Go to Making Light's front page.
Forward to next post: Chili-Dog Casserole
Subscribe (via RSS) to this post's comment thread. (What does this mean? Here's a quick introduction.)
1. The story.
I recommend starting at VerdeNews.com, a small-town news operation that’s done a good job on this story.
Friday, October 09, 2009: Two die, 19 ill in sweat lodge incident.2. The guy who made this happen.SEDONA — Two people have died and a total of 19 were treated at one of three medical centers Thursday night when participants collapsed after a New Age-type sweat lodge experience near Sedona.
As many as 68 people are reported to have packed into a tarpaulin-covered dome at the remote retreat in Deer Pass Valley about 6.5 miles south of West Sedona along Oak Creek.
Saturday, October 10, 2009: Investigators seek answers in deaths, illness during sweat lodge ceremony.
…[Yavapai County Sheriff Steve] Waugh also said that [James Arthur] Ray, who led the sweat lodge ceremony, refused to talk to investigators on site and returned to California.
“We will at some point in time schedule another interview with him,” Waugh said.
“I do not know why he chose not to speak with us,” Rhodes* added. “Everyone else we have spoken with has been very forthcoming with information.”
Wednesday, October 14, 2009: Teamwork: Verde Valley Fire talks about Angel Valley rescue.
There is much finger-pointing in the wake of two sweat lodge deaths at the Angel Valley Retreat. Yavapai county building officials say they issued no building permit for the temporary sweat lodge structure measuring 20 by 20 feet in which 68 participants crowded around steaming rocks.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Spiritual Warrior self-help instructor James Arthur Ray, Howard Bragman, disputes that Ray’s staff built the structure saying that Ray’s contract with the Angel Valley spiritual retreat called for Angel Valley to “design and construct” the sweat lodge.
Three people remain hospitalized, one in critical condition, one is listed as fair and one in good condition at the Flagstaff Medical Center.
Meanwhile, the chief of the Verde Valley Fire District, Jerry Doerksen, and his public information officer, Merry Shanks, told the press Monday about what they described as the “most significant mass casualty event the Verde Valley has ever experienced” from a medical emergency. …
“We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
James Arthur Ray is a failed businessman turned New Age hustler who sells what he calls “the Science of Success,” and runs exceedingly pricey workshops.
A New York Times article on him from 07 March 2009, Even in Difficult Times, a Self-Help Guru Finds a Willing and Paying Audience starts with a description of an audience of some 500 people, many of whom are unemployed and looking for something better, and have gathered in a hotel in New Jersey:
They were here to see a motivational speaker and self-help guru, and paying a hefty price to do so: $1,297 for a high-decibel, two-day seminar. In this case, the speaker was James Arthur Ray, one of the emerging names in the $11 billion self-improvement industry, and the event was called the Harmonic Wealth Weekend. …More on The Secret in just a moment. Meanwhile: a very funny video about the movie version of The Secret.[P]articipants ponied up even more money at tables in the back of the ballroom, where they could sign up for more seminars or purchase an assortment of Mr. Ray’s books and DVDs. The showcase item was a package of three workshops, including one called “Practical Mysticism,” on sale for the discounted price of $13,685 (a $5,695 savings), which Mr. Ray pitched throughout the seminar.
Given the current economic climate, industry analysts say it may seem incongruous for those in need to spend this kind of money. John LaRosa, research director for Marketdata Enterprises, a market research firm in Tampa, Fla., expects the recession to mean far slower growth for an industry that had been red-hot, nearly doubling in sales since 2000. The industry includes infomercials, self-help books, motivational speakers, seminars and personal coaches.
“Consumers are being squeezed,” Mr. LaRosa said in a telephone interview. “They’re not going to have as much to spend on discretionary purchases for things like expensive workshops and seminars.”
If the economy is cutting into his business, Mr. Ray, 51, says he isn’t seeing it. “I think it’s holding steady,” he said backstage during a break, as Van Halen and U2 blared over the speakers. “We have over 500 people here this weekend. I think what I’m providing is a tremendous value, and there’s always going to be a place, regardless of the economy, regardless of the market, for people who are providing tremendous value and tremendous service.”
In Mr. Ray’s case, attendees paid to listen to a former preacher’s son and a junior college dropout who has fashioned a successful business on the promise that he can help people build financial wealth as well as strengthen their spiritual and physical well-being. …Though he’s not in the ranks of Anthony Robbins and Phil McGraw (Dr. Phil), his appearances on “Oprah” and “Larry King Live,” and in “The Secret,” Rhonda Byrnes’s documentary and book that have become a New Age phenomenon, have won him a following. His own book, “Harmonic Wealth,” appeared on the New York Times best-seller list for two weeks last spring. …
Drawing on his own brushes with bankruptcy (once in 1997 and again in 2000 after the dot-com bust),Because that’s exactly the kind of background you’d want in a guy you’re paying thousands of dollars to teach you how to be a success.
Mr. Ray advised the crowd that for every negative turn, there is an equally positive opportunity. “There has to be, it’s the law of physics,” he said.“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” is a Newtonian law of motion. It predicts the behavior of billiard balls and rockets, not opportunities to acquire wealth.
I doubt the error bothers James Ray. It’s hardly his worst offense against science or spirituality. (For that, I nominate pages 51-55 of his book, Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want, in the chapter on The Science of the Law of Attraction, where he invokes Albert Einstein, quantum physics, parallel universes, vertical time, the Everett-Wheeler-Graham multiple worlds theory, and the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory.
Ray is one of the cadre of self-help gurus who’ve been helping push Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, a book I myself have described on Amazon as a feelgood book for losers. The Secret has the distinction of being equally loathed by serious magicians (as Diane Sylvan succinctly puts it, “the Goddess ain’t your bitch”), and by the likes of Michael Shermer, writing in Scientific American, who said:
The secret is the so-called law of attraction. Like attracts like. Positive thoughts sally forth from your body as magnetic energy, then return in the form of whatever it was you were thinking about. Such as money. “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts,” we are told. Damn those poor Kenyans. If only they weren’t such pessimistic sourpusses. The film’s promotional trailer is filled with such vainglorious money mantras as “Everything I touch turns to gold,” “I am a money magnet,” and, my favorite, “There is more money being printed for me right now.” Where? Kinko’s?So there.A pantheon of shiny, happy people assures viewers that The Secret is grounded in science: “It has been proven scientifically that a positive thought is hundreds of times more powerful than a negative thought.” No, it hasn’t. “Our physiology creates disease to give us feedback, to let us know we have an imbalanced perspective, and we’re not loving and we’re not grateful.” Those ungrateful cancer patients. “You’ve got enough power in your body to illuminate a whole city for nearly a week.” Sure, if you convert your body’s hydrogen into energy through nuclear fusion. “Thoughts are sending out that magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you.” But in magnets, opposites attract—positive is attracted to negative. “Every thought has a frequency…. If you are thinking that thought over and over again you are emitting that frequency.”
The brain does produce electrical activity from the ion currents flowing among neurons during synaptic transmission, and in accordance with Maxwell’s equations any electric current produces a magnetic field. But as neuroscientist Russell A. Poldrack of the University of California, Los Angeles, explained to me, these fields are minuscule and can be measured only by using an extremely sensitive superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) in a room heavily shielded against outside magnetic sources.
I’m reasonably fond of my own arguments in my Amazon review:
It’s only logical.If Rhonda Byrne’s advice were any good, neither she nor her publisher would have to publicize her book. They’d just think the right thoughts, and readers everywhere would automatically be moved to pick up a copy.Average global income would be far more evenly distributed than it is. After all, anyone can hope. Anyone anywhere can think good thoughts.
Alternately, there could be Third World sweatshops available to do our believing for us.
[T]he Evil Overlord list wouldn’t include the observation that an Evil Overlord who shouts “I AM INVINCIBLE!” is a sure bet to die almost immediately afterward.
Las Vegas wouldn’t exist. People don’t place bets they think are going to lose. Gamblers are powerfully into positive thinking. Someone who’s betting heavily while drawing to an inside straight is unquestionably visualizing success, and they’re telling the universe exactly what form they want it to take. They nevertheless fail to fill their straights at exactly the rate predicted by plain old statistical probability—that is, most of the time. …
Positive thinking is all around us. The world is full of unemployed theatre majors, unpublished writers, unsuccessful beauty pageant contestants, unheard-of musical acts, and college athletes who never made the big time. None of them got there by thinking they wouldn’t succeed.
If Rhonda Byrne’s advice were any good, no singer would ever hit a wrong note. That goes double for singers who are drunk.
I know other reviewers have already covered the implications of The Secret’s suggestion that misfortunes are caused by our own negative thoughts. Still, I have to say: NO KIDDING? SOMEBODY PHONE DARFUR NOW!
Look at Enron’s employees and stockholders. They didn’t expect to get screwed. New Orleans residents who didn’t have cars never envisioned themselves drowning in their own attics. Homeowners with subprime mortgages never imagined they’d wind up in foreclosure.
Are we to understand that some families have an inexplicable tendency to attract the same ailment, generation after generation? How is it possible for devout Christian Scientists to die of cancer or eclampsia or ketoacidosis? If a guy in his late 50s has been in denial about his radiating chest pains for the last ten or twelve hours, and the first thing he says when the EMTs come through his door is “I’m not having a heart attack,” has his attitude improved or decreased his chances of surviving the episode?
If I worry about drunk drivers, and then some night I get t-boned at 60 mph by an irresponsible lush with a DUI record as long as my arm, is the accident actually my fault because I had all those negative worries? If I’ve got a cheerful toddler with me, who’s responsible for her death? And if I kneecap Rhonda Byrne, and set fire to the warehouse where her books are waiting to ship, will she apologize to me for thinking thoughts that obliged me to do it?
James Ray’s own gospel, Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want, which I mentioned earlier, says the law of attraction will let believers “create wealth through all aspects of their lives—financially, relationally, mentally, physically and spiritually.” Ray says “wealth” a lot. I think it’s his favorite word. See, for instance, the blurbs on his website:
James boasts the unique and powerful ability to blend the practical and mystical into a usable and easy-to-access formula for achieving true wealth across all aspects of life.and
His Journey of Power® events fuse together the wealth-building principles, success strategies, and the teachings of all great spiritual traditions and practices that he has experienced and assimilated over the last 25 years.Ray also has a workshop for becoming a spiritual warrior, which was what everyone was doing in that sweat lodge in Sedona. “Becoming a spiritual warrior” sounds impressive, but it doesn’t seem to mean a lot, at least not as Ray explains it on his website.
3. The Spiritual Warrior come-on.
The quotes that follow are taken verbatim from James Ray’s Spiritual Warrior page.
“Virtually all top achievers know that to really get ahead, you’ve got to be willing to color outside the lines. Here’s why…”He never says who these top achievers are, or what they’ve done that constitutes “coloring outside the lines,” and he never explains how this will make you a success.
—James Arthur Ray
“Coloring outside the lines” just means you’re not following standard patterns. It doesn’t say whether following them is the right choice. Does learning a new trade constitute coloring outside the lines, because it’s new, or is it coloring inside the lines, because you’re still thinking of your work in terms of mastering a specific trade? And while we’re on the subject, doesn’t the fact that his clients are paying thousands of dollars for James Ray to give them permission to color outside the lines mean that they’re still coloring inside the lines?
Ray is arbitrarily privileging one of two symmetrical choices. Claiming that “learning to color outside the lines” will bring you success makes about as much sense as choosing to always turn right at intersections, or always passing up the first choice you’re offered and take the second.
Let’s face it, in our culture (no matter what people say), uniqueness is not rewarded.If that were true, there’d be no point in cultivating uniqueness, much less paying thousands of dollars to do so.
When you were in kindergarten, you were taught to color inside the lines. When it was time to snack, you snacked, and when it was time to take a nap, you took a nap. Conformity was a highly-rewarded virtue.If he thinks that constitutes pointless conformity for its own sake, he’s never had to supervise a roomful of kindergarteners. In the meantime, he’s right: our culture doesn’t automatically reward small children for ignoring the rules, procedures, and skills they’re still struggling to master.
In elementary school, it became even more important to be just like everyone else. If you dressed a little differently, you were laughed at. If you spoke funny, you were ridiculed. And God forbid you had your own ideas and opinions…Am I supposed to recognize myself in that? Are you? Are all of us? Because everyone I know suffered that same trauma.
In high school and college, it became absolutely critical to fit in… But by this time, you were good at it. You knew what was expected of you, and if there was any way you could, you delivered.I am not in the target demographic for this part of the pitch.
Yesterday’s biggest nerd is today’s richest man in the world (and he doesn’t even have a college degree). Do you think he colored inside the lines? Hardly.Do you think Bill Gates got where he is by hanging around in woo-woo sweat lodges, or by exhausting his working capital paying for workshops and inspirational speeches? Hardly.
So here you are, attempting to achieve your heart’s desires, and all you’ve ever been trained to do is stay within the lines and do what everyone else does.So here’s the question: will “coloring outside the lines” will get you your heart’s desire? And is it a universally applicable strategy?
In Spiritual Warrior, you’ll build upon what you started in Practical Mysticism.Remember Practical Mysticism, a workshop mentioned in the NYTimes article I quoted earlier? Attendees started by paying $1,297 for “a high-decibel, two-day seminar,” throughout which Ray pitched a package of three workshops. One of them was Practical Mysticism, regularly priced at $19,380, which he was offering at only $13,685. If this is the usual procedure, the seekers in Ray’s sweat lodge had paid him at least $24,677 - $30,371 total, though it may have been more if they attended the other two events in his three-workshop package.
You’ll become privy to techniques (many kept secret for dozens of generations) that I searched out in the mountains of Peru, the jungles of the Amazon (and a few other places I don’t care to recall).Paging Carlos Castaneda! What secret spiritual warrior tradition did James Ray study in Peru and the Amazon? If he’s supposed to have studied it prior to his “flirtations with bankruptcy” in 1997 and 2000, why didn’t it keep him from screwing up? If he studied it after his bankruptcies, there would have to be a significant gap in his post-2000 personal timeline to accommodate this spiritual warrior apprenticeship. Personally “searching out” secret traditions takes a while. So does mastering a genuine spiritual discipline.
(Note: Whatever Ray was studying among the Indios of Peru, it’s highly unlikely that he was studying it between 1980 and 1991, when the Sendero Luminoso movement was active. One side or another would have shot him.)
Mastering these (quite esoteric) practicesSo esoteric, in fact, that no one else knows about them. One has to wonder how James Arthur Ray found out they existed. One also has to wonder how many languages he speaks. It’s a relevant question.
Let’s arbitrarily keep this simple and assume he was dealing with Quechua-speaking Peruvian and Amazon populations, because otherwise we’d have to think about the hundreds of languages spoken by indigenous Amazon tribes, some of them singular isolates; and then we’d have to wonder how Ray knew which of those tribes to go to and ask about their ancient secret esoteric spiritual warrior traditions. I’m not assuming that James Ray speaks Quechua, but if he’s got some Spanish, there are plenty of bilingual Spanish/Quechua speakers he could hire to translate for him.
Curanderos are part of Peruvian culture. If you go googling on them, you’ll find woo-woos and tourism sites referring to them as shamans. I wouldn’t call them that because shaman is a Siberian word, and shamanism is a Siberian tradition, but woo-woos use the term pretty damn loosely. (Personally, I’d think better of them if they spent their own culture’s terms, and referred to traditional practitioners as wizards, or Wise Men, or priests. They’d object, of course: wizards makes it sound like D&D, Wise Men makes it sound like a Christmas pageant, and priests makes it sound like religion. And so it does! Funny thing, that.)
Anyway, insofar as Peruvian curanderos have the jump on traditional healers and counselors anywhere else, it’s because they have access to Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi) and San Pedro cactus (Echinopsis pachanoi or Trichocereus pachanoi). Like other hallucinogens (and a good many spiritual disciplines), they’re a technology for taking off the cover plates and poking at the underlying machinery. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on the machinery and what you do with it.
I’m not going to assert that any specific person took any specific actions, down there in Peru. I’ll state as my personal opinion that I very much doubt James Ray did any significant first-hand research in Peru and the Amazon. And I’ll observe that there’s exploitive Ayahuasca tourism in the Peruvian Amazon, just like there’s sweat lodge tourism in Taos and Sedona, “spiritual shopping” in Glastonbury, and travelers manifesting Jerusalem Syndrome in (where else?) Jerusalem. If James Ray logged actual time in Peru and the Amazon, I expect he did so as a tourist. (And I suspect—nay, hypothesize—that the biggest lesson he learned was, “Hey, you can sell this stuff!”)
What I don’t believe is that James Ray is teaching his followers effective techniques he learned in South America. The message he constantly preaches is wealth, wealth, wealth, like Scrooge McDuck diving into a swimming pool full of money—wealthy body, wealthy mind, wealthy relationships, wealthy everything.
The native peoples of Peru and the Amazon don’t have easy lives. They aren’t especially healthy, they’re materially impoverished, and they’ve gotten pushed around a lot by the outside world. If they’re an illustration of the results you can expect from James Ray’s “spiritual warrior” program, why would affluent gringos want to absorb it? Whatever those traditional practitioners in Peru are doing, it’s clear that it doesn’t attract wealth. And if James Ray has reformulated and transformed those teachings into a powerful “spiritual warrior” thingie, why isn’t he down in Peru, teaching his reformulation and sharing the wealth with the people who made it possible?
What a jerk.
(My actual suspicions about the source of Ray’s Peruvian claims are even less complimentary; but never mind.)
required me to think and act more differently than I’ve ever had to before. At first it was quite grueling, but the results…well…all I can say is, “Wow!”That’s certainly saying nothing.
Remember “quite grueling.” It’ll be relevant.
It wasn’t until I had completely mastered these concepts and techniques that I was able to combine them with state of the art scientific technologyThe closest thing to “state of the art scientific technology” Ray uses is spammy online self-promotion, plus Twitter—he’s an enthusiastic Twitterer. Not long after the sweat lodge debacle he went back and deleted all his tweets from that night, but Tech Crunch got hold of them anyway:
Commenters have observed that Ray’s advance promo for the Spiritual Warrior thing in Sedona says very little about what’s going to happen there. You have to wonder whether the participants knew what they were getting into.JamesARay: is still in Spiritual Warrior… for anything new to live something first must die. What needs to die in you so that new life can emerge?JamesARay: Day 5 of SPW. The Spiritual Warrior has conquered death and therefore has no enemies, and no fear, in this life or the next.
and, as always, create practical real-life applications (you should know my style by now).Uh-huh. James Ray created the practical real-life applications of this esoteric Peruvian/Amazonian warrior tradition. That’s very odd. What kind of warrior tradition doesn’t come with practical real-life applications already installed?
Check it out:Remember all of these when we’re asking why participants stayed in James Ray’s misbegotten sweat lodge beyond the limits of their own endurance.* You’ll accelerate the releasing of your limitations and push yourself past your self-imposed and conditioned borders (no more coloring inside the lines)…
* You’ll carve out your own destiny and quickly develop the strength and determination to live it…
* You’ll learn (and apply) the awesome power of “integrity of action”…
* You will (perhaps for the first time in your life), have a gut level understanding of “The Four Enemies of Power.” You’ll learn to recognize them at a glance, and instantly defeat them when they arise…
* You’ll define and enforce your own boundaries—without someone else telling you what they should be…
* You’ll experience a new technologically-enhanced form of meditation that creates new neurological pathways, allowing you to experience powerful whole-brain thinking (this one’s gonna knock your socks off)…
* You’ll experience, at the spiritual level, the ancient methodologies of Samurai Warriors; and gain a true understanding of the authority and strength that come from a life of honor.Samurai? A lifetime of pious discipline, self-control, self-sacrifice, nonstop training, subordination to hierarchy, strict adherence to the class one was born and raised in, disregard for personal wealth, and next to no tolerance for coloring outside the lines? What does that have to do with Peruvian mysticism? Or with N’Am sweat lodges? Or the law of attraction, or the modern American quest for wealth and self-fulfillment, or anything else Ray has been talking about?
The only reason I can see for invoking the samurai is that Ray felt he needed a little more emphasis on the “warrior” part of the concept in order to maintain the overall balance of the presentation, even though historic samurai values are seriously at odds with the rest of his program.
All this guy has to sell are his words. If I’m right about the sudden anomalous presence of “samurai” in the mix, he allows himself far too much latitude when he’s striving for effect. Given that degree of imprecision, he could be saying anything.
Someone who believes that words and intentions are magic ought not be that sloppy.
Look, you’ve most probably spent your whole life staying within the lines to get what you’ve got (or at least a major portion of it). Join me outside the lines in this heroic quest for higher consciousness.Four points. First, if the idea is to make you a warrior, with or without concepts like samurai and honor being thrown into the mix, you can’t say “There is no sacrifice.” The possibility of loss, death, and self-sacrifice is always going to be part of what it means to be a warrior. Without that, all you have is an oaf in fancy dress.There is no sacrifice—only greater and more magnificent results, wealth, adventure and fulfillment.
Second, there is no real change without some sacrifice. Becoming something different means giving up some of what you were.
Third, this is yet another message from James Ray to his followers in which he tells them to ignore signs of possible trouble. It’s not a responsible message for someone who runs boundary-pushing, physically stressful, improvisational mass therapy sessions.
Fourth, it’s bleeping disingenuous for him to say “there is no sacrifice” right before he announces the price of this little shindig in Sedona.
You owe it to the rest of your life to get to Spiritual Warrior as quickly as you can. The investment is ONLY $9695 per person.Here’s a joke Elise Matthesen told me:
The point being that New Agers will accept insane markups. It’s why they’re preyed on by so many parasitic species.Q. What’s the difference between Pagan and New Age?A. Two decimal places.
4. What happened.
From the New York Times:
Kirby Brown, 38, of Westtown, N.Y., and James Shore, 40, of Milwaukee, died on Thursday after collapsing inside the Angel Valley sweat lodge. Three other people were airlifted in critical condition to Flagstaff Medical Center.One of them, Liz Neuman, continues to be reported in critical condition.
At least seven other people have died in ceremonial sweat lodges since 1993 in the United States, England and Australia, according to news accounts compiled by Alton Carroll, an adjunct professor of history at San Antonio College who also moderates the Web site Newagefraud.org.The same list can be found on the In Memoriam page at Don’t Pay to Pray, and in the Huffington Post comment thread.
James Arthur Ray, a self-help expert from Carlsbad, Calif., led what was billed as five-day “spiritual warrior” experience at Angel Valley, which concluded with a tightly packed sweat lodge ceremony. Participants paid about $9,000 each for the weeklong retreat, which included seminars, a 36-hour fast and solo experiences in the forest.The “solo experience in the forest” was a “vision quest” in the uninhabited country around the ranch following the 36-hour fast. On the day of the sweat lodge fiasco, participants were served a buffet breakfast in the morning, then sat through a few hours of seminars before the sweat lodge got going around 3:00. Near as I can make out, the sweat lodge session went wrong somewhere around 4:30, and had become a multi-victim emergency scene by 5:00.
By the way: as with sweat lodges, sun dances, and other traditional ceremonies, Native Americans complain that vision quests are being misused by non-Indians. As one writer put it, vision quests are supposed to be undertaken by youngsters in their teens; but since kids that age don’t have much money, non-Indian entrepreneurs sell inauthentic vision quests to middle-aged spiritual adventurers.
If you’re not familiar with the long-term anger and dismay of Indian tribes over the misappropriation of their cultures, especially their traditional religious practices:
One of their biggest objections to inadequately trained poseurs running their own versions of these ceremonies is that if you do them wrong, people can get hurt.Plastic Shaman.
New Age Mystics, Healers, and Ceremonies.
New Age Religions and Plastic Medicine Men.
Paying to teach and “play Indian.”
Native American Wannabe FAQ
For All Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life.
A Line in the Sand. (On cultural property.)
Our Red Earth.
Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances.
Blue Corn Comics’ Stereotype of the Month Contest.
The Ripoff of Native American Spirituality.
Spiritual Commodification and Misappropriation.
Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality.
New Age (and other) ripoff sites.
Don’t Pay to Pray, incl. their list of frauds.
New Age Frauds and Plastic Shamans, incl. their NAFPS Forum.
Back to the story in the New York Times:
The authorities say that at any one time 55 to 65 people were packed for a two-hour period into a 415-square foot structure that was 53 inches high at the center and 30 inches high on the perimeter. Mr. Ray’s employees built the wood-frame lodge, which was wrapped in blankets and plastic tarps. Hot rocks were brought into the lodge and doused with water. Mr. Ray, who conducted the ceremony, left the area on Thursday after declining to give a statement to the police.The largest Amerind sweat lodges I’ve heard of will hold eight to twelve people, max. They’re made out of natural materials that “breathe,” and they don’t use airtight construction methods. The hugely oversized sweat lodge James Ray had built was crowded, unventilated, had no interior light, and was swathed in impermeable plastic tarps. No one seems to know how hot it was inside the structure; but as many commenters (some of them experts) have pointed out, Ray created a set of conditions where it was impossible for him to monitor the people who were under his guidance.
There’s a largish picture of the sweat lodge here, and more (if smaller) photos at ABC15.com’s Northern Arizona news site. You should also read Jim Macdonald’s entry about heat stress.
Switching over to the AP version of the story:
Between 55 and 65 people were crowded into the 415-square-foot space during a two-hour period that included various spiritual exercises led by Ray, [County Sheriff Steve] Waugh said. Every 15 minutes, a flap was raised to allow more volcanic rocks the size of cantaloupes to be brought inside.This is where I get All Judgemental. Remember Ray’s come-ons?Authorities said participants were highly encouraged but not forced to remain in the sweat lodge for the entire time.
As I said earlier, “Remember all of these when we’re asking why participants stayed in James Ray’s misbegotten sweat lodge beyond the limits of their own endurance.” If you have the sense God gave a soda cracker, you do not (1.) promise people results that will both transform them to the point of temporarily estranging them from themselves, and automatically provide them with the means to endure that transformation; (2.) put them through multiple exercises that are both psychologically and physically challenging; (3.) push them to test their own limits, and give them the impression that bailing out of the exercises is wussy, a defeat, and a waste of their ten thousand dollars; and (4.) fail to monitor them closely for signs of distress.At first it was quite grueling, but the results…well…all I can say is, “Wow!” :: You’ll accelerate the releasing of your limitations and push yourself past your self-imposed and conditioned borders. :: You’ll carve out your own destiny and quickly develop the strength and determination to live it. :: You will have a gut level understanding of “The Four Enemies of Power” … and instantly defeat them when they arise. :: You’ll define and enforce your own boundaries—without someone else telling you what they should be. :: You’ll experience a new technologically-enhanced form of meditation that creates new neurological pathways, allowing you to experience powerful whole-brain thinking. :: There is no sacrifice—only greater and more magnificent results, wealth, adventure and fulfillment.
Fasting, vision quests, and sweat lodges are all stressful, and they all produce altered mental states. Basically, they’re mind/body hacks. That’s why they’re so dangerous: they operate in an area where mind and body interact in strange ways, and normal judgement is suspended. Under those circumstances, someone trustworthy has to be there to exercise judgement for you. If the person guiding you is also pushing you to test your limits, they have to be even more careful and pay even closer attention.
“Cosmic Connie,” on her weblog Whirled Musings, talks about this class of problems:
Back to the New York Times again:[W]henever there is discussion about the negative aspects of selfish-help/New-Wage stuff, and particularly, it seems, when tragedy strikes, there is invariably discussion about how we shouldn’t place all of the blame on the gurus or leaders; the followers should bear some personal responsibility as well. I agree. Even so, as I said in a recent post about another New-Wage workshop-related tragedy (and please forgive me for quoting myself, but I’m too lazy to paraphrase):I’m all for personal responsibility. But one problem with these seminars and just about everything else in the New-Wage/selfish-help industry is this: While the [legal] disclaimers are whispered out of one side of the mouth (or written in fine print on one page of the web site), what comes out of the other side are the loud (or large-point-size) proclamations that THIS technique or path or technology or course or workshop or whatever will improve the quality of your life and deliver miracles—whoever you are, and no matter what your problem is. Add a bunch of poetic marketing copy, and throw in a few filmy trailers with mystical music and special effects interspersed with ecstatic testimonials from “graduates,” and you have a very powerful emotional cocktail.
Dr. Carroll, who is partly of Mescalero Apache descent, said the Angel Valley sweat lodge was the “best example I have seen, sadly, in a long time of why it is extremely dangerous to conduct sweat lodge ceremonies without proper training.”So how did James Ray get around that requirement? Simple: He always has his attendees sign a comprehensive waiver. There’s considerable interest in whether the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office will bring criminal charges.Katherine Lash, a co-owner of Spiritquest Retreat in Sedona and a veteran of more than 100 sweat lodge ceremonies, said she had never heard of a sweat being conducted with as many people as were involved in the Angel Valley event. “In my experience it has been very rare to have more than 20 people,” she said.
Limiting the number of people inside a sweat lodge is critical because the person leading the event is supposed to carefully monitor the mental and physical condition of each participant, experts said.
“It’s important to know who is responsible for your spiritual and physical safety in that lodge,” said Vernon Foster, a member of the Klamath-Modoc tribe, who regularly leads ceremonial sweat lodge events in central Arizona.
5. Interpretation.
There’s been a lot of online discussion of this event. The most interesting comments I’ve seen have come from Duff McDuffee, at a weblog called Beyond Growth. He’s written three entries about James Ray, two of which are recent and deal with the Angel Ranch fiasco. The earliest of the three, Good News: You Can’t Have It All was posted in August of this year. I can’t summarize the whole thing—he makes a long string of connections—but here’s a core statement:
Let’s continue with James Arthur Ray, as he is such a clear example of the excesses of personal development culture. If you click the pyramid marked “begin your journey” on Mr. Ray’s website, the headline on the next page asks…It would be worth reading even if the Angel Ranch fiasco had never happened.“Are you 100% totally and completely happy with your life?”The implication is twofold:1) that Mr. Ray is the first person ever to answer this question “yes,” making him either a pathological liar or a narcissist (or both).
2) that everyone on Earth needs to purchase his products, forever, until they too are as perfect as him.
The biggest irony is in the video clip. … Ray begins by talking about the “large amount of stress and fear lately” due to the global recession. “Who could imagine that some of the largest banks in the United States could go belly up?” He then implies that we are not in a global recession but that this is merely media scaremongering, and then says “but stop, just suppose I could show you a way to use the Law of Attraction, as well as the six other Laws of the Universe, to rise above all external circumstances?” Uhhhh, say what?!?
…Ray goes on to explain that when you understand the secrets of the Universe (which elsewhere says he learned from Peruvian Shamans amongst other spiritual teachers and gurus), you can succeed no matter what external circumstances. Implied is that he too used to be a loser like you, until he discovered the Laws of the Universe. Now he’s a winner, his life is perfect, and your life can be perfect too…
James Arthur Ray is suggesting that to solve the problem of the global recession, we should do exactly what caused it. He’s recommending that we deny reality and inflate our expectations—exactly what happened with the housing bubble, the subprime mortage crisis, the crisis on Wall Street, the credit crunch, and all the other aspects of the U.S.-led global recession we are now experiencing.
