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.