Literature Network Forums - Blogs - title by MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?35844-title The largest classic literature discussion forum on the Internet. Read Write Teach Share. en Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:55:22 GMT vBulletin 10 https://www.online-literature.com/forums/images/misc/rss.jpg Literature Network Forums - Blogs - title by MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?35844-title <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2885-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Mon, 20 Aug 2007 02:46:46 GMT After tonight I will be gone for the better part of a week (at least). See you when I get back. *Mary* After tonight I will be gone for the better part of a week (at least). See you when I get back.

Mary ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2885-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2884-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Mon, 20 Aug 2007 02:44:48 GMT -- the void and the art of not-seeing The light is just coming. Civil twilight, the sound of train wheels on steel track from the open door, my... -- the void and the art of not-seeing

The light is just coming. Civil twilight, the sound of train wheels on steel track from the open door, my white long-haired cat, Peyote, a glimmer against the grey sidewalk. I can see through the foot high gap between the bottom of my closed blinds and the bottom of the window pane. I am typing, drinking broth, listening for the bird calls to begin rising from the wood and wire. Underneath it all, under the rumble of a truck across the bridge spanning the river behind me, under the lone bird song now calling from my left, supporting and underpinning the presence of morning is the resonant void.

Lately, it is as if the void is getting louder. Not that I think it is, just that it’s getting harder for me to separate out its constant thrum from the rhythm of daily living. Perhaps that’s the point—that there is no difference? I don’t know. All I can do is concentrate on how it feels and what that makes my body know.

Teaching this experience is difficult. All one can really do is ask someone to try and have the experience for themselves. Here is an example of what that might be like.

Tracking in the void is the art of not-seeing. Imagine: no sight, or ears, no taste, nor even touch of skin. Only the thun thun of your legs walking. Thun thun, thun thun. Walking down a hill—the pressured thigh and stretched calf. Above the thun thun of feet falling, knees cycling up and then down, there is the slitch of the torso twisting as the thun thun continues, and if you can hold—the cadence of the body—your attention to the sensation of moving, there will be a body-song rise up from the patterned connections between thun slitch thun. The song-sense accretes; grows outward from the moving sinews like the nest of a cliff swallow under the eaves of a body walking. Out and around, the weaving of cadence thun slitch thun becomes the globe of the nest. And then—imagine—the feel of your shoulder lifting and sliding forward, its arm swinging, a pleasant pull in the gravity well of feeling, and the other arm, its hand curled gently, dangling at the wrist, a petal suspended on the rising arc of a backward swing. This lateral swirl of shoulder and arm moves—a layered cadence of its own—the dropped bi-beat of the arms ting ting and the sibilant sloss of the shoulders. And your head nodding pin pin, chin cocked tip to the feel of the body moving, its rhythms gliding against each other. Hold them all and walk and the nest of kinesthetic sensation will weave out, close the belled nest into a safe dark universe where the cadence of the resonant void can sing in muscle and bone. There will be only a small round tunnel through which, when you choose, the return of ear and tongue and eye can come rushing back.

The watcher—as I call that woman born the day of the jagger-bush experience—stands always with five toes curled over the edge of the great well of unknowing. This experience of self rarely subsides, even in sleep. It is as if she were a lighthouse perched there thrumming at the edge of the human world. I have come to think of the edge of the void as a cliff in my awareness. It feels that way. As if it were the edge of the world—the edge of a world I can safely story and therefore know through the history of my conscious mind’s experience. Beyond that lies this other set of universes and what can be known of that place can only be known through the agency of the body—everything human—the body thinking.

What can be known of the void is, in my experience, only adequately shared through direct experience—and then most potently in shared experience. The existence of the void (the 14th century anonymous Christian mystic called it ‘the cloud of unknowing’) is felt through the body as layer upon layer of sensation. It is like a full orchestra, which under the blaring power of the aware self thinking and the eye discerning, becomes heard only as the beat of the deep drum. The rest of the instrumentation, the flutes and viols, the cello and trombone, go on but it is as if they were silent, the blare of the I/eye is so loud. It is not surprising then, in this "silence," that the cadence of one’s life begins to crack, falling out of rhythm with the deep music to which one can no longer attend. But do not mistake: unawareness does not equate with lack of existence. The void continuously hums. In fact right now, the light finally full force, my cats asleep on the bed, coffee ready; the sky is singing. ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2884-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2872-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Sat, 18 Aug 2007 07:15:50 GMT I dream of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Not often nor in any great detail, ATP (a high energy macromolecule essential to every living thing on the... I dream of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Not often nor in any great detail, ATP (a high energy macromolecule essential to every living thing on the planet because it is our “energy currency”) winds its way through my dreams like a three-stranded woven cord, sometimes just itself on a dark background of a nearly empty dream and sometimes it comes across the stage of a dream in progress, taking the shape of something else. Last time it was a large black cat, a panther I suppose, from its size and disposition. When something like that happens, some intrusion of image or content, I stop staring at the dream unfolding and I look in surprise—this time at the molecule/cat unwinding itself across the field of my dream vision. I know in the dream it is ATP and at the same time it is a cat and the surprise of that wakes me in the dream to the fact that I am dreaming.

This last dream was a fairy story come into my head to play. I watched from the sidelines, I felt much like I do when watching an old medieval-style play being re-enacted outside at some summer festival or another. I feel a kind of wary delight, enjoying the colour and sound, the freedom of the sun and air and the simple fun of watching people act silly. The wariness, I think, comes from the knowledge of how easily human behaviour can shift from a group to a mob, and knowing that somewhere circulating among the people are those who would hurt another for a few dollars or a few moments of pleasure and perhaps it is that constant chary knowledge that causes the ATP in my dreams to transform into cats instead of, say, butterflies.

