Breakfast With Russell Baker

Russell Baker
August 14, 1925 – January 21, 2019

I was awake well before sunrise that Friday morning. A limousine was waiting for me in front of my building in Bloomfield, New Jersey, because commuter trains don't run that early. I had no time to brew coffee, so I had to make do with a chilled Pepsi offered by the driver. I am not a morning person, but it was part of my job as a publicist to escort my authors to their New York media appearances. I had booked Russell Baker on Good Morning America. 

I really didn't know what to expect from Mr. Baker, having only chatted with him briefly on the phone a few times. I had read The Good Times, for which I was doing publicity. It was a delightful memoir about his career in journalism. But I had not yet read Growing Up, his first memoir, for which he'd won a Pulitzer. Our department assistant had rustled up a copy for me only the day before.

I had learned a bit of the history, the unexpected success of Growing Up. The book had gone back for a second printing even before the publication date. The original publisher hadn't anticipated huge numbers on this sweet, understated memoir about coming of age in the shadow of the Great Depression and going on to become a New York Times columnist. The Times reviewed it, of course. It was a rave, and the book had started flying off the shelves, deservedly so.

In my youthful ignorance I hadn't really understood why it was so easy to book media for Russell Baker. It began to dawn when I saw how warmly he was welcomed at the GMA studio. They seemed thrilled to talk to Baker again, even for a mass market reprint of his second memoir. I began then to understand just how beloved he was. As the day wore on, I began to understand why.

Doctor Who and the Approaching Skingularity

William Henry believes that we are facing a time of decision. Will we choose to remain fully organic beings or will we merge so completely with artificial technologies that they become part of our very skin? Henry has released an eBook, free to whomever asks for it. I recently received my copy and have only just started reading it and poring over the spectacular images. More information on The Skingularity is Near and how to receive your copy can be found here.

In March, Henry appeared on Coast to Coast AM to discuss our future, what is increasingly possible and what is our true potential. Whether or not you agree with Henry that humans are inherently and organically capable of transforming into light beings, the vision of tech companies to transfigure us through technology should reasonably terrify you. They're wearing us down, though, by promising ease, interconnectedness, and even virtual immortality.

Many of the technologies under development mimic the language, the imagery, and even the properties of cross-cultural resurrection and ascension mythologies. The possibilities entice not only because the promises are fantastical but because they resonate with core archetypes. Henry points out that it may well be a devil's bargain. We may be handing over our fundamental liberty to a convergence of state and corporate power. What looks like an enhancement of human power could really be very cleverly packaged tyranny.

We humans have an instinctual fear of merging with inorganic machines that has long played out in our modern mythologies. The Borg of Star Trek: Next Generation portray our primal terror of losing our humanity and independence to co-optation by intelligent machines. The Matrix trilogy depicts a world lost to our development of artificial intelligence, as self-aware machines reduce humanity to batteries and trap our consciousness in a VR simulacram. But the most direct parallel to Henry's "skingularity" and it's conflict with natural human evolution plays out in Doctor Who.

Tesseract: A Journey Through Art and Time

A Wrinkle in Time was considered essential reading in my home. My mother simply loved this book and, once she'd persuaded me to read it, so did I. It has all the elements: a strong female character that any adolescent girl could admire, a fantastical storyline, and travel to other planets. I've always loved stories about interstellar travel. The book revolves around something called the tesseract which allows the central characters to move through space at light-speed by folding, or wrinkling, time. I'd always assumed "tesseract" was one of those funny, made-up words. Obviously, I was incorrect and I only learned this years later when I began to work with sacred geometry and learned about the hypercube, aka, the tesseract.

Noah, the Versificator & the Persistence of the Soul

I love Noah.  I fell hard the instant I heard his rendition of "Sexy and I Know It." He took it to pieces and brought the innate irony of the song to new heights. A round-faced, ruddy-cheeked cherub with the voice of a Delta bluesman, the boy has chops. And he keeps turning out glorious covers of good songs and bad. He elevates them all.

It occurred to me this morning as I was listening to his transformation of One Direction's "Story of My Life" just why it is that I love Noah so. I loathe One Direction, another prefab pop act designed in a board room. My daughter's twelve -- their target market -- and she knows their music insults her intelligence. Her instincts are intact. She quickly intuited that they exemplify the contempt the industry has for her. Their music is the worst kind of dreck. But there was Noah making it beautiful. So naturally I thought of Orwell's 1984.

I thought of George Winston puzzling at how the pointless entertainment churned out by a machine could be brought to life by an authentic human voice.

Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar, with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series of square white things which Winston recognized as babies’ diapers. Whenever her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful contralto:

It was only an ’opeless fancy.
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an’ a word an’ the dreams they stirred!
They ’ave stolen my ’eart awye!

The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

I thought of how her lovely voice reminded Smith that where there is soulfulness there is beauty and there is hope.

As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

‘She’s beautiful,’ he murmured.

‘She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.

‘That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston.

He held Julia’s supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip to the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would ever come. That was the one thing they could never do. Only by word of mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into interminable distance. It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same — everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same — people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of THE BOOK, he knew that that must be Goldstein’s final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard. In the end their awakening would come. And until that happened, though it might be a thousand years, they would stay alive against all the odds, like birds, passing on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill.

