Dudley Patterson & the Trail of Wisdom (Apache)

One day Dudley Patterson, a Cibecue (Western Apache) horseman, was talking to his anthropologist sidekick, Keith Basso. Basso had been hanging around him asking dumb questions for a long time, which is what anthropologists do. Basso had been asking “What is wisdom?” for a few days and finally Patterson said:

The trail of wisdom – that is what I’m going to talk about.

I’m going to speak as the old people do, as my grandmother spoke to me when I was still a boy. We were living then at Tak’eh Godzige (Rotten Field).

“Do you want a long life?” she said. “Well, you will need to have wisdom. You will need to think about your own mind. You will need to work on it. You should start doing this now. You must make your mind smooth. You must make your mind steady. You must make your mind resilient.

“Your life is like a trail. You must be watchful as you go. Wherever you go there is some kind of danger waiting to happen. You must be able to see it before it happens. You must always be watchful and alert. You must see danger in your mind before it happens. If your mind is not smooth, you will fail to see danger. You will trust your eyes but they will deceive you. You will be easily tricked and fooled. Then there will be nothing but trouble for you. You must make your mind smooth.

“If your mind is not resilient, you will easily be startled. You will be easily frightened. You will try to think quickly, but you won’t think clearly. You yourself will stand in the way of your own mind. You yourself with block it. Then there will be trouble for you. You must make your mind resilient.

“If your mind is not steady, you will be easily angered and upset. You will be arrogant and proud. You will look down on other people. You will envy them and desire their possessions. You will speak about them without thinking. You will complain about them, gossip about them, criticize them. You will lust after their women. People will come to despise you. They will pay someone to use his power on you. They will want to kill you. Then there will be nothing but trouble for you. You must make your mind steady. You must learn to forget about yourself.

“If you make your mind smooth, you will have a long life. Your trail will extend a long way. You will be prepared for danger wherever you go. You will see it in your mind before it happens.

“How will you walk along this trail of wisdom? Well, you will go to many places. You must look at them closely. You must remember all of them. Your relatives will talk to you about them. You must remember everything they tell you. You must think about it, and keep on thinking about it. You must do this because no one can help you but yourself. If you do this, your mind will become smooth. It will become steady and resilient. You will stay away from trouble. You will walk a long way and live a long time.

“Wisdom sits in places. It’s like water that never dried up. You need to drink water to stay alive, don’t you? Well, you also need to drink from places. You must remember everything about them. You must learn their names. You must remember what happened at them long ago. You must think about it and keep thinking about it. Then your mind will become smoother and smoother. Then you will see danger before it happens. You will walk a long way and live a long time. You will be wise. People will respect you.”

Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (1996) University of New Mexico Press, pp 126-127

Everything You Know About Tibetan Buddhism Is Wrong

But you'll go on believing it anyway.

I just came across Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West by Donald Lopez, Jr, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1998. This is not the first book I've read about how Western intellectuals got aspects of Asian culture wrong. It is, however, a decisive take down, with detailed notes and references, of the basic image that Westerners have of Tibetan Buddhism. Including me. Ouch.

Lopez traces the historical and ideological record of the term lamaism, a derogatory label for Tibetan Buddhism, and shows how Western labels came to be used even by Tibetans. He shows how the West came by its translations of the Book of the Dead, which turns out (surprise!) to involve the exploitation of a native culture bearer to serve the ideological agenda of Westerners.

Lopez also reviews the fascinating case of a British ne'er-do-well who pulled off a publishing coup in which he described his life as an especially gifted Tibetan sage. He goes on to excavate the philological history of the famous mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" and in doing so once again proves the point that Westerners were more than happy to make up definitions when language or cultural barriers threatened Western thought boundaries.

I feel so lucky to live at a time when, even being poor, I have a collection of some of the world's best English translations of Chinese classics and Buddhist literature on my shelf. These were translations that simply were not available until 20 or 30 years ago. In that regard, we can't blame all these progenitors for seeing things their own way. We're just the same - and all better, I think, for the continuing efforts of the translators.

How Creepy is Woody Allen?

So today there was another story in the news about Woody Allen denying he was a child molester. I happened to have time for a good long read, so I clicked through to some of the linked articles.

I never went to see a Woody Allen picture in the first place because his humor, based on what I knew of it, struck me as somewhat trite and obvious. After the abuse allegations surfaced, I forswore his movies on principle. (Well, to be honest, it probably wasn’t until after he married his step-daughter — which happened like almost immediately.)

The situation was very similar to events that were unfolding at the time with a family member of mine who had married someone with more money and status that had turned out to be an abusive, controlling psycho. In that instance, I was stunned and devastated to hear that psychospouse had actually tried to kill the family member and, having failed, was working hard to make them homeless and take their child away.

There was no doubt in my mind that if such incredible events were unfolding in my life (Ha, ha! back then I was so naïve!) there was no way in hell anyone who said the least little thing against someone like Woody Allen would have a snowball’s chance of being heard. There just wasn’t any question in my mind that this guy was getting away with molesting kids because he was a rich, well-connected celebrity.

Now, for the record I would like to say that, like everyone else, I have made a lot of assumptions throughout my life and have learned from experience that my assumptions are generally wrong. That is, if I am lucky. If I am unlucky, they are generally wrong, wrong, WRONG. I should have been wrong about Woody Allen. For decades, this guy has gone around shrugging off accusations of child sexual abuse; for decades, journalists have been asking him about it almost as if the question was pro-forma.

In my head, it was obvious this guy was guilty of probably much worse than had ever hit the news and was using his white boy privileges to buy his way out of accountability. In the news, it was just, like, “Hey, how about those child sexual abuse allegations!” like they're the Mets or something. I, on the other hand, with my powers of assumption (and not unlike people who have never been abducted by aliens yet can make up a believable story about that time they were abducted by aliens) could have told you exactly what happened in that weird celebrity family I actually knew nothing about.

Like I said up top, this morning I had time to indulge in a long read. I clicked a link in one of the pro forma questionings of Allen at some film festival somewhere and landed at one of Maureen Orth’s profiles of the Farrow family in Vanity Fair.

I fucking hate it when I’m right.

After reading a short while, I couldn’t leave the story alone, if only out of the sense that someone must stand as witness when this kind of thing goes on, even if that someone is a nobody. The full story, as reported, matched every single assumption I had ever made about the case, except my picture of Mia Farrow as a person. I’m not into movies and assumed she was just some rando starlet with one of those celebrity things for adopting enough kids for a rainbow. Mia Farrow actually comes across as a fucking hero.

And Woody Allen? How creepy is Woody Allen? Serial killer creepy?

“You can’t say his own therapy failed,” quips Mia’s lawyer Eleanor Alter. “He might have become a serial killer without it.” (from Orth’s 1992 Vanity Fair article)

And people say therapy doesn’t work! Assuming there is no one missing and no bodies waiting to be found, how creepy is Woody Allen? Pedophile sex cult creepy?

If you look at a pedophile ring like The Finders, after emptying the contents of your stomach you will undoubtedly notice that THEY TRIED VERY HARD TO HID WHAT THEY WERE DOING (and apparently succeeded, for the most part).

Allen didn't. Instead, he bought as much credibility as his wealth would allow in the courts of law and public opinion.  He has, I assume (!), bought people in his chosen profession by the bushel. What he has not tried to do is hide his actions, apart from a few see-through lies.

