Spirit on the Web

The Changing Catholic Cafeteria

2012-02-17T20:29:16Z

Back in the 1980s, during the reign of Pope John Paul II, conservative Roman Catholics minted a pejorative term for their coreligionists who thought independently, sometimes daring to differ with the Vatican over matters including contraception, homosexuality, women priests, and eating meat on Fridays. (Oh, right, the Vatican canceled that restriction a few decades ago--although some churches still put our calendars with half-tone images of fish on every Friday--along with the concept of Limbo as the permanent home of unbaptized babies.) Critics called such free-thinkers "cafeteria Catholics." In 1986, the magazine Fidelity wrote: "'Cafeteria Catholicism' allows us to pick those 'truths' by which we will measure our lives as Catholics." At the time I found this odd, having grown up in the church at a time when, even in parochial schools, we were taught the primacy of conscience. The term also lost much of its sting when national surveys showed that a majority of American Catholics ignored the church's doctrine against birth control and even abortion. But cafeteria Catholicism has had a surprising resurgence recently.

]]> Washington Post, James Downie suggested that the media should "challenge Santorum and Gingrich's 'cafeteria Cathoilicism.'" He cited scholar Juan Cole's provocative blog about Rickl Santorum's particular brand of dogma browsing, entitled "Top Ten Catholic Teachings Santorum Rejects while Obsessing about Birth Control." These teachings, well documented, include Papal opposition to the American invasion of Iraq, almost all wars, and the death penalty in virtually all situations. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also requires that health care be provided to all Americans, that the federal minimum wage be increased for the working poor, and that welfare be assured for all needy families. Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, both Roman Catholic, are opposed at some level to all of those expressions of Catholic teaching

Catholic social doctrines regarding the poor and imprisoned are based on the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels. Downie's article documents that these social justice teachings have also been supported in a number of papal encyclicals, but that seems to be of little concern to Catholic candidates seeking to appeal to conservative voters. They have become the new "cafeteria Catholics," picking and choosing which church teachings to embrace. Not surprisingly, their choices align with those of many Evangelical Christians, who are not bound by Catholic doctrine (and are openly critical of the Vatican), but who make up a sizable portion of the conservative electorate.

Perhaps the most significant change in Vatican teachings has to do with war and capital punishment The American clergy's support for the Vietnam War caused me to stop attending church, despite my affection for the Catholic Worker, a committed lay group who strongly opposed the war and ran a center to feed the hungry, a few blocks from where I first lived in downtown Manhattan's East Village. The broader church today espouses policies that are far more compassionate than those of most conservative Christians, but its continued condemnation of homosexuality, and its refusal to allow women to become priests or to have a voice in the hierarchy keep it shackled in the past. We can't expect much truth from cynical politicians like Santorum and Gingrich, even if the media had the gumption to question their cherry-picking of Catholic beliefs. But maybe it's not too much to hope that institutional religions can help create a more compassionate world, even in the face of political manipulation.

Practical Wisdom of Spiritual Masters: A U.N. Talk

2011-10-31T18:57:48Z

As he lay dying, one of the last acts the Prophet Muhammad performed was to use a twig called a miswak to clean his teeth. According to oral tradition, the Prophet often advocated the use of a tooth stick, made from a twig of a tree (Salvadora persica) that is believed to strengthen the gums, prevent tooth decay, eliminate toothaches and bad breath, improve the sense of taste, and make the teeth shine. Is this merely folklore, or pious religious dogma? In fact, some 25 years ago the World Health Organization began recommending the use of the miswak. And a 2003 scientific study concluded that people who used the miswak had better results than those using a toothbrush.

"There are 2 kinds of knowledge," the Prophet said, "knowledge of
religion and knowledge of the body." The body? Many religions would seem to
prefer we didn't have one, but Muhammad often talked about food, spices, and
the ritual of eating, believing that God preferred people to eat in groups.
]]> than a thousand years later, nutritionists like the legendary Robert Gray would
come to similar conclusions, and recommend radically altering our diet to
prevent colon and stomach cancer, among other ills.

My point is not that spiritual masters are visionaries. History is full of
visionaries who didn't teach spiritual wisdom. Instead, what I find remarkable
is how much of the wisdom of the great mystics is based on making life easier
for all of us on the most down-to-earth level. As Teresa of Avila said, "God is
in the pots and pans." This, from a woman who not only reformed her religious
order, but was also seen to levitate during prayer.

The 11th-century Sufi mystic al-Ghazzali wrote, "Illness is one of the forms of
experience by which humans arrive at a knowledge of God. As God says,
'Illnesses are my servants, which I attach to my chosen friends.'" Here we see
one great mystic, Muhammad, giving practical advice on how to avoid illness,
and another giving the further wisdom that if illness occurs despite our best
efforts to prevent it, we are to see it not as a punishment or failure, but as
a gift from which we learn compassion for others. Bill W., the co-founder of
Alcoholics Anonymous and another spiritual leader offering great practical
wisdom, once wrote, "I used to commiserate with all people who suffer. Now I
commiserate only with those who suffer in ignorance, who don't understand the
purpose and ultimate utility of pain."

I should add that this same wisdom applies to certain New Age philosophies,
such as positive thinking and the law of attraction. These can be helpful
methodologies, but the presumption that they always work is misguided. When we
keep repeating positive affirmations or visualizing prosperity or wellness and
don't get results, we may become disillusioned and feel like failures--adding to
our burden. The wisdom of Al-Ghazzali and Bill W. teaches us instead to see
pain and illness as opportunities to feel more connected to others.

Much is made of the miraculous events surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, yet most
of the miracles attributed to him were not of the supernatural or paranormal
variety. They arose organically, when someone sought him out to solve a
practical problem, like physical or mental illness. Consider the context in
which Jesus' healings took place. The Jews had been under Roman occupation for
a century, and the peasantry was dirt poor, with virtually no health care
facilities, hospitals, asylums, or doctors. Some scholars believe that the
numerous cases of demonic possession in ancient Israel may have reflected years
of colonial occupation, when many Jews felt that their land and lives were
possessed by the occupying armies. Jesus offered the afflicted a release from
their overwhelming sense of colonial oppression by showing them the existence
of a "kingdom of heaven within" themselves, more powerful than any external
force.

Further, healers were not uncommon in that time and place, and at least one,
Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, a contemporary of Jesus from the Galilee, born ten miles
north of Nazareth, is said to have been a miracle worker (although his
followers did not come to believe he was an incarnation of God). Like all the
ancient Hasidim, Hanina prayed frequently, and his prayers brought results.
When the great Jewish political leader Gamaliel II sent his messengers to
implore Hanina to come to Jerusalem to heal his son,the Rabbi said he couldn't
make the long journey, instead asking God for mercy for the young man. At the
conclusion of his prayers, the Rabbi assured Gamaliel's messengers that the
patient's fever had already left him. This assurance elicited skepticism from
the messengers, who asked, "Are you a prophet?"

To this he replied, "I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet; but
experience has taught me that whenever my prayer flows freely it is granted;
otherwise, it is rejected." The messengers noted the exact time when Hanina's
declaration was made; on reaching the patriarch's residence they found that his
son had been healed at that time, over a considerable distance. (Berakhot, v. 5
and Yerushalmi Berakhot, v. 9d).

"Whenever my prayer flows freely it is granted; otherwise, it is rejected."
This sounds a lot like the Taoist conception of Qi (chi, or vital force)
flowing unimpeded through a healthy body, which is the aim of the Chinese
exercise and healing regimen known as Qigong, and much of Chinese medicine.
Between the 2nd and 6th centuries, a Taoist movement arose that came to be
known as the Inner Deities Hygiene School, which saw the body as a microcosm of
the universe, with three energy centers called Fields of Cinnabar, or dan tien.
Anyone who has practiced Qigong knows that part of the exercise is to warm and
open up these interlocking energy fields, beginning with the lower dan
tien--three finger widths below the navel--which they believe to be the body's
center of gravity. When the chi flows freely, the body is healed.

We don't know exactly who discovered Qi or Qigong, or Yoga for that matter, but
we can presume that they were responding to the needs of the people. The
world's great spiritual masters responded to the crises of their times. Indeed,
that appears to be the reason for their arising. In the ancient Indian holy
book called the Bhagavad-Gita, the god-man Krishna--an avatar, or incarnation,
of the deity Vishnu--explains his reappearance in different times, different
forms, and different locations:

When goodness grows weak, when evil increases,
I make myself a body.
In every age I come back to deliver the holy,
To destroy the sin of the sinner, to establish righteousness.
(4:7-8, Edwin Arnold trans.)

The Buddha arose in the 6th century BCE, at a time when the world had seen
centuries of bloody warfare. He was also considered a healer--developing ways to
relieve the mental stress that had wracked the region where he lived. He taught
people a simple practice of meditation that would help relieve the stress of
suffering, and contribute to a more peaceful world. According to the Tibetan
Tradition, Shakyamuni Buddha (the historical Buddha) introduced the Medicine
Buddha to his followers as an enlightened being who has unbiased compassion for
all living beings. He protects living beings from physical and mental sickness and other dangers and obstacles, and helps them to eradicate the three poisons that are the source of
all sickness, including war. Although warfare has continued to this day, it's
worth noting that Buddhism is among those few religions that rarely seek to
resolve conflict through violence against those who believe differently. That
may be because the Buddha taught that to believe that each of us is separate
from all others is illusion, and that this belief in the separative ego
contributes to the poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance, which lead to
violence. Today Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, says it this
way: "We are all related. We interare."

The great spiritual paths have been teaching us for centuries that all life is
connected like a web in such a way that what happens to other beings affects
each of us, whether or not we recognize it. In the words attributed to the
Native American Chief Seattle, "What we do to the web, we do to all of us." He
wasn't talking about the World Wide Web, but he might as well have been! His
words also recall Indra's net, an image developed by [9]Mahayana Buddhism in
the 3rd century to picture the [10]interconnectedness of the universe. The net
was said to hang over the palace of the Vedic god [11]Indra on [12]Mount Meru;
it has a multifaceted jewel at each intersection, and each jewel is reflected
in all of the other jewels.

That same connectedness is implicit in the age-old teachings espoused in nearly
identical language by Confucius, Jesus, and Rabbi Hillel: "Do to others as you
would have them do to you" (or its obverse, "What you do not want done to
yourself, do not do to others"). Before now, these were thought of as religious
or ethical ideals, but few people believed it to be literally true that we are
all connected.

Today we are seeing similar concepts expressed not only by spiritual leaders
but also by visionary leaders in the field of quantum physics, which to many of
us may seem as ineffable as the experience of religious mystics. Rupert
Sheldrake, the visionary British scientist, observes that for the last few
centuries, matter had been viewed as the fundamental reality. And yet, he
points out, now "fields" and "energy" are considered more fundamental than
matter. "The boundaries of scientific 'normality' are shifting again with a
dawning recognition of the reality of consciousness," he writes. "The powers of
the mind, hitherto ignored by physics, are the new scientific frontier."

Journalist Lynne McTaggart has interviewed many of the leading minds in this
new field, reporting on their work in great detail in her books. Of one of the
key discoveries of researchers in this arena, she has written, "They had
demonstrated that big things like atoms were nonlocally connected, even in
matter so large that you could hold it in your hand." As the titles of her
books The Field and The Bond suggest, a vast web of connectedness links not
only human beings but all matter. McTaggart and others have been seeking to
render obsolete the Newtonian idea that we are separate individuals, connected
only marginally by familial, national, religious, and ethnic links. Instead,
McTaggert writes, "at our essence we exist as a unity, a relationship--utterly
interdependent, the parts affecting the whole at every moment." In other words,
we interare.

Now let's bring this idea of interconnectedness up to the present moment. I've
had the privilege of working on the books of two visionaries who are changing
the current paradigms of separateness among people and nations. In Manifesting
Michelangelo, Joseph Pierce Farrell tells how helpless he felt when his father, a New York City firefighter, suffered a calamitous fall and was hospitalized for many months. That traumatic event planted in the four-year-old boy a powerful desire to ease the sufferings of
others. Nearly 40 years later, he discovered, almost by accident, the ability
to act as a vessel to transmit intelligent healing power from a Divine Source
to the injured bodies and misshapen faces of suffering children and adults.

