Spendy liveblogs "Jim Morrison: Secret Teacher of the Occult"

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OK picking up where I left off:

Wyld sees Chief Tecumseh of the Shawnee as a kind of revolutionary poet, a prophet, a Muhammed: unifying a people with his divine vision of alterity—winning them over to his imaginal. Founding a new family.

He cites a memo from William Henry Harrison, when he was governor of Indian Territory:

bespeaks him one of those uncommon geniuses which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things

This is a pretty hagiographic account of Morrison, as revolutionary prophet, but if you buy it, then the Establishment is perfectly right to lock him up, the FBI is perfectly right to have a file.

 

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And he talks about how Tecumseh, before he died, spoke of how his struggle and his words would perpetuate the Great Spirit (or "Great Mystery"), so that it could infect others. And it's really discussed in terms of a religion conversion, or like flipping a spy into a double agent:

Jim [Morrison] was the gifted eldest son of one of America's youngest and most brilliant, high-ranking military officers, quite a recruitment for the Great Mystery.

Inspiration transferred in song, in spirit, in breath—animating force—host to host. This thread is such a host, a transmission vector.

 

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I remember that in like 2016 a bunch of LessWrong rationalists started reading Seeing Like A State, by James C Scott

And to some it was really a revelation, this notion that there was something High Modernist about their project, which was trying to reform and rationalize human language and discourse according to an almost classical or Apollonian ideal

But that this top-down imposition of a conceptual grid, of a 'meter' so to speak, on various cultures might rob them of their ability to communicate about valuable things

 

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And some of them became 'post-rationalists' or 'meta-rationalists' or just irrational, because once you start saying, "OK, there are forms of local order that are illegible and incomprehensible to outsiders, and even though they look illogical to outsiders, they're accomplishing pragmatic functions in the world, they're efficacious, you don't want to deprive people of them, there's a rationale all their own"—well once you start saying this about city planning, or built environment/urban design—and then once you start applying it to computer programming, as Bay Area types did—well it's not very far now to applying it to your language, to your epistemology. To start looking at energy healing and manifestation and all these 'woo' ideas that your rationalist/high modernist framework elides, and saying, Maybe there's something here I'm not seeing

Anyways I give you this little history of the blogosphere because I think this is a cycle that's constantly repeating itself. A culture tries to apply some goddam hygiene to its epistemology, to its language, but there are losses along the way and then you start noticing them, the social body starts getting sore, and you say, OK "There are more things in heaven and earth [High Modernism] / than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

And if you're hip to work at the Santa Fe Institute on complex adaptive systems maybe you start thinking, OK, "Primitive man believed the world was full of unseen forces," might these deities and forces be anthropomorphized theories of the natural world? Of ecological and social dynamics? Might the idea of "sin" be an anthropomorphized (the "Father" punishes his "children") theory of short-term and ultimately self-defeating tactics, e.g. blood feuds, envy, adultery. We can talk about these things in rationalistic, game-theoretic language—defecting and tit-for-tat—but maybe we don't need to.

 

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I don't know quite what to make of the sun/moon symbolisms

On the one hand the occult is aligned with lunar stuff—Dionysian night vs Apollonian day. Ginsberg: "Follow your inner moonlight / Don't hide the madness."

But so much of the hermetic language is about golden dawns and revelations dawning in the East.

"But, soft! me thinks I scent the morning air"

 

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Or uh



Sun rays crossing from the 5th dimension (the invisible realm) to ours

 

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Message in a beam of light. The Annunciation.

 

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But Nature clearly plays a huge part, I talked upthread about blades of grass, poet on the lawn in the sunshine wriggling revelatorily, opening himself up to the infinite

"So we can be like Christ who asked us to consider the lilies in the field, as did British Romantic poet William Blake in his 1863 poem "Auguries of Innocence," perhaps Western literature's greatest expression of cosmic consciousness:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a wildflower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

 

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This is where it starts connecting back to the Romantic Sublime for me. The hero goes out leaves the garden strays into wilderness and has an encounter with Nature, unmediated, that changes him forever. Infects him or haunts him or blesses him and he brings back the curse or the boon to his village.

