the will to power

and if you say this life ain't good enough
I would give my world to lift you up
I could change my life to better suit your mood...
~ smooth / supernatural ~

The barbarian babies are wholly gratuitous. Weird, no? Just ignore them if you can. The book (actually titled Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917) says, on page 156: Scientific racism in the United States became largely 'a spectacle of immigrants of one decade condemning to everlasting inferiority the immigrants of a later decade.' What imperialism was to anthropology, in short, immigration was to American eugenics. The so-called new immigrants from places like Greece, Russia, Poland, and Italy captivated scholarly attention as scientists now set out to survey, quantify, and assess what one eugenicist referred to as 'the great strains of human protoplasm... coursing through the country.' The book showed up today in my Amazon recommendations. Hmmm. On second thought, maybe the collaborative filtering technology that enables those recommendations has captured something that -- far from being "wholly gratuitous" -- is bang-on relevant to the current discussion. So-called "negative eugenics" was (and still is) the attempt to limit the procreation of the "unfit" -- there's that nefarious social-Darwinist idea again (see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). On the other hand, "positive eugenics" was (and is) the encouragement of procreation by the fittest. Only who decides what constitutes "fit"? Abraham Maslow thought he was as good a judge as any. Did his hyper-awareness that he was a Jew play into this? I strongly suspect so. Maslow had good reason to be hyper-aware of how antisemitic discrimination was hampering his professional advancement. It did... until 1935, when he was given a plum post-doctoral post at Columbia under the aegis of Edward L. Thorndike, a prominent eugenicist of the day. This bit is from one of the best histories of eugenics available, hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory -- a highly knowledgeable source, since it was once the focal point of eugenics "research" in the United States. Eugenics also had the support of leaders in academia. E.L. Thorndike and Leta Hollingworth popularized eugenics to generations of prospective classroom teachers. Using flawed racial interpretations of the intelligence test data after the First World War, psychometricians such as Carl Brigham and Robert Yerkes added to eugenics' unjustified luster in the public eye. At the same time, the popular authors Henry H. Goddard and Edward A. Wiggam recommended policies of controlled breeding for American citizens. Traveling across the country with lantern-slide presentations, they warned of a "rising tide of feeblemindedness" and demanded a "new decalogue of science" – a modern ten commandments based upon eugenic principles. ~ from Eugenics Popularization Steve Selden, University of Maryland It was within this historical context that Thornike invited Maslow to join in a research project called "Human Nature and the Social Order." (source: Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow, E. Hoffman, ed., Sage, 1996, p. 4). Although nothing I can find in the published literature about Maslow talks about any connection with eugenics, consider the name of that project carefully. Precisely what aspects of "human nature" had it set out to define? Then consider the following clip from the same Cold Spring Harbor page that mentions Thorndike, above. Eugenic ideology was deeply embedded in American popular culture during the 1920s and 1930s. For example, on Saturday night, high school students might go to the cinema to see "The Black Stork" – a film that supported eugenic sterilization. In church on Sunday, they might listen to a sermon selected for an award by the American Eugenics Society – learning that human improvement required marriages of society's "best" with the "best." The notion of breeding the best to the best returns us to the concept of "positive eugenics" -- and ultimately, to the question of what it was that so deeply motivated Maslow's later pursuit of what he called "eupsychian society" -- the social context for encouraging, achieving and sustaining the top level of his hierarchy of needs: self-actualization. As Maslow defines it, Eupsychia refers to "the culture that would be generated by one thousand self-actualizing people on some sheltered island where they would not be interfered with." ~ from The Third Force: The Psychology of Abraham Maslow by Frank G. Goble. The Maslow quote is from New Knowledge in Human Values Harper & Row, New York, 1959 And as these would be very special people indeed, they would breed -- that being the main idea -- a very special race. One could almost say a master race. But why master race? What did Maslow's utopian ideas about Eupsychia have to do with such a concept? The answer lies in his longstanding interest in dominance. Let's briefly review some of Maslow's publications... 1936 The role of dominance in the social and sexual behavior of infra-human primates 1. Observations at Vilas Park Zoo. Jour. Genetic Psychol., 48: 261-277. (With Sydney Flanzbaum) II. An experimental determination of the dominance behavior syndrome. Jour. Genetic Psychol., 48: 278-309. Reprinted in Dennis, W. (Ed.), Readings in General Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1949). 1937 Dominance-feeling, behavior and status. Psychological Review, 44: 404-29. 1939 Dominance-feeling, personality and social behavior in women. Jour. Social Psychol., 10: 3-39. 1940 Dominance-quality and social behavior in infra-human primates. Jour. Social Psychol., 11: 313-24. A test for dominance-feeling (self-esteem) in college women. Jour. Social Psychol., 12:255-70. 1942 Self-esteem (dominance-feeling) and sexuality in women. Jour. Social Psychol. 16, 259-94. Reprinted in M. DeMartino (Ed.), Sexual Behavior and Personality Characteristics (New York: Citadel Press, 1963). 1960 (With H. Rand and S. Newman.) Some parallels between the dominance and sexual behavior of monkeys and the fantasies of patients in psychotherapy. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1960, 131, 202-212. Reprinted in M. DeMartino (Ed.), Sexual Behavior and Personality Characteristics (New York: Citadel Press, 1963). Note that all but the last of these eight papers were published during the period when the Third Reich was, in fact, attempting to build a master race through positive eugenics -- encouraging "pure" Germanic/Nordic human breeding, and thus Aryan dominance; and through negative eugenics -- eliminating Jews. Given his background with Thorndike, and the deeply eugenic tenor of the zeitgeist, how could Maslow have been unaware of the ironic parallels between a "eupsychian" model of society and the Aryan "utopia" that was, at the same moment, under construction? It's a leading question, to be sure, but let's see where it might lead. Here's Frank Goble again in his Third Force biography: ...Abraham Maslow was the only Jewish boy in a non-Jewish Brooklyn suburb. He has said it was a little like being the first Negro in an all-white school. The "third force" is a reference to how Maslow's psychology was often characterized: an alternative to both behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Behaviorism we can dispense with. Harlow's work had already delivered the coup de grace -- and recall that Maslow was Harlow's first grad student. Psychoanalysis isn't quite so easy. There were certainly aspects of Freud's ever-evolving work that ranged from the questionable to the absurd. Instinctual drives, the Oedipus complex, penis envy -- all have since been jettisoned from many (and there are many many) flavors of current psychoanalytic theory. Maslow's take way back when, however, was that psychoanalysis was too negative. Why dwell on the dark side of human existence? Why not look instead to human potential -- which became the name of a popular movement he was instrumental in kicking off. This brings us back around to the main theme of Mystic Bourgeoisie: how a world from which the shadows have been banished quickly becomes a breeding ground for all the skeletons in the historical closet. Why look at hidden motives and the darker aspects of the human mind? The simple answer lies in the evidence of what the human mind is capable of dreaming -- and turning into horrific realities, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust. Both of which involved, very specifically, the Jews. In The Third Force, Goble writes: "Freud believed that man was in constant conflict with himself and society." Is it possible that Maslow fit the bill in this respect? Could Abe perhaps have used a bit of psychoanalysis himself? Is it possible that he suffered from a form of closet antisemitism? Before asking whether such a thing exists, consider the following from Identity and Freedom: Mapping Nationalism and Social Criticism in Twentieth-Century Lithuania by Leonidas Donskis. The clip is from page 114... Noteworthy is the fact that even Jewish self-hatred, that is, Jewish antisemitism, so aptly described by the German Jewish writer Theodor Lessing and then plausibly reinterpreted by Isaiah Berlin, appears to have been a Central European phenomenon, which stressed the failure of many talented Jews to liberate themselves from antisemitic stereotyping deeply embedded in gentile societies. Jewish self-hatred also sprang from their acceptance of the modes of discourse and the images of societal life full of modern antisemitic references, innuendoes, and cliches. Thus, the modernity of antisemitism has acquired its plane in the philosophy of history. It is especially true of a sinister tendency of nineteenth-century consciousness imposed by gentile societies on some emancipated European Jews, namely, the propensity to personify socio-political reality and its major processes -- such as scientific, technological, and religious "rationalisations" of the modern world -- and then project them onto the most familiar and recognisable idiom of otherness, that is, the Jews. Exactly the same might be said about the propensity to refer to the Jews as "rootless," "immoral," "profit-calculating," "insensitive," "incapable of patriotism," "alien and hostile to the modern intellectual and moral sensibilities," "devoid of aesthetic sense," and the like. At this point, suffice it to recall Karl Marx, Walther Rathenau, Arthur Trebitsch, Otto Weininger, and, in a way, even Ludwig Wittgenstein.(*24) We could also recall this strange phenomenon -- the very triumph of antisemitism and of the most inhumane and ugly facet of modernity -- as widespread in inter-war Poland, as depicted in the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. *24 note (p. 119): For more on Wittgenstein's idea that Jews can only interpret the world, never producing anything original and creative, and on his comparisons of Mendelssohn and Brahms at this point, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For more on the phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred, see Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, MD, & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Of the last, the famed novelist Chaim Potok wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer: "Jewish Self-Hatred has all the qualities of a master work by a seminal mind. It is a contribution of the first rank and should be regarded as one of the finest studies we are likely to see for a long time of a remarkable and sobering cultural phenomenon." Changing gears for a moment, let's take a look at one of Maslow's formative influences: Alfred Adler. (We'll have cause to return to Adler's notion of the "guiding fiction" in a later unpacking of narcissistic personality disorder.) Influenced by the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger, Adler held that individuals were not always guided in their actions by reality. They were also guided by fictions, or what they believe to be true, though these beliefs are largely unconscious (Vaihinger 1925). These ideas formed the basis of Adler's concept of the final goal. The final goal is a fictional creation of the individual -- an imagined ideal situation of perfection, completion, or overcoming. Movement toward the final goal is motivated by a striving to overcome the feelings of inferiority. Although the final goal represents a subjective, fictional view of the future, it is what guides the person in the present. In an active, courageous individual possessing a strong feeling of community, the striving toward the final goal to overcome inferiority feelings may be expressed as a life-long movement toward optimal development -- with full realization that there is no end point to this striving. This is quite similar to Abraham Maslow's view of individuals striving toward self actualization -- toward the full realization of their potential (Maslow 1970). ~ from Classical Adlerian Theory and Practice by Henry T. Stein, Ph.D. and Martha E. Edwards, Ph.D. The following is Maslow's discussion of self-esteem from the 1943 paper that first introduced his notion of a hierarchy of needs: A Theory of Human Motivation (York University Classics in the History of Psychology, originally published in Psychological Review, 50, 370-396). This paper is also the source referenced in the Wikipedia article on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. The footnote links are to the York University site. Page number references are to the article in Psychological Review. The esteem needs. -- All people in our society (with a few pathological exceptions) have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, (usually) high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. By firmly based self-esteem, we mean that which is soundly based upon real capacity, achievement and respect from others. These needs may be classified into two subsidiary sets. These are, first, the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom.[5] Secondly, we have what [p. 382] we may call the desire for reputation or prestige (defining it as respect or esteem from other people), recognition, attention, importance or appreciation.[6] These needs have been relatively stressed by Alfred Adler and his followers, and have been relatively neglected by Freud and the psychoanalysts. More and more today however there is appearing widespread appreciation of their central importance. Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability and adequacy of being useful and necessary in the world. But thwarting of these needs produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness and of helplessness. These feelings in turn give rise to either basic discouragement or else compensatory or neurotic trends. An appreciation of the necessity of basic self-confidence and an understanding of how helpless people are without it, can be easily gained from a study of severe traumatic neurosis (8).[7] Note that the reference to Adler is anything but en passant. In the opening paragraph of the Acknowledgments to The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, author Heinz Ansbacher writes: Professor A. H. Maslow gave the first and most sustained stimulation by concurring with us in the need for a comprehensive book on the psychology of Alfred Adler, by urging us to embark upon such an enterprise, and by supporting us throughout the years with his continued interest. Maslow was strongly influenced by Alfred Adler's work, which remains largely unknown or incompletely understood to this day -- not least because it was so poorly organized and conveyed by old AA himself. what's it all about... Alfie?		The Drive for Self: Alfred Adler and the Founding of Individual Psychology The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred "In 1965, a young man named Daniel Burros was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan demonstration in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was a skinhead, a KKK Grand Dragon, a high-ranking member of the Nazi Party and a Jew. When the New York Times exposed his Jewish identity in a front-page article, Burros put a bullet through his head." ~Publishers Weekly winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival
But understanding where Adler was coming from is crucial to any deep critique of Maslow. p. 111: "Much of our view of the enhancement of the self-esteem as the guiding fiction is included in Nietzsche's "will to power" and "will to seem." ... We wish to point out the absolute primacy of the will to power, a guiding fiction which asserts itself the more forcibly and is developed the earlier, often precipitously, the stronger the inferiority feeling of the organically inferior child comes to the foreground." p. 244: "The actual form of expression and the deepening of this guiding thought could also be designated as will to power (Nietzsche)." from The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler by Heinz Ansbacher The expressionist painter Edvard Munch (1864-1944) is reputed to have said (I still need to suss out where; send mail if you know; must've been toward the end of his life -- I wouldn't have guessed he was contemporaneous with Maslow): Alfred Adler translated Nietzsche's philosophical idea of "will to power" into the psychological concept of self-actualization. Thus, Nietzschean thought forms the foundation for and permeates Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology, Abraham Maslow's Humanistic Biology [sic], Carl Rogers's Person-Centered Psychology, and has influenced many other psychological ideas and systems. ... Alfred Adler was the first psychologist to borrow directly from Nietzsche, making numerous references to the philosopher throughout his works. Adler took Nietzsche's idea of "will to power" and transformed it into the psychological concept of self-actualization, in which an individual strives to realize his potential. Nietzsche claimed (somewhere; to his sister, I believe; I need to track this one down too) that he was pained by charges that he was antisemitic. But judge for yourself from this passage of The Antichrist... Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously -- that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less -- what did it matter? In The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939, John Carey, Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, writes of the modernist literary elite's withering contempt for humanity at large (p. 12)... The old, the sick and the suffering suggest themselves as particularly ripe for extermination. Nietzsche affirms that 'the great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.' He blames the corruption of the European races on the preservation of sick and suffering specimens. The breeding of the future master race will entail, he warns, the 'annihilation of millions of failures.' This leads Carey into a discussion of the eugenics movement.... As in so much else, Nietzsche was the trendsetter in this area of early twentieth-century progressive thought. In The Will to Power he contemplates the establishment of 'international racial unions' whose task will be to rear a master race -- a new 'tremendous aristocracy' in which 'the will of philosophical men of power and artist tyrants will be made to endure for millennia.' Meanwhile, there are certain people, such as chronic invalids and neurasthenics, for whom begetting a child should be made a crime. In numerous cases society ought to prevent procreation by the most rigorous means, including, if necessary, sterilization. The prohibition of life to decadents is, Nietzsche urges, vital.