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Once Upon a Time There Was a Voiceless Mermaid

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I've told many people through the years that there are two ways to read Women Who Run With the Wolves. The first is bibliomancy, which is to simply let the book fall open to a random page and begin there. The other is to read it in order from the beginning, but to do so on no particular timetable and to take it up only when the spirit moves. To do otherwise is to find the book impenetrable -- nigh well unreadable. This is something many women have told me about their attempts to read it. But trust me, I would say, read it only when you feel it calling to you from the shelf and what had been a thick tangle of far too many words will be magically transformed into the most lucid, meaningful prose you've ever indulged. Read past the point in the book you were meant to read on any particular occasion and it will once again look like something written in a foreign language.

I read the book from front to back. It took me well over a year. But each time I picked it up it was a flawless reflection of that moment in time. Not only was the text the perfect insight into an experience I'd just had or some realization that had only just begun to dawn, it came accompanied by sometimes comical Jungian synchronicities. Like the time a boisterous, eccentric old woman in a restaurant bumped into my table and sent my chicken dinner clattering to the floor just as I was reading about Baba Yaga and her house on its crazy chicken legs. Some were far less humorous. One evening I felt moved to open the book again after I returned from the emergency ward. I had very nearly lost the tip of my finger to a confrontation with a trailer hitch. With my unbandaged hand, I removed the bookmark and found myself staring in disbelief at a story called "The Handless Maiden." A few short months later I was pregnant with my daughter. The day after she was born, the World Trade Center fell down and the realization that her father would almost certainly be heading off to war was inescapable. To anyone who's read that portion of the book, the parallels would be hard to miss.

As I enjoy my new favorite show Once Upon a Time, I find myself once again seeing the line between dreams and reality becoming blurred. After taking in a number of episodes from the first season, it occurred to me that I should grab the book I sometimes refer to as "the oracle" from the shelf and more deeply consider some of the rich themes that emerge between the lines of the show's deceptively pedestrian dialog. Book in hand I sat down to watch the next episode which turned out to be "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter." In it one of the residents of Storybrooke has some very strange encounters with a wolf. It causes him to begin awakening in the dream as the viewer learns that the wolf had been his constant companion during his life as the Woodsman in the Enchanted Forest. I ran my hand across the gold embossed wolf on the cover of my book and just shook my head at the wonder of it all.

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.

Television and the Quest for Immortality

Torchwood: Miracle Day begins tonight
Sept. 14 at 9:00 pm EDT on BBC America

I've not been doing much writing lately... obviously. I'm still settling in after our most recent move. But, on my breaks from unpacking boxes, I've mostly been staring at that other box... the idiot box. It was supposed to be passive, relaxing entertainment -- a restorative after long, hard days of hating the entire process of moving.  Instead, I've once again been pulled down a rabbit hole into a network of intertwining symbolism and myth. I pretty quickly noticed that a theme was emerging and that the theme was immortality.

I finally had the opportunity to see Torchwood: Miracle Day when it came on Encore. I'd been wanting to see it since it came out but I don't have or want Starz. The previous Torchwood miniseries Children of Earth was excellent if very, very disturbing. I had wanted to write about some of the symbolism of that series when it aired but after I watched the final episode, I was just too emotionally wrecked and I never wanted to look at the series again. Miracle Day is also very dark. The mythic symbolism is, once again, so veiled, you could easily miss it.

Human immortality is suddenly, inexplicably achieved and the world discovers that it's really very inconvenient. This is not a good version of immortality. It's not an ascension of any kind. It's just an inability to die no matter how sick, old, injured, or executed one might be. But underneath all the gruesome dreariness of that Torchwood sensibility, there are subtle points to some greater themes, which keep this from being pedestrian science fiction of the "wouldn't it be weird if" variety.

As Doctor Who fans know, Jack Harkness's immortality is an aberration -- a fluke that the Doctor finds disturbing and wrong and against the natural order. But there are subtle nods to a deeper mythos. In Children of Earth, for instance, Jack is killed, dismembered and buried in cement, only to be reassembled and resurrected. He has become Osiris. In Miracle Day we again see him playing out a resurrection mythology as he is effectively crucified -- hung by his arms, tormented by townspeople, and put to death, only to rise again... and again and again.

Because Everyone Should See Dead Can Dance

Okay, this isn't quite as good as sitting under the stars with my beloveds for the concert of a lifetime but this I can post.

The KCRW copy is hilarious.

The Australian duo of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry made some of the creepiest beautiful music of the 1980s. Almost 30 years and two reunions later, the two are still at it. Watch Dead Can Dance bring its ancient ambiance to Santa Monica's Village Studios for a recording session with KCRW.

Looking through the Facebook thread, I notice that many people are very annoyed at the use of the word "creepy." The thing is... I can't agree. I read "creepiest beautiful music" and found myself nodding in agreement. Their new album is easily the most upbeat thing they've ever done. And I love it. I can play it while I'm driving and not worry about wrecking the car.

Their older stuff is indescribably dark. I love listening to it because it's like staring into the void. It strips flesh from bone. I feel that sense of awe that I imagine Rainer Maria Rilke felt when he encountered his angelic muse at Duino Castle.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to
endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

That's what it feels like to listen to Lisa Gerrard's piercing tones -- not words and yet we understand them. We somehow know what she is saying: the language of the birds.

No one can tell me that this is not a little creepy... or, at the very least, chilling:

Or this:

I think there's a reason Patton Oswalt specifically referenced This Mortal Coil's It'll End in Tears in his KFC's Famous Bowls bit.

Okay, stop right there. Can you pile all of those items into a single bowl, just kinda make 'em into a wet mound of starch that I can eat with a spoon like I'm a death row prisoner on suicide watch? Could I just have that instead?

"Um, yes, we can do that? We can also arrange those on a plate like you're an adult with dignity and self-respect. You don't have to actually eat your food out of a single bowl."

