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Summer Selections

July 23, 2006 admin 1 Comment

Long time no posts. I've been busy. So here's a little potpourri of what's been accumulating.

This is a recommendation to read Greg Palast's new book, Armed Madhouse.

As the world becomes more insane I become less inclined to read what documents the horrors, but this one I couldn't put down. In laying out a clear map of the power dynamics in the world, it goes beyond what we are familiar with. Palast is a brilliant investigative journalist, an American who broadcasts on BBC because he's too hot for our media to handle, who has his wiles and his ways, not least among them how he skewers the bad guys with wit and charm.

Am off to England, to crop circle country, to fill in some blanks in the 90-minute rough cut I have of the documentary I'm finishing. I've been trying to get Greg Palast to investigate the various tracks of disinformation that prevent people from taking the phenomenon seriously. Here's what I wrote to him, along with my appreciations for the book:

“Where exposing the reality is square one, changing things comes next. It must be a function of our dualistic worldview, where opposition rules the day, that there is so little focus on where to from here. In a world so dysfunctional, fingers in the dyke will never save us. Recalibrating who we are and what our place is in the universe, where we see we're not here to rape the earth and each other, is essential. Crop circles can get attention onto the bigger cosmos of which we are a part. What would our worldview be, beyond scientific materialism? There's no public conversation about this. It should be on Larry King and Charley Rose…and on the BBC.”

Here's a short piece that transcended my over-saturation in reading about what's awful: “Our Dumb President.”

This is an 11-minute promo for my film: http://www.mightycompanions.org/cropcircles/trailer/cc.html. Even with a fast connection it takes awhile to load, so watch your timer.

“Inside the Circles, Outside the Box is a documentary that probes the still unsolved mysteries of crop circles and looks at how they could shift our perception of reality. 'Croppies,' colorful and highly intelligent people who study the circles, reveal findings about the curriculum in number and geometry the phenomenon is delivering. Revelations about information encoded in the circles lead to questions about what is creating them and why. And croppies speculate about what the effect would be if evidence we've gotten from the circles convinced everyone that we aren’t the only intelligent occupants of the cosmos. In this wider view of our place in the universe, might we begin to think as a planet, and to work cooperatively to solve the problems we all share? Could 'CONTACT,' in headlines, give rise to an era when awe and wonder would supplant the oppositional behavior we are engaged in today?”

And for the latest from the circle front, there's a new formative type that recently arrived:

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2006/uffington1/uffington2006a.html.

If you want to read somebody smart reflecting on what we take to be reality, pick up Daniel Pinchbeck's

new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. If anyone can do anything to promote this book, contact Jennifer Levy [mailto:Jennifer.Levy@us.penguingroup.com] for a copy. Here's some guidance from her:

“I'd be glad to send free copies to educators, bloggers and newsletter editors on psychedelic/crop circle/consciousness topics, etc., as well as traditional 'book reviewers.' But I'd hate to give away too many books to people who are willing and able to buy it, since, alas, sales numbers are part of the equation – if we sell more, the books gets more visibility and we're able to devote more resources to promoting it. Would you feel all right about saying that this books is available at both chain and indie bookstores, and that I can be contacted for review copies?”

Daniel, who has become my friend since writing a crop circle piece for WIRED in 2001,

and is in my film, is speaking about things that are very much in the continuum of what I've been posting for the last while. The writings about daily happenstances that I used to post have given way to pieces that let us see the evolution of our thought and thus of our values, to help us understand how our current worldview has us stuck in scientific materialism. only in a bigger picture, where the sacred and the mundane aspects of ourselves are unified, could we do more than flail at the problems and the horrors of our day. All are held in place, resistant to change, by the beliefs we entertain about what it is to be a modern human being. Daniel dives into the modern mythos, and supports his vision with material from the sages of the ages who saw beyond the veil of modernity. The fabric of possibility that Daniel weaves is a mindscape that's beyond where people are “spectators of their culture rather than active participants in a planetary ecology.”
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World Press

TRAGIC DELUSIONS

April 6, 2006 admin 69 Comments

William Blum is an astute critic and a straight talker who makes it into the editorial pages of the New York Times. I like his insights into misconceptions that hold us trapped in this reality which just came around in his latest Anti-Empire Report:

http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer31.htm. This is the meatiest part of that mailing.

Some things you need to know before the world ends

March 22, 2006

by William Blum

“Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.” Friedrich Schiller
“With stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain.”

…Inasmuch as I can not see violent revolution succeeding in the United States (something deep inside tells me that we couldn't quite match the government's firepower, not to mention their viciousness), I can offer no solution to stopping the imperial monster other than increasing the number of those in the opposition until it reaches a critical mass; at which point … I can't predict the form the explosion will take.

