Is everything meta? I kinda think the answer is yes. My belfry bats resonated with your gongs on the nature of a “mature seeker” but wonder how one attains a state of maturity out of the reality of persistent uncertainty. I’m trying but it feels like an infinite babe-in-the-woods moment.
Your words and themes here entwine with threads of my history and meaning-surfing, but at awkward angles. I just wanted to share how they conspired in my mind.
I never got into Crosby beyond the hits, but my dad played and hung out with many of the Bay Area rock artists of that time, including Santana and the Dead. He was a hustling jazz trumpeter trying to find a place in Rock & Roll, and chose that path instead of being present in my life. When I was 30, I tracked him down while he was performing at Pier 23 Cafe on the Embarcadero. During a break between sets I introduced myself.
We never developed a relationship beyond sparse pleasantries, and he often filled those moments with famous musician name drops and related stories. He died suddenly in 2008, alone, between parked cars in Pacifica. Much of his life, at least from his perspective, is permanently locked in mystery. My younger dadhalf-siblings confirm that I have a lot of his traits, in spite of his total absence, and that is both intriguing and terrifying. It makes me ponder the scope of "spooky actions at a distance”.
Was my dad a seeker or just a hustling drug taking braggart artist? Both? Was he haunted or inspired by brushing shoulders with success and fame? What shadows dogged him? What parts of this quandary live in me?
All of the above, I assume.
Anyway, thanks for your Thought-Fu, Shrugged Shoulders style.
Beautiful post, shot through with the edge and sense of loss I was partly trying to articulate. I can hear the pain of that absence, and the even stranger resonance of that life in yours and your own searching. "Was my dad a seeker or just a hustling drug taking braggart artist?" I have met many like your dad, asked that question many times, and have spent time on both sides of that question. Sometimes I look at the whole broad and varied current of counterculture and suspect the same thing.
I think you are right to approach this slanted wise. I find persistent uncertainty a trial, and sometimes a false lure, but when I put my spiritual thinking cap on, this is where the light falls. Other times I can barely see.
Erik, thanks for that. I can`t believe I`d never heard “Laughing” or any of that album before.
`Nice one` to use the parlance of the times.
Alan Watts presented that the whole idea of hitching up with a guru or following a path is to eventually find out that you don`t need to. The tricky bit is, we have to do it in order to get to that point; we have to get into it to get out of it and the fool has to persist in his folly in order to become wise as Blake said and Alan Watts was fond of referencing.
Even Krishnamurti spent decades on the Theosophical path with all its steps and handrails before he headed off into his pathless land.
I`m not surprised that Alan Watts is still wildly popular after so long (another 50 year anniversary for your list!). Apart from anything else, his emphasis on play and purposelessness can be a great medicine for today`s spiritual consumer culture with its obsession with getting to the next level/chakra/dimension/plane/state etc and acting like a spiritual tourist fighting for his seat on the bus, whilst missing the beauty of the journey.
I do think Watts is a balm, particularly in the sometimes scary but sometimes funny way in which he pointed out the folly of all this development. Especially true today, when even the hedonism that the hippies were OK with has to be disguised as some kind of developmental hike up the mountain.
One place I have come to differ with some of the ways that Watts presents this has to do with the importance of practice. Paying attention, to myself and others, it seems pretty clear to me that there is a happy medium that involves devotion or commitment to a regular practice, at least a lot of the time, rather than simply embracing purposelessness as a reason to abandon all practices. But practices, even though their results changes or "improve", don't have to be seen as necessarily chained to the developmental wheel. There is something like "just practicing," throwing your heart into work that clarifies even as it goes nowhere. But that might just be my fuddy duddy Zen talking!
I don`t think it`s fuddy duddy Zen talk,it`s bang on the money.
That life is simply purposeless play probably isn`t to be taken as an absolute truth, more as a subtle comment/hint as to the qualities needed in the practice of life itself as well as any kind of formal practice. I think that`s different from: "life is purposeless play,it`s all a divine Leela so it makes no difference if meditate or sink another bottle of vodka and shag a couple more 20 year old disciples, there is nothing that is not the Tao,man" (cue: bangs into lamppost and slides onto ass in muddy gutter)
Very well said. What you say reminds me that spiritual or philosophical ideas are often better seen as tools or probes or even songs to inspire, and that when they become reified into dogmas then they form the foundations for whole edifices of attitudes and justifications. Think lightly, especially in tricky waters. That's why I think it is important to talk about Watts' life (as well as his abandonment of earlier families). I am not a prude or a moralist and unlike a lot of the critics, I don't think it cancels out or even takes away the value of his divine explications. I buy the purposeless play view in many ways, I just don't think it takes us off the hook!
