Once Upon a Time There Was a Chymical Wedding

"Stories are medicine. I have been taken with stories since I heard my first. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything -- we need only listen. The remedies for repair or reclamation of any lost psychic drive are contained in stories." ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés in Women Who Run With the Wolves

I'm a little late to this party -- two years to be exact -- but I have recently fallen in love with Once Upon a Time. Once again I tried to curl up with a little diversionary fluff and was instead abruptly pulled into the heart of the mysteries. As ever with these pop culture creations I am left to wonder if the writers are just randomly pulling these profound archetypes out of their deep subconscious, totally unaware of the implications, or if it's a carefully scripted foray into Gnosis.

The central plot is clever and entertaining. The evil queen from Snow White, she of the poison apple, takes her revenge by casting a spell that drags a myriad of fairy tale characters into a small town in Maine. There they live trapped in time and unable to remember who they really are. But the curse may be undone by the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, who was secreted out of the enchanted forest before the curse fell and predestined to return at the age of 28. Twenty-eight years later Emma Swan is living a lonely life in Boston until a young boy claiming to be the son she put up for adoption pulls her to Storybrooke. He insists she must fulfill her destiny and break the curse cast by his adoptive mother, who he is quite sure is the evil queen in his very unusual book of  fairy tales.

Each episode weaves together the complimentary narratives of the characters' lives in Storybrooke and their history as fairy tale creatures. It's skillful, if somewhat predictable, storytelling. But it's in the imagery that the creators tip their hand. They speak the language of symbols far too well for me to take the series lightly. From the first episode I was struck by the subtle but brilliant use of sacred geometry, character names, and striking tableaux. 

It is essentially a mystical story employing the most basic numerical code to appeal to conscious oneness.

TED Finds Deepak Chopra's Lost Talk

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As discussed, one of Deepak Chopra's criticisms of TED's censorship referred to his own talk, in which he rebutted Richard Dawkins in 2002. He apparently shamed Chris Anderson into retrieving it from the vault of hidden ideas. He has posted it, but in "the naughty corner" like Graham Hancock's and Rupert Sheldrake's talks. As with those, it's in an unembeddable format. It also comes complete with snark and insulting framing about its "misleading" science. But at least we get to hear it and I now have. I also forced myself to sit through the Dawkins talk he was responding to, which can be found here. It's actually titled "Militant Atheism." Wow.

Chopra's write-up on the restoration of the talk is here. His talk turns out to be mystical in orientation, arguing that where science is failing is in viewing the universe as separate from the observer. His quote of Krishnamurti thoroughly won me over.

A Christian fundamentalist was once conversing with the noted India spiritual teacher, J. Krishnamurti.

"The more I listen to you, the more convinced I am that you must be an atheist," the fundamentalist said.

"I used to be an atheist," Krishnamurti replied, "until I realized that I was God."

The fundamentalist was shocked. "Are you denying the divinity of Jesus Christ?"

Krishnamurti shrugged. "I've never denied anyone their divinity. Why would I do it to Jesus Christ?"

That the audience laughed at this anecdote while militant atheists scowled, seeing an imminent danger to sanity, reason, science, and public safety, shows how far apart two worldviews can be. But I persist in believing that an expanded science will take consciousness into account, including higher consciousness. Until it does, our common goal, to understand the nature of reality, will never be reached. A universe that we aren't participating in makes no sense, and our participation takes place at the level of consciousness, nowhere else.

And so it becomes apparent why this talk would go afoul of TED's rules, at least as they have recently defined them. It fuses "science and spirituality" -- that thing Chris Anderson can't really seem to decide if he does or doesn't want.

I could not help noticing that his talk also focuses a great deal on non-locality of consciousness, which, as discussed, seems to be the recurring theme amongst TED's targeted speakers.

Dawkins's talk starts out reasonably enough, arguing for evolution to be taught in schools. He even acknowledges that many religious leaders are fully on board with the theory of evolution and are some of its strongest proponents. So far so good. But minutes in he reverts to his characteristically nasty, insulting self.

But here I want to say something nice about creationists. It's not something I often do so listen carefully. I think they're right about one thing. I think they're right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion. I've already said that many individual evolutionists like the Pope are also religious but I think they're deluding themselves. I believe a true understanding of Darwinism is deeply corrosive to religious faith.

And he's off and running. Atheists are the smart people. Religious people aren't. Blah, blah, blah...

In a stunningly absurd attempt to turn creationist theory on its head, he winds up arguing the exact same thing in reverse. Creationists argue that creation is too complex not to have a designer. Silly creationists, argues Dawkins. Any creator complex enough to design all this while doing all the other things he's expected to do is inconceivable because it would compound the problem of complexity. Darwinism is simple and elegant, therefore it must be true. Creationism is too complex to be true reasons Dawkins and without a trace of irony.

Dawkins explains that his idea for stopping creationists is to "attack religion as a whole." For someone looking for simple, elegant solutions to difficult questions, such a Herculean task seems out of character.

So in a TED talk, you can't combine "science and spirituality" but apparently you can combine science and anti-spirituality. It's perfectly acceptable to verbally bludgeon people for their spiritual beliefs using the "language of science" and to "present one [anti-]spiritual view as the 'truth.'"

As I always am with Dawkins, I'm struck by how much he sounds like a religious fanatic. Here, he expresses his lack of patience with the noncommittal nature of agnosticism -- echoes of the condemnation of "lukewarm" faith I heard ad nauseum during my own flirtation with evangelical Christianity. (Revelation 3:14-17) And then of course there's the victimhood. Everybody thinks it's just fine to pick on the atheists! Atheists are marginalized, isolated, targeted. They're lonely. They're so lonely. Honestly he sounds like Bill Donohue.

I also note that he pitched his books in this lecture, albeit with wink and a nudge. And here I was given to understand that this is the ultimate no-no. Where's Al Meyers when you need him? I don't hear him calling Dawkins "sleazy."

Honestly, that this is what TED thinks is stellar enough for its main platform -- this angry, hate filled diatribe cloaked in soft-spoken, British, professorial tones -- is just another reminder that I'd rather traipse through the TED ghetto or listen to its discards. That's were the real "ideas" are spreading.

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Spiritual But Not Religious

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"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." ~ Teilhard de Chardin

If it were up to me, I'd retire the phrase "spiritual but not religious." I consider it effectively meaningless. To my way of thinking, we can't not be spiritual. We are spirit. But I'm not being fair to the idiomatic meaning of that phrase, which could be more fairly stated as, "searching for meaning beyond the confines of organized religion."

However problematic the phrase, it is a growing trend. This seems to rankle a number of religious authorities. A quick search through the Huffington Post religion section brings up a fair sampling of disdainful diatribes against all these dilettantes who think they can have God without the hard work of religious practice in like-minded community. I read a number of these posts when they came out, sighed, and moved on.

There's Pastor Lillian Daniel who is sick and tired of hearing from anonymous strangers on planes that God can be found in sunsets. She just wishes the nonreligious would stop boring her with their irrelevant observations. And, no, I'm not overstating her tone. "Please stop boring me," is her subtitle.

There's Alan Miller's lightning rod of a post bemoaning the religious illiteracy of a populace that can't name more than four of the ten commandments. He casts religion almost entirely in Judeo-Christian terms and dismisses all else as superstition. A good rebuttal can be found here.

Most recently, I read this jeremiad from Michael P. Murphy of Loyola University. Murphy bemoans a religiously untethered generation that has filled that void with technology and begun worshiping at the altar of Steve Jobs by default. I agree with Murphy that we seem to be wired to seek out both communion with other human beings and an experience of the transcendent. But his post is a muddle. And it reeks of contempt for people who think they can find something better than church.

As I paused to watch devotees of Apple products engaging in communion with the items of their religious practice, I was struck once more not only by how religion and spirituality have reached an almost comic level of topsey-turveyness, but also with the stark recognition that Marshall McCluhan's prophetic insight from 1964 is made manifest every minute of of every day in the digital age: the medium has indeed become the message.