"Part of the process here is an experiential-educational one in which we help the patient become aware of what he has been experiencing without having been aware of it."

~ from Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
Abraham H. Maslow

swan dive

Swan is a porn star. Rightly so. When these pictures were taken, she was maybe 19, but I'm guessing. From what I've been able to gather, she's a hairdresser from Southern California. I've tried to gather what I can about her, because she drives me crazy. She's one of the most beautiful women I've ever laid eyes on. And I can't have her, can't touch her, can't even send her email. If I could, what would I say? Swan, I love you. I know you're a lesbian, not into men, but that's OK with me. Lame. No, I wouldn't say that. Maybe, if I had her address, I wouldn't write to her at all. I'd be admitting what a dirty old man I am. Or maybe I'd say, I love how you make love to the camera, how you know thousands of men are masturbating to your photos, and you like that they are, that you're helping them to come. But no, let me speak for myself here. I love how you represent irreducible desire. Swan and Tara seem to love each other. Maybe this is just a titillating backstory, but somehow I don't think so. Look at them together. Look at how tenderly they touch. Abraham Maslow would have loved Swan. In a manner of speaking. Because what he was most interested in early on was social dominance -- which he equated with "self-esteem" -- especially in young women. Ah Abe. You were so transparent, meeting with all those foxy coeds in your office, searching for the elusive "self-actualizers." Did you think, like so many before you and after, that they would actualize you, magically make you more real? Questions of a thousand dreams, a thousand ships, a thousand and one nights of stories told to keep the game afoot, postpone the inevitable. and I'm conquered in a car seat not a thing that I... can do. So sang Van Morrison on Astral Weeks, way up on (way up on) Cyprus Av...enue. Back before he lost it and became the passably devilish darling of the easy listening Anglo-Celtic lite rock set, coal-black black-Irish blues reduced to emotional cliché. How white of you, Van. Back in the days when love meant something and was actually dangerous. Remember them? Sic transit G-L-O-R-I-A mundi. All this New Age bullshit isn't wrong because, as so many Christian books and websites rail, it sidelines the God of our fathers. It's wrong because it devalues whatever humanity we've got. In its smarmy self-convinced insistence on spiritualizing life, this brand of pussyfooting back-door grandiosity, with all its gnostic posturing and swooning over Nature, in the end denatures what it seeks to sanctify. So let's not talk about relationships. Let's talk about sex. Let's not talk about "healthy narcissism" and getting your needs met. Let's talk about the humility that comes for free with being what we are, without any need to pretty it up with hearts and flowers and breathy whispers about Truth and Beauty. Maybe what I'd say to Swan is simply thanks for playing with the camera like that. Thanks for helping me remember, for putting images in my head I couldn't imagine without you. Something about vulnerability as power. Something about baseline straightahead. Call me a fool, call me naive, but when you crook your finger like that, baby, you just knock me out.

a circle jerk of mutual self-adoration

Here once again is Abraham Maslow, as quoted by Edward Hoffman in The Right To Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow (1988). If we want to answer the question, how tall can the human species grow, then obviously it is well to pick out the ones who are already tallest and study them. If we want to know how fast a human being can run, then it is no use to average out the speed of the population: it is far better to collect Olympic gold medal winners and see how well they can do. If we want to know the possibilities for spiritual growth, value growth, or moral development in human beings, then I maintain that we can learn most by studying our moral, ethical or saintly people. The problem here, of course, is that there are objective metrics for height and speed, and no such consensually agreed methods for measuring morality or "saintliness." Keep in mind (if your read Manifest Destiny III) that Maslow is the same individual of whom Publishers Weekly said: "This apostle of self-actualization and creative 'peak experiences' was an intensely private man who rarely discussed his own mystical highs." Au contraire, PW. This was the guy who founded transpersonal psychology. And if that isn't all about mysticism, I'll eat my hat. separated at birth Take Frances "Transpersonal" Vaughan. Please. The first time I saw her name was on a the cover of Shadows of the Sacred: Seeing Through Spiritual Illusions. Ah, I thought, at last someone is writing about how all this spiritual bullshit is just an illusion, how this fascination with all things mystical is rotting people's brains. But my guess was just so wrong. I wouldn't have been surprised had I done then what I did just now: searched the full text of Textbook of Transpersonal Psychiatry and Psychology. Here are some initial, very partial results... 239 pages with references to spiritual in this book And that's all you really gotta know. However, looking a bit deeper -- thanks to the magic of Amazon's new bib-cite reporting -- I see that Textbook references 27 other books (a surprisingly small number for a "textbook"), among which are included: Be Here Now by Ram Dass Research in Parapsychology 1979 by William G. Roll The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Or, the After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane by Karma-Glin-Pa The Cloud of Unknowing: The Classic of Medieval Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill The Spectrum of Consciousness by Ken Wilber Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig And last but not least... Out on a Limb by Shirley MacLaine Shirley MacLaine and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Alright then. OK. I think I'm beginning to get a feel for this odd brand of "psychology." I think. I could be wrong though. Ken Wilber might be a clue -- a man addicted to spiritual rocket science. No, really. That's what they call people who "chart" the market. As in Wall Street and so forth. Rocket scientists. I found something else recently that reminded me of him. It's from a very funny article called Fictitious Tibet: The Origin and Persistence of Rampa-ism. There's much more to say about this paper, which is a rich resource in itself, covering as it does, a British plumber named Hoskins who had a hyper-fertile imagination, to say the least, the ever-entertaining occultist Madame Blavatsky, her charlatan-in-arms Colonel Olcott (in the Library with the Lead Pipe), and piece-of-work extraordinaire, Annie Besant. But for now just the clip that reminded me of Ken Wilber. Oh, but I guess you first need to know that Hoskins "was" also T. (for Tuesday) Lobsang Rampa, who wrote a number of books about his "experiences" as a Tibetan Buddhist monk; see e.g., The Third Eye. And another one called My Visit To Venus. Anyway, sorry about the unfortunately necessary innterruption. The bit that reminded me of Wilber was this... Long before Rampa, the whole range of quasi-mathematical spheres, diagrammatic arrangements, levels of existence of consciousness, master-and-disciplehood, hoisted on a style of self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing rhetoric, was more or less created by Blavatsky. Medieval Christian writers, the Hermetics and a large number of kindred thinkers and their products had indeed presented a wide vista of quasi-mathematical, impressionistic imaginary structures; earlier, of course, Jewish mysticism with kabbalistic, Talmudic, and earlier medieval Rabbinical moorings might have set the example for the medieval Christian writings of this kind, unless the Christian writers were -- or were also -- inspired by whatever filtered through to them from the Greek and Hellenic esotericists, the Pythagoreans and a large number of neo-Pythagorean writings spread through the Hellenic world. Medieval Christian scholars did not read Greek, and whatever they did know about these esoteric systems they obtained through Latin translations. Nobody knows to what degree Blavatsky was familiar with any of this. To completely communicate the sense of that passage, I guess we need an example of a quasi-mathematical diagram of levels of existence and consciousness. No problem, just gimme a sec to google Wilber. Ah, here we go...

