the story of Zen founder Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu. The emperor was a benevolent Buddhist who built many temples and monasteries throughout China. When the great teacher Bodhidharma came to visit, Emperor Wu asked “What merit is there in all my good works?” Bodhidharma replied, “None whatsoever.” Puzzled, the Emperor asked, “What then is the primal meaning of reality?” “Emptiness,” the teacher answered. “But if it is emptiness, who then am I talking to?” cried Emperor Wu. Bodhidharma shrugged and answered “I do not know,” and seeing that the Emperor was speechless, walked away (McRae). Here we see the dissolution of the subject himself through the self-referential nature of language. “Each ‘thing’ opens itself up to the infinity of predicates through which it passes, as it loses its center, that is, its identity as concept or as self” (Deleuze 174). The myriad forms fold in upon each other, stripped of meaning.

The fourth dimension of the proposition is sense. “The Stoics discovered it along with the event: sense, the expressed of the proposition, in an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition.” The Stoics were masters of paradox, especially Zeno. They even had their own esoteric vocabulary. Sextus Empiricus tells us that the Stoic had a word completely stripped of meaning, “Blituri,” which was employed with its correlate “Skindapsos.” Strictly speaking, skindapsos was the word for a four-stringed lyre. While, blituri is an oenomanopea for the strumming of the strings. But, in the Stoic use, it is applied as a blanket term for any combination of series (or strings) and the corresponding event produced by this combination. “The blank word is designated by esoteric words in general. The function of the blank word, or of the esoteric words of the first order, is to correlate the two heterogeneous series( Deleuze 67).

Zen also has a blank word, Mu (Wu in Chinese). Roughly translated it can mean “no”, “none”, or “without”. It can be used as a response when the question itself is wrong and thus cannot have a definitive answer. The Rinzai school of Zen uses the following koan as their initiation. A monk asked Joshu: “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” Joshu answered “Mu”. Early Buddhist thinkers conjectured extensively on whether animals had Buddha-nature, so if Joshu answered “no”, then he would be denying their wisdom, while if he answered “yes” he would seem to obey their dogma. Joshu’s answer signifies that the question, which demands that one take a position on a rather arbitrary matter, is itself a delusion (Mamon). More recently, Discordians, a quasi-parodic modern religious movement, sometimes labeled “Zen for roundeyes”, used Mu as the appropriate response for the loaded question “Have you stopped beating your wife?”

These blank words also extend into portmanteau combinations. Take for example the notion of We-wei, typically translated as “action without action”. This is not to say wu-wei is idleness. Instead, it’s a sort of preconceptualized, primordial action that comes directly from the will, without being turned around in the intellect. There is also the notion of Mu-shin, or No-mind. Again, this is not a purely negative indication a somnambulant, crazy or zombie-like awareness. Instead, it is a free and fluid mind, that it not preoccupied by thought and emotion. It is not relaxed or sleepy, but working very fast, as it has less mental preoccupations. It is the mental state hightly trained martial artists are said to enter right before battle. “Esoteric words, in turn, may also be designated by portmanteau words, of the second order, whose function is to ramify the series (Deleuze 67). The contradictions often stem from the misunderstanding of the negation of negation to mean the same as the original affirmative statement. But this is of the same class of mistake as taking an undead zombie to be a regular living human being.

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense
John McRae, The Antecedents of Encounter Dialogue in Chense Ch’an Budhism
Mumon, The Gateless Gate

The following is attributed to Zen master Ch’ing yuan Wei-hsin of the T’ang Dynasty: “Thirty years ago, before I started studying Zen, I said ‘Mountains are mountains, waters are waters.’ After I found insight as to the truth of Zen, I said ‘Mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters.’ But now, having achieved Satori, I say ‘Mountains are mountains, waters are waters.’