Well said regarding risky nature of saying that anything is the absolute truth, perhaps especially that the claim that everything is literally "meaningless," given where many nihilistic antinomians end up. There's a good reason why "right conduct" is so important in the eightfold path in Buddhism. Compassion is perhaps the central outcome of authentic non-duality, and the lack thereof (as in exploiting oneself or others) is a sure sign of having missed the point.
One of the deepest koans for me, and one that so much rides on, is whether compassion is *naturally* an outcome of authentic nonduaulity, or whether it must be additionally cultivated or transmitted or shaped. For me, that is one reason that the commitment to practice is so important, even if it is "meaningless" or doesnt seem to go anywhere.
You are right, I think, to wonder whether compassion must be continually cultivated, rather than assuming that it follows inevitably from non-duality. We can have many non-dual experiences in various settings, but given that prior to such experiences and for much of the time in between such experiences, we find ourselves in the dualistic soup of samsara. There's a famous story of a would-be-guru who descends from the mountains after a two-year solitary retreat. He seems to beam love and affirmation, but suddenly flashes anger at someone who bumps into by accident. Rooting out the three poisons (ignorance, grasping, aversion) takes longer than two years; it takes lifetimes, at least according to Buddhism. Nevertheless, the more capable we are of sustaining non-duality, the more capable we are of displaying compassion. The current Dalai Lama has spoken eloquently of the challenge posed by the Two Truth teaching: One the one hand, there is the deep Truth that all phenomena (including one's self) is empty of substance or independent reality; on the other hand, there is the everyday (and highly useful) truth that all aggregated phenomena exhibit a transient stability that must be taken into account. Perhaps the whole point of "intentional" communities is to create the context in which non-dual awareness (and compassion) can be cultivated with sympathetic irony. I suppose this is what many spiritual traditions have in mind by learning to be in the world without being of (mired in) it?
Yes Watts is in many ways that granddaddy of the High Weirdos. He used "weird" a number of times in interesting ways, including the injunction to "Follow your weird", which is a lot more interesting (if less pleasurable at times) than Joseph Campbell's far more popular "Follow your bliss."
It relates here because I think when we sense this weirdness of things there is a drive to understand some explanation of deeper forces that would help the weirdness dissipate, as if it were a paradox that could be dispelled with logical operations. But it may be that the purposeless play at the heart of the thing is just weird!
Hi Erik. You always trigger many thoughts and memories. I’ll just put them out here in no particular order.
The two cultural icons from that period that resonate most with me are The Grateful Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow. Now I’m wondering is there a connection between the two and I’ll probably spend next week looking for one.
My favorite seeker is (I know it’s been debunked) Carlos Castaneda
Alan Watts’s laughing meditation
A dramatic experience during an ayahuasca ceremony that I can still recall in memory which still has more meaning than clutching a shadow
That is a fine and very resonant pinball game through the era. I have never considered the GD=GR equation, but now I must. (I suspect it involves LSD and California and feedback.) I love Castaneda and find some way to include him here soon.
And I thank you for mentioning your dramatic experience, which reminds me that some moments will never leave you or stop changing you even if you wanted them to, which makes them something other than shadows, something more like part of your marrow. But you also did myself and yourself the kindness of not telling me the tale, because, while the tale would no doubt be good and valuable, it is your marrow, not mine.
I just read Sometimes A Great Notion for the first time, having reread GR just last year. Contentwise we are in a different world, tone as well, but on the level of writing -- late modernism/early postmodernism (in the literary sense more than philosophical) -- some very interesting resonances. It was interesting "hunting for the acid" in KK's prose and style.
I am thinking of writing something on LSD in GR, and the cybernetic context is really important. Gregory Bateson was of course hanging around the hospital where Kesey, Ginsberg, etc first turned on.
Thank you for this. I was raised inside this culture of seeking by disenchanted hippies, who took the 80s very hard. The album gave me intense nostalgia, although I can't recall ever having heard it before.
I'm writing because I had a thought. It has a lot of pieces, I hope you have a few minutes to bear with me.
As it happens I just finished reading the book Pleasure Activism. There are some things to recommend it, but also something about it that really bothered me. It contains a defensiveness about pleasure, a fighting spirit, anger. "Fuck you, society, for telling me not to enjoy sex (or food, or drugs, or my body) -- I will enjoy it to spite you!"
The pleasure of the laughing child (in both the spiritual mode and the nonsense mode) exists with reference to the sun, but not other babies, if that makes sense. There is no moral component to the laughing child, no politics. I now see that this is what I disliked about Pleasure Activism -- the moralizing and politics of something that I suspect to be sacred.
