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.

Chomsky on Science and Rationality
ANd politics

After discussion this evening on science/religion with respect to national security and the development of nukes, I came across this article by Chomsky: http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/95-science.html

I think that this article may add an interesting spin on my blog on islam and science.

Science /Rationality/Faith..and NATURE
I thought I would bring some parts of my written reflections in this blog for the purposes of larger public involvement and participation.
So here are my thoughts on the article "Islam and Science" by Masood published by Nature. First I would like to think of the questions of rationality and faith through a new prism of understanding, not the one we discussed with the help of Noble, but the one that kind of resonates with the modern state of the world.
So, in this new prism, the focal point is conflict. One of the first reactions we get when we think of science and religion is conflict, a conflict of interests. They bounce of each other, making a mess...confusing the public, or innocent civilians. Conflict is a conflict. It is an organized violence, controlled by institutionalized laws..
But we know that science and religions are not merely two opposing forces. On contrary, they complement each other in this strive to institutionalize structures, to naturalize laws, and to promote and impose certain attitudes and values. Indeed, science supported by 'the morality' of religion attains supremacy in the eyes of the public, or rather society as a whole. We accept it because it is how it is. ..he he..
Legitimacy of technological development, nuclear weapons, in particular, arises from a deep and sticky realm of religious dogmas not only in the west but throughout the world as the article clearly illustrates. Different parts of the world are on a mission to protect themselves from the other, to achieve security in their subjective worlds of ignorance, forgetting that we are all bound together on this planet. And we are all affected by each other. And ultimately, there is no other...But anyway, driven by ideal transcendence, or sacred duties, countries develop nukes to overpower..Evil powers whatever they are...to feel good. The question again arises whether we would know what peace is without knowing what war is. Indeed, it is a vicious cycle. And religion is at the roots, in the middle, and at the end of this race towards rationality.
Helbawi, one of the muslim religious leaders, says that science is basically a tool, and "both science and technology can be used to deter aggression, a justification..for developing a nuclear deterrent.. And science has a role in strengthening religious belief" (Masood 5). This idea just proves what I have been saying above. The world is not going to be a better place if people keep building weapons to promote justice or peace, or whatever...Hidden in their little worlds of arrogance, religious communities spread the anxiety of the upcoming end, of an imaginary aggressor, of some other entity that may become a potential threat to their own power...But who are these aggressors?? who is the other? If I look in the mirror, I see myself but from the other side..is that side me? no, that is not me, that is the other side of me..Without the mirror, there is no reflection, no other image...But that Other is essentially me. What I am trying to get here is that the other as a concept is ultimately an illusory concept.
Anyways, in terms of anxiety..and conflict...and this beliefs in the other as aggressor...My point is that conflict first arises at the bottom of the heart of each individual in her/his attempts to understand intersections between rationality and intuition, as an example.This conflict is a subtle feeling that emerges as an idea, than spreads onto the whole community as anxiety. Individual is never isolated, he or she exists in a community. So driven by this anxiety, he or she goes to a larger community for the purposes of larger discussions and debates about these thoughts on what is right or wrong...So here we go and discuss these matters, or engage in some activities that would help us understand better these matters. If we happen to find others who share our views, we form coalitions that may become future alliances. Our anxiety is lessened because 'I' is now many. Then if we belong to any religion that gives us satisfaction, we enlarge our alliances to include religious members in order for us to have a some kind of legitimate status.
Once we know we have all means to exist, we look for ends, and again we look at scriptures for meaning. We also know of other groups that have different scriptures and therefore may have different meanings. This idea underpins our notion of peace...if we are right, then those others are wrong. And if they are wrong, they may do something that is wrong..and this may promote further evil..and turn against us..and therefore they are 'The Other, which is potentially aggressor. Here we have anxiety that overwhelms and pushes us to the edge. We start looking for tools to defend, to protect ourselves...we anticipate aggression.
And we build weapons. If our religion permits us to destroy the other, we build something so destructive that is evil in itself...but nevertheless, we possess this evil. we are in control of it..and therefore we are justified in having this evil. And here we have nuclear powers, the symbol of destruction that permeates the whole of the 21st century. Vicious cycle? Naturalized conflict between science and faith?
Speculation?....
reality is that instead of achieving higher morality and pure consciousness, religion turns out to be a means for justifying destruction.....and so on

Zones of Representation of Anthropological Machine/ Biopolitics
or Camp Society!