Healing in Psychotherapy and Spirituality I'll say KEN WILBER: A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality

"Figure 2: Ken’s Uncovering of the Ontological Dimension
of the U: Gross, Subtle, Causal"
from "Mapping the Integral U - A Conversation between
Ken Wilber and Ottto Scharmer" (PDF)

WILBER: "Typically the gross/waking state is a cognition of 'it.' It’s a state where the thinking process tends to be fixed on 'its,' or anything that can be described in 'it' language. Thus, when someone is seeing everything from the outside, that person is using cognition that is distancing. This is a classic waking, or gross object oriented process, even though there are indeed conceptualizations that occur."

Now, I don't know about you, but I had a regular satori orgasm when I saw that. Though I don't know that I wouldn't have said "somersaulting" instead of "suspending." However, this is a mere nit, I agree. Overall, Wilber's vision is just so... I dunno, I guess I want to say so fuckin-A profound! His stuff always reminds me of when I used to stay up all night doing black beauties -- amphetamines that I boosted from the hospital pharmacy where I not only worked, but was in charge of all the narcotics (no lie). In the peculiar state produced by that speed, I once worked until dawn on a math problem, the solution for which turned out to be x=x. So I know what Laurie Anderson was on about. And I almost feel I understand where Ken Wilber is coming from. what is integral naked? don't miss the trailer! But back to our transpersonal Textbook. Reading on, I find the following "explanations" in the first chapter, which is titled "Introduction and Definition of Transpersonal Psychiatry"... Transpersonal psychiatry... extends the standard biopsychosocial model of psychiatry to a biopsychosocial-spiritual one in which the the later stages of human development are concerned with development beyond, or transcendent of, the individual. [p4] Ohmygod. So does that mean we're talking...? Yes, that's right. It means we're talking... G H O S T S ! The meanings of the terms transpersonal and spiritual must be... sharply differentiated from the term religious. I think this is so that M. Scott Peck's devil worship won't be excluded. Numerous studies [unreferenced] have set the incidence of mystical experience in members of the general population at 30 to 40%. [p.5] Now that is surprising, especially seeing as how the incidence of clinical psychosis is considerably lower. Alright, alright, enough of this. But in closing, let me just say that, as an over-the-hill ex acid head, I feel confident is saying: these people are all over-the-hill acid heads! Ex or not, I won't hazard a guess. But look at all this talk about dope! No wonder they're having visions and hearing things. The bios and pics are taken from the DVD series, Transpersonal Conversations. Click on the pictures to see the Amazon pages. And if you >>> click here <<< you can see a video clip of Christina Grof talking about Esalen Institute.Very, very exciting stuff (not). Damn, I wish I could afford the whole set! Frances Vaughan, Ph.D., is one of the earliest leaders of the transpersonal movement. A prolific author and theorist, Dr. Vaughan has been a practicing psychotherapist for more than 30 years. Her now-classic book: The Inward Arc, has become a standard text in transpersonal education. And her work with "Healing Awareness," meditation in psychotherapy, and intuition is considered ground-breaking and seminal in the transpersonal field. She is the former President of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology and has served on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology for many years. Charles T. Tart, Ph.D., is one of the original transpersonal theorists and early founders of the field. His classic text, Altered States of Consciousness, influenced a generation of consciousness explorers and scientists (as well as a feature film). And his work as a parapsychologist has placed him at the top of that field as well. A renowned meditation teacher and consciousness researcher, Dr. Tart also holds a black-belt in Aikido. He is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and continues to teach and research at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, CA. . James Fadiman, Ph.D., is one of the founders of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology and an early President of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology. He has also served as an editor for the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology for more than two decades. He is a teacher of Sufism and co-author of several text books on transpersonal subjects. An early LSD pioneer, Dr. Fadiman studied with Dr. Richard Alpert (AKA: Ram Dass) at Harvard and became one of the first Americans to scientifically experiment with LSD and other psychedelics under an official US Government license. Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D., is one of the original founders of transpersonal psychology along with Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich. Dr. Grof is credited with naming the field and is the founding president of the International Transpersonal Association. He is one of the world's first LSD pioneers and author of dozens of books on non-ordinary states of consciousness. He co-created with his wife and co-author, Christina Grof, Holotropic Breathwork, a powerful experiential method of therapy and self-exploration. Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., is one of the earliest psychedelics researchers in the country. In the 1960s he became part of the fabled "Harvard Psilocybin Projects" along with Harvard professors Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert (AKA: Ram Dass). Dr. Metzner is well known for this work in consciousness research and eco-psychology as well as his research and writings on psychedelic mushrooms, shamanism, and indigenous consciousness-expanding practices. If you've been paying extra close attention to this site, you may recall that the last guy above, Ralph Metzner, also appears in the Mystic Bourgeoisie Table of Contents under the chapter head "Postwar Whitewash"... In The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe former Tim Leary pal Ralph Metzner writes: "...the Nazis appropriated certain themes that they claimed to have found in Germanic myth and combined them with illusory assumptions about Aryan racial supremacy. One could say that the Nazis laid a curse on Germanic mythology." Conversely, one could say that talk about a "Germanic psyche" (p. 10) is a load of racially attuned (let's call it) Jungian bilge.

Psychosis or Transcendence spiritual madness The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock'N'Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock 'N'Roll

"Institutions of higher learning that have adopted insights from transpersonal psychology include the
California Institute of Integral Studies,
Saybrook Institute in California, and the
Naropa School of Underwater Basketweaving
in Boulder, Colorado."

