Dream Deep

And why have I survived?
I have a purpose here; I must.
And it is not enough to say
it is, of course, just what I think it is:
to be a parent to my kids, to stare
in awe, in wonder, at grandchildren,
to bury our father, our mother,
to keep our company, state, hospital,
army, our church going –
No, all these things we might
try to put our names to,
those who fell, they also could,
they did perhaps and still
they’re gone; they leave us
now with still this unanswerable
why me? why me?
What is there in all this great
roar of world that I have still to see
and taste before work is done?
What promise am I keeping
with myself, what learning,
crying, hoping, despairing,
loving – yes – what loving
have I yet to do?

Haj Ross
Pampulha
Spring 1991

a moth

the moth, large, brown, exposed in day
struggles to leave the water.

the man, full grown now, bends down,
knowing fragility, extends.

a careful finger to the flutterer
who huffs and puffs, climbs aboard,

the two together to the high piled wood;
the passenger dismounts.

and I am left to wonder: how is
gentleness passed on?

interconnection? the unity of life?
step by step, I’d guess. each step.

Haj
Ashby
17.VII.MMIII

About Itself

Haj Ross

Circle – Noetic Services, Inc.
&
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brasil
&
Linguistics and Technical Communication, University of North Texas
haj@unt.edu

It is generally felt that most prepositions which are lexically associated with verbs, adjectives, or nouns are idiosyncratic. That is, that it is an accident that it is (up)on that goes with depend, of that goes with afraid, and for that goes with hatred. What I want to do is to suggest that this kind of treatment, while in general probably basically right for many lexical items, and surely unavoidable in at least some cases, is wrong for the non-spatial [but conceptual? / topical? / _____(other)] preposition about.

So what is at issue, then, are apparently idiomatic collocations like talk about, sad about, and story about {NB: *picture about}. I will not be concerned with any instances of locative about (as in There are millions of pollywogs (all) about the house.), because I believe that there is no lexical item that selects just this preposition, as opposed, say, to selecting a higher-order constituent, such as Locative or Directional. Thus the transitive verb leave requires a direct object and selects Locative, allowing a pretty wide range of prepositions: We left jujubes in/on/around/under/…/ ??about the pail. This is all I am going to say about this spatial kind of about, because I believe it not to have any special features requiring particular comment, as opposed to whatever treatment is developed for locative constructions in general.

My basic idea is that there is only one other kind of about, and that it is (almost) never used idiomatically. I am forced to parenthetically include the hedge almost because of a few such expressions as to be about to, it’s about time and so on. I believe, however, that these are extremely rare.

What, then is this other about that we hear so much about? Prototypically, its object denotes topics (of linguistic communications: acts of speaking/signing), and then, by extension, objects of thinking (i.e., facts or states of affairs), and finally, in some languages, causes of emotions. What follows is a very preliminary list of lexical items which occur with this linguistically communicational/conceptual (?) about. Since many of these also occur with of, in the same meaning as about, I will indicate this fact, either in blocks of words, where this is possible, or on individual words, when not. “DO” and “IO” after a verb means that the verb takes a direct object or an indirect object before the about -phrase. If prepositions are necessary, I’ll indicate this too.

However, before we launch into a list of lexical items, one which is perched precariously on the extremely tippy proposition that about and of are free variants of each other, let me start by speculating even worsely – namely, by letting out of the bag what I believe to be the True Source of the Non-idiomatic Linguistically Communicational about/of: I believe it to be the result of an ascended topic phrase (in the sense of ascension in Relational Grammar / Metagraph Grammar). That is the source of (1) would be (2).

(1) I said about fried pizza that it was great.

(2) I said [that [fried pizza]Topic [fried pizza tastes great]Comment].

Perhaps (2) should derive from the deeper (3):

(3) I said [that [that fried pizza tastes great] concerns fried pizza].

On the off chance that the hypothesis that all non-spatial about-phrases are from deep topic phrases (wherever these come from; we need not insist that the possible source in (23) be crowned The Only True One) should turn out to be right, I am going to christen the relevant about’s topical about’s in the discussion that follows. My proposal has an extra fillip about it: every topical about is the remnant of a complement clause. That is, a sentence such as (4) would be derived from something like (5).

(4) I told Jack about fried pizza.

(5) I told Jack that [[fried pizza]Topic [Sentence]Comment].

via some rule which zaps the comment sentence in (5), presumably under some (totally and unthinkably illicit) condition like “the comment sentence is inferable from the context.”
Four pieces of evidence that support this conclusion:

A. One way of marking topics in English is with either the
Compound (?) preposition (??) as for or as to; thus (2) can surface as either (6a) or (6b):
(6) a. I said [that [as for fried pizza]Topic [[it/ ?fried pizza] tastes
great]Comment].
b. I said [that [as to fried pizza]Topic [[it/ ?fried pizza] tastes
great]Comment].

