WALLPAPERS(by munawar 9949935350)

Oh yes. 
—————————

NEUROECONOMICS OF TRUST
Paul Zak

Who’s more trustworthy?
    Children: women.  Facial expressions. Eye contact, body language
    Many cues doen’t exist in institutions where strangers interact
    Civilizationa [gesellshaft] as non-face-to-face relationships
    How did they evolve in kin-based groups?

To trust or not to trust as worldview
Madison: “There is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain circumspection and distrust”
Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

% per country who think others are trustworthy – 66% in Norway.  10% in Brazil, Columbia, Turkey, and Peru

    happiness correlated with trust levels  (direction of correlation later)
    self-recorded depression negatively correlated with trust.

Environments in which trust cultivated
    Trust reflects environments: Social, economic, political, legal environments
    Low trust a powerful indicator of poverty
    Investments (like legal contracts) have a drag on them when trust is low
        Then growth can’t happen

Individuals decide to trust
    Given a constant environment, how do individuals come to trust each other?
    What happens in the brain when I decide to trust John?

Trusting strangers unique to human beings
Subjects in lab cannot articulate why they make trusting decisions
Calculative trust doesn’t appear in lab

Origins with mother?

Oxytocin in animals – hormone that makes fish want to approach other fishes
    Very hard to measure, very labile, degrades quickly.
Areas of the brain associated with emotion accumulate oxytocin
    All done out of conscious control
    Kinda a gestalt
Try to get brain to make lots of the stuff

Vernon Smith’s lab – measuring trust
    Requires individuals to make monetary sacrifice to trust stranger
    Correlated with prayer, trust of president, trust of other people
    Leave yourself open to exploitation because you expect some benefit
   
    Hallmarks of schizophrenia is being withdrawn;

    Receiving a trust signal causes oxytocin to rise
    Trust begets trustworthiness
    Oxytocin correlates with trustworthy behavior

Trait vs state – how to measure oxytocin processing as nature vs nurture
    Violations of trust
    Measure five exceptions who keep everything – 2% “bastards”
        Brain dysfunction?
        Social phobics?
        Turn out to be emotionally labile, sexually very active
            Oxytocin creates higher levels of bonding
            Believe others are trustworthy
            Rate themselves as very trustworthy
        Nasal spray
            People on exytocin don’t have fear of interacting with strangers
            Dw1s Don’t expect to get things back
            Dw2s don’t change – already trusting. 
            Just like fish
        Massage therapist
            Increases trust levels 300%

On/off switch?
    HDT – circulates both in men and women, biologically inactive most of the time
    Women are more distrusting, but more generous
    The less you send a guy, the more dht.  Men resent it. 
Women don’t have a physiological response. 

Current research – where in the brain
           

Women who are ovulating are less trustworthy.  Progesterone stops trust.
Oxytocin produces dopamine so physically feels good.

Still a problem with social vs economic trust.   – swiss Presbyterian farmers have a psychotic relationship with money but a high degree of trust. 

Wilhelm Reich crackpot psychologist says that armored and unarmored man perceive and react to the world differently, hold their bodies. Differently.  You seem to have provided the physiological proof of this theory.  The extension of his thought is the theory of an “emotional plague” which transfers from person to person.  Can only be prevented by careful selection of educators and media figures.  What do you think?

[

test: attention and trust. More trust more attention.  Ragmenting attention by lack of trust. 

Problem: same conclusions already reached by philosophers and psychologists without need for blood test.  So having a odel for why – based on hormones – tells nothing.  Merely provides an easy answer to the why question (it’s always evolution) and the solution question (more drugs)

These people are dangerous.

Oh yes. 
—————————

NEUROECONOMICS OF TRUST
Paul Zak

Who’s more trustworthy?
    Children: women.  Facial expressions. Eye contact, body language
    Many cues doen’t exist in institutions where strangers interact
    Civilizationa [gesellshaft] as non-face-to-face relationships
    How did they evolve in kin-based groups?