~ from the Wikipedia article on Transpersonal Psychology
(mildly hacked)

metapost: cannibalism and the quantum hula

Although Boulder, Colorado, ranks a mere 56 in the list of 100 highest income counties in the United States of America (as measured by per-capita income), I, personally, am not a beneficiary of even this meager level of wealth bondage. However, it does mean, working from the serving suggestions of P.J. O'Rourke (see below right), that there is an abundant local food supply if I'm willing to change my diet. And I am more than willing. Believe me. While this is good news for me, it does have certain negative ramifications for the proximate populace. However, you can help save the now-endangered bipedal fauna of Boulder by looking over there in that column to your left for a graphic that looks like this: Right, that's the one! Now click that puppy. The fine people of Boulder, will, by virtue of the Sacred Quantum PSI Effect (see Quantum Hula® movie), telepathically thank you from the bottom of their hearts -- even though they never will have known how close they came.

from time to time, there will be "metaposts" here. these won't be part of the book, of course, but are intended, rather, as as "sidebar" communications with you, The Valued Readers... they're not just for breakfast anymore

manifest destiny III

there she stood in the doorway I heard the mission bell and I was thinking to myself this could be heaven, this could be hell... eagles At the edge of the Pacific Ocean, in hot-tubs high above the surf of Big Sur, the new New Age was conceived. There was an older New Age to which the new one is connected in myriad ways, many of which will unfold as we proceed. Indeed, the idea of a New Age has been quite popular with human beings for... well, simply ages. For instance, though not going quite that far back, at the dawn of the 20th century there was a magazine called The New Age, edited for some time by one A.R. Orage, a longtime pal of G.I. Gurdjieff (in those days, people just went by their initials). As Paul Beekman Taylor writes in Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (pp. 11-12): The marvelous mix in The New Age of new writing, economical and political commentary, and cultural criticism... produced a journal his public appreciated as both "lively and eccentric." Orage had his doubters then, however, just as he has them now. There are three journalistic issues on which Orage has been questioned. The first is the anti-semitic strain in The New Age. A recent critic accuses Orage's vision of a "better world, an anti-semitic one" and adds that Orage himself is "known for anti-semitism" along with Yeats, Elliot, and Lawrence. Another commentator replies that, while Pound and [Clifford Hugh] Douglas drifted toward anti-semitism, Orage and The New Age stood against usury, not Jews. Uh-huh. But of course this doesn't prove anything. I'm just saying... And while I'm at it, how about this? separated at birth? bob dylan ezra pound Just a passing thought. Never mind that. We're getting ahead of our story already, which at this point involves what I think of as Manifest Destinies I through III. Manifest Destiny I long preceded the western expansion of the United States. It manifested first in the form of an intuition of the Creator's plan for a pure white America... It seems to me that God, with infinite wisdom and skill, is here training the Anglo-Saxon race for an hour sure to come in the World's future... The time is coming when the pressure of population on the means of subsistence will be felt here as it is now felt in Europe and Asia. Then will the world enter on a new stage of its history -- the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled. Long before the thousand millions are here, the mighty centrifugal tendency inherent in this stock and strengthened in the United States will assert itself. Then this race of unequalled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it -- the representative, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization -- having developed peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind, will spread itself over the earth. And can anyone doubt that the result of this competition of races will be the survival of the fittest? Is it not reasonable to believe that this race is destined to dispossess many weaker ones, assimilate others, and mould the remainder, until in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind? ~from The New Era: Or, The Coming Kingdom Josiah Strong, 1893, quoted in A Religious History of the American People Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Yale University Press, 1974, p. 849 (ellipsis and emphasis in original, but not the grafix) Although that was written toward the close of the 19th century, the stance it reflects goes way back. And as Ahlstrom -- whose 1200 pages of American religious history won the National Book award in 1973 -- points out, these were not the sentiments of some street-corner punk. Strong was "the general secretary of the Evangelical Society... quoting in large part from Our Country, the book that had made him famous eight years before." Hold that thought. The location of Esalen at the far Western reach of the North American continent is significant. The hidden motor of Manifest Destiny I, as expressed above, drove settlers and adventurers, bounty hunters and religious communitarians from sea to shining sea, as is said. Chicasaw, Choctaw, Blackfoot, Crow, Navaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Sioux -- anyone who got in the way of God's big plan for Anglo-Saxons got processed by this jingoistic fever until they either saw the Light or stopped blocking it. As GE's Jack Welch once said: lead, follow, or get out of the way. That was Manifest Destiny II -- the one we usually associate with the phrase. Colonialism, pure and simple. Don't leave home without it. And when this impulse could push men no further (the women were too busy cookin and shootin Injuns), when the ocean stopped further Western momentum, this quintessentially American influenza was bottled up in pathological frustration. All dressed up and nowhere left to go, it finally went psychedelically postal with a little help from the potent new neurochemical elixirs that started hitting the West Coast in the 1960s. It went, as Americans left to themselves always have: religious. The colonial imperative that had driven Americans like droves of Lemmings toward the Western ocean, finally drove them out of... no, actually into their heads. Colonizing the mind -- Manifest Destiny III -- became, as one psycho-spiritually out-there '60s author called it without apparent irony, The Master Game. Any number can play -- long as you the right color, baby, and you got the bling. Now hold that whole collection of thoughts for a minute, if you'd be so kind. The next part may seem oddly unrelated at first, but it's not. I'll bring us back around in a bit, you'll see. And this next part is what I like to refer to as... So one evening a long time ago this insignificant two-bit psychologist