(The Man Who Inspired) Timothy Leary is Dead
Albert Hofmann, who first synthesized LSD, has died. He was 102 years old. His “problem child,” as he once called the psychedelic substance, turns 70 this year. Which means he was 32 when he first created acid — kind of ironic when you think about that famous slogan of the 60s, “Never trust anyone over 30.”
I tried LSD once, when I was in High School. It was 1979. It was a very nice, sunny spring day; I went with a friend to Newport News Park near my hometown of Hampton, Virginia; we spent the day watching the trees breathe and marvelling at all the pretty colors. Under the rubric of “now I know what that’s like,” I’m glad enough that I did it. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, nor have I ever wanted to take acid a second time. And that’s because two years earlier I had a more thoroughly “mind-expanding” experience of the presence of God, which I recount here. Having experienced that unitive, eucharistic presence, and then trying LSD, I can safely say that an organic mystical experience trumps Hofmann’s drug in pretty much every way that I can think of. Sure, I didn’t encounter any respiring plants when I was incandescent with the consciousness of divine presence, but what’s a hallucination or two when compared to seeing the face of God? As I said in The Aspiring Mystic, “when I experimented with LSD or cocaine or magic mushrooms, those substances always seemed pale and physically jarring in comparison to the loveliness I had known that night” in which I encountered the felt presence of God.
Forgive me for being so blunt and indulging in an erotic metaphor, but frankly it’s the best analogy I can think of: comparing LSD to a unitive Christian mystical experience is like comparing masturbation to the mystery that transpires between spouses who truly love one another.
Don’t get me wrong: I suppose LSD may have its uses, and I wish there were opportunities for legitimate scientific research in ethical and safe settings. For example, it might be a wonderful tool to assist in the healing of psychoses or for creating spiritual awareness during a terminal illness. Even so, I don’t lament its criminalization for the simple reason that I believe far better means exist for inner exploration and liberation. If you want to know more, just poke around my website for a while.
“LSD can help open your eyes,” Hofmann once said. “But there are other ways — meditation, dance, music, fasting.”
I’ll say.
China
Fran and I are going through various CDs in which we’ve archived photos taken over the last five years, and finding a few odd treasures here and there. Here’s a picture of China, who is now our oldest cat — she’ll turn 19 next month.
Incidentally, all the bottles on top of the chest of drawers behind her are filled with water from holy wells in Ireland.
More Thoughts About Christianity and Paganism
Judy’s comment on my post yesterday concerning Quaker Pagans got me to thinking.
Paganism and Christianity make for two very interesting spiritual cultures. In some ways they are practically mirror images of one another, in other ways they are so different from each other that they are like night and day. But what night and day and mirror images have in common is that each is somehow linked to the other.
I have long felt that, on at least some levels, Neopaganism represents a new religious reformation. Just as the Protestant reformers appealed to their consciously created alternative to Catholicism by appealing to the wisdom and history of an earlier time (i.e., the first century church); so do today’s Neopagans often give a voice to their religious and spiritual identity as something that is simultaneously not-Christian (and not-Jewish and not-Muslim, etc) and not-secular, by appealing to the wisdom and history of pre-Christian Europe, or other shamanistic/magical cultures. The 16th-century reformers pushed against Catholicism to create the new spiritual worldspace that became what we now know as Protestantism (and its subsidiaries, Evangelicalism, Pentecostalism, and so forth). Likewise, today’s Pagans push against Christianity as the dominant religious worldview at least in North America, as at least one of the dynamics at work in their efforts to (re)create a new, magical, Earth-centric, Goddess and/or polytheistic and/or pantheistic religious consciousness.
