Save The Phenomena

Hidden right in front of me

2011-12-27T09:10:00.004-07:00

This is the message of Barfield's work: Just because something isn't obvious doesn't mean it's not there. And just because it takes work, and practice, to see it, doesn't mean it's contrived or conjured.

For example: Years ago, I learned how to use a microscope in order to analyze bits of various materials - floor and ceiling tile, insulation, adhesives - for the presence of asbestos fibers. Eventually, not only could I determine whether or not there was asbestos in the sample, but also what type of asbestos (there are six), and a rough estimate of how much was in the sample. And after even more practice and experience, I could determine fairly accurately, without the microscope, whether a sample contained asbestos or not.

Another example: I was working on a piece of artwork for a friend's birthday. It was made with ink prints from a design I'd gotten from somewhere. I stamped the paper with my little stamp, but when I was done, it didn't quite look right. I stamped again, but still it didn't feel right. I'm not an artist of that sort - I was just doing what I wanted - and didn't know any 'theory' and had very little practice. My landlord and upstairs neighbor was an artist, though, and an experienced and accomplished one. I asked him to take a look at my creation, and suggest what I might do to finish it. He looked at it for about five seconds, suggested something, which I did, and it looked great.

For the last several days I've been making my way through The World of Tolkien: Mythological Sources of The Lord of the Rings by David Day. It's an oversized hardback, with lots of great illustrations by a variety of artists - that's why I bought it. After spending time reading it, though, I've found the text to be even more enjoyable and stimulating than the illustrations. And eye-opening.

What Day does that is so enlightening is to show the sources for many of the names in Tolkien's work of Middle Earth. The book is meant to read like an encyclopedia, sort of, with entries that include "Gods and Deities", "Morgoth", "Dragon Broods and Hoards", "Barrow-wights and Phantoms", and "The Reunited Kingdom of the Dunedain". Under every heading, Day gives the (primary world) history of a variety of relevant words from The Lord of the Rings, and as much evidence as possible of Tolkien's own reasons for employing those particular words.

The term 'middle earth' is of course essential to understand. It is this earth. Not another planet, or a fabrication from whole cloth. "In its origins, Tolkien's Middle-earth has much in common with the Midgard of Norse mythology," writes Day. "The theatre of my tale is this earth", wrote Tolkien.

This is just the beginning of course. Day traces the etymology of 'midgard,' (middle-erd, midden-erd), and traces Tolkien's own accounting of his use of the term throughout The Lord of the Rings. He does the same with 'elf', 'dwarf', 'star', 'Westernesse' (related to Avalon - Isle of Apples - related to Hesperides), 'Rivendell' (cleft valley, 'cleft' being 'delphi' in Greek), 'Arda', 'Numenor' (Atalante in High Elvish, Atlantis in Greek), etc..

I hate to use 'etc.', but the connections are so many, often from more than one language - Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old English, Middle English, High German, Icelandic, Norwegian, Welsh - and in more than one character or word or phrase. You simply must read the book. The effect this has had on me is to see more and more clearly just how little Tolkien invented, and how much he reconstructed. By tracing words and phrases and myths and stories back in time and across cultures, Tolkien discovers connections, additions, omissions, mistakes, misinterpretations along the way. In the end, what he was after was to reconstruct the true origins of the English nation, seen from 'the inside' - from the human mind.

So, about every third page of reading Day's book is punctuated by my saying 'OOOOOoooohhhhh...so that's what that means....aaaahhhh....I see now...'. There is an annotated version of The Hobbit; we need the same thing for The Lord of the Rings. With this edition, it will be clear just how much Tolkien has revealed, yet was still hidden from untrained eyes and minds.

Clearing out the cobwebs

2011-12-08T17:45:00.001-07:00

The world record for the men's 200 meter dash has only improved by 3.01 seconds in over one hundred years. When that record is cut in half in one fell swoop, and soon after that, is cut in half again, then we have ourselves a revolution in the development of the human being. When the 19.19 record is broken with a 9.59, and the very next breaking is with a 4.79, then that's a revolution. Right?

I like thinking about that, because it clears certain obstacles to my thinking, by showing them as obstacles, rather than features of my personality, or laws of the physical universe. Yet, at the same time, I see that humans have developed so profoundly. We don't realize it, maybe, because that branch of the species still exists and lives right alongside the rest of us. They are called professional athletes.

My best personal time running a mile, that I have any evidence for, is about 7:30. The world record is 3:43. There's your 'cut in half' right there.

So here's this race of human beings, that can perform at physical levels twice what the rest of us mortals can. I thought to use the term 'order of magnitude', but learned that this means 10 times greater. My time is only twice what the world record is. 34:00 would be an order of magnitude greater (slower) than the record.

Or: for the record to be improved by an order of magnitude, it would have to be run in 22 seconds.

There's something to clear obstacles to your thinking.

I love language...

2011-11-05T11:32:00.001-06:00

I was looking closely at The Empress card on the table, lined up with the four other cards I drew. I looked closely at her dress, to see what the print was - those...they're called...

I couldn't remember.

Just a minute ago, I was reading the meaning of this card in a book - for a different deck - which mentioned 'apple tree'.

"Pomegranate!"

How did I know 'pomegranate' from apple tree? Well, I know that potato in French is pomme de terre - earth apple. Pome-granate. Had to look it up, but that means 'apple with many seeds'.

I've often tried to remember a word by going through the alphabet in my head. That rarely works. I think it's because that's not how my memories are...kept, nor retrieved. More like what happened with pomegranate.

2011-10-08T11:24:00.002-06:00

I'm working on publishing a second edition of my book Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness. The current edition is wanting editorial attention in some large and small ways. And conceptually, I will try to tie some things together that aren't quite in the book currently.

If you've read the book, I encourage you to give me any feedback that you think would make a second edition better than the first.

The Owen Barfield Society met yesterday in Scottsdale, Arizona, during the annual conference of the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Modern Language Association. We heard from artist and eurhythmist Karen Bailey, author Albert Linderman, PhD student Tiffany Martin, as well as from a reading from Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul.

I also caught a Linguistics session of the conference, and heard about commodification of language and place signifiers in New Orleans, the frequency of place names with Anglo, Celtic, and other sources in Gallic France, and an analysis and defense of Noah Webster's etymologies. Good times.

I also spoke with a fellow Barfieldian at length, during which he mentioned the need for spiritual and intellectual engagemen with others, on a regular basis. I agreed; I'll check out Meetups for Steiner groups. And a google search.

Dreams are to keep me asleep

2011-08-07T17:03:00.002-06:00

As usual, reading Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams makes so much sense of things. He argued that you could assume two things for certain of any dream:

1. The dream is keeping you asleep

2. The dream is keeping you asleep by representing your own wishes as being fulfilled

The wish fulfillment is, in general, the wish to avoid work, or effort, because, in effect, the dream keeps you asleep by representing your desires, your wishes, your plans and intentions, as having already been realized. Now. Magically. You don't need to get up out of bed for a glass of water - you can keep sleeping because you already have water.

A dream keeps you asleep by convincing you that you have no need to wake up - all of your needs are met.

I've added a twist: What if I make these same assumptions with regard to my daydreams? This is significant, because I daydream often. Often. Walter Mitty-often, and just as dense.

So, if I assume these two things about my daydreaming? Well, I'm awake, so the 'sleeping' refers to some aspect of my waking life which is, paradoxically, asleep, and which I don't want to exert any effort to change. My daydreams will depict that aspect already realized. I don't need to go back to school - I already have a degree. I'm already an expert in my field - I don't need to learn anything more, to find ways to improve my work.

I might do well to look at my daydreams as reminders that I have work to do - very specific work indicated in the dream content itself. It's time to wake up, sunshine, and see those things realized, really.

Also, I might learn some things about myself if I pay attention to what mental circumstances immediately precede an episode of daydreaming. Am I thinking of some difficulty that's blocking my realization? Lack of money? Faulty thinking? Self-pity?

Damn you, Freud ;-)

Corpus Christi

2011-05-02T13:11:00.003-06:00

I'm tearing through the mist - that goddamned veil that's blocking my way - smothering me - you tore it

It is my flesh

I'm sorry

I was damned by god - damned by god the father - prepared for burial by my mother - I went to hell and freed the captives there - I'm the veil - I'm torn so you can enter me - in me - through me - one in me

Like reason - she was torn too, so we wouldn't have to be

Yes. I'm the logos - the word - that was with god in the beginning

      and was god

    Then flesh and blood

and then torn

    and then lifted up

living and flowing

like a river

broken like bread

      from wheat

in the soil and dirt

your head hung down like ripe wheat

broken for bread, hungry child

your skin torn for the wine

a broken, ripped, torn grape

like every grape of wine?

and every orange whose skin is ripped

and every apple that gives its life?

every seed that falls

every bud?

and every bloom

What about the branch? The vine? Every pruned, cut, hacked hedge?

Every bulb, withered leaves on top, cold body in the ground

Sweet sap, arrested in the oak's veins?

Like the rains thickened to snow, sweetheart

and even the clouds are like glass

and then they melt

and your blood pours again

and quenches your thirst

I'm quenched, but I'm always thirsty

I'm at your lips, child

you taste very good

drink deeply, little one - drink deeply from my breast - my earth - my body, and feel refreshed by my kiss, the sky - her wind and dewy breath on your face

amen

my womb is past

and I'm born

your own teeth will tear the skin of the grape now, and crush the wheat seed's back

for even they must die

so I can live

and in your turn, give life

amen

It is as a king,

2011-03-30T17:40:00.002-06:00

the absolute ruler of his own kingdom, that the Sermon on the Mount considers you; for this, after all, is the most complete of all the similes. When you know the Truth of Being, you are, as a literal fact and not merely in a rhetorical sense, the absolute monarch of your own life. You make your own conditions, and you can unmake them. You make and unmake your own health. You attract to yourself certain kinds of people and certain conditions - and others you repel. You attract to yourself riches or poverty, and peace of mind or fear - entirely in accordance with the way in which you govern your kingdom. Of course, the world does not know this. It supposes that the conditions of one's life are largely made for him by outer circumstances, and by other people. It believes that one is at all times liable to unforeseen and unexpected accidents of one sort or another, any one of which may seriously inconvenience or even completely ruin his scheme of life. But the Truth of Being is just the contrary of all this...

Now we come to consider this kingdom a little more in detail, and we find that the King's Palace, the office of government, so to say, is nothing less than your own consciousness - your own mentality. This is your very own private cabinet, and the business transacted there is the swirl of thoughts that continually pass across your mind. The "Secret Place of the Most High," the Psalmist calls it, and it is secret because no one but yourself knows what goes on therein. There is privacy, and there is dominion. You have the power to think what thoughts you like. You can choose which thoughts you will accept and which you will reject. You are master there.

- Emmet Fox

Read this closely...

2011-01-31T13:31:00.002-07:00

The outcome of what follows is that truth is not, as is usually assumed, an ideal reflection of something real, but is a product of the human spirit, created by an activity which is free; this product would exist nowhere if we did not create it ourselves. The object of knowledge is not to repeat in conceptual form something which already exists, but rather to create a completely new sphere, which when combined with the world given to our senses constitutes complete reality. Thus the highest human activity, human creativeness, is an organic part of the universal world-process. The world-process should not be considered a complete, enclosed totality without this activity. The human is not a passive onlooker in relation to evolution, merely repeating in mental pictures cosmic events taking place without human participation. The human is the active co-creator of the world-process, and cognition is the most perfect link in the organism of the universe.

This insight has the most significant consequences for the laws that underlie our deeds, that is, our moral ideals; these, too, are to be considered not as copies of something existing outside us, but as being present solely within us. This also means rejecting [Immanuel Kant’s] “categorical imperative,” an external power whose commandments we have to accept as moral laws, comparable to a voice fromt the Beyond that tells us what to do or leave undone. Our moral ideals are our own free creations. We have to fulfil only what we ourselves lay down as our standard of conduct. Thus the insight that truth is the outcome of a free deed also establishes a philosophy of morality, the foundation of which is the complete free personality.

Rudolf Steiner, Preface to Truth and Knowledge

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of god

2011-01-06T18:00:00.000-07:00

http://gizmodo.com/5726667/the-agonizing-last-words-of-bill-zeller

Merry Christmas

2010-12-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

From the hermit himself...

Collateral Damage

2010-12-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

I read the start of Matthew's gospel in the new testament. First the long genealogy, then the matter-of-fact statement of Mary being pregnant by the holy spirit, then the scene of babies and toddlers getting butchered because of Jesus. Stunning. The author's tone is rather formal, and steeped in a rich but formulaic culture.

I've had a couple of things in my mind as I read. One is a quasi-hermeneutic attitude: this was written at least 30 years after Jesus' death, and 60 years after his birth. I imagine myself writing about, say, my older brother's life. He's 62.

First, there wouldn't be the freshness of immediacy. 62 years is a long time. And in my case, I could at least still interview the subject. Matthew the gospel writer couldn't. Second, even though a stale biography doesn't mean it is unreliable or untrustworthy, it does probably mean that it will be more formulaic, more stylized, than a story I might tell about something that happened yesterday to someone I know closely right now.

The other thing: I'm reading JB Phillips' translation. I've loved his rendering ever since I first read it years ago. It was only years later that I read about Phillips' life, and learned that he suffered severe depression most of his adult life. He killed himself.

Ecce Homo

2010-11-28T16:06:00.001-07:00

It's not coincidental that I finally found - and have already finished reading - Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock, just a month or so after going out and buying a bible for myself, specifically to re-read some of the gospel stories. I don't want to go into my thoughts about Moorcock's book, but do want to talk about a story in one of the gospels that portrayed Jesus in a way similar to that of Behold the Man.

Read in the gospel of Mark, chapter 7, through verse 24. At one moment Jesus is getting harassed by some ultra religious types. He points out their ridiculously flawed and untenable traditions, and the tendency to replace their conscience with their traditions. He makes a big deal of calling a crowd to himself to make his points public, to clear up, publicly, the lies and ignorance of their leaders and traditions.

The next moment, "he entered a house and wanted no one to know about it, but he couldn't escape notice."

He's in public, in the synagogue (whatever that was like in those days), raising his voice to say, "Hey! People! Come here and pay attention! Let me tell you something..." Then he's slinking off to some hideout, hoping he can get away from those same people for awhile.

Why was he hiding out? Was he just haggard and harassed and had enough? One image I have in my head is of an infinitely patient, peaceful holy man, quietly going about, who is simply living his life of righteousness, who, if he weren't being harassed by crowds seeking healing and signs and hecklers and authorities seeking an end to his attention-grabbing life, would otherwise be quietly praying in the home of a friend.

Another image is of a righteously annoyed, straight talking man who has little time for willful ignorance and domineering arrogance, from anyone, and is just glad to get some time to himself and away from the stupidity and evil for a while.

The second image makes more sense to me.

Tolkien, Barfield, Violence, and the Evolution of Consciousness (revised)

2010-11-19T14:39:00.001-07:00

Here's the version of the essay as I read it at the Owen Barfield session of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association annual conference (this year it was in Albuquerque). Thank you, Pamela, for your support, and your help working through the final draft.

“The vagaries of confusion and savagery in the tribes in which anthropology finds participation most conspicuously surviving to-day, though they may well not be very reliable guides to its ancient quality among other peoples who have long since abandoned it, do nevertheless remind us of the sins of commission in thought, feeling and action of which original participation is capable.” P. 57, Saving the Appearances

"What will chiefly be remembered about the scientific revolution will be the way in which it scoured the appearances clean of the last traces of spirit, freeing us from original, and for final, participation...the other name for original participation, in all its long-hidden, in all its diluted forms, in science, in art and in religion, is, after all - paganism." Saving the Appearances

JRR Tolkien was immersed in the texts and languages of northern European sagas. He read and studied these from his early years throughout his life. It wasn’t merely scholarly activity either, but imaginative, creative and heartfelt. See for instance his inspired hunt for the original meaning of the Old English word for Ehthiopians, Sigelhearwan, as he disentangles history and experience, and explores the mental and emotional landscape from which the word arose. Read the Silmarillion, too, to see how much of that world literally springs from his analyses of and meditations on single words and phrases. He was clearly engaged with the minds and souls of the authors of these various texts, and hence of the worlds in which they lived.

This is very similar to the way that Owen Barfield approached language and history and texts, as we see exhibited in History in English Words, and philosophically justified in Poetic Diction. Barfield wrote about a felt change of consciousness as a result of reading certain texts, and when this is attended to mentally in a sensitive way, one is convinced that the resulting consciousness is very different than one’s usual consciousness. He then claimed that, in such a reading, such an understanding, of ancient texts, the reader experiences, even if to some small degree, the world of the author. That is the consciousness that one inhabits when caught up in such a text in such a way. By the way, this doesn’t imply that the reader understands the meaning of the text exactly and at every point as the author intended.

Not only did Tolkien conduct his own reading and study with such sensitivity and attention, as Barfield says is essential to experiencing, in a sustained way, the results of the felt change of consciousness. Tolkien also adopted a basic and profound conclusion of Barfield’s own studies, namely, that the older the text in question, the more one encounters concrete meaning – or semantic unity. This means that much that is for us today expressed by two or more different words was expressed with one word or phrase long ago, a word or phrase in which much meaning was implicit that would later precipitate out as separate, different words. Further,

“mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning. Connections between discrete phenomena, connections which are now apprehended as metaphor, were once perceived as immediate realities.”

We know for a fact that CS Lewis recounted to Barfield,

“You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said, a propos of something quite different, that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook, and he was always just about to say something in a lecture when your concept stopped him in time. ‘It is one of those things,’ he said, ‘that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”

With this imaginative, scholarly, and profoundly Barfieldian approach, Tolkien encountered and experienced the ancient world of northern European paganism – that is, of original participation.

So Tolkien spent much of his long and productive life looking into the world of original participation. Some of that work he exhibited in his scholarly work – as in the essays on Sigelhearwan, on Beowulf, on fairy stories. Of course, he also expended much energy, time, emotion, and imagination on his works of fiction, including the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. I think that in all of this work, he encountered and explicated the ancient mind, the pagan mind, and its correlative, the pagan world. Further, I think that, as CS Lewis once noted, Tolkien ‘had been inside language’. As Verlyn Flieger put it in her book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World:

“He had been inside the word, had experienced its power and had seen with its perception…one of Tolkien’s Oxford students…recalled saying to him once, apropos his work: ‘You broke the veil, didn’t you, and passed through?’ and she adds that he ‘readily admitted ‘ having done so.”

We have then two masters of imagination, analysis, and scholarly learning, who delved into the texts of the pagan world – the world of original participation. It is rather startling, then, to note that their depictions of that world – and we assume that they were both seeing the same world – are so very different, with particular regard to something that is so prominent a feature of the extant pagan texts, namely, personal violence.

When we do pierce the veil, through Tolkien’s fiction, of the pagan world, what do we see? Astonishingly, this: Even in the most ancient parts of the story, there is already remembrance of some pre-existing break.
“Thus began the Days of the Bliss of Valinor; and thus began also the Count of Time.

But as the ages drew on to the hour appointed by Iluvatar for the coming of the Firstborn, Middle-earth lay in a twilight beneath the stars that Varda had wrought in the ages forgotten of her labours in Ea.” – “Of the Beginning of Days”

And even before this, Melkor has already wreaked havoc, “so that the first designs of the Valar were never after restored.”

Tolkien broke through those veils, and found sadness, and treachery, almost from the very beginning.

Just recently a friend was describing to me her trip to Washington, D.C., for the interment of a decorated Navy veteran, celebrated in solemnity with full honors. She described the profound martial atmosphere - an air that Tolkien himself was intimately familiar with, and which is almost the very atmosphere of Middle Earth. She then told me a story of a chaplain who had been recently visiting several dying men, individually, unrelated to one another, except that they were veterans of World War II. This pastor was hearing stories of these men, in their dying breaths, of the sadness and terror and brutality - and tragedy - of their experience in that war. Not honor and glory and righteousness, but bare violence and fear.

In that context I mentioned to my friend a book titled Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It's a collection of work by Rene Girard. He also has peered through the mists of time, and what he sees is what he calls the founding violence of human religion - the violence, and violent acts, that are in fact the basis of human religion, and by extension, human culture, from the beginning. There Girard states:

“…the myth represents an event that actually occurred, a lynching that really took place…that neither Levi-Strauss nor any other interpreters of mythology have succeeded in recognizing because it is represented from the perspective of the murderers themselves.” P. 113, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Why didn’t Barfield see that? Why is there scant mention of that violence, when in fact Barfield claimed that what he was showing the reader is human consciousness beyond those veils? I think it was for two reasons at least: first, Barfield’s admitted goal, which is borne out in his work, was to convince his reader of the evolution of human consciousness. He did go to some extent to depict and characterize earlier modes of consciousness and their correlative worlds, but he did that primarily through philosophical texts. That was his material, but the point was to demonstrate that ancient humankind had a qualitatively different consciousness than the consciousness of today. He wasn’t comparing the early to the late for a moral evaluation – one wasn’t better, or worse, than the other – one more violent than the other. He does mention that there are advantages of one over the other. But he glosses over the brutality and violence of the ancient pagan world as “sins of commission in thought, feeling and action.”