Farrell derived from this discovery a five-step path that any of us can use to
manifest change in the world, whether social, economic, political, or
spiritual. Yet the goal of Farrell's work remains supremely practical--to teach
us that each inividual holds within the ability to heal others and to relieve
their own pain and the suffering of others.

Over the past century, Eastern traditions and practices, such as Buddhism,
Qigong, and Yoga have transformed the spiritual landscape of the West. One of
the unintended side effects of exposure to these high-grade mystical traditions
has been to leave many people with the mistaken impression that seeking
enlightenment is the sine qua non of spiritual practice. Yet one teacher who
spent 30 years traveling the Far East and studying with the greatest yoga
masters of India sees things differently. In his forthcoming book, The Promise
of Love Sex and Intimacy, New Zealand-born Mark Whitwell argues that what we need is not enlightenment but intimacy-- first of all with ourselves, and then with other people as well as with our most intimate partner. Whitwell's teachers, T. Krishnamacharaya and U.G. Krishnamurti, taught ways to increase the flow of love and intimacy between individuals and
groups--simply by learning to breathe properly, and so to unite the polarities
of male and female that exist within each of us. Seeking enlightenment, they
said, implies that you are lacking something, whereas we are already completely
supported by Nurturing Source. This is what the Yoga of the ancients aimed to
do. Theirs was a supremely practical application of the deepest yogic wisdom -- not to achieve isolated states of bliss, or merely to lose weight and look good in designer yoga pants.

Whitwell believes that the spiritual essence of Yoga has been lost in the rush
to commercialize and brand it for Western consumption. He teaches a simple,
seven-minute practice of breath and movement that he calls The Promise, and
that anyone can do, young or old, fit or out of shape, even someone confined to
a wheelchair. Through his nonprofit Peace Project, this same simple practice is
being taught to Muslim and Jewish women in the Mideast so that they can come
together in peace. One Muslim woman who teaches Koranic studies in East
Jerusalem has been learning Mark's Promise practice along with a mixed group of
Jewish and Muslim women.

"Over the last few years, I have been attending breath and movement classes with
both Jewish and Muslim women in our neighborhood. In our class we end every
lesson in a heart circle where we all hold hands and connect hearts, connect to
the love and then send it out to where it is needed, to the suffering and
trauma in East and West Jerusalem, Israel and Palestine. These classes have
helped me feel more connected to an infinite source of love, even though we are
surrounded by pain. I pray deeper. I love deeper, and I want to teach the women
in my class how to adapt these principles to their daily prayers, so they can
connect to God directly from their hearts. I know it will keep us strong and
together. This practice, combined with our five-times-daily prayer cycle, has
helped me personally feel the depth of our faith of love. It has become my joy
to pray, rather than just a social duty."

My own heartfelt hope is that by understanding the interconnectedness of the
world's spiritual traditions, and the essential equality of the visionary
leaders from which they have sprung, our social duty of religious tolerance
will also become a profound and lasting joy.

(This blog post is taken from A Talk before the Health, Transformation & Spirituality Working Group of the Committee on Spirituality, Values and Global Concerns of the U.N., New York City, by Peter Occhiogrosso, given Oct. 28. 2011.)

Keeping Occupied

2011-10-19T18:47:02Z

"Involvement is its own reward," my therapist Gary used to say, back when I thought psychotherapy could help me. If that's true, I've wondered for the past few decades why young people weren't involved in political activism. "What happened to the '60s?" my friends would say. "We stopped the Vietnam War. We started the women's movement. Where are the kids now? Why aren't they doing anything?"Yeah, I would think, we did all that 40 years ago. And then we started worrying about our careers, or we got high, or both. We got into punk rock and loft jazz, or raising a family, or spiritual practice. But then Reagan was elected and everything started really going downhill. ]]> Reagan and his allies tore up the unions, starting with the air traffic controllers; and they began a planned program of overspending on defense so that much less money would be available for the social safety net, education, and infrastructure. This has culminated today in self-righteous blather by Reagan's political descendents about the deficit and the need for austerity. That's coming from people whose idea of austerity is driving a Lexus SUV that gets good gas mileage.

Now, like a spontaneous wildfire, the Occupy Wall Street movement, along with its manifestations in cities around the country and the world, has started getting a lot of young and old people involved. I don't believe, as some insist, that the movement needs to come up with a set agenda. They can afford to hang out and see what develops. They are living in the moment, but unlike the hippies who created the first mass movement of hanging out, they don't appear to be drifting into drugs, violence, or indifference. Indeed, the very amorphous quality that some commentators are sounding so perplexed and even derisive about may be their greatest strength. It's reminiscent of an old spiritual principle, which the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel referred to as being "available" (disponible was the French term he used). Marcel meant leaving oneself open for the whisperings of the spirit, rather than following a strict agenda, religious or otherwise.

My dear friend, the late Ron Roth loved the Aramaic term for prayer, slotha, which means, "to set a trap." As Ron used to say, "When you pray, you have to keep your heart open, and set a trap to catch the mind of God." Ron had left the priesthood and then the Catholic church because his bishop didn't want him holding healing services in his Illinois parish. Ron wondered how it could not be Christian to do what Jesus did and heal the sick. He believed that instead of asking God for things, we ought to leave ourselves open to hear what God wants from us.

I'm not suggesting that the irrepressible potpourri of activists encamped on Wall Street and elsewhere are being led by conscious spiritual principles. I do think they are intuitively remaining open to possibility, and waiting for things to take shape. That's a lot more challenging than following a set plan, and in a sense it is an inspiration to all of us.

Meanwhile, the naysayers continue to be outraged. One reader wrote in support of a conservative commentator in the New York Times, "These are not the happy hippie college kids who demonstrated when I was a carefree co-ed. I believe these to be largely hired hands who will happily create mayhem on behalf of some people with very ugly agendas indeed."

To which another reader responded. "This is exactly what they said about those happy hippies the first time around."

Food Is a Right, Not a Privilege

2011-07-05T20:42:48Z

The essence of Christianity can be found in several passages from the Gospel of Matthew. One is the Sermon on the Mount (Chapters 5-7), which appeals to us to go beyond the letter of the law and act always in compassion and humility. Another key passage is the parable of the sheep and goats (Matthew 25:31-46). In this parable, the Lord invites "the righteous" to join him in "the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world." Why?

"For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

"The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'
Jesus is saying that "the righteous" are not those who followed some abstract dogma, or some particular sexual orientation, but those who have fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless, among other other compassionate acts. Yet on earth it isn't always so easy. Members of the Orlando, Florida, group Orlando Food Not Bombs have been repeatedly arrested by Orlando police for presumably distributing free food to the hungry in one of Orlando's public parks. Christian groups who focus on dogma, sexuality, personal salvation, and the Rapture, often quoting questionable scriptural passages, rarely say anything about these specific passages in the Gospel in which Jesus exhorts his followers to compassionate acts of mercy and generosity. There are exceptions, of course, including some mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, and Catholics, who emphasize the social gospel of Jesus. But I wonder where the voice of the Christian community is when people are imprisoned for trying to feed the hungry.

3 Days of Peace, Love, and Music--with Jesus!

2011-07-05T15:59:10Z

According to The Economist, "AT LEAST 25 Christian music festivals are held each summer in America, but they have never catered for theological liberals. Until this year, that is, when the Wild Goose Festival--named after a Celtic symbol for the Holy Spirit--kicked off on June 23rd on 72 wooded acres in eastern North Carolina, not so far from the intellectual hub of Raleigh-Durham.

The idea, seven years in the making, was based on Britain's Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, which draws 20,000 people a year. About 1,500 people came to the American version, which explicitly pitched its appeal to artists and musicians, nonconformists, post-Christians, non-Christians, disaffected evangelicals and a liberal evangelical subset known as the "emergent" church."

Christians and Dinosaurs

2011-07-02T14:48:14Z

I was recently watching the old monster movie, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and realized that when I watched these movies as a child I believed that humans and dinosaurs lived together on the earth. I know the fossil record doesn't support this, but this article makes an intriguing argument:

Most of us loved reading about dinosaurs at some time in our lives. In 1993, the movie "Jurassic Park" stimulated the public interest in dinosaurs far beyond its previous level. As a result, increasing numbers of people have thought, "Since we have found all these fossils and dinosaur bones, we know dinosaurs existed. How come they are not mentioned in the Bible?"

One Love, One World . . . One Hand!

2011-02-06T20:10:25Z

One of the more exciting developments in the mass demonstrations in Cairo over the past two weeks has been the coming together of Muslims and Christians in opposition to the oppressive government of Hosni Mubarak. Coptic Christians make up roughly 10 percent of the Egyptian population, or about 8 million people, and are the largest Christian minority in the Middle East. Muslim youth have taken to guarding Coptic Christian churches, which have been attacked during previous disturnaces. And for their part, Christian youth stood guard to protect Muslims as they prayed at Tahrir Square in Cairo, knowing that people at prayer are vulnerable to the secret police. According to AP, one Coptic priest, Father Ihab al-Kharat, gave a sermon on Sunday in which he said, "In the name of Jesus and Muhammad we unify our ranks. . . . We will keep protesting until the fall of the tyranny."
]]> Coptic Christianity is separate from both Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, although they share many of the same roots. The Copts trace their branch of the faith to the foundational teaching of the apostle and evangelist Mark, who according to tradition came to Alexandria in the middle of the 1st century (c. 42 CE).
     The Desert Fathers, a loosely connected group of ascetics, monks and nuns living hermit-like in the deserts of Egypt since about the 3rd century, are considered the first Christian monastics, and probably were influenced by small groups of Jewish ascetics, such as the Essenes of Israel and Therapeutae of Alexandria.
     On Sunday, thousands of Muslim and Christian protesters again made their way into Tahrir Square to commemorate some 300 martyrs who have died at the hands of the secret police since the protests began on January 25. A Coptic Christian priest, carrying a cross, celebrated Sunday mass before the crowd, standing next to a Muslim imam, carrying a copy of the Qur'an, as the crowd chanted in unison, "We are one hand!"
     The preacher then led them in the chant from the altar, "One hand! One hand!" referring to the unity of Christians and Muslims, who are expressing the same demands for a change of regime. The event was captured on video.
A Christian woman named Rana told Reuters Arabic, "All Egyptians, regardless of whether they are Christian or Muslim, want change, liberty, and justice for all people."
     Does this remind you of anything?
     In one of his last interviews before being murdered in December 1980, John Lennon says that he had the words "One World One People" inscribed on the master of Double Fantasy--the album with 7 songs each songs by him and Yoko Ono, which had just been released. (The words presumably appear on the vinyl matrix, although I don't have a copy of the LP on hand.) "If you look inside of the logo, which all the kids have done already all over the world, from Brazil, Australia, Poland--anywhere that gets the record--inside is written One World One People," Lennon told Rolling Stone's Jonathan Cott. "The kids have noticed that--no critic, no media, no anybody has said anything about it. . . . But the people that buy the record have written back from Australia, saying, 'P.S. One world, one people.' That is written on the actual master of the album."
     Some years before, in 1965, Jamaican reggae legend Bob Marley (see photo above) had recorded a song entitled "One Love," whose original lyrics included the lines, "One love, one heart / Let's join together and I'll feel all right." (Later versions interpolate the song with "People Get Ready," by Curtis Mayfield of the Impressions, whose music played a significant role in the American civil rights movement.) Back then, the conception of one world uniting disparate groups was considered a hippie-socialist fantasy by many people, just as Lennon's song "Imagine" was criticized by some for being utopian. Now it and Marley's song are widely used as anthems for world unity.
     This underlines the point I have made in previous blogs that popular music, including rock 'n' roll, hip-hop, jazz, and other idioms, are genuinely sacred music, not to be distinguished from religious or native chants, classical compositions, or so-called new age music. It has a history of bringing people together and expressin a universal desire for peace and unity.
That aspiration for unity is often tested by antagonistic and sometimes violent relations between different religious sects, including but not limited to Christians and Muslims. The chant of "One Hand" may signal a new stage in those relations, and one in which young people are playing a prominent role. Although the Coptic Pope Shenouda III has continued to defend the Mubarak regime, a group of Christian and Muslim intellectuals issued a joint statement affirming that "the revolution of Egyptian youth had instilled a new spirit in Egyptian souls, in which was apparent an excellent example of national unity... when believers guarded each others' prayers after the police disappeared." They said that this decision to stand guard came from the youth themselves, not from any religious leadership.