It’s so easy to fall into a dualistic kind of thinking where “Christianity is blessed by God while Paganism represents sheer superstition” or “Paganism honors the earth while Christianity colludes in destroying her.” But frankly, these kinds of positions, embedded as they are in mythic-membership consciousness where “my” tribe is holy while all “other” tribes are damned, is simply not useful here in the postmodern world. What seems to be far more interesting, worthy of investigation, and hopeful, would be to simply acknowledge that Christianity and Paganism are both spiritual systems with profound blessings — as well as shadow energies and spiritual blindspots — and very often, the blessings of one seem to be keyed in to th weaknesses of the other, and vice versa. If Christianity’s sexism bothers you, Neopaganism offers a post-patriarchal alternative. If you find the emphasis on magic and spellcraft within Paganism to be a bit too superstitious and naive, the contemplative mysticism within Christianity might be a much more palatable alternative.
Quaker Pagans, like Celtic Christians or Zen Catholics or others who are making efforts at religious syncretism, appeal to me because they are people who see religion not as an impenetrable guardian of truth, but rather as a fluid constellation of cultural and spiritual meaning, where both blessings and liabilities can be found. Interreligious dialogue and spiritual practice is not meant to dilute any one religious tradition, but rather offers the promise of strengthening our faith identities, by sharing the blessings and, hopefully, healing the wounds.
More to come later. But for now: it’s dinner time, and I’m hungry. 
Quakers and Pagans
I’m briefly quoted in an interesting article on Neopagans who embrace Quaker spirituality. Cat Chapin-Bishop, who frequently hangs out at this blog and who is herself a Quaker Pagan, is featured in it as well.
Christian Mysticism Book Discussion Group Forming
I’d like to invite everyone to participate in a Mysticism: Theory and History book discussion group through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The group kicks off this coming Thursday, May 1. The first book we’ll be discussing is Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.
Just follow this link to learn more about the group and to sign up: http://www.ccel.org/node/4557
Just a reminder…
Just a reminder: the Mysticism: Theory and History book discussion group through the Christian Classics Ethereal Library kicks off this coming Thursday, May 1. If you haven’t signed up for it, I hope you’ll do so now. The first book we’ll be discussing is Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love.
Just follow the link to learn more about the group and to sign up.
Wish List
The insurance company has asked me to pull together a list of items stolen from our house, along with the cost to replace them. The easiest way for me to estimate the replacement costs was to create an Amazon wish list, which I have done. If you want to be a voyeur and see approximately what we lost, click on the link below. I say “approximately,” because a number of the items listed are newer models (after all, most of what we lost were tech gadgets) — but in all instances save one, the newer item actually costs less than what we paid for when we bought the earlier model a few years back. I know our insurers will likely want to just pay us the fair market value of the actual items we owned, which means what their used price is on the open market. But even though it means we’ll have out of pocket costs, we’d rather replace our losses with new items. Buying a used DVD from Half.com is one thing: buying a used iPod something else entirely.
So here’s the list. I’m not suggesting that any angels who read over this list actually buy something for us (but of course, we won’t turn down any presents, either!)
Wish List
The insurance company has asked me to pull together a list of items stolen from our house, along with the cost to replace them. The easiest way for me to estimate the replacement costs was to create an Amazon wish list, which I have done. If you want to be a voyeur and see approximately what we lost, click on the link below. I say “approximately,” because a number of the items listed are newer models (after all, most of what we lost were tech gadgets) — but in all instances save one, the newer item actually costs less than what we paid for when we bought the earlier model a few years back. I know our insurers will likely want just to pay us the fair market value of the actual items we owned, which means what their used price is on the open market. But even though it means we’ll have out of pocket costs, we’d rather replace our losses with new items. Buying a used DVD from Half.com is one thing: buying a used iPod something else entirely.
So here’s the list. I’m not suggesting that any angels who read over this list actually buy something for us (but of course, we won’t turn down any presents, either!)
Blog It!
It has just come to my attention that FaceBook and Six Apart have joined forces to create a new application called “Blog It.” With Blog It I can simultaneously post to several different Blog Sites, including Worpress (where my “main” blog lives), as well as LiveJournal and Blogger. So this is an experiment – and if it works, I may be back on LiveJournal more often, as well as hanging out on Blogger more than ever before. It appears to be a nifty little app, so if you have Facebook, check it out.