The other reason I think personal violence is hardly found in Barfield’s work is because it’s the physical realm that I’m speaking of – murder, rape, brutal justice. Barfield’s focus is more toward the spiritual realm, and the violence done there – which doesn’t even appear to us as violence. Ahriman and Lucifer maybe spooky, and certainly oppose human evolution when one or the other dominates, but they certainly don’t strike one as violent, or as motives for physical violence.

Why is it that Tolkien did see this, and which is in fact a profound and substantive thread throughout his work, whereas it certainly isn’t in Barfield’s work? Tolkien was keen to this feature of the world of original participation because it was, in part, his motive for reaching with his imagination into the pagan texts: to understand personal tragedy. As a scholar, he was attempting to understand tragic texts – to learn the language of those texts, and to understand the mind and heart of the culture that produced them. It was then through his close, and heartfelt, study of those texts, and the exertion of his imagination in that direction, that Tolkien wrote the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. JRR Tolkien invented his languages, mostly in order to convey the stories of human violence and betrayal that he wanted to tell.

The New Mystery

2010-08-18T22:58:00.001-06:00

"The Christian Mystery was to replace the many Mysteries of the ancient world with its unique, archetypal Mystery-event. In Jesus the Logos had become flesh, and he was to become the teacher of intiation to all humanity. His community of mystai was to be the human race. In place of the old principle of selecting individuals, there was to be the gathering together of all. Hence everyone was enabled to become a mystes, insofar [as] they were sufficiently mature to do so. The Gospel is proclaimed to all, and whoever has an ear to hear is eager to fathom its mysteries; the heart of each has the decisive voice.

Thus it was no longer a case of introducing one person or another into the temples of the Mysteries, but of the word spoken to all and heard now with more, now with less clarity and strength. And it will be left to the daimon, the angel in a person's own breast, to decide how far one's initiation can proceed. The Mystery-temple is the entire world.

No longer is blessedness reserved for those who have witnessed within the confines of the Mystery-temples those awe-inspring enactments that are the types and symbols of enternity. For now, 'Bleassed are those who have not seen, but who have believed.' Even if at first they wander in darkness, the light may yet reach them. There is no secrecy; the way opens out for all."

- Rudolf Steiner, Christianity as Mystical Fact

As I am reading this, I see Jesus literally re-enacting, in his life and death and resurrection, a secret ritual - a ritual that you weren't supposed to know about and certainly weren't ever supposed to see - out in the open where everyone can see it. Though he wasn't saying it, it was almost like there was a narrator speaking: 'Here is how the secret rituals go: the person getting initiated is tested, in various ways, and severely. The other intiates join in to put the neophyte to the test. They take part in his abuse. Then it's like the neophyte dies, from exhaustion, hunger, thirst. Then, when it really looks like he's died, ...' As the narrator speaks, we see Jesus' life played out in front of us.

Jesus knew something of the significance of his own life. He knew he was living out the will of something higher, something to which he was devoted. He knew why his life offended the ones who were actually initiates into the mysteries, who saw what Jesus was doing, and were horrified and enraged. He knew he was living out what the initiates had only acted out - even if it was a genuine spiritual experience they had while acting. For centuries and across cultures, punishment was threatened for telling people what was going on in the secret meetings and rituals. And here was Jesus showing the people around him what those secrets were.

Anyone can be initiated. The Mystery-temple is the entire world.

Where is Evil?

2010-07-26T12:50:00.000-06:00

"This, however, raises the moral issue that has concerned Owen Barfield and is, as well, the subject of Clyde Kilby's paper [The Ugly and the Evil]: man's responsibility, in his use of the facutly of imagination, for the kind of world he creates. Kilby writes that ugliness is nature deformed, its very being changed. Evil and ugliness are not merely negative states, states of lack, but states in which there is positive destruction of form. When ugliness is considered analogous to evil, art is not dissociated from life; metaphysics and morality are related. For it is ontological deformity that constitutes ugliness: a thing ought to be like it is. In this correlation of the ugly and the evil, Kilby echoes Barfield's concern for the deformation of nature, unless man makes himself responsible for it. At the same time, he echoes the sense of several of the papers that the modern mode of consciousness is dangerous - a common madness-single vision."

Shirly Sugerman in the Forward to Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, which she edited.

I've wondered why evil rarely shows up in the work of Barfield and Steiner. I've wondered why the Old Testament of the Christians depicts such a violent past, while Barfield and Steiner describe pre-history and very early history very differently. There is almost no violence in the story of the evolution of consciousness. There are Lucifer and Ahriman, that's true. I don't understand those two figures at all, so they may be the answer to the riddle of the missing violence. So one reason I've missed the moral note in Steiner and Barfield is that I've not looked in the right place.

There is a more immediate reason, though, why the violence is invisible. It goes like this: My thoughts don't have any immediate effect on objects in the physical world, that I can see. Yes, I can move my hand - by my thoughts alone - and my hand can play the guitar. But whatever I think about the guitar will have no effect on the guitar - I can't play music on it with just my mind. So my thoughts are unreal because they don't - and can't - directly effect the physical world. They are the prototype of the video game: unrelated to real life, and therefore without need of restriction. You can race, and strategize, and kill as much as you want, because it's not real.

But consider this: what I think, does greatly effect something: my thinking effects the thoughts themselves. I can change my thoughts. Very much. I do it all the time: I daydream where I make up scenarios that have never happened in outer life. I misinterpret something someone said to me. I imagine a new layout for my bedroom.

So imagine just for a moment that it was a real place where your thoughts are formulated. You don't realize it as you're forming your thoughts, but imagine that it's true anyway: Where your thoughts are unfolding is a real place, and your thoughts are real in that place.

Now review some of your more recent thoughts - the deliberate trains of thought, the daydreams, the mental reactions to people, the thoughts that preoccupy you the moment you wake from sleep. Imagine that those thoughts are real in a real place.

Do you start to see the violence?

Steiner and Quantum Physics

2010-06-30T15:17:00.001-06:00

"Nature is infinitely articulated"

- paraphrase of G. W. Leibniz, early 18th c.

"Years ago it was believed that one could investigate the tiniest lifeless beings, or at least produce provisional hypotheses about them, in order to find out something about the world that constitutes the immediate surroundings of our ordinary consciousness. And what, in fact, does one find out? The scientist has to admit that having penetrated this smallest of worlds, he finds nothing that is any more explicable than a Steinway piano. So it becomes quite clear that however far we are able to go by this process of division into the very smallest particles, the world becomes no more explicable than it already is to our ordinary, everyday consciousness."

- Rudolf Steiner, lecture given at Zurich, Switzerland, October 9, 1916

"Although [this] equation may look like a classical law implying pushing or pulling by the quantum potential, this would not be understandable.... We therefore emphasise that the quantum field is not pushing or pulling the particle mechanically, any more than [a] radio wave is pushing or pulling the ship that it guides. So the ability to do work does not originate in the quantum field, but must have some other origin."

The fact that the particle is moving under its own energy, but being guided by the information in the quantum field, suggests that an electron or any other elementary particle has a complex and subtle inner structure.... This notion goes against the whole tradition of modern physics which assumes that as we analyse matter into smaller and smaller parts its behaviour always grows more and more elementary.... a particle has a rich and complex inner structure which can respond to information and direct its self-motion accordingly."

To make this suggestion yet more plausible, we note that between the shortest distances now measurable in physics (of the order of 10 [to the negative 16 power] cm) and the shortest distances in which current notions of space-time probably have meaning which is of the order of 10 [to the negative 33 power] cm, there is a vast range of scale in which an immense amount of yet undiscovered structure could be contained. Indeed, this range of scale is comparable to that which exists between our own size and that of the elementary particle."

- David Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory, 1993

Laws of Social Life

2010-06-27T09:25:00.000-06:00

"'The well-being of a total community of human beings working together becomes greater the less the individual demands the products of her achievements for herself, that is, the more of these products she passes on to her fellow workers and the more her own needs are not satisfied out of her own achievements, but out of the achievements of others.' All the conditions within a total community of people which contradict this law must sooner or later produce misery and distress somewhere. - This law holds good for social life with absolute necessity and without any exceptions, just as a natural law holds good for a particular sphere of natural processes... In actual fact the law will be able to exist as it should only if a total community of people succeeds in creating conditions where no one ever can claim the fruits of his own work for himself, but where, if at all possible, these go entirely to the benefit of the community. And he in turn must be maintained by means of the work of his fellow human beings."

Finding the Outside in the Inside

2010-06-15T12:55:00.001-06:00

'It's now a question of consciously regaining what we've lost. That means we have to be able to take hold of something the we feel is inside of us, but something that at the same time is part of the world. Something that reaches into both. This has to be our first priority, to actively seek out and find something inside ourselves that is, at the same time, a process that's happening out there in the world.'

This is a paraphrase of Rudolf Steiner from his lecture in Dornach, Switzerland, in 1919 - ninety years ago. In this series of lectures, he's been explaining the differences between three then-current views regarding spiritual development of the world and humans - the yoga path, the Christian path, and the Rosicrucian.One way he differentiates the three is by describing the role of a guru in each of the three paths. In yoga, the guru is essential, and an absolute authority. The student has to trust - it can't be forced - but it is absolute. The guru, though, is a human being just like me.

In the Christian path, that same relationship holds, except the guru is now the Guru, Jesus the Christ. Absolute trust in absolute authority, still, but the Authority is Divine and One.

The Rosicrucian path understands that a guru is never more than a more experienced brother or sister. Further, this relationship can be carried out through the medium of the written word.

This imperative, to find inside myself something that is self-evidently also out there in the world, he mentions in other lectures. It's the central idea of his books Truth and Knowledge and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. True meditation takes us out into the world, and the right approach to nature reveals ourselves out there in the world. This isn't vague ecological rhetoric. Steiner describes actual meditation exercises that direct attention to this nexus of self and world. That's one objective of esoteric training.

The Secret Path... shhhhhhh....

2010-04-17T16:48:00.001-06:00

Rudolf Steiner's How to Know Higher Worlds is mind blowing. It is no doubt a true initiation into a new way of knowledge. I tried to follow along with him, in the thinking and the meditations. But I fell behind after the second chapter or so. I finished reading the book, but from chapter 3 on it was just a series of shocks to my soul. Steiner himself often said that by just reading what has been written by those who walk in the higher worlds is to have one's first experience of those higher worlds. Whether or not Steiner is an authority on that or not, I don't doubt my experiences reading How to Know Higher Worlds.

What those experiences are I can't describe. The experience starts out as a meditation, and predominantly mental. Soon though it's full blown visual and filled with the warmth of feeling. Then it's over.

I can re-experience them - that is, I can remember them - only by walking again those mental and emotional and willful steps that blew my mind the first time. It isn't a matter, either, of some mass-like, formulaic repetition. It's simply the only way to get to that particular place in reality. Just because I have to take the same flight of steps up to my client's office every time I go to their office, if I want to see my client, then I walk up those steps. If I want a good view of Phoenix, then I drive up the South Mountain Park road, either to the main parking lot up there, or even further up near the tv towers.

Steiner sometimes called his practices 'esoteric science'. How to Know Higher Worlds hits me especially as something secret, a deep initiation. The even more astounding thing about this initiation, is that it's done right out in the open. Anyone can buy and read this book. In fact, the Steiner Archives have free copies of many of Steiner's fundamental teachings: Outline of Occult Science, Truth and Knowledge, The Philosophy of Freedom. I would recommend finding the newest translations, though, if you can afford it.

The Question is Not, Why Don't We Remember Our Previous Lives?

2010-02-21T23:12:00.000-07:00

The question is, How do we learn to remember our previous lives?

Montana

2010-02-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

i miss you...

2009-12-28T10:20:00.000-07:00

You are not alone - even in your own consciousness

2009-11-19T13:22:00.002-07:00

"There are thinkers who believe that a special
difficulty arises when one tries to understand how another person's thought life can affect one's own. They say: my conscious world is enclosed within me; in the same way, any other conscious world is enclosed within itself. I cannot see into the world of consciousness of another person. How, then, do I know that he and I are both in the same world?"

Rudold Steiner presents this problem in the Appendix to Philosophy of Freedom. I think it's still an interesting question today, and still a vital question, if not in those exact terms. His answer is not an argument, but a description of the experience of encountering another human being in real time:

"The immediate percept [of the person's physical presence], extinguishing itself as sense appearance, is grasped by my thinking, and this is a process lying wholly within my consciousness and consisting in this, that the other person's thinking takes the place of mine. Through the self extinction of the sense appearance, the separation between the two spheres of consciousness is actually overcome."

That is, "I have really perceived another person's thinking."

If you will pay close attention the next time you encounter and engage with someone, you'll notice this for yourself. This accounts, too, for the difference, in quality of experience, between reading someone's email, for instance, and talking with them in person: the physical presence isn't there to begin with - all you have is their thinking taking place of your own.

Tell me if I'm wrong.

Inerrancy

2009-11-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

Here's an excerpt from a chat with a friend about the Old Testament story in my previous post - about Aaron and his pals going through the camp and hacking up the idolaters:

friend - pretty nasty butchery at the beginning, eh?
me - yes. praise god
me - i almost said 'praise allah', since it's usually islam that's credited with that kind of violence
friend - mmm
friend - hard to comprehend Him ordering his people to massacre their own siblings.
me - i don't think he did
friend - you don't...
me - no, i don't
me - do you believe god directed George bush to execute the war in iraq?
friend - Nope
me - neither do i

Tolkien, Barfield, and the Language of Original Participation: The Vagaries of Confusion and Savagery

2009-10-22T19:48:00.004-06:00

¹ When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, "Come, make us gods ^[a] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him."

² Aaron answered them, "Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me." ³ So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. ⁴ He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, "These are your gods, ^[b] O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt."

⁵ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, "Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD." ⁶ So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. ^[c] Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.

⁷ Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. ⁸ They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, 'These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.'

⁹ "I have seen these people," the LORD said to Moses, "and they are a stiff-necked people. ¹⁰ Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation."

^….

¹⁹ When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. ²⁰ And he took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.

²¹ He said to Aaron, "What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?"

²² "Do not be angry, my lord," Aaron answered. "You know how prone these people are to evil. ²³ They said to me, 'Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him.' ²⁴ So I told them, 'Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.' Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!"

²⁵ Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. ²⁶ So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, "Whoever is for the LORD, come to me." And all the Levites rallied to him.

²⁷ Then he said to them, "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.' " ²⁸ The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. ²⁹ Then Moses said, "You have been set apart to the LORD today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day."

….

³⁵ And the LORD struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made.

- story of the golden calf in the Old Testament – dated between approximately 1444 BC and 1290 BC – roughly 3,350 years ago

“The vagaries of confusion and savagery in the tribes in which anthropology finds participation most conspicuously surviving to-day, though they may well not be very reliable guides to its ancient quality among other peoples who have long since abandoned it, do nevertheless remind us of the sins of commission in thought, feeling and action of which original participation is capable.” P. 57, Saving the Appearances

“…the myth represents an event that actually occurred, a lynching that really took place…that neither Levi-Strauss nor any other interpreters of mythology have succeeded in recognizing because it is represented from the perspective of the murderers themselves.” P. 113, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

“…alpha-thinking, as I have defined it, is a thinking about collective representations. But when we think ‘about’ anything, we must necessarily be aware of ourselves (that is, of the self which is doing the thinking) as sharply and clearly detached from the thing thought about.” P. 43, Saving the Appearances

“For Barfield, the development of consciousness, mythology and language go hand in hand. He believed that human consciousness and language have evolved together from a state of “original participation” in which subject and object, word and thing were virtually identified, to a state of alienation in which they are separated to such a degree that the sense of connectedness — from nature and with each other — has been lost.”

http://www.sophiapages.com/files/Tolkiens_Middle_Earth_and_His_Passions_for_Languages.pdf

_____________________

Barfield ended Saving the Appearances saying that, when all is said in done, years into the future, "when the last balance comes to be struck between good and evil", the thing that humankind will remember as the greatest gift of the scientific revolution, which he argued was the greatest expression of idolatry, will be in fact that very idolatry.

"What will chiefly be remembered about the scientific revolution will be the way in which it scoured the appearances clean of the last traces of spirit, freeing us from original, and for final, participation...the other name for original participation, in all its long-hidden, in all its diluted forms, in science, in art and in religion, is, after all - paganism."

If JRR Tolkien’s The Silmarillion resembles any primary-world text, it is the pagan northern European saga. The style and substance of The Silmarillion is exactly an imagining of that world, as seen through several veils of misty time. Stratford Caldecott describes Tolkien’s task with the extant texts by saying that Tolkien “was retrieving the art of mythological or mythopoeic thinking, which is as old as mankind itself, and deeply entwined with our religious sense.” [The Power of the Ring, p. 4]

The Silmarillion is very complicated and long. Only by reading it, I think, do you get a sense of the span of time, in anything like human reckoning, that is depicted. In fact, time itself doesn't even come in until late. And elves and humans come in even later. Then there are ages of tragedy. And at the end of all that, when already so much has been lost, when already there have been so many passings, do we even begin to hear names that are familiar in The Lord of the Rings. For The Lord of the Rings is the tale, the story, of the events that end the Third Age of Middle Earth, and begin the Fourth. And so we are again saying goodbye to what were already only vestiges, only echoes, only descendants of many, many generations back.

'The mists of time’ mark the transition from original participation to idolatry, using Barfield's terms for the stages of human consciousness of the last ten thousand years or so. Original participation didn’t only obtain in that far distant time, but it did fully characterize that time. As it turns out, I think the attempt to transport oneself back to that time is very likely to induce a subtle but profound metamorphosis of perception that is in itself a glimmer of that world.

Reading Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is one exercise that will likely bring about that metamorphosis. Even sketching out the chronology, from our present time, back to the beginnings of the First Age of Middle Earth, will begin to break the hard packed soil of our chrono-centrism. Let me just say, too, that in the end, it’s not necessarily the mere quantity of years, but the reaching of the mists of time, wherever we may personally encounter them, and then passing through, that is the essential thing.

So we begin with the present day, even the present moment, and we walk ourselves back to the 1960’s, when personal computers and mobile phones and the Space Shuttle and high-interest mortgages and digital photography didn’t exist. The internal combustion engine was still imagined to be the bedrock of human civilization. Then we step back another one hundred years, when that bedrock didn’t even exist, though the steam engine did. There were still empires and dynasties, political and culutural. There were still unexplored areas of the globe. Not all of Antarctica nor Africa had been fully charted according to the standards of the day.

We move further back, to the advent and golden age of the mechanical clock, before any kind of motorized transportation, when horse and wheel and ship and boat were the measures of speed. Great civilizations had and did exist, but they were great according to different scales. Great ships sailed the oceans, but only so far, and only so many. Still, there was learning, there were books, there were scribes of various sorts in many human cultures.

We look further back, through years and years and years of only small – and not necessarily incremental or cumulative – technological change, within a matrix of experiential continuity. Towns and cities may have come and gone in the course of thousands of years, but their mode of living hardly differed from what flourished a hundred or five hundred years before. There were still human-authored texts, and of course humans were speaking to one another through this whole time – in African cities and forests, on Pacific islands, in the mountains of the South American continent.

It's right about here – or ‘then’ – that I personally encounter ‘the mists of time’. There is a distinct and profound and growing gap between what I’ve read from these humans, and what I’ve seen of the external remains of those humans – their bones, their pottery, the remains of walls of their cities. The stones at Mycenae and Tyrns, the traces of Anasazi in southwest North America. I begin to lose track of what these people were like from the inside – I can no longer keep the interior view and the exterior view synchronized. The interior view - the Upanishads, the Iliad and Odyssey - no longer jive with the ruins, the dry, dusty, broken pottery, and heat of the day on the Plains of Lesithi.

Then, there, at that extreme, I read that the people of that far distant place and time themselves looked back to a far distant place and time. They themselves looked back and reached a 'mist of time' through which they couldn't see.