Paradoxical statements in esoteric words and sayings stem from the attempt to use common language to describe uncommon experience. They are not irrational. If we agree that mystical experience is an experience, then it should be possible to talk about it. Take this hypothetical example. There is an island where the inhabitants can only see in black and white, the traditional binary opposition. So, in their language ‘black’ and ‘non-white’ mean the same thing. With this, the language’s capacity for colors can be described as ‘something is either white or non-white’. Now, we have someone on the island that had a mystical experience and saw the color red. He tries to communicate this by saying he saw a thing that was neither white nor non-white. But to the typical inhabitant, this comes off as utter nonsense (BP). “This affirmative synthetic disjunction… consists of the erection of a paradoxical instance, an aleatory point with two uneven faces, which traverses the divergent series as divergent and causes them to resonate through their distance and in their distance. Thus the ideational center of convergence is by nature perpetually decentered, It serves only to affirm divergence, That is why it seemed that an esoteric ex-centric path was opened to us, a path altogether different from the ordinary one.” (Deleuze 175)

Some would object that there is no logical ground for mystical experience. However, technically speaking the statements of a mystic are founded in empirical observation of a trained consciousness. The fact that these experiences may be internal, does not make them inauthentic. It is rather a symptom of an ironic reversal which has taken place over the last century, as pointed out by Adorno in Minima Moralia. It used to be that objective knowledge, meant that which you saw and experienced directly first-hand. Now, objective is that which you believe because others have experienced and studied it for you, while subjective is the realm of faulty imperfect knowledge, somehow disconnected from the world.

“Esoteric language, which in each case represents the subversion, from the ground up, of the ideal language and the dissolution of the one who holds the real language” (Deleuze 140). It is the nature of esoteric words to disrupt the existing order, because that order is inherently man-made, imperfect and impermanent. The Zen master uses language to show and break its limits.

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense
Henk Barendregt, Buddhist Phenomenology

This Monday, February 23, the senate passed the New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act in a vote 22-16 with two abstentions. This bill is supposed to aid patients with debilitating diseases (e.g. cancer, glaucoma, AIDS) and other disorders that cause “wasting syndrome, severe or chronic pain, seizures and severe and persistent muscle spasms.” Patients with a special ID (acquired thru a doctor’s recommendation and approval by the Department of Health and Senior Services) could have up to six plants or one ounce of marijuana. Also, the state would license “compassion centers” that grow and distribute plants. If the bill passes in the Assembly and is then signed by the governor, New Jersey will be the 14th state to create a sanctioned medical marijuana program. The Assembly version of the bill, sponsored by Assemblymen Reed Gusciora, (D-Mercer), Michael Patrick Carroll (R-Morris) and Joan Voss (D-Hudson), will likely face opposition from groups like the Drug Free School Coalition. But, considering that Massachusetts decriminalized marijuana in November, New Jersey is likely to be the next state to follow suit. NJ governor Jon Corzine said he would "absolutely" sign the bill.

N.J. Senate approves bill allowing the use of medical merijuana, NJ.com
NJ god says he’d sign medical marijuana law, Newsday.com
Coalition for Medical Marijuana - New Jersey (CMMNJ.org)

A new study in Psychological Science explores the relationship between religion and support of extreme forms of parochial altruism, such as suicide attacks. The researchers have found that support for such activities is related less to what religion one practices, and more how often one participates in collective religious rituals. First, they surveyed Palestinian Muslims on their attitude towards religion, how often they prayed, went to masque, and whether they supported suicide attacks. The result was that those who attended masque more than once a day were more likely to support such, while devotion to Islam and frequency of prayer did not play a strong role in the opinion. Second, they surveyed some Israeli Jews living in West Bank and Gaza about their synagogue attendance, prayer and support of suicide attacks against Palestinians. Result, 23% of those asked about synagogue attendance supported the attacks, contrasted with 6% questioned about prayer. Lastly, the researchers surveyed six religious majorities – Mexican Catholics, Indonesian Muslims, Israeli Jews, Russian Orthodox in Russia, British Protestants and Indian Hindus – to check the theory across a spectrum of cultural contexts, and again the results showed that support for extreme parochial altruism was influenced by religious services and unrelated to frequency of prayer. This study helps further the understanding of group psychology’s influence on the self-destruction of the individual and revealing of organized religion’s violent origins (see: Rene Girard on the single victim mechanism). The research was authored by Jeremy Ginges and Ian Hansen from the New School for Social Research and psychologist Ara Norenzayan from the University of British Columbia.

