"It is thus no coincidence that, in our society, it is the luminaries (the artists, the entrepreneurs, the politicians, the shadowy financiers) who, for both good and ill, still know how to dream and are all familiar with the ancient symbols and thought-forms (i.e. the occult)"
I am reminded of the priest character in the Illuminatus trilogy who remarked all religions have their mystics, even the Catholics who keep theirs locked up in insane asylums euphemistically called monasteries.
"No book about Jesus is going to make your child a Christian."
I need to think on this one. While a book alone won't work (as you point out in your footnote) it is stories that engender faith. As a non-apostate GenXer I look back and realize the core of my faith was built not so much on church or doctrine (although questions on the latter led to a trip from very conservative Baptist/Presbyterian mix through Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy) but on a series of Bible story records my grandmother bought one a week at the grocery store. They were less an occasional read and more a constant backdrop (along with similar Star Trek, Space:1999, HG Wells, and Jules Verne records) to my life as they were used to help focus.
What is interesting is they probably let the stories soak in so they are part of my dream states in a way books do not.
Robert Anton Wilson was a very perceptive dude. Also very weird. The two often go together.
Christianity is an odd duck where dreaming is concerned. It has very little mythology of its own--the entire New Testament is either midrash/mimesis (The Gospels) or theology/church discipline. The exceptions are Acts, the actual Passion narratives (which tell full stories, even though they are using the midrashing/mimetic form), and Revelation. With the exception of the Passion, and the Apocalypse, the great "Christian" myths all come from the Hebrew tradition, This lack-of-mythos is one of Christianity's great strengths, ironically, as it allows it to sit easily impose itself atop other mythic traditions as a theological/interpretive layer. Missionaries use this feature of Christianity regularly, as it allows them to easily re-write (perhaps "edit" is a better word) a culture's existing mythos to emphasize the importance of stories of divine sacrifice and mercy, showing these stories to be pointers towards the universal gospel.
As for what make people Christian, there are two things, I think.
The first is that, coming from a Christian culture, they find the values in the Passion narrative and the epistles to be sensible and worthwhile. C.S. Lewis was this type.
The other is that the social connections and conduits through which the theology and the stories beneath it arrive are meaningful, and give it meaning. Tolkien was this type, becoming a devout catholic as the result of his relationship with his mentor, a priest, who took care of him after he was orphaned. I was this sort, and it sounds like your positive experiences with faith came through the conduit of your connection with your grandmother.
In my case I wound up getting too interested in theology and mythology--ironically in pursuit of a closer relationship with God--and learned things you can't un-learn, and I simply lost the ability to believe, regardless of how much I wanted to. This, in turn, is partly because the context in which I acquired my faith, and the relationships through which it was mediated, valued veridical truth and epistemic integrity above all else, and these were values I latched on to with a vengeance.
I hear you on the audiobooks and radio dramas. I'm seriously dyslexic, so when I've got a book in audio I will often listen hundreds of times, and it really soaks in. Books I only read also soak in, but they have to be REALLY good to stick.
"Dreamscape" puts me very much in mind of the novels of Tolkien's fellow Inkling, Charles Williams. They all revolve around either the eternal forms intruding into our corporeal world, or we straying across the boundary into theirs. Are you familiar with them, at all?
With the Inklings? Yeah. Never could get into Williams's work. My studies in mythopoetics and shamanism, as well as history and politics, have convinced me that platonism is a cancer that poisons what it touches through over-rationalizing mysticism.
I think the Dreamscape is much less an eternal world of Forms, or a separate dimension containing other beings that we can touch, than it is the most primitive and basic sensemaking layer of our consciousness, which we have access to through dreams themselves, through psychedelics, through music, through hypnosis (prayer, symbolic visual arts, dance, etc.), and through narrative--and I am very much of the view that all three of these latter are doing basically the same thing to us neurologically as one another.
A lot of these things are *really* uncomfortable for me to talk about, as I am, by nature, a rationalist/empiricist with a *very* rigid view of epistemic ethics, but as I've studied these things I've come around to the notion that Spock in Star Trek VI was almost exactly backwards when he said "Logic is the beginning of wisdom."
Rather, I think that logic and rationality are the final layer on the reasoning layer-cake, and they're built atop a series of other reasoning modalities, all arising ultimately from our basic nature of self-reflective and relational biological beings (and as socially-dependent predators). The beginning of wisdom is thus the recognition of the contingent nature of one's own understanding, and the path of wisdom involves seeking for harmony of reasoning at all the different layers of that stack (instead of suppressing, choking off, demonizing, etc. those parts we are uncertain of). The truth may not always set us free (whether the truth of what goes on in ourselves, or the truth of the wider world), but the inability to grapple with that truth makes us very imprisonable indeed. The value of the dreaming, whether undertaken by the shamen (the artists and poets and visionaries) or participated in by the masses (who gather together to experience the visions, the stories, and the struggles won from the dreamscape) is that these symbolic journeys give us the vocabulary to understand the very confusing, high-conflict world that rages within each of us, and between all of us. In the struggle for that understanding, we find meaning, and a person who has meaning that they are sure of is *remarkably* difficult to re-program and push around. This is why all cult indoctrination begins with weaponized deconstruction--if you force a person to distrust their own capabilities or sense of self (a vital first step on any growth journey) and then cut off the experience before they can take the journey to build/rebuild their confidence, they will grab for *any* safe harbor they can, and they will sell their souls in order not to feel lost.
Sorry for prattling on so long. It's a rich topic area.
If you haven't read Humphrey Carpenter's "The Inklings" (which has transcribed minutes from the meetings, and is fascinating), I highly recommend it.
Thank you for the recommendation. I have not read that one, although I did read his book about Evelyn Waugh and his crowd many years ago during an infatuation with their literary output. (I was unreasonably proud of myself for having made it through all the volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time.)
"It is thus no coincidence that, in our society, it is the luminaries (the artists, the entrepreneurs, the politicians, the shadowy financiers) who, for both good and ill, still know how to dream and are all familiar with the ancient symbols and thought-forms (i.e. the occult)"
I am reminded of the priest character in the Illuminatus trilogy who remarked all religions have their mystics, even the Catholics who keep theirs locked up in insane asylums euphemistically called monasteries.
"No book about Jesus is going to make your child a Christian."
I need to think on this one. While a book alone won't work (as you point out in your footnote) it is stories that engender faith. As a non-apostate GenXer I look back and realize the core of my faith was built not so much on church or doctrine (although questions on the latter led to a trip from very conservative Baptist/Presbyterian mix through Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy) but on a series of Bible story records my grandmother bought one a week at the grocery store. They were less an occasional read and more a constant backdrop (along with similar Star Trek, Space:1999, HG Wells, and Jules Verne records) to my life as they were used to help focus.
What is interesting is they probably let the stories soak in so they are part of my dream states in a way books do not.
Robert Anton Wilson was a very perceptive dude. Also very weird. The two often go together.
Christianity is an odd duck where dreaming is concerned. It has very little mythology of its own--the entire New Testament is either midrash/mimesis (The Gospels) or theology/church discipline. The exceptions are Acts, the actual Passion narratives (which tell full stories, even though they are using the midrashing/mimetic form), and Revelation. With the exception of the Passion, and the Apocalypse, the great "Christian" myths all come from the Hebrew tradition, This lack-of-mythos is one of Christianity's great strengths, ironically, as it allows it to sit easily impose itself atop other mythic traditions as a theological/interpretive layer. Missionaries use this feature of Christianity regularly, as it allows them to easily re-write (perhaps "edit" is a better word) a culture's existing mythos to emphasize the importance of stories of divine sacrifice and mercy, showing these stories to be pointers towards the universal gospel.
As for what make people Christian, there are two things, I think.
The first is that, coming from a Christian culture, they find the values in the Passion narrative and the epistles to be sensible and worthwhile. C.S. Lewis was this type.
The other is that the social connections and conduits through which the theology and the stories beneath it arrive are meaningful, and give it meaning. Tolkien was this type, becoming a devout catholic as the result of his relationship with his mentor, a priest, who took care of him after he was orphaned. I was this sort, and it sounds like your positive experiences with faith came through the conduit of your connection with your grandmother.
In my case I wound up getting too interested in theology and mythology--ironically in pursuit of a closer relationship with God--and learned things you can't un-learn, and I simply lost the ability to believe, regardless of how much I wanted to. This, in turn, is partly because the context in which I acquired my faith, and the relationships through which it was mediated, valued veridical truth and epistemic integrity above all else, and these were values I latched on to with a vengeance.
I hear you on the audiobooks and radio dramas. I'm seriously dyslexic, so when I've got a book in audio I will often listen hundreds of times, and it really soaks in. Books I only read also soak in, but they have to be REALLY good to stick.
I find myself saving another one of your excellent essays. You’re right, we do need to dream again!
"Dreamscape" puts me very much in mind of the novels of Tolkien's fellow Inkling, Charles Williams. They all revolve around either the eternal forms intruding into our corporeal world, or we straying across the boundary into theirs. Are you familiar with them, at all?
With the Inklings? Yeah. Never could get into Williams's work. My studies in mythopoetics and shamanism, as well as history and politics, have convinced me that platonism is a cancer that poisons what it touches through over-rationalizing mysticism.
I think the Dreamscape is much less an eternal world of Forms, or a separate dimension containing other beings that we can touch, than it is the most primitive and basic sensemaking layer of our consciousness, which we have access to through dreams themselves, through psychedelics, through music, through hypnosis (prayer, symbolic visual arts, dance, etc.), and through narrative--and I am very much of the view that all three of these latter are doing basically the same thing to us neurologically as one another.
A lot of these things are *really* uncomfortable for me to talk about, as I am, by nature, a rationalist/empiricist with a *very* rigid view of epistemic ethics, but as I've studied these things I've come around to the notion that Spock in Star Trek VI was almost exactly backwards when he said "Logic is the beginning of wisdom."
Rather, I think that logic and rationality are the final layer on the reasoning layer-cake, and they're built atop a series of other reasoning modalities, all arising ultimately from our basic nature of self-reflective and relational biological beings (and as socially-dependent predators). The beginning of wisdom is thus the recognition of the contingent nature of one's own understanding, and the path of wisdom involves seeking for harmony of reasoning at all the different layers of that stack (instead of suppressing, choking off, demonizing, etc. those parts we are uncertain of). The truth may not always set us free (whether the truth of what goes on in ourselves, or the truth of the wider world), but the inability to grapple with that truth makes us very imprisonable indeed. The value of the dreaming, whether undertaken by the shamen (the artists and poets and visionaries) or participated in by the masses (who gather together to experience the visions, the stories, and the struggles won from the dreamscape) is that these symbolic journeys give us the vocabulary to understand the very confusing, high-conflict world that rages within each of us, and between all of us. In the struggle for that understanding, we find meaning, and a person who has meaning that they are sure of is *remarkably* difficult to re-program and push around. This is why all cult indoctrination begins with weaponized deconstruction--if you force a person to distrust their own capabilities or sense of self (a vital first step on any growth journey) and then cut off the experience before they can take the journey to build/rebuild their confidence, they will grab for *any* safe harbor they can, and they will sell their souls in order not to feel lost.
Sorry for prattling on so long. It's a rich topic area.
If you haven't read Humphrey Carpenter's "The Inklings" (which has transcribed minutes from the meetings, and is fascinating), I highly recommend it.
Thank you for the recommendation. I have not read that one, although I did read his book about Evelyn Waugh and his crowd many years ago during an infatuation with their literary output. (I was unreasonably proud of myself for having made it through all the volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time.)