Do Dead Birds Mean End Times Are Near?

2011-01-14T18:03:49Z

Kirk Cameron has starred in several films based on the Left Behind books--a series of 16 best-selling novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins that dramatize what's technically known as Christian eschatology (ESS-ka-TOL-a-gee). That's the collective term for the End Times-- what will presumably happen when Jesus returns to rule over the Earth, either before or after a period of tribulation. (End Time believers disagree on the details, and the scriptures they quote are ambiguous at best.) Apparently, the fact that Cameron is also a Christian evangelist makes him the go-to guy for End Time information.
     That led CNN's Anderson Cooper to ask Cameron in an interview what he thinks of the notion that there might be a connection between the unexplained sudden deaths of thousands of birds and the Second Coming. "Well, I first think that they ought to call a veterinarian, not me," Cameron replied. "I think it's really kind of silly to equate birds falling out of the sky with some kind of an End Times theory." Cameron acknowledged that people have a "fascination with the religiously mysterious,": and with prophecy, from Nostradamus to the Bible, but he feels the connection to birds falling from the sky "has more to do with pagan mythology" and divination based on the directions in which birds flew at certain moments.
     Finally, asked if working in films based on the End Times prophecies affected his life or beliefs in any way, Cameron dismissed the idea. It made him think "I'm probably going to die of some other cause before this happens. A friend of mine just died yesterday," and that made me think that "life is short, and I need to be ready whenever it is that God decides to end my life here on earth." That's a mindset that might be embraced by non-Christians as well.
     Cameron is now working on a documentary that will retrace "the escape route of the Pilgrims."

Make Love, Not War

2011-01-12T03:43:19Z

All right, let's get the sexy part of the discussion out of the way first. I believe that Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha's epochal book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, has the potential to manifest change in the way we think about and experience sex at least as radically as prior works by Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. The authors, a research psychologist (with a BA in English Lit) and a psychiatrist, respectively, write with such good humor and compassion, even when they are openly deriding the work of evolutionary biologists and classical philosophers alike, that I often laughed out loud while rethinking what I thought I knew about human sexuality. Although their basic premise sounds novel, if not revolutionary (I don't read a lot of evolutionary biology, so I could be wrong about that), I was already comfortable with enough of the corollaries they present to give them the benefit of the doubt on the rest.
     In brief, the authors argue that our closest primate ancestors (chimpanzees and bonobos) evolved in a way that puts the lie to what they label "the standard narrative" that has ruled our vision of human history from the caveman to Victorian novels: aggressive males competing for possession of and dominion over "coy" females. Instead, they propose, the real competition was taking place among countless sperm cells from a variety of donors. ]]>      Based on evidence drawn not only from the fossil record but also by observing the ways in which our human bodies have developed, especially but not exclusively relating to the genitalia, the authors argue convincingly that this mating pattern continued to some extent with our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The real trouble begins with the discovery of agriculture somewhere around 10,000 years ago, which also happens to correspond with the destruction of the Goddess culture and the development of warfare. Not only would their new narrative obviate the myth of monogamy as a natural instinct of both women and (reluctantly) men, it would also, by extension, preclude the need for competitive violence. On the contrary, going back to the previous 200,000 and perhaps two million years, our forebears lived in relative ease, traveling in groups no larger than 150, sharing what few possessions they could carry, their food, and, yes, their mates. As several books about the so-called Paleolithic diet have already pointed out, hunter-gatherers ate hundreds of varieties of plants, nuts, berries, birds, shellfish, and game, providing abundant nutrients. Because the meat they consumed came from wildlife, it provided lean protein; these humans were by and large healthier, happier, even taller than our more recent, post-agricultural forebears.
     The advent of agriculture also radically changed how humans lived in a number of global ways. The ability to amass grain and livestock led to the creation of wealth and the separation of haves and have-nots into increasingly stratified social classes that hadn't previously existed. For the first time, our ancestors had something to fight over and kill for on a sustained, large-scale basis. Women, in turn, became chattels, as the life-giving Mother Goddess was supplanted by male deities, warlike and punitive.
     It makes sense that under this new social scenario, men, who were now supposed to be running things, began to feel threatened by women's more expansive sexuality, their capacity for longer-lasting, multiple orgasms and corresponding need and (gasp) desire for more than one sexual partner at a go. One of the authors' more delightful hypotheses is that what they clinically refer to as "female copulatory vocalization," or FCV (while unclinically citing Meg Ryan's legendary diner orgasm), was originally a mating call for potential reinforcements. What their book posits should put to rest any vestigial doubts that in the natural state, women are more sexually omnivorous than most men. For added fun, they also cite Tiresias, who in Greek myth was transformed from a man to a woman and back again, and subsequently revealed that women not only enjoy sex more than men, but nine times more. But you already knew that--based on the FCV alone, right?
     Although the authors are careful not to insist on a return to polyandry or open marriage as sure-fire ways to heal our abysmal divorce rate and save countless kids from the hell of shared visitation rites, they do point out that we should at least appreciate where we came from. How else to explain, at least from the hetero male perspective, the paradox of being profoundly in love with one woman, with whom you share the most profound physical and spiritual intimacies, while in the next nanosecond fantasizing about Salma Hayek or the checkout girl at the health food store?
     Besides seeking to release both men and women from the guilt and tension associated with adhering to the monogamous ideal, Sex at Dawn also has welcome news for those men who have studiously ignored religious and social taboos against masturbation and frequent sex in general. "A team of Australian researchers," they report, "found that men who had ejaculated more than 5 times per week between the ages of 20 and 50 were one-third less likely to develop prostate cancer later in life." Because trace amounts of carcinogens are often present in seminal fluid, these researchers hypothesized that the lower cancer rates may be the result of "frequent flushing of the ducts." But wait, there's more! "Frequent orgasm is associated with better cardiac health as well. A study . . . determined that men who have 3 or more orgasms per week are 50% less likely to die from coronary heart disease."
     Of course, it's hard for most of us to imagine returning to a hunter-gatherer existence, even with smart phones and iPads to keep us connected as we forage for food. But with massive record collections and personal libraries capable of being reduced to the size of a single hard drive--and even that disappearing into Cloud Computing Land--and marriage rates dwindling among the young, maybe it's not so far off the horizon.

The Spiral of Forgiving

2010-12-24T16:32:03Z

A woman came to me recently for an Archetypal reading, because she was suffering from a blockage in her work. Six months before, she had submitted a business proposal regarding a creative project to someone who was in a position to make it happen, and who had promised to get back to her as soon as possible. When she hadn't heard back three months later, she sent an e-mail inquiry, but received no response. She not only felt blocked in continuing her work on the project, but also a good deal of self-judgment and guilt for her failure to get results. They had been introduced by a mutual friend, and had established a certain personal connection, so her path of action was further clouded by these emotional concerns.

My intuitive insight was that she needed to call the other person directly on the phone, and, if she couldn't get past the receptionist, to send a hand-written letter. She was reluctant to take these steps, though, and after I described some of the archetypal patterns I saw complicating her situation, she asked for a reading. Among other things, the reading revealed the Damsel in her house of relationships (including business partnership) and the Saboteur in her house of creativity and good fortune. I explained that she had to take charge of the situation by following up, rather than waiting for an imaginary Knight to rescue her, thereby sabotaging her best interests. ]]> I was delighted that her actions had had a spiraling effect. I hadn't been especially concerned about the executive, because in my years as a journalist, author, and book collaborator, I'd heard all the stories: proposals being "misplaced," e-mail getting lost in spam filters, and just plain busy people being too busy. What struck me was her admission of relief at having been able to acknowledge her own guilty feelings. The spiral of forgiveness, which encompasses the real and perceived harming of, and by, ourselves and others, had expanded to relieve both people of their self-imposed guilt.

That spiraling outward of forgiveness made me think of the form of meditation known as loving kindness, which directs our inner attention to focus love and empathy first on ourselves, then loved ones, friends, teachers, "neutral people," enemies, and finally all sentient beings, including (in some versions) animals, plants, and microbes. In the oldest Buddhist tradition, known as Theravada, this practice is called metta, after the word in the Buddha's native language that means kindness, friendliness, or sympathy. It's related to the Tibetan practice of tonglen, which involves breathing in the suffering of others and breathing out happiness to them. I believe they are both based on the archetypal form of the spiral, which is one of the oldest universal symbols on earth, and undoubtedly the universe--even billions of light years away from us, sentient beings are also gazing at spiral galaxies.

   That connection is hardly surprising, since the spiral, or vortex, is programmed into our DNA in the form of the double helix, a spiral polymer of nucleic acids that holds the codes to our individual being. Although that information wasn't made conscious until 1953, when Watson and Crick first published their historic findings, the archetype of the spiral has long been part of human consciousness. It has shown up in the classic icons of the world's spiritual traditions: the yin-yang motif, itself a double spiral; the coiled serpent at the base of the spine in Kundalini yoga, which can explode into brilliant light energy; the intertwined serpents of the caduceus, symbolic of the healing arts and of the chakra system; the Kabbalistic Tree of Life; the third eye or radiant brow pictured on the double crown of the Pharaohs of Egypt; the many labyrinths inscribed on the pavement floors of medieval Christian cathedrals, such as Chartres; the spiral mounds of earth-based cultures; the facial tattoos of the Maories of New Zealand; the image of Jacob's Ladder connecting heaven and Earth (as depicted in the William Blake painting at the beginning of this post), and on and on.

   To extend loving kindness to all beings, spiraling outward from your innermost self, the glowing Divine within, as far as the smallest speck of cosmic dust, is a powerful practice. And yet I don't practice it in isolation, perhaps because I sometimes feel it's a case of putting the cart before the horse. Having grown up in the Catholic tradition, I recall the lines from the earliest version of the Gospel: "And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him and let it drop, in order that your Father Who is in heaven may also forgive you your failings and shortcomings and let them drop" (Mark 11:25, Amplified Bible). The whole message of Jesus could be reduced to the verbs love and forgive. But, as this passage indicates, forgiveness comes even before prayer and expressions of love.

Forgiveness is also more challenging than love, isn't it? When I was an aspiring idealist growing up in a middle-class suburb, I was drawn to universal love as though it were the simplest thing on earth. When I was still a young teenager, I joined the Norman Thomas Young Socialists of America, and declared to my mother that I believed in free love--without having a clue what that meant. (She was far more disturbed by the free love part than the socialism.) And yet, I could not forgive my father for being a strict disciplinarian, and especially for washing my mouth out with soap one day just for calling my brother a "louse." ("But louse isn't a four-letter word," I screamed pitiably as he hauled me to the bathroom.) Decades later I understood that his obsessive attention to order also made him a good provider who kept us all clothed and fed, while he lived in not-so-quiet desperation, commuting for hours every day and smoking himself to death at an early age. Three packs of Raleighs a day did the trick, although I think he got a nice pair of garden shears with the coupons that came in every pack.

