"Imagine losing your job, at a hospital of all places - or absolutely any argument - over astrology. ..."

"I lost a debate with my friends over whether or not my wife can walk through walls. This was all long before Greta Thunberg got a mural in San Francisco, but Tom Foremsky - an English friend I admired - gave me a book, called 'Ishmael,' featuring a gorilla who talked about 'saving the planet,' to explain what I was getting wrong...."

Writes The Crack Emcee in "First Man Canceled™️" (The Macho Response).

"In Sinema’s 2009 book... she described giving up shrill partisanship, which was making her unhappy, for a vaguely New Age ethos..."

"... that prized inner tranquillity. One chapter was called 'Letting Go of the Bear and Picking Up the Buddha,' with the bear representing fear and anger. 'Picking up the Buddha (becoming a super centered political actor) makes you a stronger, more effective you,' she wrote. 'To be your most fabulous political self, you’ll need to learn to recognize the bear and learn to let go of it in your work.' Transcending fear and anger is an excellent spiritual goal. But becoming a more centered and fabulous person is a political project only when it’s directed toward aims beyond oneself. With Sinema, it’s not remotely clear what those aims might be, or if they exist. (Another chapter in her book is 'Letting Go of Outcomes.')"

Writes Michelle Goldberg in "Kyrsten Sinema Is Right. This Is Who She’s Always Been" (NYT). 

I had to look to see if Sinema is a Buddhist. She's not, so I'm giving this post my "cultural appropriation" tag. "Picking Up the Buddha" — is that an expression, some New Age cant? Or did she come up with this image of picking up and putting down entities that are not, if real life, picked up and put down?

 

Here's a NYT article from 2012, "Politicians Who Reject Labels Based on Religion"

Although raised a Mormon, Ms. Sinema is often described as a nontheist — and that suits the activists just fine....

But a campaign spokesman rejected any simple category for Ms. Sinema. “Kyrsten believes the terms ‘nontheist,’ ‘atheist’ or ‘nonbeliever’ are not befitting of her life’s work or personal character,” the spokesman, Justin Unga, said Thursday in an e-mail. “Though Sinema was raised in a religious household, she draws her policy-making decisions from her experience as a social worker who worked with diverse communities and as a lawmaker who represented hundreds of thousands.”

Furthermore, Ms. Sinema “is a student of all cultures in her community,” Mr. Unga said, and she “believes that a secular approach is the best way to achieve this in good government.” In rejecting not only religious labels but irreligious labels, too, these politicians resemble the growing portion of Americans who feel that no particular tradition, or anti-tradition, captures how they feel about God, or the universe, or what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate concern.”

"She unfurled the floral fabric wrapping to reveal a rose-scented nest of tobacco. 'You could put it in your bath and soak in it...'"

"... her friend explained. 'I did the other day and afterwards I just lay on my bed for three hours. It was intense.' Others joined in with their new-age nicotine experiences. Some had drunk tobacco juice in the Amazon jungle, which made them 'purge' (never 'projectile vomit,' please), but was worth it for the 'most incredible clarity.' Others had 'smudged' with it — ie wafted the smoke around in order to 'clear negative energy' — or had 'shamanic snuff' (powdered tobacco) blown up their noses through a special pipe ('so grounding')."

From "WHY TOBACCO IS THE NEW (LEGAL) WELLNESS INGREDIENT/Bathe in it, drink it, waft it around — but whatever you do, don’t smoke it" (London Times).

Mystic, part 2.

Here I am at 4 in the morning reading the OED entry for "mystic." See previous post for context. 

I have to open a new post to show you something I found that has nothing to do with the "mystical cord" [sic] that was or may have been Queen Elizabeth. 

For years now, I've run into the name Donald Trump not only in the many, many stories about him but in all sorts of articles that have nothing to do with him. Just now, I found this in the OED, under the meaning "Of or relating to mysterious or occult rites or practices":

"The [Rainbow] gathering is organized around large camps and communal kitchens that serve coffee, tea and food. No money is exchanged."

