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.

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. There are, of course, exceptions. Beautiful gardens or soaring cathedrals can be engines of transcendence. But these are exceptions that prove the rule; generally speaking, the built environment is perceived to repress human wholeness. Why? Why don’t humans create beautiful living structure as readily as do bees, clouds, trees, or termites?

Nature of Order is a work of great detail and great force that attempts to answer this question. That the question of Spirit comes up, implicitly but insistently, is the work’s strength and weakness. The force of Nature of Order is derived from Alexander’s fearless exploration of the structure of the world, and the proper place of humans in that structure. But it also makes his philosophy threatening… a lot of people just want to build a better house, not wrestle with questions about the ontological grain of the universe.

Alexander’s confidence can resemble hubris; and sometimes he seems to rely overmuch on intuition when making his points. To read his books well, one must surrender to them. Not abjectly, and not forever, but a certain suspension of skepticism, while reading, helps enormously when trying to absorb the material.

The Phenomenon of Life
In Book 1, The Phenomenon of Life, Alexander gives his fullest and deepest explanation of his conception of life, and why it is more deeply felt in some places and things than in others.

Early in TPoL, Alexander describes an incident from his teaching career that succinctly captures many of the themes of his work, and the reasons his ideas meet resistance. He asks his students to compare two things: a picture of a 7th century illuminated manuscript (the Durham Gospel fragment) and the wall of the very auditorium in which the lecture was being held. Then he asked a simple question – which of the two had more life?

The question met enormous resistance. Not because it was hard—nearly every student agreed, albeit reluctantly, that the graceful, calm-yet-intricate manuscript held more life than the postmodern, brass-detailed wall. The question itself was what created resistance. Just admitting that one artifact can have more life than another was disturbing. If it is possible to enhance the life of a building, then it is important to do so; but the question of life is not being addressed in today’s architectural curricula—except by Alexander.

Alexander finds this ability in humans consistently, and he also finds that resistance is common. When asked, people agree with amazing uniformity on the relative amount of life imbued in various objects. Although the question seems strange, it has an answer. But this is astonishing, because it tends to destroy the difference between the subjective and the objective. Science stoutly rejects data which cannot be measured. Human opinions, notoriously squishy, cannot be measured by any known instrument… but what if humans, in aggregate, are themselves effective measuring instruments?

There is another, deeper reason for resistance. Lurking beneath Alexander’s simple question is a much thornier question: if humans respond to the life of a place, and if life can be detected and worked with rather simply, how is it that so much of the built world works against life? Suddenly, the work of a developer or a surveyor moves beyond the question of profit, and into the realm of religion. Faced with this, it is much easier to fight against the question, and the person raising it. But this is denial.

Alexander makes his case for pervasive life thoroughly and with great cumulative force. He begins by discussing what he calls centers:

“In using the word center in this way, I am not referring at all to a point center like a center of gravity. I use the word center to identify an organized zone of space – that is to say, a distinct set of points in space, which, because of its organization, because of its internal coherence, and because of its relation to its context, exhibits centeredness, forms a local zone of relative centeredness with respect to the other parts of space. When I use the word center, I am always referring to a physical set, a distinct physical system, which occupies a certain volume in space, and has a special marked coherence.” (TPoL, p. 84)

Redefining a word as basic as ‘center’—or ‘life’—seems willfully inscrutable at first, but the idea is actually quite useful. Consider a pond in a clearing; it is not exactly a whole in itself, because it is part of a larger whole, the clearing, which is in turn part of a forest, and so forth. But the pond is something, and calling it a center does help us to see it as a locus of interest in the midst of a larger whole, a locus that influences that larger whole. And the idea is recursive; the clearing is itself one of many centers in the larger forest and influences that whole, which in turn is one center of a larger regional whole, and so forth.

Like Alexander’s earlier concept of a pattern language the value of the concept lies in its use. Learning to analyze wholes in terms of centers makes it easier to actually see how a whole is formed, and how it can be strengthened or how it is being weakened. It gives those who are trying to analyze space an effective analytical tool.

If it seems presumptuous of Alexander to redefine a word for his own use and to propose an entirely new way of analyzing the world, well, that is a valid criticism but it is also pretty much the point of TPoL. Alexander is proposing a new way of perceiving and analyzing space—he is proposing the basis for a new theory of the world’s geometric underpinnings. Whether he succeeds or not is for each reader to decide.