Murphy clearly knows nothing of McLuhan's work... or the spelling of his name, apparently. His attempt to posthumously enlist him, of all people, in his war with modernity is risible. McLuhan's famous statement wasn't meant as prophecy. He didn't say, the medium will become the message. He said it is. It always has been. The medium to which McLuhan referred wasn't some future vision of high tech. It was any technology -- any extension of our human capacities -- going back to the stone age. McLuhan's point was that the way information is conveyed is more important than the information itself, because the means of conveyance shapes both psyche and society. As we moved from the printed word, for instance, to film and television, we stopped thinking so linearly and began to take in multiple messages/images simultaneously. These newer media force us to develop new ways to prioritize and cognize that information. Information influences what we think. The medium influences how we think.

Murphy continues.

The word "religion" finds its root in religio, which means "to bind." And herein lies the main point: we like being "spiritual" because the concept, as we perceive it, makes no claim upon us. It binds us to nothing -- or at least nothing communal, confessional or public. Of course, it is liberating to be masters of our own faith practices. To be both founders and adherents of a "Sheila-ism" or a "Murph-ism" -- that is, to participate in the postmodern practice of inventing and practicing one's own hodge-podge religion -- is a uniquely empowering proposition. The problem is that it is also an isolating, atomizing and ultimately inauthentic approach to spirituality.

In fact, the etymology of the word religion is a matter of some dispute. But this is a small point. More concerning is the paternalism. Murphy seems certain that those who do not seek God through the proper channels of an organized religion cannot possibly find connection or meaning.

An assumption spans these various writings that those who define as spiritual but not religious are isolated in their experience and have no sense of community with which to share their spiritual discovery. Leave say, I have not found this to be true.

To Miller, where organized religion is real and diligent, other spiritual practices are entirely ephemeral.

Back to the Spiritual But Not Religious-ers, they seem to have appropriated the worst of all worlds. They have retained the superstitious outlook and yet do not want to engage or present anything more broadly life affirming. Selecting a superficial mixture of "nice-feeling" items from Yoga to a slice of Zen and a moment of Tao is hardly progressive as far as options for humanity is concerned. They have jettisoned the hard work, diligence and observation of organized religion for a me-me-me what-ever kind of lifestyle.

Far be it from me to claim that there aren't a fair number of dabblers in the new age marketplace and among those who define as spiritual but not religious. But we're kidding ourselves if we pretend that churches aren't also packed with people who leave their faith at the church door after Sunday services, that there are no hypocrites who give the tenets of their religions lip-service, or worse, that there aren't those who cherry-pick and twist scripture to justify whatever abuses against humanity they indulge.

I can agree that some problems arise when we have no shared, clear cosmology. I can also agree that there is a downside to a pluralism that allows people to pick and choose nothing but appetizers and desserts from an a la carte menu of world religions. Spiritual expansion requires grounding in the deeper lessons and safeguards that come by way of well-worn tradition. Where I disagree is in the assumption that shallow practice is inevitable among the nonreligious or that a prescriptivist approach to spiritual practice is the only possible corrective.

Absent in all these posts is any sense of the responsibility organized religions might have for their dwindling numbers. This is particularly galling coming from Murphy -- a professor of  Catholic Studies. Conspicuous by its absence is any discussion of the abuse scandal that has left large numbers of practicing Catholics disillusioned and demoralized. He dismisses all of it as "the troubles and intrigues that the Catholic 'brand' has experienced." But the extent to which the Church has broken faith with its followers has caused even Catholics in Ireland to abandon organized religion in droves.

Disillusionment has always been a driver, not only of religious attrition, but also of religious innovation. But it is not just the disappointment with the flaws and limitations of religious institutions. It is the thirst for the divine that often goes unsatisfied in hidebound institutions.

In so many instances, what drives people from their churches to the spiritual path less traveled is the beginnings of spiritual awakening. Organized religion has historically been suspicious, even condemning, of mystical experiences other than those of their founders and prophets -- especially if those experiences challenge orthodox beliefs. This leaves people who have their own brushes with the numinous, experience moments of conscious oneness with the all, or in any way begin to pierce the veil, at odds with their religious institutions.

Historically these spiritual quests have resulted in sectarian conflicts, new religions -- Buddhism springs to mind -- and more than a few have led to war and wide-scale persecution. Such things still happen in much of the world. So, perhaps, it's petty of me to worry about the carping of a few religion writers.

Here, in the West, the spiritual but not religious trend is just the newest wrinkle in a consciousness expansion that began in earnest when psychedelics and Eastern thought exploded in the popular culture.

Astrologer Adam Elenbaas describes the complexity of the search for spiritual truth in a pluralistic society with an ever-expanding panoply of traditions. Spiritual but not religious has become a kind of shorthand for an experience that doesn't fit neatly into any category.

I'm an astrologer so I can't help but approach the questions I ask or the concepts I'm interested in through the lens of the system I study. From the astrological perspective I think most new agers, including astrologers like myself, struggle to define a coherent belief system for ourselves because of the times we are living through: moving now from the age of Pisces to Aquarius. Are we "believers" in astrology? Can I call myself a Buddhists even though I might be a raw foodist who practices yoga, urban tantra, and gnostic Christianity in between Christian Santo Daime works? Maybe it's just become easier to answer, "I'm spiritual not religious." Maybe it's just a shorter way of saying, "I'm looking for oneness; whatever you call it it's all the same to me. I yearn for mystical fusion. I yearn to get out of this mundane world and go home once and for all!"

Elenbaas places the debate over spiritual and religious definition in the context of the Piscean age giving way to the age of Aquarius, and our thirst to dissolve into the numinous as a Piscean (Neptune) drive.

For example, this past Friday night I went to a Dharma talk at a local Buddhist temple. The female priest giving the talk was speaking about the fundamental premises of Buddhism, and she spoke about the reality of suffering as the base condition that inspires our path toward nirvana. She talked about crossing the ocean of suffering with single pointed focus. When I left the dharma talk I felt an emotional connection to something outside of myself for sure -- at least for the rest of the evening. But it wasn't what she had to say about suffering, necessarily. It was the people in their robes, and it was the crystals glowing behind carefully arranged lamps. It was the images and icons, the quietness as she spoke to the few of us gathered together. It was the way in which the temple was filled some other-worldly magic, and how I could literally feel the presence of Neptune, like a golden trident poking through the fabric of the "Buddhist" reality. And THAT was surreal. That felt sacred to me.

It's not the words, the philosophy... it's the potency of symbols, the irrationality of myth, the sensory and intangible, that tips us toward transcendence. As per "freelance monotheist" Karen Armstrong, that is the purpose of religion. And it is precisely the common lack of that which has led so many to instead be spiritual but not religious.

"Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen." ~ Teilhard de Chardin

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The Increasingly Blatant Symbolism of Doctor Who

"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." ~ Doctor Who

A while ago Stephen Fry made waves when he bemoaned the infantalizing nature of BBC programming and characterized Doctor Who as "not for adults." Perhaps Fry, for all his many talents and artistic sensibility, is one of those hardcore atheists who has no appreciation for the power of myth. Admittedly, I haven't spent a lot of time on the mythical underpinnings of the show, although I did explore one episode's point towards indigenous creation mythology here. 

I will also give Fry benefit of the doubt and assume his comments in 2010 pertained entirely to the pre-Matt Smith years. There is no question that with the massive production changes after David Tennant's departure, came a more interesting, and I dare say, more adult show. Smith, as an actor, has more depth and gravitas than Tennant. (Christopher Eccleston was also brilliant and I took his departure hard. I know. I know. David Tennant was the most beloved Doctor ever. Blah, blah, blah... whatever.)

Not only is the writing under Steven Moffat darker and edgier, there has been a peeling away of the veils that obscured the core mythos. It seems rather obvious in discussing a show that opens with a trip through a wormhole, that we're talking about alchemy/kundalini/stargate mythology. But with the recent Christmas episode, "The Snowmen," key archetypes were even more blatant than they were in the London Olympics. Even the advertising was provocative.

Note the Blue Pearl opening above the Doctor's head. William Henry explains a bit about the mystical experience of the Blue Pearl in Secret of Sion.

As I discussed in Starwalkers and the Dimension of the Blessed, traditional shamanic peoples around the world describe a Blue Pearl, an exquisite, enchanting blue light that is a mode of transport. It appears in a flash, without any provocation or thought, and opens like a lotus or a wormhole.