McDuffee’s main article, James Arthur Ray’s Spiritual Warrior Event Kills 2, Injures 19 in Sweat Lodge Fiasco—
Whoah! Breaking news! The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office has upgraded its investigation to a homicide inquiry. I’m going to go live with this post and finish up the last few paragraphs as soon as I can.
Where was I? Right. McDuffee’s main article. Best single source of information I’ve found, on several counts.
One of them is McDuffee’s superior collection of James Ray’s tweets. As our estimable readers will no doubt recall, Ray is an indefatigable twitterer, but right after the debacle with the sweat lodge he deleted all his recent tweets that mentioned death or the Spiritual Warrior workshop. TechCrunch got its hands on four of them before they disappeared from Twitter Search, but Duff McDuffee got fifteen. I’ve collected sixteen—McDuffee’s lot plus an extra one TechCrunch snared—and mine are transcribed text, not images. I’ll be posting them anon.
Another reason it’s so informative is that McDuffee has been following this story closely, he’s got good sources of his own, he’s familiar with the self-improvement scene, and he’s been posting updates all along. He doesn’t mince words:
Two hours in a sweat lodge!? This is insane. … But this is the logic of these kinds of workshops—break you down to build you up. Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within is very similar—long hours, no breaks, constant full-on exercises. While there is usually no explicit instruction that you must remain with the group, the pressure to do so can be enormous even when way beyond your limits.Duff McDuffee, if you’re reading this, that’s one question I can answer. Kidney failure accompanies severe dehydration. As for the “damage to multiple organs,” see Jim Macdonald’s piece on heat stress. Once the hypothalamus packs it in, you get cascading system failures. I’m not sure they make dice that’ll yield the saving roll Liz Neuman needs.I’m guessing that these deaths and injuries were not a result of “carbon monoxide” (which tested negatively) but intense psychological pressure to remain in a dangerous situation far beyond the limits of safety and sanity.
I know several people who have gone to the hospital for various reasons after “large group awareness trainings” such as Ray’s “Spiritual Warrior Event.” Many people online have complained of received mild to moderate burns on their feet after Tony Robbins’ firewalk, for example. It’s time we brought these gurus to justice and demanded that personal change workshops be safe for all.
When something goes wrong in such a seminar due to it being overly intense and dangerous, usually the victims are blamed for “not taking 100% responsibility,” thus dodging the responsibility of the seminar leaders. Personally, I think we should hold James Arthur Ray 100% personally responsible for the death of these two seminar participants, up to and including going to jail. …
The excessive focus on pushing past your boundaries (treating inner objections as “resistance”) is in my opinion what creates the conditions for dangerous approaches to personal change. …
UPDATE #7
AOL has a new article giving some back story on the two who died. The woman, aged 38, “was an avid surfer and hiker who was ‘in top shape,’ took self-improvement seriously and had a passion for art, a family spokesman said.”
Some other relevant quotations from the article:
Nineteen other people were taken to hospitals, suffering from burns, dehydration, respiratory arrest, kidney failure or elevated body temperature. Most were soon released, but one remained in critical condition Saturday. …I am especially concerned that participants had fasted for 36 hours and had just broken their fast. I recently tried fasting for 36 hours. The first 24 were wonderful, then I started going into a kind of toxic shock, feeling nauseous like I had the flu (which is apparently common), so I broke the fast at about 36 hours. I wasn’t ill, but it did take about 24 more hours to feel normal again. I would have had a very difficult time doing anything strenuous, let alone a two hour sweat. A friend who fasts regularly says that one’s first fast can be the most challenging, but that they can get easier over time. For anyone fasting for the first time, this fast alone could have been quite challenging. If it had only been a two hour sweat, the risks would have been greatly reduced.And again, “highly encouraged” to stay within the sweat lodge is almost certainly an understatement of the intense psychological pressure most participants in such an event feel to conform to group norms. I think participants in seminars should be “highly encouraged” to speak up when they feel that a process is too much for them. In my direct experience on both my own path and in facilitating change with others, there is no sane reason to push yourself or anyone else so close to death in order to engage in conscious transformation.
UPDATE #8, 10/13/09
[From the NYTimes:]
Fire department reports released Tuesday show the incident wasn’t the first involving a sweat lodge ceremony at the resort. Verde Valley Fire Chief Jerry Doerksen said his department responded to a 911 call in October 2005 about a person who was unconscious after being in a sweat lodge.WOW! Ray almost killed somebody in 2005, but wasn’t stopped. This is exactly what I’ve been attempting to warn people about with my guru criticism on this blog and elsewhere.Angel Valley resort owner Amayra Hamilton confirmed that Ray was leading the sweat ceremony during the 2005 event. Ray’s spokesman declined to comment.
Ray’s spokesman, Howard Bragman, has said Ray would speak when it’s appropriate. He declined Tuesday to address the Brown family’s concerns. …In addition to the other two dead, there is another woman in a coma!A statement released by the family of Liz Neuman, who remains in critical condition at the Flagstaff Medical Center, said she is in a coma and doctors are working to stabilize damage to multiple organs
Two others remained hospitalized. Fire officials say the victims exhibited symptoms ranging from dehydration to kidney failure after sitting in the sweat lodge.Two dead, one in a coma, two more hospitalized. Do they have health insurance? Why kidney failure?
6. Questions answered, and new questions.
Update #9 is the prize catch. It’s McDuffee’s notes while listening to a 90-minute podcast that includes an interview with someone named Shawna who was there, helping with the fire:
Shawna has done many sweats in the past. She was invited to help with the fire for the sweat. When Shawna arrived at the location, her friend who had invited her was very upset and said “something went terribly, terribly wrong.” She ran to the sweatlodge. There were people lying in the dirt and sand around the lodge, with other people attending to them.Bad scene, severely disoriented ambulatory casualties, paramedics dispensing IV hydration.
2 hours later, the other people still looked like they had suffered from physical trauma, shivering in blankets.That’s because they’d suffered physical trauma. They were in shock.
One woman told Shawna her story, she passed out in the sweat lodge. She was in the very back of the sweat lodge. Most of the people who ended up with a severe trauma were in the back of the sweat lodge.Location of the victims was a datum I’ve been waiting for. If the worst traumas were clustered together, it was the sweat lodge environment that injured them.
When the door was being opened in the lodge to put in more rocks, air rushes in. She was so far in the back and the door was so small, she never felt any relief, no fresh air. This is very unusual, probably unintended. Usually opening the door, everyone feels some fresh air before the next round. She wondered if she was even breathing any oxygen by the end.Since she could still walk and talk, I’d say the answer was yes.
2 days prior attendees had gone into a vision quest where they were encouraged to fast and not drink any water. Sedona is a desert, an extremely dry climate. Participants were already dehydrated and then sweating it out.Hmmmf. Sedona isn’t extremely dry; it’s just very dry. You still have to drink lots of water, though.
James Ray is a coastal Californian, and I am biting my tongue.
That morning they had a breakfast and encouraged to hydrate, had about 4 hours to rehydrate and get nutrition in them. In Shawna’s opinion, the sweat was way too long, should be 4 rounds not 6.Okay, I can call that one. If they were trying to hydrate but their bodies weren’t accepting water, they were already in shock. These people were in trouble. Jim Macdonald, who’s present here in a chat window, adds that they wouldn’t be throwing up pure water. It would be acidified water, so their acid/base metabolism would be going out of whack, and their entire ability to move oxygen in their blood would be compromised. To which I reply that that might account for the woman Shawna talked to feeling like she wasn’t getting enough oxygen.People were throwing up water.
James Ray was in the sweat lodge with them when people were going into shock, passing out, and in some cases dying. He was supposed to be responsible for their well-being.
Shawna … shared with her husband that she was seeing people dead, passed out, etc. when “relief was on the other side of that door.” One man said “yea, I wimped out, I got out on the 5th door…I wasn’t playing full on.” This man had shamed himself, felt like he was letting Ray down. Shawna defended him as maintaining his own limits, speaking up to authority. This man questioned Ray’s authority and took care of himself, Shawna told him. And then he took that in and said “and thank God I did that, because I was well enough to carry the other people out.” …He may have saved his own life, and he may have saved others, but it took Shawna pointing it out to him for this man to realize he wasn’t a failure for bugging out early.
Continuing on with excerpts from Duff McDuffee’s notes:
Shawna interviews Jim Tree, a Native American man who does ceremonies. Many reactions from the community—not a sweat lodge ceremony, but a huge aberration from what a Native American sweat lodge is like. He’s never seen more than 20 people at a lodge.No kidding. If that can be substantiated, James Arthur Ray is in a world of trouble—and he deserves to be.Years of training to be sensitive to everyone in the lodge. Sweat lodge construction has certain materials—red willow branches for frame. There is a reason for this. Plastic tarps trap in gases. …
“We do fast the day of the sweat, but don’t fast from water. Start hydrating all day of sweat.”
“This was a recipe for disaster.”
“Usually people prepare for a year for a vision quest.”
The elders have been warning people. Apparently the elders went to Ray and confronted him and told him that he shouldn’t be doing this, that “you’re hurting people.” Most every time people have been nauseous and sick for the six or seven years Ray has been doing this event. …
Jim was stopped from doing lodges after a year from the elders and trained more to sense the condition of people in the lodge.
During the 5th or 6th run, people were calling out to be let out and were denied. “That would never happen” in Jim’s tradition.
Pouring the water is gently sprinkled on the stones to precisely control it. Ray poured water from the bucket directly onto the stones, creates an uncontrollable amount of heat.This is really bad. People have been sick and nauseated almost every year, which is a clear sign of overheating. One person collapsed and was unconscious in 2005, which datum prompted Jim Macdonald to remark, “When you start passing out from the heat, you’re on the friggin’ edge.” This year, by report, participants who wanted to leave weren’t getting to do so. Some unspecified elders are said to have previously remonstrated with Ray, to no effect. If this all comes out in testimony, Ray could be looking at several counts of negligent homicide.Jim would be glad to have Ray call him and talk to him about all of this.
7. If magic is real, it’s terrifying.
Duff McDuffee’s third entry about James Ray, The Dark Side of The Secret: Reading James Arthur Ray’s Sweat Lodge Disaster through a Magickal Lens, was the one that spooked me. He turned the event around and looked at it from a completely unexpected POV:
[W]hat if we read this event through the eyes of magick? James Ray claims lineage in the Western esoteric or occult tradition, so perhaps we could learn something interesting from reading this terrible event in this way that would deepen our understanding. Perhaps we could even find some ideas for moving forward in a positive new paradigm for personal development.(Much thoughtful commentary follows. You should all read it.)When I begin to think about the deaths of Ray’s seminar participants in this way, I find myself having a change of heart towards the man, far less cynical about his words and basic message while still holding him accountable for what transpired. Perhaps you will have a similar change of heart.
James Arthur Ray as Powerful Magician
From the magickal perspective, it’s not that James A Ray has been bullshitting us about a mythical Law of Attraction, but that he is indeed a powerful magician who attracted some very powerful, albeit unwanted results. We’d want to ask, “how did he attract this experience?” and “how can we protect ourselves from attracting similar experiences?”
We can see Ray as having successfully evoked the Warrior. The event was called the “Spiritual Warrior.” Fifteen tweets in seven days (all since deleted, but captured here) mentioned death, the Warrior, or war, and two mentioned words and actions being congruent. A magician casts spells with his or her words and intent, thus influencing reality. Ray evoked the Warrior, and powerfully so. As he would say, “energy flows where attention goes.”
This is the power of Intent and Word, cultivated by magicians to influence reality. One could see this disaster as “the dark side of The Secret,” which is not just “negative thinking” but even positive intentions gone horribly wrong. Thus, positive thinking and intent are not enough if they lead to negative consequences. Indeed, Ray himself emphasizes that the results one brings about in life are what are most relevant to one’s spiritual progress. Therefore this result should be read as part of the whole of Ray’s spiritual/magickal attainment. Or as he said, “The kingdom of heaven/expansion is w/in. But it will always be measured w/out. Your results tell and [sic] interesting story…They tell the truth”.
I too was struck by the content of James Ray’s deleted tweets—so full of death, war, and sacrifice, not to mention warnings that not everyone would make it through. However, I wasn’t struck by the same thoughts as a result. Since I don’t like cynicism, I’ll credit the difference to Duff McDuffee and I having very disparate worldviews.
What I thought on reading those tweets was that if James Ray honestly believed what he preached, if he truly believed that thoughts and words and intentions are magic, he would never have written those tweets and sent them out into the world. Therefore, my much more mundane conclusion was that he never believed that stuff in the first place.
What disturbs me is that the universe nevertheless contrived to behave as though the things he’d been preaching were true.
So, Darwin anyone? What do they call people who believe in faith healing? Dead.
So, Darwin anyone?
I don't believe that anyone is so smart that the right conman with the right pitch at the right time can't take him.
Sounds like the Black Hole of Calcutta (Kolkata) which shows what may happen when you pack so many people into a hot, cramped, airless space for hours.
Disclaimer that the Black Hole may be a British colonialist legend. Now we have an uniquely American version, featuring capitalism, wacko self-promotion, and the gullible.
I know people who buy into this kind of feel-good stuff (it's right up there with the work-from-home pyramid schemes). Fortunately they don't have the money to buy into Ray's scam.
James Macdonald #2: "I don't believe that anyone is so smart that the right conman with the right pitch at the right time can't take him."
I agree with this. It's the nature of my business that I have to cast my eyes over a couple of thousand spammy email subject lines every day, looking for a few real business emails. (That's after filters.) And what I've learned is that even with the greatest skepticism in the world, there are moments and circumstances where one of the phishy spams meshes up perfectly with something I'm wanting or expecting to see, and I'll open the email in all innocence, expecting it to be mail I was looking for.
Expectations and desires are powerful stuff. Following them down a primrose path is often regrettable, but it can be damnably hard to avoid.
Expectations and desires are powerful stuff. Following them down a primrose path is often regrettable, but it can be damnably hard to avoid.
I see it every day too, as I look at vanity presses and scammy agents, and listen to the starry-eyed unpublished writers who are certain that this is the great opportunity to get published that they've been looking for, hoping for, dreaming about.
This is a very comprehensive post that I'll have to digest for a while, but the spiritual warrior stuff just jumped out at me.
How, exactly, is being a spiritual warrior supposed to get you material wealth? Yes, I know the garbage from The Secret is supposed to make that connection, but I thought that was all about intentionality and desire, not power and force. (I wish, I wish, I wish not to be in a traffic jam, but I am. Does that mean that all these other people wished for a traffic jam harder? What sort of loon wishes for a traffic jam, anyway?)
The reference to Samurai threw me for as much of a loop as it seems to have thrown Teresa. I think that Teresa sees a good reason for him to invoke that, but I also think that part of the reason is purely because, Oriental things are cool right now. Just go to Target and buy a tile with a Chinese character on it. It might even be the character for what it says it is. It's that fetishization of the other. You also get a bit of a crossover with the people just coming out of university who have been exposed to anime. Of course, they're not necessarily capable of spending $10k and up on a retreat.
Lots of people have already used the lure of the Proud Warrior Race Guy (Native American Edition), so that's no longer fresh. But Samurai also fit, and they're still exotic enough to be workable. I still don't see how Samurai and Peruvian spirituality go together, but perhaps my mind's not open to all the possibilities.
Rick York @ 1:
So if you ever get killed while doing something dangerous, and remember that even crossing the road has a certain amount of risk to it, I'll remember that you don't need to be mourned because it was just natural selection. Thanks. James Macdonald and Bacchus have already explained the other half of the reason that I truly detest using natural selection as an excuse for feeling superior to people who have died.
Lots of perfectly sane people do sweat lodge sessions.
Near as I can make out, many of the victims at Angel Ranch had been in sweat lodges before, experienced no difficulties, and felt they were the better for it. In this case, it was the execution, not the concept, that caused the problems.
KeithS @7: Yes! That's it exactly -- there's no connection made. Ray just throws it in as an adjunct image.
"The message he constantly preaches is wealth, wealth, wealth, like Scrooge McDuck diving into a swimming pool full of money — wealthy body, wealthy mind, wealthy relationships, wealthy everything."
Actually, Scrooge's ability to dive into money - "I like to dive around in my money like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And toss it up and let it hit me on the head!" - is also a learned skill that's very dangerous for the untrained novice: at one point he lures the Beagle Boys into trying it, and they all nearly kill themselves ("Fancy that! heads like canned tomatoes...")
Rick York @1: I know it sounds dumb. Why didn't they get up and leave? I'm convinced it's in part because they'd repeatedly been instructed to ignore the inner voices that were telling them to get the hell out of there. Also, apparently there really is a huge amount of psychological pressure to stay with the program.
And there's another reason I know from experience: hyperthermia, like hypothermia, poleaxes your brain just when you need it most.
Huh.
I wonder if he's involved in the 'structured water' nonsense that's also being peddled out of Carlsbad.
It's odd. I spend a lot of my time hanging out in coffee shops in Carlsbad, and I don't think I've ever seen that dude around. I'd recognize him, he's obviously one of those people that sucks up oxygen when he enters a room.
(frex, I do see Dr. Ramachandran around, and once or twice Kary Mullis, though he's more of a surfer than a coffee and/or tea drinker)
And I know all the places where someone swimming around in that kind of cash would live. The best coffee shops are near'em. Hell, until recently the only Trader Joe's serving the Carlsbad area was right next door to where I live.
What I get outta that is that he doesn't live in his community, and based on all his seminars (and oh how very pertinent the root word is in this case, considering the tenor of his product) I'd guess he doesn't spend much time here. He's probably also one of those assholes who bribed a local geologist to let'em build a house just off the Pacific Coast Highway where there used to be a nice surfing beach but there is now a sea-wall so that a local attorney's house doesn't get a little more beach-front than he intended.
Was it hyperthermia or CO poisoning that did them in, or a combination thereof?
I can easily see a scenario where people were disoriented by a combination of CO poisoning and hyperthermia. Also, there's a weird sort of peer pressure in situations like that which tends to cause people to push themselves beyond their limits.
And Sedona has a higher than average percentage of complete nuts. The landscape has an almost otherworldly beauty to it, and I swear it attracts folks who aren't fully grounded in the realities of this world ...
Reportedly, the firefighters didn't find any CO. Hard to see where the CO would come from: The heat was being provided by hot objects being brought in, rather than by combustion inside the tent. Which isn't to say that they weren't in a low-oxygen environment. The competent experts can figure that out.
And there is a real psychological pressure: If I can hang on another ten minutes, fifteen at the outside, I'll forge new neural pathways, make a spiritual breakthrough, and be wealthy forever. But if I wimp out, I'll have blown ten grand for nothing.
Add a big dose of Willing Suspension of Disbelief plus some Emperor's New Clothes, and you've got a disaster heading your way with a totally predictable outcome.
Teresa, #11: Where were we having that "seed crystal" discussion a few days ago? If there had been one person willing to risk the contempt and social ostracization which would have been invoked by saying, "This isn't safe, I'm leaving," and walking out, s number of others might have followed suit. But nobody wants to be the first one. Add the strong desire to believe that what this guy was peddling really works, and the loss of mental astuteness that comes with extreme physical stress, and you have a guarantee for disaster.
Bravo, ChrisB! That's exactly the sequence I had in mind.
I loved Teresa's review!
Every day on the way to work and back I pass bland little office park. Tan stucco buildings, dark tinted windows. The most colorful thing about the place is the FedEx drop off kiosk.
There's also a sign by the side of the road, one of those folding easel things. Not a very professional sign. It reads: BOOK SALE, UP TO 80% OFF. The sale has been on for going on eight years now.
Who is running the book sale in this bland little office park? Beyond Words, the publisher of The Secret.
You'd think positive thinking, much less the proceeds from a book that spent a few weeks on the bestseller list, would have let them upgrade their venue.
17
You'd think positive thinking would keep the book on the best-seller list, so they don't have to have a permanent book sale with amateur signage.
The kidney failure really bugs me. I wonder if the prior fasting included low or no water rations— something I've sometimes seen cited as part of "fasting" by those who don't have a long spiritual tradition backing it. (Most religions allow or encourage water during fasts.)
As for the book, I remember when I was working at a bookstore that there were almost no paperbacks in the business section. This should tell you something about how the "Get Wealthy!" authors make money. You almost never find mass market paperbacks in the New Age section for the same reason, though they do tend more towards trade paper size, probably to keep initial costs down.
Incidentally, I am completely incapable of completing the traditional Lenten fasts— which include one meal on the day and one small snack. I'd like to blame the family tendency to mild hypoglycemia but the truth is that everyone around me is scared to let my blood sugar crash. :D
-Thank you-
I'd just found the CNN article and was wondering what the rest of the story was. Then my daily blog-cycle brought me the answer in more detail then I could've ever dreamed.
Creepy creepy stuff.
Rick @ 1: [long discussions of what Darwin's theories do and do not say, the idea that there is indeed such a thing as culpable negligence and it is indeed widely considered to trump in whole or in part the victim's 'personal responsibility', and a whole bunch of other stuff skipped by way of cutting right to the chase. It's been a long day.]
Yeah, no, sorry about your pretty pink bubble.
You are not infinitely smarter than anyone who went into that hellhole, your ability to detect lies and incompetence is not that much greater than theirs is or was, and it could totally happen to you.
If not that particular flavour of scam/negligence/reckless endangerment, some other flavour.
Your implied conviction that you, unlike those idiots, can't be scammed into doing something life-endangering actually increases the odds of it happening to you.
P.S. The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, 6th Edition is available as a free Gutenberg e-book and you should maybe read it.
You're welcome, JamesK. I'll be finished soon. Just a couple more bits to add.
Hey, cool.
If you go to maps.google.com and enter "beyond words, hillsboro, or" and select "satellite", you can see the office park. It's actually a little bit NW of the icon, in the leftmost of the three buildings. Beyond Word's suite is about in the middle.
And there's a white rectangle, in the shade of a tree on the grassy median of Cornell Road, that I'm pretty sure is the easel sign!
B. Durbin, 19: (Most religions allow or encourage water during fasts.)
In addition, the religions I know about absolutely require that the fast end as soon as it endangers the person's health.
After college, I worked in a bookstore in Flagstaff for five years. We had people come up from Sedona all the time. There were two sections that we could not keep in any form of alphabetical order: Children's and New Age.
#7 Keith
Samurai and Peruvian--in 1491 or whatever it was, Number Ten Ox or whatever the name of Chinese eunuch who led an exploratory fleet far and wide. Uh, yeah, a Chinese eunuch traveling the world leading a fleet is not exactly a Samurai, but hey, it's only across a relatively short distance of water, it's the same part of the world, and for the geography-challengd, isn't that the same thing?!
(I think that there have been pre-Columbian artifacts from East Asia found on the west coast of the Americas...)
==
As for get rich quick scams in general, where people pay for seminats, etc., I went to a free feeder real estate seminar back around five or six or so years ago, given by someone who did get rich quick apparently from flipping properties, and giving paid seminars to other people, and probably getting kickbacks from the types of companies and businesses and business tactics that created the housing bubble and then implosion... his advice included incorporating in the southwestern state which has a shield law to prevent the identities of principles of private companies incorporated in the state from being identified, promotion of his for-pay seminar and the materials with it on getting loans originating from companies offering balloon loans which would qualify almost anyone for a home loan, instructions on how to pocket money flipping properties, getting friendly assessors, and how to look for distressed properties from people over their heads with house payments...
I'm Wiccan. I pronounce it Newage (rhymes with sewage).
Combining indigenous body-challenging techniques with European (actually Middle-Eastern) body-denying messages is a good way to get people kilt.
That "Law of Attraction" stuff -- that brings cargo cults to mind. People seeing others getting rich, and latching onto the wrong part of the process that made them rich -- not "have a brilliant marketable idea," but "be iconoclastic and think positively" -- is cargo-cult thinking.
James Arthur Ray is a very powerful person. He got Teresa to spend the time and energy to put together this post and, if I understand her narcolepsy correctly, she has a limited amount of time and energy to spend.
This isn't death through misadventure, this is essentially death-for-profit. The "reasonable person" test would apply, and a reasonable person wouldn't subject people to an environment like that. 68 people in a sweat lodge isn't a a spiritual event, it is a profit event as in "all the market will bear", "a sucker is born every minute", and "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public". There is no way you can monitor 68 people in the dark in close quarters, unless, at a minimum, you have a UTB thermometer in each of them, and having a thermometer up the butt doesn't lend itself to spiritual enlightenment (68 people squirming from rectal thermometers has a peculiar entertainment value, but I digress).
I hope they find a felony committed somewhere along the way so that James Arthur Ray can be charged with murder one, death while committing a felony (as opposed to manslaughter by greed).
I am morally opposed to capital punishment, but that doesn't mean I can be tempted.
At approximately 105°, proteins in the brain denature and start to tangle (like frying an egg in slow motion) — this is a permanent brain injury. Cases of this due to fever in children is a cause of life-long seizure disorders. 105° temp or positive signs of heat stroke at a sporting event gets you tossed into a kiddy pool and ice dumped over you (while supporting the airway). Cool them down as fast as you can without drowning them.
P.S. When I started this comment, until the spirits moved me, all I planned on doing was to point attention to Teresa's brilliant line on outsourcing:
"Alternately, there could be Third World sweatshops available to do our believing for us."
Smackdown! Thank you!
The self-help section was my least favorite part of the bookstore when I worked there. The problem I find with all these "programs" that promise you your "heart's desire" is that most people don't know what their "heart's desire" really is. They want to be rich and happy, or think they do, and they want getting those things to be easy. That's their heart's desire, for success to be easy.
People who have a good idea what their heart's desire actually is generally don't need anyone telling them how to get it.
To address one eensy little portion of TNH's essay, above; to wit: the appropriation of Native cultures because they're sexxay.
My mother is French; immigrated 40-odd years back. As a lass, reading up on French history instilled in me a deep envy of French kids, living in this enchanted countryside full of castles and Gothic churches and ancient villages and just general history, so much history that it seemed like it'd be a force of nature... whereas I lived in northern California, where there was no history.* It seemed most unfair. I hoped the French kids appreciated their immense good fortune.
The most recent time I was in France was last summer, for a cousin (and dear dear friend)'s wedding. As I do whenever I'm in France**, I scoped out the used bookstores, and happened upon a young adult novel written with the same envious yearning to be from somewhere, anywhere more interesting than wherever it is that one happens to be from: it was a fantasy novel about a young American girl who could see ghosts and whose mission it was to fight them, and whose woes were mostly due to a succession of Indian curses/magic/graveyards/etc. Where I had envied the French their history, their deep-set roots, the audience of these books envied a supposed American way of life: wandering (the protagonist's family lives in a camper van, though they are in all other respects middle-class) the wide unpopulated spaces of the American West, with extra cool danger coming from exotic and poorly understood cultures.***
The point I'm fumbling towards here is not as trite as "the grass is greener"; something uglier and less easily resolved, something where "everyone, learn to appreciate your own cultures" doesn't even begin to address the issue. Should we demand that even light escapist reads be culturally sensitive? And what does that even mean?
* I was wrong about this--of course California has history, but it wasn't White history, so it didn't count--but that's a different essay for another day.
** Or anywhere else, come to think of it.
*** I also saw a bande desinee (comic book in the Franco-Belgian tradition), about a Native American princess and her tribe, that featured teepees AND primeval forests AND totem poles. My cousin was ashamed on behalf of France for producing it.
I'd be happy to lead a spiritual retreat weekend for those seeking enlightenment. All you have to do is pay for your own transportation, food, and hotel, kick in a little for function space, and we'll all achieve spiritual growth by hanging out, eating chocolate, and talking about fantasy and science fiction (or anything else we feel like talking about).
Much cheaper than a Newage weekend, and I promise not to kill anyone.
Carrie 30: People who have a good idea what their heart's desire actually is generally don't need anyone telling them how to get it.
"The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart." (Lois McMaster Bujold)
Sounds like some of these people tried. (After being led astray by this greedmongering selfish piece of shit, I mean.)
Xopher@#32, don't we call those science fiction conventions?
Carrie, shhhhhh! You'll spoil my fun!
What I thought on reading those tweets was that if James Ray honestly believed what he preached, if he truly believed that thoughts and words and intentions are magic, he would never have written those tweets and sent them out into the world. Therefore, my much more mundane conclusion was that he never believed that stuff in the first place.
This is still a charitable interpretation. He might actually be evil, as opposed to merely greedy. I think any sufficiently advanced greed is indistinguishable from evil, but if he DID believe that stuff and sent those tweets mindfully, he MEANT for people to die. Maybe he's more of a monster than we know.
Nahh. Just a con man. Not even a magician.
John Houghton, you're right. Thing is, I'm distressed by fraud and folly, so I try to force them to make sense by writing about them.
Everyone -- I've finished writing the entry, except for a couple of bits of endmatter I'll add tomorrow. Read it if you've got the wakefulness, but I'm going to sleep.
TNH: Samurai?
Must've gotten his training from Alberto Fujimori.
It appears to be a homicide investigation, now.
http://verdenews.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=33140
When I was in college, one of my housemates built a sweat lodge. Permeable walls, check. Ocular, check. Timer that went ding so that everyone left when the timer dinged, check. Few people (no more than fourteen, ever), check. Leaving before the timer dinged encouraged, check.
I remember asking questions when this hit the news. "How many people? How long were they in? Who was doing this?"
In the end, this is crazy bad stuff. Telling people to ignore their body's danger signals, and then putting them into a place of danger is just flat-out wrong. And it sounds as though there's now official agreement with that "flat-out wrong" position. Too bad it didn't happen earlier.
Keiths @7: [wrt Samurai reference] [...]I also think that part of the reason is purely because, Oriental things are cool right now. Just go to Target and buy a tile with a Chinese character on it. It might even be the character for what it says it is.
At least it's less permanent than getting a tattoo you can't understand.
Regular poster here.
The techniques sound a lot like large group awareness training, with a quick setting change to the southwest.
The one that I'm somewhat familiar with is the Landmark Forum (nee est) -- a group that promises success with the completion of many weekend seminars, all for many $$. The seminars are run so that there's very tight control on bathroom breaks, food breaks, and extremely long days so that judgment is impaired. There's huge pressure exerted by the leaders exploiting the psychology of not standing out in a large group or not letting the group down.
It's profitable. Very Profitable. I'm not at all surprised that they're talking about $10k weekend seminars. The object is to extract as much money as they can from each person, while convincing them that they're undergoing a life expanding change and should get all their friends and relations in it.
Chris Quinones @ 38: You read my mind. Except I wasted time hunting up a link. [g]
John @ 29:
I agree with your post. I am not a lawyer but it sounds to me like some charges ought to be filed. I think a DA could make a case for criminal negilence at the very least. I'd also suggest obstruction of justice since Ray was quick to leave and refused to talk to the sheriff.
