‘This myth is realized today in us’: On the deep meaning of Christmas

Botticelli's "Mystical Nativity" (circa 1500-1501)

Most of my readers know that I grew up in a strongly evangelical Protestant tradition and went on to make the study of world religions, spiritualities, and philosophies a major part of my life. This informs all of my horror fiction (and in fact forms a great deal of its explicit substance), as well as my personal relationships and my basic intellectual and emotional outlook.

I have publicly described myself from time to time as an “agnostic Zen Christian.” But in the actual personal conversations and interactions that I’ve had in my life as a writer, and also in some of the philosophically/spiritually oriented posts that I’ve made here in the past, and in the articles I’ve written at Demon Muse, and in the other aspects of my online and authorial life, I think I’ve tended to display and support the first two parts of that self-description far more than the third. I’ve tended to show that I’m deeply agnostic, and deeply Zen-oriented (or Zen-Vedanta-nondual oriented), but the Christian part has received short shrift.

That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s not a major part of my day-to-day life, both inner and outer. That’s especially true during the current season. I’m typing these words on Christmas Eve, and every year when this season rolls around, I find myself reading about, thinking about, and dwelling and meditating upon the deep meaning of the spiritual reality that is the substance of the Christmas holyday — as distinct from the Dantean inferno of consumerism that is the prevailing “spirit of the season” here in the United States.

Below are a number of passages from various books and authors that have proved meaningful to me in this regard over the years. I’ve arranged them so that they tell a coherent story, as it were, when read from start to finish, beginning with some clarifying statements about the historical and literary status of the birth narratives about Jesus and progressing to interpretations of the deep meaning of the whole idea of divine sonship. Christmas is, quite pointedly, about the “divine birth,” and this is something that doesn’t just, and doesn’t even primarily, refer to a once-only historical event that happened two millennia ago in a rural backwater of ancient Palestine. Maybe the following thoughts and statements to this effect will resonate with you as much as they do with me, regardless of your personal orientation toward religious and spiritual matters.

* * *

We can’t even begin to see who Jesus was until we remove the layers of interpretation which the centuries have interposed between us and him, and which obscure his true face, like coat after coat of lacquer upon the vibrant colors of a masterpiece … We should set aside, first, the Christmas legend. We don’t have to eliminate it; it is beautiful and has its place; but we should realize that it is a fairy tale and, though it is suffused with the joyful spirit of Jesus, tells us nothing about his actual birth.

– Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus (1991)

* * *

[M]ainline scholars do not see the stories of Jesus’s birth as historically factual reports, but as metaphorical narratives. Some Christians are uncomfortable with this conclusion. To some, denying the factuality of the virgin birth and the other spectacular happenings in the stories seems like denying the power of God. But that is not the issue. The question is not, “Can God do things like this?” Rather, the question is, “What kind of stories are these?” Many of the same Christians think that denying the virgin birth involves denying that Jesus is the “Son of God,” as if that status is dependent upon biological conception by God. And so in this context, I repeat what I said earlier: believe whatever you want about whether Jesus’s birth happened this way — now let’s ask, what do these stories mean? To argue about whether the stories narrate what actually happened most often distracts us from the meaning of the stories.

– Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (2006)

* * *

Tonight [at the feast of Christmas] we are not concerned with celebrating a birthday. Anyone who gets bogged down in the story kills the living element in the message of this night. A religious message doesn’t refer to historical facts. Today the Savior is born to you. Not back then, a long time ago. In the feast of Christmas, as in all Christian feasts, we see realized the myth of the unfolding of eternity in time. This myth is realized today in us.

… Reality has two aspects: the essence of God and the creaturely. God expresses himself in creatures. We, too, are nothing but this word spoken by God. This is what the Christmas gospel wants to tell us. We are the reflection of his splendor and the image of his nature, as it says in the Letter to the Hebrews … That is the message of Christmas, which is all about our birth from God. We are meant as Jesus was meant. “Had Christ been born a thousand times in Bethlehem / And not in you, you would still be lost forever” (Angelus Silesius).