I'm speaking here of education, and in my writing and in my public talks I like to emphasize certain points which try to deal with the underlying intellectual misconceptions and emotional “hangups” I think Americans have which stand in the way of their seeing through the bullshit; this education can also take the form of demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience, whatever might produce a thaw in a frozen mind. Briefly, here are the main points:

(1) US foreign policy does not “mean well”. It's not that American leaders have miscalculated, or blundered, causing great suffering, as in Iraq, while having noble intentions. Rather, while pursuing their imperial goals they simply do not care about the welfare of the foreign peoples who are on the receiving end of the bombing and the torture, and we should not let them get away with claiming such intentions.

(2) The United States is not concerned with this thing called “democracy”, no matter how many times George W. uses the word each time he opens his mouth. In the past 60 years, the US has attempted to overthrow literally dozens of democratically-elected governments, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, and grossly interfered in as many democratic elections in every corner of the world. The question is: What do the Busheviks mean by “democracy”? The last thing they have in mind is any kind of economic democracy, the closing of the gap between the desperate poor and those for whom too much is not enough. The first thing they have in mind is making sure the target country has the political, financial and legal mechanisms in place to make it hospitable to corporate globalization.

(3) Anti-American terrorists are not motivated by hatred or envy of freedom or democracy, or by American wealth, secular government, or culture. They are motivated by decades of awful things done to their homelands by US foreign policy. It works the same all over the world. In the period of the 1950s to the 1980s in Latin America, in response to a long string of Washington's dreadful policies, there were countless acts of terrorism against US diplomatic and military targets as well as the offices of US corporations. The US bombing, invasion, occupation and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan have created thousands of new anti-American terrorists. We'll be hearing from them for a terribly long time.

(4) The United States is not actually against terrorism per se, only those terrorists who are not allies of the empire. There is a lengthy and infamous history of support for numerous anti-Castro terrorists, even when their terrorist acts were committed in the United States. At this moment, Luis Posada Carriles remains protected by the US government, though he masterminded the blowing up of a Cuban airplane that killed 73 people and his extradition has been requested by Venezuela. He's but one of hundreds of anti-Castro terrorists who've been given haven in the United States over the years. The United States has also provided close support of terrorists in Kosovo, Bosnia, Iran and elsewhere, including those with known connections to al Qaeda, to further imperial goals more important than fighting terrorism.

(5) Iraq was not any kind of a threat to the United States. Of the never-ending lies concerning Iraq, this is the most insidious, the necessary foundation for all the other lies. This is the supposed justification for the preemptive invasion, for what the Nuremberg Tribunal called a war of aggression. Absent such a threat, it didn't matter if Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it didn't matter if the intelligence was right or wrong about this or that, or whether the Democrats also believed the lies. All that mattered was the Bush administration's claim that Iraq was an imminent threat to wreak some kind of great havoc upon America. But think about that. What possible reason could Saddam Hussein have had for attacking the United States other than an irresistible desire for mass national suicide?

(6) There was never any such animal as the International Communist Conspiracy. There were, as there still are, people living in misery, rising up in protest against their condition, against an oppressive government, a government usually supported by the United States.

(7) Conservatives, particularly of the neo-kind (far to the right on the political spectrum), and liberals (ever so slightly to the left of center) are not ideological polar opposites. Thus, watching a TV talk show on foreign policy with a conservative and a liberal is not necessarily getting a “balanced” viewpoint; a more appropriate balance to a conservative would be a left-wing radical or progressive. American liberals are typically closer to conservatives on foreign policy than they are to these groupings on the left, and the educational value of such “balanced” media can be more harmful than beneficial as far as seeing through the empire's motives and actions…

[William Blum left the State Department in 1967, abandoning his aspiration of becoming a Foreign Service Officer, because of his opposition to what the United States was doing in Vietnam. He then became one of the founders and editors of the Washington Free Press, the first “alternative” newspaper in the capital. Mr. Blum has been a freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. William Blum is currently living in Washington, DC, using the Library of Congress and the National Archives to strike fear into the hearts of US government imperialists.]

I think an alignment of intelligent people like Blum could contribute to an escalation of “the number of those in the opposition until it reaches a critical mass.” For people who haven't been with me long enough to hear me rant about this, pick up on The Twilight Club for a model from the last century, where shapers of thought united to do massive good in the world. The good that a contemporary version could contribute would be to think through our dead worldview which has us in dualistic hell. Let wise ones amongst us come up with a new idea about who we are and what we're doing here that would serve us better.

Here are some tidbits about The Twilight Club

, some of whose members were Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Edwin Markham, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas J. Watson, Rudyard Kipling, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Louis Tiffany.

