Into the Void

“Is it not in the nature of complex social systems to go wrong, all by themselves, without external cause? Look at overpopulation, look at Calhoun’s famous model, those overcrowded colonies of rats and their malignant social pathology, all due to their own skewed behavior. Not at all, is my answer. All you have to do is find the meddler, in this case Professor Calhoun himself, and the system will put itself right. The trouble with those rats is not the innate tendency of crowded rats to go wrong, but the scientists who took them out of the world at large and put them in too small a box.”

Lewis Thomas
“On Meddling,” Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher.

If you haven’t read Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament” run out and get a copy. She is a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins and is bipolar herself.

“I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. I believe, in short, that we are equally beholden to heart and mind, and that those who have particularly passionate temperaments and questioning minds leave the world a different place for their having been there. It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy. Intensity has its costs, of course — in pain, in hastily and poorly reckoned plans, in impetuousness — but it has its advantages as well.”
Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, Author and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University
in “The Benefits of Restlessness and Jagged Edges”
NPR Morning Edition, June 6, 2005

There is a video of a speech she did about Exhuberance on YouTube that was quite inspiring. She wrote a great book about the love of life called Exuberance: The Passion for Life
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Just in case anyone is still complaining that Islamists are violent, here’s something from the KJV bible. It’s pretty clear what a good Christian is supposed to do to non-Christians.

Deuteronomy 13

6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers;
7 Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth;
8 Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him:
9 But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.
10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

I’m sorry, but I had an existential crisis last night and in a fit of Kafka-esque boredom I morphed into a centipede and ate my computer.

A few nights ago I was looking into self-hypnosis and hypnosis. Sure, I’ve had many self-hypnosis tapes and CDs over the years. Not that I’m immune to suggestion, but most of them just don’t work. Often there are glaring errors. The facilitator says the stereotypical “sleep, sleeeeeeep” so much that it is comical. The facilitator tells you what not to do, which is practically guaranteed to make you think of actually doing it.

Don’t think of an elephant.

While researching self-hypnosis, I went off on a tangent and learned about some less well-known techniques.

Ideomotor Signaling is based on the concept of a split brain. The seminal book on the topic of a split brain, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, is a must-read for anyone curious about the importance of left brain to right brain interactions. I suspect his theory was sparked by research into surgery that split the corpus collosum to prevent seizures in folks with epilepsy. The surgery had a number of interesting side effects, including what I’ll describe in the next paragraph. There are some excellent materials on split brain experiments on the Nobel Prize web site, and even a game. We love games.

The theory is that since the left half of the brain controls speech, the right half of the brain has to use other means of communication. To access information that isn’t available to the speaking side of the bicameral mind all you have to do is tell the right brain to signal its answers, perhaps by a finger tap. If Ideomotor Signalling is the force behind dowsing, magic pendulums, and ouija boards, a lot of mystics are fooling themselves.

Whether ideomotor signaling really works or not remains to be seen. According to Quackwatch, Ideomotor Action, is a well-known phenomenon that occurs so deep in the subconscious that the person experiencing it is totally unaware that their action is volitional. Often the movements are attributed to some supernatural force. Hence the spirits “talk” using the Hellboy Talking Board Ouija.

In more complex variants of ideomotor action, a person may be completely unaware that they’ve lost their objectivity. You see what you want to see and ignore the rest. This is the major flaw in religion, especially with regard to absolute morality. It is also a major flaw in the scientific method.

Essentially “Ideomotor Communication” is a modern phrase for the old concept of unconscious behavior.

Can ideomotor action be used to access information that we wish to hide from ourselves? It seems rather dangerous. We erect walls in our memories for a reason.

Continuing to surf the idea that we might want to hide information from ourselves, I came across Robert Anton Wilson’s concept of the fnord.

A fnord is a word marks any fact that the powers-that-be wish us, the great unwashed, to ignore or trivialize. After reporting an Inconvenient Truth, print the word “fnord.” Children were conditioned to feel extreme anxiety when confronted with a fnord. For the rest of their lives they will avoid sensitive issues by forgetting not only the fnords, but also the news item that preceded it. Politics, environmental issues, economics, all can be hidden in plain sight.

