Because Everyone Should See Dead Can Dance

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Okay, this isn't quite as good as sitting under the stars with my beloveds for the concert of a lifetime but this I can post.

The KCRW copy is hilarious.

The Australian duo of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry made some of the creepiest beautiful music of the 1980s. Almost 30 years and two reunions later, the two are still at it. Watch Dead Can Dance bring its ancient ambiance to Santa Monica's Village Studios for a recording session with KCRW.

Looking through the Facebook thread, I notice that many people are very annoyed at the use of the word "creepy." The thing is... I can't agree. I read "creepiest beautiful music" and found myself nodding in agreement. Their new album is easily the most upbeat thing they've ever done. And I love it. I can play it while I'm driving and not worry about wrecking the car.

Their older stuff is indescribably dark. I love listening to it because it's like staring into the void. It strips flesh from bone. I feel that sense of awe that I imagine Rainer Maria Rilke felt when he encountered his angelic muse at Duino Castle.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to
endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

That's what it feels like to listen to Lisa Gerrard's piercing tones -- not words and yet we understand them. We somehow know what she is saying: the language of the birds.

No one can tell me that this is not a little creepy... or, at the very least, chilling:

Or this:

I think there's a reason Patton Oswalt specifically referenced This Mortal Coil's It'll End in Tears in his KFC's Famous Bowls bit.

Okay, stop right there. Can you pile all of those items into a single bowl, just kinda make 'em into a wet mound of starch that I can eat with a spoon like I'm a death row prisoner on suicide watch? Could I just have that instead?

"Um, yes, we can do that? We can also arrange those on a plate like you're an adult with dignity and self-respect. You don't have to actually eat your food out of a single bowl."

Fuck that, I'm done, I don't give a shit. Just pile all those things in a bowl. Is there a way that the bowl can play This Mortal Coil's "It'll End In Tears" album while I'm eating it at 2 in the morning in my darkened apartment, just kinda staring into the middle distance?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that reason is best summed up by this:

Patton Oswalt has a history of depression. Perhaps listening to a lot of Lisa Gerrard isn't the best plan in his case. But I love her. Not in spite of the penetrating darkness of her music but because of it. It's like going home.

Dead Can Dance Live -- Photo: Mixelle

Lisa Gerrard Live -- Photo: Mixelle

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The Increasingly Blatant Symbolism of Doctor Who

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

"There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes." ~ Doctor Who

A while ago Stephen Fry made waves when he bemoaned the infantalizing nature of BBC programming and characterized Doctor Who as "not for adults." Perhaps Fry, for all his many talents and artistic sensibility, is one of those hardcore atheists who has no appreciation for the power of myth. Admittedly, I haven't spent a lot of time on the mythical underpinnings of the show, although I did explore one episode's point towards indigenous creation mythology here. 

I will also give Fry benefit of the doubt and assume his comments in 2010 pertained entirely to the pre-Matt Smith years. There is no question that with the massive production changes after David Tennant's departure, came a more interesting, and I dare say, more adult show. Smith, as an actor, has more depth and gravitas than Tennant. (Christopher Eccleston was also brilliant and I took his departure hard. I know. I know. David Tennant was the most beloved Doctor ever. Blah, blah, blah... whatever.)

Not only is the writing under Steven Moffat darker and edgier, there has been a peeling away of the veils that obscured the core mythos. It seems rather obvious in discussing a show that opens with a trip through a wormhole, that we're talking about alchemy/kundalini/stargate mythology. But with the recent Christmas episode, "The Snowmen," key archetypes were even more blatant than they were in the London Olympics. Even the advertising was provocative.

Note the Blue Pearl opening above the Doctor's head. William Henry explains a bit about the mystical experience of the Blue Pearl in Secret of Sion.

As I discussed in Starwalkers and the Dimension of the Blessed, traditional shamanic peoples around the world describe a Blue Pearl, an exquisite, enchanting blue light that is a mode of transport. It appears in a flash, without any provocation or thought, and opens like a lotus or a wormhole.

. . .

In fact, says Muktananda, it contains the whole universe It is the seed of the heart, the Supreme within us. It has been described as vibrant, electric blue, brilliant indigo, azure, cobalt, and cerulean.

. . .

Also known as the Pearl of Infinite Power, the Blue Pearl, Stone or Apple is actually how our soul travels to the inner realm and it is inside of a quantum egg or in an "interphasic state of existence" (it enables us to jump through time and cross great distances or even to use this skill locally.)

Hmmm... What does that sound like?

In "The Snowmen," the Doctor meets Clara, who susses out his hiding place... in the clouds. This she does by locating something akin to Jacob's ladder.

She ascends a spiral staircase.

And at the top she finds the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space). So, she ascends a stairway to heaven where she encounters multidimensional awareness.

Jacob's Ladder ~ William Blake
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Later in the episode Clara is invited into the TARDIS and given the key -- the ritual by which the Doctor initiates his companions into the mysteries of time-space travel.

The TARDIS has been given a bit of a redesign for the new season. And I can't help noticing that the circumpunct imagery has also become more blatant.

So the connection between wormhole physics that was always implied in the show was underscored with alchemical imagery in "The Snowmen." Other mystical and kundalini themes are hinted at but they are subtler and require, to some extent, stripping the context from the archetype. For instance, we are introduced to the concept of a "memory worm" which wipes memory from all who touch it.

The plot also centers around the mystical idea of reflective reality. "The snow reflects." A strange, new, memory snow patterns itself on the people, personalities, thoughts, emotions, and objectives, its exposed to, and takes on form.

I can't help wondering if the plot line was influenced by the, albeit deeply flawed, water experiment made famous in What the Bleep Do We Know? I say flawed because the results have not proved to be replicable and Masaru Emoto has been less than transparent about his research methods. All of which leads us back to that fundamental question? Does the world reflect our thoughts or our consciousness? Because they are not the same thing. But I've discussed this little problem of new age reductionism at far too great a length already.

"The Snowman" explored the metaphysics of the TARDIS but the physics has long been a subject of discussion.

Something clicked for me a while ago when I was watching The Science of Doctor Who, which explored some of the theoretical physics of the show with prominent physicists. Michio Kaku's offered his explanation for why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside.

People forget that the phone booth is not the TARDIS at all. It's the door.

The humor of the cloaking mechanism that got stuck in police box mode back in the '60s, when they were ubiquitous in London, has provided writers with many challenges and opportunities through the years. But whether it was conscious or unconscious on the part of the show's creators, I've long thought the cubic form of this "door" implied a tesseract, or hypercube. It appears that I may be onto something.

The explanation is that a TARDIS is "dimensionally transcendental", meaning that its exterior and interior exist in separate dimensions. In "The Robots of Death" (1977), the Fourth Doctor tried to explain this to his companion Leela, using the analogy of how a larger cube can appear to be able to fit inside a smaller one if the larger cube is farther away, yet immediately accessible at the same time (see Tesseract).

There have been many indications since Steven Moffat took the helm that Doctor Who is taking us into the heart of the mysteries. I thought at the time that "The Impossible Astronaut" was playing with Gnostic themes. Specifically the Silence suggested, to me, the Archons.

Let's see... They're an ancient alien order who've been controlling human history from time immemorial but no one can remember seeing them. And like the Archons, there are allusions to both the greys (look at them) and the "men in black" (they erase your memory). Men in black were most notably associated with the Archons -- as Smith, et al. -- in The Matrix trilogy, where they also notably distorted memory and cognition. For a little more background on the elusive Archons of Gnostic lore, see here.

I have tried a few times to write something more in depth regarding the archontic symbolism of the Silence but my head goes all mushy. Not surprising, I guess, given the subject matter. Bloody Archons. Perhaps I should take to crosshatching my forearms every time I contemplate the deeper allusions of the Silence and get derailed.

It began to dawn on me over the past few seasons of Doctor Who that the Doctor should not simply be viewed as a frequent savior and protector of humanity. Rather, he can be seen as a symbol of our human potential.

Amy: But you look human. The Doctor: No, you look Time Lord. We came first. ~ Doctor Who, "The Beast Below"

As we learned in "Human Nature," Time Lords have an ability to hide their expanded, Time Lord consciousness inside a fob watch and become human.  In so doing, they forget the bulk of their awareness. In that sense, we're all Time Lords.

Bear in mind that River Song, as we learned recently, is the child of two human parents but because she was conceived in the TARDIS she has many of the abilities of a Time Lord, including regeneration.

If we begin to look at the TARDIS, not as an alien space ship, but as a symbol for multidimensional awareness, we arrive at the essence of mystical thought. Each of us contains the universe. The microcosm contains the macrocosm. The inside is bigger than the outside.

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Stargate Skyfall

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

I caught Skyfall over the holiday weekend and I loved it. Daniel Craig continues to bring a gravitas to the role that transitions Bond from outrageous camp to something with surprising depth. And this was probably the darkest yet -- a journey through death and resurrection, as the series reboots itself yet again. This is a bold re-envisioning, exchanging the high tech gadgetry, that has become too ubiquitous to be entertaining, for low tech cleverness. Javier Bardem is just flamboyant enough to be a Bond villain, yet tragic and human enough to be a believable character. He's also consistently brilliant.

The movie is excellent. But the opening credit sequence is a masterpiece.

Leaving aside for a moment the sheer awesomeness of the cinematography and the buttery richness of Adele's voice, what captivated me was the layering of esoteric imagery. It was the genius of the opening credits (posted above) that convinced me to brave the crowds and see this movie in the theater.

As with the recent Olympics, and so much in popular art and entertainment, it's hard to say how much of the symbolism is deliberate and how much is subconscious. But it's hard to believe that a film about a journey through death and rebirth just happens to have one portal image after another by accident.



This is the end...

The sequence opens with a wormhole as Bond is pulled through a swirling vortex on the ocean floor. From there, the viewer moves through one circular gate after another, from bullet holes, to the circumpunct like barrel of a gun, to James Bond's eye. We slide through these apertures, moving from one dark, surreal landscape to another.

Skyfall is where we start...

There are also numerous images of the Celtic Cross, aka the Medicine Wheel, aka the four directions. We see it in classic form on tombstones, but also made up from guns and the great stag. In one remarkable turn, Bond finds himself at the center of four, intersecting, shadow selves.

Where worlds collide and days are dark...

In one particularly stunning sequence, we move from trails of blood in the water and into the realm of the Chinese lung, or dragons -- the great, fire-breathing wyrms themselves.

Where you go I go. What you see I see...

There is also a lot of mirroring imagery, as one divides into two, in perfect reflection. And in the penultimate sequence, Bond finds himself in a hall of mirrors. He shoots holes in one mirror after another, finally shattering the illusory world around him.

Let the sky fall. When it crumbles...

The title itself, Skyfall, suggests the death of the illusory world. The sky, the boundary of our perceptual world, crumbles. It's the apocalypse -- the revelation of secrets hidden behind the veil.

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George Harrison's Quiet Legacy

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

"Who's George Harrison?" my daughter asked me this morning.

"Oh, that's easy," I answered. "My favorite Beatle."

"What's a Beatle?" Obviously, this conversation went on for a bit. How and why did it start? My daughter, being far more visual than I, had apparently noticed something on the news crawl that I hadn't.

I'm going to assume that what piqued her interest was coverage of a Scorcese documentary on the life of George Harrison that just released on DVD. At least that's what topped my news search. So now, of course, I will have to see that.

When I was my daughter's age, 10, I had a very solid grounding in The Beatles. It was an education that had started when I was much younger. When I was 3 and 4, Magical Mystery Tour was my favorite album and I played it over and over on my little record player. Now, if you'd asked me at 10 who my favorite Beatle was, I would have said Paul -- the cute one. But with age and wisdom has come a deeper appreciation for George -- the thinky one.



George Harrison is the Beatle to whom I can most easily relate. In part because of his well-known spiritual quest, which led him, amongst other things, to learn sitar and to study with the deeply sublime Ravi Shankar.

But also because -- and this is a less well-known aspect of his personality -- he would apparently do anything for a laugh. Anyone who knows me well knows of the depths I will sink to to crack myself up.

I only lately learned of Harrison's long relationship with members of Monty Python and his involvement with Rutland Weekend Television -- the show that was the genesis of the brilliantly funny Beatles parody The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. His appearance on the BBC series shows what an incredible sense of humor Harrison had about himself.

One of the revelations in Scorcese's documentary -- at least it was news to me -- is that Harrison mortgaged his house to help finance Monty Python's Life of Brian. Risky move, although I'm assuming it ultimately paid off. It was very controversial.

The film contains themes of religious satire that were controversial at the time of its release, drawing accusations of blasphemy and protests from some religious groups. Thirty-nine local authorities in the UK either imposed an outright ban, or imposed an X (18 years) certificate (effectively preventing the film from being shown, as the distributors said the film could not be shown unless it was unedited and carried the original AA (14) certificate). Some countries, including Ireland and Norway, banned its showing, with a few of these bans lasting decades. The film makers used such notoriety to benefit their marketing campaign, with posters stating "So funny it was banned in Norway!".

The film was a box-office success, grossing fourth-highest of any film in the UK in 1979 and highest of any British film in the United States that year. It has remained popular since then, receiving positive reviews and being named "greatest comedy film of all time" by several magazines and television networks. The film is the first Monty Python film to receive an R rating[3] in the United States.

Life of Brian is one of my all-time favorite movies but it was definitely provocative, raising hard questions about the origins of Christianity and about the nature of religion itself. One of the more insightful sequences demonstrates the sheeple effect when the growing mobs of Brian's followers remove a sandal simply because he's lost one. George Harrison was clearly one who was looking for a deeper experience of the divine than can be achieved by accepting dogmatic, rote teaching at face value.

I think the cultural legacy left by George Harrison is only beginning to be understood and appreciated. He was the "quiet" Beatle, seemingly content to live in the shadow of the power dyad that was Lennon and McCartney. But his was also a contemplative quiet. He explored the inner space and embraced the mysteries. It was evident in his music -- a surprising blend of pop sensibility and meditative resonance. His influence on both the Beatles and the culture was subtle but pervasive. But by following his own passions he helped to shape the psychedelic revolution and the proliferation of Eastern thought in the West. He may well have been the most complex of the fab four. The Beatles were a marvelous synergy and none of them approached as solo artists the same kind of musical alchemy. So it's hard to say how much his vision shaped their sound. But he deserves ample credit for their transformation from pop musicians to weavers of unforgettable sound tapestries.

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Tragedy in Sedona

Article first published as Book Review: Tragedy in Sedona by Connie Jay on Blogcritics.

On July 25, 2009, Colleen Conaway plummeted to her death in San Diego's Horton Plaza mall; an apparent suicide. She had no history of mental problems. She was by all accounts very happy with her life and her direction. So how did the Minnesota native meet such a sad and inexplicable fate so far from home? She was participating in a James Arthur Ray "Creating Absolute Wealth" seminar for which she had paid thousands of dollars.

The exercise was one in which seminar participants were directed to dress as homeless people and wander around downtown San Diego. They were not allowed to carry money, identification, or cell phones. In what would become a pattern for those who had the misfortune to be severely injured during James Ray seminars, Colleen Conaway spent many hours listed as "Jane Doe."

Connie Joy's daughter Erica participated in that same seminar and both Connie and her husband Richard attended the final dinner. None of them were aware that a participant had died. Only Ray and his closest staffers knew that Conaway was lying on a slab in the San Diego County morgue. And they weren't telling. People who asked about why she hadn't returned were told that she was fine but wasn't coming back to the seminar. It was over two months later, in the wake of yet another horrific tragedy on Ray's watch, that his long-time followers learned that the unnamed woman who had died in the mall that day was the seminar participant who had never returned from her homelessness adventure.



Less than two weeks after losing one of his students to a deadly fall, Ray had a select group of the high paying World Wealth Society members hiking a mountain trail overlooking Machu Picchu -- blindfolded. When concerned local tour guides tried to steer the hikers away from steep drops and around sharp turns, Ray became irritated at their interference. He was going to teach his students about the value of living life to the fullest by flirting with death and no one was going to stop him. As his group of students removed their blindfolds to take in the view from the cliff they were standing on, he asked, "Are you just taking up space or are you really living your lives?"

Ray's fascination with the theme of death was not new. But it seemed to increase rather than diminish after Colleen Conaway's inexplicable plunge. In early October, just over two months after her demise, Ray would lead his Spiritual Warrior seminar in Sedona, AZ, in which he relied heavily on death metaphors. And three people would die from exposure to extreme temperatures in a sweat lodge ceremony.

When Joy learned of the deaths of James Shore and Kirby Brown and that her good friend Liz Neuman was in critical condition in an Arizona hospital, she was shocked and saddened but not surprised. Joy had been trying to warn people about Ray's sweat lodge since she, herself, had gotten sick from the heat during Spiritual Warrior 2007. She knew the dangers of heatstroke and had long thought it was only a matter of time before someone was severely injured in one of Ray's super-heated sweat lodges.

In Tragedy in Sedona, Joy offers an insider's perspective on what led up to the tragic deaths and multiple injuries that resulted from a sweat lodge that was "too hot for too long." As World Wealth Society members, she and her husband Richard got as close to Ray as anyone but his closest staffers were allowed to get. She also saw that limited access diminish as Ray's star rose. Over a three year period, the Joys attended 27 of Ray's events as either paying participants or Dream Team volunteers.

Joy witnessed numerous injuries at Ray's events: broken bones, a punctured eyelid, and other medical emergencies, for which Ray took no responsibility and implemented few precautions. His recklessness escalated dramatically as his Oprah fueled popularity increased and he began packing his events to capacity. As the number of these incidents mounted the Joys posited that Ray would never really risk anyone's life because, if for no other reason, it would be bad for business. Besides, they knew that Ray was extensively trained by native shamans and other practitioners. Surely he knew what he was doing. But as his recklessness increased, they became less and less convinced that people were safe and increasingly concerned until the World Wealth Society trip to Peru shattered what was left of their trust.

The breaking point came when Joy learned that the hotly anticipated climb up Huayna Picchu would be on a schedule too tight to safely reach the top. Knowing that there was a history of injuries and deaths on the steep trails, the Joys went to work investigating alternative scheduling for participants who, like themselves, wanted to do a complete climb without risking their lives. Their interference in Ray's plans put them on a collision course with his ego. The result was a verbal assault from Ray that finally convinced them that he was not a spiritual leader who was living by his own teachings.

Ray's hypocrisy had been increasingly evident the Joys for some time. From the very first seminar, they'd recognized deceptive, hard-sell practices. The Joys, being realtors, had seen such tactics before and took them in stride. But over time they noticed that promises made during pitches for the very expensive World Wealth Society membership were changed or discarded completely. In Orwellian fashion, there was often no acknowledgment that many of the offerings were vastly reduced from what had been promised. Since the pitches were always verbal, rather than written, there was no way to prove the change had occurred.

In one telling exchange, Ray publicly excoriated a man for his wife's diligent note-taking during seminars. With increasing frequency, Ray would "flame" people from the stage for asking questions he didn't want to answer or as an opportunity to air grudges they didn't even know he was holding. It was something he did so effectively that many of his students were terrified to take the mic to ask a question and feared being called out. In this case, the offense in question was keeping a record of what Ray said, which he ironically described as not "paying attention" to what he was saying.

Most of Ray's sales pitches and promises were delivered when people were in a suggestible state. His upcoming seminars and packages were sold during other seminars where he would keep people on action-packed schedules that provided little time for sleep and few breaks. Joy even cites one instance when Ray began a pitch as he was leading them in a guided meditation. That was not the only time Joy, a trained hypnotherapist, noted that Ray was using stage hypnosis and/or NLP techniques to sell his events, but it was the most shocking. It was an egregious abuse of trust; one another participant referred to as "black magick." Sadly, Joy noted that it worked. She saw a woman she knew to have tight finances standing on line to shell out $60,000 for a World Wealth Society membership she could not possibly afford. Thankfully, the woman came to her senses before closing the deal. A very good thing because Ray's company had an ironclad no refund policy.

Ray's business practices were among many pieces of information excluded during Ray's manslaughter trial because they were "prejudicial." Jurors would not learn, for instance, that Ray's unwillingness to provide refunds meant that by the time participants received information packets and waivers that gave some, albeit very small, indication of the dangers posed by Spiritual Warrior, they could not have canceled without forfeiting nearly $10,000. Ray's lawyers were free to argue, however, that by signing the waivers, participants knew what they were in for. Jurors did learn that Ray's Dream Team volunteers had to pay for their own travel, lodging, and meals. They did not know, however, something Joy only discovered after Dream Teaming numerous events -- that the group rates offered to participants and volunteers were higher than the regular rates because Ray demanded substantial kickbacks from hotels.

After his contributing role in The Secret and his appearances on "Oprah" and "Larry King Live," Ray's monetary focus sharpened. He now spoke openly of his goal to be "the first billionaire in the spiritual arena." He claimed that he had become a millionaire as a byproduct of following his bliss but this was no longer good enough. He wanted to be billionaire as a way of "keeping score." Joy was floored.

It wasn't just his now open pecuniary focus that belied his spiritual aspirations. There were other unsavory indications of an ego spinning out of control.

Dubbed the "Rock Star of Personal Transformation," Ray relished the limelight. He relished the perks of wealth and stardom even more. Like Elvis's "Memphis Mafia," Ray's "Dream Team" volunteers were required, among other ignoble tasks, to let women know that he'd picked them out of the audience to join him for the evening. In one horrible case, Joy noticed a woman sobbing in the back of the hall. Joy's friend Edward, who was among the volunteer staff for the event, explained the incident. She had been thrown over when Ray changed his mind about which audience pick he expected to join him for dinner.

Ray, who taught that relationships were one of five essential pillars in a balanced life, seemed to have very odd ideas about them. He had said many revealing things about how he didn't believe that people were meant to be together forever and that having children was a vain attempt at immortality. He had been married and divorced and never intended to remarry. Yet he considered himself qualified to teach people about integrity in relationships.

Over time, Joy observed that Ray ran interference in other people's relationships. She kept finding herself separated from her husband Richard during events. During Spiritual Warrior, for instance, couples were split up and assigned same-sex roommates. It was a pattern that started to feel very deliberate, particularly when Joy was volunteering for Practical Mysticism and her daughter Erica was there as a participant. After exchanging a few words with her daughter, she saw Ray whispering to the staffer in charge of volunteers who then pulled Joy aside and gave her a talking to. Joy needed to stay away from Erica and let her "have her own experience."

That phrase, "let people have their own experience" was one heard from numerous witnesses during Ray's manslaughter trial. People who were concerned about the labored breathing and apparent incoherence of other sweat lodge participants, for instance, knew better than to interfere in the "experience" of people who were, in fact, dying. Prosecutor Sheila Polk argued that such rules actually trained people away from their natural instincts to try to help each other and to completely defer to Ray's judgment.

After reading Tragedy in Sedona, it occurred to me that it was also a way to discourage normal bonding between participants and ensure that communication during Ray's events was almost entirely vertical rather than horizontal. Too much interpersonal bonding threatened the hierarchy and Ray's position at the top of it. That sense was confirmed for me when I exchanged emails with Mary Latallade, who described for me her sense of isolation in the crowd; particularly when she was seriously injured during the the 2008 sweat lodge.

During the trial, the pressure Ray applied to men and women alike to submit to buzz cuts during Spiritual Warrior was a contentious issue. The echoes of Heaven's Gate and the Manson Family would be hard to miss. Defense attorneys worked hard to diffuse the potential impact on jurors of numerous women being shorn of their locks. Joy struggled with the decision of whether or not to shave off all her hair when she attended Spiritual Warrior in 2007. Ultimately, she accepted Ray's logic: "You are not your hair." Shaving their hair was presented as an opportunity to sacrifice ego. But Ray wasn't leading by example. He didn't have his own head shaved. Worse, when police searched his hotel room, they recovered an impressive stash of pharmaceuticals including steroids and Propecia.

In the forward to Tragedy in Sedona, psychiatrist Carole Lieberman points out that in one of Ray's books he describes the embarrassment he experienced as a boy when his mother would give him buzz cuts on the front porch in full view of laughing neighbor children. And here he was, years later, pressuring people to sit in a public area and have their hair shaved off. So was Ray shaming Spiritual Warrior participants into shaving their heads to experience humility or humiliation? Taken in context, humiliation is about the only explanation that makes sense.

During the trial, it became apparent that participants were humiliated and degraded in numerous ways. Many witnesses visibly flinched as they described flaming episodes when Ray would take any opportunity to publicly enumerate any flaws and air grievances. Some students were terrified of attracting his ire by such things as taking an unscheduled bathroom break. A good number of Spiritual Warrior participants were forced to remain perfectly still on the hard floor for hours, unable to scratch an itch, use the bathroom, or eat dinner, after being symbolically killed by a capricious "God" (Ray) during his twisted version of the Samurai Game. Many people testified to his telling participant Lou Caci to relieve himself inside the sweat lodge on the ground rather than leave the "sacred" space; something he clearly found degrading.

These condescensions from on high became more and more common as Ray's fame grew and he retreated behind body guards and away from any two-way communication with students. Mostly, he criticized them for "not playing full on" if they failed to meet the numerous physical and emotional challenges presented during events. During Spiritual Warrior he criticized them for wanting to leave the intolerable temperatures of the sweat lodge and many of them stayed against their quickly evaporating judgment.

Ray's abnormally hot and abnormally long sweat lodge reduced people to vomiting, paralyzing muscle cramps, babbling incoherence, and unconsciousness. None of that indicated a problem to Ray. In fact, it was the goal. In the aftermath of the 2009 lodge, the hottest he'd ever run, more participants than ever were in such these disabling states. It was a scene that some participants described as looking like a war zone. And as the realization dawned that a number of people were in life threatening distress and participants who were able began administering CPR, Ray sat in the shade with a cooling beverage, and observed the scene. When told by the firekeeper's wife that she needed a cellphone to call 911 because people weren't breathing, he shrugged. He was later seen chatting to someone other than 911 on a cellphone. As the ambulances started to arrive, he shambled back to his hotel room to shower and have a sandwich.

The picture of Ray that emerges from Tragedy in Sedona and in the many hours of courtroom testimony is not just that of an overblown ego. There are glimpses of something truly sadistic. Ray seemed to enjoy watching people do what he told them to do even when it was degrading... and when it was horrifically dangerous.

Ray is certainly not the first spiritual leader to exploit followers sexually and emotionally. He's not the first to accrue massive wealth at the expense of financially struggling followers. He's not the first to take advantage of volunteers. He's not even the first spiritual leader to conflate sacrificing the ego to God with submission to his leadership. What sets James Arthur Ray apart from the average flimflammer is that he was playing a game of chicken with other people's lives. How else to describe someone who would blindfold people on a dangerous a mountain trail and retool a traditional sweat lodge into an inferno so as to induce heatstroke for its mind altering affects?

Ray's students followed his lead because they trusted him to know what he was doing. He had established credibility with them by being a published author, by being part of The Secret, and by claims of having trained under established spiritual teachers and shamans in numerous traditions. But tales of his vast, multicultural training turned out to be lies. After the Joys had their final confrontation with Ray, the whole facade came crumbling down. In Peru, he'd hedged when his students wanted to meet the shaman he'd told so many stories about. Joy asked around and learned the man in question was not so much a shaman as he was a tour guide. Stan Grof, the psychiatrist who developed Holotropic Breathwork had never heard of James Ray until after he'd made headlines for his deadly sweat lodge. Grof's institute had no record of his having been trained to facilitate the breathwork. Most of his knowledge of shamanism came from Carlos Castaneda books; a fraud being led by a fraud.

For all her disillusionment, Joy writes without rancor, and with a sense of gratitude for what good came out of her experience with James Ray -- even though it came with a whopping $200,000 price tag. Tragedy in Sedona began as a chronicle of her journey of spiritual growth and healing. Ray stole from good teachers as well as bad and some of what she experienced was valuable; even transformative. It is, after all, the message not the messenger that matters.

Joy learned that she'd be writing a book when she was in Egypt on a World Wealth Society trip. While communing with the Sphinx, she was told that part of her destiny was to write a book. A math person and "digital" thinker, she never considered herself a writer. But her higher self knew she'd have an important story to tell and indeed she did. The driving narrative, the power of that story, more than makes up for any lack of linguistic flair.

For anyone who wants to understand how apparently intelligent, educated, and accomplished people could fall pray to Ray's long con, the book makes essential reading. Joy, herself, is such a person. Her vulnerability to Ray lay in some of her highest aspirations -- a longing to understand the workings of spirit, to align all aspects of her life with her spirituality, and to make a solid contribution to the world. Joy bridles against media reports that characterize Ray's followers as a "cult." She makes the point repeatedly that they were not "mindless cult" members. I would take issue only with characterization of cult members as mindless. Not even members of Heaven's Gate, the People's Temple, Hare Krishna, or other well known cults could be fairly described as "mindless." They were simply subject to a higher level of manipulation, even coercion, than Ray's organization offered at its height. All cults target smart, accomplished members because that's where the money is. They all target people with appeals to their idealism. And they all break people down by leveraging their insecurities, emotional vulnerabilities, and innate deference to authority, just like Ray.

Tragedy in Sedona makes essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how it is that three of the best and brightest wound up getting cooked to death in an abomination of a sweat lodge. It's a warning to pay attention to every red flag and not excuse or minimize questionable behavior from those in whom we invest our trust. Else we may pay with more than our wallets.

James Arthur Ray was convicted on three counts of criminally negligent homicide on June 22, 2011. An original sentencing date that would have eerily coincided with the death of Colleen Conaway, was changed to allow for more of the extensive legal wrangling that characterized the very long trial. A presentence hearing is currently scheduled for August 16th in which Ray's attorneys will argue for a mitigated sentence. Ray's multiple attorneys have also filed for a new trial claiming prosecutorial misconduct. The State has responded with a lengthy rebuttal and the defense attorneys have replied. Ray is also facing still unresolved lawsuits and possible legal action from the family of Colleen Conaway.

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The Giving Tree is a Sap

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

Better Book Titles: Children's Book Edition

As a child, I loved The Giving Tree. I read it over and over. As an adult, a feminist, and a gratefully recovering codependent, I've long since given the book a rethink. So much so that I won't expose my daughter to it. It's not allowed in the house. What I once thought of as a sweet and moving story with a  moral about the beauty of altruism, I realized one day is an appallingly sexist book filled with poisonous ideas about the role of women and of earth itself.

I don't know why the book struck such a cord for me. Perhaps it had something to do with my profound fascination with trees. Perhaps it was something more prosaic like my nascent codependency. The book presents a dangerous message, overall: Imbalanced relationships in which one person sacrifices endlessly for the happiness of another are an ideal state. In fact, happiness can be derived entirely from pleasing someone else. This is the very definition of codependency.

Codependency is not necessarily a gendered phenomenon. There are plenty of male codependents. But girls are actually acculturated to be codependent, even in families where alcoholism and other major dysfunction aren't the issue. If we don't get it from our families -- and my family was probably more progressive than most -- we get it from our communities, from our schools, from movies, from books... books like The Giving Tree.



The gender dynamics in the story are fairly obvious. The tree is female. The child is male.The tree plays a very maternal and nurturing role with the boy. And she's the kind of mother who would definitely eat the Burnt Toast.

Up 'til now, I ate the burnt toast. I learned that from my mother -- metaphorically if not literally. I can't actually remember if she even likes toast or how she eats it. But what I know for sure is that although she was a loving and devoted wife and mother, she always took care of everyone and everything else before herself. This habitual self-sacrifice was well intended, but ultimately it's a mixed message for a child. It taught me that in order for me to succeed, someone else had to suffer. I learned to accept whatever was in front of me without complaint because I didn't think I deserved good things.

Like so many girls, Teri Hatcher learned the message from her mother that a woman's role in life is to sacrifice for others. Like so many boys growing up, the boy in The Giving Tree learned to profit from the sacrifice of those who love him.

The relationship between the tree and the boy is one based on give and take. She gives. He takes. He takes without gratitude. He takes without ever giving anything back except the occasional visit. And he only visits when he wants something. But the tree just gives, and gives, and gives, until she has nothing left to give... and then she gives some more. 

Even as a child reading that book, I was startled by the boy's effrontery: Give me some money. I want a house. I want a boat. What else can you possibly give me? But -- and this is the truly alarming part -- because the tree took it all with such aplomb and seemed so happy to keep giving, I accepted his behavior as normal. I could only really enjoy the story if I allowed myself to think that it was perfectly appropriate for someone to take endlessly and give nothing in return. The boy never even says thank-you. He just takes.

The implicit message to girls reading that book is that we are only really happy when we are giving something or doing something for someone else. This is how women are supposed to find fulfillment; not by expecting anything for ourselves. The boy's happiness is the tree's happiness. And no matter how many times he takes what he wants and abandons the tree, the tree is always happy when he returns so that she can give him more of her stuff.

That message is certainly not original to Shel Silverstein. It's one women have been wrestling with from time immemorial. For Virginia Woolf, that message was epitomized by the The Angel in the House; a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore that was all the rage in Victorian England. "The Wife's Tragedy" is one of the preludes in that poem.

Man must be pleased; but him to please
     Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
     She casts her best, she flings herself.
How often flings for nought, and yokes
     Her heart to an icicle or whim,
Whose each impatient word provokes
     Another, not from her, but him;
While she, too gentle even to force
     His penitence by kind replies,
Waits by, expecting his remorse,
     With pardon in her pitying eyes;
And if he once, by shame oppress'd,
     A comfortable word confers,
She leans and weeps against his breast,
     And seems to think the sin was hers;
And whilst his love has any life,
     Or any eye to see her charms,
At any time, she's still his wife,
     Dearly devoted to his arms;
She loves with love that cannot tire;
     And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,
     As grass grows taller round a stone.

Woolf found that her very survival depended on facing down this soul killing ideal of Victorian womanhood. The "angel" had to go.

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“It wasn’t housework that distressed Virginia Woolf. It was the battle with an ideal that she called The Angel in the House. Such a woman ‘excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was a chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.’ In order to become a writer, Woolf had to kill the Angel. ‘My excuse , if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me.”

Even as social changes have allowed for more opportunities for women in every sphere of life, we tend to find ourselves in supporting roles in all of them. As we moved into the workforce, we found that instead of changing tasks, we just added more. We developed the Superwoman Syndrome, believing we had to be all things to all people both at work and at home. Structural changes to support the new opportunities for women have lagged behind those opportunities; the availability of good childcare, for instance. And we still constantly receive messages, both explicit and implicit, that it's all on us. If we want to work -- and for many women it's not a so much "a choice" -- it's up to us to find ways to manage both family life and work life.

One incident sticks out in my memory as emblematic of the kinds of hurdles working women have faced. The department head from an office adjacent to mine was waiting for the elevator at the end of the day. She was one of the hardest-working, most efficient and effective executives in the company. The marketing director stopped her in the hall and sneered, "Going home at 5:00 I see. That's what motherhood will do for you." He also had children but it never seemed to occur to him that this should create any conflict with his professional life.

The tragedy of incidents like that is that they will make most women feel guilty more than angry. They can trigger shame spirals in which we tear ourselves apart about whether we're doing enough for our children, our husbands, our jobs, and the world at large. We just know that it's all our responsibility because that's what we've been told since we were children; that if we wanted to pursue our own dreams someone else would suffer for it. So we keep eating the burnt toast and giving the perfect, lightly browned and lavishly buttered pieces away.

Ironically, feminism has provided whole new areas and opportunities for us to give over valuable parts of ourselves to other people. We have new vistas of codependency to explore. One of the most spiritually toxic arenas has been our sex lives. The sexual revolution has liberated us in some ways only to bind us to new-found levels of expectation.

Hugo Schwyzer addressed, in a recent post, how female identity as people-pleaser has informed our new sexual "freedom."

Ariel Levy, in her powerful and controversial Female Chauvinist Pigs, quoted Paris Hilton’s remarkably perceptive remark about herself that she was “sexy, but not sexual.” Hilton isn’t alone. My students today, who are mostly in their late teens (though

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I have many older ones as well) were deeply influenced by Hilton, who was at the peak of her notoriety four or five years ago, when these now-college freshman were just entering high school. And sadly, not unlike many of their older sisters, they find themselves stuck in what we might call the “Paris Paradox”.

Young women with the Paris Paradox were raised in a culture that promised sexual freedom, but what they ended up with looked a lot more like obligation than opportunity. It’s not hard to understand why the pressure to be sexy so often trumps the freedom to discover one’s authentic sexuality. As Levy and Martin and others have been pointing out for the past decade, we’ve begun to sexualize girls at ever earlier ages, as anyone who noticed the Halloween costumes marketed to tween girls will be aware. The explicitness — the raunchiness, to use Levy’s word — of this sexualization is relatively new. But when that sexualization (or pornification, to use another popular term) meets the far-older pressure on young women to be people-pleasers, we have a recipe for misery.

I read years ago that Marilyn Monroe was described similarly as one who did not seem to enjoy sex. For all her iconic sensuality, she was said to be very passive and not terribly enthusiastic. In a sense, this is probably a component of her sex appeal and of female sex objects more generally. Because that's what they are: objects. Objects don't have needs. They meet them.

This excerpt from Female Chauvinist Pigs describes the sexless sex appeal of the heiress who famously designed the "I'm Hot Your Not" [sic] t-shirt.

There is a disconnect between sexiness or hotness and sex itself. As Paris Hilton, the breathing embodiment of our current, prurient, collective fixations -- blondness, hotness, richness, anti-intellectualism -- told Rolling Stone reporter Vanessa Grigoriadis, "my boyfriends always tell me I'm not sexual. Sexy, but not sexual." Any fourteen-year-old who has downloaded her sex tapes can tell you that Hilton looks excited when she is posing for the camera, bored when she is engaged in actual sex. (In one tape, Hilton took a cell phone call during intercourse.) She is the perfect sexual celebrity for this moment, because our interest is in the appearance of sexiness, not the existence of sexual pleasure.

There is a very big difference between the preening, pouting sexuality portrayed for male entertainment and authentic female sexuality. A genuinely sexual woman can be a bit demanding. But in matters of sex, as in every other aspect of women's lives, the expectation is one of self-sacrifice. Schwyzer explains:

While both boys and girls may grow up hearing the old adage that it is “better to give than to receive”, girls are much more likely to be given regular instruction in how to give — and much more likely to be rebuked for “selfishness” if they show too much desire to receive. (Ask around. “Selfish” ranks right up there with “slut” and “fat” as an epithet with tremendous power to wound women. It only rarely does the same damage when applied to men.)

Dan Savage created an uproar, recently, when he opined in an interview with Mark Oppenheimer that monogamy may not be the best measure of the institution marriage and that in gay marriages, men will be far more tolerant of straying spouses. The last thing a lot of people want to hear, as gay marriage rights gain ground, is the suggestion from a gay activist that it will redefine marriage. Savage has a point in that infidelity has long been a part of traditional marriage.

“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitar­ian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”

Yes. So many of our social institutions work more smoothly when women are willing to sacrifice their happiness so that men can do whatever they want. This is something women are very used to hearing; that the rules are different for men and that we only make ourselves more miserable when we are unwilling to accept that.

Historically, of course, while men had more license to enjoy their concubines, mistresses, and prostitutes, women faced such social penalties as battery, scarlet letters, and even death, for infidelity -- something we still see in the Arab world. And even in the modern world, some of the most unfaithful men still fully expect fidelity from their wives and girlfriends; even when they have both. That women embracing the infidelity path for themselves thing that Savage suggests tends not to go over so well with men. Men also crave fidelity from their partners. (I would specify heterosexual men here but I know too many gay men who have been emotionally destroyed by cheating partners.) At least a part of what underlies that male jealousy is that monogamy isn't so much in conflict with our basic impulses. Rather, our basic impulses around sexuality are in conflict. None of us can stop being attracted to other people but we also can't turn off the desire for genuine intimacy that can only happen when we feel emotionally safe in our relationships. There is an emotional component to our sexuality that we can't entirely shut off, as one of Savage's readers discovered when he and his wife opened up their marriage. He described his reaction to her having vaginal intercourse with another man: “It was as if all the air in the room was sucked out through my soul.”

Shutting off such feelings has always been harder for women than for men. In the same New York Times Magazine article, Judith Stacey explains:

“They are men,” she said, and she believes it is easier for them — right down to the physiology of orgasm — to separate physical and emotional intimacy. Lesbians and straight women tend to be far less comfortable with nonmonogamy than gay men.

Stacey, like Savage, concludes that there is no one size fits all solution on the monogamy issue and that different couples, gay and straight, need to define the parameters of their relationships for themselves. Throughout history and right up to the present day, however, these decisions have been made for women, not by them. The result has been second-class citizenry in sex and relationships. I find it telling that Savage pokes at feminism for failing to bring about egalitarianism in the world of cheating. I would posit, however, that the increasingly "fairsey" nature of marriage is a somewhat indirect result of the feminist revolution. Relationships are being redefined, not on men's terms, but on women's. Along with a plethora of other rights, women have been demanding the monogamy that is innately more comfortable for them.

I have long said that Bill Clinton's biggest mistake was his failure to notice what was happening across the pond with Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Diana did something that would have been unthinkable a hundred years earlier. She refused to tolerate her husband's infidelity. Women of her social position had always been willing to put up with mistresses and quietly accept that powerful men have powerful appetites. Diana simply refused to endure a miserable situation and take solace in the other contentments of her social position. In that respect, Lady Diana was something of a bellwether of a greater social transformation.

Fidelity, sexual or otherwise, involves consideration of another person's feelings, needs, and desires; something that has always been expected more from women than from men.

The giving tree is nothing if not faithful. She waits and longs like Calypso for the boy's occasional booty call.

The boy in The Giving Tree doesn't just exploit the emotions of the anthropomorphized tree. He selfishly strips the natural resources she embodies. Silverstein's messaging on ecology is horrible. Nature's gifts are man's for the taking, without consideration to reforestation, or even any real appreciation. What does the boy care? He's the self-described "king of the forest."

The analogy between woman and earth is extremely ancient going back at least as far the myths of the great mother goddess. In many of those myths, she is the earth itself. She is Gaia, Sophia, Tiamat. At her most reduced, she is "Mother Nature." In many iterations she is the original fire serpent climbing the tree of life to reconnect heaven and earth.

This, for me, is the greatest tragedy of the perennially adored children's story. The tree that gives so endlessly and to her own detriment is more than a mother figure taken completely for granted by an arrogant child. She's a trampled and disregarded vestige of the divine feminine. And like the vastly diminished serpent goddess Eve in popular myth (if not in the Bible) she hands the boy an apple.

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Harry Potter Is Not a "Jock"

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

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Hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan on the most wrong-headed analysis of Harry Potter I think I've ever seen, which, to my great surprise, comes from Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon. In addition to getting important plot points completely wrong, Marcotte reveals far more about herself than she does the Harry Potter series. Marcotte attempts to address the Harry Potter as "nerd" with "misfit" friends narrative. I don't know whose narrative that is but it isn't Rowling's, which Marcotte tangentially acknowledges before going on to debunk it anyway.

Harry, Marcotte explains, isn't a "geek." He's a "jock." While it's certainly true that Harry distinguishes himself as an athlete in the richly symbolic game of Quidditch, I think to call him a jock is a bit of a reach. Nor are athletes so feted at Hogwarts as to make such "jocks" the in crowd. The social structure is far more complex than that. There is no jock/geek dichotomy in the Harry Potter universe.

As Sullivan points out, Marcotte misidentifies both Harry and Ron as "stereotypically privileged." Ron is best known for coming from a poor family and relying on frequently embarrassing hand-me-downs. The wealthy Malfoys openly mock the Weasleys for their poverty. Harry is an orphan raised by relatives who treat him like Cindarella and his own hand-me-down clothes have the added benefit of being absurdly large because they come from his fat, bully cousin. He spends the first years of life consigned to a cupboard under the stairs. Neither of these boys' lives could be remotely described as privileged.



Far from being part of any "jock" in crowd, Harry is not popular. He's famous. And fame is a fickle mistress. Like so many famous people, he learns that the only thing the media and the media consuming public enjoy more than building a hero up is tearing one down. He endures periods of ridicule and ostracizing that are at least as horrible as the life with his Aunt and Uncle; a life he still has to endure every summer. 

She's somewhat closer to the mark with her positioning of Snape but still misrepresents the story arc.

The most genuinely nerdy character is Severus Snape, which becomes even more clear in the flashbacks where Snape hates James Potter for his easy charm with the ladies, especially Lily, who Snape loves.  Snape is shown as being tortured by the popular kids when he's young.  As an adult, he and Harry don't like each other, and it's a continuation of the nerd-jock animus that both of them feel.

Snape is something of an odd duck but we only see a snapshot of his conflict with James Potter; one in which we learn that Harry's father was a flawed person. (None of Rowling's characters can be defined in simple black and white terms.) But to cast even that conflict as jocks vs. nerds is reductive. And to characterize the dynamics between Harry and Snape similarly is ludicrous. Harry's conflict with Snape starts because Harry's convinced Snape is trying to kill him. He thinks that, in part, because Snape gives off a decided whiff of malevolence. Subsequent revelations such as his history as a "death eater" only seem to confirm that assessment.

Harry's girlfriend is also a poor Weasley and Marcotte gets her wrong, as well.

Harry's girlfriend is not only a star athlete as well, but is clearly the most popular and beautiful girl in school, with all the boys fawning over her.  It's a feminist touch that Rowling didn't make her the wizarding version of a cheerleader, but that's what makes the books so perfect for the modern era.

There's far more than a touch of feminism in the Potter series as Laura Hibbard points out in her post on the inspirational and unapologetically smart Hermione Granger. But Ginny Weasley, while athletic and attractive, is no Heather.

There really is no such in crowd or out crowd at Hogwarts. The closest thing to such a dichotomy rests in something far darker, which Marcotte reduces to the point of absurdity in her analysis of Hermione.

Hermione is the best piece of evidence for the "band of misfits" theory, but she still doesn't rise to the level of a true geek character.  Oh sure, she gets taunted for being Muggle-born and is the smart girl who annoys the other kids.  But while I'd say she's a tad nerdy at the beginning of the books, she evolves into one of the popular kids at Hogwarts.  She becomes very beautiful, is good friends with the most famous young man in their world, and she dates a famous Quidditch player.

Hermione's "Muggle-born" status makes her situation a little more precarious than the risk of a bit of teasing. It's a matter of life and death. One of the more overt themes in the Harry Potter series is the analogy to Nazi Germany in which Muggles are the equivalent of Jews and other "mud people." This is something Rowling makes even more obvious in that they're referred to by "pure blood" aspirants with the pejorative "mudblood." As Voldemort rises to power again, Muggles are targets of his genocidal vision. I don't think it's an accident that Voldemort's major supporters the Malfoys are extremely blond.

Ironically, for an author setting her story in a magical realm, Rowling's social commentary is more overt than her brilliantly structured basis in Western Alchemy. But she's not dealing with issues as pedestrian as high school cliques. She's taking on the class system at it's most horrific. Voldemort is, among other things, a Hitlerian figure. He is also one of the most well-drawn portraits of psychopathy in modern literature but that's a discussion for another day.

Harry's goodness is defined in part because he embraces genuine outcasts: Muggle-borns, a giant half-breed, an impoverished werewolf, a poor wizarding family with a socially suicidal affection for Muggles... He forms his associations based on character rather than prestige or lineage. Harry's own mother was also Muggle-born and embraced by James Potter who also risked his life to associate with people based on who they were rather than their bloodlines. To reduce such richly drawn characters and themes to a discussion of the popular crowd is just silly.

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