Fuck that, I'm done, I don't give a shit. Just pile all those things in a bowl. Is there a way that the bowl can play This Mortal Coil's "It'll End In Tears" album while I'm eating it at 2 in the morning in my darkened apartment, just kinda staring into the middle distance?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that reason is best summed up by this:

Patton Oswalt has a history of depression. Perhaps listening to a lot of Lisa Gerrard isn't the best plan in his case. But I love her. Not in spite of the penetrating darkness of her music but because of it. It's like going home.

Dead Can Dance Live -- Photo: Mixelle

Lisa Gerrard Live -- Photo: Mixelle

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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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Stargate Skyfall

I caught Skyfall over the holiday weekend and I loved it. Daniel Craig continues to bring a gravitas to the role that transitions Bond from outrageous camp to something with surprising depth. And this was probably the darkest yet -- a journey through death and resurrection, as the series reboots itself yet again. This is a bold re-envisioning, exchanging the high tech gadgetry, that has become too ubiquitous to be entertaining, for low tech cleverness. Javier Bardem is just flamboyant enough to be a Bond villain, yet tragic and human enough to be a believable character. He's also consistently brilliant.

The movie is excellent. But the opening credit sequence is a masterpiece.

Leaving aside for a moment the sheer awesomeness of the cinematography and the buttery richness of Adele's voice, what captivated me was the layering of esoteric imagery. It was the genius of the opening credits (posted above) that convinced me to brave the crowds and see this movie in the theater.

As with the recent Olympics, and so much in popular art and entertainment, it's hard to say how much of the symbolism is deliberate and how much is subconscious. But it's hard to believe that a film about a journey through death and rebirth just happens to have one portal image after another by accident. 

This is the end...

The sequence opens with a wormhole as Bond is pulled through a swirling vortex on the ocean floor. From there, the viewer moves through one circular gate after another, from bullet holes, to the circumpunct like barrel of a gun, to James Bond's eye. We slide through these apertures, moving from one dark, surreal landscape to another.

Skyfall is where we start...

There are also numerous images of the Celtic Cross, aka the Medicine Wheel, aka the four directions. We see it in classic form on tombstones, but also made up from guns and the great stag. In one remarkable turn, Bond finds himself at the center of four, intersecting, shadow selves.

Where worlds collide and days are dark...

In one particularly stunning sequence, we move from trails of blood in the water and into the realm of the Chinese lung, or dragons -- the great, fire-breathing wyrms themselves.

Where you go I go. What you see I see...

There is also a lot of mirroring imagery, as one divides into two, in perfect reflection. And in the penultimate sequence, Bond finds himself in a hall of mirrors. He shoots holes in one mirror after another, finally shattering the illusory world around him.

Let the sky fall. When it crumbles...

The title itself, Skyfall, suggests the death of the illusory world. The sky, the boundary of our perceptual world, crumbles. It's the apocalypse -- the revelation of secrets hidden behind the veil.

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George Harrison's Quiet Legacy

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

"Who's George Harrison?" my daughter asked me this morning.

"Oh, that's easy," I answered. "My favorite Beatle."

"What's a Beatle?" Obviously, this conversation went on for a bit. How and why did it start? My daughter, being far more visual than I, had apparently noticed something on the news crawl that I hadn't.

I'm going to assume that what piqued her interest was coverage of a Scorcese documentary on the life of George Harrison that just released on DVD. At least that's what topped my news search. So now, of course, I will have to see that.

When I was my daughter's age, 10, I had a very solid grounding in The Beatles. It was an education that had started when I was much younger. When I was 3 and 4, Magical Mystery Tour was my favorite album and I played it over and over on my little record player. Now, if you'd asked me at 10 who my favorite Beatle was, I would have said Paul -- the cute one. But with age and wisdom has come a deeper appreciation for George -- the thinky one.

George Harrison is the Beatle to whom I can most easily relate. In part because of his well-known spiritual quest, which led him, amongst other things, to learn sitar and to study with the deeply sublime Ravi Shankar.

But also because -- and this is a less well-known aspect of his personality -- he would apparently do anything for a laugh. Anyone who knows me well knows of the depths I will sink to to crack myself up.

I only lately learned of Harrison's long relationship with members of Monty Python and his involvement with Rutland Weekend Television -- the show that was the genesis of the brilliantly funny Beatles parody The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. His appearance on the BBC series shows what an incredible sense of humor Harrison had about himself.

One of the revelations in Scorcese's documentary -- at least it was news to me -- is that Harrison mortgaged his house to help finance Monty Python's Life of Brian. Risky move, although I'm assuming it ultimately paid off. It was very controversial.

The film contains themes of religious satire that were controversial at the time of its release, drawing accusations of blasphemy and protests from some religious groups. Thirty-nine local authorities in the UK either imposed an outright ban, or imposed an X (18 years) certificate (effectively preventing the film from being shown, as the distributors said the film could not be shown unless it was unedited and carried the original AA (14) certificate). Some countries, including Ireland and Norway, banned its showing, with a few of these bans lasting decades. The film makers used such notoriety to benefit their marketing campaign, with posters stating "So funny it was banned in Norway!".

The film was a box-office success, grossing fourth-highest of any film in the UK in 1979 and highest of any British film in the United States that year. It has remained popular since then, receiving positive reviews and being named "greatest comedy film of all time" by several magazines and television networks. The film is the first Monty Python film to receive an R rating[3] in the United States.