The spiral of forgiveness is intertwined with the complex layers of what we need to forgive in ourselves and others. Although I believed that I had finally forgiven my father for his occasional verbal and physical abuse, I recently became aware--when it was pointed out to me by someone at a workshop I was attending--that I was still angry at him for dying young. At the time, I was in my twenties and living on my own, but I hadn't yet published anything. My father, who had been born into a farming family in Southeast Italy before immigrating to New York at the age of three, had planned to become an engineer. He attended Brooklyn Tech High School, a relatively new, forward-looking institution that focused on math, science, and drafting, but when he married my mother he had to leave and get a job. He was successful at the work he did, but when I started to study geometry in high school, he gave me his set of high-quality drafting instruments, which he'd kept for over 30 years, and I got a glimmer of his regret. Maybe having to give up his dream left him feeling unconsciously frustrated, and his self-anger sometimes boiled over--usually triggered by my or my brother's exuberance. If he had forgiven himself for doing what he had to do, he might have been able to accept his role as a dedicated parent. As John Lennon sang on his final album, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

   For all that, my father never lost his love of learning, and had amassed a credible library that undoubtedly played a role in my early fascination with the written word. His premature death deprived me of the chance to reconcile, and perhaps finally gain his approval for something. I think if he had seen his family name on a book, he might have concluded that he didn't do such a bad job after all.

   Abuse counselors have made it clear that to forgive is not to condone, and that forgiveness helps us far more than the people we forgive. Yet those are analytical, dollars-and-sense reasons. Real forgiveness is a form of stress, because it goes against the grain. It's not something your ego wants to do--almost always a good sign--and so it generates intense resistance. And while it's true that forgiving yourself for doing something foolish may take some of the pressure off, part of you will always feel more comfortable blaming yourself. Just as part of you will derive a perverse pleasure by clinging to the righteous indignation you feel toward the people who insulted, cheated, or stole from you. It's the difference between how you feel recalling a romance that ran its course and ended when you finally lost interest, and the memory of someone you wanted to sleep with but didn't when you had the chance 20 years ago. The element of unfinished business makes it hard to let go of the electric charge that's generated by a situation whose material outcome you can't change.

   You may also believe that you will never feel forgiveness toward certain people for what they did. In these cases you can still express the intention to forgive, to act "as if." In her seminal 1987 book Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Susan Jeffers makes the case that "you can accept fear as simply a fact of life rather than a barrier to success." She argues that, however much we might wish we wouldn't, we will always feel fear; the trick is to acknowledge that and act "as if" we weren't afraid. And the same is true of forgiveness. You don't need to have a heart burning with love for your forgivees; you need only express your desire to forgive them. My gut feeling is that the argument often posed against positive affirmations--that if your rational mind doesn't believe them, it will subtly resist--doesn't apply to forgiveness.

   In the account that opened this essay, the women were both able to resolve their feelings of guilt, because they addressed the tension hanging in the air. Whatever the final response, my sense is that they will both get on with their lives, personally and professionally. But when we don't have the opportunity to offer forgiveness personally, doing so through a spiritual practice is the next best thing. And, because it's impossible to recall or even to know all the layers and incidents for which we consciously or unconsciously hold ourselves and others accountable, the best way to cover the territory is by following a spiral pattern similar to that of the traditional loving-kindness meditation practice. The outline below may be too detailed to go through every time, but use it to get started. You can cut and paste it to a word program and print it out. (You may want to remove the italicized explanations before printing.) After you've tried it a few times, you can improvise by adding and removing elements as it evolves.

   After a while, you should be able to visualize its spiral shape, which you may also view as a double spiral: one spiral covers forgiving yourself, including aspects of the body-mind-spirit complex; the second spiral encompasses forgiveness of others. Like the double helix of our genetic code or the yin-yang symbol, the spirals are interrelated. We feel guilty for what we perceive as our personal failures, and for how we may have harmed others. At the same time, we resent what others have done to us, and may feel guilty for resenting them.

   These layers come to light especially around the holidays, when all our family and relationship spirals come into play. So as we celebrate the Solstice and prepare for the holidays, I hope you will find this practice helpful.

Forgiveness Meditation

This is a multi-tiered approach to forgiveness that begins with yourself, and expands to take in more and more of the universe at each level.

I forgive myself for everything I've done that I know was wrong. I forgive myself for consciously harming others, stealing, lying, cheating, and failing to be compassionate.

I forgive myself for any acts by which I unintentionally or unconsciously harmed, lied to others, stole, cheated or acted without compassion. (You may ask how you can unintentionally harm or lie to someone. One way this happens is by passing on information, advice, or guidance that we fully believe to be true and helpful, but which we later learn--or never learn--was neither.)

I forgive myself for my perceived mistakes in judgment that I believe harmed myself or others--whether they actually did or not. These are not conscious acts of harming, but simply decisions that didn't work out, and for which we feel guilty.

I forgive myself for inaction when action was called for. This can include not following up on opportunities, or not intervening to help someone in trouble or to protect someone under attack.

I forgive myself for perceived failures to try hard enough to succeed at something, whether of a material, psychological, or spiritual nature.

I forgive my body for all times when I believe that it let me down, became ill, lost vital energy, or experienced pain.

I forgive my mind for all times when it confused me, hurt me, felt pain or guilt, or led me to abuse my body and brain.

I forgive others for everything they did to me that they knew was wrong. I forgive them for consciously harming, stealing, lying, cheating, or failing to be compassionate.

I forgive others for unintentionally or unconsciously harming, stealing from, lying to, or cheating me, or acting without compassion.

I forgive others for perceived mistakes in judgment that I believe harmed myself or others--whether they actually did or not.

I forgive my family members--parents, children, siblings--and my teachers for intentionally or unintentionally harming, lying to, or cheating me, or for acting without compassion, including doing what they thought was "for my own good," whether it was or not.

I forgive others for their inaction when action was called for, and for not intervening to help or protect me when I was in trouble or under attack.

I forgive others for perceived failures to try hard enough to succeed at something I believe they should have completed. This can be as basic as blaming a colleague or family member for the failure of a project or a relationship.

I forgive others for anything they may have done, consciously or unintentionally, that I perceived to have harmed me or others physically, materially, emotionally, or spiritually.

I forgive all beings who have consciously or unintentionally harmed the world in any way. (This can include not only individuals, but also religious and political organizations, corporations, governments, and other large, impersonal entities. Again, we're not condoning what they may have done, but simply releasing ourselves from the burden of guilt and hatred associated with these groups.)

John Lennon and Vishnu

2010-12-10T16:26:05Z

The Mahabharata tells this story about Hiranyaksha (Sanskrit for "golden eye"), who was one of the principal daityas, or titans, and the twin brother of Hrianyakasipu. He worshipped the god Brahma for decades, enduring great pain and suffering. In recognition of Hiranyaksha's devotion, Brahma offered him a boon--anything he wanted. Hiranyaksha asked to become king of the entire world, and that no person or animal that he listed by name should ever have the power to harm him. Brahma agreed, and Hiranyaksha then listed all of the people and animals he could think of. Brahma granted him the power he sought, but then Hiranyaksha unaccountably became a demonic tyrant, plundering everything on the earth, tearing apart civilizations, and enslaving all peoples and animals. Finally, Hiranyaksha dragged even earth itself beneath the oceans.

The people and animals of the earth cried out to the gods for relief from Hiranyaksha's tyranny. The gods conferred and discovered that the only animal Hiranyaksha had not listed as being under his power was the pig. Vishnu then took his third avataric manifestation as Varaha--the great boar--and sought to defeat Hiranyaksha.
]]>
But a strange thing had happened: Vishnu discovered that he liked living in the sow's body. Vishnu liked the feeling of the sow's strength, liked the scents she smelled, the feeling of dirt and mud, and having sex with the boars. Vishnu liked the pain of battle in a sow's body, liked the difficulty of getting around on four legs, and the limited vision of a pig's eyes. Perhaps most of all, Vishnu liked being pregnant with a litter of piglets, giving birth to them, and suckling them.

All the gods thought that this was outrageous, and that Vishnu should be behaving more god-like than that, so they went to Shiva, and asked him to intervene. Shiva came to Vishnu and tried to persuade him to return to the other gods. "Don't you realize that you are a god?" Vishnu said. "And you are behaving like a sow relishing the mud." Vishnu grunted and kept suckling her piglets.

Finally, Shiva stabbed the sow with a trident, and Vishnu came out of the sow's body, laughing.
I can hardly find a more apt metaphor for the human condition than this marvelous story. Some Buddhists like to say that we are already perfect buddhas, it's just that we don't realize this and, so, we act like the unenlightened beings we sometimes appear to be. We really believe, in other words, that we are not divine beings but pigs romping and rutting in the mud. But that's not the whole story, either. Brain scientists, such as Paul McLean of Canada, have shown that the human brain comprises several layers of evolution, representing the brains of reptiles, mammals, and primates. This so-called triune brain combines--often uncomfortably--a reptile's cold-blooded instincts of fight or flight, aggression and lust; the uncontrolled emotions of mammals such as cats and dogs and horses; and the abstract reasoning and capacity for compassion and spirituality of the neocortex.

The human condition means living simultaneously in all three (or more) levels of consciousness, managing reptilian urges, animal emotions, and human capacity for creativity and compassion. When I was working as a music journalist in Manhattan in the 1970s, I had difficulty balancing all these aspects of the brain. (I still do, but that's another blog.) Having left the Catholic church because of disillusionment over its support of the war in Vietnam, among other issues, I had wandered into a kind of secular humanism derived from readings in philosophy. My humanism, though, seemed to be directed more toward the world in general than to particular human beings. This was especially true of my relationships, which tended to be self-serving, despite my intuition that sexuality was a portal to the infinite. I was cool with the Infinite, but the finite was less manageable--simple earthly matters like fidelity and honesty.

Those issues were probably the last thing on my mind when I had the good fortune to meet John Lennon just a few days before he left the planet. I had written a lengthy feature article about his wife, Yoko Ono, for a weekly arts newspaper in Manhattan that required several sit-down interviews with her, a number of follow-up phone calls, and thorough research about her prior career as a conceptual and performance artist and avant-garde musician. The premise of the piece was that I wouldn't interview John at all, but would get only Yoko's take on their marriage and career.

And she did speak at length about her relationship with John, which had been portrayed in the media as a tumultuous affair that began by crashing his previous marriage, and included at least one widely publicized period of John's public bad behavior in L.A. while he and Yoko were temporarily separated. But to Yoko, it was all a progression. After those dicey early years, they had to modify their lifestyle in order to have a successful pregnancy; then John took a five-year hiatus from the music scene to concentrate on raising their newborn son, Sean. He became a "househusband," a relatively new word, which, if he didn't invent, he certainly popularized. Meanwhile, Yoko--the offspring of one of the most prominent banking families in Japan, descended from a Samurai bloodline--ran the family business.

They caught a lot of flak for this role-flopping. John was portrayed as withdrawing from public performance and recording into a kind of narcissistic cocoon. Yoko was ridiculed for daring to manage a millionaire's estate, investing in purebred Holsteins for their organic farm, and other imagined foibles. For his part, John had said that he saw his five years with Sean as a personal course-correction; when his first son, Julian, was growing up, John had spent more time touring and recording with the Beatles than helping to raise him. When I asked Yoko about it, she conceptualized those five halcyon years as their modeling a modern marriage, emphasizing shared responsibilities, flexible role-playing, and mutual respect rather than respectability.

The day my article hit the stands, she called to tell me how delighted John was that her career as an artist and performer had been treated seriously in a publication that, despite its modest circulation, enjoyed wide credibility among the New York art and music world. Later that night--much later, at about 1 AM--she called to invite me to meet John in the studio where they were rerecording one of Yoko's songs.

Spending time with them that night, I witnessed the complex layers of interrelationship that Yoko had talked about. Far from glossing things over, she had probably understated how mutually supportive their roles were. The only other person in the studio was their producer, Jack Douglas, who all but disappeared behind the control panel. When Yoko stepped into the soundproof booth to continue overdubbing her vocals, to a complex backing track that featured Lennon's gut-wrenching guitar slashes, John and I were left alone to talk.

John pointed to a small refrigerator on the floor to my right. "You see that mini-bar over there?" he said, keeping his voice down. "Why don't you get us each a Pepsi and a Hershey bar?"

