her beliefs. Yet she somehow is still drawn to the idea of letting go - letting go of her strong convictions, letting go of her carefully manufactured self.

I found the most interesting - allbeit a bit whiny - part of the book to be pages 88-93, including this paragraph about Toni:

Toni's work is like realizing that we're all put here in various bizarre costumes: black skin, white skin, amputations, old age, cerebral palsey, Down's syndrome. Some people get more bizarre costumes than others, but everyone gets one, without exception. And no one really sees anyone else. We see the costume. We can't get past it. Some people never even realize they're at a costume party.

I think Tollifson dreams of a world where she could be seen for something other than her costume, but fears the exposure of not being costumed.

what the hell is water?

2010-05-06T13:45:00.001-05:00

I have been trying to come up with something to say that can fill ten minutes in preparation for the assignment for next week’s class. My biggest obstacle is not coming up with something to say, but envisioning myself saying it. Picturing myself speaking to a group is a terrifying idea which literally keeps me awake at night. Speaking in public usually begins with a concrete idea and ends with me trailing off because I get sick of my own voice halfway through. I have a really hard time putting together coherent sentences and ideas when I have to say them aloud because I become too distracted by my own “stage fright” for lack of a better word to concentrate on what I’m trying to say. And instead of just picturing myself speaking, I’m picturing my audience listening. In this scenario it’s really intimidating as Hamline GLS classes feature people whom I regard very highly and there is great effort involved with trying to get them (you) to think the same of me.
That said, my problem with this was kind of addressed in this week’s writing prompt, Isn’t it nice when you don’t have anything to prove to anyone, nothing to demonstrate about the sort of person you are et cetera. I’d imagine that yes, it would be really nice to not have to prove anything to anyone…. But being put into a situation where speaking aloud is necessary, usually the point of speaking aloud is to prove something, or to at least put forth an idea worth being vocalized. And the minute an argument or counterpoint is presented I pretty much completely shut down, not because I don’t welcome discourse, but because I feel like anyone else is usually as right or has the potential to be as right as I have or do so arguing becomes moot. This is where armor comes in. My armor has become, as my academic career has progressed, mostly in being very particular about when I choose to argue or discuss and trying to be prepared with a valid argument or discussion. I’ve found myself emotionally reacting several times, voicing my disagreement with whatever’s being said, and then failing to be able to adequately articulate my emotional stance on the issue, and therefore, in my mind’s eye, looking like an impulsive idiot driven by nothing more than emotion. So, now, I research. I come up with arguments to points that haven’t been made yet and cross my fingers that someone makes them. I try to look presentable before class so that if someone looks at me while I’m speaking, I know that it’s only because I am speaking. The idea of becoming unarmored is nice, and seems relaxing (as opposed to the exhausting nature of constructing and wearing armor), but also seems mortifying.
On the other hand, to think that my unarmored self is any worse off than anyone else’s unarmored self brings me back to the point I’ve been struggling with all semester: it’s just as narcissistic of me to think I’m nutty enough to need armor as it would be to think that my unarmored self is lovely enough not to need armor. Either way I’m dealing with the same issue of self-centeredness. Which brings me to a convoluted question about armor: If I spend as much time thinking about what people around me are thinking of me as I spend actually being me, and other people spend as much time thinking about what those around them are thinking about them as they spend actually being them, are any of us ever thinking enough about each other to really warrant how much we worry about what each other is thinking? Or…. to put it less clusterfucked: What’s the point of anyone wearing armor, if everyone’s wearing armor? Jung presented the conundrum of individuation: even after we become individuated, we still exist in a sea of other people who have either individuated or are trying to individuate. And suddenly I’m back thinking about David Foster Wallace, particularly the anecdote he gave at a college graduation where two young fish are swimming along and they meet an older fish who asks them “How’s the water?” to which they respond, “What the hell is water?”

armor

2010-05-06T12:57:00.003-05:00

It is almost essential for people to build up armor in their daily lives, in fact it's almost unavoidable. There is easy armor like brand names (wearing a particular brand of shoe, making sure the right label or phrase is on a t-shirt, affiliating with a football or baseball team) and then there is occupational armor (choosing "what you want to be when you grow up" is almost synonymous with "this is how I want the world to perceive me" and then when you're in a desired field how you present yourself in that occupation is another opportunity to decide how you would like to be percieved) and then there is societal armor (what "class" are you associating with, what "play" are you acting in, what passions or causes are you espousing, what groups or cliques are you trying to be a member in). I was struck by how difficult a task it was that Toni Packer took up for herself, attempting to participate in the aspects of Zen Buddhism that she thought were worthwhile without the accepted vocabulary or blocking for the practice.

I don't know what else to say about armor that hasn't been said and I would rather not fall back on the humor or sarcasm that is part of my own. I will say that it feels like armor is like language--you use language to help define you (what you speak and how you speak aligns you with a country and a nationality and a region within said country and nationality) and you use language to help define what you feel and how you react to everything around you. If you have no language, how do you interact? If you have no language, how do you belong?

I think the short answer is that you don't. If you have no language you will invent language.

2010-05-06T12:51:00.002-05:00

The whole idea, the concept of shedding our armor sounds very freeing. On a philosophical level, a lot of the assertions that Toni Packer made with regard to this were very poignant. On an intuitively intellectual level, they made a lot of sense. From her perspective, this armor seems largely bound up in a person's memory of his or her history, imagination, and fantasy about the future. So in other words, when we act through the armored self, we are essentially acting through the lens that is tinted by our deep reservoir of experience. She says that when we react to something, "the whole past is reacting, not just my personal past, but the impact of everything and everyone that I have ever been linked with" (5). This makes a lot of sense to me, especially in terms of what she talks about with regard to getting hurt. It makes sense to say that a lot of the time, we're not just reacting to the immediate experience of being hurt, we're using that immediate experience as a catalyst for unleashing our pent up memory-driven feelings about being hurt repeatedly in the past. And I do agree with Packer that it is very important for us to openly, fearlessly, evaluate our tendencies to react in one way or another and to see our closely entwined our reactions are to our armor, or our image of self.
However, I'd like to ask the question, why shed everything? Why go into situations without our experience? Self-evaluation is important, I agree, but what is that appeal of "seeing into" a situation as "totally fresh and uncaused, undetermined, and not dependent on anything"(6)? To me, this concept it unfathomable. And honestly, I don't think I want to experience things this way. On an intellectual level, I accept that I am nothing and nobody, but on a visceral level, I have no desire to give up my armor, I do not want to rid myself of my life experience when entering situations. Can these two sentiments co-exist?

On the other hand, if we're talking about armor as the neuroses, the compulsive, obsessive thoughts we have throughout the day that prevent us from functioning fluidly, then yes, I can relate to this kind of relinquishment. Or rather, I can understand and attempt to apply these concepts of "shedding self armor" if we're talking about armor as if it's equated with Reynold's notion of "shinkiness". And I think that upon careful, fearless evaluation of why we react the way we do in most situations, we all have at least a little "shinkiness" to shed. Also, I think we could all use a little training in being able to exist in a place of discomfort with ourselves. Often we do react to things by immediately falling back on our psycho-neurologically ingrained coping mechanisms, ( as Packer talks about) and it's important to be aware of this happening. I can get behind the concept of awareness- certainly I can grasp the importance of that. But as for the complete relinquishment of the self, that can be left up to the individuals who wish to achieve complete, wholehearted immersion into nothingness. As for me, for now I'll stick to intellectual acceptance of it.

Self-Abeyance

2010-05-06T11:40:00.004-05:00

Can we just stop and be present to the moment? Can we hold the self in abeyance long enough to set down the baggage of burden , the armor, as Kelly says, of self? Speaking only for myself, I have never accomplished no-self or totally present self, except, perhaps, when I'm fascinated with attention at something going on outside of my self. And I can only assess that state retrospectively, since to be aware of self at all would imply not being completely present sans the burden of construct; the assessment is thus flawed, tangled in a choke hold of tautology, as I need my self to analyze my self at that juncture of the fascinating event and my self.

By fascinating event I mean the occasional lecture that is so absorbing that I am rapt in the flow of information from without to within me, or a sudden, unexpected trauma in which I am either involved or am observing; in neither case is my "total presentness" volitional. I'm using the word "fascination" as intensely interested, not necessarily charmed or enthralled. I believe that when I witnessed a major California freeway car accident involving multiple casualties and fatalities, I was, in that sense, fascinated; time slowed to a glacial pace and I "viewed" the accident in slow motion - an amazing experience I've had more than once (and I believe many of us have experienced that altered state of chronological suspension, nearly always during traumatic events). I can remember that the events unfolded slowly, as if to yield the opportunity to observe the situation in micro-specificity, so that by the time everything actually stopped moving, my adrenalin was pumped up and I knew in uncanny detail what needed to happen next.

Which brings me to the question, what is the self for? I would argue that the ontogenesis of the self is primarily socio-cultural; the primary purpose of the self is to interact with other selves. As Westerners, we posit an individual self endowed with actionable agency, and in many ways we see others as attributes of our selves: my friends, my siblings, my spouse, my children, my co-workers, etc. The concept of no-self (not selfless, or altruism) is culturally difficult to understand, and I have to concede that until I understand the concept of self from other world views, I can't begin to understand no-self unless I have a different ontological understanding. If I cast my self interrelationally, but try, as Roberts did, to dissolve self, I must first remove the "mys" from my self. Can I do this? If I dissolve self, I must dissolve language - that arbiter of self. As Packard says, and I believe, correctly so, "Our language comes out of memory"(1); memory creates narrative, narrative is story and language: take these away from me and what is left, as Kelly always asks? Death, or a transformative state I have yet to encounter in any of our readings, since each of the authors who stake a claim in no-self territory have had to rely on memory and language to relay their experiences.

I'm interested in cutting-edge theories about the self, which argue that self and the sense of self is not illusory but very real, not tabula rasa but evolutionary. Please note that by interested I mean just that -- I don't mean I subscribe to these ideas, not yet, anyway. However, the theory intrigues me because I see its inherent confluence between an idea I've talked about on this blog before, that we don't just create our gods, we evolve them. Evolutionary psychology is no longer considered fringe science, but just as Darwin continues to rock the boat, thinkers like Tooby, Cosmides, and Pinker stir up controversy, and why not? Their critics contend they overrate the concept of adaptation -- the whole idea is threatening (and thus worth further investigation!) since it implies a survival of the fittest -- self. Biologists are still grappling with Darwin's ideas and religious traditions are still reeling from the implications within evolutionary theory. I think that we're going to witness some incredibly interesting debate and discovery over the next decade or so.

2010-05-06T11:32:00.001-05:00

David Foster Wallace:

Brought up an atheist, he has twice failed to pass throguh the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, the first step toward becoming a Catholic. The last time, he made the mistake of referring to "the cult of personality surrounding Jesus." That didn't go over big with the priest, who correctly suspected Wallace might have a bit too much skepticism to make a fully obedient Catholic. "I'm a typical American," says Wallace. "Half of me is dying to give myself away, and the other half is continually rebelling."

Via.

2010-05-06T09:25:00.003-05:00

I believe that I have the ability to "be here now," though I usually choose not to. I can be present in the moment when I'm at work, but when I take into consideration my short attention span and my busy schedule, then I begin to question my ability to be "present in the moment." For example, when I'm at work and a student comes in to my office, I put aside anything that I am working on and I give them my undivided attention. That is until my phone rings, or another student comes to my door, or I begin to daydream about my weekend plans. Other factors that may affect my ability to be present in the moment are my mood and the amount of caffeine in my system. Ultimately, if the moon and stars are in alignment I can "be here now." The issue is my consistency being here now.

He's gotta be him

2010-05-05T21:37:00.001-05:00

You know, Sammy Davis, Jr. can really sing. I don't know that I ever paid any attention before.

Whether I'm right or whether I'm wrong
Whether I find a place in this world or never belong
I gotta be me, I've gotta be me
What else can I be but what I am

I want to live, not merely survive
And I won't give up this dream
Of life that keeps me alive
I gotta be me, I gotta be me
The dream that I see makes me what I am

That far-away prize, a world of success
Is waiting for me if I heed the call
I won't settle down, won't settle for less
As long as there's a chance that I can have it all

I'll go it alone, that's how it must be
I can't be right for somebody else
If I'm not right for me
I gotta be free, I've gotta be free
Daring to try, to do it or die
I've gotta be me

I'll go it alone, that's how it must be
I can't be right for somebody else
If I'm not right for me
I gotta be free, I just gotta be free
Daring to try, to do it or die
I gotta be me

Other People

2010-05-03T20:51:00.002-05:00

First of all, I don't want this to turn into a book report. I just wanted to say that I thought Bare Bones Meditation was one of the more frustrating books that I have read, this side of Infinite Jest, and that only because I thought it was leading somewhere and it ended up not leading anywhere, and that was the point. Similarly, I was reading Bare Bones and I was thinking that at some point Tollifson was going to choose one and we would be convinced and everything, and she was finally on the path...But she kept waffling back and forth and just when she had it figured out she would chuck it all and go to San Francisco, and she was a lesbian and then she was not a lesbian, etc. And I was left to wonder what was the story of her life that she actually was waking up from? When did she wake up? It seems like you can never wake up from the story of your life because the story keeps unfolding and therefore the waking is actually the story at the same time. It is this sort of logical paradox that she seems to dwell on and that keeps her from actually picking where she wants to go. Still, I was astounded that after, what, 15 years of going back and forth that she would be able to tell us something. Something other than we should drop out of society and live in different communes for the rest of our lives.

I see an interesting dilemma here, one where you can talk about what makes a person happy or what enlightenment means, or what the no-self is, or the meaning of self, but from a commune. It is like testing on a lab mouse. At some point, you have to switch to live people to see if it really will make your hair shiny, or clear up that intestinal disorder. All we get the sense of success in commune retreats is that you can get a clear mind when you are separated from everything, usually in a quiet place. But when you return to the world, will it work? Does it have a correlative?

Which leads me into the question of the week, about armor. So many of the writers here have dropped out of society (even the Invisible Man) in order to escape and focus on themselves. But what are they escaping? They seem to me to be trying to escape the "play" that Goffman described---The games of society. Aha, I said to myself when I thought of this. It wasn't so much an "Aha Moment" where I have reached enlightenment, although that would have been nice, though I don't know if blogging is part of the enlightenment regimen, but perhaps it's like returning to the village with the ox-knowledge, as a boddhisatva, although its a virtual ox and I am not enlightened. So I guess it's nothing like that. Anyway...The aha is that the burden of self is to a great degree the burden of being around other people. It involves categories and expectations, set out by Goffman, that we are trying to quiet and get away from. That is the self construction. Hell is other people (oh, Sartre, you rear your head once again). So then the self, the void of expectations, is what is left, and it is a true self, but a no-self. And I guess then we are all the same once those things are stripped away.

So I guess the paradox is that the burden of self is the burden of other people. Or not a burden. Because maybe the self is a collection of the burdens of other people. This might be what Jung was getting at, right? Oh, no. I have just become a recounter of other people's positions. I can't get away from it. Maybe I should just give into it. None of these people seem to be particularly happy or comfortable. Maybe Ram Dass, but he cries all the time and did all kinds of acid (I keep coming back to that, what would Freud think?) but maybe the secret is to see the game and play it the best you can, give it your all to be a great game player. Revel in the act. Play all the parts. Emotions! Sensations! I'll take 'em all! Self be damned! Raise the curtain!

Sweet Surrender

2010-04-30T22:43:00.000-05:00

Baby I'm through runnin' it's true
I'd be a fool to try to escape you
Maybe I'm beat but oh what a sweet surrender

You keep your rights, I'll take your nights
No one can lose when we turn the lights out
Tastin' defeat, lovin' that sweet surrender

I'm givin' up myself to you but I didn't really lose at all
I gave the only love I've known and it never hurt me to fall

Now that it's done, so glad you won
I know our lives have only begun now
No more retreat, only my sweet surrender

Enhancement

2010-04-30T12:56:00.003-05:00

We ran out of time last night for me to throw this out there, but here is my little enhancement bit...
As I stated in my blog post I struggled with the design aspect of The Integral Vision. It seems/seemed pretty obvious to me that if you are trying to present something truly integral, the way in which you present it should be integral as well. The random photographs seemed disjointed and poorly chosen. There was no flow, and for me it took away greatly from any attention I was paying to what Ken Wilbur was trying to lay out.
With that, I realized that we have largely been looking at text, with a few movies/video clips here an there. I thought it would be interesting to throw into the mix a visual artist that I feel that deals with and wrestles with a lot of the same ideas that we have touched on.
While studying abroad in London I first saw Mark Titchner's work at the Tate Britain after he was nominated for the Turner Prize. His work was (as I can best recall) the first of the four nominees that I saw. His installation was titled 'How to Change Behaviour (Tiny Masters of the World Come Out)'. His work immediately settled in a little spot in my heart, and I still to this day have a hard time explaining exactly why. Here is my best attempt: I love big art. Where you have no choice but to interact with it because it is taking up an entire wall, an entire room. Also, I think it is very brave for visual artists to use words. It seems (perhaps just to me, and the way I was taught) that visual art and text are two separate things, not to be confused or explored together. Titchner's use of letters that were as tall if not taller than me was something I found incredibly exciting.
Anyhow, I find it interesting that it has been a few years since I have looked at or even thought of his work. Then all of the sudden while reading I thought to myself, 'This is a bad Mark Titchner rip off.... Mark Titchner!' I wanted to share this with the class and see if perhaps any one else has visual artists that they have found that seem to wrestle with these same questions? Here are a few links that might be of interest:

Summary of Titchner's work nominated for the Turner Prize 2006. (Which he did not win :( <--I was sad).

Short video of Titchner talking about his work.

A few examples of his work that I had put up on the blog yesterday.

Happy visual Friday!

Final exam: Just who do you think you are, anyway?

2010-04-30T12:20:00.007-05:00

For 5/13, plan for an approximately ten minute presentation on your view of self, however you choose to take that. You may wish to examine self-production, self-presentation, self-development, self-consciousness, selfishness, selflessness, self-centeredness, sense of self, self-confidence, self-concept, self-esteem, self-sacrifice, self-aggrandizement, self-deprecation, self-abnegation, no-self (experience of), self-discovery, self-indulgence, self-denial, self-awareness, self-protection, self-help, self-promotion, being yourself (or not), self-actualization, self-surrender, and so on. Expect questions and comments.

Writing prompt: Self as armor

2010-04-30T10:03:00.007-05:00

For me, the thing that draws all of our authors together -- that is, the reason I picked them in the first place -- is that they envision the self as, first of all, something we are doing, or something that is done to us (versus something that we are), and, furthermore, as a kind of burden we carry around in our day to day lives. Shawn reminded me of Rabindranath Tagore's little epigram, of which I was unaware until well after this course was named, "The burden of the self is lightened when I laugh at myself." I have hoped to show you the work we do to put ourselves out there, and to explore what might happen if we were to set all of that aside. William Reich had a nice metaphor for that: to become unarmored.

Isn't it nice when you don't have anything to prove to anyone, nothing to demonstrate about the sort of person you are, nothing to conceal, no worries about what people are thinking of you, what your relationship to them has been or will be? I carry around All of This Stuff about myself, about others, about how I am regarded, about what I want from them or the situation, or what is wanted from me. Can you just stop and be present to your circumstances, to the others around you?

Well, can you?

Edit, 3:45: I'd like to amend this slightly, mostly for Colin's benefit. Ahem. "I carry around All of This Stuff about myself, about others, about how I am regarded, about what I want from them or the situation, or what is wanted from me. Can you just stop and be present to the page?"

"There ain't no guru who can see through your eyes"

2010-04-30T06:55:00.002-05:00

who you are, etc.

2010-04-30T01:38:00.002-05:00

Here are a couple of tunes for musical friday. Enjoy:

Pearl Jam "Who You Are" live from Toronto

Pearl Jam "Who You Are" album cut

Pearl Jam "Not For You" SNL rehearsal footage

Pearl Jam "Indifference"

Eddie Veddar and Ben Harper "Indifference"

Eddie Veddar "Hard Sun"

Eddie Veddar "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"

Eddie Veddar "The Times They Are A-Changin'"

Pearl Jam "Better Man"

Wilber Squares

2010-04-29T22:32:00.002-05:00

I was just thinking about the grid/map picture that Wilber presents and the difference between that and the South African model that Shawn showed... I think it was drawn in a certain way, and that is one way to look at it, but if it were concentric circles you could make the same observations that Wilber is, divided into four quadrants and then it might look more compass like or like the Native American model. I think that it doesn't change the idea that we should aspire to deeper connections, more inclusive connections. Whether Wilber achieves that is certainly debatable, but the argument that we should look at how wisdom is similar is valuable.

But the grid and the squares versus a more organic model reminds me of the modernist movement in architecture, post WWI, most clearly seen in the International Style of Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe. They were in Europe (white men admittedly) during the first World War, and saw what terrors a specific culture and history can create, first hand. So they sought to create a new language, an International language, that was devoid of history and culture. So they reverted to basic geometry. Certainly Le Corbusier took a softer, more organic bent to the argument, and Mies Van Der Rohe took it to the extreme, but the idea is that everyone, no matter where, has geometric concepts, so build up from there.

A beef I have with the grid, though, is that the logical thing for me is that the arrows should all point inward, and the stages of "higher" being, should converge at the center. This would lead to a bullseye of integral thought. How can you be integrated when the highest thought is dissolved around the outside?

Finally, since Shawn asked at the end about the search for enlightenment being a white male thing, or at least the dropping of society for a drastically different path, I revert to two different things we've seen in class. One, that the monks in China also did it. It's not supposed to disprove anything, but just offer another example to be considered. Two, with Ram Dass, it seems like he found himself with his hand in the cookie jar. And he looked around and no one was telling him he couldn't have the cookie.

From the Tower at the Top (Playing God)

2010-04-29T15:48:00.004-05:00

The tower itself was proof I couldn't escape/when I escaped from the world.

