Contemplative Geek? Mystical Fan?
Social-network blogging (such as can often be found at sites like Myspace or LiveJournal) seems to be so often imbued with a sort of pop-culture mysticism: blogs and sites and communities wholly devoted to Firefly, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Buffy, and so forth and so on. I think, therefore I am has morphed into I’m a fan, therefore I blog.
But what do I mean when I call this a "pop-culture mysticism"? A few thoughts to chew on:
- The texts (scripts, videos, books, whatever) provide symbol-sets that create/establish/maintain meaning and values for those who are "initiates" of the particular "sacred" story;
- Frequently, the characters receive devotion if not outright worship; through slash fiction and OTP debates, the mysteries of eros can be injected into what are otherwise often asensual myths;
- Immersion into the minutiae of character and plot details (e.g., just what exactly did Snape’s and Dumbledore’s argument concern, when Hagrid overheard them in HP and the Half-Blood Prince?) creates a depth of identity with the story that enables the initiate to move into an "otherworld" experience parallel to, and often seen as more real than/higher than, "ordinary reality;"
- Such otherworld experiences result in a mild altered/hypnotic state of consciousness, that enables time and other phenomenon of ordinary reality to be perceived differently (if at all) — e.g., the experience of "totally getting lost" in the story.
What’s so much fun about fan blogs is how they extend the mystery-cult experience: now you no longer have to read a book or watch a DVD to explore the pop-culture otherworld; just visit a site like Lightning War or Buffy Mud, and go ahead and lose yourself in the pop-culture altiverse of your choice.
In the Mediterranean world of pagan antiquity, you had a variety of mystery cults to choose from: the Orphic, Eleusinian, Dionysian, Mithraic, Isian mysteries, to name just a few. A person could devote themselves deeply and faithfully to just one mystery religion, or could enjoy a more superficial (but meaningful nonetheless) connection to several such communities. Fast forward to 2006: have we, between the power of visual media and the noetic wonders of the blogosphere, simply created a new set of mystery cults; meta-mythic mysteries which call their adherents to the devotion of "Harry Potter," "Star Trek," or "Barbie"? Is the new paganism of our day actually not so much driven by the old gods and goddesses, but rather the new pop-culture icons? Put another way: Who cares if you’ve got degrees in Gardnerian Wicca and are a dedicant of ADF, if your real spiritual center of gravity is the Grateful Dead and Dr. Who?
Okay, I’m sure I’m not the first wiseguy to ask these questions (but it’s after midnight and I work tomorrow and hence I’m too sleepy right now to scour the internet looking for others who discern more than just an echo between Darth Vader and Hades). But here’s what really gets me all a-twitter: when I sit and muse on the theology of Julian of Norwich or the philosophy of Plotinus or the practical contemplative teachings of The Cloud of Unknowing, am I just another fan, using my blog to collapse the space that separates mystique from mysticism? Is my Joycean House of Breathings just another postmodern psychic funhouse where arcane literary references get bandied about to create a sense of belonging among those in the know, while (hopefully) impressing the not-yet-initiated? Is the mysticism I celebrate just another all-too-human methodology of mining culture to foster thoroughly naturalistic, engineered altered states of consciousness?
It goes without saying that I ultimately answer these questions with a confident "No!" — a negative that masks the essential affirmative quality of my belief in a real transcendent, far beyond anything that J.K. Rowling or Gene Roddenberry could ever have cooked up. The Force as envisioned by George Lucas and his Jedi do-gooders is barely a flickering matchlight compared to the blazing sun of Plotinus’ re-visioning of the Platonic One. So I’m confident that I’m not just some sort of contemplative geek or mystical fanatic. But not so confident that I don’t find myself pondering about the questions I posed above, at odd moments of the day or late at night when I’m not sleeping well. After all, if contemporary pop-culture is the postmodern answer to the mystery religions of our pagan past, perhaps postmodern expressions of mysticism (no matter how rooted in tradition) are really and truly far more culture-driven (and culture defined) than I would really care to admit.
But if that is the case, then I’ll appeal to all my fellow "fans" of the western inner tradition: let’s figure out ways to bust this loose out of the self-referential maze that is contemporary culture. We can do it. And perhaps — we need to do it. Or maybe we need to be listening as attentively as we can for the whispers of the Spirit: who is, after all, the only One who truly can lead us out of the maze.