… This feast of Christmas should teach us about our transcendent origins and thus help us grasp our real dignity. It aims to bring home to us our identity with Jesus Christ so that Jesus Christ can take shape in us, as Paul says (Galatians 4:19), and so that we can be other Christs. Recognizing this is the most important task of our lives. We celebrate this feast so that we, too, may understand that we are God’s sons and daughters, that we, too, are “God-men,” and that the words spoken at Jesus’ baptism were meant for us too: “This is my beloved Son, this is my beloved Daughter.” We celebrate this feast so that for all our crassness, earthbound minds, and stupidity, we may notice that our origins are divine … We celebrate this feast so that one day it may also dawn on us that “I and the Father are one,” and “The kingdom of God is within us,” and “I am the light of the world.”

– Willis Jäger, The Search for the Meaning of Life: Essays and Reflections on the Mystical Experience (1995)

* * *

HIS BIRTH IN ME. “My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you . . .” (Galatians 4:19). Just as our Lord came into human history from outside it, He must also come into me from outside. Have I allowed my personal human life to become a “Bethlehem” for the Son of God? I cannot enter the realm of the kingdom of God unless I am born again from above by a birth totally unlike physical birth. “You must be born again” (John 3:7). This is not a command, but a fact based on the authority of God. The evidence of the new birth is that I yield myself so completely to God that “Christ is formed” in me. And once “Christ is formed” in me, His nature immediately begins to work through me.

– Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest (1927)

* * *

What is the truth about Christmas?

In the history of Christianity, if you believe you are the sole possessor of the truth then that belief has the power to corrupt your actions, even to the point of insanity — whether it’s the Catholic Inquisition or a big shopping spree. The Truth is inseparable from who you are. If you look for it in ideas, beliefs, or even gifts from the store, you will be deceived every time.

The true meaning of Christmas is that the very Being that you are is Truth. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

Jesus speaks of the inner essence identity of every human being. Some Christian writers call this the “Christ within.” The real meaning of Christmas is to find that essential self that is universally experienced as the Christ within no matter what your cultural or religious upbringing is. As we approach the ceremonial date of the birth of Christ, and as many of you gather with friends and family, perhaps standing in the silence of the Christ within can keep bringing you back to Being – the eternal life that Christ promised human kind.

– Eckhart Tolle (21st cent.)

* * *

When we say, “Come, Holy Spirit,” what do we mean? … We may look at the idea of “coming” as a biblical way of expressing the creative drive of “being,” and since God is pure Being, Being itself, then we are speaking about the creative drive of God.

… We can put the birth of Jesus within the context of this coming process. It is when we look at the birth of Jesus as part of an immense movement of the spirit that is bringing a new and powerful energy into the human energy form field and our individual form field that we see the birth of Jesus in the context that we can really celebrate. All the teachings of the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke have been contrived to lead us to an advance in awareness, and we need not see them as historical documents. The best modern biblical scholarship does not treat those texts as purely historical scholarship. They are primarily teaching us how to advance to a higher manifestation of divine life.

The church has always taught us that contemplating the birth of Jesus is to enter into the Christ life. So the accounts in the texts of Matthew and Luke are not necessarily a factual account of Jesus’ birth, but a presentation of one human being in whom the Absolute has come, perfectly. Therefore they are a manual teaching us and leading us to our birth as Christ…as our coming. The Christ state of life is a rebirth, born of the movement of the spirit. Jesus brings us into the reign of God, out of the reign of the ego in which we suffer.

…Talking about the physical birth of Jesus is talking about the Christ state of life as a rebirth, born by the movement of the spirit. He is the one who brings us into the “reign of God” and out of the “reign of ego” in which we suffer. Just as Jesus’ coming process ended with his resurrection, so our process of coming into the experience of ourselves as a manifestation of the Absolute, of the Source, is a coming to a new mode of perception – metanoia.

…Luke 17:20 talks about the coming of the kingdom of God, which is one expression we use for coming to a higher and higher life. “Asked by the Pharisees when the coming of the kingdom of God would be, Jesus replied, ‘the coming of the Kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce “There it is!” For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’” This Gospel koan, if you really understand it, will take you into enlightenment. It is an interior event, a psycho-mystical event. Your whole psyche changes. Your whole mode of perception must change, and then you are brought into the mystery which cannot be expressed.