All I really want to say is in this poem: advice is given by those searching for "the semblance of an order." What is it that Abraham Lincoln said: "If you search for evil in the world you will surely find it"? The point isn't that the truth exists or doesn't to these people with their view from the top, but that no one can tell them differently. Which doesn't make it a matter of pride, so much as fear. "What if this is how it is? I should probably tell people." We, on the other hand, should probably listen and not worry about it. Because it's true: the more you see, the more you know. But it only matters in relation to doing something about it, to taking action, which I'm not sure I mean in a strictly political sense. If you're not going to see any more than you can, often for perfectly good reasons, then the instruction to do anything other than what you are doing is fear based, both on your part and on that of the instructor. Real art (I know, I know) is idiosyncratic, not polemic; it doesn't tell you what to do. And maybe it's a waste of time, but at least it's not afraid of playing God, and taking on the responsibility of keeping things moving, or "evolving." Can a night really be said to evolve? The best social interactions I've ever had haven't been the ones where I know I said or did the right thing. They weren't complete disasters either. Something else happened.

What, to put it another way, is the value of knowing compared to the value of not knowing? We don't know a lot, and still some pretty "intelligent" people, cultural critics no less, don't believe in God. Which would be fine if they didn't believe so much in themselves. Maybe my point is if you're going to encompass the whole of everything into the equivalent of a life raft, you'd better not only acknowledge the so-called lesser stages, but celebrate and give back to them. If you spot a "random leaf" and want to believe it doesn't know what you know (which, of course, it doesn't) you can't pretend you made it up. If you make it back to shore, you'd better turn around and watch the ship go down, since people are going to ask you what it was like.

I should say I'm not really writing or thinking about Ken Wilber so much as the idea of taking advice from authority figures in general. And with that,

From the Tower at the Top of the Winding Stairs

It seemed that the mountains of Vermont were hunchbacks
ringing their own silent bells, and above them
an opaque, cloudless sky a model of how to remain calm
while other parts of you might be thunder and rain.
From the tower it didn't take long to see the dangers
in believing that seeing was knowing - high flying birds
revealing our need for angels, some wispy scud
evidence of a past I'd yet to resolve. Still, wasn't
the psychological real? The tower itself had no opinion.
Men and women could be seen planting tomatoes
and rows of lettuce, touching each other goodbye,
and from this height others could be imagined creating
something wonderful out of motives like envy, even spite,
warding off, as they felt it, melancholy's encroachment.
To ascend the tower was to want not to come down.
There to the south -- because I had begun to dream -
you could see congressmen suddenly released
from the prisons of their partisanship, wrestling amiably
with the imperfections of human existence. And, beyond,
enemies dropping their guns, asking for forgiveness.
Everything felt comic, how else could it be bearable?
The tower itself was proof I couldn't escape
when I escaped from the world. Out of its side window
I could see a house on fire, and in the distance
cows and goats dotting the hillside, and dogs everywhere --
no matter their size, either forlorn or frisky,
entirely dependent on the good will of others.
Soon the night birds would be calling other night birds,
the normal influx of eros begin to mix with music
heard from below. I'd feel it was time to come down,
to touch and be touched, take part in a dailiness
for which I'd need words like welter or maelstrom.
But for now if I looked hard I could see the random
pine cone, the random leaf, and if I closed my eyes
something like a pattern, the semblance of an order.

Stephen Dunn

have thoughts become things for you?

2010-04-29T13:54:00.000-05:00

(I don't think this was actually from the television program, it seems that some guy just made it for fun and stuck it up on youtube. At any rate, it was kinda funny. Hmmmm.)

Purpose

2010-04-29T13:28:00.003-05:00

The question that keeps entering my mind as we follow our journey through the ideas of self is this: "For what purpose?"

The sociologists that we covered at the beginning wanted to categorize. They wanted to understand through ordering the external behavioral patterns. The psychologists wanted to understand why by dissecting internal motivations and find causes for effects. Now that we're in the spiritual section of class the question of "for what purpose?" is far more fuzzy. There is a general idea of elevating the self--enlightenment or eternal life or great understanding--through various religious manners--Hinduism (via LSD), Buddhism, Christianity ...

Once again, for what purpose? Each of these requires a specific buy-in to a greater organization (a tithing for your soul!) but it seems unclear why the particular imparter is interested in sharing their grand awakening other than "I've had a grand awakening! I'm a better person! Isn't that great! Do this and you can be a better person too!" With Ken Wilbur I have to ask once again, for what purpose? It is obvious that he is selling the idea of the Integral Vision (there are Institutes!) but why?

L. Ron Hubbard wrote a book called Dianetics. It sold a lot of copies and then he wrote Scientology and then he created Scientology and no longer paid taxes. On the bare basic level Scientology makes sense as better business system to improving your life--it is structured like a corporate workshop and you advance along a path that, to a certain degree, can help you focus on what's important in your life and achieve those goals. Conceive, Believe, Achieve. There is nothing wrong with that. Where that idea goes off the deep end is "for what purpose"--the creation of Scientology is about money. You pay a lot of money to get your thetans checked and you rise along whatever your rainbow bridge leads you ... and they decided that it should be a religion. The "for what purpose" seems pretty obvious: follow our path, we will promise you enlightenment (and superpowers!) and you will give us lots of money.

Ray Kurtzweil (who Shantel and Katie will remember from last Spring) was a brilliant inventor and possibly batshit crazy in his idea about Singularity. He has an institute as well and he has plenty of lovely graphs and diagrams in his book about the Singularity (the idea that at some point human intelligence and machine intelligence will merge, more or less). His for what purpose is pretty clear: he thinks it is going to happen, he wants to live forever, he wants it to happen to him.

So, why is Ken Wilbur doing it? He has put a lot of work into synthesizing just about every conceptual idea that has come about from religions to philosophy to (possibly even) the seven habits ... but why? What is the next step? What should people get out of following the path of the Integral Vision and what does he want for setting people on the path. He has already received approximately $16 from each of us and we haven't even bought into his idea. What does the Integral Institute produce? I don't have a clear idea about any of these, though I have my theories: this smacks of Scientology redux--keep following this path and ingesting our ideas and you can have your own enlightenment (and superpowers?). Or, Ken Wilbur sees these patterns in religions and philosophies and wants to get away from the results of the splintering of similar ideas (namely conflict) and thinks that a unifying philosophy will lead to a One World sort of situation (which is sort of what all religions and philosophies set out to do, but are met with one very big obstacle: there are still lots of people who completely believe in the other stuff). Or, Ken Wilbur, in addition to the previous theory, sees this as a legitimate method to self-enlightenment and wants that and is inviting everyone to join him as he figures out how to get there himself. Of these possibilities I like the last one the most (though it would be awesome to get superpowers) though I suspect that it is a little bit of all of them.

One other thought on the general purpose for all of these thinkers in reference to the pursuit of enlightenment: perhaps the thinking is not just upper middle class, perhaps it is the grand idea that if I can be enlightened and become a better person then we all can and as a result we have a better society and a better world. If a great journey can begin with one step, then perhaps a perfect world can begin with one person. Yeah, it's a little unrealistic, but it's nice to dream.

2010-04-29T13:20:00.002-05:00

appreciate Wilber's deep concern with "integration", especially especially with regard to way that his approach is applied to the field of medicine, business, and ecology. I actually found his approach to me the most compelling when he described it's use in the context of those fields. I think when you're working with a system that is in the "we" quadrant, or the lower-right quadrant, the integrative approach seems very applicable to me. It's imperative that when you're working in a system that includes many people that are dependent on the competency and compassion of one another ( especially, say, in the medical field), it's essential that everyone be open to all different kinds of approaches to curing disease, preserving environmental resources, or selling a useful product. For example, there have been a lot of developments in holistic medicine in the recent years. The field of nursing has really expanded it's concern for the individual as a whole- taking into consideration the patient's psychological, emotional, and even spiritual outlook when attempting to treat a disease. My mother is involved in this kind of practice- seeing the body as having chakras, vortexes of energy. She even made me lay down on a massage table, swinging pendulum with a crystal above my body in order to "sense" the chakras bound up with bad energy. The whole process seemed completely ridiculous at the time, and retrospectively, I still think it's ridiculous. I didn't feel like the process helped me at all. However, I do understand that for some patients, this kind of process could be quite meaningful. I understand that if someone is very ill and or dying ( my mother worked with people is hospice for years), they would maybe appreciate someone taking into consideration their spiritual and emotional "centers", talking with them about their feelings about their condition,swinging crystal, etc., instead of just giving them tons of pain killers or anti-depressants in order to help them physically cope with their condition.

I guess that's just what I thought of when Wilber was talking about the integrative approach in medicine. I see it as being beneficial in that way. As far as helping the individual attain sustained higher/altered states and the suggestions he gives about that- that I have a harder time with. I think that according to Wilber's model, I would probably fall into the lower levels of consciousness and I'm fairly certain I that go back and forth between the perspectives of somewhat extreme idealism and extreme postmodernism. This perspective arises out of the personal experience I've had that tends to place great emphasis on emotional and abstract intellectualism. I'm fairly comfortable with this perspective and quite stubborn about it for the most part, but I do appreciate that Wilber emphasize self-awareness about where you are in the spectrum of the integrative approach. I think awareness leaves some cracks in the stubbornness, where new perspectives can seep in. I'm just not sure how I feel about the whole yoga and meditation thing yet. It all just seems so new-agey...

None of the Above

2010-04-29T13:16:00.004-05:00

I'll admit I'm something of a personality assessment sucker, perhaps because they usually work on me. For instance, the highly reliable Facebook quiz, "What Emotional Age Are You?" pegged me at age 12. Right on: no argument from me on that result. I also know that the Myers-Briggs people nail me as an INFJ, an Introvert who everyone else thinks is an Extrovert. So, I was interested in what Wilber had to say about folks in his IOStm However, I do get queasy when the interlocutor starts off friendly but then reveals a kind of angry nastiness. I feel insecure somehow, and I don't want him to know anything more about me. Call me neurotic and undeveloped, but I just can't find my niche in Wilber's uber-paradigm.

Let me explain. While Wilber's book smacks of marketing strategies and tag clouds, Zig Ziglar, Success Acceleratorstm, Tony Jeary: Mr. Presentationtm, and other purveyors of motivational jargon, I tried to ignore my allergy to human potential theory and read with a respectful attitude. After all, at the very least, Mr. Wilber has spent a lot of time trying to develop a unified field theory that doesn't just encompass physics, but EVERYTHINGtm!

But imagine my disappointment when, after allowing Wilber to present himself, implicitly, as a Third Tier transpersonal transcendent, his Supermind sunk to a First Tier impulsive, when he resorted to name calling and snarky commentary. (I argue that Wilber must identify himself as Third Tier because in order to understand and elucidate this ultimate position on the Actualization Hierarchytm, he must understand it, which means he must have lived it, at least at some point.)

Let's have a look. Wilber decries the unfairness of the media and other less advanced people, like Freud and Jung, who in their not-yet-evolved-to-Third-Tier confusion, commit the Pre/Post Fallacytm. I hate when that happens, so I can understand Wilber's frustration. But I don't think it helps to call people idiots -- it puts us off! An example: Wilber writes that "But the media, to give only the most obvious example, completely confuse pre and trans. Any transpersonal non-dual spirituality is unceremoniously lumped with, and dumped into, the prepersonal garbage pail" (129). Well, I don't like living in the garbage pail, but does Wilber really have to refer to these unevolved stages as rubbish? I feel a bit bruised, if not slimed.

But, it gets worse, for both me and Wilber, who feels the need to disparage idiocy further: "(To make matters worse at that end, the press seems to recognize only two types of religion: fundamentalist nutcases and New Age nutcases. Both of those, of course, are pre-rational . . . . But heck, the New Agers aren't taken seriously enough to think about. The only two people that the press knows who are 'spiritual' are George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. And the press can't figure out which is the more dangerous)" (129). I'm neither a New Ager or a Fundamentalist, but gee -- does this mean that anyone who hasn't achieved the higher levels of consciousness are nutters? And when the press writes about, say, the Dalai Lama, are they unaware of his spirituality?

Wilber's not done dissing dummies. He explains that "The fact is, conservatives tend to support the first arc and liberals tend to support the second arc, with neither one of them even vaguely aware of the third arc. . . . So it's worth repeating that, at the very least, these two diametrically different kinds of 'non-rational spirituality' (pre and trans) simply must be acknowledged, by the press, or at least by anybody who can read without moving their lips" (130).

Wow.

Wilber definitely has a special rancor reserved for the press corps. I'm reminded of Kelly's suggestion that Reynolds' poor attitude might be due to having been ignored. I ran a quick Google news search for Ken Wilber, and his name appears in 2 pages of international coverage. So what's his beef?

Finally, I'll confess to one more thing. I like the word "bitch" even though I don't like it when people use it to refer to a woman who isn't afraid to pursue her own agenda. But I like it even less when people think bitch is a French word! Wilber writes, "Excuse my French, but the ultimate bitch when it comes to 'God' or 'Spirit' or 'Absolute Reality' is that the whole thing is caught in a staggeringly huge pre/post fallacy" (131). Wilber: bitch is an Old English word, originally bicce for female dog. While the French have a word, "biche," which means female deer, I'm pretty sure bitch and biche aren't related.

Unless Wilber had a really traumatic encounter with Bambi. In which case I'll need to reconsider all of the above.

a long presentation...

2010-04-29T12:29:00.001-05:00

This model to supply us a way to understand the universe by embracing 5 elements: quadrants, levels, lines, states and types, I wasn’t sure how to really take it. I felt like I could have been sitting among two hundred some lost individuals in a faintly lit open banquet hall at the local Western Inn listening to a man in a poorly fitted brown suede suit, clicking through an over stimulating power point, preaching to us through a crackling booming loudspeaker, trying to sell us the idea of the Integral Operating System. The book felt like that. An advertisement for a new age way of thinking.
I think…hmm…I think I want to get on board with Wilber. I can’t, but I think on some level, there are days, particularly these overwhelmingly past few days, that I want to understand the universe in this organized, clear, chartable perspective. My personal reasons are not necessarily intellectual, but just evidence of my lack of motivation when trying to make sense with the life changing questions in my head. The clean cut quadrants with the endless lines and the comfort that not being able to behave a particular way or not understanding a particular way of thought is because I haven’t yet developed into a specific stage, is somewhat comforting. I’ve always believed that you can’t initially fault a person for their ignorance. Teach them, yes, but how can you get mad at a person for not being able to fix your car if you already knew prior, that they didn’t know how to fix cars! So I enjoyed Wilber’s discussion on how it takes growth and practice to reach these higher stages. Actualization hierarchies, the actual means of growth, the natural developmental stages, this made sense to me. Yet I do think that these hierarchies were created in order to understand the natural patterns that human beings live in. We like answers, we like categories; we like to understand and conceptualize, so this is Wilber’s way and I think he’s not necessarily trying to shove it down my throat so I’m willingly to digest his teachings and am curious to know how others think.

Did I read the wrong book or was I just happy?

2010-04-29T10:26:00.001-05:00

I had to wonder whether I did read the wrong book based on some of the comments here. Actually, even the writing prompt itself made me wonder whether I'd read the book incorrectly. To me, this book was a valiant – yet flawed – attempt to synthesize learning and knowledge from different intelligences, disciplines and traditions to see if useful patterns would emerge that could serve as a road map to self-improvement. To me, Wilber is positing a theory based on what he has learned through research and discovery. This multi-dimensional schema made sense to me, yet was definitely over my head in places. But I never felt that Wilber made any personal claims in this book. Unlike so many of the other authors we've read, I felt like he simply was theorizing. I walk away from this book neither knowing how frequently he experiences any of the states nor what stage he has reached, personally, in regards to any of the lines.

It rings true to me that stages are progressive. Once I know that 2 + 2 = 4, except for the occasional brain-fart, I now know that and can base new knowledge on the foundation of this knowledge. This isn't an unshakable truth – I could become senile and not know 2+2 any more or get a brain injury or something – but it is a generally true concept of how we learn.

I read Shawn's critique as well as the critique he cited and feel that the criticisms are generally good ones. There are flaws in the model. I guess my reason for being a little taken aback is that I felt that it was posited as a theory or model and as such would have imperfections in it. Maybe I just responded to Wilber's tone differently than I have to previous authors or differently than my classmates have. I just didn't find him to be pejorative or prescriptive in his manner and didn't sense that he was positioning himself as "having arrived" at the enlightened end of every line and stage.

One of the things I liked about the concept was the idea that we can tap into the work of others – their self-discovery and intellectual pursuits – as a leg up in our own journey. We can use their knowledge and experiences as a rough guide toward our own journey of maturation and enlightenment.

As someone who works in computer code all day, there was something a little familiar about this. It reminded me of code blocks that someone arduously created that I can use at the base level of my code. I need a pedestrian understanding of how their code works, but I can build on it without going through the rigors of creating this base code. Wilber's maps attempted to glean wisdom from multiple traditions, disciplines and intelligences in order to provide building blocks for all of us.

All this said, I have been in a better mood lately and maybe I was just feeling happy and less jaded when I read this, but my general reaction was positive – both to the theory and to Wilber.

Mark Titchner

2010-04-28T21:56:00.007-05:00

Permanent?

2010-04-28T20:49:00.003-05:00

While reading Be Here Now I very much enjoyed the crazy aesthetic ride that accompanied what was being said. The doodlings and drawings seemed to help what was trying to be communicated with words. I admittedly was very excited when I picked up The Integral Vision and having flipped through the pages a few times before starting it I thought to myself, 'ooooh pictures!' Though once I started reading the images seemed to pester whatever it is that was being said below or around, or even in the image for that matter. The charts and graphs seemed to work since, well, its kind of hard to visually muck up a graph.
Perhaps I was just in a bit of a mood when I first picked this up and it just happened to carry through, but it seemed poorly put together. For Ken Wilbur to have spent 230 pages explaining to his readers how important integrating and seeing the bigger picture is, it was pretty obvious to me that his designers didn't exactly take that notion to heart. The disjointedness that came from the design made it a difficult read for me. It seemed like his designers saw some of Mark Titchner's work and tried to poorly rip it off.
Okay, design rant aside.
My biggest resistance came to Wilbur's idea of the permanence of stages. 'And remember, because these are stages, you have attained them in a permanent fashion (39).' Permanent is a very strong word, and 'permanent' used in any relation to human beings is something that I find increasingly more hilarious and outrageous. Everything as far as I can tell in my short few years as a human being on this planet is fleeting in one way or another. The closest idea to permanence that I can really wrap my head around is tattoos. I love when people tell me that my tattoos will be there for the rest of my life. Will they? What if my arm gets cut off? It's still permanent, yes, it will probably still be on my arm. But my arm may not always be part of me, connected to me. How permanent is it then? It seems a silly notion to sell to others that attaining permanence is something within grasp of a human being.
The rest of this paragraph goes as follows,
'Before that happens, any of these capacities will be merely passing states: you will plug into some of them, if at all, in a temporary fashion--great peak experiences of expanded knowing and being, wondrous aha! experiences, profound altered glimpses into your own higher possibilities. But with practice, you will convert those states into stages, or permanent traits in the territory of you (39).'
I can't help but feel that it is cruel and unusual to put that notion into a persons head. Permanence is a nice idea... but then again a nice idea to one is not so nice to another. I'll let Wilbur keep his permanence, and I'll sit quietly and happily with the lack.

Ethnocentricity in the 21st century

2010-04-28T16:41:00.002-05:00

I don't know why the links I post don't seem to work, but I hope you can copy/paste these into the box thing. Anyway, a couple of articles that caught my eye in the last week, regarding the encroachment of the world upon itself.

"D.I.Y. Culture Thrives Despite Globalism"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/arts/18abroad.html?scp=1&sq=diy&st=cse

"In Age of Globalism, Pardon My French"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/arts/25abroad.html?scp=1&sq=french&st=cse

1st, 2nd, and 3rd person a la Rumi

2010-04-28T13:03:00.000-05:00

Quote from Rumi:

"I, you, he, she, we, I, you, he, she, we. In the garden of mystic lovers, these are not true distinctions."

Pre-Post Fallacy

2010-04-28T12:55:00.001-05:00

Thinking about the pre/post fallacy brought me to Chance the Gardener from Peter Sellers movie, Being There. The entire movie is based on misreading "pre" for "post."

Orange Juice. GPS Systems. Ken Wilber.

2010-04-28T12:14:00.001-05:00

Reading all of these books really does seem to be a struggle of humility. I want my insights and wisdoms to come from humble mouths, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It is to my detriment in this class that I believed humility to be a key to insight. These authors are under the impression, in many of these cases, that there are attainable “higher grounds” from which to see clearer, to be closer to truths, self, enlightenment, whatever the goal may be. But then those positions are automatically assigned value. Putting any of these goals or the maps to those goals into an organized fashion seems to hinder the effectiveness, believability, credibility of that position. I’m reiterating my same point here that I made in my last post, but having a Guru telling us to buy his book about his climb to grace, warning us not to make the same missteps he’s made which lead him to grace is like telling us that we’re supposed to avoid the exact same thing that lead him to what he’s trying to lead us to. Right?!
But still, the conversation about the pursuit of truth is important. So how do we have it without making it trivial? Wilber’s approach to try to communicate the incommunicable is to offer technicolor portraits of Jesus and extraterrestrial landscapes. Putting this next to a page outlining the importance of a “comprehensive map” with quadrants and so forth comes across as trite to me. It makes me feel like I’m supposed to go to Best Buy and get a GPS system to grace. “You are 5.6 miles from your destination. Get into the right lane.”
And all we can do when reading these texts is either totally buy it and be assholes like Tom Cruise (no offense if anyone likes Tom Cruise, I’m sure he’s just lovely), or argue against us which ultimately helps us form our own truth. So maybe it is a service in the pursuit, but not in the way it was intended… like using a GPS system to avoid roads. That there are attainable better vantage points than the one on which we now stand suggests that there is a value system.
My greatest challenge with this book is that I have grown untrusting of anybody who feels they’ve figured anything out confidently enough to publish it. It all seems so subjective. All the adjectives and metaphors are cringe-worthy. People work so hard to make these ideas tangible and attainable and then they just end up sounding pedestrian. All of enlightenment (which somewhere along the line became my default word for “sense of self”) seems to be a series of oversimplifications used to make intangible ideas seem tangible. But they all seem to arrive to the same realization that it’s an idea that is impossible to convey until you’ve reached it. It’s like… picking oranges to squeeze orange juice because you like the taste of oranges. Just eat the orange, man
Or it’s like writing an analysis of enlightenment wherein squeezing oranges stands for enlightenment. Just be enlightened, man. Cut out the oranges altogether.
According to Wilber, there is an entire territory we’re supposed to use his map to avoid falling into. I actually didn’t really understand his whole map – territory metaphor. It seems that the map is to a territory like a body is to a mind. It is the physical manifestation of something too large to conceptualize. So that means we’re just supposed to stay on the map and avoid the minutia surrounding it? That seems completely contradictory to the search for truth.
But I guess, in Wilber’s defense, if you’re going to publish a book about something so vague, you have to put it into metaphors, charts, pictures that will be understood by the reader. Solid, unmanipulatable data. But then it makes it much easier to say to Wilber, or to our GPS system, “Wait, there isn’t actually a pathway there? Where are you really taking me?” So in making something difficult simpler, we’re actually making it more arguable. Maybe we don’t even want oranges at all anymore because they’re out of season.

