genocide of the SOUL!
Fantasy or Imagination: Boundaries of capitalism and spirituality?



How much is your soul? Is spirituality now on sale, buy one get two for free?
Are we that fooled by the dominant ideologies that we can take some courses in some New age doctrine, and become enlightened spiritual beings?
Why are there some many self-help books? What is wrong with the modern new age fantasy? Is it another escapism that goes hand in hand with UFOs, conspiracy theories, remnants of cold war, hippies…and other dystopian utopias?
My stomach cannot handle the amount of recipes given by neo-shamans, neo-prophets, and healers that aim to bring spirituality into the heart and mind of ‘innocent’ civilians, or individuals. This new age movement is not an attempt to secularize culture, but to commodify spirituality. Sacred knowledge is now for sale. “Noble savage’ is incarnated in the image of a medicine man or a woman. First nations are now idealized, mythologizes, and sacralized. After the long and bloody history of colonized genocide, we are now colonizing their most intimate terrains, their spirituality. We’ve taken everything from them: their land, their lives, their voices, their cultures, languages…Now we are taking their soul away!!!
Another book is been published, another sacred warrior has been invented, another medicine woman brought peace of mind to some white rich woman…another way to destroy, another turn of the wheel of time..of biopolitics that attained enormous devastating capacity. Holocaust continues in its different manifestation to different nations, to those who are on the margins, on the edge…of the dominant culture. Smallpox, then land claims, reservations, forced education, deconstruction of values, alcohol,. now it is new age spirituality. We are doing everything possible to make them a fantasy, a product of our imagination. I guess it will be easier for the white dominant culture to be with Indians being extinct, and present only in this form of myths, as noble and spiritual savages, the one who gave us new meaning of spirituality…
Plastic shamans, new age spirituality are stomach upsetting events that are happening in the dominant culture. Is it because Christianity does not satisfy spiritual hunger, or hunger for some higher mystical experiences? Is Christianity lacking something? And here I am getting myself in a sticky realm…but I think that Christian dogma was busy justifying biopolitics during Inquisition, Holocaust, colonial conquest, and Hiroshima. Christianity is full of mysticism, and sacred terrains, but we lost them in the pursuits of power and control…yes, it is more complex than this. But it is also true.
By making plastic shamans, we are committing the worst possible genocide ..the genocide of the soul.
“I am sorry you soul just died…with a new bestseller of “Sacred Warrior…X”.

These are sonic airplanes and airships...

UFO? Myth or Reality?

"The imaginal realm is an inherently ambiguous world that stands between the corporeal and the spiritual worlds and must be understood in terms of both" (Sufi mystic quoted in Denzier 113)

Imagination is what should be a focal point of the discussion on UFO. However, we need not to confuse imagination with fantasy. Fantasy is an escapism, an empty flight from "reality". Imagination is symbolic, metaphoric, and dynamic form of knowledge. Imagination is what we feel, what we dream, what we fear, what we love, what we perceive before rationalizing. Anyway, the point I am making is that imagination should not be seen as something false. It is like myth, a powerful, yet, non-linear way of looking at the world.So, we need to locate UFO within this imaginary realm of culture. This is where we blend science and spirituality together. It is only within the umbrella of imagination, we can come to know what UFO is.UFO as a narrative started on the level of the individual. Then it was spread out within the whole society, promoting debates between sceptics, realists, and New Age spiritual movements....Someone saw something, interpreted it according to his/her worldviews (that are partly shaped by the religious views), then made conclusions about it, told his/her community...so the story began.UFO as an imaginative construction started on the national level. They needed to test their machinery in the face of the Cold War. They did not want to scare the public. They took ancient myths about 'vinams', Atlantis, and angels blended them with Biblical stories, and created UFO. So they could get away with flying objects in the public space without ruining status quo.UFO as a gateway to Outer spaces coincided with political, military, cultural agendas...It was another way of interpreting reality of the western world. And we can have as many interpretations as we chose. And we will be right. Because it is imagination that is limitless. If we chose to imagine UFO as a strategic mythologized manoeuvre, we are most likely to be right. If we imagine UFO as someone's experience, we are right too. UFO is subjective, and inter-subjective. It is a cultural phenomenon.As such it also offers hope; it mirrors cultural state of the mind, its shared system of meaning. "Seeing is believing" is what we attach to UFO. Indeed, with this myth, we started to look up at the sky, waiting, hoping...The sky opened itself to us. Horizons of our vision expanded. Even though we were waiting for Them. We were still looking. And we all know that the sky has the ability to heal. Once wounded by militarism, our imagination found ways healing itself by using that militarism as a tool to get our rational attention. What I am saying here is that even if UFO is a set up , it still enabled people to expand their symbolic consciousness.With this expansion, we got closer to the sky...to outer spaces, by expanding our inner ones.Imagination needs no separation, no dualities..It is a force that brings spirituality and science together. We imagine before we do...When we look up at the sky, our imagination brings the whole universe into our eyes. Both stare at each other, both see each other. And as Nietzsche said once "if you stare in the abyss for too long, the abyss will stare at you"...UFO is a mirror effect of imagination..And it is also Opened to interpretations.