In fact, there are other ways of marking topics: speaking of, with respect to, concerning, and even about. These differ among themselves in register and other details, none of which need concern us here. Let us use either as for or as to as topic markers in what follows.
Topics cannot incorporate negatives (in the sense of Klima’s rule (Cf. Klima (1964)) of Negative Incorporation, a rule which changes (7a) to (7b) and (7c) to (7d):

(7) a. I will not touch many mangoes âžž
b. I will eat not many mangos.
c. I will not touch any mangoes âžž
d. I will eat not+any [> no] mangos.

What concerns us here is the ungrammaticality of (8a) and the corresponding ungrammaticality of (8b)

(8) a. *As for no fried pizza, it tastes great.
b. *As to not many breadsticks, they taste great.

Our hearts are gladdened by the parallels we see between (8) and versions of (1) with incorporated negatives in their about-phrases.

(9) a. I said about [*no pizza that it was / not many calzones that they were] great.

Moreover, I believe that
TOPICS

NB Topics can’t be negative:

As for nobody, he is immortal. //s

I said about [fried pizza /*nothing] that it was great.

(1) Verbs

Group 1 (both possible with of):

tell (IO [indirect object]), write ((to) IO)

(2) Group 2 (generally at least poor with of – and systematically worsened by the presence of a prepositional phrase between the verb and the about-phrase. That is, such contrasts as in the following pair of examples seem typical: ?I have read (?*to her) of various colleges.):

say DO [direct object], read (to IO), complain (to IO), talk (to
IO), speak (to IO), hear (from IO)

[NB: [very few nouns are possible as a DO of say if an about-phrase is to follow: I said [nothing / something / few things / some honeyed words] to Laureen about the size of my apartment.

(3) Group 3 (impossible with of):

(dis)agree (with IO), concur (with IO), argue (with IO), negotiate
(with IO), enquire (of IO), wonder, question DO, query DO, hush up (IO), josh (DO), kid (DO), report (to IO), go on (to IO), bitch (to IO)

(4) Group 4 (manner of speaking verbs – all take an about-phrase, and most can take a to-phrase as an IO) (though the presence of a to IO often worsens the acceptability of the about-phrase – cf. ?We were lisping (??to Mr. Kvili) about the responsibilities Jo had], and some of them can have at in place of this paradigmatic to: I [yelled/shouted /*whimpered/ *lisped] at them about Cuba. Those of them that allow of to replace about are indicated by a following of in parentheses.)

babble (?of), blabber, blather(?of), blubber, boast (of), brag (of), chat, chatter, coo, curse, dither, giggle, groan, grumble, joke (?of), kvetch, lisp, moan (of), mumble (of), mutter (of), roar, shout, shriek, snicker, snigger, stammer, sputter, stutter, swear, titter, whisper (of), yell (??of)

{Subgroup – manner of singing verbs:

yodel, chant, croon, hum, warble (*to IO),…}

(5) Adjectives (none occur with of)

evasive (with IO), silent (with IO), frank (with IO), deceptive (with IO), reticent (with IO), ?taciturn (??with IO), quiet, voluble, loquacious, effusive, eloquent (?with IO), i (?with IO), ?garrulous

(6) Nouns

story (of), tale (of), account (of), report (of), book [letter, epistle, card, journal,…] (*of)

While these lists could be extended, that is not the main point here, which is to float the following generalization:

Crummy Biconditional # 1

(7) Any verb whose meaning involves linguistic communication will be able to occur with an about-phrase, and any (non-locative) about will have the meaning that its object denotes the topic of the communication.

Before I start battling with the various problems in CB#1 (which are, after all, why it is a crummy biconditional, instead of being a regular one), let me give a few examples to suggest why it is that anyone might want to try to prop up CB#1 even for a minute.

Let us start with the contrasts in (8):

(8) a. Otimar was moaning.
b. Otimar was moaning about something.

(8a) seems to refer to a situation in which Otimar was making sounds which were characterizable as moans (i.e., low-pitched, protracted, who knows what else,…). But (8b) asserts that above and beyond making this kind of noise, there was a possibility of interpreting Otimar’s sounds linguistically. That is, when moan is followed by about, it becomes a verb of linguistic communication.

The same is true with respect to battle. Look at the sentences in (9).

(9) a. They are battling for an island.
b. They are battling about an island.

I feel the same kind of difference here – that (9a) could be used in a military situation, one in which there is no necessary implication of communication between the combatants. This implication is much more strongly suggested in (9b), though not as strongly as in (8b). Is this possibly because the primary sense of moan is one of denoting a kind of auditory experience, while the notion of verbal battle, though perfectly comprehensible, and in fact conventional, is still felt to be slightly metaphorical? I do not know for sure, and will not try to resolve this problem here.

OK. Back to the crumminess. Let’s break up the biconditional into two parts and look at each in isolation.

(10) a. Implication A: any predicate involving comunnication
(signed or spoken) can take an about-phrase.

b. Implication B: whenever about can occur with a predicate, the predicate is one of linguistic communication.

What makes this generalization wrong is two large classes of counterexamples – predicates of cognition, like think about or know about, and predicates of emotion, primarily adjectives: (sad / glad /…about), but also not a few verbs ([grieve / exult /…] + about). Let us look at the case of cognition first.

