New Houston Secular Buddhist Group

For anyone in Houston reading my blog and interested in secular buddhism, I just created a networking page on Facebook as my attempt to get something going.  Check it out if you're interested:

Houston Secular Buddhists

The Four Noble Truths and the Three Marks of Existence.

So what, after all, does Buddhism actually entail?  The philosophical tenets of Buddhism can be summed up with what it calls the 4 noble truths and the three marks of existence.  What follows is my own understanding of these “truths”.

1.  Sapient beings experience dissatisfaction.
2.  Dissatisfaction arises from craving, be it things, sensations, etc.
3.  Craving ceases when one realizes that everything is impermanent.
4.  One can realize the impermanence of everything by following the Eightfold Path.

I have used the word dissatisfaction because it seems to be a more accurate translation of the actual word, dukkha, than the more commonly used "suffering."  Suffering has a connotation of pain, and while that is related to dissatisfaction, it's not precise enough.  Dissatisfaction itself is pretty obvious, I think, it's a state of not being content with what one has.  This is seen most often when one contemplates unpleasant experiences, but it also happens with pleasant ones.  It's not that pleasant experiences are an illusion or that they aren’t actually pleasant.  It’s that they contain the seeds of dissatisfaction when one forgets that they, like the unpleasant experiences, are impermanent.  The good, the bad, there is no eternal.  There's nothing actually grim about this, it's just a fact of the universe.  It's part of the reality of everything being in flux, as I mentioned in my last post.  The fact of impermanence (annica) is neutral, but we humans have a habit of forgetting it, of craving (tanha) for the eternal, of expecting things to last forever.  This is what causes our sense of dissatisfaction with the universe we live in, and causes us to seek artificial illusions of permanence in things like religion, politics, superstition, drugs, hedonism, and all kinds of other diversions.  

None of these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves, what’s bad about them is the part of them that feed our self-delusion, the part that tricks us into thinking that they might last forever.  We spend so much time craving an eternity that doesn’t exist, and that keeps us from fully enjoying the pleasant experiences when they are going on and also wallowing in the fear of eternal suffering when we are in the midst of an unpleasant experience that will subside sooner or later.  

Siddhattha Gotama realized this somewhere around 2500 years ago.  “Buddha” is not a name, but a title.  It comes from the word bodhi, which is usually translated “enlightenment”, but really means awakened.  Buddha means “the awakened one”, someone with awareness, who notices and understands things.  He’s not a god, not a wizard, not any kind of supernatural entity, as later traditions portray him.  

Sid was just a guy who did the hedonistic thing and then spent years after doing the ascetic thing, pursuing spiritual fulfillment and attainment.  He finally realized that neither hedonism or asceticism were satisfactory, so he kicked back under a tree for a while until he realized that we humans sure spend a lot of time chasing after bullshit, and we don’t really need to do that.  Once he awoke to this realization, he decided he wanted to help others realize it too.  But what exactly is it that he realized?

Sid realized that we lie to ourselves constantly about the truths of reality, which is made up of the three marks of existence.  I’ve already mentioned two of the marks, impermanence and dissatisfaction.  The third is not-self (anatta).

In the Indian Vedic religion, there is a concept of an unchanging, permanent soul, called atman.  It’s kind of like a form, in the Platonic sense.  The idea is very similar, for things to exist, there needs to be an ideal in some other realm for it to be a reflection of, otherwise there would be nothing.  Sid rejected this notion due to his recognition of impermanence and of applying it to the very concept of self itself, plus the fact that no one can directly observe a form.

This isn’t actually that hard to figure out.  As with all things, we change and evolve over time.  We gain new knowledge, we forget things, we change deeply held convictions.  The me that exists today is very different from the me that existed when I was 7 years old.  The me that exists today is different than the me from yesterday in many respects, and the me that exists in 20 years will be more different still.  You can’t step in the same river twice, the ship of Theseus, grandfather’s axe, and other similar philosophical notions are related.  So there is not a permanent self, there is a continuous process of becoming the new self, which goes on to become a new self, etc, from moment to moment (this process is called punabbhava, or just bhava, often incorrectly translated as rebirth).  Now, in the Vedic religion that was dominant in Sid’s time, this was a supernatural notion related to transmigration of souls and reincarnation, and to be fair, Sid didn’t really bother dismissing it as nonsense, he just figured it was unimportant, since the same process goes on within someone’s life, and he was nothing if not focused on trying to help people live better lives.  

The reason not-self is an important concept is that the popular notion of the self is made up of 5 aggregate attributes and those are causes of craving, but I will go into those in another post.  The point is that Sid developed the eightfold path as a way to help people realize the causes of dissatisfaction, realize the impermanent nature of things, and to help them stop grasping at illusions.  

Next post, the eightfold path, and possibly the 5 aggregates.

Atheism, Naturalism, and Buddhism.

ATHEIST


The biggest confusion that always crops up in discussion is that atheists believe there is no god.  People like to call us intellectually dishonest, because you can't disprove the existence of god.  My reply, always, is "Of course you can't disprove god."  We don't try to disprove god because that's impossible; we can and do gleefully destroy the logical fallacies and bad arguments for the existence of god, gods, or the supernatural.  We show that the specific claims about the attributes of some gods are false.  Genesis, for example: science has demonstrated that life emerged through natural processes, as did the universe itself, although we're still working out the finer details.  So for someone who believes in the Christian god because they believe the Genesis account, it can be shown to them that that's a bad reason to believe in the God of Genesis.  The same goes for pagan gods as the source of natural phenomena like lightning, rain, storms, etc. Those gods, as best we can tell, seem to have been developed in order to explain those things, and when we have a better way to explain the phenomena, their necessity drops away.  It doesn't disprove their existence, however.  Anyone can come up with all kinds of theories about why gods might exist.  Here's one:  Gods pop into existence as the result of the collective psychic potential of people believing in them.  Occultism is full of notions like that and similar, and I used to justify my own belief in the supernatural that way.  It's a nonsense proposal, because the notion that belief can cause something to manifest has no evidence for it either, even though it doesn't assume a supernatural cause for the universe.  At best, it's an argument for memetics and their influence on human culture, not for a supernatural realm, and it's still at the mere hypothesis stage, needing confirmation.  But the point is that even if one eliminates the explanatory power that the gods used to hold, that doesn't rule out their existence as a point of fact.


To rule out existence entirely, one would have to search all of time and space, which we can't do.  On the other hand, proving the existence of a deity is relatively easy, a godlike entity can show up and present evidence of its own existence any time it likes if it does in fact exist (and it can avoid Oolon Colluphid and Babel fish).  This is why when people accuse atheists of having faith that there is no god, gods, or the supernatural, I'm always careful to specify myself as an agnostic atheist, and to clarify that when it comes down to it, most atheists are.  I admit to an outside possibility that a god might quit screwing around and present itself at some point.  But until that happens or any other type of evidence is presented, I have no reason to believe in any of them, hence, I'm an atheist, I have no belief in gods.  I have no belief in the existence of other things for which there is no evidence, either, so sometimes I use the word skeptic to be more inclusive, but atheist is usually sufficient.  I come into contact with more people who care about the existence of gods specifically than the other stuff.  


There's so many labels that fit me.  Skeptic.  Atheist.  Humanist.  Agnostic.  Epicurean.  Naturalist.  Shit-stirrer (that's nothing new).  The newest one that seems to fit, Buddhist, is funny given the others, but I'll get to that in a bit.  The problem with atheism is that it's narrow, it focuses only on what I am against, it doesn't say anything about what I'm for.  That's the topic of the rest of this article.


One of my online friends made an offhand comment the other day:  "I don't believe in the supernatural, I think the natural world is super."  That pretty much nails it for me.  Some people like to disparage those who don't believe in the supernatural, calling them materialists.  I am a materialist, but I think people like to conflate that word.  There's the economic materialist who views consumption and acquisition of goods as a good thing.  Then there's the philosophical notion who views everything as being made of matter.  Too many people seem to like to apply the oft-held disdain for the economic materialist to the philosophical materialist.  It's a word game.  To avoid it, I call myself a naturalist, since that's a better fit anyway.  What does a naturalist do?  Well, I'll tell you.