Living wholes, then, are made up of strong centers, and the life of a whole is increased by strengthening and increasing its centers. As I began to get comfortable with this idea, I indeed found it to be a useful way of looking at the world around me, a way to figure out why I like some places more than others. TPoL is copiously illustrated, and the illustrations do help to convey what Alexander is getting at. But ultimately, an interested reader will have to decide for himself how useful the idea is.

Alexander continues his argument by explaining why some centers have more life than others. And here, I think, he presents an idea that is extremely compelling and immediately useful. It amounts to a general theory of aesthetics, and will likely be adopted rather quickly in the field of visual arts.

Alexander proposes that there are 15 fundamental properties—structural features—that appear consistently in things which have life. Let’s just list them:

1) Levels of Scale
2) Strong Centers
3) Boundaries
4) Alternating Repetition
5) Positive Space
6) Good Shape
7) Local Symmetries
Deep Interlock and Ambiguity
9) Contrast
10) Gradients
11) Roughness
12) Echoes
13) The Void
14) Simplicity and Inner Calm
15) Not-Separateness

About a third of TPoL is devoted to a masterful exposition of this idea. The 15 properties are shown and discussed in manmade artifacts and in natural phenomena. The illustrations and text work together and gather force like Ravel’s Boléro, culminating in an essay titled A New View of Nature. Ultimately we realize that Alexander has done an amazing thing; he has made it possible to talk, really talk, about why we like some things and places better than others. Rather than falling back on vapid words like ‘pretty’ or ‘awesome’ we can speak with precision about the qualities that distinguish Yosemite Valley from, say, a gravel quarry, or why we are more moved by a giant sequoia than by a mall. His beliefs and accompanying language legitimize human feeling, validate our intuitive sense of value, and, without hubris or solipsism, make the world personal.

I have barely skipped a stone over the surface of this remarkable book. In 476 exhaustively illustrated and footnoted pages, Alexander rigorously makes the case for his new view of the world, and takes initial steps toward a mathematical statement of that view. It is an intellectual tour-de-force and fully supported by his real world work as a builder and architect. Such seriousness commands respect; dismissing Alexander casually will not do.

The Process of Creating Life
Defining life is a good start for Alexander, but the major theme of his career has been actually getting more life into modern buildings. And to do this, Alexander found, more than a definition is needed; the what of creation is pointless without the how. That is, a living building cannot be designed, then built. The life of a building comes from decisions made during the construction process. Design and construction turn out to be pretty much the same thing.

Alexander begins to talk about this by returning to one of Nature of Order’s fundamental questions: why is it that natural processes automatically create beauty and a feeling of rightness, and human methods so rarely do? What is the difference?

In a series of fascinating examples ranging from a wave breaking to a glass plate shattering to a fetus developing, Alexander shows convincingly that development processes in nature are a series of structure-preserving transformations. Each recognizable phase of development follows naturally from the preceding phase. Put another way, each phase of development preserves and extends the wholeness of the preceding phase—the wholeness is never destroyed, it unfolds into a new wholeness.

Consider the famous sequence of photos of a splashing milk drop. Though discrete phases of the sequence are startlingly different from each other, the changes from moment to moment are gentle and comprehensible. Alexander argues convincingly that this is a feature of all natural development.

Furthermore, the structure-preserving transformations can be analyzed in terms of the 15 fundamental properties introduced in TPoL. As extended here, the 15 properties become 15 transformations. Change that preserves wholeness is shown to be a product of transformation based on one or more of the 15 properties. Each transformation introduces, preserves, or strengthens one or more of the 15 fundamental properties. Again, one of the most useful things Alexander has done here is to provide good language, which makes good analysis possible.

He goes on to argue, with multiple examples, that humans can build in this structure-preserving fashion, but usually don’t. To do this, he juxtaposes traditional (or pre-modern) building processes with modern examples. He is getting at something deep here; humans love old places. We visit New England, or Europe, to see the old buildings, not the modern ones. We have a sense that the old cathedrals, the old city layouts, are somehow richer. Alexander contends that traditional building methods followed the structure-preserving process he finds in nature. For example, he presents a series of plans that show the development of Amsterdam from 1400 to 1800. It is easy to see how the steady development process took previous development into account. Patterns that were latent in 1400 are realized in 1800, building shapes echo each other, the relationship of the town to the water is consistent throughout. There is no sense of planned development—Amsterdam seems to have grown.