The hobbits of Hobbiton lived thousands of years before our present time, yet they seem modern by comparison to the elves and dwarves. But the elves and dwarves look back to an even deeper time, a time before there were sun and moon. Christopher Tolkien emphasized, in the introduction to The Children of Hurin, that the story takes place 'in the Elder Days, the First Age of the world, in a time unimaginably remote....Some six and a half thousand years before the Council of Elrond was held in Rivendell, Turin was born in Dorlomin." Turin of Men was a late comer, and before him were several remote pasts, some having not left a trace.

Ahead of him, those six and a half thousand years, bring us, not to the present day of our world, but more like ten thousand years ago or more. There is in fact not just one curtain of mist that separates us from our past, but many such curtains, separating us from our pasts. Now we're prepared to see the world bathed in the light of original participation. What does it look like?

Even in some of the most ancient parts of the story, there is already remembrance of some pre-existing break.

“Thus began the Days of the Bliss of Valinor; and thus began also the Count of Time. But as the ages drew on to the hour appointed by Iluvatar for the coming of the Firstborn, Middle-earth lay in a twilight beneath the stars that Varda had wrought in the ages forgotten of her labours in Ea.” – “Of the Beginning of Days”

And even before this, Melkor has already wreaked havoc, “so that the first designs of the Valar were never after restored.”

The Silmarillion is tragic, from beginning to end. Tolkien broke through those veils, and found sadness, and treachery, almost from the very beginning. You have to read it for yourself, of course, if you want to really feel it, feel the sadness. There are only a few places in The Lord of the Rings that I can think of where you get even a hint of the sadness that pervades The Silmarillion: The moment at the Grey Havens when Frodo says goodbye to Sam, Merry and Pippin; and the appendices, especially the story of Aaragorn and Arwen. There is an echo, or more accurately, a vestige, of the tragedy of the Silmarillion in the person of Denethor, whose pride and arrogance wreak havoc amongst his people and his children.

Just recently a friend was describing to me her trip to Washington, D.C., for the interment of a decorated Navy veteran, celebrated in solemnity with full honors. She described the profound martial atmosphere - an air that Tolkien himself was intimately familiar with. She then told me a story of a chaplain who had been recently visiting several dying men, individually, unrelated to one another, except that they were veterans of World War II. This pastor was hearing stories of these men, in their dying breaths, of the sadness and terror and brutality - and tragedy - of their experience in that war. Not honor and glory and righteousness, but bare violence and fear.

In that context I mentioned to my friend a book titled Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It's a collection of work by Rene Girard. He also has peered through the mists of time, and what he sees is what he calls the founding violence of human religion - the violence, and violent acts, that are in fact the basis of human religion, and by extension, human culture, from the beginning.

First, a short detour to suggest just how it’s possible to hide this founding violence. One way is to create a society-wide conspiracy. Everyone agrees to shut up about the guy that they just pushed off the cliff, mob-like (in a mob, no one individual is responsible). There would have to be, not only universal agreement, but universal compliance, for such a conspiracy to work. Also, it brings up a question: Who would this society be hiding the truth from?

A different hypothesis about how this founding violence might be hidden, is less sinister, but more difficult to believe: the murderers were not distinctly aware of what they were doing. Innocent by reason of insanity.

For instance, let’s remember briefly the story in Exodus of the making of the statue of a calf out of gold. What kind of thinking would account for this event? Specifically, what would account for these people thinking that something that they had just then cobbled together, with their own hands, with their own gold, had an existence or power apart from their own hands? Why on earth would they worship something that they had themselves just put together from lifeless stuff? How could they say, “out came this calf”?

Maybe they agreed to re-tell the story – which at that time was going to be primarily an oral dissemination, meaning lots of people could tell and pass on the story. They wouldn’t have to be able to write, nor distribute such texts. They just have to have a memory and a mouth, and they could disseminate the lie. But by those same virtues, they were also a threat to the conspiracy.

Or, what if their perception of their immediate reality was so different from mine, that it was not only possible, but usual, for them to not be consciously aware of what their own hands were doing? What if they were so focused on the coming into being of the idol itself, that they were fundamentally unaware that their own hands were making it? They simply (or much more simply than we can usually imagine) experienced the rising up of this idol.

Another way of putting this, a more broad statement, is to say that the people of that time and place simply did not experience their physical bodies with anything like the specificity and locality that we take for granted today. They really weren't aware that they themselves were cobbling this blob of gold together. They really were unaware, in a very important sense, of the workings of their own hands.

Including when those hands were holding a sword, and hacking at their neighbor’s body. This story – of the vagaries of confusion – is also, necessarily, a story of the vagaries of savagery. Slaughter and plague. Anger, rage, fear. Tolkien saw that. His first drafts of the stories that grow into the core texts of Middle Earth were written during his time on the battlefield, literally. So too, Melkor comes into the story of the Ainulindale in the fifth paragraph. And what Tolkien saw is what Rene Girard sees: cultures that always and already have stories of some primordial violence or betrayal, no matter how far back you look, no matter how many distant veils you break through.

So why didn’t Barfield see that? Why is there scant mention of that violence, when in fact Barfield claimed that what he was showing the reader is human consciousness beyond those veils? My very preliminary answer is that Barfield took the texts he was reading as primary, and would not go much beyond what was evident and true in the words themselves, which was quite enough, anyway, to demonstrate what he was attempting to demonstrate: human consciousness was different, and continues to evolve. But we must remember that those texts may just have been written by the hand of the murderer himself.

JRR Tolkien, on the other hand, invented his languages, mostly in order to convey the stories of human violence and betrayal that he wanted to tell. Because of the languages he knew so intimately and used as his models and inspiration were northern European – and pagan – and because he knew and understood Barfield’s discoveries about poetic diction and the evolution of human consciousness, Tolkien was conveyed through the extant pagan texts, to the place of original participation, but with the presence of mind – of the individual mind – required to write his fiction, but which also capable of perceiving what those ancient pagans were only very dimly aware of, and not very interested in, namely, personal violence.

List of Works Consulted

Abrams, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

Barfield, Owen, History in English Words

Barfield, Owen, Saving the Appearances

Caldecott, Stratford, The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings

Flieger, Verlyn, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World

Girard, Rene, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,

Smitherman, Daniel J., Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness: Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances

Tolkien, JRR, The Silmarillion

Tolkien, JRR, The Letters of JRR Tolkien

2009-09-28T22:24:00.000-06:00

“They aren’t something you can walk up to and touch,” Jerrold E. Marsden, an engineering and mathematics professor at Caltech, said of the structures. “But they are not purely mathematical constructions, either.”

Marsden is talking about the boundaries between regions of flowing water or air, regions marked by different velocities. Don't think of them as rigid, though. They are constantly changing - the patterns themselves flow too.

I know that it is this very sort of phenomena that some anthroposophists have studied. They consider this to be limnal phenomena, on the border between the physical and etheric. It is a skill that must be learned, to perceive this invisible phenomena. Right now it's done with external monitoring equipment, and mathematics, then rendered visually.

Otherwise, you build up a new organ to perceive them directly.

Tolkien and the World That Could Have Been

2009-09-14T12:30:00.002-06:00

Tolkien spent much time immersed in the consciousness of ancient humans, via the texts that they wrote. The Icelandic sagas, Beowulf, the Old Testament (Tolkien was an advisor for the New Jerusalem version of the Catholic scriptures).

'The mists of time’ mark the transition from original participation to idolatry, using Barfield's terms for the stages of human consciousness of the last ten thousand years or so. Original participation didn’t only obtain in that far distant time, but it did fully characterize that time. As it turns out, I think the attempt to transport oneself back to that time is very likely to induce a subtle but profound metamorphosis of perception that is in itself a glimmer of that world.

Reading Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is one exercise that will likely bring about that metamorphosis. Even sketching out the chronology, from our present time, back to the beginnings of the First Age of Middle Earth, will begin to break the hard packed soil of our chrono-centrism. Let me just say, too, that in the end, it’s not necessarily the mere quantity of years, but the reaching of the mists of time, wherever we may personally encounter them, and then passing through, that is the essential thing.

So we begin with the present day, even the present moment, and we walk ourselves back to the 1960’s, when personal computers and mobile phones and the Space Shuttle and high-interest mortgages and digital photography didn’t exist. The internal combustion engine was still imagined to be the bedrock of human civilization. Then we step back another one hundred years, when that bedrock didn’t even exist, though the steam engine did. There were still empires and dynasties, political and culutural. There were still unexplored areas of the globe. Not all of Antarctica nor Africa had been fully charted according to the standards of the day.

We move further back, to the advent and golden age of the mechanical clock, before any kind of motorized transportation, when horse and wheel and ship and boat were the measures of speed. Great civilizations had and did exist, but they were great according to different scales. Great ships sailed the oceans, but only so far, and only so many. Still, there was learning, there were books, there were scribes of various sorts in many human cultures.

We look further back, through years and years and years of only small – and not necessarily incremental or cumulative – technological change, within a matrix of experiential continuity. Towns and cities may have come and gone in the course of thousands of years, but their mode of living hardly differed from what flourished a hundred or five hundred years before. There were still human-authored texts, and of course humans were speaking to one another through this whole time – in African cities and forests, on Pacific islands, in the mountains of the South American continent.

It's right about here – or ‘then’ – that I personally encounter ‘the mists of time’. There is a distinct and profound and growing gap between what I’ve read from these humans, and what I’ve seen of the external remains of those humans – their bones, their pottery, the remains of walls of their cities. The stones at Mycenae and Tyrns, the traces of Anasazi in southwest North America. I begin to lose track of what these people were like from the inside – I can no longer keep the interior view and the exterior view synchronized. The interior view - the Upanishads, the Iliad and Odyssey - no longer jive with the ruins, the dry, dusty, broken pottery, and heat of the day on the Plains of Lesithi.

Then, there, at that extreme, I read that the people of that far distant place and time themselves looked back to a far distant place and time. They themselves looked back and reached a 'mists of time' through which they couldn't see.

The hobbits of Hobbiton lived thousands of years before our present time, yet they seem modern by comparison to the elves and dwarves. But the elves and dwarves look back to an even deeper time, a time before there were sun and moon. Christopher Tolkien emphasized, in the introduction to The Children of Hurin, that the story takes place 'in the Elder Days, the First Age of the world, in a time unimaginably remote....Some six and a half thousand years before the Council of Elrond was held in Rivendell, Turin was born in Dorlomin."

Now we're prepared to see the world bathed in the light of original participation.

Wandering in the Desert

2009-08-15T09:58:00.003-06:00

I've been preoccupied with non-evolution of consciousness concerns. Like dehydrating in the Phoenix sun while waiting for public transportation. And whatnot.

I'm reminded, though, and grateful for the reminder, that the evolution-of-consciousness concerns have never been merely - or even mostly - intellectual for me. A friend and I talked of emptiness - and for me, depression - in our lives. We then talked of dipping into the source of life, of refreshment, wherever we might find that. It's meditation that helps me dip into that source, and it is the knowledge that consciousness evolves - has evolved, is evolving, will evolve - that is the backdrop to that meditation.

At the moment, Rudolf Steiner's book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds serves to guide me. This is one of the handful of books that Steiner penned explicitly for publication, and it reads much differently than the shorthand transcriptions of his lectures. In any case, one thing I have been surprised by at several points in reading this book is Steiner's gentleness. He is very encouraging, reminding the neophyte of the difficulty of the path, the need for patience, the need to take things a little bit at a time.

I am very grateful for Rudolf Steiner, for books, for meditation, and for my friend with whom I shared this book.

Cheers.

Is Phenomenology Alive and Well?

2009-07-30T10:51:00.002-06:00

Day before yesterday I received a post on the discussion I started at Amazon.com regarding the promise of phenomenology. I posed the questions:

- Does phenomenology hold out the promise of a different mode of perception?
- Does it deliver on that promise?
- Is phenomenology as logical analysis a dead end?

The responder from a couple of days ago, Sean Hartford, answered:

- No, phenomenology doesn't hold out the promise of a different mode of perception.
- Question is moot.
- Phenomenology as logical analysis is alive and well - just read the works of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Sartre, etc..

Sean is dead wrong on the first question. His own answer belies this. But the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty belies this as well, and monumentally. So does the work of many other thinkers, alive and dead. David Abram, whose book I mentioned before, The Spell of the Sensuous, is contemporary, and is a development of Merleau-Ponty's work.

So the answers to questions 1 and 2 are, in my opinion: Yes. And Yes.

My answer to question three is also: Yes. In fact, Sean's answer itself hardens my suspicion. That he mentions only Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Sartre, etc., when answering the question, 'Is phenomenology alive and well?' tells me a great deal. I do grant that the work of these men is being developed, but that's what's more important to me - the development of that work. If I have to keep going back to Heidegger, and always ONLY going back to Heidegger, then that isn't development to me. Yes, I had to learn basic geometry, and those axioms come into play when I solve complex geometrical and trigonometric problems, but the emphasis is on the complex problems, not on the axioms.

Yes?

Schome more filler...

2009-07-28T20:29:00.000-06:00

Some filler...

2009-07-28T20:07:00.001-06:00

This is a slideshow I put together of photos from my short stay in Amsterdam last year...

If this video viewer is getting partly obscured by the deviant art photo viewer, click on the pause button of the deviant art viewer...

Human Evolution Seen From the Inside

2009-07-14T22:41:00.004-06:00

I finished Verlyn Flieger's book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World. I'm now several chapters into Owen Barfield's History in English Words. Barfield's style is sometimes very difficult to read - it was first published in 1926, by an educated and literary Brit. But it rewards gentle, undivided attention with flickers of a world that is distant, but so clear, and alien, yet so human. The amazing thing about this view, especially as contrasted with the view we might get from looking at pottery or bones or ruins, is that it is not only so human, but it is so very present - as present as our own thinking and perceiving, because in fact it is our own thinking and perceiving.

The contrast with the objects of study of archeology and even anthropology is especially relevant since, as Barfield states, "in the case of these remote Eastern [Indo-European] ancestors - or predecessors - of ours, philology is almost the only window through which we can look out on them...Historical records, archeology, ethnology, folk-lore, art, literature all come to our help in considering, say, the ancient Egyptian civilization; but it is not so with the [Indo-Europeans]."

To put it another way, he helps the reader, not "to know what the past was", but "to feel how the past is."

Original Participation = Paganism

2009-07-07T09:40:00.008-06:00

Owen Barfield ended his book Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry saying that, when all is said in done, years into the future, "when the last balance comes to be struck between good and evil", the thing that humankind will remember as the greatest gift of the scientific revolution, which he argued was the greatest expression of idolatry, will be in fact that very idolatry.

"What will chiefly be remembered about the scientific revolution will be the way in which it scoured the appearances clean of the last traces of spirit, freeing us from original, and for final, participation...the other name for original participation, in all its long-hidden, in all its diluted forms, in science, in art and in religion, is, after all - paganism."

This puts me in a quandary - it knots up lots of threads that I have tried conscientiously to disentangle. For starters, my introduction to Barfield's work, and soon after to Rudolf Steiner's work, coincided with - and I think actually had to do with - my interest in New Age thought. One accusation made against New Age thinking - an accusation made by persons who think it to be an accusation, and a fatal objection morally and intellectually - is that it's simply another version of paganism.

Another way of saying this: As a result of reading and understanding Barfield's and Steiner's work, I've come to have an understanding of, and deep appreciation for, paganism. Yet Barfield says again and again - and Steiner too, in a different way - that he was not promoting a return to paganism, but pointing a way through idolatry, beyond paganism. He called it 'final participation', in opposition to 'original participation' - that human consciousness characterized by a very very dim, vague sense of self, and a much more immediate experience of immersion in the world, the environment - air, wind, sky, heaven, heart beat, anger, joy.

So I have this deep appreciation for the world of original participation (see my previous post about sitting on the mountainside). Further, I tend to more paganism-rooted spiritual practices in my life, life the Tarot, the I-Ching, astrology, and body-based meditation, even though I'm very intellectually oriented in most other things.

In fact, the work of both Barfield and Steiner is much more about phenomenology than it is about spiritual practices - though they both use the term 'spirit' in their writings. I think that is why, even with Steiner's immense written library of work, and his genius and vision, he - and his creation Anthroposophy - are not nearly as well known as, for instance, Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy. Barfield and Steiner are simply not very accessible, and their bias in favor of the intellect - a thoroughly considered, explicit and articulated bias, but a bias nonetheless - strengthens that sense of inaccessibility.

What If Animals DO Think?

2009-07-02T12:20:00.006-06:00

In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abrams reviews the history of dualism, and the ongoing human activity of justifying our uniqueness in the created world. He mentions the ancient notion of the rational or intellectual soul, something that neither plants nor animals possess. He discusses this in his introduction to the work and thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of the main authors of modern phenomenology. Abrams argues that Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the body and the lived experience of reality - as opposed to the merely rational contemplation of experience - brings us closer to a lived engagement with the non-human world. If we let go of our obsession with the rational view of reality, and are more aware of our lived experience, we will find a whole field of non-human nature waiting there for us.

As I read this, it occurred to me that Abrams' recommendation of Merleau-Ponty's approach depends on the very distinction he says is a false one: the distinction between human and non-human nature with regard to rationality. He implies that in fact we have it and non-humans don't, and therefore the only way to directly engage non-human nature is via the body, via lived experience.

But what if non-human nature is in fact rational? In other words, what if we keep the notion of the rational or intellectual soul, or capacity, within human nature, but also grant that same capacity to non-human nature? Also, of course, we grant the correlative to this rational capacity: reason, as an aspect of reality. Then the body - that is, lived experience - isn't the only way to engage non-human reality. We can engage non-human reality with our rational faculty - our minds.

Compare and Contrast

2009-06-27T16:48:00.008-06:00

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World.

Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World.

Redemption of the Senses: Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness.

The first is by David Abrams, published thirteen years ago. I have a vague sense that I knew of the book when it came out, but am only now reading it. I'm noticing the review snippets in the front, from Bill McKibben, Thomas Berry, James Hillman, Max Oelschlager, Gary Snyder, Theodore Roszak, Lynn Margulis - names I'm familiar with, some of whom I've read. What he is writing about is so difficult to capture, to characterize, to articulate. Nevertheless, I am disappointed that he still assumes a separateness for the human body - a separately existing human body, a shell, a box that contains some stuff, and keeps out all the rest of the stuff.

The second is by Verlyn Flieger, first published in 1983. This is an excellent, if sometimes overly literary, study of Tolkien's Middle Earth mythology as an expression of Owen Barfield's conception of the evolution of human consciousness. In that conception, language and human consciousness and the world all evolve together, out of a single primal origin. If you look far enough back, said Barfield, you find less and less distinction between the three. Yet Flieger is just a little too simplistic - a little too facile with literary categories - in her analysis, which in fact does an injustice to Barfield's - and Tolkien's - achievement of finding that nexus of language, consciousness, and world.

The third is the original title of my master's thesis (if I remember it rightly). Even then (I say to myself) I knew that what Barfield's work was all about was perception. Don't read "sight" where I use the word "perception." I mean - and he meant - something much broader, though no less focused, than that. This is where phenomenology is so helpful, at least so far as giving a semi-stable framework for the study at hand. It really is about learning a very subtle but very real craft of perception, of awareness, that begins with letting go of the basic distinction 'real:unreal'. Let go of that distinction for a moment, and be aware, and find out what happens...

Book reviews at Amazon

2009-06-24T11:25:00.003-06:00

I posted a review on Amazon yesterday - it's the first one listed there. It's not a new review - I wrote it something like five years ago, for the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association E-journal. I came across it yesterday, so posted it to Amazon.

The first review I posted on Amazon - for Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances - was in 1998. Eleven years ago. I didn't realize Amazon was even around back then!

While I was rooting around Amazon, it's most awesomely helpful recommendation generation engine presented me with David Abrams book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. That link will take you directly to the Amazon reader for the book, where you can view the table of contents, as well as the first few pages of the introduction. Both really grabbed my attention, and I've put the book into my shopping cart - just waiting for money in the bank.

It's interesting that this title should be recommended to me (or maybe not? Oh, Wondrous Amazon Engine), as the title is almost exactly what I'm doing with my current study of Barfield and Tolkien.

The Key To Seeing Into the Past

2009-06-22T18:20:00.011-06:00

One guiding question when reading ancient texts is, "What did they mean?" We, as readers, make certain assumptions - some of which we ourselves aren't aware of - about how the authors of those texts thought, how they experienced the world, and what the world itself is like. From there we ask our basic question, "What does this mean?"

This may seem tediously obvious. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) for you, dear reader, this blog was established in part to question that tediously obvious approach to ancient texts - and consequently, to question that approach to the history of human consciousness itself.

Nowhere is this approach more painfully obvious than in academic philosophy, where many fundamental texts are in fact ancient ones. The discussion about what Plato meant, in texts he wrote two thousand five hundred years ago, starts with the question "What did he mean?"