Their conviction was that world peace, harmony and unity would only come about through the brotherhood of man. They were convinced that a person’s moral creed could not remain as words and platitudes, but must be translated into action. Building on this idea, they formed The Poets’ Code of Ethics, intended as a worldwide moral code that related strictly to how people acted towards each other, the ethical nature of the code being based on the concept of service to others and to the world…

Andrew Carnegie strongly advocated the necessity of spreading the seeds of culture, morality and ethics. He promised to endow millions for educational purposes—particularly through building libraries. He also organized the Authors’ Club, providing a house on 34th Street in New York, entirely free of charge providing that each member of the club agreed to write something every year that had a direct bearing on and reference to the moral code of ethics…

Out of this visionary effort came the Scout movement…As their meetings were ‘rotated’ from house to house, they eventually named their group the Rotary Club, now the Rotary Club International, with millions of members all over the world devoted to service. Other service clubs followed, such as the Kiwanis and the Lions.

Others inspired by the Twilight Club vision, such as Edwin Markham and Sophie Irene Loeb, worked to bring about change in social conditions, such as the elimination of sweatshops, compulsory education and child labor laws. Eugene Grace, president of the Bethlehem Steel Company, and Adolph Ochs, owner of the New York Times, worked to establish advertising censorship. Thomas J. Watson and Walter Russell campaigned for the elimination of the caveat emptor practice of business, which eventually led to the establishment of the Better Business Bureaus.

After the war years, Thomas J. Watson, head of International Business Machines, became inspired by the ideals of the ethical movement organized by Herbert Spencer, wanting the business world to practice these principles. He offered to pay all expenses necessary for the club activities. He, Walter Russell and Edwin Markham decided to stress culture as well as ethics, since culture stems from the arts, for World War one had caused a drop in cultural growth and patronage of the arts. They decided to call this extension of the Twilight Club, The Society of Arts and Science. Taking leadership, Thomas J. Watson and Walter Russell—who lectured for twelve years to IBM employees on better business practices—worked with others, such as Francis Sisson, from the banking, business and legal world, to uplift the standards of industry, law and justice.

For more education to help flesh out the picture of our Iraq debacle, which feels like Greek tragedy when you put all the pieces together, I recommend a shocking piece from the New Yorker magazine: Deluded, by Steve Coll. This information, just coming to light about the state Saddam was in before the invasion, concerns a study which reveals “how the Iraq invasion, more than any other war in American history, was a construct of delusion. Frustratingly, however, we now understand much more about the textures of fantasy in Saddam’s palaces in early 2003 than we do about the self-delusions then prevalent in the West Wing.”…

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This and That

INSIDE STORY

March 22, 2006 admin 121 Comments

This piece goes a ways to redeem National Geographic for a misguided program about the crop circle phenomenon that runs repeatedly on their cable channel. In the March issue of National Geographic Adventure, this personal account of the writer's trips to Peru to ingest a hallucinogenic substance, which comes from the perspective of it being about healing rather than hurting, is a very good thing indeed.

Ayahuasca is in wide use in the States (I don’t know about the rest of the world). I think of it as this era's LSD, although it's always taken under guidance, either with South American shamans or with people who have been trained by shamans from any of several South American countries, where some of its usage is in religious ritual. (There's a case to allow its sacramental use by a New Mexico branch of the Brazilian Uniao do Vegetal Church that has made it to the Supreme Court, and, in February, with Roberts presiding, the Court ruled 8-0 to let the usage continue while the ultimate conclusion is being reached — a so-far great victory!)

This is the first page of four, and if you get on the site you'll see that it just gets better as it goes further off the charts with insights into the human psyche and the fierce and glorious battle to be waged for personal freedom. In this society, where there is much yearning to cleanse dysfunction and considerable meditating and praying in quest of inner peace, ayahuasca affords a rocket ride to what's beyond our 3-D reality shell. This is one of the best things I've ever read about journeying — for how well it's written, how courageous the writer is, and what it taught me about what is possible. I hope you find it as valuable as I did.

Peru: Hell and Back

Deep in the Amazon jungle, writer Kira Salak tests ayahuasca, a shamanistic medicinal ritual, and finds a terrifying—but enlightening—world within.

Page one:

For centuries, Amazonian shamans have used ayahuasca as a window into the soul. The sacrament, they claim, can cure any illness. The author joins in this ancient ritual and finds the worlds within more terrifying—and enlightening—than ever imagined.

I will never forget what it was like. The overwhelming misery. The certainty of never-ending suffering. No one to help you, no way to escape. Everywhere I looked: darkness so thick that the idea of light seemed inconceivable.

Suddenly, I swirled down a tunnel of fire, wailing figures calling out to me in agony, begging me to save them. Others tried to terrorize me. “You will never leave here,” they said. “Never. Never.”