The structure-preserving process occurs in the modern world, but more rarely. Beginning about 1900, many forces—changes in banking, in zoning, in planning, in architecture, etc.—began to produce structure-destroying transformations. The wholeness of an existing structure was no longer considered. A classic example would be the extension of a freeway through an existing neighborhood. The freeway is designed and built without reference to its surroundings, and thereby destroys those surroundings. And similar examples can be cited ad infinitum: a skyscraper designed on one continent and built on another, a planned community laid out with equal precision on the drawing board and on the ground, a giant Wal-Mart box seemingly dropped from the sky onto its scraped pad… in every case, the previously existing whole is disregarded and destroyed.

Alexander uses these examples to define two kinds of structure: generated and fabricated. Generated structure creates life, and fabricated structure, nearly always, creates… the opposite of life.

The discussion of generated structure begins with an analogy that struck me very powerfully. Consider a fairly complex origami construction. It is not built to a plan; that is, blueprints of the finished structure are not provided. Instead, a sequence of steps is provided. A plan of the figure would be quite complex—several pages at least. But a sequence—first do that, then do this—is relatively concise. This idea is then applied to the development of an embryo. DNA does not store a blueprint of the exact appearance of a particular animal, it stores a sequence of development which then takes place affected by attendant circumstances. Interestingly, this is proved by recent experiments in biology—cloned animals do not look exactly alike. Same sequence, different circumstances.

Brutally compressed into a nutshell, Alexander’s program for creating living structure is to generate a construction sequence that first, observes the whole, then, makes a change that preserves and enhances the whole while approaching the desired end state, then… repeats as needed. Or, in his more elegant language:

“A living process is any adaptive process which generates living structure, step by step, through structure-preserving transformations.”

These sequences can also be called patterns, harking back to Alexander’s early book, A Pattern Language. Here, they emerge as part of a comprehensive program for reforming human construction methods. As argued, the case for reform is convincing and ultimately hopeful. After all, the remaining remnants of traditionally built structure are good evidence that humans can build in a living fashion. As a species we have been unconsciously competent, are now unconsciously incompetent, but are beginning to notice deficiencies—to be consciously incompetent. It certainly seems possible that the human capacity for self-observation must eventually lead to conscious competence, and to a beautiful living world.

PoCL is a massive book, totaling 635 pages with appendices and notes. The illustrations are copious and superbly complement arguments put forth. I have, therefore, presented barely a skeletal outline of the book’s full force, but I hope I have adequately suggested that it is forceful.

In some ways, Alexander is the living human I most admire. He has, after all, come by his ideas the old-fashioned way… he’s earned them. He has poured his life into his writing and philosophizing and then he has done something harder. He has, for decades, tested his philosophy, often in difficult conditions in the poorest regions of the planet. He is, simultaneously, an idealistic ivory tower dreamer and a pragmatic contractor; that dirt under his nails is a mix of grit and ink and it’s been there for decades. When a man so rigorously tests his ideas in the real world, over such a span of time, and then adjusts his ideas to accord with the practical knowledge gained… well, he deserves a hearing.

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?

Everything we see and even the thoughts that form in our brain are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms and atoms are made of subatomic particles, and subatomic particles… well they’re made of nothing; what I’m trying to say is that everything comes from nothing and, therefore, everything is a miracle. To single out some things as being somehow more miraculous than other things is a mistake. A mistake I’m going to make now by telling you stories of three miraculous events: a visualization fulfilled, an answered prayer, and a direct, non-verbal communication from the Christian god, together with prologues and kickers, and an optional application to your very own life.

A Visualization Fulfilled:
Prologue: Finding myself jobless in Idaho, I talk myself into a position with a one-man software firm. I have a facility for the work, and prosper modestly, but there’s one problem: the owner, Gary, has always worked from his crowded basement office and sees no reason why I can’t do the same. Seeing no other recourse, and having just read a book on the subject, I decide to bring the perfect office into my life via visualization, which is a strange decision for me as the Christian fundamentalist cult to which I then adhered rather frowns on visualization, affirmation, meditation, positive thinking and… well, they frown on a lot of things.

The Event: I form a mental picture of the office I desire. It is to have four components: high ceilings, elaborate millwork, a downtown location, and some interesting architectural detail. Several times a day I hold a vision of this ideal office. That’s all I do. I take no other steps, I simply… think about what I want. Within three weeks, our little firm is located in a downtown Pocatello office. The ceilings are 12 feet high and the millwork is nearly a foot wide. Oh, and the unspecified architectural detail? Turns out this office comes complete with its own jail cell.

they frown on a lot of things

The Kicker: Shortly after moving into this office, Gary appears to lose his mind. He begins by diverting company funds amounting to $30,000 into the construction of a backyard shed, a shed built to resemble a Japanese teahouse, on a rock foundation, constructed of high grade redwood, and roofed with… copper shingles. He next manages to fall prey to a recently released scam artist, who talks Gary into supplying him with a desktop computer, two laptop computers, and some cash for ‘investment’, all while taking meetings in a Motel 6…

Shortly thereafter I quit in disgust.

