Post by auntym on Oct 5, 2013 14:59:06 GMT -6
thenightshirt.com/?p=1367
10-5=13
Mutants, Mystics, and Scientologists (Thoughts on Jeffrey Kripal and Related Matters)
by Eric Wargo
eric.wargo [at] gmail.com.
Call me a slow learner, but it took me until my early forties to realize that some of the best and most inspiring things in life, besides girls, are the things I was obsessed with as a 10-year-old boy (i.e., just before I discovered girls).
At 10, I was a typical nerdy 1970s kid, curled up with sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks when I wasn’t glued to the TV in the wood-paneled basement rec room in my corduroys watching Star Trek reruns, Space 1999, or Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of. Later, out of some horrible, misguided sense of teenage conformity and the bogus need to “grow up,” I ended up setting aside all that, put Dune and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and my Alien graphic novel away in a box, and took up more respectable interests like philosophy, “literary” fiction, and science without the “fiction” attached. I remained more or less respectable (albeit still a nerd) throughout my adult life.
But gradually over the course of a protracted midlife crisis and then, more decisively, after having two UFO sightings less than a month apart in 2009 (and thereupon doing my due diligence to read up on all manner of Forteana), I allowed all those “immature” things to flood back in—science-fictional realms like aliens, bigfoot, ESP, and all domains of the paranormal or just “weird.” I have not only taken them seriously but also made them my compass in recent years. It has been one of my best and, frankly, most mature choices in life. To use Joseph Campbell’s overused phrase, I now, at long last, follow my bliss. (I highly recommend following your bliss, although I acknowledge that it is harder to really, authentically do than Campbell made it sound—there are so many competing pressures…)
One of my best discoveries in my bliss-following has been that my pre-adolescent sci-fi interests actually harmonize exquisitely with my more “mature” philosophical and religious inklings. Meditating on the unknowable is a tried-and-true Zen technique, and I’ve found that meditating on alien civilizations, interdimensional beings, and the (im)possibilities of machine sentience, as well as luxuriating in the alien/future mindscapes of artists like H.R. Giger and Richard Powers and the novels of Philip K. Dick, is as true and effective a path to Kensho as finding my original face or chewing the bone of “mu.” For example, after an intense period of rereading both Jacques Vallee’s Invisible College and the collected admonishments of the 9th-century Zen master Lin-Chi (Rinzai), the master himself chose to burst out my chest, Alien-style, to both kill and admonish me as I descended into a Maryland Metro station one evening in the rain. It was a sweet enlightening joke that kicked me into a mildly ecstatic state for a few blissful days last winter. Among many other things, this experience proved to me that, if only as a line of thinking and inspiration, UFOs are a gnosis. (Indeed Vallee himself, somewhere—maybe in Invisible College—likens them to koans.)
It turns out I was not alone in the impulse to seek gnosis through reclaiming my pre-/pubescent sci-fi bliss. Many of my generation seem to be discovering that the secret science-fictional surreality behind the unreasoning mask of consensus reality is where it’s at, philosophically and spiritually. Jeffrey Kripal, professor of Religion at Rice University, is a scholar of this trend, and his most recent book, Mutants and Mystics, concerns mystical experiences and how they nurtured 20th century imaginative literature and comic books. Even when I was a kid, there was something undefinably holy to me about the best science fiction (such as Alien), and Kripal effectively illuminates what that holy thing always was.
CONTINUE READING: thenightshirt.com/?p=1367
10-5=13
Mutants, Mystics, and Scientologists (Thoughts on Jeffrey Kripal and Related Matters)
by Eric Wargo
eric.wargo [at] gmail.com.
Call me a slow learner, but it took me until my early forties to realize that some of the best and most inspiring things in life, besides girls, are the things I was obsessed with as a 10-year-old boy (i.e., just before I discovered girls).
At 10, I was a typical nerdy 1970s kid, curled up with sci-fi and fantasy paperbacks when I wasn’t glued to the TV in the wood-paneled basement rec room in my corduroys watching Star Trek reruns, Space 1999, or Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of. Later, out of some horrible, misguided sense of teenage conformity and the bogus need to “grow up,” I ended up setting aside all that, put Dune and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and my Alien graphic novel away in a box, and took up more respectable interests like philosophy, “literary” fiction, and science without the “fiction” attached. I remained more or less respectable (albeit still a nerd) throughout my adult life.
But gradually over the course of a protracted midlife crisis and then, more decisively, after having two UFO sightings less than a month apart in 2009 (and thereupon doing my due diligence to read up on all manner of Forteana), I allowed all those “immature” things to flood back in—science-fictional realms like aliens, bigfoot, ESP, and all domains of the paranormal or just “weird.” I have not only taken them seriously but also made them my compass in recent years. It has been one of my best and, frankly, most mature choices in life. To use Joseph Campbell’s overused phrase, I now, at long last, follow my bliss. (I highly recommend following your bliss, although I acknowledge that it is harder to really, authentically do than Campbell made it sound—there are so many competing pressures…)
One of my best discoveries in my bliss-following has been that my pre-adolescent sci-fi interests actually harmonize exquisitely with my more “mature” philosophical and religious inklings. Meditating on the unknowable is a tried-and-true Zen technique, and I’ve found that meditating on alien civilizations, interdimensional beings, and the (im)possibilities of machine sentience, as well as luxuriating in the alien/future mindscapes of artists like H.R. Giger and Richard Powers and the novels of Philip K. Dick, is as true and effective a path to Kensho as finding my original face or chewing the bone of “mu.” For example, after an intense period of rereading both Jacques Vallee’s Invisible College and the collected admonishments of the 9th-century Zen master Lin-Chi (Rinzai), the master himself chose to burst out my chest, Alien-style, to both kill and admonish me as I descended into a Maryland Metro station one evening in the rain. It was a sweet enlightening joke that kicked me into a mildly ecstatic state for a few blissful days last winter. Among many other things, this experience proved to me that, if only as a line of thinking and inspiration, UFOs are a gnosis. (Indeed Vallee himself, somewhere—maybe in Invisible College—likens them to koans.)
It turns out I was not alone in the impulse to seek gnosis through reclaiming my pre-/pubescent sci-fi bliss. Many of my generation seem to be discovering that the secret science-fictional surreality behind the unreasoning mask of consensus reality is where it’s at, philosophically and spiritually. Jeffrey Kripal, professor of Religion at Rice University, is a scholar of this trend, and his most recent book, Mutants and Mystics, concerns mystical experiences and how they nurtured 20th century imaginative literature and comic books. Even when I was a kid, there was something undefinably holy to me about the best science fiction (such as Alien), and Kripal effectively illuminates what that holy thing always was.
CONTINUE READING: thenightshirt.com/?p=1367