. . .

In fact, says Muktananda, it contains the whole universe It is the seed of the heart, the Supreme within us. It has been described as vibrant, electric blue, brilliant indigo, azure, cobalt, and cerulean.

. . .

Also known as the Pearl of Infinite Power, the Blue Pearl, Stone or Apple is actually how our soul travels to the inner realm and it is inside of a quantum egg or in an "interphasic state of existence" (it enables us to jump through time and cross great distances or even to use this skill locally.)

Hmmm... What does that sound like?

In "The Snowmen," the Doctor meets Clara, who susses out his hiding place... in the clouds. This she does by locating something akin to Jacob's ladder.

She ascends a spiral staircase.

And at the top she finds the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space). So, she ascends a stairway to heaven where she encounters multidimensional awareness.

Jacob's Ladder ~ William Blake
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Later in the episode Clara is invited into the TARDIS and given the key -- the ritual by which the Doctor initiates his companions into the mysteries of time-space travel.

The TARDIS has been given a bit of a redesign for the new season. And I can't help noticing that the circumpunct imagery has also become more blatant.

So the connection between wormhole physics that was always implied in the show was underscored with alchemical imagery in "The Snowmen." Other mystical and kundalini themes are hinted at but they are subtler and require, to some extent, stripping the context from the archetype. For instance, we are introduced to the concept of a "memory worm" which wipes memory from all who touch it.

The plot also centers around the mystical idea of reflective reality. "The snow reflects." A strange, new, memory snow patterns itself on the people, personalities, thoughts, emotions, and objectives, its exposed to, and takes on form.

I can't help wondering if the plot line was influenced by the, albeit deeply flawed, water experiment made famous in What the Bleep Do We Know? I say flawed because the results have not proved to be replicable and Masaru Emoto has been less than transparent about his research methods. All of which leads us back to that fundamental question? Does the world reflect our thoughts or our consciousness? Because they are not the same thing. But I've discussed this little problem of new age reductionism at far too great a length already.

"The Snowman" explored the metaphysics of the TARDIS but the physics has long been a subject of discussion.

Something clicked for me a while ago when I was watching The Science of Doctor Who, which explored some of the theoretical physics of the show with prominent physicists. Michio Kaku's offered his explanation for why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside.

People forget that the phone booth is not the TARDIS at all. It's the door.

The humor of the cloaking mechanism that got stuck in police box mode back in the '60s, when they were ubiquitous in London, has provided writers with many challenges and opportunities through the years. But whether it was conscious or unconscious on the part of the show's creators, I've long thought the cubic form of this "door" implied a tesseract, or hypercube. It appears that I may be onto something.

The explanation is that a TARDIS is "dimensionally transcendental", meaning that its exterior and interior exist in separate dimensions. In "The Robots of Death" (1977), the Fourth Doctor tried to explain this to his companion Leela, using the analogy of how a larger cube can appear to be able to fit inside a smaller one if the larger cube is farther away, yet immediately accessible at the same time (see Tesseract).

There have been many indications since Steven Moffat took the helm that Doctor Who is taking us into the heart of the mysteries. I thought at the time that "The Impossible Astronaut" was playing with Gnostic themes. Specifically the Silence suggested, to me, the Archons.

Let's see... They're an ancient alien order who've been controlling human history from time immemorial but no one can remember seeing them. And like the Archons, there are allusions to both the greys (look at them) and the "men in black" (they erase your memory). Men in black were most notably associated with the Archons -- as Smith, et al. -- in The Matrix trilogy, where they also notably distorted memory and cognition. For a little more background on the elusive Archons of Gnostic lore, see here.

I have tried a few times to write something more in depth regarding the archontic symbolism of the Silence but my head goes all mushy. Not surprising, I guess, given the subject matter. Bloody Archons. Perhaps I should take to crosshatching my forearms every time I contemplate the deeper allusions of the Silence and get derailed.

It began to dawn on me over the past few seasons of Doctor Who that the Doctor should not simply be viewed as a frequent savior and protector of humanity. Rather, he can be seen as a symbol of our human potential.

Amy: But you look human. The Doctor: No, you look Time Lord. We came first. ~ Doctor Who, "The Beast Below"

As we learned in "Human Nature," Time Lords have an ability to hide their expanded, Time Lord consciousness inside a fob watch and become human.  In so doing, they forget the bulk of their awareness. In that sense, we're all Time Lords.

Bear in mind that River Song, as we learned recently, is the child of two human parents but because she was conceived in the TARDIS she has many of the abilities of a Time Lord, including regeneration.

If we begin to look at the TARDIS, not as an alien space ship, but as a symbol for multidimensional awareness, we arrive at the essence of mystical thought. Each of us contains the universe. The microcosm contains the macrocosm. The inside is bigger than the outside.

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William Henry on Merging with Icons

From For the Sexes by William Blake

A while ago I posted something about the pernicious role of iconoclasm -- and the second commandment -- in keeping humanity from direct interface with the divine. William Henry had touched upon the issue in an article on St. Francis of Assissi who developed stigmata, at least in part, because of his spiritual merging with religious iconography. I posited then that part of the motivation for iconoclasm is to keep us from the transcendent and mystical experiences that the Church has always found threatening. Direct experience of God was not something that just anyone was supposed to have.

I am currently reading Henry's Secret of Sion and he addresses the issue of icons as spiritual triggers, and the cruelty of a system that would deny them to humanity, very directly. He suggests that prior to the dark reign of the idol smashers, icons served an important and known function doing exactly what the second commandment says they shouldn't.

When the icons were made alchemy was the normal way of interacting with the world. Everything was viewed as in the process of transmutation or changing into something else -- like the acorn into the oak -- simultaneously unraveling and being reborn. Everything was transmutable, including the human body, which was viewed as a 'pupal' form of an ascended spiritual being, usually symbolized by the butterfly (earlier by the phoenix). All that was required to effect the transmutation was the Philosopher's Stone (= the pure tone or ring of the gate.) This (S)tone causes the body to emit or secrete an elixir - the Secretion of the Ages - that purifies the body, transfiguring it to light.

This is the key benefit of the Transfiguration icons. These images were designed not just to help the early Christians to teach about the Transfiguration through pretty pictures, but also to encourage them to re-shape their lives in accordance with the  hope or expectation of transforming into light (something our culture does not support). Through contemplation, meditation and reflection on the icon we begin to reflect the Light experienced by Jesus in our lives.

Unfortunately, in the seventh century Byzantine Emperor Leo III banned icons (726-729) in response to criticism from adherents of the new religion of Islam who proclaimed that icon/doors were false idols (more later).

. . .

Before the Renaissance and Reformation, holy images were treated not as "art" but as objects of veneration, which possessed codes of the intangible presence of the Holy realm.

In this way, a Transfiguration icon is the same as a computer icon and a highway sign. It is concentrated information that symbolizes or points to something beyond itself. When we click on a computer icon and a highway sign. It is concentrated information that symbolizes or points to something beyond itself. When we click on a computer icon it opens into a phenomenal inner world of enourmous potential called a program, a set of coded instructions that enables one to do work. The program's icon is not the program, but it symbolizes it and opens the way to it.

Strange as it may sound to our sensibilities, this is how devotees used icons to do the Great Work, the alchemy of the soul.

. . .

The materials of the image become a channel or a bridge, a gate ('babel') between the two worlds. In fact, to an Orthodox Christian the images are a medium through which the energy of the Transfiguration moment can be channeled, like a two-way mirror. Devotees could enter the cosmic realm through the icon.

Henry goes on to describe the way this mirroring process essentially brings us back into oneness with the divine depicted in the icon. I would use the term merging but it amounts to the same thing. When we experientially merge with something we perceive as being outside of ourselves, the ego which separates us from all that is, momentarily dissolves.

I was just blown away by this passage -- so much so that I thought it needed a stand-alone post. It speaks precisely to my perception of religious icons as tools for becoming "transparent to the transcendent." (Joseph Campbell) But there are some other points he raises here that deeply resonate with me.