In this dream, the play I was watching from the edge of the field was at first a single character (as it turns out the only human character), a witch, costumed in traditional black, her head bare and her hair loose. I remember feeling amused about that in the dream, the conflicting messages of mourning and hiding that come with an enveloping cloak attached through the character’s dress with the sexual and mental freedom of unbound hair. The witch was in a state of ennui. She was being serenaded by the moon (another character, and it was the moon, not a human character dressed as the moon), who was concerned to bring the witch out of her funk. The teapot, the size of a Great Dane, was pouring itself, its brew to sustain the witch in her travail. The cow and the spoon were helping out, hovering at this moment in the play. Inside the dream I could almost feel the wringing hands despite the fact that only the witch had hands. And yet, despite all the solicitous attention, for some reason she was still sighing. It was funny really: witty self mockery, as if the world really stopped to care for human languor. Then, in the middle of this performance the cat shaped molecule of ATP stalked across the field. Even stranger, the cast of the play didn’t notice and the cat, its deliberate slide of muscle, took no notice of anyone. It just walked from lower left to upper right. “Oh!” I thought, “this is a dream.”

***

I learned about ATP in a biology class, I think, during the time I was still in school in England. It is possible that I heard of it before, or read of it. One of my favourite books as an eight-year-old was my parents’ copy of Van Nostrums Scientific Encyclopaedia. But if I did read it in there, I don’t remember it.

The thing that caught my attention at first, and probably the reason for its occasional appearance in my dreams, is that I understood from that long ago biology lecture, that ATP is the main energy carrier in every living thing on earth. The knowledge blossomed in my teenaged head as the knowledge of life’s essential unity. I had already read Darwin by that time, and I accepted the basic obvious physical transformative mechanism of adaptation because it seemed clear that a life form must adapt to its environment or die. The world, I knew even then, is so big and powerful that even though the world changes, its changes will always take precedence over the needs and desires of the life it throws up. Once I knew about ATP, knew that in the bacteria that makes me sick, in the salad I eat, in my mother’s dog, and in me the same process makes life possible, makes the energy come from the sun, through the plants, into me and the finally back into the earth, I knew this explained everything.

In Biology class it was if a hot light was burning behind my eyes. I felt it spread out into my legs and arms. I felt my mind shifting, little pieces of thought breaking free, turning and reattaching to new bits. I felt my mind move outward, as if it were a bowl whose edges were alive, turning air into a wider and wider brim, enlarging the hollow of the bowl, allowing me to hold more and more knowing. Despite this deep connection between spiritual experience and knowledge, the bowl of my mind, to keep that metaphor, wasn’t really filled with bits. I didn’t have the sense of a storehouse, and still don’t. Rather it is like a shimmering pattern that gets more and more complicated but not in small incremental steps. It leaps.

I think about my current pattern, the web that holds my thoughts and beliefs, all fundamentally structured around a core piece of perception, an absolute proposition, an experience or a bit of understanding that has come down to me from my culture. I imagine it, sometimes, like a web, like Ariadne’s thread after a thousand-million Ariadne’s have woven themselves through the labyrinth and out into the world of their futures. But it is a living web and not really one of dimensional string. In my mental picture of it, based on the sense of my mind moving, it is like a web of light or heat. When a new fact or experience comes into the system mostly the web just absorbs it, shunts the new idea or knowledge into its already established place. The pattern itself doesn’t reorient. But when some things happen, sometimes as simple as learning about the ubiquitous nature of ATP, or the appearance of a purple glow around a stand of chicory, or the sound of a flock of starlings in early winter eating the cat food I leave on my front porch, the pattern can alter, breaking open old connections and establishing new ones. When this happens it feels much the same as the experience Reader describes as a “near death” mystical experience except, I feel no pain, only the wave of heat, a sense of temporary disorientation, and the sense that I have grown out, extending myself along the strands of the wyrd.

I like to think of the wyrd as the overall pattern that establishes all form and all energy. I try to hold the wyrd in my mind as an empty category and am helped in this difficult endeavour by my experiences of mind-shifts like the one induced by the knowledge of ATP. I think of pattern (the wyrd) as an algorithm and not as a number or arithmetic sign. In the equation 2 + 2 = 4, the numbers and signs are content. The numbers 2 and 4 are something. The arithmetic signs “+” and “=” are something; they are also content. The pattern, though, the wyrd which underlies the equation, the contentless presence/rule that enables the content to act is the relationship between the various content. Sometimes, I think of the wyrd like the iterated algorithm, as a kind of repetitive rule by which energy and matter form and reform. The pattern repeated and repeated creates the universe.

This is just like ATP and the manipulation and movement of energy from one form to another form. The basic processes are the same in all life. What happens is that an electrical-chemical gradient is created (in the mitochondria in animals and in thylakoid disks in the chloroplasts of plants. This gradient accumulates energy (sort of like a battery). This energy is used to manufacture ATP, which is the molecule that provides the energy for, amongst other things, the assembly of proteins, the synthesis of fats, nerve impulses, muscle contractions, the movement of sperm and bioluminescence.