COGNIZINGS

Verbs Group 1 (all possible with of)

think, know, remind DO

Group 2 (not so hot with of)

learn (from IO) [NB: I learned of [this / ?*Ed] yesterday]

Group 3 (out with of)

remember, figure out, find out, forget

Adjectives

Group 1 (both possible with of)

(un)sure, (un)certain

Group 2 (not so hot with of)

positive [NB: I’m positive of this / *Ed], accurate

Group 3 (out with of)

perceptive, secretive, definite, dubious, vague, (un)clear

Group 4 (better with of than with about)

true, false, cautious, wary

Group 5 (OK with of; weak with about)

conscious, considerate

Group 6 (only with of)

aware

Before I go on with these lists, a few comments are in order. First of all, do not be upset if you find that you are having different judgements from mine on the grammaticality of the various elements in these lists with and without about and/or of. I have only begun to look at this phenomenon, and while I am giving as accurate a set of judgements about my own intuitions as I can come up with, I not only do not expect, but would in fact be astounded if even one other speaker should share my feelings on all of these cases. I suspect that these facts are well below the level at which consensus can be expected. What I do expect, however, is that many, if not all, speakers will have some predicates with which both prepositions can occur, and others for which one of the prepositions will seem stronger. There will doubtless be some commonalities across speakers (for instance, I would be startled if a noticeable number of speakers preferred about to of after aware), but I think that we may defer harvesting these for the moment.
Secondly, the words true and false differ from all others that we have considered so far, in that they do not denote a relationship between a human (or higher animate) being and a state of affairs (the object of about / of). These two words, which occur in contexts like This (sentence / statement /…) is true/false of Texas, thus should not really be called cognizings at all. Nonetheless, I have included them here because of the way they appear to fit in with the patterns that are emerging.
Thirdly, it may seem strange to find a word like aware included in these lists, even though it does not appear to cooccur at all with about, and after all, isn’t that what we’re thinking of / on / about? Yes, but be patient a bit.

Before we turn to an examination of the use of about with predicates that involve emotions, let me mention an interesting class of regularities which my attention was drawn to by an observation of Polly Ulichny’s. This is the fact that there are some words which only accept about when its object is an embedded question. Communicate, describe, talkative, and afraid are four predicates which manifest this phenomenon:

(11) a. He never communicated with us [about where he lived / ?about
his address].
b.?She tried to describe [about how she had had to leave the
spaceship in an elliptical orbit/*about her difficulties].
c. ?Nega was not very talkative [about how she had escaped/*about
her escape].
d. I’m a little afraid [about what might happen to us / ?about the
future / ??about Soraya].

I believe this phenomenon to be quite widespread among the classes of predicates that interact with about, but I have not yet studied it systematically. I have no idea as to what it might mean. Now as we turn to look at emotion predicates, let me just indicate that I already feel that the distinction between what I am calling topics and what I have referred to above as cognizings is not a very clear one. For instance, I have classified evasive, silent, and quiet among the adjectives linked to linguistic communication, while I have placed secretive among the cognizing adjectives. This reflects my feeling that the sentences in (5a) seem to imply an avoidance of speech, while the sentence in (5b) seems to suggest a pattern of behavior designed to prevent the inferring of any information, even non-linguistic:

(12) a. Jailson was evasive/silent/quiet about some things.
b. Jailson was secretive about some things.

In the case of (un)clear, I feel that things are even worse: there are sentences that can be ambiguous. Consider (6):

(13) Naima was not clear about how long she would be working.

It seems to me that this sentence can be used in two kinds of situations. In the first, it describes the existence within Naima of a state of mental uncertainty. In the second, it refers to the lack of clarity in what Naima said. Thus in the first, nothing need have been said; in the second, the sentence is used to make a metalinguistic assertion.

I have cited these cases to show why I have said that the boundary between topics and cognizings already feels like a difficult one to patrol. I mention this because the boundary between these two (or possibly: this one) things – topics and cognizings – and what we are about to proceed to, namely causes of emotions, seems to me to be an even more slippery one.
Ah well. Let’s try our best.

The reason that I have been speaking about causes of emotion is because of a quite general relation of near, if not absolute, synonymy between sentences with about which denote emotions and corresponding sentences with an explicit causative structure. An example appears in (14):

(14) a. Nick was happy about the popsicle.
b. The popsicle made Nick happy.

There are also verbs which are associated with emotions, or with their expression, and these too seem to yield good causative paraphrases.

(15) a. Bonnie [raged / grieved / fumed / rejoiced] about the skis.
b. The skis made Bonnie [rage / grieve / fume / rejoice].

These emotion-causing about-phrases differ systematically from the about’s that appear with topics or states of affairs as their objects, in that the emotion-causers’ abouts can never be replaced by of. A partial list of verbs and adjectives involving this type of emotion-about follows:

Verbs cry, weep, sob, sigh, laugh, giggle, guffaw, rage, fume, boil, sweat, worry, exult, rejoice, rave,
grieve, freak out, fret, blow up, have a fit, blow one’s stack, feel [good /bad / wonderful /. . . /
terrible /. . .]

Adjectives glad, happy, overjoyed, relieved, sad, nervous, worried, upset, anxious, mad, sorry,
regretful, jealous, preoccupied, antsy, fretful, resentful, angry,. . .

AND the whole of the surprised-class:

surprised, astonished, baffled, disgusted, disgruntled, embarrassed, shocked,. . . (as well as compound adjectives like heart-broken, grief-stricken, awe-struck, etc., which are related to sentences which do not take visible IO’s: I was heart-broken about the Porsche is not related to *The Porsche heart-broke me, but rather to The Porsche broke my heart. Similar acrobatics are necessary for grief-stricken, awe-struck, etc.)

I note in passing that there is another class of adjectives that take about, but which have no causative paraphrase. Some examples appear in (16).

(16) Tex is [good / bad / OK / terrible / funny / generous / . . . ] about
signing checks.

Some attempted paraphrases appear in (17):

(17) a. Tex is [good /bad /. . . ] in the way that he signs checks.
b. The way that Tex signs checks is [good / bad /. . .] [NB: *generous]
c. It is [good / ?bad / *OK / terrible / *funny / generous] of Tex to
sign checks.

The differences in behavior between (10a), (10b), and (10c) make me more than uneasy – they convince me that I have not come close to understanding these adjectives, and they make me almost certain that it is not one class of words involved here but rather a whole bunch. I therefore and hereby throw up my hands about (Hmm – there’s a funny about. . .) the whole mess of them.

One of the things that elates me / grief-strikes me about this whole area is the fact that we are obviously not grappling with an English oddity here. Whatever turns out to work for English about ~ of had better be general enough to work for German über ~ von, Portuguese sobre ~ de, French de (and maybe sur?), and so on. These languages have one preposition which has a locative meaning –English about = “around (±);” German über = “over;” Portuguese sobre= “above, over;” French sur = “on” – and one which is used in possessive or genitival constructions. Thus

a desk of Tony’s / a picture of Tony

(More thought necessary than currently available)

What the door should be is open.
*What the door blew is open.
**What I kicked the door is open.

[?How/?What] the cocoa was is sweet.
[??How/*What] I made the cocoa is sweet.

Same facts in German, if my worthless opinion is worth anything. Can’t check in Brasilian, because even predicate adjectives can’t be pseudoclefted, in my even worthlesser opinion.

Buddha is the cool moon,
Crossing the sky of utter emptiness.
The lake of the mind of beings quietens,
The moon reflects beautifully in it.

Thich Nhat Hanh,
The Blooming of a Lotus,
Beacon Press, Boston,
Massachusetts. (1993) p. 26

Global Warming Prayer

May the blessings of the exalted sources of refuge,

The Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, the Three Jewels,

And the Lama, Yidam and Protectors, the Three Roots,

Pacify the terrors of illness, famine and war,

And chaos in the elements. The temperatures

Unbalanced, grand snow mountains – hard, firm glaciers –

Will melt and disappear. Rivers and lakes

Becoming scarce, the forests of the ancients

And trees of beauty, too, will near their deaths.

There is a frightful danger the world’s reaches

Will become a great wasteland. May these coming

Dangers be fully pacified, and sublime

Good fortune and happiness spread all round.

May all beings nurture one another lovingly

And kindly, so their joy may fully blossom;

May all their aims be fulfilled, like the Dharma.

The Thrangu Tulku made this prayer

at the request of the scientist John Stanley, a student of the Lord of Refuge Dudjom Rinpoche.

Translated by David Karma Choephel.

May the blessings of the exalted sources of refuge,

The Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, the Three Jewels,

And the Lama, Yidam and Protectors, the Three Roots,

Pacify the terrors of illness, famine and war,

And chaos in the elements. The temperatures

Unbalanced, grand snow mountains – hard, firm glaciers –

Will melt and disappear. Rivers and lakes

Becoming scarce, the forests of the ancients

And trees of beauty, too, will near their deaths.

There is a frightful danger the world’s reaches

Will become a great wasteland. May these coming

Dangers be fully pacified, and sublime

Good fortune and happiness spread all round.

May all beings nurture one another lovingly

And kindly, so their joy may fully blossom;

May all their aims be fulfilled, like the Dharma.

The Thrangu Tulku made this prayer

at the request of the scientist John Stanley, a student of the Lord of Refuge Dudjom Rinpoche.

Translated by David Karma Choephel.

Please Call Me By My True Names

Do not say that I’ll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply, I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the
surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes,
arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the
clear water of a pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who,
approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly
weapons in Uganda.

I am the 12-year-old girl, refugee
on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after
being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am the member of the politburo, with
plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his
“debt of blood” to my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes
flowers bloom in all walks of life,
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it
fills up the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs
at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Thich Nhat Hanh
Being Peace (1987),
Parallax Press, P. O. Box 7355, Berkeley, California. 94707.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/dancing.html

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10 Jul 1995

Dancing With The Gods

An autobiographical account of my `religious’ beliefs and how they got that way. If you start this, please read it through. Stopping partway would probably leave you with some very silly misconceptions.