What are some of the unspoken - even unthought - assumptions informing, like intoxicating vapors from the subconscious, the character of the thinking that asks that basic question, and ponders the tentative answers? They are numerous in detail, but some of the most fundamental are:

- Plato was a man like all human males
- Plato was a human being and behaved according to the same sorts of biological, social, and psychological 'laws' as human beings do today, even if he himself nor his culture knew what those laws were
- Athens was a human society in the usual sense of any society of today
- The land, the animals, the clouds, the Agean Sea, were of the same substance and of the same significance as those same things today

Especially in academic philosophy, as I knew it as a graduate student and so far as my continued acquaintance with it indicates, these are assumed, and what is primarily discussed - except in some very specialized discussions - are Plato's beliefs. About god, about the nature of political arrangements, about the working of the human mind, about the nature of water and sky and fire, the stars and sun and planets.

Now I'm going to introduce (it will be an introduction for some who are reading this - hi Meg!) an alternative approach to reading ancient texts, and consequently of understanding the authors of those texts. Another, very different, guiding question one can ask about those texts is, "What kind of thinking would account for this text?" How might one think, how might one perceive the world, how might one experience reality, such that the one would produce this text, would tell this story in just the way that it was told?

The more profound, or interesting, or suggestive way, of putting this is, "What sort of consciousness would produce such a text, such a story?"

This approach, at least initially, doesn't question the assumptions I just listed above; it simply doesn't assume them. This approach doesn't take issue with the assumptions individually. Instead, this guiding question directs one's thinking in such a way that one will end up finding out just what was the nature of Plato's experience of social and political realities of Athens of the time, and consequently something about those realities themselves. Not Plato's beliefs about them, but the substance of them.

I'm going to jump over to a different ancient text, the Old Testament, to flesh this out, because one of my first and most profound experiences of using this alternative guiding question involved a story in the Old Testament. Actually, that's not putting it exactly accurately, because I wasn't employing the question consciously, but more like groping for understanding.

The story is the making of the statue of a calf out of gold. That story - among many others - in the Old Testament simply didn't make sense to me - it didn't have any resonance for me. It didn't enlighten anything else in my life or experience when I read and studied it. Asking, "What does this mean?" was simply a non-starter for me. It was a dead question.

In a flash, I asked, or at least sensed, the question, "What kind of thinking would account for this event?" Specifically, for me, what would account for these people thinking that something that they had just then cobbled together, with their own hands, with their own gold, had an existence or power apart from their own hands? Why on earth would they worship something that they had themselves just put together from lifeless stuff?

BTW, don't get hung up on the particular example, though I would think that it isn't just an idiosyncrasy of mine that makes this story unintelligible to me. If you've never thought this about the story of the golden calf, think of some other story from an ancient text.

So, one day, I'm reading a passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biograhia Literaria, where he's discussing this very story, or maybe about the Old Testament in general (I can't direct you to the passage, and I don't think it's essential), when I'm thinking my usual 'what the fuck' about the golden calf, when it occurs to me: maybe their perception of their immediate reality was so different from mine, that it was not only possible, but usual, for them to not be consciously aware of what their own hands were doing? What if they were so focused on the coming into being of the idol itself, that they were fundamentally unaware that their own hands were making it?

In asking the question, I let go of the usual approach which is fixated on beliefs - what did they believe about the nature of idols, for instance. The problem with that fixation (which is a consequence of the bundle of assumptions I listed above) is that it can't even entertain the possibility that those people - human consciousness as expressed by those people at that time - weren't even capable of entertaining any beliefs about anything. They had no beliefs about idols; they simply (or much more simply than we can usually imagine) experienced the rising up of this idol.

Another way of putting this, a more broad statement, is to say that the people of that time and place simply did not experience their physical bodies with anything like the specificity and locality that we take for granted today. They really weren't aware that they themselves were cobbling this blob of gold together. They really were unaware, in a very important sense, of the workings of their own hands.

But enough philosophy for one day; we'll return to this line of thinking in the next post. In the meantime, let's enjoy this evening together, as we in fact experience it today, in all it's glorious, material, physical specificity.

What is behind the mists of time?

2009-06-17T10:39:00.008-06:00

The story of Tolkien's The Silmarillion is very complicated and long. Only by reading it, I think, do you get a sense of the span of time, in anything like human reckoning, that is depicted. In fact, time itself doesn't even come in until late. And elves and humans come in even later. Then there are ages of tragedy. And at the end of all that, when already so much has been lost, when already there have been so many passings, do we even begin to hear names that are familiar in The Lord of the Rings. For The Lord of the Rings is the tale, the story, of the events that end the Third Age of Middle Earth, and begin the Fourth. And so we are again saying goodbye to what were already only vestiges, only echoes, only descendants of many, many generations back.

And that brings us, not to the present day of our world, but more like ten thousand years ago or more. There is in fact not just one curtain of mist that separates us from our past, but many such curtains, separating us from our pasts.

Most profoundly,The Silmarillion is tragic, from beginning to end. You have to read it for yourself, of course, if you want to really feel it, feel the sadness. There are only a few places in The Lord of the Rings that I can think of where you get even a hint of the sadness that pervades The Silmarillion: The moment at the Grey Havens when Frodo says goodbye to Sam, Merry and Pippin; and the appendices, especially the story of Aaragorn and Arwen. There is an echo, or more accurately, a vestige, of the tragedy of the Silmarillion in the person of Denethor, whose pride and arrogance wreak havoc amongst his people and his children.

So Tolkien broke through those veils, and found sadness, and treachery, almost from the very beginning.

Just recently a friend was describing to me her trip to Washington, D.C., for the interment of a decorated Navy veteran, celebrated in solemnity with full honors. She described the profound martial atmosphere - an air that Tolkien himself was intimately familiar with. She then told me a story of a chaplain who had been recently visiting several dying men, individually, unrelated to one another, except that they were veterans of World War II. This pastor was hearing stories of these men, in their dying breaths, of the sadness and terror and brutality - and tragedy - of their experience in that war. Not honor and glory and righteousness, but bare violence and fear.

In that context I mentioned to my friend a book titled Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It's a collection of work by Rene Girard. He also has peered through the mists of time, and what he sees is what he calls the founding violence of human culture - the violence, and violent acts, that are in fact the basis of human culture from the beginning.

I'm working on my study of Tolkien and Barfield's individual journeys back behind the mists and veils of time, and I'm thinking that they too saw that violence. And I'm wondering what they thought of it.

Barfield: Under the Radar

2009-06-08T17:53:00.005-06:00

I just happened to think to check Facebook for an Owen Barfield group, and sure enough, there is an account in his name. I'm not going to supply a link, because the knucklehead who created it had his/her tongue in cheek, I think, or they are just an idiot. Anyway, there were several comments posted by 'fans' of Owen Barfield (this is the lingo of Facebook), one of which mentioned the modesty of Barfield's presentation of revolutionary ideas in Saving the Appearances. The commenter mentioned that most people aren't too comfortable with the chapters in SA about Steiner and Christianity. I suspect that he's right.

I wonder if the overall effect of Barfield's stylistic modesty, the advocacy of Steiner's work, and the language of Christian theology, have worked to almost completely hide the revolutionary ideas? When I was working on my master's thesis in Philosophy, the subject of which was Saving the Appearances, one of my committee members asked how Barfield's thought was anything more than perceptual psychology. This man was a diehard pragmatist, and was a student of Richard Rorty, so I'm not surprised, now, that he was quite blind to the deep historical aspects and implications of the man's thought. But that's no excuse: he was a philosophy professor! And still, it suggests that Barfield's work flies under the radar even with philosophically minded folks (I can't say that this committee member was a philosophically minded reader of Barfield, because I can't say that he ever read Barfield).

Another professor in that department, in a meeting in which I was appealing my dismissal from the program (they didn't like my thesis work), stated, in a way that he seemed to think was conclusively damning to my appeal, 'You came into this program a Barfieldian, and you're leaving a Barfieldian.' His point was that I was un-self-critical.

Something I've noticed about almost every synopsis of Barfield's work I've read that was written by someone who stated their sympathy with his work, is that they all same almost the exact same things. Almost the exact same phrasing. What that suggests to me is that those of us who study and try to explicate Barfield's work haven't yet broken the code - we haven't yet been able to really translate Barfield's revolutionary ideas into our own words. He's still flying under the radar.

Manhattan

2009-06-03T23:11:00.004-06:00

I love that movie. I just watched it for the fifth or sixth or seventh time. I had forgotten about the scene where Tracy and Isaac take the carriage ride through Central Park. He says to her, "You're God's answer to Job." Such a sweet scene.

And Isaac's confrontation of Yale in the empty classroom - that's the sort of person I can admire.

I've always loved this movie, since it first came out thirty years ago, and I love it again thirty years later.

Where's the beef?

2009-06-01T21:15:00.011-06:00

I'm re-reading Verlyn Flieger's Splintered Light. You can see my review of her book there at Amazon - posted in 1998 (jeebus - was Amazon really around that long ago?!) - in which I enthuse about all three: Tolkien, Barfield, and Flieger. I still do. Flieger's book is really essential reading for Tolkien and Barfield students.

I'm surprised, then, that I proposed a paper topic for an upcoming conference that seems to simply rehearse Flieger's main thesis in Splintered Light. Am I a shameless plagiarist, or a lazy scholar? I don't want to be either, so I either have to re-work my paper topic completely, or get clear on just what I intend to discuss in a paper entitled "Barfield, Tolkien, and the Language of Original Participation."

Here's what I intend: To look at how two different individuals both dealt with language as if it could be a vehicle for a world view much different than any contemporary worldview, but how differently they did so.

'Original participation' is Barfield's term. By it, he meant 'experience and perception, prevalent in human antiquity (the mists of time would get closer to describing the time period in question), that made no, or no important, distinctions where contemporary experience and perception makes many, and many absolute, distinctions.'

Wow - that was difficult to write. I wonder if the difficulties I was having were akin to Tolkien's experience of being just about to say something to his students regarding ancient language but stopping before doing so because he saw and understood the implications of Barfield's claims. There are certain things one can't say, certain ways of phrasing things, that one can't use anymore, after getting a glimpse of that ancient world as Barfield saw it.

That was Barfield's approach to the language of original participation: he showed us where to find it, and how to get inside it.

What did Tolkien do? He created some of his own originally participatory language. He wrote in the spirit and - as Flieger shows so well - the letter of Barfield's insights. Tolkien wrote a new ancient text from scratch - from the ground up, out of thin air.

The difference between the works of the two men - one a roadmap, the other a story - I think isn't in Flieger's book, and will be the focus of my paper.

Amazon search box can't keep up...

2009-05-29T18:26:00.006-06:00

I get a kick out of the Amazon search box trying to keep up with me when I'm typing "philosophy and the evolution of consciousness". You know how titles matching what you've typed flicker in a list below the text box, as you type? It always gives up around the middle of 'evolution' and goes blank...

I'm beginning in earnest to sketch out an essay tentatively titled 'Barfield, Tolkien, and the Language of Original Participation' that I'll be presenting at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association annual conference. There will also be a meeting of the Owen Barfield Society, and Owen Barfield's grandson Owen A. Barfield will be in attendance.

This is a study that I have already accomplished on the Barfield side of the Barfield/Tolkien connection, in the book I published almost ten years ago, as well as in a variety essays and papers. But for the Tolkien side, I've only hinted at it. What I'm interested in getting at is how Tolkien and Barfield 'broke the veil...and passed through', as one of Tolkien's Oxford students put it. What veil did they break, and to what did they pass through?

I studied this closely for years with regard to Barfield's work on the evolution of consciousness, and I believe I actually saw glimpses of the world 'bathed in the light of original participation.' My philosophy professors thought I was crazy. They were genuinely confused by my work. While one professor - the most accomplished member of the faculty in terms of publications and recognition outside the university - conferred A's on my work, commenting that it was of a caliber near that of one particular well known living philosopher (and of a more lasting subject matter), another begrudged me a C and scornfully pronounced - in front of the rest of the faculty - that I'd come into the master's program 'a Barfieldian', and was leaving in the same condition.

This is because I was articulating a mode of perception - I could see these things, and they couldn't. I too had broke the veil and passed through, and not without consequence. First of all, I nearly went insane. I began, in the deepest years of my immersion in my studies, what has turned out to be a twenty year off-and-on dependence on anti-depressants. I couldn't turn off the thinking about, and pursuit of, 'the other side' even when I wanted to. I literally sat on the mountain side in Missoula, Montana, meditating on Barfield's work, and achieved moments of altered perception - and consequently of consciousness.

Second, the department refused to confer on me the title of Master of Philosophy, though I completed all requirements including the thesis. In fact, I'd come into the program as a provisional student due to my lack of undergraduate work in philosophy. By the end of my third year, I'd addressed the deficiencies, completed all other coursework, advanced in college level Latin, and written a complete, 125-page draft of my thesis. Four years and five or so drafts later (as well as some additional coursework), the department called it quits. And so did I. I was beat.

LOL... Had I broken through the veil? I'd broken something. I haven't been quite the same since. I've not achieved the intensity of the experiences of those days, when I was meditating on the mountain. Now, it is simply true for me that human consciousness was very different thousands of years ago, and the world was different too - consciousness and the external world are correlative, in an intricate and complicated and beautiful and chaotic dance.

What Barfield and Tolkien did was to trace some of the more intricate patterns and threads in the living fabric of world and consciousness. I want to try to figure out some specifics of how they did that. I have my meds handy, though I hope not to have to use them this time around.

The Consolation of Philosophy

2009-05-18T15:47:00.002-06:00

Not so much. Perhaps if I could read some - or read more than a paragraph before I get distracted. Other matters are preoccupying me. I have been re-reading some of Rudolf Steiner's lectures, and my meditation book, though not every day. I did finish Twilight, and started on the next book in that series.

Hardly philosophy, but the point being that not even fiction holds my attention for long - I have no attention, except maybe when I'm working on photos, or playing guitar. I reunited with my electric guitar, by the way, since I've been here in Missoula for my daughter's graduation (more below). I brought Tascha with me - a portable guitar/bass recorder, so I plug my guitar into that, and dial up an awesome marshall stack crunchy blues sound, and I go. I love playing guitar.

My daughter Meg finished a BA in English - Creative Writing. She tells me it was an easy major. I tell her that it was easy because she has a brilliant mind for language, which she does, and which objective testing bears out. She got a great education at UM, I think. She made good friends. She met her boyfriend. She wrote, read, played. Cried. Laughed a lot. Stressed. I hope she's getting some much desired rest right now. I love my daughter, and am very proud of her.

That's my consolation.

Translating Rudolf Steiner

2009-05-03T11:54:00.003-06:00

A friend of mine just recently got interested in reading the Bible, and has quoted some of the Old Testament to me. One quote repeated the title "Lord". Why???? No one uses this word in English anymore. No one. For anything. Why is it still figuring so prominently in translations of the Bible? No one knows what it means!

I'm beginning to feel just as impatient with translations of Rudolf Steiner's work.

I'm reading Self Transformation, which is a collection of selected lectures by Rudolf Steiner. This is mostly a re-reading, but in some places it feels like a first reading. I don't know if that's because I'm reading lectures that I'd skipped over before, or because I've got a newly increasing impatience with the translations of these lectures.

For instance:

"Now, if we speak spiritual-scientifically about the human being by differentiating between head man and the rest of man, then these two organizations are, at the outset, pictures for us, pictures created by nature herself for the soul element, for the spiritual element, whose expression and manifestation they are. Man is placed in the whole evolution of earth humanity in a way which becomes comprehensible only if one considers how different is the position of the head organization in this evolution from that of the rest of the human organization."

[p. 77, Rudolf Steiner Press 2003 printing]

"Man", "organization", "soul element", "spiritual-scientifically"... I've been reading Rudolf Steiner's work for over twenty years now, and I'm impatient with these words, these concepts. What do they mean?! Why isn't it "humanity" instead of "Man"? Why "organization"? Who talks about the soul anymore???

Half the time I'm reading Steiner, I'm wondering, "If this were translated differently, would it all make sense?"

I've probably mentioned the book Freud and Man's Soul before, written by Bruno Bettleheim. Bettleheim claims that English translations of Freud's work systematically and perniciously misinterpret the man's work. The book is well worth reading; it's effect on me was a more detached and skeptical reading of Freud's work in English, and a hopeful patience while I wait for new translations to retrieve some of the spirit and truth of the original German work.

I would like to read a similar review of translations of Steiner's work. I'm not necessarily expecting any pernicious motives on the translators' parts, but I wouldn't be surprised to find consistent - systematic - mistranslations or misinterpretations of Steiner's work. My sense is that there is a certain allegiance to early translations of key phrases and concepts, translations that simply don't make any sense today.

Yes, I know that with Freud - and even more so with Steiner - the subject matter is - was - itself full of new concepts, or re-worked old ones. That is no excuse. Steiner himself says routinely: we must use the language of material existence to describe spiritual realities. But that also means that we have to use the language of today, the language of material existence as that existence presents itself TODAY, not as it did at the turn of the twentieth century.

Cross Marketing

2009-05-01T18:13:00.005-06:00

Fashion in clothes has been important to me since I was a kid. Back then, it was more just a preoccupation with clothes, since much of my day was spent scavenging my older brothers' and sisters' closets for hand-me-downs and pending hand-me-downs (they hadn't given permission yet only because I hadn't asked them yet). Shoes, jeans, shirts, coats. Maybe that's why I still like shopping in Goodwill even when I could afford to go elsewhere.

Even once it got beyond mere survival - even when I was actually assured clothes that would fit me - and later when I started buying my own clothes, I was very concerned about how I dressed.

Anyway, I've spent the last three months more alone - and lonely, truth be told - than I ever have been in my life. The people in my life who've helped me through are my daughter, my friends in Missoula and elsewhere, and my family. But when I've been by myself, I've played a lot of guitar, and I've taken lots of photos. Many of those photos have been of my apartment, and of myself.

So I started taking fashion blog pics of myself. I had started another blog about a year ago, but never did anything with it. It was - and still is - called "LL Being". After the colon: "Life on The Lake: The Unwearable Lightness of Being". It was going to consist of scans of pages out of LL Bean catalogs, with really snarky, witty, sad dialogue between the models. The byline is: "Where topsiders and cotton blends cushion the blows of middle class living". I've kept the title and the byline, but the content is fashion for men, where my fastidious sense of men's clothes reign, but where my educated and pessimistic wit and my incorrigible romanticism get free play as well.

I've heard it said that it's what's in your heart, not what's on your back or around your waist, that makes you who you are. And I've heard that the world around me - including the clothes on my back - are a reflection of my inner person. Don't know what to make of all that. Hmm... got my next post topic.

Theology - it's in the air

2009-04-20T11:38:00.002-06:00

[this photo comes from www.tehran24.com - it's a recent photo of Tehran. I'm sick of my own photos...]

From Concrete Blonde's "Bloodletting" album, the track "Tomorrow, Wendy":

Only God says jump
So I set the time
cause if he ever saw it
It was through these eyes of mine!
And if he ever suffered it was me who did his crying

That album - from 1990 - has some very harsh sentiment and thinking. From the track "The Beast":

Love is the leech, sucking you up
Love is a vampire, drunk on your blood
Love is the beast that will
Tear out your heart
Hungrily lick it and
Painfully pick it apart

Love is a ghost, haunting your head
Love is the killer you thought
Was your friend
Love is the teacher who lives in the dark
Sneak up and stick you
And painfully pick you apart

The "Love" in these lyrics doesn't have anything in common with the Christian "love is patient, love is kind, love doesn't demand it's own way..."

Does it?

A World of Scientists, Part 2

2009-04-16T11:14:00.002-06:00

A comment by a reader has me writing this continuation of "A World of Scientists", the germ of my reply to Seed Magazine's essay contest question from a while back: "What is the most significant force acting against science in society today?"

My simple answer is that science as a conscious and disciplined way of thinking conflicts with science as a general worldview - as experience of the world.

One way to illustrate this is to briefly describe the shadow side of this conflict: the crisis of contemporary theology to be relevant and to understand itself. This is not the same thing as the clash between Christian creation science and 'real' science. The issues are related, but not identical, and can be distinguished thusly: how do we judge between creationism (whether Christian or any other religious source) and science, on the one hand, and on the other, does theology have any legitimacy or relevance at all?

What follows, then, should be read with these caveats:

- I am not a Christian any longer
- Christian theology is not the only theology in a crisis. One could substitute "spiritual" for "Christian" in every occurrence of the word in what follows
- Christian theology as such is not necessarily the antidote to the crisis

Let us proceed...

