manchurian candidates

At the ITP conference this weekend, Michael Murphy talked about the evidence for reincarnation. Esalen has been collecting data on 'survival' for some time, and, according to Murphy, the evidence has now convinced him, pretty much against his will, that reincarnation is a fact.

The data that convinced Murphy were amassed by Ian Stevenson, of the University of Virginia, who has been researching the question of reincarnation for some time. His case studies concern children who were born with birthmarks or deformities, which they claim relate to the way they previously died. Such as a child born with a line of eight round birthmarks, who claimed he had been executed by machine-gun fire. Stevenson identified the man he had been, who had been shot across the chest eight times.

Sri Aurobindo's explanation for this type of phenomenon is that some of us experience a 'deep death' (like a deep sleep), in which we recharge and reconnect with our soul's mission, before being reborn in a new body to continue our evolution. Others, however, experience a 'shallow death', and as a result, carry the stresses of this life into the next, psychosomatising them into the new body as birthmarks or deformities. Woo woo enough for you?

My own reading of studies on near death experience revealed that everyone goes through a 'life review' after death, and that the one criterion on which a life seems to be judged is how well one has loved. This, it seems to me, is not only a useful guide on assessing one's ongoing life, but also constitutes a sort of pith instruction on how we can best, as a species, evolve further, and save ourselves from otherwise certain doom.


Murphy says that if we are willing to accept the possibility of reincarnation, and the implication of a continuing soul, with a mission of evolution, then we must reassess the synchronicities in our lives as glimpses of that mission. Surely they provide guidance from the deep soul. And we must listen to them, or lose that guidance.
We are all, said Murphy, Manchurian candidates, sent here on a mission about which we have no information. We have to work it out as we go, trying to sniff out the track and stay on it.

He quoted the Gita, which says, "It is better to fail in your own dharma than succeed in someone else's". These words ring in my mind like a bell. Like a transmission from the deep soul, saying don't follow any more red herrings, no matter how brightly they shine.

sati

I was told a myth this week that zinged about my mind like a hummingbird. It's the myth of Sati, who was one of the wives of Shiva.

Sati was a princess, and her father did not include Shiva on his list of potential bridegrooms. Shiva was far too marginal a type for him. But Sati had set her heart on Shiva, and so she married him just the same. The two of them went to live together at Shiva's place, in the charnel grounds, where they spent their time singing and dancing and meditating.

Sometime later, Sati's father decides to hold a fire ceremony. He invites everyone, except his daughter and her husband. Sati is furious at such public rejection, and declares her intention to go anyway.

Shiva says no, she shouldn't go. It's a mortal insult, not being invited. She should stay away. But Sati defies him too, goes, and in her rage, throws herself into the fire and is consumed. Shiva is devastated. He gathers her remains and roams about the world, grieving, until Lord Vishnu comes and cuts up the body, so that bits of it fall over India.

In this myth, Sati rejects all the suitors her patriarchial father selects for her. Instead she chooses her own man, and leaves the house of her father to be with a different type of masculine energy. But she is still enmeshed, and when her father snubs her back, her rage at the patriarchy destroys her. It burns her up.
The man who loves her cannot save her. She has destroyed herself in order to avenge herself on her father.

The myth seems to ring true to me. So many of the women in my generation have such conflicted relationships with the masculine. We reject the patriarchial system in which we grew up, and yet somewhere inside, our rage smoulders, unabated. If we're not careful, the fire of our own fury can destroy us.

The myth is unbalanced. There are two men, but only one woman. Sati lacks a supporting feminine element. If there were another woman in the story, would she run from the arms of Shiva to cast herself into the father's fire? She is too alone, she has become unstrung. The love of a good man is not enough; she needs the community of other women to save her.

As it is, alone, she cannot survive her own hurt.

tristes tropiques

Yesterday, in Grenoble, I visited all the bookshops. First I bought Tristes Tropiques by the great anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss. Then I found a book by psychotherapist Guy Corneau which starts,

“Inevitably there comes a moment in one’s life where nothing’s going right, nothing at all. Sometimes it happens as a result of external circumstances: a divorce, a failure, an illness, a reversal of fortune. Sometimes it happens within, while everything seems to be going fine on the outside…At any rate, whichever way it comes to pass, suddenly the thread seems to break. An irrepressible feeling rises from the depths. It can be a great sadness, an extreme lassitude, a gathering irritation, or the loss of one’s appetite for life. One is confronted, in the words of Leonard Cohen, with an “invincible defeat…”

Corneau is a Jungian, so he believes that such passages of despair and urgency are created by the psyche as an opportunity for discovery, and a chance to break out of the cocoon one has bound oneself into, and become one’s real self.