Class Enhancement (Trungpa)

2010-04-26T17:14:00.004-05:00

Since we ran a little short on time last week, and I don't want to suck up too much of this week's classtime, I'm just putting my class enhancement here for you guys to enjoy at your leisure. My plan was pretty much to play this poem for the class, give everyone a copy of it, and then read a little loose tie-in to make it relevant. So it's really easy to translate to blog format. Here goes!

*Here's a link to an audio version of the poem I was going to play, I'll bring paper copies on Thursday in case anyone would rather read it.

In this poem we find ourselves beginning in the place that Trungpa would call "confusion" or a "spiritual junkyard." This is a place we have all been before: feeling alone, empty, fucked up, stupid, ugly, confused, spiritually materialistic, unconstructive, invisible, phony, et cetera. This place is referred to with words like twisted, numb, behind, sideways by our poet. The hardest, but most necessary, first step to getting out of this place often occurs when we admit to ourselves that "I didn't know it was gonna be this way."

This seems to be the place that, by cutting through the spiritual materialism, Trungpa believes we can avoid; this is the place from which we must use the ideas of constructive living to escape; it is the place which cripples and starves Franny; it defines our invisible man. Emerging could require meditation, yoga, hallucination, or prayer. But concentrating on Spiritual Materialism, I would ask Trungpa how important it is to first experience spiritual materialism before accepting the path therefrom. As we've seen throughout the semester, the guru advising us has had his own slips into that which he advises us we must avoid. The slip is in many case an important part of the trip. We have to wonder here if this isn't a completely necessary part of the journey.

In this poem, we have an intensely honest narrator taking us with him through his own valley of spiritual despair where we are constantly stuck in the mouth of a lion or under a blanket of lead; where we're stuck on our bellies with our hands tied behind us,; where we constantly berate ourselves with questions, Why am I walking? Where am I running? What am I saying? What am I knowing? What I admire about this poem and its poet is that he doesn't seem as concerned with escaping immediately. he understands that it is the time spent in the valley of spiritual despair which makes the trip to the peak above more profound.

From this place, the spiritually desperate place, we realize that we need something special, something like hope - not the word hope, but the force hope. This is presumably the point when we'd reach out for a guru, a Trungpa, Salinger, Reynolds, or Dass, and try to be lead out of our furrow. In the words of our poet, "We need something to open up a new door to show us something we've seen before but overlooked a hundred times or more."

But the first thing we have to find, according to our poet and overlooked by many of our gurus who dismiss these as missteps along the path, is all the paths that don't lead us to any sort of enlightenment. The first things we find are shopping malls, maps, fraternities, Hollywood, theatre, comedy, money, pimple-lotion, movie stars, Santa Claus. And none of these things have the answers. A constant throughout the searches for self this semester seems to be first looking in all the wrong places.

Good god almighty, we realize, this stuff ain't real! According to Trungpa, this is the moment when we realize that the mask we've been wearing all along has been pointless. "And this confusion continues and intensifies," he warns, "until we finally discover that we are totally lost, that we have lost our ground, that there is no starting point or middle or end because our mind has been so overwhelmed by our own defense mechanisms" (64).

The obvious next step is to start looking elsewhere. Reading Trungpa's book, I felt that I was just looking in one more wrong place to strike off of my list before realizing that every place in which we search for our "selves" is as wrong as it is necessary. External help won't help us guide us or save us, our author warns us, after we've already bought his book. For a spiritually materialistic book about rejecting spiritual materialism, it's almost as though our author knew that in writing this it would just be one more false step along out path to happiness, wisdom, peace of mind, or whatever it is that we seek.

In the end of the poem, we find God in a church and Woody Guthrie in a hospital; both of which can be found at sundown in the Grand Canyon. What does this mean? Hell if I know, I'm still spiritually materialistic - searching for spiritual meaning in books, songs, poems, people, and landscapes. But I'd venture to say that Dylan is warning us that our spirituality is all around us and we just need to wade through all of our options to find the one that sticks for us.

When it comes down to it, this poem nails the ambiguity of the spiritual search. You can touch and twist and turn two kinds of doorknobs, and you can smell only two kinds of hallways. Nothing is ever black, white, or grey when it comes to matters of spirituality, and when it is printed, edited, bound, and sold, it just becomes more of what it warns us against.

Something I found, I'll add more when I share on Thur.

2010-04-26T12:04:00.003-05:00

http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/AQAL_critique.html
A Critique of Ken Wilber's "AQAL" Philosophy
Holons - Quantatitative or Qualitative?
At the center of Wilber's philosophy is the so-called "AQAL" - All Quadrants All Levels - cosmology. This assumes a 4-fold holistic hierarchy, as explained here. This can be shown by the following diagram

But while impressive, this diagram also contains a lot of arbitrary assumptions, and there are many inconsistencies between quadrants and levels, as Kris Roose shows in his critique. To his concerns I'll add my own objection to this arrangement of levels and holons. It is simply this. While it is a viable hypothesis that eukaryote cells are symbiotic prokaryotes, and these cells are composed of proteins (absent in the above diagram, but they would be at 2 /12 in the upper right quadrant) , proteins of molecules, and molecules of atoms, it is not the case (regarding the triune brain - 7 to 10 in the upper right quadrant)) that the neocortex is made up of many limbic systems, or the limbic systems of many brainstems. Looking at the lower right quadrant, we see the reverse - the largest element is at no.1. Following Erich Jantsch, who Ken acknowledges among his sources of inspiration, these get smaller (reverse holism, 2 is a part of 1, not vice-versa), following Jantsch's evolutionary sequence, until 7 or 8, when they start to get larger again. And as for the left hand quadrant, you can't say emotions are parts of symbols, and so on.
Ok, let's say that the holons are not - as Koestler presents them, quantitative, but strictly qualitative. Each holon includes (as Wilber insists they do) everything of the subordinate holons, as in the following diagram.

This theme of the higher including all of the lower, but the lower doesn't have everything of the higher, occurs as early as The Atman Project. It seems to be an abiding Wilberian generalisation of how the universe works. Here again we have a problem. The rational logical mental processes do not include emotions but as psychologists from Freud to Stan Gooch have pointed out, these are two distinct processes. Myth is not the same as Rationalism. The neocortex develops on top of the limbic system, but is a distinct layer. Moreover we find in nature lots of examples of organisms that lost the faculties of their ancestors. And as far as the spectrum of consciousness goes, do we really have the richness of sensory awareness of our palaeomammalian ancestors and all our intellect as well? And what about disembodied beings, for example the disincarnate who no longer have a body? (Interestingly there does not seem to be any integration - or even any mention - of occultism in Wilber's corpus. Mysticism, yes. Occultism, no. This is part of Wilber's rationalistic bias)
Wilber states that this arrangement is merely a simple schematic summary to help further the discussion, and should not be taken dogmatically or cast in stone, and that
"each of the quadrants might more accurately be constructed as a branching tree, and not a simple straight line, indicating the rich variation within each grade and clade (each level and type). Each quadrant includes both hierarchies (or clear gradations) and heterarchies (or pluralistic and equivalent unfoldings within a given grade)."
An integral theory of consciousness
This certainly constitutes a much better approach. But why isn't this explored more, in all the thousands of pages Wilber has written?

Turtles all the way down
Another problem with Wilber's evolutionary-holonal hierarchy is that it literally endless: every holon is part of a bigger holon, and is made up of smaller ones, like the joke (which he himself cites) of "turtles all the way down" Not only is this an infinite regress, but it means that one can never attain the state of pure Spirit, because this is the "last" holon, and hence infinitely remote in terms of a linear evolutionary sequence (this inconsistency, like Wilber's "Two Truths" advaitism in general, is never explained.)

An Integral Philosophy?
It might be argued that Wilber's integral system is not truely integral, as Wilber fails to unify the quadrants (the holon always being forever fourfold), and has to rely on a Two Truths style crypto-dualism (the relative vs the transcendental) to get to the One. Each quadrant has a quite distinct gradation or chain of being, and these only diverge further and further - there is no unifying principle at the end to tie it all together
Christian de Quincey in his on-line criticism argues that Wilber fails to address the "hard" mind-body problem. This is not to say that he denies unity - in fact he is a firm monist - but he sees the overcoming of duality (such as the "hard" mind-body problem) as only possible through a transcendent realisation of an advaitin-mahayanist sort. He says: "I maintain that any sort of genuine and immediate intersubjectivity can only be derived from nondual consciousness or nondual Spirit." [see Do Critics Misrepresent My Position? - A Test Case from a Recent Academic Journal]
Much as the advaitin-mahayanist monism at least provides a transcendental resolution to the Mind-Body problem, it does not provide an empirical solution. A serious obstacle here, I would suggest, is Wilber's bias towards "Da-friendly" monistic metaphysics. With esoteric teachings that could provide a resolution of the ungainly Double Dualism of Wilber IV either ignored or misunderstood (because they would go against Da's and his own understanding, and the compartmentalisation of genuine spiritual teachers and esotericists in only one of the four quadrants, Wilber remains bound by the Two Truths paradigm of Advaita Vedanta and Madhyamika Buddhism.

Where is Consciousness mapped?
To create a unified system of knowledge, one needs some of precise methodology, and Wilber's approach, as intriguing as it is, has a number of problems in it. There is also a certain arbitrariness to his taxonomy. In his unification of all knowledge, Wilber associates seminal thinkers with each of the quadrants. So one would expect scientists to go in the upper right quadrant, sociologists in the lower left, and so on. However, here Wilber makes a surprising error. Have a look at the following tabulation and see if you can see what is wrong with it.

Yes, that's right, those philosopher-mystics like Aurobindo and Plotinus who explained literally everything, and like Buddha who taught the way of liberation, are placed in the same box (upper left) as Piaget (developmental psychology) and Freud and Jung (psychoanalysis and the unconscious)! It almost seems as though Wilber, in undertaking his completely valid critique of the fragmented, specialised, postmodernist approach to knowledge, has himself becomes a postmodern relativist. The Absolute Reality that Plotinus and Aurobindo clearly described, and Buddha pointed towards with his anti-metaphysical pragmatism, has been exiled to one of the four quadrants, the one that is also about psychology (shades of Freudian reductionist and Jungian quasi-reductionist approach to mysticism!) Absolute Consciousness is now just one thing among many, and the basic principle even of Monism is lost. Is it any wonder that he was to later retreat from metaphysics to a more Mahayanist (Madyamika and Yogachara) sort of teaching? He had painted himself into a corner!
Yet the above quandary can be so simply resolved. All Wilber has to do is place a circle in the middle of his AQAL mandala, to represent the Origin from which the four dualistic quadrants have emanated, and locate Buddha's, Plotinus', and Aurobindo's teachings there. Freud, Jung, and Piaget would very correctly be grouped together in the Individual Subjective quadrant (the psyche), and there would be no reductionist confusion of Absolute Consciousness with psychology.

A One-Track Linear Sequence
Despite the introduction of states (temporary states of consciousness), lines (multiple development of the various parts of one's being), levels (evolutionary attainment), and waves (cultural-collective) in the AQAL model, this philosophical construct still retains the same weakness of Wilber II; it is rigidly linear. The problem is that there is only one road from primordial consciousness ("pleromatic") to highest enlightenment ("ultimate"). Even though the different parts of the being, and individuals verses the collective, can travel this separately, they still only can go in the one direction, and they still have to follow all the same signposts. The overall impression is of a sort of cosmic clockwork, like the evolutionary-occult cosmologies of Steiner and Leadbeater, with their rigid series of Rounds, Root Races, Sub Races, and so on, but here applied to individual and social development. Throughout, the rational bias of secular western civilization is maintained - the primitive magical-mythic "Phantasmic-Emotional" and "Rep-Conop" stages are superseded by the rational logical "Formop" stage, and from there one progresses to the "Psychic" nature mysticism (the Judeao-Christian misconception of "pantheism" as an inferior state), then the more developed theistic religious (deity) mysticism of the "Subtle" stage. This is in turn superseded by the monistic (Advaitin-Mahayana) unitary realisation of the "causal", which itself is surpassed by a few great beings with access to the Zen and Mahamudra-like "Ultimate", thus reflecting the transhumanist bias for impersonal monism over theism, and the very worldy interpretation of Zen (Mountains look like Mountains again, so the mystical experience does not threaten one's comprehension of the world). As Arvan Harvat points out:
"(Wilber's) central fault is that he tries to perspectivize all human effort and physical evolution as ladders leading towards unitary mysticism. Mozart or Napoleon are not "ladders" to Nagarjuna, and neither is Luria. This is preposterous condescending attitude of an, as Polish writer Milosz would say, "captive mind"."
Arvan Harvat - Correspondence, June 2004
Nor should realisation and liberation always be the same; in fact it is ridiculous to assume a single state of "Ultimate". As Sri Aurobindo states
" In liberation the individual self realises itself as the One (that is yet Many). It may plunge into the One and merge or hide itself in its bosom - that is the laya of the Adwaita; it may feel its oneness and yet as part of the Many that is One enjoy the Divine, that is the Dwaitadwaita liberation; it may lay stress on its Many aspect and be possessed by the Divine, the Visishtadwaita or go on playing with Krishna in the eternal Vrindavan, the Dwaita liberation. Or it may, even being liberated, remain in the Lila or manifestation or descend into it as often as it likes. The Divine is not bound by human philosophies - it is free in its play and free in its essence."
Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, vol. I p.315

The Limit of the Rational Mind?
In short, the impression I get from all this (and please correct me if I'm wrong here) is that Ken Wilber went as far as the mental faculty, unaided by cosmic gnosis, could go. Although he has an excellent insight into Pure Consciousness Unmanifest Absolute and Monism in itself - as expressed in Advaita, Mahayana Buddhism, and the teachings of Adidam, this in itself does not allow him to overcome the double dualism inherent in even the Koestlerian aspect of his AQAL model. As Arvan Harvat notes in his perceptive review/critique [A Glance at Ken Wilber's "A Brief History of Everything"], this predisposition for non-dual visions of Reality prevents Wilber from seeing the richness and profundity of the more nuanced and complex doctrines of Hermetic, Rosicrucian, Lurianic Kabbalistic and other esoteric teachings. I agree that in those representatives of the Western Wisdom tradition, with their emphasis on the way in which the One becomes the Many, and for that matter also in Indian emanationist doctrines like Kashmir Shiavism, and a truer understanding of the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, that the solution to the problem of the One and the Many is to be found.

"Spirituality is a style"

2010-04-25T21:43:00.001-05:00

ZEN is expensive. The flattering Groove pants, Lululemon’s answer to Spanx, may set Luluheads, the devoted followers of the yoga-apparel brand, back $108. Manduka yoga mats, favored for their slip resistance and thickness, can reach $100 for a limited-edition version. Drop-in classes at yoga studios in New York are edging beyond $20 a session, which quickly adds up, and the high-end Pure Yoga, a chain with two outposts in Manhattan, requires a $40 initiation fee, and costs $125 to $185 a month.

Yoga's New Wave

I am the Second Person

2010-04-25T21:37:00.002-05:00

I do wish to address the question of hierarchies and the world of betters and I am willing to concede that Wilber is better than me. Let's just get that out of the way. Boy, it feels good to admit that. I have no doubt that he and others who have been to the brink of experience know something more than I do, but in that respect I have to revert to the advice I got as a little boy when I was worried about an asteroid striking the earth and killing everything, or that the sun would explode, you know real cosmological disasters, and that advice is that it's no use worrying about it. It will happen or it won't but you still have to brush your teeth. Still I wonder about the fact that, added up, I spend more than one full day every year brushing my teeth. That worries me.

Reading Wilber, I was reminded of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. When the main character finally finds the answer to the ultimate question of Life the Universe and Everything and it turns out to be 42. Finding the question is the hard part. This is the same issue I have with this sort of categorizing. It's fine, and I guess he has done the homework on it, in the end, and it creates a lot of nice charts and graphic work. While I realize the merits of taking a universal approach to living, I'm not sure if the technique really means anything. It's like we plug all the elements of individual cultures into a supercomputer and "poof!" we have the answer! Yes, these are the common themes of world knowledge and wisdom. Okay, but if you subscribe to any one of the individual strains, don't you already have that wisdom? And then isn't it the difference that makes the meaning, not the similarity? Perhaps I am hopelessly relegated to cultural relativism, but I think perhaps we are all different. And I'm not sure I see a problem with that. Again, Wilbur is farther along than I am.

This leads me to my other trouble with Wilber. Let me get this straight, on page 66, he says "We is technically 1st person plural but if you and I are communicating, then your 2nd person and my 1st person are part of this extraordinary 'we.' Thus, 2nd person is sometimes indicated as 'you/we', or 'thou/we', or sometimes just 'we'. So we can therefore simplify 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person as 'I', 'we' and 'it'." Great. No, wait...Have we just gotten rid of "you"? While I am admittedly not a linguist, I have a general grasp of English, and I have taken French, Latin, Italian and a little Spanish (and a little rudimentary work on POV in writing classes), and in none of these languages, as far as I can tell, do they translate the 2nd person as "we". Aha, but Kelly said that Wilber is encyclopedic in his knowledge of everything, so I guess I may have to accept that "sometimes", in some languages and cultures, "2nd person is indicated as 'we'." Or else Wilber is so far along integral vision that he can change the rules of grammar. Still, where did that 2nd person go? Apparently the 2nd person has melted into the grand "we", the universal, but why does he still call it the 2nd person? Why can't he just go straight to the 1st person plural, like we were all taught? Why is it important to eliminate the "you"? Or is the major point that there is no "you", that all that exists is an all-encompassing "I"? I think this is getting dangerously close to solipsism, and while I don't know if that is bad, I don't know if I agree with that...It seems that an monotheism would say 1st person plural, but solipsist would say 2nd person.

I just realize that this post is snarkier than perhaps I mean it, and I'm sorry for that, but I think I need to get farther along the integral path to eliminate that element of my personality. Oh, but I just did it again. Or was it we? And again, I find myself brushing my teeth.

Writing prompt: Piaget writ large

2010-04-23T09:45:00.007-05:00

I tend to suspect that when scholars offer hierarchal models of anything, (1) the models as much create their phenomena as describe it, and (2) that the authors are always at the top of whatever heap they've created. Of course, this latter point is partly built into the notion of hierarchal models as innovated in modern social science by Piaget, but, of course, owing as much to the Great Chain of Being. That is, a developmental/hierarchal model can only be seen from the summit -- folks at "lower" stages cannot perceive the higher, but higher stages always have available the lower stages' perceptual tools. This places, e.g., Ken Wilber in much the same position in regard to you as a parent and their teenager: the parent knows the teenager's crisis (whatever it is) is temporary, and, however painful at the time, is kind of like practice for adult crises. But it is also true that the perceptive teenager realizes that in some sense he or she is not being taken seriously, and it pisses him or her off. (Cf., guru.)

At the same time, as Wilber has (to my mind persuasively) argued, as much as our "green" liberal mindset doesn't like it, the world isn't flat, some things are better than others, some points of view superior, some perspectives more powerful. For a fact, the parent has a superior (not in the evaluative sense, but in the "I can see more from here" sense) point of view on the teenager's travails. Looking back on my teenage romances, it does now seem a little pretend, and a lot like rehearsal. At the time, though, I thought I was being serious.

Lots of things have happened to undermine Piaget's view of children (although no view has displaced it): it's been shown that many of the developmental tasks younger children aren't supposed to be able to do, they can do if you explain it in a way they understand; Lev Vygotsky's insights, as they have gradually become known in the West, recontextualize the whole system out of stages and more into a smooth process of the child's development of an interior life. It looks like, from this view, that children are certainly not little adults, but neither are they all that different than us, cognitively speaking. They think and process in much the same way as adults, although they do it out loud and with less of a base of experience to draw on.

Anyway, Wilber is great at offering hierarchies and models. What do you think? Do these models reflect something that actually exists in the world, or does the model organize the phenomena into it's own image? Where do you think you are developmentally, according to Wilber? Are you OK with that? To what extent (or, better, when) does someone's allegedly superior point of view (which, by definition, can't really be communicated) convince you that he or she knows better than you what you need? (To rephrase that, is it possible that Rogers, or Wilber, or Ram Dass, do know what you need to do, and that you can't see it because you haven't crossed whatever developmental threshold is necessary to see it? Me, in effect, to my kid: "as the adult, I know better.")

Re: Gabrielle's most recent post

2010-04-23T09:32:00.000-05:00

Awesome, non-embeddable video.

Cutting through culture-meme materialism

2010-04-23T09:27:00.002-05:00

This is from Leo Babauta:

minimalism, rethunk

As many of you know, I’ve been passionate about minimalism for awhile now, but as the trend towards simplicity and minimalism has grown, it’s given me pause for thought.

The minimalism trend has had certain elements that leave some readers with a bad taste in their mouths: elements of hype and salesmanship, elements of obsession, elements of one-upsmanship, a focus on aesthetics, a focus on possessions to the point of obsession.

I have to confess I’m as guilty of these things as anyone else, so please don’t take this as an attack on anyone. If anything, it’s simply me, holding up a mirror and giving myself a close inspection.

It’s true that when we obsess over what (few) possessions we have, it has a hold on us just as much as if we were hoarders. I publish my list of 50 things not so much to obsess over every little thing I have, but as a way to say: limits are good things. And as a way to inspire others, to show them that it’s possible.

But still. Obsession over possessions is unhealthy, and it needs to be rethunk.