– Thomas G. Hand, Crossing Over Together: Walking the Zen Christian Path (2006)

* * *

Here in time we celebrate the eternal birth that God the Father bore and still bears constantly in eternity, and which is also now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says that this birth is happening continually. We should ask ourselves: If it doesn’t happen in me, what good is that birth after all? … We are all meant to be mothers of God…  And what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace and if I am not also full of grace?  What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?  This, then is the fullness of time:  When the Son of God is begotten in us.”

– Meister Eckhart (13th-14th cent.)

Published: Ebook edition of ‘Divinations of the Deep’

During the past couple of years, I’ve been receiving requests for an ebook edition of Divinations of the Deep with increasing frequency, and today I’m pleased to announce that the wait is over. Divinations, the ebook, is now available in both Kindle and ePub formats (the latter for Nook, Kobo, and other ereaders).

You can purchase it from either Amazon or the publisher, Ash-Tree Press.

On their catalog page, Ash-Tree describes the book as “Matt Cardin’s highly acclaimed collection of glimpses into the primal chaos which God fashioned into an ordered cosmos, and the threads which occasionally unravel at the seams of the universe.”

Ash-Tree was of course the publisher of the original print edition — which booksellers are now listing for prices ranging from $60 to $200 — and I was pleased when they recently contacted me to ask if I would be interested in having it published in their newly launched line of ebook titles. For this new version, I gave each story a light stylistic revision.

Praise:

“This collection was everything I’d hoped it would be, and that doesn’t happen often. Divinations of the Deep contains five stories that share the same Judeo-Christian religious theme. But this isn’t a book that you’ll find in Jerry Falwell’s library. This collection goes far beyond Judeo-Christian tradition, far beyond God, into the dark possibilities of what existed before God…Like Lovecraft and Ligotti, Cardin excels in creating a truly terrifying atmosphere of dread and decay by revealing what may lurk just beyond our view of reality. Few people succeed in this, but Matt does it with aplomb. His prose is intelligent and poetic, his execution, effortless. I believe this collection will become a classic of weird fiction.” — Durant Haire, writing for Feoamante.com

“This whole book is Fiction-as-Religion in action. It is truer than truth.” — D.F. Lewis

“It’s a bold writer who, in this day and age, tries to make modern horror fiction out of theology, but Cardin pulls it off. Like most heretics, he may be wrong in the eyes of the Church, but he can cite texts: lots of scary Old Testament passages that suggest a gnostic mystery underlying perceived reality. What was the ‘face of the deep’ upon which there was darkness, before the first act of Creation? Was God’s act one of pushing back or containing a primal Chaos older and vaster than Himself? Cardin manages to turn this into a vision of terrifying, Lovecraftian nihilism. No mean feat, that.” — Darrell Schweitzer

“Cardin massages the dark and hidden, and penetrates the ancient deep to fashion unique visions of horror and deity. Each piece has its own depth and unwavering regard to the theme. The settings are universally dark, murky, and decadent, putting you in mind of Poe especially, but also some of the more depressed turn-of-the-(20th)Century writers. In each of these stories, the author personalizes the apocalyptic question of ultimate power and order. It is a fascinating approach.” — Cemetery Dance

“Matt Cardin’s stories display a thorough appreciation of what cosmic horror is all about…[H]e knows that the Bible staked out the territory long before Lovecraft came on the scene. You might even say that he saw where Lovecraft went off the tracks by dismissing the power of the pre-existing symbols. In Divinations of the Deep, he has steered the train back onto the mainline of Western religion. I don’t want to suggest that these stories are devout or uplifting, or that they follow the Christian party-line. Far from it. The reputed consolations of faith are notably absent from Matt’s bleak universe. He comes by his credentials as a horror writer honestly: not by reading Stephen King with a felt marker in hand and one eye on the cash-register, but by suffering through a dark night of the soul that very nearly undid him. He merely writes what he knows.” — Brian McNaughton

Aliens and ontology: Are abductions “not real” if they’re “just dreams”?

Note the predictable materialist-reductionist assumption that characterizes a newly reported round of research into the alien abduction phenomenon. Because people could be trained to see/experience aliens and abductions while such phenomena were clearly not physically happening, Michael Raduga of Los Angeles’ Out-of-Body Experience Research Center deemed the phenomena themselves to be, therefore, illusory products of the human mind.