I contemplate the vastness of the universe and the scales involved, from the sub-atomic quark level and how much goes on there.  I think about the vast distances between objects in our own solar system, the distances between our solar system and our nearest neighbors.  I think about the vast amount of systems in our own galaxy and how many galaxies we can see out there, let alone how many exist.  I think about the growing possibility that even the immense totality of our own universe may be a single one in an even huger multiverse with whole universes popping into existence here and there every time we indirectly observe a black hole.


I contemplate the scales of time involved for galaxies and systems and stars and planets to form, the geological time scales involved in taking us from pre-organic molecules to complicated organisms, and the fact that it took billions of years even to get to those basic molecules even before life got going.  I think about how all of the component parts of everything we see on earth were born in the hearts of exploding supernovae.  How millions of years of evolution can take a single species and turn one branch into a T-Rex, and another into a peacock.  How thanks to a massive meteor or asteroid impact in the Yucatan 65 million years ago, we ourselves and all the other mammals were able to develop from small rodent like creatures dodging T-Rex footprints into one of the dominant families of organisms on the planet.  I think about how environment determines form, such as in the way whales and other cetaceans originally evolved from a wolf like looking creature that originally lived much of its life in water, like hippos do today.


I contemplate all of this and marvel at how it all fits together in so many vast combinations, constantly in flux and impermanent.  Everything is constantly adapting and mutating fractally on different time and distance scales.  Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable, everything flows stochastically from the smallest neutrino to the largest cluster of galaxies and everything else in between.  I see all of this and I elate in the fact that I'm here to see it, along with probably countless other species throughout the multiverse.  It's unlikely that we'll get to share that experience with them any time soon due to the distances in space and time involved, but it's sheer arrogance and ego to assume that in all of that vastness we would be the only ones to be able to enjoy it.  To me, if anything is going to be covered by the notions of "holy" or "sacred", it's this contemplation of reality and all that it entails, and even using that religious language seems insufficient due to the petty and parochial concerns of so much of religion.  In the face of all of that, there's an epiphany about how very cosmically insignificant we really are, and I find that incredibly liberating.


Don't get me wrong.  Some people might get all morose about this kind of thing, but that kind of nihilistic despair just doesn't bother me at all.  There doesn't seem to be anything out there that is disapproving of our ethical decisions, or what kinds of fashion we wear, or people we associate with.  Even if there were something like a god, what are the odds it would even bother to notice us or single us out as more deserving of punishment or reward than anything else?  All of the pressures that religion likes to try to put on us are irrelevant.  We don't need to worry about the external forces, even the natural ones, because they're going to do what they do.  What really matters, when one has a full realization of our actual place in the cosmos, is how we treat ourselves and each other here on this pale blue dot.


And this brings me to my recent exploration of Buddhism.


In Jennifer Michael Hecht's book Doubt, A History, she talks about various systems that are kind of between a religion and a philosophical school as commonly understood. She calls these "graceful life philosophies."  What a GLP is focused on is a philosophical approach to how one should live one's life.  They may or may not include propositional beliefs about the world or universe, but they do seem to share the fact that whether they have them or not, they are much more focused on the process of living one's life, not accepting the propositional belief.  Hecht uses the Cynics, Stoics, and Epicureans as some of the western examples, and the earliest forms of Buddhism as an eastern one, along with Confucianism and Taoism, Taoism to a somewhat lesser extent.  Over time, the western ones have pretty much died off, and the eastern ones have all pretty much transitioned to full religions, with all the superstition, unfalsifiable beliefs, and authoritarian structures that that implies.


I have no use for religion.  But I like the idea of the graceful life philosophy (GLP).  I think when I went from my initial stage of atheism at an early age to paganism and occultism, what I was really looking for was a GLP.  I have some sympathies with Cynicism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism and have for a while. I'm much more Epicurean lately in comparison to my past flirtations with Cynicism and Stoicism, especially when I account for Epicureanism's history as a synonym for atheism.  Its long association with Democritus' atomism and its opposition of supernaturalism and focus on ending suffering and its conception of pleasure as the greatest good also helps.  Epicureanism is often slandered as hedonism in the materialistic sense, but the early Epicureans focused on moderation in all things, seeking to increase pleasure by increasing their understanding of the natural world and the self, and realized that by limiting the degree to which they allowed their desires to control them, they could maximize the pleasure of existence.  Which is a perfect transition to Buddhism.


How does one get back to Buddhism the graceful life philosophy, rather than what it is in so many places today, Buddhism the religion?  Owen Flanagan, author of The Bodhisattva's Brain: Buddhism Naturalized, has this to say in the introduction of that book:


"Imagine Buddhism without rebirth and without a karmic system that guarantees justice ultimately will be served, without nirvana, without bodhisattvas flying on lotus leaves, without Buddha worlds, without nonphysical states of mind, without any deities, without heaven and hell realms, without oracles, and without lamas who are reincarnations of lamas. What would be left? My answer is that what would remain would be an interesting and defensible philosophical theory with a metaphysics, a theory about how we come to know and what we can know, and an ethics, a theory about virtue and vice and how best to live.  This philosophical theory is worthy of attention by analytical philosophers and scientific naturalists because it is deep. Buddhism naturalized, if there is or can be such a thing, is compatible with the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution and with a committment to scientific materialism. Such a total philosophy, again if there is or could be such a thing that could be credibly called "Buddhist" after subtracting what is psychologically and sociologically understandable, but that is epistemically speaking incredible superstition and magical thinking, would be what I call "Buddhism naturalized," or something in its vicinity. Such a theory might shed light on the human predicament, on how finite material beings such as human animals fit into the larger scheme of material being. Because such a theory would speak honestly, without the mind-numbing and wishful hocus pocus that infects much Mahayana Buddhism, but possibly not so much early Theravada Buddhism, Buddhism naturalized, if there is or can be such a thing, delivers what Buddhism possibly uniquely among the world's live spiritual traditions, promised to offer: no false promises, no postive illusions, no delusions. False self-serving belief, moha, is a sin for Buddhists."


There's several different types of Buddhism in the world today. Theravada, Mahayana, Tibetan (Tantric), as well as multiple variations within those categories, like Zen.  Zen certainly does have less of the mythological accretions that the rest of Mahayana does, though Zen itself is a subset of Mahayana. Zen still does retain a smattering of notions like rebirth and karma, it just doesn't accentuate them nearly as much. 


In addition to Flanagan's book, which I am still in the beginning of, I've been listening to a lot of talks by Stephen Batchelor, and reading some of his books.  I just finished his Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, and have listened to the audiobook version of his Buddhism Without Beliefs, the longer book version of which is next in my reading queue after Flanagan.


Stephen Batchelor's approach is that he takes all of the stuff that pre-existed Buddhism like the supernatural elements and strips them out, keeping only the stuff that Gotama himself taught. Gotama did mention stuff like reincarnation, but it was part of the historical culture that Gotama existed in, and it's not actually necessary to believe in that kind of stuff for the tenets of Buddhist philosophy and practice to make sense or be useful. Basically, it, along with karma and various other things that do exist in the early Buddhist materials are analogous to the few propositional beliefs that Cynicism and Stoicism contain, they're there, but they're not the focus.  The difference between Flanagan and Batchelor is that Batchelor is a former monk of the Tibetan and Zen traditions, whereas Flanagan is a neuroscientist and philosopher.  Both, however, along with various others, seem to be calling for a form of Buddhism that more fits Hecht's terminology of the GLP, and that's what interests me in particular. The result ends up being very much a form of secular humanism with more emphasis on contemplative practice, and that's right up my alley.


This has been long enough, so I'm going to post it now.  I will followup shortly with my understanding of the philosophical tenets of Buddhism.

What a fool this mortal's been: Part 6.

Down the Rabbit Hole and Out Again.

