The Teeming Brain

The current issue of the Atlantic Monthly (July/August) has an interesting cover story by Nicholar Carr — “Is Google Making Us Stoopid? What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” — about the effects of the Internet revolution on human cognition. I bought the issue at the airport last weekend while waiting for my flight to Mo*Con III and found it to be quite a worthy read, especially since the author’s description of some of the changes he has noticed in his own mental life under the spell of perpetual Internet usage parallel certain effects that I’ve been noticing in myself for the past several years.

He writes:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets — reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Carr goes on to offer a concise and fascinating history of the effects of new communications technologies on human cultures and societies, going all the way back to Plato’s low view of the development of writing itself, since he feared dependence on the written word would siphon away people’s mental abilities, to the invention of the printing press, to Nietzsche’s admission that acquiring a typewriter had changed the character of his writing. Carr finishes by advising that we should be skeptical of his very skepticism about the Internet, since all revolutions in communication technologies have been met with similar Luddite-esque condemnations. That said, he still holds out the possibility that he’s right, and that something valuable, namely, our ability and even our desire to think and reflect deeply and to have our selves and societies formed and informed by this mental and moral depth, is currently under assault and in danger of being lost:

Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

Any longtime reader of The Teeming Brain will know that I exult in finding such thoughts and feeling expressed so well, and also in expressing them myself. From Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology to Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends to Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America to dystopian fictional visions like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and, most recently, Paolo Bacigalupi’s Pump Six and Other Stories (for which I wrote a glowing review for the new issue of Dead Reckonings), I am fascinated by the exploration of the changes that modern mass and digital communications technologies are wreaking upon our civilizations and cultures.

Like Carr, my fascination has a personal aspect. Ever since I was an undergraduate student majoring in communication and minoring in philosophy at the University of Missouri, where I was introduced to culture and media criticism and the high intellectual tradition of the West (and also the East), I have been obsessed with understanding the personal effects of the technology and mass media cocoon into which I was born, and which has grown astonishingly more comprehensive and complex in just my lifetime, which hasn’t yet reached its 40th year. Most recently I have noticed that my entry into the Internet world, which occurred definitively in 1996, has produced a progressive change in my attention span and concentrative abilities exactly like the one Carr describes.

Lately I have been taking steps to remedy that. I have reduced my online time (although not my total computer usage time). I have deliberately sought out a few long works of fiction to read. Interestingly, my ability to read in long-form has been impacted almost exclusively in the realm of fiction. I am able to read nonfiction just fine. But I have noticed a growing impatience with long fictional works over the years that is attributable, when I reflect on it and trace it, to the very phenomenon Carr describes. Presently I’m pleased to report that I am in process of successfully rehabilitating myself.

Lest anybody think that these fears are new, I’ll give the last word to Ray Bradbury himself. About a year ago (May 30, 2007) L.A. Weekly published a fine article about him titled “Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted” that featured a present-day Bradbury arguing that his most famous novel is not really about censorship, as has long been received opinion by the general public and literary establishment, but is instead about the insidious and pernicious effects of television on society. Bradbury is convinced — and so am I — that present-day trends in television and American society confirm the book’s warning.

The author of the article wisely delved into Bradbury’s history and discovered a letter Bradbury wrote in 1951 to Richard Matheson that covered the same territory. The words of the then-thirty-something Bradbury about the effects of radio on people’s ability to think, concentrate, and read serve as a fascinating touchstone to Carr’s Atlantic article, written 57 years later, about the effects of the Internet on the same activities:

As early as 1951, Bradbury presaged his fears about TV, in a letter about the dangers of radio, written to fantasy and science-fiction writer Richard Matheson. Bradbury wrote that “Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’… This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people.”

If Bradbury was right then, and if Carr is right now, then we have been living through the intellectual fall of our civilization for more than half a century, and have been dressing it up and passing it off to ourselves en masse as a wonderful, liberating cultural advance. This bears much reflection and meditation — if, that is, we’re still able to do it.

Apparently, I talk like Lovecraft. That is to say, I use big words and sound like a walking, talking book. This is according to the longtime reports of my family, friends, coworkers, and the several hundred high school students I have taught since 2001. But it’s the comments to this effect arising out of my recent convention appearance as a guest of Mo*Con III that have really driven the point home for me. (BTW, that’s me in Maurice’s garage with fellow Mo*Conners at left above. At right is HPL himself.)

At Mo*Con I moderated and participated in a panel discussion about spirituality and horror fiction. The other panelists were Nick Mamatas, Bob Freeman, Maurice Broaddus, Mark Rainey, Kim Paffenroth, and — as an impromptu but wholly desirable addition — Gary Braunbeck. When it came my turn to describe my personal lifelong spiritual journey and the way it has played into my career as a horror writer and scholar, I described my beginnings in the Christian Church denomination and then subsequent odyssey through a plethora of writers, mentors, and attachments to various religious and spiritual traditions, including Alan Watts and Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism, Vedantic Hinduism, classical Western-style skepticism and agnosticism, Robert Anton Wilson-inspired reality tunnel switching, and more. Apparently, I used a lot of big words. Just ask Maurice, who hosted the convention at his church, Indianapolis’s The Dwelling Place, and who in his con report and his description of the spirituality panel referred to me as somebody “who uses a lot of big words first thing in the morning.” (Of course, this impression may have been enhanced by the fact that many panelists and attendees were still recovering from the previous night’s late-ranging party party and vigorous Celtic music performance by the band Mother Grove.)

(Incidentally, you can listen to the spirituality panel yourself, if you want, since the first part of it has apparently been made available by P.I.D. Radio as a podcast that I haven’t yet had time to listen to. I don’t know if my portion appears there.)

The impression of my big-wordedness arising from that morning spirituality panel gained in scope and gravity as the day progressed into night. We all went to Maurice’s house for food, drink, and conviviality. I ended up spending most of the evening seated in lawn chairs in Maurice’s front yard with a half-dozen fellow writers and convention goers, engaged in a free-wheeling conversation that progressed from horror and SF movies (especially the classic Japanese monster movies) to horror and SF television to horror and SF fiction to religion and spirituality (especially issues of fundamentalist-literalist Christianity as contrasted with more expansive and tolerant approaches) to personal literary inspirations. During the religion phase of the conversation, I was twice told that I expressed my thoughts, impressions, and positions with especial eloquence.

Then came Sunday, when as we were all saying our goodbyes in preparation for departing for home I was approached by two people who told me in specific reference to the way I spoke on both the spirituality panel and the editor’s panel that I am amazingly smart and super-intellectual.

Then came the debacle of the canceled Sunday flight that left Nick Mamatas and me stranded in Indianapolis and crashing at Maurice’s house for what turned into Mo*Con III.2. In a blog post from two days ago titled, amusingly (or disturbingly), “Mo*Con III.2: God Hates Matt, but Jesus Loves Kelli,” Maurice wrote, “Let me tell you, nothing will make you feel dumber than being between Nick Mamatas and Matt Cardin while they are going at it about the subjectivity of how we experience reality. Those were probably the last words I understood.”

Okay, I give. My wife and son have told me for years, “You like to hear yourself talk,” by which they mean I wax excessively wordy whenever I tell stories or talk about ideas. My high school students have said that I sometimes talk over their heads, even as they have expressed amazement and fascination at the way I sound more intellectual than anybody else they’ve ever heard. Now my fellow writers and surfers of ideas are saying the same thing. The jig is up. I am a hopelessly big-worded, hyper-intellectual geek who uses two dollar terms when 10-cent ones would work just as well.