Of course this led to Steve Jackson’s fnord generator. Try it out.

A related concept is that of apophenia. Apophenia is the tendency to find meaning in noise. This is how we see constellations in the stars, faces on Mars, and Kaziklu Bey’s visage grinning evilly from a slice of cinnamon toast.

This would make a good premise for a game.

Apophenia is the human mind’s ability to see connections and patterns out of random noise, so I figured it would be a good title for a game in which I’m trying to make both the appearance and the rules as random as possible.

Each game is generated by a seed title, covering the appearance, soundscape, and behavior of the player, an NPC, and a swarm. You control the player with only the mouse, potentially leading, pushing, or controlling it. Each game ends when either the player or the NPC shrink into nothingness. If you have trouble understanding the symbolic value of each game, a “pretentious mode” is provided to explain the concept behind each variation.
– Noyb, author of the computer game “Apophenia.”

The Apophenia game can be downloaded from Noyb’s web page.

In order to recognize our self-image, we can no longer identify with it. In other words, we have to learn how to objectify our own mental processes.
-Matthew Flickstein, Journey to the Center
Reprinted in Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist Inspirations, edited by Josh Bartok.
www.wisdompubs.org

Photo Source – Flickr
Author *Gabisa Motonia

Neowin Giveaway >> 31 Days of the Dragon

If you haven’t heard about the HP 31 Days of the Dragon, hear about it. They’re giving away a kick-@55 computer every day for 31 days. Neowin wanted to get folks to participate so I generated an mp3 about what I’d do if I had a dragon. Which I don’t.

The first thing I thought of was Puff the Magic Dragon. Most of the folks who were around for that whiny little gem now pretend that they never puffed, or if they did, they didn’t inhale. Trust me, guys, your mom and dad – or grandma and grandpa – burned enough rope to reach Colombia and back. They already [b]had[/b] their dragon and they traded it in for an Escalade.

So then I thought of the Dragonriders of Pern. It had its moments, but all-in-all I want a dragon, not a horse with wings. If I wanted a horse with wings I’d get a Unicorn – or is that a Pegasus? Well, it would have to be the one that doesn’t need for me to be pure of heart.

How about the dragon in The Hobbit? Smog was it? No, Smaug! Jewel-encrusted underbelly and all. If I had that sucker and his treasure I could buy a laptop the size of New Jersey. Too late, that little bugger Frottage or Frodo or whatever his name was killed Smaug, took the loot, and wasted it all on half-pints. And beer. Not a bad deal, actually.

I briefly considered that Robo-dragon in Dr. No, but even as a kid it didn’t frighten me. I need something really scary.

And then I thought of it! Here’s my dragon and what I would do with it. Kneel before me!
the_lesliator.mp3

– The Lesliator

I often sit out in my car at lunchtime and read. The book I’m reading here is (still) Clarissa Pinkola Estés “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” Dr. Estés covers many psychological topics from the anthropological or mythological perspective. If she isn’t a Jungian, she’s missing a great opportunity.

At home I’m reading “Spritual Emergency” edited by Stanislav Grof and Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” I would rather be home, but not because the books are any better. I ran out of an asthma med because my GP got strange about refilling drugs from a Canadian pharmacy. I did so much albuterol last night that I am still shaking.

I am so devoid of dopamine that my concern over my breathing is little more than an intellectual exercise. Y’all know the feeling?

The quote is about creativity, spirit, the river beneath the river. Many topics in the book refer to cycles or to seasons. I wonder as I sit in the sunshine whether I take psych meds to suppress the seasons of my soul.

In archetypical lore there is the idea that if one prepares a special psychic place, then the being, the creative force, the soul source, will hear of it, sense its way to it, and inhabit that place. Whether this force is summoned by the biblical “go forth and prepare a place for the soul” or, as in the film Field of Dreams, in which a farmer hears a voice urging him to build a baseball diamond for the spirits of players past, “If you build it, they will come,” preparing a fitting place induces the great creative force to advance.
Once that great underground river finds its estuaries and branches in our psyches, our creative lives fill and empty, rise and fall in seasons just like a wild river. These cycles cause things to be made, fed, fall back, and die away, all in their right time, and over and over again.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés in “Women Who Run With the Wolves.”