When Yoko returned to the control room a few minutes later, she shot a glance at John, who fessed up. "We've been drinking Pepsi and eating chocolate," he said, stating the obvious. "I needed the sugar." Yoko gave a mild grimace that said, Sugar's the one thing you don't need. She clearly had a higher awareness of nutrition, and had been the driving force behind their acquisition of an organic farm from which they could import their own veggies and dairy products. Even as John acknowledged his need for occasional junk food, he seemed to be tacitly admitting that Yoko knew best. I recalled with amusement something he had written on the jacket of one of his post-Beatles albums, turning the Love Story cliché on its head: "Love means having to say you're sorry every 15 minutes."

The song they were working on that night, eerily titled "Walking on Thin Ice," had apparently been recorded in a bare bones version for Double Fantasy. Yoko had decided that it was too edgy for the mainstream audience they were aiming at, and left if off out of concern that it might alienate some of John's fans. Now they were remixing it as a dance club single. Yoko later told me how excited John had become during the initial recording sessions. He had said, "This is gonna be your first Number One, Yoko," she recalled. "I've gotta be on it!" And he jumped up and went to get his guitar. The results were evidently superb: John and Yoko were collaborating in a way I hadn't heard before, both playing to their idiosyncratic strengths, holding nothing back. I still think of it as the finest song they ever created together.

"I told Yoko, I've got a great single for the flip side," John said that night. "But I think we're gonna go with her songs." For all I'd read about his wildness, his capacity for angry outbursts, and his erratic behavior, John appeared to be deeply in love and engaged in a profoundly supportive relationship. That also meant the kind in which you don't always do exactly what you'd like, especially if you have the option of making your partner happy--or artistically fulfilled--by going against your grain at times. At one point the phone rang while Yoko was poised to begin another overdub, and when John told her who it was through the intercom, Yoko said, "Tell him to call back at 7:30."

It was already 5 A.M. and John looked beat. "We're not gonna be here till 7:30, are we?" he said. "Well," Yoko replied, "if we want to finish these tracks, we'll have to. Like you always say, we'll sleep when we're dead."

At the conclusion of my article on Yoko, I had mentioned being at a popular rock dance club called the Peppermint Lounge when David Azarch, the trend-setting DJ who had made his name at the Mudd Club, played one of Yoko's songs from Double Fantasy with an infectious dance beat. My companion pointed out how telling it was that David was spinning Yoko, not John, for this crowd of hip young rockers.

"It's because of David that we're here in the studio till all hours of the morning," John said now with a wan smile. Apparently, he and Yoko had been encouraged by the crossover potential of her as-yet-unreleased dance track.

"So it's David's fault?" I asked.

"Well, not really," John said. "You know how it is. Anything for--" And he inclined his head in Yoko's direction. She was visible through the glass, still dubbing her shrieks over the rhythm track. John grabbed his throat, wincing in pain that seemed heartfelt. "Christ," he said to nobody in particular, "it hurts me to hear her do that!"

I could barely keep my eyes open at that hour, and announced that I should go find a cab home. Concerned for my safety--Record Plant was located at West 44th Street and 9th Avenue, and at 5 in the morning it wasn't a savory spot--John insisted on walking me to the corner, along with Jack Douglas and a beefy studio assistant. We said goodbye, and I looked forward to a new relationship.

Four days later, John would be dead, and I was left to make sense of it all, which at the time was inconceivable. Another absurdly brutal event with no message other than the utterly fearful unpredictability of life. But now, 30 years later, I'm reminded of the story of Vishnu descending to earth, playing his role of helping to liberate humanity and the planet, rolling around a while in the muck and mire, then being dispatched back to the celestial realm by Shiva's trident. In 1980, I hadn't heard that story, and hadn't begun any kind of serious spiritual pathfinding, but if I had, I might have seen the parallels.

First, Lennon helped transform the world of music and was involved in creating some of its most inspiring manifestations. As I wrote in my previous blog, "Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe," that's no small thing. Then he became an outspoken critic of war, through constant pronouncements, and songs like "Give Peace a Chance" and "Happy Xmas, War Is Over (If You Want It)"--even placing a famous billboard to that effect in Times Square and 10 other cities in 1969; and through his and Yoko's Bed-ins for Peace. For his efforts, the Nixon White House attempted to have him deported, with the collaboration of the FBI.

Like Vishnu the sow, John did his share of rolling around in the mud, for better and worse--from the usual excesses of the rock 'n' roll highlife to settling down as a loving family man--all in high style. My favorite part of the Vishnu story is that when Shiva stabbed him with his trident, Vishnu came out of the sow's body laughing. While we were all sharing our collective grief in the days following December 8, 1980, I imagine the spirit of John Lennon on some other plane laughing at the cosmic play of life--known in the Hindu tradition as lila--not to mention at his own liberation.

On the 30th anniversary of John's death, Yoko wrote a moving piece in The New York Times about a late night at the Dakota during the last year of his life, when she and John were making tea alone in the kitchen with their three cats. He confessed to her that he had learned that very day from his Aunt Mimi that the way he had insisted on making tea for so many years--countermanding Yoko and taking over the job--had been completely backwards. And they both cracked up at the absurdity of it all.

Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe

2010-11-24T19:33:34Z

Some years ago when Caroline Myss hired me to help her with the manuscript of Why People Don't Heal, she asked if she could do anything for me in return. I'd heard that Caroline was noted for her life readings, but that she had largely stopped giving individual readings in favor of aiming her gifts at a wider audience. Yet I wanted to experience her intuitive process firsthand, in part because I thought it would help me understand how she worked and, so, enable me to do a better job of collaborating. On a more analytical level, I wanted to know if she was as accurate as had been reported. And the entirely self-interested part of my reptilian brain just wanted to get some insight that might help me navigate the material world. I had recently ended my first marriage, moved out of my house in upstate New York (after having given up my long-time apartment in Manhattan), and had begun renting another home with the woman who would eventually become my wife. I was, to say the least, in transition, and I wanted all the self-vision I could get.

]]> Caroline kindly agreed, but not before asking me to describe the room where I was working as we spoke on the phone. I asked her why she wanted to know. "I'm getting a very strong monk vibe," she said.

"A Monk vibe?" I said. "I'm not sure what you mean." I didn't think she was talking about my favorite jazz pianist.

"I see you in a kind of monk's cell," she said. "A place where you write, and where you're surrounded by the tools of your trade. But I'm also getting something like an altar."

I replied that I was in my office, with my computer and books, and, now that she mentioned it, that I had created a special place on top of a cabinet next to where I worked. On it were a couple of sacred images, an incense burner, and a photo of my mother, who had died the previous year. I hadn't thought of this set-up as a home altar, but how else to describe it? Well, I thought, maybe it was just a lucky guess. When Caroline later gave her reading, it contained some accurate assessments, along with a few generalities that might have applied to any number of people of my age and background. What really struck me, though, was her opening salvo, which caught me completely off guard. "I'm seeing the course of your life," she said, "as if it's divided in half."

"In half?"

"It's as though you'd been moving in one direction up until about 10 or 12 years ago," she said. "Then it changed and started going in a very different direction."

I knew what she was talking about, sort of. From the time I had left home at 18 to go to college in Manhattan while living in a tenement apartment in the East Village, up through the early years of my first marriage, I had engaged in a single-minded pursuit of excitement--much of which could be summed up in the title of the classic 1979 song by Ian Dury and the Blockheads: "Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll." (Except with a lot of jazz thrown in.) Abandoning my career path of becoming a college English professor, I had taken to journalism, becoming a jazz critic and later the Music Editor of a popular downtown Manhattan weekly. Although I took my work seriously, writing about an area of jazz that virtually nobody else in New York was covering in such depth, I also indulged in many of the fringe benefits available to anyone with access to the music scene.

Then, starting sometime in my thirties, through a series of apparent coincidences that today I would call synchronicities, I embarked on what is popularly known as a spiritual path. It was more accurately a series of many smaller paths, with several divagations and plenty of doubling back along the way. Without going into all the details, I can say that my life changed in large measure--so much, in fact, that I could no longer continue with my marriage, or the kind of bifurcated course I had been on, pursuing pleasure and spirituality with equal fervor.

I couldn't say for certain that my life had gotten easier since that radical change in direction that Caroline had accurately identified, but it was gradually becoming more coherent. I stopped taking dangerous drugs, playing the field, and staying out all night. At the same time, market conditions within the publishing world had dictated a shift in the kinds of books I was collaborating on, from working with celebrities like Larry King and Frank Zappa to a series of books with spiritual themes. I started with one about how to communicate with your spiritual guides; several others on the link between prayer and healing, written with a former Catholic priest; and now Caroline, with whom I went on to write three books over the ensuing years. I also began an intensive series of practices that included dream work, meditation, and qigong--the last with an 80-year-old Chinese master who connected body and spirit for me in a way no one else had.

Caroline's reading led me to reevaluate the curious arc of my life, and I started obsessing that I'd wasted so many precious years in my apparently irredeemable pursuit of the nightlife. And then, a few years ago, through another series of synchronistic interventions, I began to understand that one thread had continued to weave its way through both of the major partitions in my life. It occurred to me that however undisciplined my personal life had been, the underlying context was always my love of music--all kinds of music. Writing about music was more than a mere occupation; it was an expression of something that had become for me a portal to the infinite. I'm not talking about the special "spiritual" music that you can buy in new age bookstores, but the kind of music that I was hearing every day in the course of my work.

Although philosophers and mystics from the time of Plotinus, and probably long before, have heard in music the essence of the One, the Cosmos, the Divine, most people tend to relegate divinity to so-called "sacred music." By that but they usually mean either some form of religious chant--whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Native, or Sufi--or else the high-end classical music of J. S. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, and 20^th-century composers such as Olivier Messiaen and Arvo Pärt. I've long been enchanted by all of the above, but the only problem with those lists is that they leave out a lot of splendid works classified, often contemptuously, as popular music, as well as most jazz.

Pop music serves a variety of needs, from entertainment and dancing to alleviating the boredom of certain tasks, including manual labor, driving, or exercising. That isn't so different from the role music has played in primal cultures for thousands of years. When I was just beginning my career as a jazz critic, I was invited to participate in a symposium given by the Smithsonian Institution and the Music Journalists Association in New York City. The leaders of the seminars were Martin Williams, a white jazz scholar, and Albert Murray, a black novelist and music historian, and they took great pains to defuse our concerns about proliferating racial stereotypes. Williams observed that more enlightened white people had long since come to realize that the cliché about blacks having "natural rhythm" was essentially racist as it was typically expressed. And yet, as he also pointed out, African culture was inextricably interwoven with the rhythm of the drum. Indeed, the complex polyrhythms of African drumming are what distinguished jazz from European classical and folk music, and even from Native American music.

For his part, Albert Murray described how for centuries Africans had worked, played, and conducted many of their rituals to drumming and chanting, and that African Americans had inherited this vibrant sense of rhythm as the soundtrack of life until it was encoded in them culturally, if not genetically. The slave masters recognized the significance of this connection, and had originally forbidden slaves from playing drums of any kind out of fear that they might use drumming to communicate with each other--which, it turns out, they did. Black music was subversive long before rhythm & blues influenced rock 'n' roll and set a whole generation of American youth dancing in ways their elders found downright discomfiting.

If a form of music makes work easier, heightens religious ceremony, and even communicates hidden messages, how can it be denigrated as not "serious"? In his 1948 book Jazz: A People's Music, Sidney Finkelstein, who brought a socialist perspective to his music criticism, wrote that "jazz reasserts the truth that the creation of art is a social function; that music should be made for people to use." He further described jazz as a living, changing art form in contrast to "the museum and connoisseur atmosphere that surrounds" classical music culture. Further, if jazz or pop music can heal and elevate the spirit, whether it comes from Count Basie, James Brown, Sun Ra, or the Beatles, how is that different from the role of so-called sacred music?