Of course this news story is competing with the Balloon Boy. I'm not waiting up nights for justice to be done.
John @ 29:
I agree with your post. I am not a lawyer but it sounds to me like some charges ought to be filed. I think a DA could make a case for criminal negilence at the very least. I'd also suggest obstruction of justice since Ray was quick to leave and refused to talk to the sheriff.
Of course this news story is competing with the Balloon Boy. I'm not waiting up nights for justice to be done.
Sorry about the double post. The browser is acting up. Thanks for nothing Bill Gates.
Thanks for nothing Bill Gates.
If only Bill had learned to color inside the lines perhaps we wouldn't be patching Windows every couple of days.
Nightsky @ 31: I scoped out the used bookstores, and happened upon a young adult novel written with the same envious yearning to be from somewhere, anywhere more interesting than wherever it is that one happens to be from
One of the things I was thinking about earlier was why this sort of thing piggybacks on a distortion of someone else's culture. He doesn't focus on American or European warriors, it's Japanese Samurai, Peruvian secrets, Native American sweat lodges. Perhaps Europeans and Americans never developed their own mystical traditions? I think we have plenty of people right here who will say that's not so.
I still also want to know what, exactly, these spiritual warriors are supposed to fight or fight for. It makes a certain amount of sense for certain strains of Christianity to talk about spiritual warfare, because they believe that they're going up against evil things in the spiritual realm. But I don't see that here.
Xopher @ 32:
I'll happily sign up for your spiritual growth weekend. (With that amount of chocolate, something's going to grow, anyway.)
Julie L. @ 40:
That's exactly what I was thinking!
Fasting messes with your brain in interesting ways, as it's not getting the energy it usually does. For a single day's fast, you can start off all right, go off into being a bit down, then float back up into a slight light-headed, euphoric sort of state. (Yom Kippur liturgy is structured around this same sort of pattern, if I remember correctly.)
But adding the huge stress of a crowded, poorly-constructed sweat lodge can't help any. I wonder if the excessive heat (65 densely-packed people get hot, never mind the heat of the lodge), plus a higher concentration of CO2 pushed things past dozy and euphoric straight into can't think clearly at all territory.
I have to confess: At the height of the tea bagger / town hall / death panel silly season, I was so disgusted that I more than a little seriously considered coming up with a way to fleece suckersReal Americans. Like writing Diet Secrets of the Masonic Sisterhood: The Rebekah Paradigm.
Perhaps Europeans and Americans never developed their own mystical traditions? I think we have plenty of people right here who will say that's not so.
Yes, we do have our own mystical traditions. But it's well-known how one goes about becoming a Catholic, and paying a thousand bucks to sit in a hotel ballroom for a weekend isn't part of it. It is also well-known that while saints can levitate, bilocate, heal the sick, remit sins, and do all kinds of other cool things, that their lives are also notable for poverty, self-denial, prayer, and service to others, and what fun is that?
KeithS@47: One of the things I was thinking about earlier was why this sort of thing piggybacks on a distortion of someone else's culture.
Yes! That's more like the idea I was aiming to articulate. Simple exoticism doesn't seem to be enough--it has to be a distortion, and specifically a distortion that brings teh sexxay.
He doesn't focus on American or European warriors, it's Japanese Samurai, Peruvian secrets, Native American sweat lodges. Perhaps Europeans and Americans never developed their own mystical traditions? I think we have plenty of people right here who will say that's not so.
Exactly. I'll submit the romanticized "Celtic" culture as seen in bad fiction as Exhibit A.
Going back to my YA novel*: if you're going to write about the adventures of a ghost-hunting teen, why NOT set it in France? Haunted castles! Haunted abbeys! Angry spirits GALORE! So it's not a question of the author only being able to tell his stories in the millieu of the American West, it's specifically (or seems to be, anyway) that he set out to tell stories that required his distorted America as a setting.
*FWIW, the series is called "Peggy Sue et les Fantomes"; and it's--interesting cultural windows aside--not that good.
This seems like a face of the beast of which Prosperity Theology is another face -- which we've discussed here before, I believe. Change the espoused belief system from a horrible mélange of Native and ghods-know-what-else to Christian, change the situation to a faith-healing, and the results are the same.
It strikes me that this person was wielding very powerful tools without having a clue what he was doing with them.
I am wondering if part of his willingness to do this, as well as his client's willingness to follow him, is related to, well, a lack of education about/knowledge of spiritual things?
As a culture we can be pretty aggressive about freedom from and of religion, but perhaps learning about belief is not the same as believing?
This is not a really well-formed idea right now, and it's late here on the left coast and I don't think I can make it make more sense right now. Perhaps someone else can try?
WRT novels, YA or otherwise, and cultural distortions and such, it's also easier for authors, I imagine.
A French ghost-hunting YA novel might catch flak if the author moves a French abbey from it's well-known real-life location for dramatic purposes, but a French audience likely won't blink if some random American ghost town is invented/tweaked/distorted or whatever. You can even change larger details of geography or culture and get away with it.
The exotic is often easier to fudge.
Fudging it for a novel is usually acceptable; fudging it for mystic-warrior horse-manure to fleece people out of thousand of dollars, not so much...
Somebody upthread, or one of the original articles, mentioned the figures of a 415 sq ft sweathouse, and 68 people inside... that's crazy, crazy crowded. (Oh, and no ventilation) You'd hardly need hot rocks/water/steam/etc to get a sauna atmosphere going...
Ah, yes. As discussed here before, the "Spiritual Warfare" of the far-right whackoids.
Stefan Jones: Rebekahs aren't Masonic, they're IOOF; Eastern Star are the female branch of the Masons. (Mom was a Rebekah).
Thanks for putting this together, Teresa. I've been watching a different flavor of this brand of crazy up in my childhood neighborhood in Yelm, where all Hollywood has wandered through the Ramtha School of Enlightenment over the last couple of decades.
Margaret, #52: perhaps learning about belief is not the same as believing
That's a very good point. For example, there have been reports of Avengelicals performing rituals which partook of name-compulsion magic -- something that anyone with a little exposure to genuine paganism would recognize as very black magic indeed -- but because those Christians have never looked at any other belief system (indeed, they are forbidden to look), they don't recognize what they're doing at all. And this applies to the leaders as much as to the followers.
I can very easily imagine that someone whose primary motivation is fleecing the gullible might never have looked into the potential real spiritual power of what he's calling up.
Great piece, Teresa.
The "ancient wisdom of the Samurai warrior" fascination that some people were mentioning isn't at all a new trend, it has been going steady for at least 3 decades now. I'm a bit susceptible to that one myself, and was even more so when I was actively studying some Japanese martial arts. As one example, Miyamoto Musashi's guide to swordfighting, A Book of Seven Rings was (I think) first published in the US in the mid-'70s for martial artists and Eastern wisdom devotees; it became a surprise hit in the '80s among businessmen trying to figure out why the Japanese were doing so well - before it became apparent that perhaps they weren't.
As to your last section, which I think starts touching on some deep and dark truths, I think I need to go read some more from the Duff McDuffee you cite.
I was rather reminded of one of my favorite bits from the Book of the Subgenius. That was never so much a joke as it appeared to be on the surface; rather more an assortment of serious, sarcastic, and mystic truths disguised as a joke disguised as a religion, and somewhere in there it suggests (paraphrased) "Maybe nothing is really real - maybe everything you experience and the whole universe is inside your head! Until somebody starts beating the outside of your head with a truncheon; then you can pretty well call that real." The universe has a way of suddenly whipping those truncheons out when people fall into that mental trap.
"Avengelicals performing rituals which partook of name-compulsion magic -- something that anyone with a little exposure to genuine paganism would recognize as very black magic indeed"
A tad too far inside your own paradigm there, methinks.
@Margaret Organ-Kean, #52:
It strikes me that this person was wielding very powerful tools without having a clue what he was doing with them.
I am wondering if part of his willingness to do this, as well as his client's willingness to follow him, is related to, well, a lack of education about/knowledge of spiritual things?
Ignorance is bliss until somebody ends up in the ER. Or, "My wishful thinking is just as important as centuries of practical experience." Except that the idea that this thing might require practical experience isn't even in the brainpan.
This mess reminds me of a leaflet that I kept around for years for the sheer crogglement factor--"Southern Utah Wilderness Peace Project, a Family-Tribal Vision Quest, June 1-21, 1988." The organizers admitted that the solitary Native American vision quest (tribe unspecified) was not the best model for modern USians to follow, so they recommended instead that a whole bunch of people take their kids into the desert for two weeks of "men's and women's healing circles, children's learning games, family times, alone times, sweat lodges, yoga and movement, ceremonies, music and silence," followed by a week of "integrating and refining our new visions and information, deepening the healing, and preparing ourselves to carry our well implanted new visions and mode of being back to our communities." (I copied the best-worst bits into my diary.) All of this was to be preparation for an astrological event that was shortly due to channel vast power from the galactic core . . .
Among the list of people who "might" be attending was a Utah wilderness guide. Hope he had some paramedic training, if he showed up at all.
Other stuff that showed up with the leaflet included a list of publications that were either books of healing (full stop) or magpie collections of assorted bits of more-or-less ancient more-or-less secret more-or-less wisdom. The publishing house associated with the "Family-Tribal Vision Quest" appeared to specialize in the feeling of having penetrated a mystery and/or overcome a trauma, using whatever means sounded cool. Not the kind of hard work found in 12-step groups or between the covers of The Courage to Heal, just the emotional highs.
If the Southern Utah Wilderness Peace Project actually took place, I'm pretty sure that the worst anybody had to encounter was boredom. It was probably on the other end of the spectrum from Ray's sweat lodge disaster, but I'm willing to bet that they were prompted largely by the same unexamined ideas: That if a bunch of people can get together and feel, really feel, that transformation is happening--why, then, they'll be transformed; that anything that produces such a feeling must be completely wholesome and harmless; and that the whole thing is really easy to learn and teach.
Lee @15:
Where were we having that "seed crystal" discussion a few days ago? If there had been one person willing to risk the contempt and social ostracization which would have been invoked by saying, "This isn't safe, I'm leaving," and walking out, s number of others might have followed suit. *But nobody wants to be the first one*.
Albatross linked to an article in this comment. From that article:
Lonely dissent doesn't feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.
and
What takes real courage is braving the outright incomprehension of the people around you, when you do something that isn't Standard Rebellion #37, something for which they lack a ready-made script. They don't hate you for a rebel, they just think you're, like, weird, and turn away. This prospect generates a much deeper fear.
I think this is a really good point. These people paid for Standard Rebellion #37, and the pressure will have been enormous against anyone putting on a clown suit and harshing their in-group mellow. If Ray has a strong instinct for interpersonal manipulation (and I suspect he does), he'll have put them into a state where the social pressure to go along with whatever he told them to do was enormous. The cost of the weekend will also have added to the pressure.
Otherwise someone might have got the giggles, or asked awkward questions. Or just plain listened to their bodies. And then the whole thing would have fallen apart.
(In point of fact, I think the article rather understates how harsh a small group that already identifies as outsiders treats the guy in the clown suit. When I went through my own profoundly weird phase in high school, it was the "rebels" who gave me the most trouble.)
John Houghton @29 is still making me laugh out loud when I re-read him this morning:
There is no way you can monitor 68 people in the dark in close quarters, unless, at a minimum, you have a UTB thermometer in each of them, and having a thermometer up the butt doesn't lend itself to spiritual enlightenment (68 people squirming from rectal thermometers has a peculiar entertainment value, but I digress).
I know this is going to sound weird, but this story reminds me of reading bad slush: when you look at the people behind it, it's pitiable and sometimes tragic, but when you look at what they do, it's funny.
Epslootlay, Abi, ole bean. You can't criticise one kind of woo by saying it's getting dangerously close to invoking another kind of woo, which you happen to think is real, and expect to be taken seriously. What the poster says is no different in kind from a fundie who says you can't read Harry Potter, because satan might climb in through your eyeballs.
There is no real spiritual power. There are various forms of bullshit, some of which different groups of people take seriously. [For some this may be part of a deep, historic culture. Yay for them. For others, it may be a random book they pulled off a shelf.] Some of these bullshit ideas can scare the pants off impressionable people; some of them can produce real mental problems for vulnerable individuals exposed to them. In that sense, they can have real effects. But there are no spirits, sorry.
Now, I appreciate that this kind of brute-force approach to reality might be seen as insensitive, but alas, I don't care. Umpty thousand years of structural oppression based on people being forced to listen to their local woomeisters has rendered me intolerant.
Just because some people these days get to make up their own brands of woo doesn't stop it being woo. They should know better. Any life-enhancing effects that they may feel are produced by their woo are attributable to the fact that it makes them feel good to do what they feel like. That's fine with me, have any funny ideas in your head that you like, folks. Just keep them wrapped up in public, where statements about reality really ought to be based on reality.
To sum up: "spirituality" is just a nice feeling. Nice feelings are good, but not when you mistake them for reality, and especially not when you start issuing portentous messages about the "power" that is being messed about with. The only "power" around is the power of bad ideas to scare people into doing bad things. [Or worse, to induce them into doing them for their own ends.]
I was just struck again by the numbers given above. 68 people, in the dark, in a space with 415 sqft? Ranging from 50 inches to 30 inches high? With supposedly some space left free for hot rocks to be brought in?
The only way that comes close to working is cheek-to-jowl, curled up in roughly the fetal position. There's no way to get out even if you want to, because there's literally no room to move past people, or even over them.
I think I'm going to go have nightmares now.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden #37:
Thing is, I'm distressed by fraud and folly, so I try to force them to make sense by writing about them.
I understand completely. It gave your brain a powerful itch.
And when Teresa's brain has an itch, it gets scratched thoroughly and completely, with footnotes, citations, historical and cultural context, and unassailable reasoning. In four part close harmony. In Middle English if it supported her argument.
We watch in awe.
Nightsky @50: On the other hand, "Peggy Sue et le Fantomas" might actually be quite amusing.
We now return you to your regular scheduled bumbling killer ...
There is no real spiritual power.
Maybe there isn't. But there is a wide variety of practical experience, built up over many years, about the ways humans think and behave and what happens to their bodies under various conditions.
So, maybe sweat lodges work to expand your knowledge or maybe they don't, but there's a reason you don't make 'em out of impermeable materials, that you have no more than a dozen or so people inside 'em, that the time spent inside is limited, the folks who are there are well hydrated, and those folks are encouraged to bail out if they start feeling bad.
dave @63:
You can't criticise one kind of woo by saying it's getting dangerously close to invoking another kind of woo, which you happen to think is real, and expect to be taken seriously.
Oh, you most certainly can. Indeed, I have seen it done right here on this website. It may not get taken seriously by you, but you are not the Lord Arbiter of the Internet.
Now, I appreciate that this kind of brute-force approach to reality might be seen as insensitive, but alas, I don't care.
Feel free not to care on your own blog then, because on this site, we treat other commenters with respect, even if their views differ from ours.
If the next comment you post does not actively contribute to the conversation, instead of merely sneering and asserting your superiority, you're banned from Making Light.
Not because your views are somehow too controversial for our tiny and (in some cases) superstition-befuddled minds to handle, but because your conversational pattern is really boring:
I was going to demonstrate how all but four comments in your (view all by) fit this pattern, but frankly, it's not worth my effort.
I'm not an expert on paying for spiritual guidance... but is it normal to pay $10,000 to not eat, not drink, and not breathe air?
From my very limited experience with self-help people, their line is that they're doing THIS because they want to share their happiness. If that's your line, how do you really justify exceeding expenses?
Then again, paying more money sometimes makes people feel MORE comfortable for what they're getting regardless of what it is. (In America, I'd be nervous about buying sushi for a dollar a plate, out of fear of bad fish... because I don't feel able to judge safety myself... see also Bruce Schneier's stuff about assymmetric knowledge in the security industry?) is that the sort of thinking that makes somebody pay $10,000 to be deprived of bodily needs? (assuming I'm interested in being deprived in the first place))
Well, you asked, I answered. I refer you back to the brief comment #56 to which I was responding. To my mind, the assertion that there are "real spiritual powers" out that that will, I paraphrase, mess you up if you mess with them is at least as offensive as anything I might have said. It is offensive on several levels:
1. It asserts esoteric knowledge, and by implication power, to which the knower has access and others do not, placing the knower in a position of superiority to them;
2. It creates the conditions for the use of such superiority for the exploitation of others, by encouraging them to place faith in the knower's version of a 'higher' reality not accessible to evidence and testing, and subjecting them to manipulation;
3. It denigrates the millennia-long struggle for human knowledge to be freely and equally accessible to all, and not subject to the whims of a priesthood;
4. It, of course, denigrates by implication every other form of non-compatible 'spiritual' belief, asserting their falsity by the very act of asserting its own truth [I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, less bothered about this one than the others].
5. Finally, like all assertions of a higher reality to which mere materialists have no access, it denigrates me, and others like me, as inferior beings.
Therefore, for all these reasons, I am offended by such statements. That seems to matter. Normally I would say, with Stephen Fry, 'So fucking what?' to my own offence; but you have made offence the currency of the discussion.
In my first response to the offensive remark above, I was merely lightly allusive, indicating to the party concerned that there might be certain difficulties with accepting as valid the assertion of what they sought to assert, when seen from outwith their own frame of reference. You asked me to clarify, I did. Now I have again, because, on the basis of my clarification, you condemned me as offensive. If you want to ban me for it, go ahead. But I invite you to reconsider which is more fatal to civilised discourse: to ask that discussion, if it is to be free, adheres to minimum standards of openness and rationality, or to demand in the name of 'respect' that esoteric assertions be accorded the same validity as empirical facts.
dave @70:
Well, you asked, I answered. I refer you back to the brief comment #56 to which I was responding.
See point two of my list of your conversational patterns.
Now I have again, because, on the basis of my clarification, you condemned me as offensive.
Point three.
But I invite you to reconsider which is more fatal to civilised discourse: to ask that discussion, if it is to be free, adheres to minimum standards of openness and rationality, or to demand in the name of 'respect' that esoteric assertions be accorded the same validity as empirical facts.
I had a bet on with myself that you'd play the "you must tolerate my intolerance" card. That's 20 Euro to charity.
Goodbye, dave.
Margaret Organ-Kean, #52: I am wondering if part of his willingness to do this, as well as his client's willingness to follow him, is related to, well, a lack of education about/knowledge of spiritual things?
I think it's more directly related to a lack of education about/knowledge of biology, medicine, and physics.
Nightsky, #50: The mention of that French series reminds me of James Thurber's essay "Wild Bird Hickock and His Friends," about French dime novels in which Wild Bird Hickock took the baths in Atlantic City at the advice of his physician, and sheriffs greeted rough strangers with "Alors, je vais demander ses cartes d'identité!"
As an aside. Anyone want to bet that Ray vanishes? I am kind of surprised the sheriff just let him go and did not hold him at least. They could have held him for 24-48 hours.
I've had heat stroke (I was a kid and my stupid cousin thought I was being a wimp when I started complaining.) Luckily my mother stopped it right before I threw up. I can very much see people not wanting to get out of there to show they are strong and not quitters. It's not about being dumb at that point.
abi, with all due respect, your banning of dave really bothers me. I share his position; that there is no supernatural. I am aware that just stating this position offends people who do believe in some sort of supernatural or other. I have exactly two choices: keep quiet about it out of respect for them, or speak, and offend them. Of course I can try to cushion my speech in disclaimers and verbal acts of peacemaking, and I usually do so. But the fact still remains that I do consider their deeply held and most intimate and genuine beliefs woo. And that is offensive no matter what terms it is couched in.
For the record - I don't think believers are deluded fools. They have good reasons to be believers. I just happen to think they are wrong. But I do feel like I had to append this appeasement, because I am afraid that otherwise my position would be taken as offensive. Is that fair?
I know I'm far from a frequent commenter here, but for whatever it's worth I agree with Anna @75.
For what it's worth, Abi's analysis (in her #68) of the late commenter "dave's" modus operandi seems spot on. There's nothing wrong with a rigorously materialistic view of the world, but if you're consistently using it as an excuse to be a jerk to others, you're no more charming than any other kind of jerk.
Life is short and there are other interesting things to talk about, including in this very thread. Best of luck to dave in his internet travels--elsewhere.
Charlie Stross: On the other hand, "Peggy Sue et le Fantomas" might actually be quite amusing.
And "Mary Sue et le Fantomas" is one of those disturbing ideas that I'm sure will show up at 3:00 a.m. in the future when I'm trying to sleep. Urk.
Anna @75, I think Dave @63, 71 was banned for being a jerk, not for his view that there is no supernatural. I did go back and read most of his (view all by), and he's got a history of being a jerk. The internet's a big place; I'm sure he'll find somewhere that amuses him.
B. Durbin@19
My impression is that both the Moslem fasting during Ramadan and the Jewish fasting for Yom Kippur do not include water during the period of actual fasting.
Of course, neither of them include fasting periods of anywhere close to 36 hours.
(From what I gather, the Ramadan fasting is dawn to dusk, and the Yom Kippur fasting is just over 24 hours.)
Anna @75 and Ian @76:
Dave's banning really had nothing whatever to do with his views on religion; it was entirely to do with his manner of engaging other people. Read his commenting history; his pattern really is as repetitive and disrespectful as I've described.
He was already on thin ice after this comment in the headscarf thread. And I could find no case where a comment of his improved the conversation to the same extent that his pattern has tended to damage it.
Now, I don't even have to look at either of your commenting histories to think of times I've found myself giving that little nod of "yes, that" at something you've each said. You both contribute materially to the conversations that you grace with your presence, and I'd love to see you both more on Making Light.
$9,695? I can kill you for half that money.
Michael I--it's also worth noting that fasts for such things as Lent, Ramadan, and Yom Kippur have limits on them for people who are not in good shape for them physically (frex, diabetics), or who are otherwise in a situation where fasting might be unwise--soldiers on active duty in the field are speciifically exempted from Ramadan fasting, as are women who are pregnant or nursing. The rules are often not expected to apply to very young children, as well. This is because these rules were thought up by people with good sense.
Ramadan and Lenten fasting are also good examples of conditional fasting--Ramadan by when one is allowed to eat, and Lent by what one is allowed to eat. Both also have safety valves; as I understand it, if you can just make it to nightfall in Ramadan, you can eat what and as much as you like, and in Lent, Sundays and other major feasts are officially-sanctioned days off. Athough the faster experiences limits, and may be deprived of some favorite foods in Lent, they aren't subjected to severe physical stress.
I had a professor who used Lent and Advent fasts as a diet mechanism--since the traditional forms for these fasts are vegetarian* (or even, in the most traditional, vegan)--fish is a later loophole, or so I'm told--they were a helpful way to cut back on high-calorie foods, and since she was combining them with a course of spiritual study, she said she found she didn't resent the deprivation nearly as much.
*It is no doubt entirely coincidental to the rules of Lenten fasting that in pre-modern European and Middle Eastern agrarian societies that by late February or March most people would be running out of stored animal-based foods anyway, and that things like eggs for eating, fresh milk, and fresh butter would be short on the ground, since you'd be letting the hen set whatever eggs she had to have chicks come spring, and the cows, goats &c. either wouldn't be giving milk as they were close to giving birth or else already had, and the milk had to go to their offspring.
Yes, I know that was an awfully long sentence.
Carrie V @31 The problem I find with all these "programs" that promise you your "heart's desire" is that most people don't know what their "heart's desire" really is. They want to be rich and happy, or think they do, and they want getting those things to be easy.
There's an old Barry B. Longyear book called The God Box which involves a character in a fantasy world who acquires a box that gives him whatever he most needs at the moment. Not, note, whatever he wants. I found it thought provoking as well as amusing.
Anna @75:
Reading this comment, and comparing it to dave @70, I hit this minimal pair that illustrates what I'm getting at.
Quoth dave:
To my mind, the assertion that there are "real spiritual powers" out that that will, I paraphrase, mess you up if you mess with them is at least as offensive as anything I might have said.
While you say:
But the fact still remains that I do consider their deeply held and most intimate and genuine beliefs woo. And that is offensive no matter what terms it is couched in.
You are worrying about the effect of your beliefs on other people. You care about mitigating that impact (Of course I can try to cushion my speech in disclaimers and verbal acts of peacemaking, and I usually do so.).
By contrast, dave is focusing on the effect of other people's beliefs on him, even if they weren't addressing him at all. Meanwhile, he doesn't give a toss about how he affects them. (Now, I appreciate that this kind of brute-force approach to reality might be seen as insensitive, but alas, I don't care, from comment 63).
And that, as they say, made all the difference.
#74 Anyone want to bet that Ray vanishes?
Now Radio Ray is a goin' hound
He's goin' yet and he ain't been found.
The police have his picture but they got it too late
'Cause since he's been goin' he's lost a lot of weight.
-- Aimee Semple McPherson
OtterB @ 85... That reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode What You Need, which itself was based on a Lewis Padgett story.
Bruce E. Durocher II # 78: Right now Peggy Sue et le Fantômas fut mariés (if I got the verb right) is going through my head; starring Kathleen Turner and Nicholas Cage.
fidelio @84: My grandfather, straight off the boat from Italy, had a serious problem with the Lent fasting after watching the priests as an altar boy. He'd see them eat what they wanted and get drunk off the remaining sacramental wine.
From what I can recall, Lent fasting has from the earliest been a bit of a crap shoot depending on where you were. And I think it was actually St. Augustine who pushed the vegan ideal onto it pretty hard. And yes it was always done sanely. They made a lot of changes over the years to allow people to, well, not die or get seriously sick.
What never ceases to amaze me is how people can totally and completely misunderstand how to do something because they barely read about it or don't really care. You don't even need common sense to know a closed room with very high heat exposure should be bad.
@87: Never heard that one before, it's perfect! Time for me to consult with the googles I think.
Laurence Gonzales in his excellent DEEP SURVIVAL observed "Sometimes an 'expert' is someone who's gotten away with a really stupid thing a couple of times."
In the greater scheme of life, taking out the time to question authority, asking if assertions add up, asking 'who profits from this?', and giving thought to whether the butterflies in your stomach are onto something are all good survival mechanisms.
I'm amazed at the willingness of people to throw their money at clowns who put together a half-baked mess of mysticism, exotic ritual, and plain hokum, in the hope that this will overcome the difficulties of their lives. It's no different from what is promised by evangelicals in bad suits. By the Lads from Lagos is ungrammatical emails. Or, for that matter, by Lush Rimbaugh.
Give me your hope, and I will make you richer/better/happier. But first, I need your trust/love/bank account info.
My father got heavily involved with that Landmark Forum for a while. Spent a huge amount of money on "life-changing" seminars; alas, it did not have any long-term effects that I could see. (He could certainly use some life changing.) At the time he was very excited about it, though.
The second seminar he attended happened to be right down the street from where I lived in Alexandria (VA) at the time. Although their time was very tightly scheduled (on purpose, I'm sure), he invited me to ride up to the Baltimore aquarium one afternoon with him and some friends from the seminar.
They spent the ride there enthusing about the seminar and the ride back trying to recruit me. Any requests for concrete information ("what do you do at these things?") was met with "well, come to the free session and see."
The insidious bit was the way they raved about how [massive life issue, e.g., a divorce] was clarified and/or solved outright, and then asked whether I had an issue to be worked through. Doesn't everyone? The clear expectation is that if you answer yes, you're agreeing to come to the recruiting session; if you answer no, you're in denial. That kind of pressure from friends or family members is very powerful.
(Also, where my dear father thought I was going to get several thousand dollars for this seminar, I have no idea.)
For all I know, the people attending that seminar really did go home and change their lives. I've yet to see any evidence of it, though.
Fragano @ 89... Close enough. It should be 'furent', but my metaphorical hat to you, monsieur.
James Macdonald @ 50:
Yes, we do have our own mystical traditions. But it's well-known how one goes about becoming a Catholic, and paying a thousand bucks to sit in a hotel ballroom for a weekend isn't part of it.
I think this is extremely important. We're familiar with it, so it's mundane and uninteresting; it's part of the background unless you already partake of or are interested in the tradition. Ah, but those other people around the world have belief systems that are exotic and interesting, not stodgy and Western. And you have to learn about them somehow.
Scott @ 70:
Then again, paying more money sometimes makes people feel MORE comfortable for what they're getting regardless of what it is.
It also helps to encourage people to apply the sunk cost fallacy. They've already paid at least $10k, probably more because they do it multiple times, so they can't admit to themselves that they're wasting their money.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan @ 75:
You don't have to be a believer in any kind of magic or mystical to recognize that what the people in Lee's example were attempting to do, if given any real thought, was particularly nasty. Likewise, Ray here is abusing something that has power, whether you see it as mystical or something that 'merely' alters the physical, to make scads of money.
Michael I @ 80:
Also, fasting for Yom Kippur, Ramadan, or Lent does not include extreme physical stress.
Quick side question here: I'm Jewish, and always thought that standard Jewish practice was avoid drinking water (or other fluids) when fasting. But I know that my family often got standard practices slightly wrong, because the generation two before mine was atheist and didn't want to talk about that sort of detail. Am I mistaken here?
Regarding fasting and safety valves -- absolutely crucial. In any Jewish group I belonged to, it was understood that no ritual was supposed to actually endanger safety. The shorthand here was "choose life" -- it is good for people to be living and healthy, and they shouldn't worship in ways that damage that. It's important that this not only be understood by each individual, but that everyone knows that their companions know it, so that it feels safe to admit you don't feel well.
Also, although Yom Kippur (and some other fast days) are 24 hours, they start at sunset and one often goes to bed early that night. I'm only really aware of fasting from the time I skip breakfast until sunset the next day, about 12 hours. I'm sure it would be much harder to go to bed hungry.
James Arthur Ray
"It's a death ray. Why don't you call it a death ray?!"
- Jack on Eureka
DavidS @ 96:
It is standard practice to avoid water, however standard practice also does not involve sweating out what little water you have left in an ill-constructed sweat lodge and makes exceptions for the sake of health. The saving of life comes well above the requirement to fast. It's not a test of how macho you are.
Larry #90: Here are the complete lyrics and tune. A ballad about (another) spiritual con artist, written by Pete Seeger.
I'm sure that Dave will find a more congenial forum. Personally, I'm a lot more polite here than I am in some other fora, because civility is the mode here. That's fine with me. On PZ Myers's blog, I might be a bit tarter. On [Title Withheld] I'm positively acidulous. Avoiding smartassedness isn't always easy; I got punched out for it a lot when I was a kid, and it's a hard habit to break.
Maybe someone else addressed this point earlier, but the point of Christian fasting (and maybe Yom Kippur and/or Ramadan) isn't altering your brain chemistry or what not; it's to remind you of your religion.
This plugs into a couple basic bits of the human experience, especially w.r.t. self-improvement.