What do we think when we say 'I am going camping'? Well, we usually mean some kind of 'nature' activity. Camping is what we do for recreation purposes. it is a hobby, weekend, entertainment...sports..whatever. And 'we' are western. We go shopping, schooling, working, driving, watching [tv], and CAmping. It sounds redundant, but I want to emphasize the role of action-interaction-living in these taken for granted activities.
Hey, camping is natural...some may say. Or rather, it is good for us as it involves 'nature'. Hehe...I would say that 'camping' as an idea, as a political tool, as a larger instrument of biopolitics or Anthropological machine (both are interchangeable) has been naturalized and neutralized. And as a product of a long sociocultural construction, camping gets embedded into our psyche.
Camping as a way to get away from the city is one of the examples of "the camp politics". The basic idea is to set up boundaries, to sharpen edges, to zone natural and cultural spaces. Reading Athena we see how biopolitics needs camps to promote its discourse. Taken to its extremes, camp as a way to dehumanize and destroy those who are Others stands out as a blank spot in the western history. We think of such events as something that had passed...away..in a sense. It is a dead matter. WE become comfortably numb to such events as it is history, and history is the past. We look for the future and go camping.
"Concentration Camp is a technology of giving birth to the nation's cleansed and pure future...It is also a means for the inscription of calculable and quantifiable life in the nation-state and its attendant biopolitical regimes of the normal" (Athena 148)

So..let's not look at camps. let's look at cities, at countryside..at everything we see around us..There are spaces within spaces, places and areas:streets, parking lots, highways, malls, residential areas, suburbs, airports..what have you. Naming them is easy as they are spatially segregated in accordance to their social, economic, political purposes. And when we look at such spaces, we should think of Zones...Recreational zone is one of the examples.
Zones of exclusion, exception, acceptance, resistance [resistance is imaginary abstract zone of psychic space where language becomes the only instrument;as Athena says the language of the other is archaic]. Biopolitics needs zones: they become institutionalized (as refugee camps, prisons, airport transition zones etc]; ideologized (going camping as natural]...Zoo is a perfect example of an incarnated, ideologized, civilized, "humane" concentration camp.
And once we start looking at politics of space as something that has its roots way back in the days of nazi regimes, colonialism, inquisition....we start to see the other side of it. Incarnated society of camps celebrates power over the Other, over standing reserve nature with all its species, over time and space...Yes, we do not have concentration camps...but what we have is a camp society. The former was very destructive in a short term. The latter is a lasting process of mass annihilation..and mass here is not only human but planetary...:
"If there is anything new about the technoscience of western postmodern biopolitics, it would be that it complicates, decentralizes, proliferates, and intensifies the differentiation of power involved in the definitions, images, fantasies, and representations of humanity...Biopolitical discipline tends to be less visible, more subtly dispersed and systematically integrated in the discrete banality of cultural fabric...This dispresion does not imply that contemporary biopolitics entails necessaryly less authoritative violence, but rather it involves a multitude of recognized ..techniques of violence through which ...conditions...are confirmed" (Athena 145)

Instead of going camping let us just go..away...out...or inside out...to the very edge, to the margins and periphery of constructed realities...to the very limits of humanness...Because "it is the limit that creates the event of life..." (Athena 127). And by limits I mean art as expression (I think it's Anny's idea). Instead of camps, let's take what is already there and live in it (Hobbits society living in natural houses-caves)...And yes, I am dreaming, hallucinating, imagining...It is utopia, but it is necessary to question our participation in biopolitics.

Science and Spirituality reflect each other in WATER!

Sacred Water and Scientific Discoveries (as I promised to name the famous Japanese scientist). Here are some of the links that may be useful in illustrating what I have been talking about.

http://www.hado.net/index2.html

And one more http://www.life-enthusiast.com/twilight/research_emoto.htm
http://www.masaru-emoto.net/english/entop.html

