Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The Modern Apocalypse Myth

It is impossible for a society to exist without some kind of Myth. A myth is like a society's collective dream. Just like our personal, nightly dreams, the content is deeply symbolic and archetypal , allowing the truth hidden in the myth to cut through into a deeper part of ourselves.

But the myths of today's societies are different. This is normal, because myths evolve over time to fit the societies they are paired with.

Our present myths are quite a bit different than the ones that have become before. Ours are secularized - separated from the Spiritual elements of life, in much the same way that around the bronze age our mythology was separated from the Natural elements of life. Our mythology is also somewhat incoherent, because whereas before we had organized Temples now we have the Cinema and the Internet.

Probably the most prevalent myth I see being played out in these times is the mythology of the Apocalypse. Apocalypse myths are always steeped in the fears and issues of a society in which they are told. For example, in the medieval ages the feared doom-bringers were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, representing the main causes of death and devastation in that time such as War and Famine.

From left to right: Pale Horseman (Death), Black Horseman (Famine), Red Horseman (War), White Horseman (Conquest)

This story feeds upon the internal as well as external fears of the Medieval Mind. After all, all of this external devastation has its cause in the internal problem of sin. But it is always darkest just before the dawn - the turmoil all ends and then there is a New Heaven and a New Earth, and all sin is gone. Yipee! 

But nowadays when people think of the End Times they don't think of four horsemen, they think of a natural disasters of epic proportions (think Roland Emmerich's 2012). Natural Disasters play on our guilt of the destruction of the natural world: Mother Nature fights back with massive floods, earthquakes, etc causing our supposedly secure man-made habitats to crash in the face of a blind, impersonal force. Something that I also find interesting is that a lot of the very radical ideologies that float around nowadays (such as the Zeitgeist Movement, Venus Project, Valhalla Movement, and Radical Traditionalism) acknowledge that it is impossible to establish there model utopias under today's circumstances and anticipate an apocalypse to make that job easier (building a new civilization from the ashes). 

We keep retelling the same old stories that see the destruction of large urban centers, places like the empire state building, etc. Probably a lot of people who see movies like Roland
Emmerich's 2012 see these places on a daily basis. Why do we enjoy seeing so much devastation to modern and beloved landmarks? I believe it is because we subconsciously want to tear it down. The urban, materialistic, consumerist society is anathema to both our animal nature which longs to be close to Nature and our spiritual nature which longs to be close to God. We want to destroy it ourselves, but we feel utterly hopeless in the immensity and complexity of this massive industrial system, so we hope for an event destructive enough to do the job for us.

It is easy to compare our modern apocalyptic myths to the medieval one above: They both happen unexpectedly (perhaps with a few vague, prophetic warning signs beforehand) to wreck our civilizations, they both pray on our inner guilts (Sin in the medieval version, destruction of the natural world in the modern), and they both leave the world in a cleaner, better slate.

In the Medieval narrative, the Earth is cleansed of Sin, Mankind is redeemed in the eyes of God, and the Earth is reclaimed by God. In the Modern narrative, the Earth is cleansed of Civilization, Mankind is redeemed of his crimes against Nature, and Nature reclaims her Earth. The parallels are fascinating to me.

The symbols have changed, but the overall pattern of disaster leading to redemption has not. What is it about apocalyptic narratives that make us want to return to them so much? 

I believe it is the fact that the destruction of the world is a sort of macrocosm for our own deaths. Just as we live in the shadow of Death, but still live as though it were going to happen in a comfortably far-off future, so to do we live in the shadow of the apocalypse, but it too is in a comfortably far-away place. 

Perhaps also the Apocalyptic narrative is also a twisted cry for help - we want ourselves to change (become less materialistic, or sinful, etc) but want society to change first so the conditions to act in the right way will be right. However, changing something as massive as society is hard so we hope God/Nature will do it for us. 

If that is true, we cannot spend all of our days waiting for Doomsday. It is clear that the Apocalypse tales tell us that something needs to change, after much destruction. But, as, Gandhi Said: 
"Be the Change you want to see in the World" 
The modern and medieval notions of Armageddon are things we need to dispell from our minds. It makes people apathetic, thinking they can wait to change when the time is right. We cannot wait for society to change - be it caused by nature or god or whathaveyou - for us to change. Change starts now, and we can all undergo our own apocalypse, initiated right in the here and now, and emerge, renewed in Spiritual and Natural harmony by purifying ourselves of what we find wrong in ourselves.  This is, I think, the real meaning of an Apocalypse - a dramatic, inner transformation.