Blog It!
It has just come to my attention that FaceBook and Six Apart have joined forces to create a new application called "Blog It." With Blog It I can simultaneously post to several different Blog Sites, including Worpress (where my "main" blog lives), as well as LiveJournal and Blogger. So this is an experiment – and if it works, I may be back on LiveJournal more often, as well as hanging out on Blogger more than ever before. It appears to be a nifty little app, so if you have Facebook, check it out.
The Story of Stuff
This online video comes to me from Fr. Vincent of the New Skellig Celtic Christian Community in San Francisco. Take a few minutes out of your busy day and watch it.
Quote for the Day
After that for many days, without wind in her shrouds or foam at her bows, across a waveless sea, the Dawn Treader glided smoothly east. Every day and every hour the light became more brilliant and still they could bear it. No one ate or slept and no one wanted to, but they drew buckets of dazzling water from the sea, stronger than wine and somehow wetter, more liquid, than ordinary water, and pledged one another silently in deep draughts of it. And one or two of the sailors who had been oldish men when the voyage began now grew younger every day. Everyone on board was filled with joy and excitement, but not an excitement that made one talk. The further they sailed the less they spoke, and then almost in a whisper. The stillness of that last sea laid hold on them.
— C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
My Little Hitchhiker
Yesterday I got a massage (after the events of the past week, I needed it). When I was driving home, I was at a stoplight on North Druid Hills Road in Atlanta, about to turn onto Interstate 85 north, when a wood wasp landed on my driver’s side mirror. It proceeded to climb behind the mirror into its encasement, with only its little wasp-butt visible to me. At that point the light turned green and off I went, onto the interstate.
I imagine the car going in excess of 60 MPH was a bit more than my six-legged friend had bargained for. It turned around so I could see its head and two front legs, holding on to the mirror, the rest of its body safely tucked behind the mirror in the encasement. It sat there like that for the eleven mile ride as I drove up I-85 to the I-285 interchange, where I headed east to Lawrenceville Highway.
When I got off the Lawrenceville Highway exit ramp, the light was red and I came to a stop. With my car stationery, the wasp promptly flew from the mirror to the window where it alighted for just a second, almost as if to wave goodbye to me. Then it flew away. I thought about it as I drove to the post office off Lawrenceville Highway, before heading home. The wasp was quite a few miles away from home now. Would it survive long in its new and unfamiliar surroundings? Could it somehow manage to get back home — perhaps by hitching a ride in a car going the other way? Is holding on to car mirrors a normal trick that wasps use to get around? Or perhaps it was just attending an Earth Day Celebration for the wood wasps out in the suburbs, and so hitched a ride just this one time.
And now, for proof positive that I am crazy behind the wheel of a car, here is a photo I snapped of my little hitchhiker with my Blackberry as I was driving on I-85.
Locking the Barn Door After the Horse is Out
Here’s a glimpse into the kinds of things that are happening in Carl’s and Fran’s world…
- We’ve issued fraud warnings with the credit bureaus, closed Fran’s checking account, and placed warnings on my and Rhiannon’s accounts (because the thief got our information due to my doing the taxes with TurboTax, and also helped himself to four books of Fran’s checks);
- We are shopping for a safe.
- We are shopping for a home security system.
- We’ve signed up for .Mac so that we can use its web-based backup feature.
- We’re setting up a professional account with Flickr so that we can archive Fran’s photos (the ones that we still have, thanks to having them archived on CDs; we realize that CDs are vulnerable to a fire, so we want a more secure way to archive them.
- From here on out, we will be scanning receipts and barcodes of new major purchases and archiving the PDFs of those items on iDisk; we’ll also be meticulous in saving receipts with owner’s manuals (let’s just say that up until now we have been very casual — read: disorganized — about this kind of thing).