So the Shaman/Oracle/Lake District Poet-Stutterer has an encounter with his own inner nature, with the unconscious, with the help of fasting or psychoactive chemicals, and brings it back in the form of a book or prophecy. Joyce had scopolamine, apparently.

 

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Because of course, he's giving her a light. As Dylan gives Suze a light. He goes to visit Guthrie "to catch a spark." And everyone's going to him like some Prometheus who'll set their kindling ablaze.

On The Road is such a touchstone for this stuff it's kinda ridiculous. A journey that inspired journeys (of space, of spirit). A spark that lit so many fires, a chain of beacons. "Rolling thunder." Neal Cassady a stance, a style, that produced imitations, that was stored in the battery cells of books (Kerouac's Cody, Dean; Ginsberg's Howl). (But to a Christian scientist: a demon, a parasite.)

Morrison hung out at City Lights. Morrison apparently owned 1000 books by age 18, and challenged friends to pull any of them off the shelf, which he was turned away, and read a random page—he'd tell you which book it was. Wyld thinks that this is probably a true story and a fair indicator that Morrison had read or become familiar with his whole library. I'm more skeptical but even if you add a decimal place, say maybe he read 100 of them, that's an exceptionally well-read 18 year old. There were books on the occult, yes, but also Moby Dick and Nietzsche and McLuhan and Blake and Kenneth Rexroth.

 

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I forget who told me this maybe it was Clinton Ignatov but I guess some of the Rockefeller/UN/Catholic world-government types starting in the midcentury talked about a shift in control systems

Before it was about top-down, vertical information and modeling (mimetic transfer). but the new model was horizontal transfer, with new information technology. And the weakening of top-down control, and the use of marijuana, and the cult of "cool" all made people more susceptible to these horizontal transmissions, infectious person-to-person post-beatnik social norms. The age of meme war had begun.

@vershy versh:

Horizontal poets and philosophers like Bergson and Rimbaud advocated for a permeable and "cool" (McLuhan) enmeshment, an opening of the self up to the fluxes and flows of the world, a losing of the self in involvement—an easy way, he would note, to find yourself possessed by the devil.

 

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OK next chapter is about "Faculty X"

Really really stupid name. I guess it comes from Colin Wilson. It's a dumb scifi name for something really simple which is basically world-sensitivity:

"While most of us are ruthlessly cutting out whole areas of perception, thus impoverishing our mental lives, the poet retains the faculty to be suddenly delighted by the sheer reality of the world 'out there'." In all its buzzing blooming confusion."

Except it's slightly more than that, it's also the ability to zoom out in time and space and situate yourself in a larger narrative?

"A latent power that human beings possess to reach beyond the present... a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times"

Wyld talks about how Morrison for instance always saw himself as part of this great cresting wave of rock'n'roll, he felt the cultural momentum and was of the cultural momentum, he was attuned with these larger forces and flows that stretch beyond his everyday life

 

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And when you feel those larger flows—when you're pulled out of the sense of your own mediocrity, the accidental nature of your existence, the depressing contingency—when you feel your life to be fated—it gives you a flash of godlike powers, it emboldens you, energizes you. "Our powers are far greater than we realize." Some "dormant power wakened up."

 

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The idea of sleepwalking, of the "dormant" everyday self goes well with the "occult wisdom = sunlight/dawning rays" metaphor.

I started thinking a lot about the Hymn of the Pearl when I was reading this chapter. "The chief enemy of life is not death, but forgetfulness, stupidity. We lose direction too easily. This is the great penalty that life paid for descending into matter: a kind of partial amnesia."

Focus, concentration, envisioning of the ideal: these are the key things.

 

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Faculty X seems cloely linked to Jung's idea of the numinous—an experience that feels sacred or holy somehow, in large part because it's transpersonal—somehow transcends the ego, or the boundaries of the individual; he seems himself in a larger system, the ecology of a family, complex cyclical dynamics through time.

 

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This is where it starts connecting back to the Romantic Sublime for me. The hero goes out leaves the garden strays into wilderness and has an encounter with Nature, unmediated, that changes him forever. Infects him or haunts him or blesses him and he brings back the curse or the boon to his village.

The walled garden is renewed by the stream. Imports, imports, imports. The alterity of the trader, the adventurer, the poet-stutterer replenish a stagnant culture.

 

[catalog]

This is where it starts connecting back to the Romantic Sublime for me. The hero goes out leaves the garden strays into wilderness and has an encounter with Nature, unmediated, that changes him forever. Infects him or haunts him or blesses him and he brings back the curse or the boon to his village.

So the Shaman/Oracle/Lake District Poet-Stutterer has an encounter with his own inner nature, with the unconscious, with the help of fasting or psychoactive chemicals, and brings it back in the form of a book or prophecy. Joyce had scopolamine, apparently.

This feels like a good description/distillation of the process I have defined while stoned, outsideing.

I let the outside in by exploring my senses while in the woods. (G = Earth / Grounding)

I then sit a while with those thoughts, let them flow around inside me (IN = Water)

Something new is made and I "fix" it, in my case by drawing or writing. I think of it as "firing" in the sense of making a clay pot and putting it in the kiln. (SIDE = Fire).

Finally, I let out this new, fired thing. As air. OUT = Air.

G-IN-SIDE-OUT.

important that the model is circular, can go both ways. I'm an air person I think. I get an idea, want to shout it from the rooftops. Walking barefoot in the forest, I under stand the importance of grounding.

 

[sus]

A culture tries to apply some goddam hygiene to its epistemology, to its language, but there are losses along the way and then you start noticing them, the social body starts getting sore, and you say, OK "There are more things in heaven and earth [High Modernism] / than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Lachman, Secret Teachers of the Western World:

The rejected knowledge posits there is another kind of knowledge that lies beyond what is quantifiable... it is not one of physical facts, nor can it be quantified and measured. It is a knowledge of our inner world, not the outer one, a knowledge of what we used to call the spirit or the soul, that invisible, intangible something that animates us and leads us to ask questions about who we are and what our place in this mysterious world can be.

And Stanislav Grof, The Stormy Search for the Self:

The notion of acceptable reality was narrowed to include only those aspects of existence that are material, tangible, and measurable. Western cultures adopted a restricted and rigid interpretation of what is "normal" in human experience and behavior and rarely accepted those who sought to go beyond those limits."

Parallels here with the hygiene hypothesis of allergies/autoimmune disorders. Except for like, epistemology?

I'm also reminded of

A selective sweep occurs when a new, beneficial gene mutation appears and quickly sweeps across a population, erasing the genetic diversity that existed prior to the sweep. Similarly, languages have “swept” across continents as the cultures they belonged to gained unbeatable advantages (often agricultural or military), resulting in losses of language diversity from earliest human history to the present day. Today, half the population of the world speaks one of only thirteen languages.

These are not controversial claims. More controversial is the idea that human prehistory (and even history) hosted a wide variety of human consciousness, not just language, and that these disparate kinds of subjective consciousness were destroyed upon contact with new forms of consciousness. Most dramatically, Julian Jaynes famously argued (in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) that human consciousness changed drastically in the past few thousand years, from an archaic bicameral form in which one side of the brain shouted orders and the other obeyed, to a modern, introspective form. My claim is not so extreme: I simply argue that there are and have been many forms of human consciousness, varying in particular ways, that we retain the “hardware” capability for many forms of consciousness, and that humans are constrained into particular mental states by their cultures, especially through group ritual (or lack thereof). In order to explore this claim, it is helpful to think about our own form of consciousness in detail – a form of consciousness that is novel, contagious, and perhaps detrimental to human flourishing compared with more evolutionarily tested forms of consciousness running on the same hardware.

 

[sus]

good contribution catalog

 

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This is where it starts connecting back to the Romantic Sublime for me. The hero goes out leaves the garden strays into wilderness and has an encounter with Nature, unmediated, that changes him forever. Infects him or haunts him or blesses him and he brings back the curse or the boon to his village.

So the Shaman/Oracle/Lake District Poet-Stutterer has an encounter with his own inner nature, with the unconscious, with the help of fasting or psychoactive chemicals, and brings it back in the form of a book or prophecy. Joyce had scopolamine, apparently.

And then with a film like The Master it's about the return, the voyage back. Can you return yourself to normalcy after your encounter with some paradigm-shattering experience. Can Humpty Dumpty be put back together again. The Shaman and the War Veteran become friends, recognize each other as brothers.