Mistakes, Laughter and the Trickster

There are a lot of reasons I’m ashamed to mention that I majored in sociology, the most innocuous of which is that like someone on the more functional end of the autism spectrum I find people’s behavior inexplicable and fascinating. It’s not bad as reasons go, but there’s also a lot of underwater fauna one could say the same thing about. I’m telling ya, I coulda been a marine biologist!

One cool thing about studying sociology, though, was coming across ethnomethodology, the study of how people go about creating the world by how they make sense of it. Wikipedia has a densely-packed but handy quote:

“For the ethnomethodologist, participants produce the order of social settings through their shared sense making practices. Thus, there is an essential natural reflexivity between the activity of making sense of a social setting and the ongoing production of that setting. . . Furthermore, these practices (or methods) are witnessably enacted, making them available for study.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomethodology#Example

The main reason I’m bringing up ethnomethodology is to introduce the idea of frame breaks and mistakes as a reason for laughter, but I want to point out a couple of things about ethnomethodology as a theoretical approach to understanding people.

First of all, the idea that (social) reality is fundamentally co-created between participants in that reality. I can’t help making a parallel to the notion of co-creation of paranormal phenomena that Greg Bishop of Radio Misterioso often mentions. If people are already predisposed to create reality through shared sense-making practices, so what if one of the partners in sense-making activities is a non-human intelligence?

Second of all, what people do to make sense of their world and enforce the sense they have of their world on others is easily observed. They are often quite happy to tell you the reasons that reality must be this way. This kind of interaction- and context-rich data makes for engaging case studies and can uncover some surprising rules governing the most basic aspects of our behavior. For instance, laughter.

The other day I tripped and stumbled while walking in the front door of my house. I caught myself in time and then burst into laughter. It really was terribly funny! I had tripped, and almost fallen – what could be funnier than that? I was still shaking with genuine laughter as I realized that in fact it had been a rather unremarkable trip with nothing comedic about it. Okay, I reasoned, so there was nothing in fact funny going on here; I laughed because laughter is something that relieves the anxiety produced by having made a mistake. If that were the case, though, why did I still laugh even though I was by myself and didn’t have to worry about saving face in front of anyone else? And why did I genuinely feel like the near-fall had been comedic? Was that feeling just the result of having reflexively laughed in the first place (attribution theory)? Could I ever trust laughter ever again?

It’s kind of a truism that laughter is what we do after someone makes a mistake in order to recover our sense of order. People are supposed to walk upright; falling down is a mistake. It’s a glitch in the matrix that rips us away from our shared sense-making fantasies and shoves our face into quite a different level of reality. Laughter helps heal that breach.

(For me, the funniest mistakes are mistakes with words. Any misuse or repurposing of words, the more unintended the better, makes me howl and sob with laughter. If that was my only way of dealing with anxiety, it would feel great!)

There’s also another occasion laughter regularly arises, which is when frame breaks occur. A frame is a set of expectations about social interaction. Frames are co-created by participants. By way of example, one day I was training with a fellow aikidoka. We ramped up from friendly, handshake type training to grim intensity level where we worked out with complete silence and concentration, doing our best to test one another. At a certain point we both seemed to wake up suddenly and started laughing. No mistake had been made, but the serious frame we had gotten into seemed now as absurd as it had just been so wonderful. Laughter was the spontaneous way out, and it was heartfelt as the result of a good exchange.

Maybe the trickster is the flip side of a mistake. If mistakes and frame breaks can cause not just laughter but actual gut feelings of comedy happen in people, then the Trickster is the god who makes those mistakes and frame breaks happen; laughter personified and activated, like some kind of supernatural yeast or charcoal. The rim shot, the bada-bing to synchronicity’s sweetly sawing string section. If laughter is a frame-jumping mechanism that transfers you from one meaning to another for the same situation, why shouldn’t it be a prime mover when it comes to how humans experience the paranormal?

That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. I know at least one person who really felt the trickster messed her up and was not nice at all. I’m a lot like her, except that for some reason I still think the whole thing is very funny. However, the real impetus behind this post is this: most of the really significant dreams I have always included at least one joke element. On rare occasions I recognize it in the dream, but usually it’s not apparent to me until after I wake up, have made an effort to remember the dream and then start thinking about its meaning. I might try to post an example.

This is my kind of article! Let's start off a discussion about our doctoral programs by sharing the time they made us suicidal!

One surprising thing about this article is that it was written at all. Definitely in my day we did NOT discuss these matters until maybe the moment right before, when hopefully it was not too late. Another surprising thing is the sheer numbers involved. Going through this kind of thing naturally one feels all alone, but if you had asked me in later years how many other grad students at Berkeley I'd guess also suffered from depression I would have told you 10, maybe as many as 15 percent.

The number at UC Berkeley cited in the article is 47% - almost half of all grad students and, interestingly enough, very close to the number of people accepted into doctoral programs there who do not finish (Coincidence? I think not!) You can check the exact number with Grad Div, but I warn you they don't like giving it out.

Looking back, I suppose I could take comfort in knowing that many of my cohort were as unhappy as I was, but, as that old Genesis song goes, it hardly seems to matter now.

http://qz.com/547641/theres-an-awful-cost-to-getting-a-phd-that-no-one-talks-about/

Jumper Johnson and the Radioactive Mulch Heap

In the interest of disclosure, let me immediately point out that the Johnson Jumper is a species of small spider native to California and the radioactive mulch heap wasn’t.

I encountered my neighbor John at our shared garbage bins, where he told me excitedly he had just killed a black widow spider.  “No kidding!  Are you sure?” I asked him.  I thought black widows preferred a more arid environment; we live in Northern California and the only time I had ever seen one was near Prescott, Arizona.  Not only that, but our usual spider season in this area is not until August, and it was only March.  Nevertheless, John swore he had killed a black widow spider complete with the characteristic red mark on its back.

A few minutes later he called me over to see for myself; he had found two more right there on our shared path.  John seemed a little freaked out—in fact, he told me he gets freaked out by spiders—so I sought to reassure him that this was not a poisonous species.  I told him it was probably either a wolf or a jumping spider; the red markings on the back were definitely not that of a black widow.

The specimens we were looking at were especially not dangerous, I added, since they were both dead and in the process of being eaten by ants.  “I think that one’s still alive,” John said cautiously.  “Look, the legs are still sort of moving.”  They were moving because the ants swarming around the spider were tugging on its legs.  I didn’t mention that in case John had, or was about to get, an ant phobia, as well.

Instead, I talked about the two species I figured we were looking at -- where they typically lived, what kinds of webs they built, how they hunted.  The information I provided was aimed at assuaging worries he had expressed about being bitten by poisonous spiders.  Rather than trying to explain how I knew all this – which was a complicated story - I just said I had taken a nature course once.

To my utter surprise, John not only seemed to believe what I was telling him but said, “My, you certainly seem to know about a lot of different things.”  And, while this was true, I was so taken aback at actually being complemented for that fact I stammered something ungracious like, “Yes, and look where that’s gotten me, discussing dead spiders on a sidewalk over garbage cans.”

What really flummoxed me was why John took what I said at face value when I had had a very similar conversation with another acquaintance – let’s call her Kathy, my friend with the radioactive mulch heap – where my ratiocinative approach to allaying her anxieties was a stunning failure. Kathy believed that the pile of mulch landscapers had dumped adjacent to her apartment building was dangerous; probably radioactive and at very least toxic. (You can read more about the mulch heap here.)

I ran through the same kind of reasoning I did with John based on facts I personally knew to be true and even explained why I personally knew those facts to be true.  I could see Kathy struggle between her desire to believe what I was saying because she knew me to be a truthful person, on the one hand, and her need to believe a story that put a tangible shape on whatever private demons she was facing at the moment, on the other.

If I tell you that Kathy struggled with mental illness and was on antipsychotics, you might like to think that fact neatly explains any delusions she might have.  I’m not so sure.  For one thing, I’ve run into other people who had similar delusional episodes who, while perhaps under stress and anxious, stayed well this side of a DSM diagnosis.  For another, many of the apparently deeply paranoid tales (usually of a leftist political bent) Kathy would tell me and I’d then write off would, four to six months later, pop up as news stories.  Conspiracy? No. She was indeed tapped into leftist political policy networks, and just framed her discussion of her interests in characteristically paranoid terms.

The one consistent thing between John’s case and Kathy’s was me believing that they could be reasoned out of their anxious feelings by what I said.  It’s my particular delusion that you can solve any problem by reasoning it to death.  Naturally, I can adduce any number of reasons why that strategy works well, as well as note specific occurrences in which that strategy has failed and explain why it probably did so.  What I cannot do is account for why other people seem to find my insistent ratiocination on such issues so irritating – even, in some cases (!) dreadfully dull. Oh, is that your friend over there? Of course! I understand. We can pick this up later; I have a graph I can show you.

No Soul for Westerners - Part 2

Implications of Anatta for Parapsychology

In Part 1, I outlined what the Buddhist doctrine of anatta (no self or no soul) mean in terms that people raised with classical Western educations could understand easily. In Part 2, I promised to discuss what implications anatta might have for Western parapsychological theory and research. Since I’m only a casual student of parapsychology, I’m going to confine myself to a few casual observations.

First, let’s consider why we should even care. Isn’t anatta a matter of religious belief that applies only to Buddhists, like the belief in transubstantiation applies only to Christians? That’s easy. No. Like many other aspects of Buddhist teaching, the doctrine of no self is a matter of empirical observation. It may come in various foreign-looking or sounding trappings, but ultimately it’s about discerning the true nature of reality by use of a standard set of methods available to anyone (broadly speaking, meditation). Even from a purely intellectual point of view, the concept of anatta is not that difficult to translate into Western understanding and experiences; it’s just that in Western culture there is pressure to continually reframing the discontinuous nature of lived experience into culturally sanctioned concepts such as the eternal soul.

Second, let’s consider self and soul. I’ve been using the terms interchangeably, but in fact they are not quite the same. The standard translation of anatta is no SELF. I often replace SELF with SOUL simply because the notion of a soul is a master category for organizing personal and social identity in Western cultures; it tends to subsume and/or imply self. The notion of anatta in Buddhism is NOT equivalent to the lack of a belief in a soul, i.e., a materialist or atheistic standpoint (well, at least not a materialist one. You could probably argue the atheism point until the cows come home, but that would be time better spent meditating). What it does mean is that there is no single personality, identity or soul that exists either during this lifetime or after this lifetime is over. There is reincarnation, but what gets reincarnated is not a specific person – it’s just random clumps of karmic flotsam floating on the sea of compassion. Like my favorite quote from RM Jiyu Kennett says, the bag that carried fish in it once still has a strong smell of fish about it even after it has been emptied.

Which sets us down squarely on the parapsychological doorstep of research done by Ian Stevenson and his colleagues on reincarnation. Stevenson’s work is interesting; a typical case would be a young child spontaneously making detailed statements about persons and events he or she could not know about, which then are shown to be understandable as the memories and concerns of someone who died nearby recently. If we believe Stevenson’s cases to be valid, in Western terms we might say the soul from a dead person was reborn in the young child, resulting in the child’s out-of-place memories. This interpretation fits what many Westerners think they know about karma, reincarnation and Buddhism, all of which somehow turn out to fit nicely into a comfortably familiar, mostly Judeo-Christian belief system with a reincarnation twist.

On the other hand, there’s no compelling reason to invoke the concept of a soul, self or personal identity as an explanation for Stevenson’s data. The bag smelling of fish (anatta) model would in fact work equally well. That is, if we accept Stevenson’s case data as valid, the child’s out-of-place memories could just as easily be interpreted as the left over, unresolved karma from some dead person’s life, now attached to a new human form so that it has another opportunity to be converted – that is, to have an act of agency expend its unresolved force and so come to rest in the ontological reality labeled as the Cosmic Buddha.

With something like Stevenson’s research, what’s important is that the data were collected at all. He didn’t attempt to create or sustain a religion or a system of political power with the information he searched out. Something was going on; he collected data as best he could and tried to generalize from it. Is there some kind of real phenomenon behind the type of cases Stevenson collected? I would argue yes, on account of various types of circumstantial evidence - but I really don’t know for sure. Does it have anything to do with reincarnation? I doubt it, at least as we use the word in my culture. Similar arguments could be made for the collection of ‘evidence’ in ‘ghost hunting’ ‘expeditions’ (a veritable firestorm of implicitly biased terminology).

In my effort to understand the Buddhist concept of anatta, I came to realize that rebirth and reincarnation are different things, particularly as culturally and historically understood (see Part 1). Lawrence Sutin documents how Westerners did not let partial or flawed understanding of foreign concepts prevent deploying those concepts for their own sociocultural ends. Here I argue that including anatta, understood accurately, in one’s theoretical toolbox can contribute to thinking about weird phenomena -  if only for guarding against cultural bias by asking what happens if we DON’T take the self or soul as the unit of analysis.

Of course, the negation of the self is exactly what strikes at the heart of parapsychology. Some parapsychologists want to reduce weird phenomena to perceptual anomalies while others are willing to admit there might be self-based psi abilities, but at its conceptual heart parapsychology takes the person as the unit of analysis. I don’t have a problem with either of those approaches except as totalitarian, reductionist agendas. I am an educated Western person myself and admire the methodological chops of parapsychologists. They are some of the very best academically credentialed, intellectually rigorous, open-minded and honest people when it comes to wrangling the weird into some kind of accountability. But if you take away from them the individual sense of self, body, personality or individual as the unit of the study, what will they have left?

Identification of strange personal and interpersonal phenomena, meticulous data collection and record-keeping, and careful, well-informed and broad-minded theory development and testing, I would suggest. But that sounds hard, and there’s always YouTube.

UFO data and its discontents

My response to the November 2 post at http://ufocon.blogspot.com/

“Can an accumulation of data . . . BIG data, as corporations and internet enterprises use it . . . bring UFOs to heel?”

Talk about big data in relation to ufology misses the crucial point that big data involves billions of widely valid, diachronically reliable data points. Everyone tends to agree on what a date of birth, a point of sale, a calendar date, a credit score, etc. is and has done so at least since the invention of the internet. Big data is not the same as the kind of information processing models that Vallee worked with or suggests now. Nor is Michel’s orthoteny an example of the use of metadata. Michel sought to find intelligibility in the phenomenon by presenting a hypothesis based on observational data. That’s plain old everyday use of data. (Shocking, I know.)

Ufology is not in any danger of having to deal with big data, even if Jacques Vallee himself returned and programmed a database for MUFON. I for one would be particularly interested in how any such database dealt with Simonton’s pancakes. Were pancakes present? Yes/No. Were they offered? Yes/No. Was the offer accepted? Yes/No. How did they taste? (Look what happened to Proust with the madeleine.) There are a million equally weird, equally significant variants on Simonton’s pancakes; databases are not designed to keep track of that kind of information.

If metadata or big data or the gestalt or big picture or whatever you want to call it has had anything at all to say about UFOs and suchlike, in my opinion it’s that that a trickster element is frequently involved and that no single explanation for any collection of cases will be satisfactory. I tend to think it’s more useful and interesting to look at UFOs etc. in terms of social/psychological construction and, for when you want to get esoteric, co-creation with an as yet undefined Other.

Reading UFO texts is very much like reading scripture; lack of sourcing or references to original data in a potentially high-stakes field rife with known frauds and fakes leaves the reader in about the same position as if they were reading the Bible. Hermeneutics, not big data, might be a better approach.

The End of the Witch's Grave

I grew up in a semi-rural area in the Northeast. As a teen, a really exciting evening would consist of walking down to the creek to sit on the stone bridge and gossip. Once we were old enough that at least some of us had cars, our adventures would take us further afield. A favorite destination, especially for me and my particular group of friends, was The Witch's Grave. This was in a very remote location down a series of dirt roads in a large state game preserve way out in the countryside. It was actually one of those old graveyards that are fairly common in the Northeast - consisting a dozen or two stones with dates no later than the 1800's set in a clearing of woods somewhere and surrounded by a hand-built fieldstone wall.

The exact grave of interest to us was made evident by the fancy, unusual-looking iron railing set in slate all around it and the fact that the head stone faced opposite from all the others. Those differences were all it took to make the young woman buried there into a witch and a fetish for night-traveling teens from all over upstate New York.

Me at Eva's Grave, late 1980s

The groups of teens that frequented the spot at night vandalized the grave. Over the years, the fancy iron railings were destroyed and the headstone was smashed. When I first visited the grave in the early 80s I recall those being intact, but in the photo above, which must have been taken a little less than a decade later, you can see the damage that has been done. The original iron railing consisted of several prong-topped uprights connected by links of forged chain. It was absolutely special and significant, and part of the attraction the grave had for one and all.

While the remote graveyard had been a destination for adventurous young people since at least the 70s (according to Eva's Facebook page) it seemed the bulk of the damage happened in the mid-80s. That's right around the era when nutjob Christian fundamentalism started coming into its own as a cultural force in America. One of the ways it did so was to whip up hysteria about satanism, witchcraft and the occult - resulting, ultimately, in the satanic panic of the early 90s, which destroyed entire lives. Maybe those cultural forces encouraged people visiting the grave of an alleged witch to vandalize and treat it with disrespect. But I digress.

Eva's grave, rebuilt by locals

At one point, locals repaired the stone walls of the cemetery and also place a stone covering over Eva's grave. Remember how I just said these walls were hand-built out of field stone? Maybe you're not familiar with field stone.

Cows and field stones

This guy is pretty happy. He's got land, he's got water, he's got timber, he's got a barn even. But farming in this area is notoriously difficult because of all the stones in the soil. In this picture, you can see them scattered about. They are useful for stepping over mud, but not so good when you want to plant crops. If you want to plant crops, you have to dig out all the stones and, oh, I don't know -- 

Another pic stolen from Eva Messer's Facebook page

Maybe build a wall with them? (This guy is also happy. He's holding what is basically the latest version of the iPhone in his hands.) Or at least get the space aliens to build a wall for them; space aliens seem to like working in stone.

Anyway, back to Eva's grave. 2015 has seen the culmination of a lot of activity around researching Eva's life and restoring her grave. For instance, we now know that Eva was a young woman who sailed from Bavaria to the United States at the age of 19. She married a farmer in upstate New York, had a child, then died at the age of 21. The unusual iron work and orientation of her grave were the traditions of her culture and religion; to me, the attention to that level of detail by the people who buried her suggest that she was a valued person, not a pariah.

This has all come to light through the work of local people who have researched her history and have just now actually rebuilt Eva's grave with historically accurate ironwork and a new headstone:

Eva was not a witch. She was a brave, adventurous young woman and mother who was clearly loved by those who knew her and somewhat more obscurely loved by those of us who came to celebrate her grave after she died. Kudos to the Berne/Turner Graveyard restoration team and the Eva Messer Friends group on Facebook who gave me closure on something I didn't even know I needed closure on. Check out their cool video:

Happy Day of the Dead