tupak okra rides again

Dear Ones: you simply must check out the video! The following is from the product pitch page... Dear Friends, I have been teaching about the mind-body connection, and its relevance to a vibrant, happy, and healthy life for some time now. One of the most profound ways to experience a deep, mind-body connection is through biofeedback, or as I call it "bio-regulation." I am proud to share with you one of my latest projects, The Journey to Wild Divine, a unique, beautiful and easy-to-use biofeedback program that I have helped create. [more]... With love and peace, Deepak important note: If you think this is here as an ad or endorsement, you definitely need to read more of this site.

the disturbing matter of Nazi entailment

Whether in America or Germany, talk of Holocaust seems to upset some folks -- though probably less, we can guess, than the people on whom such acts were perpetrated. The quote below is from an anonymous Amazon.com reader review of John Carey's (in my opinion and that of many others, excellent) The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939, which the writer calls "a hatchet job." When I adjudicated secondary-school debating competitions, there was always one dependable red flag that signalled a crumbling argument: the comparison with Hitler. Hitler was the teenager's favourite: if you could infect your opponent's argument with just a touch of Hitlerism, the crowd was instantly on your side and your opponent now had to climb a mountain of odium to win them back. The following quote from a book review in The Canadian Journal of History (December 1, 2001) provides a better than average starting point for exploring why so many people reach for their revolvers -- or simply stop listening -- when they hear the word Nazi. More than ever, it is apparent that certain myths about Nazism will never fully disappear. If for no other reason, Nazism serves as a useful foil, a way of gauging good and evil in the world. The things we tend to dislike in modern society we usually presume reigned triumphant in Nazism. In fact, what we suppose Nazism must surely have been about often tells us as much about contemporary societies as about the past purportedly under review. The book purportedly under review is Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whom the reviewer, Richard Steigmann-Gall (author of The Holy Reich Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945), goes to some lengths to make appear a fool. [pretend this is a footnote] In fact, Steigmann-Gall seriously misrepresents the book. "The reader is strongly encouraged," he writes, "to believe that Nazism had more to do with 'the occult, Green issues, vegetarianism, and the New Age' (p. 92), all cast as eastern in inspiration." What Goodrick-Clarke actually wrote on page 92 -- regarding Savitri Devi's A Son of God (1946) and Impeachment of Man (1959) -- was this: "Mindful as she was of the general opprobrium attaching to the Third Reich in the postwar years, these books make only coded references to her idol Hitler and National Socialism. Free of any obvious Nazi taint, both books have been recently republished for new audiences interested in mysticism and the occult, Green issues, vegetarianism, and the New Age." That's called reporting, not a la Steigmann-Gall, something we are "strongly encouraged to believe." That this was the opportunistic enticement Savitri Devi's neo-Nazi publisher pitched to a New Age audience was also explained at some length on page 3. Perhaps Steigmann-Gall's clear error on this point can be simply written off as one more reviewer who never read the book. Or, less simply, as one more jealous academic trashing a more competent colleague. A fool Goodrick-Clarke is not. He heads the Centre for Western Esotericism in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter (see Wikipedia entry). His book, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890-1935, is widely judged by his peers to be one of the small handful of credible books on the subject. Contrast the above review clip with this one: Although the gas chamber mythos has been the center-piece of ongoing Establishment efforts to diabolize the Third Reich, there has been a parallel attempt to remove that epoch from objective consideration by casting it in a less homicidal but more bizarrely demoniacal light. Linking National Socialism to occultism has served several purposes: making the Hitler period look spooky, or at least a bit "kooky"; alienating people of traditional religious outlook, and not least, cashing in on the lucrative bookselling fad of recent years sometimes called the "occult explosion." The opening gambit about "the gas chamber mythos" should be a tipoff that the publication in which this appeared -- The Journal of Historical Review -- is among a growing number of books and web sites dedicated to questioning whether the Holocaust ever took place. Exhibit: Holocaust Denial The following is from the web site of Castle Hill Publishers, which disseminates The Journal of Historical Review, as well as books such as The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. It is the goal of Castle Hill Publishers to scientifically investigate historical events, particularly those of the 20th century, without limitations imposed by dogmas or axioms. It is also Castle Hill Publishers' goal to defend human rights and to combat discrimination, especially when it is directed against the German people. This shall be done within the widest possible framework and particularly by means of proper historical research into the events of the 20th century in Europe. It is also Castle Hill Publishers' goal to correct unjust reporting or accounts of events of the 20th century. It is also the Foundation's goal to further public debate about the subject generally described as 'Holocaust'. It is also Castle Hill Publishers' goal to financially assist Revisionists who, due to their work, are subjected to prosecution, physical assault or slander, or who are otherwise victimized or persecuted. It is also the Foundation's goal to oppose, with all available legal means, those persons, institutions and organizations who denounce, charge, convict or otherwise inflict harm on Revisionists for not believing in the existence of gas chambers. Lastly, it is Castle Hill Publishers' goal to restore, with all available legal means, the honor and reputation of all persons and/or organizations who are found to have been unjustly accused or even convicted of criminal acts, especially such as were allegedly committed during World War Two. The caption for the photo below (from The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) reads: "Corpses of Auschwitz prisoners in block 11 of the main camp... as discovered by Soviet war crimes investigators." [NOTE: Apologies for the confusion with the above image. For the correct image, see here. For an explanation, see here.] Holocaust deniers might argue that, from such a picture, we have no definitive way of knowing whether these people are perhaps not merely napping. It is left as an exercise for the reader to ponder this perplexing question. Clicking here may help. "President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush tour the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C." White House photo by Paul Morse [reduced] The above image is a work of an employee of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, taken or made during the course of the person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the image is in the public domain. [via Wikipedia]

