One thing that Luhrmann’s research suggests is that mental change is often preceded by social or physical change. Take for example a new awareness of the political loadedness of terms like “disabled” and “normal” that often flares when one is moved by accident from being “normal” to being deaf. Most hearing people never think about stuff like this unless they have not “normal” relatives or friends. Another example: I knew a woman (pale skin with reddish blonde hair) who once told me that “Indians ...
The New York Subway system has had more than its share of urban legends. Especially over the past thirty or forty years, a massive and strange collection of tales and stories evolved that are as massive and strange as NYC's netherworld of rapid (usually) transportation. Weird and dangerous creatures were said to lurk along the hundreds of stations and miles of tracks which comprise the subway: monsters and zombies, ghosts and vampires, snakes and alligators (the bigger the better, of course) were ...
Today was my first day back to work. Woo. Hoo. Enough of that...why stay on a topic that I hate! Where I live, there is this Diner Gas Station thingy called Pops. Over 400 different kinds of soda. Wow! So we went there today, Bryan, Lil G (My brother) and I. They didn't have much of a selection because they don't re-stock until after the store is closed. Which blows. But its all good, I got ginger ale. Because my friend was kind of sad that I didn't work with her that night, ...
I started thinking seriously about change sometime in the 80s (my fist child was born in 1979). Then in the late 80s or early 90s I read this book called Persuasions of the Witches Craft by T.M. Luhrmann that was originally written as an anthropological thesis but then was published by a mainstream press (Harvard University Press). She concludes her book with a theory she calls “interpretive drift: the slow shift towards belief.” This is an example of how interpretive drift works: ...
There is a card in the tarot – the 2 of disks. Its key word is “change.” When I finally decided (about 15 minutes ago) to create this blog, I couldn’t decide what it was to be about. So I got out one of my tarot decks and asked. First I asked “Is this a good idea?” The cards I pulled said “yes, as long as you keep your intellect as the guiding impulse behind the fingers-on-the-keyboard and not your anger.” OK. Good advice. I can get pretty angry pretty quickly and since anger (unless very ...
Recent Comments