Or actually, I think I use exactly the words I mean. Without an ounce of pomposity or pretentiousness or egotism, just as a statement of innocent fact, I can say that speaking the way that I do is entirely natural to me. My native idiom in daily conversation is apparently something that sounds hyper-intellectual to a lot of people. As a writer who is innately passionate about philosophies, worldviews, and ideas, I have absorbed this pattern not only of thinking, but of speaking. I crave exact accuracy of verbal expression. Fortunately or not, this means I use words that are big and/or heavy-sounding by conventional conversational standards. I guess I’m somewhat like the 18th century Americans described by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman recounts how European visitors reported that the majority of these Americans, not just the overt intellectuals but the everyday people, were astonishingly bookish and inclined to speak in conversational patterns shaped by this fact. In short, these observers said, Americans at that time didn’t hold conversations, they gave speeches.

Ah, well, I guess I’m in good company. After all, I’m a lifelong devotee of H.P. Lovecraft, and who can forget Lovecraft’s famous intellectual mode of speech? Friends and biographers have said that he spoke like a book. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea illustrated this quality in their unforgettable and hugely amusing portrayal of Lovecraft in the Illuminatus! trilogy, where HPL appears as a character and speaks like the Encyclopedia Britannica. Ray Bradbury had the protagonist of his classic short story “Pillar of Fire” visit a library in an imagination-deprived, futuristic anti-utopia and ask about, among other things, the literary fate of “fine, big-worded Lovecraft.”

So forthwith, beginning immediately, I shall eschew all unnecessary agonizings over my undeniably verbose mode of discourse and shall freely employ such elephantine terminologies as arise naturally to suit the given conversational contingencies.

Or something like that.

What’s that? I run a blog, you say? And blogs are things that you have to update? Oh, yes. I had forgotten all about that.

Yes, it’s true, I took an unannounced and unplanned month-long vacation from The Teeming Brain. I hope the suspense wasn’t too much for those of you who tune in regularly. The reasons for the hiatus are various. Among the most prominent are the advent of summer vacation from my teaching job, which led to an unplanned but much-needed period of semi-hibernation from my public appearances, even the virtual ones here at the blog; the imminent onset of some serious changes in my living situation; my assiduous pursuit of several writing jobs, an effort that is beginning to bear fruit; and the necessity for me to devote a great deal of time, attention, and energy this summer to finishing up work on “Curse of the Daimon,” the first album from my musical project Daemonyx, and also on the revisions (sometimes extensive) for Dark Awakenings, my forthcoming fat book of fiction and nonfiction dealing with religion and horror, to be published by Mythos Books late this year. I’ll be having a lot more to say about these topics in coming weeks.

Then there’s the fact that I have been doing a lot of traveling. Three weeks ago I journeyed down to San Angelo, Texas and environs on a three-day tour for reasons that will remain unspoken for the time being. Then a couple of weeks ago I spent three days attending the Missouri Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church in Springfield, where my video skills were put to use just like last year. Then, most recently — as in, last weekend — I journeyed to Indianapolis as one of the guests of honor for Mo*Con III, the third installment of a convention created by the original Sinister Minister himself, Maurice Broaddus, and devoted to exploring the intersecting issues of horror fiction and spirituality.

The Mo*Con experience was great. Other guests included Mark Rainey (”the legendary Mark Rainey,” as Maurice justly referred to him), Nick Mamatas, Kim Paffenroth, Bob Freeman, Lucy Snyder, and Chesya Burke. Plus a bunch of members of the Indiana Horror Writers were there. And Lucy’s husband, the inimitable Gary Braunbeck (one of whose books I browsed in the Springfield, MO airport before flying out on Friday), was present as well. And various members of The Dwelling Place, the groovy church-in-a-strip-mall building where Maurice serves as the “facilitator” (a minister by another name).

There was a party on Friday night involving chicken marsala, fettucine Alfredo, and a Celtic band named Mother Grove. On Saturday there was a panel on spirituality, moderated by me, followed by many varieties of chili for lunch. Then there was a panel about editing, composed of editors (including me) whom Maurice lovingly referred to as “those rat bastards who keep rejecting me,” since each of us had rejected his work in the past. Then there was a panel about issues of gender, followed by a late-night party with pizza at Maurice’s welcoming house in an Indianapolis neighborhood. On Sunday morning we all went to The Dwelling Place to attend the regular service, which had been retooled in honor of all the Mo*Conners being there. The centerpiece was a playing of the DVD of Brian Keene (”We all stand in the shadow of Keene,” Maurice said) talking about his personal spiritual journey as a writer at the first Mo*Con in 2006.

There was also much selling of books and other wares. I only found out this was going to happen shortly before the weekend arrived, so I got out the few copies of my Divinations of the Deep collection that were handy and also burned off some sampler CDs of 5 Daemonyx tracks, complete with Jason Van Hollander’s wonderful cover art. I ended up selling quite a few of these, which was gratifying. N.B., I’ll make some additional Daemonyx-related announcements here soon.

Here are images (kind of fuzzy, since I’m not good at converting PDFs to jpegs) of the flyers I handed out along with goods; click them to see the slightly bigger versions:

Beyond all this, there was something that has become known to insiders as the Mo*Con III.2 experience, wherein Nick Mamatas and I became refugees from an inclement weather situation that prevented flights from leaving the airport. We ended up crashing at Maurice’s house on Sunday night with his pleasant and patient wife, his two delightful kids, and a handful of other Mo*Conners. Weakling that I am, I became the only one to finally abandon the party and steal a few brief hours of sleep before the early-morning flight. Given the far-ranging nature of the conversations and debates that had taken place up until then, I can only imagine what all was talked about in the wee hours of the morning while I was zonked out.

And this was all after I missed my Friday morning flight to Indianapolis because Mapquest took me to a non-existent airport. (Yes, I had been to the Springfield-Branson airport umpteen times in the past. The Mapquest route just looked like it might be more efficient. Stupid me.)

There are other reports about the con that are worth reading. You can read Mark’s. You can read Maurice’s (complete with photos). You can read Bob’s. You can read Nick’s brief comments about his and my flight delays. Good stuff, all.

So now it’s back to the real world, including The Teeming Brain, which will be significantly more active for the rest of the summer. Hope you’re all having a good one. Gas prices getting you down? Or food inflation? More gathering economic doom? Weather weirdness? Never fear. It will only get more interesting.

In the meantime, I’ve got some creative pursuits to — er — pursue. Watch this space for ongoing news about Daemonyx, Dark Awakenings, and other stuff. We may be living in the proverbial Interesting Times of the Chinese curse, but there’s no reason why that should have any other effect than to make artistic pursuits even more engaging and passionate.

A few weeks ago I went and jumped headfirst into the ruckus about Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth over at Oprah Winfrey’s message boards.

Surely you’ve heard about the controversy, haven’t you? Ms. Winfrey recently picked Tolle’s book as the subject for a groundbreaking 10-week video class that streams across the Internet and around the world. Her decision has catapulted the book to the top of the bestseller lists (making it by far the most awesomely popular of her numerous book club picks) and has elicited both great excitement and great negativity from crowds far and wide.

The excitement has come from two types of people, those who already know Tolle’s brilliant work as a spiritual author and teacher and those who are thrilled to be introduced to it for the first time. The negativity has come from legions of fundamentalist Protestant Christians who are filling Oprah’s message boards, and also a lot of the rest of the Internet and World Wide Web, with criticisms of and attacks upon Tolle as an evil New Age deceiver and Oprah as the founder of a proprietary cult that probably has something to do with the anti-Christ and is certainly leading many people away from God, Christ, truth, and so on. It’s as if Winfrey’s decision to promote Tolle’s book has popped a kind of boil on the face of American religion, releasing a flood of pent up, festering nastiness.