Someone who appreciates the continuum of music is Michael Feinstein, with whom I collaborated on his 1995 book Nice Work If You Can Get It. Feinstein is renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of American popular song, particularly show music, and his book detailed the seven years he spent as amanuensis to the great lyricist Ira Gershwin, who long outlived his brother, George, and worked with many other composers. During those years and after, Michael met many of the most prolific composers and lyricists, including Harold Arlen, Harry Warren, Irving Caesar, Jerry Herman, and Stephen Sondheim. He was aware of the fleeting appeal of most pop music, but he also appreciated the occasional gems that separated from the pack like gold nuggets popping up in a prospector's pan. "Popular songs were not meant to last much longer than snowflakes," he wrote.

Evanescent and plentiful, they were created for commerce, yet the best of them were also imbued with an eternal life force that transcends their 32-bar form as well as the creaky stage or film scenarios that provided their reason for being. They were unwittingly built to last--not all of them, but the ones encoded with a strong enough strain of divine DNA. It is that miraculous connection with infinity, an inherent part of any great music, that I feel every time I experience a great popular song. 'Popular'---the word itself seems to militate against any claim to timelessness, as if something created with mass acceptance in mind couldn't possibly be art. As if art hadn't so often served the populace, from African sculpture to European cathedrals to Hollywood films themselves. I have seen firsthand how popular songs heal the masses, how they give joy and hope in a very personal way to those who don't even know how badly they need them.

So, as the late Albert Ayler titled an album of his utterly idiosyncratic avant-garde New Orleans jazz, "Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe"--although Ayler himself is believed to have suffered from depression, and was found floating in the East River, an apparent suicide. Musicians of all stripes have been accused of peculiar behavior, though, including the likes of Mozart and Beethoven, not to mention some of the most creative geniuses of jazz and pop music in our era. When Michael Jackson died last year, his fans were seen crying in the streets, undeterred by all the rehashed stories about child abuse lawsuits or self-mutilation by plastic surgery. I had come to think of Michael by then as the kind of borderline personality who, if he weren't a wealthy pop star, might have been consigned to a sanitarium. And yet, I was moved by his songs, especially the early ones from Off the Wall, his brilliant breakthrough album that spawned four Top Ten singles. Hearing them again, I recalled how much delight they had given me.

Flawed vessels proliferate not only among musicians but also some of our most renowned spiritual teachers, so who's to say? In the past few decades, gurus and so-called spiritual masters have exhibited human frailties of the kind we customarily associate with sports figures and Hollywood stars. Yet many in the spiritual world still revere them, just as they insist on ranking "sacred" and classical music above popular forms from jazz to rock to hip-hop. Which is why it was refreshing to hear a recent podcast of the writings of Justin Miles, a blogger who writes about hip-hop in spiritual terms related to Nondualism--the principle derived from Indian teachings that holds that all is One, and that Brahman (the Absolute) and ātman (the self) are identical.

"Hip-hop is a viable way of connecting with Spirit," Miles says in an unpublished article. "Hip-hop, like Spirit, is what is being sought. The goal of hip-hop is to attain a sense of unity of creation and creator, and to understand that there was never separation in the first place." As an example, he cites a track by rapper KRS-One entitled "The Real Holy Place."

Why are metaphysical teachings forbidden?

The only place to talk to God is in church? You must be kiddin'!

For years they kept God hidden,

Looked for God in self, not in what's written.

They forgot that Jesus was a revolutionary

Who hung out with criminals.

You may not think of Keith Richards, the famously heroin-addicted, Jack Daniel's-swigging guitarist and songwriter of the Rolling Stones, as a great purveyor of spiritual wisdom. Yet in his often-hilarious autobiography, Life (coauthored by James Fox), Richards shows a keen understanding of the value of popular music to heal a vast array of ailments. Having grown up in a working-class suburb of London called Dartford, he was regularly beaten up by bullies on his way home from school, yet never revealed this to his parents. "England was often under fog, but there was a fog of words, too," he writes of the years just after World War II. "One didn't show emotions. One didn't actually talk much at all. The talk was all around things: codes and euphemisms. Some things couldn't be said or even alluded to. It was a residue of the Victorians." Nonetheless, he adds, "People really do want to touch each other, to the heart. That's why you have music. If you can't say it, sing it."

In another chapter, Richards reflects on what it is that makes one want to write songs:

In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people's hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you're playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases, a thread that runs through all of us--a stab to the heart. Sometimes I think songwriting is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heart attack.

In tribute to the range of music, it has always made strange bedfellows. James MacMillan, a Scottish composer and conductor who is also a lay member of the Roman Catholic Dominican order, has said that faith inspired many of his sacred works. And yet, writing in The Guardian on the role of music in our "post-religious" times, he cites with approval the agnostic English composer Michael Tippett's assertion that a connection exists between music and compassion. "This is fascinating," writes MacMillan, "since that was precisely the belief of the medieval music guilds of Europe, which venerated Job as the patron saint of music before Saint Cecilia came along. Music was seen as a comfort to the suffering, and musicians were depicted in contemporary paintings and woodcuts as visiting Job to soothe his physical and spiritual pains. To see a spiritual umbilical cord between music and compassion, between music and the work of God, reminds us of the Fuke Buddhist identification of the shakuhachi [flute] with the power of absolute love." Then he quotes the Scottish Jesuit John McDade: "Music may be the closest human analogue to the mystery of the direct and effective communication of grace."

Why shouldn't music be as effective a channel for grace as any traditional spiritual practice, many of which can prove more escapist than the silliest pop ditty. Psychologist and author John Welwood coined the term "spiritual bypassing" in 1984 to describe the use of "spiritual ideas or practices to avoid or prematurely transcend relative human needs, feelings, personal issues, and developmental tasks." This bypassing manifests in what Welwood calls "Advaita speak," referring to the Sanskrit word for "nonduality," a state ascribed in the Vedantic literature to Brahman, the Absolute that cannot be reached by reason. The underlying premise of nonduality that there can be no separation--no duality--between subject and object, doer and action, can lead to some awfully convoluted or circular language, not unlike Zen. Ironically, the Nondualist movement, if we can even call it that, has split into at least two camps, one that sticks to the absolutist language of Oneness, and another that accepts the need for a kind of "relative truth" that allows us to operate within the larger purview of Absolute Truth. In one private Nonduality forum, for example, I read the following:

But if nonduality does not honor duality, it becomes sterile and disconnected. It becomes "a one-sided transcendentalism that uses nondual terms and ideas to bypass the challenging work of personal transformation. Advaita-speak can be very tricky, for it uses absolute truth to disparage relative truth, emptiness to devalue form, and oneness to belittle individuality." In other words, it engenders escapism.

That entry reminds me of the words of the 8th-century Syrian monk John of Damascus, writing against the iconoclastic movement of his day, whose proponents went around defacing statues and paintings of Jesus and the saints, in the belief that depiction of the spiritual amounted to heresy. "Do not insult matter," John wrote, "for it is not without honor. Nothing is to be despised that God has made."

Music, of course, is not matter in our commonplace understanding, but vibrational energy. Maybe that's why it has so much power to affect not only how our bodies feel--sped up for dancing, relaxed for lovemaking--but also the interface of body and spirit. Unless we buy into the random universe of agnostic science, we must believe that, although we may be spiritual beings, we are in the body for a reason. Yet if that reason is simply to get back out of the body again, to act as if it doesn't exist, then the cosmic joke really is on us. Another option is, however, possible: We are here to master being in Spirit through being in the body--to be, in classic Christian terms, in the world but not of the world (although that precise phrase appears nowhere in Scripture). And even though Buddhism also seems to downplay the earthly state by labeling it as merely one of six realms of existence, the Buddha himself counted it as the most significant realm, because it is the only one whose inhabitants can become liberated. To orthodox Buddhists, then, the human world of Earth is more auspicious even than the realms of the god and demigods.

As well it ought to be, although the two occasionally overlap, to startling effect. A wonderful but rarely told Buddhist story, in which music and sensuality figure in, was recounted by the Greek-Irish scholar Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), who spent much of his life in Japan. For many years a learned priest meditated daily on the chapter of a famous sutra regarding Fugen-Bosatsu--the Japanese name for the Bodhisattva associated with spiritual practice and meditation. (Although Buddhism is a nontheistic tradition, many practitioners revere the Buddha as essentially divine and the Boddhisattvas as the equivalent of saints.) The priest prayed constantly that he might be permitted to behold Fugen as a living presence in the form described in the holy text. One evening, while he was reciting the sutra, sleep overtook him. In the dream that followed, a voice told him that to see Fugen, he must go to the house of a singing courtesan, called a yuj, in a nearby town. There he found the yuj entertaining a group of men, who were feasting and drinking, enthralled by her extraordinary beauty and seductive voice. She was playing a small hand-drum and singing an old Japanese song about a famous shrine.

As the priest listened, the courtesan suddenly fixed her eyes on him, and her form changed into that of Fugen-Bosatsu, riding a snow-white elephant with six tusks, and emitting from her forehead a beam of light that seemed to pierce beyond the limits of the universe. Now her song was also transformed to one of more profound implication:

On the Vast Sea of Cessation [from suffering],

Though the Winds of the Six Desires and of the Five Corruptions never blow,

Yet the surface of that deep is always covered

With the billowings of Attainment to the Reality-in-Itself.

Dazzled by the divine ray of light, the priest closed his eyes, but even through their lids he still distinctly saw the vision. The others present saw only the yuj: they had not beheld the manifestation. Then the singer suddenly disappeared from the banquet room--none could say when or how. From that moment the revelry ceased, and gloom took the place of joy. After having waited and sought for the girl to no avail, the company dispersed in great sorrow. Last of all, the priest departed, bewildered by the emotions of the evening. But scarcely had he passed beyond the gate, when the yuj appeared before him, and said, "Friend, do not speak yet to anyone of what you have seen this night."

The monk who recorded this astonishing tale remarks that, although the courtesan was supposedly of a low and miserable station in life, condemned to serve the lusts of men, she was nonetheless the incarnation of a Bodhisattva. "But we must remember that the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas may appear in this world in countless different forms," he wrote, "choosing, for the purpose of their divine compassion, even the most humble or contemptible forms, when such shapes can serve them to lead men into the true path,

and to save them from the perils of illusion."

Which takes us back to the memoir of the man from Dartford who has become a symbol, somehow, of both appalling decadence and creative stamina, with a career that has spanned more than 45 years. "I'm not here just to make records and money," Keith Richards observes. "I'm here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: 'Do you know this feeling?' "

Yeah, we know it. But we can't all say it so well, and that's why we need music to sing it for us. We need music to be a channel for grace, to save us from the perils of illusion, and allow us to live freely in the midst of pollution. The spiritual exists within the material, not in spite of it. As the teacher whose wisdom was recorded in the Gospel of Thomas put it, "Lift the stone and you will find me. Split the wood and I am there."

What Makes a Mystical Experience?

2010-10-15T19:13:00Z

Too much has been written and said about mystical experience over the centuries that makes it seem out of the reach of ordinary individuals. These elevated accounts are just another version of what my friend Mark Whitwell, the yoga master from New Zealand by way of L.A., finds so disturbing about the so-called search for enlightenment through many spiritual disciplines, including yoga. "In the very action of seeking spiritual attainment, we become blind to the fact that we already have everything we need," Mark says. "There is no such thing as enlightenment, only the perfection of life that arises in each of us. You already are a living, breathing, perfect expression of life. You don't need to realize it, because you are it!"
The fact that this perfection already exists within us on some level is borne out by the profoundly mystical experiences many people have had under circumstances that have little or nothing to do with conventional religious practices, including prayer, meditation, chanting, or fasting. A number of people have spontaneously experienced states of consciousness they described as mystical: during so-called near death experiences; under the influence of natural substances ranging from mushrooms to the leaves and vines of certain plants; during epileptic seizures and even strokes.
Religion scholar Huston Smith, for example, has established a connection between the formative eras of certain religious traditions and the use of hallucinogens. The spiritually correct term for these substances is entheogens, meaning that they engender in the user an awareness of the presence of God (theo).