The gradient has a positive pole (P-proton electrochemical potential) and a negative pole (N-electron potential). Movement along the gradient makes it possible for ATP to construct and deconstruct. ATP gives up energy (which is then used by the life-form for biological housekeeping) and becomes ADP: ATP (triphosphate) loses a tail and becomes ADP (diphosphate). ADP gets another tail (the ultimate source of that energy being the sun—via sun for plants and food in animals) and then it is ATP again, and is ready to sacrifice itself and discharge its energy to the bioform. It is the bonds that join those three tails to the adenosine that hold all the energy necessary for living. Although there are differences having to do with our various evolutions (plants for example have two different cycles for the production of ATP, one occurring in the chloroplast which works in concert with one occurring in the mitochondria, while humans do not have chloroplasts), we all have the same basic set up. The electrochemical gradient is an example of this. In chloroplasts the N side is in the stroma (the interior fluid filled matrix of the chloroplast) and the P side is in the thykaloid space (inside the thykaloid). In mitochondria N also occurs in the matrix (the space inside the mitochondria) and the P side is in the intermembrane space. But if you take their construction into consideration—taking the N side as the point of origin—in chloroplasts the gradient moves from the outside in and in mitochondria the gradient moves from the inside out. Animals, in other words, evolved from plants but got things backwards: animals are suyapi plants.

The beautiful thing is that this one rule, this working solution to the problems of distribution of energy, repeated and repeated, makes all life forms from a hyacinth to the world leaders possible. To me, understanding the radical unity of life, says that we are more alike at some levels than our gross differences would lead us to believe. It is this point of similarity, down in the chemistry and physics of our natures that makes me think that sometimes, under the right circumstances, what is often interpreted as a mystical experience may actually be something more simple and more radical. It may be an act of radical empathy. ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2872-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2869-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Fri, 17 Aug 2007 11:54:46 GMT Humans have tried a number of strategies to modify our behavior. Two of the key ones have been religions and secular ethical codes that come with... Humans have tried a number of strategies to modify our behavior. Two of the key ones have been religions and secular ethical codes that come with punishments built in. History shows that neither has much of a track record with modifying human behavior toward compassion, tolerance or just getting along: holy wars and secular wars; prisons and cults. And yet we (meaning human beings) don’t have as many public hangings as we used to. Slavery, while currently on the increase, has decreased significantly over the last 300 years. More women have some control over their bodies and can own property even if female “circumcision” is on the rise. Less children are sold into indentured servitude, even though child-slaves are still a hot property in a number of places in the world. The question is why? Why are there less public hangings? How did that happen and what does it mean?

Of course there is no guarantee that the situation won’t change and we won't go back to selling tickets to see someone swing. In fact it probably will ( as empires fall as often as they rise) unless we come up with some species recognition of what makes us behave as we do - followed by some willingness to limit our own personal power over others. I mean one thing that makes slavery possible is the ability and willingness to use superior power to force our will on another. You need both the ability and the willingness: the US had the ability to nuke 2 cities full of people, yet Hiroshima and Nagaski would not have had to be rebuilt if the US had not also the willingness. The same is also true of Saddam Hussein and his power to attempt genocide with respect to the Kurdish people. And of Andrew Jackson with regard to the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

With these 3 (and with the multitude of other current and historical examples) there were always really good reasons to do what was done. “It was war!” someone always says. Does that excuse what was done? Does it change the fact that at someone’s behest someone else died? Does it matter if it was a war fought in the name of some god or some philosophical ideal? It seems a touch hypocritical to kill in the name of peace and yet we use that same rationalization over and over – and we do it with a straight face. And of course there are the questions, Does it matter that the Kurdish died as a consequence of political policy; the Cherokee were walked to death; the Japanese cities fried? Does it matter if we extinguish our claim to the capacity for morality and rationality in the blood of others?

So what is it that compels us to ignore our back trail – our history – and blindly step all over the rights and lives of others while uttering our war cry “Freedom and liberty for all?” And at the same time as we are stumbling around through the nightmare of “foreign policy” (whether it be policy between nations or between persons), what has made the overall decline in slavery and indentured servitude possible? ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2869-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2849-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Thu, 16 Aug 2007 03:43:00 GMT This is a long one. Sorry. The apparent question, with respect to my first memory, is what actually happened? But is this question the real... This is a long one. Sorry.

The apparent question, with respect to my first memory, is what actually happened? But is this question the real question? If the experience is assessed within the cognitive framework that supports “what actually happened”, it constrains the reality of the experience. The rules by which meaning is captured in the net of a sentence and the rules by which meaning is caught by soma are different. Assessing the meaning of Il fait beau in the right context (i.e as a French sentence) works to provoke understanding; in the wrong context it is a bunch of letters and spaces.

Actually. It’s such a strong word. Even if we leave it out—The question is what happened?—“actually” still hovers there under the wing of is. This is an example of the mind storying beginning from the underlying (i.e. usually unconscious) acceptance/belief that there must be an ultimate cause and there must be one correct answer and this is the context that makes of the experience a foreign language. There must be an actually happened—one instance, one meaning, one event that is true.

But, of course, there are many possible truths (stories/fictions) to “explain” what I experienced when I was four years old. 1) It could be literally true. In some manner my child body was materially moved to another time/place where it was summer and where there were two people waiting to speak to me. 2) It could be partially literally true, in that the experience took place in the context of my psych but that the two adults were actual people who were entering my psychic space. 3) It could be metaphorically true, in that the experience was totally occurring in my psyche and that all the events, characters and place were aspects of my developing self. 4) It could be that I had a minor physical anomaly in the brain (such as I will discuss in a moment) that caused the set of sensations that got interpreted in the moment as the above experience. Which one appears to any given mind as “obviously true” is a sign of what particular set of rules govern the interpreters mind but the “obviousness” of the explanation is not a guarantee of any material truth. It’s just an indicator of cultural truth.

