Shambhala and Shamanism

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting Andrei Znamenski, author of "Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia". He was on a book tour at Books-A-Million at Discover Mills -- not a place you'd expect an audience of esotericists to show up. Alas, it was only me and my brother, but we had a good time talking with Mr. Znamenski. My bro is well-read on the subject matter of Shambhala, and I'm well-read on the subject of shamanism. It turns out Znamenski has an earlier book, "The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination". How did I miss this one? I admit I haven't read as deeply in current shamanic literature of late, being immersed in other topics, but I had to order a copy.

Znamenski is coming back to Atlanta on July 21st for a signing at Barnes & Noble in Buckhead -- a much better venue. Check out the links above and please come out if the book looks interesting to you. Let's get lots of people there for Mr. Znamenski!

Goodreads

I occasionally post book reviews up on Goodreads. Check me out here.

The Grand Masquerade

Hey, looks like I'll be at The Grand Masquerade this September. Come join us!

Convention Season

Here's a list of the conventions where I'll be appearing this Summer-Fall, 2010. All are in Atlanta, GA.

- Faerie Escape Atlanta, August 14-15

- Dragon-Con, September 3-6

- SIEGE, September 30-October 3

See ya there!

The Great God Pan is Dead

When watching the news last week, I saw the headline "Olympian Dies" and I immediately thought: "A god is dead?" Then I realized that they were of course referring to the Olympic athlete, the luger who died on the Whistler track.

How silly of me; gods can't die, unless it's their role to be dying and reborn gods (usually fertility or agricultural deities). The word of Pan's death was probably a misunderstanding referring to Tammuz's death. And yet…

What's going on these days, what meme is afoot, that the Greek gods are parading all over pop culture of late? Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief opened in theaters the same day as the start of the Winter Olympic games, although the series of books has been out for a few years now, burning up the kid lit bestseller charts. But here come the trailers for April's release of the remake of Clash of the Titans. This time, it appears that Perseus is fighting to just be a mortal, to be left alone by the gods. The kids in the Percy Jackson books want to meet their true parents -- the gods -- and learn kewl powerz, but Perseus wants none of it, probably because of the strings attached to being a hero in Greek myth -- you become a set piece in the gods' dramas. In our ego-ascendant era, that's not acceptable. The gods have to die to make way for us.

Perhaps we should keep watch for what other forms the gods are appearing in at present, and what their game is.

Is This The Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see

-- Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody"

I've gotten a bit sidetracked in reading the Red Book. I got curious about Jung's technique of active imagination. As good as Shamdasani's Introduction is for setting the historical milieu in which Jung conceived this technique, it doesn't really get at how this technique works. So, I've been reading Jung on Active Imagination, a compilation of Jung's papers that refer to the technique (which he originally called by various names, including the transcendent function).

I've only gotten through three sections -- the introduction by Jean Chodorow, a section from Jung's Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and Jung's early paper on the transcendent function (written in 1916 but revised by Jung in 1958) -- and I still haven't found what I'm looking for: more guidelines on how Jung initiated his "fantasies" (as he refers to them).

Perhaps there are no real guidelines; maybe every moment in which a fantasy can be invoked through active imagination is unique and distinct to its own character, and there are no general rules on which to draw. This seems borne out by the different but similar techniques that others used preceding Jung's "most difficult experiment", as chronicled by Shamdasani. There is probably a wealth of different approaches out there. It'd be a fascinating study to gather them all and look for commonalities. Perhaps the publication of the Red Book will draw new attention to this aspect of Jung's work, one that doesn't seem to have made any headway into non-Jungian circles. We all know about Jung's personality types and their influence on the Myers-Briggs test, and everybody knows the terms extrovert and introvert, collective unconscious, the shadow, etc. But you really don't hear about active imagination outside of Jungian or psychotherapeutic circles. Why hasn’t it had more influence on artists?

Jung himself took pains to differentiate active imagination and its expressive products (writing, painting, etc.) from art, insisting that to aestheticise it too greatly was to lose its meaning to concerns about form, and vice versa: to scrutinize it too heavily too early was to sacrifice its form for the sake of meaning alone. A symbol generated in the unconscious in its wholeness as an image is both form and meaning. To break it up into either/or is to kill its vitality, and perhaps its message.

Still … as a writer, I'm curious about how people generate ideas and how the imagination works.

I'm glad to see Jung use the term "fantasies." The word fantasy seems to have accumulated a lot of negative connotations these days. This is partly due to its use as a term designating a certain genre of fiction: generally epic or high fantasy in the Tolkien mode and/or sword-and-sorcery. This is unfortunate, since such a great word shouldn't be pigeon-holed into such a narrow sense of genre -- that is, stale trilogies about created worlds that resemble our Middle Ages. There are so many other fantasies out there that are also worthy of the venerable name.