You can find out all about it, if you like, by visiting YouTube or Google and entering Tolle’s and Oprah’s names as search terms. You’ll find homemade video segments about Tolle and Oprah that aspire to the status of exposés. You’ll find Pentecostal pastors speaking to large crowds at revival meetings about poor and/or dastardly Oprah Winfrey and her satanically inspired deception of the masses. You’ll find an Internet pastor challenging Oprah to a public debate about religion. You’ll find articles and blog posts by fundamentalist Protestants arguing that Tolle is just America’s “guru of the moment” who preaches a watered-down New Age pantheism and feel-good self-help philosophy, and that Oprah is a veritable she-devil who has made it her mission in life to twist, corrupt, and oppose the (literal, inerrant, non-negotiable, non-interpretable) truth of the Bible.

You can also visit the section of Oprah’s message boards devoted to discussing Tolle and A New Earth, where you’ll find vigorous conversations and arguments in progress about all of these things. If you poke around there long enough, you just might stumble across the following message written by me in response to somebody who suggested that participants in those conversations should consider drawing distinctions between types of Christians, since not all of the self-identified Christians who have been jumping into the conversation at those message boards are writing from a fundamentalist viewpoint.

I happen to know a little something about religion in general and Christianity in particular. I even have the by-God academic credential to talk with some authority about the matter. Here’s what I wrote in response to this very reasonable suggestion:

* * * * *

You raise an excellent point. Over the past 30 years the words “Christian” and “Christianity” have been hijacked, so to speak, in America’s general public discourse to refer primarily or even solely to fundamentalist Christians and Christianity.

Fundamentalism is the attitude or approach to any given subject or issue (not just religion) that reduces it to a handful of rigid beliefs that are then held as utterly nonnegotiable. They’re also viewed as being pretty much the only points worth talking about. Moreover, in the specific phenomenon of religious fundamentalism, the beliefs are generally held in a literalistic, externalized sense. Anybody who won’t give assent to these rigid beliefs is viewed as an outsider, somebody who’s completely wrong and probably dangerous to those insiders who assent to the beliefs. In short, fundamentalism reduces religion etc. to a dogmatic belief system.

For American fundamentalist Christians this belief system involves a number of standard items, including the idea that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the only Son of God; that his death on a Roman cross was in reality a substitutionary sacrifice where he played the part of a sacrificial lamb according to the old Jewish system of ritual animal sacrifice (an idea that came not from him but from later interpreters of his life, death, and teachings, including, especially, Saint Paul); that the 66 books of the Protestant Bible are completely without error, are to be read in a literalistic sense (six days of creation and so forth), and are the sole statement of religious truth, beside which all other purported scriptures are satanic deceptions; and so on. Fundamentalist Protestantism is entirely about “right belief.” It teaches that spiritual salvation is found in intellectual assent to its propositions.

That’s why fundamentalist Christians are so suspicious of competing belief systems: because their entire religion is at root nothing more nor less than embrace of a belief system. Doctrinal purity is everything to them. This means they’re putting intellect in the chief position. Their religion is, as Tolle would say, “nothing but thoughts in their head.” That means they have trouble even recognizing that some religious and spiritual approaches are completely different, that some religious and spiritual paths are not belief-system based but what we might called “way” based, that is, ways of transformation instead of systems of doctrines. For fundamentalists this is generally incomprehensible and often infuriating.

Obviously I’ve drawn an ideal type here. Most fundamentalists aren’t really as rigid as all this. But they are pretty danged rigid, and some of them conform entirely to the broad picture I’ve drawn. Thankfully, there are lots of other Christians who are not like that.

My interview with horror editor/anthologist extraordinaire Stephen Jones has finally been given a definite publication date in the venerable horror industry magazine Cemetery Dance. I first mentioned this interview nearly a year ago, in May of 2007, in a post titled “Stephen Jones on the death of reading” that contained a substantial excerpt detailing Steve’s views on the likely cataclysmic decline of imaginative reading habits among the general population of modern entertainment-drunk societies (like Great Britain and the United States) in the foreseeable future.

CD has had a rough year, what with one of its editors suffering some family crises. They’ve fallen behind schedule but are now back on track. Just today I discovered that they’ve posted the contents of Issue #59, and that my conversation with Steve is included. Elsewhere at their site (in the April 13 update on their Breaking News page) they mention that the previous issue, #58, is shipping right now, and that #59 is “already deep in production” and should go to the printers soon.

So it’s cold beers all around!

I’m pleased to see that I’ll be keeping company between the covers of the mag with such worthy folks as Sarah Langan, Nick Mamatas, Brian Keene, Stephen Mark Rainey, Darren Speegle, Michael McBride, Steve Vernon, Paul Finch, and a few others. Very nice.

GENERAL COMMENT FROM CARDIN:

It’s the end of the future as we knew it (and I feel fine)

What a week! From food riots to fuel prices to more evidence of financial and economic meltdown, it was one for the history books.

But in fact what’s more important to notice than the significance of all this for history is its significance for the future.

To cut to the chase: We members of modern industrial civilization, especially we members of its current Western (especially American) variety, are no longer able to pretend that we’re going to live in a Star Trek-type utopia that emerges as the logical endpoint of the civilizational trajectory our collective lives have followed for the past several decades. Sorry, but it’s over. It’s just not going to happen. That future is almost certainly dead.

And this is a good thing. But instead of using this insight as a jumping-off point to expound on the soullessness of the future techno-utopia we have collectively envisioned — which is indeed a worthy topic — I’d like to make a different and, as it so happens, much more foundational point today:

That imagined future was never alive to begin with. In fact, NO future has ever been alive. The future does not exist! Only the present moment does! And this is profoundly liberating.

I leave it to you to verify this for yourself. You can do it either experimentally and experientially right now, right where you’re sitting, without moving a muscle, simply by becoming intensely aware of what truly is. Or you can track down some good books or articles, perhaps Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now or A New Earth (or why not read one of the several interviews available for free on the Web?). Or perhaps one or more of Alan Watts’s books or lectures. Or something by Ken Wilber. Or Josh Baran’s concise little book of nondual wisdom, 365 Nirvana Here and Now. Or either of Stephen Mitchell’s wonderful anthologies of excerpts from the written spiritual wisdom of the world, The Enlightened Heart (a poetry anthology) or The Enlightened Mind (prose). Or visit Douglas Harding’s Website and read some of the articles and do some of the provided awareness exercises. Or heck, just reread Jesus’ words in Matthew chapter 6 about seeking God’s kingdom and letting the future take care of itself.

But in case you need a pointer or two (as I know I surely do myself), consider the following statements:

The only moment that’s truly real is this one right now, the one in which you are reading these words, breathing in and out, and experiencing whatever thoughts, moods, emotions, memories, and sense perceptions are present. Any thoughts about the future are pure anticipation or expectation. That future does not really exist “out there” as a real, solid, finished entity, like a portion of a film reel that’s just waiting to thread past the projector bulb. What we commonly call “the future” is simply expectation and anticipation — sometimes fearful, sometimes eager — that exist right now. The actual future never arrives. You are never “in the future.” You are always and only in the now, right in this moment, as new events, conditions, and circumstances arise.