Every summer in high school I worked summers at a Boy Scout camp near San Marcos, El Rancho Cima.  My third summer there, between Junior and Senior years of high school, I became a pagan.

I know it's kind of an odd place for it to happen, considering how conservative and Christian the BSA is as an institution, but it's full of high school kids, and there's a lot who do not tow the line.  I also got drunk and high for the first time while working at camp, but those are different stories.

Anyway, that particular summer I made friends with a guy named Brian H. who hadn't worked there in previous years.  He was a Wiccan.  As he explained to me, that meant that rather than the kind of church I was used to, his religion was all about nature, with a God and Goddess, which were balanced more than the single father god of Christianity.

This blew my mind.  I asked him about the Greek gods, and he explained to me that the various pagan gods of all cultures were aspects of the God and Goddess, like different masks that they would wear for the benefit of the different needs of different cultures.  The gods were distinctive spirits that were different personalities of the cosmic all, the life force that made up the universe, divided into God and Goddess for balance, light and dark, yin and yang, but not good and evil, since both had their good and evil sides, like we humans did.  The best part was that he also told me that magic was real, and through ritual we could make things happen, either ourselves, or by asking the gods to intervene for us.  They just asked for offerings of juice or food, left out for them.  He explained that of course the offerings would be eaten by animals or whatnot, but that was ok, since animals were part of nature, and since the gods were of nature, they'd get it.

To me, this was fantastic.  I had been reconciled to the fact that Greek religion was dead, that no one actually worshipped the pagan gods anymore.  Now not only did I find out that I could worship the Greek gods if I wanted to, I could worship ALL of the gods.  They were all real in some way.  He recommended that if I wanted to find out more, there were books I could check out.  Well, as established, I didn't need to be told twice.

That weekend when we went into town, I found Living Wicca: A Further Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham at Hastings, so I snatched it up and devoured it.  It was a sequel, apparently, but that didn't seem to matter.  Apparently I didn't need much, just some candles, incense and some Fruitopia that I saved for a libation.  I lit the candles and incense (sandalwood, which I still like) and said a short little prayer dedicating myself to Athena, always my favorite goddess, being both an awesome warrior and a goddess of wisdom.  And so it began.

**************

I was having a good time.  I enjoyed the hell out of ritual, especially on the occasion when it seemed to work, sometimes with disastrous consequences.  For instance, I was requested to conduct a ritual to help relieve stress in one of my friends by his wife, and as a result, he quit his job.  I was a bit shocked he would do something like that, but he ended up going back to school, and eventually becoming a teacher, so it worked out in the end.  Now, of course, I don't see any real significance to the ritual.  If he was stressed out enough at work that his wife would request my help, it's not much of a stretch to predict he was on the verge of quitting anyway.  There were plenty of other rituals I did that were either for goals so vague that it was impossible to nail down a result, or simply didn't produce anything at all.  No one ever said that every ritual worked, however, sometimes the gods just didn't want to help.  They were well known to be fickle, so it was easy to shrug off the misses.

I was starting to waver on the whole religion angle, however.  Try as I might, and as relatively benign as they were, I just couldn't really believe in the God and Goddess, or the literal existence of any of the other gods.  I had good evidence (HA!) that magic itself worked, and frankly I was more interested in that anyway.  I had heard rumors amongst the other pagans that I knew of something called ceremonial or high magic which was supposed to be the advanced stuff, and really overly complicated.  Most of them shunned it, preferring the relative simplicity and innocence of paganism, but unlike them, I had no real sense of devotion to the gods.  I was much more interested in getting things done.  In essence, I wanted power, and I also wanted more structure in ritual.  Pagan ritual was kinda rough around the edges and while it had its good parts, it didn't have enough in the way of formal robes and other costumes, fancy symbols on the walls or altar, and not enough fancy jewelry.  High magic had all that in spades, so deeper down the rabbit hole I went.

I started with Modern Magick by Donald Michael Kraig.  His book is a great intro to the subject, kind of a high magic equivalent of the book I replaced Cunningham with, The Complete Book of Witchcraft by Raymond Buckland, otherwise known as Uncle Bucky's Big Blue Book.  This was exactly what I needed.  It was constructed in 11 lessons, starting out with basic relaxation and visualization exercises, moving on to elemental weapon construction and banishing rituals, up to evoking angels and demons and charging them to accomplish tasks for you via symbols engraved on medallions, looking up the equipment needed for ritual in tables of correspondence to make sure you had the right elemental, planetary, and zodiac colors, incenses, etc.

Ritual magic is a beautiful system of nested heirarchies seemingly specifically designed to keep a certain kind of mind highly entertained while accomplishing absolutely nothing at all.  It was my kind of mental masturbation.  I went from Kraig's primer to the hard stuff, Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn rituals, on to Aleister Crowley's Thelema, all the time the rituals and symbolism getting more sophisticated and complicated and the meaning more and more arcane.  Crowley's motto for his publication The Equinox was "The Method of Science, the Aim of Religion".  For years, I was fooled into thinking that was what I was doing.

It wasn't all bad, of course.  Buried in this pile of Arcana are some genuine pearls of wisdom.  I still find Crowley's Liber Oz to be one of the most succinct and elegant statements on freedom ever written.  Crowley does encourage one on many, many occasions to be skeptical of one's own results, and to document everything one does in one's magical diary so that they have a record of past results to compare present ones to, and to revisit past insights to re-examine assumptions when new info comes in, etc.  He even put various traps in his works meant to trip up those who weren't as disciplined in their approach to magick as Crowley would like.  Obviously as the founder of a religion and someone who regarded themselves as a Prophet of a New Aeon (the Aeon of Horus, the forerunner of the newager's Age of Aquarius) he was still a bit of a supernaturalist, but he made a greater effort than others I was familiar with, and I have to give credit to Crowley for being one of several sources within occultism itself that put me on the path that eventually led me out of it.

Ceremonial magick was all well and good, but as with paganism before it, it was getting tiresome.  I still liked the fancy rituals, but my success rate from workings was no better than it had been before, and nothing seemed to do anything to improve it.  This is around the time that I found chaos magic.

Chaos magic was to ceremonial magick as Black Flag is to Pink Floyd.  It's loud, it's brash, it's punk as hell, and it has no use for centuries of tradition, it just wants to get down to business.  You don't need all that planetary bollocks, you can make up your own symbol systems on the fly.  Chaos magick primarily uses sigils based on the methods of Austin Osman Spare, a former associate of Crowley's who was a celebrated artist at the beginning of his career, and gradually descended into obscurity and poverty.  He did fantastic art that prefigured a lot of the surrealists, but he also had his own system of magic.  His notion was that one could write out a statement of intent, such as I WISH TO POSSESS THE STRENGTH OF A TIGER, and then craft a sigil out of the letters.  Here's an example of some of Spare's sigils:

One then takes the sigil, focuses on it while putting oneself into a trance state (called gnosis) and the theory goes that by doing this, one's subconscious is able to get the magic done for the chaos magician without all that pesky awareness and anticipation getting in the way.  Chaos magicians often banish by laughing at themselves after engaging in such an act, because it's patently ridiculous to expect to achieve results this way, and taking oneself too seriously is what ceremonial magicians do.

Chaos magicians also engage in a practice called paradigm shifting.  What this entails is that you do everything you can to put yourself into a different mindset than your natural one, if you're a Republican, try to think like a Democrat, if you subscribe to Fortean Times, go read the Skeptical Inquirer for a while.  The idea is to transcend the idea of the self, and to realize that you are a collection of conditioned reflexes and habits, in all that you do, and paradigm shifting is a way of attempting to hack your own self-illusions and come out the other side a more well-rounded person.  I still consider this kind of thing a valuable exercise to engage in periodically, myself.  There's no real supernatural bullshit attached to it, it's a good way to broaden one's perspective.  So again, while the results of my sigil activities were still stuck at the same success rate as before, little to none, and nothing that couldn't be explained via coincidence or selective attention, I was continuing to become more skeptical, while still practicing magic.  But my magical practice was becoming less and less about supernatural forces and entities and more about ways of fucking with my own head, to break myself out of my illusions.  For this, even more than chaos magic, I have a huge debt that I owe to Robert Anton Wilson.

