Culturopoiesis, or Culture-Making

How Obama Is Using the Science of Change

2010-05-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

reproduced from:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1889153-1,00.html

Thursday, Apr. 02, 2009

How Obama Is Using the Science of Change

By Michael Grunwald

Correction Appended: April 2, 2009

Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!"

Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample script from the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation's leading behaviorists. The key guideline was a simple message: "A Record Turnout Is Expected." That's because studies by psychologist Robert Cialdini and other group members had found that the most powerful motivator for hotel guests to reuse towels, national-park visitors to stay on marked trails and citizens to vote is the suggestion that everyone is doing it. "People want to do what they think others will do," says Cialdini, author of the best seller Influence. "The Obama campaign really got that." (See pictures of Obama taken by everyday Americans.)

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. "It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it," Moffo tells TIME. "These guys really know what makes people tick."

President Obama is still relying on behavioral science. But now his Administration is using it to try to transform the country. Because when you know what makes people tick, it's a lot easier to help them change.

The Nudge Factor
We all know Obama won the election because he looked like change, sounded like change and never stopped campaigning for change. But he didn't call for just change in Washington — or even just change in America. From his declarations that "change comes from the bottom up" to his admonitions about "an era of profound irresponsibility," Obama called for change in Americans. And not just in bankers or insurers — in all of us. His Zen koan, "We are the change we've been waiting for," may sound like New Age gibberish, but it's at the core of his agenda.

In fact, Obama is betting his presidency on our ability to change our behavior. His top priorities — the economy, health care and energy — all depend on it. We need to spend more money now to avert a short-term depression, then save more money later to secure our long-term economic future. We need to consume less energy in order to reduce our oil imports and carbon emissions as well as our household expenses. We need to quit smoking, lay off the Twinkies and avoid other risky behaviors that both damage our personal health and boost the costs of care that are ravaging the nation's fiscal health. Basically, we need to make better choices — about mortgages and credit cards, insurance and retirement plans — so we won't need bailouts down the road.

The problem, as anyone with a sweet tooth, an alcoholic relative or a maxed-out Visa card knows, is that old habits die hard. Temptation is strong. We are weak. We've got plenty of gurus, talk-show hosts and celebrity spokespeople badgering us to save energy, lose weight and live within our means, but we're still addicted to oil, junk food and debt. It's fair to ask whether we're even capable of changing.

See pictures of the best Obama Inaugural merchandise.

See pictures of Obama's college years.

But the latest science suggests that yes, we can. Studies of all kinds of human frailties are revealing how to help people change — not only through mandates or financial incentives but also via subtler nudges that preserve our freedom to make choices while encouraging us to make better ones, from automatic-enrollment 401(k) plans that require us to opt out if we don't want to save for retirement to smart meters that warn us about how much energy we're using. These nudges can trigger huge changes; in a 2001 study, only 36% of women joined a 401(k) plan when they had to sign up for it, but when they had to opt out, 86% participated.

It's no coincidence that Obama's budget proposes an ambitious program of automatic-enrollment pensions for workplaces that don't offer 401(k)s or that his stimulus package has billions of dollars for smart meters. Behavioral science — especially the burgeoning field of behavioral economics that has been popularized by Freakonomics, The Wisdom of Crowds, Predictably Irrational, Nudge and Animal Spirits, which is the new must-read in Obamaworld — is already shaping dozens of Administration policies. "It really applies to all the big areas where we need change," says Obama budget director Peter Orszag. (See the top 10 nonfiction books of 2008.)

Orszag has been an unabashed behavioral geek ever since he read that 401(k) study. His deputy, Jeff Liebman of Harvard, is a noted behavioral economist, as are White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, Assistant Treasury Secretary nominee Alan Krueger of Princeton and several other key aides. Sunstein has been nominated to be Obama's regulatory czar. Even National Economic Council director Larry Summers has done work on behavioral finance. And Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan is organizing an outside network of behavioral experts to provide the Administration with policy ideas.

Obama has a community organizer's appreciation for human motivation, and his rhetoric often sounds as if it's straight out of a behavioral textbook. He has also read Nudge, which inspired him to pick his friend Sunstein — best known as a constitutional scholar — to run the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the obscure but influential corner of the Office of Management and Budget where federal regulations are reviewed and rewritten. "Cass is one of the people in the Administration he knows best," says Thaler, the founder of behavioral economics and co-author of Nudge. "He knew what he was doing when he gave Cass that job." (See who's who in Obama's White House.)

The first sign of the behavioralist takeover surfaced on April 1, when Americans began receiving $116 billion worth of payroll-tax cuts from the stimulus package. Obama isn't sending us one-time rebate checks. Reason: his goal is to jump-start consumer spending, and research has shown we're more likely to save money rather than spend it when we get it in a big chunk. Instead, Obama made sure the tax cuts will be paid out through decreased withholding, so our regular paychecks will grow a bit and we'll be less likely to notice the windfall. The idea, an aide explains, is to manipulate us into spending the extra cash.

Obama's efforts to change us carry a clear political risk. Republicans already portray him as a nanny-state scold, an élitist Big Brother lecturing us about inflating our tires and reading to our kids. We elected a President, not a life coach, and we might not like elected officials' challenging our right to be couch potatoes. Obama's aides seem to favor nudges that preserve free choice over heavy-handed regulation, an approach Thaler and Sunstein, the co-authors of Nudge, call "libertarian paternalism." But it's still paternalism, and Sunstein will have the power to put it into action. The idea of public officials, even well-meaning ones, trying to engineer our private behavior to produce change can seem a bit creepy.

But face it: Obama is right. Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary. Our health expenditures are bankrupting the Treasury, and most of our visits to the doctor can be traced to unhealthy behavior. We do need to change, and we know it.

So why don't we? And how can we? The behaviorists have ideas, and the Administration is listening.

See pictures of the civil rights movement, from Emmett Till to Barack Obama.

See pictures of Sasha and Malia Obama at the Inauguration.

Economics for the Real World
Obama has pledged that his bank-regulation overhaul would be based "not on abstract models ... but on actual data on how actual people make financial decisions." That's a plain-English way of saying it will be guided by behavioral economics, not neoclassical economics.

Neoclassical economics — another University of Chicago specialty — has ruled our world for decades. It's the doctrine that markets know best: when government keeps its hands off free enterprise, capital migrates to its most productive uses and society prospers. But its elegant models rely on a bold assumption: rational decisions by self-interested individuals create efficient markets. Behavioral economics challenged this assumption, and the financial meltdown has just about shattered it; even former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan confessed his Chicago School worldview has been shaken. "We couldn't have planned a better marketing campaign for behavioral economics," MIT's Ariely quips. (See the best business deals of 2008.)

Behavioral economics doesn't ignore the market forces that were all-powerful in Econ 101, but it harnesses forces traditionally consigned to Psych 101. Behaviorists have always known we don't really act like the superrational Homo economicus of the neoclassical-model world. Years of studies of patients who don't take their meds, grownups who have unsafe sex, and other flawed decision makers have chronicled the irrationality of Homo sapiens. Some of our foibles are quite specific, like overvaluing things we have, overeating food in larger containers and overestimating the probability of improbable events — the quirk that made the Meet Barack Obama fundraising lottery such a smart idea. But in general, we're ignorant, shortsighted and biased toward the status quo. We're not as smart as Larry Summers. We procrastinate. Our impulsive ids overwhelm our logical superegos. We plan to lose weight, but ooh — a cupcake! We're especially irrational about money; we'll pay more for the same thing if we can use a credit card, if we think it's on sale, if it's marketed with photos of attractive women. No wonder we apply for mortgages we can't afford. No wonder our bankers approve them.

"We truly want to make better choices," explains Yale economist Dean Karlan. He's a co-founder of stickK.com, where users make binding "commitment contracts" to forfeit money to friends or charities — or even "anti-charities" they despise — if they fail to quit smoking, lose weight or meet other goals they set for themselves. "But we need help to get us there."

The Need to Know
The first step is knowledge. Studies suggest that better information — from public-service announcements, appeals by respected figures, even serial dramas to help reduce teen pregnancy and other social ills in developing countries — can assist us in making better choices. There was a run on energy-efficient lightbulbs after Oprah urged viewers to buy them; similarly, Michelle Obama's White House vegetable garden is intended to urge us toward fresh produce. We don't all realize that idling our cars wastes more energy than turning them off and on, or that granola is high in fat. And some of our choices are simply bewildering, which is why it's so easy to stumble into hidden fees and balloon payments tucked in the fine print of our mortgages. Even Ph.D.s can get confused by our society's paperwork; Thaler and Sunstein tell a story in Nudge about struggling to help a health economist pick a prescription-drug plan for her parents.

Nudge calls for aggressive rules for disclosure and clarity, to help us make more informed decisions about home loans, student loans, credit cards, health-care plans and retirement plans. Thaler points to an Executive Order, signed by Obama on his second day in office, that calls for new transparency through new technologies. "That's exactly what this is about," Thaler says. "If instead of the 30 pages of unintelligible crap that comes with a mortgage, you can upload it with one click to a website that will explain it and help you shop for alternatives, you make it as easy as shopping for a hotel."

See pictures of Michelle Obama's fashion looks.

See pictures of the Obamas in Europe.

More information can make us healthier too, which is why the stimulus poured $1.1 billion into "comparative effectiveness" research. Orszag has reams of charts showing that medical tactics and costs vary wildly across the country, with little regard for what works. He'd like to document best practices — from emergency-room to-do lists that dramatically reduce infections to protocols for when pricey tests and surgeries really help — and then have all medical providers adopt them. This approach has helped American anesthesiologists reduce deaths as well as costs.

But information alone isn't enough. We all know we shouldn't smoke or pig out on fudge, but knowledge isn't as powerful as motivation; even Summers could stand to lose a few pounds. Old behavioralist joke: How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: Just one, but the bulb really has to want to change. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries of 2008.)

It's Got to Be Easy
Econ 101 relies on prices to promote change, and it's true that $4 gas got us to drive less. But prices aren't everything.

Even when utilities will pay for efficiency upgrades that will save us money for years, we're unlikely to make retrofits — unless the utilities take care of the schlep factors, like finding contractors and inspecting the work. Cheap is alluring; easy can be irresistible.

This is why default options pack such power. Most of us will save for retirement, run our computers in energy-efficient mode and be organ donors if we have to take action to say no — but not if we have to take action to say yes. Almost nobody signed up for a German utility's clean-energy plan until it became the default, and then 94% stuck with it. We're also much likelier to go to the doctor for preventive care like flu shots if the appointment is made for us. In a speech last year, Orszag even suggested charging us for doctor's appointments unless we take action to cancel, though he conceded that might sound "a little crazy at first blush or even second blush."

More along these lines is heading our way. The Administration hopes to harness our inertia with its automatic pension plan, a major step toward universal savings accounts, and by dramatically simplifying applications for federal tuition aid. Its push to computerize health-care records — another big-ticket stimulus item — could make generic drugs and cost-effective procedures our default treatments. And seniors who don't select health-care or drug plans could be automatically enrolled in low-cost options. "It would be nice if we all behaved like supercomputers, but that's not how we are," Orszag says.

While Obama's economists search for pain-free, hassle-free solutions to our easy-way-out instincts, his rhetoric often aims to build our tolerance for pain and hassle. He urges us to snap out of denial, to accept that we're in for some prolonged discomfort but not to wallow in it, to focus on our values. That happens to sound a lot like "acceptance and commitment therapy," the latest advance in behavioral psychology. Instead of assisting smokers to ignore cravings and chronic-pain sufferers to think about other things — the old denial approach — acceptance therapy pushes patients to acknowledge negative thoughts and then overcome them by focusing on values. Even a small amount of this approach seems to help smokers quit, dieters lose weight and patients with diabetes or chronic pain stay out of the hospital. University of Nevada, Reno, psychologist Steven Hayes believes our Prozac culture has trained us to avoid all discomfort, leaving us reluctant to exercise or adjust our thermostats. "We're supposed to be happy-happy-joy-joy all the time," Hayes says. "Obama is trying to help us get past that."

But Obama is no therapist changing individuals one at a time. He's an organizer trying to build community and inspire collective action through house parties and Facebook as well as rhetoric about shared values. In other words, he's trying to create social norms — behavioral change's killer app.

See TIME's "Six Degrees of Barack Obama."

See pictures of Obama's nation of hope.

Everybody's Doing It!
Which message would persuade homeowners to save electricity: a call to their environmental conscience, or an appeal to their wallet? Cialdini tested those approaches in a San Diego experiment, and the answer was neither. What worked was an appeal to conformity. Residents used less power when they were told their neighbors were using less power. We're a herdlike species, more likely to be obese if our peers are.

In a 2005 study, Alan Gerber of Yale got Michigan voters to increase their turnout an amazing 8.6% with a single peer-pressure mailer that listed the previous voting records of their neighbors and noted that a follow-up would be sent indicating who voted this time. (The Obama campaign actually priced out a similar mailer but decided not to risk a backlash.) And shame works; even some AIG executives gave up bonuses. Cialdini says brain imaging shows that when we think we're out of step with our peers, the part of our brain that registers pain shifts into overdrive. "It's an incredibly powerful spur to action," he says. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

Social norms help explain the attraction of opt-out 401(k)s as well: it's not just that we're too lazy to check a box but also that we assume the default is the accepted thing to do. Obama's push to weatherize millions of homes — another stimulus bonanza — will require new norms. In Oregon, a countywide program to upgrade windows and insulation at almost no cost to homeowners got a tepid response. But after an intense mobilization campaign — through citizen councils, churches and Girl Scouts who went door-to-door asking residents why they hadn't weatherized yet — 85% of the county enrolled. "What worked was creating a sense that we're all in this together and you're a social deviant if you don't join us," recalls Ralph Cavanagh of the Natural Resources Defense Council. This is why community report cards help promote preventive health care and why interdorm conservation competitions help colleges save energy. And this is why Administration officials — after their crash course in run-on-the-bank mentalities cited in Animal Spirits — are trying to boost consumer confidence into a social norm.

Sometimes We Need a Shove
But we're not likely to spend if we don't have money. And we can't take public transit if there's none in our neighborhood. The bully pulpit has limits — Michelle Obama has literally urged us to eat our broccoli, but she can't make it taste like fudge. "I like nudges, but sometimes we need to do more," says Harvard's Mullainathan. Sometimes we need a shove. The research proves change can come about when it's easy and popular, but making it lucrative — or even mandatory — can make sure it happens.

This is one reason there's new interest in taxing gas, alcohol, electricity and even trans fats to discourage undesirable behaviors while closing budget gaps. Obama has already hiked taxes on cigarettes and wants to end tax breaks for drilling and offshoring. He seems even more eager to subsidize desirable behaviors like saving, teaching, weatherizing and buying fuel-efficient cars and energy-efficient appliances. Of course, his energy policy goes beyond incentives; he wants a strict national cap on carbon emissions. He has also signaled openness to a national health-insurance mandate. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From A to Z.")

If neoclassical economics wants government to let us alone to do what we want, behavioral economics leaves room for government action to help us do what we would really want if we were rational agents. Unfortunately, the qualities that have crippled Washington in recent years — inertia, denial, allergy to complexity, preference for short-term gratification over long-term planning — are our own flaws writ large. Members of Congress are people too; they're likely to embrace change only when it's easy, popular and rewarding. Do we really want them trying to change us?

Michelle Obama warned us during the campaign, "[Barack] is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your divisions, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones, that you push yourselves to be better." The President reinforced this in his Inaugural Address when he urged Americans to set aside childish things and choose hope over fear. (See pictures of how Obama prepared his Inauguration speech.)

But we don't need to change our hearts like that. Opt-out 401(k)s, simpler mortgage applications, programmable thermostats and cost-effective medical protocols can help us do the right things even if we remain ignorant, lazy, greedy and obsessed with childish things. It doesn't matter if we save energy because we care about the earth or our money or our neighbors; we just need to save energy. The government just needs to provide the right rules, incentives and nudges to help us make the right choices. It would be nice if Obama could change our social norms so that green living and healthy eating and financial responsibility would be new ways of keeping up with the Joneses. But it would be enough if he changed Washington's social norms. We need better policies, not better attitudes.

Behavioral literature can be a depressing window on human folly. But it offers us ways to transcend our folly, to restrain our ids, to harness our conformity and inertia and weakness in order to do less of the things that hurt us and our country. "In the physical world, we understand our limitations," Ariely says. "Nobody gets upset because we can't fly. We just design something to help us fly." If Obama can help us fly from our bad habits, he'll provide the change we need.

The original version of this story misidentified Mike Moffo as a field director of Obama's campaign.

The Meditations of an Actual Conservative - first installment

2010-04-27T14:55:00.000-07:00

In general, this blog proposes that believing in a particular way (world-view, theoretical orientation, or mythology) builds a particular culture through influence on the creation of group process - how people make group decisions. What directions might emerge from believing the assumptions on which the piece below is based?

The Meditations of an Actual Conservative - first installment

(reproduced with permission from a Facebook discussion)

30 Years of Economic History or A Brief Examination of How We Got Where We Are.

by Tobin E Threadgill

The real judge of economic health is not the size of the national debt. It's the size of the national debt in relation to the GDP. Our Debt / GDP ratio is below that which existed in 1945. We pulled ourselves out of that and we can pull ourselves out again but its going to take economic discipline and the same sense of self-sacrifice embraced in that era. It's an unfortunate but natural part of economic and political reality in a fluctuating and volatile global economy.

In 1979, the Debt/GDP ratio was the lowest in the modern era, around 31%. Every president, Democrat or Republican following WW2 was being fiscally conservative and paying down the Debt/GDP ratio. However in the 1970's our economy was suffering the stagnating effects of the Arab Oil Embargo. Economists dubbed this "stagflation" because our GDP was stagnant, we were experiencing inflation and associated high interest rates. Nixon, Ford and Carter all continued efforts to reduce the Debt/GDP ratio to the detriment of the overall economy. Why? Because they all ascribed to the economic theory that too much Government spending would damage the economy even more. They were wrong and interestingly it was Ronald Reagan, a self avowed fiscal conservative, who proved it. How? Huge deficit spending. Reagan, the fiscal conservative, kick started the economy by initiating huge Government spending. Because of this the economy took off and the GDP increased drastically. The problem that eventually bit Reagan in the ass was his foolish adoption of Arthur Laffers now debunked theory of trickle down economics. Laffer assumed that reducing taxes would boost the GDP so much that lower tax rates would still mean higher revenue for the Government. It was a disaster. Lowering taxes on the wealthiest Americans lowered revenues and increased the debt faster than the GDP. Why, because the wealthiest Americans did not spend but instead saved their money. Nothing trickled down. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and the middle class shrunk. Reagan should have lowered taxes on the middle class who were the real spenders. When Reagan finally leaves office the national debt has increased 215% to 2.9 Trillion Dollars. Had he instead increased taxes moderately after the economic recovery he could have controlled the debt to a manageable level and even kept it below the increase in GDP. Like all presidents before him he could have left office lowering or maintaining the Debt/GDP ratio. Instead he blew the roof off increasing the debt more than any president in history during peacetime or economic expansion. What started out as a great economic reversal was mismanaged eventually forming a cloud that would become a disaster in 2008, with the help of GW Bush, the son of his vice president.

Next was GHW Bush. He tried to stem the flood of red ink from what he once described as “Voodoo Economics” but Reagan's disastrous tax cuts to the wealthy were gutting the US Treasury. After promising "No new taxes" Bush was forced to break his pledge to limit the skyrocketing debt. For that he was thrown to the wolves by his own party, one significantly funded by the wealthy who liked their tax cuts despite their distructive effects on the overall economy. Bush is handily defeated at the polls and our national debt was approaching 5 trillion dollars.

In comes William Jefferson Clinton. His economic team recognises that Laffer Curve economics is a boondoggle and increases taxation on the wealthy while also cutting spending and taxes on the middle class. In short order revenue for the US Treasury goes up, resulting in lower interest rates and a boost in GDP. The economy thrives with the greatest increase in GDP since WW2. Clinton leaves office with the first budget surplus since Eisenhower. In the last 30 years Clinton is the only president to decrease the Debt/GDP ratio.

Disaster strikes. In comes GW Bush, a stooge for Dick Cheney, a corporate supply-sider who talks his president into again implementing Laffer’s disastrous trickle down economic policies. Tax breaks are again given to the wealthy and revenue to the US Treasury falters in relation to GDP. Consequently, the economy again spirals downward, the surplus vanishes and the Debt/GDP ratio skyrockets. 9/11 strikes and we enter a protracted war in Afghanistan and Iraq, putting more spending strain on the economy. GW Bush's unbelievable answer? More tax cuts to the wealthy...to the tune of 1.3 trillion dollars. As the economy continues to falter poor financial/mortgage practices from deregulation lead to an economic debacle which threatens the entire economic system. We are on the brink of economic meltdown. Finally GW Bush does one thing right. He orders huge economic spending to stabilise the fragile economy. It works and side-steps disaster but at massive cost. Why? Because we are already in so much debt due to past Laffer Curve economic skulduggery that we have little overhead to borrow ourselves out of trouble. The national debt is approaching 11 trillion dollars.

In comes a new president, Barak Obama, another fiscal moderate like Clinton, but he faces a much more difficult challenge. Fortunately he hires someone like Paul Volker instead of a supply-side ideologue to institute fiscal policy. At the end of the day it is 1941 all over again but the threat to our nation is the housing bubble and improperly regulated financial instruments, not the Imperial Japanese. What is our only real option? In 1941, we were against the wall and still suffering the effects of 1929 but to survive as a nation we were forced to institute huge deficit spending to build military hardware to fight the enemy. It ended the depression and won the war but left us with a Debt/GDP ratio above 100%. Today our Debt/GDP ratio is around 72% and we are similarly against a wall. Our only viable option is huge deficit spending via programs like TARP to buy time for the economy and our GDP to recover. To do otherwise will risk either collapse or more likely, a decade long period of zero economic growth. Obama is ultimately doing the only thing we can do and the fruits of his economic strategy are already ripening.

GM has stopped bleeding red ink and chosen to repay its 8.1 billion dollar loan from the US Treasury. This has saved thousands of American jobs and US manufacturing market share that otherwise would have been significantly lost to a foreign corporation.

New housing starts are at their highest rate in decades and prices are starting to recover.

The Stock Market although still volatile is over 11,000 from a low of 6500.

As the economy recovers we will see a significant increase in GDP. Careful increases in taxation of the wealthy combined with increasing GDP should build a stable base for long-term and eventually stable economic growth.

The balancing act Obama faces is figuring out a way to hold spending and increase taxation to stem the bleeding without seriously impacting GDP increases. Decreasing taxation on the middle class and increased taxation on the wealthy have already been implemented but that alone is not enough. Despite all the hair-pulling and misinformation, healthcare reform was not something that was optional. It was mandatory and should have been implemented decades ago. Increases in healthcare costs are so astronomical that they threatened the long-term health of the whole economy. It should have gone further but the political climate did not allow it. That will change as Americans experience first hand how reform works in the next decade.

What also must be considered is changes to Social Security. People live longer today and the very wealthy do not depend on Social Security benefits for retirement. It should be restructured to reflect this reality.

We must lower our military budget. Our military expenditures are stifling. We spend 41 cents of every dollar spent in the world. Our expenditures are 800% larger than China, 1200% larger than Russia and 20,000% larger than Iran. We cannot afford this. For example, the US has almost 50,000 troops in Germany to fight a soviet threat that no longer not exists. This is military waste, plain and simple. A modest decrease would not impact our security and go a long way toward providing us with funds to start paying down our debt, just like we did following WW2.

So...Who would you rather have in the White House? Who do you trust in this period of economic crisis, John McCain & Sarah Palin or Barak Obama and Joe Biden? I'm an old Goldwater Republican who now considers himself an independent and I can tell you I prefer Obama because I understand the economic challenges we face based on a solid facts and economic history, not BS peddled by demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter or Sarah Palin.

Someday the Republican Party will return to its true conservative roots and regain its position as a valid representative of its political ideology. Until then I will not support them with my votes. The New Republican Party has done enough damage to this great nation.