The next book I hope to read, when it comes from the library, is The Master and His Emissary. I heard a recent interview with Iain McGilchrist, the author, in which he gives a low-bullshit account of the split brain, which is the topic of this book. To give a reduction of a reduction of a reduction -- the right brain considers things in their wholeness, while the left brain considers things narrowly and for their utility. The right brain knows it needs the left brain, but the left brain doesn't realize the right brain even exists. The left also possesses all language, and so the narrative, consciousness-as-dialogue, reasoning awareness of ourselves and the world is entirely the domain of the left brain. Anyway, it's fascinating stuff and I think it's likely you already know all this so I'll move on. The book then (I hear) moves on to social critique in what McGilchrist believes is an increasingly left-brain dominant world.
Finally, my thought: that what was so radical about the 70s-era counterculture weirdness was that it was a sincere attempt to subvert the left brain. The experience of a sacred thing, that is whole and wise and also somehow literally meaningless, is the hallmark of right brain thinking. As is the inability to express it directly; we must instead rely on such shady ambassadors as art and music to look at the laughing child, the shining bird in the palm, and even then as if through a hand-mirror pointed over our shoulders, trying to see the back of our own heads.
So much for-sale spiritualism doesn't see this at all. The left brain has identified the utility of spiritualism, meditation, and psychedelic drugs, and is putting them to use, while entirely missing the point. And so these things have been reduced to productivity, moralizing, lifestyle, or politics. So I'll be thinking about these things when the book finally arrives!
Hey Sarah. Yes the ride of the disenchanted hippie can be a tough one. Cynical hedonism swallowed more than a few. (Maybe that's partly why "Pleasure Activism" bugged you). I do think hedonism can be part of a deep and nuanced philosophy of life, but only if it opens up a transformative process. Pleasure without dialectics and seeing through is maybe a trickier route. For me that is one of the reasons for recognizing disenchantment as "part of the path," rather than a reason to become cynical.
I think your ideas about the right brain are terrific -- I was kind of ready to throw out that old idea along with a number of 70s psychological ideas, but McGilchrist really revivified the model in an intelligent way. You draw out the "purposelessness" of it, the gestalt, just-being, pure expansions dimension. One thing that made much of the counterculture religious was their sometimes literalistic or crude faith that subverting/drowning/deconstructing the left brain would deliver the world and the experience and the light you wanted, when of course the results were more decidedly mixed. (But sometimes brilliant.) Maybe that's another reason why art and music play a positive role -- not just because the express the inexpressible, but because they let us elude the traps of the left brain at a safer remove.
And yes! It is the quest for utility that stains so much spirituality today. Perhaps that reflects more pragmatic, realistic, and desperate times. No time for dancing in the sun! But this quest for utility may crush "the blue pearl."
I came across a copy of "Ways of attending. How our divided brain constructs the world" It`s a summary of the basics by Iain McGilchrist. It`s only 30 pages long and found it more accessible than "The master and his emissary" which tbh I found hard to follow and a bit unconvincing , history-wise.
The relation of rightbrain to leftbrain as I follow McGilchrist`s rap, bears a fair bit of similarity to `the weird` in relation to `maps/explanations/theories of the weird`
This is a kind of `the map is not the territory/ the menu is not the meal` thing although maps and menus are vital in the right context.
It may also be another way of viewing `spiritual practice` or `anthropotechnics` too. As a kind of restoration and grounding , something akin to drinking water in a world that daily becomes more and more of a wilderness/desert of mirrors.
What this makes me think of is the vision of old skewl Taoist practice as presented in Girardot's great and highly recommended Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism. In a nutshell (or a wonton): Taoist cosmology imagines an original unformed egg of chaos (huntun, related to wonton). (This is also like the face of the deep in Genesis). Creation involves the organization of this egg, which leads to the myth in the Chuantzu about putting holes in Mr Wonton. Its a mixed legacy. In meditation, this manifests as the idea that one point of practice is to return the body-mind to original holistic chaos, and then to be reborn a fresh after practice. There are a number of zones of meditation that I increasingly see as a kind of "temporary return to nebulosity" which requires tolerance of ambiguity, the weird, the nondefined. But you don't really stay there, certainly not totally. Its like a chaos reboot.
Erik, just when I wondered how you would top your post about your early writer’s aspirations, here comes “Slanted and Disenchanted.” Really, terrific. A riff on “If you see the Buddha on the road….” This passage is priceless:
“Even the most enthusiastic and intimate interlocutor remains, in some intangible sense, a stranger. There is always a gap. In the words of the Zen master Homeless Kodo, who wandered around Japan teaching layfolk instead of monks, ‘you can’t even trade so much as a single fart with the next guy.’”