Minimalism, as discussed on minimalism and simplicity blogs, can also become a game of one-upsmanship — showing how little we have (it all fits in a backpack!), how far we’ve come (not only have I given up my car, but my house and my computer too!), how cool our setup (my desktop has fewer icons than yours). I’ve done it, and if other writers are honest, they’ve done it too, even if they didn’t mean to.

Let’s let go of these obsessions with the perfect setup, with showing simple desks and desktops and software and so on.

And that brings me to minimalism, rethunk: we need to let go.

Let go of obsessions, and embrace the moment.

Let go of salesmanship and hype, and be content.

Let go of one-upsmanship and competitiveness, and just share and encourage.

Let go of control, and embrace what comes.

Let go of perfection, and just do.

zenhabits

The Art of Not Making (Art)

2010-04-22T14:27:00.006-05:00

This post I hope will be the first of a two-part post on what any of these "be here now," instructive texts have to say about writing and, in general, art of any kind. If not, and I don't end up writing at all about writing, it will have to be "what it is."

Anyway, I think I see some obvious (to the point of being nearly indistinguishable) similarities between Trungpa and Roberts', as well as Reynolds' view of the self in relation to another. Both Trungpa and Reynolds, for example, talk about not doing anything purposefully, in the sense of having any idea of why it is you're doing what you're doing and, more importantly, what it took, attitude-wise, to get to that point, besides the fact that it's what needs to be done. Both too have some interesting and controversial views on psychotherapy, in terms of its addressing mostly fiction; some confrontation or dilemma from (where else?) the past, for the sake of honoring what distracts us in the present (even if it's crucial to our development that we sometimes be distracted). All that is to say that I don't have my notes, so this post will have to be a kind of setup to the next one, in which I hope to discuss both Roberts' and Reynolds' work in relation to writing. My guess is that in shining a light on the subject with all three texts, the texts themselves will start to carry on a conversation. For now though I want Trungpa to face up to what is undoubtedly a stupid question: what is creativity?

It might help to rephrase that as "what is fiction?", what is "separate from reality" in other words, which, according to Trungpa, includes any act of interpretation, needless to say, any act followed by a preposition. "It is" he says, "a matter of seeing the basic quality of the situation, as it is, rather than trying to do something with it" (101). This, according to Trungpa, is the "creative way," akin to walking around a museum and not touching anything.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a film I thought I would like (my first mistake) called "Hot Tub Time Machine." The premise is brilliant, but the film itself is disjointed, to the extent that is isn't what it very clearly was and then is again at various moments throughout its entirety. My point is that it doesn't pay attention to the circumstances of the reality it purports to be a part of one minute and in (not) doing so creates, invents, adds onto said reality the next, resulting in a story that is not only unbelievable, but irretrievable; it ceases to exist. The writers, not the events or characters themselves, are of course to blame for expecting wonderful and terrible things to happen, and so ignoring the reality of four men at a ski-lodge in the '80s, consequently taking them, and us, out of the picture, so to speak.

Similarly, Trungpa addresses creativity in relation to faith, writing, "Blind faith has no inspiration. It is not creative because your faith and yourself have never made any connection" (23). The use of the word "faith" here would I think be interchangeable with and equally profound as the use of the word "art." Though interestingly it would imply a sort of fracture between "art" and "creativity." The former perhaps being the idea, the interpretation, the latter the reality, the "space" which "contains the tremendous precision of being able to work with the situations in it" (85).

But can such a reality exist in the mind of a writer? Or is the writer too invested in the part of a "watcher", "keep[ing] the whole picture together," thus reinforcing the dichotomies that allegedly need not exist between... anything? Isn't the relationship (by nature of its being a relationship) between writer and subject problematic? Without getting too mathematical, it will be interesting to make sense of how the wisdom of this book speaks to what is most certainly a reality: literature. How, without setting up the writer and the work like variables on opposite ends of an equation, delaying each others' inevitable cancellation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1FnYvk6KP0&feature=channel

Flawed-but-gifted

2010-04-22T14:08:00.004-05:00

Spurred by your excellent posts, I continue to think about these "flawed-but-gifted" men who have authored a couple of the texts I picked. I admit I didn't really think about it when I picked them (as a New Critical trainee, I don't think much about authors), but, along with Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, this new guy -- I haven't really heard the story yet -- umm, Ben Roethlisberger, Salinger and Trungpa (and Reynolds if you want to include "pricks") certainly fill the bill. I was interested in Salinger's situation, not because of the scandal part, but because of the recluse and refusal to publish part. I deemed that relevant to his conception of "self." The matter of authorial presence, and whether genius excuses misbehavior, is fascinating, but not really central to my original idea, so I didn't really give Trungpa any thought. (I do remember all the arguments flying around at the time. It put a lot of feminist Buddhists I knew in a real bind. I wonder if this sort of thing is part of what led to Toni Packer's apostasy, although she has never mentioned it as far as I know, and, after all, she was a Kapleau student, not a Trungpa student. I think.)

My thoughts, anyway:

1. Mostly, they get a pass. Tiger is pretty much rehabilitated (he still has his Nike sponsorship, is still golfing, is still married to a supermodel) -- how long was that? two months? half a year? -- Michael's business seems to have been swept under the carpet, and, while Roethlisberger is being punished, it seems pretty minor. Apparently, if you look appropriately contrite and go to six weeks of counseling of some kind or another, you're good. (I forgot about Kobe.) In fact, Tyson is the only sports figure I can think of who managed to get run out of the business. And that might be just because he lost his edge in the ring. Trungpa and Salinger, in my view, are a little like the steroid guys (you can treat women any old way, but drugs are bad), with an asterisk next to their legacies. I wonder if it bugs them in whatever afterlife they live in. But mostly, a pass.

2. George Harrison: "It doesn't matter if you're the greatest guitar player in the world, if you're not enlightened, forget it."

3. Does this ever happen to women? Not nearly so much, maybe. At least not the sex part. But I guess Mother Theresa got debunked by Hitchens. J. Z. Knight was accused of some pretty horrendous Gurdjieff-like antics. OK, maybe so. But if Annie Dillard is found to have had multiple inappropriate liaisons with pool boys, I shall be disappointed. I mean, I kind of expect her to be on her own planet, but I'd be disappointed by tawdry.

4. On the one hand, it seems fair to ask spiritual leaders to model their program. On the other hand, it seems unusual for them to do so. I don't know if that means we need to give up on spiritual leaders, or give up on the expectations. It looks like we've already given up on our authors, sports stars, and politicians.

5. Flawed but gifted is better than just flawed, I guess, although the gifted part kind of enables the flawed part.

6. I know quite a few quiet, spiritual people who live calm lives of basic decency. None of them are famous.

7. This isn't really going anywhere, is it? I'll stop.

get over it

2010-04-22T13:15:00.005-05:00

In preparing for my classroom enhancement last week Kelly had given me the option to present before, in the middle, or after the film, or to instead focus on Trungpa. Not quite knowing what angle I was going to approach from I did a little digging on Trungpa as well as my eventual topic of Bodhidharma. There seem to be some similarities between the character of these two men. As I began the reading then for this week I was not doing so with a completely blank slate, as Trungpa mentions in his book about seeking a guru, one does so based more often on reputation than on chance encounter. I was viewing this text through the filter of the little bit of biographical information that I had read in advance, especially the following information about a scandal that occurred during one of Trungpa's retreats in Colorado a few years after this book was published (copied and pasted from the Wikipedia entry):

An incident that became a cause célèbre among some poets and artists was the Halloween party at the Fall, 1975, Snowmass Colorado Seminary, a 3-month period of intensive meditation and study of the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana vehicles of Tibetan Buddhism. The poet W. S. Merwin had arrived that summer at the Naropa Institute and been told by Allen Ginsberg that he ought to visit seminary. Although he had not gone through the several years worth of study and preparatory mind training required, Merwin was insistent he attend, and Trungpa eventually granted his request – along with his girlfriend as well. At seminary the couple stayed to themselves. At the Halloween party, after many, including Trungpa himself, had taken off their clothes, Merwin was asked to join the event, but refused. On Trungpa's orders his Vajra Guard forced entry into the poet's locked and barricaded room; brought him and his girlfriend, Dana Naone, against their will, to the party; and eventually stripped them of all their clothes, onlookers ignoring Naone's pleas for help and for someone to call the police.^[57] The next day Trungpa asked Merwin and Naone to remain at the Seminary as either students or guests. They agreed to stay for several more weeks to hear the Vajrayana teachings (which centered around samaya^{[citation needed]}), with Trungpa's promise that "there would be no more incidents," and Merwin and Naone's assertion that "it would be with no guarantees of obedience, trust, or personal devotion to him."^[58] They left immediately after the last talk. In a 1977 letter to members of a Naropa class investigating the incident, Merwin concluded,

My feelings about Trungpa have been mixed from the start. Admiration, throughout, for his remarkable gifts; and reservations, which developed into profound misgivings, concerning some of his uses of them. I imagine, at least, that I've learned some things from him (though maybe not all of them were the things I was 'supposed' to learn) and some through him, and I'm grateful to him for those. I wouldn't encourage anyone to become a student of his. I wish him well.^[59]

Author Jeffery Paine commented on this incident that "Seeing Merwin out of step with the rest, Trungpa could have asked him to leave, but decided it was kinder to shock him out of his aloofness."^[60] However, he also notes the outrage felt in particular by poets such as Robert Bly and Kenneth Rexroth, who began calling Trungpa a fascist.^[61]

We can conclude from this that Trungpa is far from perfect (as also stated by Tom in his research). Does this make him a bad teacher? In the text he indicates that all gurus are also men, and as men they are not necessarily more high--just more highly sought for their collected "wisdom". I put wisdom in quotation marks because it could also be information, or life experiences, or any number of reasons why one would seek out a person to interact and learn from. It seems that the thing that individuates guru/ teachers from others is an understanding that collecting the information isn't the be all and end all of the work. Just as in the ox drawings, part of the path of enlightenment is to move past the "enlightened" position and return to daily life.

So, what lesson do we take from this? Shawn had a good point with his Star Wars reference: "Do or do not, there is no try." But I think that another point to be made is that it is necessary to simply get over yourself. A reoccurring theme in finding enlightenment is an emptying out of oneself. It would seem, from one point of view, that Trungpa during his Colorado seminary in 1975 was trying to do that with the poet and his girlfriend--they had insisted they come to the seminary, but were not engaging with it and he tried to force/ shock them into compliance. That's one point of view--in another he is a fascist dick on a weird sexual power trip.

In Spiritual Materialism Trungpa showcases two gurus. The both endured and inflicted hardships on the people that wanted to study with them. It might be material or financial or it might be physical and emotional--the reason was to break the interested student: break them of their material grounding, their preconceived notions of themselves and the world, and from their ideas about the guru and his teachings. One of the gurus depicted lived in poverty, to help break his potential student he sent him to another guru who not only lived in more poverty but also lived amongst many dogs--the student had to give up the pretense of wanting to learn in order to actually learn. The same went of the notes that he took of his encounters, he placed a lot of value in what he'd written down, but after his jealous companion sabotaged them he realized that he'd only written down what he didn't understand and that the things that he did lived within him. When he returned home to his wife and children and their farm potential students sought him out, but he continued living as a farmer and as a husband and a father and a man.

So, where does this leave us when looking at a teacher and indiscretions? In the case of Trungpa, he seemed to be a bully who was addicted to drugs and alcohol and had copious amounts of sex. He also profited from being a guru. Does that negate his teachings? We can say that some teachers shouldn't be around students, just as some spiritual leaders shouldn't be in places of influence--but a Catholic priest who is a pederast is different from a Catholic priest who is an alcoholic. A Catholic priest who is a Nazi collaborator is different from one who is a conservative dogmatic. There are degrees. Trungpa's teachings don't seem to make him too big of a hypocrite--gurus (a term that he says is overused) are also people with flaws. They are guiding people on this path while also being on the path themselves. If part of the contract of the teaching is that you are going to be beat with sticks (as described by Kelly) then there is really no use complaining that you're being beat with sticks if that is the path that you are choosing to take. If it is not right for you, choose another path. It's part of the contract. Now, if the contract is for peaceful quiet meditation and the teacher begins to beat you, then that is breaking the contract.

But, to get away from the character of the teacher and back to the teachings, once again: is there merit? Not highly documented and academically supported postulating ... no, is there merit in the guidelines of what is being laid out before the potential student? One must choose the path that one takes, one must be prepared for the information that one receives, one must be willing to accept that being human is part of being enlightened. This isn't a course that is promising a mythical paradise for "good" behavior and threatening to withhold it for "bad" behavior. It is about understanding and transcendence. Is it right or wrong? I don't know, but there seems to be some merit in the journey.

Now, there was somewhere else that I was going to go with this entry as well ... but, it's gone for now. Perhaps later.

Not Exactly On The Road to Shambhala

2010-04-22T12:18:00.003-05:00

I find it difficult to apply Trungpa to any of our earlier readings, because I am unable to apprehend the necessary stance. Trungpa writes that "If we really want to learn and see the experience of truth, we have to be where we are" (81). I struggle to grasp that concept without honoring the importance of where we were. But more to the root of the problem, for me, is the denial of self, or ego. Trungpa insists that the idea of the development of a self "is illusory, the mistaken belief in a 'self' or 'ego.' Confused mind is inclined to view itself as a solid, ongoing thing, but it is only a collection of tendencies, events" (145). We have intelligence, even a primordial intelligence, which generates the concept of "I;" "I is the product of intellect, the label which unifies into one whole the disorganized and scattered development of ego" (151). So, tendencies and events coagulate into an ego which the intellect labels "I" and from which we make the intellectual leap to "I am." And this is, I believe, the burden of self under which we labor fruitlessly and neurotically, according to Trungpa.

In order to alleviate this state of neurosis, we must come to (without striving) the realization that the walls separating us from the world, or the other, are a dualistic prison of our own making. In order to become truly compassionate we must become fluid with the world. We must grasp the origin of suffering, which is born from the struggle to perpetually improve our selves.

So I have two claims I need to accept in order to understand Trungpa: The self is nothing more than a pile of events and tendencies, and suffering is caused by our struggle to "maintain and enhance ourselves" (180). Trungpa would probably see me as a victim of thought-bondage, but I am unable to agree that the self is nothing but an illusory construct; Trungpa has not convinced me otherwise, though I have tried hard to let him. I also eschew the notion that the origin of suffering is born solely from our struggle to improve ourselves, though no doubt these efforts often do lead to pain, disappointment and sorrow. Still, I think of the nearly 1,000 homeless teenagers waifing through the Twin Cities as I write, and I wonder how their suffering lies in their efforts at self-improvement. I'm not trying to be judgmental, but I do believe that once again, this path to enlightenment is a privileged journey, best taken when one's more immediate needs are secured or tended to by others.

If I must review another reading in light of my experience with Trungpa, I will say without irony that Paul Fussell comes to mind. Like Fussell, Trungpa's Weltanschauung has levels, stages and classifications. There are heaps, categories and definitions specific to his writing. And while Fussell is certainly funny at times, I continue to believe that he is every bit as serious about his societal structuring as Trungpa is about his path to enlightenment. Of course, Trungpa would say that so much of our problems lie in our social systems and our posturing; Fussell would no doubt consign Trungpa to the X class. Nevertheless, both men, I think, fall prey to their own anchoring heuristics. I look forward to our discussion tonight.

"we finally discover that we are totally lost..." (64)

2010-04-22T09:47:00.002-05:00

Presently, in my other class (The Creative Process) we are working on essays chronicling our own creative processes and how they relate the processes presented by some of the authors on our reading list. In an effort to combine that train of thought, which I can’t seem to shake, and the topic for today’s blog-posts, I’ll just translate the “Creative Process” into a “Way of Living” because for those of us (and I assume that includes many of us in this class) who consider ourselves creators in one way or another, often our way of life must be conducive to creativity.
The essay that I ended up writing focused mostly on my rejection of the Zen Buddhist way of thought that encourages us to “live in the moment,” “be in the now,” “be where you are,” ad infinitum. All of the sudden I felt myself pushing back asking, But what about the past? What about the future? Why is it so detrimental to use now to contextualize then? I have spent much of my life searching (literally and figuratively) for some sort of meaning, an attempt to be good, as Trungpa puts it. And in my past I’ve put into effect some of the options explored this semester: hallucinogenic drug use (which usually left me giggling over nothing and chain smoking cigarettes), college (in progress), travel (constant), Christianity (No thank you), Judaism(No thank you) to name a few….. but one endeavor which I have never and probably would never explore is working intimately with a guru, as outlined by Trungpa. That just seems really…. strange to me.
As we discussed last week, it is really difficult to accept the wisdom handed to me in a book (that has been bound printed published edited illustrated and bound), or from a guru who is spending his time teaching enlightenment instead of experiencing enlightenment. I really like the idea from last week of the enlightened one resigning his enlightenment and blending in, unidentifiable, for the rest of his days. I just have an automatic rejection of someone saying, “Look at how ENLIGHTENED I am, guys!!!”
I’ll leave this brief since I am “enriching” class tonight… but I think that in many cases, we can find momentary enlightenment through turns of phrase, pages in books, notes in songs, sections of poetry and so forth, and it is a bigger service to ourselves to just stores these things away into our consciousnesses until they are eventually called to the front lines for some reason or another. My problem is that when I am under the distinct impression that whoever I am hearing, seeing, or reading is distinctly trying to enlighten me, I am quick to brush off that person for any number of arbitrary reasons. (Like Tom, I did some research on Trungpa and he nearly immediately became undesireable as a spiritual advisor).

To try to tie this together, if enlightenment really includes giving up one's past, living fully in the moment, and being constantly present... then it just doesn't even sound that nice to me personally. I'd have to wonder... why even ever try to experience beauty if it can only exist for the moment of it's conception. I want to retain it forever. Does that make me spiritually materialistic? Unconstructive? Invisible?

Olivia's post

2010-04-22T09:18:00.002-05:00

For some reason the blog isn't letting me comment on Olivia's post even when logged in. So I'll do it here. I really love the connections that you made between Trungpa and Franny and Zooey. I thought they were really insightful and compassionate. Thank you.

Life as life is

2010-04-22T09:11:00.001-05:00

When we read the Reynolds book, my thought was that there are a great number of similarities between Buddhism and Reynolds Constructive Living concepts. Shawn has pointed many of these out, but the primary similarity seems to be that of living in the moment and doing the work of the moment rather than dwelling on the past or future. So why did I say that Reynolds is what the Buddha would be like if the Buddha were a prick? That comment came from the ways in which Reynolds and Trungpa (CL and Buddhism) differ and from the places where I see Reynolds stuck in his own form of "spiritual" materialism.

The first and most marked difference I find between Reynolds and Trungpa is that of judgment. Trungpa is clear that judgment is a tool of the ego – it is making solid what is fluid and it is buying into the dualistic approach of this versus that. Judgment is part of the grasping and attachment that is the root of suffering (Second Noble Truth). To truly be in the moment and accept life as it really is means also accepting the ego as it is. Time and time again, particularly in the Q and A portion of the book, Trungpa tells us to stop trying, stop beginning, and just be. Although I must say I became pretty weary of that damn monkey analogy, all those pages dedicated to the development of the ego and the journey through the skandhas was to point out that ego is part of the human condition. Only the completely enlightened would be free from ego and all its different neuroses. To judge this is to refuse to accept life as life is. In fact, the Bodhisattva path is built on the foundation of having lived/passed through the five skandhas. A Bodhisattva would not be a Bodhisattva if it were not for his/her experience with living through his hell, his hungry ghosts, his animal stage, etc.

The counterpart of judgment is compassion. In short, Reynolds seems to lack compassion and Trungpa is full of it. If we are miserable because of our ego, neuroses and attachments, we are simply miserable and that is life as life is at that moment. When we are done being miserable – done nursing that state of our ego and neuroses – we will move into new stages. Where I differ from Shawn is that I don't think that Trungpa is really saying "just do it." I think he is saying to open yourself – compassionately – to where you are so that where you are can be transformed. Gritting your teeth and pushing against life as life is lacks compassion, is full of judgment and is its own type of spiritual materialism.

Ultimately, I think that Reynolds himself provides an excellent example of someone who is caught up in the spiritual materialism that Trungpa is describing. He is immensely burdened by his ego and grasps his ideology with such force and hunger and "speed" that he seems closed off to life as life is. Rather than opening himself to life and observing how life is with compassion and appreciation, he is quick to give a name to what he sees, measure it against his ideology and judge it with brutal dualism as being good or bad. With this level of attachment, he will continue to suffer.

Don't take the brown acid!

2010-04-21T21:10:00.002-05:00

So after Ram Dass, I both wanted to sit down and drop a bunch of acid and to start meditating. As it is probably a rather irresponsible thing to drop a bunch of acid, and even so I think others make a compelling argument why that doesn't necessarily lead to enlightenment but to long hair and beads, not to mention the fact that I am still scarred from watching the Woodstock documentary and hearing the announcement about the "bad brown acid". In addition, burlap robes are impractical in our climate. Perhaps when global warming comes to a head I will be able to wear flowing robes and be quite comfortable. They might even be the fashion of choice.

Oh, but I am missing the point. I am wrapped up in things that are conflicting with enlightenment, and I am not talking about robes. I am focused on image, thinking about long hair and beads. I am focused on the past, with my thoughts about Woodstock. I am cloaked in fear about the bad acid. I am focused on the future with my concerns about global warming. I am even concerned with sensory comfort. All these things are detrimental. I have a lot of work to do if I wish to follow the path of the Buddha.