An Answered Prayer:
Prologue: While taking a bath in Idaho, I receive a phone call from my mother in Kentucky who tells me that my father has just had a stroke. My family and I leave the next morning and arrive two days later. My father’s right side is paralyzed and he is unable to speak. Since my mother has just undergone double bypass surgery, the situation is serious and we decide to move to Kentucky to help them out. I have one day to secure a job before returning to Idaho to pack. Since I am still a member of the aforesaid wacko Christian cult, and since visualization didn’t seem to work out so well, I offer up a fervent prayer to God, asking for His divine assistance.

I have been working as a land surveyor, so I take the yellow pages and a map and head to Owensboro, determined to apply in person to every survey company listed. I begin by driving to a firm named McDonough-Brown. I know that I am in the right block and have the correct address, but for the life of me I cannot find it. I walk up and down the block a few times and ask the locals for assistance, but ultimately I leave in frustration.

I manage to speak to every other firm on my list, and none have any openings. It is a long, frustrating day and, frankly, I am a little disappointed with God’s effort.

The Event: I impulsively try one more time to find the mysterious McDonough-Brown. This time, when I pull up to the address, I immediately see a fairly prominent sign that says, “McDonough-Brown”. I walk in. I launch into my spiel, which by now is well-practiced. Everyone seems surprised, no, shocked to see me, and they fall all over themselves to show me the place, explain what they do, and persuade me to work for them. It was weird… but I leave with a job.

I later learn why everyone was so astonished to see me. Turns out, moments before I arrived, the owners were abruptly forced to fire a long time employee for failing a drug test. If I’d looked over my shoulder while walking in, I would have seen him driving away. Had I arrived earlier in the day, there would have been no opening. My arrival at that precise moment struck all of McDonough-Brown’s employees as an act of… God.

The Kicker: This is easily the worst job I have ever had. I am away from home for weeks at a time, working in swamps, nominally in charge of a crew of pistol-packing politically paranoid rednecks named Wayne. The work is brutal and degrading, and sometimes involves lugging sacks of cement hundreds of yards from a truck to a boat, a procedure that systematically lines all of my orifices with a thin layer of concrete. Though still a Christian, I can’t help but wonder if there might be something to reincarnation and if I was, perhaps, a really nasty person in a previous life.

A Direct Non-Verbal Communication from the Christian God:
Prologue: In the beginning of the summer of 1984, my life is, frankly, perfect. I am on my university’s honor roll, I have been training for a triathlon and am an Adonis, I am sharing a beach house with friends, and I am beginning to realize that girls, though puzzles, are solvable puzzles. Even my hair is looking good. Clearly, this is going to be the best summer ever and I kick it off with a trip to a Grateful Dead concert in Sacramento.

At that concert I have a bad acid trip, the most harrowing experience of my life. To tell the story of that bad trip properly would be a separate lecture, but for your entertainment I am going to attempt the impossible and condense it into one sentence.

{breath}

Arriving early at the concert I begin to take any and all drugs that are offered to me and wind up gobbling acid, shrooms and unidentified pills by the handful which gradually engender in me a paranoid conviction that the concert is in fact a ploy to attract and slaughter would be hippies like myself and so I escape from the stadium by jumping a fence and running across an eight lane freeway only to find myself in a field full of thorns, stickers and burrs, convincing me definitely that this is no ordinary would be hippie slaughtering conspiracy but that I am in fact in hell, and if I’m in hell, of course, I might as well take off all my clothes and surrender to the demons, which I do, but the demons don’t show up so I run back and forth across the freeway, naked, looking for them and then I run into an apartment complex, still naked, to make a phone call, and the police show up and I’m actually pretty happy to see them, so I surrender and am handcuffed and placed in a squad car only to realize, too late, that the police are in league with the demons and now I want to escape so I kick out the police car door window with my bare feet and, yes, still naked, wriggle out and almost make it until four of them land on me like, well, a ton of cops and I am placed in four point restraint and taken to a hospital where I suddenly realize that I’m not in hell but, rather, am in the midst of a millennium-long, life and death struggle between good and evil and it’s absolutely imperative that I take sides in this struggle and after thinking it over for a while, I choose… good.

