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nemorathwaldMore and more often I find myself referencing Eric S. Raymond's essay Dancing With The Gods. It's very close to Karen Armstrong's book The Battle For God on my required reading list for the power of the explanatory models of religious experience and institutional development that these writings provide. The essay makes me wonder if god archetypes have ever manifested themselves in me, and if so, which ones. Perhaps if I brought it up somebody would say "oh yeah, we see you acting like so-and-so sometimes." Dancing With The Gods left me with some questions.
Raymond writes about his early phase as a dogmatic secular materialist, "I'd known the score since my early teens; religion was an instrument of oppression, deities a delusion, mysticism a bag of sterile mind-games and somatic circus tricks." In college he discovers "... there is a kind of live internal logic to mysticism and religion, something entwined with psychology that sends runners and shoots all through culture and art. Not that I took any of it seriously as a description of the real world. It was an intellectual chew-toy, perhaps at best a way of understanding the pathologies that prevented human beings from living the infinitely more desirable life of reason and science."
He hints very strongly throughout this section that he is going to present something that changes this conclusion. And yet just like Karen Armstrong, he never seems to do so as far as I can detect. Eventually in the narrative of his life he has what he describes as "a wrenching re-adjustment of my world-view" and starts talking as if the somatic circus tricks which happened to him had overturned a rational, explicable universe, despite the fact that he still rejected supernatural explanations and apparently still does to this day. The fact that the gods are explainable, as archetypes in our innermost psychological nature, a lizard-mammalian hindbrain planted in the subconscious by evolutionary DNA, leaves materialism unthreatened.
He says "that cold and mechanistic way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one." A hundred times while reading the essay, I asked, again and again, "why would you want to?" "...becoming a whole human being for the first time in my life. Opening up emotionally. Playing beautiful music. And ... um ... getting laid."
I would never, ever, mess around in the operating system of my computer, much less with my brain. I would definitely break something. There's got to be a better form of therapy and self-adjustment than tinkering amateurishly with scary altered states. Something that involves more reliability, less messiness and impairment and what Cory Doctorow in 0wnz0red called "conditional operators left behind by a sloppy coder." "... a computer that won't boot unless you restart it twice, switch off the monitor, open the CD drive and stand on one foot. If you're a luser, you do all this shit every time you want to boot your box, but if you're a l33t hax0r like you and me, you just figure out what's wrong with your computer and fix it. You don't sacrifice a chicken twice a day, you 0wn the box, so you make it dance to your tune... I say, you should be super-user in your own body."
As Greg Egan wrote in The Planck Dive about ritual and myth, "They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit." "I told him that if he was ever embodied in a space-suit, floating among the stars, he ought to try sneezing on the face plate to improve the view."
Raymond writes about his early phase as a dogmatic secular materialist, "I'd known the score since my early teens; religion was an instrument of oppression, deities a delusion, mysticism a bag of sterile mind-games and somatic circus tricks." In college he discovers "... there is a kind of live internal logic to mysticism and religion, something entwined with psychology that sends runners and shoots all through culture and art. Not that I took any of it seriously as a description of the real world. It was an intellectual chew-toy, perhaps at best a way of understanding the pathologies that prevented human beings from living the infinitely more desirable life of reason and science."
He hints very strongly throughout this section that he is going to present something that changes this conclusion. And yet just like Karen Armstrong, he never seems to do so as far as I can detect. Eventually in the narrative of his life he has what he describes as "a wrenching re-adjustment of my world-view" and starts talking as if the somatic circus tricks which happened to him had overturned a rational, explicable universe, despite the fact that he still rejected supernatural explanations and apparently still does to this day. The fact that the gods are explainable, as archetypes in our innermost psychological nature, a lizard-mammalian hindbrain planted in the subconscious by evolutionary DNA, leaves materialism unthreatened.
He says "that cold and mechanistic way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one." A hundred times while reading the essay, I asked, again and again, "why would you want to?" "...becoming a whole human being for the first time in my life. Opening up emotionally. Playing beautiful music. And ... um ... getting laid."
I would never, ever, mess around in the operating system of my computer, much less with my brain. I would definitely break something. There's got to be a better form of therapy and self-adjustment than tinkering amateurishly with scary altered states. Something that involves more reliability, less messiness and impairment and what Cory Doctorow in 0wnz0red called "conditional operators left behind by a sloppy coder." "... a computer that won't boot unless you restart it twice, switch off the monitor, open the CD drive and stand on one foot. If you're a luser, you do all this shit every time you want to boot your box, but if you're a l33t hax0r like you and me, you just figure out what's wrong with your computer and fix it. You don't sacrifice a chicken twice a day, you 0wn the box, so you make it dance to your tune... I say, you should be super-user in your own body."
As Greg Egan wrote in The Planck Dive about ritual and myth, "They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit." "I told him that if he was ever embodied in a space-suit, floating among the stars, he ought to try sneezing on the face plate to improve the view."
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Date: 2004-10-01 03:10 pm (UTC)