[What follows is excerpted from the comments which followed the above post - ed.]

As someone statistically a member of the "wealthy" I've never resented the progressive tax structure. Besides, the... See More wealthy have instruments to lessen their tax burden. The middle class simply does not have access to these instruments because they do not have that much expendable income. I know wealthy who pay a smaller percentage on their real income in taxes than those in the middle class by utilizing these instruments. The progressive tax structure essentially mitigates this fact.

One thing that erks me about many wealthy complaining about taxes is that these are often the same people who wax eloquent about patriotism. I find it appalling that they are also the most likely to cheat on their taxes. Their country is in trouble. Their country provided this incredible opportunity to realize a wonderful quality of life and while they talk about patriotism and the rule of law, they cheat on their taxes. That's patriotism?

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I[n] the 1980's [t]he income tax rate went down under Reagan/Bush for the wealthiest Americans from around 69.5% to as low as 28%. There was a tiered rate during this time so the rate went up to around 33%-35% and then down to 28% for income above a certain level. This tiered structure taxed the middle class more that the wealthy.

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FWIW...Here are some historical FACTS to consider. In 1982 the top income tax rates dropped to 50% or below for the first time since 1932. The top taxes rates since 1982 have been far below those existing between 1932 and 1981. So, the wealthy who complain about today bearing unusually high income tax rates are either lying or unaware of historical fact. For example, during Eisenhower's administration, a proud Republican and conservative, the top income tax rate was 90%. Recent top income tax rates have fluctuated in the 30 - 40 % range.

Don't believe me? The facts are easy to find.

http://www.ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.html

Another interesting to note. In 1992, Clinton raised the top rate to only 39.9%. This combined with cutting spending, cut the deficit. We enjoyed a huge increase in GDP via a booming economy which further led to increased revenue, balancing the budget and even creating a surplus.

As soon as GWBush started lowering tax rates on the wealthy, upping the income threshold and increasing spending, the budget exploded the other direction.

Its right there in black and white for anyone who cares to actually consider verifiable facts over BS peddled by ideologues with an political agenda.

Links and References

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=394465253943&comments

[from Toby]
The reason I cited the NTU website is that the numbers are correct and they are obviously anti taxation. Despite their bias, the numbers do not lie. The most obvious source for the information I use if the Congressional Budget Office.

http://www.cbo.gov/budget/historical.shtml

Other sources for information off the top of my head are these:

http://cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

http://zfacts.com/p/1117.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms

http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/2/us-debt-levels-are-fine-debt-to-gdp-chart-is-wrong-and-meaningless

http://www.uwsa.com/us-national-debt.html

http://www.creditloan.com/blog/2008/10/30/americans-debt-to-income-ratio-as-compared-with-other-countries/

Obama Administration Marks Major Open Government Milestone

2010-04-07T12:28:00.000-07:00

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 7, 2010

Obama Administration Marks Major Open Government Milestone

All Cabinet agencies release open government plans and highlight

flagship initiatives on transparency, participation, collaboration

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, President Obama hailed the release of open government plans by all Cabinet agencies – the latest milestone in his Administration’s unprecedented efforts to erase the long-standing barriers between the American people and the government. These plans are the agencies’ strategic roadmap for making transparency, citizen participation, and collaboration part of the way they work.

“For too long, Washington has closed itself off from the oversight of the American public, resulting in information that’s difficult to find, taxpayer dollars that disappear without a trace, and lobbyists that wield undue influence,” said President Obama. “That’s why my Administration is taking concrete steps to build a government that’s more transparent, open and accountable. And now that these plans are published online, we hope the American people will play their part and collaborate with us to provide oversight and improve upon this information. Together, we won’t just build a more efficient and effective government, but a stronger democracy as well.”

The plans released Wednesday make agency operations and data more transparent, while creating new ways for citizens to have an active voice in their government. In addition, each agency has identified at least one “flagship initiative” – a signature open government innovation in the agency. Examples include:

· Department of Health and Human Services’ Community Health Data Initiative: This initiative will publish online a large-scale Community Health Data Set -- a wealth of easily accessible, downloadable information data on community health care costs, quality, access, and public health. HHS will work with outside experts and citizens to take advantage of the new data to raise awareness of community health performance and spark improvements.

· Department of Energy’s Open Energy Information Initiative: DOE has launched Open Energy Information (OpenEI.org), a new open-source web platform that opens DOE resources and data to the public. The free, editable, and evolving wiki-platform will help to deploy clean energy technologies across the country and the world. OpenEI.org also will provide technical resources, including U.S. lab tools, which can be used by developing countries as they move toward clean energy deployment.

· Department of Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative: The VA Innovation Initiative (VAi2) will invite VA employees, private sector entrepreneurs, and academic leaders to contribute the best ideas for innovations to increase Veteran access to VA services, reduce or control costs of delivering those services, enhance the performance of VA operations, and improve the quality of service Veterans and their families receive. The VA Innovation Initiative will identify, prioritize, fund, test, and deploy the most promising solutions to the VA’s most important challenges.

· Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Homelessness Prevention Resources Initiative: Many agencies and organizations struggle with the task of capturing information about the homeless. Even more difficult is the task of predicting when and where homelessness will strike. HUD believes that homelessness can be averted by combining information from multiple agencies and using the data to identify communities that may be at a tipping point towards increased homelessness. HUD will work to develop a set of tools and processes to help predict at-risk communities, allowing the Department to take proactive steps to combat it.

The White House website tracks the progress of those agencies required to meet the open government milestones. Independent agencies are not mandated to participate, though many, like the Peace Corps and the Corporation for National and Community Service, have taken on the challenge to open their practices to greater transparency and public participation.

In addition to the Open Government Plans, the Administration is releasing new policy guidance involving the use of social media and the Paperwork Reduction Act, improving transparency in the rulemaking process, and setting the process by which the government will collect and publish, for the first time ever, subaward data for all federal grants and contracts. This last piece is in line with the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, which then-Senator Obama coauthored in 2006 with Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

Background on the White House Open Government Initiative

The Administration’s open-government efforts began on the President’s first full day in office, when he signed a presidential memorandum that established transparency, participation, and collaboration as the hallmarks of a more efficient, accountable government. That same memorandum directed the Federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to issue recommendations for creating a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government.

To that end, the White House Open Government Initiative and the CTO partnered with the American people to solicit expertise from outside of Washington. The three-phase public consultation involved thousands of Americans commenting on and shaping policy approaches that were incorporated in the December 2009 Open Government Directive. The Administration released an Open Government Progress Reportto coincide with the Directive, outlining the steps that the federal government has implemented to break down those barriers to public participation and agency transparency.

###

Agency plans can be found here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/around.

Chelsea Kammerer

The White House

Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Office of Public Engagement

p: 202.456.3182 I ckammerer@who.eop.gov

Seriously Funny

2009-06-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

Reproduced feature from UC Berkeley Alumni Assoc. California Magazine

2009 March / April

https://alumni.berkeley.edu/California/200903/ratliff.asp

Seriously funny

by Evan Ratliff

Legendary folklorist Alan Dundes took jokes to another level.

Clintons: AP Photo/Jimmy May, Norris: Orion Pictures Corporation/Photofest, Bush: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

Alan Dundes died with a joke on his lips. At least, that's one version of the story. This much is certain: The beloved Cal professor died unexpectedly in 2005, while lecturing. Dundes was a giant in the field of folklore scholarship, an inveterate collector of, and prolific publisher on, unrecorded tales, songs, and traditions. But the man who was sometimes called the Joke Professor had a particular affinity for humor.

Growing up in the suburbs of New York City, Dundes fell in love with the quips his father picked up on the commuter train and heard hundreds more during two years in the Navy. As a grad student, inspired in part by Freud's collection of Jewish jokes, Dundes began gathering them for his doctoral dissertation. Once ensconced at Berkeley, he launched the Folklore Archive, which now holds over 500,000 items—including thousands of bits of humor collected by students enrolled in Dundes's famous course, The Forms of Folklore.

A large man, known for his rapid speech and an endless rotation of baggy suits, white shirts, and dark ties, Dundes held court in office hours that were both intimidating and exhilarating. He brimmed with advice and insight but countenanced no sloppy scholarship. So singular a presence was he for students—some of whom called him "the Master" or simply "Himself"—that they collected their own Dundes folklore, known as Dundesiana. The Berkeley Folklore Archive even has a folder devoted to Dundes-inspired "latrinalia," the bathroom wall scribblings he established as a legitimate object of study. One entry reads "Keep Alan Dundes working! Write graffiti!"

Dundes's revolutionary contribution to the field, however, was not in gathering folklore but in analyzing it. "For him, being a folklorist was like being a scientist," says Maria Teresa Agozzino, a folklore professor at Ohio State University who worked as Dundes's assistant for eight years. To Dundes, collected scraps of folklore "were the hard data" of social mores and cultural trends, and jokes could be particularly illuminating.

Dundes turned a gimlet eye—often with a Freudian lens—to every brand of humor ranging from math jokes to light-bulb jokes, Gary Hart jokes to AIDS jokes, Muslim jokes to elephant jokes. The latter, for instance, he interpreted as veiled references to African Americans, a kind of humor code spawned by white anxiety over civil rights. He also saw a direct line running from what he believed was a German cultural obsession with scatological jokes, to the rise of Nazi fascism.

"Some people believe jokes and nursery rhymes and fairy tales are just harmless little stories that don't mean anything," Dundes told Jim Holt, author of the joke history Stop Me If You've Heard This. "But they're not meaningless. And they're not necessarily harmless, either."

Digging out the meaning buried in off-color humor, Dundes knew, could cause offense. And offend he certainly did. His analysis of the "dead baby" joke cycle, which he linked to abortion's emergence as a political issue, featured such universally disturbing examples as "What's harder to unload, a truck full of bowling balls or a truck full of dead babies?" Answer: "Bowling balls. You can't use a pitchfork with bowling balls." It's a revolting premise with an even more disgusting punch line, and Dundes cited such things ad nauseam. It wasn't gratuitous. He insisted there was meaning to be mined from all jokes, no matter how crass or shallow.

"Nothing is so sacred, so taboo, or so disgusting that it cannot be the subject of humor," he wrote in a paper analyzing Auschwitz jokes. "Indeed, it is precisely those topics culturally defined as sacred, taboo, or disgusting that tend to provide the principal grist for humor mills."

Of course not everyone agreed that all jokes, no matter how offensive, deserved scholarly attention. Several publishers refused to print his work—notably his examinations of Holocaust jokes and his paper on Romanian political jokes, "Laughter Behind the Iron Curtain." During his career, he was reportedly shouted down, pelted by audiences, and once draped in toilet paper while speaking. He is likely the only folklorist to ever receive a death threat, after a version of his classic 1978 paper "Into the Endzone for a Touchdown"—on the homoerotic subtext of American football terminology—appeared in Time magazine.

If you didn't know the man, Dundes's obsession with finding the dark shadings of id and superego in every punch line might suggest a certain humorlessness. Yet the thing about him that friends and former colleagues remember best was precisely his ability to make people laugh. Professor of Scandinavian, John Lindow still cracks up recalling Dundes's story of falling overboard on his final day in the Navy. "He was," Lindow says, "probably the funniest person I've ever known."

"He could have had a career as a standup comedian and made a fortune," insists Stanley Brandes, a professor of social cultural anthropology at Berkeley.

"Even though he'd been doing it for 30 years, he would make everybody feel like he hadn't heard it before," recalls Agozzino. "He was like a kid in a candy store. He never lost that infectious excitement."

Dick Corten '65, who took Dundes's courses as an undergrad and was editor of The Pelican, remembers the lectures. "Everything was rapidfire. His badda-bing delivery, his citations of other scholars, his gallop through the material…. His energy level must have been extraordinarily high." Partly due to the pace Dundes set, his classes tended to take most students "down a notch. A students to B, B to C, and so on" Corten says. "As entertaining as his lectures were, he wasn't just an entertainer. That the material was diverting cut two ways. You couldn't help but laugh, but then you had to grab the concept and remember what it meant."

It was Jim Holt who wrote in Stop Me If You've Heard This that Dundes died "with a joke on his lips." The Wikipedia entry on him reports only that his last words were, "But there are really only two uses for Marxist theory in folkloristics." It's tough to say whether that was meant as a setup or a serious point. In any case, the entry contains no citation. It's just one more bit of Dundesiana for the archives.

Evan Ratliff is a freelance writer living in San Francisco.

Samuel Beckett

2007-12-19T23:02:00.000-08:00

from the Internet Archive

Also Known As:
Samuel Beckett's Film
Runtime: 20 min
Country: USA
Color: Black and White
Sound Mix: Silent

A twenty-minute, almost totally silent film (no dialogue or music one 'shhh!') in which Buster Keaton attempts to evade observation by an all-seeing eye. But, as the film is based around Bishop Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi' (to be is to be perceived), Keaton's very existence conspires against his efforts

Lucky's monologue - French. "Waiting for godot" By Samuel Beckett

PLAY (from YouTube)

much more from YouTube

CCR exercise 01

2007-12-19T11:28:00.000-08:00

Beyond the published analysis on the web, what's going on in this song?

Lyrics for: Lookin' Out My Back Door

Just got home from Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy
Got to sit down, take a rest on the porch.
Imagination sets in, pretty soon I'm singin',

Chorus:
Doo, doo, doo, lookin' out my back door.

There's a giant doing cartwheels, a statue wearin' high heels.
Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn.
A dinosaur Victrola listening to Buck Owens.

Chorus

Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band.
Won't you take a ride on the flyin' spoon
Doo, doo doo.
Wondrous apparition provided by magician.

Chorus

Tambourines and elephants are playing in the band.
Won't you take a ride on the flyin' spoon
Doo, doo doo.
Bother me tomorrow, today, I'll buy no sorrows.

Chorus

Forward troubles Illinois, lock the front door, oh boy
Look at all the happy creatures dancing on the lawn.
Bother me tomorrow, today, I'll buy no sorrows.

Chorus

Robot sex and vampire energy - nah, mythology is dead.

2007-12-18T21:06:00.000-08:00

Robot sex.
Almost not kidding.
http://www.60secondscience.com/archive/science-technology-news/robot-sex-is-the-latest-buzz.php?sc=WR_20071218

Our vampire energy sucks are on a wall switch. One toggle later and No More Suck.
That's just because we're very clever.

Voluntary Regulation

2007-12-18T20:54:00.000-08:00

Propaganda's Launch as an art form

2007-12-18T17:35:00.001-08:00

MULTI-media

2007-12-12T09:15:00.000-08:00

Multi - media. Crossroads of image and word and sound and myths (Big Ideas in and through story).

Example

Check out this video: I Need You To Remember

Add to My Profile | More Videos

more later...

Wafa Sultan - an opportunity to debug

2007-08-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the 21st century mindset she implies is not as simple as she thinks. What if it were not a clash between civilization and backwardness but between, as she almost implies, a transition from doing conflict poorly to doing it well while holding unused the option to war while honoring its gravity and the passions of The Enemy, whomever is so identified at the moment. More on this to come.

Origins of Psychology

2007-08-08T12:18:00.000-07:00

reproduced from : http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhiana.cgi?id=dv4-01

PSYCHOLOGICAL IDEAS IN ANTIQUITY

Psychology is a modern term, but its components, psyche and logos, are words whose history goes back to the Indo-European parent language. For the philos- ophers of classical antiquity, giving an “account” (logos) of the psyche was a necessary part of intellectual inquiry. Greek philosophy was vitally concerned with many of the problems which exercise modern psychologists, but did not regard “study of the mind” as an autonomous subject with specific terms of refer- ence. Frequently theories about the psyche were intimately connected with ethical, physical, and meta- physical assumptions.

In this article “antiquity” means the period of Greco-Roman civilization (ca. 750 B.C.-A.D. 450), and “psychological doctrines” means theories held about the psyche by philosophers. It is necessary to leave the term psyche untranslated initially, since it cannot be accurately rendered by a single English word such as “soul” or “mind.” The meaning of psyche will best appear by examining its functions and what it is used to denote. Most of this survey is devoted to a chrono- logical discussion of the major psychological doctrines, but a preliminary note on the language and popular conceptions inherited by philosophers will help to set the scene.

THE LEGACY OF EARLY GREEK LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

The Homeric poems (ca. 750-700 B.C.) are the earli- est European literature. In them references to psyche are almost confined to descriptions of death or the dead. A man who has lost his psyche is either dead or unconscious (through fainting) and it is probable that the word has a primary association with breath. The precise location of psyche in the body is obscure, though there are good reasons for associating it with the head (R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought, Cambridge [1951], pp. 95-115). Psyche is sufficiently corporeal to be “breathed out” through the mouth or through a wound and to survive as a ghost when it has left the body. But though essential to the living man, psyche is not connected in Homer with any particular activity. Nous is his favorite word to describe “mental seeing” or “planning” and it can sometimes be translated “mind.” To denote emotions the important word is thumos (physically associated with breath and blood). A man may “desire in his thumos” or his thumos may “urge him to do some- thing.” Though not regarded as “organs” of the body, nous and thumos are permanent possessions of the living man to which his thinking and feeling belong. There are other words which overlap or go beyond these, but Homer does not have a single noun to denote the soul or personality. Nor does he use a single term for “body.” When the Homeric hero is under emotional stress he may externalize his heart or his thumos, scolding it or conversing with it. The notion that emo- tions or intellect are in some sense independent of their possessor is illustrated by the “psychic intervention” (Dodds [1951], pp. 5-16) seen in expressions like “Zeus took away his understanding” or “A god put courage into his heart.”

The survival of the psyche in Homer appears not to possess any important ethical or religious associa- tions. Deprived of the body, the psyche lives on in Hades, a feeble transformation or residue of the living man. Essentially, the man whose psyche has left the body is dead. Merely to survive as a psyche did not make him immortal (athanatos). For to be athanatos (literally “deathless”) is to possess the property of the gods, and the Homeric psyche is so far from being divine that it is compared to smoke. The immortality of the soul was a concept which Greeks as late as the fifth century B.C. found surprising (Herodotus IV, 93ff.).

The significance of the development between Homeric thought and early philosophy has been admirably analyzed by Snell (Die Entdeckung des Geistes, pp. 12ff.); but a caveat is perhaps needed against his claim that Homer gives a fully repre- sentative picture of Greek ways of thinking at a par- ticular time. Homer is the culmination of a long oral tradition which has its own highly formalized expres- sions. In the lyric poets of the next two centuries psyche came to be treated as the seat of emotions, in spite of its Homeric associations with death; and it is possible that such a use of the word is not as novel as its absence from Homer might suggest. Eventually intellectual activity was also ascribed to psyche and by the fifth century B.C. psyche has changed its relation to other words and become the name for a single thing to which consciousness and vitality in general belong. How and why this happened is impossible to answer precisely, but it is certain that religious conceptions associated with the names of Orpheus and Pythagoras were highly influential.

The essence of these conceptions, which probably go back to the sixth century B.C. in northern Greece and southern Italy, is as follows: the psyche is an im- mortal (and therefore divine) being, sullied by incor- poration into a mortal body but capable by initiation and ritual observances of becoming pure and eventu- ally free of its earthly shell. Rebirth in various forms and final union with the universal divinity are essential features of this doctrine. It is clear that the Homeric concept of psyche has become quite transmuted here.

Page 2, Volume 4

Now, far from signifying merely that which leaves a man when he dies, psyche must, in order to fulfill the religious belief, denote his living self or personality. The full significance of this concept was to be devel- oped by Plato, but some earlier philosophers (whether or not they accepted the religious belief) now treated psyche as the center of consciousness.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DOCTRINES OF THE PRE-SOCRATICS

1. Thales and Anaximenes. The first Greek thinkers who are conventionally called “philosophers” were more interested in cosmogony and cosmology than in the study of man. To Thales of Miletus psyche seems to have denoted both life and the source of motion. The concept of psyche as that which moves and ani- mates the body is a natural development of the view that a dead (motionless) body has lost its psyche. In Aristotle's opinion (De anima 411a 7f.) Thales may have believed the world itself to possess psyche; and many later philosophers certainly took this view. Anaximenes, Thales' younger fellow-countryman, drew a specific analogy between the human psyche and the material which he supposed to surround (and control) the cosmos (frag. 2). Both were identified with breath or air, and the point of the comparison is clearly that the psyche in man possesses a function similar to that of air in the world. Psyche or air is the life-principle. Thales and Anaximenes did not apparently discuss psychology in detail, but the assumption of an affinity between the human psyche and the cosmic principle belongs to the same climate of ideas which gave rise to beliefs in the psyche as the divine element in man and the center of his consciousness.

2. Heraclitus. In Heraclitus of Ephesus all these concepts occur and they are also associated with an interest in sense perception and theory of knowledge. To Heraclitus the senses are the first source of informa- tion about the world, but their witness can be mislead- ing (frag. 107). If the evidence of the senses is correctly interpreted by the soul (by which psyche will now be translated) it can bring about an understanding of the logos, the principle determining all things. This princi- ple, which means the unity behind opposition and change, is not directly an object of perception, though Heraclitus may have supposed it to be “drawn in” physically through the senses (Guthrie [1962], p. 430). Logos is an object of intellectual apprehension which a soul in the right condition can grasp. The principle has as its material constituent fire, and Heraclitus probably also regarded fire as the fundamental material of soul, since “it is death to soul to become water” (frag. 36), while “a dry [i.e., hot] soul is wisest and best” (frag. 118). A number of fundamental ideas are involved here. First, the soul is now treated as the recipient of sense-impressions. Second, it is able, by interpreting these, to grasp a principle which is not strictly empirical. Third, the soul at its best is analogous to, if not identical with, the fiery cosmic principle. Aristotle, much later, was to talk of “the thought which thinks itself,” and the embryo of this notion may be contained in Heraclitus' belief that the soul is both the apprehender of logos and in some sense identical with logos. These ideas were not stated in such precise terms by Heraclitus himself. Indeed he advised that the soul possesses depths which cannot be grasped (frag. 45). But they are reasonable inferences from his oracular fragments. He probably believed that the soul was immortal, and that excellence of character went along with intellectual understanding. In this he anticipated Plato, but also his near contemporary, Empedocles.

3. Empedocles. In Empedocles, science and mysti- cism are curiously blended. But though it would be improper to draw an absolute distinction between his two poems, On Nature and Purifications, the former is primarily an attempt to explain the physical world and the latter an account, in the Orphic-Pythagorean tradition, of the incarnations, rewards, and punishments of the “soul” (daimon). Since the work On Nature accounts for sense perception, emotion, and thought in purely material terms, without reference to a psyche, it is hard to know what role the immortal soul played in the mortal body. Empedocles' account of this is confined to the religious poem (in the evidence which survives) and it is safest to assume that he distinguished the source of physical consciousness from the moral, immortal self. If so, Empedocles has come nearer to the concept of a soul which is quite distinct from the body.

Empedocles gave detailed explanations of sense per- ception and thought. It is difficult to summarize these, since they are intimately connected with his basic assumptions about the world. Four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and two polar forces, Love and Strife, constitute all that exists. To perceive is to receive in the pores of the sense organs effluences from the exter- nal elements, which are recognized by similar elements in the sense organs. Thought takes place primarily in the blood, which is composed of a nearly perfect mix- ture (frags. 98, 105) of the elements. It is by thought that we perceive Love and Strife, which are probably also embodied in the blood. Empedocles does not ex- plain whether or how the evidence of the senses is organized by thought. At about this time a Pythagorean philosopher, Alcmaeon, had traced perception from the senses to the brain, but Empedocles may have regarded thought itself as a category of perception which has as its function receiving through the pores and assimi-

Page 3, Volume 4

lating different combinations of external elements. Even the elements are in some sense “conscious,” and all processes, including emotional and mental activi- ties, are referred to their mixture and separation. The naiveté of the theory should not obscure its achieve- ments. Empedocles has focused attention on the mech- anism of consciousness, and offered an explanation consistent with his theories about the natural world. Psychology is here related to physiology. The investi- gation of physical phenomena has aroused interest in the physical processes of sensation and thought.

