I just learned about Twendr (yes, I’m a tad slow with these things; bit of a Luddite, really). I hate the baby-talk name; but anyway, it tells you about twitter trends as they happen by spotting keywords in people’s posts.  In other words, it just tells you what everybody is talking about in a global sense, in real time.

But think about how this could be applied to utilities like Google Street View and Google Earth and blogs and 4Chan and whatever remains of journalism in the twenty-first century, and every other frigging thing out there.

Think of where this is going. We’ve made maps, representations, of the real world since the beginning. We called them words and ideas and symbols and myths, and sometimes, actual maps. We learned to manipulate these representations. We realized we could use them to highlight certain facts and ignore others, and so could understand the real world better—and alter it to suit our interests.

We’ve had conflicts not only because our interests collide, but often because our representations of the world, our maps, feel more real than the actual world. Or they block out our view of the actual world. Indeed, we tend to bury our faces in our maps and forget to put them down and look where we’re going.

Get out your Hawaiian shirts, folks. Everybody’s a tourist.

But now comes the internet, which, among other things, is like a huge map—not only of physical space, but of cultural space as well. And with things like Twendr and Google Earth, we’re updating that map in nearly real time, with commentary.

I mean, the internet—I can’t say it’s alive, exactly; but it’s certainly some kind of evolving organic system. It’s a cyborg brain with people for neurons and electronics for synapses.

And the thing is: this vast representational network, this colossal meta-map, is becoming more complex every second, like some zygotic panopticon.

We can imagine a day when the map becomes more detailed than the territory. And as this happens, we’re developing biotech and nanotech that will one day give us the power to edit the physical world as easily as we can edit photos and documents.

The map, already approaching 1:1 scale, will bleed off the page and into the world, The word “reality” will have no meaning beyond the conversation about it, shifting with our desires and delusions. The medium will literally be the message. We will truly dwell in a collective hallucination that every saint and sinner, every starred commenter and asshat troll will tug and twist with all available might. Whether that hallucination will be consensual and mutually worthwhile, or if it’ll be a bad trip for some or all—that’s anybody’s guess.

But maybe, if we know we’re all hallucinating, we can choose to make it a good one; because we’ll know that every act, every idea we nurture, will contribute (however minutely) to what the next moment brings.

Maybe we’re already living in a Matrix-like world mediated by digital mapping and manipulation, and thereby shaped by the hopes and fears of the minds contained therein. Maybe the singularity happened a long long time ago, and we just don’t realize it. Maybe we’re gods and mortals by turns… fallen from Olympus with self-imposed amnesia and arbitrary limitations, just so we can experience the whole existence thing with fresh and passionate eyes—even if it means we also suffer, and are occasionally brutal to each other. I mean, it’s the challenge that makes the game worth playing, right?

Or maybe I’m just a lunatic, and you should ignore everything I’ve said here.

Choice is quite a thing, no?

You’ll note here that the use of the past-tense strongly implies that religion no longer has any value in evolutionary and social terms, and if you watch the talk you’ll see Dawkins imply that religion itself never actually did—that religion is just an unhealthy byproduct of healthy evolutionary imperatives. All of which is pure assumption / opinion on Dawkins’ part and nothing more.

But it got me to thinking I should write some more measured pieces about Atheism, considering my last one (the first post on metapunk written in anger, probably not the last, but hopefully one of only a few).

At the same time, Dawkins’ video led me to two far more intelligent discussions on the place of religion in the modern world.

The first, by SentientRaven, neatly sums up much of how I, and I think a lot of other spiritual people, feel about the subject:

SentientRaven makes three main points:

1) Concepts like Love and Democracy are words describing social conditions, not neurochemistry. It is the social context, not physiology, which is vital to understanding them. Likewise with God. God doesn’t have to exist physically to still be a relevant and meaningful social issue.

2) As concepts go, God is a really big, expansive one; bigger than any one religion, and something that no single work of scripture like the Bible or the Koran can do justice to. So, these works should be taken with a big grain of salt.

3) Religions (particularly Christianity and Islam), insofar as they rely on a single work of scripture as a source of eternal moral law, present a definite social problem. If these books are regarded as perfect and immutable, there is no way they can evolve and adapt to changing social conditions. There’s no way they can progress, or overcome the mistakes of the social & historical context they were written in. Human beings are not perfect, and there’s no way that our moral scriptures can be perfect either, so we should be able to revise them when we need to.

In other words: it doesn’t matter if God is real, a belief in God is not a problem, as long as you realize that God can’t be contained by a book, and that scripture shouldn’t keep us locked into antiquated moral and social systems.

This is an Atheist with an intelligent and informed opinion. One I really respect. I haven’t met many of those on the internet.

The second video is another one from ForaTV, this time by Sam Keen.

This is part of a larger video at: http://fora.tv/2010/03/11/Sam_Keen_In_The_Absence_of_God

I’ve never heard of Sam Keen before, but I’m going to pay more attention from now on, because again, here is a video that neatly sums up a lot of my own feelings about religion.