Life of Brian is one of my all-time favorite movies but it was definitely provocative, raising hard questions about the origins of Christianity and about the nature of religion itself. One of the more insightful sequences demonstrates the sheeple effect when the growing mobs of Brian's followers remove a sandal simply because he's lost one. George Harrison was clearly one who was looking for a deeper experience of the divine than can be achieved by accepting dogmatic, rote teaching at face value.

I think the cultural legacy left by George Harrison is only beginning to be understood and appreciated. He was the "quiet" Beatle, seemingly content to live in the shadow of the power dyad that was Lennon and McCartney. But his was also a contemplative quiet. He explored the inner space and embraced the mysteries. It was evident in his music -- a surprising blend of pop sensibility and meditative resonance. His influence on both the Beatles and the culture was subtle but pervasive. But by following his own passions he helped to shape the psychedelic revolution and the proliferation of Eastern thought in the West. He may well have been the most complex of the fab four. The Beatles were a marvelous synergy and none of them approached as solo artists the same kind of musical alchemy. So it's hard to say how much his vision shaped their sound. But he deserves ample credit for their transformation from pop musicians to weavers of unforgettable sound tapestries.

Tragedy in Sedona

Article first published as Book Review: Tragedy in Sedona by Connie Jay on Blogcritics.

On July 25, 2009, Colleen Conaway plummeted to her death in San Diego's Horton Plaza mall; an apparent suicide. She had no history of mental problems. She was by all accounts very happy with her life and her direction. So how did the Minnesota native meet such a sad and inexplicable fate so far from home? She was participating in a James Arthur Ray "Creating Absolute Wealth" seminar for which she had paid thousands of dollars.

The exercise was one in which seminar participants were directed to dress as homeless people and wander around downtown San Diego. They were not allowed to carry money, identification, or cell phones. In what would become a pattern for those who had the misfortune to be severely injured during James Ray seminars, Colleen Conaway spent many hours listed as "Jane Doe."

Connie Joy's daughter Erica participated in that same seminar and both Connie and her husband Richard attended the final dinner. None of them were aware that a participant had died. Only Ray and his closest staffers knew that Conaway was lying on a slab in the San Diego County morgue. And they weren't telling. People who asked about why she hadn't returned were told that she was fine but wasn't coming back to the seminar. It was over two months later, in the wake of yet another horrific tragedy on Ray's watch, that his long-time followers learned that the unnamed woman who had died in the mall that day was the seminar participant who had never returned from her homelessness adventure.

Less than two weeks after losing one of his students to a deadly fall, Ray had a select group of the high paying World Wealth Society members hiking a mountain trail overlooking Machu Picchu -- blindfolded. When concerned local tour guides tried to steer the hikers away from steep drops and around sharp turns, Ray became irritated at their interference. He was going to teach his students about the value of living life to the fullest by flirting with death and no one was going to stop him. As his group of students removed their blindfolds to take in the view from the cliff they were standing on, he asked, "Are you just taking up space or are you really living your lives?"

Ray's fascination with the theme of death was not new. But it seemed to increase rather than diminish after Colleen Conaway's inexplicable plunge. In early October, just over two months after her demise, Ray would lead his Spiritual Warrior seminar in Sedona, AZ, in which he relied heavily on death metaphors. And three people would die from exposure to extreme temperatures in a sweat lodge ceremony.

When Joy learned of the deaths of James Shore and Kirby Brown and that her good friend Liz Neuman was in critical condition in an Arizona hospital, she was shocked and saddened but not surprised. Joy had been trying to warn people about Ray's sweat lodge since she, herself, had gotten sick from the heat during Spiritual Warrior 2007. She knew the dangers of heatstroke and had long thought it was only a matter of time before someone was severely injured in one of Ray's super-heated sweat lodges.

In Tragedy in Sedona, Joy offers an insider's perspective on what led up to the tragic deaths and multiple injuries that resulted from a sweat lodge that was "too hot for too long." As World Wealth Society members, she and her husband Richard got as close to Ray as anyone but his closest staffers were allowed to get. She also saw that limited access diminish as Ray's star rose. Over a three year period, the Joys attended 27 of Ray's events as either paying participants or Dream Team volunteers.

Joy witnessed numerous injuries at Ray's events: broken bones, a punctured eyelid, and other medical emergencies, for which Ray took no responsibility and implemented few precautions. His recklessness escalated dramatically as his Oprah fueled popularity increased and he began packing his events to capacity. As the number of these incidents mounted the Joys posited that Ray would never really risk anyone's life because, if for no other reason, it would be bad for business. Besides, they knew that Ray was extensively trained by native shamans and other practitioners. Surely he knew what he was doing. But as his recklessness increased, they became less and less convinced that people were safe and increasingly concerned until the World Wealth Society trip to Peru shattered what was left of their trust.

The breaking point came when Joy learned that the hotly anticipated climb up Huayna Picchu would be on a schedule too tight to safely reach the top. Knowing that there was a history of injuries and deaths on the steep trails, the Joys went to work investigating alternative scheduling for participants who, like themselves, wanted to do a complete climb without risking their lives. Their interference in Ray's plans put them on a collision course with his ego. The result was a verbal assault from Ray that finally convinced them that he was not a spiritual leader who was living by his own teachings.

Ray's hypocrisy had been increasingly evident the Joys for some time. From the very first seminar, they'd recognized deceptive, hard-sell practices. The Joys, being realtors, had seen such tactics before and took them in stride. But over time they noticed that promises made during pitches for the very expensive World Wealth Society membership were changed or discarded completely. In Orwellian fashion, there was often no acknowledgment that many of the offerings were vastly reduced from what had been promised. Since the pitches were always verbal, rather than written, there was no way to prove the change had occurred.