My old teacher, Cherokee Mystic Virginia Sandlin, always says that nothing changes in this reality but everything transforms. Nothing is solid. All matter is in a constant state of transformation. During a vision quest, Virginia took us through an elaborate butterfly-transformation ritual. And she made the point that the butterfly is a symbol of transformation not just because it comes out of the chrysalis dramatically different but because it so completely embodies the nature of the transformation process.

When a caterpillar goes into a cocoon, it doesn't just sprout wings, go through a few other changes, and pop out. It completely transforms and becomes a new being out of the same raw material. It secretes an enzyme and digests itself. It breaks down completely into a gelatinous goop and reforms as a butterfly, reemerging with magnificent wings.

It suddenly occurred to me as I was reading this passage that Henry's "elixir," or the "oil" he has also  discussed at length,  may be something similar -- an organic substance meant to break us down and transform us. What that would be I have no idea. It's been
suggested that the DMT, which probably issues from the activated pineal gland as Rick Strassman theorizes, is the secretion. I don't know, but something about the way Henry has correlated those two thoughts -- the butterfly and the elixir -- has me contemplating.

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Analyticial Thought Undermines Religious Belief

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"Our intuitions can be phenomenally useful, and analytic thinking isn't some oracle of the truth," says Will Gervais, co-author of a new study demonstrating how analytical thought reduces religious faith. His phrasing is inadvertently hilarious. An oracle is, by definition, intuitive, and is the conduit for divine information. And this study bolsters earlier research showing that intuition and faith are as closely linked as the analytical is to not-faith.

The University of British Columbia study not only affirms that analytical personalities are less likely to be religious, it demonstrates that taxing the left brain decreases belief amongst more intuitive personalities.

People who are intuitive thinkers are more likely to be religious, but getting them to think analytically even in subtle ways decreases the strength of their belief, according to a new study in Science.

. . .

Analytic thinking undermines belief because, as cognitive psychologists have shown, it can override intuition. And we know from past research that religious beliefs—such as the idea that objects and events don't simply exist but have a purpose—are rooted in intuition. "Analytic processing inhibits these intuitions, which in turn discourages religious belief," [Ara] Norenzayan explains.

Says Joshua Greene, who published similar findings last year, "Obviously, this study doesn't prove the nonexistence of God. But it poses a challenge to believers: If God exists, and if believing in God is perfectly rational, then why does increasing rational thinking tend to decrease belief in God?"

That kind of misses the point, really. By Greene's own admission, millions of "very smart and generally rational" people believe in God. His assessment presupposes that rational equals intelligent and that rationalism is superior to our intuitive nature. I would humbly suggest that these aspects of ourselves are complementary opposites that make up the whole of us.

Neo: The Architect told me that if I didn't return to the Source, Zion would be destroyed by midnight tonight. Oracle: Please... You and I may not be able to see beyond our own choices, but that man can't see past any choices. Neo: Why not? Oracle: He doesn't understand them - he can't. To him they are variables in an equation. One at a time each variable must be solved and countered. That's his purpose: to balance the equation. Neo: What's your purpose? Oracle: To unbalance it. ~ The Matrix: Revolutions

Graham Hancock has repeatedly pointed out that the "alert, problem solving" mental state serves a wonderful purpose but it is not the sum of our consciousness and to stay in that state all the time is really quite limiting.

In this recently posted Karen Armstrong lecture, the former nun and "freelance monotheist" explains that the purpose of religion is to move us beyond "words and concepts" and "tip" us into transcendence. Or, to quote Joseph Campbell, we become "transparent to the transcendent." A religious experience is quite marvelously irrational.

One very rational woman discovered this when a stroke shut down much of her left brain function. I posted this wonderful lecture by Jill Bolte Taylor a while ago. I repost it here because it elucidates so brilliantly the necessity of both left and right brain function, and how it is through the non-rational, non-linear, right brain function that we can begin to transcend the ego and experience our divine unity with all things -- which is to say, "God."

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To Suffer a Witch

Put this in the broad category of things I really don't want to write about. But I'm afraid I have to. In a curious synchronicity I noticed the latest drivel from Rob Kerby on my start page. One of these days I will remove the Beliefnet feed, but a combination of morbid curiosity and laziness has prevented it thus far. (For the back story on the Beliefnet news feed's devolution into a reactionary, bigoted, wingnut megaphone for the Christianist Kerby, see here and here.) Kerby's latest bit of wrongheadedness is a diatribe on the dangers of witchcraft. Why is this synchronous? This may be a little hard to follow but bear with me.

Let me start by saying that Kerby's biggest mistake is in conflating certain third world, tribal fears of witchcraft with Pagan faiths. He expresses dismay at Harry Potter for trivializing the dangers of witchery and at the Cornwall schools' inclusion of Paganism in its religion curriculum. This is the first synchronicity. But even more curious is that I was watching this fascinating video last night which had me thinking about a very particular usage of the term "witchcraft." It's a documentary on shaman and "vegetalista" Don Emilio Andrade Gomez who more than once uses the term witchcraft to describe the dark practice of sorcery. A lot of this could be written off to semantic differences but the distinction is too important to leave to the Rob Kerbys of the world... because that kind of thinking gets people killed.

There are several admonitions in the Bible against various supernatural practices. It all gets very confusing because the Bible also extols those same practices in other contexts -- the Book of Daniel, chapter 5 comes to mind but there are other references. The specific use of the word witch which has caused innumerable deaths through the centuries comes from Exodus 22:18 and reads, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," in the King James version.

The word witch is a poor translation from the Hebrew word m'khashepah which is more fairly translated as "poisoner." It stems from ancient beliefs in the ability of some people to harm or even kill people through various forms of spell-casting.

When a shaman like the one in the video uses the term witchcraft, he is, somewhat ironically, closer to the actual meaning of the original term. It's clear from his comments that he is referring to malicious sorcery.

The hybridization of Christianity and indigenous shamanism is one of the most fascinating aspects of this documentary, which was made as part of Luis Eduardo Luna's field work in the Peruvian Amazon. It is also somewhat jarring, as is apparent in some of the comments posted on YouTube. It is an apparently benign religious drift. The merging of Christianity and tribal beliefs, though, isn't always harmless and has led to numerous witch persecutions in third world countries. I touched on this here in a discussion of Sarah Palin's mentor, Kenyan witch-hunter Thomas Muthee. I also posted recently about the disappearances of a number of Peruvian shamans which have been tied to fundamentalist Christian officials in the region.

What I find singularly horrifying about Kerby's post is that he seems to believe that these murderous witch hunters have something to teach us about the dangers of everything from Harry Potter (which is actually based in Western alchemy) to modern-day Wiccans, Druids, and other Pagans. He also touches on Arab persecutions of sorcerers and those who consort with the djinn. Here's a lovely example from Saudi Arabia. Yet, somehow, what Kerby seems to find disturbing is all the witchery that goes on, not the fact that innocent people are being killed for it.

The problem with some of this Christian outreach and missionary zeal is that it simultaneously feeds the fear of sorcery and disavows shamanism as a healing practice, viewing it all as "witchcraft." Don Emilio repeatedly refers to his own work as aligned with Christ and as a tool to use against sorcery. It is the distinction between the shaman as healer, or curandero, and the sorcerer. Sorcery, again, is a term that is subject to semantic variation and isn't negative in every context but to a Latin American shaman it's a very negative term. Shaman Christina Pratt draws the distinction thusly: A sorcerer is someone who uses the same tools as a shaman but for the highest bidder. (I'm paraphrasing from memory.) It's the difference between having a moral compass and not.

In a recent show, Christina waded into the sorcery issue again and dealt specifically with the subject of curses. I'll be very honest and say that this subject is way over my head. Psychic attacks and the like are just so far outside my paradigm, I don't feel able to speak to them. From my perspective, as a mystical thinker, I consider it impossible to attack someone else without tearing yourself apart in the process. Because my beliefs and practices are mystical, I don't actually think it's possible to "put a spell" on anyone but myself because I am the source of my reality. To put it another way, I can't bend the spoon without bending myself, so I couldn't damage the spoon without damaging myself. In any event, to any Pagan or shaman, dark sorcery is frowned upon. It also subjects the practitioner to painful blow-back -- the three-fold law and all that.