Study Suggests Collective Religious Rituals, Not Religious Devotion, Spur Support for Suicide Attacks, PsychologicalScience.org

Man Enough: An Interdisciplinary New York University Graduate Student Colloquium on Masculinity, presents:

Institution, Work and the Masculine Self.

On Thursday, 19 February 2009, 5-7 pm, in the Great Room, 1st Floor, 19 University Place, New York City

Free and open to the public

What role do work and institution play in the gendered construction of masculine self-consciousness and what are the effects of hegemonic masculinities as constructed through work? How have the changing concepts of “man’s work” or the “all-male sphere”, over the last century or so, operated upon male self awareness, representation and action, and what relationships may be perceived between the construction of masculinity through institution and work, and military interventionism? Centered around a discussion of these and related topics our panel features:

‘The Literary Study of Victorian Masculinities’ – Benedick Turner, PhD, Department of English, NYU

‘Keeping Workers Out of the Spineless Class: Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor, and Masculinity in the Making of Labor’s Foreign Policy, 1895-1918’ – Justin Jackson, PhD candidate, Department of History, Columbia University

Film screening: ‘Debating Masculinity’: A short film of interviews with five leading voices in masculinity studies – Introduced by Josep M. Armengol, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor, Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, SUNY at Stony Brook

Moderator: Josep M. Armengol

Man Enough Blog

The first stanza of Jabberwocky first appeared in Misch-Masch (a series of private periodicals for his siblings, which Carroll wrote and illustrated) in 1855, when Carroll was 23, under the heading “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.”

 After interpreting the different words, he wrote:

 Hence the literal English of the passage is: ‘It was evening, and the smooth active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hill-side; all unhappy were the parrots; and the grave turtles squeaked out.’

There were probably sundials on the top of the hill, and the ‘borogoves’ were afraid that their nests would be undermined. The hill was probably full of the nests of ‘raths’, which ran out, squeaking with fear, on hearing the ‘toves’ scratching outside. This is an obscure, but yet deeply-affecting, relic of ancient Poetry.

A Possible Interpretation

Stanza 1: Around 4pm, the toves spin and screw near a sundial, while the depressed birds turn up their noses and the foolish kneeling land-turtles whistle and sneeze.

Stanza 2: Words of caution in the Name of the Father, who warns to beware the Jabberwock, the thing that speaks incoherently, thereby destroying sense. Also, the Son should avoid the bird in passion that has no release as it lives in isolation, for this perhaps makes its thoughts muddled, as well as the raging Bandersnatch, which Carroll does not define possibly on account of its lewd origin

Stanza 3: So, wielding a vorpal sword, the Word as Gospel, he goes off seeking his foe. On the way, he stops by the monotonously rustling tree and contemplates awhile.

Stanza 4: But, unlike Buddha’s serene meditation under the Bodhi tree, the Son’s mind is turbulent, and suddenly the Jabberwock appears. It’s whiffling and burbling could be huffing and puffing (like the Wolf in Three Little Pigs), but could also mean that it’s whistling lightly, mumbling to itself, or just talking to itself in a silly way.

Stanza 5: One, two! One, two! The Son, through binary oppositional logic, slays the nonsensical metaphoric beast, his sword laughing as it feeds. Upon cutting off the Jabberwock’s head, the Son galumphs home, though this can mean either that he is galloping triumphantly as a hero, or that he moves clumsily and slow, in which case maybe the Jabberwock was no real threat and killing it was unnecessary.

Stanza 6: The Father welcomes the Son back, rejoicing with open arms. Yet the restraint of his laughter hints at insincerity, and his caveats on the Jabberwock’s danger may have been false.

Stanza 7/1: The story comes full circle and starts anew, perhaps this time with the hero in the role of the Father talking to his Son.

Limerick for Miss Vera Beringer (1869)
There was a young lady of station
“I love man” was her sole exclamation
But when men cried, “You flatter”
She replied, “Oh! no matter
Isle of Man is the true explanation.”