Theology changed in the last 500 years or so, and the nature of the change from classical to contemporary theology, that accounts for the crisis of legitimacy of theology, is a change that is significantly marked by the role of science in modern and contemporary thought, and which change is not one to be dealt with only by theology, nor only on a rational or argumentative level. Further, creation doctrine is in a crisis of its own, and that crisis is a specific and thereby potentially more explicable case of the general crisis of theology. If we review the role of science in regard to creation doctrine, we might see the significance of the role of science in the general crisis.

A friend of mine, a philosophy professor, advised me when I considered studying graduate level philosophy: be careful that philosophy doesn't displace your Christian faith as a way of life. Because I lacked my friend's brilliance (and perhaps faith as well, since I no longer count myself a Christian), my success in taking and keeping his advice meant my failure in philosophy. But this same advice applies regarding Christian faith and science: be careful that science doesn't become a way of life, rather than a job. That is the Christian view.

But for all of us, in many (mostly unconscious) respects, science is not merely a method but a world view. It is more than a method practical within the horizon of a specified world view; it is the world. For most Christians, their faith is also a world view, a developing language and thought life in which and by which they live and take up with the objects and subjects of their lives. Science as a world view, and Christian faith, are then bound to clash, whereas science as a method within a prescribed horizon and Christian faith are not bound to clash.

Though all the details are arguable, many scholars and intellectuals agree that the modern world displaced the medieval/classical world. This was a gradual process, yet the passage was marked profoundly in the 16th through the 19th centuries. Scholasticism waned, experimental science waxed, and religion faltered. In a short span of two hundred years or so, the ideas, methods, opinions, and even artifacts (illuminated texts, cathedrals) of the classical/medieval world were found to be not just impractical or insufficient, but downright unintelligible to those that came after. This is the change that one Christian theologian, James McClendon, refers to as "The Christian doctrine [of creation] in eclipse":

we must consider the difference made to Christian thought as a whole by the enormous success, since the Middle Ages, of science and technology....in post medieval times science became in the English language the name of the study of nature (including social and psychological nature, but) excluding theology. [McClendon, "Doctrine", p. 150]

McClendon points out that this word for science, scientia, was "the ordinary medieval word for knowledge," [p. 150] of whatever sort. The change to a modern worldview is marked in the change of meaning - really, the constriction of meaning - of this word for knowledge. Now, knowledge is what we observe in, and infer about, the material world, not the spiritual or divine. This new science is not special knowledge, at least, not now. Though perhaps it began as a disciplined way of seeing, for most of us now it happens that we now see this way. This is the world as it appears to us. It is our worldview.

McClendon suggests that aspects of this view that are profound obstacles to a Christian doctrine of creation:

the dominance of science in the world of thought, the effective absence of God from nature, and the man-centered shape of the surviving residue of the doctrine of creation....[p. 151]

To counter these tendencies, McClendon addresses each one separately, and offers an end-around for each. For the dominance of science in modern thought, he invites a critical attitude toward received notions; and suggests we distinguish between "what is factual and contemporary in current science, and what is a mere holdover from the scientific mistakes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." [p. 153] For the absence of God, he points to Christian practice of prayer, which "presumes the divine presence." [p. 155] For the anthropocentrism, he prescribes an ecological view of creation. [p. 157]

Several observations and responses are appropriate here. First, let's step back and notice what we have here. In the thick of a theological exposition on the kingdom of God, the nature of God's rule, McClendon brings up Christian creation doctrine, and discusses at some length the nature and hegemony of science in modern thought. He repeats what has become common in our day: there really was a thing called the scientific revolution, and things changed drastically as a result, and Christian doctrine is fighting for its life. Now, either this is true, and only becoming more obvious with each passing day, or for some reason we are more and more inclined to adopt the story about our human western history of the last three or four hundred years. If science isn't a real problem, then the fact that we are so paranoid about science is itself as serious a problem, and perhaps of the same nature as would be our problem if this momentous change really had occurred.

The antidotes he suggests to this encroachment of science on the Christian mind and heart is an ecological reading of Scripture and the world. Yet ecology itself comes under harsh scrutiny by some as just another science that denies God, denies nature a voice, and perpetuates the dominance of man over nature.

I think the problem is as bad as McClendon says, and worse. That dominance of science, absence of God, and centrality of Humanity are all of a piece. They are the main features of a worldview, one which is a complete alternative to the Christian worldview. Let us go back to what McClendon said in the beginning pages of the first part of his systematic theology:

Those who construe [the world] in relation to God - the God of Moses, of Isaiah, of Jesus of Nazareth - must do so by thinking as Moses and Isaiah and Jesus think, and that is in...images or pictures. [p. 66]

That McClendon sets his hopes on "picture thinking" is especially challenging, in this regard: he characterizes this thinking as significantly teleological or eschatological. But surely teleology is explicitly and historically denied by science. This is part of the magic that drained out of the human experience and separates modernity from the classical world. We do not habitually look to the "end" of things, as not just the product of a mechanical process, but the end to which a process is directed and by which it is informed along the way. Here in a seeming philosophical/cultural tangent to his theology McClendon suggests a practice essential to theology, but shown up clearly in the tangent as anathema to the contemporary milieu, and probably doomed to failure. So theology probably is too.

It is a matter then not merely of reconciling the Christian faith with some facts of science, just as it is not merely a matter of reconciling modern theology with some various claims of contemporary intellectual schools. It is a matter of what world we see. It is a matter of whether we have eyes and can see, ears that hear, tongues that taste and know that the Lord is good. If we cannot serve both God and mammon, neither can we hope to preserve the house that mammon built, if in fact we do serve God.

But I preach. What is instructive here to me is that the needed tenacity of a believer insofar as his and her thinking goes, in its breadth and depth, is not to be understated; the corollary is that the tenacity of scientism cannot be understated either. The pictures that comprise scientism constrict and blind because they are exclusively material pictures. The pictures of God's Rule picture what we cannot otherwise see.

Because this eclipse of Christian creation doctrine is really an eclipse of spirtualized sight, not just a questioning of various theological propositions, then the contemporary intellectual account of the change from Scholasticism to modernism and post-modernism will gloss over all the important details. Why? Because a change in worldviews means a change, not most importantly in theories or explanations of facts, but in the facts themselves. Classical theology is anachronistic because the medieval world is gone. The Apostle's Creed may not be able to be preserved in its mere words because the meanings that filled those words were the phenomena of a world passed long ago. Hans Urs von Balthasar is the closest to what lies behind the contemporary experience of theology as stark and dry: "the removal of the magical from man's view of the world." [p. 26] Theology was born, and gave birth to ideas, in that magical world. Science is not, in this regard, most significantly a collection of facts. It is an obsessive/compulsive, nigh on demonic preoccupation with the material elements of all phenomena. That is all science sees. Science didn't debunk theology; science ignored and became blind to the divine.

This is all true; and maybe more, and more robust, acknowledgment of the fact of alternative worldviews, as opposed to mere conflicting facts, will be necessary before we can honestly deal with whatever good lies in the results of science. There may be a time, for an individual and a culture and a civilization, to cultivate the eyes of God in and through what God gives them to see. If that is a collection of material objects in which the face of the divine finds no reflection whatsoever, so be it.

A World of Scientists

2009-04-13T23:24:00.002-06:00

Seed Magazine ("Science is Culture") sponsored an essay contest, asking the question: "What is the most significant force acting against science in society today?" Here is the beginning of my essay, which I didn't finish:

The most significant force acting against science in society today is confusion between the nature of science as a worldview, on the one hand, and on the other, science as an explicit, disciplined, rule-governed, deliberate and self-conscious activity. Science has yet to come to terms with the fact that what was once a disciplined way of looking at the world practiced only by a few, is now, in its general aspects, the intuitive inheritance of everyone.

Very few people can purify DNA or identify asbestos fibers under a microscope, but everyone senses, if not sees, the curvature of the earth, and knows, if not believes as well, that cause and effect follow one another blindly and with iron certainty. Everyone feels gravity pulling their mass toward the center of the earth. Everyone sees the highway recede into the distance as an effect of perspective. Everyone in this sense is a scientist.

Of Cars and the Common Good

2009-04-13T23:16:00.002-06:00

[another op-ed]

Fifty-one percent of New Yorkers do not own cars. The New York City population is estimated at 17 million people. Therefore, 8.67 million people in that city do not own cars. Car ownership in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a city of over 18 million, is 30% (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/5139), or more than 12 million without a car. In Johannesburg, South Africa, population 7 million plus, 74% of households do not own a car (http://www.csir.co.za/enews/2007_dec/be_02.html ). In Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, only 5 to 10% of the population own a car. The raw numbers of people who do not own cars is huge, though the percentages vary widely from city to city. What doesn’t vary, though, is that in every one of these cities, car ownership is costly – for the owner, and the community.

More and more municipal and central governments around the globe are addressing problems related to private car ownership. In Sao Paulo, the city government has engineered an expansive and innovative bus system – or Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system – that transports millions of people every day. In China, gasoline and car registration taxes are determined in part in order to curb private car ownership and ridership. Those are two very different approaches: encourage public transport, and discourage private. Both approaches, though, aim at what the government should aim at: the general welfare.

City governments especially have incentive to promote a system of public transportation that keeps people employed, shops open and doing business, and crime and pollution at a minimum. Those governments therefore take on a significant role in promoting the general welfare. Public transportation is a big part of that promotion, and a lack of such transportation is associated with the negative aspects of urban life: pollution, traffic jams, de facto segregation as a consequence of “white flight” from the city centers.

It is sad to read stories of the emptying out of Johannesburg – not only in the long term, as whites move out to suburbs, but on a daily basis, as the downtown clears out almost completely after 5 p.m.. Check out the blog http://deathofjohannesburg.blogspot.com/ for photos and comments, to see what this looks like. A similar thing happens in American cities across the US, too. This is evident not only directly, as one drives through an empty downtown after the work force goes home, but also by the boast of those cities that do have vibrant downtowns after dark.

Though there is no one single and obvious pattern of car ownership and public transportation across the globe – in some places ownership is declining, in others it is rapidly increasing; in some cities the downtown increasingly empty, in others it is increasingly lively, in others it never was empty – but what is clear is that the quality of human life more and more is the quality of urban life, and that urban life is strongly characterized by the nature of transport within that urban area. The common welfare includes, on a national level, even the most remote and sparsely populated areas, but in the cities that welfare is more obvious, positively and negatively, and the consequences are greater and more immediate.

More and more of the planet’s largest cities are outside of the United States, and more and more cars are sold in those cities. Those cities, too, are now going through, in an accelerated way, what many American cities have gone through. But in a twist of population-induced irony, even though America has successfully worked through these issues in some of its cities, those other distant cities of the world are still effecting the quality of life here by way of global warming, increased fuel consumption, and increased standard of living and education that mean the movement of industry and commerce away from America. Just as our way of life in America has affected the rest of the world for most of the last half of the twentieth century. Let us hope that not only will those distant cities and people’s learn from our mistakes, but also our successes, and may we empathize with them in their education into the life of the private automobile.

Death of Johannesburg

2009-04-13T23:12:00.001-06:00

[Another of my op-eds]

Johannesburg, South Africa, is a city of between 4 and 10 million, depending on how you slice it. The same wide variation holds true, apparently, regarding its health, and its future. It is cited as one of the most dangerous cities in the world. The unemployment rate is near 40%. As recently as May of 2008, some immigrants – African immigrants – were killed, many others hurt from beatings and stabbings. A former white resident of Johannesburg created a blog to witness her disappointment, anger and sadness at the replacement of previously white-only neighborhoods by blacks since the end of apartheid.

At the same time, a listing of hotels in the city shows more than a dozen high-end establishments. The city will host the 2010 World Cup tournament. The city accounts for a significant percentage of the entire GNP of the nation of South Africa. The northern suburbs are described as leafy and generally safe – and white.

Johannesburg as an indigenous settlement has been around for approximately 800 years. Only the last 140 years saw the influx of whites into the area. Apartheid took on governmental policy status in the late 1940’s. It was dismantled only 15 years ago, with the first election open to all blacks in 1994. Yet somehow, in this very short time, some whites had established such a deep attachment to and feeling of ownership of this city that the current troubled and chaotic change that this city is experiencing is described as “The Death of Johannesburg.” (http://deathofjohannesburg.blogspot.com/ )

How does one understand such a statement? Death is real. People die. Animals die. Plants die. Whole civilizations have died. In every case, death is a sad thing. Yet the birth, growth and final death of a beautiful birch tree is not a tragedy if it happens in the course of things, without violence. Neighborhoods wax and wane in a city, for a while being new and clean, then old and abandoned, then reclaimed and refurbished.

Yet violent change, violent death, especially violent death by another human being, is a tragedy. Cold blooded violent murder. Violent death of passersby and bystanders. Violent death of children. These are tragedies.

Johannesburg has witnessed, and still witnesses, such violence. The murders in May of 2008 were, according to the BBC account, committed against immigrant Malawians, Mozambicans, and Zimbabweans (neither the identities nor the nationalities of the perpetrators are mentioned in the account, which seems very strange). This is only part of the death of Johannesburg meant by the author of the blog.

The much larger part of the meaning of death for that person is the passing, even the destruction, of neighborhoods, of buildings and parks and street corners and houses. The occupation of once clean, well maintained apartment buildings by squatters, leaving the building surrounded by trash, windows broken out, laundry hanging from lines strung across the front sidewalk. These were places that this person knew, and lived in, walked in, shopped in, slept in. Felt safe in.
That is death too. Death leaves one homeless. Death leaves one broken up, falling apart, strewn about. Stinking and rotting. Where there once was life, is now a rotting corpse.

Then, the corpse rots completely, and the grass grows up over the skeleton, which in turn crumbles, and the grass grows up even greener and taller. That’s not a bad thing.

So maybe it is the violence. When death comes by violence, it makes us angry, and sad. Not all of Johannesburg has died. Not all of Johannesburg that died, met death through violence. That street, those buildings, that café, all those places that met a violent end, that is sad, and they are lost, and we cannot regain what is lost.

The Open Boat

2009-04-13T23:02:00.003-06:00

[My December - and last - op-ed for Modern Republic. The title is an allusion to the short story of the same name by Stephen Crane. The opening lines:

None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them.]

The Open Boat

Stock markets around the world continue to fall, and not just a day here or there. The New York Stock Exchange composite index dropped from about 10,000 down to about 4,000 in the last twelve months. Other markets dropped likewise. In California, 1.5 million people are out of work; in San Diego, unemployment is as bad as it's been in thirteen years.

In an article on Bloomberg.com (http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=agcSNwaOYvxE&refer=home), U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is quoted as saying, “The economy is turning down pretty dramatically. It's very important that lending continue to be available.” The article details the problems in the U.S. economy, problems that are worsening and widening. The recently announced plans of Citigroup to layoff approximately 53,000 employees could be a symbol of the combination of the credit crisis and the resulting employment problems.

The other side of the trouble, and highlighting the seriousness of the situation, involves the U.S. government's efforts to mitigate the damage. The government is paying billions of dollars – that it has to borrow in its own turn – to slow the crash. It has propped up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and there is talk of doing so with Citigroup. It has issued a tax refund to a wide swath of American taxpayers – a refund now long ago spent and absorbed into the overall economy. These actions, and more to come, say “Disaster!” to those listening.

Much of the focus is on the United States situation, for various reasons, but the trouble is not confined to the US. AFP reported that the Chinese economy, too, is experiencing a slowdown in growth not seen in almost twenty years (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iAc8Ke4N1KDRdm5tLnSdKkwz370w). And as in the U.S., the efforts worldwide to stem the tide tell as much as do the problems themselves. So the article above starts out saying that “Leaders from Asia and the Americas promised on Saturday to push for a global free trade deal and reform international lenders in an effort to keep the world from sliding into a deep recession.”

Back in San Diego: I recently relocated here from a small city in Montana (population about 70,000). I lived there for nineteen years. The last eleven I was employed almost uninterruptedly in the IT field. The last two jobs came with significant salary increases. Moving to San Diego had nothing to do with my career, but I saw from online job searching that lots of IT positions were open – companies were hiring.

I have applied for at least thirty positions, most of them for which I have strong and recent experience. The other positions are below my professional level, but I am casting the net widely now. I have not had one call back for an interview, and only one or two replies of any kind of interest in my application. And the net is cast even wider, if that is possible.

The worldwide statistics, on the one hand, and the facts on the ground, on the other hand, say the same thing: Money is disappearing. How will we fix this? Make no mistake, either: It is a “we” situation, rather than a “them” situation. We will have to work together toward recovery, or be together in trouble.

Writing

2009-04-11T09:01:00.003-06:00

I started my first novel when I was about ten years old. It was science fiction, though I wasn't really aware of sf as a genre, nor of the word "genre" for that matter. The main character was a young male Air Force pilot (my father and brother were both Air Force pilots) who flew the B1 bomber. He was also an astronaut. In the first (and only?) chapter, he arrives at some government building to be briefed on an emergency mission to Jupiter.

Even before that, in fourth grade, I wrote a love note to a fifth grade girl that I had a crush on.

In high school, I wrote my first poem that I remember, which began:

When will it end
this state of utter confusion

Hilarious. It was published in the school literary journal for that semester. In my senior year at the American school in Athens, Greece, I took a class called Advanced Essay, in which we quantified various features of our writing, with the objective being to wield more control over it. I enjoyed it immensely.

When I started college at the University of Texas, I declared journalism as my major - I wanted to write, and I loved photography (my parents had just recently bought me my first SLR, a Fujica St605n, which I still have). That lasted a semester or two before I realized that I didn't want to write newspaper copy. I switched to English, and finally to Secondary (high school level) Education, with emphases in English and Physical Science (basic Chemistry and Physics).

One class I took at UT was a short story writing class. It was an intense experience - I learned just how difficult writing can be sometimes, and also just how talented some people are. I wrote some stories that I love to this day.

Right after graduating, I entered my poetry phase. I wrote probably a hundred poems, and experimented with sound, rhythm, and meaning. It was thoroughly engrossing. I submitted a manuscript of poetry to the Yale Series of Younger Poets, titled "Letters From A Far Country". I had a poem published in The Austin Chronicle titled "December City." That poem, and several others, were recently published online at the Southern Cross Review, as was a short story of mine that I wrote about ten years ago.

More recently, as a product of my unfinished Master's program in Philosophy at the University of Montana, I self-published my thesis, prosaically titled Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness. That's not presumptuous, is it??? I had submitted the manuscript to several publishers, and The University of Missouri Press eventually asked for a complete manuscript after reading my proposal and several chapters. They passed on it, saying it was too short.

Last year I had my first try at journalistic writing. I got a gig writing a monthly op-ed for the online magazine Modern Republic, on any topic of international news. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The gig ended when the editor quit paying me (John Ramirez still owes me $120) and announced ex post facto that the magazine had dropped the International News section. Most of those essays are on this blog.

Right now, the editor at The Southern Cross Review is looking at a chapter of my book in which I analyze... shit, lots of very, very deep ontological stuff - it's frickin' philosophy, after all. Even I have to concentrate to follow the argument. We'll see soon whether that essay shows up online.

I currently have two manuscripts 'in progress': about 150 pages of a novel that's fairly obviously the story of my time as a graduate student, when I was so deeply involved with my subject of study (the evolution of consciousness) that I couldn't turn off the thinking even when I wanted to; and a collection of essays touching on phenomenology and nature.

I love language. I love communicating with the written word. And the logos became flesh, and dwelt in us.

Carmella

2009-04-08T10:13:00.002-06:00

Vote here for my photo of Carmella

A photo of mine is in a contest of some sort at Purina. Follow the link above to vote for Carmella The Cat under Top Photos.

What if someone raised your expectations...

2009-04-01T22:34:00.003-06:00

and then met them? And raised them yet higher? And met them again? By expectations, I mean your overall general expectations of that person. What if you two kept doing this? What would become of you both? Would you sublimate into heaven?

Empty Forest Phenomenon

2009-03-16T22:35:00.004-06:00

When I lived in Montana, after I first moved there, I went hunting several seasons. I never even shot the rifle, except to sight it in. I did do a lot of walking as quietly as I could through miles of Montana forest in the late fall. I don't remember if one of my hunting companions taught me this, or it just occurred to me, but after a while I realized something: I can't take what I'm seeing and hearing and smelling there in the forest at that moment as necessarily representative of that area. Specifically, just because I don't see any deer, or squirrels or birds, doesn't mean there aren't any nearby.

That's because my presence goes out all around me. I'm noisy, even when I'm trying to be quiet. Because of my noisiness, animals are alerted to my presence well ahead of my physical arrival. On my side, my noisiness drowns out any faint rustlings that those alert deer might make as they move away from me. Basically, I send out a very subtle and shifting force field that blinds me to my surroundings.