savitri devi, the hindu-aryan myth and neo-nazism secret aryan cults and their influence on nazi ideology: the ariosophists of austria and germany, 1890-1935 the growing assault on truth and memory history, holocaust, and the david irving trial

cat on a wade clark roof

“ Himself a boomer, Roof sometimes embodies, rather than explains, the most flaky and superficial impulses of boomer faith. ” ~ Kirkus Reviews

yet another photo essay

book description... The first history of Traditionalism, an important yet surprisingly little-known twentieth-century anti-modern movement. Comprising a number of often secret but sometimes very influential religious groups in the West and in the Islamic world, it affected mainstream and radical politics in Europe and the development of the field of religious studies in the United States. In the nineteenth century, at a time when progressive intellectuals had lost faith in Christianity's ability to deliver religious and spiritual truth, the West discovered non-Western religious writings. From these beginnings grew Traditionalism, emerging from the occultist milieu of late nineteenth-century France, and fed by the widespread loss of faith in progress that followed the First World War. Working first in Paris and then in Cairo, the French writer Rene Guenon rejected modernity as a dark age, and sought to reconstruct the Perennial Philosophy -- the central religious truths behind all the major world religions --largely on the basis of his reading of Hindu religious texts. A number of disenchanted intellectuals responded to Guenon's call with attempts to put theory into practice. Some attempted without success to guide Fascism and Nazism along Traditionalist lines; others later participated in political terror in Italy.

a newage++ jehovah

The following is from an article titled "Desperately Seeking Spirituality" by Eugene Taylor (more about whom in a minute) that ran in Psychology Today over ten years ago (11/1/1994)... Look beyond the crystals and the seances; this is not some touchy-feely new age fad. author's note: Oh yes it is. Its cuts wider and deeper. It is the engine of a whole paradigm shift in society with the power to heal the mind-body split that has dominated western thinking for centuries, and while we're at it, the new spiritual awakening promises to remake the political landscape as well. Norman Mailer, in a recent article in Esquire, says he sees it in Madonna. The actor Richard Gere believes it is in helping resettle in the United States Tibetan Buddhists whose own country was overrun by Chinese Communists. Singer Don Henley has found it in his effort to preserve Thoreau's Walden Pond as a protected wilderness and to keep it from developers who look beyond the waters and see only condominiums and office towers. Mitch Kapor, cofounder of Lotus software company, sees it in cyberspace, which he regards as a great new spiritual frontier. With a cast like that, how could anyone doubt that, as Taylor says a bit further on, "our conception of spirituality is undergoing enormous change"? In fact, he wrote a whole book about it in 1999: Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America. It would constitute an excellent historical overview of how the Mystic Bourgeoisie developed, were Taylor not such an insufferable cheerleader. Here's a picture of him leading a cheer now... Celebrating the One Hundredth Anniversary of William James' Lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience The Swedenborg Society at Harvard Presents: A Free Lecture Series on The Spiritual Currents of American Pragmatism Dr. Eugene Taylor, Lecturer on Psychiatry Harvard Medical School And gee, I'm sorry I missed this one! The Appropriation of Jung's Ideas Within the American Psychotherapeutic Counter-Culture - Eugene Taylor Abraham Maslow and Anthony Sutich, editors of The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, declared the launching of a new era in psychology in 1961. This new psychology would emphasize self-actualization, interpersonal knowing, transcendence, the study of the whole being. It would draw on varied sources in Eastern and Western traditions and would appropriate "parts of Jung." Since then, Jung -- often represented only as an acolyte of Freud and largely ignored in mainstream academic psychology -- has been enthusiastically embraced by the psychotherapeutic counter-culture. What this appropriation was all about, and its consequences for practice and credentialing analysts in Jungian psychology today and in future will be examined. via the C.G. Jung page The "psychotherapeutic counter-culture." I like that. You like that? Translation: nut cases on bad dope. In any case, as the night is wearing on, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Taylor for commending Emanuel Swedenborg, William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow and every other god-fearing crack-smoking spiritualist he could dredge up to the attention of a whole new generation: you, as they used to say on the Mickey Mouse Club, the Leaders of the 21st Century!