I was raised Catholic by a Catholic father and a relaxed Protestant mother. I had my first mystical experience in 1967 at the age of 10, at an old-style Latin Tridentine mass in the hills outside Rome, as the priests were censing the aisle of the church during the Offertory. It presented itself as a sudden, intense sense of being in a moment outside time, an eternal instant co-existing with every other eternal instants of history, with the illusion of time and change stripped away. “As it was in the Beginning, is now, and ever shall be, World without End, amen” conveys the flavor exactly.

I was aware even at the time that this experience was inside my head, induced by the Mass but not specifically Christian in content.

From an early age I was exposed to, and very interested in, skeptical/ scientific accounts of the world. Reichenbach’s “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy” and Korzybski’s General Semantics taught me to value evidence, logic, and rationality.

On Thanksgiving Night of my twelfth year, as I was being offered the sip of sherry my family hauled out for the kids at holiday meals, I made the first major spiritual commitment of my life. I realized that the religion I’d grown up in was like the wine — attractive but cumulatively toxic, promising exaltation but delivering the death of reason.

I quietly refused the wine. I am a teetotaler to this day, refusing not only wine but psychoactive drugs of all sorts (I do drink tea, which affects me very little). With it, I renounced — and swore enmity to — not only my birth religion but any other form of belief founded on faith and soi-disant `revelation’, as opposed to evidence and reason.

For years after that I was militantly and indiscriminately anti-religious. Spending ninth through twelfth grade at a Catholic school hardly discouraged this :-). I read the Bible and the Koran and the Upanishads and the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead and found them wanting. I developed all the attitudes, knowledges, and ignorances of an Enlightenment philosophe. I read Voltaire and Russell. And drank no wine.

Sometime early this period I was first exposed to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism. It was immediately apparent to me that (ignoring the religious stuff) there was interesting content there. I consciously experimented with meditative techniques, treating them as a sort of mental calisthenics in an effort to alter and broaden my perceptions. (This was the early Seventies; people were still wearing bellbottoms and peace symbols, and the hippie “doors of perception” thing was still very much part of the Zeitgeist.)

My second major mystical experience was a successful though unexpected result of one of one of these experiments. It happened on a school bus at about 3:30 on a fall afternoon, I think in 1972. I had been attempting to visualize a larger and larger range of distance scales in the cosmos, from angstroms to megaparsecs. I was holding in my mind vibrating hydrogen atoms and galactic clusters, and I tried to push further in both directions. And something happened — something that was a bit like seeing the point of a joke, a bit like an orgasm, and a bit like being pinned by powerful headlights. I believe it was a classic satori, ego-death, consciousness of All (though I did not understand those terms or their implications until years later).

By the time I entered college in 1976, I felt I had learned most of what I could from such mind-games. Lest you get the wrong impression, they had never been a major interest for me. For every minute I spent thinking or reading about religion or mysticism, I undoubtedly spent thirty devouring huge amounts of science, history, philosophy, and mathematics. (No, I didn’t have much of a life! I was a skinny, runty kid with cerebral palsy and few social skills, fanatically devoted to improving my mind because it was the only part of me that seemed to work right. I was all hungry intellect and raging hormones :-))

I had filed the whole topic away as interesting but not worth a lot of my time — not likely to produce scientifically replicable results and too close to what I saw as the huge, nasty mind-mangling traps for the stupid and credulous otherwise known as `conventional religions’. I had grown — I readily admit it — rather smug in my enlightenment, quick to dismiss religiosity and mysticism in general as a sort of childhood neurosis of the species, to be abandoned by any rational individual and eventually by everybody as we march forward into the light of secular scientific understanding.

Anyone who can’t predict from the above that my complacency was soon to be shattered has no ear for irony…

When I was in my junior year in high school, I had started learning how to play guitar. Unfortunately, it was my sister’s guitar. My interest rekindled hers, and she reclaimed it just about the time I entered college, during that itchy period you get while learning when you have to play, every day. Desperate for something to feed my jones, I snaffled my other sister’s abandoned flute.

And wow! I was a natural…immediately better with it than with the guitar I’d been hacking at for months. I was commuting to college at the time, and took it with me. I’d play as I walked between classes. Six weeks from a cold standing start I sat in with a professional jazz band for the first time…and they liked it.

This was delightful but mystifying. All I’d had to do was learn to play a scale, and this amazing river of music poured forth with barely an effort on my part. It seemed almost as though my hands and lips had always known what to do, had been waiting for me to pick up the flute.

Something happened to me when I played that instrument. The angry, anxious, frustrated adolescent kid I was then just disappeared. I was powerful, competent, passionate. And I got these stunning rushes of pure timeless joy, when my consciousness seemed to expand outwards from the limits of my skin to fill the universe and I could no longer tell whether I was playing the music or the music was playing me.

Nor were these effects just going on inside my own head.

At the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology there’s a large, circular domed chamber in the Oriental wing with a skylight at its apex. Directly underneath that skylight they display the second largest natural-crystal globe in the world, a flawless five-inch sphere on a silver stand in the form of a dragon. I found it there one day with the sun shining full on it. Feeling utterly compelled, I ran ten blocks and back to get my flute, gazed into it, and started playing.