Tangentially but no less importantly, the same holds true for the past. It does not really exist “out there” as some permanent record stretching out “behind” us with real substance. What we commonly call “the past” is simply memory and conditioning that play out right now, in this present moment. When you call up a memory, you are not actually conjuring up some sort of mental window on a really existing former moment. Instead, you are focusing attention on the mental-emotional-biochemical trace of a former “now” that exists right now in this moment.

In short, as various writers about spiritual matters (especially Alan Watts) have been fond of saying: THIS IS IT. Right now, this moment as you sit these reading these words, is all that’s real. There is nothing else. Your memory of accessing this blog and beginning to read these paragraphs a few minutes ago is nothing but a trace remainder of something that is no longer real. Any thoughts or expectations about what you’ll do or what will occur at any point beyond this moment are equally unreal. The expected future never arrives. What actually arrives or arises in the present moment is like nothing else. It is comparable to nothing. If we see it through the mental filter of past or future — that is, through the haze of what we expect or wish it to be — then we’re not really seeing it. We’re not really seeing reality. We’re comparing what’s real to a mental phantom that exists only in our own heads.

The great medieval mystic Meister Eckhart wrote,

There exists only the present instant…a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence….The ‘now’ wherein God made the first man, and the ‘now’ wherein the last man disappears, and the ‘now’ I am speaking in, all are the same in God, where this is but the now.

The contemporary spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has said,

One never experiences the future, nor the past. One experiences only the present moment. Whatever you do, think, or feel can happen only in the present moment, the Now. If you live in such a way that you continuously deny the present moment, it means that you deny life itself, because life is inseparable from the Now; it can unfold only Now. The past is a memory of a former Now; the future is a mental projection of an expected Now. Strictly speaking, nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nor will anything happen in the future; it will happen in the Now. It sounds almost simplistic or meaningless, and yet there is a deep truth in it: that life and Now are one.

My erstwhile informal guru, the late Scott Morrison, whom I’ve mentioned here in the past, wrote in his wonderful little book, There Is Only Now,

There is only now. Everything we call the “past” is nothing but present memory. Everything we call the “future” is nothing but fantasy and commentary, that is, present memory rearranged. If we continue to pretend that there is some other time or place to be, besides right here, right now, we are cruelly and pathologically deluding ourselves.

All of this is why the death of our collective vision of the future that’s presently underway is so profoundly liberating: because what we have been doing as we have gone about the great project of building a gargantuan technological society erected on an economic base of epic financialization is to pursue a vision of the future that’s divorced from reality, not only in its ignoring of natural ecological limits but also in its ignoring of the truth that the future is an illusion. All of our activity has been a protracted process of hedging our bets against the possibility of future deprivation and boredom. We have been sucking the life out of the present by living for the specter of tomorrow, even as we have chattered to ourselves that we are enjoying the good life and living high on the hog.

The death of our ability to imagine the future we have programmed ourselves to imagine can seem like a terrible blow. It can seem positively tragic. It can profoundly depress and discourage us with a sense of disillusionment. But to lose our illusions is actually a positive thing (unless we live in a Lovecraftian/Ligottian universe where sanity depends on ignorance and illusion, in which case all bets are off). And for some but probably not all of us, what may die in this process is not just a particular vision of the future — the one you see embodied in advertisements for cell phones, iPods, automobiles, restaurants, clothing, retail stores, television programs, computer platforms, tooth whitening products, exercise machines, financial institutions, pharmaceuticals, etc., etc., etc. — but the very idea that the future is real. Maybe, just maybe, some of us will experience an awakening to the present that does away once and for all with the fallacious notion that there’s really a future out there and a past behind us, and that we’re sandwiched between them and burdened with the weight of both.

As you read the excerpts from various commentators and news sources that follow, let this insight into the unreality of past and future remain lightly in the background of your awareness. Let it color your experience of reading the following word-montage of our current unfolding crisis, as it has obviously done for Carolyn Baker, who is quoted below (in the last of this week’s excerpts, “Recession, Depression, and Collapse” ) and whose words deserve to be highlighted here as well:

The world we wanted to have is not within our reach; the world we deeply dread is upon us. Meanwhile, the world we have known, ugly as it may be but nevertheless familiar, is vanishing before our eyes. Herein lies an opportunity to experience deeper layers of who we really are and what we are really made of. Collapse is compelling us to confront these issues, whether we want to or feel ready to do so or not. While I do not welcome the suffering this will entail, I do welcome the transformation of human consciousness and thus the evolutionary quantum leap it may offer us.

* * * * *

End of the world as we know it

Guy R. McPherson, The Arizona Republic, April 7

[Cardin comments: Dr. McPherson is a professor of conservation biology at the University of Arizona. He has been warning about impending civilizational and ecological catastrophe for quite a few years now. Presently it looks as if his predictions really are set to come true. Followers of the peak oil press sometimes classify this type of article as "doomer porn," that is, the venting of catastrophic and apocalyptic predictions that appeal to people who get their jollies by contemplating the cataclysmic end of everything. It's useful to know this, since the fact that there's a market for this type of writing leads some people to write it for purposes of pure entertainment, disguised (perhaps even to themselves) as factual analysis. But having said that, it's equally important to bear in mind that this doesn't have any real bearing on the factual basis of the claims being made. To paraphrase Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, just because a truth is unpleasant -- or just because some people take pleasure in positing unpleasant truths -- doesn't make it any less true.

For additional illuminating commentary, read my introductory remarks to the next piece below (the one from The Dallas Morning News), since they apply equally here.]

Peak oil spells the end of civilization. And, if it’s not already too late, perhaps it will prevent the extinction of our species.

….Most of the world’s oil pumps are about to shut down. We have sufficient supply to keep the world running for 30 years or so, at the current level of demand. But that’s irrelevant because the days of inexpensive oil are behind us. And the American Empire absolutely demands cheap oil. Never mind the 3,000-mile Caesar salad to which we’ve become accustomed. Cheap oil forms the basis for the 12,000-mile supply chain underlying the “just-in-time” delivery of plastic toys from China.

There goes next year’s iPod.

….Within a decade, we’ll be staring down the barrel of a crisis: Oil at $400 per barrel brings down the American Empire, the project of globalization and water coming through the taps. Never mind happy motoring through the never-ending suburbs in the Valley of the Sun. In a decade, unemployment will be approaching 100 percent, inflation will be running at 1,000 percent and central heating will be a pipe dream.

In short, this country will be well on its way to the post-industrial Stone Age.

After all, no alternative energy sources scale up to the level of a few million people, much less the 6.5 billion who currently occupy Earth. Oil is necessary to extract and deliver coal and natural gas. Oil is needed to produce solar panels and wind turbines, and to maintain the electrical grid.

Ninety percent of the oil consumed in this country is burned by airplanes, ships, trains and automobiles. You can kiss goodbye groceries at the local big-box grocery store: Our entire system of food production and delivery depends on cheap oil.

If you’re alive in a decade, it will be because you’ve figured out how to forage locally.

The death and suffering will be unimaginable. We have come to depend on cheap oil for the delivery of food, water, shelter and medicine. Most of us are incapable of supplying these four key elements of personal survival, so trouble lies ahead when we are forced to develop means of acquiring them that don’t involve a quick trip to Wal-Mart.

On the other hand, the forthcoming cessation of economic growth is truly good news for the world’s species and cultures. In addition, the abrupt halt of fossil-fuel consumption may slow the warming of our planetary home, thereby preventing our extinction at our own hand.

Our individual survival, and our common future, depends on our ability to quickly make other arrangements. We can view this as a personal challenge, or we can take the Hemingway out. The choice is ours.