So, in sum, I highly recommend the video above as a small window into the world of ayahuasca using shamans. I also recommend Christina's show on curses as well as interviews she did with Steven Beyer on working with plant teachers. Both, I think, lend some context to the documentary. Beyer explains the "diet" of the initiate into plant medicine, for example.

And, I think Rob Kerby is a menace and an embarrassment to a site that still at least gives lip service to ecumenicism and support for the Pagan community.

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Karen Armstrong on Religion as Unknowing

In this wonderful lecture, Karen Armstrong tackles the big questions and determines that there are no answers -- not if you're doing it right. As I wrote yesterday, embracing unknowing is a key to dismantling oppressive hierarchy and abuses of power. And willingness to embrace mystery is the pathway to God.

What is God? The former nun recalls the answer she learnt in catechism: "God is the supreme spirit who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections." That answer, while far too heady for an eight year old, is still too limiting to be meaningful. Instead Armstrong turns to the teachings of Maimonides, Avicenna, and Thomas Aquinas whose thoughts on the matter she paraphrases.

God is not the supreme spirit. God is not the supreme being. God is not a being at all. God is being itself.

What is religion? Again, there is no simple answer according to Armstrong. Religious experience shouldn't be definable. It should defy explanation.

In the pre-modern world, good theology was meant to tip you into a moment of transcendence and silence where you realized that you'd gone beyond the reach of words and concepts. Because our minds are tuned to transcendence.

In the modern world, she argues, we've turned religion into a "head trip" rather than the experience of living myth and mystery. Scripture can't be read as literal truth. But myth does not mean falsehood. It is, she says, "more than history." When we enact myth in ritual and ceremony we internalize the power of those myths and are fundamentally changed by them.

Armstrong's lecture was part of a program on the compassion initiative she spearheaded in 2009. I'll be the first to admit that I when I first learned of the Charter for Compassion I thought the idea might be too abstract to have any practical impact. But according to Armstrong the project has exceeded expectations in numerous arenas around the globe.

One of my personal favorites is the prison reform project that trains prison officers to treat inmates with more respect and care. When it was put into practice in a jail in Washington State, the goal was to decrease violence by 2.5 percent; in fact the project was so successful that violence was decreased by 100 percent. Now the creators are evaluating just what the federal government could save by implementing this program across the United States. Additionally, Louisville Kentucky and Berkeley California are just two of the cities exploring restorative justice programs as part of their cities' compassionate programs.

Among our partners are both scientific and medical researchers. Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education is conducting research into mapping compassion in the brain and developing compassion training programs; for adults. In Holland, an impassioned group of medical students have written a charter focused on medical ethics and compassion in healthcare. They are working to make compassion training a required part of the medical school curriculum.

We are connected by the Internet in a fashion as never before. To take advantage of that opportunity we have launched a new website. It will provide practical tools and a meeting place for people from all over the world who are interested in creating and sustaining a more compassionate world. If we all became active upholders of the Golden Rule in our daily lives, in our political lives, in our cities, we could combat the voices the extremisms and hatred that are tearing us apart and endangering us all. We could create a better, more just, more respectful society and world. We can do it and we must do it.

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Herman Cain: Napoleon Hill Fan?

I knew something sounded familiar about this staggering quote from Herman Cain regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself! ... It is not a person's fault if they succeeded, it is a person's fault if they failed.

I've placed it. Cain's statement sounds a lot like this little gem from Napleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.

SUCCESS REQUIRES NO APOLOGIES, FAILURE PERMITS NO ALIBIS.

As discussed here, that's an exact quote -- all caps, bad grammar, and all. And I think it's a fairly heartless philosophy. Worse, as I've observed many times, much of "new thought" is basically apologia for the worst excesses of capitalism. It's little wonder that books like The Secret get the full sanction of the corporate media. (It's also, arguably, why James Arthur Ray got the kid gloves treatment throughout the sweat lodge trial.) Poor people have no one to blame but themselves. And having money and success equals legitimacy. Nothing to threaten the power structure there.

I can remember leafing through Hill's perennial favorite -- a book that's been in print since 1937 -- when I was working in a new age bookstore. It never really clicked for me, even when I was enjoying the works of other new thought leaders like Louise Hay and wanted desperately to believe that I could control everything with my thoughts and make all the bad things go away. Paging through a little of it now reminds me as to why Hill never really resonated. He says far too much that makes no sense at all. One needn't look much further than the passage from which I take the above quote to see how badly the book fails the basic logic test.

In planning to acquire your share of the riches, let no one influence you to scorn the dreamer. To win the big stakes in this changed world, you must catch the spirit of the great pioneers of the past, whose dreams have given to civilization all that it has of value, the spirit which serves as the life-blood of our own country, your opportunity and mine, to develop and market our talents.

Let us not forget, Columbus dreamed of an Unknown world, staked his life on the existence of such a world, and discovered it!

Copernicus, the great astronomer, dreamed of a multiplicity of worlds, and revealed them! No one denounced him as "impractical" after he had triumphed. Instead, the world worshipped at his shrine, thus proving once more that "SUCCESS REQUIRES NO APOLOGIES, FAILURE PERMITS NO ALIBIS."

So Hill had kind of a myopic view of history. While it's true that Copernicus's work is legendary and foundational to our current understanding of astronomy, his escape from negative consequences may have owed something to fact that he died of natural causes rather promptly after publishing on his heliocentric model. During his life, he kept a lot of his ideas close to the vest to protect himself from consequences.

About 1532 Copernicus had basically completed his work on the manuscript of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium; but despite urging by his closest friends, he resisted openly publishing his views, not wishing—as he confessed—to risk the scorn "to which he would expose himself on account of the novelty and incomprehensibility of his theses."^[63]

His theories were denounced by some Church officials and debated for some time. His grave was not so much venerated back then as it was lost and his epitaph destroyed during wars in the late 17th or early 18th century. Some of his remains were very recently found and reburied.

Copernicus was reportedly buried in Frombork Cathedral, where archaeologists for over two centuries searched in vain for his remains. Efforts to locate the remains in 1802, 1909, 1939 and 2004 had come to nought. In August 2005, however, a team led by Jerzy Gąssowski, head of an archaeology and anthropology institute in Pułtusk, after scanning beneath the cathedral floor, discovered what they believed to be Copernicus' remains.^[73]

. . .

The grave was in poor condition, and not all the remains of the skeleton were found; missing, among other things, was the lower jaw.^[74] The DNA from the bones found in the grave matched hair samples taken from a book owned by Copernicus which was kept at the library of the University of Uppsala in Sweden.^[75][76]

On 22 May 2010 Copernicus was given a second funeral in a Mass led by Józef Kowalczyk, the former papal nuncio to Poland and newly named Primate of Poland. Copernicus' remains were reburied in the same spot in Frombork Cathedral where part of his skull and other bones had been found. A black granite tombstone now identifies him as the founder of the heliocentric theory and also a church canon. The tombstone bears a representation of Copernicus' model of the solar system—a golden sun encircled by six of the planets.^[77]

So, I don't know. Maybe Hill was talking about some other "shrine" somewhere.

Copernicus's ideas were far from uncontroversial and continued to be so long after his death. Galileo, who famously embraced the Copernican model, was found guilty of heresy, was forced to recant, and lived out his days under house arrest. Such was his reward for being as bold as Hill recommends.

More to the point, Columbus... Wow... So, as per Hill, Columbus seized the day and the world is all the better for it. In fact, we owe our way of life to Columbus. Some might call that revisionist. Some might call it a grievous insult to the millions of native peoples on two continents whose cultures were destroyed in one bloodbath after another over hundreds of years.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love my country. As you can see, I'm spending the duration of the DC40 celebrating the Goddess Columbia, whose name is ostensibly derived from that of Columbus. But our history is far from clean and is the product of a kind of violent imperialism that we like to think of as consigned to the annals of history. Yes, conquest was the way of the world back then and history is littered with the corpses of people who've been on the wrong side of its relentless march toward "progress." But that Hill blindly accepted the version of history that was written by the winners is about the kindest thing you could say about that sentiment. The idea that the European conquest of the Americas was an unalloyed good is the worst kind of white, imperialistic arrogance.