There are any number of ways you can get out of being punished for child sexual abuse if you are rich and famous. Adopt a disguise, move to another country, buy a fake passport, I don't know. It's not really my area of expertise. Or you pull an Allen and not even care enough to hide it, counting on your money and prestige to buy you the way out.

That's some kind of cold shit. It goes past creepy and into the land of actually dangerous. Dangerous as in, I don't care what effect my actions have on others and I don't have to because I'm rich. Said another way, I'm highly delusional and my wizarding powers are so great I can make my delusions real. So how creepy is Woody Allen? Is he Donald Trump creepy? Why or why not?

I leave it for you to consider.

Mia's Story (1992)
Mia Farrow's Story (2013)
10 Undeniable Facts (2014)
Open Letter from Dylan Farrow (2014)
My Father, Woody Allen and the Danger of Unasked Questions (2016)

Edit 9/6/2016: I remembered that my relative had said the lawyer hired by their spouse (named Alan) was also Woody Allen's lawyer. Which would explain why the issue  comes up on my emotional radar long after.

In terms of the How Creepy contest, though, I have to admit that Warren Jeffs and the whole FLDS (and Mormonism as well?) far, far outrank Allen. Which is not a good thing. 

Acariya Mun’s UFO Experience

Acariya Mun (1870 – 1949) is a famous Theravadan monk who lived in Thailand and is credited with reviving the Forest Monk or dhutanga tradition. He is widely held to have had considerable what we would call psychic powers; specifically, the ability to know exactly what was going through anyone’s head and the ability to converse with nagas, devas and others.

The Forest Monk or dhutanga tradition is a rigorous, ascetic and only loosely institutionalized form of Buddhist practice that focuses on training one’s awareness. This is a form of Buddhism perhaps most closely mirroring Buddhist practice as it was during the Buddha’s lifetime and shortly thereafter.

It just so happens that there’s a very readable biography of Acariya Mun available for free in English. The book is fascinating from perspectives anthropological, mystical, historical, Buddhist, and so on. The author, Acariya Nanasampanno (‘Acariya’ is an honorific), one of Acariya Mun’s disciples, has a very natural, direct, engaging way of telling a moving and incredible story. I especially appreciate that he always mentions where he got his information – if it was from Acariya Mun himself, another disciple, local villagers, or what.

In the first chapter of the book, Acariya Mun is still a young man experimenting with and striving to perfect his technique of meditative practice. This is when he had what a Westerner might interpret as a UFO experience.

“Acariya Mun’s citta [roughly, attention] converged into a state of calm and a vision arose spontaneously. The mental image was of a dead body laid out before him, bloated, oozing pus, and seeping with bodily fluids. Vultures and dogs were fighting over the corpse, tearing into the rotting flash and flinging it around, until what remained was all scattered about. The whole scene was unimaginably disgusting, and he was appalled. 

From then on, Acariya Mun constantly used this image as a mental object to contemplate at all times … he continued in this manner until, one day, the image of the corpse changed into a translucent disk that appeared suspended before him. The more he focused intensely on the disk, the more it changed its appearance without pause. The more he tried to follow, the more it altered its form so that he found it impossible to tell where the series of images would end. The more he investigated the visions, the more they continued to change in character – ad infinitum. 

For example, the disk became a tall mountain range where Acariya Mun found himself walking, brandishing a sharp sword and wearing shoes. Then, a massive wall with a gate appeared. He opened the gate to look inside and saw a monastery where several monks were sitting in meditation. Near the wall he saw a steep cliff with a cave where a hermit was living. He noticed a conveyance, shaped like a cradle and hanging down the face of the cliff by a rope. Climbing into the cradle-like conveyance, he was drawn up to the mountain peak. At the summit, he found a large Chinese junk with a square table inside, and a hanging lantern that cast a luminescent glow upon the whole mountain terrain. He found himself eating a meal on the mountain peak and … and so on, and so forth, until it was impossible to see an end to it all. Acariya Mun said that all the images he experienced in this manner were far too numerous to recall. 

For a full three months, Acariya Mun continued to meditate in this way. Each time when he dropped into samadhi [meditative absorption] he withdrew from it to continue his investigation of the translucent disk which just kept giving him a seemingly endless series of images. However, he did not receive enough beneficial results from this to be convinced that this was the correct method. For after practicing in this manner, he was over-sensitive to the common sights and sounds around him. Pleased by this and disappointed by that, he liked some things and hated others. It seemed he could never find a stable sense of balance. 

Because of this sensitivity, he came to believe that the samadhi which he practiced was definitely the wrong path to follow. If it were really correct, why did he fail to experience peace and calm consistently in his practice? On the contrary, his mind felt distracted and unsettled, influenced by many sense objects that it encountered – much like a person who had never undergone any meditation training at all.”

Acariya Nansampanno (2003), Biography of Acariya Mun, pp. 8-9

Acariya Mun concluded that directing his attention to external phenomena like the translucent disk is a flawed method and from then on centered his investigations on his own body.

I’ve read fairly widely in English translations of various Eastern mythological and esoteric traditions and this is one of the more stand-out accounts of something that might count as a Western UFO. Translucent, hovering disk that shape shifts (or reality warps) and can float you off in a basket? Check, check, and check. Acariya Mun doesn’t exactly call the phenomenon self-negating, but it is described as an endless series of images which even as you chase after them keep changing. Maybe I’m projecting, but by the end of the story it sounds to me as if he decided the whole hovering translucent disk thing is just a waste of time.

Anyway, if you are up for a taste of something new, check out Acariya Mun’s biography. Bhikkhu Dick Silaratano’s English translation is very accessible to non-Buddhists and there’s some good stories in there (like The Hypercritical Naga).

One of many ways to read the book

Watch My Mum Talk to Aliens

My Mum Talks to Aliens is an Australian documentary that came to my attention after it was posted as an Amazon (prime) video. It’s a video I’d watch again because it represents a new genre in UFO films, where UFOs are put in their social context. This lends a great deal more general interest and in-depth richness to the story of UFOs as well as related phenomena, both explained and unexplained.

In the case of My Mum, the documentary unfolds as if it’s a battle of rationality between a skeptic and a believer, who just happen to be son and mother. Then you see how rationality and logic line up against social and familial bonds. The son is grossly offended by his mother’s lack of rationality, until her lack of rationality is publically insulted in a debate with a skeptic. At that point, he begins to want to defend her, and maybe expands what he considers to be the range of normal a tiny bit in order to still be able to include his mum among the sane.

It’s a very nice illustration of what the sociology of knowledge and science is all about – how what we believe and even why we believe it is, to a considerable extent, influenced by social forces. In My Mum, the son moderates his position about what is normal slightly in order to maintain a social bond with his mother. It’s an object lesson in how people categorize obviously wrong things as acceptable or not (yes, I am positing that obviously wrong things exist) that doesn’t carry the price tag the same lesson might if one of the players was of a minority race or lower income. Ufology is all love and white light that way.

Practicing Martial Arts

This weekend was two for two.

ONE

I've slid through most of my life without habitual physical confrontations, which I attribute largely to my demographic attributes. However, for two days in a row now, I've had the dubious pleasure of putting my training to use. In fact, the first thing I did at martial arts practice this morning was to ask my classmates' opinions about how I had handled an assault situation I encountered in a Berkeley park the previous day.