For individuals interested in making other arrangements, it’s time to start acquiring myriad requisite skills. It is far too late to save civilization for 300 million Americans, much less the rest of the planet’s citizens, but we can take joy in a purpose-filled, intimate life.

It’s time to push away from the shore, to let the winds of change catch the sails of our leaky boat.

It’s time to trust in ourselves, our neighbors and the Earth that sustains us all.

Painful though it might be, it’s time to abandon the cruise ship of empire in exchange for a lifeboat.

* * * * *

U.S. at a national crisis and turning point, and neither conservatives nor liberals know what to do

Rod Dreher, The Dallas Morning News, March 30

[Cardin comments: You really need to click through and read Dreher's entire editorial. He's the editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News. As such, his views have a large audience. That's as it should be, because in this particular piece he nails the issue, and nails it hard. Read it. Let it sink in. Let it settle into your thinking, your emotions, your outlook. The biggest challenge facing us all isn't material or practical, although such matters are of course of crucial importance. The biggest challenge is psychological. We Americans have lived ourselves into a cultural and civilizational dead end, gripped as we've been by a fundamental outlook and set of assumptions that are fundamentally out of touch with reality. Such a situation could only exist for a brief period until reality came crashing in. That's what's happening right now. As Matt Savinar has placed as the slogan at the top of the front page of his Website Life After the Oil Crash, "Deal With Reality or Reality Will Deal With You."]

The economic crisis now breaking upon us will be both a political and cultural event that may well be a turning point in our nation’s history as consequential as the Great Depression. Which, by the way, is the historical standard to which some smart people –- like former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan –- are comparing this event.

When asked recently on National Public Radio why so many financial insiders are using such drastic rhetoric, Wall Street Journal economics editor David Wessel said the closer you are to the crisis, the more you understand just how “very frightening” it is.

The cultural roots of this crisis have to do with Americans’ refusal to recognize natural limits….For nearly a generation, Americans have had the luxury to organize their political fights around cultural issues like abortion and gay rights because economics haven’t been central to either politics or culture. And we have financed the illusion of sustainable progress through massive accumulation of debt, both personal and governmental. Prosperity masked decline; optimism occluded realism. As historian John Lukacs writes of the boom years in the current Chronicles, “The middle class habits (and virtues) of permanence, of saving, of passing their assets — and values — on to their children disappeared.” That now must change. The cost of our grand national experiment in living beyond our means is now coming due, and not just in the form of the housing crash. If the country indeed goes into a long, deep recession, forcing austerity and worse on the general public, the full social cost of casting aside traditional communal bonds and moral values — the beliefs that enabled people to thrive during hard times — will be painfully manifest. The psychological shock to the body politic will be sharp.

….Here’s the hope: Economic and related events will force a change in the culture toward sustainability and a revival in localism, personal asceticism and traditionalism. This, in turn, will produce a new, more responsible politics, one that keeps the excesses of a culture in material and social crisis from damaging the common good and public order. Here’s the fear: The cultural shift soon to occur will turn Hobbesian, producing a fearful, nationalistic, demagogic politics, and God knows what to follow.

We live in interesting times. And neither liberals nor conservatives are ready for what’s next.

* * * * *

Major powers play energy tug-of-war in Central Asia

CNNMoney.com, April 8

It’s got all the makings of an international geopolitical thriller: World powers move their armies into a violent, remote, and politically fragile region brimming with valuable oil and natural gas resources; except it’s not fiction.

Central Asia is the scene of this powerplay. Europe is maneuvering to satisfy its energy needs while it cuts greenhouse gas emissions. China and India need the region’s reserves to quench their booming economies’ thirst for fuel. Meanwhile, the U.S. is challenging Russia’s traditional control of the region’s gas reserves — which are large — but not large enough for everyone.

Tense jockeying is underway — complete with corporate intrigue, diplomacy, and guns — as the United States, the European Union, Russia, China and India all vie for the right to build huge pipelines to get the oil and massive natural gas reserves out of the remote nations of Central Asia.

* * * * *

It’s time to start hoarding

The Daily Reckoning, April 11

All over the world, food fights are breaking out. Not because there is too much food or too little, but because it has gone way up in price. Of course, you could put that another way: the paper money in which food is priced is going down faster than usual. There’s no less food than there was five years ago. But there is a lot more paper money. Modern central banking was invented so that we should have paper money — and have it in abundance. Now, we have so much that it is causing food prices to soar. But food is hardly in a class by itself. When one bubble pops, the authorities immediately begin pumping up another one. After the dot.com bubble deflated in 2000-2001, for example, up came even bigger bubbles in residential housing and the financial industry. Now, both housing and finance are losing air. But the central banks are still pumping hard. Where’s the air going? Apparently into commodities. In other words, worldwide inflation of food prices is a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman might put it, not an agricultural phenomenon.

….Of course, hoarding is exactly what a smart family should do. Most likely, there will be runs on other commodities too…and then a run on gold itself. People will want something real…something sure…something with which they can buy rice, without having to worry about it doubling in price two weeks later. That something, traditionally, is gold.

Hoard it now, while you still can.

* * * * *

Chaos Spreads as Food Prices Skyrocket; World Banks calls for action

Der Spiegel, April 10

Gunfire in Haiti. Riots in Cameroon. A government crisis in the Philippines. The effects of skyrocketing food prices have reached every corner of the globe. Now, the World Bank has called for world leaders to take action before it is too late.

….Unrest triggered by the higher food and fuel prices has been gaining steam across the globe in recent weeks. During a two-day riot in Egypt earlier this week, one person was killed. Cameroon has also seen street violence. In the Philippines, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo warned on Tuesday that rice shortages were exacerbating political and social tensions in the country.

* * * * *

U.S. food banks under siege, hunger soaring

Bill Moyers Journal, April 11

[Cardin comments: From the page linked to below, you can click to read a full transcript of last Friday's story about hunger in America on Moyers Journal on PBS. You can also watch the archived video itself.]

The news at the grocery store is grim for many. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, food prices rose by 4% last year, the largest increase in 17 years. And, the USDA predicts they will rise another 4% this year. Eggs are up 40% in the past year; milk up 26% a gallon; a loaf of standard bread, 20%.

All across the nation families, government agencies and food banks are feeling the pinch. So many people are in precarious straits our government figures 28 million Americans will be using food stamps this year, the highest level since the program began in the 1960s. Almost one in 10 people in Ohio get food stamps; one in eight in Michigan, and one in six West Virginians. The rising food prices make that assistance worth less and less and food banks and pantries are facing increased need and those same higher prices.

* * * * *

Blow to GE highlights depth of global crisis

The U.K. Times Online, April 13

It was, perhaps, the point at which the world began to realise that General Electric, the US industrial giant whose annual sales would eclipse the output of many a small country, is more than a maker of lightbulbs, jet engines, Hollywood films and railway locomotives.

On Friday GE issued its results for the first three months of the year. They were truly dreadful – far worse than Wall Street had been expecting. And Jeff Immelt, GE’s chairman and chief executive since 2001, readily identified the reason for the disappointment. He said: “Our primary short-fall was a decline in financial-services earnings.”

….It is GE’s size — with a turnover last year larger than the output of countries such as Colombia, the Czech Republic and Malaysia – that has given it the status of a bellwether of the US economy.

