Paper Trail

December

On My Night Stand

• McSweeney's #24
• The Mythic Tarot-Sharman-Burke, Greene
• The Mythic Image-Joseph Campbell
• Discovering The Mind-Walter Kaufmann
• The Hero With A Thousand Faces-Joseph Campbell
• The Stars-H.A. Rey
• Metamorphoses-Ovid, trans Rolfe Humphries
• Vacation-Deb Olin Unferth
• Remainder­-Tom McCarthy
• I Am A Strange Loop-Douglas Hofstadter
• A New Earth-Eckhart Tolle
• Tarot and the Journey of the Hero-H. Banzhaf
• Everything That Rises-Lawrence Weschler
• Reading Like A Writer-Francine Prose
• Deep Economy-Bill McKibben
• The Shape of Things To Come-Greil Marcus
• Black Elk Speaks-Neihardt
• Your Code Name Is Jonah-Edward Packard
• Parzival-Eschenbach
• D'Aularies' Book of Greek Myths

Actively Reading

• The Mythic Tarot-Sharman-Burke, Greene
• A New Earth-Eckhart Tolle
• Tarot and the Journey of the Hero-H. Banzhaf
• D'Aularies' Book of Greek Myths
• Parzival-Eschenbach
• I Am A Strange Loop-Douglas Hofstadter
• Everything That Rises-Lawrence Weschler

Listening To

• The Mirror Conspiracy-Thievery Corporation
• Presence-Led Zeppelin
• The Essential Clash
• Cosmic Game-Thievery Corporation
• A Charlie Brown Christmas
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• Radio Retaliation-Thievery Corporation

Viewed:

• The Truman Show
• National Treasure
• National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets
• Xanadu
• In Search of Myths & Heroes
• Hancock
• The Da Vinci Code
• Lost (Season four)
• Wholphin # 7
• Kung Fu Panda
• Wall-E
• Short Circuit
• Indian Jones and the Last Crusade
• American Outrage-(from Wholphin #5)
• It's A Wonderful Life
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• Tin Man
• The Black Hole
• I, Robot
• I Am Legend

2008: opening the hatch

I can identify with John Locke.  I want to be special.  I want to do something important.  I want to believe that I'm the hero.  But, in truth, all I do is "push the button".

This has been a pretty strange year for me and those around me.  What was the point?  I think the following image sums it up pretty well.  It was a year of backsliding caused by our perception of lack: (and with backsliding we receive separation as opposed to unity.)

I suppose that I've determined that the most important thing that I do is this.  This chronicle of my exploration has very little ego involved.  Here I seek truth not recognition.  I have no idea if anyone reads this, and at this point, don't know if I care.  (I signed up for google analytics at one point, but then felt like Big Brother and refused to "watch".)  I do this, my blog, because I feel I must, not because of the promise of some future reward.  When I started "pushing the button" I was convinced that the island would somehow reward me for my selfless work, but alas, I still stock magazines, deliver Chinese food, and will likely be fruitless in my application to the creative writing program I'm applying to next month.

I think I'm o.k. with this.  After I send in my submission, I will likely share it with you.  I have a feeling that you will "get it".  This year for me has been about the preparation for opening my heart.  That is, transcending "the gut" Chakra and moving up to the heart, to La Vita Nuova, The New Earth. 

I'm back to robots and hearts again.  I understand my fascination w/ the moon and space.  I've made peace with 2008 and think I understand "its purpose".  I'm ready to embrace the term "Synchromystic"--I've done this my whole life.  I've always read "the stars" for meaning.  So synchromystic?  Yes.  cinemalchemist?  You bet!

Call me DJ Ishmael.  I'm ready to follow Ahab into the whale.

Here is a description of "the hatch" (I know I'm loosely mixing a couple of Lost ideas together) from Joseph Campbell's The Mythic Image:

Just below this lotus of the heart there is pictured a lesser [octagonal], uninscribed lotus, at about the level of the solar plexus, supporting on a jeweled altar an image of the Wish-Fulfilling Tree.  For it is here that the first intimations are heard of the sound OM in the Silence, and that sound itself is the Wish-Fulfilling Tree.  Once heard, it can be rediscovered everywhere and no longer do we have to seek  our good.  It is here-within-and through all things, all space.  We can now give up our struggle for achievement, for love and power and the good, and may rest in peace.

Leap of Faith

I feel like we have returned to the edge.  Jumping might be the best thing for us, but first we have to let go:

Dory He says it's time to let go! Everything's gonna be all right!

Marlin How do you know!? How do you know something bad isn't gonna happen?

Dory I don't!

Of course maybe we need to encounter our shadow before we are ready?  Maybe we need a crisis to break through to our unconscious self?  We need to face the Devil?

I've been thinking about jumpers.  I think we are on the ledge again.  See Jake for more.

Dory Here comes a big one--whooooooo! Come on, you gotta try this!

Marlin Would you just stop it!?

Dory Why? What's wrong?

Marlin We're in a whale! Don't you get it!?

Dory A whale?

Marlin A whale! 'Cause you had to ask for help! And now we're stuck here!

Dory Wow. A whale. You know I speak whale.

Marlin No, you're insane! You can't speak whale! I have to get out! I have to find my son! I have to tell him how old sea turtles are!

Dory Woo-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-hoo! Hey. You okay?There, there. It's all right. It'll be okay.

Marlin No. No, it won't.

Dory Sure it will, you'll see.

celebrate

-maenad

The Devil

strength

Paper Trail

November

On My Night Stand

• McSweeney's #24
• The Mythic Tarot-Sharman-Burke, Greene
• The Mythic Image-Joseph Campbell
• Discovering The Mind-Walter Kaufmann
• The Hero With A Thousand Faces-Joseph Campbell
• The Stars-H.A. Rey
• Metamorphoses-Ovid, trans Rolfe Humphries
• Vacation-Deb Olin Unferth
• Remainder­-Tom McCarthy
• I Am A Strange Loop-Douglas Hofstadter
• A New Earth-Eckhart Tolle
• Tarot and the Journey of the Hero-H. Banzhaf
• The Inner Reaches of Outer Space-J. Campbell
• Ways Of Seeing-John Berger
• Everything That Rises-Lawrence Weschler

Borrowed/Bought

• Akira
• Lost (season one)
• Speaking In Tongues-The Talking Heads
• Escape to Witch Mountain
• Tron
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Dark City
• The City Of Lost Children
• A.I.

Returned

• Valis-Philip K. Dick
• Speaking In Tongues-The Talking Heads
• The Western Mysteries-David Allen Hulse
• Akira
• Ways Of Seeing-John Berger
• Tron
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Dark City

Actively Reading

• I Am A Strange Loop-Douglas Hofstadter
• The Mythic Tarot-Sharman-Burke, Greene
• A New Earth-Eckhart Tolle
• Tarot and the Journey of the Hero-H. Banzhaf
• The Inner Reaches of Outer Space-J. Campbell
• The Stars-H.A. Rey

Listening To

• Loyalty To Loyalty-Cold War Kids
• The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan-Bob Dylan
• Twin Peaks
• Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust-Sigur Rós
• The Mirror Conspiracy-Thievery Corporation
• Narrow Stairs-Death Cab For Cutie
• The Cosmic Game-Thievery Corporation

Viewed:

• Lost (Season One) (partially)
• Robots
• Escape to Witch Mountain
• Tron
• Dark City
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Iniana Jones and the Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull
• The Cat From Outer Space
• The Truman Show
• The Matrix
• Bolt

Culture:

• Michael Pollan
• Jeremy Enigk

 

more light

thanks (the matrix has you. . .)

Thanksgiving 
from a Native Point of View

By Jacqueline Keeler

Thanksgiving is the truly American holiday, celebrating the romantic history of arrival in the New World and cooperation with its inhabitants. For a Native American, the story is a much less happy one -- yet PNS commentator Jacqueline Keeler finds some occasion for hope. Keeler, a member of the Dineh (Navaho) Nation and the Yankton Dakota Sioux works with the American Indian Child Resource Center in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in Winds of Change, an American Indian journal.

I celebrate the holiday of Thanksgiving. This may surprise those people who wonder what Native Americans think of this official U.S. celebration of the survival of early arrivals in a European invasion that culminated in the death of 10 to 30 million native people. Thanksgiving to me has never been about Pilgrims. When I was six, my mother, a woman of the Dineh nation, told my sister and me not to sing "Land of the Pilgrim's pride" in "America the Beautiful." Our people, she said, had been here much longer and taken much better care of the land. We were to sing "Land of the Indian's pride" instead.

I was proud to sing the new lyrics in school, but I sang softly. It was enough for me to know the difference. At six, I felt I had learned something very important. As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some "inside" knowledge of what really happened when those poor tired masses came to our homes. When the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, they were poor and hungry -- half of them died within a few months from disease and hunger. When Squanto, a Wampanoag man, found them, they were in a pitiful state. He spoke English, having traveled to Europe, and took pity on them. Their English crops had failed. The native people fed them through the winter and taught them how to grow their food. These were not merely "friendly Indians." They had already experienced European slave traders raiding their villages for a hundred years or so, and they were wary -- but it was their way to give freely to those who had nothing. Among many of our peoples, showing that you can give without holding back is the way to earn respect. Among the Dakota, my father's people, they say, when asked to give, "Are we not Dakota and alive?" It was believed that by giving there would be enough for all -- the exact opposite of the system we live in

To the Pilgrims, and most English and European peoples, the Wampanoags were heathens, and of the Devil. They saw Squanto not as an equal but as an instrument of their God to help his chosen people, themselves.

Since that initial sharing, Native American food has spread around the world. Nearly 70 percent of all crops grown today were originally cultivated by Native American peoples. I sometimes wonder what they ate in Europe before they met us. Spaghetti without tomatoes? Meat and potatoes without potatoes? And at the "first Thanksgiving" the Wampanoags provided most of the food -- and signed a treaty granting Pilgrims the right to the land at Plymouth, the real reason for the first Thanksgiving. What did the Europeans give in return? Within 20 years European disease and treachery had decimated the Wampanoags. Most diseases then came from animals that Europeans had domesticated. Cowpox from cows led to smallpox, one of the great killers of our people, spread through gifts of blankets used by infected Europeans. Some estimate that diseases accounted for a death toll reaching 90 percent in some Native American communities.

By 1623, Mather the elder, a Pilgrim leader, was giving thanks to his God for destroying the heathen savages to make way "for a better growth," meaning his people. In stories told by the Dakota people, an evil person always keeps his or her heart in a secret place separate from the body. The hero must find that secret place and destroy the heart in order to stop the evil. I see, in the "First Thanksgiving" story, a hidden Pilgrim heart. The story of that heart is the real tale than needs to be told. What did it hold? Bigotry, hatred, greed, self-righteousness? We have seen the evil that it caused in the 350 years since. Genocide, environmental devastation, poverty, world wars, racism. Where is the hero who will destroy that heart of evil? I believe it must be each of us. Indeed, when I give thanks this Thursday and I cook my native food, I will be thinking of this hidden heart and how my ancestors survived the evil it caused. Because if we can survive, with our ability to share and to give intact, then the evil and the good will that met that Thanksgiving day in the land of the Wampanoag will have come full circle. And the healing can begin.

JC and the Moon

Jake has been talking about JCs and the moon.  The Moon was my focal point last year, and now this obsession can be see for what it was:

However, the work has still not been completed. Although the monster has been overcome, and the imprisoned soul freed, the hero still has the difficult return ahead.  He or she must find the way out and should not lose the way in the labyrinth of the underworld. Insidious dangers lurk on this return route and become traps for great failed heros (191-192).

The Moon card is frequently misunderstood today because we primarily connect the moon with romantic images. But here it means darkness, night, and the deep exploration of the inner spaces [emphasis mine] (195).

As long as the hero is fascinated by the light side of his anima, the star woman, he will also remain enslaved to her dark aspect. This dark aspect has pushed itself in front of the sun here as the moon. Only when the hero recognizes that the actual goal, the sun (as a symbols[sic] of the self), lies behind this darkness, can he escape from the labyrinth, or the enchanted woods (197).

In the myths of many peoples, including the Upanishads of India, the moon is considered the gateway to the heavenly world. To the same extent that goal lies behind Saturn's threshold, the most enriching and delightful experiences that can be achieved lie behind the fear.  This is why Saturnian rituals, such as fasting, silence, and aloneness, belong to all religions as the the transitional rituals that help the human being cross this threshold. . . The task here is to not lose heart, not to become discouraged by the darkness, but to follow the longing and sincerely take the path of fear with courage and trust in order to reach what is authentic behind it (199-200).

The journey through the night, diving into the depths of the unconscious, has led the hero to an enormous expansion of consciousness. The danger of losing everything at the last moment through a greedy maneuver by the ego, through betrayal of megalomania, is great (202).

Hajo Banzhaf, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1976).

In the context of these symbolic assignments, the cycle of a single lunar month has been compared, by analogy, to the term of a human lifetime, with the fifteenth night, which is of the moon become full, equated with the human adult's thirty-fifth year (in the reckoning of three-score and ten as the human norm).  On that very special evening there is a moment when the rising moon, having just emerged on the horizon, is directly faced across the world, from the opposite horizon, by the setting sun. Certain months of the year and the two, at this perfectly balanced moment, are of equal light and the same size. By analogy, the confrontation has been likened to that in the midmoment of a lifetime when the light of consciousness reflected in the mind may be recognized, either suddenly or gradually, as identical with that typified metaphorically as of the sun.  Whereupon, if the witness is prepared, there ensues a transfer of self-identification from the temporal, reflecting body to the sunlike, eviternal source, and one then knows oneself as consubstantial with what is of no time or place but universal and beyond death, yet incarnate in all beings everywhere and forever; so that as we again may read in the Upanishad: tat tvam asi, "though art that."

This is the realization connoted in the metaphor of the Virgin Birth, when in the mind and heart the ideal is conceived of a life lived, not for the primary economic and biological ends of survival, progeny, prosperity, and a little fun, but to a metaphysical end, intending values transcendent of historical survival (59).

Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. (Tornoto, St James Press: 1986).

JB responds. . .

The Key of Dreams by Magritte 1898-1967

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight. The Surrealist painter Magritte commented on this always-present gap between words and seeing in a painting called The Key of Dreams.

The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe (7-8). . .

Today we see art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.

This difference can be illustrated in terms of what was thought of perspective. The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centres everything on the eye of the beholder.  It is like a beam from a lighthouse --only instead of light travelling outwards, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.

According to the convention of perspective there is no visual reciprocity. There is no need for God to situate himself in relation to others: he is himself the situation. The inherent contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.

After the invention of the camera this contradiction gradually became apparent (16-17).

. . . Every drawing or painting that used perspective proposed to the spectator that he was the unique centre of the world. The camera -- and more particularly the movie camera -- demonstrated that there was no centre.

from John Berger's: Ways of Seeing. Penguin Books, London: 1972.

"God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

~Alain de Lille

ET responds. . .

I recently had to back a friend down off the wall.  He was addicted to reality.  I think I actually said something to the effect that one can find more "reality" in fiction--that fiction is more real than reality, and that it would be beneficial to stop watching news and start watching movies or reading literature.

Because of the dualistic nature of our "reality" and because some films are able to contain the entire macrocosm of life, our entire reality on film, i.e. Tron, Dark City, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Lost, I don't believe our world is all that "real".  It is a construct with one story that we see resonating in everything.  

The Big Bang?  That is what my wife and I did to create life.  The singularity was the ovum into which my "comet" collided brining it life. These things fused, became Isis, from one many.  The one cell became an entire universe. The first cell is is.  It is life, but inside my wife it was "the other".  It was a parasite feeding on her.  It was alien. To observe this new life was like traveling to "outer space".  The equipment used to hear this alien life-form tickled one in a sci-fi sort of way.  The images reminded one of shifting galaxies in space.  Hopefully this "other" will be wanted and loved.  One of the most insane things we do as a species is creating unwanted, unloved life.  We are lazy, selfish and insane. (maya/dukkha/sin)

Where else is the "other" manifested?  In the past "the other" was female, non-English (Irish, Jewish, etc.), black, Mexican, Middle Eastern(-they still very much are other), but who are these others who have recently shown their power in their choice in a new President resulting in what could be a whole new order? Something that still blows my mind, but is obviously true, is that normal America does not understand (thus condone) homosexuality. And we fear that which we don't understand. You are "the other" Michael!  You are the alien that is invading our world.

I've only been "the other" a few times, and it was a usually  situation I could control.  There was a few places in Seattle that I could go to and be the minority, but when I wanted to leave and come back to the majority culture, I could. At a class at Seattle Central Community College, I had to eat crow for an hour a day for a quarter.  The instructor held "me" (white, anglo-saxon, protestant-heritage, heterosexual) up and showed the class my privilege.  I didn't think I was privileged. I didn't have any money and was working two jobs, but I was, and received all kinds of cultural benefits that I didn't acknowledge.

What I'm saying here folks, is that the best model to understand our "reality" is Literature.  We are living in a construct, and "the writer" employs metaphor.  The "aliens" is a concept loaded with meaning.  I'm being "invaded" right now!  This is the theme in my life.  The things I'm reading though have to do with the brain, the mind, the self, and consciousness.  Yet, the fiction I'm choosing is filled with "aliens." (What would Freud say about the Richard Dreyfuss character in Close Encounters?  Is this film about literal aliens, or a man who has an affair and leaves his family?)

It really wasn't my intention to have quite so much introduction here, but oh well.  I wanted to share Eckhart Tolle's take on "space" as one more response to "the aliens."

The inspiration for the title of this book came from a Bible prophecy that seems more applicable now than at any other time in human history. It occurs in both the Old and the New Testament and speaks of the collapse of the existing world order and the arising of "a new heaven and a new earth." We need to understand here that heaven is not a location but refers to the inner realm of consciousness. This is the esoteric meaning of the word, and this is also its meaning in the teachings of Jesus. Earth, on the other hand, is the outer manifestation in form, which is always a reflection of the inner. Collective human consciousness and life on our planet are intrinsically connected. "A new heaven" is the emergence of a transformed state of human consciousness, and "a new earth" is its reflection in the physical realm. Since human life and human consciousness are intrinsically one with the life of the planet, as the old consciousness dissolves, there bound to be synchronistic geographic and climatic natural upheavals in many parts of the planet, some of which we are witnessing now (23).

from Eckhart Tolle's: A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. Plume, NY: 2005