From Live Science and its sister site, Life’s Little Mysteries (with emphases added by me):

Researchers say they have conducted “the first experiment to ever prove that close encounters with UFOs and extraterrestrials are a product of the human mind.” In a sleep study by the Out-Of-Body Experience Research Center in Los Angeles, 20 volunteers were instructed to perform a series of mental steps upon waking up or becoming lucid during the night that might lead them to have out-of-body experiences culminating in encounters with aliens. According to lead researcher Michael Raduga, more than half the volunteers experienced at least one full or partial out-of-body experience, and seven of them were able to make contact with UFOs or extraterrestrials during these dream-like experiences.

Raduga designed the experiment to test his theory that many reports of alien encounters are actually instances of people experiencing a vibrant, lifelike state of dreaming. If he could coach people to dream a realistic alien encounter, he said, that could prove that reports of such encounters are really just a product of our imaginations.

- “Alien Abductions May Be Vivid Dreams, Study Shows” (October 26, 2011)

From the Daily Mail (with emphases added by me):

Lead researcher Michael Raduga said, ‘Alien contact is not indicative of the existence of otherworldly civilizations, but rather of a poorly studied state of consciousness that people fall into inadvertently…The fact that UFOs and extraterrestrials may be deliberately encountered in a controlled manner, and within a few days proves that such experiences are a product of the human brain.’

– “Alien abductions are ‘just dreams’: Researchers train people to meet ETs in their sleep” (Oct. 27, 2011)

Reading this, I can’t help wondering whether Raduga has ever heard of — to name just one pertinent counter-example — the DMT research conducted by Rick Strassman, and the entirely anti-reductionist attitude that he  adopted while trying to interpret and understand the results. Strassman led numerous test subjects through multiple DMT trips over a period of years, and sat right beside them the whole time, and saw no aliens or other-dimensional beings himself — and yet he refused to reject out-of-hand the subjects’ accounts of entering other worlds and encountering such beings. Instead, he approached the whole thing with a truly open mind and used the data as a spur to philosophical/ontological and scientific reflection about the nature of reality itself and the possibility of alternative realms or dimensions that exist alongside the empirical one and are just as real as (or maybe even more real than?) it is.

Even more starkly, I can’t help wondering what Raduga makes of the more pervasive phenomenon of religious experience, whose accompanying particulars are no less invisible to and undetectable by empirical observation than the typical alien abduction experience (although all of these things — spiritual/religious phenomena, alien/UFO activity, and other supernatural and paranormal things — do have a tenacious tendency to impact the empirical world occasionally and erratically in ways that defy duplication and repeatability and, therefore, confirmation or disconfirmation in laboratory experiments). Would Raduga and Co. blithely announce that they have proved religious experience is likewise “mere” mental projection if they could teach people to produce it at will?

Well, actually, that might be exactly what they would say, given the similar line of thought that has been advanced regarding, for example, the connection between religious experience and temporal lobe epilepsy.  Then there are the related assertions from Michael Persinger about the significance of the experiences produced by his famous “God helmet.” A simple web search turns up the fact that Raduga himself is known for both his OBE focus and his non-belief in metaphysical matters. We’re living in the age of neuro-everything, including neurotheology. Neurological reductionism is a part of the zeigeist. Maybe “neuroparanormality” will be next.

If so, its popularity won’t make it any less wrong-headed. Neurological reductionism of any kind only pretends to answer questions, when in reality it begs and buries them, and then tries to act as if the conversation is over.

“The Vampire Is Always within Us”: My SF Signal interview with Ian Holt

Ian Holt arrives at Spike TV's "Scream 2010" in Los Angeles

My interview with Dracula-and-vampire expert Ian Holt is now available at SF Signal: “The Vampire Is Always within Us: A Conversation with Ian Holt.”

Ian is the man who co-wrote Dracula: The-Undead with Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew. As you probably already know, the book is the official, Stoker-family-sanctioned sequel to Bram’s classic novel.