* * * *

The decline and fall of the American empire of debt

Andrew Leonard, Salon.com, April 14

[Kevin] Phillips [author of Wealth and Democracy, American Theocracy, and American Dynasty] has warned for years about the inevitably malign consequences of what he calls the “financialization” of the American economy. Sometime in the mid-’90s, he writes, financial services overtook manufacturing as the biggest chunk of the U.S. gross domestic product. If you believe, as Phillips does, that all the furious activity on Wall Street masterminded by the likes of Citigroup and Goldman-Sachs and Merrill Lynch is just a bunch of speculation and froth that doesn’t actually result in the creation of anything real, then there has never been a better time for triumphantly pointing out [as he does in his newest book, Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism,] the disasters that ensue when the rest of the world also realizes that Wall Street is wearing no clothes.

This book’s thesis, now that a quarter century’s results are in hand, is that the eighties can be identified as the launching pad of a decisive financial sector takeover of the U.S. economy, consummated by turbocharged, relentless expansion of financial debt, and eventual extension of mortgage credit to subprime and other unqualified buyers. The two converging pumps helped to swell the housing, mortgage, and credit bubble that began imploding in the summer of 2007.

….As for oil, while at first it might seem a bit off-putting to find a chapter on “peak oil” in the middle of a book mostly devoted to financial shenanigans, the current price tags of a barrel of crude and a gallon of gasoline obviously pile even more stress on top of an economy already teetering after years of gross mismanagement….Dark times are ahead, he foresees, as the major powers of the world struggle for control of the world’s dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. But as this time of peril hastens toward us, the once mighty U.S. is no longer master of its own manifest destiny.

….My summation is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation’s history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence, and quantitative negligence.

* * * * *

IMF says US crisis is ‘largest financial shock since Great Depression’

The Guardian, April 9

America’s mortgage crisis has spiralled into “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression” and there is now a one-in-four chance of a full-blown global recession over the next 12 months, the International Monetary Fund warned today.

The US is already sliding into what the IMF predicts will be a “mild recession” but there is mounting pessimism about the ability of the rest of the world to escape unscathed, the IMF said in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook. Britain is particularly vulnerable, it warned, as it slashed its growth targets for both the US and the UK.

The report made it clear that there will be no early resolution to the global financial crisis. “The financial shock that erupted in August 2007, as the US sub-prime mortgage market was derailed by the reversal of the housing boom, has spread quickly and unpredictably to inflict extensive damage on markets and institutions at the heart of the financial system,” it said.

* * * *

For Many, a Boom That Wasn’t

The New York Times, April 9

The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500.

This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records. In every other expansion since World War II, the buying power of most American families grew while the economy did. You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens?

* * * * *

Recession, Depression, and Collapse

Carolyn Baker at CarolynBaker.net, April 11

No one walking away from a foreclosed home, no one declaring bankruptcy, no uninsured person staring in the face tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills needs a maestro or any other member of the ruling elite to tell them that not only are we in a recession, but we are on a fast-track to a depression that is going to make 1929 look like living in the lap of luxury. It’s called the collapse of Western civilization, and it is well underway.

….What I want the reader to understand is that collapse is already happening. Your resentment of the word doesn’t change the fact that it is occurring. Like Greenspan and Paulson, we all have the option of masking the realities of meltdown and continuing to wait for someone or something to “prove” to us that the world as we have known it is over.

Is talking about collapse scary? You bet. Does that mean we should avoid the word or “re-frame” it into something more “acceptable.” Only if we insist on living in denial. If we feel fear about collapse, does that mean that we are “living in fear”? Only if we feel nothing else about it except fear and allow the fear to paralyze us.

….The world we wanted to have is not within our reach; the world we deeply dread is upon us. Meanwhile, the world we have known, ugly as it may be but nevertheless familiar, is vanishing before our eyes. Herein lies an opportunity to experience deeper layers of who we really are and what we are really made of. Collapse is compelling us to confront these issues, whether we want to or feel ready to do so or not. While I do not welcome the suffering this will entail, I do welcome the transformation of human consciousness and thus the evolutionary quantum leap it may offer us.

Yesterday I received an email from one of my former high school students. He asked me a few questions that indicated he has really entered into a reflective state of mind: Am I familiar with C.S. Lewis and Mere Christianity? What do people mean when they refer to other people, situations, or anything else as “perfect”? Is there a one-size-fits-all definition of perfection? Why do most people never question the near universal assumption that life is a good and valuable thing?

I began typing my response and, as sometimes happens, saw it blossom into more than the brief note I had intended. After clicking “send,” I thought I might as well go ahead and share the letter with my Teeming Brain readers since I know they’re a reflective and philosophical lot themselves.

Note that names — or actually, just one name — have been omitted to protect the innocent.

* * * * *

Hi C—,

Good to hear from you. Sounds like you’re in a really thoughtful state of mind lately.

Yes, I’ve read Mere Christianity three times in its entirety and then gone back to reread selected passages many more times. For a few years Lewis was one of my favorite writers. I still have great affection for him even though I’ve don’t hold his actual ideas in as high a regard as I once did. As he aged his writings grew more and more entrenched in a kind of puritanical Protestant morality. That’s why I like his early work better than his later work, since the early stuff is more filled with a general sense of exhilaration about ideas, philosophy, spirituality, and religion in general. Mere Christianity stands at about the halfway point in this evolution of his work. The three sections of it were originally published as three separate pamphlets before being stitched together to form of a single book. I personally find the final section, “Beyond Personality,” to be far and away the most brilliant, valuable, and exciting one. It also happens to be the most purely philosophical. Lewis’s superstar status among contemporary American Protestant Christians seems to be based largely on a love of the first half of that book, since it’s material from that part of Mere Christianity that you almost always hear quoted in churches or on the radio when somebody brings up the man’s name.

As for questions about the nature and meaning of perfection, the value or nonvalue of life, etc., it sounds like you’ve awakened to the basic philosophical cast of mind. As you may know, the word “philosophy” means “the love of wisdom.” The subject itself, which nowadays the majority of people study only for a single semester in college so they can earn a required credit to graduate, is the king or crown of all the intellectual disciplines. It’s not “about” anything in the way that history, science, mathematics, literature, economics, and other classes are “about” something. All of those other fields deal with specific subjects and content, e.g., what happened in the past and how it affects us today (history), the way the physical world works (science), and so on. But philosophy is about all of them. It asks, “What does all of this mean?” Philosophy raises the question “Why?” and applies it to everything. It tries to figure out, or at least it calls into question, most of the things that almost everybody takes for granted every day, in just the same way that you’re now asking some pretty radical questions that you felt it necessary to soften with a p.s. assuring me that you’re not contemplating suicide.

So this is all to say that I encourage you to continue your questioning. You’ll find over time that you’re experiencing a shift in your perception of absolutely everything. It begins to feel a lot like waking up from the Matrix. You start having a “Holy crap!” reaction as you realize that all of the ideas and points of view that you’ve always taken for granted are entirely up for grabs. Your whole outlook, the mental and emotional basis for the way you’ve lived your entire life and made important choices and wanted some things while rejecting others, is revealed as arbitrary. You come to recognize that you’ve believed things and held values not because you know they’re true but because you were programmed to do so by the environment in which you grew up.

This awakening is a very good thing.

You asked for advice about books. I suggest that you find a good introductory book on philosophy. One that comes to mind because it’s very accessible, and also amusing, is Does the Center Hold?: An Introduction to Philosophy. You can buy a fairly cheap used copy through Amazon. I’ve never read the whole thing myself but I’ve browsed it in college bookstores and found it highly engaging and informative.