{breath}

The Event: Two days later I am sitting in my living room, trying to figure out just how one signs up on the side of good. I hear a knock on the door. And then something happens that I can’t explain; sitting there in my living room I suddenly feel as if a non-verbal stream of information is being beamed directly into me, as if God himself has decided to reach out to me, and the message I am given is the absolute certainty that whoever is knocking is bringing the Truth. It is a profound, soul-shattering, supernatural event. I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure I’ve just been born again.

So whatever the folks at the door are selling, I’m buying, and when I open the door I am not particularly surprised to see a pair of… Christian cultists. The next evening, I attend my first meeting and am a faithful, true believing cult member for the next 18 years.

The Kicker: Being in a cult really sucks. I quit school and never do get a degree. For 18 years I attend five meetings a week and go door-to-door as many as 100 hours a month. I read four church magazines, a book or two, and a couple of pamphlets each month. I see no R rated movies, smoke no tobacco, give and receive no oral sex, celebrate no holidays, take no blood transfusions though I need them, offer no toasts, salute no flag and am generally an insufferably self righteous son of a bitch. I drop my non-cult friends, refuse to attend my own brother’s wedding, and take Prozac to suppress obsessive suicidal ideation. When I finally leave the cult, more than a hundred close friends immediately stop talking to me for fear of offending God and I leave behind an ex-wife and two children one of whom, frankly, fears me to this day because she believes that a heretic like myself is a sinner worse than a murderer, rapist or child molester.

What I am trying to say is that the holy sense of rightness that I felt, the conviction that God himself was leading me to Truth… led directly to the most… fucked up mistake I’ve ever made.

An Optional Application to Your Own Life:
So what am I saying? That visualization is useless, that answered prayers come with dark strings attached, that divine revelations are from trickster gods who seek to mislead us? No, not at all. My point is more subtle than that.

I have a truth to share with you, and it’s an optional truth because it’s mine, not yours or, at least, not necessarily yours. But my truth is this: you are your own gods. You are miracles creating miracles, you are the weavers of reality. And that’s a heavy burden and it’s tempting to lay that burden down and turn it over to some God or prophet, but here’s the thing: you can never lay it down. Never. Never, never, never; never.

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Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

Is this a problem? Is it possible that the handing down of belief from one generation to the next leads to confusion, like a massive, centuries long game of telephone? Is it possible that as a religion gets older, it gets farther away from its roots? Does the survival of the organization become more important than the spiritual needs of its followers?

Should every generation make up their own religion?

I was thinking about these questions and a little story, a parable, occurred to me and I wrote it down as fast as I could. Frankly, it didn’t feel like something I’d written, it felt like a gift… and here it is.

Once upon a time there was a village in the hills, suffering from drought. The villagers searched for water and found, miraculously it seemed, a fresh pure spring high in the hills and far away. They were so happy. Though it was a difficult journey, they went to the spring often, to drink at the source and to haul back what they needed for day to day use.

But eventually they began to notice that it was quite a long round trip and that it was difficult to bring back all that they needed. So they conceived of a pipeline, the greatest task they could ever set for themselves, and with great effort and after many false starts they were able to build it and it made them happy. Now they could have water from the spring right in their village.

a funny taste now and then

Now the villagers were the first to admit that their pipeline was not perfect. Having no other material at hand, they were forced to use rather thin bamboo that limited the flow and the tar they used to seal the joints could give the water a funny taste now and then. So, although they were happy with their pipeline, some of the villagers would journey up to the spring on occasion, to drink pure water from the source.

Time passed, and eventually all those who had discovered the spring and built the pipeline passed on. Their children had been told about the spring, and they believed in it. After all, they could see the proof of its existence in the steady supply of water that was delivered to their village. Few of them had actually been to the source, but they appreciated the water (not knowing it could taste better) and the pipeline, and they were content.

Still more time passed and the flow of water began to wane and it even stopped at times. The villagers assumed that the spring was dying away – but they could never have thought this if they had seen the beautiful spring for themselves. In reality, the pipeline was failing because it was old and because it was being neglected.

The villagers began to grumble and to doubt everything they had ever been told. Needing water, some moved to other villages. Most of those who remained tried to live off of the water that still came through the pipeline, though it was scarce now, and foul tasting. A few, a very few, went searching and exploring, and followed the old pipeline far back into the hills and discovered the spring for themselves, as full and as fresh and as pure as it had ever been.

And they were very happy.

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In our attempts to gain supernatural insight, humans have consulted tea leaves, animal guts, bird flight, umbilical cords, crabs, shoulder blades, runes, books, coins, clouds, fecal matter, mahjong tiles, logarithms and there are, literally, hundreds of other well defined systems for consulting the divine, which is to say, divination. Like drug use and magick, divination has a history as old as humankind and for all that time has been slightly disreputable; something about fortunetelling has always irritated established power structures, perhaps because it offers a direct and untaxable link to wisdom, an end run around the dreary formalities imposed by authority.

Typically, divination systems have three components: randomness, codified meanings, and interpretation. In tarot, for example, the cards are selected randomly, each card is associated with meanings collected in books, and the tarot reader interprets the cards and meanings that show up. And here’s an interesting thing: though divination tends to be associated with psychic abilities, in fact most methods are better suited for people like myself who exhibit no psychic talent; after all, why would a person with genuine psychic ability go to the trouble of learning the usually complicated systems associated with most divination systems? Wouldn’t it be easier to just, you know, be psychic?

as it happens, I have an opinion on that

But what you really want to know is, ‘does divination work?’ and as it happens I have an opinion on that, and the supernatural is not necessarily involved. I believe that an acceptable ‘minimum’ explanation for the uncanny insight received via divination can be derived from the combination of randomness, codified meaning, and interpretation I’ve described. It may be that the intersection of randomness and judgement is a reliable way to access unconscious knowledge, a relatively easy way to tap the kind of inner wisdom that we sometimes receive in the form of dreams, visions, hunches and other premonitions. A corollary to this idea is that all of the paranormal claptrap typically associated with divination—the gypsy robes, the ceremonies, the meditations—might all be useless window dressing, and that the real secret of divination lies in the entirely human skills that we bring to our chosen fortunetelling technique. And if that’s the case, the inescapable conclusion is that you might as well try it yourself, rather than relying on others. After all, who has more unconscious knowledge of your life situation than you yourself? And what are you risking, other than demonic possession?

All that said, I have had experiences with tarot that elude rational explanation, and curiously, these experiences have not tended to be particularly helpful—it’s more like I’m abruptly playing poker with an intelligence considerably vaster and less scrutable than my own… if you can imagine that; put another way, it sometimes feel as if I’m being trifled with. But on the other hand, these brushes with the divine inspire awe and a certain humility, and given my cynical, egocentric ways, may be the best reason of all to persist in divination.

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The making of vows seems hardly human

Though I can’t remember the details of the oaths I took as a Cub Scout, Webelo and Boy Scout, I believe I am safe in saying that I have violated both the letter and spirit of all of them. The same can be said for all the godly commitments I made at the various levels of the YMCA sponsored Christian brownshirt program to which I adhered for several years. I actually can remember the vows I publicly professed when being inducted into the cult in which I misspent my youth, but I am too embarrassed to repeat them here – suffice it to say that I have broken them repeatedly, and with gusto. Finally, the earnest vows I made to my first wife in a ritualistic church ceremony were broken just a few years ago and I have to admit, that one hurt and was also expensive, much like necessary surgery. But still, I did it, and I must acknowledge that I am by now a practiced oath breaker, a promise non-keeper, and a passionate disregarder of all my youthful commitments… hurray for me. The pleasures of idolatry, fornication, drunkenness, heresy, the occult and several other categories of taboo are magnificent and easily outstrip the pallid rewards of faithful asceticism. My mental and spiritual well-being are also improved, which only makes sense – it is always a good idea to escape confinement, in whatever form it occurs.

I now maintain that breaking vows is not nearly so sinful as making them in the first place; after all, when you think about it, a man who makes a vow is a man who has decided not to change, not to adapt his beliefs to new knowledge or circumstances. He is a man who has decided not to think and, at least in my book, is a grievous sinner indeed.

The making of vows seems hardly human, and it’s interesting to note that the nefarious practice most often occurs in political and religious settings. Governments and churches are very eager to bind us with our own words, to tie us up with guilt and fear. It’s easy to see what these corporate entities get out of the arrangement – armies of self-policing followers. But how, exactly, do humans benefit? Can it ever be a good idea to agree in advance not to change my mind? Doesn’t it seem a little paradoxical to use our human capacity for reason and commitment to commit to not reasoning?