So perhaps I should meditate about my shortcomings. But this apparently will not really help. The biggest problem, I suppose, is that I would expect to get enlightenment through meditation, when the meditation will not "give" me anything especially when I want it to. Only when I don't want it to will there be an opportunity for it. There are many of these paradoxes in meditation. Even the spontaneous act of being is troubling. You cannot walk to the corner of the room to meditate without expectations and thinking about the future, i.e. you expect that the corner of the room will be there when you reach it, you expect that the air you breathe is not poison, you expect that time will unravel forwards rather than backwards, you expect that gravity will not suddenly reverse and drop you on the ceiling. These might not be conscious expectations, but I think they are inherent to human existence. Let's assume that these expectations are even let go by the "living in the moment" person, I still think there is a hierarchy of "betters" that goes along with any sort of activity. It is better for me to step toward the meditation mat than not, better for me to breathe than not, whether it is voluntary or involuntary, better to live the path of the Buddha than not, even if it is not garnering any sort of spiritual hierarchy, there is a hierarchy of actions. This is even without the assumption of an outside observer. If we do not prioritize action then it is equally beneficial to walk around in circles as it is to follow the Buddha. And if this is the case, then why are there paths to follow? I think the main expectation is that the path leads somewhere, even if it is in circles. Even if it is nowhere. Is it possible to get rid of expectation? I suppose it is, if we grant that everything we take for granted is part of an illusory world. But then isn't the expectation that we will someday find the true nature of reality? And if we then grant there is a "true nature", then aren't we saying one thing is right and one is wrong, and thus dealing with an ego? All of this makes me want to drop some acid, and puts me back where I started from. But still, there's that brown acid...

convinced you've" joined the side of 'right'?"

2010-04-21T13:32:00.004-05:00

I'm quite interested by what Kelly said about Trungpa's advisement/description of Zen meditation being more mature in nature than the perspectives that have been exemplified in some our previous texts. Trungpa talks about one of the mistakes of the enlightenment-seeking individual is to try to store up particular experiences, to accumulate symbols to help the individual maintain the facade that he or she has "joined the side of 'right' "(63). He talks about the rituals or motions, if you will, that people go through in order to convince themselves that they are on the path of truth, when in actuality, these "collections" of beauty, knowledge, awareness, ritual, etc. are more simply more obstacles, more layers, that will eventually need to be painfully peeled away during the true process of letting go ( of the ego). It seems that he is saying that no matter how earnest a person's intentions/desires are to reach enlightenment, until they recognize this spiritual materialism and learn to let go of what they thought was helping them on their path, they are stuck ( so to speak), and cannot move forward toward enlightenment. This is interesting because I think in our culture religious practice and ritual is emphasized so much ( prayer, church-going, community service) that it seems like you could say that a lot of America Christians (who think they are doing good and on the path to earning their place in heaven) fall victim to this kind of spiritual materialism. Personally, for me, the idea of "letting go" of my ego-driven ambitions seems unfathomable and downright dangerous in our cutthroat society where if you're not trying to make it to the next level like everybody else, you are nothing- or at least you feel like you are nothing: lazy, depressed, incompetent, etc. We have so many negatively connoted words to describe the unambitious. This is a perfect example of why it would be very difficult for many Americans to grasp (let alone absorb) Trungpa's teachings.

To further root this idea of spiritual materialism in example, when Trungpa used the metaphor of the beautiful collection of antiques in the shop, I was reminded of a section in Salinger's Franny and Zooey where Zooey points out Franny's own victimization at the hands of this materialism. He starts by saying to her,

" What do you think you're doing with this Jesus Prayer?... You talk about piling up treasure - money, property, culture, knowledge, and so on and so on....in going ahead with the Jesus Prayer, aren't you trying to lay up some treasure? Something that's every goddamn bit as negotiable as all those other, more material things? Or does the fact that it's a prayer make all the difference?" ( 147)

This part of the novel was very interesting and insightful to me upon my first reading, and now I find this point to be resonating in Trungpa's teachings. Basically Zooey is saying that Franny's obsessive reciting of the Jesus Prayer is closing her off from her potential for openness in the same way that the accumulation of material goods by people closes them off from their potentiality for seeing truth in daily life, for seeing things simply as they are and not through the lenses of the ego. I guess it is to Zooey's credit that she recognizes the deceptive nature of materialism in the 1950's world. However, she fails to recognize that by allowing herself to be paralyzed in the family couch reciting the same prayer over and over again, trying to achieve this ascetic lifestyle, she is indulging in yet another illusion that is blocking the true path to enlightenment.

Just do it!!!

2010-04-21T09:57:00.002-05:00

Cutting through Spiritual Materialism
P.XI The inspiration to find the truth, to see what is real, and to lead a genuine life-the culmination of which can be enlightenment-is what underlies every spiritual journey.
Constructive Living:
p. 84 Reality is truth. To deny that truth is to withhold the important information we need in order to behave in a fitting manner.
Cutting through Spiritual Materialism:
p. 9 The neurotic state of mind is not difficult or impossible to deal with.
Constructive Living:
p. 100 Neurosis is sloppy habits and unrealistic thinking and self-centered attitude.
Cutting through Spiritual Materialism:
p. 19 There is a saying in the Tibetan scriptures: Knowledge must be burned, hammered, and beaten like pure gold. Then one can wear it as an ornament
Constructive Living:
p. 3 It’s important to realize that it takes time and effort to ripen the fruits of life.
I clearly remember the mixed reviews about Constructive Living; the one that sticks out in my mind was the commit about Reynolds being a “prick”. I agree with that, but I also believe that he has a lot of truth to share. I also believe that Cutting through Spiritual Materialism and Constructive Living share one common theme, and that is, “Don’t talk about it, fucking be about it”. Trungpa cut’s through the spiritual B.S. like a surgeon with a scalpel; he cuts away at the things that hinder true spiritual endeavors. He has no time for fluffiness. I get the feeling that there is a sense of urgency in his book. There’s no time for spiritual games, just spirituality. Reynolds on the other hand goes to work like a wild caveman swinging a club. He smashes without concern, ripping and slashing those persons or idea’s that keep us from doing the things we ought to do when it comes to constructive living. In the end I believe they would both agree with the great, small, green one knows as Master Yoda. Just as he told Luke, Do, or do not. There is no try.

The Exhibition of No Self

2010-04-19T18:28:00.004-05:00

I can't put my finger on it now, of course, but at the time of reading I thought this resonated with some of what was brought up last Thursday, especially the last 5-6 paragraphs, in terms of how ambiguous identity is, no matter whose side you're on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/arts/design/16african.html?scp=3&sq=detroit&st=cse

Writing prompt: Cutting through, well, what?

2010-04-17T09:36:00.004-05:00

Rereading this little book, Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, I expected to be mostly interested in the spiritual materialism part, intending to emphasize how self-ness kind of intrudes on everything. So, for instance, you do something nice for somebody and part of your brain -- well, my brain, anyway -- is saying, "Oh, hey, look at me, I'm doing something nice. Aren't I a great person?" And, of course, I'm not just this way around being nice, or around spiritual matters: look at me, I'm being smart, kind, brave, helpful, responsible, holy, mature, artistic, and so on. At the same time, I also see myself posing, resenting, worrying, avoiding, being neurotically anxious, and all of those other things I'd rather not see myself doing, but I kind of hide those away, especially from others as I present myself, but also, of course, I try to keep those things hidden in my self-concept as well, not exactly gone, but out of sight. Sort of like all the junk in the drawers in my living room, all the things stuffed in there so you won't see them when you visit, but also out of my way, too. At times, naturally, this fails, and then I dwell on the less favorable stuff which pretty much amounts to the same thing. If you like, you can reflect on that, although I have no prompt for you. Perhaps I'll just say that the "presentation of self" isn't only for others. I also construct a rather edited view for my own benefit.

What I find that I am more interested in just now, after our discussions of Roberts and Salinger and Reynolds particularly, is what I find to be Trungpa's clear writing about the result of Zen meditation as he sees it. He takes all the woo-woo out of it, is far less impressed by the ecstasies and despair that concern Roberts so, and he demystifies (great word, eh?) the whole business so nicely. I suggest that you take one of our earlier texts -- those three stand out for me, but use whatever you like, including either of the films -- and review them in light of your reading of Trungpa. He seems to me to be so much more mature than any of those three about the matter, much less romantic. (Has he lost anything?) You know, as against, say, "Teddy."

Yaeko Iwasaki's letters

2010-04-16T09:59:00.002-05:00

Alas, I cannot find an online transcription of Yaeko Iwasaki's letters, except as elided by Amazon's "look in this book" feature. However, the day of her great enlightenment, December 22, 1935, is mentioned on a whole lot of "on this day in history" pages, FWIW.

Even the thousand sages do not know of him

2010-04-16T09:37:00.005-05:00

In order:

In Search of the Bull (aimless searching, only the sound of cicadas)

Discovery of the Footprints (a path to follow)

Perceiving the Bull (but only its rear, not its head)

Catching the Bull (a great struggle, the bull repeatedly escapes, discipline required)

Taming the Bull (less straying, less discipline, bull becomes gentle and obedient)

Riding the Bull Home (great joy)

The Bull Transcended (once home, the bull is forgotten, discipline's whip is idle; stillness)

Both Bull and Self Transcended (all forgotten and empty)

Reaching the Source (unconcerned with or without; the sound of cicadas)

Return to Society (crowded marketplace; spreading enlightenment by mingling

Wikipedia.

The text for the tenth stage:

"He closes the thatched gate to his hermitage
so that even the thousand sages do not know of him.
He buries the light of his own knowing
and goes against the tracks left by former sages.
Carrying a gourd, he enters the marketplace; holding his staff, he returns home,
Bestowing Buddhahood on barkeeps and fishmongers."

Here's a very nice rendition -- best I've found on the web so far.

Devo can't get no, should go to the U of MN

2010-04-16T09:23:00.005-05:00

"...baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby..."

Steve Earle ain't never satisfied, should go to the U of MN

2010-04-16T09:17:00.005-05:00

I was born by the railroad tracks
Well the train whistle wailed and i wailed right back
Well papa left mama when i was quite young
He said now "one of these days you're gonna follow me son"

Woh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
I ain't ever satisfied
Woh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
I ain't ever satisfied

Now i had me a woman she was my world
But i ran off with my back street girl
Now my back street woman could not be true
She left me standin' on the boulevard thinkin' bout you

I got an empty feeling deep inside
I'm going over to the other side

Last night i dreamed i made it to the promised land
I was standin' at the gate and i had the key in my hand
Saint peter said "come on in boy, you're finally home"
I said "no thanks pete, i'll just be moving along"

Bellen!

2010-04-15T23:13:00.003-05:00

Bellen! (Click to read.)

Bodhidharma

2010-04-15T15:43:00.004-05:00

Here is a biographical portrait of Bodhidharma compiled via Wikipedia:

Bodhidharma was a Buddhist monk who lived during the early 5th century and is traditionally credited as the transmitter of Zen (Chinese: Chán) to China.

Very little contemporary biographical information on Bodhidharma is extant, and subsequent accounts became layered with legend, but

most accounts agree that he was from the southern region of India, born as a prince to a royal family. Bodhidharma left his kingdom after becoming a Buddhist monk and travelled through Southeast Asia into Southern China and subsequently relocated northwards.

The accounts differ on the date of his arrival, with one early account claiming that he arrived during the Liú Sòng Dynasty (420–479) and later accounts dating his arrival to the Liáng Dynasty (502–557). Bodhidharma was primarily active in the lands of the Northern Wèi Dynasty (386–534). Modern scholarship dates him to about the early 5th century.[1]

Throughout Buddhist art, Bodhidharma is depicted as a rather ill-tempered, profusely bearded and wide-eyed barbarian. He is described as "The Blue-Eyed Barbarian" 藍眼睛的野人 (lán yǎnjīngde yěrén) in Chinese texts.[2]

The Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall (952) identifies Bodhidharma as the 28th Patriarch of Buddhism in an uninterrupted line that extends all the way back to the Buddha himself. D.T. Suzuki contends that Chán's growth in popularity during the 7th and 8th centuries attracted criticism that it had "no authorized records of its direct transmission from the founder of Buddhism" and that Chán historians made Bodhidharma the 28th patriarch of Buddhism in response to such attacks.[3]

Bodhidharma's origins

Though Dàoxuān

(Dàoxuān (Chinese: 道宣; Wade-Giles: Tao-hsüan; CE 596-667) was the Chinese Buddhist monk who wrote both the Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks (續高僧傳 Xù gāosēng zhuàn) and Standard Design for Buddhist Temple Construction.)

wrote that Bodhidharma was "of South Indian Brahman stock," Broughton (Broughton, Jeffrey L. (1999), The Bodhidharma Anthology: The Earliest Records of Zen, Berkeley: University of California Press) notes that Bodhidharma's royal pedigree implies that he was of the Kshatriya warrior caste. Mahajan (1972:705–707) argued that the Pallava dynasty was a Tamilian dynasty and Zvelebil (1987) proposed that Bodhidharma was born a prince of the Pallava dynasty in their capital of Kanchipuram.

Yáng Xuànzhī's eyewitness account identifies Bodhidharma as a Persian (波斯國胡人 bō-sī guó hú rén) from Western Regions (西域 xī yù), and Broughton (1999:54) notes that an Iranian Buddhist monk making his way to North China via the Silk Road is more likely than that of a South Indian master making his way by sea.[20] Broughton (1999:138) also states that the language Yang uses in his description of Bodhidharma is specifically associated with "Central Asia and particularly to peoples of Iranian extraction" and that of "an Iranian speaker who hailed from somewhere in Central Asia". However, Broughton 1999:54 notes that Yáng may have actually been referring to another monk named Boddhidharma, not related to the historical founder of Chan Buddhism.[21]

Bodhidharma's name

The name Bodhidharma is sometimes spelled as "Boddhidharma". His surname was Chadili. Faure (1986) notes that "Bodhidharma’s name appears sometimes truncated as Bodhi, or more often as Dharma (Ta-mo). In the first case, it may be confused with another of his rivals, Bodhiruci." He was named Bodhidharma by his Indian teacher Prajnatara.

Tibetan sources give his name as "Bodhidharmottāra" or "Dharmottara", that is, "Highest teaching (dharma) of enlightenment".[22]

Encounter with Emperor Liang

The Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall tells us that in 527 during the Liang Dynasty, Bodhidharma, the first Patriarch of Chán, visited the Emperor Wu, a fervent patron of Buddhism. The emperor asked Bodhidharma, "How much karmic merit have I earned by ordaining Buddhist monks, building monasteries, having sutras copied, and commissioning Buddha images?" Bodhidharma answered, "None, good deeds done with selfish intent bring no merit." The emperor then asked Bodhidharma, "So what is the highest meaning of noble truth?" Bodhidharma answered, "There is no noble truth, there is only void." The emperor then asked Bodhidharma, "Then, who is standing before me?" Bodhidharma answered, "I know not, Your Majesty."[45]

From then on, the emperor refused to listen to whatever Bodhidharma had to say. Although Bodhidharma came from India to China to become the first patriarch of China, the emperor refused to recognize him. Bodhidharma knew that he would face difficulty in the near future, but had the emperor been able to leave the throne and yield it to someone else, he could have avoided his fate of starving to death.

According to the teaching, Emperor Wu's past life was as a bhikshu. While he cultivated in the mountains, a monkey would always steal and eat the things he planted for food, as well as the fruit in the trees. One day, he was able to trap the monkey in a cave and blocked the entrance of the cave with rocks, hoping to teach the monkey a lesson. However, after two days, the bhikshu found that the monkey had died of starvation.

Supposedly, that monkey was reincarnated into Hou Jing of the Northern Wei Dynasty, who led his soldiers to attack Nanjing. After Nanjing was taken, the emperor was held in captivity in the palace and was not provided with any food, and was left to starve to death. Though Bodhidharma wanted to save him and brought forth a compassionate mind toward him, the emperor failed to recognize him, so there was nothing Bodhidharma could do. Thus, Bodhidharma had no choice but to leave Emperor Wu to die and went into meditation in a cave for nine years.

This encounter would later form the basis of the first kōan of the collection The Blue Cliff Record. However that version of the story is somewhat different. In the Blue Cliff's telling of the story, there is no claim that Emperor Wu did not listen to Bodhidharma after the Emperor was unable to grasp the meaning. Instead, Bodhidharma left the presence of the Emperor once Bodhidharma saw that the Emperor was unable to understand. Then Bodhidharma went across the river to the kingdom of Wei.

After Bodhidharma left, the Emperor asked the official in charge of the Imperial Annals about the encounter. The Official of the Annals then asked the Emperor if he still denied knowing who Bodhidharma was? When the Emperor said he didn't know, the Official said, "This was the Great-being Guanyin (i.e., the Mahasattva Avalokiteśvara) transmitting the imprint of the Buddha's Heart-Mind."

The Emperor regretted his having let Bodhidharma leave and was going to dispatch a messenger to go and beg Bodhidharma to return. The Official then said, "Your Highness, do not say to send out a messenger to go fetch him. The people of the entire nation could go, and he still would not return."

Nine years of gazing at a wall

Failing to make a favorable impression in Southern China, Bodhidharma is said to have retreated to the northern Chinese kingdom of Wei to a cave near the Shaolin Monastery where he "faced a wall for nine years, not speaking for the entire time".[18]

In one version of the story, he is said to have fallen asleep seven years into his nine years of wall-gazing. Becoming angry with himself, he cut off his eyelids to prevent it from happening again.[46] According to the legend, as his eyelids hit the floor the first tea plants sprang up; and thereafter tea would provide a stimulant to help keep students of Chán awake during meditation.[47]

In another version of the story, after the nine years, Bodhidharma "passed away, seated upright".[18]

In another, Bodhidharma disappeared, leaving behind the Yi Jin Jing.[48]

In yet another version of the legend, Bodhidharma's legs atrophied after nine years of sitting,[49] which is why Japanese Bodhidharma dolls have no legs.

Bodhidharma and the martial arts

In the south Indian state of Kerala (the homeland of kalaripayat), Bodhidharma is remembered as both a kalari master and as the "father of Han-Chinese Shaolin Fist".[50] The Yi Jin Jing also credits Shaolin kungfu to Bodhidharma. Malays believe that Bodhidharma introduced preset forms into silat. All this would make him an important influence on Asian martial arts in general, and make India the origin of Asian martial arts. However, both the attribution of Shaolin boxing to Bodhidharma and the authenticity of the Yi Jin Jing itself have been discredited by some historians including Tang Hao, Xu Zhen and Matsuda Ryuchi. This argument is summarized by modern historian Lin Boyuan in his Zhongguo wushu shi as follows:

As for the "Yi Jin Jing" (Muscle Change Classic), a spurious text attributed to Bodhidharma and included in the legend of his transmitting martial arts at the temple, it was written in the Ming dynasty, in 1624, by the Daoist priest Zining of Mt. Tiantai, and falsely attributed to Bodhidharma. Forged prefaces, attributed to the Tang general Li Jing and the Southern Song general Niu Gao were written. They say that, after Bodhidharma faced the wall for nine years at Shaolin temple, he left behind an iron chest; when the monks opened this chest they found the two books "Xi Sui Jing" (Marrow Washing Classic) and "Yi Jin Jing" within. The first book was taken by his disciple Huike, and disappeared; as for the second, "the monks selfishly coveted it, practicing the skills therein, falling into heterodox ways, and losing the correct purpose of cultivating the Real. The Shaolin monks have made some fame for themselves through their fighting skill; this is all due to having obtained this manuscript." Based on this, Bodhidharma was claimed to be the ancestor of Shaolin martial arts. This manuscript is full of errors, absurdities and fantastic claims; it cannot be taken as a legitimate source.[48]

The oldest available copy was published in 1827[51] and the composition of the text itself has been dated to 1624.[48] Even then, the association of Bodhidharma with martial arts only becomes widespread as a result of the 1904–1907 serialization of the novel The Travels of Lao Ts'an in Illustrated Fiction Magazine.[52]

Huiguang and Sengchou were expert in the martial arts before they became two of the very first Shaolin monks—years before the arrival of Bodhidharma.[53] The Taishō Tripiṭaka documents Sengchou's skill with the tin staff.

Bodhidharma is associated with the idea that spiritual, intellectual and physical excellence are an indivisible whole necessary for enlightenment. Such an approach to enlightenment ultimately proved highly attractive to the samurai class in Japan, who made Zen their way of life, following their encounter with the martial-oriented Chán Lingji School introduced to Japan by Eisai in the 12th century.

(this entry was compiled as notes for my enhancement presentation and some background on the "Bodhi-Dharma" portion of the film title).

A Non-self help book.

2010-04-15T10:12:00.003-05:00

Initially, I was excited to read Bernadette Rogers' book, until I realized that she was writing from a Christian perspective. I am not a Christian, and I couldn't help but lose interest in the book when I realized that essentially the concept of "self" was replaced by God. The space that was taken up by the self was now consumed by God. God is all around, God is everywhere, God is within me. I tried reading it with an open mind, but I got lost in the details. Perhaps if we called the "silence," meditation instead, I would be more intrigued. If we switched "God" with "higher being," I'd appreciate the book more. I felt left out as a reader, and I was unable to overcome it throughout the book.

I am happy for Bernadette Rogers and the deep spiritual experience she had, but I am also happy for Timothy Leary and Ram Dass for their drug-induced "enlightenment." Personally, I thought they had the same outcome. Leary and Dass took LSD, and Bernadette's stumbled upon her "enlightenment" (she felt oh so tired and just couldn't figure out why). The thing that I kept thinking to myself as I was reading the book was that if Bernadette indeed experienced "no self," why did she write the book? Surely with no self, she won't feel satisfaction from sharing her stories with others.

I thought the book was intelligently written and thoughtful but at the same time, I can't relate to Bernadette's no-self. I am all about self, I feel that the deeper understanding one has of themselves, the happier they will be. I love Erving Goffman's theory, where the self, though influenced immensely by those around you, is in control. The difficulty that I have with Christian teachings (that I have experienced) is that God is in control, we are created in God's image, and our life's work is to carry out God's teachings. I am not a puppet. The choices that I make, the people that I surround myself with, and the work that I do, determine my destiny. I do not believe that my destiny is pre-determined.

In reading "The Experience of No-Self," I was expecting more of a self-help book, but it was quite the opposite. Bernadette never lets the reader in on how to experience "no-self," but speaks about how wonderful and fulfilling it is. She can't explain it because it is something that suddenly happened to her, so she fed it and nurtured it and turned into No-self.

As far as the books we've read so far for this class, I'm more of a fan of LSD and yoga to reach enlightenment.

Self to No-Self to Godself

2010-04-15T10:01:00.004-05:00

Kelly's weekly prompt has me stumped: "I am thinking about the contrast between individuating, getting bigger, making an impact, improving yourself, taking up more room as against moving toward "no-self," self-effacement, humility, and so forth. It seems to me to be such an anti-cultural idea, hard to imagine really embracing as much as I am naturally drawn toward it . . . It isn't much of a question, really, but what do you think about this self-effacement? How are you responding?"