I was helping out the SF Mime Troupe by guarding their stage setup; they were doing back to back shows in the same park over the weekend. I had the late afternoon/early evening shift on Saturday. A white homeless guy saw me reading all by myself near the stage and started harassing me. I was more annoyed and angry than anything. I mean, I knew I was going to be spending time in a Berkeley park; of course I came prepared. Still, I didn’t want to have to hurt anyone.

I told Homeless to go away. He went off to sit with another homeless guy about 30 yards away, where he kept talking about me in a loud voice. His hapless audience – who had, until then, been napping in the sunshine – eventually got irritated (judging from his tone of voice), picked up all his stuff and left the park to his more irascible counterpart. A short while later, Homeless returned in my direction with a different homeless man in tow. They were headed directly for me as I sat on a bench near the stage, reading my journal. Homeless was talking loudly about how I needed company and how he and his friend were going to provide it.

All this took place in daylight in a park full of people hanging out on the grass or playing with their dogs, right near a playground full of children and parents. While I felt like I could effectively prevent things from escalating to actual assault given those helpful conditions, the insensibility Homeless demonstrated to taking such factors into account did make me think of him as more dangerous than his physical appearance would otherwise suggest. In other words, he might not know karate, but there seemed a good chance he was conversant with ka-ra-zy.

Ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to stand my ground. Dude was a sexually harassing, misogynistic asshole who was violating the sanctity of the commons and MOREOVER did not recognize me as a badass who would show him a thing or two about what women are really like. In order for the world to be a better place, he needed to be taught a lesson!

But here’s the thing. The journal I had been reading while sitting on that park bench was from ten years ago when my life was very different. I was basically reading about how much of an asshole I had been due to the fact that I thought I was right all the time. Even when I had actually been right, I had managed to significantly misread the situations I wrote about in the journal, and ended up paying the price for that. I know this because, of course, I know how the story turned out now! Back then, I just knew that I was right, and I thought that was all that mattered.

I train in Filipino martial arts and had at this point supplemented the items I was carrying on my person that day with items that I had put in my backpack that morning “just in case” and other items I always keep in my car and had retrieved from there. I also had the keys to the SF Mime Troupe truck parked a few yards away; when the volunteer coordinator gave them to me, she had said, “If there’s any trouble, lock yourself in the truck and call the police.” I decided those keys were my best weapon in the situation.

Going to the truck, getting in and locking the doors was sort of difficult. I knew that I was right and Homeless and his sidekick were wrong. It felt wrong to retreat, but it also felt like the right thing to do.

Once I was inside the truck, I realized another thing. I had been very angry at Homeless and, from a Buddhist perspective (I’m a Buddhist), you don’t want to let yourself be driven by feelings of anger. In this case, I had successfully not reacted to feelings of anger, but it dawned on me that this is the kind of thing guys, and particularly my martial arts brothers (because they are ones who care enough to make the effort) have to deal with all the time. It was a revelation to me, because when I get angry it’s mostly self-directed (which is a common Western female pattern).

TWO

So when we convened for our usual morning martial arts practice in a local park the following day, I was interested to get feedback from my training partners on how I handled the situation. The males immediately commented that this kind of slow-moving assault is not how confrontations happen between males; guys just walk up and hit other guys. There’s no slo-mo, there’s no stalking and talking, there’s no trying to hide violence behind the verbiage of intimacy.

Interesting, I thought. The day before, my focus had been primarily on not letting anger and/or pride drive my response. I wasn’t thinking as much about the gendered aspect of the situation, fraught although it was with gender power dynamics. I briefly wondered if telling Homeless he was exercising White Male Privilege would’ve made him feel better about himself and his position in society. It was Berkeley, after all. There was a good chance homie was a fellow sociology doctoral dropout.

We had a nice, late-summer-morning class featuring mainly wrist locks and stance drills. Towards the end of class the teacher put each of us through our paces on a six-count spada y daga (sword and dagger) drill. Spada y daga typically involves a short rattan stick and a large training knife, but we dispense with the knife so as to practice the trap hand instead. Not long before the end of class, an angry, older white male approached us.

We knew there was a Hostile Neighbor very upset with us for using the local park for our martial arts practice. Our interaction with him had started earlier in the year, when he began screaming at us from his yard across the street. The stick part of our practice made too much noise and woke him up, apparently. HN called the police, but after chatting with us the officer who responded to the call assured us that we were using the park legally. To be courteous to HN, though, we started delaying stick practice to the second half of class, typically after 10 am, and moved the class to a part of the park where hopefully the sound would not carry so much.

Today when the angry, older white male approached us, it was pretty clear this was Hostile Neighbor in person. He asked to talk whoever was in charge of the group. Me being always right, I’m thinking analytically, “Well, that’s either Rey, or I suppose me . . .” and then I start reading the situation. By then, we all turned from the drill we were doing to look at the guy, standing together. This is, after all, Filipino Martial Arts.

Hostile Neighbor started ranting, barely feinting at making a rational argument. In fact, his goal seemed to work himself up into a further state of quaking rage, and he succeeded. I’d seen the same thing years before when I took shelter with family members who turned out to have a secret history of domestic violence. Back then, I theorized that this kind of shaking rage was a precursor to actual physical attack, but I hadn’t stuck around to test that theory. I wasn’t particularly interested in testing it today, either.

There were enough squirrely things about Hostile Neighbor’s behavior in this encounter that I think we all arrived independently at the conclusion that he posed a real threat. For instance:

Instead of approaching our group directly from where his house was across the street, he took a circuitous journey around the park, indicating fear and anxiety, as if he wasn’t sure of the ground he stood on.

He asked to speak with the group’s leader (wait . . . Filipino martial arts groups have leaders? Come on! You must be thinking of Aikido!) but, instead of starting a conversation, he launched into a harangue. The only time he listened to what anyone else said was when he demanded to know where each of us lived, insisting if we weren’t residents of Pinole (the city in which the park was located) we didn’t deserve to use the park. HN being an angry white male and our group, reflecting local demographics, being diverse in terms of skin tone and cultural heritage, I couldn’t help thinking we might be talking to a Trompette. (Trompe (Fr.) meaning deceived, deception; Trompette being a play on words)

After several attempts to speak with Hostile Neighbor, we finally started telling him to go home. It seemed the best possible outcome. He began to walk away, ranting back over his shoulder. Then he took exception with one of us smiling, turned around and started walking back toward our group, verbally asking for active conflict.

I do not know what script was playing in that guy’s head, what twisted, dumbed-down, 21^st century version of James Thurber’s Walter Mitty. That some shred of logic was still working in HN’s head was indicated by the fact that when he approached the group again he walked past the teacher (1975 Lightweight Karate Grand Champion of the Philippines) and basically anyone who was tall and/or holding a stick to go chest-to-chest with the shortest member of our group. I know this because I was standing three feet away, flipping my stick. Seriously, dude? You think I’m not gonna fuck with you if you touch my friend?

Fortunately, we were martial artists, half a dozen people with some pretty significant training between us, which in this case resulted in doing nothing. There were no karate chops, no leaping kicks and or ki-ai’s. We stood, waited and watched as Angry White Male deflated his chest and went home, possibly to run a loving hand along the length of his gun cabinet. After a brief consultation, we decided that Meadow Park in Pinole had become too dangerous to use for recreational purposes.