In the University bookshop I bought an autobiography of Isabelle Jarry, one of my favourite authors. It starts with an account of spending two years working on a new book, only to have her editor reject it.

I’m comforted by the failures of people whose lives and works I admire. It’s so easy to see their temporary blind-alleys as the dust in the oyster. Clearly set within a context of overall success, they look meaningful, or at least harmless. Not a wasteland, but a field left fallow as part of a pattern of crop rotation. Not a drop from a great height into the wilderness, just a wrong turn taken when exploring a new city without a map—no problem, just turn around and find your way again. And keep your eyes peeled as you go, just in case you bump into something amazing and un-thought-of, while you’re walking where you didn’t expect to be.

This is good to remember. Because from ground level, when you're in it, it's too easy to feel like a rat in a labyrinth, with no lever to press. When we're in the shadowy slums of the soul, it’s pure faith to imagine finding one's way out--walking steadily forward into a the light of a wide, tree-lined square, with a fountain sparkling newly in the sun.

musee du quai branly

The Musee du Quai Branly in Paris houses 300,000 artifacts from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas. It’s a serious centre for ethnographic and anthropological research, as well as a repository for stunning ethnic art. The collection is dramatically, theatrically lit, setting the pieces, stunning in themselves, in a manner that leaves you panting the way good opera does.
I am immediately riveted by a case with four decorated skulls, called simply ‘ancestors’. One has been given a new face of smooth clay and eyes made of round, whorled shells, so that they look wide open with shock. “I’m dead?” Another still has its teeth, and has been worked with a collage of seeds. But the one I find most touching is the plainest, a small skull which has been painted in simple ochre and red, and polished to a sheen. Its empty eye sockets are dark and deep.

Looking at this old person, I think I'd like to have my ancestors somewhere, in a place where they'd be safe and I could visit them. I’d like to take the dead faces of my grandmothers into my hands and stroke their temples and croon to them. I’d like to light a little fire for them in the winter and sit with them by it. Looking at these skulls, so lovingly preserved and honoured by decoration, I wonder at the way we simply consign our loved ones to fire or earth and have done.

Wandering on, I come to a group of huge wooden posts with heads carved in them. They're open in the middle, and can be played as drums. Their purpose was to guard the sites reserved for ritual dancing, as well as to provide the music for ceremonies. Lit from above, the looming faces, with their protruding triangular jaws and bulging brows, look bewildered and angry. I get a sense of some energy that's not quite heat, not quite vibration. It seems to me they're anxious and unhappy to be so far from the place they were made for, so divorced from their purpose in this world. Instinctively I stoop to touch the floor in front of them to pay hommage, I wish I had a little honey and sesame to leave for them, even though that's West African and these come from Polynesia and who knows what sacrifices they require. I'm sure they'd be grateful though, for something.

The final part of the exhibition is a section on repair in Africa, entitled ‘Wounded Objects'. The notices explain that in Africa, things are repaired rather than thrown away. Partly because resources are scarce, and partly because when something breaks, it is taken to reflect a rupture not only in the object itself, but in the community. So mending it also represents repairing the community. Furthermore, the wound is considered part of the life of the object, so there’s no intention of hiding it, or of re-making the object as new. Many of the repairs are beautiful, for example the small patches of intricately engraved metal that patch calabashes and pots. Or the copper staples applied diagonally, in lines. Or the precise stitches placed across neat lines of holes drilled by hand along the two sides of a break in a calabash.

Looking at leather thongs and nails repairing a large carved wooden object that seems to be two linked bowls with lids, I reflect that in a culture where things are made by hand, with hand tools, over days and weeks of careful, inspired, intricate movements, you would indeed hesitate to ditch something just because it was cracked. You couldn't just throw it away and buy a new one. Every piece here is unique. Every piece is a labour, if not of love, then at least of intimate respect. And it would cost a corresponding amount, increasing your respect for it. Of course you would repair it; there would be no question.

And this respect for the absolute, instrinsic value of a thing, as well as the relative poverty (at least when riches are measured in cash) of the area, means that ordinary things are also repaired. A large colour photo shows a woman in Mali repairing both calabashes and plastic buckets, with neat stitches of blue plastic thread. Another shows a man repairing someone's broken rubber flip flop, using a roll of nylon string.