Robert Anton Wilson is the guy who wrote the Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea back in the 70s, the greatest conspiracy novel ever written as far as I'm concerned.  It's a huge piece of ontological anarchist agitprop that starts out as a crime novel, quickly wraps itself deeply in the lore of various conspiracy theories, and goes on to simultaneously champion and mock pretty much all of the sacred cows of the occult, the new age, the UFO heads, the Kennedy assassination theorists, and every possible fringe group one can think of, and many that one can't.  If you haven't ever read it, I highly recommend it, although upon first reading it tends to make one's head spin.  It's like a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet made of LSD-25 ricocheted into your perceptions, and was exactly what I needed.

Wilson, both in Illuminatus! and his other works like Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger advocates militant agnosticism about EVERYTHING.  Everything we interact with passes through many filters before the signal is eventually interpreted by our brains and then propagated to our conscious awareness.  These filters include both the physical organs that transmit the signals themselves and the various cognitive biases that we use to interpret information.  So often, we filter out what we don't expect to see, or manufacture things that we do want to or expect to see.  Anyone who's undergone this Basketball Test has had this demonstrated to them.  Wilson would conduct tests where he had two people come into a room, one would stab the other, and afterwards leave.  Wilson would ask how many people saw the knife, usually getting a lot of them to agree, only to have the the "knife" revealed as a banana.

In Prometheus Rising, Wilson offers an exercise early on in the book.  He says that if nothing else, this exercise, done long enough, will pay for the price of the book.  As you go about your day, think about quarters.  Visualize yourself finding quarters lying on the ground.  When you actually do this exercise, as I have, lo and behold, you will find quarters all over the place.  The question is, did you make the quarters appear, or did you find them because you had primed yourself to look for them by thinking about them?  Wilson's point is that all of us use various webs of expectation and prejudice to deal with the world we live in.  He calls these maps, and reminds us not to confuse the map for the territory.  Question all assumptions, all assertions, and always remember to question your own maps most of all.  Allow for the possibility of all things to be true, because you never know.

So between chaos magic and Wilson's model agnosticism, I was a lot more skeptical than I had been for a long time, but still, there was a problem.  The problem with being agnostic about everything is that it leads to a kind of solipsistic existence, where you're not sure about anything ever.  Basically, questioning is good, but you can't really get to a point where you know anything.  Wilson shoots himself in the foot in this manner by being too willing to uncritically accept certain types of claims.  He ends up justifying some aspects of Christian Science in some places because rather than the placebo effect being what it is, a useful effect to test the effectiveness of real medicine, he confuses it for something that can be relied upon to heal people via mind over matter thinking.  Wilson even wrote a whole book on CSICOP called The New Inquisition because of his inability to recognize that agnosticism is only the beginning position of the search for knowledge, not the end point.

Eventually I joined the Temple of Set while still retaining a lot of my agnostic positions.  I had a good time, met a lot of great people, and participated in a lot of fun, but again, the actual tangible results of my magical work were negligable.  I don't feel the need to go into too much depth about the Temple here, because it's not especially relevant to this tale of my journey from paganism to skepticism.  Perhaps in another post sometime.  I do mention it, however, because the Temple did provide me with the tool that eventually led to my leaving the organization and having the epiphany that allowed me to finally drop my attachment to the supernatural.

The Temple of Set has a huge, multi-category reading list full of books on a wide variety of subjects from ancient philosophy to history to political science to psychology and satanism (it being an offshoot of the Church of Satan) and a plethora of other interesting subjects.  Buried in that massive list is The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan.

I don't know who got it put on the list, but whoever he or she is, I thank them profusely.  I already knew who Carl Sagan was, of course, I'd seen and read Contact, I'd seen bits and pieces of Cosmos, and seen him on tv a lot growing up, talking about science.  He was one of the people who when I saw them on a show, I always stopped and watched, because it was going to be good.  I may have been a pagan and an occultist, but I never got rid of the love of science I had engendered in me early on, as covered in the early posts in this series.  I had never heard of this book, and I dutifully bought it on one of the many shopping trips I made to add to my collection of Temple reading list books.  Unfortunately, it ended up sitting on my shelf for years, unread, until I finally got around to it.

A year or so before I left the Temple, my active participation wound down to barely anything, simply due to other people being busy with their own lives and whatnot, and I wasn't doing much magic anymore anyway.  I was spending most of my time working and dealing with the back problem (herniated disc) exacerbated by work.  At some point, I came across The God Delusion in a bookstore, and I figured I'd check it out.  I knew Dawkins from The Selfish Gene which I had bought years ago as a chaos magician because I was interested in memetics.  The memetics section was the only part I'd read (I've since read it multiple times, and I'm considering pursuing biology as a result, but that's another story).  I'd also seen The Root of All Evil and liked it.  Ever since the experiences when I was younger, I either didn't believe in God or I wished he was real so I could kill him, so Dawkins riffing on JHVH and the Christians, Muslims and Jews was just fine with me.  So I read The God Delusion happily, got a big kick out of it without really considering it relevant to my own odd perspective on the supernatural, and when I finished, I was looking for something else in that vein.  I ended up finding Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, and I read and re-read their stuff over and over.  Eventually, I decided that since the Temple wasn't doing much for me anymore, it was time to leave, so I emailed them politely that I was resigning.  

Curiously, after resigning, I actually felt a brief resurgence of magical enthusiasm, and I started to reengage with a strain of magick I had enjoyed, early hermetics based in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Alexandria specifically, in the early Christian era.  As I was researching neo-Platonism again and working up an alternate Greek Qabalistic Tree that I was going to create, I was still engaged with reading the atheist books.  I had also been introduced to the Point of Inquiry podcasts shortly before I left the Temple when Don Webb, a former High Priest of the Temple was interviewed, and I was working my way through the backlog of episodes.  After hearing Harris and Dawkins interviewed, I picked up and re-read The God Delusion in audiobook, and when I was done, I recalled that Dawkins had quoted from Carl Sagan in the book, and my eye fell upon The Demon-Haunted World.  Time to read that.

This was exactly what I needed.  Sagan broke it down, again and again, exactly what I had felt was missing from my Wilsonian agnosticism.  I didn't have to be satisfied with my solipsistic illusions.  There were ways of finding out the truth.  From the Dragon in my Garage to the baloney detection kit and beyond, this was exactly the shot in the brain I needed.  I applied the critical thinking skills I got from that book to my own residual superstitions.  My conception of deity was indistinguishable from an invisible dragon in the garage.  My own seldom effective magick was a mix of cognitive biases, wishful thinking, and placebo effect.  I recognized in depth a lot of the same behaviors described within the book in myself and my fellow occultists.  

Carl Sagan basically handed me the tools to recognize that I had spent the last 17 years or so telling myself comforting lies and fantasies, and that I didn't have to do it anymore.  I was free.  Finally, I was free.

What a fool this mortal's been: Part 5.

Priming the Pump.

Sophomore year of high school I fell in love for the first time.  Sarah was a girl who had just moved here from Seattle, which I thought was cool as shit, this being the heyday of grunge.  I met her in art class, and we began hanging out a lot.  Eventually my current best friend at the time got jealous that he wasn't the one monopolizing my time anymore and said some particularly nasty things about her.  We got in a fight, I beat him down hard, and impressed the hell out of her for defending her honor.  Chivalry's not dead.  When I told her that I loved her, she said it back, and thus began the most tumultous and irresponsible relationship of my life.

Prior to meeting Sarah, I was always a huge geek.  I still am, but I never dated, the one girl who ever even got close to getting involved with me was a neighbor in Ohio who said she wanted to date, but really just wanted to laugh at me with her friends.  People can be such assholes.