UFO? Myth or Reality?
"The imaginal realm is an inherently ambiguous world that stands between the corporeal and the spiritual worlds and must be understood in terms of both" (Sufi mystic quoted in Denzier 113)

Imagination is what should be a focal point of the discussion on UFO. However, we need not to confuse imagination with fantasy. Fantasy is an escapism, an empty flight from "reality". Imagination is symbolic, metaphoric, and dynamic form of knowledge. Imagination is what we feel, what we dream, what we fear, what we love, what we perceive before rationalizing. Anyway, the point I am making is that imagination should not be seen as something false. It is like myth, a powerful, yet, non-linear way of looking at the world.
So, we need to locate UFO within this imaginary realm of culture. This is where we blend science and spirituality together. It is only within the umbrella of imagination, we can come to know what UFO is.
UFO as a narrative started on the level of the individual. Then it was spread out within the whole society, promoting debates between sceptics, realists, and New Age spiritual movements....Someone saw something, interpreted it according to his/her worldviews (that are partly shaped by the religious views), then made conclusions about it, told his/her community...so the story began.
UFO as an imaginative construction started on the national level. They needed to test their machinery in the face of the Cold War. They did not want to scare the public. They took ancient myths about 'vinams', Atlantis, and angels blended them with Biblical stories, and created UFO. So they could get away with flying objects in the public space without ruining status quo.
UFO as a gateway to Outer spaces coincided with political, military, cultural agendas...It was another way of interpreting reality of the western world. And we can have as many interpretations as we chose. And we will be right. Because it is imagination that is limitless. If we chose to imagine UFO as a strategic mythologized manoeuvre, we are most likely to be right. If we imagine UFO as someone's experience, we are right too. UFO is subjective, and inter-subjective. It is a cultural phenomenon.
As such it also offers hope; it mirrors cultural state of the mind, its shared system of meaning. "Seeing is believing" is what we attach to UFO. Indeed, with this myth, we started to look up at the sky, waiting, hoping...The sky opened itself to us. Horizons of our vision expanded. Even though we were waiting for Them. We were still looking. And we all know that the sky has the ability to heal. Once wounded by militarism, our imagination found ways healing itself by using that militarism as a tool to get our rational attention. What I am saying here is that even if UFO is a set up , it still enabled people to expand their symbolic consciousness.
With this expansion, we got closer to the sky...to outer spaces, by expanding our inner ones.
Imagination needs no separation, no dualities..It is a force that brings spirituality and science together. We imagine before we do...
When we look up at the sky, our imagination brings the whole universe into our eyes. Both stare at each other, both see each other. And as Nietzsche said once "if you stare in the abyss for too long, the abyss will stare at you"...UFO is a mirror effect of imagination..
And it is also Opened to interpretations.

Interpretations?! As an echo from last lecture, I am 'meditating' on this notion of interpretations as a stepstone towards understanding. It is important to make sense out of symbolic meaning of religious texts. When there are many communities that share the text, then how do they harmonize their philosophies? I do not want to sound redundant, but again the question of justification of any means or ends comes to the surface...If there is a text that may be understood from a number of different perspectives, then there is a possibility of multiple "right" answers. Now, 'right' and 'wrong' are merely adjectives...But the question of compromise remains opened. How do they achieve consensus among themselves with these 'free-floating' interpretational thing?
Now, the guest prof. mentioned that there is no individualism, but communal relations between individuals. She also emphasized this diversity that is again based on "interpretations". When speaking about consensus, she said that there is no need for "one umbrella" unity...COnfusing? Yes...And no...
Religion is historical. It is a process. When it becomes solidified in its historicity, it loses actuality, and stops serving its purpose. Religion needs to be a process. It goes along with politics, with the nation, with citizens, with individuals, communities....The past is memory. When we go back and check scriptures about what is right in the present or in the future, we go back 5 000 years in time...Symbolic meaning is coded. One can have as many interpretations as one wishes to have...NOw...what? what am talking about here?
Anthropological machine needs diversity of opinions, needs these miriadic process of making sense of the past...We need also remember that religion as an institutional system coincides with domestication and warfare. I think the problems we are facing right now are partly rooted in this religious determinism, where free floating messages of truth are taken out of the dynamic context, and become tools in the hands of further domestication...become wheels of the anthropological machine.
Before religion, there was magic...animate earth. Prof.McNab put it in a very nice manner: It is spirituality that lies at the center...Spirits communicate...And there is an ongoing dialogue, participatory and reciprocal. It is the spirit that gets information, then it becomes available to the body, so to speak. Is there an internal conflict here? No, there is a flow of meaning...not solidified truths.
I guess the problem I see with religions in general, is a problem of interpretations, with the Absolute....Monotheistic approach goes hand in hand with biopolitics.