There are some successes that require far more than simple apologies. Our treatment of Native Americans in this country is our national shame for which we can never make adequate restitution.

It might just be time to reassess a hierarchical, patriarchal model that makes the successes of some dependent on the failures of others. Anyone who divides the world into winners and losers and posits that the winners never have anything to apologize for loses morality points as far as I'm concerned.

As discussed here, new thought tomes like The Secret and Think and Grow Rich effectively blame the victims of the excesses of others. It is the opposite of a balanced, inclusive world view in which we take responsibility, not only for our actions, but for our entire co-creation.

As Christina Pratt explained in an episode of Why Shamanism Now? devoted to The Secret, this completely misses the point. We're not all just creating our own, individual, discrete reality. We are part of a collective reality that we are constantly co-creating. She calls this "the big dream." Says Pratt:

Do not think that you can use this idea that we are dreaming our reality to bludgeon other people who are suffering. In other words, if there is a drought-ridden country somewhere, you can't just go, "Oh well those people dreamt up that drought." Not only is that, um, ignorant, and not remotely compassionate, but you're missing the point, entirely, which is that we are dreaming. We, the entire family of humanity is dreaming life as we know it. And so the drought over there is most likely the manifestation of a dream that is dreaming excess somewhere else. That the dream -- because, we are never not dreaming -- but we have not been trained the responsibility of being a dreamer. We've not been trained to dream well; to dream with maturity for easily, oh, two thousand years or more. And so, consequently, we are dreaming constantly pollution, toxicity, excess, deficiency, and what results then in disease in our human lives into the dream. Because we are not disciplined, we are not even aware, that we, every moment, we are contributing to the dream. And so The Secret says, you know, every moment you're manifesting your life. Well, yes, you are. Every moment you're also manifesting mine and I'm manifesting yours.

So, it comes down to whether we want to continue to extol the individual "dreamers" of Napoleon Hill's unapologetic, imperialist world view or embrace our role in co-creating a "big dream" in which all people can thrive.

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Does James Ray Disprove the Law of Attraction?

Meryl Davids Landau asks if the James Ray sweat lodge trial means there is no law of attraction. In an article that is really a study in cognitive dissonance, Landau extols the virtues of the law of attraction philosophy and how it's worked in her own life. She concludes:

Ultimately, then, the James Ray trial doesn't say anything about the truth of the law of attraction. It only says something about Ray: That if he does sincerely believe in the power of this universal principle, he somehow didn't put it into practice as well as he might have.

But if the law of attraction is a universal principle as basic as gravity, everything that occurs should say something about the truth of it. We don't put universal principles into practice and we don't have to believe in them. If we fail to practice the law of gravity well, we don't go floating off into space.

One can certainly understand Landau's desire for a kinder, gentler law of attraction; one where our great results are testament but our disasters don't prove anything at all. She's surely a more compassionate person than her philosophical forebear Napoleon Hill who wrote in his famous tome Think and Grow Rich, "SUCCESS REQUIRES NO APOLOGIES, FAILURE PERMITS NO ALIBIS." (That's an exact quote, complete with the obnoxious, all caps format and bad grammar. I take no responsibility for either.)

James Ray also tried to dodge the harsh judgment implied by his own belief system. Shortly after being indicted and with his financial fortune apparently evaporating, he took to his Twitter account and started soundbite philosophizing about why the simple cause and effect formula he'd been propounding for years wasn't simple at all. And then he told us that we'd always been at war with Eastasia.

Abraham channeler Esther Hicks whom Landau references in her article has not been so generous in her assessment of Ray. According to Abraham/Hicks, the law of attraction worked perfectly in Ray's case and that's why he's where he is. (The video from which this transcript is taken follows.)

So, here is a teacher who was part of The Secret movie, who understands law of attraction not even in the slightest, who held seminars for the purpose of seeing how much discomfort you can endure without dying. Deprivation in the desert, deprivation without food, deprivation without air, high temperatures in the sweat lodge; in other words, see how much you can endure. Now law of attraction brings the leader of this group right now to jail where he is being deprived of all of the things, all of the things that are important to feeling good. In other words law of attraction is this powerful, powerful, powerful, powerful law that says you get what you think about and what you think about is evidenced by the way you are feeling in the moment. And when you've decided that you’re going to struggle your way to joy, the joy never comes. So, that's what we say. You can't have it both ways. You cannot suffer your way to joy. And you cannot joy your way to suffering.

There is a certain seductiveness to this logic. It's viscerally satisfying, in the way a guilty verdict would be. It sounds just and we all want to think that everything that happens here is ultimately just. But it isn't really as simple as she/he presents it to be. Universal principles aren't about good and bad. They operate in wholeness. That's why they're called universal. (universe = one turn) At least that's how I, as a mystical thinker, must view it.

In the Abraham/Hicks scenario, joy and suffering are simply incompatible. We have to choose one or the other. But life is really kind of a mixed bag. And it's going to be a mixed bag no matter how we feel about it; how "positive" or "negative" we are about the whole thing.

The other day I wrote about how law of attraction proponents always want to put the things they don't like "over there." They're all about creating distance rather than honoring everything we encounter as our reflection. Landau, in the quote above, does that. What's happened to Ray doesn't say anything about her beloved law of attraction, or, by extension, about Landau. It only says something about James Ray.

Mystical thought says, if I'm aware of who James Ray is, he does say something about me. He is my reflection. And the work for me is to figure out what I need to learn from this series of events that has  captured my attention.

The Hicks material, likewise, is all about distancing yourself from uncomfortable reflections. From the same video comes this rather disturbing lesson for "healers." The healer, it says, is supposed to be in a "vortex" of wellness thinking that the sick people live outside of... because of all their "deprivation" thoughts.

But the thing that's tricky about someone that's inside the vortex convincing someone outside the vortex is that if they're very far outside the vortex, they can't hear you. So most healers do traipse outside the vortex to try to help them but then they can't help them because they're outside the vortex. So this has been the conundrum that healers have been experiencing for a very long time. Most healers eventually are trained by the sick people into their vibration rather than training the sick people into their vibration… And we say, in order for you to be of any value to anyone you have to separate yourself from the discordant beliefs that they hold about sickness... So what happens, people in need, they'll drag you out every time. 

They'll say, "I need you. Be here with me. You've gotta be there for me."

There are people complaining or hurting, whether it's emotionally or physically, if you're not giving them sympathy, which means if you're not giving your undivided attention to their discomfort, then they don't believe that you're there for them. And you've gotta understand, whether you can make them understand or not, that you can't be there for their for their problem and there for their solution at the same time. You've gotta make a choice. You can't be there for their sickness and there for their wellness at the same time. A healer must be there for the wellness. [all emphases mine]

So you can't just be there for the person; the whole person. You have to be there for one half of this very polarized construction that almost animates wellness and illness into conscious entities. You can't possibly accept people for who they are and where they are in their process.

You must know it so unequivocally that no matter what the tests show, that no matter what the x-rays show, that no matter what the attitude is, that no matter what the manifestation is, you have to know the potential for wellness is greater than the potential for illness. And as you hold fast to that knowledge and you practice it every day of your life relative to you and to everything that you see, eventually that vibration will be so powerful within you, that with anyone stands before you with their problem or their illness, you will have risen so far above it.

And many of them will say, "Hey man, you're not there for me."

And your answer must be to them, whether they hear it or not, "I'm there for you. I'm there where your recovery is. I'm there where your value is. I'm there where who you really are is. I'm there where your strength and vitality are. I practice my thoughts of your resiliency. I practice my thoughts of your well-being. I practice them incessantly. In fact I have trained myself so that I never allow myself to focus upon your plight or your illness even for a moment."

And they will say, "Well, it's not really helping very much."

And you must say and mean, "I don't do it for you. I do it for me." [all emphases mine]

Well, that last sentence is at least honest... if narcissistic. Note that the entire lecture is about the healer imposing their will, their vision, their ego, onto the ailing person. Acknowledging and honoring where that other person is in the moment is out of the question.

What if that illness is perfectly appropriate for them? What if it's teaching them something they need to learn? There is nothing in this channeling about the transformational opportunities in illness.