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The origins of the spiritual tradition known today as Hinduism involved ritual consumption of Soma, whose active ingredient is believed to have been a mushroom similar to the one from which the Swiss research scientist Albert Hofmann synthesized psilocybin. Hymns to Soma, featuring references to ecstatic experiences with wildly kinesthetic and visual elements, are found in the Rig Veda, composed some 4,000 to 6,000 years ago.

Hoffman also did research on ergot, a fungus that grows on rye and related plants and that has an effect similar to psilocybin. Ergot is believed to have been part of the initiatory rituals employed in the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece dating to around 1600 BCE. The Mysteries involved visions and the conjuring of an afterlife, both of which may have been the result of taking entheogens. Because the mystery cults were so successful in maintaining silence about their beliefs and practices, though, nobody knows for sure, although images of corn do appear in several locations believed to have been used by these groups.

Renowned mycologist R. Gordon Wasson and others have further documented these connections between entheogens and mystical experience, which were demonstrated by a series of experiments carried out at Harvard by Timothy Leary and Richard Albert, known today as Ram Dass, including one known as "The Good Friday Experiment." That experiment induced what was described as mystical experiences that had life-changing effects on many of its participants. But in the conservative backlash against the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, academia and the government contrived to ban any further scientific experimentation with LSD and other entheogenics, a ban that has gradually dissipated over the last decade or so. According to a recent article in The New York Times ("Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again" by John Tierney), scientists have become newly intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported by religious mystics and practitioners of meditation and other spiritual exercises. Experiments led by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins "found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered," according to the article.

The results of his double-blind studies led Dr. Griffiths to propose that the human brain is wired to undergo these "unitive" experiences, perhaps because of some evolutionary advantage. "This feeling that we're all in it together may have benefited communities by encouraging reciprocal generosity," Dr. Griffiths said. "On the other hand, universal love isn't always adaptive, either."

The new openness to this kind of experimentation has developed in part because of gradual social acceptance of the hospice movement, yoga, and meditation, among other practices, in the watershed years since 1969. Two events happening that summer, less than a month apart, brought people together on vastly disparate levels. On July 20, men walked on the moon for the first time, an event watched on television by an estimated 500 million people around the world. Given a global population then of around 3.6 billion, that would represent roughly 14 percent of everyone on earth. Three weeks later, perhaps half a million people gathered in one location not far from Woodstock, New York, for "three days of peace and music," ostensibly without incident. Other momentous events occurred that same year: Sandwiched between Apollo 11 and Woodstock, on June 28, came the Stonewall riot in New York City that marked the beginning of the gay rights movement; and the FCC banned all cigarette advertising on television and radio, the dawning of recognition that health is a universal human issue.

The growing sense of world unity, however fractured and fragmented in the years since, still has not diminished. Recent research has shown that overall health and longevity are directly proportional to the depth and strength of our social connectedness. So human connection and, shall we say, cosmic connection--the unitive experience created by entheogens--may share some similarities, one of which is a potential strengthening of the immune system.

Researchers now believe that the sacred entheogens, including psilocybin, peyote, and ayahuasca, among others, can provide benefits that conventional medicine and commercially available pharmaceuticals cannot. "Researchers are reporting preliminary success in using psilocybin to ease the anxiety of patients with terminal illnesses," Tierney reports. One psychiatrist involved in an experiment at U.C.L.A., describes it as "existential medicine" because it helps dying people overcome fear, panic and depression. "Under the influences of hallucinogens," he writes, "individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual physical demise, and return with a new perspective and profound acceptance of the life constant: change."

That sounds suspiciously Buddhist, although Buddhism, ironically, not only has no history of entheogenic origins, but also actively discourages the use of any mind-altering substance, from alcohol to antidepressants. And yet accounts that have been handed down of the Buddha's experience of enlightenment make even the most fantastic descriptions of modern-day acid trips sound tame by comparison, meaning that the Buddha was able to access the unitive state of consciousness on his own. (No wonder he is still worshipped as a god in much of Asia.)

The emphasis in these new experiments on what Timothy Leary used to call "set and setting" is instructive. During the late 1960s and early '70s, I took both psilocybin and LSD a number of times, but not in the kind of setting that would be likely to trigger a mystical experience (although they did expand my appreciation of jazz and certain other music). Some years ago, however, while researching a book on spiritual experience, I did participate in several ceremonies of a Brazilian sect known as Santo Daime. The heart of these rituals was the sharing of an entheogenic sacrament called ayahuasca, a decoction of several plants that grow in the South American rain forest. The active ingredient in the sacrament appears to be DMT, a hallucinogenic drug that I had smoked years before to much less dramatic effect. What made these Santo Daime rituals different was that they took place in a specifically religious setting. Although we gathered in a loft in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, we were required to fast for a full day prior to receiving the communal sacrament, to dress in white, and to sit separately by gender, as in certain Orthodox Jewish and Muslim services. We also chanted Catholic prayers and sang Brazilian hymns in Portuguese and English.

The results I could only describe as mystical, although they were so far beyond anything I had achieved through prayer or meditation that I really have no functional reference point. But these incidents, my own and others', raise intriguing questions about the nature of mystical experience and spiritual practice. If significant numbers of people can have what they and objective observers describe as "mystical" experiences, what does that say about the conventional route of prayer, meditation, chanting, fasting, and other practices used to achieve higher states of consciousness?

I believe that all those practices do directly affect our physical and psychological being. Fasting, for instance, can be seen as an act of spiritual sacrifice, but depriving the body and brain of sustenance can be expected to affect your consciousness, for better or worse. At least one Native American scholar has said that the purpose of some extremely long, grueling ceremonies from his culture, such as the Sun Dance ritual, is to wear down the resistance of participants and facilitate their entry into an altered state. He said that these rituals are intended to "bore" the participants to such an extent that their normal thought processes are short-circuited. Should that methodology be considered spiritual or physical or psychological?

My conclusion is that it doesn't really matter, although these intensive rituals, as well as entheogenic sacraments, probably affect us on all three levels, which also conforms to the holistic or holographic vision of life. The same goes for what I call the "three portals" to spiritual experience that are not always viewed through a spiritual lens: nature, art, and sex. Succinctly put, many people have had intimations of the infinite through the awe induced by the beauties of nature, or the experience of certain forms of art, music, poetry, theater, and film. It's not much of a stretch to say that physical union with another human being, at its best, is the closest we come on earth to union with the Divine. Any number of contemporary writers and teachers have delineated spiritual paths based largely on romantic relationship--not even complex practices like Tantric sexuality, but just ordinary, garden variety intimacy.

But are these kinds of mystical insights or intimations equivalent to the visions and experiences of cosmic consciousness that have been reported by the classical mystics of all faiths and the people who have taken entheogenic drugs in a spiritual setting? Steve Fanning, a healer and author of books on Christian mysticism, likes to tell the story of several students of his mysticism class who asked him how they could achieve a mystical experience. He told them to spend four straight hours in prayer. All but one of them declined, either unwilling to make the commitment, or not believing it would yield the kind of experience they had been reading about. But one woman did try the exercise. She reported back that nothing much happened for the first three hours, but that in the last hour a change in consciousness did overtake her. She couldn't compare it to St Theresa levitating or going into ecstasy for hours, or Padre Pio bilocating, but she definitely did feel something unaccountable, and planned to continue the practice.

I'm not recommending that anyone start experimenting with entheogens, although I think they provide helpful reference points. The fact that one can have profound mystical experiences by taking entheogens in the proper setting, without necessarily spending years learning complex spiritual practices, does prove one thing: As Mark Whitwell observed, we all already are living, breathing, perfect expressions of life. Many people who have had near-death experiences--usually brought on by accidents or medical emergencies having no relation to spiritual practice--report similarly life-changing effects.

Much the same effect, remarkably, can result from having a stroke, as was famously reported by the brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor, whose detailed description of a form of cerebral hemmorhage sounds startlingly similar to both entheogenic and mystical experiences. During hr stroke, she became aware of the separate roles played by each of her brain's hemispheres. Describing the present-moment consciousness of the right lobe of the brain, Taylor said, "In this moment we are perfect, we are whole, and we are beautiful."

"I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me," she went on to say of her experience. "And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there." This sounds surprisingly like a Hymn to Soma in the Rig Veda, possibly the oldest sacred scripture we have, composed some 3,000 to 6,000 years ago, in praising the mystical awareness created by imbibing a sacred entheogen:

I in my grandeur have surpassed the heavens and all this spacious earth. . .

One of my flanks is in the sky; I let the other trail below:
Have I not drunk of Soma juice?
(Mandala 10, Hymn 119)

So, we don't need to seek enlightenment by straining after it, but we do can find ways to recognize the perfection within us. That's where the daily practices of prayer, meditation, deep breathing, yoga, qi gong, and other things play a useful role. They help to remind us that we are connected to "the magnificence of the energy around" us, in Taylor's words. That magnificence is always there, waiting to be realized in an act of love, devotion, or simple awe at the incomparable beauty of nature or another human being.

The Spiritual Power of Pain Relief

2010-06-03T01:22:14Z

I recently spent a day in a workshop given by Susun S. Weed, called "My Herbal Medicine Chest," which elucidated the healing powers residing in more than a dozen common plants, from burdock to yarrow. Weed, an ethnobotanist and internationally recognized expert in herbal medicine, has devoted her life to the study of plants of all sorts, and her workshop was a revelation. She added immeasurably to my knowledge not only of herbal remedies, but also how to spot and utilize these plants, most of which grow right around us.

Plantain, for instance, is a common weed that grows all across North America in front lawns and meadows, and even pops up through the cracks in your driveway. (See photo: Common Plantain, plantago major, is distinct from the banana-like fruit that grows in the tropics.) It has remarkable healing properties when chewed and made into a poultice. A few days after the workshop, I happened to slash the heel of my hand while doing home repairs, and decided to forgo the hydrogen peroxide and sterile gauze pads and give plantain a try. Chewing a small leaf and spreading it across the bleeding, inch-long gash, I covered the moist poultice with a whole leaf and wrapped it all with a strip of adhesive tape. The pain dissipated almost immediately, the bleeding stopped, and I forgot about it as I continued working.

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A few hours later, I removed the poultice to discover that the skin had already begun to close over the wound. The next day I could still see a line in my hand where it had been slashed, but there was no sensitivity, redness, or swelling--all the usual signs that the immune system's inflammatory response has been called into action. The plantain's natural healing properties had not only relieved the pain, but had also healed the wound so thoroughly and naturally that my immune system felt no need to spring into action. That may sound unremarkable, except that I've often experienced noticeable anti-inflammatory symptoms in response to much smaller cuts, which have remained tender and puffy for several days after being treated with disinfectants.

I was astonished at how effective the plantain was, especially since I thought I already knew quite a bit about herbal remedies. I've spent the better part of the last 20 years writing and co-authoring books and teaching workshops about the spiritual life and the world's religions. Recently, though, I have devoted most of my time to books about health and healing in one form or another. In these co-authored books I have researched and contributed information about the value of anti-inflammatory diets and herbal supplements in preventing or slowing arthritis; strategies to avoid or relieve musculoskeletal pain in general; and the emergence of consciousness-based healthcare. (What's that, you ask? As opposed to mind-body medicine--mind-based therapies including meditation, visualization, and biofeedback that help patients heal themselves--in consciousness-based healthcare, the mind of the practitioner effects healing in the patient through focused intention.)

To my mind, there's no inconsistency between spirituality and relieving pain. Any stratagem that alleviates suffering without creating dangerous risks, as with narcotic painkillers or invasive surgery, is essentially spiritual, because relieving pain--our own or other people's--is an inherently sacred act. That should be self-evident, but it doesn't get much traction in our Manichaean culture. The Manichaean heresy that found its way into early Christianity held that spirit is good but the body is inherently evil. If something is evil, the reasoning goes, it deserves to suffer. Based on the core Christian belief that Jesus died to redeem humanity from sin, suffering can be seen as a positive good. And for nearly two millennia, that belief had a certain rationale. Until the introduction of ether and chloroform in the 19^th century, followed by the development of painkilling opioids, pain was considered a fact of life that was best dealt with by assigning a spiritual purpose to suffering. Karl Marx might have been speaking almost literally in 1844, when he wrote, "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people" (The Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right).