psychology and spirituality in america

one-in-herself: comforting illusion #909

I said move over once, move over twice.
Come on baby, don't be cold as ice.
I said I'm traveling on the one after 909...

~ beatles

from the back cover: When the Goddess of Love was still honored, the sacred prostitute was virgin in the original sense of the word (one-in-herself), a person of deep integrity whose welcome for the stranger was radiant, self-confident and sensuous. Her raison d'être was to bring the goddess' love into direct contact with mankind. Using Google Scholar to search for references to this book yielded a fascinating sounding paper: Full-body-mega-kundalinigasm: 'sacred' sex and sexual politics by Kath Albury. Unfortunately, as you'll see if you hit that link, the thing is protected from prying eyes; it'll cost you 23 bucks to read it (I can recommend several porn sites that'll give you full access for a lot less). The article, btw, is from Volume 15, Number 2/July 1, 2001 of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. The same search also found a possibly even more fascinating sounding paper titled "Too Hot for God": Beasts and Sovereigns in Prostitutes’ Discourse (PDF), which is quoted in the right sidebar. The Yoni Sacred Symbol of Female Creative Power this is one instance where Amazon's Look Inside™ grafik adds a certain special touch. On a final note here, it appears that the title "Too Hot for God" comes from the following "Liturgy for Lilith" by Cosi Fabian, who also has a piece called "The Holy Whore: A Woman's Gateway to Power" in the book pictured directly below her "poem." I am Lilith Grandmother of Mary Magdalene I am Lilith Whose sexual fire was too hot for God I am Lilith The first woman Who chose the rage of exile Over the cancer of servitude I am Lilith Mother to the motherless I am Lilith Whose blood covers the moon I am Lilith Standing on owl’s claws At a woman’s crossroads I am Lilith The Great Whore Whose charm lured the warrior Into my Goddess’s final warmth ...and so on. Here's the book...

Among the many wondrous "benefits" wrought by the Jung/Eliade axis have been its mystically retro notions of "the feminine." If you liked the barefoot and pregnant trope, you're gonna love sacred prostitution. “ If the decision to become a prostitute has the same mythological function and ramifications for each woman who makes it, how can it be sovereign rather than merely programmatic? Would such a programmatic quality not merely return the prostitute to the extreme representative of women’s disempowerment and exploitation, rather than constituting a statement of autonomy? ” ~ from "Too Hot for God" (see text for full reference)