What if it's simply their time to die; the one that they have chosen? They should die without your fully attentive presence and compassion?

This is the kind lunacy that ensues when we construct a formulation as simple as: health good, illness bad. We start putting all these judgments, not only around the illness, but around the people who deign to get sick. We treat them like by being sick they're doing something wrong. Illness, according to Abraham/Hicks, is an "attitude problem." It's "about mood."

So if people who are exposed to radioactive iodine (think: Fukushima) start getting thyroid cancer, they wouldn't actually be getting sick because of all that radiation. It would be because they're just so negative. So if they cheer up, presumably, all will be well.

And nowhere in this is any attention to what lessons the healer is supposed to be learning from the experience of the person before us, who, like it or not, is our reflection.

As I've said many times, the "law of attraction" is a very dumbed down version of mystical awareness. As I wrote here:

Underlying this attractive idea is what mystics have been teaching for millennia. It is that all things reflect all other things. That it cannot be otherwise because we are, in fact, one with everything around us. This means that the people you meet are not "like" you ("like attracts like"). They are you.

What that means is that James Ray is me and I am James Ray. It profits me not at all to wag my finger and pass judgment on how his thoughts manifested his circumstances. As a mystical thinker, the question I must ponder is what James Ray and the tragedy he materially created, reflects in me. That doesn't make me, as an individual, a reckless, wannabe shaman who cooked people to death. I know for a fact that I am not. But it does mean that somewhere in me is some tiny piece that reflects that somehow. It could be a snippet of a past life. It could be some piece of childhood memory. But somewhere, in me, is something that I haven't completed and that I need to forgive and release.

What strikes me as so odd in Landau's article is the implication that Ray's being on trial is something that "happened" to him. Somehow this mysterious turn of events might call into question her entire philosophical framework because someone who's made a career out of the law of attraction should maybe have better disciplined thoughts and feelings than that. But Ray didn't just "law of attract" a catastrophe. This wasn't a tornado or an earthquake. This is something he created through his own actions (and omissions). Whether our very earthly, human concept of justice is to be satisfied when the James Ray trial goes to verdict will be up to a jury of his peers.

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Oprah, James Ray, and the Cult of Victim Blame

A link to this bit of sheer insanity was posted on Connie Joy's Facebook page the other day. Someone called patharding riffed on Oprah's commentary from her sign-off as follows:

Posted on May 27, 2011 5:40 PM

I'm curious what you people think of this:

“Time and again the theme that kept showing itself in our early
years on the show was PEOPLE MAKING BAD CHOICES…and then blaming
everybody but themselves for the state of their lives…”

“Nobody but YOU is responsible for YOUR LIFE! It doesn’t matter what
your momma did. It doesn’t matter what your daddy didn’t do. YOU are
responsible for YOUR LIFE!…”

“…you are responsible for the energy that you create for yourself
and you are responsible for the energy that you bring to others.”

–Oprah Winfrey (from her final show)

MY COMMENT:

I just had to share this from my personal recording of the final
Oprah Winfrey show because of how it applies to the James Arthur Ray
trial. Those people knew beforehand that the 2009 warrior workshop was
going to be tough. THAT’S WHAT THEY PAID FOR!!! If they read the
liability waiver, sent to them beforehand, THEY KNEW that there very
well may be a sweat lodge involved. If they didn’t read the liability
waiver before they signed it THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE for not reading what
they signed before they signed the liability waiver, NOT MR. RAY!!!

Those people who went back into the sweat lodge when they KNEW they
could not handle it have no one else to blame besides themselves for
whatever bad things may have happened as a result. If I was there, went
into the sweat lodge and felt I could not properly breathe it would
have been MY RESPONSIBILITY to get out of that sweat lodge and STAY
OUT!!!

To echo and paraphrase the words of Oprah Winfrey, on her last show:
Certain people at the 2009 Sedona Warrior Workshop made bad choices and
want to blame others for the the state of their lives as a result of
those bad choices

Nobody but YOU is responsible for YOUR LIFE! It doesn’t matter what
your momma did. It doesn’t matter what your daddy didn’t do. IT DOESN’T
MATTER WHAT JAMES ARTHUR RAY DID OR DIDN’T DO!!!

YOU are responsible for YOUR LIFE!…”

A just court of law will force you adults to take responsibility for
your actions at that workshop. Liz, Kirby & James Shore should have
told people they needed help. Instead they said they were fine and paid
for that lie with their lives. THEY HAD NO ONE TO BLAME BUT THEMSELVES
FOR WHAT HAPPENED!!!!

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!!

Get it? Probably not

Oh well….

It can be easily proven that the 2009 Angel Valley sweat lodge was
NOT A SAFE STRUCTURE!!! James Arthur Ray had nothing whatsoever to do
with the construction of the 2009 Angel Valley sweat lodge. If you want
someone to pay for those three deaths then go after the real culprits:

ANGEL VALLEY!!!!

So James Arthur Ray is not responsible for the deaths in the sweat lodge he conducted because James Shore, Kirby Brown, and Liz Neuman were responsible for their own lives. Yet, somehow, Angel Valley is responsible for the whole fiasco. Get it? You're responsible for your own death even if someone deprives you of food and water for more than a day and then super-heats you into delirium. But you're not responsible if the structure is bad. So poor tent architecture is now the single exception to the "YOU are responsible for YOUR LIFE!!!" meme.

The dizzying illogic and internal contradictions of patharding's comment are their own fascinating study. Such cognitive dissonance is not atypical of "law of attraction" true believers I've encountered. But I don't want to take a lot of time examining the thought patterns of someone who is most likely Lee Kuan under one of many pseudonyms. Kuan is well known amongst followers of James Ray's catastrophic fall from grace. Were I James Ray, I'd probably think long and hard about Stephen King's Misery when it comes to some of these hardcore fans.

I think this merits discussion because it's Oprah herself who puts this sort of insanity in play with woefully irresponsible commentary like the above. I didn't watch her sign-off show. I haven't watched Oprah in years. I lost interest in the format after years of job-related immersion in it. Mostly I lost interest in sound-bite answers to complex questions and, sadly, that's Oprah's stock in trade.

I'm happy for Oprah that she managed to put the poverty, racism, and abuse, that marked her early years, more or less, behind her. I'm happy for her that she made peace with all that and created a spectacular life for herself. But to suggest that the sort dimestore psychology she dispensed on her show should put such issues to rest for everybody else is vanity.

Hey, you bunch of losers! It's not about what your momma, or your daddy, or your priest, or that IED did, that left you emotionally and/or physically damaged. Buck up. Suck up. And read The Secret.

Whether Oprah realizes it or not, she's propounding a kind of Social Darwinism. It's a common trope. People can achieve whatever they want against all socio-economic odds. Just look at this exceptional, poor, black person who rose from poverty and became a multimillionaire! Now just never you mind that people in positions of power are, to this day, disproportionately white, male, and affluent. You can do anything, I tell you. Anything! And if you can't, you have no one and nothing to blame but yourself.

It's a very convenient way to excuse any form of social injustice. And it's an equally convenient way to excuse horrific abuses at the microcosmic level. In the case raised by Lee Kuan/patharding's post, James Arthur Ray. But it's not just Ray's apparently loony fan. It's an attitude that's been echoed across the media (see In Session), the public discourse and, more to the point, by Ray's attorneys.

Defense attorney Thomas Kelly repeatedly clashed with participants over whether they were free to leave. Some agreed they were, but jurors also heard extensive testimony from others who said they felt obligated or even bullied to stay. Nearly all said they had trusted Ray's assurances that they could make it through all the rounds.

There's a central, if somewhat philosophical, question raised by this trial about the nature of free will itself. Is a man free if he doesn't know or understand that he is free? And there are more germane questions about how free a person is under various forms of mental manipulation. Witness after witness has testified that to this day they don't really understand why they didn't leave. Most pointedly was Dennis Mehravar, who admitted that he probably would not have saved a dying Luis Li because it might have upset Mr. Ray.