named Maslow is driving along the coastal highway, going somewhere, don't ask, who knows. Suddenly, his head grows heavy and his sight grows dim -- he has to stop for the night. Nothing else being handy, he pulls into this place looks like maybe it might put him up. But as he's trying to check in -- turns out it's not exactly a lodging -- something funny happens. Some people who work there are unpacking these boxes of books, and as he looks closer he notices they're his books. "Hey," he says (or words to that effect), "I wrote those. What are you doing with so many copies of my books?" As it transpires, he's dropped in to Esalen Institute, and when they find out he's the great Abraham H. Maslow, well didn't they have a good time then. And what a time it was, oh yeah! Abe and Esalen, a perfect match. Livin it up at the Hotel California. Now the thing about Abe is this. He was taken early on with alpha male Macaques -- those being apes of the sort you would find in, say, any decent primate research laboratory. One of his early promoters, Richard Lowry, says you could tell when Maslow talked about them that he really admired these dominant males. And how do I know this, you ask? By tracking down an out-of-print copy of this: Dominance, Self-esteem, Self-actualization: Germinal Papers of A. H. Maslow Richard J. Lowry, Editor Brooks/Cole Publishing Company (1973) And another thing about Abe? It seems, as you can see from the above (though it's really only hinted at there), he equated -- as in x=y -- dominance with self-esteem. He got this exceeding strange notion in a primate research laboratory run by the deservedly famous, but not famous enough, Harry Harlow -- the guy who drove a stake into the heart of the then-ruling paradigm of behaviorism by proving that monkeys love their moms, and that it isn't about milk as reinforcement in some cockamamie operant conditioning scheme. In fact, the primate laboratory where Maslow picked up his odd idea about dominance equaling self-esteem was was one of the only (if not the only, I'll have to check) such labs in the U.S. at the time, where Maslow was Harlow's first graduate student. And how do I know all that? By perusing in the first case, and actually reading in the second, these: The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow by Edward Hoffman, of which Publishers Weekly says: Brandeis psychologist Maslow (1908-1970), a founder of humanistic psychology, was an uneasy hero of the 1960s counterculture. As spiritualistic fads swept the country, he scolded Esalen Institute instructors for their smugness and warned his followers that too much inwardness is not psychologically healthy. This apostle of self-actualization and creative "peak experiences" was an intensely private man who rarely discussed his own mystical highs. ...which is funny beyond words on a number of fronts, but precisely why will have to wait till a bit later. and... Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection by Deborah Blum -- a thoroughly wonderful book, of which Publishers Weekly says (far more credibly than above): In this surprisingly compelling book, Blum (The Monkey Wars) reveals that many of the child-rearing truths we now take for granted -- infants need parental attention; physical contact is related to emotional growth and cognitive development -- were shunned by the psychological community of the 1950s. As Blum shows, Freudian and behavioral psychologists argued for decades that babies were drawn to their mothers only as a source of milk, motivated by the instinctual drive for sustenance, and that children could be harmed by too much affection. Harry Harlow's experiments, Blum finds in this deeply sympathetic investigation of his life and work, changed all this, conclusively demonstrating that infant monkeys bond emotionally with a specific "mother" -- a dummy figure made of cloth even if it is not a source of food. And now we're ready for the one more thing about Abe that'll wrap this puppy up, at least for tonight. It's this. In that book of Germinal Papers I cited above, Maslow has a piece dated 1942 (I think; this is from memory, so I'll need to dig the damn book out and make sure) called The Totalitarian Mind, or something close. In the first page or two, he says the big clue, you might say, about this mindset is that it likes to construct pyramidal hierarchies. Which is just too weirdly ironic, since Maslow's later "hierarchy of needs" is perhaps the most famous such pyramid in all of psychology. Later note: the actual paper title and source for the above is "The authoritarian character structure." Journal of Social Psychology, 18, 401-11. Reprinted in Harriman, P. (Ed.), Twentieth Century Psychology: Recent Developments in Psychology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946). I believe this is the same paper I looked at, in Dominance, self-esteem, self-actualization: germinal papers of A. H. Maslow, Richard J. Lowry, ed., Brooks/Cole Publishing Company,1973. But wait, it gets better. Only affluent cultures will be able to achieve "peak experiences" and "self-actualization" on any scale, Maslow says, for obvious reasons: poor people have no time for anything but filling their bellies. But then what happens is a pack of ne'er-do-well hippies go off in search of spiritual enlightenment -- to the very poorest of the poor living in remote regions of the globe where shamanism and drug abuse flourish, practiced by people who, if they're lucky, might just bag a parrot for supper! So, did I bring you back around to Manifest Destiny III, like I promised? You bet I did. And that's it: colonizing the mind turns once again to the imperial appropriation of "primitive" culture for the edification and entertainment of the rich -- whom, as Aerosmith and P.J. O'Rourke suggest, we should eat. ~ affluent Anglo-Saxons actualizing their selfs ~

for the chapter: Manifest Destiny of the Third Kind On the Edge of the Future: Esalen and the Evolution of American Culture Brothers in Elysium Religious Interpretations of American Destiny your basic barbarians God Is Not: Religious, Nice, One of Us, an American, a Capitalist American Expansion and the Empire of Right The Conquest of the New World The Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences one pill makes you larger... Pathways to Higher Consciousness Maslow on: Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences Hotel California The Upstart Spring: Esalen and the Human Potential Movement A Biography of Abraham Maslow Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection Totalitarian Science and Technology Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy Shamanic Journey Drumming I hope you have enjoyed this bookish little journey from the ridiculous to the sublime and back. ~the author

The subtitle of the book on the left is "The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism." The the book on the right takes a somewhat shallower cut at the problem. We'll encounter the unintentionally ironic Mr. Dyer again in the chapter on New Thought.

is there an eco in here?

