Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

"The Red Book's compensatory message, however, is that while the pursuit of rational, scientific psychology is important and justified, it risks leaving out other of psyche's voices that must be heard. This point, made discursively in Psychological Types, is made narratively, artistically, and experientially in The Red Book. Jung's idea is that our quest to attain a full perspective on the psyche or soul must be initiated from positions that are not only rational and scientific, but also experiential, intuitive, and imaginative, and, in short, inclusive of the whole man. A psychologist, one might be inclined to say, must not only pursue psychological knowledge, but must also be open to the lived experience, imaginative possibilities, and artistic and spiritual pursuits that complement and give live to that knowledge. This not only means that psychology should reopen its boundaries to other disciplines, including those that are artistic and literary, but that it should also consider the possibility that things of great significance can be better or only expressed in modalities such as music, art, and literature that are neither scientific nor rational in the narrow sense of the term. Jung's use of mandalas and other paintings as a vehicle for achieving and expressing "wholeness" is a case in point."

Sanford L Drob

 

 

Edited June 8, 2014 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

"I have heard what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies? Yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart; Which think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams which they tell every man to his neighbour, as their fathers have forgotten my name for Baal. The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the Lord."

Jeremiah 23: 25—28

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"The door of the Mysterium has closed behind me. I feel that my will is paralyzed and that the spirit of the depths possesses me. I know nothing about a way. I can therefore neither want this nor that, since nothing indicates to me whether I want this or that. I wait, without knowing what I'm waiting for. But already in the following night I felt that I had reached a solid point.

 

"I find that I am standing on the highest tower of a castle. The air tells me so: I am far back in time. My gaze wanders widely over solitary countryside, a combination of fields and forests. I am wearing a green garment. A horn hangs from my shoulder. I am the tower guard. I look out into the distance. I see a red point out there. It comes nearer on a winding road, disappearing for a while in forests and reappearing again: it is a horseman in a red coat, the red horseman. He is coming to my castle: he is already riding through the gate. I hear steps on the stairway, the steps creak, he knocks: a strange fear comes over me: there stands the red one, his long shape wholly shrouded in red, even his hair is red. I think: in the end he will turn out to be the devil."

The Red Book

 

 

Edited June 8, 2014 by Flex Mentallo

[Flex Mentallo]

The Red One: "I greet you, man on the high tower. I saw you from afar, looking and waiting. Your waiting has called me."

T. R.: "Don't you recognize me, brother, I am joy!"

 

I: "Could you be joy? I see you as through a cloud. Your image fades. Let me take your hand, beloved, who are you, who are you?"

 

Joy? Was he joy?

 

 

[Pat Calhoun]

Fascinating as always, Michael. Of course got me thinking about SF alien encounters. You used the word “compensatory”, and it reminded me of Simak and how in Way Station he elevates compensation to a cosmic principle. The Pangborn’s an old fave about Martians who are a lot like us- maybe a bit better. And (your) Lem is a masterpiece of confronting the unknown.

 

 

[eman13]

Every time I read this thread I always think of this quote:

 

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

 

[MrBedrock]

There are so many themes presented by Michael, but one seems to reoccur...that of one person's, or many persons', obsession influencing another who goes on to another obsession, and so on and so on, creating art or science or spectacle. Jung influenced so many, as he was influenced by Haeckel. A tale of UFO abduction becomes hundreds, thus influencing a generation to hysteria and entertainment. Jeffrey Kripal, a Rice University professor of religious studies (and a noted customer of Bedrock City ), wrote a wonderful book called Mutants and Mystics which postulates that paranormal activity has had a profound influence on many of those who have gone on to create important pop culture entertainment, essentially showing how the "unexplained" is an explainable part of the comic books, movies, and books that we discuss on these boards every day. So while Michael's thread may seem to be discussing things foreign to Golden Age comics, what he is really discussing is the vital DNA of the creation of those same comics.

[Flex Mentallo]

Why is the world we created not the one we dreamed of? Why does it feel as if we live in an alternate world?

 

 

 

If we lived in a golden age, we would not need to ask.

 

 

 

Next: Lost Horizon

 

 

 

[Cat-Man_America]

Why is the world we created not the one we dreamed of? Why does it feel as if we live in an alternate world?

 

 

 

If we lived in a golden age, we would not need to ask.

 

 

 

Next: Lost Horizon

 

 

 

Because the reality of the world we live in isn't the world we dream about and even the history we think we know is only a snapshot of a dream.

[Flex Mentallo]

There are so many themes presented by Michael, but one seems to reoccur...that of one person's, or many persons', obsession influencing another who goes on to another obsession, and so on and so on, creating art or science or spectacle. Jung influenced so many, as he was influenced by Haeckel. A tale of UFO abduction becomes hundreds, thus influencing a generation to hysteria and entertainment. Jeffrey Kripal, a Rice University professor of religious studies (and a noted customer of Bedrock City ), wrote a wonderful book called Mutants and Mystics which postulates that paranormal activity has had a profound influence on many of those who have gone on to create important pop culture entertainment, essentially showing how the "unexplained" is an explainable part of the comic books, movies, and books that we discuss on these boards every day. So while Michael's thread may seem to be discussing things foreign to Golden Age comics, what he is really discussing is the vital DNA of the creation of those same comics.

 

Thanks for putting me on to this Richard! To extend your description, Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University. He is the author of six books, including Esalen: America and The Religion of No Religion and Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred.

 

After a little digging I found the following excerpt from Mutants and Mystics Chapter 2 - "Alienation: Superman is a Crashed Alien". On this occasion I make no apology for the wall of text!

 

[font:Book Antiqua]"It was also Superman who gave the superhero comic its archetypal form, that is, a costumed man or woman with a secret identity and superpowers.

 

"The occult and sci-fi backgrounds of the Man of Tomorrow are well worth teasing out. Before Siegel and Schuster created Superman, for example, the same two young men created "Dr. Mystic: The Occult Detective." As we have it in this single two-page strip, Mystic, as he was called for short, joins his ally Zator, and together they flash along through the spirit world "at a speed greater than that of light itself" toward India and "the Seven." Dr. Mystic's face and build look more or less exactly like the later Superman. These same two pages also contain what Greg Sadowski has described as "comic books' first flying caped figure," that is, Zator.[ii] These, then, are some of the roots of the superhero genre: a mystic flying to India in the astral plane to do occult work.

 

"This earlier explicit occultism was gently suppressed by Siegel and Schuster until it could only be gleaned from coded details like the notion that Superman was eventually said be an exile from another planet called Krypton (first introduced on January 16, 1939), which translates, if it were Greek (which it is), as the Hidden or the Occult. Put simply, Superman is a crashed Alien from the Occult. The accent, though, had clearly shifted from the Occult to the Alien, that is, from the mysticism to the science fiction, which is all to say from the mytheme of Orientation to that of Alienation.

 

"Superman has attracted a great deal of criticism, some of it quite thoughtful, some of it grossly exaggerated. It is often claimed, for example, that the trope of the Superman was originally Nietzschean. It is then pointed out, correctly, that the Nazis loved Nietzsche's dream of the Übermensch—the Overman, Superman or, perhaps most literally, the Superhuman. This assumed conflation of the Superman and Nazism is then extended to the entire genre of superheroes, as if being a superhero is the same thing as being a fascist. The psychoanalyst Frederic Wertham, for example, consistently conflated Superman and fascism in his famous 1950s rant against comics, The Seduction of the Innocent. Numerous writers—from Frank Miller's The Dark Night Returns to Alan Moore's Watchmen—have since exposed the genre to similar withering critiques from within.

 

"But equating the Superman, much less the superhero, in toto with fascism or any other political ideology is, at best, a half truth and, at worst, a gross misrepresentation. To begin with, Nietzsche was not a Nazi, and he despised the anti-Semitism, racism, and nationalism that he saw around him: he would have hated Hitler. It was his sister who later misrepresented him to the Führer and the Nazis. His concept of the Superman, moreover, is complex, undeveloped, and by no means clear. What is clear is that the men who created Superman were Jews, as were most of the movers and shakers in the early comic-book industry. And key superheroes, like Captain America, were explicitly and consciously created to fight Hitler, not sing his praises. Finally, the roaring success of the earliest American superhero comics is intimately connected to the GI's who fought the Nazis on the European front and took their comics, Superman and all, with them, too often to their own gruesome deaths. When the moral courage of World War II was no longer needed on the European front, the superheroes simply went away. To equate Superman and the superheroes with fascism, then, is a precise reversal of the truth.

 

"There is also the deeper historical fact that the idea of a superhuman is finally an ancient religious trope, not a political, American, or even especially Western one. Indeed, we could easily trace the notion back to what many believe to be the "first" and most primordial figure of the history of religions: the shaman. The shaman's mystical calling through an initiatory crisis, often around puberty (mental illness, anomalous sexuality, near-death experience via visionary dismemberment or descent into the underworld, lightning strike), and subsequent magical powers (clairvoyance, soul flight, luminous energies, the acquisition of animal languages, magical battle with demons and black magicians) look a lot like our modern superhero myths. Numerous other examples, moreover, could easily be found in the history of Western mystical literature, where notions of the Divine Man abound, from Christianity's famous man-god and the Divine Intellect (nous) of the philosopher-mystic Plotinus through Goethe's figure of Faust to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Oversoul and hymn to humanity as "a god in ruins."

 

"Similar notions of humanity's secret identity can easily be found in Asia as well. In ancient and medieval India, for example, we encounter the lore around the Siddhas or "perfected ones" of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions and the literally towering figures of Jainism (portrayed still today in immense multistory-tall standing stone figures), whose supercosmic conception of the human form and its siddhis or "perfected powers" make almost anything in the superhero comics look downright banal. Indeed, one such founding Jain teacher is known as Mahavira, literally, the "Great Hero," or, with just a little spinning, the "Superhero."

 

"Closer to the present, an Indian freedom fighter turned spiritual teacher by the name of Aurobindo Ghose taught an "integral yoga" that combined evolution and Indian philosophy. Aurobindo believed that such a yoga would eventually conjure a superconsciousness that would "descend" into this world in order to integrate the upper and lower worlds and finally enable humanity to realize its own inherent divinity. He named this the Supermind and suggested that it would descend to help evolve a new "supernormal" species of "gnostic beings" that he collectively called the Superman. Yes, that's right: the Superman. Aurobindo, of course, was well aware of Nietzsche's earlier expression, and he meant something entirely different by his own: he meant a humanity that has taken full possession of its spiritual nature, a supernature that includes all sorts of psychical powers (the siddhis again), with which Aurobindo personally experimented and then classified and cataloged with incredible precision in his yoga journals. Aurobindo, in short, was writing out and practicing the Superman a good two decades before Siegel and Schuster came on the scene in 1938.

 

"And on and on we could go through culture after culture. So, no, the general idea of a superman is not new, and no, it has no necessary connection to Nazism, or any other political or religious system. Of course, the American Superman displays his own nationalist dimensions. All that red, white, and blue works on many levels, including the obvious and repeatedly stated one of representing "truth, justice, and the American way." I am not denying the obvious. I am simply suggesting that there is also a "secret life" to Superman that extends far, far beyond his latest incarnation and "descent" (or crash landing) into American pop culture.

 

"And there is more. In a pattern that is seldom fully appreciated, Siegel and Schuster's Superman is closely linked to the mytheme of Mutation. Hence Superman's early epithet as "The Man of Tomorrow," which, of course, suggests that Superman is functioning as a model for the future evolution of human nature: basically, Superman is us from the future. Hence on the very first page of Action Comics #1, we read that the alien child's "physical structure was millions of years advanced." We are also treated to "A Scientific Explanation of Clark Kent's Amazing Strength." The latter two frames employ the examples of the ant, which "can support weights hundreds of times its own," and the grasshopper, which "leaps what to man would be the space of several city blocks," to make its case (the early Superman could not literally fly; he leapt, like a grasshopper). To extend our reading now, we might say that the genre of the modern superhero begins with the trope of the Alien from the Occult, who is compared to a super-evolved Mutant Insect as a sign of the Future Human.

 

"I am highlighting such themes because they are weirdly resonant with the phenomenon of the alien in twentieth-century America. As the ufologist knows, the alien experience is suffused with an insectoid pattern that is in turn linked to an evolutionary schema. Hence the spaceships or the aliens themselves are often described as "buzzing" like bees or large flies, and they often appear to share a hivelike communal mind, two features emphasized as early as 1950 by British American writer Gerald Heard, who also, by the way, wrote extensively about psychical powers, was inspired by Indian philosophy, and was committed to an evolutionary mysticism.

 

"Moreover, in countless cases, the aliens are described as either super-evolved humanoids or as instectoid, or, combining these two themes now, as humanlike insects. Hence the last century's most famous and eloquent abductee, Whitley Streiber, who consistently described the "visitors" whom he encountered as insectlike, hivelike, or, in one scene, a "terrible insect" that "rose up beside the bed like some huge, predatory spider". When another abductee, this one interviewed by Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, drew what she had encountered, she sketched what amounted to a humanoid bug."

[/font]

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

.. and here is a bit more from the same extract...

 

[font:Book Antiqua]"Or an alien Spider-Man. This is where things get a bit uncanny. Spider-Man, after all, is the humanoid insect par excellence. Moreover, his iconic wraparound eyes—created in 1962 by Marvel monster artist Steve Ditko in Amazing Fantasy #15—reproduce, almost perfectly, the classic almond eyes of the alien. With the exception of Superman's S, there is no superhero symbol more beloved and more iconic than Spidey's eyes.

 

"Is it possible that Ditko's Spidey eyes informed the later abduction accounts of the mid-1960s, '70s, and '80s? The dates certainly make this possible. The first major published study of an alien abduction, Saturday Review columnist John G. Fuller's classic The Interrupted Journey (1966), recounts the September 1961 abduction of Barney and Betty Hill, complete with multiple descriptions of the aliens as possessing large foreheads, slits for mouths, and bluish gray or metallic skin. Most of all, though, especially for Barney, there were the awed descriptions of those haunting, vaguely Oriental or Asiatic "slanted" eyes.

 

"Barney drew these eyes from within a hypnotic trance state: the sketch looks like a child's drawing of Spider-Man's head (with pupils now). In another passage, he describes how everything disappeared except a single eye, like, he points out, the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland: "this growing, one-beam eye, staring at me, or rather not staring at me, but being a part of me." These eyes did strange things too. They "spoke" to him telepathically and told him not to be afraid. They carried a subtle smile. They "pushed" into his eyes as they came closer and closer. And they "burned" into his senses and left "an indelible imprint."Such descriptions were drawn from hypnosis and therapeutic sessions that took place the first six months of 1964, well after Spider-Man's first appearances, month after month, on the magazine racks of America. So the door of influence is left open here...

 

"Whatever we make of the ultimate iconic origins of the alien's eyes, we can well posit that the influence eventually went the other way, that is, from the alien abduction experiences to the representations of Spider-Man, since some of the later artistic renditions of Spider-Man look more and more like an alien. This later "Ultimate Spider-Man" (created by artist Mark Bagley at the turn of the millennium, in 2000) approaches an almost archetypal or spiritualized form, as it moves further and further away from the human body of Peter Parker to the lithe, thin, huge-eyed, "subtle body" of the classic alien Gray.

 

"Or Black. Consider also Spidey's famous black suit, which first appears in 1984 in Secret Wars #8. Not only does this black suit appear at the height of the abduction narratives, and not only does it make the wall-crawler look even more like an alien, but we quickly learn that the black suit is an alien, that is, a sentient alien symbiote that can take on and exaggerate, inevitably in violent and aggressive ways, the personality features of anyone with whom it bonds (read: abducts). In the film Spider-Man 3, the alien symbiote even bonds to Peter in a manner eerily similar to the classic alien abduction experience, that is, in bed while Peter is sleeping on his back. This, I must add, is the classic physical posture and scenario of what folklorist David Hufford has called the "old hag" or "supernatural assault" tradition and tracked around the world, including through the modern American folklore of the alien and the physiology of "sleep paralysis." Such universal experiences coded in local forms, Hufford shows, are usually terrifying experiences but also, strangely, sometimes possess ecstatic or spiritual dimensions.Rather like the blue and black Spideys...

 

"Superman and Spider-Man are by no means the only coded aliens among the superheroes. The simple truth is that, of all of my proposed mythemes, Alienation is probably the most central to both the science fiction and superhero genres."[/font]

[Flex Mentallo]

"You are as the yellow leaf.

The messengers of death are at hand.

You are to travel far away.

What will you take with you?

You are the lamp

To lighten the way.

Then hurry, hurry.

When your light shines."

Buddha

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Snow Leopard

 

‘You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars…’

Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditation

 

The 28th September 1973, "Two white sahibs, four Sherpas, fourteen porters" assemble to make their way up the Himalayas.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

In 1973 Peter Matthiessen accompanied zoologist George Schaller on a five week quest to the sacred Crystal Mountain in Nepal with the intention of studying the Himalayan Blue Sheep; and in the hope of glimpsing the rare and semi-mythical snow leopard.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Schaller is one of the only two westerners who had seen the snow leopard in its natural habitat, twenty-five years earlier.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

“After midday, the rain eased, and the jeep rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a deep tumult of swirling grays was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At dusk, white egrets flapped across the sunken clouds, now black with rain; on earth, the dark had come. Then four miles above these mud streets of the lowlands, at a point so high as to seem overhead, a luminous whiteness shone- the light of snows. Glaciers loomed and vanished in the grays, and the sky parted, and the snow cone of Machhapuchare glistened like a spire of a higher kingdom. In the night, the stars convened, and the vast ghost of Machhapuchare radiated light, although there was no moon.”

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Himalaya above Pokhara is the Annapurna massif. Annapurna I is the world’s 10th highest peak. Although climbers had reached 28,150 feet (8,580 metres) on Mount Everest by 1924, Annapurna I became famous in 1950 as the first peak above 26,000 feet (8,000 metres) to be ascended to the summit.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Their ultimate destination is Inner Dolpo, an area of Nepal occupied by people of the Tibetan culture and ethnicity.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The high Tibetan valleys are sealed off from the rest of the country by mountain passes over 17000 feet high, and its people exist in a time warp of Tibetan culture little changed in a thousand years.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The sacred mountain of Dolpo is called She-Re Drug da, which translates as "Dolpo Crystal Mountain of The Dragon's Roar".