4. Parmenides. Other pre-Socratic theories may be discussed more briefly. To Parmenides, whose influence on Empedocles and subsequent philosophy was pro- found, the physical world possessed no reality; for it contained no subject of which “exists” could always be truly asserted. Parmenides was unable to satisfy the claims of his logic by reference to changing phenomena and he rejected the senses in favor of nous, the mind or the application of thought: the only existent is an object of intellectual apprehension. For the history of psychology this is important. Parmenides set up the intellect as an autonomous faculty, quite independent of sense perception. Its physical basis (frag. 16) is obscure and hardly relevant to his main argument. But among philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, who were concerned with the relation between soul and body, an analogous belief in the primacy and independence of the intellectual faculty persists.

5. Anaxagoras and Democritus. It is improbable that any pre-Socratic philosopher regarded mind or soul as wholly immaterial. Anaxagoras made nous the first cause of the cosmos and the controlling principle of living things. He called it the “finest and purest of all things” (frag. 12), which suggests that he was coming close to expressing its immateriality. Unlike Empedocles, Anaxagoras regarded perception as the interaction of contraries; we recognize external heat by virtue of cold in ourselves. He was also an extreme realist, taking all qualitative differences to be funda- mental differences in matter itself. This theory was opposed by his contemporary, Democritus the atomist, who referred all the qualities we perceive to changing states of the body and its interaction with atoms of different shapes. Democritus was consistent with the general pre-Socratic position in giving the soul (spherical atoms distributed over the body) the same substance as his cosmic principle.

PLATO

Plato's psychological theory is fundamental to his whole philosophy and only its more striking aspects can be indicated here. In regarding “cultivation of the soul” as the primary duty, Plato was certainly influ enced by Socrates and the Pythagoreans. Our knowl- edge of Socrates is largely based on the works of Plato, but it can be assumed that Socrates advocated and practiced rigorous discussion about moral concepts as the means of tending the soul and making it competent to control the body and its passions. “Soul” here means intellectual and moral self. The two attributes go hand in hand. For it is only when we know what goodness is that we can (and will) become good.

Dualism. Plato presents this intellectualist position most strongly in the Phaedo. Soul and body are alien substances. It is the aim of the soul, which is simple in essence and immortal, to rid itself of the body, for while it is embodied the soul cannot attain perfect knowledge. The only objects of knowledge are Forms— unique, incomposite, immaterial entities of which the particular objects of perception are only fleeting replicas. During embodiment the soul can apprehend the Forms only by thinking as far as possible inde- pendently of the body. Soul is the thinking, rational self in direct opposition to the passions, pleasures, and sensations associated with the body. It is still part of the soul's job to animate the body during its incarna- tion, but this is a regrettable incursion on its spiritual activity and Plato does not explain how the soul acts on the body.

Differentiated Soul. This extreme dualism was not Plato's final word. In the Republic (Book IV) soul loses its unity and becomes divided into nous (“intellect”), thumos (“passion”), and epithumia (“appetite”). To its appetitive part are ascribed bodily desires; thumos is the emotional element in virtue of which we feel anger, fear, etc.; nous is (or should be) the controlling part which subjugates the appetites with the help of thumos. Plato seeks justification for this theory on two counts. First, his quest for justice is based on the assumption that the state is a large-scale analogue of the individual, and therefore the components which sanction the state's division into three classes (artisans, soldiers, and guardians) are established as categories for analyzing the psychology of the individual. Second, Plato invokes the empirical fact of conflict within the individual (Republic IV, 436ff.). At one and the same time we may both desire to drink and be unwilling to drink. But the same thing cannot act in opposite ways with the same part of itself towards the same object at the same time. If such conflict is to be referred to the soul as a whole, then the soul must possess different parts to account for the clash. It is also the case that passion and appetite may conflict, for a man may be angry with that in himself which prompts him to do some- thing shameful. Hence a part of the soul different from reason and appetite is required. Like the soldiers of the ideal state, passion should be the ally of the

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governing component. The basic conflict for Plato is still between bodily desires and intellect, between sense and reason, but the dualism of the Phaedo has been modified by locating the division which follows from incarnation within the soul itself. At the same time Plato saw the possibility of reconciliation within the divided self, for he asserts that the two lower parts have “following reason” as their function (Republic IX, 586e). The true philosopher is one in whom the rule of reason is established, and in this situation all parts of the soul conspire together for a united good. Nor is the rule of reason an exercise of cold intellection. The rational part of the soul is a lover of wisdom, and distinguished from the appetitive part not by the ab- sence of all desire but by having a different object of desire: the absolute, intelligible good.

This doctrine is presented mythically in the Phaedrus (246a ff.), where the human soul is pictured as a charioteer (reason) driving a pair of horses (passion and appetite). The passionate horse is a clean, upstanding creature which follows the guide of reason, whereas its fellow horse is a shaggy, recalcitrant beast which tries to drag the chariot down from its heavenly course. Here the soul's composite nature does not depend on incarnation; but the point of the image is the imperfect human soul's moral tension, not its multiplicity of function. Plato's division of the soul persists in later works such as the Timaeus, in which the rational part of the soul is stated to be divine and immortal, and is contrasted with two mortal, irrational parts: passion and appetite (69d ff.). The rational part is located in the head and is composed of immaterial ingredients blended from the basic principles of the intelligible world and the world of physical change. The irrational parts are located in the chest (passion) and the belly (appetite). Their activities are associated with the bodily organs which house them. The blood vessels seem to be the instruments by which the different parts of the soul communicate with each other.

Knowledge and Perception. Soul is self-moving, the principle of motion (i.e., animation) both in individual living things and in the world itself (Phaedrus 245c ff.). The world is an intelligent, living creature on which man himself is modelled. In its original, discarnate state the human soul has direct acquaintance with the Forms and thus acquires knowledge. This knowledge is for- gotten when the soul enters a body but it can be recalled, at least in part, by “dialectic,” rigorous philo- sophical discussion, and the judgments which we make about our perceptions presuppose it. All judgments entail the use of such terms as “exists,” “is the same as,” “is different from,” and these are not objects of perception (Theaetetus 185a ff.). Learning is a process of recollecting a priori truths, a doctrine Plato attempts to prove in the Meno (81e ff.) by an experiment in which an uneducated slave is shown how to “recall” the answer to the problem, what square has twice the area of that of a given square, by answering a series of simple questions. Since sensible objects lack the unchanging existence required by Plato of what is fully real, he took less interest in the analysis of sensation. But in later dialogues the soul is more explicitly related to the body insofar as sensations are described as movements, caused by external phenomena, which are transmitted to the soul through the body (Timaeus 43c); and pleasures which have their source in the body penetrate to the soul (Republic 457c). Plato also recog- nized a form of “judgment” in which the mind pro- nounces rightly or wrongly on what is presented to the senses (Sophist 263d-264b).

Plato's psychology is not a systematic doctrine, rigidly adhered to. His view of the soul developed from the uncompromising dualism of the Phaedo to a posi- tion in which a unitary self is attainable if harmony can be established between reason, emotion, and bodily appetite. Body and mind are related to each other through pleasure and sensation. But Plato never aban- doned his belief in the priority of reason, the part of man which is akin to the fully real, unchanging world and which has as its essential function apprehending that world.

ARISTOTLE

With Aristotle, psychology became a subject of sys- tematic inquiry. He devoted a whole treatise (De anima) to defining soul and its functions, and a group of smaller works (Parva naturalia) covers specific topics such as memory and sleep. Aristotle regarded psychol- ogy as an aspect of physical science, and his own analysis is based on the principles which he lays down for all study of the natural world. But the De anima occupies a fundamental place in his entire philosophy. The biological works require constant reference to it, and it is highly relevant to the ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Aristotle has good claims to be the founder of “psychology,” though the word itself is not used by him. All later Greek psychological theory shows his influence, in both terminology and method.

Soul as Vital Principle. Aristotle began his career as a student of Plato, and in his earliest works, of which only fragments survive, he argued for the preexistence and survival of the whole soul. According to that theory the relationship of body to soul is temporary and con- tingent. But in the De anima, a work of his later years, Aristotle takes body and soul to be two aspects, which are only conceptually distinguishable, of a single sub- stance: “a body which possesses life” (II, 1). Aristotle calls these two aspects “matter” and “form.” Soul is

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the form which animate matter must possess. The physical matter of an animal is not its soul, for what distinguishes animate from inanimate is not physical matter but “the possession of life.” The potentiality to be alive is a natural property of certain bodies, and it is in virtue of soul that such bodies realize this potentiality.

Aristotle defines soul as “the primary actuality of a natural body which potentially has life” (De anima 412a 27-28). By “primary actuality” he means the actual possession of the faculties which are necessary to life, just as an eye, in order to be an eye, must possess the faculty of vision. It is clear that with this concep- tion body and soul are necessarily related. Aristotle recognizes that emotions, desire, perception—all func- tions of the soul—are dependent on the body which contains them. But the influence of Plato remains strong enough to make Aristotle regard mind (nous) as a faculty of soul which has no physical base and which may be capable of existing apart from the body. Of this more below.

Faculties of Soul. In the first book of De anima, Aristotle surveys and criticizes earlier theories of the soul. From them he draws certain general assumptions; in particular, the soul is the principle responsible for thought, sensation and perception (Aristotle's single word aisthesis covers both), and movement. His detailed analysis in the next two books is concerned with these functions of soul.

Since soul is that which distinguishes animate from inanimate, Aristotle considers what characteristics are peculiar to living creatures. He nominates four: nutri- tion (the faculty of growth and reproduction); sensa- tion; locomotion; and thought. The first of these is a “form of movement,” and it is possessed by every living creature from plants upwards. Only man has all four faculties, which thus serve as a way of classifying all living things in ascending order of complexity.

This method of analyzing soul is an important ad- vance on Plato's. Aristotle is not dividing the soul into parts (a procedure which he opposes) but analyzing its different functions. Possessing aisthesis means possessing at least one (touch) of the five senses, and it also entails imagination, pleasure and pain, and de- sire. The latter is not a base part of the soul, but a necessary concomitant of perception and sensation. Aristotle in some sense is a behaviorist. He wants to know how and why living creatures act, and he analyzes this in terms roughly comparable to stimulus and response. Thus an animal moves in space because its appetitive faculty is prompted by an object which presents itself as desirable (or good), and the animal is then moved to pursue it (De anima III, 432b 15-17; 433a 27-29). In man the psychology of action is more complex, since mind and desire may clash; but there is no question of man's acting independently of desire since all action is prompted by the good, as the agent sees it. What man can do, if he has himself under control, is to contemplate objects of desire or aversion without acting in consequence, though physical changes, such as rapid heartbeat, may ensue (De anima 432b 27-32). He also has the unique capacity to deliberate and thus establish a goal of action inde- pendent of his immediate environment and physical state.

Sensation and Perception. Aristotle devoted consid- erable attention to the analysis of sensation and per- ception (De anima II, 5-12). His theories here, though hampered by inadequate physiology (the nervous sys- tem, commonly confused with the arteries, was dis- covered about sixty years after his death) represent a major advance on previous speculation. Aristotle takes sense perception to be an activity in which external objects so act upon each sense organ that it receives their form (perceptible properties) independently of the matter with which this form is associated in the object itself. Just as wax can be imprinted with various impressions, so the sense organ or sense can become qualified as colored, resonant, hot, etc. Neither the sense nor its (perceptible) object has any actual exist- ence except in the act of perception, and this takes place when the appropriate medium (e.g., light in the case of vision) is acted upon by the external object and passes on its perceptible properties to the sense organ. It has been observed that an explanation of aisthesis as a “process of being acted on” does not square well with the active notion of “discrimination,” which Aristotle also attributes to this faculty (Hamlyn, Classical Quarterly, 9 [1959], 12f.). Part of the difficulty arises from a lack of terms to distinguish sensation from perception. But Aristotle was not perhaps so confused as some make out. The organ is so constituted that it reacts in certain ways to the objects which fall between the ranges, light-dark, soft-hard, etc. (De anima 423b 30-424a 10). The sense is a “mean” be- tween two extremes and it is in virtue of this mean that we are made aware of (or judge) the different properties of objects. Hence the reason, according to Aristotle, why we are not aware of temperature equiv- alent to that of our own body.

A more serious difficulty is how to explain the coor- dination of information received by the senses and the problem of self-consciousness. Aristotle asserts that each sense has its own object, to which it is necessarily related. (He seems to exclude the possibility of halluci- nation by connecting actual hearing with actual sounding, De anima 425b 26ff.). But there are certain properties such as motion, rest, shape, magnitude, and

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number which are apprehended by more than one sense. Since there is no sixth sense, this “perception of common sensibles” is due to the cooperative activity of the special senses, i.e., the whole faculty, and Aristotle calls this “common sense” (De anima 425a 14-425b 11). Whereas we can never, in Aristotle's view, be deceived by the simple qualities (e.g., color, sound) reported by the special senses, we can make mistakes about the common sensibles; we can also relate any object of perception to the wrong external object (what Aristotle calls the “incidental” object of perception), i.e., take what we perceive to be Socrates when it is Plato. For perception does not tell us what something is (this is the job of the mind); it gives information about the qualities of an object. The pre- cise workings of “common sense” are obscure in the De anima. In the Parva naturalia mention is made of a single, unified sense faculty, probably located in the heart, by which the data of sense are coordinated and on which self-awareness, imagination, and dream- ing depend. But if Aristotle envisaged such a role for “common sense” in the De anima he does not say so.

Thought. Artistotle's account of thought is obscure and unsatisfactory. Much of the difficulty derives from the fact that he takes thought to be an activity analogous to aisthesis, i.e., a change brought about by an object, in this case “thinkables” or “intelligibles” (De anima III, 4). Now in sensation the sense organ is acted upon by external phenomena, but these are not available to actualize the mind, which “has no organ.” Aristotle takes the mind to be in one respect analogous to a blank wax-tablet on which anything can be imprinted; in this sense mind is capable of receiving and becoming identical with any object of thought, but it has no actual existence until it thinks. In another respect, the mind is an ever-active power that actualizes its own capacity for thought in the manner of light which makes potential colors actual (ibid., III, 5). This doctrine of an active intellect is necessary, given Aristotle's theory of potentiality, if the capacity of the passive intellect is to result in an actual cognitive process. But the active intellect does not apparently create its own objects of thought. Where then do they come from? They cannot be independent substances, like Plato's Forms. But thought is concerned with “forms” or “essences”—what things really are—and it thinks them with the help of mental images (ibid., 431a 14-15). Aristotle seems to conceive of imagination as a faculty, intermediate between aisthesis and thought, which provides the mind with the data in which it can conceptualize the essential form of particular things, or, in the case of abstract thought, the form of, say, triangle without reference to any actual existing triangle. But the precise relationship between imagi nation and the two aspects of mind is very uncertain.

In its active aspect mind is independent of body, eternal and immortal. It is not engendered in the phys- ical process of conception but enters the womb “from outside.” But what kind of existence the individual mind enjoys when separate from the body is not explained. God, for Aristotle, is nothing but an ever- active mind, and man has something of God present in himself through his active intellect.

This doctrine does not seriously contradict Aristotle's view of soul and body as two aspects of a single sub- stance. Soul essentially is that which actualizes the body's vital capacities, but the active intellect has no physical correlate, though it temporarily unites with the passive intellect, which ultimately seems to depend on the body. The details of this theory are not Aristotle's main concern in the De anima. There he shows how the response of a living creature to its environment can be analyzed as a movement, varying in complexity from the single nutritive functions of a plant to the behavior of man, who responds by his rational and appetitive capacities to the data provided by the senses and imagination. Knowledge is the formulation of general notions by induction from the particular objects of perception. This ability to frame concepts provides man with his ethical goals and the subject matter of his scientific inquiries.

Aristotle's psychology is a general analysis of the determinate capacities of the species which fall under the genus animal. It has important metaphysical and ethical applications, but unlike Plato, Aristotle emphasized the organic unity of body and soul, and established terms of reference for investigating animal behavior.

POST-ARISTOTELIAN PSYCHOLOGY

1. Theophrastus and Strato. After Aristotle's death the philosophical school (Lyceum or Peripatos) associ- ated with his name won fame as a center of scientific research, under its successive heads, Theophrastus and Strato. Theophrastus' De sensu, a historical survey of theories of sensation and perception, is an invaluable source of information about the pre-Socratics, but the little that is known about his own psychological theory suggests that he followed Aristotle in most respects. He did, however, raise questions about the “external” origin of intellect and the manner of the association between the active and passive intellect (Themistius, In De an. 430a 25). In this context, and for what follows, Strato is a figure of major importance, a fact which has not always been fully appreciated. Evidence about him is scanty, but it reveals a thinker of the highest scientific quality. Strato departed radically from the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition in regarding sensa-

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tion, perception, emotion, and thought as multiple aspects of a single, unified consciousness (Plutarch, De libidine et aegritudine 697b). This he located in a central organ (the front part of the brain) which com- municates with the sense organs and the rest of the body via pneuma (“fine air or breath”). Sensations occur not in the organs themselves but in this sensorium, whence they are projected to the particular part of the body which is affected (Aëtius, IV 23, 3). Strato thus provided a firm physiological basis for consciousness lacking in Aristotle's system, and com- pletely abandoned the distinction between rational and irrational faculties, as well as the belief in an immortal soul or a transcendent reason. Mind is not peculiar to man; rather, it is a necessary condition of sensation and perception, since the data of sense require “atten- tion” if they are to be registered (Plutarch, De sollertia animalium 961a). In this theory, thought is down- graded to “consciousness,” a thoroughly heretical no- tion in the general context of Greek philosophy. For his physiology Strato was certainly influenced by med- ical science which, probably shortly after his death, was revolutionized by the discovery of the nervous system. (See F. Solmsen, “Greek Philosophy and the Discovery of Nerves,” Museum Helveticum, 18 [1961], 150-63, 169-97.) Strato's use of pneuma as the carrier of “messages” (Aristotle in his biological works had already assigned to pneuma the function of trans- mitting bodily movement) as well as his concept of a unified consciousness found further development in the psychology of the Stoics.

2. Stoics and Epicureans. In spite of their scientific achievements the Peripatetics were not the major influence on later Greek thinking in its broader sense. Epicurus and Zeno (of Citium), who founded schools in Athens at the end of the fourth century B.C., inaugu- rated two philosophical systems which rapidly acquired rival adherents from a wider range of society than Plato and Aristotle had affected. It is customary to invoke the conquests of Alexander the Great and the collapse of the Greek city-state in accounts of the origin of these systems. The instability of the times and the inadequacy of traditional ethics may well help to explain the suc- cess and motivation of Epicurus and Zeno, who both provided a morality which stressed the self-sufficiency of the individual. But the intellectual basis of both systems is thoroughly Greek and their psychological theories develop ideas already discussed.

These theories may conveniently be studied in con- cert, for Stoicism and Epicureanism possess striking similarities as well as contrasts. Both systems are a form of materialism: for Epicurus, following Democritus, all that exists is atoms, differing in size, shape, and weight (this last an innovation), which by deviating from their normal downward movement in empty space collide and form temporary compound bodies. In living things the soul itself consists of very fine atoms, resembling fiery air, which pervade the whole body. No body which lacks a soul can be alive and soul cannot be sentient or cause sensation unless it is housed in a body, a doctrine which rules out the survival of consciousness after death (Letter to Herodotus 63-64). The soul-atoms located in the human breast constitute “mind,” which controls and issues instructions to the rest of the soul (Lucretius, III, 136-44). Mind and soul are thus in permanent contact with all parts of the body. Sensation is the result of eidōla (effluences exactly reproducing external objects) striking the sense organs and thus setting up a movement in the mind. And certain par- ticularly fine “idols” (e.g., from the gods) penetrate directly to the mind. All sensations as such are true, and the only source of knowledge; but they may be misinterpreted by the mind and hence errors arise. General ideas are built up by the mind from repeated presentations of the same object, and perception occurs when individual presentations match the general idea. Scientific thought seems to operate by the juxtaposition of two sets of atoms within the mind, constituting different concepts (C. Bailey, Epicurus [1926], p. 269), but the evidence for this theory is notoriously obscure.

In Stoicism the soul also permeates the whole body and finds its “thinking center” in the heart. It consists not of atoms but pneuma (“fiery breath”) in a particular state of “tension.” For the Stoics, all that exists consists of bodies differentiated by pneuma, the active force which binds the passive material qualities, earth and water, into individual things according to its tension. (Like the pre-Socratics, Stoics and Epicureans ex- plained soul in terms of the basic principle governing the universe.) Pneuma is not merely a mechanistic concept, like the Epicurean atom, but a dynamic, rational force which pervades and activates the whole world, all parts of which are thus interconnected. In perception the sense organs are acted upon by objects, either directly or through a medium, and this sets up a presentation (phantasia) which is reported to the central organ by currents of pneuma. The agent has the power to assent or not to the presentation, and his act of assent constitutes perception or “grasping” the object. The Stoics argued that presentations which completely reproduce the object are grasped as true by men of normal health, and on the basis of these, general ideas are built up by analogy, combination, etc. (Cicero, Academica posteriora I, 41-42; Sextus Empiricus, Adversus mathematicos VII, 227-60; Diogenes Laërtius, VII, 45-54). Presentations can also occur without an external cause, a theory which ac- counts, inter alia, for hallucination. Like the

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Epicureans the Stoics based their theory of knowledge entirely on perception.

Both systems gave special attention to motivation. For the primary impulse the Stoics took “innate attraction towards those things which are peculiarly suited to preserve an animal's natural well-being and avoidance of their opposites” (Cicero, De finibus III, 16ff.). All living creatures are endowed with a drive, and this is naturally stimulated by awareness of the appropriate object. Without this drive no action is possible, and it follows on a mental picture stemming from something internal or external. What distinguishes man from other animals is the possession of reason. This develops through childhood, and in maturity ena- bles a man to control his drives and so make responses to the environment which are rational and moral as well as appropriate in the instinctive sense. Assent plays its part here as a means of determining the mental attitude, which is open to the individual's control. From God's viewpoint all events are predetermined, but so far as human action is concerned the causal factor (as in Aristotle) is primarily the disposition which the agent has acquired by repeatedly acting in a certain way.

The Stoics underrated emotions, which they regarded as perverted judgments, except in the case of the sage. Like Strato they unified all functions of soul. For the Epicureans, by contrast, pleasure and avoidance of pain are the primary impulse of living creatures and the foundation of ethics. They constitute the objects of desire by which all action is prompted (Cicero, De finibus I, 29ff.). For any action to take place, mental images in the form of “idols” must strike the mind and obtain its attention. Then the will is activated and movement transferred from the mind to the limbs (Lucretius, II, 261-83). The freedom of the will in action is explained by reference to an indeter- minate “swerve” of atoms (Lucretius, II, 250-60). This has generally been taken to imply a spontaneous movement of soul atoms for every voluntary act. But it has recently been argued that the swerve explains not particular voluntary acts but merely the fact that character is not wholly determined by antecedent causes (D. J. Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, Princeton [1967], pp. 169-237).

Stoicism and Epicureanism are primarily theories of ethics, and their psychology focuses attention on the motives and processes of human action. Both abandon completely any idea of an incorporeal mind; mental activity is psychosomatic activity in which the soul acts by physical processes upon the body. Human behavior is necessarily related to the environment, from which all the data used to form concepts are derived. Such materialism and behaviorism were completely abandoned by the last great pagan and early Christian philosophers.

PSYCHOLOGICAL DOCTRINE IN LATE ANTIQUITY: PHILOSOPHICAL THEOLOGY

Between the foundation of Stoicism and Epicurean- ism and the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire lies a span of some six hundred years. The early part of this period produced a ferment of ideas in philosophy and science. But the first two hundred years of the Roman Empire, in spite of the achievements of the anatomist Galen and the astronomer Ptolemy, were not a time in which original thought flourished. Much was done to synthesize, mod- ify, or reinterpret existing theories, but the dominance of Rome, so fruitful in many respects, was not con- ducive to philosophical speculation. Yet there were forces at work which were to produce figures of major importance in the history of ideas, in particular Ploti- nus and Augustine. In them classical philosophy and the eclecticism of the age combined with spiritual theology in a remarkable way.