Essence of Technology? Additional knots in this labyrinths of meaning of technology and spirituality
And of course, Heidegger and his essence of technology...What is so enigmatic about Heidegger? Is it his charismatic way of writing, a combination of poetry and analytic philosophy? Anyway, essence is what needs to be taken into the account of meaning. As we move along the landscape of ideas, we tend to miss essential moments of technocultural intersections. And this is where Heidegger comes into play.so essence...of technology is enframing..something that orients humans towards their destiny, something that frames destiny into meaning..."as a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering" (p.27). Hmm, ordering is some ultimate goal as in Noble's analysis...Order is what we want. Predictability and Mastery. What about chaos theory?
Nevertheless, this illusion of the mastery has been so powerfully constructed that it becomes reality. Agamben would say that this reality is what closes humanity in perceptual worlds, it is what separates them from animality or the open space of relationships. This illusion has its roots in the biblical myths of man dominion over nature. This illusion makes technology. This is what rules the anthropological machine. "...the posture of lord of the earth..In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists insofar as it his construct..This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion:it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself" (Heidegger 27). This mirrored reality makes us the machine more humane...becomes a reflection of our values and motivations...It is an illusory, yet, real construct that empowers humans as humans. Perhaps, we need some other than human entity (not nature) but something constructed or created to feel all the power of being humans. It is the other that makes the self, at the end of everything. The other can be a machine that represents self's ideas. So the self is perfected with this other's constructed reflection.
Yet, Heidegger, admits that "man never encounters his essence"....Essence is something slippery, something that is not easy to realize or understand. The problem is not technology, but the essence of technology. Human essence reveals itself in a human-constructed essence of technology. And here is where a potential danger hides. The danger "of enframing [that] threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.."(28). This is what frightens us. Perhaps, in order to manifest something, to create and to reveal, something always has to be destroyed first, concealed..destruction and creation are those two poles that are bind together beyond any dualistic constructions. This is why Heidegger quotes some poet: .."where danger is, grows the saving power also..."

Timeline of Ideas or Incarnation of Meanings of Technology
From Noble's The Religion of Technology to Heidegger, we travel through the landscape of ideas on technology. WHat is technology in relation to one's being, in relation to humans quest for knowledge? How do those ideas manifest themselves within the cultural discourse?
Noble illustrates a historical analysis of ideas, or rather ideological history of technology. Quest for knowledge to transcend the reality has been manifested by the means of technology. Religious underlying basis for this quest is a some sort of justification for technological development. Humans have been given this divine role to dominate nature in order to gain true knowledge of its laws to attain transcendence. As we can see they have been truly successful in its endeavor...windmills construction incarnated into aviation machinery, alchemy has been turned into chemistry, taxonomies into human genome project...secrets of the heart of matter into nuclear engineering..and the list goes on and on as we keep living on the planet, the global sacred.
As life changes with new technological tools, so does the culture and society. Once sacred becomes profane in this dynamic universe of meaning. But sacred attains new meanings. And these new meanings constitute new type of relationships. We move from spheres to globes as it says in Global Sacred, from reciprocal relations to abstracted communications. Digitization of human consciousness has occurred. The image of the globe as an object in empty space gives us a new meaning of life.Now we can look upon as opposed to look from within. Boundaries have been re-shaped and re-defined. We are now in,on, and above this new global sacred. Image of the planet is like a vaccine for altered states of mind and imagination. It is open for interpretation. Whatever we think life is, or life is about, we impose upon this image to gain entry into this global sacred. For example, corporations took this vaccine, Now they are able to move their commodities all over the world to gain efficiency and profit. Global Sacred is now a global sacred economical premise that rules globalization. Environmental movement has also taken this vaccine. Now we all care (or at least pretend to care) about global warming because we all share this global space and each of us is responsible for life per se. Global sacred has been put into a global agenda of environmental management, politics, education, economics...'modern consumer culture exploits the ambiguity of global images,completing the sign with its own, brand-specific signifers" (Szerszynski, 167).
Sacred is what defines boundaries of unknown, mysterious, and yet, familiar and domestic..It is not transcendence but empirical reality that needs to be taken into the account.
Indeed, global sacred is a new leap forward towards new consciousness. Harraway would call it an expansion of cybernetic, a hybrid of human and machine, nature and culture...Agamben would probably call it closed openness, where humans are faced with the reality of probability, yet, uncertain and finite. Noble would probably point out that the image of the globe does represent american missionary ideology, puts them in a position of a provider of meaning...a control base for justice...Nevertheless, it is sacred...Technology has brought sacred meaning to the whole notion of life.
We as members of a society also contribute to this meaning-making process, to the whole of cultural machine (or anthropoligcal machine). We participate in it, we get influenced by its constructed reality; we take part of its constructive processes, we become a part of it..we are it..I would like to end this blog with Donna Harraway's quote:
"The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate us or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries, we are they"..(in Cyborg Manifesto..)