Carrying on from my previous post, what good is it to someone to see that they are 'suffering from Apollo'? The concept that one is troubled by a God is plain ridiculous...Besides the philosophical and spiritual arguments can go nowhere, surely it is more important to find solutions, to act in a way to counteract the threat, or the disease; to apply the remedy in a rational way.

But I'm arguing for the myth.
Even for the concept of Apollo.

A mythic view of a pathology creates a distance, a space before action in which the patten that lies underneath the situation may be noticed and if not changed, then at least brought to consciousness. Seeing the patten and glimpsing the context that creates and supports the pattern provides choice...

But the main reason why myths/fantasy are important is that this is the language of the mind, the only way sometimes, to see what is required to restore balance.

James Hillman follows on from Jung and Campbell, explaining mythology in the modern world: and the care of soul..

Apollo.

I was reminded this morning as I watched first a clip from an Adam Curtis program, then a short film of Jung, followed by a lecture by James Hillman of two things; how mythology is woven into the metaphorical fabric of our cultural heritage, and secondly how Apollo is the favored the god of the 20th and 21st century.




Atheism is no remedy; mythology is too deeply entwined in our culture, it recycles as cliche, as yet another Orpheus loses his head expressed in newspapers as 'Death of pop star- tragic, too young to die, Confirming the Orphic myth that art leads to madness and madness leads to art' etc etc.

But the most chilling examples of how mythology replays again and again is to be found in the stories of Apollo.

I find Apollo fascinating, he is so clearly the god of science, so obviously a squeaky clean New Age and acceptable substitute for the angry man, the god of the bible. Apollo, envisioned by Nietzsche as the god of the rational, favored by NASA who took him on face value as a sun god.


I start with Sophocles' Oedipus the King. It is a story both well known and resonates with recent times. Oedipus is a ruler of a country that is fast becoming the wasteland...there is plague, there is drought.

Thebes is a country under attack, so what should a good king do? The king tightens the borders of his country and decrees new laws to strengthen the state. But we, as inhabitants of a post-Freudian world all know that the king is culpable, that the king represents terrible crimes committed without knowledge.

It isn't too difficult to see that the a governments policy of closing down a country's borders to immigrants, and creating draconian laws to prevent terrorism are of the same nature as Oedipus's dilemma. The king is culpable, the king has committed the crimes of killing his father and marrying his mother. It is crucial to repeat that the king does not know what he has done. Yet even in knowing and admitting his own guilt the wasteland extends and the plague will continue until the god is satisfied.

Essentially Oedipus is the king who cannot see, so it is fitting that once Oedipus metaphorically sees the truth, he destroys his own eyes.

The king remains blind..

Well much could be said of the blindness of countries to the horrors inflicted upon myriad people by wars and 'interventions' in the name of Apollonian values of order, rationality, freedom; democracy.

But I'm looking for Apollo, and how Apollonian mythology works in our time.

The short answer to the question 'how does the Apollonian myth express itself is - it works now in much the same as it did when Oedipus Rex was written.

The next question is, 'why search out the deeper meanings to the origins of Apollo?'
The answer is that knowing the mythic antecedents to Apollo makes sense of both the play, and the pathology of our time...

Because we make the gods in our own image, and Apollo is the dominant god in Oedipus Rex.

As Walter Burkett and other's have clearly demonstrated, Greece was not entirely responsible for mythology, nor for the themes encoded in the symbolism of the myths; much of it was born in Mesopotamia.

Apollo is a combination of Enki (control/wisdom/purification..) and Nergal (plague arrows/war/Mars). The fact that Thebes was being ravaged by plague connects it with Apollo-Nergal.

A reference to plague arrows connecting Apollo with Nergal is to be found in the Iliad. Homer calls Apollo - hekebolos - 'the far-shooter'.

"Down he strode, wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders his bow and covered quiver. The arrows rattled on the shoulders of the angry god as he moved; and his coming was like the night. Then he sat down apart from the ships and let fly a shaft; terrible was the twang of his silver bow. The mules he assailed first and the swift dogs, but thereafter on the men themselves he let fly his stinging arrows, and smote; and ever did the pyres of the dead burn thick.

The connection with Enki is to be found in the Homeric Hymns:

Thus said Phoebus, exulting over her: and darkness covered her eyes. And the holy strength of Helios made her rot away there; wherefore the place is now called Pytho, and men call the lord Apollo by another name, Pythian; because on that spot the power of piercing Helios made the monster rot away.

Then Phoebus Apollo saw that the sweet-flowing spring had beguiled him, and he started out in anger against Telphusa...

So Phoebus Apollo kills a she-dragon, and the sweet waters begin to flow, recalling the killing of Tiamat and the control by Enki of the 'sweet water's' of the Apsu.