If I understand self-effacement correctly, and I am no longer sure I do, effacement is a stance characterized by deference and humility. I do understand certain of its implied etymological nuances-- to virtually disappear the face, or the self, and I believe this is what Kelly's talking about -- but I personally understand self-effacement as an act of stepping back from the center, in order to allow another individual or group to receive a greater share of attention, or to in some way serve and support that individual or group, putting their needs ahead of one's own. Where the self and god/spirit is concerned, I would postulate that self-effacement suits the supplicant, the petitioner, the novitiate and the servant, but not the priest, who receives his powers and privileges through the process of succession.

Without trying to confer judgment on Roberts, I myself equate the desire to achieve "oneness" or a state of "everywhere and nowhere"(ness) as fiercely ambitious, and thus, not at odds with our Western sense of self. Again, let me fall back on Kelly to help me stumble through my thoughts: "Anyway, I am thinking about that self-effacing quality. It is in such contrast to how we are invited to live. What it seems to me we are supposed to do these days is get bigger, in a sense. Right? You know, discover yourself, get in touch with your feelings, make an impact, look great, use the right products, market yourself both professionally and interpersonally, and so on. There's Joyce Maynard whose sister explained to her that she was kind of hard to be around: 'You take up so much room."'

So, how do we separate the desire from the act? The desire to merge, not just unite, but to shed the reflexive self and to transform into a godself -- is this desire not without its hubris? And is the effort to achieve this desire not without its privileges? The time, the space, the support one would need to unburden one's reflexive's self's responsibilities in order to absent oneself (who was looking after her brood?!): how is this self-effacing? In some sense, I see Robert's endeavors, along with Ram Dass's efforts, as a willingness to give up the burdens of the self, in order to achieve a higher, transformative godself, not a calling rooted in self-effacement but in a desire to transcend the ordinary.

Of greater interest to me in Roberts' book is her discussion about Christ, which led me up some interesting alleys. According to her, Christ stands for all of us and our relation to God (143). Christ is not a metaphor for God but for us; but at the same time, Christ is a human metaphor for God. She explains that Christ's death, "the foregoing of his human self and its particular union with God - that is, self's knowing and experience of oneness with God . . . the falling away of self is equally the falling away of its experience with God. Though it is not inappropriate to call this event the 'death of God,' the only thing that can die or cease to be is something created and non-eternal in the first place. God, of course, does not die; rather it is the purely human way of knowing and experiencing God that dies" (pp 149-150). Roberts believes that our general understanding of Christ's death is misinformed; he did not "(give) up his self so the rest of us would not have to do so . . . . Self is not our true life . . . . Christ did not overcome our individual self for us; he only showed us by this death what we too will have to go through to be trule free . . . . Christ not only mediates this overcoming of self, but in the end is 'that' which goes beyond the self to endure the passage and finally see. If the truth be known, when self's transformation into Christ is complete, it is only Christ who dies and Christ who rises" (152-153). Is this ultimate transformation attainable while the potential and as yet to be transformed godself is contained within the host body? Also: Christ never was; he is and will be...

Finally, I'm led to think about where, in this drama of men, this burden of gender, is woman? Roberts has a chapter, "Where is Christ," but I'm compelled to ask, "for Christ's sake, where is Mary?" Any woman who has given birth knows what effacement truly is, and knows that frankly, it hurts like the devil. And it never really heals.

Responding to Bernadette Roberts

2010-04-15T08:43:00.003-05:00

I was genuinely shocked at how much I actually liked Bernadette Roberts’ The Experience of No Self. I expected to find it condescending and holier-than-thou and prescriptive. Instead I just thought she seemed like a really caring, thoughtful woman experiencing her version of religious freedom. I admired how she set off on a journey for religious purposes and found humor in the irony of how the obliteration of self that she experienced didn’t fit into her Christian agenda (59). To a degree, I agree with the consensus that she often sidesteps directly saying what her revelations were with references to how indescribable they are or how they can’t be put into words. Certainly if you consider yourself a writer you’d come up with better ways to describe a life-changing event than to call it indescribable. But in her defense, she calls her book “A Contemplative Journey” not “A Definitive Prescription For Abolishing One’s Self.” She is more concerned with relaying the importance of experiencing something that aids in the explosion of the self than making sure that everyone goes about it in the same fashion that she did. Perhaps she did herself and her way of life a service by going into less detail because it gives the reader an opportunity to find his own path to selflessness instead of just trying to mimic Roberts’. I guess what I’m saying is that I agree very much with Kelly who said that he is far more interested in the something that happened to Roberts than the conceptual system which allowed for it to happen.
I am interested in how Roberts would feel about being a published author. Nobody gets published prehumously without trying, it seems, so she must have gone to great lengths to make sure her words were read. Many times I find myself doubtful of people’s “zen” or “revelations” or “enlightenment” or “no-self” because I tend to think, “Well if you’re so enlightened, shouldn’t you be just satisfied with your own enlightenment instead of putting it onto paper, bound into a book, and neatly stacked up at the Barnes and Nobles so I can follow your lead?” In the case of Bernadette Roberts, I would ask her what the world would really be like if everyone in fact did away with their ideas of self. I’m not trying to find little misquotes, wrong-sayings, lies in her words, but Roberts says that “if it hadn’t been for the children, I would have thrown everything to the wind and gone off” (81) but then almost immediately refers to her hellish-looking hair and the self-consciousness it provokes. So by her own admission, she sees the kind of selfless person she wants to be, and considers the different ways she can go about becoming that person, and then makes note of the process. Granted, this book is written retrospectively, but I wonder really if these things were noticeable to her during her journey. The falling away of the body, the explosion of the self, the “intense triumph of being common” (115), to me these seem like observations of the self which can only be made retrospectively.
Ultimately, I liked Bernadette Roberts for her description of her own contemplative journey, leaving holes where the reader is able to fill in his own needs and observations.

On another note, I found an interview online with Roberts in which she describes "the point at which all existence comes together and I found it to be rather lovely, so here it is if you have interest. Oh and it's located on a Ken Wilbur Forum.

This center can be compared to a coin: on the near side is our self, on the far side is the divine. One side is not the other side, yet we cannot separate the two sides. If we tried to do so, we would either end up with another side, or the whole coin would collapse, leaving no center at all - no self and no divine. We call this a state of oneness or union because the single center has two sides, without which there would be nothing to be one, united, or non-dual. Such, at least, is the experiential reality of the state of transforning union, the state of oneness.

road to nowhere

2010-04-14T21:45:00.003-05:00

It seems to me, while reading Ms. Roberts try and explain her notion of The Experience of No-Self is that her path to the "nothingness" seems to take up a lot of space and she really desires that you acknowledge how fraught her journey was. What I read in her account is her spending a lot of time being quite in a church, feeling a bit off at home and struggling, and then abandoning her family for five months to sit on the side of a hill until a park ranger finally told her that she needed to leave or she might freeze to death. The she goes home and is just so burdened by life that she needs to go on another retreat, this time to Big Sur. Of course, this journey to Big Sur, a journey that others take (and that one monk takes up and down once a day) is just so perilous that she very nearly didn't make it (and had to demand that the monk get out of her way so that she could make it to the top). Then, while she was there she felt so oppressed by this feeling that she just had to face it which she did by sitting quietly on the side of the mountain. As she writes it though it was like she was fighting for her life.

I understand the need to find a path toward simplifying your life so that it makes sense again, so that you not only feel in control, but also that you feel connected. But Ms. Roberts seems to be trying to describe an epic journey that consists of her being quite and meditating--and she is very self important about it. When she discussed her struggle with Father L, he seems very excited about it and then starts postulating his own ideas and she leaves him (confident, of course, that his ideas would dead-end and fail). Why? Because he didn't immediately get her perspective and agree completely. Instead he was only excited about what she was describing.

I think that I'm with Luke in thinking that it gets old pretty fast that she keeps talking about this experience that she has and then instead of talking about the experience says that there are no words for it--we just have to take her (lack of) word(s) for it that it was as epic as she would like us to believe and she managed to claw her way through the gateway to bring us this important message (that she can't quite describe).

While she is having this epic quest of sitting quietly on the sides of hills and mountains it seems very much like she is abandoning her family. And when she is there, it doesn't really seem like she is there. For someone who is trying to be open and connected, she seems pretty closed off and self-involved.

And now, some music:

A map, a maze, a way of seeing

2010-04-14T19:07:00.003-05:00

Roberts writes about the "limits of time" in relation to (though I doubt she'd look at it quite that way) the self; the self, in other words, is constructed and derided by way of making of itself a map, a maze, a particular "way" of seeing and not seeing perhaps, but at the very least a way of getting somewhere that exists because one has it in mind. This would be the opposite of self-effacement, in a sense, except that, as Roberts says, "all our experiences in the interior life are merely our own reactions to "that" which we cannot otherwise... experience" (83). So maybe the "true" self, the self that lets the silence be, is effaced from the moment it resets its course, again and again.

The "synaptic self that continually colors all incoming date before sending it out again... [eliminating] a great deal of thinking" (98) is completely satisfying in the sense that our concerns are ignorant of just about everything around them; things which we tend to, not think of, but posit are the catalysts of our concerns, the water we're busy saturating, in other words, as opposed to that of ourselves. I do think it's true that we create fear as a means of protecting ourselves from the unknowable. Think of all the shitheads you know who turn every situation into a problem for the sake of being in charge of getting everything "back in order," when in reality all that's happened is that time has passed and nothing has changed, except what's in our heads. And it's fascinating that this other "life" going on "as usual" (though perhaps unheard of) is unknowable, and that what makes it universally so is inherently private, as far as we know, anyway. But I want to get back to these so-called "limits."

Paul, perhaps the most down-to-earth of Jesus' disciples, struggled too with "mistak[ing] [himself] for God," until he said something to the extent of, "I'm human." And maybe all it means to be is that you're trying too hard, but to Paul, I think, it felt like a surrender, so that he could go on living. Whatever that means. And it's important to know, but probably not in the way I'm talking about.

Either way, I leave you with a song by Coldplay that was playing in the cafe at a time in my reading that seemed significantly in contrast with what Roberts was going on about, and a line from a poem by Terrance Hayes: You can spend your whole life/doing no more than preparing for life and thinking./"Is this all there is?"

http://hypem.com/track/107163/Coldplay+-+What+If+Live+

nothingness as justification for individuation...

2010-04-14T13:55:00.004-05:00

Upon reading "The Experience of No-Self", there were many parts that reminded me of the existentialist notion proposed by Sartre that "existence precedes essence", and that we are thrust into a world where we are free to create ourselves as we see fit. As I have said before, I find this to be a consoling concept and in many ways, and some of Robert's assertions reiterated some of the concepts that originally drew me to existentialist thought. Roberts says that "whatever we care to call the ultimate reality, we cannot define or qualify it because the brain is incapable of processing this kind of data" (37). I agree with this in that "nothingness' in itself seems like an incomprehensible concept. We can put a name to it in order to speak of it, but once again we are attempting intellectual comprehension of something entirely unfathomable to the rational mind. Therefore, it seems that the pursuit of the self-conscious self, the ego, seems like a fair compensation for this underlying nothingness. Roberts talks of these pursuits such as " studying, speculating, practicing, looking, striving, experiencing,etc" as a complete waste of time (71)in her pursuit to find truth. Although I understand what she is saying, I personally do not find these pursuits to be a waste of time since I am not seeking to experience the truth of nothingness or no-self, but I am simply seeking to justify my constant need /desire to individuate.
And I feel that once we have accepted the truth of nothingness, even if we have not experienced the no-self as she did, we can find the motivation to go out into the world and and create our selves. And I don't feel that it is necessary for us to experience no-self in order to accept, on some level ( even an intellectual level will suffice) that nothingness underlies everything. In a lot of ways, I feel that this is what being an Atheist is about.

Roberts discovers that the truth of life is a void and that the self is simply trying to fill the void. As an Atheist, the idea of nothingness ( however truly incomprehensible it may be) being the true backbone of reality is remarkably consoling. Furthermore, this notion of the truth of emptiness seems to promote a self of boundless opportunities, embracing choice and self-creation, with no right or wrong answers or paths. And this notion of the free self in a wash of nothingness takes an enormous amount of pressure off. As Kelly suggested, we are culturally conditioned to believe that the pursuit of the self and individuation are especially important. And for me, it is the acceptance of the underlying nothingness that provides justification for the efforts put toward individuation. In other words, in a world where inherent value seems nonexistent, we are empowered by individuation to lend value to whatever we see fit.

Lost on the Mountain

2010-04-11T22:09:00.002-05:00

Some reactions to No-Self and the self-effacing prompt...
First, I have to say (I guess I don't have to but I am going to anyway) that I am somewhat disenchanted with the "experiential" sort of enlightenment writing that we have had recently. What I mean is the idea that Ram Dass does LSD for years and has these amazing moments and then says, "but you don't need LSD to get this". But how does he know? He only knows how he got it, and that some enlightened people that he has met aren't phased by dropping acid. He is giving in to a fallacy that one thing leads to the other without taking into account the external factors, meaning perhaps enlightened people already have LSD in their system or are immune to the effects. As a former scientist, he shouldn't discount these possibilities, but take his experience as it is...But onto Roberts: She similarly has this mind-blowing series of episodes, and then treats the book as our explanation of those episodes. I, for one, had no idea really what she went through, as her vague descriptions of the event didn't relate to me. But to say, "this experience isn't something I can describe" is both a bit of a cop-out and also a sort of justification for me to disregard what she is saying. She even titles the book "Experience" and unless you have the experience, I really don't know what there is left to understand. So I guess the problem I have is that without the experience the words seem empty. (Which perhaps is the conclusion anyway, so maybe it was effective, but I don't feel like my mind was blown by the book)

Second, one of her experiences involved going to the mountains for five months and how she communed with nature and found how easy and beautiful it all was. I had questions about her experiences and she clarified them when she included the story about the park ranger telling her to evacuate and she didn't want to leave her safe haven. I think this relates to what we were discussing about this sort of internal pondering being the territory of the affluent. It is easy to think that nature is easy and beautiful when you are in a nice cabin, away from your responsibilities (of children and I assume a husband) getting heads up weather calls from park rangers. But that would be like saying that Mexico is all sitting on beaches with cocktails. How easy and fun and completely devoid of drug cartels and political corruption! Nature is brutal and harsh, really, and people who lived in the mountains gathering food lived short lives. And rather than coming to conclusions about the lack of self, they worried about food and hunting ritual. Certainly, when a blizzard came through, they could not easily drive to the university town and miss the seclusion.

This leads, I hope, to my post about the self-effacement, and I think it goes along with Tom's post earlier about the nature of evil. I think the problem with the self goes along with the nature of being human. What is the end of humanity. And as I was thinking about this I was thinking about the word "human" as an adjective, with completely different results. For one, you could say, "I stole the car, but hey, I'm only human." Meaning, humans are fallible and weak and corrupted and so that is justification for my action. The second is "I can't believe that guy did that, it's like he's not even human." Meaning, he is robotic and has no compassion or love or connection to others. I realize that you have to accept my "definitions" for these two uses of the word to accept the rest of the post, so I will press on assuming that you do. The two definitions lead to two conclusions: The first definition, that "human" means weak and corrupt, would necessarily want to get rid of those qualities in order to be fulfilled, and so the extinction of the self would be a goal. How does this tie into Tom's post? Well, I'm not sure who proposed it, but I have heard a justification for the existence of evil in the theology of a benevolent, omnipotent God, is that evil is not a thing in itself. Existence is the lack of goodness, and that good is the actual thing, and without good, then you have evil. So God didn't create evil, he created good. This leads to the second version of "human" where it means compassion. In this reading, "human nature" is good, and the lack of "human nature" is where evil lies. Therefore, we should try to be "human" as much as possible. I would rather (I realize that this is antithetical to all the "no self" and "no assumption" sort of writing that we are reading lately, since I am bald-faced admitting that I am choosing my own self-concept) believe that we have tools and that we should use them to the utmost, to enjoy things and not try to dissolve them, and to be a positive, rather than a negative. I think we should try to be more human, and not less. Hopefully, at least in theory, they would both lead to the same thing.

Choice selection from the middlebrow canon

2010-04-11T00:48:00.004-05:00

Doesn't mean it isn't a great poem, of course.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

— Emily Dickinson

Writing prompt: Self-effacement

2010-04-09T11:03:00.005-05:00

The first time I read The Experience of No-Self, I was taking a class from Don Nugent. I never knew if Don was exactly a failed monk (in the sense that he may have signed up as a young man, then quit) or just someone really drawn to that life. He certainly knew all the monks at Gethsemani -- the monastery Thomas Merton served for many years near my home. He was, like Roberts, a very Catholic guy, drawn heavily to seclusion and contemplation, and, as a tenured history professor (so no one could tell him what to teach), he held "classes" that introduced students to the various mystical traditions still active in contemporary culture.

At the time I knew him, at least, Don hadn't had the "aha" experience of kensho or any sort of direct experience of God. (He was open about this.) However, he wanted it very badly, and surrounded himself with materials about it, hung out with contemplatives, taught meditation techniques on the quad, cultivated students who seemed to have an angle on it, and so forth. He was a kind, graceful person (so even without the "split of sky" he embodied the fruits of the spirit), humble, self-effacing, you name it.

Anyway, I am thinking about that self-effacing quality. It is in such contrast to how we are invited to live. What it seems to me we are supposed to do these days is get bigger, in a sense. Right? You know, discover yourself, get in touch with your feelings, make an impact, look great, use the right products, market yourself both professionally and interpersonally, and so on. There's Joyce Maynard whose sister explained to her that she was kind of hard to be around: "You take up so much room."

The first notes we've had on this book, from Tom and Shawn, seem a little, um, suspicious of Roberts's ideas (that's fine: it's what Ken Wilbur thinks, after all), and, of course, many people do not resonate at all with the framework in which she interprets her experience. My view, right now, halfway through my rereading, is that something happened to her, and she interpreted it with the conceptual system she had on hand. I am far more interested in the something than the conceptual system.

In any case, I am thinking about the contrast between individuating, getting bigger, making an impact, improving yourself, taking up more room as against moving toward "no-self," self-effacement, humility, and so forth. It seems to me to be such an anti-cultural idea, hard to imagine really embracing as much as I am naturally drawn toward it. (If you refresh the browser window, the little epigraphs at the top change. A large number of those quotations concern this matter.)

It isn't much of a question, really, but what do you think about this self-effacement? How are you responding?

Pastor Shawn says....

2010-04-09T09:41:00.002-05:00

Wouldn’t you know it, the very week we touch on a subject that I think I know a whole lot about we take a break. God must be testing me :).

Tom I thought your questions were awesome and thought provoking; I’m going to use my response to your questions as my assignment this week. I’m going to take off my student hat (I really don’t wear hats) and put on the pastors robe (I really don’t wear a robe on Sundays, just jeans and t-shirts most of the time). This is not the official Christian response, but the official response from a progressive Pastor.
Tom: Why does God give us a self if we are not supposed to use it? Why is the self such a "bad" thing? In other words, why would He give us a self if our job, as author Bernadette Roberts says, is to transcend it?
Pastor Shawn: I don’t agree with Roberts, or maybe I don’t agree with the words Self & transcend, within the circles where I walk, we use the word transcend to mean moving beyond something. As for the word “self”, I’d use the word soul. Because we are created in the image of God, the Self (soul) is a gift to be strengthened and developed, not something that we move passed. If transcend is to redeem or transform, then I would agree, but I think she means moving beyond, at times she sounds more Buddhist then Christian. Our Job is to transform ourselves from one state to another, not leave it.
Tom: Roberts says that nothing is separate from God (29). "We can say Christ is everywhere, because there is nowhere he is not" (163). If this is so, then, by definition, God was in Haiti when the earthquake killed tens of thousands. And God was present when a Catholic priest sexually molested deaf children. And He was there when that priest's superior looked the other way. If God is everywhere, that means either He cannot prevent the worst kind of human suffering or he can prevent the worst kind of human suffering but He chooses not to.
Pastor Shawn: You raise an age old question, one in which there really isn’t a good answer, or an answer that makes a lot of sense. “What about evil and an all loving god?” Why would an all loving God allow bad things to happen to so many people throughout history? I can only come up with one answer and it not that good. Before I give the answer, I believe we need to ask a different question. That question is why does God allow ourselves to harm ourselves when we have the ability not too? This question takes the “heavy off of God and places it where it belongs, which is on humanity. We speak of evil and bad things happening as if it’s something out there, something that you could catch like a cold, but in fact it’s inside, it dwells inside of all us. I recall one of the authors stating that we are all murders and prostitutes (or something like that). It’s my belief that an all loving God has given us the greatest gift of all; free will. Most of time, when Christians talk about free will, it’s in the context to believe and follow God or not, that’s too small for free will. If I have a choice to love God back or not, then I have a choice to love others or not. I can choose to kill, steal, rape, and commit low down acts against humanity for any reason I want or I can love. It’s my free will. The other thing to consider is what types of evil or bad things do, we want God to stop. Is it just the killing, or raping, maybe natural disasters? This list would go on until smashing a bug would cause one to face the wrath of God. We tend to attach our idea of a loving God and a God who intervenes as the same thing. I tend to believe that an all loving God allows his creation to choose to do right. As for the natural disasters thing, I read an article once about natural disasters and human death. The author argued that natural disasters happen all the time on this planet. Floods, tornados, earth quakes, and so no, most of them are unseen and not felt. It only becomes important if humans happen to be in the area or it empacts humans in some way. It can be argued that the planet is a living organism and is constantly in flux, it does what it does regardless of humanity. So what we call natural disaster, only becomes a disaster if someone happens to be standing in the same spot where the earth did what it has always done for thousands or millions of year (depending on what side of the argument you fall on). So, the answer isn’t a good one, but the reason why God allows people to suffer at the hands of others is because God has given us the power to restore each other and the power to cause suffering to each other, we get to decide which one we will do. As for natural disaster, the earth is dynamic and living, if it burps or passes gas, or moves around it only doing what it’s supposed to do, it’s no different from us, but when the earth does it, it does it on such a grand scale that human don’t stand a chance or the structures we build don’t stand a chance. Why would God stop the earth from doing what it does when he doesn’t stop humans? (See, I told you it wasn’t a good one).
Tom: Yet, I seriously wonder whether what I call man-made religion (and, let's face it, men, not women, deserve most the credit or blame, depending on one's point of view) has been a source of more good or more bad. At least, it is a fair question.
Pastor Shawn: It’s a fair question, and one that needs to be addressed. All religions are man –made, and they are based upon man-made thoughts about God (theology). The word theology literally means study of God. I personally believe that created beings (humanity) have major limitation to understanding the being (God) that created them. So, one’s study of God will always be limited to a particular ideology and context. Out of our thoughts about God come our doctrines (what we believe or hope is true about God); this should lead to Othro-Praxis (right behavior and living). The major problem with religions is, it’s our best guess, and that guess is based upon groups of collected people saying yes to that idea (that’s why we have so many denominations within Christianity). With all that being said, I’m stilled convinced that there is a God who is all powerful and loving. More so than a religion I argue for relationships, a relationship with God and others, one that’s based upon doing the best good you can do.