telepathology

Here's a teaser from Marina Warner's review of The Invention of Telepathy in the London Review of Books [Vol. 24 No. 19 (October 2002): 16]... The chainlink fence around telepathy has been patrolled, usually more vigilantly than by Derrida, because the occult poses such a threat to legitimacy: the eminent figures in the SPR were keen not to be thought cranks. Even worse, the occult has tended to leak into the fascist, and distemper its adherents (think of Pound, Yeats, Jung). Luckhurst tracks Freud's struggle to keep psychoanalysis at a healthy distance from the psychic and the occult... The Guardian reprints the entire review. As usual, we have some sources to consider... The Invention of Telepathy: 1870-1901 book description: The belief in telepathy is still widely held and yet it remains much disputed by scientists. Roger Luckhurst explores the origins of the term in the late nineteenth century. Telepathy mixed physical and mental sciences, new technologies and old superstitions, and it fascinated many famous people in the late Victorian era: Sigmund Freud, Thomas Huxley, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 book description: In this book Pamela Thurschwell examines the intersection of literary culture, the occult and new technology at the fin-de-siècle. Thurschwell argues that technologies such as the telegraph and the telephone annihilated distances that separated bodies and minds from each other. As these new technologies began suffusing the public imagination from the mid nineteenth century on, they seemed to support the claims of spiritualist mediums. Talking to the dead and talking on the phone both held out the promise of previously unimaginable contact between people: both seemed to involve ‘magical thinking’. Thurschwell looks at the ways in which psychical research, the scientific study of the occult, is reflected in the writings of such authors as Henry James, George du Maurier and Oscar Wilde, and in the foundations of psychoanalysis. The Victorian Supernatural book description: This collection brings together essays by scholars from literature, history of art and history of science which explore the diversity of Victorian fascination with the supernatural: ghosts and fairies, table-rappings and telepathic encounters, occult religions and the idea of reincarnation, visions of the other world and a reality beyond the everyday. These essays demonstrate that the supernatural was not simply a reaction to the "post-Darwinian loss of faith", but was embedded in virtually every aspect of Victorian culture. Spiritualism and the Foundations of C.G. Jung's Psychology book description: Charet uncovers some of the reasons why Jung's psychology finds itself living between science and religion. He demonstrates that Jung's early life was influenced by the experiences, beliefs, and ideas that characterized Spiritualism and that arose out of the entangled relationship that existed between science and religion in the late nineteenth century. Spiritualism, following it inception in 1848, became a movement that claimed to be a scientific religion and whose controlling belief was that the human personality survived death and could be reached through a medium in trance. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Carl Jung) quote: I dug up Eschenmayer, Passavant, Justinus Kerner, and Görres, and read seven volumes of Swedenborg.

literature, technology and magical thinking, 1880-1920 the victorian supernatural

celtic revival / occult revival

The following, from Modernism and the Celtic Revival, demonstrates the close ties that existed between "the Celtic" and the occult at the end of the 19th century. That association continues in the most recent Celtic revival toward the end of the 20th (they seem to have occurred with some frequency for roughly the last thousand years), which constitutes part of the amorphous mix-and-match catechism of the New Age. The occult revival of the 1890s served as a creative outlet for Anglo-Irish intellectuals and artists -- Bram Stoker's Dracula, for example, comprises "seven years of Yeats-style research into folklore, myth, armchair anthropology, medieval history, magic -- particularly diabolism" -- whose sense of deracination could not be assuaged by the discourse of unity that had emerged in the United Irishman movement in 1798 and that had lost its credibility among many nationalists after the fall of Parnell. Yeats would prove to be no exception. In "Irish Fairies, Ghosts, Witches, etc.," an essay written in 1889 for a theosophical magazine, Yeats justified his recourse to an occult philosophy that to many seemed eccentric with respect to Irish folk culture: When reading Irish folk-lore, or listening to Irish peasants telling their tales of magic and fairyism and witchcraft, more and more is one convinced that some clue there must be. Even if it is all dreaming, why have they dreamed this particular dream? Clearly the occultist should have his say as well as the folklorist. The history of a belief is not enough, one would gladly hear about its cause. For Yeats, occultism is the best way to understand the cause and origin of folklore and the "universal mind" of which "the fairies are the lesser spiritual moods" and "wherein every mood is a soul and every thought a body." Irish writers who were urged to mine Irish folklore for poetic material were also urged to explore the occult since, as Phillip Marcus puts it, all "point toward the same conclusion: the spiritual, the visionary, the occult are fit subjects of concern for Irish writers because they are essentially related to the true Celtic nature." Marcus's conclusions were anticipated by Evans-Wentz's claim that the Irish peasant's "mystic" consciousness made possible a belief in the existence of a "discarnate" consciousness that could "exhibit itself in various individual aspects as fairies." source: Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Gregory Castle, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p 59. [read the entire book online] And here's another, similar passage from Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival by Sinead Garrigan Mattar (p. 43). The revival of folk and native mythological traditions at the fin de siècle coincided with a surge of interest in occultism, confirming for Yeats that folklore contained radical truths leading back to the roots of time and encouraging an interest in comparativism. Inspired by his Theosophical mentors, he wrote in 1889 that 'Tradition is always the same. The earliest poet of India and the Irish peasant in his hovel nod to each other across the ages, and are in perfect agreement.' Moreover, occult philosophy, in the shape of Theosophy, confronted evolutionary theory in a manner that appealed to his own anti-scientism, claiming it o be a lamentably small portion of a spiritual truth. Evolution actually occurred on the spiritual plane: whilst matter degenerated, the soul spiralled to eternity, and an ape was a degenerate man. Madame Blavatsky (described by Yeats as 'a sort of old Irish peasant woman') argued that folklore maintained in small the the esoteric truths that were once part of a world-religion, a revealed truth that might be reclaimed.