Perhaps that is what the Collective Unconscious is trying to get us to do by bombarding us with so many stories of world-ending destruction. Stir us into action by making us more and more aware of the need for some serious, destructive change.

"Resurrection" painting by Johfra. 















Sunday, June 23, 2013

"Fantastic Forest": A Poem

-Analyzing, Pondering, Questioning, Comparing, Contrasting.......

Stop. All you've ever thought about are thoughts. What's it worth?
Come, relax, and let me show you how to see a new kind of Earth.

-Well, what's that like? 

Remember: words are just fingers pointing at the moon -
People obsessed with symbols will always become loons.

See that Faerie emerge from the glade,
Watch it whirl, leap, fickle, and fade,
Now your body is part of its dance,
Now you too are in a delightful trance!

Do you hear the music of a watery chant?
SSSShhhhHSHSHHSHHHhhSSSssshhhSSh
You find its source in a solitary stream,
home to an incorporeal girl who gleams.
She offers you a fruit with a funny fluid
Take one bite, and suddenly you're lucid.

Everything is alive - sky, earth, all in-between.
This great web of being is all theres ever been.
Tree & Rock were just waiting for you to say hello!
But now, alas, the vision is vanishing away - oh no!

The further in time the vision gets,
more and more of it will you  forget.
Doubt causes the fruit of knowing to decay,
this is what all people who believe must pay.

-Did it happen? Was all of it  real? 
 You experienced it, what's the big  deal?
-What can I do? I must tell everyone, one and all!
 No, they are trapped behind common sense's walls.
Just be happy that for you dreams and reality have coalesced,
nothing to do now but consider yourself one of the blessed.

-Will it happen again? 
.... We'll see.


====================================================

I recently performed this piece at Ed's Used Books & More.  Here is a video: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=197305783785220&set=vb.133992196768331&type=2&theater

Saturday, June 15, 2013

The Transformative Power of Stories

"We will always learn more about human nature and personality from literature than from psychology" - Noam Chomsky
A study done at Ohio State University showed and explained the unconscious phenomenon of “Experience-Taking”: When we become so immersed in a fictional world that we take the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of one of the characters as if they were their own. Of course, every one knows that, from TV-addicts to movie buffs to bookworms. But it goes much deeper than we thought.

Experience-taking can lead to genuine transformation in the lives of readers. This happens because we allow ourselves to merge our own identities with those of the characters, which can, among other things, make us more tolerant. For example, people were asked to read a story about a character of a different race, sexual orientation, gender, etc, and if the people who read it became genuinely immersed in the story they would feel less likely to stereotype and more likely to sympathize with the different group.

In particular, white students who read stories where the character was revealed to be black towards the end of the story felt more favorable towards blacks, but when the race of the character was revealed at the beginning they did not. This is because when we see a character is similar to us in some way a barrier is broken, as it were.

So we can see clearly that stories can make us more empathic, and bring us the opportunity to explore perspectives, feelings, and identities other than our own.

Experience-taking only ever happens if you are able to forget about yourself while reading. For example, the same study pointed out, the researchers found that most college students were unable to undergo experience-taking if they were reading in a cubicle with a mirror. Because they became reminded of their own identities, experience-taking could not occur.

Brain scans have revealed what happens to our grey matter when we are reading a detailed and exciting narrative and we get really sucked into it. In a 2006 study published in the journal Neuroimage, researches in Spain revealed that reading words like “cinnamon”, “soap”, “perfume”, “coffee”, causes the olfactory cortex to light up. It is the same thing with textile descriptors: they light up the sensory context. Descriptors that involve motion light up the motor cortex.
“Reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that runs on the minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” - Keith Oatley, Cognitive Psychologist

The brain cannot make much a difference between experiencing something in real life and experiencing it through a novel. Novels can get so immerse that they become for us a living, breathing world.
“If you can can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it well enough” - Albert Einstein

In light of that above quote, and all of the information that we mentioned above, what do you think is the best way to explain something to a little kid? It is, to me, immediately obvious. You explain it in a story. How many kids learned about the importance of environmentalism through Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax?”.  How many high-school students have learned about communism and the dangers of totalitarianism through Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984”? How many people, of all ages, have learned about Ethics through the medium of storyship, be it either from Aesop’s Fables or The New Testament?

