If you’re arriving here because you enjoyed this post, you’ll probably also like this, this, and this, to start.
cheers,
Angus
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Long Dark Teatime of the Soul was taken…
As long time readers are no doubt tediously aware, I spent arguably the best years of my life in a Christian fundamentalist cult and for most of that time I was a True Believer; not only did I zealously adhere to the cult’s tenets myself, I worked tirelessly to convert others to my sorry theology. But for the last couple of years of my time with the brethren I existed in an odd and excruciating limbo. Though I was convinced that my erstwhile belief system was a crock of crap, I remained a nominal member of the church: in short, I had a decision to make. On the one hand, I could retain my family and half a lifetime’s worth of friends by continuing as a putative cult member. True, I would be living a lie, but in retrospect I am convinced that many of my brethren had made exactly this choice.
On the other hand, I could sever my ties with what I now recognized as a vicious cult. This might strike you as an easy decision… but there were complications: since this cult practices a severe form of excommunication, opting out of this false worship meant that I would also be opting out of community. Probably, it also meant the end of my marriage and to be honest with you, I dearly loved the wife of my youth.
But I did pass through it
So I dawdled a year or two, contemplating upon this weighty decision, and here is why I dawdled: disillusioned, as I was, with a particular religious ‘truth’, I wondered if it was such a great idea to risk, really, my entire life on a concept as nebulous as absolute truth. I thought there might, in fact, be an upside to hypocrisy. It seems a little presumptuous to say that I passed through what St. John of the Cross called the “Dark Night of the Soul”; let us say, instead, that I passed through a ‘Cloudy Afternoon of the Soul’. But I did pass through it. In the event, and as you have probably figured out, I did renounce my vows to the idiotic religion I had become ensnared in and I chose Truth. And, in fact, things turned out much as I expected. My so-called friends dumped me like a carton of sour milk, my marriage ended, and my children were coached to look at me with fear. For several months, life sucked. And then… things got better. New friends, new opportunities, a surge of creativity, and above all, a sense of joy and freedom that remains with me even now. In a very meaningful sense, I was born again.
So now I suppose I am that tiresome creature, a person with advice. For I am certain that a percentage of you, my readers—like a percentage of all humans—are living a lie. You’re in a loveless relationship, a toxic religion, a thankless job, or are existing in some other form of hypocrisy. And I am here to tell you… choose truth. And especially… choose your truth. I won’t promise you that your path will be easy or pleasant, for I know from bitter experience that it may, in fact, be painful. You could even die. But the fact is, when you live a lie, you are already as good as dead… and you may as well start acting like it.
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Creepy either way…
That’s gotta be what it is, right? Or is this pareidolia?
This quick scene happens immediately after Deb suggests that Dex might have something to “unload.”
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This review was challenging to write. To summarize 1,100 pages or so in a few thousand words is never easy, especially when the 1,100 pages make such good use of photos and sketches. But I also felt a bit of missionary zeal—I really believe that Alexander’s ideas are incredibly important.
In a previous essay (not on this blog), I briefly profiled architect Christopher Alexander and alluded to his magnum opus, the four book Nature of Order. In this essay, I’ll be reviewing the first two books of the set, The Phenomenon of Life (TPoL) and The Process of Creating Life (PoCL). The prominence of the word life highlights the importance of this concept in Alexander’s thinking. For him, life is a quality inherent in all things, not solely a property of plants and animals. This is not a particularly radical belief. It’s a tenet of Buddhism and Taoism, and is beginning to find adherents among some scientists. The thing is, it’s hard to define life in a way that includes creatures like animals and insects, but excludes things like crystals or complex computer programs. Viruses are a good example of the difficulty; are they intricate crystals that self replicate in certain animals, or are they living beings in their own right? Ask a biologist sometime, and see what he says.
In any event, Alexander defines life very broadly, and believes that it exists in the world around us in varying degrees.
So, right away, we find that he is tackling some big questions: What is Life? What is Space? What is the Nature of Order? These are questions that occupy mystics, and there are some who see Alexander that way. I don’t. He is too practical and hardworking, and he is not too concerned with individual spirituality; his focus is on reforming the built environment but, yes, he addresses… spirit.