Storying begins with what Collingwood calls an absolute proposition. Absolute propositions are ones that are not verifiable. God is an absolute proposition, as is “no god,” as is all actions in the universe have causes. An absolute proposition is the baseline place from which storying begins. In the example of my first memory, if a person starts from the assumption that the body is the sole cause of experience it is very unlikely this person will interpret the experience and arrive at explanations 1 or 2. If the interpreter accepts as an absolute position that there is a non-corporeal world of intent that can cause change in the material world then choices 1 and 2 are now potential stories that could be attributable to the experience. So, depending on what absolute propositions a person has to begin with, any of the above stories could be true or false.

Since absolute propositions are not verifiable by their very nature, no sense can be made of the question “which explanation is true?” What matters is not the truth or falsity of an absolute proposition (Collingwood calls it nonsense to ask this of such a proposition), but its “efficacy.” What matters: What lived universe does an absolute proposition create?

To understand anyone’s reaction (including my own) to my first memory one needs first to understand the absolute propositions that underlie the particular storying mind. “No god” is an absolute proposition and this text (and my life) is the edifice which has been built upon it. No human being lives without a multitude of absolute propositions about the world, the fact that you are a human being, for example. Can your human status be proved? No medical test in the universe—no genetic scan, no battery of comparative anatomy tests—can definitively rule out the possibility that you aren’t some cleverly designed machine or altered alien. Silly, of course, but that’s what happens when you subject an absolute proposition to the test of verifiability.

Perhaps because of their status as unverifiable, absolute propositions are useful things. They are like little platforms from which the world can be perceived and assessed. We jump around (quite unconsciously most of the time) from one platform (absolute) proposition to another depending on what it is we want or need—depending on what context encloses the need to understand an experience. Collingwood, in his Metaphysics, outlines the absolute propositions behind what he terms Newtonian, Kantian and Einsteinian physics. Examining the physical world and its phenomena: Newtonian physics bases its analysis upon the proposition that some events have causes and some events are “due to the operation of laws;” Kantian physics—all events have causes, that is, the concept of law collapses into the concept of causation; and finally in Einsteinian physics there are no causes only laws—there are only laws because the concept of causation has collapsed into the concept of laws. It seems obvious that all of these various physics are “true” by virtue of their applicability. What matters is whether the world of knowledge they build is explanatory and predictive—their efficacy.

Each edifice that has been built from these three absolute propositions is particularly useful in explaining a particular aspect of the world. If you want to know how long a lever you need to move a heavy block, utilizing the theory of relativity will probably result in a backache. By the same token Newton can’t deal with the interesting world of subatomic particulate behaviour. Utility as a guideline is easy to accept in a situation to which very few of us have an emotional attachment. I can think about the movement of planets in their orbits and then think about what string theory could possibly actually mean without a twinge: I can switch systems with no regret, relief or other emotional state. The same cannot be said of other kinds of absolute propositions.

Some propositions are more closely tied to our sense of immediate survival and this is almost always an emotional issue. For example, when faced with the emotions of anxiety and fear the absolute proposition of meaningfulness kicks in to play. We struggle under the weight of answering the question about whether the universe is meaningful or meaningless. We struggle because we believe it must be one or the other. We struggle partly because the emotional consequences are so dire with either choice. The question of meaning is not verifiable, nor is the assumption that there is one correct truth or explanation. They are, therefore, absolute propositions. Choosing meaning or meaninglessness is, in other words, an act of faith.

One’s place in history—one’s culture, ethnicity, gender, class, sense of identity—deeply effects which set of absolute propositions is foundational to the storying process. Both one’s place in history and one’s set of absolute propositions are foundational to one’s sense of identity. The particular set of absolute propositions which a person utilizes to assess the world is a key structural element in the conceptual framework which guides what one will perceive as evidence and how one ascribes meaning to the evidence that is accepted. I refer to this overall structure—in its operation—as the “rules of evidence.”

Profound psychological/spiritual change is often about modifying one’s rules of evidence: spiritual disciplines are those practices that when followed accomplish this modification.

Dr. A.I. Reader was a clinical associate professor of ophthalmology in 1995 when he wrote an article called “The Internal Mystery Plays” to explain his “near death experience.” It is a really interesting document on a number of levels. He describes his experience in some detail, focusing on the physical experience as well as the sense he made of it. His experience begins with worry and then a racing heart and pain. He realizes he is dying and then at that moment he “remembered (his) upbringing, which said, ‘When you are facing death, you are to let go and turn everything over to God.” He does, and experiences a “sudden release of the pain and the fear and a complete sense of bliss and understanding.” What he experiences—life memories flashing into awareness, “threads” connecting everything, a bright light, his ancestors and a decision whether he was going to stay or not—are commonalities in many near-death experiences. His status and knowledge as a doctor means that much of what he is describing has a clinical feel to it. The effect is to simultaneously reassure (as to the veracity and reliability of the described experience) and limit (as in the creation of a chasm between the brain made me do it type of explanation and author’s experience of “the Guiding Spirit.”)

He carefully explicates the physical sources of the experience. His headings include: “Neurological Foundations,” “Cortical Contributions,” “Autonomic Contributions,” “Vascular Contributions,” “Psychological Contributions,” and “Theoretical Model for Near-Death and Mystical Imagery.”

Over a period of time this (hyperventilation) can lead to a ‘pseudoangina” syndrome with chest pain, shortness of breath, and other typical myocardial infarction symptoms. This leads to tachycardia and eventual disconnection in the autonomic nervous system with a (usually sudden) decrease in the pulse rate due to the profound reflex vagal stimulation to the heart. Sudden cardiac standstill ensues, which can last up to 20 seconds before profound bradycardia in the rage of 30 to 40 beats per minute occurs. This, I believe, is the physiological basis for my own near-death experience.