Betraying Salinger

2010-04-06T08:49:00.003-05:00

I just thought I'd share this article I found today about Roger Lathbury's experience in trying to publish Salinger's novella, Hapworth 16, 1924. There's a lovely little anecdote about Salinger's insistence on the importance of the space between the type so that "Seymour could breathe." Enjoy.

Esmé Squalor

2010-04-01T15:49:00.002-05:00

A character from A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snickett, inspired by "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor."

salinger

2010-04-01T13:48:00.001-05:00

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/religionandtheology/2334/the_mystic_in_the_rye:_jd_salinger%E2%80%99s_religious_fiction?page=2

As we are discussing the burden of self, and what we bring to the table (or how we present ourselves), this assignment has made me very self-conscious. I’ve become aware of my lack of depth when it comes to the world of classic literature and writing as an art form. The first time of heard of J.D. Salinger was in class last Thursday. In the article that I posted the author makes the claim that the book The Catcher in the Rye (I’ve heard of the book) is part of the implicit New American canon. He goes on to say that there isn’t a ninth or tenth grader who hasn’t been forced to read it. Well that’s not true I know at least one who hasn’t (me). Like most people who realize a lack of something or in something, you get locked into two paths (or so I believe). One: quickly as possible cram as much information or stuff as you can off the surface of the topic into your head or around and pretend to know or have more than you do or two: Find a subject that you know well and connect it to the topic at hand. I’m opting for number two
In the Article “The Mystic in the Rye: J.D. Salinger’s Religious Fiction, the author makes the argument that Salinger was a Religious seeker. He claims that Salinger use of the spiritual self and its realm is a main staple in his books (that’s how I understand it). In this article the author uses the word spiritual and religion as the same thing (I think). If what I read is true then it makes sense that he would weave the spiritual into his stories. From what I’ve read he was half-Jewish, one site called him a Jewish- Catholic, and yet another said that he practiced Buddhism. I’m sure all three religions have somehow rubbed off on him and have filtered their way into his writings. Most of the things that I found on his quick departure from the writing world vary. Knowing very little about Salinger and the world of literature, here’s my pennies worth of why he might have left like he did. Maybe writing was Salinger’s yoga, like Nick Salinger grew up in a family that accepted the spiritual (Nick’s Mom). It would make sense if being Jewish (half?) and being raised Catholic didn’t work when it comes to enlightenment or sense making out of the spiritual world, then maybe Buddhism, if not maybe write about it. Maybe if he wrote about it enough in his characters and in the back ground he too would experience the “lights going on”. Maybe he got to a point when he realized that writing wasn’t going to bring harmony to his religious/spiritual chaos. It could be that his departure was his metaphoric move to Colorado and mountain climbing. In writing this, I’m completely aware that reading two books, an article, and scanning web sites make me nowhere near an expert on him or his world. This is my feeble attempt to do the assignment, that’s all.

Bearable

2010-04-01T10:44:00.003-05:00

One of the articles that I found especially interesting while researching for this activity appeared in th New Yorker shortly after Salinger's death. It is rememberance written by Lillian Ross that reflects upon their long friendship and sheds some light on the man behind the myth, both as a family man and writer.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/02/08/100208ta_talk_ross

Another article that I found particularly useful for purposes of the assignment appeared in Time magazine after his death entitled: J.D. Salinger Dies: Hermit Crab of American Letters. It is a biographical take on the life of the author and provides some colorful commentary from J.D. Salinger himself. For example, "Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of splash." Classic Salinger!

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1957492-3,00.html

Looking Back

2010-04-01T08:14:00.002-05:00

I heard this story the day after Salinger's death. There are a few interesting comments, I think, in relation to Salinger's own that, "If you publish, the world thinks you owe something," from a few contemporary writers.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123081495

Here's a portfolio that appeared a month or two ago in The New Yorker. I saw this before reading a word of or really about Salinger and thought he looked like a nice guy who had probably good reasons for staying out of the limelight.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/02/08/slideshow_100208_salinger#slide=1

Two Articles

2010-03-31T22:53:00.002-05:00

Here are two articles that I don't have the brainpower to synthesize or discuss right now, but I didn't want to only have the links on my computer.

A Paranoid in Reverse: Revisiting J.D. Salinger from the February 11th issue of LAWeekly

The Mystic in the Rye: JD Salinger's Religious Fiction from a website called Religion Dispatches.

the jesus prayer

2010-03-31T22:21:00.003-05:00

A reoccurring theme in Salinger is living an authentic life, or living a spiritual life. The use of the Jesus prayer seeks to combine these themes in Franny and Zooey. The prayer was originally written/ spoken in greek and then translated into many different languages:

“

Κύριε Ιησού Χριστέ, Υιέ του Θεού, ελέησόν με τον αμαρτωλόν.

”

“

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.

”

The prayer is introduced into the Glass family story in the Franny section of Franny and Zooey by a Russian book called The Way of the Pilgrim. Franny is struggling with a spiritual crisis and this crisis revolves around the uttering of the prayer. As we learn from the Zooey section, Seymour and Buddy Glass spent years trying to help their siblings find some sort of spiritual enlightenment (enlightenment that they, apparently, were never really able to find). Zooey determines that as a result of their constant instructions that they made both Zooey and Franny freaks (he admits to Bessie Glass that he is unable to start any meal without saying the Four Great Vows). The point of the Jesus prayer is to pray without ceasing. The idea is that phrases in the prayer match up to a persons breathing and that eventually it becomes as steady as the persons heartbeat. Most prayers are petitions and the Jesus prayer is not--it is seeking to be opened to awareness of the larger world. It's a "state of awareness" and is important because "humans cannot feel and think at the same time." It's part of early Christian mysticism that suggests "the soul alone with itself, with reality."

The last quotes are taken from the following lecture on the subject. The embedding of the video was disabled, but you can see the hour long lecture by following the link. I plan to play the video from about 42:00-53:00 in class if there is time as part of this class enhancement.

Early Christian Mysticism: The Jesus Prayer

The book that the lecturer is speaking about is The Power of the Name: The History and the Practice of the Jesus Prayer.

Most of the struggle at the end of the Zooey section is about their struggle for spiritual awakening. It's an understanding that nothing is perfect, but perhaps grace is, and that they've been raised to believe in a perfection that isn't possible without spirituality. Franny is collapsing because she can't quite stand how how, for the lack of a better term, phoney everyone around her seems--ego seems to constantly be getting in the way of beauty or truth. Zooey keeps trying to impart on her that it is actually them and not everyone else, because they were raised to expect something out of people that is unrealistic. They have to find a way to relate to people (he admits that he is insufferable to be around most times) and that is where the concept of the Fat Lady comes in--a reason to be their best and still try to relate to everyone else.

dust bunnies in the vault

2010-03-31T21:33:00.003-05:00

I've heard a lot about the treasure trove of material hidden away in the mysterious safe at Salinger's house. At this point I'm presuming that it contains the lost Ark of the Covenant and the remnants from Roswell as well. The point that I'm sarcastically getting at is that there is a very good possibility that J.D. Salinger doesn't have innumerable unpublished manuscripts sitting next to Walt Disney's cryogenically frozen head and that's probably okay. He wrote some good stuff--some people would say great stuff--but others have picked up the torch where he dropped it and continued creating characters that are reminiscent of both the boy in the red hunting cap and the Glass family. See below for examples:

First, beginning with the heir apparent and quite possibly the only representation we'll see of young Holden on screen is the film Igby Goes Down.

Here is the full film:

A chronicler of idiosyncratic types, Wes Anderson created his own rebel in the manner of a Salinger character, Max Fischer in the film Rushmore.

Wes Anderson continued in his next film, The Royal Tannenbaums, to create a family not dissimilar to the Glass family (and Tannenbaum is also Boo Boo's married name, so that can't be a complete coincidence, right).

Here is the opening of the movie, in which we're introduced to the Tannenbaum clan.

And this scene feels very reminiscent of the closing of The Perfect Day for Banannafish.

So, even though we may never get another Salinger story (and is that really the worst thing in the world?) there are people that are still creating characters in that vein. For good measure, here are a few other contemporary films that continue the tradition of Salinger's characters (I refuse to outright say that they are modeled after Salinger's characters, because I don't believe that J.D. ever had a solid claim to "the only author to ever create the troubled/ alienated young man"--hell, to a degree, Dickens beat him by almost a hundred years with young Pip in Great Expectations. Enjoy.

Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys:

Some of these videos are clipped by the blog size, for the full versions, just click through to YouTube.

Interesting links

2010-03-31T16:46:00.005-05:00

I'm trying to find a full-text copy of an essay called "Voices of the Self in Fiction."

http://www.springerlink.com/content/jq31557l2k18118x/fulltext.pdf?page=1

I'm not having any luck finding the full text but in the meantime I found this article, for anyone who is interested. The essay is called "Voices of the Self in Psychoanalysis: A Qualitative Analysis."

http://ezproxy.hamline.edu:2374/ehost/pdf?vid=2&hid=101&sid=090cb057-b36c-43e7-a36c-a9d696f46f22@sessionmgr112

Glorious Imperfections

2010-03-31T13:55:00.003-05:00

"This is the life. I've been writing short stories since I was fifteen. I have trouble writing simply and naturally. My mind is stocked with some black neckties, and though I'm throwing them out as fast as I find them, there will always be a few left over. I am a dash man and not a miler, and it is probable that I will never write a novel. So far the novels of this war have had too much of the strength, maturity and craftsmanship critics are looking for, and too little of the glorious imperfections which teeter and fall off the best minds."

I found this article which features a letter that Salinger wrote when he was twenty-six years old and serving in the Army. For some reason it gives me a distinct pleasure to read magnificent authors expressing self-doubt. Another reason I really liked this article is that it was published in Esquire. Imagining a letter written by Salinger sandwiched in between the Women We Love Gallery and stories such as "What Really Goes On In Sex Rehab?" tickled me somewhat.

I'm interested in seeing why he has had such a great impact in non-academic folks, such as people who read Esquire. Salinger fills his pages with the experiences of people in crisis: existential crisis, faith crisis, familial crisis et cetera. So much of what happens in his stories happens in between cigarette ashes and endless dialogue. I'd consider strength, maturity, and craftsmanship to be some of his strengths in this aspect. Sure his characters aren't the most mature, but they are presented so non-judgmentally. I really took a shine to Franny, in particular. Half the time I wanted to just yell at her in the same tone that Zooey was. And the other half the time I just wanted to be her curled up on that couch. I want to live in the Glass house.

All of this discussion about the credibility of the author, taking the life of the author into account when reading his literature, has got me thinking. With Salinger, I am completely unconcerned with how he spent his time (as he made clear was his intention) and I feel the same about some of my other favorite authors who may have lived sort of hedonistically (Hemingway comes to mind). Someone made the analogy that if Hitler had written children's stories, they probably wouldn't read them to his children. But isn't it worth noting that Hitler didn't, in fact write children's stories. When considering the skeletons in any writer's closet, it's probably important to pay infinately more attention to what he presents of himself.

Salinger and mysticism

2010-03-31T13:07:00.003-05:00

Salinger seems preoccupied with mysticism. Or at least this seems to be exemplified through his characters. Mysticism, like enlightenment, remains way to allusive to subscribe to. Believing that God is everything, and making mediation and the convergence with God the primary concern of one's life seems, well... rather silly and unproductive to me. Mysticism seems to be the opposite of intellectualization and I guess the latter seems like a better, or more justifiable way of viewing the world. Enough of my opinion.
In class on the day that we watched the episode of Leave It to Beaver, we talked about what the 50's was like- how there was this order that it was expected everyone maintain, or at least you maintain the facade of order. And it seems that at the same time, maintaining this veneer really takes a toll on some individuals. You could argue that this order includes socialized gender roles, intellectualized ways of viewing the world, expectations about education, careers, family, etc. In Salinger's Franny and Zoey, Franny talks about how interested she is in the meditation techniques she's read about in "The Way of the Pilgrim"- and in affect, she seems to come to a realization about the hopelessness of her life situation. She says, " All I know is I'm losing my mind. I'm just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's"( 29). It's interesting because much of Buddhist meditation technique and mysticism is about letting of the self, the ego, the distinguishing factors between oneself, others, and God. It is all the same. Franny seems to be having a bit of a breakdown upon gravitating toward these ideas.
Similarly, in the last of Salinger's Nine Stories, "Teddy", the main character is a child-savant-guru who wholeheartedly believes in his realization that God and all reality are one in the same. Teddy says, " I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up and all that" ( 288). This seems like a rather advanced spiritual assertion for a ten-year-old, but he seems to have gotten a grasp on the realization that Franny's character is just beginning to encounter.
Also, in Franny and Zooey, in the letter that Buddy, the older Glass sibling, writes to Zooey, he asserts the importance of the no-self. He explains to Zooey that he and Seymour became concerned with the importance of mysticism as far as the indoctrination of their younger siblings when he says: " that education by any name would smell as sweet, and maybe much sweeter, if it didn't begin with the quest for knowledge at all but with a quest, as Zen put it, for no-knowledge" (65). They all seem to be making similar points- happiness is not all about adhering to intellectual and socialized methods of interpretation, but it is about letting go of knowledge ( or at least not letting knowledge rule you) in order to be open to the mystical experience- to be open to God. This is once again reiterated when Teddy says, "what you have to do is vomit it up [logic] if you want to see things as they really are" ( 291) .

It can be argued that Salinger's characters seem to be saying, or maybe Salinger himself is saying that first and foremost, it is more important to be concerned with one's own state of being before reading Shakespeare or learning about the structure of atoms. Or maybe he's not saying that at all, maybe he's just making a case for how mysticism is another form of escapism- another path that people take to console themselves against the stifling, depressing pressure of society and the roles we are forced to play within society.

Ram Dass Class Enhancer: Drug Induced Art :)

2010-03-30T16:27:00.008-05:00

Last week was my turn to offer an additional enhancer to the class. Due to our full schedule in class, I was unable to present, but I was thinking along the same lines of Luke, to post it on here and allow everyone to have a discussion, comment or whatever they would like to my enhancer. I hope this is okay Kelly!

In addition to the literary work of Remember Be Here Now, I was most pleasantly amazed at the artwork and drawings that Ram Dass included in his book. I was unsure if they were originals or if they were interpretations of his words from a third party, but regardless, I found them somewhat fascinating. I find artwork like that to be a window into their psychedelic visions. There’s something interesting about the images that surface when we allow our minds to have that freedom. I’m not even sure if freedom is the right word to use. Regardless I was interested in exploring other psychedelic art. This is art that I found to be truly genuine and authentic from artists who used drugs to create art, some for a pathway into the psyche, others for money :)

Pablo Amaringo is a visionary artist that lived in the Peruvian Amazon. He was not only a recognized artist, but a retired shaman healer. His paintings were from visions he received after drinking the Ayahuasca brew, made from plants in the Amazon.

Mental Abilities
The mind comprehends the functions of discriminatory perception when it sees the living visions of the shaman. In that moment it can distinguish one thing from another, one being from another. It understands that life has a very complex spiritual organization, which traces itself back to the depths of many eons (intelligence made eternal by divinity.)
http://www.yashpal.com/store/artcards/amaringo/

John Van Hamersveld, an artist often recognized for his images in the 1960’s pop culture and numerous rock band album covers credits the original Jefferson Airplane Pinnacle Indian Poster 1968 to drugs where he “puffed and puffed to focus”*.

* ["John Van Hamersveld, DECADES"], by Robert Wald, Ocean Magazine, July / August 2008

On an exploration to search out more drug induced artwork, I came upon an artist named Max Magnus. I found this particularly interesting because this art piece of golden dragons was from a vision he had after taking cough medicine with the active ingredient being morphine.

http://maxmagnusnorman.com/artist_blog/art_day_53.shtml

Psychiatrist, Oscar Janiger administered a study experimenting with the effects of LSD from l954-l962. Nearly a thousand participants, both males and females, participated resulting in a book titled LSD, Spirituality and the Creative Process. It is here where “the authors examined the effects of LSD on a sample of professional artists who rendered a Pueblo Indian Kachina Doll prior to and during LSD intoxication”. Below are some samples of the artwork.

I think there's something quite interesting in how drugs are able to induce various images. I'm intrigued where it comes from. Is is really something within the psyche or is it merely just the drugs talking. I don't have any art history experience, or any general understanding on art techniques. I just enjoy and appreicate the visiual stimulation and what it does to my mind I suppose.

The following website is interesting. It's pictures drawn from an individual who is on LSD over a span of time. It's interesting to see how you can see where he is at his highest and when he begins to come down from the high.

http://www.cowboybooks.com.au/html/acidtrip1.html

Salinger: Hero, devil or somewhere in between

2010-03-30T14:08:00.002-05:00

Feeling truly understood is intoxicating. J.D. Salinger’s characters rang intimately familiar for so many of his readers that they believed only Salinger really knew them. While evidence of this cult-like adoration of Salinger is abundant in the articles written about him, nowhere is it more palpable than in the flurry of comments posted in the month after his death. A sturdy few who had the nerve to voice criticism or apathy about the man, quickly were put in their places by those fans that have been worshipping Salinger for decades. One of the articles I read was My adventures answering Salinger’s mail by Joanna Smith Rakoff. Rakoff began as one of those readers who didn’t get the fascination with the characters or books that Salinger wrote. What she did get, and quickly, was a glimpse into the way his writing affected his readers. People wrote such intimate things to him because they felt – through his books alone – an unquestionable intimacy had already been established by Salinger himself. He, of course, would not read or accept any letters from his fans, so the author of this article soon abandoned the stuffy form letter and responded personally to his fans, acknowledging their predicaments and empathizing with their wish to connect with Salinger. The combination of experiencing the fervor of his fans devotion and re-reading Salinger’s words herself, eventually instilled in her a deep appreciation for Salinger, even as his idiosyncrasies filled her daily work life. Interestingly, J.D. Salinger was not only a recipient of literary fan mail. He was a rejected writer of fan mail to Papa – Ernest Hemingway. (See here for the audio story, about halfway down the page).

I also read the article Recluse with an ugly history of women by Mikki Halpin. She gets the comments going. Like Joyce Maynard’s interview with Charlie Rose, she makes a distinction between being a recluse and being secretive. It would be fair to say that both she and Maynard have a sense that his seclusion is not a wish for privacy – after all, he did leave his home, go out for dinner, stay active in the community – and more a ploy to divert attention from the things for which he did not want to be held accountable. Ms. Halpin points out how successful he was with this ploy. He was so successful in casting himself as the brilliant, misunderstood man who just wanted to be left alone that when Joyce Maynard wrote her book or when Margaret Salinger talked about her father’s short-comings, they were vilified and discredited. Halpin draws parallels to Pablo Picasso and Roman Polanski in trying to paint a picture of Salinger in relief. In her closing paragraph, she writes:

Picasso painted compelling portraits of women he had abused. Roman Polanski assaulted a young woman and made taut, thoughtful films. J.D. Salinger went to church suppers and hooked up with actresses.

This could have been a great ending to her article if she hadn’t ended it with “hooked up with actresses.” Clearly, readers responded with wonder about how that is harmful. Salinger was harmful and hurtful to the women in his life, and sins much greater than “hooking up with actresses” could have been used to complete these comparisons. However, her basic point is sound. He is not a god – he is human. Salinger, like most of us, suffers from a discontinuity of character when his worst moments are pressed up against his best.

Time Magazine's cover story, September 15, 1961

2010-03-29T05:26:00.004-05:00

Twelve pages of breathlessness:

The appearance this week of his new book, Franny and Zooey (Little, Brown; $4), actually two long, related stories that originally ran in The New Yorker, is not just a literary event but, to countless fans, an epiphany. Weeks before the official publication date, Salinger's followers queued up, and bookstores sold out their first supplies. To a large extent, the excitement is fueled by memories of Salinger's most famous work. For of all the characters set to paper by American authors since the war, only Holden Caulfield, the gallant scatologer of The Catcher in the Rye, has taken flesh permanently, as George F. Babbitt, Jay Gatsby, Lieut. Henry and Eugene Gant took flesh in the '20s and '30s.

Link.

The Seven Faces of Salinger

2010-03-28T01:23:00.005-05:00

In her 1962 Harper's article, "J. D. Salinger's Closed Circuit," novelist and short story writer Mary McCarthy takes on Salinger's eccentricities through a provocative examination of Salinger's characters. Even though Salinger had more than four decades of Garbo-esque behavior ahead of him at the time she wrote her piece, McCarthy intuits his dualism (me v. the rest of the world) and his clubbiness: the authentic people versus the phonies; his world seems to shrink as his bibliography grows. McCarthy, with a typically scathing but unerring petard, asks, "And who are these wonder kids but Salinger himself, splitting and multiplying like the original amoeba?"

It's easy, though, to take aim at Salinger. Despite his efforts at reclusivity, we know more about him than Pynchon and other writers who didn't cleave to secretiveness as tenaciously as Salinger. We know he dabbled in Zen, Christian Science and Scientology; he was paranoid about his health and he had a penchant for younger women. Too little, however, is said about his WWII experiences and the possible effects PTSD may have had on a man who was raised as a Jew and was among the first to enter a Nazi death camp after the war ended. Yet even his "Jewishness" was in question: only after his Bar Mitzvah did he learn that his mother wasn't Jewish at all: she was a Catholic of Celtic descent. (Jewish tradition holds that one is only legitimately Jewish through maternal lineage; Salinger would have been aware of this.) Such a discovery may seem unimportant to those raised with a secure sense of their heritage, but to those who, as adolescents or young adults, discover they're not who they thought they were, perhaps due to adoption or hidden ethnic backgrounds, the disclosure can be psychically cataclysmic. As we explore the concept of "self" in this class, I think it might be interesting to consider to what degree our real and perceived ethnicities have on our concepts of personal identity.