"At a trading post, kids and adults bartered for jewelry, stones, glass pipes and Snickers. A painted rainbow was being erected over the 'Granola Funk' stage in the meadow, where a musical, a gong show and other performances would take place. At the Christian-themed Jesus Kitchen, one attendee said the nondenominational gatherings had made him a believer. 'I’d never seen Christians do it the way these guys do it,' said Gavin Boyd, 25, a carpenter from Fort Collins, Colo. It was, he said, less orthodoxy and more spirituality."

 
"The Rainbow Family comes to Colorado, bringing peace, love and anxiety" (WaPo).

This weekend is the 50th Anniversary of the first Rainbow Gathering.

Most of the WaPo article is about the locals worrying about the environmental impact of the gathering and the group's basically good reputation for sanitation and cleanup. There was a little something about politics:

"The vanishing of nature is also romanticized: the lonely polar bear on an ice shelf. Romanticism has trickled down through Walt Disney..."

"... and now we have the Disneyfication of landscapes, of human existence, of storytelling, of our relationship with wild nature. The bears are cuddly and you have to hug them and you have to sing to them. That’s the tragedy of Timothy Treadwell, in 'Grizzly Man,' a tragedy of misguided philosophy. When somebody espouses New Age ideas, I always lower my head and charge."

Said Werner Herzog, quoted in "Werner Herzog Has Never Liked Introspection/A conversation with the filmmaker about the place of literature, the toll of war, and the conviction that his writing will outlast his movies" (The New Yorker). I see he has a book coming out soon, called "The Twilight World" that is, in part, the true story Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who fought, from a position on an island in the Philippines, for 3 decades after WWII had ended.

Herzog met Onoda in real life. He was in Japan, and had actually turned down an invitation to meet the Emperor. He didn't want to see the Emperor, because he would have been required to "speak only in formulas and polite, prefabricated dialogue." So who did he want to meet? He said, “Onoda.”

"Some years ago I evolved what I called the Small Ball Theory to assess the quality of literature about sports."

"This stated that there seems to be a correlation between the standard of writing about a particular sport and the ball it utilizes -- that the smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature. There are superb books about golf, very good books about baseball, not many good books about football or soccer, very few good books about basketball and no good books at all about beach balls...."

Wrote George Plimpton — in 1992 — in "The Smaller the Ball, the Better the Book: A Game Theory of Literature" (NYT). I'm reading that not because this weekend is The Masters, but because I stumbled across a 1996 piece "Bad Sports," by Michiko Kakutani (NYT), about the "hippie psychobabble" that had taken over golf writing:

Consider the ur-text of New Age golf writing, ''Golf in the Kingdom'' (1972), by Michael Murphy, a founder of Esalen. In the course of the book, the reader is introduced to a guru-like golf teacher named Shivas Irons, who spouts aphorisms like ''let the nothingness into yer shots,'' and is pelted with a boggling array of metaphors: golf as ''the new yoga of the supermind,'' golf as a recapitulation of evolution and golf as a Rorschach test of character....

Two recent novels -- ''The Legend of Bagger Vance,'' by Steven Pressfield, and ''Follow the Wind,'' by Bo Links -- give us Shivas wannabes, who tell their disciples to find their ''troo self.''... Perhaps sappiest of all is Jeff Wallach's ''Beyond the Fairway,'' a series of essays that purports to be a golf version of ''Zen in the Art of Archery'' when in fact it's closer to one of those business manuals that try to adapt the principles of Sun Tzu's classic ''Art of War'' to corporate back-stabbing....

I'm reading Kakutani's old essay because I was looking up "The Art of War" in the NYT. And I wasn't doing that out of any sort of thought that the Russians are botching the art of war in Ukraine, but because I wanted to do a post in honor of the 50th anniversary (tomorrow) of the discovery of the Yinqueshan Han Tombs, which contained "a nearly complete Western Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) copy of The Art of War, known as the Yinqueshan Han Slips, which is almost completely identical to modern editions." 