Ian’s and my conversation took place shortly before my cyber-sabbatical of January through May, and when I recently transcribed it and readied it for publication, I was reintroduced to just what a treasure trove of interesting thoughts and subjects it really is. We talked about the nature of evil, the question of supernatural reality, the conflicting historical memories of Vlad Dracula that persist in the Eastern and Western European traditions, the Vlad Dracula materials housed in the Vatican archives, Bram Stoker’s lifelong unhappiness, the possible influence of one of his nightmares on the writing of Dracula, Ian’s and Dacre’s motives in changing the Dracula mythos, the divided response among their readers, the relationship of vampires to religion, and the true secret of the vampire’s enduring appeal as a fictional character. Ian is a walking, talking encyclopedia of Dracula and vampire lore, and I think you’ll probably find something of interest in his words. I know I did.

More Bad Titles for Horror Movies

A couple of years ago — okay, almost three — I posted a list of truly awful titles for horror movies that had occurred to me during my off hours. In honor of the current Halloween season, I thought I’d exhume and — what’s more — expand the list. You can never have too many bad movie titles on hand. So here’s the original list reprinted for your Halloween holiday pleasure, followed by a dozen new entries. To my knowledge, nobody has yet used any of the original 26 for an actual movie. If you decide to lift any of them, feel free to mention my name.

The original list:

1. Screech
2. The Mewling
3. Heckraiser
4. Candydude
5. Disco, Monster, Disco!
6. The Bride of Weasel Man
7. Re-Constipator
8. The Gnat
9. Night of the Lactating Dead
10. Prancer
11. Alien Colonoscopy
12. The Beast from 2 Fathoms
13. Arbor Day
14. My Funky Valentine
15. Tales from the Outhouse
16. The Tickle Pit of Doctor Gigglehausen
17. I Waltzed with a Zombie
18. Curse of the Care Bear
19. Heckbound: Heckraiser II
20. Frankenstein and the Monster from Cleveland
21. Rosemary’s Baby-Daddy
22. That Booger Fella
23. Alien, Shmalien
24. Something Wicked Awesome This Way Comes
25. Salem’s Sandlot
26. The Lincoln Log Murders

New titles for Halloween 2011:

27. Sanford and Son of Satan
28. The Haunting of Toll House
29. Blood in Satan’s Craw
30. The Thingamabob
31. Entrails for Xmas
32. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A Love Story
33. The Last Smurf on Earth
34. The Tackle Box Murders
35. Scat People
36. The Phantom of the Opry
37. Frankenstein vs. Wolfman Jack
38. The Wanking Dead

(Note: After coming up with these titles, I discovered that although there apparently haven’t been any movies using them, the new list does feature a couple that have been used for stage productions. #32 is the title of a real play that was so poorly received, it almost killed a Canadian theater. #36 was the title of a 1989 sketch starring Carol Burnett and Julie Andrews. It’s also a full-length stage musical. Apparently, no title is too bad to try in real life.)

Technology, ecology, and the real sin of Dr. Frankenstein

I first read Lewis Thomas’s wonderful Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Sympthony as an undergraduate communication major (philosophy minor) at the University of Missouri. In more than one of the essays contained therein, Thomas expresses the belief that many or most of humanity’s basic problems, including environmental and ecological ones, can only be solved by the application of science and technology. In “Making Science Work,” for example — first published in 1981, right on the heels of the two great U.S. energy crises of the 1970s — he states flatly that “We will solve our energy problems by the use of science, and in no other way.” In “Basic Science and the Pentagon,” he claims that if the money being channeled into nuclear weapons research were to be more productively redirected toward other fields of “basic science,” “We could be gardening out in the galaxy. We could free ourselves, our animals, and all our vegetation from disease. We could solve our energy problems and learn how to clean up after ourselves on our own suburban planet.”

It was circa 1990 when I first grappled with all of this, and I instantly noticed the clash between Lewis’s viewpoint and that of the vocal and prominent environmentalists whose ideas I was also reading and hearing at the time. Solve our problems with technology? But isn’t technology, with its wastefulness and pollution and inbuilt, inhuman, anti-life logic, part of the problem itself?

The point was sharpened when, as a part of the intensive extracurricular self-education that I was also undertaking, I fell in love with many writers and books that collectively expressed this same conflict or contradiction. Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends, for instance, became a master text in my philosophical maturation and worldview, and Roszak was all about exposing the evils of scientism and technocratic civilization a la Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society while reclaiming the lost worldview and existential experience of spiritually charged Romantic imagination a la the likes of William Blake (although he did take pains to specify that any sustainable future as he saw it would retain the benefits of a restrained and purified empirical science and technology, shorn of its pernicious, soul-killing materialism). But I also “turned on” explosively to Robert Anton Wilson, who was all about the full-bore pursuit of everything that ever higher and higher levels of technology can give us (although he did heap scorn on dogmatic materialism and skepticism; see his The New Inquisition), and who in his Schrödinger’s Cat trilogy made direct — and satirical, and dismissive — mention of Roszak and Where the Wasteland Ends.