Let us swear. Anathema on the Da Vinci Code! On The Course in Miracles! On Oprah and Chopra and Marianne Williamson! In this Great Work I bow to the one who has traversed these shadowed paths and mysteries far longer and deeper than I ever will (gods willing) if I live another thousand years. I bow to the superior wisdom of the True Magus... Then Bramanti said: "Brothers, we are gathered here in the name of the One Order, the Unknown Order, to which Order, until yesterday, you did not know that you belonged, and yet you have always belonged to it! Let us swear. Anathema on all profaners of the Secret. Anathema on all sycophants of the occult. Anathema on all those who have made a spectacle of the Rites and Mysteries!" "Anathema!" "Anathema on the Invisible College, on the bastard children of Hiram and the Widow, on the operative and speculative masters of the lie of the Orient and the Occident, Ancient, Accepted, or Revised, on Mizraim and Memphis, on the Philalethes and the Nine Sisters, on the Strict Observance and on the Ordo Templi Orientis, on the Illuminati of Bavaria and of Avignon, on the Elus Cohen, on the Perfect Friendship, on the Knights of the Black Eagle and of the Holy City, on the Rosicrucians of Anglia, on the cabalists of the Rose + Cross of Gold, on the Catholic Rosy Cross of the Temple and of the Grail, on the Stella Matutina, on the Astrum Argentinum and Thelema, on Vril and Thule, on every ancient and mystical usurper of the name of the Great White Fraternity, on the Guardians of the Temple, on every college and priory of Zion and of Gaul!" "Anathema!" "Whoever out of ingenuity, submission, conversion, calculation, or bad faith has been initiated into any lodge, college, priory, chapter, or order that illicitly refers to obedience to the Unknown Superiors or to the Masters of the World, must this night abjure that initiation and implore total restoration in spirit and body to the one and true observance, the Tres, Templi Resurgentes Equites Synarchici, the triune and and trinosophic mystical and most secret order of the Synarchic Knights of Templar Rebirth!" "Sub umbra alarum tuarum!" "Now enter the dignitaries of the thirty-six highest and most secret degrees." As Bramanti called the elect, they appeared in liturgical vestments, wearing the insigne of the Golden Fleece on their chest... ~ from Foucault's Pendulum Umberto Eco, p. 482-3 Umberto, I love you. Even though I only spoke to you that one time from the CMU Robotics Institute by accidentally calling your fax machine on their dime using the number my sister gave me (who knows where she got it), but you didn't know who was calling. "Hello? Hello?" you said. However, I love you nonetheless. With these words of deep learning and craft, once again you have restored my sense of balance (and humor), thus rescuing me -- I have no doubt of this whatsoever -- from a terrible and devastating madness.

for the chapter: The Usual Suspects

The Teacher brought the new Student to the Principal. She inquired, "At which level should he start?"

The Principal examined the Student for a few moments and then asked, "Why did you come to this school?"

The Student replied, "To learn the art of happiness."

The Principal turned to the Teacher and said, "Level 1." He smiled, looking at the Student.

"Now go to your classroom."

??? Shortcut to Spirituality: Mastering the Art of Inner Peace ???

"...it is here that the story touches on the strange history of Rennes-le-Chateau. Henry Lincoln has argued that the order of the Priory of Sion, which was founded at the end of the first Crusade by Hugh de Payen and his knights, actually dates back many centuries through the dynasty known as the Merovingians..."

The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved
The Holy Shroud of Turin, p. 202
Colin Wilson

who's afraid of virginia woolf?

		for the chapter: Fascist Modernism: Double Vision
Did the invention of interchangeable parts, a prerequisite of the Industrial Revolution, influence the Zeitgeist of the mid-19th century and how it tried to grapple with Darwin's notion of fitness? What Darwin meant by "survival of the fittest" was that the probability of an organism's evolutionary advance was greatly increased if it found an environmental opportunity it could exploit to advantage. Although the concept of ecological niches is fairly commonplace today, it was a difficult idea to grasp in 1859 when The Origin of Species was first published. Far more familiar, even at the dawn of early industrialism, was the idea of parts that "fit" their intended application. Evolutionary "fitness" thus came to be seen as a match against a preexisting norm or ideal -- an archetype, one might almost say. As a result of this Social Darwinism, eugenics came to be widely adopted as a response to a felt need for "race improvement" toward such an ideal type of human being. Those falling short of these metrics of worth, or unworthiness to live, were not only dispensable, but a positive danger to (read here: Anglo-Saxon) society. Is a picture beginning to emerge? The introductory passage below is from A Concise Companion to Modernism by David Bradshaw (p. 49). ...there is one passage in her diary which has caused considerable consternation and which is not remotely ironic. On January 9, 1915 Woolf and her husband went for a stroll by the River Thames between Richmond and Kingston: On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead , or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.		the origin of species A Social History of Industrial Automation
The quote is from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I: 1915-1919, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (p. 13). Modernism and Eugenics: Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, and the Culture of Degeneration goes into much greater depth on these issues. That art and literature in the era of modernism was deeply bound up with eugenics -- and the eugenic "solutions" it led to -- seems to be well known in certain quarters of the academy, and largely unknown elsewhere. As the academy is where the problem largely began, there's an outside chance these ideas might be worthy of more than passing intellectual curiosity. Call it a wild hunch.		Modernism and Eugenics we are not amused