To this we can add the following: Western philosophers make much of Socrates’ claim that he was wise because he knew that he knew nothing. Given the cantankerous character of Plato’s teacher, what he meant to say was that--after spending the day making various upper crust townspeople look ridiculous, and in front of a bunch of teenagers at that—he didn’t know shit, either. He didn’t have that answer, not even for himself. He was still looking until the end.
I’m signing up for a subscription to Burning Shore! Keep up the good work.
Thanks Michael. I always think a lot of work can be done, and a lot of problems solves, by really clarifying what kind of character Socrates has for oneself. How crusty, how ironic, how sincere, how wise. What's the vibe?
You are a pro philosopher. Why is it that the history of Western philosophy stars so many Men Who Know, when the whole thing arguably starts (or crosses a bifurcation point) with Plato, and therefore has this crusty old Not Knower at the source of the stream?
The great American philosopher John Dewey opined that people want to know the answer (to whatever), because not-knowing generates anxiety. What does anxiety name? The foreboding realization of our mortality, and thus perhaps the groundlessness/meaninglessness of the mortal life we inhabit. Living with Anxiety: This seems to have been much of what Alan Watts kept getting at: "The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms" (Angelius Silesius). Western philosophy after Socrates became dedicated to getting to the right answer, rather than preferring to attend patiently to what shows up without expecting to gain mastery over it by dint of intensive study. Here I recall what Rollo May said in a seminar forty years ago: Being a good psychotherapist means learning to live with anxiety for eight hours a day! Ain't it the truth!
I am sad at this moment. I just read a response to my article in my inbox (I wish they had posted it here so it would be public) which said I needed to get a grounding in NONDUALITY and Ken Wilber and then I would understand. That didnt make me sad (besides, I have read Wilber since the days YOU read Wilber, though no more thank god, and I like Dzogchen very much!).
Then they confused my position with "postmodernism" and that made me sad, for it erased the whole deep "wise anxiety" current, from its ancient sources and scattershot medieval and mystical uprisings, to so much of modernity's wisdom in literature, poetry, and existential psychology. I guess in today's philosophical marketplace it looks like "postmodernism," a hip and trendy skepticism rather than an honest attempt to not put a "move" on mortality or the absurdity of our conundrum. I think there are ways to work with and alchemize anxiety, one of which is a capacity for "nondual" experience, but to write over the void in the picture? Usually rings false to me.
Uh, no question the you are in tune with non-duality, which is central to Zen and other Buddhist schools, so this person's point is puzzling, indeed. (Have you read David Loy's great book on non-duality?) As for postmodernism, a messy concept to begin with, and it's not a topic that even occurred for me in regard to your post. For the "perennial wisdom," the issues of mortality and attendant anxiety are central to the whole quest for wisdom to begin with. Maybe this knot (being mortal, knowing about it, and being helpless to change it) is the key to all Zen koans! I love this one: Two Zen students propose to stump their master by holding up a glass with some liquid in it. They ask: Is the glass half full or half empty? The Zen master replies: Already broken!
Great column, Erik! And thanks for introducing me all this great music, which, I sadly confess, I'd really never heard before. What's amazing is that I was already (almost) 'adultish', and you were just a 'little kid'! One assumes that you weren't listening to this when you were four or five years old, or, who knows? maybe you were! Keep up your fine work!
Nope, I heard CSNY when I was a little kid (my parents had the records) but I didn't hear this one until the 2000s, when it was rediscovered by freak folk fans and other retro psychedelia heads. But don't be sad! Hipster music culture teaches us to compete to be "in the know" (a species of the Man Who Knows) when one of the most wonderful things in the world is, when later in life and in listening, to discover for yourself some otherwise well-known music that sounds fresh and amazing and worthy of the canon. A blast from the past you didn't even have!
Aligns with my own recent experience, but I wouldn't have thought of the Crosby song. Thanks for the analysis and pointer. I wore that album out when it was fresh, but didn't have a clue what it might've meant. I've developed even more and better cluelessness as I've aged. "It's all done with mirrors." (Also appreciating the Homeless Kodo reference, I happen to be reading "The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo" right now...)
Yeah I am really enjoying that new edition of Homeless Kodo, he definitely had that kind of vibe that communicates through the page, the translation, the generations. He also represents to me a modern current of Zen that manages to avoid the taint of imperial nationalism.
I will ponder your line for a while: "even more and better cluelessness."
Ooof. Lots of personal confluence in this one.
Is everything meta? I kinda think the answer is yes. My belfry bats resonated with your gongs on the nature of a “mature seeker” but wonder how one attains a state of maturity out of the reality of persistent uncertainty. I’m trying but it feels like an infinite babe-in-the-woods moment.
Your words and themes here entwine with threads of my history and meaning-surfing, but at awkward angles. I just wanted to share how they conspired in my mind.