So I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. My growing army of primary philosophical influences tore me in two different directions, and I wasn’t mature or confident enough to do my own thinking about the matter.

A couple of days ago, Orion magazine published an essay at their website, drawn from their September/October 2011 print issue, that brings this whole issue roaring back from my distant intellectual past. Below is a summary version of the argument mounted by the authors, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute, which is self-described as “a paradigm-shifting think tank committed to modernizing liberal thought for the 21st Century.” The essay repays full reading and careful reflection, because it’s still talking about a live issue, and Shellenberger and Nordhaus are savvy and articulate. Note especially the references to the Frankenstein myth at the end of the piece. I’ve pasted them below in full. Significantly, the young Mary Shelley’s vision, born amid the cultural inception of science itself, is still very much alive as well.

Many environmentally concerned people today view technology as an affront to the sacredness of nature, but our technologies have always been perfectly natural. Our animal skins, our fire, our farms, our windmills, our nuclear plants, and our solar panels—all 100 percent natural, drawn, as they are, from the raw materials of the Earth…None of this changes the reality and risks of the ecological crises humans have created…But the difference between the new ecological crises and the ways in which humans and even prehumans have shaped nonhuman nature for tens of thousands of years is one of scope and scale, not kind. Humans have long been cocreators of the environment they inhabit. Any proposal to fix environmental problems by turning away from technology risks worsening them, by attempting to deny the ongoing coevolution of humans and nature…Though it poses as a solution, today’s nihilistic ecotheology is actually a significant obstacle to dealing with ecological problems created by modernization—one that must be replaced by a new, creative, and life-affirming worldview…There’s no question that humans are radically remaking the Earth, but fears of ecological apocalypse — of condemning this world to fiery destruction — are unsupported by the sciences…The apocalyptic vision of ecotheology warns that degrading nonhuman natures will undermine the basis for human civilization, but history has shown the opposite: the degradation of nonhuman environments has made us rich…Putting faith in modernization will require a new secular theology consistent with the reality of human creation and life on Earth, not with some imagined dystopia or utopia. It will require a worldview that sees technology as humane and sacred, rather than inhumane and profane.

According to [the French anthropologist Bruno] Latour, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not a cautionary tale against hubris, but rather a cautionary tale against irrational fears of imperfection. Dr. Frankenstein is an antihero not because he created life, but rather because he fled in horror when he mistook his creation for a monster—a self-fulfilling prophecy. The moral of the story, where saving the planet is concerned, is that we should treat our technological creations as we would treat our children, with care and love, lest our abandonment of them turn them into monsters.

“The sin is not to wish to have dominion over nature,” Latour writes, “but to believe that this dominion means emancipation and not attachment.” In other words, the term “ecological hubris” should not be used to describe the human desire to remake the world, but rather the faith that we can end the cycle of creation and destruction.

Full article at the Orion website: “Evolve: A case for modernization as the road to salvation“

“Accepting the Monster into Your Heart”: Horror as a spiritual path

Recently, I was telling some of my college students about a shift in mass entertainment culture. A few years ago, I told them, I began to feel as if “my time,” and also that of my generation — namely, Generation X — had finally arrived. Somewhere around the turn of millennium, the appearance of things like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and a truly excellent Spider-Man movie, the latter of which I and millions of other comic book-loving teens in the 1980s had long expected to arrive with James Cameron in the director’s chair, heralded a sea change. Almost immediately the floodgates were opened, and suddenly television, video games, movies, and music began to bristle with the kinds of things that we had all loved in our youth. And of course comic books themselves rose to a position of major cultural prominence and newfound respect, culminating with Barack Obama’s announcement during his presidential campaign that he was a life-long comics fan with a love for Marvel’s Conan adaptations. Chalk it all up, I told my students, to the fact of a generational changing of the guard. In the entertainment industry, and also everywhere else, key positions of power and influence are increasingly occupied by people of my particular generational bracket and worldview. “Your time,” I told them, “may come next.”