He basically says religions develop in 5 stages.

Stage 1: An individual person goes off by himself and has a primary, transformative experience of the sacred. These are people like Moses, the Buddha, Confucius, Jesus (and I would add, Mohammed, Rumi, Socrates, Heraklitus, and many others). Their experiences are symbolised by metaphors like Moses’ burning bush, or the ecstatic poetry of William Blake. Thus indicating that for whatever reason, these people have begun to see ordinary reality as something extraordinary.

To add my own thoughts here, this way of seeing things as sacred is perhaps best summarized by Martin Buber’s explanation of the two primary relations, an I to an It (secular, utilitarian reality), and the relation of an I to a Thou—the experience of boundless or sacred reality.

Stage 2 of a religion, according to Keen, is when disciples are so inspired by this primary figure that they begin to mythologize them. The individual becomes a legend, a superhuman being, born of a virgin or under auspicious star signs, or whatever, with miraculous powers and insight.

Stage 3 occurs when the holy individual’s revelations are turned into a theology—a systematic examination of the implications of the original experiences.

Stage 4 is the creation of a religious institution, a church or whatever, to preserve, continue, and communicate the theology.

Stage 5 is when the religious institution ends up competing with secular institutions, and thus sets its sights on notions of Empire and domination.

Of course, it’s never as clear cut as all that, but Keen feels that it’s in these later stages that religions become a problem. “Religion,” as a concept, is typically identified with the latter four stages; the mythology & theology, the institution and the drive to dominate. But that’s missing the point. “The essence of religion is none of those things,” Keen says, “The essence of religion is a series of primal experiences which belong to us only because we are born human and we share the human condition.”

In other words, the important stage—the primary experience of stage 1—is typically ignored by believers and non-believers alike, overshadowed by the other four. The implication of this is that we can all learn to experience the sacred; to see the world as awesome and extraordinary in a profoundly transformative way. We don’t need churches (or scientists or atheists, for that matter) to interpret these experiences for us or to tell us how to live as a consequence–especially if these people have not had these experiences themselves.

Heady stuff. But Keen is right on the money.

I guess this is why I’m personally so drawn to religions like Sufism and Buddhism and Aboriginal spirituality. In most forms of each, while there is some mythology & theology, and a tradition/institution, the institution remains communal, never reaching an authoritarian stage 5. And instead of overshadowing the primary experience; the mythology, theology, and community are all in the service of that first stage. They exist not to tell people what to think or how to behave, but to give people a path to discovering their own experience of the sacred; their own humanity.

It’s also why I get so annoyed at evangelical Atheists: they’re so preoccupied with the negative, stage 5 aspects of religion, that they’re wildly intolerant of the stage 1, without comprehending it much at all.

That’s enough for now. Look for part II later this week, when I will discuss these misconceptions in more detail, and outline why I believe this kind of vitriolic Atheism itself often sounds like a stage 5 religion, having started from stage 3, and skipping 1 and 2 altogether.

Anyway, a while back I read Chris’ piece on the meaning of life, and he reminded me of something very important. In a Western, post-existentialist context, the meaning of life often does boil down to creating your own meaning—your own religion. This echoes Nishitani, who points out in Religion and Nothingness that it’s pointless to ask the use of religion, because religion is the thing that helps you discover the use (or meaning) of everything else. It is your point of reference in an otherwise changing and confusing world.

So, while it’s true that traditional religions often fail for various reasons, it’s still important to have a religion, a way of making meaning, of some kind.

If you don’t already have one, such as the kind of thing you inherited from your parents, there’s a good chance you won’t think much about the issue of religion or meaning until you encounter a situation where life seems to lose meaning. But at that point, your quest will begin. Your only choice will be to rediscover (or reinvent) some framework for meaning, or succumb to despair.

In other words, you’ll have to create your own religion. There’s a lot of different ways to go about this. For some, it may be as simple as taking some existing religion and tweaking it… learning to understand it in a new way, or taking elements from another faith and incorporating it into what you already have.

For others, the process is more radical, and may involve combing through books on different religions and philosophies, and trying to distill out some commonalities; some collection of truths that makes sense to you.

Personally, I have found the latter path to be more rewarding. I’ve found it to be a lot like Worldbuilding (that is, constructing a fictional world for telling stories). Indeed, apart from language creation I find the creation of fictional religions to be the most enjoyable part of worldbuilding. You look at the way you want your culture, or your protagonist, or whomever follows the faith in question, to be. You want to look at the ways they get along with their faith or don’t, and in general what the religion you’re creating is trying to achieve.

I suppose it’s a little different if you want to develop a system of beliefs that you yourself are going to follow, but a lot is the same. You still want to figure out the ideal life you’re trying to live. Even if your new religion involves some notion of an afterlife, your focus should still be the kind of life you want to live—the person you want to be—while you’re waiting for that afterlife. Only by knowing this can you proceed to develop beliefs that will help get you closer to being the person you want to be.

I’ll give you a quick example of what I mean. I believe in an afterlife, and in reincarnation, and that life on Earth is a learning experience over successive lifetimes. An atheist might find such beliefs to be unfounded, not grounded in evidence. I certainly have no measurable evidence for reincarnation or the education of the soul, or anything like that. I have no evidence against it, either, but you’d still be justified in asking: why do I continue to believe in such things? Because I know that believing it gives me permission to be human. If I believe I get more than one shot at living a good life, I know I can make mistakes and still forgive myself. I’m a happier and more pleasant person because I believe in reincarnation. If I took the atheists’ view, that we’re here for a short time and then it’s over, and that all the major fuck ups of my life (which are numerous), were all for nothing… well, then I’d be miserable. So I don’t believe that.

Certain beliefs I hold simply because of the effect they have on me, not on the basis of either evidence or revealed “Truth.” I mean, for the most part these things can’t be proven one way or the other anyway, so why not believe in things that make me a better person?

It’s as simple as that: find or create beliefs (and practices, and art, and music, and rituals if that’s your thing) that make you and the people around you happy. A very good friend of mine once made a mix-CD for all his friends entitled: “Optimal Songs for Maintaining Awesomeness.” Well, that’s all religion is supposed to be—optimal beliefs (or whatever) for maintaining awesomeness.

Just remember in all of this that one person’s optimal mix isn’t necessarily going to work for somebody else. It’s not about “the one true way.” I mean, my belief in reincarnation works for me. Maybe for an atheist, the belief that he or she only gets one shot at life is an important motivation to get things right the first time. There’s something to be said for that, too.

The important point here is that no matter which way you go, you’re consciously exploring all of these different ideas aobut life, and understanding them for yourself. I think when people get really caught up in dogma and self-importance, it’s often because they have failed to really look at their beliefs objectively, and to look behind the words at the spirit of what is being said—WHY it is being said at all.

So, in my last post I promised homework. Here it is: If you aren’t already doing so, make up your own religion. Heck, make up three or four for kicks. Just because you decide to believe one thing now, doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life. Religion should be flexible, always with an eye toward making people happy and healthy.

This isn’t an excuse to be a moral relativist—we can’t just do whatever we want and damn the consequences; that’s not meaningful or mature (and in the long run won’t make us or anyone else happy). Find good ethics and live by them—just leave yourself room to breathe.

I think I’ve rambled on enough about this. You get the idea.  Religion is something we ought to play with; not something we have to be grim about.

People of Walmart

A friend of mine recently told me about the People of Walmart website, featuring pictures of Walmart shoppers in various states of dress as they go about their business, and occasionally, their vehicles. Some of them are silly, some are disturbing, but most of them are simply a slice of someone’s life, replete with all the assumptions you can make about that life based on a photograph.

But there’s something terribly, tragically human about these photos, and it occurs to me that Dukkha is never more apparent than in a Walmart. Dukkha is a Buddhist word from the Pali language that usually translates to “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It refers to the desperation of the human condition as we pass from life to life through the cycle of Samsara.

Dukkha is the sense that no matter what you do, your life is never complete; that we are never quite whole. Dukkha is in all the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we overcompensate for our insecurities, and for the endless longing we wish we didn’t feel. Dukkha, the Buddha says, arises because of craving attachment—wanting, or desiring life to fit our ideals when it cannot realistically do so. Dukkha is the siren song that calls to us, compelling us to fill that hole in our souls with money, objects, sex, drugs, and so on, as we attempt, quite unsuccessfully, to address existential concerns with material things.

So there are those people in the Walmart, lost in a desperate struggle to get by, to belong, to figure out who they are… spiritual refugees of a globalized, consumerist world.  They are a mirror for us all.

I’ll leave you with a song: Blood, Milk, and Sky by White Zombie.

The siren sings a lonely song / of all the wants and hungers
The lust of love a brute desire /  the ledge of life goes under
Divide the dream into the flesh / Kaleidoscope and candle eyes
Empty winds scrape on the soul /  but never stop to realize
Animal whisperings / intoxicate the night
Hypnotize the desperate /  slow motion light
Wash away into the rain / Blood, milk, and sky
Hollow moons illuminate / and beauty never dies
Running wild running blind / I breathe the body deep
1,000 years beside my self / I do not sleep
Seduce the world it never screams / dead water lies
Ride the only one who knows / beauty never dies

Songwriters: John Tempesta, Rob Zombie, Jay Noel Yuenger, Shauna Yseult Reynolds

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

I disagree. Sometimes you have to look long and hard to understand what happiness is before you can pursue it. And the meaning of life… well… If you’re always looking for a purpose, it certainly is hard to live—but if you don’t have one at all, living is even harder.

I’ve created the Holodoxy category to summarize the results of my own fumbling search for the meaning of life.  Take from it what you will—it’s a work in progress.  If you’re feeling brave, maybe you can help me refine it.  Constructive criticism is always welcome.

*I’m only joshing—I’ve never read Camus—I just found that quote on the Internet.  When it came down to a choice of which existentialist philosopher to explore for further reading, I picked Buber.  If it helps, I plan to read Camus…

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