After presenting his experience and its physiological causes, Reader then discusses what he calls the “correlates to contemplative practices.” In this section after the paragraph quoted above, he discusses the means by which such states may be induced, talking about empathogens, fasting, meditation, hypothermia, etc. It isn’t until the science is well documented that he moves on to the last two pages of his explanation which begins with the heading “Transformational Psychology.” His first sentence: “However, there are two aspects of the experience that cannot be fully explained physiologically and require delving into physical and spiritual realms.” The first three paragraphs still focus on the physical structures of the experience, β-endorphins, for example and the “dive” reflex, recounting a particularly nasty experiment where researchers let loose a small animal in a tank of water where the animal could not escape. The scientists watched the animal lose hope, “dive” to the bottom of the tank and die. This paragraph immediately precedes “the second aspect of the near-death experience…the transformational aspect of the psyche.”

I find this choice of narrative movement fascinating. It’s almost as if his role as scientist (therefore establishing which rules of evidence should be used to assess the world) required him to focus on the brain made me do it even though, as becomes clear, he has personally applied a completely irrational (from the point of view of the brain made me do it) story to the experience, that which he calls the “Higher Power” or “Guiding Spirit.” He says that

I am constantly asking myself why this experience is accompanied by such a profound feeling of Spirit. The only answer that I can give at present is the one that I have received from the experience itself, and is the same answer given by all known religious masters. The answer comes in a love that is so profound, deep, and unifying that it seems that it can only come from a Universal Presence, and from nowhere else.

This is where he ends up in terms of his thinking about the experience—this is what it feels like but I don’t really know—some deeply honest sentences. What makes this insecurity work in his text is the narrative movement from vicious “dive” experiment to the next paragraph, which ends with “It is this subjugation of will that is the common feature of almost all persons who have had near-death experiences and have then had a transformation in their psyche in the way they live in the physical world.” He cannot explain the subjective experience physically, (“In spite of these discoveries and those yet to come, no one will ever fully know why these reflexes and the sensations associated with them exist, or why they cause such profound psychic, physical, and spiritual changes in the individuals who have them.”) but he can try to mimic the experience for us by shunting us from an imagined death—overwhelmed by the hopelessness and horror of watching a dive-reflex death—to the transformative moment of “consciously releasing the physical body from the personal will through the sudden acceptance of a Higher Authority.”

Amongst other things, what I take from readings like this, and from similar stories recounted to me over the years by people who have had similar transformative experiences is that while absolute presuppositions are themselves unverifiable, the primary criteria for choice concerning which absolute proposition to use is expediency. We need our propositions to work in the world. We want them to do the work of helping us cope with what happens to us and if they don’t then we quickly reach for whatever base-line proposition will allow us to explain our experiences in ways that will allow us to get along in our lives.

Let me hasten to add, this capacity to stand happily on philosophical quicksand has no moral content in my view. Both our inflexibility and flexibility depending on circumstances is just what humans are like. The Stanford experiment shows that this trait can lead to much human misery yet positive therapy (whether secular or religious)—where a person changes the basic story of his or her life enough to effect increased contentment and happiness—is another possible outcome of the human ability to shift absolute propositions and its attendant evidentiary rule. What Reader’s account shows is that while culture and the framework of beliefs that are passed on through socialization are powerful (otherwise why spend so much time assuring the reader of his fundamental scientific orientation, only to tell us of the importance of turning over the will to the “Higher Power”) absolute propositions are not unchangeable. That is, human beings can adapt to this kind of experience in ways that, as Reader puts it, develop strong “altruistic feelings of sibling-like love that are essential to the ethics and morality of any successful culture or race. These moral rules of ‘fair play’ are inherent in the unitive feelings experienced in the near-death state.” ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2849-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2842-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Wed, 15 Aug 2007 02:02:53 GMT Note: This was posted on this site (somewhere) but the content fits here in this "story" I am telling. So for those of you who have seen it before...oh well

I was born on a dark moon in October of 1956. The year I turned four my parents, my baby brother and I lived in small green house somewhere north of Pittsburgh. Our house was one of three on a hillside. The three perched in a clearing cut from the surrounding timber. There were evergreen shrubs around the foundations of the house and a narrow brick ledge that seemed, at the time, so high that I was in danger when I climbed along its bricks. I loved to inch along the ledge, back to the house, my palms pressed flat against the rough bricks. I would chant as I went. Purple people eaters. Purple people eaters. I climbed past the shrubs, felt a frisson of fear, that they—and their sharp needles—would eat me if I fell from the ledge.

The day which marks for me the beginning of my spiritual life also marks my first memory. It was early winter just after I turned four. I wore a brown snowsuit with mittens hanging from strings. The snowsuit was the same colour as my stuffed donkey, a toy my grandmother had given me at my birth, my mother told me. Donkey was as big as me. He had a rough brown body, a white nose and big floppy ears. I remember the snowsuit, I think, because Donkey was so important to me. In fact at age 50 I still have him.

There was snow. It was like stars or diamonds. The sky was blue and bright, the air not really cold. My face, I remember, felt warm inside the white fake-fur of my hood. My mother dressed me and sent me into the yard to play. She stayed inside with my baby brother. It was a safe place to live (I think) and so we had no fences.