McCarthy alludes to heritage and background when she describes the Glass kids as "half-Jewish, half-Irish, the progeny of a team of vaudevillians." Consider Salinger's family dynamics when reading the following passage by McCarthy:

"To be confronted with the seven faces of Salinger, all wise and lovable and simple, is to gaze into a terrifying narcissus pool. Salinger's world contains nothing but Salinger, his teachers, and his tolerantly cherished audience—humanity; outside are the phonies, vainly signaling to be let in, like the kids' Irish mother, Bessie, a home version of the Fat Lady, who keeps invading the bathroom while her handsome son Zooey is in the tub or shaving."

Wow. It always comes back to Mom, doesn't it?

Perhaps Salinger's trip to the narcissus pool began in his adolescence, a period when we are all struggling with identity issues. Perhaps he felt his own authenticity was somehow at stake, upon discovering that he had a different ethnic makeup than he'd been led to believe. It may be that Salinger never left the reflection pond, unwilling to disturb his fixation with the necessary maturation that comes with having to deal with the world. I'm reminded of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in the 1770s and immediately vastly popular among adolescents and young adults who identified with Werther's egotistical self-absorption, seeing in Werther their own heartbreaks and alienation, their sufferings and contempt for the rest of society. The book was a kind of 18th Century Catcher in the Rye. Like Salinger, Goethe was enamored of younger women; he tried unsuccessfully to marry Ulrike von Levetzow, whom he met when he was in his 70s and she just 18. The difference between Goethe and Salinger, however, is that Goethe himself was no recluse; he virtually personified the Age of Enlightenment and matured and enlarged his self, so to speak, with his lively intellect and cultural interactions throughout Europe. Is Salinger an example of what happens to the self when we voluntarily isolate ourselves from society?

Anyway, here's the link to McCarthy's article:

http://ezproxy.hamline.edu:2562/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CH1420018144&v=2.1&u=clic_hamline&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w

Did Salinger Miss a Great Opportunity?

2010-03-27T23:37:00.001-05:00

For some reason I can't get the video to post properly here, so I'll just paste the link below, but here Colbert envisions the book I wish we were reading by Salinger...

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/233531/july-14-2009/raise-high-the-rage-beams

Subsidiary questions, re: Joyce Maynard, etc.

2010-03-26T12:24:00.008-05:00

There are just my musings, not an exam. Discuss as you like, but don't feel obliged.

1. To what extent should we overlook J. D. Salinger's deficiencies as a person because he wrote some stories with wonderful, appealing, characters? (Cf., Michael Jackson, pedophile, "Thriller") To what extent should we suspect (or modulate) our responses to those characters because the author had some serious deficiencies?

2. Do authors (Maynard, e.g.) get to write about other people, revealing them, freely? Should these authors ask permission? What if someone wrote a tell-all about your family? What if it isn't accurate in your view? What should you do on either side of the issue? This, of course, is well-trod territory. Anyone take the memoir class? If Michele Campbell wasn't in France, I'd ask her to write a note about the issue, although I bet the answer is in her archive somewhere.

3. Where do people get off thinking Salinger didn't have the right to retire? Why do they feel they have that privilege? It is something about those wonderful, appealing, characters. They conferred ownership.

4. Seducing an 18-year old girl is not pedophilia. It is distasteful at worst. This does not, of course, excuse how Salinger treated Maynard. It is interesting that it seems like people critical of Salinger's post-retirement life object to the 18-year old women more than their treatment.

5. Those characters, again: why is Hapworth so reviled? The response goes well past simply not liking a story. I am reminded of Misery. (Yes, I could have linked the book. Sue me.)

6. Of course, any time a woman accuses a prominent, well-regarded member of the community of bad behavior, she gets further abused. I wonder how Salinger felt about being in the role of the protected, established, prominent guy rather than the underdog accuser? Much of the opprobrium piled on Maynard comes from people who would never blame a rape victim or doubt an abuse story. Why are they different in this case? And why couldn't they see that?

7. Should any of this have anything to do with the appreciation of Salinger's work? The standard lit-crit answer is, "no, works exist on their own, no authors necessary." Other approaches (cultural studies, feminist readings -- surely someone has done this) would reread the stories in light of the revealed abuse, looking for cues.

Guns n' Roses, "Catcher in the Rye"

2010-03-26T11:22:00.001-05:00

Man, I dislike these guys.

When all is said and done
We're not the only ones
Who look at life this way
That's what the old folks say
But every time I see them
Makes me wish I had a gun
If I thought that I was crazy
Well I guess I'd have more fun
(Guess I'd have more fun)

Oooh, the Catcher In The Rye Again
Won't let ya get away from him
(Tomorrow never comes)
It's just another day...
Like today

You decide
Cause I don't have to
And then they'll find
And I won't ask you
At anytime
Or long hereafter
If the cold outside's
As I'm imagining
It to be
Oh, no

Lana nana na na na
Lana nana na nana

Ooh, the Catcher In The Rye Again
Won't let ya get away from him
(Tomorrow never comes)
It's just another day...
Like today

When all is said and done
We're not the only ones
Who look at life this way
That's what the young folks say
And if they'd ever change
As that reminds to say
But every time I see them
Makes me wish I had a gun
If I thought that I was crazy
Well I guess I'd have more fun
Cause what used to be's
Not there for me
And ought to for someone
That belongs...
Insane...
Like I do

Oh, no
Not at all

On an ordinary day
Not in an ordinary way
All at once the song I heard
No longer would it play
For anybody
Or anyone
That needed comfort from somebody
Needed comfort from someone
Who cared
To be
Not like you
And unlike me

And then the voices went away from me
Somehow you set the wheels in motion
That haunt our memories
You were the instrument
You were the one
How a body
Took the body
You gave that boy a gun

You took our innocence
Beyond our stares
Sometimes the only thing
We counted on
When no one else was there

Weekly activity: JD, an introduction

2010-03-26T10:27:00.010-05:00

The story of J. D. Salinger, or rather, the story of his brilliance and sudden disappearance, has been the subject of a lot of speculation, psychoanalysis, one tell-all book (about which opinion was sharply divided), and almost no information from the subject himself. In addition to the stories, I would like to supplement our discussion with some group-sourced research on the matter. Here's what to do:

(1) Claim, in the comments here, a source or two on J. D. Salinger so as to avoid too much overlap. Try to find interesting sites: critical or fan sites are a lot more fun than Answers.com or Wikipedia. Alternatively, roll your own (I seriously can't believe I said that) by putting together a handful of letters, editorials, news articles, etc. (At least a million "appreciations" were written when Salinger died.)

(2) Digest it somehow.

(3) Bring your findings into next week's discussion, and/or post something here. OK, not just post -- post your synthesis, analysis, view of the source, please.

Some help for you, although it's just Google search results (i.e., you could have done this yourself):

Bananafish
Letters to J. D. Salinger
The Bananafish Google Group
Why did J.D. Salinger spend the last 60 years hiding in a shed writing love notes to teenage girls?
I have no idea
My long friendship with J. D. Salinger
Here's a bunch
My adventures answering J.D. Salinger's mail
Salinger: "Recluse" with an ugly history of women
Dead Caulfields
Jerry and me: A decade of correspondence with J.D. Salinger
J.D. Salinger: The Man in the Glass House
J. D. Salinger documentaries

Adding a couple more:

Why Does the American Press Hate Joyce Maynard?
Literary Fascism at The New York Times
Leech Women in Love!
If You Really Want to Hear About It
The Cult of Joyce Maynard
A conversation with author Joyce Maynard
Joyce Maynard – At Home In The World
The Unofficial Joyce Maynard Webpage
Justice to J.D. Salinger

In the interest of full disclosure, I count myself as a Maynard supporter, at least in the sense that I believe she gets to write about her own life without regard for Salinger's preferences or legacy. I mean, if he acted like that then he acted like that, and if he expected her to remain quiet about it, well, she didn't. I can't side with bullies. (I haven't forgiven Maureen Dowd.)

Etc. I think I can understand why the guy became a recluse. Although it was at least partly because he didn't want to be outed as a jerk. Does this have anything to do with how we should read the stories?

Questions

2010-03-25T23:10:00.002-05:00

As per Kelly's request, here are a couple questions:

-In the "self-help" sort of section or "enlightenment" section, in which I include Reynolds, and Ram Dass and the no-self book and "Enlighten Up!", we encounter people who have been doing what they have been doing for years (in the later case, the gurus), but we as an audience are expected to take what they have found in stride, without the background, i.e. we are asked to accept Ram Dass' conclusions without having taken years of LSD. I guess this is less than a question than a continuation of Kelly's last post about the cheapening of enlightenment. But I think it applies to all of it. The musician in the movie says near the end to Nick something like "you expect to get in a few weeks what it takes a lifetime to get just one strain of." I guess the question would be how can we make these things meaningful without the history?

-Does Goffman's performance model for human interaction hold when we are talking about spritual/religious matters? I refer perhaps to the idea of people being seen at church, or wearing beads and dancing with Ram Dass...And if we can't accept this, then is this where Goffman breaks down and we can say there is something real beyond the performance?

hey kids, I found Jesus!

2010-03-25T16:10:00.004-05:00

First of all, this post is a little later than I had hoped... but after two trips to the Apple store my computer is finally behaving (now that I have typed that, I give it 24 hours before it hates me again).

My dad would always say to my brother and I, 'Hey, Kate and Joe, I found Jesus'.
'Really?'
'Yeah, he was behind the couch the whole time'
This still makes me laugh.

When it comes to this enlightenment business I am quite skeptical. It doesn't really work for me. For those it does work for, great! At least in my own experience I haven't really gotten enlightenment from things such as yoga, or being set up to be reborn as a Christian. When I was a junior (?) in high school my mom, aunt, and I signed up for a yoga class. It was once a week with a frighteningly short and flexible man. His skin has spent so much time in the sun that it looked like leather. He was an incredible nice and soft spoken person. From what I remember the class was twice a week, and we went for only 4 weeks or so. I was very athletic at the time and the class fell in the midst of my ski season. I was used to working out and training very hard. Yoga was a great break for me, and let me explore the strength in my muscles in a very different way. That was about as much as I got from it.

While I was in middle school there were a few of my friends who had joined this new church. They kept talking about how cool and laid back and fun it was. 'We get excited about Christ! We celebrate!' They would tell me how with the power of prayer with their peers they could speak in tongues and how amazing and heightened of an experience this was. Speak in tongues? What? So I decided to go with them, just to see what it was about. What an uncomfortable hour that was. I thought I would be able to go in, hang out in the background and just observe what this place was all about. That was an incredibly naive assumption on my part. I found myself to be the main focus of the greater part of this hour. Suddenly the whole goal of this hour (mass? service?) was to get me reborn, or to speak in tongues, or see god, or something along those lines. I felt violated in so many ways upon leaving there. I felt as though I was watching a show of people filling in gaps in their lives with wild antics that they could cite as proof that they are spiritually alive. If that is what spiritually alive is, then I will pass, thanks.

What I am trying to get at is that I think my dad is spot on. I don't know if enlightenment has to be some big dog and pony show or journey. Who is that journey for? You? Or is it so you can tell everyone else about this incredible journey? Why can't it just be simple? Even just a moment of realization that something was there the whole time, and you were just oblivious to it can be a very satisfying moment. Kind of like when I freak out because I can't find my car keys, and damn it, I had just had them, where did I put them, I really hope they aren't locked in my car... And they were in my hand the whole time.

Taking Place

2010-03-25T15:50:00.003-05:00

It all sounds like emotional mathematics to me, until I remember we're not supposed to be equating things (and perhaps not having emotions either), just accepting them as equal. I don't know, I think Reynolds and these yahoos would agree that you can't think of it in terms of what's to come. Maybe for that reason it is like sitting down, as opposed to taking a next step. If the guy in the film wasn't so anxious about getting phone numbers I would say he's more enlightened than the film's director, in that, at least when it comes to enlightenment, he doesn't seem to believe there's anything he can do that he isn't already. I just love this idea of communicating at every moment with our presence, in spite of our words. What we say seems to me to be so much about a next step, an expectation, that not talking is perhaps the only way to talk about it. And then you really have to think about what you're saying by just being, because it's all true. That's the scary part. It's all there, not hidden deep inside or in the clouds, but taking place. What's scary is what I think the book argues: enlightment is you taking the place of you.

I don't get enlightenment. Period.

2010-03-25T15:18:00.002-05:00

I’ve always felt that this “enlightenment” or “transformation” that is spoken of is pretty much all about sitting is quiet with the authentic self. By the “authentic” self, I mean the self that you’re in pure contact with. Personally, I find it rather difficult to sit in any sort of quiet stance and let my thoughts float in and out of my consciousness. A lot of my thoughts are scary and I don’t really want to acknowledge that I’m having them. I’m not confident at all that being “here, now” even feels possible in my life. I guess that’s just how I feel personally about enlightenment. When we were watching the movie, I was totally on the same page with Nick- I feel that yoga seems like a good way to strengthen the body’s core, but actual spiritual progress seems almost impossible to make. The only way to tap into this extra element of consciousness from yoga seems possible is through intellectualization, so I understand why Nick was concerned with asking the yoga masters so many questions. When Ram Dass talked about transcending personalities and coming into pure contact with the “self” that is free of the body, social roles, etc.- quite honestly, it just seems impossible without the use of drugs and when the drugs run out, then what?

still haven't found ...

2010-03-25T15:10:00.005-05:00

"Any trip you want to take leads to the same place."

I think that we maybe allow ourselves to get in the way of enlightenment and that is what Ram Dass's book is pushing toward.

We look at enlightenment as getting away from ourselves, as changing who we are, but we really can't change who we are on a fundamental level. We're still the same collection of molecules. So we can't really change, but we can augment. We can alter our activities and our perceptions. And that is what Ram Dass is getting at (and it sounds like what Kevin Reynolds it getting at, though I still haven't read that entire book). They have different ways of going about it and from what I understand the Reynolds' book seemed to polarize the class as to how he presented his ideas.

U2 might have had the right idea with this song ...

If we're really just on a trip, a journey, searching for ourselves amongst other things, then the journey is in a way the destination as well. We're not meant to find, because there are no answers only more questions.

Or, maybe Life really is a highway ...

And then here is a spiritual journey ...

Awkward Airplane Small-Talk

2010-03-25T14:18:00.004-05:00

First of all, I really loved Ram Dass' book, top to bottom. I enjoyed every page of Remember Be Here Now. I attribute that to how vague everything is. Unlike Reynolds, who gave prescriptive ways to live constructively and obtain tangible goals, Dass seemed to be giving vague notions to apply here and there in our lives which could perhaps lead to our own version of enlightenment. That's what I thought often while Nick in that yoga flick struggled for enlightenment, I think it's important (for me, anyways) to define our own version of being enlightened. I say this not feeling like an "enlightened" person, but feeling like a person who has reached different forms of enlightenment and moved on. Because if we ever really did reach any concrete enlightenment, what would be the point of searching further? Dass gave life/world/spiritual advice which can be applied in a million different ways in a million different scenarios, and I thought it was presented beautifully.

Yoga offered Nick a "change" because he began exploring the ideas of what exactly he wanted to change in the first place. Ram Dass' book offers anyone who reads it a change because suddenly they are living a life in which Ram Dass exists. Everything we ever do changes our life. So doing anything deliberate (yoga, meditation, hair color change, a trip to the Maharaj-ji in India) just reminds us of what our life is, what it consists of, and what needs to change. It is really easy to change ourselves and our lives, the hard part is deciding in what direction we want to take that change. So for some of us that is drastically away from the ideas of constructive living, as we saw last week. And for some of us it is towards the ideas of constructive living. But we've all benefitted from reading it because now we see that distinction.

I was reading Ram Dass' Be Here Now on Tuesday morning on an airplane to Arizona (where I am now sitting, typing this out by the pool, so forgive me if my shallow vacation-brain is contributing nothing to this discussion) and the man next to me was reading some sort of war literature. He noticed the peculiar way I was reading my book and asked me about it. I began to tell him about Richard Alpert and his relationship to the LSD movement and Dr. Leary and I probably divulged too much as I began to talk about how incredible LSD is for certain types of exploring. He shook his head slowly, looked down at his book, looked back at me and solemnly informed me that his son is "fighting for my freedom in Iraq" right now, as though telling me that the freedom for which his son (and himself in a former war, his father in a former war, and two of his other sons in the current war) fought was being wasted on Americans like me who squander that freedom exploring the hallucinogenic effects of different chemicals. I didn't have the heart to tell him that perhaps his son and Dr. Leary just find the road to enlightenment different from one another.

I think the American preoccupation with "the road to enlightenment" as we see all around us is actually a lovely thing. Yeah, some people definitely miss the point, some people benefit monetarily from the exploration, some people use it to manipulate, but at least it's something that people acknowledge. Who needs to change? Everybody needs to change. And there are opportunities all around us for change. We just have to slowly start weeding through them.

As for myself, I'll probably hang onto both Ram Dass' and David K. Reynolds' books. There's no reason in my opinion that they can't work "constructively" together to make my life better.

Why change?

2010-03-25T12:36:00.000-05:00

As a society, we are obsessed with the notions of change and transformation. Marketing and television maximize our preoccupation with changing our circumstances with advertisements for products that will make our lives better and reality TV is flush with makeovers over our homes, our bodies, our lifestyles. But what is it that draws us so intensely to change and transformation? And does changing and transforming really satisfy the want that led us to seek transformation? There is no purpose in change for change's sake and people can be transformed by both love and hatred. Behind the yearning for change and transformation there has to be a malaise – a dissatisfaction with the way things currently are – or a belief that life is supposed to be more, better, richer, thinner, happier than it is.

This is where enlightenment comes in. To me, the search for enlightenment gets to the existential angst that lies behind flurries of changes and transformation. Seeking to understand who I am, what I am, why I am can inform how or whether I choose to seek change. People pick up practices such as yoga and meditation and go on spiritual quests to get answers to these questions. As earlier bloggers have pointed out, sometimes what yoga gives the person is simply the enlightened identity that "I am a person who practices yoga and has a yoga mat." For others, it isn't about enlightenment at all but is part of a quest to improve (change/transform) one's body through the exercise of yoga. But the enlightenment found through yoga may go further for some people. For some, it is understanding, as Ram Dass did through psychedelics, what they are and are not. It is understanding the relationships between body, mind and spirit; learning the intricacies of breath and thought.

I do not have much personal experience with yoga, but I do with Buddhism and meditation. Learning to quiet my mind, be in the precise moment, release the past and future, and focus on breathing has been extremely helpful. I suppose it has been transformative, but it has been so in a counter-cultural type of a way. It has "transformed" me to be more appreciative of life as life is – to live in the moment – to let go of existential angst. When the current moment is tolerable, there is less need for the perfect face cream or diet or pill or shoe.

For these reasons, I tend to view enlightenment as completely separate from change and transformation. You can be enlightened without choosing to make changes and, heavens knows, you can certainly make changes without enlightenment.

Here we go again

2010-03-25T11:44:00.006-05:00

This is getting silly. Tom (R.) finds that book, the National Geographic Explorer show is blogged, the Cary Grant essay gets BoingBoinged, and now Letters of Note has a thing from Huxley.

Brave New World novelist Aldous Huxley was diagnosed with cancer in 1960, at which point his health slowly began to deteriorate. On his deathbed in November of 1963, just as he was passing away, Aldous - a man who for many years had been fascinated with the effects of psychedelic drugs since being introduced to mescaline in 1953 - asked his wife Laura to administer him with LSD. She agreed.

The following letter - an incredibly moving, detailed account of Aldous' last days - was written by Laura just days after her husband's death and sent to his older brother Julian.

Read it here. I assume that thinking about LSD is just in the wind, and we got caught in it like these commenters who are bringing it suddenly to our attention also did. Other alternatives are, of course, selective perception issues (possible) or, implausibly, the world has arranged these coincidences for our specific benefit. Synchronicity troubled Jung a great deal, of course. It troubles most everyone, and we handle it by dismissing it or repressing it since we don't really know what to do with it. (It would be different if I were out looking for these things, but they're just showing up in my RSS reader all by themselves.) Oh well: Let's dance!

Andy Summers's guitar there is a Gittler guitar, extremely rare and collectible.

a lil rant at the end..

2010-03-25T11:42:00.000-05:00

In the world we live in today, it seems people are more concerned with the things in front of their faces. I say “things” almost literally because we are a materialistic society. From our discussions so far, it is obvious that individuals, more often than not, find their worth and value in accordance to the objects they possess, in turn, representing them (house, car, job, etc.). Our desires and conveniences are fed continuously and it is easy to allow these wants and selfish desires to control us. There is an overstimulation that occurs when we are constantly being bombarded with what we should have and what we just can’t live without. As a result, once this awareness of this over stimulating, materialistic mindset is made, overwhelmed with it all, people tend to want to return to simpler times, the basics, a mind frame where it’s not about the external, but the internal.
I find this is where the idea of enlightenment is pursued. There must be some form of internal questioning, discontentment with one’s life, or loss of purpose for those to have the desire to seek out more. I think transformation and change of self can occur, but this vague concept of enlightenment has to do with finding internal peace, finding a resolution to the chaos that one cannot control, even if that means being made aware of the fact that you can’t control it. I think one of the key similarities that our readings have offered us is the ability to gain this “enlightenment” internally.
There’s something strange to me in the way Nick goes about seeking enlightenment, as if it’s some external force that enters you and changes you. I find that yoga, meditation, constructive living, psychedelic drugs, are all methods and paths to achieve this internal place of peace and contentment. I can’t help but think that human beings are not as cookie cut as professionals may want us to be sometimes and maybe this is extremely idealistic of me, but I’m a little tired of arguing about directions. We all, for the most part, want peace of mind and contentment, what is the issue if we take the time to find the best way possible for ourselves.
I know this may not be necessarily the response I wanted to convey, but excuse my slight ranting :)