To trust or not to trust as worldview
Madison: “There is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain circumspection and distrust”
Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

% per country who think others are trustworthy – 66% in Norway.  10% in Brazil, Columbia, Turkey, and Peru

    happiness correlated with trust levels  (direction of correlation later)
    self-recorded depression negatively correlated with trust.

Environments in which trust cultivated
    Trust reflects environments: Social, economic, political, legal environments
    Low trust a powerful indicator of poverty
    Investments (like legal contracts) have a drag on them when trust is low
        Then growth can’t happen

Individuals decide to trust
    Given a constant environment, how do individuals come to trust each other?
    What happens in the brain when I decide to trust John?

Trusting strangers unique to human beings
Subjects in lab cannot articulate why they make trusting decisions
Calculative trust doesn’t appear in lab

Origins with mother?

Oxytocin in animals – hormone that makes fish want to approach other fishes
    Very hard to measure, very labile, degrades quickly.
Areas of the brain associated with emotion accumulate oxytocin
    All done out of conscious control
    Kinda a gestalt
Try to get brain to make lots of the stuff

Vernon Smith’s lab – measuring trust
    Requires individuals to make monetary sacrifice to trust stranger
    Correlated with prayer, trust of president, trust of other people
    Leave yourself open to exploitation because you expect some benefit
   
    Hallmarks of schizophrenia is being withdrawn;

    Receiving a trust signal causes oxytocin to rise
    Trust begets trustworthiness
    Oxytocin correlates with trustworthy behavior

Trait vs state – how to measure oxytocin processing as nature vs nurture
    Violations of trust
    Measure five exceptions who keep everything – 2% “bastards”
        Brain dysfunction?
        Social phobics?
        Turn out to be emotionally labile, sexually very active
            Oxytocin creates higher levels of bonding
            Believe others are trustworthy
            Rate themselves as very trustworthy
        Nasal spray
            People on exytocin don’t have fear of interacting with strangers
            Dw1s Don’t expect to get things back
            Dw2s don’t change – already trusting. 
            Just like fish
        Massage therapist
            Increases trust levels 300%

On/off switch?
    HDT – circulates both in men and women, biologically inactive most of the time
    Women are more distrusting, but more generous
    The less you send a guy, the more dht.  Men resent it. 
Women don’t have a physiological response. 

Current research – where in the brain
           

Women who are ovulating are less trustworthy.  Progesterone stops trust.
Oxytocin produces dopamine so physically feels good.

Still a problem with social vs economic trust.   – swiss Presbyterian farmers have a psychotic relationship with money but a high degree of trust. 

Wilhelm Reich crackpot psychologist says that armored and unarmored man perceive and react to the world differently, hold their bodies. Differently.  You seem to have provided the physiological proof of this theory.  The extension of his thought is the theory of an “emotional plague” which transfers from person to person.  Can only be prevented by careful selection of educators and media figures.  What do you think?

[

test: attention and trust. More trust more attention.  Ragmenting attention by lack of trust. 

Problem: same conclusions already reached by philosophers and psychologists without need for blood test.  So having a odel for why – based on hormones – tells nothing.  Merely provides an easy answer to the why question (it’s always evolution) and the solution question (more drugs)

These people are dangerous.

There are LOTS of evolutionary biologists here
    arguing about lemurs and chimps
    which of course prove that communism was doomed to fail

They are creating a very big machine here
    political scientists who can frame their arguments
        according to the best advice of linguists
    economists who can argue in terms of cognitive psych
   
A talented generation
    of cunning thinkers
       dedicated to liberty
          also to free trade
(the gentleman who could not be convinced that mill towns and the company store really existed: “that worker must have been stupid.”  but i have evidence!)
(and then there are others who are fighting the good fight; free african americans not by unionizing but by ending the war on drugs…)
   
I’m afraid that the progressive think tank movement, thirty years behind, will never
accomplish anything competitively similar. 
Cash in your chips now; we’ll all be libertarian in the future.