In one telling exchange, Ray publicly excoriated a man for his wife's diligent note-taking during seminars. With increasing frequency, Ray would "flame" people from the stage for asking questions he didn't want to answer or as an opportunity to air grudges they didn't even know he was holding. It was something he did so effectively that many of his students were terrified to take the mic to ask a question and feared being called out. In this case, the offense in question was keeping a record of what Ray said, which he ironically described as not "paying attention" to what he was saying.

Most of Ray's sales pitches and promises were delivered when people were in a suggestible state. His upcoming seminars and packages were sold during other seminars where he would keep people on action-packed schedules that provided little time for sleep and few breaks. Joy even cites one instance when Ray began a pitch as he was leading them in a guided meditation. That was not the only time Joy, a trained hypnotherapist, noted that Ray was using stage hypnosis and/or NLP techniques to sell his events, but it was the most shocking. It was an egregious abuse of trust; one another participant referred to as "black magick." Sadly, Joy noted that it worked. She saw a woman she knew to have tight finances standing on line to shell out $60,000 for a World Wealth Society membership she could not possibly afford. Thankfully, the woman came to her senses before closing the deal. A very good thing because Ray's company had an ironclad no refund policy.

Ray's business practices were among many pieces of information excluded during Ray's manslaughter trial because they were "prejudicial." Jurors would not learn, for instance, that Ray's unwillingness to provide refunds meant that by the time participants received information packets and waivers that gave some, albeit very small, indication of the dangers posed by Spiritual Warrior, they could not have canceled without forfeiting nearly $10,000. Ray's lawyers were free to argue, however, that by signing the waivers, participants knew what they were in for. Jurors did learn that Ray's Dream Team volunteers had to pay for their own travel, lodging, and meals. They did not know, however, something Joy only discovered after Dream Teaming numerous events -- that the group rates offered to participants and volunteers were higher than the regular rates because Ray demanded substantial kickbacks from hotels.

After his contributing role in The Secret and his appearances on "Oprah" and "Larry King Live," Ray's monetary focus sharpened. He now spoke openly of his goal to be "the first billionaire in the spiritual arena." He claimed that he had become a millionaire as a byproduct of following his bliss but this was no longer good enough. He wanted to be billionaire as a way of "keeping score." Joy was floored.

It wasn't just his now open pecuniary focus that belied his spiritual aspirations. There were other unsavory indications of an ego spinning out of control.

Dubbed the "Rock Star of Personal Transformation," Ray relished the limelight. He relished the perks of wealth and stardom even more. Like Elvis's "Memphis Mafia," Ray's "Dream Team" volunteers were required, among other ignoble tasks, to let women know that he'd picked them out of the audience to join him for the evening. In one horrible case, Joy noticed a woman sobbing in the back of the hall. Joy's friend Edward, who was among the volunteer staff for the event, explained the incident. She had been thrown over when Ray changed his mind about which audience pick he expected to join him for dinner.

Ray, who taught that relationships were one of five essential pillars in a balanced life, seemed to have very odd ideas about them. He had said many revealing things about how he didn't believe that people were meant to be together forever and that having children was a vain attempt at immortality. He had been married and divorced and never intended to remarry. Yet he considered himself qualified to teach people about integrity in relationships.

Over time, Joy observed that Ray ran interference in other people's relationships. She kept finding herself separated from her husband Richard during events. During Spiritual Warrior, for instance, couples were split up and assigned same-sex roommates. It was a pattern that started to feel very deliberate, particularly when Joy was volunteering for Practical Mysticism and her daughter Erica was there as a participant. After exchanging a few words with her daughter, she saw Ray whispering to the staffer in charge of volunteers who then pulled Joy aside and gave her a talking to. Joy needed to stay away from Erica and let her "have her own experience."

That phrase, "let people have their own experience" was one heard from numerous witnesses during Ray's manslaughter trial. People who were concerned about the labored breathing and apparent incoherence of other sweat lodge participants, for instance, knew better than to interfere in the "experience" of people who were, in fact, dying. Prosecutor Sheila Polk argued that such rules actually trained people away from their natural instincts to try to help each other and to completely defer to Ray's judgment.

After reading Tragedy in Sedona, it occurred to me that it was also a way to discourage normal bonding between participants and ensure that communication during Ray's events was almost entirely vertical rather than horizontal. Too much interpersonal bonding threatened the hierarchy and Ray's position at the top of it. That sense was confirmed for me when I exchanged emails with Mary Latallade, who described for me her sense of isolation in the crowd; particularly when she was seriously injured during the the 2008 sweat lodge.

During the trial, the pressure Ray applied to men and women alike to submit to buzz cuts during Spiritual Warrior was a contentious issue. The echoes of Heaven's Gate and the Manson Family would be hard to miss. Defense attorneys worked hard to diffuse the potential impact on jurors of numerous women being shorn of their locks. Joy struggled with the decision of whether or not to shave off all her hair when she attended Spiritual Warrior in 2007. Ultimately, she accepted Ray's logic: "You are not your hair." Shaving their hair was presented as an opportunity to sacrifice ego. But Ray wasn't leading by example. He didn't have his own head shaved. Worse, when police searched his hotel room, they recovered an impressive stash of pharmaceuticals including steroids and Propecia.

In the forward to Tragedy in Sedona, psychiatrist Carole Lieberman points out that in one of Ray's books he describes the embarrassment he experienced as a boy when his mother would give him buzz cuts on the front porch in full view of laughing neighbor children. And here he was, years later, pressuring people to sit in a public area and have their hair shaved off. So was Ray shaming Spiritual Warrior participants into shaving their heads to experience humility or humiliation? Taken in context, humiliation is about the only explanation that makes sense.