I never got into Crosby beyond the hits, but my dad played and hung out with many of the Bay Area rock artists of that time, including Santana and the Dead. He was a hustling jazz trumpeter trying to find a place in Rock & Roll, and chose that path instead of being present in my life. When I was 30, I tracked him down while he was performing at Pier 23 Cafe on the Embarcadero. During a break between sets I introduced myself.
We never developed a relationship beyond sparse pleasantries, and he often filled those moments with famous musician name drops and related stories. He died suddenly in 2008, alone, between parked cars in Pacifica. Much of his life, at least from his perspective, is permanently locked in mystery. My younger dadhalf-siblings confirm that I have a lot of his traits, in spite of his total absence, and that is both intriguing and terrifying. It makes me ponder the scope of "spooky actions at a distance”.
Was my dad a seeker or just a hustling drug taking braggart artist? Both? Was he haunted or inspired by brushing shoulders with success and fame? What shadows dogged him? What parts of this quandary live in me?
All of the above, I assume.
Anyway, thanks for your Thought-Fu, Shrugged Shoulders style.
Beautiful post, shot through with the edge and sense of loss I was partly trying to articulate. I can hear the pain of that absence, and the even stranger resonance of that life in yours and your own searching. "Was my dad a seeker or just a hustling drug taking braggart artist?" I have met many like your dad, asked that question many times, and have spent time on both sides of that question. Sometimes I look at the whole broad and varied current of counterculture and suspect the same thing.
I think you are right to approach this slanted wise. I find persistent uncertainty a trial, and sometimes a false lure, but when I put my spiritual thinking cap on, this is where the light falls. Other times I can barely see.
Erik, thanks for that. I can`t believe I`d never heard “Laughing” or any of that album before.
`Nice one` to use the parlance of the times.
Alan Watts presented that the whole idea of hitching up with a guru or following a path is to eventually find out that you don`t need to. The tricky bit is, we have to do it in order to get to that point; we have to get into it to get out of it and the fool has to persist in his folly in order to become wise as Blake said and Alan Watts was fond of referencing.
Even Krishnamurti spent decades on the Theosophical path with all its steps and handrails before he headed off into his pathless land.
I`m not surprised that Alan Watts is still wildly popular after so long (another 50 year anniversary for your list!). Apart from anything else, his emphasis on play and purposelessness can be a great medicine for today`s spiritual consumer culture with its obsession with getting to the next level/chakra/dimension/plane/state etc and acting like a spiritual tourist fighting for his seat on the bus, whilst missing the beauty of the journey.
I do think Watts is a balm, particularly in the sometimes scary but sometimes funny way in which he pointed out the folly of all this development. Especially true today, when even the hedonism that the hippies were OK with has to be disguised as some kind of developmental hike up the mountain.
One place I have come to differ with some of the ways that Watts presents this has to do with the importance of practice. Paying attention, to myself and others, it seems pretty clear to me that there is a happy medium that involves devotion or commitment to a regular practice, at least a lot of the time, rather than simply embracing purposelessness as a reason to abandon all practices. But practices, even though their results changes or "improve", don't have to be seen as necessarily chained to the developmental wheel. There is something like "just practicing," throwing your heart into work that clarifies even as it goes nowhere. But that might just be my fuddy duddy Zen talking!
I don`t think it`s fuddy duddy Zen talk,it`s bang on the money.
That life is simply purposeless play probably isn`t to be taken as an absolute truth, more as a subtle comment/hint as to the qualities needed in the practice of life itself as well as any kind of formal practice. I think that`s different from: "life is purposeless play,it`s all a divine Leela so it makes no difference if meditate or sink another bottle of vodka and shag a couple more 20 year old disciples, there is nothing that is not the Tao,man" (cue: bangs into lamppost and slides onto ass in muddy gutter)
Very well said. What you say reminds me that spiritual or philosophical ideas are often better seen as tools or probes or even songs to inspire, and that when they become reified into dogmas then they form the foundations for whole edifices of attitudes and justifications. Think lightly, especially in tricky waters. That's why I think it is important to talk about Watts' life (as well as his abandonment of earlier families). I am not a prude or a moralist and unlike a lot of the critics, I don't think it cancels out or even takes away the value of his divine explications. I buy the purposeless play view in many ways, I just don't think it takes us off the hook!
Well said regarding risky nature of saying that anything is the absolute truth, perhaps especially that the claim that everything is literally "meaningless," given where many nihilistic antinomians end up. There's a good reason why "right conduct" is so important in the eightfold path in Buddhism. Compassion is perhaps the central outcome of authentic non-duality, and the lack thereof (as in exploiting oneself or others) is a sure sign of having missed the point.