As an adult, a lot of what you do to improve yourself or your life involves ignoring some levels of unpleasantness or discomfort or even pain. For example, eating less food to lose weight is unpleasant--it involves ignoring fairly urgent signals from your body, signals that evolved to keep you alive but now are encouraging you to kill yourself by overeating. Quitting smoking, or getting regular exercise, or forcing yourself onto a stable schedule, or leaving an abusive lover--all those involve ignoring discomfort and psychic pain. And yet, that's a necessary part of self-improvement, of bettering your situation in life. No pain, no gain.
Similarly, when you learn an entirely new thing, you usually have to start out taking a lot of stuff on faith. I can teach you the basics of cryptography in a few days, but you're going to have to take a lot of stuff--from the hardness of the discrete log problem, to the idea that iterating a weak cipher a lot of times with different keys can get you a strong one, to some notion of what randomnes means--on faith. Later, you can play around with those ideas, even prove them wrong. But not till you've spent some time in information-absorption, taking-it-on-faith mode. (Or maybe you can prove each step, but I think it will take you a long time to learn something new, then.)
And religion is a fundamental part of the human experience--not universal, and some people find little worthwhile in it[1]--but a big part in many lives. Religion fundamentally involves faith, and many social movements, even atheistic ones like Marxism and Objectivism[2], use the same mechanisms of faith and belief in a community and heresy and doctrine. Again, religion requires opening yourself up to being conned, because it requires faith and an accepting spirit in some sense[3].
These are basic things you have to be able to do to improve yourself and your life, to make things better and learn new stuff. And yet, they also involve opening yourself up to con men and deluded fools.
I infer that conmen of this kind shall be always with us, because they exploit necessary and valuable parts of the human experience. Like a virus that uses some critical receptor on the surface of a cell to gain entry, these guys make use of stuff we need, and so can't easily get rid of.
[1] Not all people participate in all such things. I find that the "team spirit" experience mostly leaves me cold, in much the same way my dad just doesn't find religion to be interesting or rewarding or meaningful.
[2] Was it Charlie Stross who had the Objectivist Marxists in one of his books?
[3] As I write this, I find myself wondering whether this is universally true, and particularly wondering what Xopher might have to say about it.
Xopher @ #33
Wait.... I thought those were called conventions. Are you proposing Making Light start it's own "SpiriCon"?
#29 ::: Lawrence:
Not only is Ray's business cargo cultish in regards to business, it's cargo cultish so far as religion is concerned.
Imitation without full understanding is a basic part of how humans learn and play, but it's risky if you don't have a teacher, and riskier if you shut down the rest of your mind.
In re the safety valves built into Ramadan and Yom Kippur: Does anyone know if they were there from the beginning, or added after a while when it became clear that they were needed?
I'm pulling together a theory that a lot of Americans (I can't speak to other cultures) don't know what it means to be competent at something. This is a much more serious problem than any specific ignorance or incompetence.
I do have some belief in woo, but even if one doesn't, it quite plausible that if you're vigorously pursuing a project, what's on your mind and in your emotions at the time is going to shape it.
Framing it as what spirit you're invoking might be useful.
...the point of Christian fasting (and maybe Yom Kippur and/or Ramadan) isn't altering your brain chemistry or what not; it's to remind you of your religion.
That forty days in the wilderness stuff suggests there may at one time have been those who thought otherwise.
68 people?! The sweat lodge I participated in had a half dozen attendees. And $10K to attend -- unbelieveable.
The most I've ever paid to attend a Pagan/Wiccan event (PSG) was $120 -- for a week at a private campground. The money went for campground and portapotty fees.
That one had 2 dozen people on its emergency staff -- EMTS, MDs, and RNs, plus a psych contingent. The difference between Newage and Pagans -- we damned well take care of our fellow attendees!
@102: That is a good point. From a Roman Catholic perspective (I was raised as such) it's about the sacrifice. It's a mix of payback to Jesus for dying for us, a way to emulate his sacrifice, and a showing of devotion to God by doing so. It's meant to show piety not reveal new things due to altered states of being.
That is how they presented it when you heard about saints and what not fasting and doing stuff. It was because of the pious nature they showed and the intense faith.
Serge @ 88: Fascinating. I haven't read the Padgett story, but the first thing that came to my mind was Theodore Sturgeon's story "Need."
I suppose it's a common enough riff to have two stories (at least) based on similar ideas.
Carrie 31:
People who have a good idea what their heart's desire actually is generally don't need anyone telling them how to get it.
I've been trying to figure out what makes my spiritual practices different from the kind of thing illustrated in this post (aside from the fact that I'm not interested in endangering my life or paying somebody tons of money to tell me things I can figure out for myself) and I think that pretty much nails it.
Margaret Organ-Kean 53:
I am wondering if part of his willingness to do this, as well as his client's willingness to follow him, is related to, well, a lack of education about/knowledge of spiritual things?
Furthermore, you can educate yourself about these things very cheaply. Any library will (hopefully) have some good books that describe safe, basic techniques for experimentation.
Ray's focus on nonconformity really struck me. Because we all hate conformity, right? But telling someone "Listen to your heart" is not the same thing as telling them "Listen to me telling you to listen to your heart, and pay me for these words of wisdom."
Lots of spiritual traditions stress the importance of having a teacher/guru/intermediary of some sort. I've always been mistrustful of such people . . . and this post is why.
Beth Friedman @ 109... Besides, two writers(*) using the exact same starting point will wind up in very different places, by virtue of the differences in their imagination's landscape, if not simply because of their voices being different.
(*) three in this case as Padgett really was Henry Kuttner & Catherine L Moore
Victoria #104: I'd say that in the spirit of multiculturalism, affirmativeness, openness, and experimentation it should be called ConSpiriSí.
There seems to be a real connection between "hucksters tapping into things they don't understand how to do safely" and "pagans taking care of their own." Those without a spiritual community surrounding them - people who are members of a mainstream religion but want to dabble in mystical experiences, say, or someone who's searching for the spiritual path that's right for them but hasn't found it yet - are not necessarily more gullible, but more likely to be caught up in a situation without proper safety nets.
LDR, one reason for the teacher/guide/guru is to have someone to test your ideas and inspirations against--someone who will test you when you think you've come up with The Answer, or even just An Answer--and they aren't in it for their benefit; they're there to help you; generally the reason for this is because someone helped them at some point, and they ought to pay it forward. Another reason for the "master" is for there to be a person of some experience available who can say "Stop that; it's not safe" or "Are you sure you're ready for this? Ask yourself carefully why you want to do this now, and make sure you tell the truth."
Socrates, as Plato depicts him, was operating along those lines in some ways, although not so much in a sense of spiritual discovery. He asked people awkward questions about what they believed about the way their social world worked, and why, and then picked away at their answers until they (supposedly) had a better understanding of things.
You are free to imagine how someone like that would have dealt with the notion of paying big-timecashmegabucks for a weekend of badly-mixed superficial woo. Please share the results if they're entertaining.
#99 A ballad about (another) spiritual con artist, written by Pete Seeger.
Sung by Pete Seeger, yes, but written by him? I doubt it. Mr. Seeger was only seven years old when the events in the song took place.
--------------
Speaking of plastic medicine men, shall we mention the loathsome Montague Summers, who (based on the fact that he could read Latin and owned a cassock) claimed to be a Catholic priest (although no record of his ordination exists nor did he belong to any diocese) and went whipping around early-twentieth century England writing books (including the first (and badly flawed (perhaps deliberately so)) translation of the Malleus Malificarum, which has been getting folks into mischief ever since). His Witchcraft is a thing of wonder. He starts out by describing the ability of street magicians in India to grow a mango plant from a seed to fruiting bush in a matter of moments, as attested by British officers of unquestioned veracity, and from this that these street magicians really were growing these plants by supernatural means, that they were doing so by the power of Satan, and from this that therefore Satanic Witchcraft is real and various persons during the middle ages and renaissance were genuinely in league with Satan and were no-kidding flying around on broomsticks, cursing cattle, and otherwise misbehaving.
That Summers' books are pure bunkum should go without saying, but they are still widely referenced in the Satan-hunting community today.
I forgot to mention that the seminar-giver regarded himself as a highly moral and positively-principled person because he tithes to the religious branch he is a member of and didn't squeeze for every cent possible when property flipping. Barely legal tax evasion and exploiting every loophole and lobbying for more, weren't things that bothered him in the least though, and he was an enthusiastic proponent of and partisan for the oligarchy 2001-2008.
As for addictive group experiences etc., going to F/F conventions and participating on Making Light, are experiences that are a lot more freeform, creative, and inexpensive than getting sucked into being an expensive seminars-for-profit attendee. But then, I doubt if the regulars here tend believe in "Come attend my Seminars for $10,000 each and that will fulfill your life self-ctualize you..."
For that matter, the US Civil War allowed people to avoid the draft by paying someone else to go into the military in their stead... in some ways this stuff seems to me to be a related type of vicarious buyout....
I was delighted to see Teresa's write up of this, as I'd been following it since the story broke. One thing I've been noticing *missing* from the coverage, however, is really interesting. What, exactly, was the intention of the work?
What I've seen out there in public is general statements about being a spiritual warrior - but very little about how this stuff (vision quest, fast, sweat) is necessarily supposed to help make that happen, other than demonstrating that you've got enough stubborness to make it through the sequence. That's not only bad ritual design, but it's really bad teaching design.
It is, however, very good brainwashing technique, to have lots of vague and generic good things that will happen if you just follow the recipe without actually working through the steps inside your own head attentively and consciously.
On the issue of risks in ritual and related experiences: I'm a priestess in a Wiccan-influenced religious witchcraft tradition. We have practices that have risks - some that could be health risks in some settings, some that could be mental well-being risks, because we're doing work aimed at self-transformation, which always has that risk.
However, when I talk to people about this, I compare it to something equivalent to learning to drive a car. Cars have risks, if we don't know what we're doing. And there's some risks from just being on the road, because there are other things out there we don't control.
However, we can learn how to mitigate those risks. We learn to drive slowly in parking lots and low traffic, starting in a parking lot, not on a winding road at high speed in bad weather. We learn to use the safety tools available (a well-maintained car, a seatbelt, lights, signals). We have agreed upon community rules that help keep things working smoothly (traffic lights, signs, ways to handle types of situations). We practice with someone else around who can give us feedback. And we should be (we hope) taught to figure out when we just really should not be driving (because we're exhausted, have been drinking, whatever.)
None of this makes driving a car 100% safe. But it makes it a risk that most of us are not only willing to take on, but take on daily.
I teach people I talk to in my religious community to look for the same kind of thing in ritual and group work. Are people taking the fact there *are* risks seriously? Do they provide education in advance, so you can make a reasonably informed choice and ask specific questions based on your own needs? Do they know you well enough to make thoughtful suggestions about what makes sense for you right now, or (in the case of public events) design so that the risks are minimal and there's enough support around if someone has an unexpected problem?
A week workshop doesn't provide a chance for the leader(s) to know the individuals well enough to make that judgement. And yet, it also doesn't provide enough time for much education about the specific demands of each step, unless someone's very careful and organised about it. Both of those should be big warning signs.
(Oh, and Jim et. all: I consider one of my basic obligations as a priestess to have my first aid and CPR requirements reasonably up to date. We haven't had major issues in my nearly 10 years doing fairly intense ritual work - but we have had occasional moments of faintness, blood sugar issues, and similar things that could get nasty if not handled sensibly.)
I have participated in Native American Church sweat lodge ceremonies.
I've seen sweat lodges that could hold up to 20 people, no more. The leader of the ceremony is always very aware of the state of the participants. If Anglos are present, they often open the lodge two or three times during the ceremony.
The point is not to "build neural connections". It is to make a sacrifice of your suffering in order to speed your prayers to god. The hottest sweat I ever attended was held to pray for a young man who was going to Sun Dance. He was about to attempt something very difficult, and so it called for stronger prayers. But even there, the lodge was opened between rounds of prayers and singing.
It's very troubling to see con men abusing the religious practices of another culture to make money, and then have them do it so badly that people die.
Beth Friedman @109 and Serge @111, I haven't read either the Padgett or the Sturgeon stories. I'll have to look for them. I suppose all of this belongs at least loosely to the ancient genre of cautionary tales with morals like "be careful what you wish for."
Given the current economic climate, industry analysts say it may seem incongruous for those in need to spend this kind of money.
Somebody is surprised that in times of FUD snake oil sales are up? Especially with the cult of personal responsibility that denies such ancient truths as "shit happens", throwing all of one's money and energy at changing one's self instead of at least trying to change the circumstances, snake oil can be expected to be the only growth market in an economic downturn.
Teresa @ 11: I know it sounds dumb. Why didn't they get up and leave? I'm convinced it's in part because they'd repeatedly been instructed to ignore the inner voices that were telling them to get the hell out of there.
Anything useful the inner voices might have said has been pre-emptively invalidated by the adverts, the way I read them. That exercise was something which everyone would expect to be extremely uncomfortable and possibly painful. So the thought "I feel like hell, this cannot be right" is used as a sign that everything is on-track.
I have a very bad record of falling for that kind of thing, but even though I'm aware of it, kicking the "it's only good for you if it hurts" habit is hard.
James Macdonald @14: I would expect a lot of CO2, not CO, from how tightly people were packed in an unventilated room. Out of curiousity, is that likely and how dangerous would it be?
KeithS: One of the things I was thinking about earlier was why this sort of thing piggybacks on a distortion of someone else's culture.
Considering some of the stuff that goes as "Christian" in the US, there seems to be no dearth of piggybacking on distortions of one's own culture.
Margaret Organ-Kean @ 52: It strikes me that this person was wielding very powerful tools without having a clue what he was doing with them.
Hearing some drama and psychodrama from these kind of seminars, it seems that the people running them usually have less of a grasp of psychology and group dynamics (or care less) than a halfway experienced D&D DM.
Jenny Islander @ 60: This Utah wilderness weekend sounds like Taize without running water. Though I suspect the Utah desert is a little more dangerous to the inexperienced than Burgundy?
OtterB @ 119... Or the positive side of that old saying. By the way, Padgett's story is quite different from the Twilight Zone episode. For one thing, the former is outright SF while TZ is... well... TZ. It doesn't explain. All things considered, I think TZ's use of the core idea made for a better story.
What's troubling to me as a Pagan is the notion that difficult times motivate spiritual searching, and both the times and the quest are motivated by deep vulnerability. I read about this when it happened and was appalled by it all; the huckster, the PRICE (oh, my Gods!), and the stupidity surrounding the sweat ceremony itself. Truly, this person was a charlatan who had little knowledge of what he was doing, physically or otherwise, except as it pertained to taking money from vulnerable people. Very upsetting.
Serendipitously, I ran across mention of Barbara Erenreich's latest book _Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America_ and her shorter-version blog entry on the topic.
fidelio @114:
Unfortunately I haven't read enough Plato to be able to construct a really good Socratic dialogue. But I can envision the entertainingness of the Ideal dialogue on the subject of "paying big-timecashmegabucks for a weekend of badly-mixed superficial woo." I open it up to contributions from the floor.
It's quite true that a teacher who actually knows better than you and doesn't have too many ulterior motives can be very helpful. But how to find such a person?
James D. Macdonald: I find Montague Summers extremely amusing in small doses. ISTM that if you believe Satan a) exists and b) is virtually omnipotent, then you pretty much qualify as a Satan-worshipper yourself.
I feel absolutely no need to pay $10 k for a newage retreat.
However, I have my eye on this $5000 all-inclusive 7-day dive trip to Fiji... And I'd have more fun...
caffeine @ 93: The insidious bit was the way they raved about how [massive life issue, e.g., a divorce] was clarified and/or solved outright, and then asked whether I had an issue to be worked through. Doesn't everyone?
Exactly. These sorts of programs find people at a low point in their lives, then 'solve' them in their own way. It works as a support group, but people attribute feeling better to whatever magic or philosophy the group preaches, rather than the fact that they're building up a new circle of friends. It doesn't really matter whether it's evangelical Christianity, Landmark Forum, Amway, or what have you.
Nancy Lebovitz @ 105:
The safeties built into fasting on Yom Kippur are noted in the Mishnah, which means that they are, at the very least, 1800 years old, and probably much older.
#123 ::: Janet Croft
Serendipitously, I ran across mention of Barbara Erenreich's latest book _Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America_ and her shorter-version blog entry on the topic.
Erenreich always hits the zeitgeist bullseye, doesn't she? She is being interviewed, provided welcome guest slots, on all the radio talk shows these last two weeks.
I've found this tendency in the U.S. to be ever more disturbing. For me it began when my their 'guardian angels' and the guardian angels of other family members in all seriousness. My mother?????!!!! talking of guardian angels? The strict Lutheran religion in which we were reared, which she practiced, particularly eschewed such concepts as either pagan or Catholic or as ignorant, uneducated superstition. This was about 25 years ago. This is when I knew the nation had changed drastically from what it had been, and that the Enlightenment was effectively being rolled back just about everywhere.
Love, C.
I read “ . . . audience of some 500 people, . . . . $1,297” and my brain goes 500 times 1300, four zeroes, 5 times 13 is 65, 4 zeroes, get the comma in the right place [$650,000] two-thirds of a million, minus costs, net of half a million for just one weekend shit
It was a tragedy long before it was a calamity.
Then there's the earworm: Pe-eggy Sue, Pe-eggy Sue, les Fantomes de do-de-do . . .
Were are the filkers?
Anna 75: To give a personal perspective on what abi said, I am not offended by people who believe different things than I do. I am not offended by your saying so, or even by your saying that you think my beliefs are woo. I'm offended by people who act like my expression of my beliefs is grounds for them to take offense and "retaliate" with whatever level of rudeness they feel like using. I suspect that dave was raised Evangelical, of the proselytizing sort, and hasn't changed his basic character, only the content of his beliefs; now he feels an obligation to Witness and draw others to the Truth that there is no God.
I would never call you stupid and imply that you're evil or gullible because you're not religious. I feel confident, because of the way you've always behaved, that you would never do those things to me because I am.
theophylact 101: Hmm, I took that for a typo. Is there a joke there that I don't get?
albatross 103: Again, religion requires opening yourself up to being conned, because it requires faith and an accepting spirit in some sense[3]. ... [3] As I write this, I find myself wondering whether this is universally true, and particularly wondering what Xopher might have to say about it.
Thank you for thinking of that and of me, and for putting these things so courteously. (I'm glad to see dave banned, but would be crushed and horrified if Anna or Ian were, or even started feeling unwelcome here.) I have a whole lot to say about that, probably more than I have time for right now. I don't think religion requires faith; this is a good thing, because I'm a profoundly spiritual and deeply religious person, but the gift of faith has never been given to me. I believe that reality is really real (pace, Zen, I respect you but you're not for me for that reason), and that science is how we find out about the Universe, and that the Universe is worthy of worship, without its needing to be anything other than what our best science says it is (well, plus the things that science has not yet found out about it; but those things are knowable, just not known).
You don't have to "believe in" (in the usual American sense) gods to worship them, either. Belief/faith is a gift; some have it, others don't, and some lose it or gain it. I have never had it at all. Worship, on the other hand, is a choice. It seems strange to some, no doubt to worship something without "believing in" it, but through worship (and ritual, and (less) prayer) I get benefits I could not otherwise get. None of that compromises in the least my belief in scientific fact or the difference between data and anecdote, etc. The way I put it to a Hindu coworker, I pray to Ganesha every morning ("You're more religious than I am!" she exclaimed) and hope it's OK that while my heart is devoted to Him, my mind has a hard time with faith, because of the deep skepticism and scientism* with which I was raised.
As for "an accepting spirit in some sense," well, you can't learn something if you're not open to learning it. That part is as true of calculus as it is of any spiritual discipline. But I think you mean something deeper than that; a willingness to allow one's mind and ways of thinking to be changed by religious/spiritual instruction or experience. This I do think is essential. A religion that never asks you to do anything differently than you would if you didn't have that religion is no religion at all (to paraphrase Teresa). I think that can open you up to being conned IF you don't have a well-honed bullshit detector to begin with. I always modeled one for my students, and tried to pass some of my skepticism on to them.
For example, there's a watered down, Newagey version of Wicca known to the rest of us as White Light Wicca, or Fluffy Bunny Wicca, or Elves and Strawberries Wicca, and by many other (equally derisive) names. They act like nothing bad ever happens, like they never do anything they regret, like they never have uncomfortable feelings...or at any rate, like such things have no place in their spiritual practice. You won't see Kali or Anubis invoked at their rituals. I believe that the spirit, like the body, has to eat, but also has to shit. Getting rid of what you don't want is important; you can't get rid of it if you don't acknowledge that it's there. Any of my students would roll their eyes at anyone putting out that "only the WHITE LIGHT!!!" crrrap.
Victoria 104 and Fragano 112: I was thinking more in terms of ChocoCon, but hey, the idea of an actual convention (relaxacon, please!) just for Making Lighters sounds very cool.
Jennet 117: Hail and well met. I'd add that when you're doing trance work, you don't let people drive until they're back in a more ordinary state of consciousness!
___
*Bonewits' term. I'm using it here to mean the belief that nothing exists unless we've proved scientifically that it does, which sounds OK until you realize it entails believing that neutrinos did not exist until the 1950s. I find it an arrogant viewpoint. Good scientists are not scientistic; they know that there's all sorts of things they don't know, and that what is neither proved nor disproved is an open question.
Teresa, the samurai reference did not jolt me. I took it as a reference to the "Katanas Are Just Better" trope. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KatanasAreJustBetter
While the site's banner page says TV Tropes, my site mining has revealed an equal number of movie and book references as well. I would say TVtropes.org to be a popular entertaiment reference site. However, the Samurai and their "signature tool" have been codified into pop culture. Nightsky explained the attraction for exotic cultures better, and with examples, so I'll just ask you to re-read comment #32.
I read the excerpts from James Arthur Ray's "message" as a mix of pop culture and pop science references spin doctored into a self-help format by a confidence man. So, for me, the sudden inclusion of the samurai wasn't jarring at all. In fact, it more or less rang true -- if one buys into the "I'm Superman and you can be a Superman, too!" worldview. Ignoring, of course, that he's actually holding classes on how to be Batman...with a sword.
Also, Peruvian Mysticism blending neatly into Samurai-ness does make sense if one assumes that a Tom Cruise-esque samurai equals Jackie Chan flicks equals Kung Fu (the movie and TV series) with some "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" added for color.
Fragano Ledgister @ 112.
I like that much better. So the next question is where? And when?
Victoria #131: Good point. Also, how we can persuade Xopher to be Guest of Horror, I mean, Honour?
Anna, Iain, you may not be the most frequent commenters here, but we value your presence. *I* value your presence.
Dave didn't get zapped for being an atheist. Lots of people here are outright atheists, including Avram, and lots more are some finely-graded variety of doubter, disbeliever, denier, or "I'm sorry, my brain can't even process that as information." The shades and gradations of belief are just as various. We respect them all.
Orthodoxy at Making Light has always consisted of making good conversation. The sole exception I can think of was a period lasting a few days when we avoided a certain topic until the urge to shed blood had passed, and that was practical, not political.
Back to Dave. Abi's comment to him was very precise. He got zapped for being a sneering, unpleasant, non-interactive jerk. It's a bog-standard trollish interaction: he thinks we can't handle his opinions (which in fact are unremarkable), when it's his manners that are the problem.
Abi was easier on him than I would have been. I was just about to partially disemvowel his posts -- literally, I was just opening them in separate tabs -- when I noticed your comments, and wrote this reply instead.
abi, I didn't take a look at his previous history (having, alas, spent the whole morning sucked in by Teresa's link, bad Teresa, bad!). On the grounds of his interactions in this thread alone, it seemed a quick ban, but I had no idea that it represented a pattern.
Sadly, I also think that my bar for civility has been set very low by the fact that no matter how much I know I shouldn't, I read Comment is Free under too many Guardian articles and by comparison to your average CiFer even obnoxious people sound reasonable and civil. This afternoon I was musing glumly on how much more I would enjoy my life if I either managed to stop reading CiF or it was moderated even a tiny little bit.
Barabara Ehrenreich was on The Daily Show yesterday talking about her book that is, yes, exactly about this kind of stuff. Much of what she said had already been covered in Bait and Switch: the selling of the power of positive thinking to become Rich and Happy. Jon Stewart introduced her with a "What's up, grump?" And no, B&S is not a happy book. In fact, no reading experience re Ehrenreich has been followed by joy and relief.
She's right, of course. But I wish she was a bit more cheerful about it. I read B&S while I was looking for work and it was instrumental in making me effectively give up. She made the excellent point that all these seminars, motivationals workshops, gurus and so on hammer on the fact that it's your fault, the individual fault, if you are broke/poor/unemployed. And this chimes in with a strong and dark undercurrent in American contemporary outlook: the same that is fed by the Ayn Rand fans at all levels, the same that Charlie Stross was talking about when he wrote about the lack of compassion in American society. (One that is emerging strong and lively in the Daily Mail section of our own voting public, alas).
Ehrenreich also points out that this has another effect, obviously political: if you manage to convince en mass the disenfranchised, umemployed, underemployed, alienated, corporate slaves, that it's all their fault and only their fault and by unleashing the power within they can save themselves, you stop them from uniting and organizing.
And after reading all the links that Teresa provided, one thing keeps resounding in my mind: that all Native Americans who are so mad about the misappropriation of their culture and tradition keep repeating that their rituals are rituals of their community, and that it is damn strange that the same people who seem so fascinated with the Native Indian culture are so indifferent to actual Native Indian people and the plight of their community.
Of course they are: one thing is the flip side of the other. They can't understand why appropriating NA rituals has no sense because the whole philosophy they are investing lots of money and effort and emotional involvement in preaches the exact same opposite of the importance of community.
Another aspect of "spiritual power" and how thinking influences humans has been in the scientific news.
Placebo effect (Reuters), Times online (UK) version, or original Science abstract.
It's not coincidence that descriptions of these types of seminars & self-help meetings sound like cult indoctrination & similar historic versions. The techniques work.
Serge@111: Actually, sometimes Lewis Padgett was Kuttner, sometimes he was Moore, and sometimes he was both. Sort of a Schroedinger's author, though since Moore's death no one can open the box.
Xopher:
. . . through worship (and ritual, and (less) prayer) I get benefits I could not otherwise get.
What is your explanation for how that works?
I tend to think that inappropriate cultural appropriation, for all its problems, is still at root a healthier attitude than xenophobic know-nothingness. At least you're thinking about learning from someone else and some other culture.
Though it is much easier to pick out one or two useful characteristics and admire/imitate/mangle them, than it is to adopt the whole network in which they exist and make sense, and which (sometimes) makes them possible.
(In the reverse direction, there are a lot of, um, interesting misfires on ways to adopt the Enlightenment and the Scientific Method and other fun Western traditions.)
My goodness. This is quite fascinating, in a horrifying sort of way, but I'm sure there was something else I was planning on doing with my day than read all this. I wonder what it was...
While I can't say I know much about sweat lodges or fasting, I have spent a few years working as an archaeologist in the high heat and humidity of DC area summers, including a few notable weeks of record heat index, and a behind-deadlines project that involved 10 hour days digging on a former sod farm with barely a tree in sight. Even with all the air you can breathe, the number one recurring catch phrase/joke is: "Drink more water!"
The other thing that comes to my mind is that this is a classic case of cognitive dissonance in action, and I worry somewhat about the attendees who survived continuing to buy into further of this nonsense. (For those not familiar with it, I highly recommend the book Mistakes were Made (but not by me). The relevant argument is essentially that as most people don't wish to believe themselves to be gullible idiots, when they make a decision such as paying large sums of money, possibly while unemployed, for what a non-invested observer might consider a dangerous and content-free experience, they have a huge invested interest in neither admitting this to themselves nor examining why they might not do so, and thus will often become its strongest defenders.)
I am forced by new data to issue a correction and a sincere apology to Beyond Words.
First the first time in a while I actively at their their "BOOK SALE" sign on the way to work this morning.
Somewhere between the time I stopped paying attention to it and today they replaced the stenciled-letters on white-painted-plywood sign with a spiffier model with their logo on it.
Left open is the matter of how it got there. Did they use some of the profits of The Secret to buy a sign, or did they manifest it with the power of positive thought?
I smell a sequel.
Re Dave, Anna, Xopher at al:
I am a hard-core atheist, I got there via extraordinarily ecumenical Christianity at an American Baptist church associated with a leading theological school that (now) also has a rabbinical college. Early exposure to wild-eyed fundamentalism is certainly a factor as well.
I fully believe in peoples' spirituality. I just believe that it comes from the inside — the brain is a wonderful thing. But knowing that doesn't diminish their spirituality one bit. Sometimes I envy them.
LDR 137: What is your explanation for how that works?
I don't fully understand the mechanism, but I know that it does. That's pretty close to my definition of magic, and yes, implicit in that is the idea that today's magic is tomorrow's science. I suspect that the placebo effect plays a large role. (Hey, it's a real effect...why not use it effectively?)
I have a deep need for ritual in my life. With no ritual, I get unhappy after a few days to a week. I get cranky, in fact. Beginning each day with Ganesha puja lets me have a more settled mind. I also know that no matter how cruddy I feel when I start, I feel better when I finish. (Not "all better" or "completely fine," necessarily, but at least somewhat better.) That means it's good.
Also, since I sing most of it, I get to sing first thing in the morning. Gives me some idea how my voice is doing, but more importantly, singing lifts the heart. I don't know why; again, I have no scientific explanation for it.
I guess the key here is that part of what makes it spiritual practice (instead of mental hygiene or something) is that I don't know how it works, just that it does. FOR ME, not for anyone else.
Republican Gommarah is a book about the current Republican party being dominated by the politics of personal crisis.
In particular, there's a lot about James Dobson (Dare to Discipline), a child psychologist who's built a movement of people who come to him (his staff) for advice, and who then get lots of advertising to push them into political action.
If the teabaggers seem crazy, there's a reason.
Fair warning: I've read about the book, but haven't read it.
I would like all this much better if it were fiction. It works very nicely as fictional villainy. See Purdom's "The Barons of Behavior" (bad guys manipulate neighborhoods to be attractive to particular psychological types, thus making political control easier because propaganda can be precisely targeted) and Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky (dictatorship rules by creating and ameliorating Emergencies).
Anna @134:
And after reading all the links that Teresa provided, one thing keeps resounding in my mind: that all Native Americans who are so mad about the misappropriation of their culture and tradition keep repeating that their rituals are rituals of their *community*, and that it is damn strange that the same people who seem so fascinated with the Native Indian culture are so indifferent to actual Native Indian people and the plight of their community.
Of course they are: one thing is the flip side of the other. They can't understand why appropriating NA rituals has no sense because the whole philosophy they are investing lots of money and effort and emotional involvement in preaches the exact same opposite of the importance of community.