1. Plotinus. As concern with moral conduct became increasingly dominant among philosophers, so interest became ever more centered on the “inner man.” Already in Stoicism it was the attitude of mind, the internal disposition, which mattered in ethical judg- ment, but Stoicism remained earthbound by its denial of any existence to the incorporeal. In Neo-Platonism, as established by Plotinus, the highest human activity is contemplation of the transcendent Good, which is the source of various grades of being. Lowest on the scale is the material universe, including the human body with which the soul forms a mysterious and temporary union. This looks similar to Platonic dualism, but in fact it is significantly different. For Plato embodiment prevents the soul from fully grasp- ing the Forms. But for Plotinus the body is not a necessary barrier to union with the One or ultimate Good, the goal of human endeavor. This follows be- cause man's soul in its highest aspect is continually engaged in intellection of the Forms; it is “illumined” by Intellect, the principle second only to the One or Good. In this activity the soul is not self-conscious, since this would detract from its attention to the object of contemplation. Plotinus notes that certain activities, such as reading, go better if we are unconscious of ourselves as acting. What “comes down” to the mate- rial world and joins with body is an irradiation from the higher soul. But this lower soul is incorporeal, and Plotinus discusses the problem of its relation to the body at length (Enneads I, 1, 1-10; IV, 3, 9-23). He rejects all previous explanations of this relationship in favor of an analogy with light: soul is present to body

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as light to air. The living body is “illumined” by soul. In sensation the soul uses the body and reads impres- sions made on it. Hence there is no action of body on soul. The two remain “separate but in contact.” Memory and perception both belong to soul and depend on its faculty of imaging (Enneads IV, 3, 27). The soul sees when it looks out at externals. In thought the faculty of imaging is acted upon by the higher soul, and this provides the principles with which reason works. Memory is a concept of great importance for Plotinus because it provides (or is) the continuity of self-consciousness. Only by memory does the embodied soul possess an image of itself. It is through desire for the lower that soul enters into body, and it is by desire for the higher that the soul can recall memory of its activity in the intellectual sphere and aspire eventually to forget all the lower (including self-awareness) in contemplation of the divine.

2. Augustine. Plotinus was the last great pagan philosopher of classical antiquity, but it is no coinci- dence that he shares much with Saint Augustine. In interpreting the scriptures Augustine was influenced by an intellectual climate common to pagan and Christian; and inner experience as revealed by intro- spection becomes the key to psychology. In a summary it is impossible to do more than indicate some of Augustine's major doctrines on the soul. In the De quantitate animae problems of the soul's relation to the body, and the nature of sensation and thought are discussed in dialogue form. The soul is incorporeal and its substance cannot be named; rather must it be inferred from the fact that God, its creator, is its proper habitation (Patrologia Latina, 32, 1036). The soul shares in reason and is fitted to rule the body. By its presence it vitalizes the body and forms this into a harmonious unity. In this doctrine Augustine is closer to Plotinus than to Aristotle. The soul can take note of the body's changes (and this is Augustine's definition of sensus) but these do not affect the soul itself. In man the soul possesses various grades of being (ibid., 1074ff.), a ranking determined by the objects of its attention. Apprehension of any kind is a result of the mind's choosing to attend to something in its field of internal vision. God is always present to the mind (whatever its activity) and by His grace the souls of the faithful at their highest possess a stable vision of the truth. It is by divine illumination that the soul has standards of judgment “impressed” on it, for the divine mind contains eternal truths (P.L. 42, 1052). Like Plotinus Augustine laid great weight on “memory,” for this is not mere reminiscence but the storehouse of experience and the mind's knowledge of itself (ibid., 1048). In conversion the mind “remembers” God.

Augustine, for all his indebtedness to Greek thought, looks forward to the Middle Ages. But it is not the business of this article to chart the subsequent history of psychology. Needless to say, modern thinking owes more than is sometimes acknowledged to ancient psy- chology. Between the materialism of Democritus and the extreme spirituality of Plotinus runs a line on which intermediate positions are taken by Descartes as well as Plato, by Gilbert Ryle as well as Aristotle. In spite of inadequate technical knowledge the Greeks devel- oped ways of analyzing mind and body and the re- sponse of an organism to its environment which con- tinue to shape much of our thinking. They knew no “science” of psychology, and were not hampered by having to confine their attention to a neatly labeled set of “mental phenomena.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For pre-philosophical psychology the best starting points are Erwin Rhode, Psyche: Seelenkult und Unsterblichkeits- glaube der Griechen, 4th ed. (Tübingen, 1970; Engl. trans. London, 1925); Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes, 3rd ed. (Hamburg, 1955), trans. as The Discovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1953); E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, 1951). Texts of the pre-Socratics are collected in H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin, 1951-52). For an extended treatment see J. I. Beare, Greek Theories of Elementary Cognition (Oxford, 1906). W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Vols. I, II (Cambridge, 1962, 1965) has extensive notes and bibliography. For Plato the most im- portant texts are Phaedo, Phaedrus, Philebus, Republic IV- VII, X; Theaetetus, Timaeus. For bibliography see H. Cherniss, Lustrum (1961), 340-82, and for recent discussion I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato's Doctrines, Vol. I (London, 1962). Aristotle's psychological theory is set out in De anima, ed. Hicks (Cambridge, 1907) and Parva naturalia, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1955); general discussion and bibliography in I. Düring, Aristotles (Heidelberg, 1966). See also D. W. Hamlyn, De anima Books II and III, with Certain Passages from Book I (Oxford and New York, 1968). Some basic texts for post-Aristotelian psychology are col- lected by C. J. de Vogel, Greek Philosophy. A Collection of Texts with Notes and Explanations, Vol. III (Leiden, 1959). Relevant works of Augustine are De trinitate, De liberio arbitrio, De quantitate animae, and of Plotinus, Enneads I, 1; IV. This period is well surveyed by E. Zeller, Die Philos- ophie der Griechen, Vol. III, 1, 5th. ed. by E. Wellmann (Leipzig, 1923), and A. H. Armstrong, ed., Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 1956).

ANTHONY A. LONG

[See also Analogy in Early Greek Thought v1-09 ; Atomism v1-21 v1-22 ; Behaviorism v1-30 ; Biological Conceptions in Antiquity v1-31 ; Cosmology v1-66 v1-67 ; Dualism v2-05 ; Epicureanism v2-15 ; Imprinting v2-64 ; Neo-Platonism v3-47 ; Platonism v3-63 v3-64 v3-65 ; Pythagorean... v4-04 v4-05 ; Rationality v4-07 ; Stoicism. v4-41 ]

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There are currently hundreds of studs of the business world, breakfast food package designers, television net work creative department vice-presidents, advertising "media reps," lighting fixture fortune heirs, smiley patent lawyers, industrial spies, we- need vision board chairmen, all sorts of business studs who are all wondering if this man, Marshall McLuhan ... is right.... He sits in a little office off on the edge of the University of Toronto that looks like the receiving bin of a second-hand book store, grading papers, grading papers, for days on end, wearing-well, he doesn't seem to care what he wears. If he feels like it, he just puts on the old striped tie with the plastic neck band. You just snap the plastic band around your neck and there the tie is, hanging down and ready to go, Pree-Tide.

But what if-all sorts of huge world-mover & shaker corporations are trying to put McLuhan in a box or some thing. Valuable! Ours! Suppose he is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game suppose he is the oracle of the modern times - what if he is right? he'll be in there. It almost seems that way. An "undisclosed corporation" has put a huge "undis closed sum" into, McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. One of the big American corporations has offered him $5000 to present a closed- circuit-ours!-television lecture on-oracle!-the ways the products in its industry will be used in the future. Even before all this, IBM, General Electric, Bell Telephone were flying McLuhan in from Toronto to New York, Pittsburgh, God knows where else, to talk to their hierarchs about . . . well, about whatever this unseen world of electronic environments that only he sees fully is all about.

They all sit in these conference rooms, under fluorescent lights, with the right air conditioned air streaming out from behind the management-style draperies. Upward-busting hierarch executives, the real studs, the kind who have already changed over from lie- down crewcuts to brush back Eric Johnston-style Big Boy haircuts and from Oxford button-downs to Tripler broadcloth straight points and have hung it all on the line, an $80,000 mortgage in New Canaan and a couple of kids at Deerfield and Hotchkiss-hung it all on the line on knowing exactly what this corporation is all about -they sit there with the day's first bloody mary squirting through their capillaries-and this man with part of a plastic neckband showing at the edge of the collar, who just got through grading papers, for godsake, tells them in an of-course voice and with I'm being-patient eyes, that, in effect, politely, they all know just about exactly . . . nothing . . . about the real business they're in-

-Gentlemen, the General Electric Company makes a considerable portion of its profits from electric light bulbs, but it is not yet discovered that it is not in the light bulb business but in the business of moving information. Quite as much as A. T. & T. Yes. Of course-I-am-willing-to-be-patient. He pulls his chin down into his neck and looks up out of his ion' Scotch-lairdly face. Yes. The electric light is pun information it is a medium without a message as it were Yes. Light is a self- contained communications system in which the medium is the message Just think that over for a moment-I-am-willing-to-be - When IBM discovered that it was not in the business of making office equipment or business machines

- but that it was in the business

of processing

information,

then it began

to navigate

with

clear

vision.

Yes.

Swell! But where did this guy come from? What is this-these cryptic, Delphian sayings: Th e electric light is pure information.

Delphian! The medium is the message. We are moving out of the age of the visual into the age of the aural and tactile . . .

Oracle!-McLuhan sits in the conference room on the upper deck of an incredible ferry boat that Walter Landor, one of the country's top package designers, has redone at a cost of about $400,000 as an office and design center. This great package design flagship nestles there in the water at Pier 5 in San Francisco. The sun floods in from the bay onto the basket woven wall-to-wall and shines off the dials of Landor's motion picture projection con sole. Down below on the main deck is a whole simulated supermarket for bringing people in and testing package impact and all sorts of optometric wonder wards for testing visual reception of metribergiarglebargle and McLuhan says, almost by the way:

"Of course, packages will be obsolete in a few years. People will want tactile experiences, they'll want to feel the product they're getting-"

But!-

McLuhan's chin goes down, his mouth turns down, his eyes roll up in his of course expression: "Goods will be sold in bins. People will go right to bins and pick things up and feel them rather than just accepting a package."

Landor, the package designer, doesn't lose his cool; he just looks- what if he is right?

". . . The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums . . ." That even, even, even voice goes on-

-McLuhan is sitting in the Lombardy Restaurant in New York with Gibson McCabe, president of News week, and several other high-ranking communications people, and McCabe tells of the millions Newsweek has put into reader surveys, market research, advertising, the editorial staff, everything, and how it paid off with a huge rise in circulation over the past five years. McLuhan listens, then down comes the chin: "Well . . . of course, your circulation would have risen about the same anyway, the new sensory balance of the people being what it is . . ."

Print gave tribal man an eye for an ear.

McLuhan is at the conference table in the upper room of Howard Gossage's advertising firm in San Francisco, up in what used to be a firehouse they're pretty great converters in San Francisco- and a couple of newspaper people are up there talking about how they are sure their readers want this and that to read-McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck: "Well . . . of course, people don't actually read newspapers. They get into them every morning like a hot bath."

Perfect! Delphic! Cryptic! Metaphorical! Epigrammatic! With this even, even, even voice, this utter scholarly aplomb-with these pronouncements-"Art is always one technology behind. The content of the art of any age is the technology of the previous age"- with all this Nietzschean certitude McLuhan has become an intellectual star of the West. He is a word-of-mouth celebrity.

Corporation executives are only the beginning of the roster of people in America who stand to be shaken up -what if he is right? The university establishments, the literati-McLuhan has already earned the hostile envy of the New York literary establishment- the artists-they like him-scores of little groups of McLuhan cultists-thou sands of intellectuals are now studying McLuhan. The paperback edition of his book Understanding Media has been an "underground best seller"-that is, a best seller without benefit of publicity-for six months. City planners-

City planners are wondering what if he-McLuhan is the prophet of the New Life Out There, the suburbs, housing developments, astrodomes, domed-over shopping centers, freeways, TV families, the whole world of the new technologies that stretches out to the West beyond the old cities of the East. To McLuhan, New York is already obsolete, on its way to becoming not much more than a Disneyland discotheque for the enjoyment-not the big business or the gawking wonder, but the playing around-of the millions out there. They are already living the new life, while New York sits here choking to death in its old fashion.

McLuhan has developed a theory that goes like this: The new technologies of the electronic age, notably televi sion, radio, the telephone, and computers, make up a new environment. A new environment; they are not merely added to some basic human environment. The idea that these things, TV and the rest, are just tools that men can use for better or worse depending on their talents and moral strength-that idea is idiotic to McLuhan. The new technologies, such as television, have become a new environment. They radically alter the entire way people use their five senses, the way they react to things, and therefore, their entire lives and the entire society. It doesn't matter what the content of a medium like TV is. It doesn't matter if the networks show twenty hours a day of sadistic cowboys caving in people's teeth or twenty hours of Pablo Casals droning away on his cello in a pure -culture white Spanish drawing room. It doesn't matter about the content. The most pro. found effect of televi sion-its real "message," in McLuhan's terms -is the way it alters men's sensory patterns. The me dium is the message-that is the best- known McLuhanism. Television steps up the auditory sense and the sense of touch and depresses the visual sense. That seems like a paradox, but McLuhan is full of paradoxes. A whole generation in America has grown up in the TV environment, and already these millions of people, twenty-five and under, have the same kind of sensory reactions as African tribesmen. The same thing is happening all over the world. The world is growing into a huge tribe, a . . . global village, in a seamless web of electronics.

These are McLuhan metaphors. He started out as an English literature scholar. He graduated from the University of Manitoba in Canada and then got a doctorate in English at Cambridge in England. He wrote his dissertation on the rhetoric of Thomas Nashe, a sixteenth-century English playwright and essayist. In it he led up to Nashe with a massive study of rhetoric from the Greeks on up. He got interested in the way different kinds of speech,

written and oral, affected the history of different civilizations. Gradually his field expanded from literature to the influence of communication, all kinds, all the media, on society. He started doing research in psychology, even physiology, sociology, history, economics everything seemed to come into it. McLuhan was sort of like John Huizinga this way. Huizinga is a historian, Medieval history, chiefly, who discovered "the play element" in history. He ended up with a rather sophisticated sociological theory, in the book Homo Ludens, that in many ways is a precursor of the mathematical "game theory" that so fascinates Pentagon war strategists today. McLuhan worked on his communications theory. For about thirty years he was pretty much in obscurity in places like the University of Wisconsin, the University of St. Louis, and the University of Toronto. He published The Mechanical Bride in 1951, then The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, and with that one the McLuhan Cult really started, and what if he-?

As McLuhan sees it-in the simplest terms, here is his theory step by step: People adapt to their environment, whatever it is, with a certain balance of the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. If something steps up the intensity of one sense, hearing for example, the other senses will change intensity too, to try to regain a balance. A dentist, for example, can practically shut off pain-sense of touch-by putting earphones on a patient and pouring intense noise into his ear-sense of hearing.

Every major technology changes the balance of the senses. One of the most explosive of these technologies was the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century. Before that, people's senses still had pretty much the old tribal balance. That is to say, the sense of hearing was dominant. People got their information mainly by hearing it from other people. People who get their information that way are necessarily drawn closer together, in the tribal way. They have to be close to each other in order to get information. And they have to believe what people tell them, by and large, because that is the only kind of information they can get. They are interdependent.

They are also more emotional. The spoken word is more emotional than the written word. It carries emotion as well as meaning. The intonation can convey anger, sorrow, approval, panic, joy, sarcasm, and so forth. This aural man, the tribal man, reacts more emotionally to information. He is more easily upset by rumors. His and every body else's emotions-a collective unconscious-lie very near the surface.

The printing press brought about a radical change. People began getting their information primarily by seeing it -the printed word. The visual sense became dominant. Print translates one sense-hearing, the spoken word-into another sense sight, the printed word. Print also converts sounds into abstract symbols, the letters. Print is or derly progression of abstract, visual symbols. Print led to the habit of categorizing-putting everything in order, into categories, "jobs," "prices," "departments," "bureaus," "specialties." Print led, ultimately, to the creation of the modern economy, to bureaucracy, to the modern army, to nationalism itself.

People today think of print as if it were a technology that has been around forever. Actually, the widespread use of print is only about two hundred years old. Today new technologies-television, radio, the telephone, the computer-are causing another revolution. Print caused an "explosion"-breaking society up into categories. The electronic media, on the other hand, are causing an "implosion," forcing people back together in a tribal unity.

The aural sense is becoming dominant again. People are getting their information primarily by hearing it. They are literate, but their primary source is the radio, the telephone, the TV set. The radio and the telephone are obviously aural media, but so is television, in McLuhan's theory. The American TV picture has very low defini tion. It is not three-dimensional, like a movie or a photograph, but two-dimensional, like a Japanese print or a cartoon. The viewer fills in the spaces and the contours with his mind, as he does with a cartoon. Therefore, the TV viewer is more involved in the TV image than in the movie image, he is so busy running over the image with his eye, filling in this and that. He practically reaches out and touches it. He participates; and he likes that.

Studies of TV children-children of all social classes who are used to getting their information primarily by television-studies of this new generation show that they do not focus on the whole picture, the way literate adults do when they watch a movie. They scan the screen for details; their eyes run all over the screen, focusing on holsters, horses' heads, hats, all sorts of little things, even in the fiercest gun battles. They watch a TV show the way a nonliterate African tribesman watches a movie

But exactly! The TV children, a whole generation of Americans, the oldest ones are now twenty-five years old-they are the new tribesmen. They have tribal sensory balances. They have the tribal habit of responding emotionally to the spoken word, they are "hot," they want to participate, to touch, to be involved. On the one hand, they can be more easily swayed by things like demagoguery. The visual or print man is an individualist; he is "cooler," with built-in safeguards. He always has the feeling that no matter what anybody says, he can go check it out. The necessary information is filed away somewhere, categorized. He can look it up. Even if it is something he can't look up and check out-for example, some rumor like "the Chinese are going to bomb us tomorrow"-his habit of mind is established. He has the feeling: All this can be investigated- looked into. The aural man is not so much of an individualist; he is more a part of the collective consciousness; he believes.

To the literate, visual, print man, that seems like a negative quality, but to the aural, tribal man, it seems natural and good. McLuhan is not interested in values, but if anything, he gives the worst of it to the literate man who is smug in the belief that his sensibility is the only proper one. The tribal man-the new TV generation-is far more apt at pattern recognition, which is the basis of computers. The child will learn a foreign language faster than a literate adult because he absorbs the whole pattern of the language, the intonations and the rhythms, as well as the meaning. The literate man is slowed down by the way he tries to convert the sounds to print in his mind and takes the words one by one, categorizing them and translating them in a plodding sequence.

In formal learning, in schools, that is, the new TV-tribal man is at a great disadvantage, however, given the current teaching methods. As McLuhan sees it-if people think there is a bad drop- out problem in American schools today, it is nothing compared to what it is going to be like in another ten or fifteen years. There will be a whole nation of young psychic drop- outs-out of it-from the wealthy suburbs no less than the city slums. The thing is, all these TV-tribal children are aural people, tactile people, they're used to learning by pattern recogni tion. They go into classrooms, and there up in front of them are visual, literate, print-minded teachers. They are up there teaching classes by subjects, that is, categories; they've broken learning down into compartments -mathematics, history, geography, Latin, biology-it doesn't make sense to the tribal kids, it's like trying to study a flood by counting the trees going by, it's unnatural.

It's the same way with these cities the print-minded rulers keep on piling up around them, more skyscrapers, more freeways pouring into them, more people piling into them. Cities are still based on the old idea of using space efficiently, of putting as many activities into a single swath of ground as possible to make it easier for people to move around and do business with each other. To the new drop-out generation and the drop-out genera tions to come, this idea of lateral space and of moving people around in it doesn't seem very important. Even visual people have begun to lose a little of the old idea of space because of the airplane. When somebody gets on a jet in New York and flies to San Francisco in four hours, the time is so short, the idea of the space, the three thousand miles, loses its meaning. It is just like taking a "horizontal elevator," McLuhan says. In Los Angeles, with everybody traveling by car on freeways, nobody talks about "miles" anymore, they just say "that's four minutes from here," "that's twenty minutes from here," and so on. The actual straight-line distance doesn't matter. It may be faster to go by a curved route. All anybody cares about is the time.

For that matter-the drop-out generations will even get rid of the cars, says McLuhan. The car is still largely tied to the idea of space, but the TV-tribal kids aren't. It even shows up in their dances. The new American dances, the twist, the frug, and all that, ignore the geography of the dance floor. The dancers stay in one place and create their own space. They jerk, spasm, hump, and bob around in one place with the sound turned up-aural! tribal!-up into the hot-jolly hyperaesthetic decibels. Eventually, says McLuhan, they will use the same sort of pattern in the way they work. They will work at home, connected to the corporation, the boss, not by roads or railroads, but by television. They will relay information by closed-circuit two-way TV and by computer systems. The great massive American rush-hour flow over all that asphalt surface, going to and from work every day, will be over. The hell with all that driving. Even shopping will be done via TV. All those grinding work-a-daddy cars will disappear. The only cars left will be playthings, sports cars. They'll be just like horses are today, a sport. Somebody over at General Motors is saying-What if he is right?

Whole cities, and especially New York, will end too just like cars, no longer vital to the nation but . . . just playthings. People will come to New York solely to amuse themselves, do things, not marvel at the magnitude of the city or its riches, but just eat in the restaurants, go to the discotheques, browse through the galleries-

-McLuhan is having lunch at Lutece, a French restaurant at 249 East 50th Street, with four of his admirers, three journalists and a movie star. Lutece is one of the real high-powered, gleaming toothed places in New York where the culturati, the fashionati, literati, and illuminati of all sorts have lunch. The Big Boys go there. It has real wine stewards. It is so expensive, only the man who has to pay is shown the prices. Everybody else at the table gets a menu with just the dishes listed. Eat 'em up, gleaming teeth. So these people with gleaming teeth, glissando voices, lazenge-shape cuff links, peacock-colored Pucci-print dresses signed "Emilio" turn the gleams on each other and sit in there and laugh, cozzen, whisper, bat the eyes, look knowingly, slosh their jowls around at each other in the old fight to make it or make it bigger in the biggest city in the world-and McLuhan just sits out in the garden at Lutece smiling slightly, oblivious to the roiling, wearing a seersucker jacket and the plastic neckband tie, looking ahead as if . . . he were looking through walls.

Well, of course he is! The city-

"Well, of course, a city like New York is obsolete," he says. And all the gleaming teeth and glissando voices are still going grack gack grack in the same old way all around, all trying to get to the top of the city that will disappear.

McLuhan was in New York that time because two rather extraordinary men from San Francisco, Howard Gossage and Gerry Feigen, had just begun their ongoing "McLuhan Festival." The original McLuhan Festival was a kind of "happening" or "environment" in an armory at the University of British Columbia, put on by some teachers there. They were part of what is sometimes called "The McLuhan Cult"-esoteric groups of intellectuals who have . . . discovered McLuhan, in Canada and in the United States, most of them over the past three years, since The Gutenberg Galaxy came out. In the armory they suspended sheets of plastic from the ceiling, forming a maze. Operators aimed light projections at the plastic sheets and at the people walking through them, a movie projector showed a long, meaningless movie of the interior of the empty armory, goofy noises poured out of the loudspeakers, bells rang, somebody banged blocks of wood together up on a podium, somebody else spewed perfume around, dancers flipped around through the crowds, and behind a stretch fabric wall-a frame with a stretch fabric across it-there was a girl, pressed against the stretch fabric wall, like a whole wall made of stretch pants, and undulating and humping around back there. Everybody was supposed to come up and feel it-the girl up against the stretch fabric -to understand this "tactile communication" McLuhan talks about.

