The Genie and James Arthur Ray

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

The other night I was watching an old X-Files episode; the one about the genie, or jinniyah, who makes all kinds of trouble by giving people exactly what they wish for. The problem, she finally explains to Mulder, is that people always wish for the wrong things: "Without fail. It's like giving a chimpanzee a revolver." So naturally, I thought of James Arthur Ray.

Remember this sterling bit of wisdom from Ray in The Secret?

As with so much of The Secret, I found the genie comparison disturbingly arrogant. The universe is not here to serve your ego. Your ego is what separates you from the awareness that you are the universe.

Graham Hancock on Reclaiming Our Consciousness

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

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In the first chapter of Supernatural, Graham Hancock recounts his early experimentation with psychadelic plants, under the guidance of indigenous shamans. Of his use of the healing plant Iboga he writes:

Was it really a supernatural realm that the ibogaine took me into, or just a crazy hallucination? As I've emphasized, this was not something I was yet in a position to judge; nor was it easy to disentangle cause from effect. But what was miraculous nonetheless was the dramatic turnaround in my mood that I benefited from after my ibogaine session. For months beforehand I had been intensely depressed and irritable, filled with morbid thoughts and gloomy anxiety. My guilt at what I perceived as my dismal failure of my father, and my grief at his loss, had been compounded by feelings of worthlessness and anguish so deep that I frequently saw no point in taking any further initiatives in life. It was better by far, I had persuaded myself, to withdraw from the world, abandon research, and avoid all new intellectual challenges -- which, anyway, I would certainly fail.

I hadn't expected ibogaine to make a difference, but it did. From the moment I woke up with my strength recovered, I knew that it had flipped some sort of switch in me, because I was no longer able to see anything in the world in the same negative and nihilistic way as I had done before. From time to time a morbid thought would still stray across my mind and try to drag my mood down; previously I would have dwelt on it obsessively until it made me miserable; now I found it easy to dismiss it and move on. I didn't feel so bad about my father either. I'd not been at his bedside, and I couldn't change that. But somehow, now, I no longer ached so much.

Whether this healing was achieved through contact with the spirit world, or whether it was just a beneficial side-effect of shaking up my brain chemistry, I felt grateful to ibogaine. Regardless of the explanation, or the mechanism, it had put me through something I would never forget -- something very much like a religious experience. It had swept away the cobwebs of ingrained bad habits and moods. And it had most persuasively demonstrated the worth of a hitherto neglected line of research into the spiritual life of the ancients.

Doctor Who and Grandmother Spider

Crossposted from Reflections Journal.

(The following is my attempt to shamelessly ape the stylings of Christopher Knowles. It is my first such attempt. Developing...)

An interesting article on how the forming Earth avoided falling into the sun caught my eye this morning. I read it with avid interest to see if, perhaps, it pointed to a giant arachnid queen organizing the particles of the developing planet, a la Doctor Who's "The Runaway Bride" (Season 3, Episode 0).

I fully admit to having been stuck to my leather couch during the two day Doctor Who marathon on BBC America -- the lead in to David Tennant's swan song.  It kept sending my husband screaming from the living room, so I recorded a few to watch later. I was that engrossed by it. Something to do with the paucity of new Doctor Who content this year, although the specials have been quite special.