This is a really insightful observation. From my own heavily community-centered worldview, I also think that's why these things end up feeling so promising and unsatisfying at once, so that people go for stronger and stronger doses of the woo-woo each time. There's a need that's not being met, because that crucial component isn't there. It's like eating sawdust: filling but not nourishing.
You know, you should spend less time reading unmoderated comment swamps on the Grauniad and more time on Making Light ;)
Teresa #63:
Thanks for letting me know I made you laugh, it is an especially good day for me to hear something like that.
I was already inordinately proud of that sentence, I had just enough hard lemonade to disinhibit me* and slow my brain down to typing speed, and enough time to polish it.
*spirits wasn't a typo.
I've also seen somewhat from Native Americans that their religion is about their ancestors, and what's wrong with these white imitators who are neglecting their own ancestors?
John 141: I fully believe in peoples' spirituality. I just believe that it comes from the inside — the brain is a wonderful thing. But knowing that doesn't diminish their spirituality one bit. Sometimes I envy them.
When I say "sometimes I envy them," I generally mean "I sure wish I had the good parts of what they have—but then I think of the price they pay, and it's not worth it." Is that what you mean?
If so...well, why not see if you can get some part of what they have without paying that price, or at any rate not paying a higher price than you're willing to?
It's quite possible to sit around in a circle with friends saying "OM" without believing you're aligning your chakras, or connecting with the Soul of the Universe, or Filling Yourself With White Light, or doing anything besides sitting in a circle saying "OM." In fact, the benefits of doing so come most easily when that's all you're doing.
And if it doesn't do anything for you (see how you feel right after, and after sleeping on it), don't do it again. If you don't think it's worth it, or you think you'll feel too silly, or...anything, well, don't do it. I'm not a guru. But if your envy of spiritual people comes out of a lack you feel in your own life, why not do something to fill that lack?
And if the brain is a wonderful thing (and I'm completely with you there!) why not use it (in a new way, I mean, one that makes you happier) yourself? It really doesn't require self-delusion.
Nancy @143: For the sake of nostalgia, an old thread about Dobson and his dog.
Xopher: if you don't mind me asking, what's your definition of "faith?"
My experience is similar to yours, in that I have a spiritual practice that works for me, and something makes it work. I can't/don't understand it completely, but the fact that it does work gives me a sense of faith in this something. It does exist. (Of course, that's only the rational explanation. There are irrational components to it as well.)
But it seems like my definition of faith must be different from yours.
Oh, dear. I'm not trying to criticize you, John, or proselytize you. Apologies; rereading my post (which I swear I read before posting it!) it really sounds that way. I just see someone sitting on the lawn wishing and wishing for a blade of grass, and can't resist telling them "well, pick one!" Sorry.
ConnieH@91:"Sometimes an 'expert' is someone who's gotten away with a really stupid thing a couple of times."
A most excellent point. "C'mon, I've done it tons of times!"
Lori Coulson@107: That one had 2 dozen people on its emergency staff -- EMTS, MDs, and RNs, plus a psych contingent.
This. I can totally see the value of spending a few bux to experiment with fasting and/or other states of altered consciousness in an environment like this, where qualified people are around to look after you and exercise judgment when you aren't able to.
But nearly $10K? And for less than competent criminally negligent supervision?
fidello@114
You are free to imagine how someone like that would have dealt with the notion of paying big-timecashmegabucks for a weekend of badly-mixed superficial woo.
*Ray poofs into existence at Socrates feet at the School of Athens, ~2500 years ago.*
Ray: Hey, Socrates! So I'm having a life-changing philosophical warrior's retreat next week, and I've come back in time just to tell you that I'd be totally honored if you'd come by. It'd be a big draw; plus, you could work on some of your own issues, eh, big guy? *chuckles* We're all going to dress up and pretend to be Spartan warriors, which will enable us to go all Spartan warrior on our problems! *mimes imaginary sword moves* It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dynamicize your life and realizate your destiny! Only a year's wages, which I know you'll agree is damn cheap for finding enlightenment!
Socrates: *shock at the realization that this guy comes from the future*
*despairs*
*kills himself*
Western Civilization: *vanishes*
KeithS #48, inge #120:
There wouldn't have been a significant increase in CO2, it dissipates readily even in that kind of environment. Excess CO2 gets your lizard brain to need fresh air NOW. It might have saved them.
I would actually expect them to have blown off all their CO2 by hyperventilating as their body tried to cool itself any way it could, causing poor O2 uptake. Do not mistake lightheadedness for enlightenment.
It seems to me like he called up a demon he could not put down. Whether or not it was outside his head in any way isn't that important - he was, just as his victims were, enveloped in the mindset-maintaining elements he was using to sell his ideas. Plus he had the feedback of all these people who believed him, and (if he has had as little training as seems likely) his own success really was largely to do with positive thinking of the "I reckon I can fool a lot of people with this" variety.
I think that, on some level, he may have fooled himself. He evoked the Warrior strongly, and that's what he got. The nonsense about not needing sacrifice is, as pointed out by others, non-sense on every level for a Warrior; so when he was in the Warrior mindset, he started to send out tweets which acknowledged the dangers, and the likely results - his conscious mind may not have known what he was doing, but on some level he seems to have had an idea of how it was likely to turn out.
Of course, in the Warrior mindset, he didn't care.
He was trying a half-assed ritual cobbled together from bits and pieces of mythology and mysticism he didn't understand, and the results killed people.
I think that avoiding water for a long religious ceremony is an extraordinarily bad idea from a health perspective. If I want to indulge in an altered state, I'll just read some genre fiction.
LDR: Well, faith means a number of different things to me, but in this context I'm using it to mean "belief without, or in some cases contrary to, evidence." This overlaps and shades into meanings that are more like trust; most people I've asked can't really nail down what they mean when they say they "believe in God."
If I believe in things because I've experienced them myself, that's not faith, that's experience. If I believe something because I trust someone who tells it to me, that's closer, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; this is the very opposite of the certum est, quia impossibile asserted by some people of faith.
I am not a person of faith. I am a person of doubt. If I had to have a motto, it might be "Through doubt, striving; through striving, learning." If someone could translate that into Latin for me I should be very grateful!
I hope enough water has passed under the bridge since the previous reaction to Lee's #57 for me to ask the question that immediately occurred to me (and which a busy-busy late afternoon/early evening, with dinner, kept me from posting earlier)
"Name-compulsion magic" was what caught my eye, even before the rest of the explanation "something that anyone with a little exposure to genuine paganism would recognize as very black magic indeed -- but because those Christians have never looked at any other belief system (indeed, they are forbidden to look), they don't recognize what they're doing at all. And this applies to the leaders as much as to the followers.
That label looks like a mightily condensed package of meaning, and I'd like an explanation, in short words and easily-understood sentences. (I've tried to use my Google-fu, but in the end, decided that there are some unanswered anxiety issues being plucked by the search - and I'd rather trust the folks I've read here to tease out stuff so I could see it better.)
Crazy(and grateful to Teresa for the original post, but - whoa, nellie! - the resultant semi-flashback introspective reaction, it's making tough going)Soph
#156
I think it was Xopher, a year or so back, who commented on some evangelical-fundamentalist students who were writing names on paper and doing stuff to the paper, in connection with prayers for the named.
There's also the churches who burn books by people who don't agree with their views - the latest one I heard about is also going to burn non-KJV Bibles because they believe the KJV is the Only Right Version, along with other stuff, including books by Rick Warren.
I'm hoping for a sudden cloudburst there, if not a full-on thunderstorm. (I don't people to get killed, but having the bonfire drowned out sounds good.)
I've recently started meditating (along with other things more in line with modern medicine) to help manage some long-term stress/anxiety issues that are causing some physical issues. Like yoga, meditation seems to be the shallow end of a deep pool of cultural and spiritual knowledge and practices (including several religions; some of the guided meditations I'm using even call on Christian concepts). I'm primarily interested in meditation in its simplest form, though: sitting in front of a candle for five minutes a day clears my mind like nothing else.
Is this sort of "take what you need and leave the rest" an American characteristic? Is it cultural appropriation? Can it be done respectfully?
Is the sweat lodge disaster the other end of the spectrum from a tea light on a table and a cushion? Are they even on the same spectrum?
I'm not sure if it was me or not, but someone posted a link to an article that talked about the new Christian youth camps where the kids are trained to do everything we hate about proselytizing Evangelicals, like harassing people endlessly and never listening.
In one ritual, they wrote the names of non-Christian (or insufficiently Christian) friends on pieces of paper and nailed them to a cross with the explicit intention of compelling their "friends" through the "power of Jesus" to convert! I can't recall whether they then burned the cross or not; it would certainly align the symbolism appropriately if they did.
From my point of view this is coercive magic (or actively baneful if they burned the cross). It's if nothing else extremely rude and unfriendly. If I were a highschool student and a friend did that to me/my name, I would never speak to them again.
But even from their point of view, I'd have some questions to ask these misguided young people: So, you think the crucifiction was such a good experience that you symbolically crucify your friends? And your intention is to compel them to convert—does that mean you think Free Will, which that would take away from them, is a curse rather than a gift?
Xopher: Okay, that's a very traditional definition of faith. For me, the word that means "belief without, or in some cases contrary to, evidence" is either "stupid" or "crazy."
If I believe something because I trust someone who tells it to me . . .
That's sort of like having faith in the person, isn't it? Are they reliable? Or is there value in the idea because they believe it?
I suppose part of having an open mind is neither to believe nor disbelieve in certain things. Faith in the sense of "absolute certainty" doesn't really enter into it.
Arrggh. 'Crucifiction' was a thoughtless typo, not a deliberate slam on Christianity.
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan @ 75: "I share his position; that there is no supernatural. I am aware that just stating this position offends people who do believe in some sort of supernatural or other."
I share that position as well, but I don't think believing in any particular brand of woo (or in the generalized existence of woo) is necessary to understanding its potential real-world benefits and dangers. Whether or not one considers woo to be genuine, it can clearly have a real and significant effect on how people behave. Behavior is a nice and materialistic criterium, and to the not inconsiderable extent to which woo can effect behavior, woo can be said to have real and objective power.
So: mystical woo which causes/inspires/misleads people into doing things that they otherwise could/would not do is, objectively considered, powerful. Likewise, bits of mystical woo which drive people towards doing dangerous and harmful things that they wouldn’t have done otherwise is, objectively considered, both powerful and evil. Now, I don't know nearly enough about name-compulsion magic to know whether I would agree with Lee that it's evil, but I do think that there's a paradigm under which we could discuss the issue comprehensibly. Or rather, I think that this thread as a whole is an example of it already happening.
(Also, I'm terribly glad we've all been using the word "woo.")
albatross @ 103: "I infer that conmen of this kind shall be always with us, because they exploit necessary and valuable parts of the human experience. Like a virus that uses some critical receptor on the surface of a cell to gain entry, these guys make use of stuff we need, and so can't easily get rid of."
Sadly, yes.
LDR, that's what I was trying to shorthand by saying "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." More explicitly, if someone tells me it's raining outside, and they're not a known habitual liar, I'll probably believe them. If they tell me space aliens have landed in Central Park, then no matter who they are I'll ask why they believe that and what the evidence is.
There are people I'd believe (pending evidence) about the aliens, who if they told me that in 29 CE a man died for my sins, and that only through him will I get into heaven, I still wouldn't believe. That's much harder to believe than the aliens, and no one has ever shown me even marginally credible evidence in favor of it.
I believe in woo (actually, for a Daoist that's even a joke.) I'm not offended by people who don't believe in woo . . . I'm more likely to be offended by people who believe in different types of woo from me, and/or make us woo-believers look bad.
Most importantly, I don't expect people to judge me by anything except my behavior. What I say I believe is almost irrelevant.
Xopher: I agree with you, but I'm not going to criticize Christianity on this thread.
Nancy @ 146: what's wrong with these white imitators who are neglecting their own ancestors?
That might point to a motive for cultural appropriation of that type. Those white imitators know exactly what crap their ancestors were up to (or know that staying ignorant once they look in that general direction will be hard work), so they prefer ancestors that are less well documented.
I have my own variety of woo, but all my husband ever wooed was me.
LDR: Fair enough, but recall that I don't believe it's necessarily wrong to have faith/believe things without evidence. It's just not a path that works for ME. So I actually wasn't criticizing Christianity, just saying why I don't personally believe it.
How much woo would a woo-shuck shuck if a woo-shuck could shuck woo?
Xopher:
If I pick a blade of grass, it is no longer a blade of grass.
I can't imaginer a group of my friends sitting around chanting OM. Chanting Harry Seldon?
Maybe.
You did sound a bit preachy there, but you caught yourself in time.
What I envy, I think, is the idea that the universe is being personally benevolent to them. The universe is clearly benevolent to a degree: we exist after all. But it isn't benevolent to any of us in particular.
John 170: What I envy, I think, is the idea that the universe is being personally benevolent to them.
Ah. I agree, in that case, that the price is too high, and essential to the thing envied.
Xopher: ah, but my Vulcan ancestry causes me to believe that the statement "There is no evidence for that" is a serious insult : )
John Houghton @ 152:
Thanks for the information about CO2.
Chaos @ 153:
I don't think he fooled himself at all. I think he's into fooling other people in order to make piles of money, and he didn't give a wet slap about making sure the experience was safe.
crazysoph @ 156 and Xopher @ 159:
It was Lee responding to Xopher in this post a couple years ago.
caffeine @ 158: Is this sort of "take what you need and leave the rest" an American characteristic? Is it cultural appropriation? Can it be done respectfully?
I don't think it's a uniquely American characteristic, but it does go with the broad caricature of Americans wanting everything without having to put any effort in.
I think that taking parts of other people's cultures can be done respectfully, but it's harder to do. Since they're full-on cultures and religions, they have interconnecting tendrils that you can't just snip off and take any old bit from. All the same, some bits are more easily isolated than others.
Your candle and cushion work for you, and that's fine. You're not pretending that clearing your mind in front of a candle for five minutes now makes you an Authentic Oriental Mystic-Type Person. You're also not taking something large and important to someone else, stripping it of all its cultural context, using it to make money, then waving it in the face of its traditional owners.
Anna Feruglio Del Dan @ 134: "She made the excellent point that all these seminars, motivationals workshops, gurus and so on hammer on the fact that it's your fault, the individual fault, if you are broke/poor/unemployed."
Something my partner and I discuss occasionally is the way in which admitting fault for something is in a perverse way very self-empowering. If something is wrong, and it's your fault, that means that you have the power to fix it. You can change yourself, and thereby change your circumstances. The shoe in the gears is that actually, sometimes it isn't your fault and so no matter how hard you try to fix it, you still fail. Then you start to feel broken, an irretrievable failure. But still--a failure who is the master of your own destiny, not the pawn of forces beyond your control. (Writing this I suddently thought of the Stephen Crane poem: "In the Desert")
Would it be too derailing to mention how interesting I find the full and frank discussion of woo in the most recent section of this thread?
inge @ 120: I would expect a lot of CO2, not CO, from how tightly people were packed in an unventilated room. Out of curiousity, is that likely and how dangerous would it be?
In this case, the room was not completely unventilated; the door was opened for additional hot rocks, so the CO2 levels would be variable. Part of that variability would be how far away from the door each patient was -- further away, less mixing of fresh air, increased heat and CO2 buildup.
The most dangerous component of this mixture was the heat. Hyperthermia kills all by itself -- that's what happens to children and dogs left inside parked cars.
Hyperthermia with hypoxia kills faster. Hyperthermia with hypoxia and hypercarbia probably makes more people sicker and sooner.
Hyperthermia, with pre-existing dehydration, and hypoxia is a recipe for disaster. I fully expect the comatose woman to go into complete organ failure and die from this.
Fragano Ledgister @ #132
Well, where is he located on the globe? Who has access to the kind of chocolate he likes? How much is needed and/or what varieties? How about the bribe of home made truffles?
This whole story is more or less "local" news here in Prescott (same county, different town), and what has struck me most is the recent charge of homicide. What con man posing as a guru, or even deluded type who thinks he *is* one, would want to do away with any of his well-paying followers?
The "spiritual warrior" element mentioned above might have something to do with it, but as for the official charges I can only guess (without further evidence at present) that they're thinking in terms of negligent homicide, since people have gotten ill during previous retreats even though no deaths seem to have occurred.
It's all a sorry mess, and pollutes a beautiful place in a beautiful season (once known as Indian Summer).
Harriet Culver @ 175: I'm not sure about disruptive, but I agree entirely. I'm particularly finding Xopher's take on spirituality fascinating and rather inspiring, although I'm sure that by the time I sort out anything useful I might have to say about it, the thread will be several days out of date.
Do these conversations always move so fast?
(I'm not through reading all the comments yet, but I'll say a few things before I forget about 'em)
Someone upthread mentioned "EST." I used to live with a woman who (extremely briefly) worked for the people putting on those seminars. Her job was to take attendance,track that everybody had the required issued literature,no recording devices, etc.
It was an extremely brief job because, during the second day of a three-day seminar, afdter watching all the people who *really, really, REALLY needed to use the restroom, but were forbidden to do so by the organizers (if you left during a session you were not allowed back in, and your fee was not refunded).
When the more than 200 people were finally released for their potty break,she was (I suspect intentionally) next to a live microphone when she said "Baaaahh, Baaahhh" several times.
Second -- Abi -- in regards to The Poster Who Is Now Gone -- thank you -- You have saved me from saying some things to "Dave" I likely would have gotten my wrist slapped for (at least)
Reading this post gave me one of those nasty sorts of moments of epiphany when I realize just how much worse an even in my past could have been, and thus highlighted that yes, I am the sort of person who could be vulnerable to this kind of thing. It would be much more comforting to believe that I'd never be so foolish as to pay a huge sum of money to a charlatan for the privilege of being physically and emotionally abused. And yet...
Early high school, I decided to go on a mission trip. I was full of the gung-ho adolescent evangelical Christian "We must save the world!" spirit, and more so, I wanted an excuse to travel. So I signed up with Teen Spirit, and spent several months diligently raising the few thousand dollars necessary to go on a proselytizing trip with them.
From the moment I arrived on the compound, I was uncomfortable; partly the literal uncomfortable of being in a hot, damp room packed with other people and a lot of flashing lights and loud music going on during the worship service, partly the sheer culture shock. (Missionary culture, where I'd grown up, != American middle-class evangelical culture, despite a lot of overlap.) And it just got worse as the trip went on: the complete control of where you could go and what you could do* and what you would eat and how much you could take with you and what you could say and who you could talk with... I had one of my three books that I'd packed along confiscated as being insufficiently godly, and there was the constant pressure to Obey Authority. Hanging over everything was the threat that if you broke any rules, they could put you on a flight immediately and send you home to your parents, and your family's expense.
Did I mention not being middle-class myself? The cost of a flight from Bolivia back to Ecuador, and then again to the United States for the upcoming furlough, would have put my parents into a few thousand dollars of debt that they certainly couldn't afford. So in the midst of the constant pressure to conform was the knowledge that I could seriously hurt my family's finances, with a debt that would take years to repay, by breaking any one of the many rules.
But that was just the emotional pressure. The physical pressure was that this form of proselytizing involved doing a fairly physically active dramatic performance several times a day, usually out in direct summer sunlight. We were allowed to pack a single water bottle, which would be our only hydration between breakfast and dinner. (Lunch was provided.)
I came down with some mild illness--a cold, probably. When I told the leaders, they insisted I keep performing, though they graciously allowed me to bow out of any entertainment activities they planned. Within a few days, when I was complaining of fatigue and sore throats and coughing constantly, they added praying out the "demons of illness" to the group prayer every evening. When I started running a fever, they gave me aspirin and prayed harder. When I hadn't slept in three days because of the constant fever, and passed out in the middle of a performance... the leaders tried to convince me to keep going as soon as I regained consciousness, rather than throwing off some of the symmetry of the performance by sitting it out.
When I started hallucinating due to sleep deprivation, they let me sit out the rest of the performances for that day. And their one saving grace is that the following day, they finally took me to a doctor.
I wasn't a stupid kid. I was, by day two of the fever, thoroughly convinced that these people were foolish and dangerous. My parents worked with missionary doctors; I knew full well that the appropriate response to illness was not to only pray about it.
And yet it wasn't until I actually passed out in a performance that I was able to argue against their insistance that I continue. And it wasn't until I was literally hallucinating and unable to form any more coherent arguments of any sort that they got medical attention for me; by that point, I was in no state to request it. What if they had just continued praying? Maybe I would have recovered. Maybe I would have ended up as one of those people where afterwards online commentators shake their head and ask how someone could be so stupid as to keep following an obviously dangerous course of action, just because a person in a position of authority over them tells them to.
* To some extent, I'm sympathetic; being responsible for a large group of teenagers you've never met before, in a country belonging to none of you, for a month straight, is no easy proposition, and so you need some rules. But they went well beyond "some" in that setup.
Namcy Lebowitz @ 143 said: I would like all this much better if it were fiction. It works very nicely as fictional villainy. See Purdom's "The Barons of Behavior" (bad guys manipulate neighborhoods to be attractive to particular psychological types, thus making political control easier because propaganda can be precisely targeted) ...
The scary bit there is that I just finished reading Bill Bishop's _The Big Sort_, about how people are sorting themselves into like-minded communities and avoiding contact with people who don't think the same way they do.* In it he discusses techniques the Republicans deliberately adopted from mega-church evangelists, insurance agents, and real-estate delevopers to do just that: to create and encourage like-minded groupings that can then be more easily manipulated as a group.
(That's one thing I like about Making Light -- I think what we self-select for is intellectual curiousity and a penchant for civil discourse [with an occasional bit of moral outrage], but we don't exclude anyone on the basis of differing opinions IF they can adhere to these norms.)
*I was rather surprised he never mentioned _The Bell Curve_, which raises similar concerns about self-sorting by education.
Haven't read all the comments yet -- there are certainly a lot of them! -- but I've got personal experience to toss into the mix, of a similar type of seminar -- the Excellence series from Randy Revell of Context Associated (also the founder of Lifespring).
The psychological pressure to go along with the program is indeed intense. Context's seminars did not have life-threatening portions, as far as I can tell, but they are psychologically grueling. Overall, I think I did get some good from them, and they probably were worth some reasonable portion of what I paid for them. But for years I've been describing them as part of the Western secular initiatory tradition -- these seminars are actually initiations, and are structured as initiations. (The direct transmission lineage from Crowley to Hubbard to Erhard to Revell is well-documented, for example -- and one of the levels of initiation into the OTO requires one to go out and found one's own religion, the Knight of East and West level IIRC.)
I personally experienced one of those "flip" moments when I was going through one of the advanced seminars, called Mastery, which was basically about learning to ask for help when one needs it. That, and finding a personal totem-figure ("Vision-Quest Light", I think would be a good description). For most of the weekend, they kept pounding into me that there were challenges in my life that I was not up to facing, that I was dissatisfied on a deep level, and a lot more like that. The final night, before the last daytime, I snapped -- and I came to the realization that the biggest problem I had in the present moment was that these people were telling me I had problems, and that I needed their help to get beyond them. And I said that. They graduated me anyway. In a very real sense, I'd "gotten it", as the estians say.
Two points about that particular series: they were quite explicit about the use of the phrase "I attract to me that which happens." They admitted that it wasn't true, but that it was useful as a way to get past falling into blaming others for what's going on (which is a very disempowering way to deal with the world). And they said it was never appropriate to apply it to anyone else's life. I can use "I attracted that to me" as a working hypothesis: I won't say as a general rule that someone else attracted something negative to themselves.
Two good things about the seminars, that have been very worthwhile to me: a firm grounding in the "look at the other person's viewpoint before trying to change something they're doing" approach to making change in the world (that works surprisingly well); and a much deeper understanding of how I personally approach the world. The former was incidental; the latter was (IMO) the primary thing they were trying to teach. The seminars were not all bad, not all good, and if they were high-priced -- in our society, cost is often related to how seriously people will take something.
That said, I really hope Ray gets his ass seriously prosecuted.
Going off-topic here, but question to John Houghton way back @ 30 (or to Jim or anyone else knowledgeable):
105 starts scrambling proteins? That seems kinda low to me. My eldest son regularly went above 105 (via aural thermometer, but repeatable and in both ears) as an infant, with no noticeable damage. And my 9-year-old was up at 105 (aural, repeatable, both ears) just last week with something very flu-ish, and seems to be okay. No fancier treatment than ibuprofen and cool wet towels on the neck and arms.
I'm not bringing this up (and going off-topic) to be disagreeable. I'm seriously wondering what the "danger level" is. At what point would you say more drastic treatment necessary advisable?
Jon, my understanding is that children, especially very young ones, can spike up to those temperatures and take no lasting damage, because the mass of their brains is low enough that the heat dissipates quickly once the fever is no longer driving it higher (and 'spike' is a key word here). It's much more dangerous for adults.
But perhaps I should wait for Jim to weigh in.
Sometimes there are advantages to having to be away from the computer for a while! Thanks to everyone who responded to questions on my behalf (especially KeithS, who saved me from having to do an exhaustive search back thru my View All By).
I'd like to clarify one thing which was not expressed as well as it should have been in my #57. I self-identify as pagan, because it is emotionally comforting to me to believe that there is some variety of (for lack of a better term) Higher Power in the universe. Sometimes I think of this as the Goddess, sometimes as the Force.
However, I am very well aware that just because I find it emotionally comforting to believe this, that does NOT necessarily make it true! I also have a very strong atheist/rationalist streak, and I am not by any means convinced that there is in fact such a Higher Power.
Furthermore, I find nothing objectionable about engaging with those who do believe in the literal existence of a Deity from the position of, "Well, if you believe X, then Y follows from that." Christians clearly do believe in magic (although they don't call it that), so it is perfectly fair IMO to call them on it when they are practicing black magic -- whether I believe in it or not is irrelevant.
I also am finding the subthread on woo interesting. I believe in woo. I am not offended by the statements of other people who do not, or who believe in different variations of it. I usually (nearly universally here on ML, sometimes less so in real life) enjoy interactions that follow up "I believe this" with a side dish of "here's why" or "and here's my understanding of how this differs from your beliefs; shall we discuss?" I'm offended only when it slides over into "and anyone who disagrees with me is a gullible fool, a heathen, or more generally someone unworthy of being treated like a human being."
And yet. I do not hold all beliefs as equal. I find some beliefs pernicious, loathsome, or simply laughable. There is a line between beliefs I respect even if I don't share them, and beliefs I do not respect.
This discussion is making me think about where and how I draw that line.
LDR @164, I agree we should be judged more on our behavior than on our stated beliefs, but intention does matter. So does the consistency between our beliefs and our behavior, or between various parts of our beliefs.
Oh, and heresiarch @169 snort
#129 ::: Xopher
(And forgive me if this has already been answered)
When you asked theophylact 101: Hmm, I took that for a typo. Is there a joke there that I don't get?, I think folks were struck by the possible use of "Avenge" in the new portmanteau word "Avengelical". Or, of course, not. (I liked it, too.)
albatross @ 103
As an adult, a lot of what you do to improve yourself or your life involves ignoring some levels of unpleasantness or discomfort or even pain. For example, eating less food to lose weight is unpleasant--it involves ignoring fairly urgent signals from your body, signals that evolved to keep you alive but now are encouraging you to kill yourself by overeating.
Funny you should mention that. The other day my newspaper ran a glowing front-page article about a real estate agent-turned-motivational speaker who runs very expensive, high-energy seminars for Toronto businessmen, teaching them to lose weight by just not eating as much. According to this guy, weight loss brings happiness, wealth and success. Some of his clients are indeed a lot thinner. It took me the better part of an afternoon to figure out why the article creeped me out. I eventually realized that the reason was because the rhetoric sounded exactly like a pro-ana website. There's a scam for all of us, I guess.
albatross @ 103
As an adult, a lot of what you do to improve yourself or your life involves ignoring some levels of unpleasantness or discomfort or even pain. For example, eating less food to lose weight is unpleasant--it involves ignoring fairly urgent signals from your body, signals that evolved to keep you alive but now are encouraging you to kill yourself by overeating.
Funny you should mention that. The other day my newspaper ran a glowing front-page article about a real estate agent-turned-motivational speaker who runs very expensive, high-energy seminars for Toronto businessmen, teaching them to lose weight by just not eating as much. According to this guy, weight loss brings happiness, wealth and success. Some of his clients are indeed a lot thinner. It took me the better part of an afternoon to figure out why the article creeped me out. I eventually realized that the reason was because the rhetoric sounded exactly like a pro-ana website. There's a scam for all of us, I guess.
I majored in religious studies as well as in physics, so I got a lot of opportunity to contemplate how rituals work in different religions. I bracket my skepticism in order to more fully grok the perspective of someone who does understand their ritual in a supernatural way. But even with skepticism unbracketed, I think that ritual makes meaning, creates thoughts and emotions and affects your construction of reality.
And I mean even such rituals as how you sit down for dinner, whether you greet a friend with a handshake, a hug, or a kiss on the cheek, how you end a conversation. It need not be woo-oriented.
Even woo-oriented rituals still do something even if you don't intellectually accept the woo. I don't mean that they do something supernatural. But they still make meaning, in the way people understand themselves, other people, their relationships with other people, their interactions with material objects.
The jacked-up "warrior" stuff here, and the "sweat lodge" ritual, did create bad meaning -- in a totally non-woo way. They created really unhealthy ways of dealing with your body, for example: ignoring bodily distress signals, searching for holiness and enlightenment by punishing the body (see: Byzantine saints). They caused damaging ways of relating to the other people doing the same ritual: a competitive endurance mindset. They set up damaging ways of relating to yourself: your financial misfortunes are personal failures of belief or morality; if you were a good/enlightened person, you would be rich and happy.
Rituals do stuff. They may or may not talk to gods, demons, or spirits, but they definitely talk to other people, and to yourself. And they show, don't tell -- which is more effective in life as in fiction.
(And obviously, if your ritual includes physically dangerous components that are not handled in a way that prevents or at least mitigates injury, the psych effects will be the less important meanings created.)
Anna @75, abi@several: Hey, I'm a materialist/rationalist too (at least on odd-numbered days :-)), and even without consciously picking up the pattern, I was starting to flinch when I saw "dave"'s byline. (Thanks, Abi!)
Teresa: Thanks for this thorough chronicle and takedown! I wish there were a few folks like you at the major newspapers....
Abuse of Other People's Traditions... well, the knightly virtues (for example) would actually require courage, self-restraint and honesty. Someone already commented about the privations of Christian saints... I'd add "martyrdom" to the list.
Fasting: The practices of Yom Kippur, Lent, and Ramadan, have all been through several centuries of selection -- that is, if they had killed off too many adherents, their practice would have been abandoned or changed by now .
Personal experience: I was at a firewalk, which included a sweatlodge as preparation. My first warning was that making the fire for the coal bed involved gasoline... impatience does not mix well with any spiritual practice! During the sweat lodge, I started feeling nauseous. Fortunately, by that time in my life, I was aware enough of my body to recognize an emergency signal, so I left the lodge early and hung around until the others emerged.