The thing is, I view this generational shift as something that pertains to a lot more than just entertainment culture. It also pertains to everything else, including, pointedly, philosophical and spiritual matters. And so it is that I’m hugely gratified yesterday to stumble across an essay/article at The Huffington Post by Scott Poole, Associate Professor of History at the College of Charleston. Scott and I are friends on Facebook and Twitter. I’ve followed the pre-publication and, now, post-publication news about his new book Monsters in America with great interest, because, as you know, I’m deeply invested in the interface between religion/spirituality and horror. (The book’s official publication date was October 15. It’s from Baylor University Press — whose offices are located a 15-minute drive from where I now sit typing these words.) And now Scott has gone and written an essay about this very subject that’s one of the best things I have read or am likely to read this week, month, and year. It’s virtually a manifesto on the subject as a whole, and it effectively conveys a vivid sense of the massive cultural significance of this deep-dark spiritual link and its proliferating arena of impact.

Read the following cherry-picked excerpts. Then click through and read the whole thing. “Our time,” indeed.

More and more, religious studies scholars are looking at both the sacred themes of horror and the horror that lies at the root of sacred narratives…But these have been primarily academic and scholarly reflections. Could monsters offer a spiritual path? By this I don’t mean as allegories of evil or symbolic threats to the soul, but rather as avatars of the sacred, fit images for spiritual contemplation. Can you accept the monster into your heart?…Horror offers a compelling spiritual path. Horror threatens our boundaries. We fear the knife of the slasher and the claws of the beast because they threaten to rend us, to tear our precious selves to piece. Our repulsion to blood and gore, as Freud himself once noted, is the terror of our dismemberment, the possibility that we will literally come apart. But is the destruction of the self not the heart of authentic spiritual experience? Horror is by nature about excess, about the destruction of the safe parameters, about going off the rails. True spiritual experience offers much the same…Even the nihilistic impulses of horror offer a meaningful, if challenging, mysticism. In the worldview of horror is often found a bleak wisdom that recognizes the frailty and cruelty, as well as the elegance, of the universe…For so many of us, the path of dark mysticism seems more promising than the infantile catechisms currently being proffered by our religious institutions and their leaders. We open our heart to the monster.

Complete story at The Huffington Post: “Accepting the Monster into Your Heart“

Penn State announces new sleep paralysis study

During my Darkness Radio interview last week, I mentioned the culture-wide surge of awareness and interest in sleep paralysis that has occurred during the past few decades, and especially in the past four and five years. From being an experience and phenomenon that was essentially forgotten, or rather suppressed from memory, in Western culture at large for several centuries until folklorist David Hufford recalled it for us via his groundbreaking 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions, sleep paralysis has steadily grown in cultural stature during recent years, to the point where it now

• is talked about all over the Internet;
• serves as the subject of a growing number of documentary films and books, as in, most recently, Shelly Adler’s just-published Sleep Paralysis: Night-Mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection, which has received major media attention;
• and has become a kind of cause célèbre in entertainment culture, where it receives muted references in, e.g., the Paranormal Activity movies (and direct ones in their attendant rip-off/mockbuster, Paranormal Entity), and where it was even featured as a “mystery disease” on the Rachael Ray Show in July 2010.

So the news today from Penn State about a new round of professional research into SP is just another entry in this cosmic-cultural log book, and a very welcome one at that, not least because of the accompanying announcement that the research was supported in part by the National Institute of Mental Health.

(Tangentially, when you click through, note that whoever published the Penn State press release chose to accompany it with, of course, the famous Fuseli painting, whose ascendancy in these matters is another and entirely worthy story in its own right, and one that I plan to relate in a future installment of my soon-to-be-resurrected Stained Glass Gothic column at SF Signal. Directly above, you can see one of Fuseli’s alternative takes on the same subject.)