One of the deepest koans for me, and one that so much rides on, is whether compassion is *naturally* an outcome of authentic nonduaulity, or whether it must be additionally cultivated or transmitted or shaped. For me, that is one reason that the commitment to practice is so important, even if it is "meaningless" or doesnt seem to go anywhere.
You are right, I think, to wonder whether compassion must be continually cultivated, rather than assuming that it follows inevitably from non-duality. We can have many non-dual experiences in various settings, but given that prior to such experiences and for much of the time in between such experiences, we find ourselves in the dualistic soup of samsara. There's a famous story of a would-be-guru who descends from the mountains after a two-year solitary retreat. He seems to beam love and affirmation, but suddenly flashes anger at someone who bumps into by accident. Rooting out the three poisons (ignorance, grasping, aversion) takes longer than two years; it takes lifetimes, at least according to Buddhism. Nevertheless, the more capable we are of sustaining non-duality, the more capable we are of displaying compassion. The current Dalai Lama has spoken eloquently of the challenge posed by the Two Truth teaching: One the one hand, there is the deep Truth that all phenomena (including one's self) is empty of substance or independent reality; on the other hand, there is the everyday (and highly useful) truth that all aggregated phenomena exhibit a transient stability that must be taken into account. Perhaps the whole point of "intentional" communities is to create the context in which non-dual awareness (and compassion) can be cultivated with sympathetic irony. I suppose this is what many spiritual traditions have in mind by learning to be in the world without being of (mired in) it?
On the subject of Alan Watts, I remembered something he said which certainly ties in with core themes on these pages...
"The more I look at things ,the more I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird"
Yes Watts is in many ways that granddaddy of the High Weirdos. He used "weird" a number of times in interesting ways, including the injunction to "Follow your weird", which is a lot more interesting (if less pleasurable at times) than Joseph Campbell's far more popular "Follow your bliss."
It relates here because I think when we sense this weirdness of things there is a drive to understand some explanation of deeper forces that would help the weirdness dissipate, as if it were a paradox that could be dispelled with logical operations. But it may be that the purposeless play at the heart of the thing is just weird!
Hi Erik. You always trigger many thoughts and memories. I’ll just put them out here in no particular order.
The two cultural icons from that period that resonate most with me are The Grateful Dead and Gravity’s Rainbow. Now I’m wondering is there a connection between the two and I’ll probably spend next week looking for one.
My favorite seeker is (I know it’s been debunked) Carlos Castaneda
Alan Watts’s laughing meditation
A dramatic experience during an ayahuasca ceremony that I can still recall in memory which still has more meaning than clutching a shadow
Thanks for the great post
That is a fine and very resonant pinball game through the era. I have never considered the GD=GR equation, but now I must. (I suspect it involves LSD and California and feedback.) I love Castaneda and find some way to include him here soon.
And I thank you for mentioning your dramatic experience, which reminds me that some moments will never leave you or stop changing you even if you wanted them to, which makes them something other than shadows, something more like part of your marrow. But you also did myself and yourself the kindness of not telling me the tale, because, while the tale would no doubt be good and valuable, it is your marrow, not mine.
My first two thoughts about the inroads to a GD-GR connection are the Farina-Garcia interactions or maybe throw Ken Kesey in the LSD GR mix
I just read Sometimes A Great Notion for the first time, having reread GR just last year. Contentwise we are in a different world, tone as well, but on the level of writing -- late modernism/early postmodernism (in the literary sense more than philosophical) -- some very interesting resonances. It was interesting "hunting for the acid" in KK's prose and style.
I was thinking more of the milieu of the Cuckoo’s nest and the merry pranksters
I am thinking of writing something on LSD in GR, and the cybernetic context is really important. Gregory Bateson was of course hanging around the hospital where Kesey, Ginsberg, etc first turned on.
Looking forward to that👍
Thank you for this. I was raised inside this culture of seeking by disenchanted hippies, who took the 80s very hard. The album gave me intense nostalgia, although I can't recall ever having heard it before.
I'm writing because I had a thought. It has a lot of pieces, I hope you have a few minutes to bear with me.
As it happens I just finished reading the book Pleasure Activism. There are some things to recommend it, but also something about it that really bothered me. It contains a defensiveness about pleasure, a fighting spirit, anger. "Fuck you, society, for telling me not to enjoy sex (or food, or drugs, or my body) -- I will enjoy it to spite you!"
The pleasure of the laughing child (in both the spiritual mode and the nonsense mode) exists with reference to the sun, but not other babies, if that makes sense. There is no moral component to the laughing child, no politics. I now see that this is what I disliked about Pleasure Activism -- the moralizing and politics of something that I suspect to be sacred.