I made for the woods. I felt as if I was on long journey. I suppose because I still had the legs of a small child. I would lift my feet, my knees nearly at my chest, just to clear the snow. Just inside the wood, where I could still see my parents’ house if I looked, there was a living hump of red jagger bushes. Now I know they must have been raspberry canes, or perhaps blackberry, but at the time I called them jaggers because they had thorns like daggers. There was a small entrance into the mound that the jaggers made and a short little tunnel of the same thick woody canes. They were bright red those canes and stood out against the dark trees and the snow that fell on the hump of its back.

Inside the jagger mound, it was clear of snow; instead there was a bed of soft, fragrant leaves. They were big leaves. Bigger than my hand and they were brown like my snowsuit skin. They smelt of sleep and somehow of home, although not of my house where I lived with my family. I remember the feel of them under me. I laid down, my arms tucked in at my sides. My feet fell open a little. I stared up at the living roof, smelled the earth, felt the cushion of old life, heard the soft shush of air moving through the jaggers. I could taste raisin toast. And then I wasn’t there in the jagger-house anymore.

I felt no surprise. No fear. I was in an oval glade that closed-in-green around a small circle of blue sky. It was summer. The grass green and the trees were in full leaf, and it smelt of hyacinths, although I don’t remember seeing any. There were two people there, a man and a woman. They talked to me for quite a while it seemed, telling me things. Time was different here. It was as if I were floating in a sea, moving, yet not moving. It was as if a wave of some kind had picked me up and was lifting me gently, moving me up and down. I could not really tell what was me and what wasn’t: I had an amorphous sense of own limits. It was if the whole thing—the glade, the people, the trees, the sky, me—were all there was. It was as if it was forever and yet it was also like there wasn’t any time at all. It’s the same sense I get swimming in the sea—as if I am suspended in a drop of green light that has neither space nor time. Of course at the time I didn’t think about it like that. I didn’t “think” about it at all. I just felt the flow and ebb, heard the sounds and voices, saw the summer trees and the sky. What I learned that day registered at the sensory level not at the cognitive. So I wasn’t listening to the two people exactly, although I took all the sounds in. I was just there and open, absorbing what was present. I had no intent, nor will, no feeling really, just presence.

My family and I moved from that house sometime after this. I don’t remember returning to the jagger-house, although I am fairly sure I must have since I felt so safe and welcome there. What I do know is that this experience changed my world profoundly. I didn’t speak about it with my mother (at least I don’t remember doing so and she never brought it up to me later), but it was as if I was born that day. My memory, for one thing, was vivid: some things when they happen, I seem to record in great sensual detail. I can still, for example, remember how the leaves under the jaggers felt. I can see their big points, like maple leaves; feel them under my palms. Perhaps it is that life had depth and resonance from then on: it was as if a wakeful watcher had moved into my head; she sensed things I couldn’t.

She, I sometimes think, is the one who remembers in this new and vibrant way. (She also has, I must say, a rather wicked sense of humor, although she is not mean. She has always helped me to avoid the worst consequences of my own stupidity.) From that day I have always been conscious at some level of what I call the void. That awareness became, for me, my backbone, especially when things were hard. ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2842-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2833-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Tue, 14 Aug 2007 01:49:02 GMT There is a piece of research from post-WWII done by Stanley Milgram and called, not surprisingly, the Milgram Experiment... There is a piece of research from post-WWII done by Stanley Milgram and called, not surprisingly, the Milgram Experiment. It turns out that human beings are more willing to inflict pain on others than they are to defy authority figures. There are good evolutionary grounds for this behavior (see lion story in post 3 for details) but it does rather fly in the face of our concept of ourselves as “choosing” what we do and the concept of “free will” at least with respect to praxis. What interests me about the Milgram experiments was his motivation for doing them. It was during the Nuremberg trials. There were many, many Americans saying things like “Americans would never do what the German people did!” Milgram decided to see if that was true. It wasn’t. Abu Ghraib is only one recent example of our inability to learn from Milgram’s research. So are we any different from the Germans who had an invading army bent on “world domination?” Is there any real difference in the effects of German “fascism” and American “democracy?” Do Reservations count as concentration camps? (Recognizing the exception that we still have Reservations and the Germans dismantled the Camps.) What about the Japanese Internment Camps? (Well, we didn’t have gas ovens at least. But during the contested "ownership" of the lands now known as the United States, we did use small pox infected blankets as a kind of early biological weapon. Would we have used gas ovens if we had had the technology and could have gotten away with it?)

What would it take to change human beings so that we could see, understand and apply (to ourselves) the results of studies like Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s (or take another look at our own history) and actually modify our behavior? ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2833-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2823-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Mon, 13 Aug 2007 03:36:01 GMT When I was a child of about nine or so, some 6 years before I would move to Britain and go on my adolescent tour, but some time (a year or so) after... When I was a child of about nine or so, some 6 years before I would move to Britain and go on my adolescent tour, but some time (a year or so) after the last shorter visit with relations in England, I lived for a while in rural Pennsylvania. It was an uncomfortable experience for me, not because of my skin colour, which is pretty much white, but because of my cultural differences. My family was not Christian, nor did we behave so, and I suppose my differences were obvious: apples hanging on a spring tree. Everyone around us, for example, claimed to belong to Jesus (or to America, which curiously, especially in children’s minds, seemed to mean the same thing), and mostly, they were quite vociferous about the importance of salvation and warding off anything that might endanger grace. We were, I think, suspiciously quiet. In addition, I had a British accent, which, at first, my grade-school teachers took for a speech impediment, because they could not recognize it for what it was. (It was my father’s appearance with his pronounced British accent at a teacher’s conference that finally got me removed from my “speech therapy” sessions, which consisted of colouring pictures alone in the nurse’s room.)