I can’t think of any books at the moment to suggest for your specific questions about the meaning of “perfection” and the question of life’s value, but I can suggest some books that were valuable to me vry early on in my own awakening to a general philosophical cast of mind:

- The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts

- Walden by Henry David Thoreau

- Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

- Irrational Man by William Barrett

The Watts book is particularly accessible and readable. The Percy book may be a bit more difficult, especially in the middle section about the philosophy of language, but early sections are especially valuable as Percy paints all sorts of hypothetical life circumstances and situations and then considers different points of view from which they can be interpreted and understood.

Since you asked me specifically about Lewis, I can recommend another of his books for you: The Abolition of Man. You might find it difficult reading. But then again, maybe not. It’s a bit different (that’s an understatement) from Mere Christianity. In it, Lewis sets out to disprove the modern idea that human ideas of morality, value, etc., are just that: human ideas. He tries to prove that there really are objective moral truths. Following him in his exploration of the issues is a very educational and mind-expanding experience, regardless of whether you agree with his arguments and conclusions. You can find used copies of the book online and in bookstores at bargain-basement prices.

Finally, I strongly urge you to read a little bit about Socrates, the ancient Athenian Greek who, for us members of Western civilization, pretty much started the whole philosophy thing. There are some good, brief online biographies. The one at History for Kids makes for extremely easy reading. Some others are more lengthy and dense.

Oh — and really finally, since I mentioned The Matrix I may as well direct you to the Sparknotes page about some of the movie’s philosophical influences. It may give you some ideas for further reading.

Good luck! I hope I haven’t blown your mind (or bored you to tears) with my reply-on-steroids to your short questions.

All best,

MC

Well, I’m back from another long hiatus. It’s been four weeks since my last confession—er, blog post. I’m certainly making good on my previous claim, circa early September, that my foreseeable activity here at The Teeming Brain would be sporadic.

At the moment I thought I’d drop in to mention that this downturn in blog activity isn’t due solely to an upsurge in real-life busyness, although that certainly has played and continues to play a role (as with my 13-hour work day yesterday, culminating in my returning home last night around 10 o’clock and leaving again for work this morning around 8). What’s also factoring into the situation is a downturn in my overall motivation to take part in the life of the Internet. And that, in turn, is a result of certain inner changes that have occurred in me over a several-month span.

In a nutshell, I’ve started receiving or experiencing flashes of nondual insight that have put flesh, as it were, on the bones of the spiritual, philosophical, and theological ideas that have occupied my attention for most of my life. Readers of this blog, as well as of my formally published fiction and nonfiction, are well aware of my philosophical and spiritual proclivities. So they (you) may (or may not) be interested to learn that this latest development kicked off in earnest last spring and has continued pretty much unabated ever since. Hints of it appear in some of the posts I’ve published here. The change has taken the form of an intensification of things I initially began to realize some years ago—first intellectually and then existentially—about time, consciousness, and identity. I used to read the words of various sages and spiritual teachers who said things like, “You are not your mind,” “You are not your experiences but the experiencer of them,” “The world happens inside you, not vice versa,” and so on. And I really dug it. Delving into this kind of thing, seeking and savoring books and ideas along these lines, became a way of life for me. My thoughts and bookshelves were, and still are, populated by things relating to meditation, mysticism, theology, Zen Buddhism, nondualism, esoteric Christianity, comparative religion, existentialism, consciousness studies, depth psychology, and more.

But for the most part, my experience of all these things was purely intellectual. I was pursuing not real experience but intellectual ideas—“mere thoughts in your head,” as Eckhart Tolle would say—which I, with my particular personality and set of predilections, found appealing, intriguing, and exciting. Only I didn’t realize this, since I mistook the ideas for the realities.

Now, recently, this situation has undergone a substantial change. It didn’t happen all at once but instead arose, as mentioned above, as an intensifying of something that had already started. I’ve experienced various “awakenings” over the years but this recent change has been more fundamental and extensive than anything that’s come before. My frequent thought/feeling has been, “So that’s what the words always meant!” Another frequent thought/feeling, often accompanied by a fleeting, cackling laughter, has been, “You’ve got to be shitting me” (addressed to no one in particular, or perhaps to myself).

Several side effects have accrued, including an interesting shift in the tenor of my personal relationships and the aforementioned lessening and loosening of my attachment to the Internet. The latter isn’t permanent, I think, since it’s primarily a spin-off of the fact that the fundamental motivations that have fueled a great many of my lifelong pursuits, including my writing (including my activity here at The Teeming Brain), are presently called into question. I’m undergoing a bit of an internal reorganization.

In truth, the whole thing is a lot like what Josh Baran describes as his awakening experience in his excellent and even essential little book of quotations, 365 Nirvana Here and Now. Baran says that after many years of reading books and practicing various spiritual techniques, he flew to Nepal “to receive Dzogchen teachings from a revered master, Tulku Urgyen,” in whose presence he “found my ‘self’ instantly stopped cold. There were no fireworks, no thunder—just the sudden, obvious, stunning realization of the pure awareness that I had overlooked my entire life, not hidden or elsewhere.”

He goes on to write: “In the face of this presence or nowness, all seeking, wandering, and waiting vanished before my eyes. I saw how much of my life’s energies had been focused on looking forward to some imagined future, rather than simply celebrating the all-pervasive present: trying to get ‘there’ instead of being ‘here.’ My previous years of forced meditation and effort seemed, in retrospect, useless.”

Lately, whenever I read Baran’s words and others like them, I find that I actually understand them on a level beyond that of mere interesting thoughts.

In linear-temporal terms, this might be considered a partial fulfillment of some time I spent—virtually, in cyberspace—with the now-deceased spiritual teacher Scott Morrison during the mid-1990s. I came into contact with him via his website 21^st Century Renaissance at www.openmindopenheart.org, now sadly defunct (although most of its contents are still available via the Internet Archive). Scott had just achieved a measure of recognition as a teacher of nondual wisdom via the publication of his little book There Is Only Now, which had aroused considerable excitement among Zen and nondual spirituality circles. He created 21^st Century Renaissance to serve as an online community where people from all over the world could participate in an electronic version of satsang or dokusan, the Eastern spiritual practice in which disciples gather around a teacher and ask questions in order to deepen and sharpen their insight. I became one of his informal students in this manner. Several of the questions, along with Scott’s responses, that appear in the archived website are from me. He and I also struck up a private email relationship, in the course of which I was impressed to discover that he was one of the first batch of original American students of Chogyam Trungpa.

But none of that meant that I really understood what he was talking about. Repeatedly, to me and lots of other inquirers, he said things like, “Give up looking for anything like ‘enlightenment’ or ‘spiritual awakening.’ You’re making it into some sort of external goal to be attained in the future. That’s the very opposite of the truth. Just focus your attention on the present moment and recognize what’s already here, what’s already true, what’s inescapably real when you drop all mental-emotional storylines.” I thought I knew what he was saying, but that was precisely the problem: I thought I understood him, which meant I was just understanding a thought, which meant I was making the whole thing into a “thought in my head,” which was exactly the delusional move that he was pointing out.

Scott died in 2000. For more than a year afterward, I didn’t know why my sporadic emails were going unanswered or why the website had fallen silent. Finally, I wrote to the people at www.sentient.org to ask if they knew what was going on (since I knew they had a page devoted to Scott). They wrote back to inform me of his early death by cancer at around age 40. I hadn’t even known he was ill.

These seven years later, it’s gratifying to return to his books and online writings and have an “Oh, that’s what he meant” experience.

I’ll close this post with two excerpts from two different authors that get at the type of awakening I’m talking about. The first is from Scott:

“What follows has been said in many, many different ways, here and elsewhere. If you are passionately interested in Self Realization, I suggest you go into this very, very slowly and carefully. If we are honest, we can’t assume anything, so don’t take my word for any of this. (What that means is that to know the truth, you have to search your own heart with as much sincerity and integrity as possible. It’s entirely up to you.) That said, it all comes down to this:

“There is only now. This is it. This is everything.