Less than 8 percent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis, but it is more frequent in two groups — students and psychiatric patients — according to a new study by psychologists at Penn State and the University of Pennsylvania…Brian A. Sharpless, clinical assistant professor of psychology and assistant director of the psychological clinic at Penn State, [said] “I realized that there were no real sleep paralysis prevalence rates available that were based on large and diverse samples. So I combined data from my previous study with 34 other studies in order to determine how common it was in different groups”…People experience three basic types of hallucinations during sleep paralysis — the presence of an intruder, pressure on the chest sometimes accompanied by physical and/or sexual assault experiences and levitation or out-of-body experiences…”I want to better understand how sleep paralysis affects people, as opposed to simply knowing that they experience it,” said Sharpless. “I want to see how it impacts their lives.”

Full story at Penn State Live: “Psychologists chase down sleep demons“

The Occupy movement as global insurrection and revolution

Leave it to Daniel Pinchbeck to provide a predictably excellent statement of what the consciousness movement could or should be doing relative to the worldwide Occupy phenomenon. I heard a few days ago that he was scheduled to address the assembled protesters in New York City. This new and short piece at Reality Sandwich is, I suspect, the basis of what he said there.

We are seeing the inception of a global insurrection that will not end until the dominant system is overthrown and replaced through a planetary metamorphosis. The mainstream media continues to play down the Occupy phenomenon, critiquing its lack of specific demands. Specific demands are pointless, because the entire political, social, and economic system in which we exist has rotted out from the inside. Demands would suggest that there is a way to reform the present system, but no reformist initiative is possible.

As someone who wrote about the prophecies of indigenous cultures such as the Maya and the Hopi, I believe the time we are in is one of constantly accelerating transformation. The process we are undergoing as a collective organism leads to an evolutionary leap of consciousness on a species level. This mutation happens within the next few years — it is already happening now.

[...] The consciousness movement has the sacred task of integrating our understanding of spirit and Psyche into the rapidly unfolding movement for planetary justice and social regeneration. This global movement is part of an initiatory process for humanity as a whole that will bring about a transformation of both the individual and collective ego-structure. The goal is not the destruction of the ego but the attainment of an ego-free state — liberation from the tyrannical demands of the ego, which can never be satiated. Similarly, we don’t want to see the smashing of current institutions, but their alchemical transmutation, so they support our human community and safeguard the resources of the natural world. Humanity, as a whole, is rapidly losing our appetite for violence and destruction. We are increasingly sick of the negative patterns of the past, and ready to overcome the inertia.

Full story at Reality Sandwich: “Global Revolution Underway“

Shadow people, sleep paralysis, and discarnate dark entities: My guest spot on Darkness Radio

Four days ago, on October 11, I was the featured guest on Darkness Radio, the popular paranormal radio show originating out of Minneapolis on KTLK and hosted by David Schrader (of the Travel Channel’s Paranormal Challenge and Ghost Adventures). The topic was sleep paralysis, shadow people, and discarnate dark entities — all things I’ve talked about here at The Teeming Brain several times. As you know, I’ve also talked about these subjects and/or related matters previously this year on Spiritually Raw radio (twice), the Mancow Muller Show, and the Genre Traveler podcast, and in an interview with Waco Today magazine titled “Tapping into Darkness.”

Below is the podcast of my Darkness Radio appearance. It’s an hour-long show. David and his two cohosts did an excellent job, and it was an enjoyable conversation. Note that if you’re really into paranormal matters, you might want to check out their show archives for some interesting and out-there subjects and guests.

STREAM THE SHOW:

You can also visit the episode’s webpage to download the mp3 for later listening.

TRANSCRIBED EXCERPT:

DAVID: When you’ve had these experiences, have you ever had the feeling that the beings that you’re encountering are not of a ghostly or supernatural ilk, but more of an alien or extraterrestrial one?

MATT: For me to talk about that, I pretty much have to say that my understanding of the alien phenomenon and the extraterrestrial phenomenon is really in line with a lot of what you hear from Patrick Harpur, who wrote Daimonic Reality. Or I’m sure you’re famliar with Jacques Vallee, or Terrence McKenna, and people like that. It’s possible that there are beings from other planets that are visiting us, but I really view the whole thing, and my experiences, too, more in terms of some sort of archetypal thing that’s happening in the psyche. So that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an objective reality, but it’s an objective reality within the psyche. Jung was big on that: the objectivity of the psyche. It really is something real that we as ego selves are encountering as an “other,” only its otherness is somehow behind our own subjectivity.