There are LOTS of evolutionary biologists here
    arguing about lemurs and chimps
    which of course prove that communism was doomed to fail

They are creating a very big machine here
    political scientists who can frame their arguments
        according to the best advice of linguists
    economists who can argue in terms of cognitive psych
   
A talented generation
    of cunning thinkers
       dedicated to liberty
          also to free trade
(the gentleman who could not be convinced that mill towns and the company store really existed: “that worker must have been stupid.”  but i have evidence!)
(and then there are others who are fighting the good fight; free african americans not by unionizing but by ending the war on drugs…)
   
I’m afraid that the progressive think tank movement, thirty years behind, will never
accomplish anything competitively similar. 
Cash in your chips now; we’ll all be libertarian in the future.

Down in Dealey Plaza the tourists mill about.

I’ve done a lot of talking to strangers recently.  A couple of brilliant, anonymous responses to my Craiglist postings for dead authors, maybe a cup of coffee later on.  Last night, strangers at the restaurant.  An old couple struck up conversation, and after forty minutes of telling my suit-clad friend about the boards of hospitals and the AT&T phone company mergers they started talking to me.  About what they really wanted to talk about.  My opinion on psychic phenomena.  They had both had a string of strange experiences.  She said “mere synchronicity.”  He was worried about his eternal soul.  They kept making a joke of it, and then returning. 

Virtuality is about vulnerability: Reich says that armored man and organic man not only hold themselves differently before the world, but their permeability is also entirely different in substance; the armored man will never know, because he can never observe. 

I think always on Derrida’s phonebooth in the Postcard: the new (male) Heloise calling the new (female) Abelard, wondering, will this message get through?  How strong is this connection?  Has the line gone dead?  Which words *did* you hear?  But Derrida is no nihilist: he keeps calling. 

So do the Craigslisters, bless them, marvelous mode of communion; I count on my list of personal salvations from Sartrean suicide the Missed Connections page, the furtive glances listed on the N-Judah every morning.  Some of the glances connect, sometimes.  Sweet gleaners of the fields among the lillies.  I am startled by how deeply I love them. Kierkegaard: the man of God is like any other man; he gets up, he goes to work, he loves his wife; it is only that he has always already thrown his confidence into the void. 

The linguist in me begins to wonder if ‘projection’ is merely a throwing too far — throwing again and again without waiting to see if those infinite glances into the universe went anywhere. 

All conspiracy theories, all over-abundant lonelinesses, all paranoias, are ultimately about a lack of confidence that the ache to connect will ever achieve an arch across the void. 

I will wait,
I will wait,
I will wait.

Technorati Tags: identity, virtuality, angels, psychics, god, strangers, anonymity, craigslist, soul, derridal, nihilism, missed connections, messages, signification, reich, permeability, tourism, tourists, projection, confidence, conspiracy theory, fortean research, paranoia, loneliness, virtual reality, intimacy, love

Down in Dealey Plaza the tourists mill about.

I’ve done a lot of talking to strangers recently.  A couple of brilliant, anonymous responses to my Craiglist postings for dead authors, maybe a cup of coffee later on.  Last night, strangers at the restaurant.  An old couple struck up conversation, and after forty minutes of telling my suit-clad friend about the boards of hospitals and the AT&T phone company mergers they started talking to me.  About what they really wanted to talk about.  My opinion on psychic phenomena.  They had both had a string of strange experiences.  She said “mere synchronicity.”  He was worried about his eternal soul.  They kept making a joke of it, and then returning. 

Virtuality is about vulnerability: Reich says that armored man and organic man not only hold themselves differently before the world, but their permeability is also entirely different in substance; the armored man will never know, because he can never observe. 

I think always on Derrida’s phonebooth in the Postcard: the new (male) Heloise calling the new (female) Abelard, wondering, will this message get through?  How strong is this connection?  Has the line gone dead?  Which words *did* you hear?  But Derrida is no nihilist: he keeps calling. 

So do the Craigslisters, bless them, marvelous mode of communion; I count on my list of personal salvations from Sartrean suicide the Missed Connections page, the furtive glances listed on the N-Judah every morning.  Some of the glances connect, sometimes.  Sweet gleaners of the fields among the lillies.  I am startled by how deeply I love them. Kierkegaard: the man of God is like any other man; he gets up, he goes to work, he loves his wife; it is only that he has always already thrown his confidence into the void. 