Given what we know about the placebo effect, it's not hard to understand that accepting pain as a form of spiritual cleansing could in fact be anodyne. And the moivation for overcoming pain need not be related to any particular religious belief system. In 1959, the Harvard anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher wrote about observing at Anzio and other World War II battlefields that seriously wounded soldiers reported much lower levels of pain, even when they had suffered severe tissue damage in combat, than his civilian patients in the recovery room of Massachusetts General Hospital. Some of these soldiers, Beecher reported, had "entirely denied pain," despite the obvious evidence of their injuries. He reasoned that the men may have been distracted by other, more powerful concerns, such as staying alive or protecting their comrades.

That could also explain why the Judeo-Christian world has always had contempt for drugs, a disdain not shared by many of the spiritual traditions of the East. But once painkillers were readily available, one needn't rely only on religion or heroics to cope with intractable physical pain. Perhaps as a natural offshoot, contemporary spiritual teachers have taken a much more practical--and compassionate--approach to pain. My own experience of the connection between spiritual life and physical healing dates back more than a decade to my collaboration on a series of books with Caroline Myss and Ron Roth. Myss, who worked for many years as a medical intuitive, has always been on the side of healing from pain, while exposing the self-imposed blocks that prevent that healing. The late Ron Roth, a former Catholic priest with whom I wrote five books on prayer and healing, left the priesthood because of a conflict with his bishop. Ron had been conducting hands-on healing services in his community, but the bishop thought this was inappropriate for a Catholic priest. What madness! Apparently it was all right to read about healings in the Gospels, but not to follow the example of Jesus and heal people on one's own.

Then, in 2003, I co-created a deck of Healing Cards with Caroline, for which I drew on teachings from the world's spiritual traditions that relate to health and healing. (One of my favorites is: "God didn't create any illness without also creating the remedy, except death," which comes from the oral tradition of the Prophet Muhammad.) In the course of doing research, I discovered that all spiritual traditions offer practical wisdom related to health, diet, nutrition, and mental well-being. You might expect this in the Eastern practices of Ayurveda, Taoism, and Tibetan Buddhism, but it's also essential to the Judeo-Christian tradition of the West. Not only was Jesus of Nazareth a healer, after all, but he also came from a tradition of Jewish healers that produced renowned miracle-workers such as Rabbi Hanina Ben Dosa, who lived around the same time as Jesus. Somewhere along the way, Christians lost the connection between Christ's compassion and his ability to heal physical and psychological pain, and they chose simply to bear it as a misguided path to transcendence.

In part because of my own experience with chronic back and joint pain, I was especially grateful to work on two books with one of the country's leading sports medicine doctors, Vijay Vad, who is based at New York's esteemed Hospital for Special Surgery. The books offer a variety of remedies for arthritis and musculoskeletal (or MSK) pain apart from prescription painkillers, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and invasive medical procedures.

Growing up in India, Dr. Vad was exposed to the traditional medicine known as Ayurveda, and he watched as Ayurvedic physicians and remedies helped both of his grandfathers heal from serious ailments. As a result, although he was trained in conventional medicine, he has an appreciation for the integrative approach, combining mainstream with complementary or alternative treatments. I had my own experience of the conventional medical system while working on Dr. Vad's new book, Stop Pain: Inflammation Relief for an Active Life (Hay House). Suffering from severe pain in my lower back and sciatic nerve, I went to a neurologist who recommended surgery on my spinal discs. After talking it over with my wife, Louanne, who is a gifted nurse, and with Dr. Vad, I decided to seek a second opinion.

The neurologist I saw next, based on a careful physical exam, recommended Physical Therapy, and prescribed Celebrex, a Cox-2 inhibitor, for the pain. "Where is surgery on your list of treatments?" I asked.

"At this point, it isn't on the list," he said. "If your condition gets worse in five or ten years, then maybe."

The PT helped reduce the pain somewhat, and the Celebrex did the rest. But after Vijay reminded me of the dangers of heart disease associated with Cox-2 inhibitors (two others, Vioxx and Bextra, were withdrawn from the market at FDA insistence), I stopped taking it. Dr. Vad recommended some herbal remedies (described in our book), and among the options I found ginger and bromelain to be most effective. Bromelain is an enzyme derived from pineapple that has been shown in scientific studies to have marked anti-inflammatory properties. It has even been approved by the German Commission E--a regulatory agency established by the government to evaluate the usefulness of over 300 herbs--to treat swelling and inflammation following surgery, particularly sinus surgery. And ginger has been used in India to treat joint pain and nausea for thousands of years.

Ron Roth used to say that suffering was not an end in itself. And even if we look at it as a means to an end, he believed, we're still better off if we don't suffer needlessly. Far from being therapeutic in some transcendental sense, physical pain distracts us from the enjoyment of life that is part of our spiritual mission. Pain can also inhibit us from doing our work, which would seem to make it run counter to the almighty American work ethic. That might be a good thing, of course. Mystics from John Donne to Ram Dass have written eloquently about how illness or disabling infirmity can be powerful teachers. But I'm talking more about the everyday chronic pain that allows us to function while draining our energy and making it less likely that we'll accomplish what we set out to do.

Which isn't to say that I didn't learn a great deal from my brush with MSK pain. To begin with, I now appreciate the value of getting a second opinion--especially when the guy telling you that you absolutely, positively must have surgery happens to make his living by cutting people open. I discovered firsthand that herbal remedies work as well as some prescription drugs--without the dangerous side effects--and that even mainstream medical institutions, including the Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, have begun to devote well-documented pages of their Web sites to herbal and nutritional supplements. Most of all, I learned that the real value of integrative medicine lies in taking the best from both worlds. If you're having a heart attack, you do want an experienced medical team to intervene as invasively as necessary. But the evidence is increasingly showing that following an anti-inflammatory diet, using herbal remedies, and doing moderate exercise can prevent or forestall most heart disease to begin with. So you really need both approaches to be available, and the best doctors are beginning to understand that.

We may still have a lot to learn about the connection between the natural world, human compassion, and the spirituality of pain relief. But healers like Susun Weed and Vijay Vad are helping us get there.

NY Times interview w/Vijay Vad, M.D. and video link

More about Stop Pain: Inflammation Relief for an Active Life

More about the Healing Cards deck and iPhone app

More about Susun Weed and herbal medicine

Double Fantasy

2010-03-20T13:08:34Z

The spiritual world is rife with powerful paradoxes, perhaps none more confounding than the fact that romantic love can be at once passionately physical and profoundly mystical, transcending time, space, and even bodily limitations. In its material manifestation, romantic love can encompass the best and worst of human drives, from fierce loyalty and self-sacrifice to physical and emotional abuse, lies, and betrayal. Yet the mystical realms to which love can open the human heart are boundless, extending beyond the physical body--as far as we now know the nonlocal mind can reach.

That all-in-one reality of human love gives the lie to the Manichaean split between body and soul that has formed the basis for countless strains of puritanical prejudice and bad religion over several thousand years. So it's all the more inspiring for a book that tells the love story of two people who emerged from the New York City art and music scene of the 1970s, and who were known for their celebrations of physical love, to be shot through with spiritual references. Even on the first page of the Foreword, the author mentions saying her prayers before going to bed, not as a child but as a grown woman of 43 who was a staple of the punk rock revolution. Patti Smith's memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010), is emotionally involving and even sweet while detailing a subculture not noted for its compassion or spirituality.]]>
Smith's story resonated with me for so many reasons that I obsessively tore through the book, despite a pressing deadline on a book of my own, and felt bereft when I had finished it. While these two developing artists were encountering each other for the first time in Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan, I was living on East 3rd St off the Bowery, in a fourth-floor walk-up directly across from the Men's Shelter. According to the flap copy of Smith's book, "It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots. . . ." But it was also the summer of first acid trips and other psychic dislocations during which the political and social revolutions of the '60s were coming to a head. I wasn't the starving artist that Smith and Mapplethorpe were in those early years of their extraordinary relationship, merely a starving student, living on a steady diet of fried eggs and corned beef hash. Smith's meal of choice at the time was canned Dinty Moore beef stew.

But what was really fueling her in those years, apart from her work, was her undying love for Mapplethorpe. Her depiction of what was clearly a passionate physical affair is inextricably intertwined with their mutual support for each other as emerging artists, neither of them quite clear as to what form or direction their art would take. While spending most of her creative time writing poetry and drawing, Smith was gradually guided by her coterie of friends and encouragers into leading a punk rock band. And for Mapplethorpe, fine art photography was almost an afterthought, growing out of using Polaroids in his collages until someone gave him a Hasselblad camera.

Part of the beauty of Smith's book is the gentle unfolding of their love for each other alongaide their development as artists--a commitment that survived Mapplethorpe's discovery that he was gay. After a brief separation, they not only resumed living together but also, for a while at least, continued their physical relationship. And although Robert clearly flirted with the dark, demonic side of his personality, Smith appears as the quintessential seeker, shunning drugs and alcohol while searching for the moral subtext of her own checkered life.

Smith's account of her shared artistic journey with Mapplethorpe often reminded me of John and Yoko, whom I met just a few years after attending my first Patti Smith performance. As Lennon once described that relationship, "We were two poets in velvet cloaks, literally." (And we've seen the photos of them, so clad, strolling in Central Park while living at the Dakota.) Indeed, the title of the album that John and Yoko released in 1980--at once a manifestation of John's emergence from five years of hermitage, and, sadly, his swan song--says a lot about their own mutual commitment. He had been taken by a tropical flower called a double fantasy that he saw while in Bermuda, and he felt the name summed up his relationship with Yoko. They modeled a level of commitment and a mutual shifting of roles--John the househusband, Yoko the businesswoman--that few couples of our subculture in that time embraced so openly. Which made John's untimely murder all the more heartbreaking. Patti and Robert's double fantasy also ended sorrowfully, of course, with Mapplethorpe's death from AIDS some years after they had finally separated and Smith had married the musician Fred Smith, with whom she had two children.

Yet Patti and Robert remained in constant touch with each other until his death. Unlike many former lovers, they clearly enjoyed each other's artistic successes, if not without the occasional wry comment. After Smith's recording of "Because the Night," a song she had written with Bruce Spingsteen, became her first and only hit record in 1978--at a time when Mapplethorpe's photographs had yet to be widely recognized--they were walking down Eighth St. together as the song blasted repeatedly from storefront speakers. "Robert was unabashedly proud of my success," Patti writes of that moment. "What he wanted for himself he wanted for us both. He . . . spoke in a tone he only used with me--a bemused scolding--admiration without envy, our brother-sister language. 'Patti,' he drawled, 'you got famous before me.'"

Admiration without envy is one of those spiritual principles that is so basic to genuine love--certainly it animated John and Yoko's life together, too--yet so hard for even the most devoted to maintain, that many spiritual masters of renown haven't achieved it. As John wrote memorably on the jacket of one of his albums during his marriage to Yoko, "Love means having to say you're sorry every 15 minutes."

In the end, Smith's lovingly hewn story calls to mind some of my favorite lines from one of her favorite poets, Paul Verlaine. I carried his bilingual collection around with me during those same years--one of the few books I managed to keep through many moves, break-ups, and rip-offs. Often overshadowed by his younger, wilder partner Arthur Rimbaud, Verlaine had a timeless ability to cut to the innocent heart of love without fear.

Soyons deux enfants, soyons deux jeunes filles
Eprises de rien et de tout etonnees
Qui s'en vont palir sous les chastes charmilles
Sans meme savoir qu'elles sont pardonnées.

(Let's be two children, let's be two young girls
In love with nothing and astonished by everything
Who go palely under the chaste bowers
Without even knowing that they are forgiven.)