The whole thing stinks to me; if what I am agreeing to is such a good idea, why can’t everyone involved trust that it will continue to be a good idea? Why must my very soul be subjected to an eternal, non-negotiable contract? I wouldn’t sign such a contract with a used car dealership or a time-share condo association and nothing in my personal experience – or world history – suggests that religions or governments are any more reliable.

Perhaps I need to make just one more vow, one that settles the matter once and for all. I swear to God, I am never going to swear to God again or, for that matter, to any other entity.

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In fact, it’s pretty simple—more fun and less louche than I imagined. Here are some do’s and one don’t:

Look for this sign.

• Do just walk in. They’re not private clubs, they’re not secretive, and you don’t need to know a secret handshake or anything. Ordering is as easy as stepping up to the counter, consulting a menu, and placing your order. In my experience, English was always spoken. Prices are reasonable, and all the pot and hash my companion and I smoked was superb—the hash, especially, was very strong. Per the Internet, Amsterdam marijuana is supposed to be way stronger than the stuff we Americans smoke, but I didn’t find this to be the case. It’s very good, but not remarkably better than the best stuff available here. I was not able to distinguish one strain from another, and at least one local suggested that the menus are a bit deceptive. But my lovely companion was able to distinguish each from each, so your mileage may vary.

• Do buy something. It doesn’t have to be pot; this is the most important thing I can pass on to you. Most shops sell a gram as a minimum amount (though they’ll often sell a half gram if you ask) and that’s probably more than you want to smoke at one sitting. So if you buy a gram every time you stop in, you’ll end up with a lot of excess weed at the end of your trip and you’ll be tempted to bring it back with you. Fortunately, most coffeeshops don’t care if you smoke weed that you bring in yourself. They’ll even provide smoking materials if you ask—more on this below. But don’t be a dick and just use the place without recognizing that they are a business; buy something. A lighter makes for a good souvenir. I can recommend the hot chocolate, which is usually made with steamed milk and Nestle’s Quik and is delicious. Coffee, fruit juices, candy bars, and other munchies are also available. Sadly, you can’t get any of Amsterdam’s delicious beer at the same place you get Amsterdam’s strong, tasty marijuana—the licenses are kept separate. Humanity will be truly civilized when this does become possible.

Do ask for a bong

• Do ask for a bong. Most of the residents smoke their dope in the form of large, cone-shaped joints, and that’s why you’re handed a packet of small, stiff pieces of cardboard along with your weed purchase; they’re rolled up and used as filters/mouthpieces at the end of the large joints so you don’t need a roach clip. Watching a local roll a four-inch doobie is a treat but frankly I found them a little intimidating. Instead, my companion and I learned to ask for one of the loaner bongs, which are kept behind the counter (once we were asked for a passport to be held as a deposit, but we were never charged). One will be produced, cleaned, and filled with fresh water. The best bongs had large chambers that held ice. One inhalation fills the ice-filled chamber with thick water-cooled smoke, and a second inhalation pulls that large amount of super-chill smoke deep into your grateful lungs. It’s marvelous.

• Do say hello to others, if it seems appropriate. Apply the same discretion you’d apply in your favorite bar; some people and groups will be doing just fine without the addition of your wonderful tourist self, but others are happy to chat and you’ll meet cool people. We once spent an hour or so chatting with an Egyptian belly dance instructor—conversations like that are the best reason to travel.

I was so baked when this was taken.

• Don’t smoke in the street. It’s illegal, uncommon, and it’s rude. Unlike San Francisco, where I often smell pot in the street, I never once smelled it in Amsterdam. Respect their ways.

Finally, should you smoke pot in Amsterdam? Well, I recommend it. As mentioned above, it’s a great city to be stoned in—there’s a reason it’s pot-friendly. As described above, it’s easy and fun. Also, even if you haven’t smoked marijuana since high school, you’re likely to enjoy the relaxed, non-paranoid atmosphere. And, do you really want to visit Amsterdam and not try the coffeehouses?

A great place to smoke pot.

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Scientists tell us that honeybees have learned to convert pollen, a natural substance, into a synthetic compound made of palmitate, palmitoleate, hydroxypalmitate and oleate esters of long-chain aliphatic alcohols. Bees use this substance for housing and food storage. It’s better known as beeswax, one of the planet’s most useful substances.

any equation as simple as ‘artificial = bad’ is bound to be wrong

Humans also produce wax, in our ears and also, like bees, synthetically, and we produce a multitude of other complex compounds such as plastics, resins, glass, ink, paper, etc., etc. etc. And we use these compounds for housing and food storage, to wash our hair, make tools, paint our homes and faces, kill each other, scent ourselves, etc., etc., etc.