McLuhan Temple! McLuhan in church-the Rev. William Glenesk brings McLuhan into the pulpit of his church, Spencer Memorial, on Remsen Street in Brooklyn Heights, one week night in a kind of . . . apotheosis of McLuhan cultism. Glenesk is the "hip" Presbyterian minister who has had jazz combos, dancers, sculpture graven images!-in church. He brought McLuhan in one night and put him in the pulpit and it became . . . cult! like a meeting of all the solitary souls, from the cubicles of the NYU Bronx campus to the lofts of East 10th Street, who had discovered McLuhan on their own. All these artists came in there in the great carved oak insides of the church and sat in the pews, Stanley Vander Beeck the "underground" movie-maker in an orange shirt and red polka dot tic

"It is a hot night," says McLuhan, speaking from the pulpit. "Therefore, I invite you to move forward. Heat obliterates the distance between the speaker and the audience . . ."

But of course! The heat steps up the tactile sense, diminishes the visual; the audience is no longer at ease sitting back and watching the speaker as though he is separated from them like the usual . . . visual spectacle. The artists, Vander Beeck, Larry Rivers the painter, John Cage the composer-they are all fo r McLuhan, even though McLuhan has a paradoxical attitude toward the "modern" arts. On the one hand, he says artists are geniuses who serve as "early warning systems" for changes in society's sensory balance. But at the same time, he says so -called "modern" art is always one technology behind. In the early nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution came in-the MACHINE age. The artist didn't realize that this was a new age, but they se nsed that some kind of change was taking place, and they resented it-damned machine-cog life -so they reacted by coming up with the modern art of the early nineteenth century: NATURE, all those landscapes, grazing sheep -the content of the previous technology, namely, agriculture. Modern! All these modern artists, Constable and Turner, couldn't understand why nobody had even painted these great spewy albumen cloud banks and shaggy green horizons before. In the early twentieth century the ELECTRONIC age began, and the artists, only fifty or seventy-five years behind, as usual, suddenly discovered cubism and other abstract forms, breaking up objects into planes, spheres, component parts-the content of the MACHINE age, the industrial technology of the nineteenth century. But in any case, the artist's immediately obsolete "modernism" is a sign that somethin g is changing in society's sensory balance. The artists seem to like this idea that they are the "early warning," the avant- garde, even if they are moving forward backwards.

They also like his general "culture" orientation. McLuhan started out as an English scholar, after all, and still laces his work with references to Marlowe, Rabelais, Whitman, Cervantes, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Joyce. McLuhan's work is really squarely in the area of biology and sociology now, but artists can take to him-he talks their language. It was the same with Freud. Pavlov never caught on with the culturati-all those damned endless clinical descriptions of dog brains. But Freud was "cultural," a lot of great business from Sophocles, Aeschylus, da Vinci, King Oedipus running around, bare-breasted Electra, all those classical lovelies. Freud wrote like an art dealer prospecting in the forbidden lands of brain physiology.

McLuhan talks the same language, and people are willing to undertake massive artistic expressions of his new science of the senses. In the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, a McLuhanite named Harley Parker is designing a "pure McLuhan" gallery for displaying invertebrate paleontology, fishes and things, "a gallery of total sensory involvement," Harley Parker says, with the smell of the sea piped in, the tape-recorded sound of waves, colored lights simulating the fuzzy-plankton undersea green, "not just a gallery of data, but a total experience." In New York, Father John Culkin of Fordham University is considering sort of the same thing, a McLuhan architectural environment, only on a much larger scale, a whole communications center at Lincoln Center, the big culture temple.

But with the standard old line romantic-reactionary literati of New York-that is another story. Old doggies like Dwight Macdonald recoil from McLuhan. This man, this pop Guru McLuhan, asserts he supremacy of technol ogy, the environment, over the romantic ego. McLuhan says man succumbs to the new technologies, the new sensory balance the technologies impose, no matter how hard he fights it, even if he doesn't watch the idiot box -and I don't pay attention to ads-no matter what. The old doggies put their faces up in the air, with their eyeballs rolled back, looking for God, and moan a few howls there inside their parlor-floor brownstones at this big red fire siren going by, Marshall McLuhan.

Get this man. But if they want to get at McLuhan, they ought to forget the sanctity of the romantic ego, the last godhead of the literati, and go after him where he is actually vulnerable; one place is his idea of the sensory balance of man and the dominance of one sense over another and so forth. McLuhan is talking straight physiol ogy here, science and he has not proved that the five senses are actually set up that way. Maybe it can't be proved. As yet, there is no apparatus for measuring just how intensely the human mind is attuned to this or that sense. Knowledge about three of the senses, smell, taste, and touch, is still absolutely primitive. The sense of smell, for example, cannot be measured at all, currently. Perfume makers have to use people they call "noses" to get the right combination for different scents. They put a white smock on THE NOSE and squirt one test batch of hair spray in a tin closet and THE NOSE jumps in there, and then he jumps out of there, and they squirt another batch in the next closet, and THE NOSE jumps in there, and so on and on, with this NOSE in a white smock leaping and diving in tin cubicles-this is sensory measurement in the modern age.

The other place they might get McLuhan is in his crazy daredevil weakness for making analogies. He loves the things. He soars around making analogies. The Russians still have a basically aural, tribal sensory balance, and they like to do their spying by ear, hiding microphones in wooden American eagle seals in the American Em bassy and so forth. That seems perfectly all right to them, that's natural, but they are scandalized by something like the American U-2 flights-that is visual spying, spying by eye. Americans, on the other hand, are basically a visual people; the U-2 flights seem like the natural way to spy, but a mike in the eagle that's a scandal to the visual Americans. Beautiful McLuhan rubric -but . . .

But, all right, he may have missed the mark on this or that, but McLuhan will remain a major figure in the social sciences if for no other reason than that he has opened up the whole subject of the way the new technologies are changing people's thinking, reactions, life styles, everything. One means, well, one is in a supermarket and here comes some Adam's-apply carbuncled kid with bad hair pushing a rolling hamper full of All Detergent Man Mountain Giant Bonus boxes, and he is not looking where he is going; he is not lo oking at anything; his eyes are turned off and screened over, and there is a plug in his skull leading to the transistor radio in the breast pocket of his shirt, and he is blamming his free hand on the Giant All boxes, blam blam ble-blam blam, keeping time to the Rolling Stones, Hey You Get Offa My Cloud; somewhere inside of his skull, blam blam, plugged into some kind of electronic circuit out there, another world-and one knows, instinctively, that all this is changing people in some kind of way. Sociologists and physiologists have done practically nothing on the subject. They have done practically nothing on the way the automobile has changed Americans, as long as cars have been around. Every time sociologists have a meeting, somebody gets up and says, why doesn't somebody make a real study of the American automobile? Not just the stuff about how they're choking our cities or how they made the big housing developments possible, but how they . . . well, change people.

Not even with cars! Much less with television, radio, computers -McLuhan comes on like the only man to reach a huge, hitherto unknown planet or something, and there is so much ground to cover and so little time, all this unknown ground, mothering earthquake, swallowing everybody up and they don't even know it. That is the way McLuhan thinks of it, and he exasperates

A television executive is up in Howard Gossage's office in the firehouse in San Francisco, talking to McLuhan and saying how a couple of things he said don't fit together, they don't hold up; maybe it is the part about the Russian hidden microphones or something. McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck and opens his right hand like a century plant-

"I'm not offering this as a self-contained theory; I'm making probes. Probes. There is so much here that hasn't even been gone into, I have no interest in debating it point by point along the way. There is so much that hasn't even been explored."

Rather grand manner. He won't argue, he just keeps probing, he spins off theories and leaves them there for somebody else to debate, moving on all the time on his single track . . . but, of course. The prophet.

A lot of McLuhanites have started speaking of him as a prophet. It is only partly his visions of the future. It is more his extraordinary attitude, his demeanor, his qualities of monomania, of mission-He do esn't debate other scholars, much less TV executives. He is not competing for status; he is . . . alone on a vast unseen terrain, the walker through walls, the X-ray eye . . . TV executives. McLuhan even characterizes General Sarnoff, Generalis simo of RCA and NBC, the most powerful man in American communications, a god in the TV world, and the eyes of the government, too, for that matter-McLuhan characterizes the good General as one of the "technologi cal idiots." Sarnoff is one of those people who thinks that television is merely a wonderful tool whose impact is merely what a man chooses to do with it.

McLuhan flies all over Canada and the United States to talk to groups of five, six, twelve, well, not twelve, fourteen . . . disciples. Numbers mean nothing to him. If a thousand people suddenly turned up, it might be a bad sign-McLuhan sits in the upper room at the firehouse at a round table with six or eight people, Gossage, Feigen, Mike Robbins of Young & Rubicam, the advertising agency, Herbert Gold, the novelist, Edward Keating, editor of Ramparts magazine, not disciples-But what if he is right-and somebody asks McLuhan what he thinks of the big communications conference going on in San Francisco at that very moment, at the Hilton Hotel, a thousand people, headed by the great semanticist, S. I. Hayakawa.

"Well . . . they're all working from very obsolete premises, of course. Almost by definition."

By definition?

"Certainly. By the time you can get a thousand people to agree on enough principles to hold such a meeting, conditions will already have changed, the principles will be useless."

McLuhan pulls his chin down into his neck. The Hayakawa conference . . . disappears.

McLuhan may get some of the normal chuckly human satisfaction out of putting down the General Sarnoffs and the Hayakawas of this world and bringing to package design moguls the news that packages have had it and so forth-it is hard to say. More likely, though, he is simply oblivious to the stake other people have in the things he is talking about. He seems oblivious to all the more obvious signs of status where he himself is involved. He just snaps on that Pree-Tide plastic neckband necktie in the morning and resumes his position, at the monoma niacal center of the unseen world . . .

Unseen scholars. McLuhan comes out of a world that few people know about, the world of the liberal arts scholars, the graduate schools, the carrels. It is a far more detached and isolated life than any garret life of the artists. Garret life? Artists today spend all their time calling up Bloomingdale's to see if the yellow velvet Milo Laducci chairs they ordered are in yet. Liberal arts scholars, especially in McLuhan's field, English literature,

start out in graduate school in little cubicles, known as carrels, in the stacks of the university libraries with nothing but a couple of metal Klampiton shelves of books to sustain them, sitting there making scholarly analo gies-detecting signs of Rabelais in Sterne, signs of Byron- would you believe it? in Thoreau, signs of Ovid in Pound, signs of -analogies-hunched over in silence with only the far-off sound of Maggie, a Girl of the Stacks, a townie who puts books back on the shelves-now she is all right, a little lower-class-puffy in the nose, but-only the sound of her to inject some stray, sport thoughts into this intensely isolated regimen. In effect, the graduate school scholar settles down to a life of little cubicles, little journals, little money, little chance of notice by the outside world-unless his intense exercises in analogies, mental combinations, bust out with something so . . . electrifying as Marshall McLuhan's.

Even then there is no one in the . . . outside world able to scout scholarly stars, it is all so esoteric. But McLuhan has had Gossage and Feigen, two of the most imaginative characters in San Francisco. Gossage is a tall, pale advertising man with one of the great heads of gray hair in the USA, flowing back like John Barrymore's. Feigen is a psychiatrist who became a surgeon; he is dark and has these big eyes and a gong-kicker mustache like Jerry Colonna, the comedian. He is also a ventriloquist and carries around a morbid looking dummy named Becky and is able to get into great psychological duels with strangers, speaking through the dummy. Gossage and Feigen started a firm called Generalists, Inc., acting as consultants to people who can't get what they need from special ists because what they need is the big picture. One thing that drew them to McLuhan was his belief in "generalism" -pattern recognition. McLuhan, for example, dismisses the idea of university "departments," history, political science, sociology, and so forth; he considers all that obsolete and works in four or five of the old "fields" at once. It is all one field to him. So Gossage and Feigen invested about $6000 into just taking McLuhan around to talk to people, Big Boys, all sorts, outside the academic world, on both coasts. Gossage says they had nothing particular in mind, no special goal, they just wanted to play it "fat, dumb and happy" and see what would happen.

It all turned out kind of like the way the architect in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall describes life as being like one of those whirling discs at the old amusement parks. You get on the disc and it starts spinning and the faster it goes, the more centrifugal force builds up to throw you off it. The speed on the outer edge of the disc is so fast, you have to hold on for dear life just to stay on but you get a hell of a ride. The closer you can get to the center of the disc, the slower the speed is and the easier it is to stand up. In fact, theoretically, at the very center there is a point that is completely motionless. In life, some people won't get on the disc at all.

They just sit in the stands and watch. Some people like to get on the outer edge and hang on and ride like hell-that would be Gossage and Feigen. Others are standing up and falling down, staggering, lurching toward the center. And a few, a very few, reach the middle, that perfect motionless point, and stand up in the dead center of the roaring whirligig as if nothing could be clearer and less confused-That would be McLuhan.

Gossage and Feigen were bringing McLuhan to New York last May, and McLuhan was two days late getting there. He was in Toronto grading papers for two days.

"Grading papers?" says Gossage. Gossage can see the New York panoply of lunches at the Lombardy, lunches at Lutece, men like Gibson McCabe, and God knows who all else high in the world of communications waiting for McLuhan-and McLuhan holed up imperturbably grading papers. "Listen," says Gossage. "There are so many people willing to invest money in your work now, you'll never have to grade papers again."

"You mean it's going to be fun from now on?" says McLuhan.

"Everything's coming up roses," says Gossage.

In San Francisco, Gossage and Feigen take McLuhan to a "topless waitress" restaurant, the Off Broadway, at the request of some writer from New York in a loud checked suit. Herb Caen, the columnist, is also along. Everybody is a little taken aback. There they all are in the black-light gloom of the Off Broadway with waitresses walking around wearing nothing but high-heel shoes and bikini underpants, and nobody knows quite how to react, what to say, except for McLuhan. Finally, Caen says that this girl over here is good looking-

"Do you know what you said?" says McLuhan, "Good look ing. That's a visual orientation. You're separating yourself from the girls. You are sitting back and looking. Actually, the lights are dim in here, this is meant as a tactile experience, but visual man doesn't react that way."

And everyone looks to McLuhan to see if he is joking, but it is impossible to tell there in the gloom. All that is clear is that . . . yes, McLuhan has already absorbed the whole roaring whirligig into his motionless center. And later in the day, Gossage presents the piece de resistance of the McLuhan Festival, a party in the firehouse. The first floor of the firehouse, now the lobby, is filled, and yet in there Gossage has put a twelve-piece mariachi band, with trumpets . . . En la Bodega and the mariachi players stand on the tile in their piped powder blue suits blasting away on the trumpets and Tout San Francisco is filing into the firehouse into the face of the what the hell is Gossage up to now, Santa Barranza, mariachi trumpets, the trumpet announcement of the new Darwin-Freud Einstein, Grack, En la Bodega. Then McLuhan himself arrives, filing into the firehouse, and there before him is a field of powder blue and . . . yaaaaaaaaaaaagggghhhhhhh trumpets-and Gossage sits on the stairway with his head thrown back, laughing over the spectacle, but McLuhan-well, let one see here, or, actually, not see, the auditory sense is sharply stepped up, the visual fades, just the slightest haze of powder blue-of course! one need only stop struggling with one's eyes, roil, roil, well, of course, it is clear and . . why not? serene, the new world.

Come now, be sensible.

2007-07-07T12:52:00.000-07:00

Sensible

("sEnsIb(@)l) Also 4–6 sencyble, sensyble, 5 sensibill, -yll, censible, 6 sensybul, sensibil, 6–7 sencible, (sensable, 8 senceible). [a. F. sensible, ad. late L. sensibilis, f. sens- (:—*sentt-), ppl. stem of sentWre to perceive, feel: see -ible. Cf. Sp. sensible, Pg. sensivel, It. sensibile.]

A. adj.

I. That can be felt or perceived.
1. a. Perceptible by the senses. (In Philos., opposed to intelligible 3: in this use now rare.). b. Const. to. c. Specific collocations in scientific use. sensible horizon: see horizon 1. sensible heat (†caloric): used in contradistinction to latent heat: see heat n. 2c. sensible perspiration: sweat as distinguished from the emission of vapour through the pores. †d. Of or pertaining to the senses or sensation. †e. quasi-adv. Perceptibly. Obs.
2. Perceptible by the mind or the inward feelings.
3. Easy to perceive, evident.
4. Large enough to be perceived or to be worth considering; appreciable, considerable. Now only of immaterial things (as quantities, magnitudes, etc.).
†5. Of discourse, etc.: Easily understood; suited to make a strong impression on the mind; striking, effective. Obs.
†6. Such as is acutely felt; markedly painful or pleasurable. Const. to. Obs.

II. Capable of feeling or perceiving.
7. Endowed with the faculty of sensation. †a. Of living beings, their nature or mode of existence. b. of organs, tissues, or parts of the body. †c. sensible virtue, wit, later sensible faculty, capacity: faculty of sensation. Obs.
†8. a. Having (more or less) acute power of sensation; sensitive. Obs. †b. Liable to be quickly or acutely affected by (some object of sensation); sensitive to or of. Obs.
9. Capable of or liable to mental emotion. †a. Having sensibility; capable of delicate or tender feeling. Obs. †b. Sensitive; easily hurt or offended. Obs.
c. Sensitive or readily accessible to some specified emotional influence. Also const. of. Now rare.
10. transf. a. Of material things or substances, esp. of instruments of measurement, as a balance, a thermometer: Readily affected by physical impressions or influences, sensitive. Const. to. Now rare. Also in †sensible plant, weed = sensitive plant, where the adj. has, strictly speaking, sense 8, the movements of the plant having been formerly regarded as evidence of real sensation. †b. Music. sensible note. [tr. F. note sensible.] = leading note (see leading ppl. a.). Cf. sensitive. Obs.

III. Actually perceiving or feeling.
11. a. Cognizant, conscious, aware of something. Often with some tinge of emotional sense: Cognizant of something as a ground for pleasure or regret. Const. of, †to; also with clause. Now somewhat rare. †b. Mindful of a person. Obs.
12. a. Emotionally conscious; having a pleasurable, painful, grateful or resentful sense of something. In later use almost exclusively: Gratefully conscious of (kindness, etc.). Also const. to (? obs.), †for, and with clause. †b. Without const. Obs.
13. Conscious, free from physical insensibility or delirium.

IV. 14. a. Endowed with good sense; intelligent, reasonable, judicious. b. Of action, behaviour, discourse, etc.: Marked by, exhibiting, or proceeding from good sense. c. Of clothing, footwear, etc.: practical rather than attractive or fashionable.

B. absol. and n.
1. That which produces sensation; that which is perceptible; an object of sense, or of any one of the senses. †2. A being that is capable of sensation. Obs. †3. The element (in a spiritual being) that is capable of feeling. Obs. 4. One possessing good sense, a judicious person.
1747 W. Horsley Fool (1748) II. 323 The Sensibles are desired to confine theirs to Masquerades and Playhouses.

The Role of Fear in Traditional and Contemporary Shamanism

2007-07-01T19:08:00.000-07:00

reproduction of: http://www2.ull.es/congresos/conmirel/YORK.html

MILLENNIUM: FEAR AND RELIGION. MILENIO: MIEDO Y RELIGIÓN. MILLÉNNAIRE: PEUR ET RELIGION.

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The Role of Fear in Traditional and Contemporary Shamanism

Strictly speaking, shamanism is a religious technique which is practiced by the Evenki or Tungusic tribes in the north-eastern regions of Siberia. Therefore, to apply the term `shamanism’ to medicine-people and witch-doctor practices belonging to ethnic identities further afield, such as among African tribalists or indigenious Indians in both North and South America, is an Euro-centric misnomer which carries an artificiality akin to the British colonial labelling of the diverse dharma practices of India under the single rubric of `Hinduism’. Nevertheless, the term `shamanism’ provides religious studies scholars a convenient generic designation for an animistic worldview in which special medium technicians link the visible world with the otherworld of gods and spirits for the benefit of the local community. Consequently, it is with reference to a broadly detectable similarity of religious belief and practice pertaining to an active mediumship involving spirits conceived as autonomous entities and for the purposes of healing, divination, control over natural events, and the like that I employ the terms `shaman’ and `shamanism’ in this paper.

The shaman is a combination healer, priest and magician whose speciality is controlling or gaining aid of supernatural agencies. Among the devices the shaman employs, we find hypnotism, ventriloquism, sleight of hand, and, above all, trance-like states. These last are achieved through dance, music, fasting, meditation, drug-taking and/or self-hypnosis. In other words, the shaman is one who has mastered what Mircea Eliade designates `techniques of ecstasy’. It is in the ecstatic state that the shaman’s soul is believed to leave the body and travel great distances – including the heavens and the underworlds. The dangers of the otherworld are always present, but through the shaman’s initiatory preparation, and fortified with the aid of acquired guardian spirits, the shaman alone is able to brave the challenge.

For traditional societies, out-of-body shamanic projection has specific purposes. The primary goal is to cure illness including `loss of soul’. He or she also functions as a psychopomp who escorts the souls of the dead to the otherworld. In the shaman’s capacity to direct communal ceremonies along with the propensity to commune with extra-terrestrial regions, he/she functions as a kind of `psychic safety-valve’ for the host community. The shaman may also practice divination and clairvoyance and thereby serve to locate lost objects, animals or people for the benefit of other members of his/her society or for the social collective as a whole.

The most crucial factor for the indigenous shaman, therefore, is his/her social role. The shaman is the specialist who explores the outer reaches of the mind, the realms of fearsome archetypes, the dimensions of schizophrenia. It is the vitally important social duties of the shaman which serve as the psychic-explorer’s anchor. In other word’s, it is the shaman’s society and his or her obligations to it which constitute the source of security and support in the specialist’s explorations of madness and the ability to return from what might otherwise amount to a permanent state of insanity.

It is through the shaman’s ability to divine the future that the shaman becomes most similar to the prophet. However, the traditional prophet operates in times of prosperity. The apocalyptist, on the other hand, is one who predicts in times of distress. Millennialism is the belief that personal and socio-political life will change for the better at the end of a specific period of time. The awaited `millennium’ is often expected to follow a transitional phase of radical and cataclysmic upheaval in which `enemies’ and oppressors are eliminated. The apocalyptic `birthing-time’ of the coming new world order in which good triumphs over evil is nevertheless an interval of terror for all involved.

In general, shamanism is not associated with millenarianism, and any detectable element of fear has more to do with the individual shaman’s challenges in the otherworld than with collective devastations pertaining to this one. However, in America, the early nineteenth century Handsome Lake revival and Ghost Dance movements of the 1870s and 1890s which celebrated the imminent disappearance of the European descendants, the restoration of traditional lands and ways of life, and the return of revivified ancestors were predicted and launched by mediumistic shamans. Consequently, while indigenous shamanism is primarily concerned with maintaining the status quo of society, in times of colonial oppression or extreme stress, the shaman may inspire a millenarian movement which provokes fear and the necessity to follow strict codes of conduct as a means to prepare for – and remain safe in - the anticipated change.

The New Age Millennium

Essentially, for the New Age Movement, the anticipated `New Age’ paradigm is a metaphor for salvational change. The movement itself is a complex and loosely organised confederation of contrasting beliefs, techniques and practices that blend Eastern mystical philosophies, occult-psychic phenomena and pagan religious practices together in an often haphazard and uncoordinated manner. There is no centralisation within New Age which could either speak for the movement as a whole, supply membership lists, or even ascertain who and who is not a member. The New Age Movement is largely a perpetually shifting and ad hoc alliance of exegetical individuals and groups, audience gatherings, client services, and various new religious movements that range between the cultic, sectarian and denominational. Even when viewed externally, such as in sociological observation, there is little agreement concerning what constitutes New Age and who is and who is not to be included.

However, the establishment of a new supernatural world order is the defining or essential thrust of New Age expectation. Within its broad confederacy of belief and identity, we find three ideal-type New Age orientations: the occult, the spiritual and the social (York, 1995 pp. 36f). It is the occult dimension of New Age which exhibits the greatest parallels with the contemporary Pentecostal/charismatic revival. Both are primarily concerned with spiritual and physical healing largely outside the confines of standard medical science; both seek guidance from spirits along with direct experience of the sacred – through glossalia for the one and channelling for the other; and both find the world on the verge of radical spiritual transformation. For occult New Agers, the New Age is often understood to come about through the operation of an external supernatural agent.