How many people have learned about the historical tragedy of The Holocaust through “Schindler’s List”, and the complexity of historical figures through movies like “Lincoln” and “I, Claudius?”  While science may never invent a time-machine, we already have one through the medium of fiction.

All of the stories mentioned above have always been in print since they were released. They are immortal, since the issues that they touch upon are also immortal.

But not only that - when we read stories and get emotionally involved and attached to the characters, when we are amused by the rhymes and rhythms of poetry, enjoying a sample of new music, feasting our eyes on a detailed painting, something is happening to us. The information from these pieces of art is hitting us at a much deeper level than if we just looked at it intellectually. It hits us emotionally.

We can not just think about why Totalitarianism is so bad, we can directly experience it through Winston Smith in “1984”, and when you emerge, with him, through the horrors of Room 101, you will be damn sure to keep your eye on anyone who is trying to take your rights away!

Mythologist Joseph Campbell called the most familiar and oldest story type The Hero’s Journey. The structure of such mythic adventures involves leaving home, going on risky travels that are full of obstacles we learn from, and finally returning, changed forever. Not only does every individual go through there own version of the Hero’s Journey in real life, but learning about other people’s heroic journeys (Theseus and the Minotaur, The Odyssey, The Journey to the West, etc) helps us to have the fortitude of our own because we become familiar with the idea of conquering outer challenges and inner demons.


“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”- Neil Gaiman, Coraline

In other words, when we emerge, with Frodo from his journey to Mt. Doom and back, we are not the naive, childish little hobbits we were before. Now we are stronger, braver, and wiser - traits that we use on our own journeys, to conquer our own Mt. Dooms.

All of this neuroscience, psychology, etc leads me to declare that All Fiction Is Real!, as real as anything else that passes through our heads. Fiction is a time-machine, a teacher, a friend, and a portal to adventure. What are you waiting for? Go read a story today!


Sunday, June 2, 2013

The War of the Senses and Reason

We talk a lot about different Dualities on this blog, perhaps too often. Earlier we talked about Mechanicalness Vs. Humanness, and Apollonianism Vs. Dionysianism, and now today we will be talking about the classic conflicts between our rational minds and animal desires. The Senses Vs. Reason.



The Five Senses: Sight, Hearing, Touch, Smell, and Taste are like windows for our consciousness to gaze out into the world and perceive what is going on out there. What I find very interesting is that while the senses are the most immediately obvious way to gain knowledge about the world, there quickly comes a point where we have reached the limits of sense-knowledge and need to rely on something that we can't immediately use our senses to perceive, and that is where Reason kicks in.We use our rational minds to come up with things as grounded in science (but still only theoretical) as String Theory, or something as metaphysical as the Theory of Forms (I'm a big fan of Plato's theory, and plan on writing an article about it sometime soon!).

So, we can use Reason in two accepted ways: We can make judgements based off information gathered through the sense-windows, making conclusions we believe are justified by the evidence that we can see, touch, etc. This is called Empiricism (Perception + Reason = Empiricism).

But we can also attain to knowledge about the empirical world using rational reasoning alone. Let us say, for example, that a nasty ol' snake-oil salesman came up to me with a box and said that if I paid him 5,000$ he would lift open the lid on the box and show me Icy Fire. That is, of course, impossible, because it is contradictory for Icy Fire to exist. I wouldn't need to pay you 500$ to know that what you are trying to claim is false. There is ice, and there is fire, but there is not Icy Fire. The belief that most or all things can be known through reason alone is Rationalism.

It is important to note that our Rationality can be tricked by our senses, and that is why it is important to always stay on guard.

'Know the Self to be sitting in the chariot, the body to be the chariot, the intellect  the charioteer, and the mind the reins .'
 'The senses they call the horses, the objects of the senses their roads. When he (the Highest Self) is in union with the body, the senses, and the mind, then wise people call him the Enjoyer.'
He who has no understanding and whose mind (the reins) is never firmly held, his senses (horses) are unmanageable, like vicious horses of a charioteer.''But he who has understanding and whose mind is always firmly held, his senses are under control, like good horses of a charioteer.'
I think that paragraph from the Katha Upanishads (part of a collection of scriptures from Hinduism called The Upanishads) illustrates the ideal relationship between the different parts of ourselves.