Sarah, however, was the real deal.  She was my first kiss, my first love, my first everything.  I was obsessed with her.  The fact that it got intimate quickly probably was a huge factor.  The problem is, Sarah didn't have issues, she had subscriptions.  She was manic-depressive.  She was psychic.  She was regularly abducted by UFOs.  She used to hang out with Kurt Cobain before he died, and knew lots of other grunge stars before they were big.  She was 14 years old, I was 15.  Looking back I'm amazed that I fell for all this, but what the hell, I was in love and lust.  The manic-depression was real, she had the medication for it (albeit the wrong meds, which I found out years later), but the rest of it was probably a result of the disorder.

I still remember very quickly coming home one day after school, watching tv while lounging on the couch, and kind of half-dozing.  At some point, I heard in my head, "KEITH!" very loudly in Sarah's voice.  I shot up wide awake, looking around, but there was no one else home yet.  I called Sarah up and told her about it.

After a short pause she said, "Yeah, I thought I had a connection."

"Don't do that!" I replied.  "You scared the shit out of me."

She promised to give me fair warning next time.  Looking back, there was no next time, and I add this to the list of many incidents that in retrospect were examples of her taking advantage of my credulity about the paranormal.  There were plenty of others.  If we were outside at night, sometimes she would seem to go off into a trance state and attempt to wander off, saying that the visitors were calling to her, and I would have to physically restrain her.  Other times she would show me marks on her body, the one I recall the most being a bunch of triangles in a circular pattern of raised, burgundy welts on her thigh.  It was probably about 3 inches across, and scared the shit out of me.  Years later, I realized she probably fell asleep against the suction intake of her whirlpool or hot tub.

I don't know how much she was consciously manipulating me, or how much was her mental state riffing off what I fed her.  What I do know is that I was in a heavy imprint vulnerability state at the time, losing my virginity, getting justification for my paranormal inclinations and some great sex (any sex is great when it's your first sex) and having a number done on my head.

It didn't last of course.  The whole relationship lasted about 4 months in real time, although it seems like years in my memory.  I was basically high on her the entire time, and then she dumped me.  Even that had a seeming supernatural component.

I had just walked her to her class, was trying to kiss her goodbye, and she told me "I don't think we should see each other anymore."  As soon as the words left her mouth, I slumped against the wall, rocked back as if I had been physically struck, and then the lights went out, literally.

On the day that she dumped me (February 11, 1994, Friday before Valentine's Day), we had a power outage at McCullough High School for most of the day.  The power went out between 1st and 2nd period and didn't come back on until around 1pm or so.  I ended up stuck in my Japanese classroom in the dark for hours, trying to come to terms with the new development, with my friend Tosh commiserating with me over the recent loss of his own girlfriend.  I know we were both a nightmare to Mrs. Reade, our Japanese teacher that whole time and the rest of the year.  I seem to remember at one time getting up and banging my head against the blackboard over and over again.  It was a bad scene.

The rest of that year was miserable.  Eventually it culminated in a major depressive disorder for me, which I was diagnosed with a year or so later.  To this day I take medication to control my moods, although I have a much healthier outlook than I used to.  I was a bit of a pseudo-stalker to her the rest of that year, not helped by the fact that we were still in art class together, and it was just a bad scene all around.

Maybe 4 or 5 years after sophomore year, I got in contact with Sarah again, I hadn't seen her for a while, she'd ended up going to another school somewhere during my junior year.  I found out that when we were dating, she was in a manic phase, and broke up with me as she was transitioning into a depressive phase.  I also discovered that she had been prescribed meds that didn't help her at all when we were dating, and she didn't even take them that often.  She was on proper meds now.  I showed her some of the stuff I had written that was inspired by the relationship, and she cried about it, etc.  She was much stabler, and we were able to forgive each other, me for her treatment of me during the relationship, and her for my treatment of her after it.  So I got closure in the end, but the damage was done.  By the time of this reconciliation, I was already getting deeper and deeper into the occult by the day.

What a fool this mortal's been: Part 4.

How I Fell in Love with Gods.

As far back as I can remember, I've been reading voraciously.  I read science books, mysteries, horror, fantasy, science fiction, anything I could get my hands on.  Very early on, I ended up hooked on books about "real" ghost stories, or monsters like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.  I didn't read them to the exclusion of other stuff, but if I found a pseudoscience or supernatural book, I absorbed it.  I was already familiar with wizards and what not, both as good guys and bad guys, but this stuff was marginally better because it was real, or so the books said.  So I learned about Atlantis, and Yetis, and UFOs and the ghosts of the Tower of London and the Winchester mansion and on and on and on.  Hey, they were in the non-fiction section of the library.  The librarians wouldn't get that wrong, the were the keepers of the books!  Knowledge came from books, they knew where the books were, therefore the librarians were the masters of all knowledge.

So I absorbed all this stuff and internalized it.  It appealed to me in the same way the fiction I was reading did, but it was better because it was real.  Sure, other people told me that Bigfoot and UFOs didn't exist, but had they read the books I had?  Of course not, so they were easy to ignore.

Fast forward a few years to sixth grade.  In sixth grade I found Edith Hamilton's Mythology, and thus was I introduced in earnest to paganism.  Now, I didn't believe in these gods yet, I still put them in a class with Jesus, who I didn't agree with, but man, they were so much more entertaining.  They had great stories, not the boring stuff like in the Bible.  Real heroes, huge monsters, epic wars, and I even found out that some of the heroes I already knew about like Hercules were related to them.  Thor was even in there, I thought he was just a comic book character.  This was more like it.

I distinctly remember having a conversation with my dad, who didn't yet know that I had already given up on Catholicism, why we didn't learn about the Greek gods.  I was willing to let God-God be in charge, but I was arguing that we should let the Greek gods in too, maybe have them work for God.  Their stories were just so much more interesting.  He said we couldn't do that because the Greek gods weren't real.  This didn't really take, for the obvious reason.

In the second half of sixth grade we moved to Cincinatti, Ohio for a year and half, returning the summer before eight grade started for me.  Ohio was nice because I got to enjoy real winter again, and it wasn't so hot all the time.  It was also great because not only did I still have the Edith Hamilton book, which I read and reread until it fell apart, in seventh grade we actually got to study Greek history and mythology in social studies, spending what seems in memory to be about half of the year on it, although I don't trust that.  I do know that I got to learn about Sparta and Athens, the Battle of Thermopylae and the war against Persia.  I learned about the foundation of direct democracy and that the Greeks were really honest about rulers who didn't let people vote.  Even the guy who seized power called himself a tyrant, and wasn't that bad a guy.

As cool as all that was, the best part, by far, was the mythology, especially the Trojan War.  The Odyssey was ok, but the War was the best.  I was already familiar with it from Hamilton, but we got to draw pictures and do projects and all kinds of cool stuff.  The coolest part about the Trojan War is that the gods and goddesses of the Greeks did not fuck around.  Ares strode out onto the battlefield to fight for the Trojans and Athena showed up and called bullshit on him.  Hermes was all over the place like a UPS guy on meth.  If you pissed off Zeus, he upped and smacked you with a lightning bolt, and did pretty well with the ladies too, which was a good thing, because otherwise where would all the heroes come from?

The Greek gods didn't pussyfoot around with bullshit like burning bushes or visions, they'd roll up and say hi, although usually as a prelude to messing up your day, although they could also give you a bunch of gifts in exchange for favors, like when Athena hooked up with Perseus to put a hit on Medusa.  They were there, they were more like superheroes, and I couldn't find any instances of utter dick moves like when God wanted Abraham to kill his kid.  They punished people, sure, but only people who deserved it, and they rewarded loyalty with favors.  These gods I could get behind.  I didn't believe in them yet, but between my newly discovered love for them and my predilection for pseudoscience and pop myths, the two things would converge in a few years.

Mea Culpa

In a recent discussion, I casually tossed off a reference to the God Helmet in reference to one of the ways human beings can be deceived about their experiences.  I said something like "you can stick magnets on people's heads and make them see God."  I was remembering when I saw it being covered on Nova or some other science show.

As one can see from reading the Wikipedia page on it, let alone the actual scientific studies, the god helmet effect is not conclusively proved as of yet, and there are some problems in replicating the initial results.  It needs a lot more study before one can draw conclusions based on it.

Now, the God Helmet isn't the only example I used, I also mentioned various forms of chemicals by which I meant DMT psychoactive drugs that seem to have better supported evidence about the kinds of effects they can produce, but the fact remains that I was not using the best reasoning I could.  This is an obvious limitation of debate, at least over short term timescales.  It's also an example of how even proponents of a standard can fail to live up to them.

What this says to me is that I need to remember to strive to be more humble when presenting my own claims, especially when criticizing others about theirs.  It doesn't make me less of an atheist or a skeptic, it's just a reminder of how sometimes I can be a dick about it.

A clarification interlude.

A few clarifications, directed at some recent discussions:

One doesn't prove a negative, because obviously, that is impossible.  However, if there is no evidence of a thing's existence, there is no good reason to assume that it does exist.  See the partial namesake of this blog, Russell's teapot.  If I were to say "Russell's teapot doesn't exist," technically I would be incorrect, because I can't know that for certain.  However, it would be a huge waste of time to need to spell out that distinction for every single potential thing without evidence for it, so assume that if I do say that if something doesn't exist, I mean that there is no good reason to think that it does.  I'm only interested in the existence of things for which there is evidence, either direct observed, or indirect (such as how dark matter is observed indirectly by calculation of the mass that should be there, though it is of course theoretical).

I was indeed a sincere occultist during the years I spent in pursuing it.  I was sincere in my search for truth by pursuing it.  I never really had a position of faith, where I believed without evidence, but for a long time my standards of what I considered "good enough" evidence were a lot lower than what they are now.  Anyone who assumes that because I have now given up on even that meager subscription to supernaturalism that I therefore never was sincere in my pursuit of it should familiarize themselves with the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Science is not a belief system.  Nor is critical thinking.  Both are methodologies.  Neither require one to presume the existence of anything prior to finding evidence of it.  When one does that, one is reasoning backwards.  What I had realized is that I was presuming the existence of supernatural forces and then went looking for evidence to confirm it, conveniently ignoring contradictory evidence and explanations for my so-called "evidence" of the supernatural.

As I learned more and more about the basic irrationality of humans, our very flawed perceptual apparatus, our inability to estimate statistical probabilities accurately, our tendency to fill in gaps in what we perceive with things we expect to see, the various chemicals both external and in our brain that can cause us to see what isn't there, and a plethora of other things that show that seeing is not believing at all, and that just because I experienced something, doesn't mean that it has any existence outside of my own head unless I can confirm it with others.

We'll never fully achieve a sense of objective reality, due to those filters and others, but if we want to talk about things outside of our heads, we're forced to rely on confirmation from others who can reproduce the same results as we have gotten, and those others need to be from outside of our own little ideological circle, so that if we are deluded due to something we really wish is true, we don't rely on confirmation from those who have the same biases, or those who can be coerced into parroting our own beliefs back at us out of social pressure.  Still, we can achieve a degree of intersubjective knowledge about the "real" world by putting these things into practice.

So it wasn't just the lack of evidence in the supernatural that got me to the point where I didn't believe in it anymore, but it was the positive evidence of the many, many different ways that we as a species have tools of perception that can be confused, wrong, and in error about what it is we see.  Also the way we form ideas in our heads, and draw faulty conclusions based on prior assumptions, and I can no longer find any justifiable way to believe in supernatural phenomena based on current evidence.

Some will object that there are aspects of the supernatural that are unfalsifiable, and therefore immune to analysis, and that somehow it's defensible to believe in them without evidence.  My response is that for those things that are truly unfalsifiable, existing outside the natural universe and unable to interact with the natural universe, we don't need to even consider them, as they have no way of effecting us.  For those things that some claim are unfalsifiable but also claim can exert influence upon the natural universe, via healing, magic spells, etc, each of those assertions are testable in themselves, and therefore falsifiable.  So the attempt to try to hold on to supernatural ideas by placing them in a fortress unassailable by science and reason only works to the extent that such ideas have no way of being at all operative in the universe.  Supernaturalists who are ok with this, I have no argument with, but if they want their version of the supernatural to be productive, they have no recourse.

This is not to say that I think that there can never be evidence for the supernatural.  I can conceive of many things that would prove the existence of the phenomena itself, randomized symbols and messages sent from one psychic to another under strict laboratory controls, performance of reiki or acupuncture that consistently and reproducibly beats placebos in effectiveness, actual manifestations to visible appearance of summoned demons that can be repeated in a variety of controlled circumstances.  These successful results for the claims of the supernatural have yet to occur, and in some cases have been falsified already.  I for one encourage the continued research into this area, because if such effects could be demonstrated, I think they'd be damn useful.  But until there is evidence to support such claims, I sadly have no reason to give credence to the existence of such phenomena in the credulous way I would have done so a short time ago.  I remain open to their possible existence, but no longer open to the uncritical thinking that allowed me to deceive myself for so long.

What a fool this mortal's been: Part 3.

Why Science Kicks Ass, and How I Learned to Hate Jesus.

To pick up where I left off, I never did believe in Jesus again, or any of the other tenets of Christianity, let alone Judaism or Islam (which I only really became aware of at all when Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came out).  That ship had sailed, and it was never coming back.  I feel towards Christianity the way Christopher Hitchens feels about it, maybe more so.  Atheist isn't a sufficiently strong term for my feelings towards the JHVH meme and it's associated works.  Misotheism, "hatred of God" is a good technical term, but really all that can express it accurately is apopleptic swearing.  That gradually developed after I'd already stopped believing, just by learning more and more about it, both doctrine and history, and becoming immersed in a much more Christian culture than I was originally exposed to.  Becoming a pagan later certainly didn't help me much on that front, but that's what this installment is about.

I first started to really hate God in the second half of 5th grade, when I was 10 years old.  My parents had moved us from New York down here to Texas, and I was attending Wilkerson Elementary in The Woodlands, where we lived.  This had already been a miserable experience, because not only was it so damn hot all the time, but the people were really stupid.  I kept hearing all kinds of weird stuff about Rebels and no one seemed to be talking about Star Wars, and everybody thought I played baseball, and there's no way they'd let a 10 year old even on the field at Yankee Stadium, let alone play.*

To add insult to injury, they would never shut up about Jesus, and some of these kids actually seemed to enjoy church!  What kind of kid enjoys church?  There's monster movies on!  In New York, I was forced to go to church, but nobody actually expected me to like it, just to behave, and I didn't have a single friend who thought it was anything more than a chore.  These kids were proud to go to church, they acted like Jesus was their best friend, and not only that, they didn't like science.

I loved science.  I loved science since before I can remember being aware that it was science.  I watched Mr. Wizard's World all the time on Nickelodeon.  Mr. Wizard told me about doppler effect, the speed of sound, electricity, and all kinds of cool stuff.  I knew why ice didn't overflow the glass when it melted.  I could make a big square aluminum can cave in on itself with a bucket of ice water and a flame, but I wasn't allowed to play with the flame to show how.  I could make a balloon stick to my head.  Science was awesome.

I couldn't understand why these kids didn't like science.  Hell, the best part of moving here was that I actually got to go to NASA!  This is back in the day, when you could tour Johnson Space Center properly.  Space Center Houston is a joke.  When I went there as a kid, what the hell did I need rides and games for, I had a giant Saturn V rocket right there!  I could try on astronaut helmets!  They had science stuff, and it was real.  Some of it had actually been in space.  It was like going to the Natural History museum in NYC, but better in one respect (and only one, as you'll see below), because as cool as the dinosaur fossils were, this stuff was made by scientists like Mr. Spock!  (I was 10, dammit.)