There are a couple of Gaelic words in the poem, particularly ‘rath’ and ‘manxome’. Carroll clarified that ‘rath’ rhymes with ‘bath’, hence it is a homonym with ‘wrath’. The limerick above makes a plausible case that ‘manxome’ is related to Manx (the Ancient Gaelic spoken on the Isle of Man, as well as a type of cat native to the island), and so could mean ‘of man’. In combination as ‘wrath of man’, this possibly hidden connection may refer to the violence done to meaning through binary opposition logic and blind obedience to the Name of the Father.

This is a "death van" used in China as an alternative to the traditional method of execution by firing squad. Manufactured by Jinguan Auto, a maker of ambulances, the van has a sliding stretcher that comes out the back, so as to avoid the brutal scene of dragging the condemned prisoner onboard for their lethal cocktail. It also comes equiped with a live video feed to broadcast the executions. Certain critics argue that the vehicle makes it easier for authorities to engage in illegal organ harvesting of the prisoners, difficult to verify, since no one is allowed to view the corpses of the executed prior to cremation. Amnesty International reports that the profits from organ sales may be part of the reason China refuses to abandon the death penalty. According to Kang Zhongwen, designer of the vehicle, the shift from shooting people in the back of the head to poisoning them in the back of a bus reflects how China "promotes human rights now." It’s also a horror movie begging to be made.

China Makes Ultimate Punishment Mobile, USAToday.com

Social scientist and engineer Noshir Contractor of Northwestern University conducted a curious study on the social dynamics of virtual reality using the popular game EverQuest II. Using 60 terabytes of game data and a survey of 7,000 players, Contractor found several “structural signatures”, particular kinds of social network configurations:

Many players underestimate the time they spend playing the game
The amount of players who admit to being depressed is disproportionately high
Women don’t like to play with other women
The average player is not a teenager, the mean age being 25-26
Most people play with others from the same general geographic area

Virtual Games Players Stick Close To Home, ScienceDaily.com

Intellectual Love, by me

A new psychological study suggests that it is the experience of making certain purchases (like movie tickets, meals in restaurants) that bring us happiness, by satisfying higher order needs for social acceptance and vitality, rather than the actual products involved. "These findings support an extension of basic need theory, where purchases that increase psychological need satisfaction will produce the greatest well-being," said Ryan Howell of San Francisco State University. In his experiment, Howell asked participants to answer a series of questions about recent purchases. The common theme was that people saw experiential purchases as money better spent, regardless of the amount spent or the income of the individual. “Purchased experiences provide memory capital… We don’t tend to get bored of happy memories like we do with a material object”.

Buying experiences, not possessions, leads to greater happiness, EurekAlert.org

A team of archeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have found a 12,000 year old skeleton of a female shaman near Galilee in north Israel. The small corpse, sealed in a limestone enclosure by a rock slab, was buried along with pieces of animal bone, an eagle wing, a cowtail, a human foot, and fifty tortoise shells arranged around the body. The skeleton suggests that the woman was 45 when she died, an advanced age for the era. The grave is thought to be of Natufian origin, a nomadic culture that existed in the east Mediterranean 9,500-13,000 BC. According to Harvard anthropologist Ofer Bar-Yosef, the unusual arrangement of the shells could be a "sign of elite emerging among hunter-gatherers". This find offers a unique insight into the transitional period towards sedentary societies, prior to the development of writing."What we see [with the Natufian burial rites] is the beginning of a tribal system," says Bar-Yosef.

12,000-year-old shaman unearthed in Israel, Time.com

Award winning author of ‘Media Virus!’, ‘Coercion’, and ‘Ecstasy Club’, who has a new free book ‘Open Source Democracy’ is giving a free talk at the Princeton Club, in NYC tonight at 6pm, 15 W 43rd St.

"Barack Obama is a secret muslim," perhaps the most pervasive meme this campaign season. There’s this picture of him in his onion head hat, there’s the incessant e-mail chains about how he was OMG TRAINED IN A MADRASSA, his middle name is Hussein, and, of course, he’s brown. There are a lot of reasons that "Obama is a secret muslim" line is so difficult to scrub out of the mass consciousness. On the basest level, it appeals to latent xenophobia as well as the myth of the "sleeper cell," that wonderful post-9/11 idea that the "Muslim next door" could, in fact, be a terrorist agent waiting for the right moment to flip. Together, these two concepts bind the "secret muslim" label quite strongly (see: sleeper cells).