“Everything we think we think we know, in advance, about ourselves, about each other, about the world, about God, about the universe, is nothing but the play of memory, belief, and opinion, with all of its historical, emotional, psychological, social, political, economic, and intellectual baggage. This includes all spiritual, philosophical, and religious beliefs and fantasies.

“The only thing we know, for sure, is awareness.

“If attention is not fixated on self-centered ideas about things, its true nature is revealed as love, affection, insight, clarity, wisdom, equanimity, and compassion.

That true nature is what you are.
You are a verb and the universe is a verb.

“If you don’t deny that, trivialize it, or pretend it’s not so, you will discover that all of the joy, happiness, peace, and freedom you have been seeking everywhere else has been right here all along.

“However, these are all just words. If you are truly open and honest, you can put the words, too, aside.

“Without the word, ‘awareness,’ what is it?

“Without the word, ‘love,’ what is it?

“Without the word, ‘freedom,’ what is it?

“Without the word, ‘peace,’ what is it?

“Without the word, ‘now,’ what is it?”

The second is from Richard Lang, who worked with Douglas Harding for several years before the latter’s death in January of this year. Richard now carries on Douglas’s work of pointing out the reality of “headlessness,” that is, the immediate, inescapable first-person experience of being not a thing but space, or the capacity for experience, which each of us knows firsthand. Richard’s description below is wonderfully precise and lucid:

“Here’s a suggestion:

“Sit down on your own for ten minutes with the sole purpose of being awake to Who you really are. Keep guiding your attention home to this undivided Capacity for your boundless view, this Silence for the limitless soundscape, this clear Absence that is Room for the edgeless world of body sensation. Whatever you find yourself thinking about, notice these thoughts are happening in your Spaciousness, in your No-Mind. That’s all you have to do. You don’t have to try and stop thinking for example, or try and feel peaceful, but simply be aware of being Space for the thinking process, or for whatever you are feeling. Attend to the Space and whatever is happening in it. As you do so, things will naturally reveal themselves, then dissolve. Just keep seeing that things unfold in the Space. It may happen that insights or understanding come to you. If this happens, observe these things too, occurring in the Space. See them arise, see them dissolve. Be aware of all of this happening there, as you look from the Mystery here. The Mystery that you are.

“If the experience is a pleasant one, be aware of that feeling in the Space. Pleasant feeling there to its Absence here—two way attention. If it’s unpleasant—say you don’t like what you are feeling or are impatient for something different to happen—also notice this reaction in the Space. In fact, when difficult feelings appear it’s good news! Now you have the opportunity to see Who you really are in a more challenging situation. See there is no one here to be challenged. Feeling there to no-feeling here. . . Reaction there to no-reaction here—to no one here. World there to Capacity for the world here. Moment by moment, stay with the obvious and visible fact that you are not a thing at Centre but capacity. This experience of staying with the truth of Who you really are in a difficult situation will then help you if you experience something unpleasant at another time. You will know that you have the capacity and power to view it from the Space here, and to respond to it from the Space here.

“It’s not a matter of trying to have any particular kind of experience but of noticing that whatever your experience is, you are viewing it from Awareness, from this boundless clear Space or Single Eye, from Freedom, from Peace.”

At long last, T.M. Wright and I are able to able to announce the table of contents for the Holy Horrors anthology that we began editing a year ago this month. We received more than 600 submissions. The final TOC contains 40 stories by 40 separate authors. Many of the rejections were agonizing to make. The quality bar was set very high right from the start, simply by the nature of the submissions we received. So here’s a massive thanks to all the authors who sent us a story for what has turned out to be a massive anthology (which may well be issued in two volumes; only time will tell). Life-permitting, T.M. and I will each be contributing an original story as well, although this is not a sure thing on either count given current life situations and conditions of busyness for both of us.

We’re still deciding on a publisher. I’ll give updates as they become available.

Note that the number appearing after most titles indicates approximate word count (this was a record-keeping device for my co-editor and me).

HOLY HORRORS: The Table of Contents

1. “Intentions” by William Freedman. 7800
2. “Saviour” by Gary A. Braunbeck. 6200
3. “The Sect of the Idiot” by Thomas Ligotti. Reprint
4. “The Dead Must Die” by Ramsey Campbell. Reprint
5. “The Editor” by Pamela K. Taylor. 1300
6. “Hate the Sinner, Love the Sin” by Brian Hodge. 10,000
7. “Darshan” by William Eakin. 3900
8. “At the Feet of the Forest Primeval” by Randy Chandler. 6000
9. “Vom-Beist” by Mike Norris. 4100
10. “Porta Nigra” by Darren Speegle. 3600. Reprint
11. “Purifying Vows” by Kim Paffenroth. 5000
12. “Magog” by Craig Holt. 9300
13. “The Hands of God” by Michael McBride. 4500
14. “Sanctuary” by Jim Rockhill. 330
15. “Redemption” by David Niall Wilson. 5500
16. “Thunder of the Captains, and the Shouting” by Tom Piccirilli. 5500. Reprint
17. “The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini” by Reggie Oliver. 7300. Reprint
18. “The germ of his ideas” by Jose Lacey. 6400
19. “Abandon” by Adam Browne. 7200
20. “Bavel II” by Jens Rushing. 5500
21. “A Prayer for Captain La Hire” by Patrice E. Sarath. 6900. Reprint
22. “Behind the Bathroom Door” by Sarah Berniker. 4900. Reprint
23. “Sicarii” by Andrew Tisbert. 6700
24. “Cold to the Touch” by Simon Strantzas. 6500
25. “Darkness” by Jude Wright. 5000
26. “Ezekiel Remembers” by Kurt Dinan. 2000
27. “Bad Religion” by Douglas M. Chapman. 5000
28. “Anubis Has Left the Building” by Tim Waggoner. 3900. Reprint
29. “The Bishop Receives a Visitor” by Marion Pitman. 6500
30. “The Tattoo Artista” by Eric S. Smith. 4200
31. “In the Name of God” by Stuart Young. 5000
32. “Uncaged” by Paul Finch. 6000
33. “The Monsters We Defy” by Karen Williams. 4800
34. “The Shaft” by Brian Hodges. 6600
35. “Waters Dark as a Raven”s Wing, Flames Bright as a Dove”s Breast” by Dru Pagliassotti. 1900
36. “The Temple” by Quentin S. Crisp. 5200. Reprint
37. “The Wound of Her Making” by Gerard Houarner. 6100. Reprint
38. “And You Shall Be Adored” by Regina Mitchell. 2000
39. “On This Day of Reckoning” by Joseph Nassise. 4500
40. “Rapture” by Robert Morrish and Harry Shannon. 3700

(Note: Lest there be any confusion, I’ll point out that #6, Brian Hodge, and #34, Brian Hodges, are indeed two separate authors with remarkably similar names.)

Here’s the final run:  Beginning tomorrow (Friday, August 17th), everybody who’s still waiting on a reply to a submission to the Holy Horrors anthology should send a query to my co-editor, T.M. Wright, at editortm@yahoo.com.  We’re discovering more and more cases where Yahoo! mail has failed to send out his editorial responses, even though his sent mailbox shows otherwise.  The failure rate may be as high as one in every 10 emails.  So if you’re still waiting, fire off a message tomorrow and one of us will get back to you ASAP.

And thank you all for your continued patience!  You’ve been great.