Later, when I did the firewalk, I got burned by picking up a coal between my toes. I also noted afterwards that my "talisman" (each of us hung one by the fire before the sweat, mine was a floppy disk) was destroyed by the heat of the fire.... Afterwards, several other participants commented that they'd also noticed a "lack of respect for the fire".
I would just like to say thank you to the Making Light community for restoring my faith (heh) in religious people after 4 years of Catholic high school destroyed it. I love the ritual of going to church, although it was never something my family did. It centers me in a way nothing else I've found does. The hypocrisy that I found among all the people I knew who described themselves as religious put me off the very idea though. They were in high school, I know some of them grew out of it, but the bad taste lingers.
I long for that sense of ritual again, along with a sense of community that I think belonging to a church could provide. Unfortunately, I don't have the belief necessary to feel like I'd be joining a church in good faith. In addition, I'm married to an atheist who is happy for me to do what I want, but will not be joining me. I have thought of trying a simplified version of meditation, but at this point I could really use the community as well.
Anyway, long way of saying, I really appreciate being able to discuss this here, even if it is only tangentially related.
Re: woo
Recently I've been looking into Tarot cards. Not because I genuinely believe they can tell the future or interact with the spirits or any such rot*, but because I like them--a library of usually beautiful pictures, rife with symbols just waiting for a mind to find meaning out of them. In my case, it seems to help punch through psychological denial: examine your thought processes as you shuffle, draw, examine; learn to notice what you dread seeing, and why; learn to recognize that sinking feeling of "DAMN, the cards are good" as the first solid hit of a wrecking ball against a wall of denial. Not a message from the cosmos, but a message from yourself.
And that is my experience with woo.
*I identify as an atheist, with vaguely pagan leanings--much like Xopher, evidently, I like rituals. I'd say credo consolans, I believe because it's comforting, but even that's not right: I tell stories to myself in the dark, because the alternative is being alone in the dark.
Xopher @129 - Hail and well met likewise! (And I agree about the no driving after trance. More than one reason for post-ritual food, after all.)
LDR @137 - on the "Why do ritual". Ritual consoles me, comforts me, challenges me, and changes me. Like Xopher, I get cranky when I don't, which is probably a good enough reason. (I get cranky when I don't read, too.) But more than that, it's as good a way as anything else I've found to be aware of what's going on in my head and my heart, and what I want to do about that. Best way to start making better-informed choices is to know where I'm starting from.
There's other ways at that self-awareness, and I use some of them too (journalling, talking with friends), but ritual often illuminates the bits I'd try and duck out of facing in other settings.
Another thought about 'why do people do these workshops':
I spend a fair bit of my time in my religious community talking to people who are looking for *something*, but who haven't yet figured out what they're looking for. The self-aware ones, and the ones who run into the people with ethics and who care about education figure out (given some time) what they want. But the ones who fall in with the 'don't bother thinking, just do what makes you feel right' crowd always worry me. Some of those folks are harmless, but far too many are dangerous out of inexperience or lack of knowledge (of practical safety issues, even before you get to ritual specific stuff.) And a few of them are predators of various stripes.
We talk about literacy of various kinds - academically, emotionally, interpersonally, online. I think there's something to be said for religious and spiritual literacy, both in the sense of it being handy to be able to deal with someone else's religious life moments meaningfully (baptisms, funerals, high holy days, Ramadan, whatever), but also because understanding what the draw is for some people, and the different kinds of things that might feed it can help avoid the more dangerous bits of the search process. That said, I have no idea how you implement something like that, other than getting born into a family and community that's got a diverse religious background, and being willing to keep looking for information on an ongoing basis.
I mostly just lurk here, but always find the conversations to be enlightening and thought-provoking. Like OtterB at 187, I am trying to define my own beliefs and where I draw the line at respecting other's.
For me, the questions that any belief-system has to answer are 1) is it life-affirming and 2) does it foster personal liberty. If the answer to either is no, then I have no respect for it at all.
I'm not sure what I feel about the "fairies at the bottom of the garden" type. I tend to think that the "wishing makes it so" crowd are deluded. Sometimes, shit just happens, and it's nobody's fault, and there's nobody to blame, there's only living with it and getting on with life as best you can (the attitude I have about my own mental illness).
I personally identify myself as a pagan/agnostic (atheist when the wind blows from the right direction). I'm not sure I believe in a god or gods, but I have a deep sense of wonder at the universe, and everything I learn about science reinforces that sense of wonder. I have a need for ritual in my life, and like the symbol-set of the particular branch of paganism that I follow. it may be True in some ways, for me, but that doesn't necessarily make it true (for differing values of "true").
One thing no one's touched on so far, on the subject of goals...any profoundly transformative experience, like the one that these people were seeing, changes not only how you think but also what you want. Indeed, if you come out of it wanting the same stuff you went into it wanting, you're probably doing it rong.
There are no serious mental or spiritual disciplines that reliably make people rich, for instance. But there are a heck of a lot of them that teach them value other things more than money.
Nancy Lebovitz makes a generalization about "Native American" religion at 146 and by doing so participates in the same error that underlies the hucksterism under discussion. There is no such thing as "Native American" anything. There are traditional beliefs special to diverse cultural groups, some fraction of which have aspects of ancestor worship, which have persisted more or less in their original form into the post-contact world. There are modern synthetic religions like the Native American Church and the Indian Shaker Church which combine spiritual beleifs and practices from multiple sources. There are ad hoc Pentecostal movements which combine Christian belief and traditional practice in a fluid mix, and there are mainstream Christian missions which try to reach Native groups by (sometimes mindfully and respectfully and sometimes not) using Native language and concepts in talking about Christianity.
And then there's woo: taking a grab bag of Don Juan and Black Elk and mixing well with Tim Leary and every purveyor of religious/spiritual shenanagins ever. Some of it's merely a way to separate the rubes from their money but then there's practitioners who are working out the ultimate evil: the human drive for complete life-and-death power over other humans. One does not need any other demon.
@EClaire - Not sure where you are but reading that comment I'm wishing I could invite you to my local UU church. Spiritual diversity, we can has. Also strong community.
And coffee.
Thena@199: Does that mean we can host the Making Light Con there? It sounds like it has all that's necessary. :)
This is just to say
I have borrowed
the woo
that was in
your beliefs
and which
you were probably
saving
for Heaven
Forgive me
there are trusting souls
to fleece
and deceive
John Houghton #170: That's Hari Seldon. Get with the Plan.
Hari, Hari Seldon
Hari, Hari Seldon
Hari, Hari Seldon
I would totally go to a Making Light Con, and I've thought about a UU church. I'm in New Orleans, which leans precipitously Catholic. I've done a little research into the Friends Meeting of New Orleans, thinking that striving toward simplicity and less materialism is something I could use encouragement in, and sitting quietly pondering the spirit of the divine sounds, well, divine. I haven't yet overcome my social hesitance enough to go to a meeting though.
EClaire @194: For meditation practice and ritual, I can highly recommend attending a Tibetan Buddhist temple. Taking classes at KTC here in Central Ohio is what snapped me out of a bout of depression in 2002.
I found it also enriched my Pagan rituals, and Tara and Chenreizig don't seem to mind sharing my room with Dana, Isis and Brighid...
#198 ::: JESR
Good point. I'll avoid that mistake in the future.
I thought of something, but keep forgetting to mention it: the plastic they covered the thing with...when it got warm, could it have emitted toxic gases?
John Houghton @170: What I envy, I think, is the idea that the universe is being personally benevolent to them.
There was an SF short-short story titled Narapoia (google tells me it was authored by Alan Nelson).
In it, a patient tells his doctor that he is suffering from 'narapoia', an inverse of paranoia. He believes that complete strangers are out to do nice things for him. And he thinks he is following someone, but he doesn't know who.
I've always enjoyed that notion that people are conspiring to do nice things for me.
Albatross @ 103: As an adult, a lot of what you do to improve yourself or your life involves ignoring some levels of unpleasantness or discomfort or even pain
Not only as an adult.
I find the "no pain, no gain" (or, the way I have been taught it, "stuff that is good for you hurts, stuff that stops the pain is bad for you") hard to un-learn. I used to think that people working with adults would respect their clients or customers (or their money) enough to not push that meme, but ... obviously not.
Xopher@33: I recently investigated hotel function space, in NZ it's around $NZ45 per person per day for a package that includes rooms configured as classrooms, tea, coffee, and lunch. I expect that the deals are similar in most hotels around the world (although the price will vary). The minimum number of delegates is about 20.
An un-conference arranged by a group of like-minded individuals would be quite economical. When staying in a foreign city $45 per day (plus whatever dinner costs) really isn't much money to spend. Usually tourists spend more.
I think that the idea of having an un-conference for people who comment on a major blog is viable.
Tom Whitmore #183 : ...But for years I've been describing them as part of the Western secular initiatory tradition -- these seminars are actually initiations, and are structured as initiations.
An excellent point! It's also worth noting that running initiations takes a good deal of both expertise and responsibility.... Not every initiation has real hazard involved... but most do, and sometimes that gets shoved under the rug.
I'm sorry if this comes off as disjointed or somehow insensitive to the real victims, I'm still trying to digest this all through the process I know best: Recontextualizing.
While reading through all the links last night, the ones that stood out the most were Jay's deleted Tweets where he talked about needed sacrifices and mastering death and the rest. I realized: I've seen this scenario before. Many times.
My stance on woo shifts back and forth depending on whether my "But it feels empowering and good" side or my "It's all in your head, you don't need to actually do any of it" side is stronger, but I always enjoy approaching these things with the assumption of - well if it -is- real, then what happened?
If we assume that summoning The Warrior archetype is real, and belief creating reality is real, then Ray is either very stupid, or he is very evil.
I do a lot of roleplaying. 'Exalted', 'Unknown Armies', 'Mage-tA', and I've put Ray into games before as the Villain of the Week. To answer someone's question from further up: "Why would someone kill his followers?" If you assume magic is real (and some of those Tweets read like they were coming from the sort of headspace where someone would think it is), and you assume someone is an amoral monster, then there is an excellent reason to kill a lot of people all at once.
Magically, (in settings such as 'Unknown Armies' or 'Mage') death is very powerful. Control that much death, and you are controlling a lot of power. Taking a mystically significant number of people into the wilderness and getting them to kill themselves at your command is one of the time honored techniques for the villain that wants to attain Godhood/Awakening/Ascension/Assumption of Avatarhood/Soforth.
Of course, it didn't quite work. The Conquering Death sweat lodge was stopped after just half of the planned cycles, and nearly everyone lived. Godhood assumption thwarted, Jay quickly left.
Or he didn't believe any of what he was spouting, but still managed to cobble together enough ritual to manifest The Warrior within himself in all it's dark, greedy, abusive glory. Because you can't be a manipulative power-abusing dick and manifest The Warrior positively. The Rules never work like that.
I don't know if Ray had actually gone so far around the bend that he'd actually try and do something like that, but if I ever gave out those Tweets in a game, the players would be complaining that they -got- it already and I didn't need to hit them over the head with "Bad guy bad, going to kill a lot of people for power now."
Not sure what I'm trying to say, but regardless of whether you look at this from a "Woo is real" or a "Woo is Woo" stance, James Arthur Ray has done some very very bad things.
re 106: The devil begins by tempting Jesus with nothing more mind-bending than a bite to eat.
"Christians clearly do believe in magic (although they don't call it that), so it is perfectly fair IMO to call them on it when they are practicing black magic..."
Orthodox (small o) Christianity doesn't involve a belief in magic in the sense that seems to be implied in #57, where you follow a particular ritual or recipe in order to compel supernatural forces to do your bidding (in that example, pinning people's names on a cross to make something happen to the people named).
There is obviously a belief in the miraculous; we do, after all, believe that our founder rose from the dead, and performed other miracles as well. But we don't believe that we have power over miracles. We do have certain rituals which we believe convey grace, and in some cases even have "miraculous" effects (if normally undetectable, as in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist). But we can't use those rituals for some arbitrary desire; it's whatever God ordains, not us. We can, of course, ask God in prayer for something, as can anyone else, Christian or non-Christian; but we can't *compel* God to do what we want.
That said, there are a wide variety of different beliefs and traditions that people identify as Christian, some of which are pretty far off the traditionally orthodox strains. Slacktivist has posted more than once on the heresy of the "name it and claim it" strain of belief, which is basically The Secret in Christian clothing. Similarly, the "St. Jude" notices you sometimes see in classifieds, that claim whatever you want will be granted by saying the prayer and publishing the ad, are generally treated by Catholic authorities as superstition rather than religion.
JamesK,
I like the gaming twist, but I'm not sure it's wholly convincing. (There's a lot of things Real Life (tm) throws at us that feel like an over the top GM. Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction, but it's often much less subtle.)
Still those tweets are really disconcerting, especially in retrospect. Interesting that he had enough presence of mind to realize that and try to destroy them.
re 143: Nancy, I've read Dare to Discipline and it does not "urge beating children into submission in order to restore the respect for God and government that America’s youth had lost during the 1960s" (quoted directly from the first paragraph here). Dobson is not on my list of political authorities, and I do wish he would shut up; but if we're going to complain about tea-bagging we ought to eschew it ourselves.
David Harmon @211 -- thank you! I've thought the tracing of that tradition was worth a book, or a thesis, for several years now.
One place I'd disagree with you: any initiation that someone believes in has the chance to do real damage. That damage may be physical, or it may be psychological -- but if there isn't risk, it's a ritual that isn't an initiation. At least, that's the way I use those words.
John Mark, please note that Lee said ""Christians clearly do believe in magic," not that belief in magic was orthodox in Christianity. The fact that the toes of saint statues are rubbed down to bare metal in St. Joseph's Church in Manhattan is evidence of Christians (not the Church) believing in magic.
And 'superstition' is what people call other people's religious practices.
John Mark Ockerbloom @214 -- you remind me of an obscure joke:
Q: How can you tell which St. Jude classifieds are posted by the Illuminati?
A: They're in the Business Personals.
I went through a two-month-long period of intermittent sort-of-fasting last year (three periods of no solid food, the longest approximately a week and a half long). I'm not really sure you can call these 'fasts' as they were medically essential -- my digestive system had essentially jammed. Even keeping my blood sugar levels up with lucozade and fruit juices and the like, after a couple of days it was impossible to concentrate on anything, and after a couple more anything approaching rational thought became pretty much impossible. Oh, and you soon start smelling like something dead, as well. Really attractive.
I can easily imagine someone in that sort of condition doing all sorts of horrifically dangerous things simply because they weren't thinking clearly enough to realise they were dangerous, and were weak enough, from hunger and heat, not to want to get up and walk out anyway, even ignoring the social pressures, assuming they were even conscious.
(I was lucky: I was at home, not in a sweat lodge, and I knew this was not normal, not good and not remotely voluntary, so I took no risks at all and didn't engage in any strenuous activity --- other than the risk of not eating, which I judged to be less risky than the risk of exploding. I never ever want to undergo anything like this again. Voluntary fasting is for people who've never had to cope with the involuntary kind.)
Thanks for the amazingly comprehensive article on this event. Excellent blog journalism.
Thanks also for the links to my articles.
Indeed, I agree with both Shermer and Sylvan. Whether you're a serious skeptic or a serious magician, the naive views of Ray et al should be criticized strongly, especially when combined with narcissism and cult dynamics.
abi @ 167... While we woohoo for you at what you do, yes we do. Woot!
lawrence @ 136... Yeah, I think I read about Padgett's shifting nature. I wonder who Padgett was when he/she wrote Vintage Season or Mimsy Were the Borogove.
By the way, I met Moore at 1981's worldcon in Denver. Got my French edition of Shambleau autographed. It was a strange experience. She seemed nervous when I approached her. Maybe I looked insane.
("Saying 'looked' implies that insanity is a thing relegated to your past, Serge.")
I heard that.
Thanks for the information on kidney failure due to severe dehydration too.
Jon Marcus, #184, kids can go higher in temp without problems. Adults really don't want to get that hot -- the cold water bed is awful.
Earl Cooley III, #201, great!
Duff @ 224... I took my wife to the ER a few days a go because she was in a lot of pain, and it was because of a kidney stone. They told her that it can be caused by dehydration. Luckily they didn't tell her "Hydrate! Hydrate!" I might have burst out laughing because of the Doctor Who story about Earth 5,000,000,000 years into the Future. At least she wasn't treated by Doctor Faust as happened a few years ago.
Once again, I am awed by Teresa's pit bull approach to investigation, and by this community's ability to converse with clarity, attention, and respect.
Some random remarks:
I find it sad (and scary) that Mr Ray's website asks, "Are you 100% totally and completely happy with your life?” -- which suggests that you should be, and if you are not, something's wrong (which he can fix.) Such a statement and what it implies seems to me to be insane or, at best, utter bulls**t. It is, in my opinion, impossible to be 100% totally and completely happy and be human. Such a statement, on any website, should warn just about any adult that the folks who put this material together are untrustworthy and want to sell you something that could be physically, morally, and spiritually dangerous: run. I am sure there were many such statements on the website.
Spiritual hucksterism has been around a very long time; Ray is one example of this moment's version of it. Note that he appeared on Oprah, which provides a kind of cultural imprimatur,a suggestion that what he's providing is safe. But initiations aren't necessarily safe, especially those that require a physical ordeal -- that's why they require a long period of study and preparation with people one trusts. Why, one wonders, would anyone trust this guy? His charisma? Hmmm. I think none of these people had any idea of what they were getting into.
However, when people go looking for 1)something to ease their pain, or 2) power, or both, they tend to lose whatever common sense and good judgment they might have once had.
As a long time student of a Japanese martial art, anytime I hear anyone, and particularly -- though not exclusively -- anyone non-Japanese, call upon the traditions of the samurai to support this or that activity, practice, or discipline, my hair stands up and I look around for an exit. Are there ways in which aspects of Japanese culture, (for example, martial arts, or Zen, or tea ceremony, or taiko drumming) can be relevant to the life we live now? Sure. But not in a way that can be understood and internalized over a weekend in a sweat lodge.
I agree entirely with McDuffee, that Ray should be held accountable for these two deaths.
Harriet Culver @ 188... The Avengelicals sounds like a neat name for a religious superhero group, when they fight the Creatures of Habit. Joanna Lumley dressed like a nun is an excellent idea.
Xopher, 155: Your motto, in Latin: Per dubium, contentiō; per contentionem, eruditiō.
I think you deserve a good Latin motto.
(Abi, feel free to amend as you see fit, my Latin is decidedly rusty.)
My dad was a surgeon. I once asked him how he let people know that they were going to die. He said that if they didn't want to hear it, it was impossible. They would interrupt with the latest ball game stats, anything, to hide from themselves what was going on. No one can make anyone else pay attention.
I do not believe that most people who do terrible things believe themselves to be evil. They simply avoid thinking about the consequences of their actions. If pushed, they may come up with elaborate justifications, but it's usually obvious that they're the one they're most anxious to convince. Rather than waking up chortling and rubbing their hands over the awful things they'll do that day, they get up like the rest of us and get on with it, perhaps feeling pride in how much they enlarged their assets with the recent seminar.
They should be called on the results of bad decisions with appropriate severity. Turning them into demons only adds static.
Jon Marcus #184:
Going off-topic here, but question to John Houghton way back @ 30 (or to Jim or anyone else knowledgeable):
105 starts scrambling proteins? That seems kinda low to me. My eldest son regularly went above 105 (via aural thermometer, but repeatable and in both ears) as an infant, with no noticeable damage. And my 9-year-old was up at 105 (aural, repeatable, both ears) just last week with something very flu-ish, and seems to be okay. No fancier treatment than ibuprofen and cool wet towels on the neck and arms.
That's a question for your doctor. Neither Jim nor I can diagnose or prescribe ("Your arm is bent at a 90° angle halfway between your elbow and your wrist. I think it may be broken"). If I see signs of a temp that high, I'm calling for an Advanced Life Support ambulance. I'll start cooling them down with their consent (implied consent if they are not conscious or able to understand and answer my questions). If they are showing signs of heat-stroke, I'll be icing them if ice is available, spraying them with water and fanning them if not, and hoping the paramedics get there quickly. As someone that happens upon a situation, I have a lot less intervention that I can do than if I am working an event or in a situation where I have specific protocols.
Where the danger line is for young children with fevers is well outside of my standard of care and standard of training. The precise temperature and conditions that each protein in the brain starts to break down is well outside of my knowledge. I'm trained to work with conservative rules-of-thumb, and to escalate to higher levels of care if I'm uncertain.
Oh, and when I get different answers from different doctors, I go with the one who's more worried.
Xopher, #129 & Harriet, #188: "Avengelical" is certainly not original with me, and in fact I'm pretty sure I picked it up here, back in some of the discussions about the Religious Right in 2007/2008. It bears the same sort of relationship to "Evangelical" that "Christianist" does to "Christian" -- referring specifically to the hate-based subset of a larger group.
John, #214: I will grant that magic, in the "manipulating the supernatural to affect other people or the world" sense, is not part of orthodox Christian dogma. Nonetheless, a good many orthodox Christians do believe in it casually, cf. "the power of prayer" and the sort of things Xopher mentions @218.
Believing in it seriously is one of the attributes that distinguishes the Avengelical variety of Christian. That names-on-the-cross ritual is most definitely that sort of magic, as is what was done to a friend of mine by a cow-orker who said that she would "pray for [my friend] to be broken at the feet of Jesus". I consider it important to spotlight this sort of thing, for a number of reasons.
LDR@110: Wrote: "Lots of spiritual traditions stress the importance of having a teacher/guru/intermediary of some sort. I've always been mistrustful of such people . . . and this post is why."
I think that the motive of the spiritual leader is the main issue. I can walk into almost any church and have a pastor/vicar/priest tell me as much as I want to know about their variant of Christianity at no cost. Opinions vary as to the benefit of such spiritual advice, but people who offer such advice for free tend to believe it and want to help others.
Most variants of Christianity strongly encourage giving 10% of your income to the church and also helping out at church events. The poorest people at a typical church will receive gifts of food, clothes, accommodation, and sometimes money from church funds - often to a value that greatly exceeds what they donate. The real spiritual leaders take only what people can afford and give to those who need it.
Any "religion" that starts with "give us all your money" almost certainly doesn't have the best interests of it's followers at heart.
Perhaps a good first step towards evaluating a spiritual system is to demand that something be given for free with no obligation. If you want me to consider your variation of Christianity then give me a free Bible and study guide, if you want me to consider the benefits of Hari-Krishna then give me a free vegan cook-book. But I won't give you my address or phone number.
Nightsky@194: your post sums up my feelings regarding Tarot cards exactly. They are beautiful and can offer a way to think about one's own life in different ways; the important thing, to me, is the recognition that the interpretation and meaning are coming from me, not from some outside power.
That's been my experience with ritual, as well. Not that I'm at all experienced with it, but I do think that it's a way that you can tell yourself things and perhaps convince yourself more deeply than you might just by repetition. (The ends, of course, can be good or bad.) My personal experience was incredibly silly, but the feeling of it has stuck with me. As a teenager, on a visit to relatives, I had to sleep in an unfinished basement which smelled of gasoline and in which I was completely surrounded by the pipes and tanks of a furnace: I've been terrified of this sort of environment for as long as I can remember (and still am; no idea why). I don't think that the half hour I spent on my bed, "casting" a protective circle called up spiritual guardians to prevent the furnace from exploding or whatever, but it helped me to convince myself that I was going to be safe in that environment. And I really did feel safe after, when I had been feeling increasingly edgy and panicky.
I still have to avert my eyes from the furnace room in my own house so that I can pretend it's not there, but I slept just fine at my relatives.
Tom Whitmore #217: I agree with your statement in general, but there are some initiatory rituals where the danger has been reduced to symbolism or voluntary embarrassment (sometimes because the ritual is recognizing an already-passed test). Mostly, I was being wary of making an absolute statement, when I'm not secure in my expertise on the topic.
Lizzy L @ 227:
I'd like to combine your observation about people hawking 100% happiness with Anna Feruglio Dal Dan's point at 134 that many of these sorts of scams focus on the idea that if bad things happen to you then it's your own fault. It runs like this:
You're not happy and successful, but they are. You must be doing something wrong. You don't necessarily know why you're unhappy, or, if you do (e.g. messy divorce, annoying boss), you don't know how to make it better. But they, out of the goodness of their heart, will share their secret with you. And it is a secret, too. But they'll share it. If you're feeling down enough, you pay up.
Once you come out the other end, you might be happier. You'll be riding the feel-good wave of a motivational speaker, or you'll have come out of some bonding exercise, or you'll have made new friends. Or you'll have spent a lot of money, so you tell yourself that you're happier. But the happiness isn't 100%, and it has to be your fault. But they made you feel better before, you just need to keep going with it. And so on it goes.
[when seeing Fozzie perform for the first time]
Kermit: This guy's lost.
Waiter: Maybe he should try Hare Krishna.
Kermit: Good grief, it's a running gag.
Brain damage won't occur until the core body temperature goes above 107.6 degrees F. When the patient is at 105, you do want to take measures to bring down the temp before it continues to rise to a dangerous level. A fever of 105 is not pleasant anyway, so cooling is a relief.
In malignant hyperthermia, the temp continues to rise despite our best efforts. I had a rabbit go at least 108 F, and we did lose him.
Caroline @191: Even woo-oriented rituals still do something even if you don't intellectually accept the woo. I don't mean that they do something supernatural. But they still make meaning, in the way people understand themselves, other people, their relationships with other people, their interactions with material objects.
I can testify. I did two years of group work with this guy in Seattle. The money we paid only went to rent the space, and the intent was to discover in ourselves and as a group how to create spontaneous, meaningful ritual without any shared social or ideological relationships between us. From the first hour, the "instigator" (as he called himself) hammered on the rule that we were absolutely responsible for our own safety, and that if we felt we were in danger, we were to leave the floor and just witness. To take care of oneself was considered a valid and honorable part of the personal work.
It was an amazing two years and I still have great friends from it.
I have had two painful experiences with people who rocketed out of Landmark having disconnected from all common sense, and promptly ruined their lives; I have also reconnected with two good friends whose natural common sense was validated and encouraged by Landmark into new careers and joyful living. Go figure.
#236 ::: KeithS:
This reminds me of something I've read: that believing pain = failure is a symptom of having been abused. It sounds plausible to me, but I don't have evidence or a system that it's from.
Any thoughts?
James MacDonald, #2: "I don't believe that anyone is so smart that the right conman with the right pitch at the right time can't take him."
In other words, anyone can be deceived. Sure. But it amazes me how many people don't think so. I've taken some serious heat for saying things like that. It's the ultimate fantasy of power: believing that one has a line to ultimate truth, and it's a fantasy that some people hold a death grip on, sometimes all too literally.
Carol Kimball #230:
My dad was a surgeon. I once asked him how he let people know that they were going to die. He said that if they didn't want to hear it, it was impossible.
I had a hernia repair when I was in my 20s. I asked the doctor to tell me exactly what he was going to do. He told me, using all the wonderful doctor words used to obfuscate meaning to lessen the impact*. Or at least I think he did. I spent several minutes watching his lips move, without hearing anything at the conscious level. It was interesting to observe this happening, and to realize why it did.
*Debride, as a general example. It means to remove debris from a wound. I would recommend the anesthesia, you'll need it.
LumiCon? I'm all for a Making Light relaxacon.
As a religious person, I find the discussion fascinating, because faith/belief (and the choice of traditions you pull it from) is deeply personal. Most peoples Christianity (or pick your organized/disorganized religion) is a mishmash of several different trads christian and non, with or without their conscious knowledge. It's much like a chicken soup 'recipe' - it's your grandmother's or your mother's or something you picked up somewhere. Then you change it, tweak it according to a variety of things. Some people believe it should be made with dumplings, or noodles, or matzoh balls, with or without vegetables, with or without garlic, reflecting your upbringing, ethnicity, tastes, choices, and ability to appropriate out of the local enviroment. About the only tradition involving chicken soup we can all agree on is that we're using chicken stock. The Church Herself, ancient and modern, embraces a wide variety of traditions and it's one of the things that eventually drove me to be an Episcopalian, the *stated dictum* that all are welcome here, no matter what your personal path or what it comes from, as long as we can pray together.
The only time I have problems with other belief systems (and most recently, it's been the militantly evangelical atheists) is when other people attempt to impose their beliefs on me, or belittle me for mine. We see a prime example above, and I was all set to make a point by point reply last night when I saw Abi's responses. It's a much better method. I'm just annoyed that others feel the need to dictate the validity of my beliefs and so I let them invade my personal space and get more angry in the process. It will take learning.
Fragano Ledgister #202:
John Houghton #170: That's Hari Seldon. Get with the Plan.
Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa,
Culpa Culpa, Mea Mea.
I actually dithered for a second on checking the spelling, and decided against open another window of Task Avoidant Procrastination.
@243 - Gee, thanks, now I'm going to bed with THAT stuck in my head (and mental images of the book-bashing monastics from Monty Python and the search for the holy grail).
I'm all for a LumiCon if we ever get sufficiently organized. I'm not sure we'd all fit in my church at the same time but we could take turns standing on the lawn befuddling the local populace.
Opening
Task-Avoidant* Procrastination
*Language rule learned from Teresa's joke:
"Only when used as a compound adjective."
John Houghton #241
all the wonderful doctor words used to obfuscate meaning to lessen the impact
When my dentist told me I would have to have two wisdom teeth removed, he said "We'll get you into hospital, and they'll pop those out for you". When I quibbled, he did concede that "wrench" would be a better word than "pop".
The most common causes of acute renal failure are dehydration, serious illnesses that cause heart or liver failure, severe blood loss, shock, or traumatic injury such as a burn. It may also occur in: those with conditions that block the flow of urine, such as kidney stones, tumors, or enlarged or inflamed prostate gland; those with a blood infection (sepsis); or those with kidney damage caused by kidney disease or exposure to a toxic (poisonous) substance.
EClaire@204, try visiting that Friends meeting; maybe you'll like the practice, and probably you'll like the people, though of course it always depends. There are some meetings that are relatively Christian, and some that are primarily not, but they're pretty much all fairly radically accepting of other people. I attended a meeting in New Jersey for a few years - we had people there who had come over from the Unitarian church because the UUs were really too dogmatic and organized (:-), and people who were more traditionally orthodox, and some Buddhists and Jews and a yoga teacher, and people from other backgrounds, and some who'd grown up in the Friends, though most of us hadn't, and I found the quiet spiritual searching together to be really meaningful.
In general, most Quaker meetings are what's called "unprogrammed" - there's no preacher, there's no ritual, you sit quietly together and if you feel God or whatever calling you to speak, you might speak, but mostly you're sitting quietly reflecting. There's another Quaker tradition, "programmed", mainly in the Western US, that has more traditional Protestant services with a preacher and structure and maybe even music. My wife and I started going there one week when we realized that we really didn't want to put up with a Memorial Day sermon at our regular Baptist church near the local military base and we knew some of the Quakers from the local peace movement. I've really missed that kind of religious community since I moved out here - mostly we've just been slacking, but also haven't really connected with the local Quaker or Christian congregations we've visited.