The linguist in me begins to wonder if ‘projection’ is merely a throwing too far — throwing again and again without waiting to see if those infinite glances into the universe went anywhere. 

All conspiracy theories, all over-abundant lonelinesses, all paranoias, are ultimately about a lack of confidence that the ache to connect will ever achieve an arch across the void. 

I will wait,
I will wait,
I will wait.

Technorati Tags: identity, virtuality, angels, psychics, god, strangers, anonymity, craigslist, soul, derridal, nihilism, missed connections, messages, signification, reich, permeability, tourism, tourists, projection, confidence, conspiracy theory, fortean research, paranoia, loneliness, virtual reality, intimacy, love

Boy

The winds coming can be heard from far off. 
You see the clouds getting sickly and purple with excitement on the horizon:
To them it’s just like a roller coaster.
Swooping, cold, bright speed, lights, squealing winds. 
Now as it approaches you can see the things it picks up and throws down again:
    Weeping cows, red umbrellas;
small shacks, chokes of fence still clutching the ground.
The storm doesn’t know what it wants.

Then there’s an awful silence.
You don’t know what happened, you couldn’t feel the walls being
torn from around you,
your letters, sheets, towels flying around
Too embarrassed that your world was so poorly made.
    It collapsed so quickly.
What can you do?  This is a fact of nature.
You feel the scream cramp in your lungs.

The next morning you think:
Where is my mobile home?  Where is my fucking life?
You say: I’m out of here! I’ll hit the road!

But the roads have all been blown away.

The storm is gone.  You want to cry.

(poems from some time in early 2005)

Technorati Tags: poems, poets, poetry, wind, disaster

Boy

The winds coming can be heard from far off. 
You see the clouds getting sickly and purple with excitement on the horizon:
To them it’s just like a roller coaster.
Swooping, cold, bright speed, lights, squealing winds. 
Now as it approaches you can see the things it picks up and throws down again:
    Weeping cows, red umbrellas;
small shacks, chokes of fence still clutching the ground.
The storm doesn’t know what it wants.

Then there’s an awful silence.
You don’t know what happened, you couldn’t feel the walls being
torn from around you,
your letters, sheets, towels flying around
Too embarrassed that your world was so poorly made.
    It collapsed so quickly.
What can you do?  This is a fact of nature.
You feel the scream cramp in your lungs.

The next morning you think:
Where is my mobile home?  Where is my fucking life?
You say: I’m out of here! I’ll hit the road!

But the roads have all been blown away.

The storm is gone.  You want to cry.

(poems from some time in early 2005)

Technorati Tags: poems, poets, poetry, wind, disaster

 
Natural Disaster II.

i.

When I was a boy the flood came early one morning and the town was gone.

We waited for the politicians to give us something to gnaw on.

Nurses and retirees unloaded big boxes.

They smiled passing sandwiches in cellophane.

We are still waiting for them to tell us why it happened here.

My father did not hold me as he stared at the far-off sky.

It is a season that returns, he said.  Men wander beneath the sky,

And from heaven, no food, only spirit. 

Vagabonds from his childhood memories,

Now he was one of them, a pile of work laid low.

All his show a family, hungry and helpless.

He thought these poverties were gone, but now they’re back,

Like in Egypt, I guess, when the Red Sea parted,

What was taken away was restituted whole. 

Some stayed hoping for such a providence,

The Nile’s flood restored its farms.

They were coaxed by things another season told them. 

But we heard nothing. There was nothing we could see of home there.

So we turned to the road.

We are anointed as pilgrims again, a holy calling.

ii.

They misunderstand this, who apologize

Too much for what is and what can’t be.

People, at least, are mobile.

It’s only that there is nowhere left to go towards.

In another country, now, and calloused,

Grown accustomed to the weather, the rough sleep,

Now the land’s dried up, and we’ve dried out too.

Sometimes we steal things: chickens, milk in bottles.

I know you are scared of me, but there’s nothing else for us here,

Just water now and then,

Which comes from heaven. 

And men steal water sometimes too. 

It isn’t the having of water that counts. 

We aren’t fish.

But you know men die of thirst.

iii.

I am on the road now and I see others,

Fit men, lit up by the window, staring into the street-lights.

I know they are waiting too.

Some sickness like the first that knocked us out

Is blowing through them so cold

No clothes or house can keep them in. 

Their paths are unclear.  They wait

For signs they can’t see. 

The city is their prison,

Its streets their endless labyrinth. 

But what do I know? It might be safer

That way.  They are happy sometimes,

And I am too. Unlike them I am

made of road and wind. I see things in the weather

They do not. The weather changes first at the horizon,

Where the road begins.  I come in the night while they sleep,

and set off before they wake.  There can be no slumber

for those who belong to the road.

iv.

When I see them cursing their wives

Or rising daily to the dismal monastic skyscrapers

I know they are unlike us altogether.

Love cast us out. Love woke me up and hurled me out of bed.

Fearing love, I still give thanks, each footstep,

For the road itself alone.

This is because it must be.

There is no coming in but the one,

And no way but by going the whole way round.

Technorati Tags: flood, poetry, natural disaster, landscape, water, death

 
Natural Disaster II.

i.

When I was a boy the flood came early one morning and the town was gone.

We waited for the politicians to give us something to gnaw on.

Nurses and retirees unloaded big boxes.

They smiled passing sandwiches in cellophane.

We are still waiting for them to tell us why it happened here.

My father did not hold me as he stared at the far-off sky.

It is a season that returns, he said.  Men wander beneath the sky,

And from heaven, no food, only spirit. 

Vagabonds from his childhood memories,

Now he was one of them, a pile of work laid low.

All his show a family, hungry and helpless.

He thought these poverties were gone, but now they’re back,

Like in Egypt, I guess, when the Red Sea parted,

What was taken away was restituted whole. 

Some stayed hoping for such a providence,

The Nile’s flood restored its farms.

They were coaxed by things another season told them. 

But we heard nothing. There was nothing we could see of home there.

So we turned to the road.

We are anointed as pilgrims again, a holy calling.

ii.

They misunderstand this, who apologize

Too much for what is and what can’t be.

People, at least, are mobile.

It’s only that there is nowhere left to go towards.

In another country, now, and calloused,

Grown accustomed to the weather, the rough sleep,

Now the land’s dried up, and we’ve dried out too.

Sometimes we steal things: chickens, milk in bottles.

I know you are scared of me, but there’s nothing else for us here,

Just water now and then,

Which comes from heaven. 

And men steal water sometimes too. 

It isn’t the having of water that counts. 

We aren’t fish.

But you know men die of thirst.

iii.

I am on the road now and I see others,

Fit men, lit up by the window, staring into the street-lights.

I know they are waiting too.

Some sickness like the first that knocked us out

Is blowing through them so cold

No clothes or house can keep them in. 

Their paths are unclear.  They wait

For signs they can’t see. 

The city is their prison,

Its streets their endless labyrinth. 

But what do I know? It might be safer

That way.  They are happy sometimes,

And I am too. Unlike them I am

made of road and wind. I see things in the weather

They do not. The weather changes first at the horizon,

Where the road begins.  I come in the night while they sleep,

and set off before they wake.  There can be no slumber

for those who belong to the road.

iv.

When I see them cursing their wives

Or rising daily to the dismal monastic skyscrapers

I know they are unlike us altogether.

Love cast us out. Love woke me up and hurled me out of bed.

Fearing love, I still give thanks, each footstep,

For the road itself alone.

This is because it must be.

There is no coming in but the one,

And no way but by going the whole way round.

Technorati Tags: flood, poetry, natural disaster, landscape, water, death

I walked outside my back door this morning to hear the French coverage of the France-Switzerland match and glimpse a lasso swinging.

I live in one of those victorian working-class row houses — three families to a lot, stacked in front of each other; work lots of backyards with nineteenth-century wooden fire escapes down the back, used for the most part for drying laundry. Ours has laundry flapping around basil plants and succulents.

Our backstairs neighbors include a Franco-British family, which had apparently invited over every other Frenchman in San Francisco. Cattycorner dwells a retired Mexican couple who hold barbeques in their back yard every Friday afternoon in the summer. The Mexican family typically plays ranchero ballads, which come soaring over the fences while the men, in enormous cowboy hats and neckerchiefs, sway.

The French family have a spreading fig tree, under which their daughter plays.   The Mexicans have a large dirt back yard, edged with neat rows of vegetables: cabbages, epazote, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers. Their sons are over practicing throwing the lasso. 

I was yelling over the fence at the French family, attempting to egg them on behalf of Switzerland (alle la Suisse!!). I made no impression whatsoever over the loud cheering and focussed consumption of Stella Artoises.  But it has definitely attracted the attention of the lassoers, who keep winking at me as I sit typing in the sun.

Happy Sunday!

Technorati Tags: cities, international, worldcup, backyards, space, neighbors, neighborhoods, san francisco, interactions, strangers, gardens

I walked outside my back door this morning to hear the French coverage of the France-Switzerland match and glimpse a lasso swinging.

I live in one of those victorian working-class row houses — three families to a lot, stacked in front of each other; work lots of backyards with nineteenth-century wooden fire escapes down the back, used for the most part for drying laundry. Ours has laundry flapping around basil plants and succulents.

Our backstairs neighbors include a Franco-British family, which had apparently invited over every other Frenchman in San Francisco. Cattycorner dwells a retired Mexican couple who hold barbeques in their back yard every Friday afternoon in the summer. The Mexican family typically plays ranchero ballads, which come soaring over the fences while the men, in enormous cowboy hats and neckerchiefs, sway.

The French family have a spreading fig tree, under which their daughter plays.   The Mexicans have a large dirt back yard, edged with neat rows of vegetables: cabbages, epazote, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers. Their sons are over practicing throwing the lasso. 

I was yelling over the fence at the French family, attempting to egg them on behalf of Switzerland (alle la Suisse!!). I made no impression whatsoever over the loud cheering and focussed consumption of Stella Artoises.  But it has definitely attracted the attention of the lassoers, who keep winking at me as I sit typing in the sun.

Happy Sunday!

Technorati Tags: cities, international, worldcup, backyards, space, neighbors, neighborhoods, san francisco, interactions, strangers, gardens

A year ago, I suffered one of the most formative religious experiences of my life.  Swimming along the coast of an isolated beach in Thailand, I was attacked by a mammoth jellyfish.  As my eyes swelled shut and my body began convulsing with poison, I was hauled by boat from beach to beach and island to island.  Safe at the hospital, I was pumped full of morphine, where I stayed, for three days, not sure I’d ever regain the sight of both eyes. 

Floating outside of my body, watching my corpse slung in a wheelchair, I had something of a revelation.  I’d never done drugs of any form, and the morphine startled me by making visible and palpable experiences of out-of-body travel I had dismissed as so much new-age junk. The journey to Thailand had been spiritual in nature, and I spent most of the three days contemplating a life of disability, contemplating what my eternal soul would do if this body ended up without much to show for itself; asking answers from God, and strangely feeling like all those answers were answered in a form of prayer more like open dialogue. 

For the last month I’ve been traveling on another sort of spirit quest, off in search of  my own identity.  In bed, reading by lamplight, I put down the tome of Jung I’d been using as some sort of palliative. I had lapsed into a funk that could only be solved by prayer.  I went into a deep meditation and out again, asked for a solution to anxiety, forming slowly very slight directions: leadership.  Social change.  True identity.  Externalization of the internal and sacred.  So I put in one of those “hey also you know how I’m superstitious and this is all irrational in the first place if you wouldn’t mind could you give me a sign?” requests, and dropped it.  Sleepily reopened Jung.  Reading about fishes.  Fishes among the Cathars.  The Leviathan.  The Satanic fish and the fish of Christ.  Yeah ok whatever I get it, I said to myself, paraphrasing my favorite moment in David O. Russell’s masterwork of postmodernism defined, I Heart Huckabees: Everything is like everything else and then it’s also its own opposite.  I rolled my eyes at my beloved Jung.  Bored, flipping through the Armenians and Greeks on carbuncles, I flip through the pages until my thumb rests on the page where it feels like it’s been creased.  I must have left it lying open face down at a random page.  I turn to it, and the skin on my neck turns a degree colder. 

A certain twenty-year-old patient of Carl Jung had experienced great anxiety about his graduate student career.  He did not know what to do with himself.  One night he had a vivid dream, one of those “big dreams,” in which he was lost in a forest, and came to a pond.  In the middle of the pond was a floating, enormous puddle of light: an enormous red jellyfish.  He awoke and immediately understood that he would become a scientist. 

Jung’s gloss: the jellyfish represents the concentrated, individual expression of the great ocean of the collective unconscious, rising up into history to challenge the conscious ego.  It represents, simply, the soul.

Technorati Tags: jellyfish, jung, the self, identity, religion, experience, thailand, island, beach, morphine, obe, spiritual, travel, awakening, depression, prayer, social change, leadership, anxiety, film, the soul

A year ago, I suffered one of the most formative religious experiences of my life.  Swimming along the coast of an isolated beach in Thailand, I was attacked by a mammoth jellyfish.  As my eyes swelled shut and my body began convulsing with poison, I was hauled by boat from beach to beach and island to island.  Safe at the hospital, I was pumped full of morphine, where I stayed, for three days, not sure I’d ever regain the sight of both eyes. 

Floating outside of my body, watching my corpse slung in a wheelchair, I had something of a revelation.  I’d never done drugs of any form, and the morphine startled me by making visible and palpable experiences of out-of-body travel I had dismissed as so much new-age junk. The journey to Thailand had been spiritual in nature, and I spent most of the three days contemplating a life of disability, contemplating what my eternal soul would do if this body ended up without much to show for itself; asking answers from God, and strangely feeling like all those answers were answered in a form of prayer more like open dialogue. 

For the last month I’ve been traveling on another sort of spirit quest, off in search of  my own identity.  In bed, reading by lamplight, I put down the tome of Jung I’d been using as some sort of palliative. I had lapsed into a funk that could only be solved by prayer.  I went into a deep meditation and out again, asked for a solution to anxiety, forming slowly very slight directions: leadership.  Social change.  True identity.  Externalization of the internal and sacred.  So I put in one of those “hey also you know how I’m superstitious and this is all irrational in the first place if you wouldn’t mind could you give me a sign?” requests, and dropped it.  Sleepily reopened Jung.  Reading about fishes.  Fishes among the Cathars.  The Leviathan.  The Satanic fish and the fish of Christ.  Yeah ok whatever I get it, I said to myself, paraphrasing my favorite moment in David O. Russell’s masterwork of postmodernism defined, I Heart Huckabees: Everything is like everything else and then it’s also its own opposite.  I rolled my eyes at my beloved Jung.  Bored, flipping through the Armenians and Greeks on carbuncles, I flip through the pages until my thumb rests on the page where it feels like it’s been creased.  I must have left it lying open face down at a random page.  I turn to it, and the skin on my neck turns a degree colder. 

A certain twenty-year-old patient of Carl Jung had experienced great anxiety about his graduate student career.  He did not know what to do with himself.  One night he had a vivid dream, one of those “big dreams,” in which he was lost in a forest, and came to a pond.  In the middle of the pond was a floating, enormous puddle of light: an enormous red jellyfish.  He awoke and immediately understood that he would become a scientist. 

Jung’s gloss: the jellyfish represents the concentrated, individual expression of the great ocean of the collective unconscious, rising up into history to challenge the conscious ego.  It represents, simply, the soul.

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I just got an email from Jeff Wells.  I’m reporting here in case any of you have come to me looking for him.

Blogger, for some reason, has eaten Jeff’s megapopular and extremely well-written blog.  He can no longer post new content.  Blogger support offers no response.

As a last resort, Jeff is blogging away on RigorousIntuition 2.0.
http://rigint.blogspot.com/

Missing June posts are here:
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2006_06_01_rigorousintuition_archive.html

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