The other day I was driving, and reveling in the speed, and exclaiming to myself that all San Diegans love to drive fast. It then hit me almost visually: My own speed had warped my perception of everyone else's speed. Not everyone drives fast - obviously, because I am more often passing than getting passed. I had somehow projected my revelry in driving fast onto all other drivers, even as I passed them going ten miles per hour faster than they were going.

There's this almost tragic horizon, this rippling that we send out around us in every direction, and we can't experience beyond it without disturbing that as well.

Another way of thinking of this projection is as a physical shadow cast by sources of light. We can't be without a shadow where there's light, but we so early in our infancy recognize our shadow that we never mistake it for anything else. It is never a source of confusion for us.

What would it be like if I could come to recognize the emotional and psychic level ripples I send out all around me? To learn not to be afraid of my own shadow?

Heaven:

2009-03-13T21:42:00.004-06:00

Driving south on I-5 in the beautiful San Diego sunshine on a Friday afternoon, listening to U2's "No Line On The Horizon".

The Unconsoled

2009-03-03T01:34:00.004-07:00

I made it to the bank (Union Bank of California) this morning. Finally. I was sidetracked several times. I needed to get this money in there before I bounced a check. It did bounce. But I made it to the bank. I felt as if I'd been trudging upstream in a chest high river.

There is a novel titled The Unconsoled, written by Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote The Remains of the Day. It's about seven hundred pages long, and it is tortuous to read. It's about a man, a concert pianist, who is in an unnamed town in an unnamed country in Europe somewhere. He is anxious about his parents making the trip to hear this concert. Early on, weird things happen. Weird things pop up here and there. At first it was very disconcerting, and confusing. Eventually I convinced myself that the author was writing a narrative as if by a man dreaming, or experiencing alzheimer's disease.

Things pop up that divert this concert pianist character from carrying out various intentions. 'I must ask the receptionist exactly what time the concert begins.' But he forgets, or the receptionist is gone, or they miscommunicate somehow. Again and again this diversion happens - will he ever just ask a straight question and get a straight answer? Many of my dreams have this character, where I am not just thwarted, but turned off into a new, unintended direction.

The book is agonizing to read. When I finally made it to Union Bank this morning, I felt like I'd lived that book.

Back to Steiner. He is a fantastic philosopher. I started reading Rudolf Steiner's books back in about 1989 or so - twenty years ago. I was reading mostly his gospel lectures and some historical overviews. I didn't know his philosophy per se. That would be his books Truth and Knowledge, and Philosophy of Freedom.

Those are essentially his only truly philosophical works, in an academic sense. The two books actually make up one complete treatise. It is a profound work of phenomenology. It's very simple and straightforward, but not dry. You can hear a young, enthusiastic degree candidate behind it.

It's in the appendix of Philosophy of Freedom that he discusses the occurrence of experiencing the thinking of another person. What he states is that we experience the thinking of others all the time. We just don't realize that that is what it is. We notice it. We just are mistaken about what it is.

One reason we make this mistake is because our consciousness is overshadowed by other consciousness, which is something like itself, so isn't as noticeable a change. It's still consciousness - instead of just having your consciounsness blanked out, as in sleep.

I once thought that I had witnessed those moments where my consciousness was overshadowed by an other consciousness. It was all very ordinary, just like Steiner described it. I thought: You mean that some of the chatter in my head might be the chatter of another consciousness, even a non-human (e.g., mountain) consciousness?

Pretty heavy stuff.

Rudolf on my mind

2009-02-27T11:08:00.004-07:00

Steiner is still on my mind. More like, my mind is on the spiritual worlds, and how to engage them.

Steiner's program of training for someone who wants to be able to perceive what is otherwise imperceptible is a combination of meditation and contemplation.* The objective is to find and develop the faculty of thinking that doesn't have anything to do with the perceptible aspects of reality (what we usually regard as 'all there is'). So he suggests, for the purposes of meditation, various phrases to contemplate. For instance, "wisdom lives in the light." The essence of these phrases is that they consist of concepts that make little or no reference to the physical world. "In the beginning was the Word" would be a good one. Or make up your own.

Along with the non-physical concepts to contemplate, the contemplation itself has a distinct feature in Steiner's spiritual science. Specifically, when one thinks on "in the beginning was the word", you pull your thinking as far away from the sensory aspects of the concepts as possible. You have to feel your way out into the apparent nothingness beyond those sensory aspects. Emmet Fox's discussion of the law of relaxation may be helpful here. Fox taught that mental effort is self-defeating. If you force your thinking, you're actually reinforcing the existing train-tracks of thought. It's only when you relax that your thinking can be set free. Set free from its attachment to the physical, is what Steiner would say.

What the hell does that mean? Steiner does say that our regular thinking is inextricably bound up with our voice. This other thinking that contemplates "in the beginning was the word" has no voice element to it. You can't be oh so subtly voicing this while you're contemplating.

Still with me?

* The problem with the words "meditation" and "contemplation" is that there are no standard definitions for those concepts.

Steiner's Secrets to Mind Reading

2009-02-12T12:00:00.003-07:00

In Rudolf Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom, he addressed a philosophical issue in an appendix. It's fairly technical, but the gist is this:

If you're attentive to what you actually experience when you encounter another human being - as opposed to just being in this apartment of mine all by myself - only when you encounter another human being, you yourself are affected in certain ways. They are subtle and quick, but they are real. If you notice how you are affected when you encounter another human being, you will notice two things:

- First you notice the body - the physical existence of the person
- That physical apparition disappears, and you're now aware of your own stream of consciousness being replaced by some other consciousness

You really should read Steiner. Anyway, in his words, the conclusion is:

"I have really perceived another person's thinking."

When you've read that, come back here and we'll discuss...

Meanwhile, back at the goetheanum...

2009-02-08T14:32:00.003-07:00

Steiner's work is so bizarre if you come at it unitiated already into some kind of metaphysic. But he repeats a few, essential statements everywhere throughout his work, that are of a philosophical, not esoteric or metaphysical, quality. That's what his books Knowledge and Science, and The Philosophy of Freedom, are: disciplined, clear thinking. Anyway, one of those essentials I just read yet again in something of Steiner's:

I clearly pointed to the very necessity of finding something which the human being lays hold of within himself and which he, at the same time, recognizes as a process of the world.

He says it several ways.

the endeavour to find something in the human inner life in which an outer process takes place at the same time.

we have to acquire the ability of taking hold of something that is in our inner being, which belongs to the outer and the inner world simultaneously and reaches into both.

This is profound. He's taking the academic philosopher's ad absurdum - that you can have inside and outside at the same time - and founding a philosophy on it. The really important thing is that Steiner doesn't invite us on a search with him to find this elusive event; Steiner says, "It's happening all the time. I'll show you where and how to look so that you can perceive it for yourself."

Next time: Danny reveals Steiner's Secrets To Mind Reading...

Education

2009-02-06T18:38:00.003-07:00

I've learned a lot since I've been here. I'm playing my guitar more frequently, and can hear a change in my playing, an advancement. My photography has advanced, too. I'm using the external flash a lot (mostly with auto settings), and the 55-200 zoom lens. That zoom lens has vibration reduction, so with the new D80, I think my shots are getting much clearer and crisper.

I'm trying to learn, objectively, exactly what I have in my inventory of myself. What hand was I dealt, what have I done with that, and what can I change if necessary? I have a hyper sensitive moral organ - not hyper true, just hyper sensitive. Some behavior jolts me like megavolts of electricity. Like today.

Next week I'm going on another photo shoot with the San Diego Photographers Meetup group. Does that sound pathetic?

I had an interview-of-sorts with a personnel service. They don't usually handle IT jobs - or at least the woman didn't who talked with me. Quick few questions, and some paperwork, and I was out. I'll find out next week yea/nay. It's a one to two month contract gig.

Before I go: These SD freeways and surface streets are killing my tires and alignment. I had to buy new tires, and I'm now super careful about potholes, curbs, etc..

Ciao.

Life is a highway

2009-01-27T21:27:00.004-07:00

My new favorite section of highway: 163, North and South, between 94 and 8. So. Cool. It's impossible to describe - I don't know what it is about it that makes it so fun to drive. It's definitely narrow and curvy. And fast. The outside lane usually is doing 70, and I think the limit is 55. There are wooded banks, arching bridges.

My new favorite stretch of surface street: Upas between Florida and Park. At least a fifteen percent grade. Maybe eighteen (I don't know what grades are, btw, but I was just on a different stretch of road that had a sign saying it was fifteen percent). Really narrow - maybe two car widths.

I was coming home from my sister's place this evening, just a little after sunset. Coming south on I-5 from north of the airport, there is a fantastic view of the San Diego skyline. The sky beyond the city was darkening, but the glass buildings of downtown were all glowing golden and silver and bluish and greyish. Since I was a kid, I read science fiction, and daydreamed alot about future cities and cultures. Those future cities look a lot like San Diego.

From a distance anyway.

The reading experiment

2009-01-20T10:54:00.002-07:00

I've been telling folks that I haven't been reading lately. I used to read all the time, and always had about four or five books going at the same time - fiction, non-fiction, magazine article, online stuff. For the last four months - since shortly before my divorce - I simply quit reading.

Actually, that's not completely true. It's funny how some things are invisible to me... I've not stopped reading email, phone texts, and IM messages. Lots of that. So what I've stopped reading is the analog stuff - the paper, the old school documents, the father (reference to an apocryphal saying of a mental patient, who once mumbled about 'the white stuff, the father'). Books. I've quit reading books.

So, the last week or so, I've been making an extra effort to read books. That's a pretty amazing statement from me, a bibliophile, reader, writer, and general unabashed humanist. That I have to make an effort to read a book. Here's what I'm reading currently:

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor. This is moral philosophy, which I am not generally interested in. I am reading it on the professional suggestion of a philosophy mentor of sorts.

The Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien. I have the hardback edition illustrated by Ted Nasmith. It's mostly for the pictures, which are beautiful, but just the other day I read the tale Of Maeglin. Quite tragic and dark. Most of the Silmarillion is like that, actually.

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. This is steam punk on a bad acid trip. Not usually my cup of tea, but it gets engrossing when I let it.

Guidance in Esoteric Training by Rudolf Steiner. Specifically the lecture titled "Concerning the Union of the Image with the Archetype."

New Moon by Stephenie Meyer. Sequel to Twilight. Yes, I know.

Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism by Anonymous.

Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity edited by Shirley Sugerman. Specifically the essay by Mary Caroline Richards titled "The Vessel and the Fire." Incredibly insightful.

Reading like this - with effort, deliberately, self-consciously - makes me feel like an invalid re-learning some basic physiological skill. I get frustrated easily. Maybe I need the 'reading skill' equivalent of a physical therapist?

What the ocean does for me

2009-01-19T10:56:00.004-07:00

Years ago in Missoula, just a couple years into our life there, I became friends with a guy who was getting his Master's degree in Wildlife Biology. Tim Van Deelen. I went on one of his outings once to inspect some live beaver traps. For myself, I would talk about the thoughts that would consume me for a long time and see some expression in my master's thesis, and it's published version.

One day, talking about I don't remember what, I told Tim how deeply I was affected whenever I would look up at the mountain peaks that surround Missoula, and see only trees and rock and grass - no asphalt or brick. I said something like, 'It means so much to me to be able to look around and see a place that is not choked with humans and their structures.' He replied matter-of-factly, 'We all feel that way.'

When I look out at the ocean, I feel that same way: I see something new and wild and untamed by me, (relatively) undeveloped by humans.

In another, different way, watching the ocean is like watching a campfire - it has the same quality of never-ending variation and form. Deeply satisfying.

Where's the Steiner?

2009-01-12T21:02:00.002-07:00

This blog was created as a place for me to write out my thoughts on Barfield, Steiner, the evolution of consciousness, and such. I haven't written anything remotely related to those topics, not in a long time. Truth is, I've not been up to that sort of mental exercise.

I've read only very rarely in the last four months - maybe even before that. I recently picked up my copy of "Sources of the Self" by Charles Taylor (I came to San Diego with just a handful of books, and this is one of them?????). Got lost halfway through the first paragraph. I did finish "Twilight", and have started on the sequel. And I'm several chapters into "Perdido Street Station" by China Mieville (Richard recommended this),which I'm enjoying.

Anyway, the point is that I've not been thinking much about consciousness lately. There was a time in my life when I was very careful with my body and mind, and they were free of lots of distractions. That's when I was journaling, meditating, imagining. But to use my body and mind like that requires stability and nurture - neither of which I currently tend to. Unfortunately, that organic/psychic instrument is the gateway to the world correlating to meditation and imagining - the place where Barfield's final participation is played out.

Ulrich Schnauss is my new hero

2009-01-12T20:47:00.003-07:00

Check out his music here:

Ulrich Schnauss at eMusic

I have listened to "A Strangely Isolated Place" and "Far Away Trains Passing By". They are both fantastic - dreamy electronic stuff.

Me In San Diego

2009-01-12T18:50:00.004-07:00

I'm looking for work outside of San Diego - and outside of California. I would rather not move, not right now. San Diego is a very cool city. But I have no income. Period. So I have to take other measures.

Anyway, it would be a shame to leave San Diego before I got a few pics of me in my apartment. After all, the photographer rarely shows up in their own shots. So you can see a few shots of me at my flickr gallery. You will tell me if I look too thin, won't you?

I'm headed to Camarillo on Thursday to hang with my niece and nephew while my sister and her husband hang in Vegas with another of my (eight) sisters. Then I come straight back on Saturday to do a one-hour photo gig for Private Paparazzi.

Oh, and I'm having coffee on Wednesday morning with a high school friend, Nancy. She and I were in Athens, Greece at the same time, as seniors in high school. We didn't hang with the same crowd, but our parents were friends, so we saw each other every now and then. We connected a few years ago, and again recently.

I've been playing my guitar much more lately. I've also connected with a female vocalist who is willing to do some of my music. I put an ad on Craigslist, and got three replies. So I'm getting practiced up for our first session, maybe this week.

Ciao for now.

New Directions

2009-01-07T10:00:00.003-07:00

I did my second photo gig yesterday morning. It was out in Bonsal, at the local movie theater complex. A large corporation was honoring their top sales people, complete with limo ride to the theater. They had the theater decked out to look like a movie premier. I was one of the paparazzi taking photos as they got out of the limo. That part is cheesy, but I play it pretty low key.

The most satisfying aspect of it, though, is I get to interact with people in a way I wouldn't usually interact. They let me get very close to take their photos. And they say silly things because they're nervous. But because I can get so close with my camera, I get some really amazing photos. I don't know whether I can post any of those publicly, but if I can, I will.

The photo with this post (all the photos with my posts are my own, unless I've specified otherwise) is a screenshot of the Upload/Download speed test at speakeasy.org. I've been using the free internet here at my apartment, which is called SoCalFreeNet. It's free, but it's slow - 1.5 and 600, or something like that - and, it times out every four hours, clock time, to discourage people from hogging the bandwidth. That timeout happens at very inopportune moments.

Anyway, I signed up for real internet with Cox. They delivered a modem to my door the next day, and I was online within about half an hour. With those dwnld/upld speeds. It will make posting photos so much faster. When things run slow, I tend to stop doing them.

San Diego still continues to amaze me. I have to at least mention the highways... I went through the craziest zigzag crossing over about three or four freeways in a quarter mile stretch of land. Another equally astounding thing about that little jaunt: I was on University Ave. and about 5th, and asked for directions to a mall nearby from the woman at the flower shop (yesterday was Deborah's 45th birthday). She directed me to Fashion Valley Mall. The directions were really complicated, but I got them right. But I felt like a slalom skier going 70.

I've got to head out for a walk. Ciao for now.

Change

2008-12-31T17:03:00.004-07:00

Beginning the end of August, this year has been nothing but change. Heraclitus said that change was the fundamental reality. I remember reading somewhere that the ancient Greeks knew, better than we today, that at bottom, reality was chaos, and that our legends, myths, "histories", were all attempts to shield us from that shattering truth.

I've certainly been shattered. My life today is nothing like what it was 9 months ago. Nine months ago, I hadn't been overseas on business (I've taken two trips to Kuwait since then). I'd never been to Amsterdam (I've been there three times now, and had serious plans to move there just three months ago). I was married (I divorced in September). I lived in Missoula, Montana, where I'd spent nineteen years of my life (I am now in San Diego). I weigh less than one-thirty; I no longer have the mountain bike that I loved to ride; there are no Christmas decorations in my home; I got paid for a professional photography job on Christmas eve; I've walked on the beach in December; I ate lunch outside in the sunshine overlooking La Jolla Cove two days before Christmas; I drive everyday on the freeway.

Can't step into the same river twice...

San Diego Freeways

2008-12-23T20:08:00.004-07:00

I'm not a hardcore city driver, so read the following accordingly. But I really enjoy driving, and so far, I really enjoy driving in San Diego.

Now, I am not working full-time, so I can schedule my travel times to avoid commute times, which means that my experience may not be typical. But I find the SD freeways fantastic for driving. You can get almost anywhere in the city within 25 to 30 minutes, if you avoid heavy traffic. That's pretty amazing, given the size and topography of this city.

One cost of driving this system is attention: You have to really pay attention to the signage. In order to get you to all these places via freeway, those freeways have to be fairly complicated. There are intersections of freeway where three or four major freeways intersect. North and south, east and west. And the exit and entrance ramps.

Even ignoring THAT complexity, there is the immediate challenge of driving in whatever traffic you are in. There are a lot of people in this area of the country. In my three and a half hour drive from San Diego to Camarillo (north of LA), the traffic density hardly changed, and it was dense. It was like SD freeway traffic the entire 200 miles or whatever it was. No chance for cruise control, I learned.

It helps that my car is a sweet ride...

Best damn fifty bucks I ever spent

2008-12-20T10:18:00.003-07:00

Logitech X-240 speakers for my computer. Holy garganzoly. It really is an amazing set of speakers, at least coming out of my hp pavilion dv5.

While I'm on the topic of hp pavilion dv5 machines... This one is a great laptop (I have the fifteen inch monitor), but as far as audio goes, I have a huge complaint. I specifically looked for a higher quality sound card built in, so that I could record on it - plugging my guitar and midi controller directly in. This sound card will record that way, but there is no monitor, so you can't hear AS you're recording. You can't record that way.

Had two heaters going last night here in the apartment. It might have dropped below forty.

I'm headed out for a morning walk on the beach in Coronado. Ciao for now.

Rain in Southern California

2008-11-26T17:52:00.008-07:00

It's raining. Such a nice sound. I haven't seen much rain here in San Diego, but then I've only been here a month. It's been colder and wetter than I expected. That's nice. In fact, most of the time I've spent in my apartment - which is in the Golden Hill neighborhood just east of downtown - I've worn fleece slippers and a sweater. I sleep with a down comforter.

The apartment is pretty sweet. I knew right away that I wanted it. It's probably a thousand square feet at least, with two bedrooms, one bathroom, kitchen, and a very large front room that has a gothic arch in the middle of it, effectively making it a living room and dining room. It's on the second floor, and there's two doorways - one in the front on a landing shared with the one other apartment on the second floor, and another doorway down a private back stairway that opens onto a stoop in the side garden. Both the garden and the front door have locked gates - that is definitely the norm in this neighborhood.

Take a look:

View Larger Map

It's the two story Spanish style stucco building on the corner in the shade. I'm on the second floor, on the right.

Stop by if you're in the neighborhood.

Self-Knowledge: The Most Difficult Kind

2008-11-25T02:46:00.002-07:00

The notion that we create our own reality - that's pretty crazy stuff. To some people, it's patently false. It doesn't matter how much I WISH certain things, the reality is what it is.

Another way of putting this notion is that one's exterior is an expression of one's interior. This way of putting it makes the notion more intelligible and credible to me, especially when I consider one specific aspect of my exterior: my friends. They are an expression, to some degree, of who I am and how I think. I didn't create them, of course. But I did choose them, directly or indirectly: where I choose to spend my time, how I spend my money, the level of education and income, the books I read, the neighborhood I live in. These all are involved in the mystery of how I make friends.

So I'm thinking about this, as I end another day in San Diego. Who are my friends? And what do they tell me about myself? A good friend of mine has the moniker The Mirror (though not a moniker I made up). I've asked for her feedback, for this very reason. Not always a pleasant experience, either. But I'm thinking less about what friends tell me, with words, and more about what they tell me just by virtue of being my friends.

E.F. Schumacher wrote a little book called Advice for the Perplexed. He distinguishes four fields of knowledge: knowledge of nature, of other humans, of ourselves from the inside, and of ourselves from the outside. He claimed that the last - knowledge of ourselves from the outside - was the most difficult kind of knowledge to achieve.

This is what friends are for: they are my teachers, directly and indirectly. And in turn I am their teacher.

So why would this knowledge be so difficult? I'm thinking about that, as I end another day in San Diego.

Favorite Exit Ramp

2008-11-20T21:21:00.002-07:00

10th Ave. exit off I-5 going south, San Diego, California.

Best f***in' audio hardware combo ever

2008-10-12T14:15:00.004-06:00

Sony PSP + Bose noise canceling headphones

That didn't last long

2008-10-09T12:42:00.002-06:00

Had a nice cry this morning.

I'm renting a car tomorrow morning - an SUV class, in fact - and heading up to Glacier for the day. It'll be a very short trip, as the days are shorter and shorter. But I have to get out of Missoula, and Glacier has always been there when I need it.

I surprised myself by realizing that I want to see the New York Stock Exchange while I'm in New York City. Isn't that weird, for one who voluntarily lived a life of near poverty for a while? While I was in Kuwait, one of my Kuwaiti friends took me to the stock exchange there in Kuwait City. Very small, but interesting.

Meg and I are going to see Equus on Broadway. I'm hot to see Daniel Radcliffe naked.

Then after New York, my life takes an even more deliberate turn.

Leveling out?

2008-10-06T13:02:00.003-06:00

I just realized that it's been days since I cried. A couple of weeks ago, it was daily. In public, on my bike, at work. Sheesh.

On my way out of Missoula, I'll be visiting my mother and some sisters (I have eight of them) in Florida for a few days. Then I'm headed to New York City for a week. My daughter will meet me there for the last several days, so we can see some shows, shop, take pics, etc.. Another friend will visit me at the beginning of the week, and a third may pop in for a visit too. Very, very grateful for the people in my life.

I've only been to New York once before, for the day. I visited the Museum of Modern Art, and saw one of Dali's paintings - Persistence of Memory, I believe. I also visited the shop/factory of a luggage maker. I managed a high-end luggage and leather goods store in Austin at the time, and stopped in to see how they made the stuff. Pretty cool.

I'm getting pretty sick of hanging out in Break Espresso. The studio apartment that I'm in doesn't have an internet connection - why would there be? Only one unsecured network in the neighborhood, too, with a very weak signal. So I'm here at the Break at least once a day, sometimes twice.

Last Ride

2008-10-05T09:32:00.005-06:00

Yesterday afternoon I took a ride from my apt. up to the Rattlesnake Wilderness trailhead. There's a separate road right there that goes up into Sawmill Gulch. That road has it's own trailhead up there. Right there is the start of a single-track that goes right along the edge of the Sawmill Gulch road. It's such a nice trail - like slalom skiing.

So that's what I did yesterday afternoon, as a goodbye to that particular trail. I've also taken a walk up at Waterworks Hill, another of my favorite places.

I've thought about running up to Glacier, and I still might do it. I just need a car... Guess I could rent a car and do a day trip - I've done the day trip lots of times. I love Glacier - one of my favorite spots on this planet. I may only be in Amsterdam for three months, if I don't find work, but it's likely I won't be back to Montana for much longer.

A few more photos from my ride yesterday: http://www.flickr.com/photos/djsmitherman/sets/72157607755646828/show/

Those include a couple of shots of my friend David: he was just headed out on a ride of his own.

Danny

The Unemployment of An Artist

2008-10-02T08:48:00.004-06:00

I am making huge changes in my life. My wife and I are no longer married. I am unemployed. In three weeks I'll be in New York City to see the sights. In four weeks or so I will be living in Amsterdam, looking for work there.

I started this blog a few years ago, primarily to log my thoughts regarding the evolution of consciousness. That has remained the focus of my posts to this blog, but it hasn't been the extent of the postings. I've posted my political rants, and maybe an occasional personal note. Looks like the blog itself is going to start a new phase of development.

More later...

kuwait city

2008-08-11T23:42:00.000-06:00

Atoms for Peace?

2008-08-09T03:22:00.004-06:00

This was posted as my July 2008 op-ed at Modern Republic:

Atoms For Peace?

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency – IAEA – there are 439 nuclear power plants currently operating in 30 countries around the globe. There are an additional 34 plants actively under construction – most of them in developing countries. John McCain, the Republican nominee for President, called for the construction of 45 new plants here in the United States by 2030. This represents an increase of almost 50% in number of plants in the US, given that there are 104 plants in operation here. This, even though the US hasn’t built a new reactor in about 30 years.

Again, according the IAEA, worldwide, nuclear power-generated electricity accounts for roughly 15% of the worlds’ electricity consumption. In France, 78% of their electricity is generated by nuclear power; in the United States, that figure is about 20%.

Last July, at the 6th Congress on Science and Technology for Development that took place in Bangkok, Thailand, the IAEA Director General Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, addressed “why we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in nuclear power.” He claimed three broad interests driving this resurgence:

- Energy diversity and security: Nations are more and more concerned for a steady, reliable source of energy, given that energy demands continue to increase around the globe, and the unstable future of fossil fuels becomes more pronounced

- Carbon emissions and environmental concerns: Greenhouse gases effect everyone, everywhere, and nations are coming together to do what they can to limit, and hopefully decrease, these gases for the sake of everyone

- Strong performance of the nuclear industry: ElBaradei states that “nuclear power is a mature technology” and it has a “strong performance record”

He also stressed, though, that for this resurgence to last, a set of concerns must be addressed:

- Safety
- Security
- Waste
- Non-proliferation
- Technological innovation
- Infrastructure
- Public perception

The IAEA website and materials present a measured, but nonetheless hopeful picture of nuclear power in the world of 2008. But clearly the Agency understands what is at stake, and what the challenges to any resurgence are. So does Walter Patterson. He is trained as a nuclear physicist, and is a Fellow of Energy, Environment, and Development Programme at Chatham House, at the Energy Institute, London, and visiting Fellow at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex. Referring to just one of the list of challenges, Patterson remarks that “Nuclear energy needs climate change a lot more than climate change needs nuclear energy.”

Patterson would be a formidable instance of another of the challenges, namely, “public perception.” Actually, one aspect of Patterson’s perception is something that isn’t really fleshed out in the IAEA list above: cost. Patterson argues that the technology is half a century old – which the IAEA Director General regards as a measure of stability – and further, that it was developed for weapons and submarine propulsion, and is inappropriate for large-scale civil power generation. Nuclear power promoters are thus forced to deliver a “deeply dishonest sales pitch.”

“The promoters have nevertheless a decades-long commitment to this technology. However, they understand the risks all too well. That's why they are waiting for governments to provide - yet again – financial safety nets against all the various liabilities that may - and on the historical evidence almost certainly will - arise. Unless and until governments, that is, taxpayers, indemnify the promoters against these open-ended risks, no private capital will finance new nuclear plants anywhere.”

Whether this is true the world over – that private capital won’t finance new construction – it is certainly true that nuclear energy is still significantly subsidized by the world’s governments. In Canada, for instance, Bruce Power in Ontario currently leases their facilities, though they do plan to invest in bringing currently off-line units online. Nevertheless, they claim to be “Canada’s first private nuclear generating company.”

The resurgence of interest in nuclear power is real: new plants are being built, de-commissioned units have come back online, more units are being planned and designed. Oil prices continue to climb. Much of the Middle East, home to much of that oil, suffers under civil and regional wars and unrest, and political and economic instability. Global climate change is real, too: glaciers are melting, Arctic summer ice pack is rapidly declining, sea levels are rising. There are many good reasons to seek out clean, economical, safe, secure sources of energy. Nevertheless, deep concerns remain; after all, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and North Korea are real, too.

amsterdam photos

2008-08-08T10:20:00.002-06:00

Culture Shock

2008-07-08T14:27:00.005-06:00

[this was my June op-ed at Modern Republic]

In 1977 I was 15 years old. I lived in a very small town in Colorado between Colorado Springs and Denver. I had lived there for six years – since I was 9 years old. Then my dad got a job with Lockheed on a project in Iran. Just a few days after my sister walked through her high school graduation, we – I, my brother and three sisters and mother - got on a plane to Tehran, Iran.

Our flight included a layover in London and a stay in a very ritzy hotel – both firsts for me. We then flew on. We landed in Tehran late at night, and stayed in the nicest hotel at that time, the Intercontinental. What I saw was sand colored buildings everywhere, cars everywhere, smell of diesel smoke everywhere, cars “parked” on the sidewalk, everyone with dark hair, dark eyes, and an incomprehensible and threatening sounding language.

We – us kids – huddled together. We were four bleach blonde Americans in a sea of Middle Eastern faces. I had not the faintest idea what I was supposed to do, what the new place was. I was frightened, disoriented, hungry and thirsty (I’d always been a finicky eater, and there was nothing on offer that even vaguely appealed to me). This was culture shock.

I lived in Tehran for eighteen months. We lived in the hotel for a short while, and then moved into an apartment in the north of the city. I was frightened to venture out much, and we took private taxis when we did go out. My dad was retired military, so we had Base and Embassy privileges – which I took full advantage of: I ate American style hamburgers at the Officers’ Club, and bought American books (sci-fi) and magazines (Mad) at the base bookstore. My mother shopped for mostly American groceries at the Embassy.

I made American friends, went to an American school, played American football and wrestled American style. I had American girlfriends, and hung out at the American teen club.

At the same time, we lived in an Iranian neighborhood – there was no “American compound” in Tehran. There were Americans living nearby, but also Iranians, Germans, Israelis. Iranian boys who lived next door would throw rocks into our pool, and mildly taunt us when they saw us outside. An Iranian man riding by on a moped slapped me on the cheek once. Some kids threw rocks at us as we walked to a nearby ice skating rink. Iranians poisoned our pet dog: I watched him die from the poison, and I helped bury him in the field across the street.

Also, I smoked a lot of Iranian hashish.

In the fall of 1978, the Islamic Revolution had begun. There were student protests, and various clashes between protesters and the Shah’s military. Some days our school bus didn’t show up. Some days we went home early. My dad’s shuttles to work would take different routes. They put Plexiglas and chicken wire over the windows of the shuttle busses. Our school homecoming events were cancelled. School let out for Christmas break, and never resumed. From the roof of our house I watched tanks roll up and down Saltanatabad Boulevard.

We – Lockheed employee dependents – were evacuated from the city in the first week of January, 1979, in two chartered Pan Am 747 jets. We had boxed up our belongings to be shipped later, and only took onto the plane what we could carry. Many of my belongings – including my nearly new Atomic downhill skis and San Giorgio ski boots – I never saw again.

A month and a half ago I took a two week business trip to Kuwait. This was the first time I’d been back to the Middle East in 30 years. The sand colored buildings were familiar. The traffic and diesel smoke were familiar. The dark hair and eyes, and the incomprehensible language were all familiar.

Also familiar were the building cranes, high rise glass and steel buildings of ultra modern design, wide multi-lane highways, big green highway signs, well lit streets, cell phone toting masses, and late model luxury cars. But I’d seen all this in places like Seattle, New York, London – and not all in the same city at the same time. And the Arabic was incomprehensible, but most everyone I worked with spoke passable, if not perfect, English.

The hotel I stayed in provided almost suffocating service. I never had to open a door myself if I didn’t want to. The hostess in one of the restaurants memorized my name from the first day forward. At six o’clock every evening a hotel employee would knock on my door, and ask if I needed my bed covers turned down. My clothes came back from the laundry looking as if they’d just come off the store rack.

This, too, was culture shock.

Enough Hero Worship Already

2008-07-01T09:52:00.002-06:00

I saw a bumper sticker the other day:

My Grandson Is A Marine

Nothing unusual here. But immediately I thought: Why don't I see bumper stickers that say:

My Grandson Is A Clerk At Seven-Eleven

Or:

My Child Collects Stamps

Or:

My Daughter Works In The Division Of Motor Vehicles

Tower of Pride

2008-06-17T13:04:00.003-06:00

[One of my op-eds at Modern Republic]

The Burj Dubai came up in conversation recently. This is the building in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which, though still under construction, is unofficially the tallest building in the world. There was disagreement as to whether the Burj was in fact the tallest building, and since I didn’t know the name of the building beforehand, I had some googling to do.

Eventually I found references to the Burj (which is “tower” in Arabic). The official website for the Burj Dubai is really worth checking out – very slick, interactive, informative. The Vision statement is very intriguing. In part, it says:

The goal of Burj Dubai is not simply to be the world’s highest building. It’s to embody the world’s highest aspirations.

The byline on the homepage (it’s done all in Flash, so “homepage” doesn’t really apply):

Monument. Jewel. Icon.

(It’s interesting, by the way, that the vision statement includes a subtle but clear misnomer: The Burj Dubai will in fact not be the “highest” building – that honor belongs probably to some building in La Paz or Lhasa. But they chose “highest building” to finish the parallelism with “highest aspirations”, since “tallest aspirations” makes less sense than “highest building”)

In my searching, I found a discussion of the Burj in which there was a reference to the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea. Specifically, the reference was something like, “The Burj Dubai will not become another Ryugyong Hotel.” I was intrigued, and read what I could find on the net about the Ryugyong Hotel. It’s a sad story.

According to wikipedia, construction on the Ryugyong Hotel began in 1987. It was designed to be 105 stories, to a height of 1,083 feet – which in fact it is. It was scheduled to open its 3,000 rooms two years later (the Burj construction began in 2004, and is slated to be completed next year – a total of 5 years for construction). That didn’t happen. By 1992, “construction came to a halt…and has never resumed.”

The building still stands, though it is uninhabited, with no windows, no fixtures, crumbling concrete, and a construction crane still perched on the very top. It can be seen from every point in the city of Pyongyang. Its estimated construction cost – such as it was – was estimated at $750 million – “2% of North Korea’s GDP.”

“It’s to embody the world’s highest aspirations”…

North Korea hasn’t always been impoverished. Relative to its size, population, and arable land area, it was at one time in the recent past self-sustaining with regard to food production. Its people ‘enjoyed’ a relatively high life expectancy, and their children “were far better vaccinated than American children.” (http://globalpolicy.igc.org/security/sanction/nkorea/2003/0723peace.htm) Their people had, and surely still have, aspirations. What those are, I don’t know. Whether or not the Ryugyong Hotel embodied those aspirations, I seriously doubt it.

But whatever those aspirations were and are, the country suffered the loss of trading partners when the USSR collapsed, and on the heels of that, suffered severe drought. And, of course, various sanctions imposed by the United States and the United Nations.

Perhaps not every American knows that we are technically still at war with North Korea. Most do know that North Korea is a member of George Bush’s fictional ‘axis of evil.’ Whatever the point of that fiction, it functions in part as a justification of continued – and increased – sanctions against the people of North Korea. Because those sanctions are not only against military weaponry – as if the United States bomb and gun makers have shown any restraint in selling their bombs and guns to whomever they can.

Sanctions. After killing millions of North Koreans, and nearly destroying their land with our ‘scorched earth policy’, our government, with the complicity of the United Nations, continues to punish the people of North Korea.

I don’t know what North Koreans themselves think of the Ryugyong Hotel. In fact, some correspondents have mentioned that it’s difficult to get anyone to speak of it much. Even local guide maps don’t show it. To me, though, the Ryugyong Hotel embodies our lowest inclinations, not our highest aspirations. The arrogance of the leaders of North Korea, who built for their egos and not for the people; the petty pride of our American governments since 1950 to extract some kind of apology from a nation that we nearly destroyed; the inability of the United Nations to relieve the people of North Korea of inhumane sanctions; the shame of poverty and isolation.

My hope is that the Burj Dubai is indeed not another Ryugyong Hotel.

Birds, Butterflies, and Language

2008-06-14T21:50:00.005-06:00

OK, I'm going to probably commit a straw man fallacy here, but I'm too lazy to dig up the original argument to which I am going to object.

In graduate school, one of my professors was very much into pragmatism, especially the work of Richard Rorty - who in turn referenced Donald Davidson alot. So I read some Rorty and Davidson, and this one argument of Rorty's in particular dealt with the notion of alternative conceptual frameworks. The gist of that notion, first of all, is that if we assume that the human mind plays a role in presenting reality to each one of us, and if we grant that through history and across the globe the human mind varies, then we can conclude that to some non-trivial degree the human experience of reality is varied. So the ancient Greeks, with their worldview or conceptual framework, experienced a different world, or different aspects of the world, than did the Indians of the Vedas and the Mayans of the Americas and the Mongols of Asia and the 21st century Japanese, etc..

To the degree that a worldview is conceptual, it is evident in the language one speaks. Further, differing worldviews will be expressed in differing concepts. Further, the greater the difference between two worldviews, the greater the conceptual differences as expressed in concepts - and hence in language. A language different from mine signals an experience of reality different from my experience of reality.

Now, the arguments both by Rorty and by a proponent of the possibility of alternative conceptual frameworks are long and complicated, and can't always be compacted into a few words. But I'm not going to be thorough here; all I want to do is get to the gist of something I've been thinking about in regard to a specific objection that Rorty - with references to Davidson - makes against this notion of alternative conceptual frameworks.

There were two points is his objection in particular that I've thought about ever since I read them at least fifteen years ago. The first is an argument that concluded with a reductio ad absurdum, as it's called. Rorty argued that, if this notion of alternative conceptual frameworks was correct, then there could be worldviews so radically different from our own, expressed in concepts - and language - so alien that we wouldn't even recognize it as a language. If this were true, then there might be language-speakers all around us without us even recognizing them as such - trees and butterflies could have a language. But, since we know that trees and butterflies don't have languages, argued Rorty, then the premises of the notion of alternative conceptual frameworks are wrong somewhere.

The second point he made, in the course of making this first point, was that if you encounter some behavior of some living being, and you claim it is expressing itself using language, but you can't show how that behavior is correlated in any way to that being's environment, then you have no basis for claiming that in fact this being is engaged in language behavior.

OK... So, those are the two objections. My reaction to the first, even at the time fifteen years ago, was to say, "Well, of course trees and butterflies have a language, to themselves. So this isn't a reductio ad absurdum, and so this doesn't undermine the argument for the possibility of alternative conceptual frameworks." It is so obvious to me that through history, even and especially recent history, humans have extended the boundaries of what they accept as sentient, intelligent, autonomous behavior - including the languages of slaves, barbarians, dogs and whales - that I am expecting that it is only a matter of time before we know, not just that trees and butterflies have languages, but the details of their grammar, and we will be able to communicate with them directly.

The second objection - that of a lack of correlation between an entity's putative language behavior and the entity's environment - is what's really been on my mind recently. This is because of the robins that have taken up residence in our neighborhood, beginning this spring. They perch on the rooftops - and go from rooftop to rooftop - early in the morning and late in the evening, chirping away. For many mornings now I've lain in bed, half asleep, listening to them. They don't have one regular, rote, song. They repeat patterns, but they change subtly and not so subtly as they go along. So it might sound like this (writing phonetically of course):

cheep cheep charp chup
cheep cheep charp chup
cheep cheep charp
cheep charp cheep
cheep charp chup chup
cheep chup
....
chootle chirp
chootle chirp chirp

etc.

As I lay listening, I wonder what it is they are saying. That's when I start thinking about Rorty's objection: does their chirping correlate to their environment?

Well, immediately I think: what part of the environment? What about the environment? And then I ask: how does my own language, my own speaking, correlate to my environment? If I'm outside talking to my wife, would the robin know that my language correlated to my environment? Would it be able to determine that the various sounds I was making correlated to the time of day, temperature, humidity, season?

Of course this is ridiculous. In fact, the more advanced a human child gets in their language, the less is it correlated to any obvious physical environment. That's exactly the nature of language: it is freedom from physical determinism regarding behavior.

Quantum Weirdness

2008-05-09T09:06:00.005-06:00

In the latest issue of Seed magazine (the byline of the magazine is: "Science is Culture") there is an article about some physicists in Austria doing some experiments to confirm/disconfirm quantum effects - non-locality and object permanence, if I remember correctly. The article is poorly written, in my opinion, and doesn't do much to help a non-physicist like me really follow the logic of quantum weirdness, but it is worth reading, if only to be reminded that this is still very controversial and fascinating stuff.

I read a book back in graduate school, in a Philosophy of Science seminar, called "The Ghost in the Atom". It's still in print, and though it's dry, I remember it to be a better presentation of the issues - which apparently haven't changed in the intervening 15 years. I will be re-reading that book in the coming days. In the meantime, I also got this book: Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness. I got the hard copy, and paid an extra $4 to get an online copy so that I could start reading it right away.