I believe that our senses can mislead us in two ways: Illusions of perception, and Desire.

An example of sensory illusions is this: I remember, one time, I was having a sleepover at my friend Griffin’s house, and we were in his basement. It was very dark, and of course we are rowdy, talkative teenagers so it was well-past midnight. We looked out of the window and I became terrified, and he asked me why. I said that there was a creepy old lady staring at us through the window. He looked at it from my angle and said the same thing. We were both fairly certain there wasn't actually someone looking at us, because it seems unlikely that this would happen and that an elderly lady could just be staring there motionlessly. The next morning when the sun came up the demon was revealed to only be a formation of dust on the wall - the angle I was looking at it from and the level of light available to me tricked my eyes into thinking it was a creepy, elderly face.
                                                                                                                                         
In other words, my senses tell me: There is a demon staring at us through the window! But my reasoning says: There must be something up...

An example of our senses being fooled by desire is this: Earlier this year I decided I would start eating healthy. I do not believe that ignorance is bliss, I believe that only the ignorant and the lazy think that. Instead I prescribe by “bliss is knowledge” by virtue of it being real and that ignorance is actually one of the purest expressions of suffering. So I gave up chocolate, candy, fast food, chips, pop, - the whole bit.

Because I have been eating this stuff for so long my body was addicted to it in a sense, and as a result of that the first week was like a withdrawal period. I had to struggle, to remind myself that the food is unhealthy regardless of how good it tastes, etc. I was experiencing, for myself, the classic example of our Reason leading us out of temptation. This is a very religious thing, a very ascetic thing, but Temperance is surely one of the oldest uses of Reason.

Now I find my body is extremely cautious towards letting anything get into my body and lets my mind decide instead, and I find I am healthier, with more energy and concentration. Sacrificing short-term pleasure for long-term gain has paid off!

So not only can our rational minds guide our senses (as in the example above) it can also tame them.

This second example of reason leading us out of pointless & destructive desires is called Temperance, one of the Four Cardinal Virtues. This is important to note because I believe as Socrates believed, that to be Rational is to be Ethical, and vice-versa.

When I went through my phase of quitting so many bad habits,I became extremely interested in why my body was so averse to quitting foods that were obviously unhealthy for it. Then, I read the research of biologist Niko Tinbergen. Niko Tinbergen discovered that animals are easily fooled by supernormal (alternatively called “super-real”) stimuli. The parents of songbirds would prefer to feed fake baby birds with mouths wider than their real children.  Male stickleback fish would ignore real rivals in order to attack wooden replicas with brightly painted underbellies. The sensuous instincts of the animals were hijacked and harmed as a result of that.

But, there is already an animal that is quite familiar with super-real stimuli..... Humankind!
                                                                                                                                                             
After all, while our technology is fantastic and all it outran our instincts a long time ago and the same brain that was made to cope with the Savannah's of Africa must now survive in an environment of refined foods that are saltier and tastier than anything that was ever available to our ancestors, technology that can immerse us into another world, and pornography. Is it any wonder, then, that the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) includes pornography, video games, and junk food?

What I gather from all this is that while animals are led along by their senses and are even “captured” by them, unable to act differently to what they see or hear regardless of how real it is. A human, using his rational intellect, can differentiate between the real and the unreal, between the beneficial and the harmful, and choose between them for his betterment.
awesome artwork called "Reason Vs. Instinct", original photo by Onikaizer. Instinct is portrayed as the animal mis-match monster on the left, and reason as the mechanical entity on the right. 

I guess Aristotle was right when he said we are the “Rational Animal”: Animals + Intellect = Humans. I believe this following statement is right regardless of your cosmological stance: Humans should allow their reason to dominate and guide their senses, otherwise their senses will dominate and guide their reasons. If you are an evolutionist, then you must not allow millions of years of evolution to go to waste by not making use of that rational mind, and exercise your unique, Nature-given capability to reason and control yourself. If you are a creationist, than God surely gave you a rational mind to elevate you beyond the level of mere animals so you should exercise it. 

After all, are not most of the traditionally accepted Ethics based on that above foundation? My senses tell me to be gluttonous, my reason tells me to be temperate. My animal mind wants me to steal, my human mind wants me to be charitable. My inner animal wants me to kill and compete, but the better angels of my nature want me to be merciful and just.