This idea of the repair being an honorable part of the object, and of the repairer deliberately not trying to hide the fact that the thing has been broken and subsequently pieced carefully back together, is fascinating to me. At times I have felt so broken myself, so worried that I’ll never be quite the same again. And now here’s a whole roomful of objects which are just fine with being openly broken. The repairs are like scars, writing the story of the life of the object on its skin, as it were. Many are even decorative, making the object more beautiful than it was before—though that’s not necessary either. Many of these are sacred objects, objects of power, and they don't need to be beautiful. They don't need to seduce in order to be respected. The energy radiates out of them. 'The repair restores their power', states the notice.

Interestingly, when I ask for the catalogue in the bookshop later, I’m told it has sold out. Evidently I’m not the only one who’s struck by the notion of rupture and repair.

countryside thoughts

My last day in England is blustery and autumnal. I hike up the lane behind my sister’s house and follow a Public Footpath sign across stubbly fields. The wind roars in a big ash tree and a flock of about a hundred rooks rises flapping and cawing into the air. I find a fragment of terracotta sticking out of the earth, and then a delicate chip of bone china with an elegant blue and white willow pattern. Who knows how old they are. Antique stuff is always getting ploughed up in Britain. It’s everywhere.

Some of my American friends have disparaged the European countryside for this reason. “We have wildernesss,” they say, “But in Europe there’s not an inch where humans haven’t been.”
I felt rather hangdog the first time this happened, unable to defend myself or my continent. It’s true. Everything has been touched by humans. But I realise now that actually this is one of the things I like about Europe.

There’s a relationship with the land here. It knows us. It has myths and legends enshrined in it, as well as ancient Britons, Gauls, Saxons and Romans buried in it. The place names tell the story, and lumps or troughs in the grass reveal historic sites. (Plus you can go camping without having to hide your food from bears.)

Closer to York, there's an area with field after field of pasture, the surface of which runs in wide, flat ridges like corduroy. These are the remnants of the old strip farming system, established over a thousand years ago in Saxon times. Every family had its strip. Villagers convened to decide how the crops would be rotated and which areas would be left fallow to regenerate. It’s amazing to see the system still there, now covered with sheep, casually grazing by the side of the track.

Up by where my parents live is an islet of trees and bushes, on a hummock in the middle of a field. The farmer ploughs neatly around it every year. If you look on the ordonnance survey map, you can see it’s marked as a barrow—an Iron Age burial mound. No big deal, they’re common up here in the north, where there aren’t so many people and urban sprawl hasn’t reached so far into the fields as it has in the south. I doubt it has ever been excavated.

The footpath in the field I’m in now ends in a ditch of nettles and brambles, so I stump along the hedgerow until I can get through to the lane on the other side. Most of these hedgerows are ancient too, and they provide a rich and undisturbed micro-habitat for everything from foxes and badgers, to knuckle-sized voles and shrews. In the old days a hedge was professionally maintained, by a Hedger, who pruned the new growth in the autumn, chopping neatly half way through the vertical branches so that he could bend them back down and weave them back into the hedge, strengthening and thickening it. Now hedges mostly just get lopped by a mechanical trimmer attached to a slowly moving tractor, and the result is gap-toothed hedges composed of trees and holes, and reinforced by barbed wire.

Further north, fields are separated not by hedges, but by dry stone walls. Miles and miles of neatly stacked pieces of stone. No mortar is used; the stones are secured only by the way they have been fitted together. The wind blows through the chinks so it doesn’t knock the wall down, even in winter gales. Sometimes it’s a cavity wall, with two neat outside edges and a filling of smaller rocks and rubble. Every few hundred yards a larger stone is left sticking out, making a step for a stile, so you can nip across the wall if you need to.

Dry stone walling is another craft teetering on the brink of oblivion, although artists like Andy Goldsworthy have helped encourage people to value the age-old skill.

Up by Robin Hood’s Bay I saw where the old walls had been filled in by people less than expert. The flat stones had been carefully stacked back on top of each other, but they didn’t all line up quite so smoothly as in the older pieces of wall, and they weren’t topped by a neat edge of vertically stacked toppers, like a row of stiff lace.

This lane is edged by rosebay willowherb, stretching its tall spikes of mauve flowers. Delicate purple vetch and pink clover bob among nettles underneath. I spot lady’s bedstraw, so named because it really was used to make beds for ladies, in the days when peasants bedded down on the floor, and ladies on beds stuffed with straw. Shiny blackberries bulge on the thorny brambles, and I taste a few. Tangy and sweet. Juicy.

work as god

James Hillman likes to write about polytheistic approaches to the psyche, as an alternative to our worship of the One God of Ego. He says that with a polytheistic approach, the other voices within us can be heard, not demons vis a vis the Ego and its rationality, but as equally important spirits. He urges us to let these voices speak, and be heard, rather than rushing to label them as pathology and supress them in favour of the Ego and its gospels of reason and success.

The monotheism/polytheism dichotomy is enlightening. We fall into the montheism trap SO MUCH, in so many areas of our lives. It's pervasive. Perhaps not surprisingly, as the struggle between the two modalities lasted many centuries and resulted in the Spanish Inquisition, the massacre of Jews and Cathars, and the burning of thousands of so-called witches and satanists. We learned the hard way that there is only room for one truth, one guiding principle, one way.

One area which this has affected is that of what we do for a living--in the US, work is a jealous god. We are supposed to live to work, we define ourselves by what we do ("I'm a manager".). And we squeeze a meagre existence around the edges of that. It's a weird ethos. A classic case of an ideology obscuring the economic base of exploitation of the worker, Marxists would say. Classically Protestant work ethic, a philosopher might opine.

The French, who are historically Catholic and Revolutionary, have a different set of ideologies. They work 400 hours less than Americans per year, but are much more productive--because they have a life too and time off to live it!

Here in the US, however, where work is God, if you ask for time off without pay, or try to negotiate extra holiday, they look at you askance--you've just revealed yourself to be a Blasphemer, a Heretic. It makes them uncomfortable. They disapprove so profoundly that they don't even wonder about the cause of that disapproval, or wonder how reasonable your request is. They just know it's a sin to do what you just did. They feel it in their bones.

Where are the Cathars of the world of work?

the matter of darkness

They said on the radio this morning that 70% of the universe is made up of dark matter. Pretty much all that we know about it is that it's the stuff that pulls the universe into explansion.

I know I'm extrapolating directly from physics into metaphor here, but this just seems somehow significant:
1. Most of the world we think we know is made up of stuff we don't know anything about, and aren't even aware is there. We are, so to speak, completely in the dark about what's really going on.
2. It's the dark stuff that forces us to expand. Not the light, but the dark.
Both seem as true on the personal level as they are on the physical.

I like them because they help to reclaim the importance of darkness, and sever the link we have made between darkness and evil, negativity and death.

In the Far East white, not black, is the colour of death. Funeral corteges consist of mourners clad in bright white, colour of bones and loneliness. Someone once said white was the colour that he associated with "lost". Like the white fog in which you lose your way, or the over-brilliant, blinding glare of snow.

Dark is the place where the seeds lie buried in winter, until by the grace of that period of apparently endless dormancy, they invisibly begin to germinate, sensing the light and warmth they can now move toward. If they get to the light too early it can be dangerous--they can grow spindly, or be too shallow rooted to withstand strong sun. In the desert of New Mexico the native farmers plant the corn DEEP.

The dark is difficult. Or at least, the cold dark is. As winter fills the evening with frozen ink, I light candles and think of the soft, welcoming dark of tropical and Mediterranean nights, with the little lights strung out between the looming shadows of acacia trees, and the soft songs of crickets rasping in the background.

progress

It occurred to me this week that in the old days, when things did not change so fast and there weren't so many people, and so there was not the same need for endless development, you could stand on a piece of land in mid-life, on which you had stood as a kid, and on which you have stood every day since then, and look out, and it would be the same.

And that permanence in the LAND would have given you a different view of life. A view of life in which cycles of seasonal change went on, but basically the world endured. And I think this permanence would have been a comfort.

Now I go to the places that I loved and took solace and strength from when I was younger, and they have been touristified and pathed over, with explanatory plaques and souvenir vendors, or they have been razed and built on.

The LAND is disappearing. The world population has DOUBLED since I was born, and I feel this nostalgia for the passing of calm and silence and small-scale life, and for a time when things did not require continual adjustment at such a pace.

Some things are good as they are, they function well and do not need to be replaced or improved. It's a relief to find things as they were, unchanged, old friends softened by time and use.

I long for respite from the continual murder of the simple and quiet. I scour around in my mind for where peace and permanence might be found, but there are people and buildings and roads everywhere that I know now, and I feel a panic at the thought of the 3B more who will arrive by the time I am 80, tripling the population since the 3B it was when I was born.

Already all the bustle overwhelms me. Moving somewhere unspoiled simply invites a repitition of that experience of seeing the houses begin to sprawl over it. There is no solution, no grace to be found.