celtic voices: women of song

in which we get hooked up

Via Technorati, I just found that Mystic Bourgeoisie has been added to Psyche's Links. Don't look at me; first time I ever heard of it. But I thought I'd return the favor -- not least for all you Mystic-B readers seeking to get your Kabbalah, Gematria, Tarot and various other sorts of arcane/occult needs met. Psyche's Links Esoteric Subjects on the Web 15000+ Links for General Reference and Esoteric Study Qabala and Related Material

blinded by the light

There's an article in today's New York Times titled This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis... Hypnosis had a false start in the 18th century when a German physician, Dr. Franz Mesmer, devised a miraculous cure for people suffering all manner of unexplained medical problems. Amid dim lights and ethereal music played on a glass harmonica, he infused them with an invisible "magnetic fluid" that only he was able to muster. Thus mesmerized, clients were cured. Although Dr. Mesmer was eventually discredited, he was the first person to show that the mind could be manipulated by suggestion to affect the body, historians say. This central finding was resurrected by Dr. James Braid, an English ophthalmologist who in 1842 coined the word hypnosis after the Greek word for sleep. Braid reportedly put people into trances by staring at them intently, but he did not have a clue as to how it worked. In this vacuum, hypnosis was adopted by spiritualists and stage magicians who used dangling gold watches to induce hypnotic states in volunteers from the audience, and make them dance, sing or pretend to be someone else, only to awaken at a hand clap and laughter from the crowd. Update: 24 hours after it was published, the above piece was the #1 most-emailed article on the NY Times site. Which has gotta tell you... something. Among those most "hypnotized" by early demonstrations of mesmerism in the United States was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who launched the "religious science" that came to be known as the New Thought movement. New Thought gave rise to Christian Science, founded by one of Quimby's students, Mary Baker Eddy. It also spawned Unity® -- fast growing in popularity today among the New Age crowd, largely thanks to its popularity with Alcoholics Anonymous and its prodigious publishing efforts. Here's a typical clip on "prosperity" from Unity's Daily Word magazine: I give thanks for rich blessings of Spirit in my life and the world. The blessings of Spirit are within me and for me. I turn my attention to each expression of good in my life and in the world. With an attitude of gratitude, I acknowledge the inexhaustible substance of Spirit. Spirit speaks to me through the desires of my heart. I am blessed with more than what is necessary to meet my everyday needs and to fulfill my dreams. That "attitude of gratitude" trope is a sure signal of the Unity/AA connection. (A similar AA connection put M. Scott Peck on the map. The Road Less Traveled had been in print for five years before AA discovered it; for the next five years, it never left the New York Times bestseller list). Make no mistake, however: Unity and New Thought are "religions" in which a "get more stuff" frame of mind is not considered a spiritual obstacle. Far from it. But back to more traditional notions of mesmerism. Oxford University Press describes George Du Maurier's novel Trilby as follows... First published in 1894, the story of the diva Trilby O'Ferrall and her mentor, Svengali, has entered the mythology of that period alongside Dracula and Sherlock Holmes. Immensely popular for years, the novel led to a hit play, a series of popular films, Trilby products from hats to ice-cream, and streets in Florida named after characters in the book. It is made very clear in Trilby that Svengali, the mesmerist, is a Jew. The following is from an article by Neil R. Davison titled "'The Jew' as homme/femme-fatale: Jewish (art)ifice, Trilby, and Dreyfus" (Jewish Social Studies; 1 January 2002). The passage is discussing Daniel Pick's book, Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture. Pick devotes an entire chapter to the popularity of Victorian mesmeric narratives, and he associates the "sexual charge" at the heart of Trilby as potentializing the nineteenth-century attraction/repulsion to "sexual confusion and moral violation." Obviously valid, the point must also be set in the context of Trilby's much greater success as compared to other tales exploiting Victorian repression, whether they made use of the popularity of hypnotism or not. In this manner, Pick's emphasis of the novel's unique imbrication of mesmerism, sexual power, the music hall, and "the Jew" becomes somewhat hesitant, especially in the face of authorial commentary throughout the novel pertaining to the subterranean, destructive powers of both "Jewishness" and "the Jew." Pick recognizes Anglo-American liberal ambivalence toward Jews as essential to the novel's significance but does not confront fully how the work positions the myth of Aryan dominance and the cultural threat of "the Jew" as the widest social base of sympathy for Trilby and her plight. “ Black leather Trilby style hat, looks good with smart or casual outfits. ” On a final note, it seems that Nabokov's novel Lolita bears an uncanny resemblance to Trilby -- one that cannot have been entirely accidental. The following are notes from The Annotated Lolita (H.H. = Humbert Humbert, the main character, not counting the title role). H.H. is often mistaken for a Jew; see p. 79, where John Farlow is on the point of making an anti-Semitic remark and is interrupted by sensitive Jean. Quilty thinks H.H. may be a "German refugee," and reminds him, "This is a Gentile's house, you know." "...on the other hand we are still spared..." "I wish," interrupted Jean with a laugh, "Dolly and Rosaline were spending the summer together." interrupted Jean: John is about to say "Jews," and Jean, suspecting that H.H. may be Jewish, tactfully interrupts. 250/10 Phineas Quimby, Lebanon, NH: in mythology, Phineas provided Jason the directions to find the Golden Fleece; while Phineas Quimby (1802-1866) was an American pioneer in the field of mental healing, born in Lebanon, NH. He initially specialized in mesmerism, and for several years gave public hypnotic exhibitions (1838-1847). H.H.'s coercion of both Lolita and the reader make him a latter-day specialist, and on p. 308 he says that "Mesmer Mesmer" was one of the possible pseudonyms he had considered for his narrative. Is it just me, or does the plot truly thicken?

from mesmer to freud: magnetic sleep and the roots of psychological healing mingling minds: phineas parkhurst quimby's science of health & happiness forgotten founder of new thought each mind a kingdom: american women, sexual purity, and the new thought movement, 1875-1920 the alien enchanter in modern culture

"Trilby, hypnotized by Svengali. Svengali's exaggerated features
were typical of anti-Semitic portrayals of Jews at the turn of
the century. This engraving was done by Du Maurier himself for
the first edition of the novel in 1894." [via mtholyoke.edu]

the insider/outsider problem revisited

SCAR/WAVE isoforms and actin assembly. In a merged image Abi1 (green) and Scar3 SHD (red) co-localize to cytoplasmic spots and to the edges of lamellipodia. Taken from: Kramer-Haemmerle et al. BMC Cell Biology 2005, 6:11 [View article]

“In Membranes, Laura Otis examines how the image of the biological cell became one of the reigning metaphors of the nineteenth century. At the heart of her story is the rise of a fundamental assumption about human identity: the idea that selfhood requires boundaries showing where the individual ends and the rest of the world begins.”

indo-european philology: mighty white-a you

This book was written sometime in 1880s. The publisher claims it is "...serving the patriotic communities by selling English- and German- language books, historic audio and video tapes, and Third Reich collector's items." Uh huh. And I'm just passing along the publisher's description of the The Aryan Race as a public service... The origin and achievements of the Aryan Race outlining the history of the great and noble family of mankind which has played so striking a part upon the stage of the world. Contents: Types of Mankind; Home of the Aryan; Aryan Outflow; Aryans at Home; Household and the Village; Double System of Aryan Worship; Course of Political Development; Development of Language; Age of Philosophy; Aryan Literature; Other Aryan Characteristics; Historical Migrations; Future Status of Human Races.

the nazi expedition to find the origins of the aryan race pp. 27-28: ...in 1808, Schlegel argued that Sanskrit was the language of elites and had first been spoken by a race of cultured warriors in Northern India. Driven by the noblest of motives, these masterful northerners had conquered and civilized the world. They had founded colonies from Egypt, where they seeded the civilization of the Pharaohs, all the way to Scandinavia. The proof was in their words: Indian and European tongues had all 'sprung from some common source.' Schlegel gave a name to his masterful northerners: Aryans.

Say what?

sometimes a snake is just a good cigar

Of Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake-Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia, Publishers Weekly writes: After Covington, a writing instructor at the University of Alabama, novelist and freelance journalist, covered the trial of a preacher convicted of attempting to murder his wife with rattlesnakes, he was invited to attend a snake-handling service in Scottsville, Ala. He found the service exhilarating and unsettling; he felt a kinship with the people, for he was only two generations removed from the hill country of Appalachia. Of Scottish-Irish descent, the handlers are religious mystics who believe in demons, drink strychnine and drape rattlesnakes around their bodies. Covington attended other services with Brother Carl Porter; he eventually handled a huge rattlesnake, and recalls that at the time, he felt absolutely no fear. This is a captivating glimpse of an exotic religious sect. The book was a runner-up for the National Book Award. The one below was not.

“...the handlers are religious mystics who believe in demons, drink strychnine and drape rattlesnakes around their bodies...”

spirituality or...

“The British monarch has nothing to say. The English language is splendid. We thoroughly serve and subjugate.” “Heaven and earth begin to join We begin to speak good Aryan language...” ~ Chögyam Trungpa “The mind of the pauper is small because it is rooted in attachment -- a death grip on life.” ~ Sakyong Mipham OK, if you say so. But... but.. might there be another way to look at this, however (I'm sorry, excuse me) Western? Attachment and Loss - Volume 1 Attachment and Loss - Volume 2 Attachment and Loss - Volume 3 Feel free to take the size of those cover images as some measure of how much I value the ideas the books contain. I'd take one single copy of anything by John Bowlby over the whole back catalog of Shambhala Publications -- which will evidently publish anything as long as it panders to the lowest, most narcissistic inclinations of the Mystic Bourgeoisie. But moving on -- as we all must, eventually -- the following is from the book site for Ruling Your World: Ancient Strategies For Modern Life by Sakyong Mipham... Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is the head of the Shambhala Buddhist lineage, a spiritual and family lineage that descends through his family, the Mukpo clan. This tradition emphasizes the basic goodness of all beings and teaches the art of courageous warriorship based on wisdom and compassion. He is the dharma heir of his father, Vidyadhara the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was instrumental in bringing Buddhism and Shambhala to the West. Anyone who attended Oxford University in the 1960s -- indeed, anytime after roughly 1933 -- ought to have known better than to bandy about the word "Aryan." Unless, of course, it wasn't mere bandying. And anyone launching something called Shambhala anything might be expected to be familiar with the historical associations. The following is from Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who received his Ph.D. from (well, would you look at that!) Oxford University. Originally rooted in Tibetan and Mongolian mythology, the notion of hidden sacred centers in the East was first popularized to Western audiences by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of modern Theosophy. In The Secret Doctrine (1888), based on the "Stanzas of Dzyan," which she claimed to have read in a secret Himalayan lamasery, Blavatsky maintained that there existed many similar centers of esoteric learning and initiation; magnificent libraries and fabulous monasteries were supposed to lie in mountain caves and underground labyrinths in the unexplored regions of Central Asia. Notable examples of these centers were the subterranean city of Agadi, thought to lie in Babylonia, and the fair oasis of Shamballah in the Gobi Desert, where the divine instructors of the Aryan race were said to have preserved their sacred lore. Other Theosophical writers later extended these speculations. Annie Bessant and Charles Leadbeater described "Shambhalla" as a city founded circa 70,000 BC by the leader of the Aryan race on the shores of a now-vanished Gobi Sea, while Alice Bailey identified "Shamballa" as the seat of the "Lord of the World," again in the Gobi Desert, who watches over the evolution of men until all have been saved. Alice Bailey, btw, was a rabid anti-Semite. But of course all this is beside the point. Shambhala figures in the Kalachakra Tantra, which pre-dates Madame B. by some goodly number of years. And perhaps Trungpa was just kidding with that reference to subjugation and Aryan diction. He was a great kidder. Perhaps his son is kidding, too, with this business about Ruling. Tibet was, after all, the very model of an Aryan theocracy. Who knows? Perhaps it's a whole line of kidders. Or... perhaps it's a pathetic attempt to model a "spiritual kingdom" on outworn -- and good riddance -- British notions of monarchy and empire. While you're Ruling Your World, don't rule that one out. Related... Joe Schmidt: The Sakyong’s new book is out... "Nor does Shambhala International waste any time on gentle hypocrisies. No bothering with the hope that the sales of 'Ruling' will help people or spread the dharma. No genteel wishes of good reading or pleasantries about telling friends and picking up a copy or two as gifts. No blither about buying the book in order to read it or giving it to friends because you liked it. No, this is hard-sales tactics. You buy it because the Sakyong wrote it and you give it to friends and family -- lots of them -- to chalk up another mark towards the national bestsellers lists." Shambhala News Service - instructions to the faithful "Momentum depends on keeping sales high over an extended period of time. How can you help? If you plan to buy more than one copy of the book -- as Christmas gifts, for example -- buying one or two every week will be helpful because it creates a steady sales stream. You can help bring the book to the attention of other buyers by making sure that it is face out -- not spine out -- on the shelf, each time you stop by to pick one up. This triples the book's visibility! Every book bought through a major bookstore will count toward bestseller status." Rocky Mountain News - local nonfiction bestsellers 11/11/05 The Truth (With Jokes) - Al Franken The Year Of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion The Peacefinder - Joan McWilliams Team Of Rivals - Doris Kearns Goodwin The Castro Obsession - Don Bohning Ruling Your World - Sakyong Mipham Who Moved My Cheese? - Spencer Johnson The World Is Flat - Thomas Friedman Our Endangered Values - Jimmy Carter What The Bleep Do We Know!? - William Arntz Mystic Bourgeoisie: On the Road to Sham-ba-la "Something atavistic, dark and dangerous, lurks in the mind, in the recurrent nightmares of the imagined collective unconscious. Through the murk and the mystification, a picture begins to emerge. It is not pretty. And it is not yet 'history'..." The photo below is from Tail of the Tiger, a.k.a. Karmê Chöling, in Barnet, Vermont. It was snapped in the early '70s. By 1974, I was living in that barn you see in the background. In a roundabout way, this is how I came to be in Boulder, Colorado, writing this blog about numinous lunacy and all that attends and supports it. What a long strange trip it's been...

from the Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche Chronicle Project

more on monsters, race and degeneration

This clip is from an article titled "Race and the Victorian Novel" by Patrick Brantlinger in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (pp. 149-150): ...a widely held Victorian view of race as the mainspring of world history is evident from Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which poet and critic Matthew Arnold employs "Hellenism" and "Hebraism" as racial terms to distinguish the chief tendencies of Western civilization. Arnold believed that he was echoing the latest findings of "ethnology," an early version of physical anthropology that scholars today treat as a pseudo-science of racial difference. "Race is everything: literature, science, art, in a word, civilization, depend on it": so... declared Dr. Robert Knox in The Races of Men (1850). Foreshadowing Count Gobineau's influential Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, published in France in the early 1850s, Knox argued that historical change is due to the physical and mental inequalities among races; that race hatred and conflict are inbred factors in human nature; that war and imperial expansion are the results of this hatred; and finally that, where climate does not affect the outcome, the fair, stronger races invariably defeat and either enslave or exterminate the dark, weaker races. And further on, Brantlinger writes (p. 161)... Like the Monster in Frankenstein, the demonic characters in Victorian Gothic romances such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are often, at least implicitly, racial others. Thus, in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the Count, carrying the scourge of vampirism from Transylvania to England, reflects several aspects of late-Victorian racism: anxieties about immigration, especially from eastern Europe; the anti-Semitism that such immigration aroused; and the fear of racial degeneration among the English themselves.

no further comment

In discussing whether Houdini "was the greatest psychical medium of modern times" -- in The Edge of the Unknown (1930) -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, states: I do not see how it can ever now be finally and definitely proved, but circumstantial evidence may be very strong, as Thoreau said when he found a trout in the milk jug.

you go, girl

Almost nearly by accident, I ran across a book called Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. Here's a clip from a chapter titled "The Hypertext of Identity" (p. 125): The moral uplift The Oprah Winfrey Show has undergone since its creation is revealed in a number of genre shifts. Instead of featuring individual deviants, she has focused on relationship problems and offered quick-fix recipes to solve them, thus taking on a more decisively therapeutic vocation. Oprah has become highly focused in her determination to embark on a spiritual mission and to make her guests' lives "successful" and "healthy." Toward that end, she has consistently used a mix of New Age spirituality and popular psychology to promote self-help themes in which all viewers can engage. As Linda Rountree, senior vice president and media director at the advertising firm of Luckie and Co., put it, "I don't think she's evangelical in terms of a particular religious sect.... It's more of a self-help, self-confidence type thing without having necessarily religious overtones, per se." This is an accurate observation, for, akin to the New Age spirituality that transcends locality, Winfrey promotes a religion of the self "thin" and abstract enough to include viewers from all ethnicities, ages, genders, sexual orientations, and social classes. The image below is from Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, and is included here only because it's a cool picture.