But no, these kids didn't like it.  For some reason, they thought they couldn't be friends with Jesus if they liked science.  That made no sense to me, but then, I didn't believe in Jesus, either.  Some of my friends in New York had had imaginary friends when I was younger, but they grew out of it.  I never had one myself, but I assumed that that was what was going on here, except my friends had always had unique imaginary friends that reminded me of how I felt about Johnny, my little brother.  I'd never heard of anyone sharing an imaginary friend.  The not liking science had something to do with monkeys.

I don't recall ever being sat down in a science class during elementary school, either in New York or Texas, and being taught about evolution.  I may have been and just can't remember.  But I knew about it anyway, because I had been to the American Museum of Natural History a lot.  A whole lot.  I haven't been there in over 20 years, but I'm pretty sure I can still find anything in there in under 30 seconds.  Between Cub Scout trips and school trips and just going with my family, I'd been there a ridiculous amount of times.

When I moved here from New York, I'd never been to the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, or Yankee Stadium (that last one pissed me off, because I was a Yankees fan, and my dad and brother were Mets fans, and I'd been to plenty of Mets games, because they didn't want to let me go to the Bronx).  But I knew and loved both the Museum and the Hayden Planetarium, and I never ever wanted to leave.  More to the point, even though I'd never been formally taught evolution that I can recall, the museum had the Hall of the Age of Man.  I knew Lucy.  I knew Peking Man.  I knew Austrolopithecus, Homo Erectus, Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon, and more importantly, I knew the differences between them, the order they came in, and that WE were modern Cro-Magnons!  I can't remember not knowing about evolution, and more importantly, HUMANITY'S evolution, thanks to that museum.  I never had to be told that the Flintstones were bullshit, because I knew that humans never lived at the same time as dinosaurs.  The dinosaurs were in a totally different part of the museum.  Man had to deal with sabertooth tigers, Woolly Mammoths, and all kinds of other stuff, not to mention glaciers and land bridges and all that stuff, but no damn dinosaurs.

These Jesus kids didn't know any of that!  OK, not everyone can have the best museum in the world, that's fine.  But how can their parents not tell them this stuff?  I said to one of them, "Of course we came from monkeys, but different monkeys, like apes and whatnot, not the little ones.  How do you not know that?"

Not only did he not know, but he was mad.  But nothing prepared me for what came next:

"God created the world in 6 days and humans on the 6th day in the Garden of Eden.  We never came from monkeys.  Anyone who believes we came from monkeys is going to Hell!"

Wow.  I had never heard anyone say anything so monumentally stupid in all my life.  I thought he was retarded (I'd never call anyone that now, but that's what I actually thought at 10 years old).  So I switched gears, and started talking more slowly.

"You do know that the world is billions of years old, right?  Fish, dinosaurs, big giant mammals, us, continental drift, all that, right?"

"Why do you keep lying?  There were no dinosaurs!  Those were dragons!  Billions!  The world is 6000 years old!"

This kid really was an idiot.  There were some other kids around, and I looked at them, trying to gain some acknowledgment of the phenomenal idiocy of this poor bastard, but I didn't see looks of pity.  They were mad at me!

"You're a stupid Yankee, Keith.  Jesus made us, not a monkey."

I had to get out of there, so naturally, I headed to the one place they wouldn't be.  The library.  I had to think.

Someone made these kids stupid.  I mean, I could understand if they thought science was boring.  I didn't, but I had known kids who didn't like science much back home.  But these kids HATED science.  I didn't know how that was possible.  The only thing they had in common, aside from being bullies, was Jesus**.  So I rapidly came to the conclusion that Jesus was more than just a boring story that ate into my reading time at church.  Jesus didn't want kids to like science.  I liked science.  Therefore Jesus was the enemy.

To be continued.

*This is probably obvious, but just in case it's not, region plays a huge part in what gets taught in social studies.  I could name dozens of historical Native American tribes in the Northeast and give salient details about their relationship to the settlers, both before and after the American Revolution.  I could tell you a great deal about Nathan Hale (I'd done a report on him in 4th grade where I got to dress up and act like him) and a wide variety of figures, British and American, from the French and Indian War and the Revolution, but I didn't know a damn thing about the Civil War, because we just hadn't gotten around to it yet when I moved down here.
**I shouldn't have to mention this, but just in case, I will.  Not every kid in this school was an idiotic, Yankee-hating Jesushead.  But the ones who gave me shit all had that in common.  There were plenty of other kids who I got along with, we played with our GI Joes, Transformers, and Ninja Turtles (mutation and evolution!), read comic books, science fiction, etc, etc.  I found other kids who liked science, nerds, like me.  But like me, they were in the minority, and like me, they were bullied by the redneck Jesus-bullies, which only fueled my hatred further, because if there's one thing I've always hated more than being bullied, it's when people bully my friends.

Interlude: An apology

I wanted to take a moment to apologize to those I have subtly or obnoxiously influenced in the past to lend credence to supernatural, paranormal, or otherwise unjustifiable beliefs and claims about the way the world works.  I know that I have had such discussions with many people over the years and I believed that way myself, so I wasn't consciously deceiving anyone.  I was deceiving myself however, and that carried on to others.  I have done all of you a great disservice.

(Not that I think I necessarily am that great an orator or arguer, but for whatever effectiveness in that respect I have had, I feel badly about it.)

What a fool this mortal's been: Part 2.

HAIL SANTA!

So I'm free, now what?  D'oh!

Obviously, it's not quite as pat as all that.  I had already been a strong critic of the various mainstream religions for a long time.  In fact I had been a naive atheist in my younger days when I stopped believing in the Christian God around 7 or 8 years old, around the same time I stopped believing in Santa Claus.  I have now read so many similar accounts that I can't say for sure whether I'm remembering my own experience or combining it with that of others*, but here's my version:

When I was 7 or 8, I went downstairs one Christmas eve when I heard motion in the living room late at night.  I wanted to see Santa, dammit.  What I saw instead was my parents putting presents under the tree.  That in itself was no big deal, I always got some presents that were labelled "From: Santa" and some that were labelled "From: Mom and Dad".  I figured they were putting their presents for me under the tree before they went to bed.  After all, my bedtime was 7pm, right after You Can't Do That on Television and Danger Mouse**, and grown-ups got to stay up later.

The next morning, I tore ass down the stairs along with my brother Johnny, and my sister Tina came in from her room, and we all went and woke up Mom and Dad because we weren't allowed to open presents without them.  That doesn't mean we wait, it means they have to wake the hell up!  It's present time!  Hail Santa!

As they groggily shuffled in we all got under the tree and were pulling out presents, sorting them into piles and figuring out who got the bigger pile of loot. (All kids are greedy Republicans, but what the hell, Reagan was in office.) Somehow in my frenzy of paper wrapping I noticed that some of the presents I had seen my parents putting under the tree were labelled "From: Santa."  This was strange.

By the way, this isn't as implausible as it sounds.  We were supposed to write thank you notes to our relatives who gave us presents, so along with Santa and Mom and Dad, we had to notice labels from Grandma and Grandpa R. and/or N., aunts, uncles, cousins, great-grandparents, etc.  The Santa presents were the ones we didn't have to write notes for, which made them extra special, as they had no chores associated with them.  I had figured out that loophole in a previous year, when I pointed out that I didn't need to write a note to Santa, as I had already thanked him by leaving out milk and cookies.  No wonder my Mom sometimes says I have the soul of a lawyer.

Anyway, I can't say that I drew the connection immediately, but as time went by, the incongruity of finding the wrong label puzzled me, until I realized what I had.  A mystery!  Just like the Hardy Boys, or Encyclopedia Brown.  I was gonna solve this.  So the first thing I do, I go ask my friends.  Of course I can't ask my parents.  I wasn't supposed to be downstairs, so I'd get in trouble if I asked them.  I'll start with Doug, my best friend.  His dad is Lutheran, his mom is Jewish, and his birthday is in December, so he gets presents for Christmas, Hannukah, and his birthday all in December.  He's gotta be the expert.