The next book I hope to read, when it comes from the library, is The Master and His Emissary. I heard a recent interview with Iain McGilchrist, the author, in which he gives a low-bullshit account of the split brain, which is the topic of this book. To give a reduction of a reduction of a reduction -- the right brain considers things in their wholeness, while the left brain considers things narrowly and for their utility. The right brain knows it needs the left brain, but the left brain doesn't realize the right brain even exists. The left also possesses all language, and so the narrative, consciousness-as-dialogue, reasoning awareness of ourselves and the world is entirely the domain of the left brain. Anyway, it's fascinating stuff and I think it's likely you already know all this so I'll move on. The book then (I hear) moves on to social critique in what McGilchrist believes is an increasingly left-brain dominant world.
Finally, my thought: that what was so radical about the 70s-era counterculture weirdness was that it was a sincere attempt to subvert the left brain. The experience of a sacred thing, that is whole and wise and also somehow literally meaningless, is the hallmark of right brain thinking. As is the inability to express it directly; we must instead rely on such shady ambassadors as art and music to look at the laughing child, the shining bird in the palm, and even then as if through a hand-mirror pointed over our shoulders, trying to see the back of our own heads.
So much for-sale spiritualism doesn't see this at all. The left brain has identified the utility of spiritualism, meditation, and psychedelic drugs, and is putting them to use, while entirely missing the point. And so these things have been reduced to productivity, moralizing, lifestyle, or politics. So I'll be thinking about these things when the book finally arrives!
Hey Sarah. Yes the ride of the disenchanted hippie can be a tough one. Cynical hedonism swallowed more than a few. (Maybe that's partly why "Pleasure Activism" bugged you). I do think hedonism can be part of a deep and nuanced philosophy of life, but only if it opens up a transformative process. Pleasure without dialectics and seeing through is maybe a trickier route. For me that is one of the reasons for recognizing disenchantment as "part of the path," rather than a reason to become cynical.
I think your ideas about the right brain are terrific -- I was kind of ready to throw out that old idea along with a number of 70s psychological ideas, but McGilchrist really revivified the model in an intelligent way. You draw out the "purposelessness" of it, the gestalt, just-being, pure expansions dimension. One thing that made much of the counterculture religious was their sometimes literalistic or crude faith that subverting/drowning/deconstructing the left brain would deliver the world and the experience and the light you wanted, when of course the results were more decidedly mixed. (But sometimes brilliant.) Maybe that's another reason why art and music play a positive role -- not just because the express the inexpressible, but because they let us elude the traps of the left brain at a safer remove.
And yes! It is the quest for utility that stains so much spirituality today. Perhaps that reflects more pragmatic, realistic, and desperate times. No time for dancing in the sun! But this quest for utility may crush "the blue pearl."
I came across a copy of "Ways of attending. How our divided brain constructs the world" It`s a summary of the basics by Iain McGilchrist. It`s only 30 pages long and found it more accessible than "The master and his emissary" which tbh I found hard to follow and a bit unconvincing , history-wise.
Sounds good! I didn't read most of the McGilchrist, heard some lectures and read a few chunks. I will check this out.
The relation of rightbrain to leftbrain as I follow McGilchrist`s rap, bears a fair bit of similarity to `the weird` in relation to `maps/explanations/theories of the weird`
This is a kind of `the map is not the territory/ the menu is not the meal` thing although maps and menus are vital in the right context.
It may also be another way of viewing `spiritual practice` or `anthropotechnics` too. As a kind of restoration and grounding , something akin to drinking water in a world that daily becomes more and more of a wilderness/desert of mirrors.
What this makes me think of is the vision of old skewl Taoist practice as presented in Girardot's great and highly recommended Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism. In a nutshell (or a wonton): Taoist cosmology imagines an original unformed egg of chaos (huntun, related to wonton). (This is also like the face of the deep in Genesis). Creation involves the organization of this egg, which leads to the myth in the Chuantzu about putting holes in Mr Wonton. Its a mixed legacy. In meditation, this manifests as the idea that one point of practice is to return the body-mind to original holistic chaos, and then to be reborn a fresh after practice. There are a number of zones of meditation that I increasingly see as a kind of "temporary return to nebulosity" which requires tolerance of ambiguity, the weird, the nondefined. But you don't really stay there, certainly not totally. Its like a chaos reboot.
Erik, just when I wondered how you would top your post about your early writer’s aspirations, here comes “Slanted and Disenchanted.” Really, terrific. A riff on “If you see the Buddha on the road….” This passage is priceless:
“Even the most enthusiastic and intimate interlocutor remains, in some intangible sense, a stranger. There is always a gap. In the words of the Zen master Homeless Kodo, who wandered around Japan teaching layfolk instead of monks, ‘you can’t even trade so much as a single fart with the next guy.’”
To this we can add the following: Western philosophers make much of Socrates’ claim that he was wise because he knew that he knew nothing. Given the cantankerous character of Plato’s teacher, what he meant to say was that--after spending the day making various upper crust townspeople look ridiculous, and in front of a bunch of teenagers at that—he didn’t know shit, either. He didn’t have that answer, not even for himself. He was still looking until the end.
I’m signing up for a subscription to Burning Shore! Keep up the good work.
Thanks Michael. I always think a lot of work can be done, and a lot of problems solves, by really clarifying what kind of character Socrates has for oneself. How crusty, how ironic, how sincere, how wise. What's the vibe?
You are a pro philosopher. Why is it that the history of Western philosophy stars so many Men Who Know, when the whole thing arguably starts (or crosses a bifurcation point) with Plato, and therefore has this crusty old Not Knower at the source of the stream?
The great American philosopher John Dewey opined that people want to know the answer (to whatever), because not-knowing generates anxiety. What does anxiety name? The foreboding realization of our mortality, and thus perhaps the groundlessness/meaninglessness of the mortal life we inhabit. Living with Anxiety: This seems to have been much of what Alan Watts kept getting at: "The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms" (Angelius Silesius). Western philosophy after Socrates became dedicated to getting to the right answer, rather than preferring to attend patiently to what shows up without expecting to gain mastery over it by dint of intensive study. Here I recall what Rollo May said in a seminar forty years ago: Being a good psychotherapist means learning to live with anxiety for eight hours a day! Ain't it the truth!
I am sad at this moment. I just read a response to my article in my inbox (I wish they had posted it here so it would be public) which said I needed to get a grounding in NONDUALITY and Ken Wilber and then I would understand. That didnt make me sad (besides, I have read Wilber since the days YOU read Wilber, though no more thank god, and I like Dzogchen very much!).
Then they confused my position with "postmodernism" and that made me sad, for it erased the whole deep "wise anxiety" current, from its ancient sources and scattershot medieval and mystical uprisings, to so much of modernity's wisdom in literature, poetry, and existential psychology. I guess in today's philosophical marketplace it looks like "postmodernism," a hip and trendy skepticism rather than an honest attempt to not put a "move" on mortality or the absurdity of our conundrum. I think there are ways to work with and alchemize anxiety, one of which is a capacity for "nondual" experience, but to write over the void in the picture? Usually rings false to me.
Uh, no question the you are in tune with non-duality, which is central to Zen and other Buddhist schools, so this person's point is puzzling, indeed. (Have you read David Loy's great book on non-duality?) As for postmodernism, a messy concept to begin with, and it's not a topic that even occurred for me in regard to your post. For the "perennial wisdom," the issues of mortality and attendant anxiety are central to the whole quest for wisdom to begin with. Maybe this knot (being mortal, knowing about it, and being helpless to change it) is the key to all Zen koans! I love this one: Two Zen students propose to stump their master by holding up a glass with some liquid in it. They ask: Is the glass half full or half empty? The Zen master replies: Already broken!
Erik,
Damn! Sounds like you`ve been door-stepped by an Advaita`s Witness!
I`d rather have crusty old Not-Knowers any day of the week.
Great column, Erik! And thanks for introducing me all this great music, which, I sadly confess, I'd really never heard before. What's amazing is that I was already (almost) 'adultish', and you were just a 'little kid'! One assumes that you weren't listening to this when you were four or five years old, or, who knows? maybe you were! Keep up your fine work!
Nope, I heard CSNY when I was a little kid (my parents had the records) but I didn't hear this one until the 2000s, when it was rediscovered by freak folk fans and other retro psychedelia heads. But don't be sad! Hipster music culture teaches us to compete to be "in the know" (a species of the Man Who Knows) when one of the most wonderful things in the world is, when later in life and in listening, to discover for yourself some otherwise well-known music that sounds fresh and amazing and worthy of the canon. A blast from the past you didn't even have!
Aligns with my own recent experience, but I wouldn't have thought of the Crosby song. Thanks for the analysis and pointer. I wore that album out when it was fresh, but didn't have a clue what it might've meant. I've developed even more and better cluelessness as I've aged. "It's all done with mirrors." (Also appreciating the Homeless Kodo reference, I happen to be reading "The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo" right now...)
Yeah I am really enjoying that new edition of Homeless Kodo, he definitely had that kind of vibe that communicates through the page, the translation, the generations. He also represents to me a modern current of Zen that manages to avoid the taint of imperial nationalism.
I will ponder your line for a while: "even more and better cluelessness."