“…Look, without humor we would all have committed suicide. We made fun of everything. What I’m actually saying is that that helped us remain human, even under hard conditions.”
– Holocaust survivor, quoted by Dr. Chaya Ostrower, PhD of Beit Berl College, Israel
in Humor as a defense mechanism in the Holocaust

I came across the above quote this morning while checking the Pendulum listing on dmoz.org. Holocaust humor? WHAT????

The article above is about the victims of the death camps using humor to stay sane in an inhuman, insane situation. Humor is a great coping mechanism. If it worked for people who lived in the shadow of a crematorium, it can certainly work for us.

No, there was nothing funny about the Holocaust. There is nothing funny about genocide. There is nothing funny about a thing that goes beyond hate, that stigmatizes, dehumanizes, and then brings formerly rational human beings to methodically exterminate their next-door neighbors.

“Holocaust” means “complete burning.” The word Holocaust is technically used to refer to the six million Jewish victims. The goal was to exterminate an entire race just because they weren’t Christian. Ok, well, there were other factors, but nobody had to wear an “successful” badge. They had to wear a Judenfleck.

I am misusing the word to include the three million non-Jewish victims. Feel free to comment.

My personal interest in the Holocaust focuses on the “Aktion T 4,” the Nazi euthanasia program to eliminate “life unworthy of life”. The Nazis tuned up the Death Machine on mental patients before grinding through the other 9,000,000 victims.

Nine Million. Can you even get your brain around such a number? That is like murdering the inhabitants of SIX Philadelphia, PAs. (Philadelphia population is from the Census Bureau’s State & County QuickFacts.)

“The murder of the lunatics contains the key to the Pogrom of the Jews…”
– Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
quoted in The Cynical Republic, “Haus des Eigensinns – House of maddening beauty”

I’ll be talking about this some more.

Technorati: suicide Nazi holocaust T+4+Aktion mental+illness Judenfleck

“Vocatus atque non vocatus… deus aderit
Called or not called , GOD will be present.”
– Inscription on Gravestone of Professor Dr. Carl G. Jung, Kusnacht, Switzerland
Quoted from Heaven’s Register

Have you read any Jung? Jung was a medical doctor whose father was a philospher and pastor. Jung believed that God is not “out there” but is inside us all. God is our subconscious mind! You feel deep down what is right, now don’t you?

Jung pointed out that God evolved morally over the course of biblical history. That’s right, God got better and better. He had to, to keep up with his children’s moral evolution.

Being the firstborn is a curse for a lot of reasons, and it didn’t start with that whole “Dad forgot to paint the lintels” thing.

It can be deduced from the concept of a morally evolving God that Jesus Christ was the manifestation of this evolution. the “God made flesh.” God hoped that a physical manifestation would convince the Pharisees, the NT version of the Religious Right, to evolve too. It didn’t work, though. The Pharisees, like any hierarchical structure heavenly or temporal, were notoriously inflexible. Anything the Pharisees disagreed with was a sin, Evil, abomination. As a child Jesus was almost stoned for breaking one of the old rules.

If God is within us, then the fight between good and evil is going on inside us too. In Jung’s words, “from the psychological point of view demons are nothing other than intruders from the unconscious, spontaneous irruptions of unconscious complexes into the continuity of the conscious process.”

Here’s a simplification derived from Alan Watts‘ Tribute to Carl Jung. Satan isn’t in me, it can’t be, because I am Good. The Evil and the hate must be over there in you! (That’s the non-self-aware speaking, the one with Blind Faith and no reason.)

Look in your heart. Both good and evil are right there inside your own subconscious, making you act out their presence. Like a projector you are shining your own ugly thoughts onto the blank screens of the A-theists. This is the psychology of evil.

And until you discover your self-contradictions, you will always hate anyone who disagrees with you.

As for me, I’m not afraid of the guru. I’m afraid of the people who threaten me with eternal torture in his name.