Spirit is always threatening to disrupt our lives
I wish I could talk about Christopher Alexander without getting into questions about the meaning of life, but it’s no use; the man continually and infuriatingly will point out the 600 pound gorilla in the room that we’re all trying to ignore – humans are spiritual beings, and the world is a spiritual place. We make demands on our buildings that aren’t satisfied by profit and efficiency. That we so successfully avoid this reality so much of the time explains much, Alexander contends, about the often unsatisfactory nature of the world we’ve made for ourselves.
Spirit is always threatening to disrupt our lives; seen in a certain light, the bureaucratization of our society’s large institutions seems designed to prevent such troubling eruptions—see Franz Kafka, Charlie Chaplin, Michael Moore, et al. It is axiomatic that no priest wants a saint in his parish, but then, neither does the mayor, or the factory owner.
Alexander points out that structure, too, can work against human wholeness and spirituality and this seems logical enough. After all, no one leaves nature to get ‘back to the city’ when seeking peace and enlightenment. [click to continue…]
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Medicine wheels are great circles of stone, quartered by spokes emerging from a central hub. About 70 are known to exist, mainly in the northern United States and southern Canada. Little today is known about their use by past cultures, though it is assumed that medicine wheels were ceremonial or religious in nature.
We are not the first civilization to be puzzled by medicine wheels. Many of them are thousands of years old, and over the millennia many civilizations have flourished and receded in their territory. And all these cultures made some accommodation with these mysterious stone wheels. Above all, they maintained the wheels; they kept them in repair and extended them, made them larger. Even today they are carefully preserved. So the meaning attached to the wheels has changed over time, but for thousands of years humans have served these patterns in stone.
When I worked as a land surveyor, I served a pattern that stretches over much of the United States. The sectional survey system is the arrangement of grids that divide rural landscapes into square fields and straight roads. Parts of it are nearly 200 years old, and surveyors like myself maintain it by periodically restoring corner monuments. Like any civilization, the American experiment will someday be replaced by another, but the sectional survey system will likely survive—it is ingrained in the land, has reshaped the very contours of that portion of the planet in which it lives.
Patterns do live. They come into being and grow for a while. They evolve, multiply, and sometimes die. They interact with humans and other life forms. Their lives are played out in geologic time, but if we could somehow grasp their movements over thousands of years we would observe all the features of this thing we call life. And from that perspective, humans would seem like cells or helpful bacteria, small pink things rushing about, maintaining the patterns and extending them and eventually discarding and dismantling them.
Patterns are everywhere. Languages are huge patterns, continually maintained and evolved by humans over millennia. Some, like english or mandarin, prosper and grow while others die off.
Religions, corporations, governments; these too can be seen as patterns, ordered systems that persist over time, made up of humans but living far longer than humans. And, of course, even the human body is a sort of pattern; we’re all very comfortable with the idea that our cells switch out every seven years or so, but think what that means. It means that the body is not constant, but some template for the body, some pattern, does endure.
Really, is it too much too say that everything is a pattern, made up of other patterns, nesting and interlocking in exquisite hierarchies of order that endlessly repeat and replicate and die back and rise anew? And that is something to think about; what patterns are we creating and being created by while we live, and when we die, which of those patterns will endure and even, perhaps, live forever?
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You could be forgiven, I think, if you didn’t look to a pot smoking, heavily tattooed graffiti artist for sensitive, intelligent explication of fundamental Buddhist concepts… but that’s exactly what Mike Giant provides at his blog. He has a really excellent series of posts on the Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths; they are, however, a little hard to find because there’s no tagging and the archiving isn’t all that wieldy. You have to scroll waaaaaaay down. So, I asked Mike if I could collect the links here, just to make them a little easier to access.
• THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: INTRODUCTION This is actually more about Mike’s introduction to Buddhism than it is about the Eightfold Path, and it’s well worth reading. And as he gets into the basic teachings of Buddhism, I value the way he makes the teachings personal, figures out how they work in his life.
• THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: PART 1. RIGHT VIEW No explanation is needed here, except to note that the order of the eight precepts is Mike’s own, based on his conception of the most useful order of application.
• THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: PART 2. RIGHT INTENTION
• THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: PART 3. RIGHT SPEECH
• THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: PART 4. RIGHT ACTION
• THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: PART 5. RIGHT LIVELIHOOD
• THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: PART 6. RIGHT EFFORT
• THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: PART 7. RIGHT MINDFULNESS
• THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: PART 8. RIGHT CONCENTRATION
• JUST BREATHE Mike’s thoughts on meditation, including the striking admonition, “Fuck your Ego.”
• THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS Short and simple.
I first learned about Mike Giant’s art when I lived in San Francisco, at Turk and Larkin in the Tenderloin—he had a big work up on a low wall right across from me, and a gallery up the street had a show of his. To me his work is crunchy and hard and gritty and pretty and sweet, all at once. Anyway, if you’re interested in Buddhism and are looking for some basic information, you could do worse.
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This article in Salon describes the current state of psychedelic research, and the way legitimate research has slowly recovered from the post-Leary abyss. Worth reading if you have an interest in psychedelics and/or consciousness.
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I hate to be all pompous and play the ‘I’m a licensed surveyor’ card… but sometimes a man has to step up.
I happen to be a Registered Land Surveyor, licensed in the State of Wisconsin. I am, therefore a government certified expert in the art of laying out large patterns, such as subdivisions, on the ground. So let’s talk crop circles.
My musings on crop circles usually take the form of an imaginary client who walks into my office and asks me if I could lay out a large pattern in a wheat field. “Sure”, I say, “I have the equipment and personnel to do that.” But then he says, “Well, the work has to be done all in one night. And you have to mash the wheat down neatly, without breaking it off – in fact, you have to bend it a few inches above the ground and weave it into a basket pattern. There will be people looking for you but you can’t be seen and you can’t leave footprints. The pattern I want you to make is quite large, several hundred feet across, and it’s kind of complicated. Oh and, by the way, it’s not my field – and the farmer has threatened to shoot trespassers.”
Oh and, by the way… it’s not my field
So I show my imaginary client to the imaginary door in my mind, but then I get to thinking… jeez, could I lay out a crop circle, given the above conditions? And you know what? Maybe. Maybe I could if I had a big crew and practiced a lot, and if the field was lit and it was dry… but then I think, no way. Not if the farmer wasn’t cooperating. Not without being seen.
But the fact is, at least some formations are hoaxed, and by some very talented people. Working for pay, some hoaxers have made very large formations as advertisements or for TV programs. But… all the formations that have definitely been hoaxed were made in the daytime, on rented fields, with the help of large booms so that the formation could be seen from above.
Here are a few things that haven’t happened: no hoaxer has ever announced a complex pattern in advance, no hoaxer has ever been caught in the act, no hoaxer has ever been interrupted and left a large pattern half-finished, and no hoaxer has ever demonstrated a good technique for creating the often extraordinary weavings formed by the bent crop.
In the end, beliefs about crop circles are a lot like beliefs about Bigfoot, the Illuminati, aliens, and God. One has to consider the swirl of evidence and counter-evidence, and make a decision. And as always, only fools and madmen are ever absolutely certain.
Well, you’ve listened to me this long; it seems only fair to tell you where I stand on the issue of crop circles. I believe that conventional hoaxers don’t account for all crop circles. I believe that at least some crop circles cannot be explained by use of any known human technology. I believe that crop circles are a manifestation of some advanced intelligence. And, most of all, I believe that a crop circle tattoo is a good way to secure a position of oversight in the post-alien-takeover world.
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Sigh. Why does it always fall to me to correct the supposed experts?
Even before George R.R. Martin‘s seriously excellent series A Song of Ice and Fire
Moreover, there is a far better comparison to be made, between ASOIAF and Jack Vance’s Lyonesse
Lyonesse is everything that ASOIAF is, writ slightly smaller. It too is set in a fantasy world something like our own. Like Westeros, Lyonesse is human-centric, with fantasy elements (like magick and dragons) that are compelling but not the whole story. Characters lust for power, money, and sex, and in them we easily see our neighbors, lovers, and bosses. Of the two series, Martin’s is clearly the greater: it’s bigger in every way, explores larger themes, and rises above genre to become great literature by any reckoning. But Lyonesse is, mayhaps, the sprightlier read and I, for one, love it no less.
All of which is by way of saying—if you like anything about Game of Thrones, be sure to give Lyonesse a try. Or anything by Vance; he was astonishingly prolific, and once you have read him you will see his influence everywhere.
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