I don’t know how long I played. When I was aware of the world again, echoes were dying away in the high dome, and a dozen or so people were lined up at the four entrances, keeping absolutely still. Rather stupidly, I said “Why are you all standing there?” thinking that if they’d wanted to listen they certainly could have entered the room. And a man said “We didn’t want to interrupt you…” in a hushed, totally awed tone of voice that embarrassed me no end. We all looked at each other like we’d been caught in some weird intimacy in public. I mumbled something and fled.

And this kind of thing kept happening. Without my intention. Without my understanding it. Until the girl on the landing.

I was climbing the stair to the fourth floor in one of the quad houses one day, to visit some friends. A girl stepped onto the landing, saw me, and turned white as a sheet. I said something obvious along the lines of “Why are you looking at me like that?”

She started to babble something about last week when she was studying, looking outside at the quad and seeing me walk by “…and the leaves were following you!” And it was like I was the Spring and the life in the grass. And a whole bunch of other stuff that made me wonder what drugs she’d been doing (this was 1976 or early ’77; every second dorm room had a bong and blotter acid was easier to score than good music). So I shook my head dubiously and rolled on upstairs and visited my buddies.

I was walking home, idly puzzling over this peculiar incident, and damn near fell over when I finally got it. That girl had been trying to cope with a theophany; she had looked at me and seen a god. A particular god. And I knew, suddenly, with utter shattering certainty, which one it was. And that it probably was not the first time I had inadvertently triggered such an experience, and would almost certainly not be the last.

You have to understand that I was not happy about this at the time. I’d known the score since my early teens; religion was an instrument of oppression, deities a delusion, mysticism a bag of sterile mind-games and somatic circus tricks. I didn’t need any of it. I was proud of not needing any of it.

But I still had an omnivorous curiousity, and one of my friends was “into the occult”. Had a chin beard, read Crowley, wore black turtlenecks. He loved to talk endlessly about Eastern mysticism and archetypal psychology, shamanism, the organizing role of ritual, magic as mind-change, metaprogramming (I sat for him once while he did LSD). A minister’s son; turned into a Fundamentalist with an alcohol problem years later. But he was very educational at the time.

Thanks to him, I had started months before the girl on the landing to see clearly what I’d only dimly grasped in my first pass at the subject; that there is a kind of live internal logic to mysticism and religion, something entwined with psychology that sends runners and shoots all through culture and art.

Not that I took any of it seriously as a description of the real world. It was an intellectual chew-toy, perhaps at best a way of understanding the pathologies that prevented human beings from living the infinitely more desirable life of reason and science.

Until I realized, finally, belatedly, what had been happening to me. Until the Great God Pan reached out of my hindbrain and thundered “YOU!” And his gift is music and his chosen instruments the pipes and flutes. And his, too the power of joy; magic so strong that when it flowed out of me, even before I knew what I was doing, it amazed people into awe and incoherence and poetry.

That day I was reborn; from a skinny lame kid with a flute into a shaman and a vessel of the Goat-Foot God, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Horned Lord. And the music was my first power, but not my last.

(And, oh, yes. The first time I handled a set of pan-pipes I could play them. Fluently. Effortlessly. And knew I could before I touched them.)

During the next several months I went through a wrenching re-adjustment of my world-view as I assimilated what I have just related here. There was simply no way it would fit in either the religious categories I’d grown up with or the comfortable, naive materialism I had constructed for myself. I clung to the conviction that I live in a rational, explicable universe — but the Gods had spoken and after that transforming moment of realization I could no more go back than a butterfly could crawl back into its cocoon.

I knew I wasn’t crazy, even by my own rather strict definition of sanity. I was coping pretty well — in fact, I was becoming a whole human being for the first time in my life. Opening up emotionally. Playing beautiful music. And … um … getting laid. (Well, what do you think happens when you start channelling the freaking God of Sex Himself? :-))

So I coped. I read Jung and Crowley myself. I gradually learned how to evoke Pan in myself nearly at will. I constructed a world-view in which the forces I experienced fit within the natural order of science, as what Jung called “archetypes of the collective unconscious”. I rejected supernatural explanations, but learned to believe in magic — the magic of the human mind and hand and heart.

Here is what I learned:

All the Gods are alive. They are not supernatural; rather, they are our inmost natures. They power our dreams and our art and our personalities. Theurgy and ritual can make them stronger, more accessible to the shaman. They can be evoked in a human being to teach, heal, inspire, or harm. Occasionally they manifest in spontaneous theophanies; the result may be religious conversion, creative inspiration, charisma, or madness.

Magic is loose in the world. It is not the magic of fantasy — no would-be violators of the laws of physics need apply. Real magic acts in and through human agents. The two forms of practical magic are healing and divination. Healing works because human minds have more control over their bodies than we normally think; divination works because humans know and perceive more than they are consciously aware of.

The mode of the religious is faith. The mode of the mystic is experience. We do not enact rituals and promulgate dogmas to express our `faith’ that the sun rises in the east, because it is a fact of experience. No more does a true shaman or mystic invest faith in the god(s) he or she invokes; they too are facts of experience. The elevation of `faith’ is, in fact, a sign that a religious tradition is losing its ability to induce theophany, or has already lost it.

More generally, allegiance to fixed religious forms reliably murders true religious experience. Descriptive theology (“Oh, yeah, Hermes and Thoth are basically equivalent…”) is worth doing; prescriptive theology is at best a waste of time and at worst an invitation to holocaust. The Gods personify everything humans have ever imagined as sacred. Good things, bad things, and occasionally jokes that got out of control. They’re all in there, all waiting to be tapped.

The Gods taught me these things while I was being some of them. Usually I’ve been the Horned Lord (Pan/Cernunnos/Freyr/Krishna). Occasionally I’ve been the Trickster (Coyote/Mercury/Loki/Eris) or the Sage (Thoth/Merlin). Just once, by accident in a martial-arts class, I have been the Warrior (Thor/Indra/Cuchulain).

But I’m getting ahead of my narrative. It wasn’t till the early ’80s that I learned how to invoke gods other than the Horned One.

In late 1977 a woman I was involved with, who’d seen some of my odd gifts in action and shared something of my developing understanding of them, invited me to go up to New York City with her to meet some friends. She was singularly mysterious about them, and kept smiling as though she knew something I didn’t.

She did. They were a Wiccan coven called Blue Star. And they knew what I was. They’d seen it before. And they had a whole technology for raising the God Pan and his triune Goddess and exploiting those altered states, that I hadn’t known existed.

Now, understand, I hadn’t thought of myself as a witch up to then. To the extent I labeled myself at all, I thought of myself as a shaman or experimental mystic. I didn’t use ritual induction (no need). I didn’t work with other people. I knew very little about Wicca.

They showed me that the imagery and energy I’d stumbled into using on my own was part of a larger picture; that it fit the mythology of Wicca and animated its ritual forms. They showed me that I was a natural witch, albeit of a kind uncommon in this century. Most spontaneous Wiccan theophanies happen to women. For a man to spontaneously channel the Goat-foot God before training is unusual, though not unheard-of.

So I decided I was a witch — or, at least, that I was willing to play with the Wiccans. Nothing else resembling a live religious tradition seemed to have any room in its categories for my experience. And they were completely comfortable with my scientific skepticism. “Do what works,” was the attitude, “worry about explanations after you leave the ritual circle.”

Subsequently, I made numerous friends in the neo-pagan movement. (The Wiccans are the largest single group in that movement.) I went to many festivals, and founded and ran a coven of my own for six years in the 1980s. I became a respected priest, elder, and bard. I developed something of a reputation as a ritual designer and theoretician. And out of me flowed poetry and healing and inspiration, and by these signs I knew and others knew that the Gods moved and lived within me.

I helped and trained and initiated many people myself, teaching them by design skills I had discovered by accident. There is a living Wiccan lineage today (Tradition of the Rainbow Wheel) that calls me its founder and still uses portions of the Book of Shadows I wrote.

The original coven I founded broke up in 1986 under circumstances that aren’t relevant here, but which turned me off of group work for a while. By the time I was ready to become active again, my life had become filled with other challenges.

While I still use the gifts of the Horned God, and identify with neopagans, and do the odd bit of practical magic now and then, these days most of my spiritual life is wound up in my martial arts training. I’ve once again become very interested in Zen Buddhism, enough to read primary sources and seriously consider doing dokusan and the whole monastic-retreat thing at someplace like the Mountain Zen Center in Vermont. I may do it yet.

Zen represents a return to my earliest, non-theurgic mystical experiences as a child. Zen is very … clean. It doesn’t have the practical utility or drama or sexiness of the neopagan path. But there is one thing it does better; it strips away illusions. To experience things as they are, just as they are, without the drunken monkey of the mind perpetually layering them over with expectations and interpetations and preconceptions and yammering till you can’t hear yourself be — that is the Great Way of Zen.

There’s my experience. Now some theory for you skeptical types out there.

If my language is too “religious” for you, feel free to transpose it all into the key of psychology. Speak of archetypes and semi-independent complexes. Feel free to hypothesize that I’ve merely learned how to enter some non-ordinary mental states that change my body language, disable a few mental censors, and have me putting out signals that other people interpret in terms of certain material in their own unconscious minds.

Fine. You’ve explained it. Correctly, even. But you can’t do it!

And as long as you stick with the sterile denotative language of psychology, and the logical mode of the waking mind, you won’t be able to — because you can’t reach and program the unconscious mind that way. It takes music, symbolism, sex, hypnosis, wine and strange drugs, firelight and chanting, ritual and magic. Super-stimuli that reach past the conscious mind and neocortex, in and back to the primate and mammal and reptile brains curled up inside.

Rituals are programs written in the symbolic language of the unconscious mind. Religions are program libraries that share critical subroutines. And the Gods represent subystems in the wetware being programmed. All humans have potential access to pretty much the same major gods because our wetware design is 99% shared.

Only…that cold and mechanistic a way of thinking about the Gods simply will not work when you want to evoke one. For full understanding, the Apollonian/scientific mode is essential; for direct experience, the Dionysian/ecstatic mode is the only way to go.

One great virtue of this dual explanation is that it removes the need for what William James, in his remarkable “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, called the “objective correlative”. By identifying the Gods with shared features of our psychological and inter-subjective experience, but being willing to dance with them on their own terms in the ritual circle, we can explain religious experience in respectful and non-reductive ways without making any anti-rational commitments about history or cosmology. Scientific method cannot ultimately be reconciled with religious faith, but it can get along with experiential mysticism just fine.

This much I figured out early, by 1979 or so. Later, I learned some more things:

Primary mystical experiences like mine are common. A study by two British sociologists I read once seems to have shown that they are widespread in the general population, though perhaps more common in children and adolescents. Our culture provides very little context or language for such experiences, however; they are not generally categorized or recognized by the subjects as `spiritual’, and are commonly undervalued and forgotten.

Religions are, mostly, the rotting corpses of dead mystical schools. They’re founded by people who have primary mystical experiences or theophanies and (for whatever reason) do not interpret the content of those experiences into the terms of the religious traditions available around them. These primary mystics recruit disciples and attempt to teach them how to replicate their theophany.

Usually these founders (having neither training for nor interest in science or analytic rigor) mistake the incidentals of the experience for its cause, and teach induction methods which are only accidentally effective. As time goes by the induction methods accrete layers of ritual and dogma that crowd out the theophanic aspect, and are adapted for other purposes.

Very occasionally a charismatic mystic will arise within a religion and strip away the dogmatic accretions, re-creating a living mystical tradition. Meister Eckhardt and George Fox did this in a Christian context; the semi-mythical Sixth Patriarch of what was then the Dhyana school seems to have done it in an early Mahayana Buddhist one. The movements they founded (the Pietists, Quakers and Zen) became exemplary, but they were the exceptions.

Most late-stage religions distrust mystics and lock them up in monasteries or hermitages; they rightly fear the renewing but disruptive effect of theophany. Eventually, for most of the religion’s followers, even the theoretical possibility of unmediated experience of the God(s) is lost, or thought of as the preserve of specialists and madmen.

And this decay impoverishes our spiritual lives. It cheats most of us of our birthright to the sacred lightning…

And this is why I am implacably hostile to Christianity in particular and the other Zoroastrian-offshoot religions in general. Never mind the fact that they have a long history of torturing pagans and mystics like me to death, and I fear they will begin doing it again the second they have the power.

No…their crime in present time is that they are such tragic, monstrous cheats. They create huge chasms of disconnection between us and our Gods, and then tell us that is inevitable because we are `sinful’. They associate the spiritual domain with so much dogma, cant and irrational garbage that anyone with a functioning brain has to either live in hypocrisy or reject the whole package — and then wonder why life is so empty. They warp the language of spiritual discourse; they exert a sinister gravity on living mysticisms, tending to remake them in their own diseased images. In the name of God, they strangle mystical experience; in the name of love, they murder; in the name of truth, they tell lies.

It doesn’t have to be that way. I have seen. I have been. I have known. The mysterium tremendum is within reach of everyone, “closer to you” (as the Koran puts it) “than the vein in your neck”.

To find it, it is only necessary that you abandon both the dogmatic materialist prejudice that it’s not there, and the dogmatic religious preconception that you know what it is. As the Buddha said from his deathbed to his favorite disciple Ananda, “Have no fixed beliefs, and find your own light.”
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10 Jul 1995

Eric S. Raymond

A present from Nick

April 13, 2008.

From the Oxford English Dictionary (online)

awe (noun)

I. As a subjective emotion.

{dag}1. Immediate and active fear; terror, dread. Obs.

2. From its use in reference to the Divine Being this passes gradually into: Dread mingled with veneration, reverential or respectful fear; the attitude of a mind subdued to profound reverence in the presence of supreme authority, moral greatness or sublimity, or mysterious sacredness.

[The actual awe, in 13th c. a{ygh}e, was a. ON. agi, acc. aga (Da. ave), representing an OTeut. *agon- wk. masc. (of which the OE. repr. would have been aga); but this was preceded in EE. by native forms descending from OE. {ehook}{asg}e, str. masc.,:{em}OTeut. *agiz str. neut., Goth. agis fear, taken as if it were a str. masc. agi-z. (Both f. ag-an to fear.) The ME. eye, (aye,) and awe, were thus in origin and derivation distinct though cognate words, but were practically treated as dialectal variants of the same word, of which aye was still used in s.w. c1400, while awe was in the n.e. c1250. The sense-development is common to both. They are therefore here taken together; the examples being separated into groups {alpha}(from OE. {ehook}{asg}e) and {beta}(from ON. agi).]

Two bums are walking along. One says:

Wanna play 20 questions?

wuzzat?

‘S a game. I think of sumpn, n you git 20 yes-no questions t’ guess it. If you
git it in lessn 20, you win. If ya don’t, I win.

okay. less try ‘er.

OK – I’m thinking’ uh sumpn.

kin you eat it?

Uh – I reckon, yes.

is it mule dick?