Consequently, despite the more pervasive understanding of the `New Age millennium’ as a metaphor of change, any careful survey of holders of the New Age paradigm reveals a sizeable number of `adherents’ who understand the New Age as a literal event. Many of these even expect the advent of the New Age to be apocalyptic and characterised by terrestrial and social upheaval. This more `Christian wing’ of New Age thought – exemplified in the writings of Edgar Cayce and Ruth Montgomery – adopts a premillennial form of Christian millenarianism. Jesus’ physical return follows a period of earth catastrophes but inaugurates the New Age millennium. It contrasts with the more `postmillennial’ position of most New Agers which, if not necessarily expecting a second coming to occur at the end of a `thousand years’ of New Age righteousness, at least argues for worldly activism and reform as the incumbent process necessary `to make the millennium’. A leading spokesperson for this vision as a product of human effort rather than supernatural intervention has been Marilyn Ferguson, author of the 1987 best-seller, The Aquarian Conspiracy. A third position between the more canonical Christian on the one hand and the essentially `New Age’ Christian and non-Christian on the other is represented by the Eastern mysticism and Christian mix that we find expressed by the Montana-based Church Universal and Triumphant’s Elizabeth Claire Prophet. Mrs. Prophet, claiming not to be a channeler but one who follows in the old tradition of the prophets, argues for spiritual and physical preparation according to the guidance she has received from higher beings.

New Age identity

What tends to distinguish New Age thought from that of the major world religions is its theodicy. New Age, by and large, and with such exceptions as Montgomery and Prophet, tends to deny the reality of evil. As a corollary to this, New Age also denies the validity of fear. With its doctrine of reincarnation, whatever negativity that one perceives to encounter is simply an opportunity to learn and progress in self-development. The New Age affirms the potential powers of the individual, and it believes that a person can re-create the cosmos according to his or her wishes.

A typical New Age technical practice is that of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). NLP advances itself as a new science of the mind in which one trains (programs) one’s neural impulses toward positive expectation. The technique is believed to develop power to influence others, shape one’s own destiny, heal past wounds, create one’s dream future, overcome obstacles and cure phobias. In essence, NLP is a modern recasting of the earlier principle of `positive thinking’. In its consideration of a fundamental dynamics between mind and affirmative language, it develops an epistemological theory concerning how their interplay creatively affects our bodies and behaviours. Consequently, NLP will not countenance the possibility of the negative or a failed outcome. More broadly, its essential affirmation of unlimited human potential is a sine qua non of New Age theory and practice.

At times, this ability to create one’s own universe veers toward the solipsistic – as witnessed with Shirley MacLaine’s new year’s eve New Age ceremony in which she realises her total responsibility and power for all world events (MacLaine, 1987:173-75; vide York, 1995:78). That humans feel terror is seen by Ms. MacLaine as simply the fact that she herself feels terror. It is on the earth-plane level that we each experience fear, pain and difficulties as realities, whereas the `loving’ spiritual level of infinite wisdom guarantees that it alone is the sole reality and all else an illusion. Nevertheless, regarding both the physical and spiritual realities, "We create them both" (MacLaine, 1987:333). Consequently, this underlying New Age conviction that we are ourselves the authors of spiritual reality and that the material world is a valueless illusion betrays the New Age’s Gnostic inheritance. In its ultimate rejection of the physical, New Age is simply a modern updating of a longstanding transcendental-gnostic-theosophical tradition.

The New Age/Neo-pagan dichotomy

But this `nature is an illusion’ stance of New Age reveals the movement’s own internal and unresolved dichotomy. New Age is frequently assessed by sociologists and other scholars of religion as well as by itself to include elements of pagan spirituality. Contemporary Western paganism, often referred to as `Neo-paganism’, has instead increasingly come to distance itself from the New Age. Instead, the basic theological perspective of paganism pictures the godhead as immanent and not something `wholly other’ from the tangible. Nature is understood as real and sacred rather than a delusional mâyâ or veil that requires penetration and piercing to reach the spiritual truth it obscures.

This spiritual dichotomy remains, in part, an unresolved tension and dialogue within New Age, though increasingly as each diverging worldview finds its own articulating voice, a polarisation emerges in which the New Age assumes the `nature as illusion’ position, while Neo-paganism centres on `nature as real’ and something to be centrally cherished. But if gnosticism and paganism are to be seen as polar opposites, they are also, vis-à-vis the mainstream Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy, natural allies. Both movement’s place the burden of spiritual decision on the individual alone. Both eschew the imposition of any ecclesiastical authority or body in determining what one should or should not believe. In this respect, both New Age and Neo-pagan `seekers’ become the typical spiritual consumers in what sociology often labels the contemporary religious supermarket. In our modern/postmodern era, beliefs and practices have tended to become commodities sampled, accepted or rejected by the religious consumer. The exegetical and hermeneutical decision belongs to the individual alone in predominant New Age and Neo-pagan conviction. Whereas paganism tends, however, to delve into and keep more within the parameters of a specific tradition (e.g., Wicca, Druidry, Santería, Egyptian Mysteries, etc.), the New Age by-line more typically and unencumberedly is: `If it works for you, then it is right’.

New Age/Neo-pagan similarities and distinctions

The biggest contrast between New Age and Neo-paganism, apart from the reality of nature and `location’ of the godhead question, concerns millennialism. As this last is, in the West, essentially a Christian or at least Christian-derived concept, it has little place in contemporary Western paganism. For New Age, by contrast, it constitutes a centrally defining feature – whether literal and/or apocalyptic, or whether metaphorical and an insistent goad for social activism. Whether the New Age is to be a quantum shift in collective consciousness, whether a golden age of peace and love, whether imminent or a defining objective, the Age of Aquarius is its catalyst and identifying point of reference.

In the current re-emergence of paganism in the West, there is little co-ordinated use of the millennium symbol. While Bryan Wilson (1973) finds that thaumaturgy and millenarianism often go hand-in-hand among undeveloped peoples in the third world, this linking of magic and adventism is absent for present-day pagans in the Western world. This absence, however, does not preclude concern with the environment, ecology, anti-pollution efforts or, even occasionally, pro-Luddite sentiment. In fact, in contrast to the frequent narcissistic and laissez-faire criticisms of New Age, Neo-paganism is by-and-large fully committed to activist campaigns against litter, road and highway construction, and desecration of ancient and sacred sites.

New Age too, however, may frequently share with paganism the notion of `stewardship of the earth’ – a concern which tends to draw both movements behind the `Green Movement’ as a primary political expression. Other similarities "between New Age and Neo-paganism include eco-humanism or some variant, the belief in the intrinsic divinity of the individual, epistemological individualism, and exploratory use of theonymic metaphors not traditionally associated with the Judeo-Christian mainstream" (York, 1995:145). The foremost emerging symbol for the godhead is that of `the Goddess’, and after Wicca/witchcraft, this single construct is perhaps more frequently encountered in New Age than it is among the remaining contemporary Western pagan practices. As a whole, however, both movements clearly recognise what they consider a need for a spiritual idiom in feminine terms.

Apart from contrasts between a hierarchical understanding of the godhead vis-à-vis a more `democratic’ structuring of the supernatural, the primacy of the invisible spiritual world versus the precedence of the material, ad hoc and simplistic ceremony in contrast to intricate and elaborate ritual, the New Age and Neo-pagan unite in their mutual acceptance of belief in reincarnation. Though the raison d’être may often be different, i.e., `spiritual development’ through progressive shedding of karma with the goal of final re-emergence with the godhead as ultimate source vis-à-vis simply pure participation in the great cosmic round of nature encompassing the eternal cycle of birth-death-rebirth, the notion of rebirth is something which is entertained largely, if not exclusively, throughout both movements. The occupation by the soul of a new body after the death of the former body is a New Age and Neo-pagan belief which sets both movements apart from the prevailing Judaeo-Christian understanding of the West.

But if reincarnation, Gaia consciousness, the sharing of the same sacred sites and ecological restoration link the two movements, another major overlap between New Age and Neo-paganism is to be found in the incorporation of what are hailed as `shamanic techniques’. The appropriation of these along with Native American spirituality is among the more contested issues which arise from the dynamics of the religious Western consumer market. As the market is itself a feature of the modern/postmodern transition, so too is the employment of shamanic tools – one which pits Western interpretative shamanism vis-à-vis traditional, indigenous forms of shamanism. Nevertheless, when guided imagery is used to replace shamanic journeying, the emphasis is then placed on the `imaginal' (as opposed both to the imaginary and to Jung's archetypal). What this amounts to is that the power and process of imagining becomes a workable way not to appropriate from other cultures.

Neo-shamanism

All forms of shamanism as a religious belief rely on an animistic assumption concerning the world. In animism, natural objects are perceived as imbued (animated) with inherent vitality. Everything in the cosmos - humans, animals, plants, stones, emotions, dreams, ideas – possesses an independent, individual and conscious life principle. The indwelling spirit could be benign and benevolent, indifferent and neutral, or dangerous and a cause of fear. But the very idea that spiritual beings exist which can separate from their resident bodies allows the notion of shamanism that one’s soul can encounter these entities and that this encounter might be beneficial or harmful – depending on the nature of the spirit and the precaution and strengths of the `soul-traveller’.

Animism is connected with fetishism, totemism, idolatry, notions of taboo, ancestor worship, the use of charms, amulets and talismans, and, of course, shamanism. The conscious personalities inherent in objects and which may be encountered in the otherworld as independent spirits require propitiation or manipulation. It is chiefly the function of the shaman to outwit whatever negative forces that are confronted and are serving as obstacles to collective and individual well-being.

The basic idea of shamanism appears to be the institutionalisation of a socially recognised intermediary who liaisons between the world of pragmatic realities and the more subtle realm of spirit. While the construct `shamanism' is of course a Western, largely academic fiction, thanks principally to the influence of Carlos Castaneda, Michael Harner and, retroactively, Mircea Eliade (see Daniel Noel, 1997), there is currently also a burgeoning of interest in what is typically called neo-shamanism, sometimes New Age shamanism. In fact, in a 1980 work entitled The Way of the Shaman, Michael Harner has led the way to an acceptance of what is now known as `core shamanism' as representing the essential features of shamanic transformation and experience of ecstasy. It is important to recognise, however, that `core shamanism' is also a Western and, in many respects, an artificial creation which has little if anything to do with traditional shamanic practices in indigenous or Asian cultures.

While Noel concedes that it was Castaneda who inspired the West's `shabby imitation' of indigenous shamanisms, neo-shamanism is nonetheless a new religious movement which may be spreading rapidly in the West. Among the salient features of neo-shamanism is the orientation toward personal and spiritual empowerment among its practitioners. Certainly as a neo-colonial intrusion, it is seen to be a `fake' practice from the Native American perspective. Dreamwork itself is largely absent in Harner's development or `creation’ of core-shamanism which follows in the wake of Eliade's `construction' of shamanism and Castaneda's incorporation of a great deal of fantasy in his works. Consequently, while Harner originally did some solid anthropological ethnographic work in South America, his subsequent development of the concept of `core shamanism' is essentially a creative and imaginative work. What occurs in a typical Harner workshop, in which he replaces shamanic journeying with guided imagery, will not, in fact, be found in any single indigenous tribe.

Core shamanism defines itself as "the universal and near universal basic methods of the shaman to enter nonordinary reality for problem solving, well-being, and healing" (Common Ground 100, Summer 1999, p. 108). Harner’s workshops, weekend intensives and experiential courses in shamanic training have spawned numerous centres on the North American West Coast, throughout North America in general and in Europe: e.g., The Foundation for Shamanic Studies (Mill Valley, California), Friends Landing International Centers for Conscious Living (http://www.friendshipslanding.net), Sacred Circles Institute (Mukilteo, Washington), Inward Journeys – Laeh Maggie Garfield & Edwin Knight (British Columbia and Eugene, Oregon), Dance of the Deer Foundation Center for Shamanic Studies (Soquel, California), and Leo Rutherford’s White Eagle Lodge (London).

The Foundation for Shamanic Studies places particular emphasis on the `classic shamanic journey’ as an awe-inspiring visionary method for exploring `the hidden universe’ of myth and dream. Friends Landing combines shamanic orientation with hypnotherapy and the ideokinetic study of how imagery affects movement. Sacred Circles Institute, Inward Journeys and Dance of the Deer Foundation hold camping retreats, Mount Shasta pilgrimages, wilderness treks and/or similar experiential encounters with nature in order to attain personal and spiritual transformation. According to Garfield and Knight (Common Ground 100, Summer 1999, p. 47), "Shamanic development is a pathway that brings understanding and meaning to your life through mastery and cooperation with the natural world." It includes stargazing, interconnection of the soul’s different parts, mastery of elements, use of yoga, herbs and power sites, and `Vision Quests’. One is encouraged to become the person one always knew he or she was born to be. One is reputedly "provided with methods for journeying to discover and study with [his or her] own individual spiritual teachers in nonordinary reality" (ibid. p. 108). The purpose of New Age `core’ shamanism, therefore, is to restore spiritual power and health into contemporary daily life for the healing of oneself, others and the planet.

Using the `magic of focused attention’, neo-shamanism endeavours to help its practitioners secure habit and lifestyle changes for both oneself and one’s clients in order to transmute suffering, relieve stress, gain personal understanding and locate a core of wellness that can implement one’s life’s dream. While part of its effort is to train the would-be aspirant to supply fee-providing healing and training services to others, the main concentration of neo-shamanic activity is directed toward the self. In this sense, it is in full accord with the essential thrust of New Age concerns with personal transformation. This use of shamanic techniques as a `quick fix’ and human potential tool, however, is at complete variance with traditional tribal shamanisms in which rarely does an individual choose on his or her own accord to become a shaman. In the indigenous context, the long and arduous training which leads one into being a shaman is something which befalls an individual – usually after the experience of an unwanted and major trauma.

Shamanism and neo-shamanism compared

Unlike indigenous shamanisms, in core shamanism knowledge becomes exoteric rather than esoteric. As a commodity, it is essentially something which is bought and sold. There is also little attempt to master the spirits. In fact, the aim is give power directly back to the people and thereby eliminate the shamanic specialist altogether. In Jonathan Horwitz's explanation during the 1998 `Shamanism in Contemporary Society' conference sponsored by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the `new shamanism' is a spiritual discipline which enables one directly to contact and use the spiritual dimension of the universe - one which is based on the animistic understanding that everything that exists in the physical plane contains spirit power. Horwitz prefers to see this process as a shamanic revival rather than as `neo-shamanism', though he recognises that there is much confusion in making the peak experience the goal rather than simply the doorway.

However, a key weakness in neo-shamanism would appear to be its over-emphasis on the self without a community framework. Horwitz argues that the shaman is only a vehicle, not so that the shaman can become more powerful, for this is the endeavour of the sorcerer, but to discover the shaman’s very humanity by surrendering to the spirits in an act of discovery. Though Horwitz recognises that such a surrendering is also to one's own personal responsibility, there is little if any recognition that the shaman must negotiate a dangerous and threatening path and this in addition not on behalf of himself/herself but for the community he/she serves.

In traditional shamanisms, the shaman's entire endeavour is shaped by his or her role vis-à-vis the community. Deliberately sending forth one's free-soul, exploring the spiritual realms of the otherworld, being beyond the boundaries of the norm and of normal behaviour in a Western cultural context is to be mad, insane or schizoid. In the traditional understanding of a soul-duality comprising both a life or body soul and a free or dream soul, if a person's dream-soul does not return to the waking body, the person is understood to be mentally ill and eventually physical illness inevitably follows. For the ordinary person, soul-loss is an accident or misfortune. For the shaman, by contrast, the very propensity for entering an altered state of consciousness is his or her trade. But it is still not the raison d'être. The purpose instead is the community welfare.

In navigating the dangers of the world of spirit, within the condition of an altered state of consciousness, even for the experienced shaman there is the risk of soul-loss through the sheer terror of encountering the mysterium tremendum. It is the very social function of the shaman which provides his or her link back to this world. Community service becomes the grounding link which prevents the shaman from becoming permanently lost in the otherworld. So while the mediumship of the shaman is what allows a community an access to the spiritual without which there is the danger of collective madness, it is the community itself and the shaman's duty to serve it which provides the shamanic safeguard against the specialist becoming imprisoned perpetually in the world of purely analogical and magical effervesence. It is this aspect which is essential in all indigenous forms of shamanism but which currently in contemporary creations of `core-shamanism' - as simply altered states of consciousness without a developed sense of social responsibility - is only incipient.

The full New Age inclination of core or Neo-shamanism, however, remains detectable in its theodicean denial of the negative as real and/or as evil. This is New Age holism as opposed to more traditional dualistic understandings of good and evil. New Age theodicy "tends more simply to devalue or transvalue the reality of suffering than to attempt a formal explanation for its existence" (Wuthnow, 1976 p. 128 on the mystical meaning system). But by denying the reality of the negative – whether fear or evil, New Age shamanism employs a technical tool with perhaps a misunderstanding of the context in which to use it. In traditional shamanism, the shaman’s flight of the soul takes him or her into a psychic realm of infinite terrors, and it is the technician’s acquired ability to cope with fear and the trickster element of the supernatural that allows the shaman to return to the everyday world when the task is completed and not become a lost victim in an unending dimension of enchantment. From the viewpoint of its critics, Neo-shamanism, by contrast, is a foolish playing with fire.

Neo-shamanism belongs to New Age’s concern with anxiety and phobia treatment. Its primary focus is upon personal anxiety disorder which people may perceive as impairing their ability to function. Shortness of breath, dizziness, racing heart, trembling, depersonalisation, paralysing terrors, panic attacks and fear of dying are recognised as various symptoms of anxiety which human potential, New Age techniques and Neo-shamanism claim to eradicate. The alleged superficiality and lack of in-depth study which many see as endemic to the New Age throw into question its often and seemingly willy-nilly appropriation of cultural artefacts without a mature and guarded wariness on how to use them.

Conclusion

As a whole, Neo-shamanism may be seen as a polyglot, pluralistic movement that parallels the eclectic and multicultural/multiperspectival developments of contemporary Western spiritual proliferation. It is basically only in its more New Age emphasis that it tends to deny the reality of intrinsically nefarious spirits. During the 1988 Newcastle conference, Horwitz expressed this typically New Age perspective when he proclaimed that the spirits of cancer and Aids might be encountered as revoltingly ugly but are not evil and can be appealed to as respectable entities in the process of extrication. From an opposite viewpoint, Denmant Jakobsen at the same conference pointed out that in their environments of origin, shamanic practices tend to approach a spirit of illness as something to be killed and destroyed or at least boomeranged back for the destruction of its sender.

Contemporary Western shamanistic practices are, of course, not only New Age. In the increasingly complex and varied fabric of Western society, indigenous spiritualities are steadily to be found – often with creative and innovative adaptations for fitting into an urban environment as opposed to the more rural conditions of their original homelands. Foremost in this respect are the Afro-Atlantic faiths of Macumba, Santería, Voodoo and so forth. The Santerían santeros, however, is less a shaman as he or she is a medium. The differentiation between the shaman and the medium is often subtle and fluid. In general, however, the medium is an individual who is occupied by a spirit while in a trance. The medium acts as a channel for the words of a by-standing spirit or the ghost of a deceased person. In this sense, the medium is closer to the oracle. The shaman, by contrast, travels to the afterlife - whether the netherworlds or the celestial. Soul-travel is the shaman's speciality, and in this sense, though frequently classified as shamans, the Yoruban elegun and Japanese miko are closer to mediums since they undergo spirit possession. The Amerindian Algonquin is also similar in this last: he or she conjures a vision-questing spirit into himself/herself rather than send out a soul in ecstatic trance. Moreover, in this vein, the religiosity of the North American Plains peoples has been described as a democratised form of spirituality inasmuch as everyone participates in vision quest - not just the religious specialist.

Native American and Afro-Latin religiosities are both traditionally pagan and in this sense have more affinity with contemporary Western forms of paganism than with New Age spirituality. If shamanism is one of the major bridges between New Age and Neo-paganism, there are also important differences between how the two orientations respectively practice shamanic techniques. If Western paganism too tends to disallow the intrinsic existence of evil, it nevertheless allows more than New Age for the possibility of `operative’ evil. It also more fully recognises the dynamics of fear.

While Wicca/witchcraft is the more dominant form at present within contemporary Western paganism, another residual school surviving as a legacy of the counterculture of the 1960s we may designate as psychonautica. In traditional shamanism, the use of drug-induced trance states is a major avenue through which the shaman achieves `flight of the soul’. Modern Western psychonauts comprise a quasi-scholarly and quasi-experimental alliance of explorers in `entheogenic’ experience. Not all this pursuit is conducted as a religious or spiritual undertaking, but much of it is, and most of what is is pagan. Present-day psychonauts eschew hallucinogenic use in any form of recreational tourism. The purpose, instead, is self-discovery and imaginal exploration. But while the more traditional understanding of community to be served might be absent and the present-day community for Western psychonauts is generally the psychonautic community itself, the psychedelic experience of mental archetypes and the mind’s antipodes allows a cognizance of fear itself as a profound reality – betokening a frightening emotion which, as Rudolf Otto (1928:19) recognised "must be gravely disturbing to those persons who will recognize nothing in the divine nature but goodness, gentleness, love, and a sort of confidential intimacy."

The ira deorum, the fear or wrath of the gods, is something New Age by-and-large cannot and will not countenance. The sociologist of religion cannot judge this as wrong in itself. The New Age presents a different worldview – one which contrasts sharply with those of most major world religions as well as with traditional paganism and its contemporary Western varieties. In New Age theodicy, evil is largely understood as ignorant behaviour, that which arises from a state of ignorance. The antidote of sin for the New Ager is not atonement but gnosis. Knowledge, wisdom and understanding are the means by which evil can be transformed and transcended.

From a more purely pagan perspective, evil is extrinsic rather than intrinsic and is essentially a disease. As something which invades or disrupts an organism’s natural equilibrium, the negative is to be cured. While both New Age and Neo-paganism speak in terms of healing metaphors, for the former this is a state of mind, an enlightenment, while for the latter, it is a re-gaining of the natural balance, a `disinfection’ and removal of disruption. If Eliade saw shamanism as comprising various techniques of ecstasy, the Russian Shirogokorov in the 1930s tended to associate shamanism with spiritual healing as its most salient feature. We might assess that both were correct. What is interesting in our ambivalent and confusing times, however, is that two forms of contemporary shamanism are taking root in today’s world: the New Age variety which seeks to move beyond fear toward a state of complete spiritual and emotional freedom, and the pagan variety which endeavours to manage or outwit fear in the process of bringing benefit to the individual and community.

It is within the area of pyschonautica that the New Age and Neo-pagan branches of contemporary Western shamanism might come closest together. Psychomimesis, entheoi or catalepsis is variously induced through different hallucinogenic substances. Following from Brazilian and other South American practices, Michael Harner has employed ayahuasca as a medium by which to experience a world of spirit and vision. Carlos Castaneda's preferences included use of jimson weed, peyote and Datura stramonium. We know that first century Thracian shamans resorted to hashish, while the Vedic peoples' medium of choice was soma - possibly the eastern Mediterranean pine Ephedra fragilia or the fly agaric mushroom traditionally associated with the Lapps. Alcohol is always another possibility, while Ecuador's Jivaro Indians employ tobacco and Surinamers, the takini plant. Pythagoras apparently used kykeon which translates as `disorder'.

The ayahuasca which Harner has used as his preferred vehicle into ecstatic experience is known in South America as la purga. While ayahuasca is a central feature in the Brazilian Pentecostal sects of Santo Daime and Unio de la Vegetal, it is more widely known for its medicinal/healing properties than for its hallucinogenic ones. This connects the psychonautic tradition which follows in Harner’s footsteps (e.g., Alan Schumacher, Wilfred Van Dorp, etc.) more with the idea of shamanism as first perceived by Shirogokorov. While still conforming essentially to the ideas of `core shamanism’, this particular entheogenic practice re-opens New Age shamanism to pagan dimensions.