Count me in for LumiCon, if it gets organized and providing our schedule doesn't have a conflict!
#216 ::: C. Wingate:
I'm not sure exactly what in the quote you're disagreeing with.
However, here's a list of the more offensive bits from Dare to Discipline-- "beating a child into submission" doesn't seem like an unfair reading.
The amazon reviews may imply that the effect of the book (on both parents and children) is pretty variable, but it does seem to be an excuse for abuse at least some of the time.
EClaire @ 204 - Quakers or UU, depending on how much structure you want. With the caveat that local congregations will always have differences. It's part of the attraction of those services, that there is no central authority dictating...much of anything, and it's all congregational.
Nix @ 220 - Voluntary fasting is for people who've never had to cope with the involuntary kind.
Not really - done both. Actually, we're pretty sure adhering to 14th c. Lenten Practices caused my hypoglycemia to manifest, and that means that my days of voluntary fasting are over. But sometimes? It reminds you of the sacrifices you've made, that your ancestors made, that your God made. And that's important to me.
Ritual has power. Sometimes, it's just the psychological power of tradition and what that does to/for you and those around you. (Think, turkey at Thanksgiving or family decorating the Christmas tree. These are rituals, often involving food, a certain order of events, and remembering other times.) For me, I believe that ritual has some other attributes, having the weight of time and what should be pressing down on it as well. The fact that in the seventh month of the year, all the leavened bread is thrown out of the house and meat is eaten with bitter herbs for 2500 years (at least), gives it weight, and in reenacting that particular type of feast it has more meaning than what exists solely at the table. Places become imbued with tradition - houses of worship remember what the ritual should be, both good and bad. When it is changed, the building itself adds it's protest to that of the congregation against moving away from the status quo. You'll often get major facilities failures with major ritual changes. Yes, this very well might be because the old people in charge weren't doing their jobs and that's *why* there are so many new changes all at once. I've participated in some fairly major changes at churches and it keeps happening. Sometimes it goes the other way - that recurring problems disappear upon new ownership or new, better leadership (I'm specifically thinking about a leaky basement here. It leaked badly at the end of a certain pastor's tenure. He left in a scandal. A year later, we installed a new pastor. The basement doesn't leak now.)
People who are sensitive to it often feel it most during the really common parts of the ritual that are all being enacted at the same time. Because of various placement in liturgies, on Sunday there is a version of the Lord's Prayer rolling constantly around the world. A common comment on why we do it; "It makes me feel a part of something larger than myself," and on Sunday morning, it's true - logic says that because of Christianity's shear size, there is pretty much always another congregation somewhere in the world saying the prayer as well, with almost 2000 years of tradition adding it's weight into the mix. It can get even more pronounced at midnight on Christmas eve as many Christians in the time zone end up singing Silent Night - that's slightly more in the "part of current community" vein than the "longstanding traditional weight". Both have power in my eyes. It is part of the magic of Christianity, outright "woo" that it is. (And watching a 'sensitive' priest do mass is a wonder and a joy for me, because it has the weight of history adding to the impetus of channeling that 'woo' raised by ritual into something [hopefully] productive.)
Through my reading of this post and the long and fine set of comments, I can't help thinking of the kind of limited, qualified faith implied in Pascal's Wager*.
Look, the come-on says, you don't have to really believe all that mysticism stuff I'm babbling on about. Act like you believe... pay the money, follow the forms of belief, stick it out in the sweat lodge. Then, if it turns out that it's all true, you're covered. And what if everything I promise is true? Wouldn't you want at least a shot at it?
As a dyed-in-the-wool cynic and skeptic, I feel like this applies to every seminar I go to, everything from Agile Programming Methods to Robert McKee's Story Seminar. The honest ones own up to it... we can't guarantee this will work for you, but try it. Maybe it will. The dishonest ones just let it go.
Sorry: I'd write more, but my laptop battery is dying.
* Or my own shallow misreading of it.
Lee @ 232: "That names-on-the-cross ritual is most definitely that sort of magic, as is what was done to a friend of mine by a cow-orker who said that she would "pray for [my friend] to be broken at the feet of Jesus"."
I'm not sure what cow-orking is, but it sounds awful. (The name's not great either.)
173/232
That's the one I was sort-of-remembering.
I don't mind prayer trees (which are usually for people who are in the hospital or otherwise in need of help), but that one is a little too close to forcing conversion.
I have a somewhat different viewpoint on woo than most folks here. My dad was an attorney, and an extremely good one. (He would have liked to be a painter, but his school counselors refused to accept that as an option.) Since he'd handle legal matters for folks with unusual beliefs without denigrating them he ended up with a huge amount of clients who were experts in woo, and who often passed along freebies: color breathers, psychic healers (who recommended you do what your doctor recommended and deferred to the doctor's treatments), Tarot card readers, you name it. Because of this I've been exposed to the lot (with the exception of the Tarot--don't know how I missed that one), often as a cross between a dressmaker's figure and a dummy, which is why I always used to grin at the Molly Ivins line "I was born again three times before age 13 and it doesn't seem to have hurt me any."
Combine this with a membership in the Society of American Magicians in college and having had the luck to take a course from Rodney Stark while at the UW (Teresa may know who he is, but the rest of you will probably need to look him up. Basically he's THE expert on cults and indoctrination, and he ended up testifying to the Vatican II folks as an undergraduate.) and I ended up with a profound grounding in how and when it's possible to sell a load of bilgewater.
My favorite moment was back when I was in high school. My dad suddenly developed a blood clot in his eye that damaged his vision, so he ended up doing a lot of exercise, taking blood thinners, and looking at various relaxation techniques. Because of that he ended up signing up for Transcendental Meditation in the early days, when it was billed as a relaxation technique, and why he ended up paying for mom and me to get the training. Remember, this was years and years before the claims of learning levitation, invisibility, and walking through walls for only $6K each. Anyway, I found TM a good way to relax, at least until my roommate in college started bringing in groups of people to stare at me while I did so, which is why I've lost touch with that roomie.
Anyway, back to TM. The local training setup ended up flying in the first guy that the Maharishi had taught TM to in England, and dad got us tickets to the session so we could find out more about the guy who'd come up with the technique we'd been using.
I will never forget that meeting. The guy somehow brought to mind the shopkeeper in the Dead Parrot sketch, and when he'd come out with a sloppy statement dad would ask questions to try to figure out what the guy was going on about. This threw the guy because he clearly wasn't used to being asked detailed questions by a non-Journalist, and he'd come out with something else that was stranger, and dad would ask more questions. It all fell apart when he loudly asserted that the Maharishi could make the most perfect building in the world appear overnight but wouldn't do so because it would never pass local building codes...
Cow-orker is the Scott Adams description of the sort co-worker who tends to show up as the point of the joke in the latest Dilbert strip. If you're the sort of person that triggers Alice's Fist of Death or makes Dilbert's head explode from your stupidity, you're a cow-orker. (Like "filk", I think it started as a typo and got adopted.)
This discussion has got me thinking about the worship group I'm involved with at my university, and our regular use of the same Biblical passages for repetition over and over. One of the points of a properly structured ritual system [1] is that, from an internalist point of view, it forces you to confront stuff that is true but might not be in accord with the mood of the moment. Having a virus-checker running on your internal meme-structure is a valuable thing.
[1] Ignoring for the moment the debate about exactly how you determine "properly structured", and just assuming that well-done structures exist and can to some extent be distinguished from badly-done.
Lizzy L #227: As a long time student of a Japanese martial art, anytime I hear anyone, and particularly -- though not exclusively -- anyone non-Japanese, call upon the traditions of the samurai to support this or that activity, practice, or discipline, my hair stands up and I look around for an exit.
I feel that way about Six Sigma TQM (Total Quality Manglement) "Black Belts".
Nancy Lebovitz @ 239:
This reminds me of something I've read: that believing pain = failure is a symptom of having been abused. It sounds plausible to me, but I don't have evidence or a system that it's from.Any thoughts?
Pain is often a result of doing the wrong thing, such as smashing your thumb with a hammer, incautiously picking roses, or eating that potato salad that's been left out too long, so in that sense pain can be said to be related to failure. It's a mechanism that announces that something's wrong, and, if it's related to something you just did, not to do that again.
Beyond that, I don't really know, I'm afraid.
To go off on a slight tangent here: I have to confess that I have mixed feelings about the idea of "cultural (mis)appropriation." On the one hand, white people passing themselves off as Authentic Native Americans is stupid and tacky and disrespectful. But I can't quite get on board with the notion that you shouldn't adopt any other culture's custom (or clothing, or food, or iconography) unless you have an immersive textbook understanding of its cultural context. Which, yeah, is probably the ideal when possible, but doesn't strike me as a very practical standard.
Part of it, I must admit, is that my approach to life is syncretic by inclination, and "a small slice of each, please" is as close to a working philosophy as I'm likely to get. I don't especially want to be limited to only the experiences I'm "entitled" to by virtue of heritage, and notions of cultural purity - my own, or other peoples' - leave a bad taste in my mouth. At the same time, I understand that "take what's useful, leave the rest" has its own unpleasant resonances in light of a history of imperialism, so I get why it's a sensitive tangle of issues. But I'm just not sure where the line is; I'm pretty confident that making curry doesn't make me much of an appropriator or a wannabe, but I'm less certain about wearing a kurta*, or worshipping a god with an elephant's head without adopting the rigors of living as a Hindu** otherwise.
And my feeling about clumsily appropriated cultural trappings is that it's a lot like a bad movie based on a good book: it sucks that the movie is what most people think of, but the book, as has been famously pointed out, still exists. But then, two days ago I'd have said that if rich white people want to put a makeshift sauna on their campsite and call it a "sweat lodge," there's no harm in that, so it's possible I'm missing something here.
But in any case, I really want my culture to be a melting pot rather than a neatly sectioned cafeteria tray. And not only because I'm an over-privileged Westerner who feels entitled to chicken tikka masala*** and oud music and kung fu lessons, but because (as Eddie Izzard points out) a mongrel nation is a healthier society than a purebred one. I have to wonder if a certain amount of tacky and disrespectful is the cost of doing business in a genuinely diverse multicultural world.
___
*My friend Vishal says no more so than businessmen in Mumbai wearing white shirts and ties, but note that that's at least one bingo square right there.
**Whatever that even means, complicated by the fact that there's not much consensus of definition among Hindus, and that it's not generally seen as something you can even convert to.
***A dish originating in Scotland, which surely goes to show something or other.
This story brought back a couple of nasty memories of times when I was cornered by a group of people who pressured me into doing what they wanted. As a teenager, I came within inches of being the victim of a gang rape (I managed to outrun two of the very stoned rapists). While doing research for my college senior thesis, I was locked in a room by a group of Synanon grads (my fellow counselors at a juvenile detention facility) who demanded that I admit that I had betrayed the group. After three hours of verbal abuse, they gave up and let me go.
Putting yourself into a situation where someone (a date, an employer, a spiritual guru, or a cult) has power over your physical safety and your life is a thrill for some people. I am grateful that I got over it early in life, and got out without too much damage.
@#137Xopher:
. . . through worship (and ritual, and (less) prayer) I get benefits I could not otherwise get.
What is your explanation for how that works?
(I know this is from far upthread but had to butt in.)
oo! oo! I just attended a fascinating workshop regarding the physiological effects of spiritual practices. They included these really nifty brain scan images showing how meditation actually changed the function of the brain, with areas like the frontal lobe and parietal section giving patterns of activity which were consistent with establishing mental boundaries between oneself and others (as well as "other" from "different other.") I.E. Meditating shifted how the brain processed information, allowing the participant to feel more "at one" with the Universe (or whatever.)
If any one is interested, I could dig out my notes for more specifics.
Tony Zbaraschuk @ 256: "Cow-orker is the Scott Adams description of the sort co-worker who tends to show up as the point of the joke in the latest Dilbert strip. If you're the sort of person that triggers Alice's Fist of Death or makes Dilbert's head explode from your stupidity, you're a cow-orker. (Like "filk", I think it started as a typo and got adopted.)"
How interesting! I did not know that.
I believe cow-orker evolved on Usenet, starting among the "usual suspect" fringe groups, and then spread everywhere. It didn't really have any special meaning to start with AFAIK, it was just based on noticing that "coworker" visually kind of wants to be divided after the cow. Googling a bit, I see Usenet cites going back as far as 1989. See e.g. the jargon file. I think I might have seen it before that, in which case it probably originated on t.b.
Nancy Lebovitz @239:
For people with a background of abuse, it is often true that pain=shame. Not "I am being hurt because what I did was wrong," but "I am being hurt because I am wrong." This comes from abusers insisting that their victims deserve pain because of who they are. As in, "You are such a brat!" Whack! Many, possibly most, victims respond by showing the appeasing, submissive behaviors that usually prompt the abuser to stop inflicting pain. Later in life, an alert con man or abuser in search of an adult victim can find these triggers and exploit them.
@259 Dan
I'd say the line is where one's convenience/desire causes other people harm. And that's easier to say than to figure out, sure, and people don't necessarily agree.
Myself, I wouldn't be bothered by any of the options you suggested, though I might be on the picky side if I was supposed to *eat* the curry you made. Then too, I strongly suspect Ganesha's position in the Hindu pantheon is itself syncretic. He has the feel of a local deity cobbled in after the fact.
Thing is, other Hindus might draw the line elsewhere. And (using us as an example) that doesn't mean you need to live in fear of those other hypothetical Hindus. But it does mean that they may have reasons to be upset, and those reasons are worth listening to respectfully.
To take on your book/movie analogy: the issue is if the book has only a small print run, or doesn't get publicity from the movie since it's easier to just see the movie, and in a little while the movie is all one can find of that story. That's when it starts being a problem.
Similarly, when people tell me that Zelazny, Simmons, and Ian McDonald write Indian SF, and don't know names like Anil Menon or Vandana Singh, that's where I find myself feeling like I'm on one end of (mis)appropriation (though I'd only really point the "mis" finger at Simmons on that end.)
Does that help clarify?
Rachel @ 261, & anyone else interested, Possibly-relevant work on the physiology of placebo analgesia has just been published by some Hamburgers called Eippert, Finsterbusch, Bingel & Büchel in Science. Links @135, supra.
Mind/Belief influences Body ::: Body certainly affects Mind – experienced both. Intermingled at a very deep & intimate level indeed.
sisuile @242, As a sympathetic agnostic/atheist, I understand why some "militant atheists" get stroppy. The bile, mendacity & destructiveness of "militant theists" & their abuse of power recently often gets me reacting snappily in kind. The reaction still upsets & disgusts me, tho'.
Keep the Sabbath, fine. Just don't encircle & rain spit on those who don't. Same with women's headcoverings, men's beards, getting contraceptives banned, burning down beef/pork butchers, &c. The old "blame natural disasters on sin" meme gives me the screaming (h)abdabs. There was one [redacted] blaming the February fires on Victoria relaxing its abortion laws. If sins did contribut to them, they were a different kind.
Something I haven't noticed mentioned in this fascinating and disturbing thread is that there are plenty of psych studies showing that "Are you really 100% happy?" or "Do you have problems in your life?" are questions that actively decrease people's happiness/evaluation thereof.
So the question causes unhappiness, and the con artist claims to know how to solve it, and seems even more prescient because you hadn't even realized how unhappy you were till they pointed it out.
Nightsky@194: I think that's fairly common attitude to Tarot - it's an alphabet of archetypes you can use to nudge yourself into looking at things you may have been sweeping under the carpet. There's no need to invoke woo-bosons striking the cards and dictating the spreads, though there's obviously a contingent who swing that way.
re 213: A solid glucose hit can be pretty mind-bending to a person on the edge of starvation, I hear.
heresiarch@162: Also, I'm terribly glad we've all been using the word "woo."
A moment's silence for dave the banished, who left it to us. Not every day you get a satisfying new uncountable noun like that.
A note on legal terms.
"Homicide" is often used as an administrative word for investigations into deaths. In some US Jurisdictions I know it also is the label for some or all criminal charges possible.
What it certainly means, in this context, is that the local law enforcement people are inverstigating this event with a view to presenting evidence in court.
I don't know what the Arizona laws are on murder and manslaughter (those are the basic UK terms) and what they call the different levels of unlawful killing. The names at that stage maybe don't matter. I've heard UK cops talk about "homicide investigation", and it has the virtue of being neutral about likely criminal charges.
"Suspicious death" is the wider classification. If they say they're not looking for any suspects, it was likely suicide.
There's a lot of circumlocutions because the words we'd naturally use might be confused with terms of legal art. In the end, a Coroner's Court, or a Criminal Court, pins the formal name on a death.
sosuile @ 242... LumiCon? I'm all for a Making Light relaxacon
Heck, some of us have been having Gatherings of Light in the Bay Area, once or twice a year, when I travel there. Since they usually are held in places where food & beer are available, that makes them like a con suite.
Epacris @ 266... My wife and I are both atheists. Me, I'm planning to set up the Christmas Tree as soon as she's off to Australia in a couple of weeks. Not because she's against Trees. On the contrary. It's just that she usually thinks it's weird of me to want to do the setup so early each year and this time is even earlier than before. Rather than have scorn & ridicule heaped upon me, I'll be sneaky.
He didn't call up a demon; he called up reality, which is harder to deal with.
It was an extremely brief job because, during the second day of a three-day seminar, afdter watching all the people who *really, really, REALLY needed to use the restroom, but were forbidden to do so by the organizers (if you left during a session you were not allowed back in, and your fee was not refunded).
That's interesting; this has been used as a form of interrogation under borderline torture. Keep giving the guy more coffee, whilst being all nice cop, then turn on the nasty cop act while he squirms.
It seems that a lot of people have strange baseline views about water intake; interestingly, this has gone from the sporting world. Racing cyclists (!) used to refuse water on the road because they thought it slowed them down; these days, it's practically a status symbol in any field of sport to hook down as much electrolyte as possible (it shows you're working hard). The military has gone the same way; once they used to demand water discipline, now they spend startling amounts of money out of their own pockets on Camelbaks.
I don't know what the origin of this killer meme is, but it does seem that it dies out among people who regularly exercise themselves thirsty, probably because of the banging your head on a wall principle (it feels so much better when you stop).
Also, I heard the phrase "spiritual warfare" in the context of Bush-era right-wing Christianism as well.
KeithS @ 173: I don't think he fooled himself at all. I think he's into fooling other people in order to make piles of money, and he didn't give a wet slap about making sure the experience was safe.
I think that's where he started - but the tweets sound like he believed it, and not in the way he wanted to fake. He was immersed in the experience as much as his marks were, and words have power.
Whether or not that actually contributed to his disastrous set up of the situation is a different question, of course.
Alex @274: He didn't call up a demon; he called up reality, which is harder to deal with.
To me, the difference is basically meaningless in this context.
Nancy Lebovitz @ #239:
This reminds me of something I've read: that believing pain = failure is a symptom of having been abused. It sounds plausible to me, but I don't have evidence or a system that it's from.
Any thoughts?
I didn't get it from a belief system, but--
I was in an abusive relationship for four years. One of the things I learned from it (she says with a bitter laugh) is that if I hurt, I'd Done Something Wrong. Tears at words were a sign that I Wasn't Accepting Something Important, physical discomfort was a sign that I Wasn't In The Right Mindset, and when he 'had' to hurt me, well, that was Just Punishment. Things even he couldn't twist around to be directly my fault--like a hip problem I was born with--couldn't possibly be so bad if I didn't HAVE to see a doctor about them, so it was my fault I was in pain for making such a big deal out of it.
Even when he'd defend me in an argument I was having with someone else, it was always with a side of "But she's a total bitch and so deserves your anger and abusive words."
Now, I had a touch of this before I'd ever met him--it's freefloating in the culture, especially for strange girls like I was--but that relationship is what made it sink in bone deep. Eight years after I got out I'm still fighting it off on a weekly basis, even though now I'm very aware of how much bullshit it is.
Friends of mine who suffered from abuse suffer similar effects.
And now I'm going to go shake in a corner. It's always more upsetting to talk about than I think it will be.
Aaand html fail that I of course don't notice until half a second after I hit post. Argh, sorry.
Sarah Vowell did an incredible piece way back in the day for what turned into "This American Life" (PRI - Public Radio International) on the Prayer Warriors of Colorado Springs.
This has been going on for decades now in the U.S. Reagan let them out from under the rocks, and the dubcheney regime was their time to parrrrrrrrrrrrrrrteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! They're not going home now, either.
Love, C.
Renatus: my condolences for the ordeal you endured, and my congratulations on your escape.
I think "woo" may have originated either on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog, or on the associated forums.
It's a terribly useful term.
Lila @ 160:
For me, trusting people is some combination of a low-level default understanding that most people aren't malicious; awareness of the social and legal structure that constrains some forms of self-centered and, yes, malicious behavior; experience with specific people and contexts; and sometimes an inexplicable feeling that I can trust someone beyond what I have justification for. I put a lot of little things on that first one: if someone on the subway asks to borrow a pen, sure, why not, I have plenty of cheap pens (and have always gotten them back). And I am wary about the last one: if it makes it emotionally easier to do something I have reason to think makes sense, great. But I realize that that reaction could lead me into trouble.
And I'm not sure any of that is practically applicable, except for the degrees of: that I trust someone not to randomly start screaming and attacking people on the street doesn't mean I'm going to lend them my life savings, or even let them sleep on my couch.
re 241: Nancy, of course if you are opposed to corporal punishment at all, then you'll reject Dobson's advice. The problem is that "beating children into submission" sounds like "pounding on children until they cry for mercy", not "administer the occasional spanking". There's a world of difference between complaining that his advice invites abuse and saying that it advocates abuse, which is what the sentence I quoted says. Calling Dobson an advocate for corporal punishment, while still a bit slanted, at least sounds something like a factual statement rather than cant. And again, you're getting your story about the book from people who focus on the CP material and ignore the other 85-90% of the book. It's pretty much the equivalent of reading police training materials and representing them as advocating shooting people, or should I say, "brandishing guns at people to force them to respect the political establishment."
Re: Dobson's book:
My parents read his book after having one child, and switched from "don't stifle the child's natural impulses!" to "any time the child doesn't immediately respond to commands, apply a spanking" pretty much overnight. It wasn't the kind of beating that left bruises, but it sure as hell left emotional scars on the sibling in question.
Anecdote != evidence. But I've seen pretty clearly that, yes, following Dobson's child-rearing advice like it's the word of God can cause some serious problems for a kid. I used to read his books when I was a kid, just out of curiosity, and these days they feel to me a lot like zero tolerance school policies: a way of abdicating responsibility while exercising authority. If you follow the procedures in the book, you're excused from having to actually think about effects and use your own judgment and adapting things for different personality types.
(Dobson did address different personality types among children, as I recall, but the only advice about handling them differently that I now remember was something along the lines of "Some kids, you're just going to have to punish a lot more often.")
re 270: Maybe that was Satan's plan.
#283
The problem is not so much what Dobson is advocating as that a lot of the people who buy that book, and follow it, are very much more into punishment, corporal or otherwise - spanking isn't one or two swats with the flat of the hand, it's a heavy belt used until the victim is genuinely hurting, and possibly bleeding.
The limits aren't being laid out clearly for them, or they don't seem to get the idea of limits to punishment. (You only win if the loser is totally humiliated and completely subject to your will: that kind of mindset.)
#283 ::: C. Wingate:
I did look at the amazon reviews, which were mixed, as well as at the "worse of" web page. He advocates hitting children for defiance, presumably until they give in completely.
Now this could work out reasonably well if the parents' demands are doable, and the child basically trusts the parents.
If the demands are impossible or too extreme, or if the child just isn't compliant with being hit, then Dobson's advice is going to lead to abuse.
I also don't much like his advice to use an object to hit with. Not only does this result in less feedback for the parent as to how hard they're hitting, but I can't imagine being stupid enough to physically trust my parents' hands just because they happen not to have a hitting object in them at the moment.
Also, that "worst of" page has rather a lot of insults about children. One of the underlying points seens to be that if the parent wants to discipline, the child is never in the right.
I'm not sure I see a huge difference between "invites abuse" and "advocates abuse", though there is a difference.
With regard to whether those tweets indicate James Ray is practicing black magic: I think intent is relevant here. If he believes what he claims to, he was trying to use magic in ways that he should reasonably have thought might kill people. If he had, instead, pointed a gun at someone, told them to do X, Y, and Z or he would shoot, that would be criminal even if he knew the gun wasn't loaded. If he pointed what he thought was a loaded gun at people and fired, and the gun proved to be empty, I don't know whether that's legally attempted homicide, but ethically I think it is. Trying to use black magic is wrong even if there is no such thing as black magic.
In this case, it's more like someone who quietly dosed his guests' food with what he (perhaps falsely) believed to be a powerful drug, and then pressured them into other stressful activities. It's an attempt to further stress the people who were going through that expensive weekend he created. Yes, sneaking what he thought was a mind- or personality-altering substance into their drinks may make no material if the dealer cheated him and all they got was distilled water, but the attempt is still unethical. (In case it's not obvious, the unethical thing here is dosing people without their knowledge or consent.) And if it had been a real drug, a court is not going to look kindly on a defense based on either ignorance of the drug's effects, or a claim that he thought it was distilled water. Especially when there's years of evidence, from his own writings and past experience, both that he thought this stuff was real.
There's also evidence, from the 2005 case that Teresa pointed to in this post, that he knew or reasonably should have known that the "spiritual retreats" and sweat lodges as he was running them could be harmful.
Fade, I'm not here to defend Dobson. One's degree of dissent from his advice is irrelevant to describing it with some faint taint of accuracy and objectivity. "Beating into submission" is dishonest political rhetoric.
C. Wingate @102:
the point of Christian fasting (and maybe Yom Kippur and/or Ramadan) isn't altering your brain chemistry or what not; it's to remind you of your religion
Yes, precisely. Lent is about altering perceptions, but social rather than physical perceptions, and the fasts of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday are not enough to put any real stress on the body [if they are, it's a valid reason not to do them]. The point of fasting, prayer, and alms-giving is to rearrange your life for a period around different priorities. Lent isn't intended as a mind-body hack, but as a mind-soul hack.
As a specific distinguishing point, I think most people would agree that the purpose of Lent relies on its religious assumptions: as the Apostle Paul said If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we die.
Some of the Native American traditions (and in other parts of the world) seem to have a different purpose -- they are intended to mess with your physical perceptions. This was motivated by the desire to allow specific spiritual perceptions, but transformative experiences (Abi) or mind-body hacks (TNH) can still make sense in a woo-free way. This does require a level of physical or emotional stress that is risky; thus the need for the process to be designed carefully around those risks.
Adrian Smith @ 271: "Not every day you get a satisfying new uncountable noun like that."
Indeed not!
Chaos @ 276: "I think that's where he started - but the tweets sound like he believed it, and not in the way he wanted to fake. He was immersed in the experience as much as his marks were, and words have power."
I think that the "he believed it/he didn't believe" binary isn't a very useful way of looking at it--in order to run a scam like that, you have to be able to believe in it one-hundred-percent, pass-a-polygraph when you're looking the customer in the eye, and then not believe in it at all when you're drawing up the payment schedule or running with the money. It requires double-think, the ability to overlay both beliefs in your mind and flip back and forth like a smarmy Schrodinger's cat.
(I think it's worth differentiating between this kind of long-term scam, where ideally your mark walks away happy and proselytizes for you, and the short-term type where your mark realizes he's been conned--but only after you're in the next state over with a new name and a new scam. They require very different mindsets.)
Fade Manley @ 284: "I used to read his books when I was a kid, just out of curiosity, and these days they feel to me a lot like zero tolerance school policies: a way of abdicating responsibility while exercising authority. If you follow the procedures in the book, you're excused from having to actually think about effects and use your own judgment and adapting things for different personality types." [emphasis mine]
Strike "authority" and sub in "power," and you have the Milgram experiments all over again, with Dobson playing the part of the supervising researcher. It's a strange thing, but people are willing to impute a much greater degree of certainty into an external authority than they're willing to grant themselves. Not that strange, I guess--for all you know, they truly are certain, whereas your own doubts are unavoidable. (That's a major branch of woo right there: putting your faith in something outside yourself in order to imbue its claims with unquestionable authority.)
C Wingate @288. Does he advise parents to hit their children until the children obey their commands without physical coercion?
Sounds very close to "beating into submission", once stripped of rhetoric & justifications.
C. Wingate, I didn't think you were defending him, nor am I really trying to get into a discussion about the validity (or lack thereof) of his parenting methods. I was trying to provide a data point for the angle of "He is not actively advocating extreme physical abuse, but what he advocates can have some of the same psychological effects as abuse." But I don't think I made that very clear in my post.
I think that the phrasing "beating into submission" is emotionally loaded, and not what Dobson is explicitly recommending, and a plausible outcome of people following his advice. (Whether it's a common outcome, I don't have evidence to speak to.)
In retrospect, stepping into the middle of a disagreement to say "I think both sides are absolutely correct" was probably not a useful move on my part, especially when I expressed it without any great clarity.
This is too small a site for LumiCon, but: http://www.vacationrentals.com/vacation-rentals/13128.html
Because a theoretical LumiCon needs a kitchen.
I belong to a group of Christian mothers who are attempting to raise their children (sometimes with the help of their husbands, sometimes not) in considered opposition to the teachings of Dobson, Ezzo, the Pearls, et al. They point out that Dobson assumes that the relationship between child and parent is, at its foundations, adversarial; that is, it's always about power and that is the fault of the child. Whether or not a parent applies physical pain, approaching childrearing from this mindset is bound to do damage. If you think that your child is always trying to control you, rebel against you, and so forth, you're not likely to look at a screaming toddler with compassion or consider, "Well, that settles it--he's definitely getting sick," or, "I'm the one with the bigger brain, he just can't grok the word "no" right now, so let's go home and let him get his big feelings out (although the answer is still "no!") and we'll take him out in public again tomorrow," or "I shouldn't have bought her that cookie because now she's crashing from a sugar high, so let's go for a drive until she calms down and I can finish my errands after that." Punishment has nothing to do with these situations and may make them worse. But punishment is the default tool in Dobson's kit because every situation is a power struggle.
Dobson also wrote The Strong-Willed Child, which recommends breaking the will of children who do not immediately obey--for their own good, of course.
Shweta @266: Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, which are pretty close to where I see things myself. "Listening respectfully" is, I think, always a good idea, even if you end up disagreeing with what's being said.
I'd say the line is where one's convenience/desire causes other people harm. And that's easier to say than to figure out, sure, and people don't necessarily agree.
Well, there you go. No one wants to be That Asshole who says "Oh, come on. This isn't really hurting you." But I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that a party who claims injury is always right, either. ISTM that there's a difference between being actually hurt and just being annoyed*, but I sure don't want to be the one making that call.