Fran and I are aging hippies. Up to now we have gone through life with a rather smug sense of pride that we were not so gripped in the jaws of materialism that we had to armor ourselves with a safe, alarm system, etc. etc. Well, that pride now has been painfully purged away.
I’m writing all this not just to beat the breast of my own shame, but to shout out loud and clear: we suggest that you lock your barn before your horse gets out. I spoke with Linda, my agent, yesterday, and she said she would be telling my story to all her other authors — especially about having an offsite backup — because I’m living proof that an author’s worse nightmare really can come to call. Thankfully, I was in the habit of emailing files I was working on to myself at work, using Gmail: so my loss is by no means complete. But I’ve lost a lot of my most recent work, and I have the hassle factor of going through Gmail, downloading the various files (often the same file in different permutations) and piecing it all together. Kind of a literary archeological dig.
So do your backups my friends — and don’t just use a memory stick, which is what I was doing (and which like a fool I left plugged into my computer Friday morning, and now it’s gone). Do it. Every day. To an online destination.
Ministry in the Emerging Postmodern World
Here is a succinct slide show that begins to describe the important distinctions between modernity and postmodernity, and what a difference that makes for people of faith.
I think it’s a few years old, but since it’s new to me, I figured it might be new to a few other folks as well. Thanks to the ever-resourceful Mike Morrell for passing it on.
Trespasses
Fran and I went to church twice today: with my dad at the Lutheran Church we’ve been taking him to in Athens, and then later in the day at our home Catholic Church.
So twice today we’ve prayed the Lord’s Prayer. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us” takes on an entirely new depth of meaning when reeling from being burglarized!
But it’s a good new depth. Fran and I were talking yesterday about how it’s stuff like this that puts one’s faith to the test. Sure, I’d love to be able to do all sorts of vicious things to the person(s) who perpetrated violence on our home and walked off with all sorts of stuff. I’d be dishonest if I didn’t say so. And still, I keep going back to “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” What does that mean, other than that I don’t get to be a “victim” any longer? Someone ripping me off is a hassle, an annoyance, a trial. But it doesn’t change who I am spiritually or where my values and my foundation truly are grounded. If it were to change things so easily, I’d have to ask just how solid my faith and my values really are.
I don’t want to give any impression that Fran and I are saints in the flesh. Trust me, I’m having a much easier time hanging out in the consciousness of desired revenge than in the consciousness of forgiveness. But I’m aware of that possibility of consciousness, and when I allow myself to be aware of it, it does seem to breathe a certain lightness and spaciousness into an otherwise most upsetting headspace. Hey, the guy walked off with my electronics and my intellectual property. But if I fall out of my sense of joy in Christ and of the love of life that ensues from that joy, that’s something I’m choosing to lose.
Silver Lining
It’s way past my bedtime — but I wanted to just take a minute to post my first blog entry from my new MacBook. I’m two thousand dollars deeper in debt than I was this time yesterday (let’s hear it for a speedy processing of my insurance claim), but I’ve got a sweet new laptop to show for it.
Meanwhile, we just keep stumbling into freaky new rooms in this topsy turvy funhouse. Fran discovered that about 150 of her checks are missing. Looks like we’ll be closing our bank accounts ASAP.
Point of entry
Here’s how the burglar(s) got into our house: through the window in our bedroom. I know this isn’t a great photo, but I took it with my Blackberry, as that’s the only camera we have at the moment.
The window was shattered, with broken glass all over our bed. The pane you see lying on the bed is our winter frame, which the intruder just pushed through. He cut himself, leaving drops of blood on the windowsill. We had a CSI person in our house yesterday, gathering up the blood and some fingerprint samples as well.
Added to the casualty list: my mini-disc recorder. Added to the blessings list: I found a CD backup I had made of most of my laptop files just last month, which means I have much more of both my financial records as well as my writing than I had initially thought.
Tonight we go to the Apple Store (I’m posting this from work). Proud American consumer that I am, I normally love to go buy a new computer. But we had already decided to hold off on getting a new Mac until at least next year, as we’re hoping to save for a nice vacation and do some work around the house. Now we’re just hoping that the insurance will cover replacing at least one of the computers and one of the cameras…
Job 2:10
I am posting this from my old iMac that I bought in 2002. It’s mighty slow and it crashes a lot, but for now, it’s all I’ve got. While Fran and I were at work today, someone broke into our house. They tried to enter through the bathroom window, but only managed to bust up the screen; then they successfully got through the bedroom window, breaking both the screen and the window pane in the process. They ransacked the bedroom, and alas, found about $150 in cash we had squirreled away; then they made their way through the house, helping themselves to our two newest computers, my iPod and Bose sounddock, our video camera, and both our digital cameras. They must have left through the sliding glass door out of our den; there were bloodstains there (apparently from the broken glass in the bedroom) but no sign of forcing, suggesting that they opened it from the inside.
What particularly hurts is that I kept my writing files backed up on a memory stick – and it was plugged into my laptop. It’s missing, along with both computers. So basically all the work I’ve done on the book over the last six months (along with all the other writing I had saved, as well as all our digital photos, Rhiannon’s medical records, Fran’s music and recipes) are gone.
Our blessings: we are all okay, as are all three cats. Both guitars were left. We have a friend working on repairing the window, and we do have homeowner’s insurance. Re-creating the book is mostly just a matter of re-doing the work I’ve done, and there’s plenty of material on this blog that will be adapted for the book, and it’s not due on my editor’s desk until St. Brigid’s Day 2009. We’re learning a hard lesson about doing online backups (if you’re not doing that, it’s time to start). But we’re trying to be thankful for our blessings. Although right now we’re all pretty slammed.
Clutter Bulimia
We’re getting ready to have a large spring sale at the bookstore where I work. Selected titles will be discounted 30% — and “selected” means close to a fourth of our current inventory, so there are some real treasures to be found there. We’re trying to reduce our inventory level in anticipation of remodeling the book department, hopefully before the Christmas rush kick in six months from now.
Cleaning is not my long suit. I’m a packrat and a magpie, I love to fill my life with interesting books, magazines, CDs, and trinkets of various sorts. The end result is a chaos of clutter. Normally I just tolerate it, but I get antsy about the clutter when I get busy — and these days I’m very busy, between practicing the bass, writing a book, this blog and the forthcoming CCEL book group, and of course my job and family life. Yee haw! Ironically, it’s when I’m busy that I feel the urge to clear the clutter: when life is more relaxed (and I have more time to work on cleaning), I’m more tolerant of the mess.
There’s a link between creativity and disorder that I never fully understood until one day in the mid 1990s when my printer was on the fritz and I had a job that needed to get done in a hurry, and so I went over to a friend’s house to use hers. She is a prominent full-time artist here in Atlanta — she’s a college art professor and has had numerous showings and public installations — and she lives in a converted warehouse in the city that now functions as both her living space and her studio. When I went to see her and use her computer, I literally had to push piles of papers, books, etc. away from her desk just to see her Mac, let alone use it! Indeed, her entire office was a sea of clutter. Here was one of Atlanta’s most successful artists, and her work space was if anything in greater disarray than mine. It was a moment of profound liberation. At the risk of sounding Nietzchean, I came to the realization that artists have an entirely different relationship to the question of cleanliness and neatness than do ‘ordinary’ mortals. I started paying attention, and have noticed again and again how people who are high-functioning in the world of creativity often seem to be hopeless in the Martha Stewart department. It’s rather amusing.
But I’ve also come to see that I’ve got clutter bulimia: once in a while I have to stop everything and go on a binge of throwing things out, listing books for sale on Half.com, and generally trying to impose some small modicum of order on my pulsating clutter. It’s always a satisfying purge when it happens, and invariably I settle back into a more relaxed period of letting the piles grow, mold-like, pretty much everywhere in the house.