By the time I was beaten up so visibly that my parents couldn’t pretend that the gulf between our family and those around us was not dangerous to their children, they had decided that perhaps Sunday school would be a way for my younger brother and me to integrate with the people with whom we went to school. And so for two weeks I went to Sunday school.

The memory is sharp in places. The basement room of the church: light came in on rafts of dust straight, it seemed to me, from the sky to the brown wooden tables where we children sat. There were eight or perhaps nine of us. I am no longer sure. I remember more clearly the man who was our teacher. In his black clothes, he had a sense of specialness that as a child I connected with, the sweep of his long belled sleeve, the plainness of his clothes, the way the sun lifted up his black-robed shoulders as if he were going to grow raven wings. I don’t remember the lesson, mostly because I could hear singing above me. Above us and in a connected building just down the road a service was being held. Adults, my parents not included, were singing far enough away that I could not hear distinct words but close enough that my ears would not move away from their attention to the feel of the singing. My whole body was tuned to the cadence of blue light that I could feel coming from the people-song above me. It was if the basement room where I sat was being filled with the yellow light of the sun and the blue light of the song. I was entranced by the way the two sources of sensation made me feel, and I suspect I didn’t give our teacher the deference which he thought I ought. But then he started to read us psalms and I heard that. Even above the play of the light and song. I listened. When he was finished he assigned each of us a different psalm to memorize and recite the following week.

I don’t remember clearly what psalm I was to remember. I think it was the first one, because even today I get a powerful sense of awe and wonder reading that song. It was the trees I think, their steadiness. At the same time, my awe of the psalm arises from realizing that spiritual steadiness, which comes from a kind of psychic rootedness—which comes from practices like quietly paying attention to the world—could be so clearly written and that many people, even those who claim this tradition as their own, apparently do not get at all what this implies. It’s as if they can read, even recite, but not understand: they can feel its power but not reason from its argument. It is the trees in that psalm that bear, for me, the lesson: Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked…they are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. It seems to me that it might be suggesting that the life-world of trees might have something to teach us about how to be happy, how to wait, where to take nourishment, how to root in a place where all these happy things can happen. It does not seem to me to suggest that, wanting apples in March, the tree should be cut down as unproductive.

I went back to Sunday school the next week. I remember that I was prepared. I felt excited, open. I liked the psalm and I wanted to feed its seed, sitting in my head as the memorized lines, so when it came my turn I stood in front of my chair as the other children had done before me but instead of closing my eyes and reciting my assigned verses I asked a question instead. I asked, what does it mean? I suppose I should have recited first then asked, but as it was I was so excited by the feel of the song in my body that I wanted an answer immediately and it never occurred to me that he might not want to answer me nor care whether I understood.

The young man in his black robe, in his sun garment, standing at the head of the table, hit me. For impertinence? I don’t know.

I took off, out of the church and across the road. My brother followed. A whole series of contingent events gusted up in the wind-storm of that slap. I ran across the road to the corner store. Even though my brother and I had never stolen anything in our lives, we stole some candy. My brother felt so guilty and scared, that he confessed to our father, telling him that I was the instigator (and I was the elder). My brother came to tell me. He told me that he confessed and that he had blamed me. I was still so angry, having refused to tell my parents’ why I would never go back to Sunday school or any church ever again, still so angry from that slap, from his face as he slapped me, from his look of fear and its unbidden rage, from his look of disgust, that I pushed my brother down. He fell down the tall slope behind our house that separated the forest from our dwelling. He rolled down. He hit his head on a concrete block and went utterly still. I thought I had killed him. I ran into the trees as my mother came running out from the house. I stayed out all night, only coming home the next day.

My brother, although knocked unconscious, lived without damage. My parents wisely said nothing to me, figuring, I think, that a night out in the forest was a good enough teacher. I never went back to Sunday school. I knew from that slap, from the night with the trees, knew deep in my body, even if not in my conscious mind, that there was a fundamental difference between what the trees in the Psalm had to teach and what religion had to offer. I knew what the trees had to offer was something I could be; I knew what religion had to offer would only cause more misfortune. I knew then that I was safer picking my fights on the playground. I thought I stood a better chance at surviving the cruelty of the people I went to school with, than I did surviving adult people who like chaff that the wind drives could not control themselves in the face of their own feelings.

To be clear: I knew all these things in the long moment between the slap and the next day when I came in from the forest, but I knew them not to speak them but as feelings in my stomach, legs, my skin and hands. Nothing could have dragged me into that church again and made me stay. My entire body rebelled, recognizing the danger.

clear silver light: open ears
red thread sewing: closed mouth
pearl grey void: resonant heart
black bell deep in the solar plexus
orange fire: slow thigh hum
stone roots: curled toes, tense feet
and a hot blue knife in the palm

And yet the forest, even though there were real fears, of skunks and dangerous plants, of drowning and broken legs far from home, these were manageable. They did not make me rebel, did not make me run from terror or hatred. They made me pay attention to where I stepped, knowing that if I was careful I could probably manage this. Contrary to the church, I knew the forest might take my life but it would never try to break me.