OK, very short, and very incomplete. It is well known that in most stories Mardock killed Tiamat, not Enki. The point is the dragon killer takes control of water and creates a place of prophesy...in Apollo's case, Delphi.

The hidden aspects of Apollo are war and plague; curiously envisioned in Christian mythology as a positive sign of 'end times'.

Libido.

Monsters from the id is an ironic title really, I do not consider there to be any monsters only consequences that are monstrous. For instance where does the energy come from that enables massacres, burnings, torture in the name of the good come from?

Why is it possible for people to act upon the most outrageously improbable explanations of reality, without stopping for a moment and questioning the image that they hold on to?

I assume that primal forces (hardwired needs and desires which may or may not be called libido depending upon whose definition you care to use) are blocked or ignored or forced to remain unconscious, then they either find an accidental way into consciousness or not.

If not, the theory is that they are there, close to detonation, like trip mines, waiting for any kind of disturbance; then the blocked psychic energy explodes...and yet ideologies act as fracture lines to enable atrocities to be committed, drawing paranoia from the deep wells of the mind, making rational the most unkind and despicable acts.

Life as arranged by most societies is a compromise between the deep inner forces and the outer forces or structures designed to moderate behaviour, rather than a solution.

In other words it isn't possible to find a society that produces mental health; but it is true to say that some societies are better than others!

There isn't a single solution; no one size fits all. But there are philosophies and religions to make sense of the myriad shock waves and interference pattens (our perception) arising from the flow and blocking of energy.

On the other hand, isn't it better simply to go for truth-seeking rather than truth-preserving as a way to tackle the infinite number of problems life gives us?

Here is the theory of truth-seeking as given to me by David Deutsch on the subject of relationships:

I think that relationships, to be functional, have to be either traditional or truth-seeking. Anything else is unstable to any problem that may come along-- and it will. By 'unstable' I mean that problems will tend to grow and cause distress and impairment of the parties' ability to function, and not be resolved.

By a 'traditional' relationship I mean one that follows a standard pattern that has evolved over many generations. Typically deviations from that pattern are taboo, and the parties define ‘morality’ as the habit of subordinating oneself to the pattern. Deviation from the pattern is identified with weakness and / or failure as a human being and is punished by psychological sanctions as well as guilt on the part of the deviant and (where the traditionalists have the power) physical sanctions too. The meme reproduces itself *and* provides a workable system by preventing change and hence sticking to what has worked before. A less pejorative name for it would be 'Truth-preserving' relationship. Needless to say, I hate and fear this phenomenon, but I think it is pointless to deny that under many circumstances it provides both stability and a lifestyle that the parties perceive as giving them fulfilment and happiness, and that deviants often do end up not only with ruined relationships but with other aspects of their lives ruined too.

Truth-seeking is the only other known way of providing stability (in any human enterprise, but in particular, in human relationships). The main (not the only) mechanism by which truth-seeking provides stability is that when people with opposing theories both seek the truth, and both make progress towards it, they tend to converge towards each other. But you can draw this last conclusion only if you believe that there is a *single* truth of the matter’ in regards the issue of dispute, and that this truth is also consistent with truths of other matters. In other words, it must be an objective truth, which means that it exists, and has stated properties, in reality.

The connection with TCS (and ARR) is this: people have differing theories in a wide range of areas-- factual, moral, aesthetic, and so on. The viability of traditional relationships depends on suppressing all but the favoured theories, but the viability of a consensual relationship depends on *solving the problems* that these conflicts create. And that’s only partially because the problems cause trouble if unresolved; it is also because the stream of knowledge created by solving problems (which is the only possible way of creating knowledge) is the positive fuel that powers relationships.

A letter.

Referring to my first post, and to the avowed aim of this blog, I am asking what is the female lineage and what happened to it, in this case specifically what happened to it in respect to Tibetan Buddhism, and what effect does it have to excise real women practitioners to put imaginary or desexulised ones in their place?

First of all, why does the Goddess have to be 'tamed'?

The Goddess as interpreted by men (from W. Berkertt -Homo Necans) is a terrifying force. The primal fear of death and the female's capacity to give birth and the hunter's guilt and elation at killing created a vision of the Goddess as blood thirsty, a force that needed to be controlled. Yet this image of female as murderous is confounded by reality, for a mother feeds and takes care of her baby and cries for her children should they die or be harmed.

It became obvious to practitioners of a religion that eschewed violence and killing that the Primal Mother -Goddess of the hunter- must be re-envisioned; a Goddess who now gave birth to phenomenon and her power must be controlled taken by a man, hence the title for a Tibetan Buddhist guru is Lama meaning High Mother.