The authors of Quantum Enigma are physicists, who are latecomers to the historical and philosophical context and implications of their trade. I'm reading the beginning chapters in which they are attempting to set the context that will - hopefully - reveal the implications of quantum mechanics in all their weirdness. They start with Aristotle's science, such as it was, up through the middle ages, renaissance, and the scientific revolution.

These first chapters are a little rough, mostly because they are simplistic, and rather personality-centered: Aristotle, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo. Not just their names, but what they were like, who they were. That is not bad - actually, this was an aspect of the history of science that I wished for more of in graduate school. Nevertheless, I am feeling the logical thread missing - and therefore the weirdness missing.

One interesting thing that the authors do is present a macroscopic example of the implication of object non-permanence. Quantum mechanics, if true - and so far, every test confirms the truth of quantum mechanics - applies to the macro and not just the micro level of matter, and it implies that objects don't exist per se until they are perceived by a conscious observer. What that looks like on the macro level IS pretty weird.

One thing I've been thinking: there is another weird implication of quantum mechanics, that is mutually exclusive with the object non-permanence, and that is instantaneous coordination of unconnected objects. According to the authors, if qm is true, then either one or the other of these reality principles is not true: objects exist whether or not they are observed; and two objects separated by vast distances cannot instantaneously influence one another. My meditation was specifically: Why are these two principles mutually exclusive? What's going on between these two principles that either one or the other has to go???

Enchantment

2008-04-23T14:35:00.001-06:00

Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World...it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills.

- JRR Tolkien

I'm reading "Defending Middle Earth" by Patrick Curry. He includes the above quote from Tolkien.

It got me thinking about my photography, specifically, my frustration with it lately. Two points of frustration: 1) my photos are not perfectly crystal clear and noise-free like so many photos I see on DA and flickr; 2) my photos don't perfectly and completely capture the moment and place that I photograph.

Both of these are shallow deceptions, and I should know better. This isn't a comment on those photos that DO seem crystal clear and noise-free; and my own philosophical and spiritual experiences have taught me that "the moment" that I'm usually trying to capture is the alchemical mixture of perception and imagination, and so of course a photo can't capture that perfectly and completely.

That is, a photo can't do that simply by being a bare chronicle of the object I photographed. Because THAT is only the perception part; there is still the imaginative aspect. In fact, even the perceptual aspect is stripped down: there is no sound, no feeling, no taste, no smell in a photo.

So what does all this have to do with Enchantment and Magic? I sometimes want my photography to be magical: a technique geared to wield power over the world. I will force my will onto the image. When it doesn't come out perfectly, I am frustrated.

Instead, if I thought of my photography as Enchantment... well, what would that be like? I would simply approach my photography - from the framing of the shot, to the clicking of the shutter, to the post-production - as a way to create a secondary world that both I and my viewers could step into. No forcing of my will on the primary world - we all know what that looks like. This would be a secondary world, one that exists, but not like the primary.

Demographic Winter, Blindness, and Hope

2008-03-22T09:59:00.003-06:00

[One of my op-eds at Modern Republic]

The term “demographic winter” refers to the deepening chill creeping across our planet as birthrates decline, fewer and fewer children are born, cultures die out. Many nations are concerned about this trend. Italy, for instance, legislated monetary compensation to couples having children. Other nations have enacted similar measures.

There are also religious groups gravely concerned with the downward trend. The Catholic Church is concerned, as far as I can make out, because this trend underlines what the Church has been saying for quite some time: Modern life is out of balance, evidenced in abortion, feminism, and hedonism – all of which are seen by the Church as various causes of the overall downward trend of childbearing.

I have only recently begun reading about the phenomenon of "demographic winter", but almost my first question was - and is still, as I read more: Are 6,000,000,000 human beings on the earth not enough? In the United Nations document “World Population Policies 2007”, in the Summary and Conclusions, it is stated:

“In developing countries, and especially in Africa, an increasing number of Governments consider that both population growth and fertility are too high and have implemented measures to lower them.”

In fact, according to the UN 2003 document “The World Population in 2300: Executive Summary”, world population is predicted according to five different scenarios. According to those scenarios, from lowest to highest estimates, in the year 2300 - three hundred years from now - world population will be 2.3 billion, 8.3 billion, 9 billion, 36.4 billion, and 134 trillion (Yes! Trillion!).

Of the last scenario, the report states:

"If, for the sake of illustration, the fertility of countries is kept constant at 1995-2000 levels, the world population soars to 244 billion by 2150 and 134 trillion in 2300, a definitely impossible outcome."

It is not the case that the birthrate is decreasing planet-wide.

So what is the concern then? In an online article at LifeIssues.net, Steven Mosher confirms my suspicion that it is not the human family that is the concern for some, but rather the European human family, when he ends his article:

"Much is at stake. For as Europe goes, so goes much of the world."

And what does the future hold for Europe? Those same five UN scenarios predict these possible European population figures: 90, 200, 538, 611, and 2,204. Only one scenario predicts that Europe’s current population of 728 million will increase; in every other scenario it continues to decline.

Of this decline, Mr. Mosher states:

“Islamic jihad and ‘global warming’ are often presented as the most dangerous threats to the Western world today, yet they pale in comparison to the demographic crisis since, of course, without people, nothing else matters.”

And again he writes:

"Great Britain has already succumbed to the deadly malaise that has gripped postmodern, post-Christian Europe. The birthrate is at historic lows, as is church attendance. Many of the children you see on the streets of London are of Pakistani descent."

This is not to single out Steven Mosher. In fact, in everything I’ve read by those who express some degree of panic over the situation, I keep finding myself asking the question: Aren’t Pakistanis, aren’t non-Europeans – or non-Christians – humans? Don’t they count? Why do Mosher and others who are so distraught over the declining birth rates in Western nations not see the fallacy of the explicit premise that Western nations = The World?

The truth is, we are all human; the human birth rate is not declining overall. Therefore the only important question is, Why is the birthrate declining in some populations and not others, and should this be a concern to the human family as a whole?

I think part of the answer does actually appear in the writings I’ve been referring to. Mosher quotes Pope Benedict in Canada as saying that the declining birthrate is due to a mentality that lacks hope.

“This disturbing testimony to uncertainty and fear, even if not always conscious, is in stark contrast with the definitive experience of true love which by its nature is marked by trust, seeks the good of the beloved, and looks to the eternal.”

This could very well be true.

The Falling US Dollar

2008-03-22T09:58:00.003-06:00

[One of my op-eds at Modern Republic]

In January of 2007, if I traveled somewhere in the European Union where the Euro is used, my one US dollar would exchange for .77 Euros. If I were to do so today, that one US dollar would exchange for .69 Euros. Closer to home, in January of 2007 I would get 1.75 Canadian dollars for my one US dollar; today I would get .98 Canadian cents.

This trend is generally true for most international currencies - the Japanese Yen, the Australian dollar, the Singapore dollar, the Swedish krona. In terms of exchange rates, this is what is meant when we read "the dollar is falling." If you're a traveler, the meaning of a falling dollar is evident in the higher expense, in US dollars, for your trip. But what does the falling dollar mean for us living in the United States?

This is a simple question with complex, even inscrutable, and certainly equivocating, answers. So first a few facts. The exchange rate between the major international currencies used to be - between 1946 and 1973 - "fixed at levels determined by governments" (http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Enc/ExchangeRates.html ), and were fairly stable, according to Paul Krugman. Krugman is an economics professor, and writes for the New York Times (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/ ). He's written a lot in the past year or so on the fate of the dollar. Read his article at The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics and you will see that, concise though it is, it isn't a simple matter. Suffice it to say here that since 1973, exchange rates are no longer determined by governments, but by financial markets. People around the world buy and sell currencies on foreign exchange markets. Thus the values of those currencies are determined, to an important extent, just like stocks are on the stock market.

This means two things: First, unless you corner the market, individual transactions won't bring about boom or bust - there are just too many total transactions going on for that to be true. Second, like any financial market, confidence and perception are very important. If the dollar is, and has been, falling, the conclusion is that lots of people - not just one or a few - who are trading currencies believe that the dollar is worth less and less.

One effect of the falling dollar is a boost to the economy (which is not to say, a rosy economy, just a boost to a clearly flagging economy). Foreign investment in American assets - real estate, retail sales, American exports, financial investments - are all getting cheaper and cheaper for those foreign investors. This is good for America, to a point. If you trust George Bush (http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/idUSWBT00811620071220 ). He is a Harvard Business School graduate, after all.

That is an effect of the falling dollar. What is the cause? People around the world believe the dollar is worth less and less. So the investments represent, not unqualified signs of confidence in our economy, but also belief that the investor has found a bargain, and that bargain is in part a reflection of the desperate situation of the seller. A Chinese bank bought into an American bank, where the American bank had just recently lost billions of dollars on subprime mortgage loans (http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2007/10/16/china_bank_bids_for_bear_stearns_stake/ ). This is a relative bargain for the Chinese bank, because of the falling dollar, but the subprime crisis is also a cause of that falling dollar. Analysts and investors around the world lose confidence in the American economy, at least in the short term, when they see more and more American banks losing money.

The world just witnessed the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. Early speculation suggested either the Pakistani military, or Al-Qaeda. A quote from Cursor.org says that "Trudy Rubin reported from Islamabad that 'just about every Pakistani with whom I spoke blamed her death not on al-Qaeda, but on their own government - and the United States.'" ( www.cursor.org, Dec. 28, 2007) The Asia Times report on the same day (http://atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/IL29Df01.html ) makes it clear how both of these are true: Al Qaeda did it, BECAUSE of the U.S. and Musharraf.

Another reflection of diminishing respect for the U.S. from our fellow world citizens, a fact reflected in the falling dollar. The world does watch America.

Putting "Alien" Back Into "Inalienable Rights"

2008-03-22T09:55:00.002-06:00

[One of my op-eds at Modern Republic]

“How can Iran's peaceful nuclear program be considered in the Security Council while Iran has carried out its obligations, and cooperated to the fullest extent possible, far more than it is obliged to in accordance with its treaty obligations, namely the NPT and the Safeguard Agreement? Isn't it simply because the IAEA could not find any diversion from lawful and peaceful purposes? How could one expect the IAEA to prove a negative fact?”

So spoke H.E. Mr. Manouchehr Mottaki, Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran before the United Nations Security Council, in March of last year. Each one of us, probably, has experienced, as an individual, what Iran is experiencing, and Iraq experienced, when one follows the rules, but doesn’t gain what was expected as a consequence of playing the game by the rules. It is called the rule of law. It means that, so long as we all agree on and assent to the principles involved, we will all be treated according to those principles, and nothing else.

In the situation with Iran and their program of developing nuclear power – not nuclear weapons – one feels as if there are other rules, unspoken, a hidden agenda, operating in the background. This is exactly what the rule of law replaces. There are no other rules in play but the ones that we all agree on. There are no underlying assumptions that determine the legality of some action; the explicit, stated, agreed on principles are all that determine – and define – “legality.” Nothing else.

So, if Iran is following those rules – I am not in a position to say what those rules are, much less to say whether Iran is following them or not – then the matter is settled by definition. There is no need to dig deeper. If their was no penalty, and the running back broke the plane of the goal line while in possession of the ball, it doesn’t matter what his intent was, what his motives, his background, the fact that he fumbled on the previous play or committed a personal foul in the first quarter.

The United States of America is a great country in part because we trace our founding to documents that explicitly state the principles upon which we conduct our lives together with one another, and as a nation with other nations. If there is any truth to President Bush’s claim that ‘the terrorists’ hate us because they hate our freedom, it is the freedom defined by those documents and the principles explicated there.

Mr. Manouchehr Mottaki speaks the language of principles. They of course aren’t the same principles as our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, but they are recognized and respected principles nonetheless – our beloved documents don’t frame every and all good principles that exist. So, he claims that “in order to achieve the politically motivated and unlawful goal of depriving Iran from its inalienable right to nuclear technology, attempts have been made to manufacture evidence.” And that “the Security Council is being abused to take an unlawful, unnecessary and unjustifiable action against the peaceful nuclear program of the Islamic Republic of Iran which presents no threat to international peace and security and falls therefore outside the Council’s Charter-based mandate.” Whether or not one believes Mr. Mottaki, that is the question, but it can’t be denied that he is speaking the language of our own Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, and therefore evidence is indeed called for, and that evidence must be judged according to the principles agreed up previously. He is speaking the language of inalienable rights, law, and justice. That shouldn’t be surprising; he is speaking before the United Nations Security Council, which is itself founded on, and bound by, principles and laws. This is a language that an American can understand, because it is the language of our identity as Americans.

We drown out such voices to our own detriment. We ignore such voices to our own peril. By drowning out such voices, we risk dulling our own ears to the principles by which we live as Americans, in which we take pride, and by which we experience peace, with one another, and with other nations. It is to lose our hearing for that same language, for principles spoken by our very own fellow Americans, our neighbors, and therefore, and by definition, ourselves.

Op-Ed Archive

2008-03-22T09:51:00.003-06:00

Since there is as yet no official archive of my op-ed articles at Modern Republic, I'm archiving my previous pieces here. I'll post each separately...

Does Consciousness Move Through Space and Time?

2008-03-16T10:08:00.007-06:00

If I am riding my bicycle, and I have a pain in my knee, and am aware of that pain as my leg bends and stretches as I pedal... is my awareness of my knee also moving up and down? Does my consciousness move through space - and time?

Again, if I say to myself, as I walk with my dog Pippin on one of our favorite trails, if I say to myself: "I am here; it is now", then, a minute and a hundred paces later, I say to myself again "I am here; it is now".... did the part of me that really was aware of "here/now" in both instances, did that part of me also move a hundred paces, and grow one minute older?

You have to try this yourself before you can experience that part of yourself - your awareness - though perhaps you can assess the question logically without doing the experiment. In that case, you're like that "school" of philosophers back in the first half of the twentieth century who answered such questions by saying things like: "'Consciousness' isn't a noun to which we associate verbs of moving or aging, so the answer isn't 'yes' or 'no', but, 'It is nonsense to apply verbs of moving and aging to a concept - concepts don't move or age."

That just proves my point - we are then left asking, "Why don't concepts move or age?" Even the philosophers in that school - logical positivism - have to answer by telling us what a concept is, and how concepts differ from knees that go up and down, and bodies that move along a dirt path alongside their beloved dog.

They still have to explain what a concept is, in what sense it exists and is real, and therefore why it doesn't age or move. Even if the logical positivists don't do so - if there are any left alive - it remains for each one of us to ask, and try to answer, the same questions.

Consciousness Doesn't Last

2008-01-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

On the Amazon discussion of how to study the evolution of consciousness, a participant suggested that there is the internal approach, and the external approach. I agree with that broad distinction. The external approach, in turn, can be distinguished into several approaches - the semantic or etymological approach, the archeological approach, the geological approach, the biograhical approach.

The internal approach, in my opinion, is the most appropriate, and the most difficult. Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science is the only systematic exposition of this approach that I know of. Unfortunately, Steiner's spiritual science is also very complex and rigorous. At least the initial step is straightforward, if not easy: meditation.

I just recently had an idea: To test the interior approach against the exterior approach. One person studies the archeological evidence of a very specific, finite period of human pre-history, and another person does the same purely by meditation. Both would have to be given some preliminary data to start with - and that seems the catch. But then they would each be given one week to study, in their particular ways, and to present their basic findings.

Have you seen archeological artifacts that constitute only a very small part of a whole sculpture or building? There will be a ghostly, artist's rendition of the complete artifact, with the actual discovered fragment displayed on top of the whole, in its particular spot - like one puzzle piece highlighted in a very big puzzle. Like this.

I imagine the interior approach as providing the ideal outline of the whole; the exterior approach provides the occasional material fragments.

Op-Ed at Modern Republic

2008-01-01T11:59:00.001-07:00

I am writing a monthly op-ed for an online magazine called Modern Republic. My article can be found by clicking on "International News" on the right end of the red banner.

Check out the other articles too - including pieces on bluegrass music, Barak Obama, and separation of church and state.

Can We Remember The Future?

2007-12-26T10:33:00.000-07:00

The distinction between past and future is foundational for us westerners - maybe non-westerners, too, I don't know. We believe that the future doesn't yet exist, and the past is all there in our memory, to be accessed more or less at will, more or less completely. Let's look at this more closely.

We don't believe that we remember everything, of course, nor even most things. But we believe that what has happened, happened, and is therefore real. This is one distinction between past and future: we can say what happened, and we can't say what will happen.

But this isn't true. We can say with certainty that everyone alive today will one day die. We know the future with certainty in that regard. On the other hand, we can't say with certainty who lived in the past - that is, we can't determine every single individual who has lived, their name or location or duration.

Even in our own individual lives, the limits of our memory of our own personal lives is extremely limited. I have often thought to ask my mother about various details of my childhood, to verify those details. My mother is now in her early eighties, and she gave birth to thirteen - yes, thirteen - children. Why do I think her memory will be authoritative regarding the minutiae of my early childhood?

On the other hand, I can say with certainty that I will one day die. I can say, with a high degree of confidence, what I will be doing this evening at about 10 p.m.. I can say with a lower but still significant degree of certainty what I will be doing on Saturday morning at 10 a.m.. My future does already exist, in some sense. My future is real. I can access my future - I just did, in fact.

What does this mean?

Silence is deafening

2007-12-15T10:07:00.001-07:00

Catch two new discussions at Amazon:

"Whither Deep Ecology?"

"How do we study the evolution of consciousness?"

Human human history

2007-12-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since my last post - I've been quite wrapped up (I wouldn't say busy) with reading lots of stuff, including these three:

The Hidden World: Survival of Pagan Shamanic Themes in European Fairytales

Psychohistorical Crisis (science fiction)

Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization

Two non-fiction, one sci-fi... one common theme: the nature of history, or, how humans remember things. This has been my passion and consolation since I first read Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances. Actually, reading Barfield was a response to my own readings and studies in the history of science. Here's the short version of the story...

Back in 1986 I was recently married, with a baby on the way. I had a BS in Secondary Education, certified to teach English or Physical Science (not Physical Education, but Physical Science - a kind of basic chemistry and physics). I wasn't working in my field, and got a job offer to teach high school sciences at a small private school. I jumped at it.

The first semester of teaching, I studied more - and more efficiently - than in the entire four years I was in college. In the first few weeks of class, in every class, there was a short introduction to the science at hand - chemistry, biology, earth science. In every text book, it was the same basic story: humans had been guided by superstition for most of human history, up until around the 1600's, when it started dawning on people that you could actually observe nature, and start to understand cause and effect.

The simplicity of these stories put me on my guard. I started reading outside of the textbooks - biographies of some of the early figures in the recent history of science, like Lavoisier; some original texts, like Darwin's Origin of the Species and Galileo's writings. I was also put on guard regarding the claims of contemporary science as well. I read David Ehrenfeld's The Arrogance of Humanism, and assigned it to my senior Physics students. And a fellow science teacher at another school recommended Saving the Appearances.

From there I was directed to Immanuel Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason; and a friend gave me his copy of Phenomenology and Existentialism by Robert Solomon. When my teaching contract wasn't renewed after the second year, I took the opportunity to apply to graduate school in Philosophy. I came to Missoula to study at the University of Montana. Seven years later, with a thesis manuscript and no degree, I moved on. And am still moving on...

Hermeneutica

2007-11-12T09:44:00.000-07:00

I had another brief exchange with someone online regarding translation, interpretation, and faith. I suppose this is a live issue for anyone who evaluates the world and themselves in light of a written text, especially if that text is very old, and the product of a foreign culture.

It was in reading Saving the Appearances that hermeneutics dawned on my horizon. Reading Steiner's lectures on the various gospels deepened that perspective.

Whither thou goest, deep ecology?

2007-11-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

Canvassing the ether for the status of deep ecology, and I am initially surprised at how few recent references I've found. While in a brick and mortar Barnes and Noble a couple of nights ago, I found even fewer titles and references.

But I may be looking in the wrong places. I was reading actively in the field in the early and mid nineties, and perhaps the notion of deep ecology has morphed into topics I wouldn't recognize?

Back then I was reading The Wilderness Condition, The Natural Alien, The Idea of Wilderness, and other essays, articles, etc.. I was very enamoured of phenomenology, and lived in western Montana, studying at a University with an active environmental studies program. These interests and circumstances constituted the soup in which grew my ideas of a phenomenology of wilderness.

My writing at the time that was related to deep ecology ranged from diary entries published in camas: an environmental journal as "Turns of Mind and Weather: Six Months in Missoula" (winter 94-95 issue), to personal letters, to academic papers and thesis chapters, including what became the chapter titled "The Impossibility of Interpenetration as the Problem of the Other" in my book Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness.

Anyway, if any of my reader(s) know(s) whither deep ecology, would you let me know? Thanks.