I can feel one of those turns coming on. Hey, it is time for spring cleaning.
Splash
This has been online for a while, so I suppose many of you already know about it. But it always gives me a chuckle, so I thought I’d post it here for those of you who haven’t seen it.
PIcasso thought that we should let children teach us how to paint. Watching this video, I think maybe kids could teach us a thing or two about the sacraments as well.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Mysticism — Last Call!
If you haven’t done so already, please answer one or more of the following questions — and post your thoughts as a comment to this blog post.
1. What do you think Christian mysticism is?
1b. Why do you care about Christian mysticism?
2. What topics or issues would you like to see a book on Christian mysticism address?
3. How could a book on Christian mysticism be really, really, helpful to you (so helpful that you’d want to give copies to all your friends and relatives)?
4. Have you ever read a spiritual book that you believe totally changed your life (in a good way)? If so, what book (or books) was it, and can you speak briefly about why you think this book was so life-changing for you?
Last November, when I entered into negotiations with a publisher to bring out the book I’m now writing, I posed these questions on this blog, to gather feedback from readers about what would make a book on Christian mysticism truly helpful for them. In the last five months, the readership of this blog has grown exponentially (for which I am humbly grateful) and it occurs to me that many newer readers may not have had a chance to ponder these questions. I am now actively writing the book, so if you want your ideas to be thrown into the stew, now is your chance: please answer one or more of the above questions, either as a comment to this blog or directly to me via email (my email address can be found on the homepage of my blog — scroll down and look for the “I’d love to hear from you” widget on the right).
Thanks for your help!
Quote for the Day
If I were to say ‘I know God’, I would be a liar. God is beyond comprehension. Better to be silent and live in humility. If I were to say, ‘I do not know God’, I would also be a liar.
— Jean-Yves Leloup, Being Still: Reflections on an
Ancient Mystical Tradition
Mysticism Wow
When I was a teenager listening to rock music (okay, so I’m a midlifer who still listens to rock, but that’s another story), among my friends the worst thing you could say about a musician or a band was that they had “gone commercial.” The idea was that pop and rock existed on a continuum, with “pure musicianship” at one end and “money-grubbing sell-outs” at the other. As teenagers, we really couldn’t grasp the subtlety that in a free market society, all art is commercial to some extent — we just had a sheep and goats mentality, where bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Yes were seen as true artists, while the Bee Gees, Styx, Boston and Foreigner were derided as the sellouts. Of course, after the punk rock explosion a new line of demarcation emerged: you had the new wave and the dinosaurs — but I’m talking about the mid-70s, when it was still cool for rockers to have long hair and even longer guitar solos. In those halcyon post-hippie days, artistic integrity was bound up with being unconcerned about something as base and dirty as album sales.
Okay, thirty years later I can chalk all that up to youthful naiveté, but while I eschew the black and white thinking of my youth, as an author I continue to ponder the question of artistic integrity in a market economy. If a book (or song, or whatever), can’t sell, it doesn’t get published. If you have the resources to publish it yourself, great, but maybe then the word is it shouldn’t get published, as it’s a waste of your resources which could have been saved for a more worthy project. But of course, this is a dicey business. It’s legendary how creative juggernauts like Dr. Seuss or the Beatles had to endure rejections from editors or producers who were convinced that their work lacked commercial potential. The original British publisher of The Lord of the Rings calculated that he’d lose £1000 (no small sum of money in the 1950s) by publishing it, but did so anyway because he thought it was a work of genius (now there’s a case where intuition trumping business sense paid off handsomely). But of course, this works the other way around, where much-hyped and ballyhooed creative properties are released to thuddening commercial failure. Take, for example, Wikipedia’s list of Box Office Bombs: movies that grossed less money than they cost to produce. Some of these movies are critical failures (The Golden Compass) while others are regarded as artistic triumphs (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). You never can tell, can you?
So, where am I going with this? Well, the issue for me is the question of the marketability of mysticism.