Oddly, to me at least, when bees synthesize a complex chemical compound, it’s called ‘natural’ but when humans synthesize compounds they’re called ‘artificial’, and too often the word ‘artificial’ is automatically pejorative, as if humans, by making things, are doing something outside the bounds of nature. But of course we’re not. The conversion of existing materials into other materials is something all living things do, one way or another.

I’m not suggesting that everything humans make or do is wholesome and wise and in our best interests, but I am suggesting that everything we featherless bipeds do is natural, by virtue of the fact that everything is natural, part of nature; to pretend otherwise is to introduce an awkward and unnecessary layer into an already complex debate.

Consider monosodium glutamate, or MSG. The fact is, glutamates are exceedingly natural substances – our own traitorous bodies produce 40 grams of glutamate daily, and glutamates occur naturally in many foods. And MSG is simply glutamate mixed with salt. Yet MSG is the subject of America’s longest running food scare, despite an absolute lack of any evidence, other than anecdote, that MSG has any negative effects whatsoever. And it does appear to be largely an American obsession; after all, as one food writer has said, ‘If MSG is bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in China have a headache?’

I wonder if it’s merely the dread word ‘artificial’ that has been attached to this apparently innocuous substance. In other words, I wonder if reactions to MSG are an allergy, not to the substance, but to the idea of artificiality. And I wonder if this allergy to artificiality occurs in more important arenas than condiments. For instance, in the important struggle to reclaim agriculture from a morass of ill conceived pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals, are some genuinely useful man-made chemicals being rejected not because they’re bad in themselves, but simply because they’re man-made? I don’t honestly know the answer to this question, and I certainly don’t trust Monsanto, but I do know that any equation as simple as ‘artificial = bad’ is bound to be wrong. Humans are part of nature too, and we make things. To say that such making is inevitably a source of evil is to say that humans are inevitably evil… and surely that’s a bit of an exaggeration.

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When I was in college, my housemates and I invented a game that we called Strawberry Shortcake. We first played it while eating, you guessed it, strawberry shortcake. The rules are simple: players take turns describing the most extravagantly ideal strawberry shortcake eating scenario that they can conceive of, and at the end of a round the player who has described the scene that is most ideal, most deliciously blissful, most outrageously, over the top paradisaical, is judged the winner. I remember winning one round by envisioning a gentleman’s library carved into the side of a Tibetan mountain pass, with a glass wall on one side to facilitate yeti observation.

the ability to imagine delight is like a muscle

Now I grant, Strawberry Shortcake is not going to replace Texas Hold’em on ESPN anytime soon, but it does have some interesting aspects. For one thing, my friends and I noticed that as we played successive rounds, the scenarios we conceived grew progressively richer and more enjoyable. It seemed that our capacity for imagining and visualizing delight was like a muscle that grew stronger with exercise. The game also increased our enjoyment of the present moment – paradoxically, imagining other, more joyful situations for eating strawberry shortcake seemed to add joy to our actual situation. And finally, whenever we played, we had to overcome an initial reluctance; something about deliberate mental creation of ideal circumstances seemed onerous, although we always enjoyed the game after we got started.

I have played Strawberry Shortcake since those days, though probably the name should now be changed to, ‘beer’. And there is still enormous resistance to the very idea of the game, and I still find this resistance puzzling. Of course, it may be that the game is simply dorky, but I think it goes deeper than that. After all, much conversation among friends is devoted to the creation of negative scenarios; who of us hasn’t been in a thousand conversations about things that can go wrong, or how a revolting predicament could be even worse. Why is it easy and common to visualize and talk about possible calamity, but relatively rare to deliberately visualize equally possible utopia?

I wonder if the answer has something to do with our early observation that the capacity for joyful invention seemed to grow stronger with use. Perhaps the ability to imagine delight is like a muscle, and perhaps many of us are rather flabby in that area. Maybe competitive visualization can help with that. So I here present strawberry shortcake to the world as an enjoyable way to exercise the imaginative capacity. Feel free to play with any food or beverage you like, and with as many people as you can cajole into joining you.

But can a game like this improve our daily lives? Well, of the four of us who invented the game, one was already wealthy and talented, two have since become wealthy and talented and they’re good looking too, and the other is, um, me. So those aren’t bad odds.

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