The contrast between New Age shamanism and pagan shamanism in a modern Western context revolves around the role of fear. In traditional shamanism, the shaman’s initiation is an ordeal involving pain, hardship and terror. In its classic version, the shaman experiences death, often dis-membership or skeletalisation, before undergoing reconstitution and rebirth. New Age, by contrast is a religious perspective that denies the ultimately reality of the negative, and this would devalue the role of fear as well. But in seeking to dismiss the fearsome, New Age also has the propensity to eliminate a central feature of religion qua religion, namely, the experience of awe. The encounter with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans engenders a mixed emotion of fear, reverence and wonder. If, however, all becomes `sweetness and light’ through a New Age agenda, there is no dread. But without the experience of fear, there can then be no real experience of the awesome. New Age shamanism would then seem to constitute an incomplete form of shamanism – one which does not include the central feature of shamanic initiation, and one which also does not include a central feature of religion.

References Mircea Eliade (1972), Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (tr. W.R. Trask), Princeton, University Press.

Marilyn Ferguson (1987), The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher.

Shirley MacLaine (1987), It’s All in the Playing, New York & London: Bantam.

Daniel C. Noel, The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities (New York: Continuum, 1997).

Rudolf Otto (1928), The Idea of the Holy (tr. John W. Harvey), London: Oxford U.P.

Bryan R. Wilson (1973), Magic and the Millennium: A Sociological Study of Religious Movements of Protest Among Tribal and Third-World Peoples, London: Heinemann.

Robert Wuthnow (1976), The Consciousness Reformation, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Michael York (1995), The Emerging Network: A Sociology of the New Age and Neo-pagan Movements, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Metashamanism

2007-07-01T18:30:00.000-07:00

I hope to develop Daniel C. Noel's idea which he referred to as neoshamanism in contradistinction to the creations of folks currently using that term.

A big part of the dissertation I'm writing and community we are building has to do with shifting in perception back and forth between the literal (myths of Progress, Science, and mechanized Industrialism) and the metaphorical (myths of Soul, Humanities, Poetics). Dr. Dan Noel was convinced that the contemporary search with which many folks are identifying themselves as "spiritual but not religious" has to do with a desire for a more conscious metaphoricality in relationship to spirit and soul realms, a more purposeful fiction-consciousness that acknowledges the overlaps of the poetic, psychological, literary, (spiritualigious?spiritualicious :) , and the fundamental systemic presupposition of unconsciousness - that which may be related to through imagination but never fully known - shared by all these approaches.

In wondering in mystery, I am interested in a transition from both the power-base clergy authenticated by apostles of a dominating idea and the "native medicine man" sprung fully clad from the head of a colonizing Nostalgia. Both are invested by the contemporary scientistic imagination in knowing something, some sympathetic prestidigitation, that gives access to some place inaccessible to "normal" people, the existence of whom I find dubious at best. (See Ernest Becker "Everyman as Pervert: an essay on the pathology of normalcy" if at all possible - in his "Angel in Armor").

I wonder if Noel meant to imply not a neoshamanism, though that is the word he chose, but something less Nouveau that follows our revisioning of what is native to the spirit and soul in a contemporary contextlessness seriously lacking in nativity. I thought about referring to this imagination in creative motion as post-shamanism but heard Thomas Holcroft's admonition ringing in my ears that "The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post."Still post-shamanism might work, or how about metashamanism? The metashaman is certain to know some things that I don't, but the reverse is also guaranteed to be true. What attracts me is that she knows differently some how, in some way that I can feel at first and then understand, but which requires some sustained practice to continue deeply enough to apply. It is the way of her knowing, the art in her process that I find compelling. She moves by way of the imagination, making fiction, making community that is aware of itself dreaming its own consciousness, identity, purpose, and culture.

Here is a place metashamanism was mentioned before me with a different but parallel inflection. I'll have to look for where Joseph Campbell used the phrase "shaman of shaman". This piece is from an excellent article on storytelling and writing. I recommend it to your attention.

Further Reading on the Craft of Storytelling

Okay, so you've decided that you want to get serious about learning the craft of storytelling. Maybe you've even set your sights on creating an epic myth, in the tradition of Star Wars, Dune, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, or even The Odyssey or Gilgamesh. Now what? Part of your motivation involves personal goals, like proving your value to yourself and the world, or earning a living doing something you care about. Those are valid goals! Part of your motivation involves more communal goals, like finding the most productive way for you to give back to the world, or to create a story that nourishes young people the way your favorite stories nourished you. How do you entwine those goals together, to create a synergy between your animal and spiritual/artistic impulses? How do you create a story which heals those pieces of you which aren't yet as healthy as they might be, then share that recipe for self-healing with the world?

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) observed that virtually all "precivilized" tribal people have a witch-doctor, or shaman, who functions as the intermediary between the known and the unknown (especially the divine). We modern "civilized" people like to flatter ourselves by imagining that we have outgrown the primitive need for a shaman, but Campbell argues that the reverse is true, that the "shamanic function" has vastly proliferated, splintering into two main groups: the scientist/engineer deals with the "logos," or rational use of symbols, while priests and artists deal with the "mythos," or intuitive/divine use of symbols. Homer, Thomas Edison, Isadora Duncan, Albert Einstein and George Lucas can all be understood in the context of serving the shamanic function in society - providing useful new patterns for our relationship with each other and the world.

For scientist- and engineer-shaman, the path to gaining shamanic strength is fairly well-defined: both scientists and engineers ground themselves in logic, which is the basic set of rules that governs the physical universe (like 1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples). People learn logic mostly by solving logical problems, typically using math, syllogisms or computer programming. Every technological innovation in the world is created using a combination of logic and the scientific method, which is really just a systematic way of testing educated guesses to discover if they work or not in reality. But what about us aspiring storyteller-shaman? We typically learn our craft primarily by intuition, starting out by imitating our favorite stories, then slowly venturing into increasingly original territory as we gain a feel for what makes stories entertaining and valuable. But what if we want to draw on more than just intuition, and approach our craft with the same methodic rigour scientists and engineers find so empowering? Where would we begin?

Because he spent his life identifying the root patterns followed by storyteller-shaman, Campbell sometimes referred to himself a "shaman of shaman," which might be abbreviated as "metashaman." Three of the most significant metashaman of the past several hundred years were Max Müller (1823-1900), Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Jung (1875-1961). Müller practically invented both comparative linguistics and comparative mythology, providing the first rough "map" of mankind's relationship with divinity and divine symbols which derived from the scientific method applied to several belief systems (before Müller mankind's ideas of the divine were almost always discovered through what might be called "divine intuition" within a single religious tradition). Freud coined the modern use of the word "unconscious," meaning the part of our mind which makes decisions beyond our conscious control; this gave us our first scientific vocabulary for the "territory" inside us where the motifs used by both dreams and mythic stories operate. Jung was the first to organize these motifs into useful categories, such as "shadow" (the embodiment of all our fears) and "anima" (the archetypal feminine). Joseph Campbell extended Jung's idea of the archetype by using them to map the basic pattern of all stories, the monomyth, and also the common element behind all religions and spiritual ideas, which he named the transcendent.

If we aspiring storytellers are one modern form of the tribal shaman, then one way to approach our task is to educate ourselves toward a solid understanding of shamanism and the shamanic role in society. What exactly makes a gifted shaman so valuable to other people? What does it take to become a shaman? The two strongest sources of this "metashamanic" information might be (1) serious anthropological overviews of shamanism and (2) nonfiction essays by the most powerful modern shaman explaining their methods and goals. Both Jung and Campbell were set on the "shamanic path" by asking themselves the same question: "By what myth do I live?" Here are some powerful starting places for asking yourself the same question:

Poetics by Aristotle (383-322 BC) might be the oldest "metashamanic" work, an attempt to systematically explain and categorize various forms of fiction. Poetics didn't make a big splash when it was first released, but has since become a classic and staple of literary theory. Aristotle apparently coined the term catharsis, which literally means "to cleanse" but in context refers to the emotional cleansing we experience while vicariously experiencing horrible or forbidden things.

"Politics and the English Language" (1946) by George Orwell (1903-1950) is a concentrated burst of mentoring on how to use language with power and honesty.

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee is one of the best no-nonsense books describing the basic building blocks and mechanics of stories.

Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949) is short, entertaining, and essential. Campbell is one of the most powerful "metashaman" of all time, and all his books are worth reading. He's even more engaging in video than print, so you might start with his videotapes, particularly The Power of Myth, available at many libraries. Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers does more than simplify Campbell's book for screenwriters; he also makes well-reasoned criticisms and suggests improvements to the monomyth pattern.

The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell, is among the best starting places on Jung. Jung himself summarized his ideas for non-psychologists in the book Man and His Symbols (1961). It's important to understand the basics of Freud, but he's terribly long-winded, so you might start with a summary of his main ideas written by someone else. Also helpful is Freud's essay "An Autobiographical Study" (1924), which he wrote towards the end of his life as a summary of his goals, methods and discoveries (available in The Freud Reader).

A huge number of books on shamanism are available, but unfortunately most of them tend to be so fluffy, or contain so much wishful thinking and misinformation, that they aren't of much practical use. The two most well-known, exhaustive and helpful meat-and-potatoes anthropological overviews of shamanism are probably The Golden Bough (1922) by Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) and Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964, originally published as Le Chamanisme, 1951) by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986).

As I understand the craft of storyteller-shamanism (distinct from metashaman like Jung and Campbell), Tolkien is the most powerful shaman of the past 100+ years. The closest he ever came to explaining what he was up to is his essay "On Fairy-Stories" (1938).

The Essential Max Müller; On Language, Mythology, and Religion (2002), edited by Jon R. Stone, may be the best starting place on Müller. While honoring Müller and presenting some of his strongest work, the introduction also acknowledges Müller's flaws and the inevitable partial out-dating of any pioneering work into a new field. Müller is also placed in the correct historical context, helping us understand how revolutionary his idea of "comparative mythology" was when it swept Europe in the late 19th century.

King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1886), both by H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925), were a powerful direct influence on The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Anne Rice's vampire books, Jung's theory of the anima, H.P. Lovecraft (particularly "The Call of Cthulhu," 1926), Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter of Mars and Tarzan), Robert E. Howard (Conan) and countless others. These books launched the "lost race" genre, a strong common parent of both science fiction and modern fantasy. Indiana Jones is based primarily on stories which were based primarily on Haggard's Allan Quatermain character. No matter which modern wonder stories or adventure stories you enjoy, they almost certainly have roots tracing back to Haggard.

Always be reading. Try spending a minimum of 200% as much time reading as watching TV and films combined. Read at least 50% outside your favorite genres, and at least 30% of your reading should ideally be books from outside your immediate culture (that means books originally written in modern non-English-speaking cultures, books written 100 or more years ago, or both). When a story grips you strongly, make a practice of tracing that story's sources: read interviews with the author, biographies and literate criticism. Try and build an intuitive feel for the creative methods of your favorite artists.

Figure out what you love (by trying a lot of things), and become an expert at it. Give special consideration to learning a musical instrument. Poets have been around for longer than recorded history, but up until just a few hundred years ago calling someone a "poet" automatically meant that they knew how to play a musical instrument. Performing musically will give you a feel for what sounds good that will carry over into your writing.

An epic is a compression of everything that's worth considering in life strung together into a single narrative. To write an epic, you need to develop your own idea of which things are most important, or worth considering. For instance, you'll probably have birth and death in there. Night and day. War and love. What else? The seasons? Different personality types, or social roles? Good vs. Evil? The afterlife? Look at the world around you - what is it everyone is struggling so hard for? Us shamanic wannabees earn our keep when we identify and communicate better ways for people to fulfill their needs and dreams.

Don't limit your sources to other stories: keep an eye out for ideas from music, art, your personal life and especially the natural world which you can import into your stories, expanding our idea of what a story can be. The most powerful shaman are to a degree metashaman, questioning the very nature of stories and consciousness. What is it that draws you to stories in the first place? Who are you? Why are you here?

Here is another place it was mentioned - probably before me and before Kristen Brennan.
reproduction from
http://www.geocities.com/~taoofearth/rants/D21-96.html

Sat. December 21st., 1996, 1:05am

Trendy Techno-Shamans Take the Web

Here I sit, in the “small bedroom” of the apartment that we have turned into the computer room, and I spend endless hours staring at a screen and typing on a keyboard. There is a new trend on television about "web-addiction", and I can see where it might come from, for I think I have it...but not in the sence that most do... I sit here, in Durham, North Carolina, and through this piece of electronic equipment, I can send my consciousness out at any part of the planet, and find information on anything that I could ever imagine. Do shamans not do this to find cures and remedies by sending their consciousness through the astral plane? But now I am not only an observer in this world beyond the physical point of my “computer room”, I can also tell others of my ideas and beliefs by leaving “temporal footprints” in cyber-space and spread the things that I have learned and the things that I believe in...could this be a new state of being...maybe, metashamanism? Being able to be in all places and in no place all at once? The term “Techno-Shaman” has being picked-up by every person that has experience with a computer and a bit of psychedelic drugs, it is no longer a term that fits with those that have been calling themselves this for many years. There are now probably hundreds that claim they came up with the term “techno-shaman”, and they/we all believe in our definitions of the word, they may all be right. But thousands of years ago, who knew the exact definition of a Christian, or a Taoist, or a Buddhist? These are but definitions that society has come up with to lump groups into their social structures, and I have no problem with anyone calling themselves a Techno-Shaman, as long as they always stay open to the goals of Nature and peace, and can allow their thoughts and beliefs to flow from their homes into cyber-space to spread the ideas that there can be a balance between Nature and Technology, and that we must treat both with the respect that they deserve. And if one wishes to become a metashaman, they need to learn to be in all places and in no place all at once. But then again, the word metashaman is something that I just came up with tonight, and by next year, it could be just another buzz word...

Peace and light to all

Tao of Earth

Earlier even than that:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=html&cd=9&url=http%3A%2F%2F209.85.173.132%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dcache%3A5T8vHVbof9gJ%3Awebdelprofesor.ula.ve%2Fhumanidades%2Felicap%2Fes%2Fuploads%2FBiblioteca%2Fmetashammanism.pdf%2Bmetashaman%26hl%3Den%26ct%3Dclnk%26cd%3D9%26gl%3Dus&ei=bmJ-SebmKZGksQPJkoHzAw&usg=AFQjCNHwEa-7PXxbhKmsjg4082141BgkSw&sig2=Twpc-1hV4BCdXxSu225J2g

SCIENCE, SHAMANISM AND METASHAMANISM
Paper Read at the
Second Venezuelan Seminar on Ethnomedicine and Religion
(Mérida, Venezuela, March 26-30, 1990)
Elías Capriles
1.- «Scientific» and Shamanistic Vision
We shall begin by reviewing two main approaches to life, health, illness and healing: the «primitive», shamanistic one prevailing in tribal communities, and the «modern», scientific one prevailing in industrial societies and their followers.
The «scientific» approach characteristic of industrial societies and their followers regards the environment as a cumulus of objects lacking subjectivity to be manipulated, and studies the generation of «physiological disease» overlooking the state of the «patient»s network of significant relationships and the effects that the problems arising in that net could have on the development of «illness».
In general, the «scientific» approach only considers the patient’s significant relationships in the case of imbalances deemed to be «psychological», and only recently—as a result of research such as the one carried out by Bateson, Haley, Weakland and Johnson on the genesis of «schizophrenia» or as the one carried out by Winnicott on the genesis of autism, of the development of the understanding of family dynamics1, and of the development of Antipsychiatry2— has managed to understand part of the social dynamics at the root of such «imbalances».
Whereas the «scientific» approach causes human subjects to relate instrumentally to their environment, the shamanistic approach, which regards the latter as a cumulus of subjective phenomena (or even as a living whole) leads human subjects to relate to it communicatively. In other works I have attempted to show that, in so far as we are possessed by instrumental relations, there is no way for us to confine them to the field of our relationships to the environment and thus we necessarily treat other people as things, and also that, given our technical might, instrumental dealings with the natural environment necessarily result in the destruction of the physical basis of our existence, giving rise to the ecological crisis that threatens us with destruction. Therefore, we must not accept

1Please consult the Bibliography at the end of this article.
2Although the term «Antipsychiatry» was coined by David Cooper (see the Bibliography), Ronald Laing is also considered as an antipsychiatrist, and the same may be said of Aaron Esterson, Lee, Philipson, Berke, Szchazman and other members of Laing’s original group. The precedents of Antipsychiatry are to be found in the Jungian interpretation of neurosis as a potentially healing process, in Kazimierz Dabrowski’s book Positive Disintegration and in the research by Gregory Bateson (in particular, in various of the works in the book Steps to an Ecology of Mind and in the book Perceval’s Narrative). According to Antipsychiatry, psychosis may be a spontaneous self-healing process that, unless institutionally aborted, may put an end to alienated, pathological normality (that is, of the pathological result of adaptation to a sick society).

Habermas’ thesis that the relations between human beings should be communicative and that the relations between human beings and their environment should be instrumental3.
Now, what we are concerned with here is that the shamanistic approach searches for the root of imbalances or illness in a pathology of the intersubjective relationships of the «diseased» person. Among the sharanahua, the cashinahua and the members of other South American tribes, the shaman consumes a psychedelic substance in order to discover and treat the communicative pathology that supposedly produced the imbalance4. As noted by Marlene Dobkin de Ríos5:
«The use of ayahuasca for healing does not require the conceptualization of the hallucinogenic as a healing agent per se. Rather, the vine is regarded as a substance that activates a powerful means for achieving an intended result: it gives the healer access to the culturally important zone of the causality of illness, allowing him or her to identify the nature of the illness... in order to later on neutralize or drive away the magic ill that is regarded as the cause of the disease. In regard to the successes attributed to the healer, we find that in general terms there has been a process of selection whereby the healers only accept the patients whom they believe they may successfully treat... Only the patients suffering given kinds of illness take ayahuasca—normally those suffering ills often classified as psychosomatic.»
We should not think that shamans only treat maladies imaginaires. Recent research has dug out the psychological roots of many illness that until very recently were regarded by the prevailing «medical science» as physiological diseases having no connection to the psyche—and in particular of illness still deemed «incurable» or difficult to cure, such as cancer6.

3See Elías Capriles, Las aventuras del fabuloso hombre-máquina. Contra Habermas y la ratio technica.
4See Michael J. Harner, Alucinógenos y chamanismo.
5Marlene Dobkin de Ríos (Spanish, 1976), Curas con ayahuasca en un barrio bajo urbano. In Michael J. Harner, opere citato.
6As noted by Fritjof Capra in his book The Turning Point:

«The Simontons fully recognize the role or carcinogenic substances and environmental influences in the formation of cancer cells, and they strongly advocate the implementation of appropriate social policies to eliminate these health hazards. However, they have also come to realize that neither carcinogenic substances, nor radiation, nor genetic predisposition alone will provide an adequate explanation of what causes cancer. No understanding of cancer will be complete without addressing the crucial question: What inhibits a person’s immune system, at a particular time, from recognizing and destroying abnormal cells and thus allows them to grow into a life-threatening tumor? This is the question on which the Simontons have concentrated in their research and therapeutic practice, and they have found that it can be answered only by carefully considering the mental end emotional aspects of health and illness.
«The emerging picture of cancer is consistent with the general model of illness we have been developing. A state of imbalance is generated by prolonged stress which is channeled through a particular personality configuration to give rise to specific disorders. In cancer the crucial stresses appear to be those that threaten some role or relationship that is central to the person’s identity, or set up a situation from which there is apparently no escapea. Several studies suggest that these critical stresses typically occur six to eighteen months before the diagnosis of cancerb. They are likely to generate feelings of despair, helplessness, and hopelessness. Because of these feelings, serious illness, and even death, may become consciously or unconsciouslyc acceptable as a potential solution.
«The Simontons and other researchers have developed a psychosomatic model of cancer that shows how psychological and physical states work together in the onset of the disease. Although many details of this process still need to be clarified, it has become clear that the emotional stress has two principal effects. It suppresses the body’s immune system and, at the same time, leads to hormonal imbalances that result in an increased production of abnormal cells. Thus optimal conditions for cancer growth are created. The production of malignant cells is enhanced precisely at a time when the body is least capable of destroying them...
In ancient Tibet, shamanistic and metashamanistic Bönpo medicine asserted that in order to heal the patient it was necessary to heal the environment, for it was believed that many illness were caused by the subjective entities who animate—or who live in—natural phenomena, as the result of a provocation in which the diseased person or other human beings (often intimately related to the diseased) had incurred7.
In regard to «mental illness», the shamanistic approach is, also, radically different from the «scientific» one. States that modern science deems «pathological» and which it tries to «heal» by means of countless inefficacious and destructive treatments were intentionally induced by the shaman as means of initiation to a sacred reality, capable of leading the individual to a state of greater personal realization and communicative integration.
In fact, in the last three decades a series of students of the human mind have insisted that certain psychotic episodes could be spontaneous self-healing processes that are aborted by the environment in the family, the asylum and other institutions, and transformed into processes of self-destruction, of which the former also contain an element8. As noted by
«...Lawrence LeShan studied more than five hundred cancer patients and identified the following significant components in their life historiesd: feelings of isolation, neglect, and despair during youth, with intense interpersonal relationships appearing difficult or dangerous; a strong relationship with a person or great satisfaction with a role in early adulthood, which becomes the center of the individual’s life; loss of the relationship or role, resulting in despair; internalizing of the despair to the extent that individuals are unable to let other people know when they feel hurt, angry, or hostile. This basic pattern has been confirmed as typical of cancer patients by a number of researchers.
«The basic philosophy of the Simonton approach affirms that the development of cancer involves a number of interdependent psychological and biological processes, that these processes can be recognized and understood, and that the sequence of events that leads to illness can be reversed to lead the organism back into a healthy state. As in any holistic therapy, the first step toward initiating the healing cycle consists of making patients aware of the wider context of their illness. Establishing the context of cancer begins by by asking patients to identify the major stresses occurring in their lives six to eighteen months prior to their diagnosis. The list of these stresses is then used as a basis for discussing the patients’ participation in the onset of their disease. The purpose of the concept of patient participation is not to evoke guilt, but rather to create the basis for reversing the cycle of psychosomatic processes that led to the state of ill health.»
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a) For example, situations such as those that Ronald Laing called «untenable», defined as those in which we cannot stay and, however, we cannot leave.
b) See Simonton, Mathews-Simonton y Creighton, Getting Well Again, p. 57 et seq.
c) Personally, I cannot accept the hypothesis of the «unconscious», unless it be understood as the result of that which Sartre called «bad faith». Therefore, I cannot accept this distinction between «consciously acceptable» e «unconsciously acceptable». Nonetheless, I agree that insisting that the illness is the result of a conscious decision that is then concealed could produce a feeling of guilt that in turn could aggravate the illness or difficult healing.
d) See Lawrence LeShan (1977), You Can Fight for Your Life, p. 49 et seq.
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7See the work by John Meredith Reynolds quoted in the Bibliography and the various works by Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, as well as the transcriptions of his talks.
8In Perceval’s Narrative, Gregory Bateson wrote about «schizophrenic» psychosis:
«It would appear that once precipitated into psychosis the patient has a course to run. He is, as it were, embarked upon a voyage of discovery which is only completed by his return to the normal world, to which he comes back with insights different from those of the inhabitants who never embarked on such a voyage. Once begun, a schizophrenic episode would appear to have as definite a course as an initiation ceremony—a death and a rebirth—into which the novice may have been precipitated by his family life or by adventitious circumstances, but which in its course is largely steered by endogenous process.