As an adult, I have not lost the anger, not in all these years, but I think about that young man with some compassion now. I wonder what kind of life drives a body to strike at its own young with so little provocation. I wonder at the tenuous hold someone like that must have on the system to which he has given his life that a child’s question about meaning should evoke such a response. I think about why he did what he did but I cannot come up with a plausible answer. I do not know what my question meant to him but I still, occasionally, think about it—especially when faced with another violently angry, abusive or controlling Christian. Today, I think mostly about his face and the revelation of his emotions, displayed, I am sure, without any conscious control. When faced with a child asking, he broke. I think now that this means that he doesn’t actually believe in his god nor even in his faith, but rather he believes only in his church, in his place within it, his position and his authority. And so when his church hates, he hates. When his church loves, he loves. He has, in a sense, become the system that animates him. Perhaps he had no other place to go. ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2823-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2818-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Sun, 12 Aug 2007 21:25:33 GMT 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... 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 should just get on with life. It is no good holding all that anger. I mean Americans aren’t really prejudiced against Indians anymore. They should just let it go.” Then she married (about 5 years later) a Latino. After the first time someone glared at her and called her a “race traitor” she developed a rabid new political consciousness as well as amnesia about her earlier state of consciousness. This is normal. Completely normal.

Circumstances go a long way towards dictating our interests and therefore, of course, our minds. And of course it is supposed to be this way. Just imagine an animal that didn't flow with or take acute interest in its surroundings! I mean, really..."Jake! Jake! There is a lion coming up on your right," Mary yells as she runs away. "Oh don't worry about it Mary. Take a look at the shape of this pear! Isn't it fasc....." The lion's teeth crunch.

One really good example of how fast and easily circumstances change the way we think and act is the Stanford Prison Experiment conducted by Dr. Zimbardo. Briefly - a few, nicely normal, young college students agreed to a live-in experiment in which some of them would become “guards” and some would become “prisoners.” It took less than 36 hours for these nice normal intelligent middle class boys to start falling apart. Within 36 hours there had already been degradation, rebellion and a psychological break. And lest we think this was demonstrated only by the “boys” the professor (Zimbardo) had fallen into the same patterned thinking dictated by prison life as had the subjects. In the official site he says,

“Less than 36 hours into the experiment, Prisoner #8612 began suffering from acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage. In spite of all of this, we had already come to think so much like prison authorities that we thought he was trying to "con" us -- to fool us into releasing him.”

And then there were the parents and friends. They bought the “authority” of the situation too. And a Catholic priest. It lasted only 5 days. In that 5 days everyone had gone from knowing that this was just and experiment to believing themselves really involved with prison in one way or another. Even those on the outside. 5 days. That’s all it took to change a “normal” person into something we all would like to believe we would never become. ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2818-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2815-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Sun, 12 Aug 2007 04:02:56 GMT 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... 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:

1) in a new group that has some novel ideas that spark an emotional response (say-“if I work hard I can have what ever I want”)
2) take one of the new ideas (If I work hard…) and apply it to self.
3) think about it a good deal. Talk about it with the new group and then, suddenly, there appears to be an instance of it coming true in the world. Say you started off small. “I want someone to notice me.” Then after thinking about it for while and considering what “working hard” might mean with respect to being noticed, you go out to the mall and suddenly it's as if everyone is staring. Oh! You think. It works!
4) Pumped by the discovery of the new idea’s TRUTH you try out the other ideas that the group has. You go looking for evidence of the truth of the group’s reality. And of course you find it.
5) By this time you are emotionally attached to both the group and the ideas that seem so deeply applicable to your life. You have also got the idea that these ideas and the help of the group can give you some control over your own life (always a rather erotic idea).
6) And then, when evidence to the contrary comes up (say they didn’t all look at you, or you discovered that maybe they were all looking because there is a big hole in your neon green spandex short-shorts) you explain away the failure by anything but the idea that the idea itself is wrong. In other words, you constrain the evidence to fit the theory. And you have become a true-believer.

Of course, next year, when life has become intolerably boring yet again, and a new group surfaces, with new ideas, then “interpretive drift” starts all over again. We change allegiance and alliances and our mind—and new “evidence” pops up that proves this new idea TRUE and we forget all about the earlier TRUTH. As we race to follow this new chimera, we reinvent our past so that we can say (and believe it) “oh I never REALLY believed in that stuff but now I KNOW this is the TRUTH.”

Change. Humans excel at this mind drift. One sees it all the time and not just in religious behavior. But is this change or is it just drifting on the same pseudo-intellectual surface of what we like to think is human reason?

And if it isn’t real change then what is? ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2815-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind <![CDATA[MaryLupin's changing mind...]]> https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2814-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind Sun, 12 Aug 2007 03:56:17 GMT 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... 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 disciplined and very clearly directed) often creates more problems than it solves, this is advice I will accept. So next I asked, “So what can I talk about?” I pulled “Lust.” Oooh. Nope. Then I thought about it a little. Got up. Went to the kitchen. Poured a little wine and got a few nuts. Let my brain re-engage after it got rousted by my response to the Lust card.

The Lust card is about the lust for life in general and not just for other people of certain physical characteristics. Its about the fire within reaching out for the fire without. It is also number 11 in the major arcana and as such represents the first steps at a new level of organization or into a new road, the road created by walking from 0-10 (the Fool through Fortune). Ok. Having thought about it a little (and letting the wine take effect) I feel calm enough to reconsider the advice given by pulling the Lust card. But still as a guide to what (specifically) to write, it’s a little unclear. So I sat down with the cards again and asked “Ok. So what is the warp thread around which the content of this blog will weave itself?” And I pulled the 2 of disks. Change. The astrological symbolism of this card is Jupiter in Capricorn. Expansiveness and responsibility: Imagine the Ghost of Christmas Present partying with Mahatma Gandhi. As a plant the 2 of disks is maybe yellow dock. As a mineral, amethyst.

Anyway, so after some consideration, I have decided to go with change as a guiding topic. ]]> MaryLupin https://www.online-literature.com/forums/entry.php?2814-MaryLupin-s-changing-mind