On one hand ordinary women are dangerous distractions from practice, on the other thy are deeply symbolic beings, essential to help a man gain enlightenment (enlightenment as an inner union of male 'essence' with female 'essence'..or am I being too simplistic?)

Meanwhile for those of us in a relationship with someone who is a practitioner, it is probably going to end in betrayal. For anyone, a practitioner or not, anyone who does not need to conquer or tame or destroy human love will find being with someone who cannot respect partnership and reciprocal tenderness just mirrors the worst kind of relationship one finds in the ordinary, worldly-world.

My argument is that a practitioner, male or female should never treat his or her partner as a means to an end, that the word compassion (so frequently used!) cries out for feelings to be taken seriously, and the very fact that people abuse others in the name of 'Left-hand tantra', of breaking taboos for the hit of energy points to errors (putting it mildly!) in the interpretations of that word, compassion.

The mystery of Tantric Buddhism consists in ...
the manipulation of erotic love
so as to attain universal androcentric power.

Today I got a letter from a guy telling me that he was abused about sixteen years ago.

From a purely personal point of view I consider abuse to be long term betrayal; a catastrophe of missed connections, and insensitivity:

Essentially, betrayal means that one party in a relationship acts in away that favors his or her own interests at the expense of the other party's interests. In one sense,this behavior implies that the betrayer regards his or her needs as more important than the needs of the partner or the relationship. In a deeper sense, however, betrayal sends an ominous signal about how little the betrayer cares about, or values his or her relationship with, the betrayed partner.In particular, and as Gaylin (1984) noted, when those on whom we depend for love and support betray our trust, the feeling is like a stab at the heart that leaves us feeling unsafe, diminished, and alone. Psychologically, then, betrayal may be conceived as a profound form of interpersonal rejection with potentially serious consequences for the healthy functioning of the betrayed individual.
Reference.

I don't think that getting the law involved would help anyone, but I'm not sure...

The connection, between me and the letter writer?
Well it is Tibetan Buddhism, and the fact that I know his abuser and have no doubt at all that abuse took place.

If I was the abused guy, I think that perhaps I would go to the police.

The Bardo Thodol- The Tibetan Book of The Dead.

My theories regarding the play between reality and virtual reality (which I define for the purpose of this blog as the mental simulacrum of reality created within the mind via myriad neural connections) were derived from two main sources:

Primarily the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. I lived in a Buddhist center for three years, my Lama is Ato Rinpoche, during my time at the center I studied Torma with Lama Lodro -once the 'ritual master of Palpung monestry- whilst there I completed the Nundro, the preliminary practices of the Vajrayana.

Secondly, my theories were (and still are) explored during my experience of playing computer games; computer game provide the perfect opportunity to spot that moment when I 'cross over' into immersion; that moment when awareness of my physical self is lost, due to experiencing an artificial, totally engrossing environment.

Most people have heard of The Tibetan Book of the Dead -The Bardo Thodol.

The Bardo Thodal is one of several 'books of the dead', a kind of Necronomicon offering its possessor, instead of 'dead names' knowledge.

Unlike the Necronomicon, the Bardo Thodol guarantee's a safe passage through the experience of death and beyond. It has been described as a travel guide for the netherworld...

Like the Necronomicon, the Bardo Thodal has come from the East and is full of, if not of names, then full of words of power, but most significantly (for me, anyway) like the Necromomicon the Bardo Thodol has an imaginary -a virtual- aspect that is far bigger and more powerful and far more interesting than the book itself.

To a large extent the content of the Bardo Thodol is eclipsed by its reputation. Its recent history reflects Western myths distilled from a desire for transcendence, of dreams necessary to balance disappointments. Basically its allure comes from its rich language of symbols, something that has been excised from Western religion.

Thought The Bardo Thodol and Tibetan Buddhism appears to offer all that hum-drum Christianity can not: a perfect alternative to a clergy untainted by sex-scandals, and a history bathed in the blood of Holy wars, and the atrocities perpetrated by the Inquisition. It is more interesting to ask why similar stories of less than perfect conduct attached to the history of Tibetan Buddhism, are not believed.

So, what is within the Bardo Thodol?



The book, like Tibetan Buddhism, represents a promise of pure wisdom, an escape from the illusions and delusions of (the virtual realm of) ordinary mind, and the book (and the whole religion) with its status as esoteric, difficult to comprehend, and always absolutely good is in truth far from empowering.

Like all good abusers, the Bardol Thodol offers a slew of impossible promises and a host of impossible solutions for your imaginary problems.

The book and the religion always positions the student as in need of purification from obscurations (karmic tendencies/bad habits/ philosophically the ultimate bad habit is the willful failure to see through the error of believing in their own opinions).

The Bardo Thodol tries to tell you how...