Pondering on this a little more, I wonder if a better yardstick is pretention to authenticity, because it seems like the most harm is done by appropriating something and passing it off as the genuine article.** If I make a curry, I'm not going to try and convince anyone that it's Real Authentick Indian Cuisine*** (though I might call it something like Practically Chicken Korma in the spirit of creating some kind of ballpark expectation). That seems a pretty good distance away from doing a half-assed imitation of some other tradition, pretending it's the real thing, and trying to make money from it.
And on that note, having thought about it some more, I think my good-book-bad-movie parallel breaks down at the point of looking at who profits by it. A bad adaptation is likely to create at least some market for the original work, assuming the filmmakers are reasonably upfront about their source material. So if you're that author, it might be annoying to have the schlock identified with you, but you might at least get some sales out of it. But exoticized misrepresentations of appropriated cultural stuff seem to mostly create a market for more of the same, which results in NinjaMania (on the relatively benign end) and You Too Can Be A Mystical Shaman seminars (on the other).
I've also been thinking more about the parallels between cultural appropriation issues and fanfic, both of which seem to cause arguments along similar faultlines, and which seem to me to spring from a similar impulse: "Wow, there's some Cool Shit that would be fun to play with." And I think that the appropriate "marketplace" for both, in the vast majority of cases, is a gift economy; it's probably okay to share these things, but it's probably not okay to sell them. I recalled after writing my previous comment that I have in fact been to an event where middle-class white people participated in a "sweat" (organized in part by both actual Indians and Caucasians who had spent a significant amount of time immersed in Native - in this case, Lenap'e - culture); one of the reasons I have a hard time seeing it as objectionable is that no one paid five figures for the privilege.
___
*There's a set of objections to appropriated stuff that read a whole lot like accusations of BadWrongFun as much as anything else, with the harm, if I understand it right, being mostly having to know that there's someone out there Doin It Rong. But Doin It Rong is, I think, an inevitable byproduct of transmission, and also the means by which we get wonderful things like rock music and Voudun.
**Though I also think fetishizing "authenticity" leads to some strange places, not all of which are good or healthy themselves.
***But, if I were ever foolish or unlucky enough to be serving it to someone who'd grown up on the real deal, I'd at least hope for a certain level of courtesy on their part the same as any other guest, in the same way that I don't get a pass to be rude about the lasagna at my very not-Italian in-laws' just because it's not like what Mom used to make.
@James MacDonald Yes, we do have our own mystical traditions. But it's well-known how one goes about becoming a Catholic, and paying a thousand bucks to sit in a hotel ballroom for a weekend isn't part of it. It is also well-known that while saints can levitate, bilocate, heal the sick, remit sins, and do all kinds of other cool things, that their lives are also notable for poverty, self-denial, prayer, and service to others, and what fun is that?
I would like to offer the small elaboration that most branches of Christianity have their own forms of mysticism, ranging from the formal monasticism of the Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox Churches to various activities undertaken by a number of Pentecostal groups.[1] Really, it's quite amazing how rapidly any religion, even ones with formal rules restricting common mystical practices[2], seems to grow it's own mystical branch.
[1]eg., as snake-handling.
[2]Such as Islam, with formal rules restricting diet restrictions or the like above and beyond what was prescribed in the Qu'ran.
Vicki @288 -- there's a very real question of whether the people he was taking into the event were actually capable of informed consent. Most of these events have a great deal of secrecy about exactly what the attendee will encounter in them. They talk a great deal about the positive results that one will get, but not much about what's going on. One thing that's almost never mentioned in advance: the mixture of group-formation and isolation. It's seldom that an event like this allows the participants to talk freely when the event is in recess. And that's a mind-altering situation indeed. And I expect that people who run them knows this *works*, but don't think of it as being the equivalent of a drug.
I wonder how much of the scam in these things is a "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, These people have done this thing and had good results; therefore if I do it I will have good results. Ignoring time, place, context and personality, of course. It's similar to thinking that drinking milk leads to smoking marijuana -- almost everyone who smokes marijuana started out drinking milk, after all.
truth is life #298: most branches of Christianity have their own forms of mysticism, ranging from the formal monasticism of the Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox Churches
I hope "formal monasticism" was a mistyping, because monasticism != mysticism, at least in my rather dog-eared book.
Some monks are mystics, and some mystics are monks.
James #301:
But they are not one-to-one, and onto, as the math people like to put it.
Vicki #288 ::: I think you're being way too charitable here.
...practicing black magic: I think intent is relevant here.
I don't, because knowing what you're doing is a prerequisite of responsible use of magic. It's easy to drift into evil even in mundane life -- when magic (with it's self-manipulation) gets involved, it's even easier.
If he believes what he claims to, he was trying to use magic in ways that he should reasonably have thought might kill people.
Regardless of what he believed, he established leadership and gained the trust of sixty-odd people, and then, while they were in a condition of impaired consent, he put them into a physical situation which he damn well should have known was likely to kill some of them. Remember, he'd had multiple close calls before!
dosed his guests' food with what he (perhaps falsely) believed to be a powerful drug
Never mind "thought to be" -- fasting is a mind-altering practice. (Water deprivation is more so, with a significant chance of permanent damage to the brain -- along with other organs.) Other such practices (not a complete list) include sleep deprivation, breath control, rhythm/music, exhaustion, and many others. Many of these are often dismissed as just "trimmings", but all can be used to enter altered states of consciousness -- and/or to manipulate a group of followers.
------
Since there's already been some comparison of traditions, allow me to point you to Michael Harner's Way Of The Shaman. This dude started out as an anthropologist who learned shamanic techniques first-hand from a whole bunch of tribes, so there's your "traditional cred". But then he came back and founded what I consider a Western school of shamanism, based on common elements of several traditions, but stripping away most of the mythology and a lot of the more dangerous practices.
Using just drums (or tapes/CDs), his techniques allow for some pretty damn dramatic excursions into alternate states of consciousness -- basically, all you need is the book and either a CD player or a (minimally talented, but reliable) friend to play the drum.
It's also worth noting that as of when I was still following them (a few years ago, at least 15 years after tWotS was published), he and his foundation were not making grandiose claims about wealth, power, or such -- they pitch it strictly as a spiritual practice, and their "evangelism" was distinctly lackadaisical. (Also, his foundation directly supports many individual shamans and groups, in threatened traditions around the world.)
Addendum to "all you need"... oh yeah, a pair of rattles too. (even if you're using the CD for the drums). Also, it's perfectly fair to hold off on buying CD and rattles until you've read the book and decided you actually do want to try it.
David @303:
What I'm getting at is that the would-be black magic is an aggravating factor: if he'd had no previous bad experiences, and hadn't been trying to invoke "the warrior" in verbal ways, but had shut that many people up in that sort of small space, and overheated and dehydrated them, and two had died, it would still likely be criminally negligent homicide.
As it is (and no, I Am Not A Lawyer), it sounds more like depraved indifference to human life, which is a more serious matter. And the attempted magic, while not the main thing, is an aspect of that.
Dan Layman-Kennedy @ 297: I don't really have much to add, but I really like the way you lay out the issues. Historically, "exploring other cultures" has been largely synonymous with "exploiting other cultures." Real intercultural learning, in a non-hierarchical, non-exploitative way, is an endeavor that we humans are still just barely starting to figure out. The scars left from earlier failed attempts are still pretty raw, and I think you've hit on some good guidelines on how to avoid irritating those wounds.
I hope "formal monasticism" was a mistyping, because monasticism != mysticism, at least in my rather dog-eared book.
Oh no, I was not attempting to assert that monasticism and mysticism are isomorphic. I was merely giving an example of a practice designed to promote and facilitate mystic experiences, insofar as the Christian practice originated in early Christian mystics, and that monastic practices are often the same as mystical practices elsewhere.
As to monasticism versus mysticism, certainly the Christian contemplative orders are much inclined to the latter. Indeed, I think it is largely their purpose.
There has been a dialogue going on for decades among some of the Catholic contemplative orders and monastic and/or mystic groups of other religions, particularly Buddhist but also including Islam. Thomas Merton could be considered exemplary, but he is certainly not the only one.
The saying "All mystics come from the same country and recognize one another" is attributed to St. Martin of Tours. I first heard it quoted by my Zen teacher, speaking approvingly of the German mystic Meister Eckhart. (In Googling to confirm the wording of the phrase, I find it quoted by Avram Davidson inter alia, in regard to Crowley. An interesting juxtaposition.)
James D. Macdonald, #248, two of mine have been/are poisonous substances -- NSAIDS (Motrin, to be exact), and prednisone (the med that's fixing my brain from March's stroke). But my other was an autoimmune form of focal glomerulosclerosis. Ha! Medline says "Some patients will receive high doses of corticosteroids or a drug called cyclosporine". I was the first person to take cyclosporine for focal glomerulosclerosis -- I had to sign a lot of papers because they considered it experimental for that use.
Vicki #305: Well, I'm certainly with you on that. This guy basically has no excuses to hide behind, neither on the rationalist nor the mystical sides of the story. IANAL either, but I doubt he'll fare well in court.
Upon reflection, and in regards to the concept that mysticism is somehow cooler if it comes from a different culture, I am surprised that no one has brought up The Way of Mrs. Cosmopolite.
Just wanted, briefly, to add that I very much appreciate the work that Teresa has done here, & I hope it finds wide application.
According to the AP, 49 year old Liz Neuman, who was hospitalized with damage to multiple organs, has died.
@Dan 297 --
Agreed. A couple other thoughts:
No one wants to be That Asshole who says "Oh, come on. This isn't really hurting you."
But Dan, I see people doing this all the time. Especially on race issues. It's generally phrased as "You're overreacting" or "I don't like your tone", but that's what people (generally not of the target group) say quite often.
And I don't think it's assholishness; I think it's that when one hasn't faced a particular type of pressure, it's hard to see why other people would react to it. It's also that we're enculturated to believe that some people are inherently more rational than others, and most of us believe that unconsciously. It's wrong, but it's not necessarily malicious.
But I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that a party who claims injury is always right, either.
Agreed, and it's even possible for someone to claim injury in all honesty and for that injury to come more from previous injury than from the current situation -- but it's probably a good idea (and I say this for myself, too, rather than meaning to lecture) to pause and consider the possibility that someone who claims injury is right, and try to make sense of why that would be true.
I figure if we all do that, then it becomes a lot more possible to resolve individual situations as they arise.
ISTM that there's a difference between being actually hurt and just being annoyed*, but I sure don't want to be the one making that call.
Agreed, and me either.
Though, thinking about it (and thinking out loud here), I wonder whether "annoyed" and "hurt" aren't coming from very different places? Can someone who's vulnerable and hurtable *get* "annoyed" really? It seems like something that happens more when one has the high ground on some axis.
Which doesn't pattern exactly with the group one belongs to, of course. I just think the situations in which I get hurt, annoyed is not really an option. Does that make any sense?
Samurai is more than just, "the other". They have been being used for ages as the apotheosis of the "warrior mind."
I recall (because I was very interested in Japan in my teens; I read Ruth Benedict, and then moved on from there) the sudden rise in Samurai stuff in the '80s (with the Japanese set to "take over the business world" and the attempts to apply "The Book of Five Rings" to everything
Add the misundertandings of Zen, and the present militarisation of the US, and all the rest. I was surprised it took him that long to bring them into the equation.
dave (ole bean, you don't mind the condescending moniker I've not actually earned the social right to use, do you? Din'nt think so chap, where was I, oh yes):
Get it. Probably not.
Then again, you came in with your own paradigm, and then applied to to all, and made a hash of it (see above, about the affected plummy tone you used; in itself an interesting tell of class, culture and nation; in that you seemed to be using an affected British tone [hard to do in text, but hey points for trying, or not). That you believe to have The Truth, and wish to shoehorn every other way of seeing the world into it, with dismissive comments about how it's fine and dandy to believe thing, until other people actually start to act like such beliefs mean something....
Well that's offensive. It's offensive even if you are right (which, when all you packed into that little sentence is dragged out of the box and into the light, you aren't, not really. Because how people perceieve the world isn't a problem until they start forcing people to kowtow to them).
Not, of course, that I think you are still around. I'm engaging in a point of rigidifying the local morés , which as abi points out, are not about you; but about how the people here treat each other, and how you failed to be a decent member of the community.
Which is one of those belief things, and one, even with a relatively brief history here (as you have) you ought to have picked up.
EClaire: Check out the meeting. They will be quite friendly, in a low key way, and very accepting.
Re "water discipline". The Army has been doing some pendulum shifts on it (not least because of Desert Storm, and then the over-watering [leading to deaths in 1998 at Ft. Sill from overhydration. I actually had minor overhydration issues in 1993]). The reason, however for the massive fondness for camelbacks is a two-fold tactical one.
First, they are easy to drink from. If you are disturbed in the middle of drink, you just spit out the nipple. Add the convenience of distributed weight and it's pretty nice.
But more importantly, when using a canteen one has two options. Carry it full, or carry it empty. Taking a couple of swallows out of one turns it from a leaden lump on the hip, to a sloshing pain. Not only does the balance shift, it makes a lot of noise.
That's why we spend the money on camelbacks.
C. Wingate: I'm of a mixed mind on corporal punishment. I was spanked, and I seem to have not suffered from it. But I look at children reared, and animals trained, with positive reinforcement, and they are more biddable, and more responsive to correction.
Which is context; because I read that book. I also read it's companion, "The Strong Willed Child" and I was appalled. The passage with the dog pretty much summed it up. The dog, "talked back" and he beat the thing with a belt, in what he described as a pitched battle; an existential battle of wills.
""When I told Sigmund to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie's way of saying. "Get lost!"
"I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me 'reason' with Mr. Freud."
"What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!"
If that's something he sees as appropriate to a dog, then what shall we do with a child, more rebellious, and who ought to know better. The implication is they need a stronger application of the rod, lest they be spoiled, which isn't just my take on it, it's Dobson's too:
"But this is not a book about the discipline of dogs; there is an important moral to my story that is highly relevant to the world of children. JUST AS SURELY AS A DOG WILL OCCASIONALLY CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITY OF HIS LEADERS, SO WILL A LITTLE CHILD -- ONLY MORE SO." (emphasis in original)
It may be a poor shorthand to sum the two books in the single title, but to say Dobson believes in beating children into submission does not seem to me to be, "dishonest political rhetoric., and when you try to say he doesn't argue for it, you are defending him, and doing it by painting those who have the gist of his position as either ignorant, or dishonest.
Then again, the shorthand was yours. Nancy said Republican Gommorrah had a lot about Dobson, and referred to his best known work. You said that reference was unfair, because the idea of beating children into submission, which he clearly makes part of his philosophy, isn't in bold type in that particular, book.
Which isn't exactly honest political rhetoric.
What struck me when I read "The Book of Five Rings" was the way in which it differently expressed some pretty standard guidelines. It's about personal combat, but "every stroke must be a cutting stroke" covers a lot of the basic Principles of War.
Yes, there's the appeal of the exotic. And most of us get these things through a translator's interpretation and rephrasing. And what may be more important is that they come with a different cultural baggage. In the end, a successful US Army officer is drawing on the same principles, but he's US f???ing Army, dammit. And Miyamato Musashi isn't.
A book that changed my view of spiritual metaphors that invoke and mayhem was "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" by Christopher Hedges.
In the book, Mr. Hedges refers to Freud's theory that all people are comprised of two drives: Eros, the drive to create, and Thanatos, the drive to destroy.
What Hedges says is that at the beginning, the the path to love and the path to destruction feel the same. They are both wonderful forces that lift us up from our cares and give our lives meaning. The difference is that one enriches our lives, and the other ultimately claims them.
That's why we so often choose the path of destruction, because we don't know it for what it actually it. It feels like creation.
Anyway, the warrior and sacrifice talk reminds me of this.
Thanks for a great post!
Terry, excerpts of Dobson @316 remind me of the mindset in this story, linked in The Nomination Thing @83,
Edward said, inter alia, "he thought [his sister & her husband] were at times "too easy" when they disciplined their children.His response to this vicious attack was sheer self-defence: a night break-in, stabbing & beating the pair to death wih a knife & wheelbarrow handle. Then, of course, adopting the orphans so as to raise them right. I wonder if they'd've survived.
He also said that 'it wasn't just Christmas' when he wasn't invited over. It was also Thanksgiving in 2005, the year his and [his sister]'s father died.
"When someone does that, they hate you - they're out to destroy you," Wycoff said.
Iain Coleman @ 281: I think "woo" may have originated either on Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog, or on the associated forums.
I've been hearing it since the Eighties at least (although it was more likely to be the full "woo-woo" back then).
Terry@315: Then again, you came in with your own paradigm, and then applied to to all, and made a hash of it (see above, about the affected plummy tone you used; in itself an interesting tell of class, culture and nation; in that you seemed to be using an affected British tone [hard to do in text, but hey points for trying, or not).
Possibly reading "a tad" too much into "Epslootlay, Abi, ole bean." I liked the way he reckoned "Umpty thousand years of structural oppression based on people being forced to listen to their local woomeisters has rendered me intolerant." as though he'd personally had to sit through all of it.
But he still brought us "woo", even if it has been around since the umpties. "Woo-woo" isn't quite as good IMO.
A third person has died from multiple organ failure.
On the topic of sweating it all out, there is some evidence to suggest that Bronze age humans in the English South Downs and Midlans used some sort of sauna. The evidence is large amounts of damaged flint which had been heated then cooled, apparently by having water dropped on it.
The small scale reconstruction attempt by 1st year archaeology students involved ill fitting tarpaulins over a framework of flexible boughs and a clay lined pit into which the hot rocks were placed. And of course safety glasses in case bits of rock went flying due to rock fracture.
Mentioned here, page 12, for example:
http://www.le.ac.uk/lahs/downloads/Clayvolume73600dpism-2.pdf
Last time I heard "woowoo" was a few years ago when MythBusters's Adam Savage gave his verdict on pyramid power.
As somebody pointed out when that passage from The Strong-Willed Child was discussed in my mothers' group, the whole situation was Dobson's fault because he doesn't know what discipline is for dogs or anybody else. "I told him 'down off the chair' and he growled at me" is a sign of bad dog raising.
Sometimes, when I tell Freya to get off the spot I want to use on the couch, she'll growl. It's not a lack of discipline. She's just a bit deranged.
#316: I'll never be getting over the dog scene. Is there any clearer indicator of "you fail at authority" than getting menaced by one's own dachshound? Mind-controlled by a goldfish, maybe?
Buying into Dobson's ideas about creating and exerting hierarchical authority is like falling for a beggar's get-rich-quick scheme or taking a notorious jailbird's advice on "how not to get caught".
I know they say "those who can't, teach", but there should be some level of incompetence below which you can teach only by bad example.
I just had a rather horrible thought: I wonder if Ray even knows the names of the people he killed?
"What I thought on reading those tweets was that if James Ray honestly believed what he preached, if he truly believed that thoughts and words and intentions are magic, he would never have written those tweets and sent them out into the world."
Or, perhaps, he is death-obsessed. He speaks (or tweets) much of death.
It seems to me that a big part of the reason these "instant enlightenment" scams are so popular is because there are no legitimate outlets for spiritual hunger in our society. For this, I see two reasons: first, and simplest, from my viewpoint all religious forms are past their use-by dates, and out of touch with current reality. We await the new revelation. This I see as a global problem. The second is specific to Western culture: the dominant religion is hostile to mysticism. Consider the fate of St. John of the Cross. It is not a coincidence: the Nicene Creed contains, among other things, a rejection of mysticism, and Christianity often treats its mystics little better than Rome and Israel treated a certain famous itinerant preacher from Galilee. Contributing to the problem are unrealistic Christian attitudes towards the physical. Make no mistake about it: there are people for whom the hunger for the spiritual is as real as the hunger for human contact. And most Christian churches offer these people only a harsh monastic creed which barely admits the possibility of mysticism. The times are unsettled and there is much hunger of many sorts. It is not, therefore, surprising that many people are prey for the likes of Ray.
"Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled."
"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves."
Inge #328: "those who can't, teach"
Pedantic mode on: That saying originally was about people who can't do their Thing for some other reason than incompetence -- like the football player who turns to coaching after his joints give out.
Inge #328, cont'd: But yeah, that is total "fail at authority". My understanding has always been that it's the low-ranked types who tend to resort to violence -- the true dominants don't need it.
And for small dogs or small kids, simply picking them up and putting them in their time-out corner makes a much more useful impression than hitting them.
Well, it began as a joke, but I think the idea of a worldwide gathering of Making Light commenters is a terrific idea, and I would show up if I can possibly manage it! OTOH I think the idea of selecting ME as the GOH is patently absurd. How about, you know, Teresa? Or Patrick? Or abi, Jim, or Avram? Even outside those people, I can think of others who would be better GOHs than me. Inside them...I would be too busy trying to get out to think.
I think the idea of a Unified Spiritual Field Theory Conference also has merit. If you all think I should be GOH I will humbly accept and work my ass off to deserve it. You won't have to bribe me with anything; I'll even pay my own way and all that. Gifts of chocolate will be gratefully accepted!
OK, now to get a little more serious. I have a lot of catching up to do, because of a film project.
C. 102: the point of Christian fasting (and maybe Yom Kippur and/or Ramadan) isn't altering your brain chemistry or what not; it's to remind you of your religion.
The point of the Ramadan fast, I have it on excellent authority, is to keep you mindful of the fact that there are poor people who don't have enough food or water at ANY time. This also encourages almsgiving, which is another of the Five Pillars of Islam. I told a Moslem friend this past Ramadan that in New Jersey (where we both live) reminding yourself of the plight of the poor might be better served by simply not bathing or sleeping indoors for a month. He agreed, but said he would keep the traditional fast, and consider the different plights poor people are in around the world.
Chris 229: Your motto, in Latin: Per dubium, contentiō; per contentionem, eruditiō. ... I think you deserve a good Latin motto. (Abi, feel free to amend as you see fit, my Latin is decidedly rusty.)
Thank you!! I have a question. Contentiō is clearly the source of our word 'contention'; does it carry the meaning of conflict between different parties that our word does? I realize 'striving' can mean that (cf. 'strife'), but what I meant was striving in the sense of "keep on trying (esp. to improve oneself), even when it's really hard."
Lee 232: "Avengelical" is certainly not original with me, and in fact I'm pretty sure I picked it up here, back in some of the discussions about the Religious Right in 2007/2008. It bears the same sort of relationship to "Evangelical" that "Christianist" does to "Christian" -- referring specifically to the hate-based subset of a larger group.
I'm definitely stealing that one. I've been uncomfortable for some time using 'Evangelicals' and 'Fundamentalists' to mean the hate-filled anti-reason "Christian" right. I know some Evangelicals and Fundamentalists who are none of those things, including on the political right. Now I have a word I can define once and use thereafter. Thanks!
Dan 260: I'm pretty confident that making curry doesn't make me much of an appropriator or a wannabe, but I'm less certain about wearing a kurta*, or worshipping a god with an elephant's head without adopting the rigors of living as a Hindu** otherwise.
Well, I worship Ganesha, as I've said, and none of the Hindus I've spoken about it thought it was in any way inappropriate for me to do so. I've never heard of a Hindu saying that the Hindu gods are only for Hindus, in fact. I suspect this is because "to a Hindu all things are Hindu," as a friend once put it, but also partly because Hinduism really isn't threatened with extinction. Hindus aren't being herded into reservations and forced into dire poverty that they can escape only by becoming Christian.
Rachel 262: If any one is interested, I could dig out my notes for more specifics.
I'm VERY interested! Spirituality and the brain (no, I'm not equating spirtuality with Pinkie) is a subject so fascinating that it makes me wish I'd studied neuroscience in school.
Shweta 266: Thank you. I can only quote Hindu friends; having the word of an actual Hindu on these matters is invaluable.
C. 283: Nancy, of course if you are opposed to corporal punishment at all, then you'll reject Dobson's advice.
Dobson advocates corporal punishment of babies for arching their backs. That's abusive by any non-insane definition. Dobson is a manifestation of evil in the world, and all righteous people will oppose him and all his works. Parents who follow his advice should be rewarded by having their children taken from them (or if they grow to adults, cut off all contact permanently), and by rotting in poverty and neglect in their old age.
But perhaps I'm hypersensitive on such issues. He's undeniably an advocate of abusive behavior.
Clifton 308: The saying "All mystics come from the same country and recognize one another" is attributed to St. Martin of Tours. I first heard it quoted by my Zen teacher, speaking approvingly of the German mystic Meister Eckhart.
I had an interesting experience a few years ago, when a Christian drummer came to do Christian drumming mysticism with some people from our congregation. He and I had completely different frameworks, except when we talked about where we go when we drum. Our experiences were identical—no, not even identical, because that implies they were separate things. They were the same experience, and we were going to the same places.
Terry 316: Damn that Dobson. I was going to say "Damn that Dobson is a piece of shit," but actually the shorter sentence expresses my feelings about him even better.
Jenny 326: As somebody pointed out when that passage from The Strong-Willed Child was discussed in my mothers' group, the whole situation was Dobson's fault because he doesn't know what discipline is for dogs or anybody else. "I told him 'down off the chair' and he growled at me" is a sign of bad dog raising.
Absolutely. Notice his dog isn't a big German Shepherd, or he wouldn't even try his abusive methods. I hope his dog rips his fucking throat out while he's asleep. The dog would be killed, of course, but I'd add its name to my list of Martyrs in Good Causes.
David 331: That saying originally was about people who can't do their Thing for some other reason than incompetence -- like the football player who turns to coaching after his joints give out.
I like that better, but I can't resist quoting an addendum my father gave me: "Those who can't teach, teach gym."
David Harmon #331: that saying originally was about people who can't do their Thing for some other reason than incompetence
OK, I thought it was about how people who had to work hard and study all the nuts and bolts of a skill to become passably competent in it make better teachers than naturals.
Dobson, however, even if he had studied dog training for years, doesn't seem to have learned enough about it to understand that he's bad at it and why -- which is the minimum requirement for teaching from lack of talent.
Feh. I wrote a nice long comment, addressing a bunch of other people's comments, and linking to the other comments because I'm so far behind.
I forgot that putting in a lot of links gets your comment held for moderation. Dræt.
The Raven@330: It is not a coincidence: the Nicene Creed contains, among other things, a rejection of mysticism
Say what?
I just now went and looked up the Nicene Creed (in order to make certain I was remembering all of its bits correctly), and I'm entirely unclear about which of its many and various clauses could be construed in that manner.
(If you're talking about qui locutus est per Prophetas -- "who has spoken through the prophets" -- which is the only thing I can think of that comes even remotely close, that's still stretching the meaning past the point where the rubber band goes snap.)
The raven #330 - perhaps you can define mysticism more clearly for us? I can thinks of a couple of slightly different responses to what you wrote, depending on what we do or do not agree is mysticism.
Pendrift #323: A third person has died from multiple organ failure.
I mentioned that up-thread @317, but I suppose people usually just skip over one-word link posts.
Debra Doyle, #335: the Nicene Creed contains no requirement for study or discipline or anything other than baptism. There is no requirement that adherents make an effort to know the spiritual, no requirement of practice. In every other religion I am aware of, core dogma makes greater demands. As this worked out historically, any mystical interest was treated as suspect--indeed that too much interest in any kind of knowledge was suspect. Hence the destruction of the libraries of Hellenic paganism.
The Raven, 330: And most Christian churches offer these people only a harsh monastic creed which barely admits the possibility of mysticism.
I go to church every Sunday, mas or menos -- the above sentence does not describe my church at all. Neither my bishop nor my pastor have any objection to mysticism per se, though they would rightfully be wary of any particular instance of it. (I'm fairly certain that Warrior Spirit retreats would not find much support in the diocese of Oakland.)
I'm not sure what "a harsh monastic creed" is. The Rule of Benedict, one of the principal Christian monastic rules, is remarkably gentle given the restrictions and assumptions of its time. The Nicene Creed, which we say every Sunday, is not "monastic," nor is it "harsh." It says, I profess this.
Could you explain, please?
#239 I have had two painful experiences with people who rocketed out of Landmark having disconnected from all common sense, and promptly ruined their lives; I have also reconnected with two good friends whose natural common sense was validated and encouraged by Landmark into new careers and joyful living. Go figure.
Another handy illustration of Momma's Wisdom, "It takes all kinds."
#296 Dobson also wrote The Strong-Willed Child, which recommends breaking the will of children
In Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer writes about different colonial groups' typical attitudes toward child-rearing. "Breaking the will of the child" was one way, bending it was another, and I have forgotten the others, but I remember it as a fascinating view of where and how different threads in American culture were spun. The Dobsons we will always, apparently, have with us.
Doug 341: The Dobsons we will always, apparently, have with us.
You have spoken words of ill omen. Spit for luck.
Lay Christians and mysticism:
My acquaintance with Christian mysticism is almost entirely Catholic. From what I have seen, there are plenty of avenues into the mystical for even lay Carholics (though several of my friends who started down that road as lay Catholics later "turned pro.")
There is a substantial population of Roman Catholics who find the rosary and its attendant meditations (the Mysteries) a gateway to substantial mystical experience. Don't sell those little old ladies muttering over their beads short because they don't look like televangelists.
Others are fans of the Jesus prayer, which (in my personal experience) can lead to the same mental states as I have read about from other repetitve prayer traditions.
Lay people (and vowed religious from other orders) who get really interested in this stuff can join the more contemplative orders; I know several Third Order Carmelites. This gives budding contemplatives access to established traditions and experienced spiritual direction.
I know less about the options available for vowed religious members of the church, and nearly nothing about Protestant and Orthodox practice, but there is certainly a deep, wide and publicly available tradition of mysticism down at Saint Whosiewhat's Catholic Church in your neighborhood. It won't necessarily be the exotic flavor of woo you want, but on the other hand, it's free and won't kill you.
Lizzy L, #340, you have found a place for yourself; I am happy for you. I know many people who have found places in Christianity. None of this is directed at you or the church you attend. Yet I know many more people who were shut out, anathemized, abused. You and your church are members of a minority. Look at Catholicism throughout the third world. In Mexico, people still make pilgrimages on their knees. Examples multiply, and I can cite horrific ones from the present day, and many more from history, but enough. I would never send someone who was looking for a mystical practice to Christianity unless that was the only path they would accept--there are too many traps, and a majority of Christians regard mysticism as, at best, an aberration and at worst evil.
It is perhaps useful to regard the place of mysticism in Christianity as similar to the place of music in Islam. The more stringent sorts of Islam outlaw music and nowhere is it more than tolerated. Yet Muslims still make music, and the muzzein's call itself is a kind of music. So with mysticism in Christianity. It is not loved by the Church's authorities. Yet there are still Christian mystics, and despite all secularization there is a kind of magic in the rituals.
Comments on $9,695 New Age sweat lodge session kills 2, injures 19: