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Recent reading
Oct. 4th, 2006 01:17 pmFrom The Temple of Konarak: Erotic Spirituality, 1971, photos by Eliot Elisofon, text by Alan Watts:
"We are dangerously insane and making ready to commit global suicide because we have separated the spiritual from the sexual, and the conceptual from the real. Obviously, only those who believe that the world of spirit is more real than the world of life, biology, and sex will gamble on detonating the atomic bomb."
(Watts also comments on the mistranslation of Hindu terms into Western terms such as "god" or "real", altering and confusing their meaning. This is a familiar problem to me - what I mean when I say "god" or "magick" is very probably not what you mean.)
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From "On Self-Respect", an essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
"It is the phenomenon called 'alienation from self'. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question."
Writing in 1961, Didion characterises this state as a lack of self-respect; any sufferer will recognise it at once as social phobia.
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I also read LSD guru Timothy Leary's 1966 article You Are a God; Act Like One!, and was fascinated to learn the real meaning of his famous slogan "turn on, tune in, drop out". It's usually understood as "Get ripped and don't work", but he's talking about breaking out of our conditioning and changing our lives to match this new, freer state. Naturally he preaches LSD as the way to "turn on" - a shortcut to a new state of mind. That has worked for some people. For me, Zen and feminism did the trick; although I did have the advantage of having failed to asborb much of the conditioning in the first place.
"We are dangerously insane and making ready to commit global suicide because we have separated the spiritual from the sexual, and the conceptual from the real. Obviously, only those who believe that the world of spirit is more real than the world of life, biology, and sex will gamble on detonating the atomic bomb."
(Watts also comments on the mistranslation of Hindu terms into Western terms such as "god" or "real", altering and confusing their meaning. This is a familiar problem to me - what I mean when I say "god" or "magick" is very probably not what you mean.)
__
From "On Self-Respect", an essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
"It is the phenomenon called 'alienation from self'. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question."
Writing in 1961, Didion characterises this state as a lack of self-respect; any sufferer will recognise it at once as social phobia.
__
I also read LSD guru Timothy Leary's 1966 article You Are a God; Act Like One!, and was fascinated to learn the real meaning of his famous slogan "turn on, tune in, drop out". It's usually understood as "Get ripped and don't work", but he's talking about breaking out of our conditioning and changing our lives to match this new, freer state. Naturally he preaches LSD as the way to "turn on" - a shortcut to a new state of mind. That has worked for some people. For me, Zen and feminism did the trick; although I did have the advantage of having failed to asborb much of the conditioning in the first place.