During the trial, it became apparent that participants were humiliated and degraded in numerous ways. Many witnesses visibly flinched as they described flaming episodes when Ray would take any opportunity to publicly enumerate any flaws and air grievances. Some students were terrified of attracting his ire by such things as taking an unscheduled bathroom break. A good number of Spiritual Warrior participants were forced to remain perfectly still on the hard floor for hours, unable to scratch an itch, use the bathroom, or eat dinner, after being symbolically killed by a capricious "God" (Ray) during his twisted version of the Samurai Game. Many people testified to his telling participant Lou Caci to relieve himself inside the sweat lodge on the ground rather than leave the "sacred" space; something he clearly found degrading.

These condescensions from on high became more and more common as Ray's fame grew and he retreated behind body guards and away from any two-way communication with students. Mostly, he criticized them for "not playing full on" if they failed to meet the numerous physical and emotional challenges presented during events. During Spiritual Warrior he criticized them for wanting to leave the intolerable temperatures of the sweat lodge and many of them stayed against their quickly evaporating judgment.

Ray's abnormally hot and abnormally long sweat lodge reduced people to vomiting, paralyzing muscle cramps, babbling incoherence, and unconsciousness. None of that indicated a problem to Ray. In fact, it was the goal. In the aftermath of the 2009 lodge, the hottest he'd ever run, more participants than ever were in such these disabling states. It was a scene that some participants described as looking like a war zone. And as the realization dawned that a number of people were in life threatening distress and participants who were able began administering CPR, Ray sat in the shade with a cooling beverage, and observed the scene. When told by the firekeeper's wife that she needed a cellphone to call 911 because people weren't breathing, he shrugged. He was later seen chatting to someone other than 911 on a cellphone. As the ambulances started to arrive, he shambled back to his hotel room to shower and have a sandwich.

The picture of Ray that emerges from Tragedy in Sedona and in the many hours of courtroom testimony is not just that of an overblown ego. There are glimpses of something truly sadistic. Ray seemed to enjoy watching people do what he told them to do even when it was degrading... and when it was horrifically dangerous.

Ray is certainly not the first spiritual leader to exploit followers sexually and emotionally. He's not the first to accrue massive wealth at the expense of financially struggling followers. He's not the first to take advantage of volunteers. He's not even the first spiritual leader to conflate sacrificing the ego to God with submission to his leadership. What sets James Arthur Ray apart from the average flimflammer is that he was playing a game of chicken with other people's lives. How else to describe someone who would blindfold people on a dangerous a mountain trail and retool a traditional sweat lodge into an inferno so as to induce heatstroke for its mind altering affects?

Ray's students followed his lead because they trusted him to know what he was doing. He had established credibility with them by being a published author, by being part of The Secret, and by claims of having trained under established spiritual teachers and shamans in numerous traditions. But tales of his vast, multicultural training turned out to be lies. After the Joys had their final confrontation with Ray, the whole facade came crumbling down. In Peru, he'd hedged when his students wanted to meet the shaman he'd told so many stories about. Joy asked around and learned the man in question was not so much a shaman as he was a tour guide. Stan Grof, the psychiatrist who developed Holotropic Breathwork had never heard of James Ray until after he'd made headlines for his deadly sweat lodge. Grof's institute had no record of his having been trained to facilitate the breathwork. Most of his knowledge of shamanism came from Carlos Castaneda books; a fraud being led by a fraud.

For all her disillusionment, Joy writes without rancor, and with a sense of gratitude for what good came out of her experience with James Ray -- even though it came with a whopping $200,000 price tag. Tragedy in Sedona began as a chronicle of her journey of spiritual growth and healing. Ray stole from good teachers as well as bad and some of what she experienced was valuable; even transformative. It is, after all, the message not the messenger that matters.

Joy learned that she'd be writing a book when she was in Egypt on a World Wealth Society trip. While communing with the Sphinx, she was told that part of her destiny was to write a book. A math person and "digital" thinker, she never considered herself a writer. But her higher self knew she'd have an important story to tell and indeed she did. The driving narrative, the power of that story, more than makes up for any lack of linguistic flair.

For anyone who wants to understand how apparently intelligent, educated, and accomplished people could fall pray to Ray's long con, the book makes essential reading. Joy, herself, is such a person. Her vulnerability to Ray lay in some of her highest aspirations -- a longing to understand the workings of spirit, to align all aspects of her life with her spirituality, and to make a solid contribution to the world. Joy bridles against media reports that characterize Ray's followers as a "cult." She makes the point repeatedly that they were not "mindless cult" members. I would take issue only with characterization of cult members as mindless. Not even members of Heaven's Gate, the People's Temple, Hare Krishna, or other well known cults could be fairly described as "mindless." They were simply subject to a higher level of manipulation, even coercion, than Ray's organization offered at its height. All cults target smart, accomplished members because that's where the money is. They all target people with appeals to their idealism. And they all break people down by leveraging their insecurities, emotional vulnerabilities, and innate deference to authority, just like Ray.

Tragedy in Sedona makes essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how it is that three of the best and brightest wound up getting cooked to death in an abomination of a sweat lodge. It's a warning to pay attention to every red flag and not excuse or minimize questionable behavior from those in whom we invest our trust. Else we may pay with more than our wallets.

James Arthur Ray was convicted on three counts of criminally negligent homicide on June 22, 2011. An original sentencing date that would have eerily coincided with the death of Colleen Conaway, was changed to allow for more of the extensive legal wrangling that characterized the very long trial. A presentence hearing is currently scheduled for August 16th in which Ray's attorneys will argue for a mitigated sentence. Ray's multiple attorneys have also filed for a new trial claiming prosecutorial misconduct. The State has responded with a lengthy rebuttal and the defense attorneys have replied. Ray is also facing still unresolved lawsuits and possible legal action from the family of Colleen Conaway.

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The Giving Tree is a Sap

Better Book Titles: Children's Book Edition

As a child, I loved The Giving Tree. I read it over and over. As an adult, a feminist, and a gratefully recovering codependent, I've long since given the book a rethink. So much so that I won't expose my daughter to it. It's not allowed in the house. What I once thought of as a sweet and moving story with a  moral about the beauty of altruism, I realized one day is an appallingly sexist book filled with poisonous ideas about the role of women and of earth itself.

I don't know why the book struck such a cord for me. Perhaps it had something to do with my profound fascination with trees. Perhaps it was something more prosaic like my nascent codependency. The book presents a dangerous message, overall: Imbalanced relationships in which one person sacrifices endlessly for the happiness of another are an ideal state. In fact, happiness can be derived entirely from pleasing someone else. This is the very definition of codependency.

Codependency is not necessarily a gendered phenomenon. There are plenty of male codependents. But girls are actually acculturated to be codependent, even in families where alcoholism and other major dysfunction aren't the issue. If we don't get it from our families -- and my family was probably more progressive than most -- we get it from our communities, from our schools, from movies, from books... books like The Giving Tree.

Harry Potter Is Not a "Jock"

Buy at Allposters.com

Hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan on the most wrong-headed analysis of Harry Potter I think I've ever seen, which, to my great surprise, comes from Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon. In addition to getting important plot points completely wrong, Marcotte reveals far more about herself than she does the Harry Potter series. Marcotte attempts to address the Harry Potter as "nerd" with "misfit" friends narrative. I don't know whose narrative that is but it isn't Rowling's, which Marcotte tangentially acknowledges before going on to debunk it anyway.

Harry, Marcotte explains, isn't a "geek." He's a "jock." While it's certainly true that Harry distinguishes himself as an athlete in the richly symbolic game of Quidditch, I think to call him a jock is a bit of a reach. Nor are athletes so feted at Hogwarts as to make such "jocks" the in crowd. The social structure is far more complex than that. There is no jock/geek dichotomy in the Harry Potter universe.

As Sullivan points out, Marcotte misidentifies both Harry and Ron as "stereotypically privileged." Ron is best known for coming from a poor family and relying on frequently embarrassing hand-me-downs. The wealthy Malfoys openly mock the Weasleys for their poverty. Harry is an orphan raised by relatives who treat him like Cindarella and his own hand-me-down clothes have the added benefit of being absurdly large because they come from his fat, bully cousin. He spends the first years of life consigned to a cupboard under the stairs. Neither of these boys' lives could be remotely described as privileged.

Prince Charles On Sacred Geometry

Buy at AllPosters.com

Well, color me gobsmacked. I've just added to my bookstore, of all things, a book by Prince Charles. I never thought I'd see the day. But this headline on The Huffington Post caught my eye: "Prince Charles Reflects on 'Sacred Geometry.'" Not only does he demonstrate a solid knowledge of sacred geometry but he is speaking to something that I have been saying for years; that if we constructed things according to the principles of sacred geometry, we would have far more efficient and durable systems. It's something that drives me mental, actually, on a daily basis. Little things like the way shampoo bottles tip over in the shower because the structure and weight don't account for changing center of gravity as you use up the shampoo. And, of course, on a grand scale everything from urban planning to architecture to farming would benefit from following the laws and principles of the natural world instead of fighting them. These greater world problems are what Prince Charles is addressing his book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World.

Examining some of the past wonders of human achievement, Charles highlights a "sacred geometry" which stands in sharp contrast to the hectic and scattered appearance of modern life. He argues that such principles are not archaic but are, in fact, highly relevant to solving many of the world's current problems.

In this exclusive excerpt, the British heir marvels at his favorite building, the Chartres Cathedral, and the seemingly perfect order of its architecture.

Chartres was begun at the start of the eleventh century. It is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and Professor Critchlow suggests that the symbolism of the entire cathedral is intimately tied up with the medieval development of the cult of Mary - perhaps a renaissance, he claims, of the cult of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Sophia. I can only give a snapshot here of the remarkable scholarship he has achieved, but it is so important that the wider world sees some of what he has uncovered because it demonstrates in physical form the outlook that prevailed in the mood of thought in the Western world 1,000 years ago.

Once again the geometry of the entire building is derived from a circle. Its floor plan is contained within the proportions of a vesica. As the illustration demonstrates, the centre point of the vesica sits at the very centre of the building so that the North and South doors, seen here on the left and right, are exactly positioned. The windows also conform to this shape. The great Belle Verrière window, for example, which depicts the Madonna and Child, sits perfectly within a vesica and thus perfectly within the floor plan of the cathedral, with every significant point in the design of the window corresponding to key positions in the geometry of the rest of the building. Christ's head sits over the Madonna's heart. As Professor Critchlow has shown, the infant Christ's throat, from which the entire Christian tradition was eventually spoken, falls at the very centre of the vesica and therefore at the very heart of the building. The blue jewel in the Madonna's crown falls on the rond point of the cathedral at the end of the choir, which happens to sit immediately below a large weathervane up on the roof in the shape of Gabriel, the archangel who brought the news to Mary of Christ's incarnation. The eight stars that circle the Madonna's head, fall precisely on the eight pillars that surround the altar, and her feet rest on the columns of the doorway of the West entrance. And so the precision of this comprehensive geometry goes on.

The entrance into the building is through the West front, which comprises two soaring towers, one with the symbol of the Moon upon it and one, a significant number of feet taller, bearing the symbol of the Sun. The height of this spire matches the length of the cathedral: 365 feet. The Moon spire is 28 feet shorter, a number linked very closely to the lunar calendar. And beneath them sits one of the most spectacular of all rose windows, symbolizing the uniting of the apparent duality represented by the symbols of the Sun and the Moon. This unifying process is even built into the way the pilgrim was expected to journey around the cathedral. They would enter the building beneath the Moon, passing from the world of time into the timeless, and then progress along the left wall, reading the story of Christianity in the windows of the North side of the cathedral. There are in fact three great rose windows in the body of the cathedral and they were also intended to be read in sequence, along with all of the other layers of symbolism built into the fabric of the architecture.

For instance, there are two gateposts on the building, one on the North door and one on the South. The Northern gatepost carries a statue of St Anne, who, being the mother of Mary, is traditionally the figure in whom the Old Testament ends. After progressing through the building, following the course of Chartres's famous labyrinth with its central chamber containing twelve petals on the floor (exactly at the point, incidentally, where Christ's feet appear in the Belle Verrière window), the pilgrim would pass the Southern door, above which is the image of the fully grown Christ, enclosed within a vesica. On the gatepost of that door Christ is depicted again, carrying in his hands the book of his message to the world, his New Testament. Even here the architecture is full of symbolism. Professor Critchlow points out that the shape of the book is a Golden Rectangle and that it is angled in such a way that one corner rests on Christ's 'naval centre', as it would be described in the Indian, Vedantic tradition, while the upper corner rests on his 'heart centre'. Keith Critchlow has also calculated that this book is tilted at approximately 24 ½ º, which is both the angle at which our hearts lie within our bodies and the tilt of the Earth in relation to the solar axis.

Quite clearly not an inch of this entire building is left to chance. Every angle and position conveys symbolic meaning. The medieval Christian architects who designed such a breathtaking structure were following the teachings of the mystics of their age and created what seems to me to amount to a profound prayer to all of creation. They made a building that offers us the direct experience of what the ancients held to be our true relationship with the world. To walk around within its soaring pillars and to bask in the gentle light that pours through its exquisite windows is to experience a sense of participation in the very 'patterning' of the soul. No sense here of being a disconnected observer in a dead and mechanical universe.

I have wanted to pay such attention to the principles of the world's sacred geometry because they stand in such contrast to the predominant way in which we view the world today. I am sure many people will say that you cannot organise 'modern' life around ancient, irrelevant concepts, but the point is that the sheer elegance of a building like Chartres Cathedral and the precision of its geometry was only possible because of the rediscovery of classical knowledge which was born of a tradition of wisdom which is not time-specific and 'historic'. It is timeless and extremely relevant to the way the natural world works today - as it has always been. Nature has not changed her attitude because of fashion.

"Nature has not changed her attitude because of fashion." I just need to repeat that for emphasis. Brilliant.

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Religulous and Other Intellectual Dishonesty

I finally got around to watching Bill Maher's "Religulous" a couple of weeks ago. It's on Showtime so what the hey. It was pretty much what I was expecting. Quite amusing in some parts. The unintentionally funny cartoons are the best part. Adam stroking the rib bone in an unmistakeably pornographic manner caused my husband to hit the pause button so we could just stare at each other in utter disbelief for several minutes.

That said, the movie in sum is a cheap shot. Maher does that thing that so many in the New Atheist movement can be counted on to do. He focuses almost exclusively on the outer reaches of religiosity and inductively reasons the lunacy of all religious people everywhere. He interviews a lot of fundamentalists and dogmatists and then draws broad conclusions about religion and it's implications for our future, reaching absurdly hyperbolic conclusions.

"Religulous" is what came to mind when I read this piece on The Huffington Post. John Thatamanil takes on the intellectual dishonesty of using the worst examples of religious thought (or lack there of) instead of taking on theologians and other religious thinkers of substantial mental wattage.

It should go without saying that tremendous expertise in biology does not entitle one to claims of expertise on religion. Dawkins is a fine biologist, but he knows precious little about religion. Terry Eagleton has made this point brilliantly: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology." To Eagelton's quip, I can only say Amen.

In interreligious dialogue circles, participants operate under a fundamental ethical constraint: never compare the best in your tradition with the worst in another's. A Christian who compares liberation theology with caste in Hinduism is making an invidious comparison. A similar constraint should apply in conversations between atheists and the religious. Atheists who tar the whole of religion by contrasting the insight of Einstein with the fulminations of fundamentalists are engaged in egregious dialogical malpractice.

But most atheists are ill equipped to abide by this rule because they know nothing about Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, medieval women mystics like Julian of Norwich or major thinkers from other traditions like Śaṅkara or Nāgārjuna. Absent such knowledge, caricature becomes inevitable.

Cartoons aside, "Religulous" is indeed a caricature of religion. And after a while, it starts to feel a little mean-spirited. Laughing at the ignorant for an hour and half just seems cruel and unfair. It wears thin the way People of WalMart does. I just end up feeling really badly for some of these people.

But mostly I feel a certain sadness for Maher. He not only appears to be incapable of understanding that many people of faith are well aware that they are participating in myth and metaphor. He seems cut off from the richness of that experience.

As a side note, I once again find myself in the uncomfortable position of needing to point out that Jesus is hot. (see above) Why are our artistic depictions of Jesus always hot? What's up with that?

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