Over and over defense attorneys have cajoled and lectured witnesses about their free will and extracted some concession that, yes, they could have left... even if they were still baffled, even tortured, by their own inexplicable inaction. They have brandished those concession trophies in court with other witnesses and even, in legal arguments before Judge Darrow. Laura Tucker said she wasn't in a cult. Therefore, no one was manipulated by Ray, reasoned Li.

The members of Heaven's Gate also scoffed at the idea that they were victims of cult brainwashing, as Glnody did in her "exit statement."

Many humans assume that if you live privately and do not put down roots, then you must have something to hide -- like a drug dealer or other criminal, or might be, at the very least, a part of a "dangerous cult."

As Steven Hassan points out in Releasing the Bonds, members of that group all proclaimed some version of having freely chosen their deaths in a mass suicide.

Members of the Heaven's Gate cult took turns making video-taped farewell statements that explained why they had decided to leave their "vehicles" behind and commit suicide. All of them claimed that they were exercising their own free will, and that they were happy to perform this radical act of dying.

When former member Steven Hill spoke to the Washington Post, his version of events spoke to the time and distance from his immersion in Applewhite's teachings.

The story Steven Hill tells of life inside Heaven's Gate has little in common with the serene testimonials of other former cult members. Hill offers no assurances that the tidy suicides were acts of enlightened free will. He does not believe the departed have reached a Mother Ship. The cheery "farewell video" sickens him.

Although Hill says he feels some responsibility for bringing Yvonne McCurdy-Hill with him into the orbit of cult leader Marshall Herff Applewhite, he maintains that she was ushered to her death by a self-styled messiah he had come to recognize as "a cold, calculating, manipulating" hypocrite.

. . .

Dependence on the cult was total. "There was choice to leave," Hill says. "But there was a lot of pressure" to stay.

A "choice to leave" but "a lot of pressure" to stay... Sound familiar? It should to anyone who's been following the James Ray sweat lodge trial.

I'm not saying that James Ray and his students constitute a full-blown cult like Heaven's Gate, or Hare Krishna, or the Moonies. But the similarities should make us all a little nervous about the influence of charismatic leaders, from the religious to the political, and the very nature of our "freedoms." I'm also not saying that such manipulation is or should be illegal. There are definitely "slippery slope" issues raised regarding the free speech and freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment. Moral culpability and legal culpability are sometimes, necessarily, quite different. (Personally, I think Ray is legally responsible for far more pragmatic reasons some of which will probably be hashed out today in court as the defense argues for a directed verdict. Here are the defense's request and the prosecution's response.)

Increasingly, here in the United States, our "freedom" has been equated not with our right to have a free mind but with our "God-given right" to buy stuff. We are strongly influenced by politicians and advertisers alike. How dare anyone try to interfere with our right to buy gas guzzling SUVs and take out variable rate mortgages on more house than we can afford?! Now, take a good hard look at your credit card bills and ask yourself, am I free?

James Ray pitched his events as "investments" in themselves and told participants that such "investing" in themselves was good even if it meant maxing out their credit cards. In keeping with the central message of The Secret, he assured people that the state of the economy wouldn't affect them if they just got their thinking in order. And, as Connie Joy explained in her recent interview, he persuaded people to rack up massive debt just as every economic indicator was heading south. Strangely, despite their investiture in Ray's teachings, many of them now find themselves under water.

True believers in The Secret would tell you it's still their own fault because they're just not doing it right and they need to buy still more of their products and lectures to perfect their ability to press the universe into their service.

The message we get over and over from adherents of The Secret and similarly simplistic spiritual teachings is that YOU created YOUR problems with YOUR thoughts. You, you, you... It's a road map to distancing ourselves from the problems of the world and from the attendant responsibility. All those bad things that happen to other people? THEY created it. I don't need to worry about any of it because I know how to control my own thoughts and my own reality. See ya later, suckas!

As Christina Pratt explained in an episode of Why Shamanism Now? devoted to The Secret, this completely misses the point. We're not all just creating our own, individual, discrete reality. We are part of a collective reality that we are constantly co-creating. She calls this "the big dream." Says Pratt:

Do not think that you can use this idea that we are dreaming our reality to bludgeon other people who are suffering. In other words, if there is a drought-ridden country somewhere, you can't just go, "Oh well those people dreamt up that drought." Not only is that, um, ignorant, and not remotely compassionate, but you're missing the point, entirely, which is that we are dreaming. We, the entire family of humanity is dreaming life as we know it. And so the drought over there is most likely the manifestation of a dream that is dreaming excess somewhere else. That the dream -- because, we are never not dreaming -- but we have not been trained the responsibility of being a dreamer. We've not been trained to dream well; to dream with maturity for easily, oh, two thousand years or more. And so, consequently, we are dreaming constantly pollution, toxicity, excess, deficiency, and what results then in disease in our human lives into the dream. Because we are not disciplined, we are not even aware, that we, every moment, we are contributing to the dream. And so The Secret says, you know, every moment you're manifesting your life. Well, yes, you are. Every moment you're also manifesting mine and I'm manifesting yours.

Another point that Pratt makes early on is that not everything can be simply thought in or out of existence. She addresses this in terms of our physical health but I've found this to be true across the board.

The body is an amazing creature and there are some deep-running currents that affect our health that we cannot change by thinking or feeling differently. There's soul loss. There is power, energy, and theft. [sic] There is the healing of the unresolved energy of the ancestors. You cannot think that into difference. You have to go do that work. And there's also a shaman's illness. There are some illnesses that are the very transformation we are longing for to take us to where we are meant to be. And so health: bad health, good health, health is not always what it seems to be. 

So what's important here is that if we continue to focus on what I want in the moment and what I think will make me happy in the moment and disregard the innate wisdom in the moment in the world around us and learn to engage, instead, with the world as a teacher, versus learning to impose my will on the world.

Where there is soul loss, power theft, energy theft, ancestral wounding, unresolved past life issues, and the like, healing has to be done at that level. And where there is significant mental and emotional damage, some long-term therapeutic process is may be in order. It's not as simple as changing your thoughts, feelings, or even your actions.

I mention this because it speaks to one of the specific problems with Oprah's formulation. You can't  just change your attitude or feelings, forgive and forget -- none of which is remotely simple -- and start recreating your life. Where there is significant damage, injury, and loss, at any level of our being, none of the tools offered by The Secret work very well.

What many of us who undertook those positive affirmation and visualization tools found -- long before The Secret brought a whole new popularity to these ideas -- is that they were effective for a while and up to a point and then we hit roadblocks. In some cases, we started manifesting unintended and unfathomable catastrophes. And the response from "new thought" proponents was, Well, you're doing it wrong. You're not "positive" enough. You don't really "want" to change. You're still caught up in your "story." Lather, rinse, repeat.

The truth, though, is that sometimes you find that you have significant healing work to do and a magnificent process of discovery to undertake. And the universe, in its infinite wisdom, far from bringing you your every vain wish, brings opportunities to heal on a deeper level so that you truly can manifest your piece of that "big dream."

In truth, the universe cannot do otherwise because the universe is us -- all of us; not just the parts we like and want to cultivate. We will invariably see ourselves reflected all around us: people, events, experiences, nature, everything. So the only question is, are we willing to accept the challenge of healing the world we observe by healing ourselves. Shutting down around big pieces of it, ignoring it because it's "negative" and we want to focus on the "positive" will not work. That kind of myopia has lead and continues to lead to incredible destruction.

As much as we might want to put the problems we see before us "over there," we can't because those problems are reflections of us. They are the result of our constant, collective dreaming.

Saying YOU or THEY created their own problems ignores the fact that there is no you or they. There is only oneness. In LaK'ech Al K'in, as the Maya say, "I am you and you are me." My former teacher, Cherokee Mystic Virginia Sandlin puts it this simply, "There is only one person here."

To the mystical thinker, the question is not, "Why did YOU manifest that for YOURSELF?" The question is, "What is MY piece in this? Why am I seeing this particular reflection that is expressing as you?" That's what we ask ourselves when we are truly taking responsibility at a spiritual level for all that we manifest.

Note: I recommend listening to Christina Pratt's entire show "The Secret or The Big Dream." It can be found in the show archives here or downloaded from iTunes. As I have previously mentioned, I have known Christina for years and recommend all aspects of her work very highly.

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