I found myself laughing at them. “I'm not scared of you,” I said. But the darkness became even thicker; the emotional charge of suffering nearly unbearable. I felt as if I would burst from heartbreak—everywhere, I felt the agony of humankind, its tragedies, its hatreds, its sorrows. I reached the bottom of the tunnel and saw three thrones in a black chamber. Three shadowy figures sat in the chairs; in the middle was what I took to be the devil himself.

“The darkness will never end,” he said. “It will never end. You can never escape this place.”

“I can,” I replied.

All at once, I willed myself to rise. I sailed up through the tunnel of fire, higher and higher until I broke through to a white light. All darkness immediately vanished. My body felt light, at peace. I floated among a beautiful spread of colors and patterns. Slowly my ayahuasca vision faded. I returned to my body, to where I lay in the hut, insects calling from the jungle.

“Welcome back,” the shaman said.

The next morning, I discovered the impossible: The severe depression that had ruled my life since childhood had miraculously vanished.

Giant blue butterflies flutter clumsily past our canoe. Parrots flee higher into treetops. The deeper we go into the Amazon jungle, the more I realize I can't turn back. It has been a year since my last visit, and I'm here again in Peru traveling down the Río Aucayacu for more shamanistic healing. The truth is, I'm petrified to do it a second time around. But with shamanism—and with the drinking of ayahuasca in particular—I've learned that, for me, the worse the experience, the better the payoff. There is only one requirement for this work: You must be brave. You'll be learning how to save yourself.

The jungle camp where our shamanistic treatment will take place is some 200 miles (322 kilometers) from the nearest town, Iquitos, deep in the Peruvian Amazon. Beside me are the other four members of my tour. There is Winston, the biggest person I've ever met. Nearly seven feet tall (two meters), surely over 400 pounds (181 kilograms), he has a powerful body that could easily rip someone apart. I expect him to be a bodyguard or a bouncer; turns out he's a security guard. But there is something else about him. Something less tangible. It seems to rest in the black circles beneath his eyes, the face that never smiles, the glances that immediately dismiss all they survey. Winston does not seem like a happy man.

Then the others: Lisa, who has a master's degree from Stanford and is now pursuing her doctorate in political theory at Duke University; Christy, who just quit her job counseling at-risk teens to travel around South America; and Katherine, Christy's British friend. By all appearances, our group seems to be composed of ordinary citizens. No New Age energy healers. No pan flute makers. No hippies or Rastafarians or nouveau Druids. Christy betrays only a passing interest in becoming a yoga instructor.

And then there is me, who a year ago came to Peru on a lark to take the “sacred spirit medicine,” ayahuasca, and get worked over by shamans. Little suspecting that I'd emerge from it feeling as if a waterlogged wool coat had been removed from my shoulders—literally feeling the burden of depression lifted—and thinking that there must be something to this crazy shamanism after all.

And so I am back again.

I've told no one this time—especially not my family. I grew up among fundamentalist atheists who taught me that we're all alone in the universe, the fleeting dramas of our lives culminating in a final, ignoble end: death. Nothing beyond that. It was not a prescription for happiness, yet, for the first couple decades of my life, I became prideful and arrogant about my atheism, believing that I was one of the rare few who had the courage to face life without the “crutches” of religion or, worse, such outrageous notions as shamanism. But for all of my overweening rationality, my world remained a dark, forbidding place beyond my control. And my mortality gaped at me mercilessly. Lisa shakes me from my reveries, asking why I've come back to take another tour with the shamans.

“I've got some more work to do,” I say. Hers is a complicated question to answer. And especially personal. Lord knows I didn't have to come back. I could have been content with the results of my last visit: no more morbid desires to die. Waking up one morning in a hut in the sultry jungles of Peru, desiring only to live.

Still, even after those victories I knew there were some stubborn enemies hiding out in my psyche: Fear and Shame. They were taking potshots at my newfound joy, ambushing my successes. How do you describe what it's like to want love from another but to be terrified of it at the same time? To want good things to happen to you, while some disjointed part of you believes that you don't deserve them? To look in a mirror and see only imperfections? This was the meat and potatoes of my several years of therapy. Expensive therapy. Who did what, when, why. The constant excavations of memory. The sleuth-work. Patching together theory after theory. Rational-emotive behavioral therapy. Gestalt therapy. Humanistic therapy. Biofeedback. Positive affirmations. I am a beautiful person. I deserve the best in life.

Then, there's the impatience. Thirty-three years old already, for chrissakes. And in all that time, after all that therapy, only one thing worked on my depression—an ayahuasca “cleansing” with Amazonian shamans.

For pages 2-4 get on the website:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/0603/features/peru.html
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