Of course, at this stage, with less than three months until the election, the only people who believe that "Barack Obama is a secret Muslim" would not have voted for him anyway. Think the archetypal redneck that votes against his root economic interests because of carefully calibrated anti-liberal fear mongering.

And yet, the "secret Muslim" meme tells us a lot more about our country than it does about its half-black Democratic standard bearer. Barack Obama elicits a kind of subconscious fear that someone like, say, Jesse Jackson doesn’t. As alien, as different, as "other" as Jesse Jackson may be to the typical white man, at the end of the day Jesse Jackson has a well defined and well observed, if not well understood, role in American society; he is an ‘integral’ part in the race narrative in America. Barack Obama is different. His father is a Kenyan herdsman, an other’s other. His parents met at a Russian language class at the height of the Cold War. Mrs. Obama had a thing for ‘colored’ men; her second husband and B-Dot’s step-father was an Indonesian at a time when interracial marriage was still largely taboo and an interracial kiss on Star Trek involving body snatchers could be the apex of controversy.

So Barack Obama would be the first President in many generations to have at least one parent who was not "American." And yet, from Punahou to Harvard to Washington politics, Barack Obama has outperformed his more American peers. On some level, this threatens the American idea of American superiority. At a time when the American brand name is tarnished and America has hit a ‘rough patch,’ it could be even more deflating to see that for relief the country turns to someone with such foreign roots to fix it. And look at how loved he is overseas, more to make Americans uncomfortable. Barack Obama brings out discomfort in the mass consciousness because he is a personification of the forces of globalization that have transformed our world in the last 60 years; his far-flung origins (Hawai’i via Kenya and Kansas, two years in Indonesia) serve to remind Americans that the America (and the world) of the 20th century has been relegated to the dustbin of history. The 21st century is a different time place; USA cannot SMASH at will its enemies and two oceans are no longer a sufficient barrier from the rest of the world. Barack Obama piles on to this: the image of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant can no longer be neatly grafted onto America as its "archetype," and, of course, the youth have taken over. So Barack Obama is not a Secret Muslim, and no rational educated person thinks so anymore, but the idea persists because he is just so different from what we expect of our leaders, be they white or black, from the mainstream or the margins, and as the great open-ended signifiers he has become the globalization and ‘change’ that we are only now realizing has already completely engulfed our reality. Rejecting B-Dot won’t turn back the clock on that process, but embracing him may make the remainder of the transition smoother.

In Flag City USA, False Obama Rumors Are Flying, WashingtonPost.com
Obama the ‘Magic Negro’, LATimes.com

According to Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energy Association (GEA), "High prices and climate change are definitely creating a renaissance in geothermal interest, particularly on a state and local level." So, to further geothermal research, Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas plans to lease out its Mount Spurr (a 2 mile tall, snowcapped volcano near Anchorage, which erupted in 1992 covering much of the city in ash) to energy companies who would search for ways to harness the mountain’s power. A wise move on both parts, as geothermal projects are eligible for numerous tax benefits, with many already in effect in most Western States and on the coast between Texas and Florida. Gawell: "If we really want to go all out for it, we could easily achieve a substantial amount, 20, 25 per cent of US energy needs within a few decades. We’re limited more by public policy than the resource - the resource is enormous." Though mentioned recently by Sen. Barack Obama, geothermal energy has had little play in the alternative energy debate. Nonetheless, the GEA estmates that by 2010, the number of countries producing geothermal energy will double to 46.

Harness volcanoe power, energy experts say, Telegraph.Co.Uk

Tiananmen Square, June 5, 1989

Classics in Lego, Flickr.com
Mike Stimpson’s prints, RedBubble.com

The International Cryptozoology in Portland, Maine, is in dire straits following an IRS lawsuit, and needs $15,000 in donations to move to a new location. Loren Coleman, the curator of the museum and author on numerous books on the study of ‘hidden’ animals, says the case began as a challenge of "the reality of cryptozoology as an occupation," which in turn called the validity of the museum into question. According to Code 183 of the IRS, cryptozoology is a hobby, so the museum needs more income to support itelf. Coleman argued that combined with publications, and the visibility of the museum on the internet, he lived above poverty level, but since the museum is a separate entity, that didn’t fly, loosing him an appeal. It is a little strange that cryptozoology does not merit more consideration as a science. Every day new species are discovered, widening our understanding of evolutionary diversity. Considering some of the species already discovered, like the egg-laying venomous mammal the duck-billed platypus, a unicorn or Big Foot no longer seem that exotic. Further, a history of hidden animals may lend clues to animals already extrinct, as well as those we have not ‘officially confirmed’ yet. On a curious note, when Magellan returned from his journey, having for the first time seen a rhinocerous, he declared that he found unicorns, but that they look somewhat different from how people imagined them. If nothing else, a cryptozoology museum is a unique place preserving preserving both our earlier understanding of the animal kingdom and our creative imagination thereof, which is often all science ever is.

Save The Museum, Cryptomundo.com

RyoheiHase.com

Wikileaks, has recently released the sensitive but unclassified US Special Forces counterinsurgency manual FM 31-20-3, which outlines tactics to be used in the suppression of rebellions and guerilla movements worldwide. Official Special Forces policy, the document promotes pervasive surveillance, censorship, warrantless searches, imprisonment without charges, hiding human rights violations from the media, and particularly psychological operations (PsyOps) to facilitate population and resource control.

But it was the recent death in Afghanistan of UK’s Corporal Sarah Bryant, a member of the Psychological Operations Group, a tri-service PsyOps support service to the British Armed Forces, which really brought PsyOps to the news foreground. The key role of PsyOps is Target Audience Analysis (TAA), similar to US military’s human terrain system, or for that matter, market research. It is the systematic study of people’s attitudes to map the military psychological environment, identifying weaknesses, and using them to base lines of persuasion. The key to its success is ‘maneuverism’, that is, striking suddenly and unpredictably at weak spots, instead of trying to overwhelm by sheer force. Armies recruit human scientists (a mixture of psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist, economist) for their PsyOps branches. The US Army is forbidden from carrying out such operations within the country, but the FBI and police seem to be excluded from this ban, as PsyOps tactics were used in the 1993 Waco Siege.

US Special Forces counterinsurgency manual FM 31-20-3, Wikileaks.org
‘I love her now and always’ - husband’s tribute to Sarah Bryant, first female soldier killed in Afghanistan,TimesOnline.Co.Uk
15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group Annual Report 2007/08, PsyWar.org
PsyWar.org

DD now has a splinter blog, Amusementality, an entertainment blog, which will cover tv, music, anime, art and sexy stuff that I can’t post on this here respectable publication. Go there now, go there repeatedly, and if you’re interested in becoming a contributing author, drop me a comment.

amusementality.wordpress.com

According to a new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, internet addiction is a common disorder that should be included in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders V (DSM-V). The disorder consists of excessive gaming, sexual preoccupations, excessive email/text messaging, and variants typically include 1) a loss of sense of time and neglect of basic drives, 2) internet withdrawal when a computer is not available, 3) a tolerance, which leads to a search for better equipment, faster connection, and more hours of use, and 4) negative repercussions, including lying, fatigue and social isolation. This comes after a series of studies published in South Korea, which had 10 cardiopulmonary deaths in internet cafes, as well as a game-related murder. According to government estimates from 2006, 210,000 South Korean children 6-19, 2,1% of the population are addicted and require treatment, with 80% deemed to need medication, and 20-24% requiring hospitalization. So if you spend more than 23 hours/week on the internets, you may have a problem. Seek help immediately! And I don’t mean on Google!!

Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction, PsychiatryOnline.org

Caroline’s Dreams: The Other Family

Miuki, Photosight.ru

The summer solstice, the longest day of the summer when the sun reaches its furthest point north of the equator, is today, 7:59 EST. It’s the earliest solstice since 1896.