It was just like the day before. Dude walks up full of incoherent anger. It’s messy and illogical and it’s not doing him any good, but if I have to hurt him I want the reason to be right. I want it to be a form of skillful means inspired by some bodhisattva who had perfected all the wisdoms and all the techniques and is also perfect in appropriate use of force. I want to be like Kanzeon, Kuan Yin and Avelokiteshvara, just whipping that frond of mercy out of a vase filled with the waters of compassion and waving it around to making stuff all right. But instead I have nothing, and can only get into the truck where at least it’s less likely I’ll harm another person. And next week we’ll be practicing in a different local park.

Internet Famous circa 1994

According to Google, when I can be distinguished from other people of very similar name I'm most famous for being acknowledged by Debbie Nathan in the forward to her book Satan's Silence and second most famous for . . . well, just type "Feline MPD" into Google. Apparently my article is still the first result. 22 years and going strong! Back then . . . well, say "PINE Is Not Elvis" and say it like you MEAN IT! Back then there were no tab characters; we had to type all our spaces by ourselves. It was terrible! At least PINE brought line wrapping, and somehow we all survived until html was invented and the first conspiracy websites went online. 

I was also into university tunnels and urban exploration, apparently. And of course intellectual analysis of the TV program The Prisoner. Such innocent days!

Possessed Dogs

Being fully awake and alert at 3:30 in the morning, there are a number of projects on which I could productively use my time. I will write about possessed dogs instead.

Dog #1

Four of us were practicing martial arts in the park, and by practicing I mean mostly standing around and talking (“tongue fu”). Every so often the teacher would demonstrate something on someone, one of us would grab a partner to try something out on, or someone else would test out a stance or strike. To any observer it would be slightly more interesting than watching grass grow.

A very tall young white man with head shrouded in a grey hoodie appeared at the edge of the park being led by a tiny pouf of a dog. People walk their dogs there all the time. This dog was particularly adorable. It looked like an ambulating hand muff (anyone remember what those are?) with two large, bright eyes. And when it saw us it went nuts. It stopped, it stared and started pulling on the leash. The tall, sleepy-looking owner walked along the edge of the park. As they passed by, the dog, its head on a swivel, gazed at us with rapt attention. You could feel it from yards away.

The young man passed by where we were throwing out our desultory punches and stances and started to exit the park. The tiny, bright-eyed dog would not follow him. He was straining at the leash back in our direction, still staring raptly. His owner paused to let him look. By now all of us were aware of this dog’s fascination. Someone commented he must have been a warrior in a past life. Although something along similar lines had been going through my head, it surprised me to hear this particular guy say something so mystical.

Now we had all stopped to look at the little dog who was so fascinated by us. I felt bad for it. It knew what martial arts was, it had found some people who were doing martial arts and it very, very badly wanted to do martial arts with them. But it couldn’t, because it was a dog.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you should cease from evil and try to do mostly good: so you won’t be reborn as a dog who can’t do martial arts.

I called out to the tall young man that his dog wanted to take the class, he waved at us and then the dog accepted the fact he was just a dog right now and they went on their way.

Dog #2

We were in the same park, which is just down the street from where the teacher of our small martial arts group lives. One of his dogs had died the previous week, a dog I had known from being at the house either to practice or help out with carpentry stuff. Yuki was a very big, very happy, very loving dog, all white with round black spots on his ears. It was impossible not to like him, and he was very attached to my teacher. He was big, he was awkward, and he liked to hump my leg as I was using power tools but he was very, very lovable. However, he got old and died.

My teacher’s son, who had grown up with Yuki, was really upset and I questioned my teacher closely about his state of mind too. I know he and the dog had been close. My teacher grew up in a different culture than me but has always been happy to answer my questions about how he sees things compared to how I am used to thinking about them. He didn’t have a problem with Yuki’s death and told me exactly how it happened, with Yuki’s head on his lap. I wanted to cry just listening to his story. He was very matter of fact: “He was old. He died. That’s what happens.”

However, a week or so later we were at the park down the street from my teacher’s house doing our martial arts class as usual. Five or six of us were lined up doing various stances and drills. A pair of free roaming dogs trotted by on the sidewalk (unusual in this suburban community) and one, when it saw us, raced over to our little group with wild abandon. It greeted me like I was an old friend, leaping with joy, and then made a beeline for my teacher, jumping up and circling around him like crazy. It was definitely unusual behavior, but unusual behavior of a nice kind. The dog was ecstatic, jumping and licking at Rey, and all I could think was that Yuki had taken some existing dog’s body to deliver a final farewell.

We just kind of laughed it off. I probably said something about Yuki’s spirit saying farewell, but it was a very odd event and you couldn’t say anything for sure. In the end, the dog ran back to rejoin his companion who had remained outside the little park and they trotted off together down the sidewalk.

Dog #3

For the record, I am more a cat person than a dog person. But I guess you could call me ecupetical. (Ecumenical, ecupetical, get it? Never mind.) Several years ago and a different martial art school, I was sitting on a low wall outside the building chatting with another student before class started one evening. This was near a major route in a small urban community, so cars were going by and pedestrians were not unusual. What was unusual was some dog that came racing up to us from nowhere – I mean, came out of the dusk at full tilt toward where Zack and me were sitting talking on the wall waiting for someone to unlock the dojo.

It happened so fast I didn’t really have time to react, which is a hard thing to admit if you claim to be a martial artist. This was a young, strong pit bull that came out of nowhere, leaped up on the wall next to me, sat down and then leaned hard up against me with its whole body. It was extremely affectionate and happy, like I was some kind of long lost love. I put my arm around it, checking for collar and wounds. It was definitely wounded, but that bothered me more than it did the dog.

Long story I don’t even remember all that well now short, the young pit bull belonged to a local man and had gotten bloody probably climbing over the fencing around his yard. The dog had tags and when the dojo was opened and everyone arrived she was the center of a highly attentive Dog Rescue and First Aid Committee. Her owner was called and came by to pick her up, expressing great relief at finding her. I washed off the blood, because blood on the mat is not cool in aikido, and changed into my uniform.

I’ll never forget how she raced out of the darkness and pressed herself so happily and wholeheartedly against me. It was joy in the night, but a quixotic one. I desire to help all living beings, but all I got was this friendly, slightly bloody teenage dog to hug briefly.

Go Pokemon, Young Man

There's some famous phrase saying, "Go West, Young Man," which I guess meant that the land of opportunity, at least for white males, was thataways. I'm just mentioning that because we're on the internet now, and anyone younger than me probably doesn't get the outdated styling of this post's title.

In a related vein, I sometimes have dreams which try to convince me they're real. It turns out I'm just as sarcastic and cynical in my dreams as I am in real life, so even when a heavy hitter comes along I usually give things a sneer and then keep my own counsel. It's not that I'm disrespectful of dream life; I have a hard time tolerating bad logic and obvious cons in most of the realms I'm conscious of existing in. That being said, there are things that get automatic bows (a sign of acknowledgment and acceptance) from me, like talking cacti, talking tea-pot like objects that also walk, anything involving snakes, and of course the House, the Lord of the House and certain Thai monks. (And you, if you've rolled by.) But mostly I'm a highly suspicious and skeptical cuss and my dream philosophy is if you can't bring it, go home. There's a reason you're in a dream.