«In terms of this picture, spontaneous remission is no problem. This is only the final and natural outcome of the total process. What needs to be explained is the failure of many who embark upon this voyage
Michel Foucault, in the European «Classical Age» madness was often thought to have a divine character; it has been rather recently that Europeans have begun to regard all kinds of madness as diseases to be «healed» by re-establishing normality9.
In any case, there is no doubt that the shamanistic vision is ecologically healthier than the «scientific» vision, for by leading human beings to relate communicatively to their natural environment, the latter is protected and preserved10. The instrumental attitude
to return from it. Do these encounter circumstances either in family life or in institutional care so grossly maladaptive that even the richest and best organized hallucinatory experience cannot save them?
In turn, in The Politics of Experience Ronald Laing wrote:
«There is a great deal that urgently needs to be written about this and similar experiences. But I am going to confine myself to a few matters of fundamental orientation.
«We can no longer assume that such a voyage is an illness that has to be treated. Yet the padded cell is now outdated by the «improved» methods of treatment now in use.
«If we can demystify ourselves, we see «treatment» (electro-shocks, tranquilizers, deep-freezing—some times even psychoanalysis) as ways of stopping this sequence from occurring.
«Can we not see that this voyage is not what we need to be cured of, but that it is itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality?
«In other times people intentionally embarked upon this voyage.
«Or if they found themselves already embarked, willy-nilly, they gave thanks, as for a special grace.»
And also:
«From the alienated starting point of our pseudo-sanity, everything is equivocal. Our sanity is not «true» sanity. Their madness is not «true» madness. The madness of our patients is an artefact of the destruction wreaked on them by us, and by them on themselves. Let no one suppose that we meet «true» madness any more than we are truly sane. The madness that we encounter in «patients» is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that stranged integration we call sanity may be. True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality: the emergence of the «inner» archetypical mediators of divine power, and through this death a rebirth, and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the divine, no longer its betrayer.»

9See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’age classique.
10American Indians, like pre-Buddhist Tibetans and the aboriginals of many regions, were still in the communicative stage and therefore related to natural phenomena as though these were persons rather than mere things lacking subjectivity: all of their relations were communicative. And, as shown by the prophetic statements of several Indian sages (among which it is best known the answer of chief Seattle to the proposal of the U. S. President to buy the lands of his tribe), having been in contact with the Anglo-saxon invaders and perceived the latter’s attitude toward Nature, North American Indians predicted the ecological crisis that currently threatens us with destruction.
In general, American Indians were masters in the art of ecological conservation. As noted by Arturo Eichler in his book S.O.S. Planeta Tierraa:

«The ancient Lacandones of Mexico used to grow 70 different products in a single hectare and, even today, those Amazonian aborigines... who have not yet been exterminated... grow up to 80 varied products in their small chacras, which they never over-exploited, so that after millennia they have not degraded their natural environment. They know that many «undesirable» weeds are indicators reflecting the quality of the soil or some specific lack. When the balance of the soil is restored, the weed disappears on its own.»
A group of anthropologists that in Peru restored a pre-Columbian system of irrigation channels that also works as natural fertilizer and used it for growing crops obtained with its help, and without chemical fertilizers, a much higher productivity per hectare than the average productivity achieved elsewhere with the help of chemical fertilizers. In the same way, as Dr. Eichler notes in the above-mentioned booka:
«Already in the thirteenth century Marco Polo observed that Asian peasants used to leave aside small lots sown with grain for insect-eating birds, and he was astonished when he observed that the birds... used to
toward the natural environment that characterizes the «scientific» vision, instead, has produced an ecological crisis that threatens to cause our extinction before the first half of the next century, or even during the last decade of the present one.
In the same way, the shamanistic approach to illness and «delirium», and the shamanistic treatment of imbalances, is no doubt less dangerous and harmful—and, in many cases, more effective—than that of the prevailing «medical science».
2.- A Third Approach, Different from the «Scientific» and the «Shamanistic»: the Metashamanistic, Liberating and Genuinely Religious11
As noted by Michael J. Harner, South American shamans think that the «reality» to which the hallucinogenic substance gives them access is the «true reality», and that the every day vision free of the effect of drugs is a «false reality». Available information about shamanistic cultures of other regions suggests that Harner’s statement about South American shamanism may apply to shamanism in general: although different shamanistic cultures may attribute a greater or lesser reality to the every day vision of the «normal» individual, all shamanistic cultures attribute a high degree of reality—in general higher than that of the «every day reality»—to the shamanistic experiences induced with the help of psychedelics or by other means12.
learn (to eat only that which had been destined to them). Today, whichever species competes with us for food is our deadly enemy.»
Possessed to such an extent by instrumental relations and by the lack of systemic wisdom that Buddhists call avidya, modern Westerners only know how to destroy the world with the technological tools that they developed for that purpose. Thus, the transformation of the human psyche that would allow us to survive and that would give rise to a new Golden Age must, on the one hand, put an end to instrumental primary process relations and, on the other hand, provide us with a wider range of vision free of conceptual overvaluation that will not set us in opposition to Nature and other human beings.
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a) Arturo Eichler, work mentioned in the Bibliography.
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11The word «religious» comes from the Latin religare, meaning «to re-establish the link»: religion is the re-establishment of the link with the divinity or, in other words, with Unity, Wholeness, Plenitude, Perfection, etc. Now, in so far as we feel separate of that which religions call «divinity», any link we may establish with it will necessarily break sooner or later. This is why, far more «religious» than the temporary re-establishment of a link with something that we consider external to ourselves is the discovery of our primordial nature, which is precisely that which theistic religions understand as an «external divinity» and that constitutes the true nature of all appearances and of the whole universe.
Furthermore, leaving aside etymological considerations, in the life-histories of most founders of those religions that we call «great» we find stories telling us how they had experiences of the «supernatural reality» in which shamans work, and were Enlightened precisely because they recognize them as illusory and managed to avoid its enchantment. Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, was first attacked with arrows and other weapons by Mara (the demon) and his retinue and then was object to the seduction of the Apsaras (Mara’s daughters), yet remained undisturbed and thus attained Enlightenment. Jesus was tempted in the desert, yet did not succumb to the false appearances and thus achieved his spiritual majesty. Milarepa was attacked by the goddess Tseringma and a retinue of demons; having given up the protection of self and recognized that all experiencia is illusory, he attained Enlightenment. An so on and on.
12See the works mentioned in the Bibliography; in particular, those by Mircea Eliade, that by Gary Doore (Ed.) and that by Ronny Velásquez.

In Tibet and its zone of cultural influence, popular culture contains important shamanistic elements13, which the representatives of the two most important religious systems do not discourage. Both Bönpo and Buddhist Lamas refer to local spirits and demons as self-existent entities that may cause great harm and, in general, encourage the belief in supernatural entities that may be noxious or helpful to human beings. Nonetheless, to gifted disciples who wish to attain liberation from error and delusion, obtaining that which both Buddhists and Bönpos call «Enlightenment», Lamas of both systems teach very dangerous practices that may eventually allow them to recognize the «supernatural» reality as illusory and free themselves from its influence and power. Repetition of the practice progressively neutralizes the propensity to experience the «supernatural» reality to which the practitioner gains access by yogic-shamanistic means as something self-existent, independent of the practitioner’s mental processes, and absolutely true.
The point is that Tibetan spiritual systems regard as delusive, both the every day experience of human beings and the «supernatural» experience to which practitioners gain access by yogic and shamanistic means. This is not to say that both realms of experience are considered to be merely hallucinatory. Tibetan Teachings acknowledge that there is a given that, upon being processed by our mental processes, is experienced as the world in which we live, with its countless entities. Delusion arises when we are unable to see that entities do not have inherent, absolute existence, but depend both on the existence of other entities and on the functioning of our mental process in order to exist in the way they exist for us. Thus, delusion is a confusion about the mode of existence of entities, including the human subject: when we believe that ourselves and other entities exist inherently and substantially (in the sense of being self-existent and not needing anything other to itself in order to exist), that the relative is absolute, we are under delusion.
Delusion produces countless emotional responses that generate constant dissatisfaction and recurring frustration and suffering. If we believe in the supposedly inherent existence of «supernatural reality», we may become victims of demons and spirits, just as has happened to so many Tibetans; if we believe in the supposedly inherent existence of the entities, values and beliefs of every day reality, we will struggle in order to maintain our identities, possessions, etc., and thus will give rise to constant discomfort and dissatisfaction as well as to recurring frustration and pain.
However, by simply telling ourselves that the «supernatural» reality does not exist in truth, we would change nothing: the propensities to experience it and become its victims would still be there and, besides, we would continues to experience the everyday reality as self-existent. This is why it is necessary to do the practice in which, beginning from shamanistic belief, we experience the «supernatural» reality with its demons and spirits and, while we experience that «reality», we apply the instructions received from the Teacher or Lama in order to recognize it as illusory and free ourselves from its influence and power.

13Modern anthropologists would say that it has «conserved» shamanistic elements, and would imagine that the metashamanistic approach developed out of shamanism. This is precisely the opposite of what Idries Shah asserts in his book The Sufis: according to Shah, shamanism is a degeneration of metashamanism. This thesis fits into the Indian-Greek-Roman schema of processes of temporality—aeons or kalpa—that are divided into eras of increasing degeneration. The reader may find a description of the some versions of this schema as well as a critique of Hegel’s opposite schema in my book Mind-Society-Ecosystem: Transformation for Survival, in a forthcoming book I have written with Mayda Hocevar and three other post-graduate students of philosophy, and also in my paper Wisdom, Equity and Peace and in my book Qué somos y adónde vamos.
If we are successful in this and we repeat the practice again and again, also in daily life we shall recognize to an ever greater extent the delusive character of our projections and therefore we shall experience ever increasing plenitude and ever decreasing dissatisfaction, frustration and suffering.

3.- Illness, Tibetan Ethnomedicine and the Practice of gCod.
Among the means applied by Tibetans in order to achieve the above, the famous practice of gcod is of the greatest importance.
According to the Bönpo ethnomedicine of ancient Tibet, many illness were the result of the revenge of spirits, demons and other «supernatural» entities who had been harmed by the plowing of the soil, the building of dams, the construction of houses, etc., by the harmed individual, by members of her or his family and/or by other human beings. Ancient Bönpo medicine attempted to cure the disease by healing the natural environment, on the premises that, if the dwelling and environment of the «supernatural» entities were healed and therefore the entities themselves would heal, they would cease taking revenge by inflicting illness on those responsible and on other human beings14.
In the practice of gcod, the practitioner starts from the basis of the belief in demons, spirits and other supposedly objective entities who inflict illness on human beings, bringing to bear the principle of ancient Bönpo medicine that requires that the natural environment be healed if human beings are to be healed. Nonetheless, instead of encouraging the practitioner to protect her or himself from demons and spirits regarded as «objective» in order to forestall harm, she or he is told to face them, because they are her or his own overvalued thoughts which she or he must recognize as such and liberate. Yet it is not enough to know intellectually that demons and spirits are only overvalued thoughts; the practitioner must carry out the practice spending the nights of waning moon in the charnel grounds where Tibetans dismember the corpses of their dead and offer them to the wild beasts15, for it is widely believed that such places are inhabited by most noxious «supernatural» beings and that whoever spends the night in them will meet the most horrible death one can imagine.
During the practice, by yogic-shamanistic means the yogi must gain access to the dangerous «supernatural» reality that is proper to the charnel ground and that, according to popular belief, is bound to destroy her or him. Then, faced with dreadful demons and other noxious beings, she or he must realize that these are but projections of her or his own mind and thus apply the instructions that will lead to the spontaneous dissolution of the tensions at the root of the illusion of inherent existence and of the dread begotten by that illusion, and thus to the realization of Truth, understood as the dissolution of delusion and error: the realization of the unreality of the visions that appear in the practice and of all experiences—those of daily life and those of the «supernatural» realm.

14See Note 7.
15In this way, human corpses can be more directly and immediately useful to other sentient beings than they would be if they were buried or cremated. Moreover, this custom may serve as a medicine against the illness of wanting to keep and protect one’s own body, even beyond one’s death.

Some practitioners who, during the practice, have failed to attain liberation from delusion, have met death, being «devoured» by the «supernatural», noxious beings inhabiting the charnel ground. One could ask how can the beings of the practitioner’s imagination kill her or him. There is the story of a practitioner of gcod who had a knife with him while doing the practice; upon being assailed by demons and other noxious beings, panic overtook him, and he took out his knife in order to defend himself. Fortunately, when he was about to stick the knife into the demon’s belly, a flash of clarity caused him to check and see where was he going to stick it—upon which he realized that he directed it to his own belly. Had he stuck the knife, he would have died and his corpse would have found half-devoured or fully devoured by the beasts who feed on corpses.
The practitioner must offer her or his body to the demons, visualizing it as an ambrosia that gives access to wisdom and liberation16 and thus causes the beings who eat it to cease suffering and to stop inflicting suffering to other beings. This will induce a dreadful «supernatural» experience in which the noxious beings devour her or him. If her or his practice is effective, she or he will recognize the illusory character of the experience, and the psychophysical tensions at its root will spontaneously dissolve, putting an end to fear and forestalling harm.
Repetition of the experience will cause the practitioner to become immune to the influence of illness-inflicting demons, which results in a most «real» immunity to infectious diseases—so «real» that, during epidemics, the experienced practitioners of gcod were in charge of disposing of the corpses and dismembering them to feed the beasts, but none of those who were in such an intimate contact with the illness would contract it: the practitioners of gcod who had obtained the result of the practice had become immune to all infectious diseases17. Furthermore, in many cases lepers and other people suffering illness then deemed «incurable» set out to practice gcod as a preparation to face death and, as a result, were «miraculously» cured and, moreover, became immune to all infections18.
Tibetans also believe that the realized practitioners of gcod have the ability to cure the diseases of others when they are caused by demons and other «supernatural» entities. In fact, practitioners of gcod often perform the gcod ritual for the ill and, although many Lamas insist that those rituals are mere superstition, in most cases the diseased person heals as a result of the ritual.
Of course, Tibetans only resort to such rituals when remission cannot be achieved by other means and it is suspected that the cause of the illness is the provocation of noxious «supernatural» beings. In other occasions, Tibetan doctors prescribe: (1) pills made with different vegetable products, (2) products that often contain such chemicals as mercury, sulfur and gold, and even gems; (3) cauterization, and (4) acupuncture. I have with me different kinds of Tibetan pills that I can show to those interested.
In the case of that which Tibetans call «energy disturbances» and which we call «mental illness», Tibetan doctors also prescribe various medicines featuring different vegetable products. However, according to Tibetan medicine, such disturbances are often the result of the provocations of «supernatural» beings, and therefore it is common to ask the practitioners of gcod to perform the therapeutic ritual. Again, in many cases, this results in the remission of the disturbance.

16Sanskrit: amrta; Tibetan: bdud-rtsi (dütsi).
17See Giuseppe Tucci, work mentioned in the Bibliography.
18Ibidem. See also the various works in which Alexandra David-Neel recounts her experiences in Tibet.

Nevertheless, both Tibetan Buddhists and Bönpos insist that the only true mental illness is delusion and the passions associated to it: delusion and the passions are called nyon-mongs (nyonmong), whereas crazy people are called nyon-pa (nyonpa), which means «the one who is under the power of the nyon-mongs». Therefore, both Buddhist and Bönpos affirm that the mind is truly healed only when the individual is freed from delusion. For example, when she or he has successfully completed the practice of gcod and the subsequent practices of thod-rgal (togel) and/or of the yang-thik (yangthik).
Besides—preferably before undertaking the practice of gcod—the yogi or yogini must practise for some time a set of other disciplines, among which I will refer to the practice of dreams. If delusion consists in being confused in regard to the mode of existence of reality, when we dream and believe that our dream is part of the «real life» of wakefulness, unaware that it is only a dream, we are also under delusion. Therefore, the practice of dream is deemed very important. In it, we must recognize the dream as such and yet keep dreaming19 and direct the dream according to the traditional instructions provided by the Teacher20. Among these, I want to mention the following: (1) to jump into abysses, into the fangs of wild beasts, into torrents and, in general, to face situations that in the «real life» of wakefulness would destroy our body, in order to taste the inseparability of insubstantiality and pleasure when the «body of dream» is not destroyed as a «real body» would be during wakefulness; (2) to practise the «alchemy of transformation», transforming our own body into water in order to put off fires, into fire in order to burn wood, and so on; (3) to transform demons and other noxious entities appearing in our dreams into tutelar deities21 such as those that are visualized in the practices of bskyed-rim (kyerim) and rdzogs-rim (dzogrim), etc. In order to carry out these practices successfully, the Teachings prescribe other practices to be performed during wakefulness, such as that of the «illusory body»22 and that of imagining that the experiences of wakefulness are sequences of a dream23. In the same way, although celibacy is not recommended, the practitioner must keep the precepts of anuyogatantra that forbid the emission of sexual fluids24. Success in recognizing dreams as such and in carrying out the various activities prescribed will prepare the practitioner to succeed in the practice of gcod and forestall the potential harm of failing to recognize the «supernatural» experience as illusory and thus failing to dissolve the tensions at the root of the illusory experience and of the dread it begets.
4.- Conclusion
Although the vision of shamanism is less harmful than that of modern «science», it is still a vision that imprisons and enslaves human beings. The aim of Tibetan methods is to

19Both Descartes and Sartre (see Bibliography) claimed that this was impossible. As the experience of any practitioner of this yoga proves, they were both totally wrong in this respect.
20See Namkhai Norbu, Dreamwork. Also, see Elías Capriles, Autoliberación de los seis bardo o «modos de experiencia».
21In Sanskrit, devata; in Tibetan, yi-dam (yidam).
22Practice performed with a mirror, with one’s own echo, etc. See Herbert V. Guenther, work mentioned in the Bibliography, and Elías Capriles, Auto-liberación de los seis bardo o «modos de experiencia» .
23See Elías Capriles (1986), Autoliberación de los seis bardo o «modos de experiencia».
24See Elías Capriles: (1) The Direct Path. Providing a Background for Approaching the Practice of rDzogs-chen. (2) Introducción a la teoría y práctica del budismo tántrico. (3) Qué somos y adónde vamos.

allow individuals to achieve liberation in regard to all possible visions: to the daily, everyday vision—whether «scientific» or «tribal»—and to the «supernatural» vision proper to shamanism. Upon attaining that liberation, the individual obtains a complete mastery of the «supernatural forces» that affect human beings, precisely because the sensation that the «I» as a separate entity is mastering something different from and external to itself has dissolved.
Thus, Tibetan systems are not normal shamanistic systems, but metashamanistic ones: systems that employ the principles of shamanism in order to free the individual, not only of the supernatural beliefs that enslave her or him, but also of the belief in self-existence of everyday reality that causes him to face constant dissatisfaction and recurring suffering.
Although in the West some traditions and isolated individuals are aware that the supreme aim of yogic and shamanistic tools is the liberation of all experiences rather than the mere production of extraordinary ones, and some have even attained to the self-liberation of experience, in general most members of Western civilization who have experimented with different means of access to the «supernatural reality» proper of shamanism—including most psychologists and psychiatrists who have done so—have contented themselves to induce extraordinary experiences, without knowing how—and in general without even trying—to liberate those experiences. Thus, the bulk of Westerners has had no access to genuine metashamanistic systems25.

25It was due to the lack of direct metashamanistic instruction and transmission, and to the influence of shamanistic and protoshamanistic ideologists such as Timothy Leary, that the hippy movement fell apart, that many of its members were «psychiatrycized», that many others destroyed themselves through hard drugs or adapted to the system and, leaving aside their spiritual search, set out to achieve a high position in that system, and that still others enslaved themselves with the help of false spiritual masters and systems.

The mistake of hippies was to have given themselves to the induction of «altered states» unaware that these states were experiences conditioned by delusion to which it was a major mistake to cling and that it was necessary to interrupt and liberate, not knowing the methods for interrupting and liberating them and lacking the capacity to apply them. Thus, they clung to the experiences of greater space-time-knowledgea and the pleasure resulting from the increase in the bioenergetic inputb induced by the substances in question, and came to depend on those substances in order to obtain extraordinary experiences—which, as we have seen, in general were conditioned and delusive and did not represent a true liberation.
Therefore, sooner or later many of the seekers of «altered states» had to face the «bad trip» or «psychotomimetic experience» that may obtain after the widening and permeabilization of the focus of conscious attention. This widening and permeabilization—produced by the effect of psychedelic substances, by kundalini yoga and by other spiritual practices—may allow «ego-asyntonic» contents to slip into the consciousness, which in turn may face the individual with a tremendous conflict. It may also reveal the insubstantiality of the «I» and of all that we consider substantial, producing enormous anguish in those who have been conditioned to dread insubstantiality and «nothingness» and to flee from that dread by clinging to the «I» and to the illusion of substantiality. In the same way, if during the state produced by the increase of bioenergetic input passions based on aversion happen to manifest, the high bioenergetic input and the widening and permeabilization of consciousness may cause us to experience them as a veritable hell.
No matter how anguish and tensions arise, the high bioenergetic input will not allow the individual to remain unaware of them by means of the phenomenological double negation or «bad faith»c: the limits of conscious attention have become wider and more permeable, no longer allowing the individual to keep unaware of whatever she or he does not want to see. And, since the individual reacts to an increased suffering with increased rejection, the anguish becomes a veritable hell which—in case the individual does not manage to act on her or his experience so that it will cease contradicting his self-image and false sense of substantiality—may last far beyond the normal effect of the drug, becoming «psychosis».
This is not to say that metashamanism has only been easily accessible in Central Asia and, to a lesser degree, in the rest of the East. We cannot discard the possibility that some nations of pre-Hispanic America may have had wide and easy access to metashamanistic systems. If it were proved that they are not mere fiction, the works by Carlos Castañeda would show, at least, that some systems of aboriginal America contain elements of the kind that I have called «liberating» or «metashamanistic».
If the individual is unprepared, she or he will not manage to descend, like Dante, to the bottom of Hell, in order to enter Purgatory and, going through it, reach the Open Spaced of liberation. Instead, she or he will take the descent to Hell as a dead end and will try by all means to return to the Limbo of «normality». However, unable to manage, she or he will remain in a state of despair, with her or his ego-function and capacity to socialize impaired.
During the sixties, many of those who faced the above problem recurred to the consumption of cocaine, to false spiritual systems and teachers, to heroine and to other means of inflating their deflates egos and/or recover their capacity to socialize. In particular, many of those who became habituated to cocaine integrated themselves into the system and set out to work hard in it in order to afford the costly habit, helping the system to temporarily prosper. Heroine addicts, instead, «gave themselves up to death»: whereas cocaine may produce a false «heroism of victory», heroine may produce a false «heroism of defeat».
____________________________________________________________
a) When our focus of conscious attention widens, our spatial perspective widens and our subjective sensation of temporality slows down. The focus of attention widens to the extent that the bioenergetic input increases. For an explanation of the concept of space-time-knowledge see Tarthang Tulku, work mentioned in the Bibliography.
b) In Sanskrit, kundalini; in Tibetan, thig-le (tigley). Western science explains in terms of the concept of «alterations of brain biochemistry» the alterations that ancient Eastern traditions explain in terms of the concept of «increase of bioenergetic input». Both explanations are partly valid and must be taken into account.
c) I.e., self-deceit. See J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness. In several of my works I have explained how the Freudian hypothesis of the unconscious and the Sartrean theory of «bad faith».
d) In Tibetan, nam-’’mkha (namk’a), meaning «space», «sky» or «heavens» (the latter, not in the sense of the conditioned state of temporary, illusory happiness that Buddhism calls deva loka or deva gati).
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and its Relation to ModernWestern Disciplines
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Capriles, Elías (1986; published in 1990), Las aventuras del fabuloso hombre-máquina. Contra Habermas y la ratio technica. Mérida, Actual (magazine of La Universidad de Los Andes), 1st issue of 1990 (which should have been the last of 1989).
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Guénon, René (1945), Le règne de la quantité et les signes des temps. Paris, Gallimard Idées NRF.
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Lock, Margaret (1980), East Asian Medicine in Urban Japan. Berkeley, University of California Press.
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Norbu, Dawa (Ed.) (1976), An Introduction to Tibetan Medicine. New Delhi, Tibetan Review Publications.
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6.- Reference to Western Philosophical Works
Descartes, René (translation by Manuel García Morente) (this Spanish version, 1976), Discurso del método and Meditaciones metafísicas. Madrid, Espasa-Calpe S. A.
Habermas, Jürgen (1968; Spanish 1982), Conocimiento e interés. Madrid, Taurus.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (31st French edition, 1980), L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris, Editorial Gallimard, Collection Idées.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Psychologie de l’imagination. Paris, Gallimard.

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