Back to Kakutani (whose name is misspelled in the NYT scan of her ancient article):

Zen golf, [Wallach] writes, is ''a way of transporting yourself to a new dimension, gaining access to new perspectives, and maybe racking up a few birdies along the way.'' The problem with such passages isn't just the bad writing (which pretty much negates George Plimpton's famous ''Small Ball Theory'' that the smaller the ball the better the writing), the sanctimoniousness or even its startling trivialization of Zen. The problem is that such writing takes sport out of the lovely pure realm of the physical, where talent and strength and discipline are measured in unforgiving inches and lifetime stats, and plunges it into the warm recovery movement realm of subjectivity and self-esteem.

Little did Kakutani know, the very year she wrote, 1996, a new phenomenon would take over golf. Tiger Woods went professional that year, and just about ever since, the main thing about golf has been how is Tiger doing? An in-the-flesh icon overwhelmed the old hippie psychobabble of "The Legend of Bagger Vance." 

But they did make a movie out of "The Legend of Bagger Vance" — "Time [Magazine] called it one of the most 'embarrassing' films of recent years for its treatment of African Americans and the use of a 'Magical African-American Friend.'" 

Matt Damon's magical friend was, of course, Will Smith: 

The NYT ethicist — Kwame Anthony Appiah — comes out in favor of cultural appropriation.

The column begins with a letter from an art therapist who had hospital patients go on "a guided mindfulness journey to find their spirit animals." This involved teaching them about Native American cultures and having them draw "their animals" on a totem pole. One patient questioned the activity and used the criticism "cultural appropriation."

I think it's an awful exercise, for many reasons. I don't know what has to happen to you to make you a patient on the receiving end of such "therapy," but if I'd been in that situation, if I had anything like the mind I have now, I'd have refused to participate. It's an imposition of ersatz religion. It's fake and sappy, and it appropriates the sincere religion of others and turns it into a childish art project. 

The ethicist began by questioning whether it is cultural appropriation when there's only a "hazy" connection to a culture. Speaking of religion, he makes a food analogy:

"When I was about 10 years old, my mother became interested in the idea of the divine feminine, specifically centering spirituality on women..."

"...rather than the patriarchal notion of a male god.... Judging from the attendees of the goddess fairs in hotel ballrooms I was also taken to, this was a fairly White, progressive and privileged group of women. It served as a kind of spiritual extension of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, parallel to feminism. Men soon started to realize that they, too, had a gender to consider, and the men’s movement took off in the ’70s and ’80s. It manifested in three expressions, says Cliff Leek, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Northern Colorado and vice president of the American Men’s Studies Association: 'You get pro-feminist [men’s] groups that do work around reproductive health and sexual violence; and, on the other end of the spectrum, men’s rights groups that say, "We are gendered and the system is out to get us." The middle way is the mythopoetic: tying masculinity back to the sacred and mythological.' The prevailing figure in the mythopoetic movement is the poet Robert Bly. In 1990, Bly, who was in his 60s (he’s now 94), published 'Iron John: A Book About Men,' which includes lines like, 'Where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be.' Bly’s idea, told through Jung-influenced archetypes and fairy tales, was that men had been robbed of true masculinity via emotionally withholding fathers who raised soft sons. With some reflection — and maybe some banging on drums with other dudes in the forest — they could reclaim their inner Zeuses and thrive."

Cherry-picked right from the center of "QAnon’s Unexpected Roots in New Age Spirituality/Masculinity, faith and the strange convergence of counterculture and hate" by Marisa Meltzer (WaPo).

"A few weeks into riding, [Michelle] Schaeffer, 34, posted a suggestion on the 395,000-member Peloton Facebook page."

"Riders there frequently rave about the soaring emotions and meaning they get from the teachers’ words combined with the physical intensity. Posts about crying during rides are common. Wouldn’t Christian music — maybe gospel — be even better, Schaeffer wondered, even more intense? Responses were rapid. 'Just stop. Please don’t turn Peloton into another political/grievance battle. Drop it,' wrote one. 'Perhaps you could find your Christian ... whatever ... at church?' wrote another...."

From "Peloton makes toning your glutes feel spiritual. But should Jesus be part of the experience?" (WaPo).

How does a modern-day meaning-making community work? And is there room for old-school religion? Americans in recent decades have been rapidly ditching religious services and looking for spiritual uplift, meaning and transcendent community through experiences like yoga and spin classes, political activism and cooking — more and more of it online.... 

Casper ter Kuile, a Harvard Divinity School... said Peloton is part a much bigger trend he calls "unbundling." Within that, people are now browsing in a variety of places for the things they once got all at a congregation: worship, scripture, life transitions and social justice among them. As a result, he said, American religious life is very unstable, very individualized. "When religion is infusing these secular spaces, it troubles the concept of religion, but also troubles the strict secularity we’ve come to expect."

Ter Kuile noted the irony of people — Peloton riders — challenging religious institutions while they are themselves part of an activity many see as cultlike. He says that’s more about institutional religion’s current branding problem. "They’d trust Peloton as a cult but not the Catholic Church as a religion," he said.

"Despite these delusions, Ms. Gilbert — a self-described mystic who has written four books, with titles like 'Swami Soup' — mostly struck me as a New Age eccentric who could use some time away from screens."

"She disdains the mainstream media, but she agreed to be profiled, and we kept in touch. Over a series of conversations, I learned that she had a longstanding suspicion of elites dating back to her Harvard days, when she felt out of place among people she considered snobby rich kids. As an adult, she joined the anti-establishment left, advocating animal rights and supporting the Standing Rock oil pipeline protests. She admired the hacktivist group Anonymous, and looked up to whistle-blowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. She was a registered Democrat for most of her life, but she voted for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in the 2016 presidential election after deciding that both major parties were corrupt. Ms. Gilbert’s path to QAnon began in 2016 when WikiLeaks posted a trove of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. Shortly after, she started seeing posts on social media about something called #Pizzagate. She had dabbled in conspiracy theories before, but Pizzagate — which falsely posited that powerful Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor, and that all of this was detailed in code in the Clinton emails — blew her mind. If it was true, she thought, it would connect all of her suspicions about elites, and explain the horrible truths they had been covering up. 'The world opened up in Technicolor for me,' she said. 'It was like the Matrix — everything just started to download.' Pizzagate primed Ms. Gilbert for QAnon, which she discovered through the YouTube videos of a British psychic.... For her, QAnon was always less about Q and more about the crowdsourced search for truth. She loves assembling her own reality in real time, patching together shards of information and connecting them to the core narrative...."

"From A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling/Valerie Gilbert posts dozens of times a day in support of an unhinged conspiracy theory. The story of this 'meme queen' hints at how hard it will be to bring people like her back to reality'" (NYT).

The article assumes this woman was a person of the left who — encountering QAnon — flipped into a right-winger. But it's pretty clear that the conventional left/right divide doesn't explain her. She's into New Age and conspiracies and fitting interesting, exciting ideas together. It's a quality of mind, a way of being, a way to feel and to have fun with your mind and with the internet.

"I’d like to hear your point of view. I also acknowledge that you are personally insulting me right now. I don’t give permission to myself to be insulted."

"So thank you for insulting me. But now let’s declare our values and our action plan for those values and get the personalities out of the way altogether."

Said Deepak Chopra, quoted in "How to Have a Disagreement Like an Adult, According to Deepak Chopra/The longtime New Age celebrity has a working theory about how we can all get along. Your mileage may vary" (NYT). The quote is offered as something he might say in response to someone who has attacked him verbally.

I like the creamy center: "I also acknowledge that you are personally insulting me right now. I don’t give permission to myself to be insulted. So thank you for insulting me." I think the beginning — "I’d like to hear your point of view" — is a good buffer to the central part, and might keep "thank you for insulting me" from seeming too sarcastic. But I think the ending is weird and alienating — "declare our values" and "our action plan." It's so aggressively impersonal. I can see wanting to get "personalities out of the way" — to rise above the insults. But it's so coldly corporate. I feel like I'm at a crushingly boring meeting. Can't we be a little personal? Are personalities really out of the way when you swap in declarations of values and action plans or are you just demanding a form of conversation that fits your personality and puts me at a disadvantage?

"Is modern Western life anathema to the effort needed for the kind of spiritual development you espouse?"/"Yes. Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts —"

"Those are the daily attention-grabbers that make it so that you can’t come from your mind to your heart to your soul. The soul contains love, compassion, wisdom, peace and joy, but most people identify with the mind. You’re not an ego. You’re a soul. You’re not psychologically full of anxiety and fear.... If you identify with the ego plane, you’ll find you’re in time, you’re in space, you’re a little body. But go to the spiritual heart, and there will be a doorway to the next plane of consciousness: soul land. My guru once called me over after I threw a plate of food at a Westerner at the ashram. Maharaji said: 'Ram Dass! Is something the matter?' I told him my complaints about the Westerners who were hanging around, and he got a glass of milk and fed it to me, and he said, 'Now, you do it for them.' So I fed the milk to every one of the Westerners. It made me feel good in my heart. Feed them. Love everybody."

From "Ram Dass Is Ready to Die" (NYT), where I learned that old lectures by Ram Dass — most famous for a 1971 book called "Be Here Now" — will be available in a podcast called "Here and Now." Ram Dass, a contemporary of Timothy Leary's, is quite old now, 89, and he is speech impaired (after a stroke).

The interviewer asks him if he worries "that all these individuals turning inward rather than outward are doing it as a way of avoiding political engagement?" He says:

Social action and spiritual work are not mutually exclusive. The witness witnesses the politics or the many games we play. In the long run, this is beneficial to individuals and the culture.

Yes, that feels like an explanation of what I've been doing here these last 15  years.

The interviewer pushes him about Trump. What would he say to Trump? Answer: "Identify with your soul." The interviewer snarks: "That would take some work." Answer: "No." The interviewer continues: "No? Am I being unfairly judgmental?" Answer:

On my puja table [altar] is Donald Trump. When I look at his picture, I say to him, “I know you from your karma, and I don’t know you for your soul.” And I am compassionate about that soul because he has heavy karma.

And let me give you the part that explains the title of the article. The interviewer says, "You’ve said that you’re ready to die. When did you know?" Answer:

When I arrived at my soul. Soul doesn’t have fear of dying. Ego has very pronounced fear of dying. The ego, this incarnation, is life and dying. The soul is infinite.... The soul witnesses the ego and witnesses thoughts. “Be here now” gives people an opportunity to reidentify outside of their thinking-mind ego and into that thing that’s called the soul. It is the perspective from which we could live a life without being caught so much in fear. To reidentify there is to change your whole life.

But what about political engagement?!

"Alternative treatments, rituals and metaphysical organizing principles... Astrology and tarot cards... Sound baths and other forms of 'energy medicine'" — all are finding their way into the realm of the clinical psychologist.

I'm reading "Now Therapists Have to Figure Out Astrology, Tarot and Psychedelics/Patients are confronting psychotherapists with a fresh pile of really useful challenges" (NYT).

“A lot of things in psychology were once considered edgy and alternative,” said Charlynn Ruan, a clinical psychologist and the founder of Thrive Psychology Group in California, who said she is learning about different alternative treatments and approaches. “I’m not teaching it, but I’m not saying you can’t bring this into the room. That would be disempowering and arrogant.”...

In Los Angeles — likely the wellness capital of the world — plant medicine, shamans, astrology, reiki and sound baths come up frequently in sessions. “In L.A., you’ve always said, ‘My therapist says’ — that’s not a weird thing to say,” said Kristie Holmes, a therapist with Thrive in Beverly Hills, Calif. “But now name-dropping a shaman is normal.”...

According to many therapists who spoke to The New York Times, the patients bringing up these approaches in general tend to skew female, younger and more affluent....

The young, well-off females of California — so important in our culture.

When these topics do emerge, mental health professionals often see them as ripe for exploration....

I assume anything the patient thinks or believes is "ripe for exploration" to a therapist. The question is whether science-based therapists are accepting astrology, tarot, and the like as alternative medicine. Are the therapists supporting and reinforcing pseudoscience? Where is the professionalism?

[W]hile the American Psychological Association doesn’t have an official stance on alternative practices, it maintains an evidence-based practice policy, said Lynn Bufka, the associate executive director for practice, research and policy at the organization.

Why don't they have an official stance? I note that this NYT article doesn't allow comments. I'd like to read what NYT readers — especially professionals in the field — think of supposedly professional therapists using utter junk in their practice.

In Chicago, Nicolle Osequeda, a therapist and the clinical director of Lincoln Park Therapy Group, said that some of her patients who have lost loved ones are seeking out mediums to feel a connection. She also hears from clients who have seen intuitive healers and done reiki. “I don’t find them to be competing things,” Ms. Osequeda said. “I do very different things than a reiki practitioner does.” In general, she supports the use of any safe methods that her patients find helpful....

Well, anything might be helpful. Flipping a coin. A Magic 8 Ball.

“There are times when there are feelings that come out of nowhere, and I don’t know how to describe them,” said Abby Mahler, a 25-year-old [patient] in Los Angeles. During those moments in therapy sessions, she has found herself talking about tarot, as well as internet memes, to communicate. Ms. Mahler said her therapists have realized that “when I bring up tarot or a meme, it’s because I don’t have the verbal ability to describe what I need to and this is just a tool to do it.”

Tiana Clark, a 35-year-old in Nashville, has gone to therapy on and off for the past two decades. She became interested in crystals, online tarot readings and astrology apps like Co-star this year, after experiencing burnout and extreme anxiety. “You’re breaking down your thought patterns and behavior patterns in therapy, and that’s kind of what you do in astrology,” she said. “If something seems applicable, like if I read something on Co-star, I feel comfortable peppering in those details as I’m walking through certain traumas.” In the future, Ms. Clark said she may not need a therapist who “understands the healing power of crystals.” But for now, it feels right.

Are therapists open to this nonsense lest the clients walk away?

"For Marianne Williamson and Donald Trump, religion is all about themselves/The conviction that you can shape the world with your mind is an American tradition."

By Tara Isabella Burton (in WaPo). This is a fantastic article, full of detail and useful connections spanning American history. Excerpt:

But Williamson has more in common with President Trump than she — and indeed many voters — might admit, and it’s not just that both have used personal celebrity as a springboard into politics. At their core, both are also prime representatives of one of the most important and formative spiritual trends in American life: the notion that we can transform our material circumstances through faith in our personal willpower. Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality and Williamson’s woo-inflected belief in the power of “self-actualization” both come from the quintessentially American conviction that the quickest and surest route to Ultimate Reality can be found within ourselves....

Trump... has spoken openly about his family’s long and close relationship with Norman Vincent Peale, a 20th-century writer well-known for his best-selling 1952 book, “The Power of Positive Thinking.” While Peale was formally a Christian — he was the pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in New York for more than 50 years — his writings were suffused with the idea that you can transmute and augment yourself through sheer mental exertion. “Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” he wrote. “Never permit it to fade.” By thinking it, his readers would make it true....

Waves of what you might call “intuitional religion” have been washing across the American religious landscape since the First Great Awakening of the 18th century... New Thought, which flourished in the mid-1800s, was heavily shaped by the Transcendentalist philosophers of the previous generation, writers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that the human self was the closest thing we have to a reflection of the divine. For these thinkers, organized religion — indeed, every mainstream institution — inhibited people from trusting their divinely sanctioned intuition, which they saw as the most direct path to truth....

"Why Corporations Want You to Shut Up and Meditate/Ron Purser’s new book McMindfulness examines how spiritual practices and self-care became tools for corporate compliance."

Headline at The Nation. Excerpt:

Rooted in a centuries-old Buddhist meditation practice, mindfulness, like the religion it originates from, is based on the Four Noble Truths, the first of which loosely translates to “Life is suffering.”...

Today’s corporatized mindfulness is largely a do-it-yourself practice (with countless books, meditation apps, podcasts, gurus, and seminars) filling the vacuum of a lonely culture obsessed with self-optimization, mind hacks, and shortcuts to self-care. Modern mindfulness is often sold as evidence-based, sanitized of any cultural baggage—neuroscience with a dash of what Jon Kabat-Zinn, known as the father of the modern-day mindfulness movement, calls “the essence of Buddhism.” It’s at once secular and clinical yet sacred....

The article is written by Zachary Siegel, who interviews Ronald Purser (author of "McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality"). Excerpt:

ZS: Your book chronicles various spiritual movements rising and falling in America—the rise of New Age in the 1970s and Transcendental Meditation in the ’90s. Who is behind the mindfulness boom?

"I try not to get too New Age-y. I don’t talk about things being 'for a reason.' But I do think the more unexpected something is..."

"... the more there is to learn from it. In my case, what was it that made me skip down the hallway to the kitchen thinking I was fine when I’d been in a wheelchair six months earlier? It’s because I had certain optimistic expectations of myself, and I’d had results to bear out those expectations, but I’d had failures too. And I hadn’t given the failures equal weight."

Said Michael J. Fox, about breaking his arm, quoted in "Michael J. Fox on acting with Parkinson’s, taking the wrong roles and staying positive: ‘Until it’s not funny anymore, it is funny’" (NYT).

I also learned that Fox's brother-in-law is the writer Michael Pollan. Pollan's latest book is about psychedelic drugs, so the interviewer asks Fox if he's used any psychedelics. He says:

No. But one of the things that happened when I got my spinal surgery was, when I came out of the anesthetic, I was hallucinating like crazy. I thought the coat slumped on the floor against a chair was a gorilla; the floor was a miasma of swirling proteins. Really weird. So I certainly related to parts of that book. I liked the idea in the book that it’s possible that powerful psychedelic experiences are basically brain farts, but that doesn’t mean we have to devalue their importance....

"Colleen McCann is a former fashion stylist who now offers a full array of shamanic services — crystals, sage-burning, energy-channeling..."

"... for a client base of music executives, admen, fashionistas, Wall Street titans and staffers for the lifestyle empire known as Goop (she’s its in-house shaman and crystals expert). One of her specific market niches: scrubbing bad energies from their wardrobes. It all started one night a decade ago, she says, when she was trying to get a 2 a.m. sandwich at a New York bodega. She was struck by a clairvoyant vision — a voice, really, that warned her of a fight that was about to occur over the price of the bananas. What followed was a long string of coincidences, strange encounters and psychic consultations, somehow culminating in her enrollment in shaman school."

From "The wellness revolution has reached its shamans-for-hire stage" (WaPo).

And doesn't it always go like that? It starts with a sandwich... and then visions of bananas....

"The 'spiritual but not religious' of now is not the old New Age."

"What I have been seeing is that this version has much more depth. It has a lot of substance. The conversation I have on the show is really intelligent — we value the life of the mind. It’s not something that is in a category of "This is where my emotions and my spiritual life are" — it shows up in how people do their jobs or the workplaces they want to create or how they think about their life trajectory.... I grew up in an immersive southern world that had all the answers. I do love deep religious conviction, and I really honor that, but I like the idea that we can hold that in a creative tension with a real humility before mystery."

From a long New York Magazine article, "On 'On Being' Krista Tippett tends to her flock in the Church of the Spiritual (but not necessarily religious)" — which is teased on the front page with a phrase that caught my attention: "has made NPR the center of a new New Age":



The phrase "NPR the center of a new New Age" isn't in the article, but there's this:

Th[e] decline in religiosity, particularly among the more educated, urban classes, has meant less community, less ritual gathering, less time for quiet contemplation; that, in turn, has meant more yoga classes with earnest cooldown dharma talks, more meditation studios and acupuncture. It’s meant that SoulCycle and CrossFit and Tough Mudder all have begun to fulfill roles previously occupied by churches and synagogues and mosques.

It has also meant boom times for Krista Tippett and her gentle, quiet, Sunday-morning voice piping through NPR, suggesting a version of spirituality for the cultural one percent, a population fried out on bad news and dire predictions. “On Being” is not about naming the world’s many ills, but it is not about escapism, either — not premium television, or sports, or luxury ecotourism. It’s about imagining a more beautiful, thoughtful, generous way of existing that is neither hopeless nor instrumental but is instead thoughtful and questioning and open.....

ADDED: Phrase in the teaser that I only noticed after publishing this post: "Krista Tippet Is a Religion." Ack!

AND: I notice that NY Mag has 2 different spellings of the name of the person they published a very long article about. Editing!

"For years, [Tchiya] Amet had been trying to make the world listen to her account of a powerful man [Neil deGrasse Tyson] who had once assaulted her and derailed her life."

"Mainstream publications, including BuzzFeed News, were unable to adequately corroborate the events from so long ago, and did not publish her allegations. And internet commenters assailed her character and New Age lifestyle. Her claims may have stayed buried forever, if not for the women who saw in Amet’s story a shadow of their own. 'I saw that her credibility was being questioned in a way that honestly had a lot of racist and sexist and anti-religious undertones,' Allers said. 'I kinda figured if I had any credibility to lend to that so that she’s taken more seriously, I should do that.'"

From "Nobody Believed Neil deGrasse Tyson's First Accuser. Now There Are Three More/No one believed Tchiya Amet when she said Tyson had raped her in the 1980s. Now, three other women tell BuzzFeed News that he harassed them, including one who’s sharing her story publicly for the first time" (BuzzFeed).

What was the New Age religion that that seems to some people to discredit Amet? We're told that after the time of the alleged rape...

Amet would never return to science (though she tried, twice, to reenroll in graduate school, with a focus on historical African astronomy). She got married, homeschooled her two kids, moved into a small one-story house on an Indian reservation in Northern California, and then got divorced. She sang in a reggae band, and fully adopted a New Age way of thinking about the universe — rooted in energy, astrology, and ancient teachings, rather than science.

In 1995, as part of what she calls her spiritual healing, she changed her name to Tchiya Amet — which means “rebirth” and “truth” in Hebrew. “I did not want to identify with Staci — I wanted her to be dead,” Amet said.

Amet "wrote a rambling blog post, as fragmented and disjointed as her memories of the incident, titled “I Survived RAPE by Neil de Grasse Tyson; The Blue Lotus Speaks!”

From Neil de Grasse Tyson's own response:

For me, what was most significant, was that in this new life [30 years later], long after dropping out of astrophysics graduate school, [Amet] was posting videos of colored tuning forks endowed with vibrational therapeutic energy that she channels from the orbiting planets. As a scientist, I found this odd....

When does religion discredit a complainant? I don't think the answer should be when it seems flaky to people who would be deferential to a member of a mainstream, traditional religion. When a person adopts a new religion, it says something about what's been going on in that person's life, and a shift from centering in astrophysics to obviously unscientific ideas about planets and energy looks very significant, but which way is it significant? It could mean this person doesn't adhere to real-world facts, but can also raise inferences that something terrible happened to her and changed the course of her life. Whether the terrible something was Neil de Grasse Tyson is another matter.