It's also a term used by Michael Meade (and, I think, James Hillman) to refer strictly to products of the ego: fantasies about male-power, wealth fulfillment, spiritual wisdom aspirations, etc. They seem to reserve the term imagination for the products -- the images -- of the soul. I once thought this was a useful distinction. No longer. It's time to reclaim fantasy. It's a good word for the raw, unfiltered welling up of images from the unconscious, even if they are occasionally commandeered by the ego for its own one-sided purposes. Fantasy, in the end, will win through, and enchant the mind to let down its guard, so that its sleeping princesses can awaken and take the castle.

Addendum: A shout-out to the Atlanta Jung Society Red Book reading group. We met last night for the first time, and it looks to be a fruitful endeavor. Thanks, fellow Red Bookers!

Here Comes the Sun

Whew, didn't mean to take so long between posts. I have not been able to get very far into The Red Book; household issues and work took over. Now, in this lull between Christmas and the New Year, I hope to dig in again.

Let me state here that I am not approaching this work as an analyst. I'm a writer of pop-culture artifacts -- namely, roleplaying games. I am interested in how pop-culture "trash" -- the discarded, the dismissed -- reveals truths moving in the collective unconscious that are often more telling, vital and alive than those expressed in more consciously considered and (over?)wrought works of art. I am interested in how these undercurrents symbolically and synchronistically interrelate to other things going on in culture. More often than not, these connections seem absurd. Jeff Wells, at Rigorous Intuition, has pointed out that the universe is sometimes a lot like a Google search -- it's an associative database. Do a search on Google and you'll often get odd juxtapositions of things that don't seem to belong together, but are connected by the word or phrase you've typed in. That describes synchronicity rather well. Unrelated things pop up in our lives significantly, based around a theme, image, word or number.

It's these sort of odd juxtapositions and mash ups in pop culture that are often overlooked because they don't fit our definitions of causality or belonging. Because the writer, artist, designer, etc., did not consciously put them there, we tend to afford them no significance, or consider it an "accident". The unconscious, however, works with intention, balancing our limited ego perspective by expressing what the ego refuses or has denied. Pop culture is a good place to go looking for traces of the cultural shadow, as well as other archetypes. The movements of these behemoths of the collective unconscious are invisible to consciousness, but they often leave traces or premonitions of their coming in art. I think the popular arts provide a more immediate view, if we can look past the smudges in the window. Let's face it: most pop culture is crap. Looking it at archetypally doesn't mean we have to excuse poor artistry and workmanship. The issues I'm concerned with here aren't "is it good or bad?" Rather, "what does it say?"

So, this brings me to The Red Book. One section of Shamdasani's introduction struck me as having interesting significance: Jung's discovery of the Self in his Liverpool dream.

Several young Swiss and I are down by the docks in Liverpool. It is a dark rainy night, with smoke and clouds. We walk up to the upper part of town, which lies on a plateau. We come to a small circular lake in a centrally located garden. In the middle of this there is an island. The men speak of a Swiss who lives here in such a sooty, dark dirty city. But I see that on the island stands a magnolia tree covered with red flowers illuminated by an eternal sun, and think, "Now I know, why this Swiss fellow lives here. He apparently also knows why."

Jung paints a mandala based on the city map he has seen.

The dream represented my situation at the time. I can still see the grayish-yellow raincoats, glistening with the wetness of the rain. Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque, just as I felt then. But I had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was why I was able to live at all … I saw that here the goal had been reached. One could not go beyond the center. The center is the goal, and everything is directed toward that center. Through this dream I understood that the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning.

We all know Liverpool is famous for something other than Jung's dream: The Beatles, of course. That the dream took place there is just a coincidence, right? Hmm. The Red Book was born from Jung's prophetic vision of what he later realized was World War I. Why should we assume that Jung's prophetic sense ended there? He could have had no way of knowing that the eternal sun he encountered on that dream island in the center of Liverpool would herald the Fab Four, who would later sing about that sun and tell us "it's all right."

Has there ever been before or since a phenomenon like The Beatles? I don't mean the boys themselves, but the world's reaction to them. How could such a cataclysmic cultural event not reverberate back in time and have been foreseen by a few lonely prophets, who had no idea what they had witnessed or what would come of it?

The classic four-man rock band is a mandala of sorts, representing the four elements of Earth (drums), Air (vocals), Fire (guitar) and Water (bass). Led Zeppelin later made this more explicit in actually adopting elemental symbols for the band members.

The tree Jung saw was a magnolia. Perhaps a sugar magnolia, as sung about by The Grateful Dead?

I don't know what all these means. Maybe it's just bullshit pattern-seeking behavior triggered by anxiety in my amygdala. To paraphrase Robert Anton Wilson: "All things are true in one sense, false in one sense, meaningless in one sense, true and false in one sense, true and meaningless in one sense, true and false and meaningless in one sense, etc."