That being said, I had a dream about 15 or 20 years ago, just as the great unwashed masses were discovering the internet and poisoning it for the rest of us. It was one of those dreams claiming to be an alternate reality, only this one claimed to be in the future. A time travel dream. Back then personal websites hosted by something called geocities were common, because the clueless newbies were too dumb to learn about hosting and FTP (remember FTP?) blah blah blah. In the dream, I logged in without any apparent device (back then, think desk top towers and wired connections for contrast) to the location of my dream host, who was a prepubescent boy. Except it wasn't really him, it was what today we would call an avatar of him that did the greeting of visitors and directed them around the site. It was his own website, kind of like an interactive 3D Facebook page but also a fully immersive virtual reality experience.

Then the owner of the webpage inhabited his avatar and started talking to me directly. He explained that I was experiencing where technology would go in the future and that this was in fact a time travel dream. (Never had one before or since. Other planets, yes. Time travel, no.) I was lucid enough to ask him, once that reality feeling started to kick in, what the name of this technology was called. Maybe I could get in on the ground floor and retire to Hawaii like Zachary Fox. The boy said it was called "Gonemon" pronounced Go-noh-mahn.

I looked it up. It wasn't a word. It wasn't even close. There was gnomon, with a silent G, that is the thing in the middle of the sundial that casts the shadow. I tried different languages, but back then I was as yet unfamiliar with dream language and the sneer it has built in. (At least for me. Ya'll might have the Virgin Mary built in, but I came out of the shop with the sneer package. I actually saw a ;) in a pile of alien writing on another planet that someone else who claimed to be real was showing me.  I was like, "Apparently alien writing has evolved at least partly from Earth emoticons, how interesting and do you even have a clue as to what this one means?")

I have not yet done Pokemon Go. The main reason I probably will (from a non-Sue-entity account) is because it sounds, well, interesting and new, vaguely social which I know is good for me, and while it's not the thing I experienced in that dream, it's the first steps toward it. This is going to become bigger, spawn Facebook-like personal internet virtual reality experiences, and take over how people interact with one another via the internet. "Go-noh-mahn" was obviously Pokemon in terms of vowel shapes, with the initial P replaced by a G. I just hope the little brat who welcomed me to his virtual reality of the future wasn't me, because I really want to be a monk in my next life.

You heard it here first.

Casual Thoughts about Buddhism and the Paranormal

I only stumbled into the weird, wacky world of the contemporary Western paranormal because I love ghost stories and am apparently easily led by internet links. In real life, while I have some interest in esoterica and the paranormal, I have way less interest in those areas than I do in, say, deepening my understanding of Buddhist practice. At the same time, I recognize that for some people the necessity for understanding what paranormal thing happened to them or what UFO they saw is as fundamental as is my need for a Buddhist practice. Amidst the swathes of the paranormal world that I view as entertainment, there is that contingent who, insistent with their questioning, exhaustive with their research and/or dedicated to effective communication, make it an intellectually intriguing and rewarding arena for thought.

That’s what I think when I wear my Former Academic hat. Wearing my Buddhist hat, I indulge my longstanding interests in esoterica, etcetera by searching through various Buddhist scriptures for any reference to Others – ghosts, aliens, demons, gods – in search of an (unlikely) answer.

On account of the religious and political institutions of monotheism, in the West we have a long history rigorous dualism. There is one true god and one true church; the rest is evil, Other. The pattern was repeated even after the Enlightenment came and was followed by the Industrial Revolution and then the flourishing of big-S Science. Scientism replaced God, spirituality became superstition, and myth and folklore became epistemological slurs instead of words describing meaningful social competencies. Buddhism, however, comes from the half of the world that didn’t fuss with drawing those particular distinctions and positively bristles with gods, demons, snakes and monsters. (Some of whom, of course, are us.)

So can Buddhists answer questions about the paranormal, UFOs, big feet and more? Can becoming a Buddhist turn you into someone who can get the paranormal answers that no one else has? Such questions come up because it’s known that intensive training (meditation, yoga, qigong etc.) can result in various powers or abilities thought of in the West as supernatural, including chatting with Others. However, Westerners tend not to have the personal discipline to train so intensively or the structure of social institutions that could support such an effort. Moreover, special powers are traditionally held to be mere epiphenomena of training – something of no intrinsic importance that just happens along the Way. While they may seem magical, they can be misused just like love and loyalty, for example. They pose a real question to Science, but as experiences are just another bubble in the boiling pot of water that is a human life.

Yet there’s no doubt that in Buddhism the world is full of Others of various shapes and sorts. Because of the long history of Buddhism and of literacy in China and because I’m writing this in 2016, we have fantastic access to great scholarship and translations from original sources that allow English only speakers like me to understand various sutras (scriptures) and mantras (spells or prayers) in a way that was not previously possible. I don’t mean that we should understand this aspect of Buddhist literature to be empirically descriptive in an ontological sense. But it does reflect the centuries-long heritage of training by Buddhists. When I say that, I am thinking of my martial arts teachers who have trained much longer and harder than me. I have learned to listen to what they tell me; the consequences of not doing so are usually painful.

One traditional Buddhist teaching is that of the six realms a being may find itself born into, according to its karma: humans, animals, hell, gods, hungry ghosts or titans. Another I’ve already mentioned is that superpowers exist and can be obtained, but they're sort of like Kim Kardasian’s butt – fascinating, but not for more than a few minutes.

The Thai Forest Monk Ajahn Mun in the 20^th century regularly talked dharma with devas (some kind of disincarnate or non-human being) during meditation. His biographer, Ajahn Maha Bua, explained that there were terrestrial devas and celestial devas, differentiated by how far above the ground they lived. Reading all this made me wonder about spook lights and UFOs and the story of the Sky-Walkers from The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, a 17^th-century Zen spinoff from a classic of Chinese literature, Journey to the West. Recently I’ve been reading about the Shurangama Sutra, which in part goes into the various delusions one can have even in deep meditation. I’ll just leave you with Monkey in Chapter Three of The Tower of Myriad Mirrors:

Just as [Monkey] jumped up to go search for his master, he heard voices in the sky and quickly looked up to see four or five hundred people swing axes and using chisels to dig holes in the sky.

Monkey thought, “They don't have the look of celestial workers or ominous or evil stars. They are obviously people from earth, but why are they doing this sort of work here? They aren’t monsters disguised as men because I see no evil aura about them. Come to think of it, maybe heaven has grown extra bones and has asked a surgeon to remove them. Or maybe heaven is too old and they are chiseling it away so they can put in a new one. Or maybe heaven has been covered by a screen, and they are removing the false heaven for the real one. Or maybe the Milky Way is flooded and they are channeling away the excess. Or maybe they are rebuilding the Palace of Magic Mists and this is an auspicious day to break ground. Or maybe Heaven likes elaboration and asked people to carve a thousand and ten thousand lines to make a beautiful scene. Or maybe the Jade Emperor is thinking about this world and they are opening an imperial road so he can come down often.

"I wonder If Heaven's blood is red or white. Or If Heaven's skin is one or two layers thick. Or if there will be a heart or not when Heaven’s chest is opened. Or if Heaven's heart is slanted or straight. Or if Heaven is young or old or if it's male or female. Or maybe they want to open Heaven and let Heavens mountains hang down and surpass earth's mountains. Or maybe they are opening the mouth of Heaven to swallow the Underworld. But even if any of these things are true, no one on earth could have such power. I'll just go up and ask them then I'll know for sure."

I love how Monkey – think a Buddhist Wiley Coyote – wildly ratiocinates a la an Andrew Basiago or Grant Cameron while still desperately grasping after the keel of rationality. He comes up with all sorts of unlikely post hoc explanations for selectively chosen data sets in a way that people who follow ufology are all too familiar with. Yet in the end, he seems to rein himself in and decides that he should just find out, instead of speculate.

The Professor and the Abductee

Let me start by issuing a global apology right now. Things happen. This was one. The poem is The Walrus and the Carpenter by Lewis Carroll, which was also put into music by Donovan. But I blame Paratopia.

The sun was shining in the sky

Shining with all his might;

He did his very best to make

The UFOs smooth and bright.

And this was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.

The moon was shining sulkily

Because she thought the sun

Had no respect for UFOs

When all was said and done.

“It’s very rude of him,” she said,

"to say there were no nuns!”

The sea was wet as wet could be,

The sands were dry as dry.

You could not see a USO because

They had forgotten how to fly.

The only things were pelicans

Against an endless sky.

The Professor and the Abductee

Were walking close at hand;

They wept like anything to see

The aliens try to land.

“If they don’t crash those noble ships,”

They said, “it would be grand!”

“If seven researchers with seven slides

Researched it for half a year,

Do you suppose,” the Professor said,

“That they could get it clear?”

“I doubt it,” said the Abductee,

 And wept a bitter tear.

“O Aliens, come and float with us!”

The Professor did beseech.

“A pleasant session, a pleasant regression,

Along this starry slope.

We wish to probe your memory,

And test your telescope.”

The biggest Alien looked at him,

But never a thought it sent.

The biggest Alien winked one eye

And shook its outsized head

Meaning to say it did not choose

To play weird games in bed.

But other Aliens hurried up,

All ready for MPD.

Their eyes were slanted (but that was not at all a racial thing), their faces expressionless,

There shoes were clean and neat –

And this was odd, because, you know,

They hadn’t any visible feet.

Four other Aliens followed them,

And yet another four;

And thick and fast they came at last

All through Disclosure’s doors –

Hopping through the frothy speeches

And scrambling to the fore.

The Professor and the Abductee

Walked on a parsec or so

And then they rested on a famous landing site

Conveniently situated close to a conference hotel;

And all the little Aliens stood

And waited in a row.

“Time is irrelevant,” the Professor said,

And so is history;

We can pretty much make up whatever we want

And call it ufology

Or prove the sea is boiling hot

And aliens have MPD.”

“But wait a bit!” the Aliens cried,

“Before we download our binary code;

For some of us have Rh- blood,

And all of us are ancient!”

“Don’t worry,” said the Abductee.

They thanked her much for that.

“A pair of panties,” the Professor said,

“Is what we chiefly need:

DNA and fluids too

Are very good indeed –

Now if you’re ready, Aliens dear,

We can begin to research.”

“But not on us!” the Aliens cried,

Turning a little grey.

“Regression hypnosis would be

Inadvisable methodologically!”

“The night is fine,” the Professor said.

“Did you see that UFO?

“It was so good of you to share

Your experience with me!”

The Abductee said nothing but

“Will I be in the book?

I wish you were not quite so deaf –

My agent is on the hook.”

“It seems a shame,” the Professor said,

“To play them such a trick.

After we’ve misrepresented them

And falsified their data.”

The Abductee said nothing but

“The truth will come out later.”

“I study you,” the Professor said,

“I deeply telepathize.”

With sobs and tears he sorted out

The ones whose stories fit

Holding his Lam-owl spectacles

Before his dimming eyes.

“Oy, Aliens!” said the Abductee,

“You’ve run the needed tests.

Shall we be shapeshifting back to Zeta then?”

But answer came there none –

And this was scarcely odd because

They’d made up* every one.

*Almost

Rh Negative Folkore

We all know the UFO field is intellectually crippled (present company excepted of course), and the rain of inanities that continues to fall from the lips of UFO pundits about the Rh negative blood factor as being somehow linked to manifestations of the phenomena is just more proof of this. I admit to getting exercised about this issue; the whole Rh neg thing gets my panties so twisted that I doubt even Dr. Jacobs could straighten them out into one of his books. It’s a sad statement about the intellectual desert that UFO/phenomena studies finds itself in that even the people I hold to be the most informed and interesting thinkers in the area make themselves sound like idiots when talking about the Rh blood factor. Possibly they feel forced to address the bizarre approach ufology takes to the topic because Nick Redfern recently published a craptastic book on the topic. If that’s the case, then Redfern has done a much greater disservice than bilking me out of ten dollars; he’s promoted complete bullshit to the top of the paranormal agenda.

In the age of Trump and Brexit, it may seem quaint to get upset about something like the Rh negative factor being used to resurrect racist and eugenic agendas. If America is about to leave behind even putatively mythical values like religious tolerance, freedom, democracy, etc., why fuss about long-ago bankrupted pseudoscience being used to prove that one race is somehow superior to another? Don’t worry; we’re not talking about intelligence this time—now it’s paranormal sensitivity. The compass needle has swung; it used to be that natives and savages were considered to be more sensitive and superstitious, but with the Rh factor mythology, whites (with a little admixture of Cherokee thrown in for good measure) are now reclaiming direct access to the gods and the privileged knowledge that entails.

Is the Rh factor mythology gaining popularity in ufology as a measure of ufology’s waning, as nativism is gaining in white national communities unable to adapt to changing economic and demographic circumstances? However, it’s pointless to ask that question until people recognize the Rh factor myth as a myth, or trope, or meme, or narrative – whatever term your generation uses. Which involves recognizing it as NOT FUCKING BASED IN ANY SCIENCE WHATSOEVER.

Sorry. Had to pause and unknot the knickers once again. How anyone can get through a college or even high school education and not have enough basic knowledge to see through the whole nativist Rh factor argument is just beyond me. Like I said, though, even the best and the brightest in the paranormal have swallowed it hook, line and sinker with only a couple nervous, giggling hiccups of references to “well, we don’t want to be racist now; we’re not being racist, are we?”

And yeah, they were all white guys. In a way, you can’t blame them; how would they even know? It’s like telling a fish about water. A fish obsessed with algae: “I can feel it all around me, and sometimes I can see it; I KNOW it’s out there!” and you’re like, “And there’s this matrix it travels in, it’s called water—” and the fish is like, “That was a blue one! Yesterday I saw a green one that was smaller.” “The thing about water is—” “Holy shit! Was that a purple, round one? Right over there by my nest? Holy fucking shit!”

Setting aside the subtexts, though, how anyone with a basic education in science can give the Rh negative mythology any time of day at all is just beyond me. Something like Project Core that collects self-perceptions of Rh status as data points isn’t a problem; the problem is people who don’t seem to have the intellectual equipment to think critically about applying a not very difficult idea from the world of science to ufology and ufology’s confreres.

Originally I got exercised about this topic after listening to an episode of Where Did the Road Go. I felt like writing something to express my opinion but didn’t want to be just another asshole on the internet. Later, going about my business while listening to an old time radio podcast, I heard a character protest to cop/hero Danny Clover (Broadway is My Beat), “I am from Rh negative blood, Lieutenant.” That was 1949, folks. Very, very close to the period when blood antigens were becoming better understood and in particular the all-important Rh factor which affected childbirth and blood transfusions. If this mention in an old radio show is any indication, inchoate claims of superiority due to possessing Rh negative blood factor appeared in popular culture almost as soon as the discovery of the factor did. If that’s true, than UFO pundits are just the latest in generations of dupes and we’ve got a very interesting case of scientific folklore to investigate.

How to Make a Buddhist Altar for Your Cat

I just moved into a new place. I'd like to put a Buddha altar inside and also in the yard, so naturally I went on the internet. Wikihow is a great site that had a page just for me: How to Create a Simple Buddhist Shrine.

Step one: choose a stable place above head level. Okay, my cats are gonna go for that in an instant. Espeically if they think it's special in any way.

Step two: make a shelf to support the objects. And by "objects" I suppose they must mean "cats."

Three: place the objects onto the shrine. Some recommendations follow about what objects should be placed on the shrine, but you and I know it's all up to the cats as to what they choose to knock to the floor and what they're willing to curl around. Steps four and five are similarly technical, expecially if cats are likely to be involved. They concern choosing specific scriptures or images, but don't address the likelihood of hairballs, shedding or dried tapeworm fragments.

Step six: place offerings such as a bowl of water on the lowest level. This practically guarantees the presence of hairballs, shedding and dried tapeworm fragments on the rest of the altar and increases the likelihood of that special Buddha statue purchased off Amazon being knocked over and broken by a whopping 47 percent.

Steps seven through nine talk about what kinds of offerings are appropriate to make at the shrine, but to me it just sounded like the things I do to try to get the cats to like what I feed them. And I'm pretty sure any attempt at placing a stupa on the shrine would lead to puffed tails, hissing, and vigorous escape leaps. Some things are just too damn weird, or maybe just too New Age, to countenance.

Step ten, the incense: I'd like to make offerings to Buddha, but my cats freak out if I make a flame in the house. Maybe I can make the incense offering inside and then when the cats are asleep sneak into the yard and burn it out there.

I guess I worship cats.

Sex and Delusion

audio journal transcript, driving to work

This morning I was thinking about sex and delusion. Actually, I was thinking about the social construction of sex. I had been reading Maha Boowa’s biography of Acariya Mun (both well-known Buddhist monks in the Thai Forest tradition) and was thinking about how Theravadan monks can’t touch women. Actually, if you think of it, it kind of make sense; if you become a monk at a young age and haven’t had any experience—have I already said this?—haven’t had any experience being socialized with women, being around women in their various roles as people and as different parts of society, when those hormones kick in, you only have one source of information: what your hormones are telling you. That’s never a good thing. We know that.

I could see in that context trying to continue to keep women cloistered is a strategy that kinda makes sense. Whereas if you bring kids up with a more humanistic view of—or with humanistic socialization where people are individuals and not just their social role or gender identity—you would have maybe more awareness of or control over that kind of reaction that’s prompted just by sheer instinct. I say awareness of/control over because I think it’s clearly the awareness part that that helps. Control over is not so helpful without the awareness, cuz then you’re just kind of repressing something by brute force without really examining it.

The reason I say that is cuz two things. I was sitting in mediation yesterday, and this has happened not unfrequently, and just this very kind of antisocial, id-ish type thought would leap into my mind every so often. I’m like, “Wait a second! Where did that come from? I’m not that person! I don’t think like that! Is that what they call the id? I don’t even know if I believe in the id.”

Then I was reading the Acariya Mun biography. The biographer actually mentioned something about kilesas or defilements in that respect, that these things are no joking matter. You really don’t know what you’re dealing with. I forget how he put it, but it made me realize that might be what I’m encountering in my practice.

It did make me think of desire as being partly a social construct. In addition to it actually being an instinctual part of—cuz like the argument for subjugation of women in patriarchal cultures is that men can’t control themselves around women. Which, as we know, is simply that men WON’T control themselves around women and they exist embedded in a social structure which facilitates rape and abuse and violence against women. I’m saying that non-ironically. It seems to me pretty self-evident. You don’t have to be Andrea Dworkin, you don’t have to take things that far. All you have to do is open your eyes.

[Digression into local human trafficking news, psychological manipulation techniques and reflections upon certain bird mating displays]

The same kind of social rituals that go into manipulation and victimization of these people [trafficking victims] are also in another sense erotic. To me, to a lot of people, some of them. That’s completely terrifying. If you don’t know where to draw the line, that is completely terrifying. How do you know where to draw the line?

Somehow, some of us figure out where to draw a line. Apparently, it’s possible! Hence, what I say about the institutionalized misogyny being at some level a choice. If it’s a choice, you can become aware of it and you can choose not to do it. If you think that’s worth doing, if you think that women are people, etcetera, etcetera.

This was all in the shower. I thought as an added kind of proof of that idea, of that concept, you have women who for centuries now have been subjugating their sex drive, being non-orgasmic, not being aware of the sexual aspect of their being and suffering the consequences of what happens when you do that. Cuz it’s painful, it’s difficult, it’s hard and it sucks, but if you’re risking your life to project a sexual identity and try to get sexual satisfaction, you’re probably gonna learn how to suppress that.

What men would say is, “Women, they just—they’re non-orgasmic, they’re not as into sex.” I’ve had my guy friends say this to me, ones from older generations especially, but I’m sure lots of younger ones still think it. That’s not the case at all. It’s just that it’s too dangerous to show it, to let it show its face. It will strip you of your freedom, your ability to survive, a lot of that shit.

Yes, in part desire is socially constructed. If women can learn to subjugate their sexual identity in the interest of their sheer survival, then men can learn to control themselves around women and no longer have to project onto women their raging, uncontrolled hormonal impulses and make it out like women are the feeble, tainted, etcetera etcetera sex.

Maybe someone somewhere will start to doubt that any of it is even real.

Of Mind and Memory and Tea Trays

Less than ten people stayed after meditation for the midweek dharma talk. With a small group like that, things are bound to be more casual. Reverend Master told some funny stories about back when the order kept milk goats and he served as goat monk. Then the talk veered toward cheese and started to get rather lively.  Once again, I became aware of how close we were to the local gourmet ghetto. At the last possible second Reverend Master swung the conversation away from the approaching iceberg of an extended consideration of the technical aspects of enhancing melting qualities in cheese and invited us instead to contemplate uncertainty.

After the talk was over, I picked up the tray and started to collect everyone’s tea cups. One woman who had been talking a bit excessively during dharma talk was now standing and chatting with Reverend Master like they were at a cocktail party. I held out the tray to collect her cup, doing the smile and half bow that is the local etiquette. She smiled back and, instead of placing her cup on the tray, took the tray from me. Apparently she wanted to collect the tea cups, so I gave it to her.

(The whole smile and half bow thing is GREAT for those of us who don’t do names. I knew Talking Woman, but had no clue what her name was. She was just another one of us older middle aged white ladies. I know my own name and think of all the other females as Mary. The guys are all Paul. Most post-ceremony potluck conversations I have start out with at least one person saying, “I’m sorry, but I’ve forgotten your name.”)

Talking Woman wasn’t completely familiar with the local etiquette, but so what? If you do a practice, your understanding will develop over time. The exactitudes are not important; etiquette is merely a tool for developing awareness. For instance, last week Mary showed me how to turn on the meditation hall lights. Of course I know how to turn on lights, but being shown how to turn them on for ceremonial observances felt like getting promoted in martial arts.

The moment after I handed the teacup tray to Talking Woman, the entire incident vanished from my mind. I petted the temple cat and went to put on my shoes. Mary was putting on her shoes, too, and we had to cooperate to make use of the limited space by the door. The tea tray incident flickered briefly into my mind again. Talking Woman’s behavior was like that of someone used to receiving things from subordinates. It was easy to imagine situations where those kinds of roles played out. It’s funny how much people’s behavior reveals about their background and character, I reflected, and then forgot about it.

I was buckling my seatbelt when I thought about it again. I knew Talking Woman, but from where? It really was a puzzle. It will come to me in time, I thought. These things always do. She was definitely familiar. Mainly, though, I was thinking of goats and cheese and shipping wax.

Approaching the highway on-ramp a few minutes later, she popped back into my head again. This was really annoying! There was nothing I could do about it until I finally remembered. There’s just no conscious way of intentionally remembering something, after all. You either remember it or you don’t, right? Why did I even care?

I got onto the highway. There were shoes and ships; it was night; I had my tunes playing. Then: I’m going to remember this. Not actually remembering, but the knowledge that I am now in the process of remembering and will soon have remembered. Verb tenses don’t even convey the experience! The fire was lit, the kettle was on the hob and the deep was bubbling. The question of Talking Woman was really nagging at me now. Why did I care? Why was I so sure that I was going to remember?

The whole thing unfolded over a 15 minute night drive home. I was playing tunes and thinking about a book I was reading, but the image of Talking Woman’s face as she smiled back at me over a tea tray she almost certainly didn’t want to accept kept rearing its middle-aged head. Where did I know her from? TV? No, it couldn’t be; She wasn’t British and I don’t have a TV. It really couldn’t be TV; it was highly unlikely to be TV. Why was I thinking TV? I let it go again and enjoyed the night drive.

It was TV, I was just going to have to accept that. I could feel the memory approaching. It’s like when you feel like you’re going to have to take a crap soon; I could actually feel the memory starting to emerge. This was not someone I had met in person; I was just going to have to accept that as a fact that some part of me knew to be true, even if my conscious mind was playing catch up.

If it was TV, that means Netflix; Talking Woman was a middle aged white female, and that narrowed the field considerably. What movie had I ever watched in which a middle aged white female smiled the way she did when inadvertently taking the teacup tray from me? I queried my brain.

By the time I got to the highway off ramp near my home, I thought I had the answer. I couldn’t remember the actor or the name of the movie, but I had definitely watched it on Netflix. Once home I was able to find out the name of the movie, look up the IMDB listing and confirm who Talking Woman was. Then I watched the movie again because it really was very well done. Afterwards I realized that if I ever ran into her again it could be tricky. To me she’s that character in that movie, while in real life she’s someone I’ve never actually met.

The mental unfolding of the tea tray incident was rather remarkable. We’re talking about a split second of an interaction which I put behind me as soon as it was over yet still presented some problem that my mind really wanted to be allowed to solve. None of the mental events were particularly volitional and the topic was not of conscious interest to me, but my mind kept worrying away at it like how your tongue feels around the hole a lost tooth leaves behind. The mental sensation of feeling an actual memory coming closer and closer before I actually had it was also quite interesting. It was almost like being able to predict the future, at least in terms of my own mental content;I knew I was going to remember something before I knew what it was I remembered.

House Builder, Thou Art Seen! Well, at least glimpsed.

Integrating Theoretical Approaches in the Study of the Parawhatsit

I was listening to Paratopia Oculus the other day when Jeff Ritzmann mentioned that in his writing he was struggling with integrating the notion of anti-structure he adopted from the works of George Hansen (1) with Greg Bishop’s co-creation theory (2).

Wow, that has got to be some rough going, I thought, even before you add in any element of the supernatural, paranormal or whatever the currently fashionable term is. The reason being that the theoretical underpinnings of the two approaches are themselves at odds. Hansen’s work is based on a type of social theory called functionalism that takes a systems approach to explaining social phenomena. Co-creation theory, to the extent that I understand it, is basically a social constructivist approach focused on how shared understanding creates social phenomena. In the case of co-creation theory, one of the entities sharing the understanding happens to be differently incarnated (i.e., non-human and possibly non-physical), but otherwise it’s straight constructivism.

Why does this matter? All theories put forward for explaining and understanding human social phenomena take certain things for granted. Sometimes these assumptions are explicitly named, but more often they go unrecognized. Moreover, most theories excel at explaining certain types of things but fail miserably at accounting for other stuff; they all have their strengths and weaknesses. In the case of functionalist versus constructivist theories, some of the assumptions they are based on are antithetical, that is to say, completely opposed to one another. Also, the things each theory tends to be good or bad at explaining are wildly different. Trying to integrate functional and constructivist approaches is sort of like mixing oil and water; Jeff Ritzmann has cut himself out a ridiculously difficult task.

But then, salad dressing tastes good. That’s even before you add in the paranormal croutons. If you try to integrate functionalist and constructivist explanations AND make it account for parastuff of various ilks, I definitely want to taste that salad – but I can’t guarantee I won’t snack while I wait for it to be ready.

Because there’s a further question. From a purely theoretical perspective, we still have not resolved the question of whether the stuff of parastuff is OUR parastuff or THEIR parastuff. Hansen’s functional approach seems to suggest that liminality or anti-structure breaches reality enough for an external reality of ontological others to break on through, but doesn’t address how the encounter then goes. Co-creation doesn’t address how the encounter begins, but posits that as it’s happening both an ontological other and a human being participate in shaping the nature and meaning of an event. Then we have Eric Ouellet with his recent book Illuminations arguing that the whole thing can be put down to entirely to human activity, albeit in the form of as-yet-poorly understood psi, or perhaps social psi, activity.

We are now very far from CSICOP territory, were everything has an explanation and nothing is not normal. However, that is no reason to give up on theoretical rigor, rules of evidence and meticulous attention to the logic of argumentation. I bow to the unknown, but I do not submit to it. We press on.

I find Ouellet’s theory extremely attractive; it overlaps with several areas of my own education and previous research and holds out the promise of being a powerful explanatory approach. But to me, the most exciting part is the gaping hole it seems to have. If all this parastuff can be put down entirely to as-yet-not-fully-understood human psi or collective psi abilities, WHY IS IT SO OFTEN EXPERIENCED AS AN OTHER? Specifically, as radical alterity – aliens! – not only non-human, but outside known reality – an ontological Other.

If Ouellet’s assumption is wrong, ontological others do exist and we occasionally interact with them. That is totally cool in my book. If his assumption is right, there are certain circumstances under which we define our own experiences as so foreign they can only be understood in terms of an ontological Other; we are in effect creating UFOs, ghosts, poltergeists we occasionally experience; we ARE the plants that speak to us in dreams and visions. Either way you answer that question, I’m in my happy place. In fact, you don’t have to answer the question at all (an answer may in fact be impossible) and I’d still in my happy place, which is the sociology of knowledge.

What kind of boundary work is involved in perceptions of radical alterity? How do we draw lines around what counts as us and what counts as Other? It’s rich philosophical territory and also open to empirical enquiry. How much fun is that?!?!?

Bibliography of Three Books I Have Not Actually Read, Although I May Have Heard Other People Talk About Them On Some Podcast Somewhere: 

1. Hansen, George (2001) The Trickster and the Paranormal

2. Bishop, Greg (2016) It Defies Language!

3. Ouellet, Eric (2015) Illuminations

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