Doug isn't much help.  Rather than getting 3 times as many presents, he gets roughly the same amount as me, he just gets them bundled all together.  What a ripoff for him.  At least my birthday's in July, so I get biannual loot.  But wait!  He lives in a basement apartment at his Grandma's house, and his parents have less hiding space, and he tells me that for the last few years, he's found his presents ahead of time, and always found Santa labels.  He didn't have anyone to talk to about it before, but he tells me that he thinks his parents are Santa.

"How can both your parents be Santa!?  Your dad is the right shape, but he doesn't have a beard, and that leaves out where your mom fits in!"

I was a bit slow on the uptake.

"No," he tells me. "I don't think Santa is real.  I think he's just a story.  Even if I didn't see the presents beforehand, I don't have a fireplace.  How would Santa get in?"

This was irrefutable logic for me at age 8 or so.  Come to think of it, MY house had a chimney, but I didn't have a fireplace either.  What's up with that?

"So, Santa is a lie?" I asked.
"I'm not sure, but I think he must be," Doug confirmed.

Neither of us had much appreciation of the distinction between a lie and a myth at this point.  I can't speak for Doug, but I was too amazed by the revelation that parents can lie.  Why do they get to lie?  They always tell me that lying is bad, and I'm not supposed to do it.  Then I thought it through.

If Santa's a lie, what about the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy?  What about Jesus?  For me at 7 or 8, I had much more compelling reasons to believe in Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy.  They gave me toys, books, candy, and money.  I could see them on tv.  I had evidence, dammit.  Jesus wasn't a big deal, I didn't mind if he was a lie, because he was a major inconvenience to me anyway.  More importantly, he didn't give me anything except for a really crappy cracker periodically, and I could live without that.  Plus I had to get dressed up in a white suit and memorize a bunch of boring words to even earn the cracker, and that wasn't worth the effort.

Jesus was just someone that I heard about in church, and the less I had to do with Church, the better.  Church made me dress up nice just to go and sit and be bored for an hour, and I couldn't even just sit, they kept making me stand, kneel, and sit, and they kept changing it up.  Couldn't we do all the standing and kneeling and sitting one after the other, instead of mixing it up?  At this point I was already allowed to bring a book to church to read so that I wouldn't be fidgeting, and all this additional business with the standing and kneeling ate into me finding out what Frank and Joe had discovered in the cave.  I knew Christmas was Jesus's birthday, of course, but it was always a bit puzzling to me what he had to do with it, because I'd looked at that Nativity diorama my parents set up every year really closely, and I never did a find a reindeer in that barn thing, just sheep, a cow, and a donkey.  So even though I technically had access to a toy set associated with Jesus, it still made no sense as I got yelled at when I tried to have Snake Eyes ride the donkey.

Back to the point, I now knew that parents could lie, but somehow I wasn't allowed to.  That wasn't fair, so I figured I'd lie back, that would show them.  I'd keep pretending that I believed in Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and I suppose Jesus too, but I wouldn't actually.  Jesus didn't matter so much, but as I long as I still lied and said that I believed in the rest, I'd still get books, toys, candy and money.  Serves them right, hypocrites (not that I knew that word yet, but I would soon).

Obviously my knowledge about religion got more sophisticated as I got older, but even after I stopped pretending to believe in Santa and the rest, I still kept going through the motions at the Catholic church services and catechism classes I kept having to go to, all through maybe sophomore year of high school, whenever confirmation happened.  At that point, I wasn't even keeping the fact that I believed none of it a secret, but I went through it because the family wanted to be able to celebrate the empty rituals.  After confirmation, I put my foot down, though.  No more church.

This has also gone long, although I think funnier, so I think I'll end this here and continue with part 3 later, probably tomorrow.


*Plasticity and self-editing of human memory is yet another flaw with self-reported supernatural experiences, but I'll address that in a future post.
**I'm pretty sure that those shows didn't air on Christmas Eve, but the airing of those on regular days is how I remembered bedtime.  Sue me.

What a fool this mortal's been: Part 1.

I've recently given up my occult practice after almost 20 years. In that time I went from Wicca to paganism to ceremonial magick to chaos magick to the Temple of Set to whatever I am now. I've been working on how to put the transition and my feelings about it into words for a while now, but it's been rough, because my feelings haven't quite settled down yet, I'm still sorting it all out. Not to say I'm conflicted or anything, or in some kind of “dark night of the soul” nonsense, I actually feel pretty good about my current state of mind. Before my epiphany, for lack of a better term, I was already a model agnostic à la Robert Anton Wilson, agnostic about everything, recognizing that all of our maps were flawed and that there was always another lens to focus our perception through. I didn't make too many assumptions about the underlying reality of my magical work, I just got results as best as I could, and entertained numerous possibilities about the meaning of said results. I know it sounds ridiculously wishy-washy, and it does to me too, now.

The biggest flaw with this approach is that I had no self-correcting mechanism. The eternal ambiguity of my position also put me in a place where I couldn't distinguish between actual results and self-deception, and while I was happy to be skeptical about my interpretations of said results, I was never questioning my assumption that I was actually obtaining meaningful results, I wasn't seriously considering the possibility that I was just going through particularly elaborate acts of mental masturbation. Not only did my approach lack rigor, but it was incapable of rigor. I had basically philosophized myself into a solipsistic death-spiral.

I resigned my membership in the Temple of Set a few months ago. Unlike other ex-members I've talked to, I have no complaint with the Temple, I met a lot of really great people during my time as a member, had a lot of fun, experienced interesting things, got some insight into my own values, and all in all, it was the school I needed at the time I joined. I just gradually realized that it was no longer particularly useful to me and my own process of development (Xeper, in Temple jargon), and it hadn't been for a few years. I was basically still in it for the social aspect, and it would've been hypocritical of me to stay in just for that, not to mention anathema to the values the organization itself stood for.

Funnily enough, I got a burst of motivation right after I left, and began a new project of daily ritual practice (a modified Gnostic Pentagram Ritual mostly, for those occultists keeping score), and got it into my head to revisit hermeticism. I had previously had an interest in the Greek Magical Papyri and related texts that originated in Graeco-Roman Alexandria, and so I started re-reading books in my library like Hermetic Magic by Stephen Flowers, got Greek Qabalah by Kieren Barry, along with copies of the Hermetica, the Enneads, and various other neo-Platonic texts. I decided I wanted to re-formulate the Western Esoteric Tradition materials such as can be found in the writings of the Golden Dawn and Crowley, but I was going to rework it from the ground up as an alternate magical history, trying to imagine what it would have been like if the rise of Christianity had never occurred, and if things had proceeded more directly from the learned Alexandrians. It was going to be EPIC.

Then one day, probably a few weeks into this project, I had an epiphany: What the hell was I doing? I had just been a member of an initiatory occult organization for almost 10 years, and what did I really have to show for it? And now I was starting over again with basics for about the fifth or sixth time? With all that effort expended, how had my life actually improved in a significant way? I'm not talking pleasurable and insightful subjective experiences, I'd had plenty of those, made valuable friendships, all that's to the good. But if I was really the capable magician I'd been attempting to be for so long, why was I not wildly successful, financially speaking? Why was I still in such bad physical shape, halfway crippled with recurring back pain? What concrete results could I show for all of my hard work?

Nothing. I had nothing to show for it. I gradually realized that I had basically been lying to myself for years, spending lots of money, effort and time on a fantasy power trip that kept me an ineffective deluded fool when I could have been actually doing something worthwhile and productive with my life. I had wasted nearly 20 years on a Quixotic quest for false enlightenment.

The funny thing is, while I was amazed at the magnitude of the waste I had engaged in, I didn't feel depressed about it. I found it hilarious. I was such an idiot! But more importantly than that, I felt free. I had locked myself into a hamster wheel of nonsense, and I had just remembered that the key was in my pocket the whole time. So I let myself out.

This is getting long, so I will make this Part 1, and continue later. 

For reference

This blog is named after the notion of the Orbital Mind Control Laser from the Illuminati card game from Steve Jackson Games, a device which realigns one's subscription to various dogmas and ideologies (known as alignments in the game) and Bertrand Russell's teapot analogy:

"Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of skeptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."

For more, check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot