Culture

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week

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This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from poet Mark Siet:
Blessings this year all the way through
Lasting until forever in all that you do. Evoking the highest sent from above
Seeing with clarity and feeling with love. Seeking and finding every good thing
Inside and out may this year to you bring
Nothing but wonderful thoughts to sing
Giving to others to let happiness ring. Simple gifts of love floating on the wing. Over and over the path is set straight
Fearless you travel opening the gate.

Culture

Robert Bergman — On Our Art Gallery

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Reviewing Robert Bergman’s photographic portraits in the January/February issue of Tikkun, Peter Gabel writes:
These breathtaking works of art… bring us face to face with other human beings. But unlike most face-to-face encounters in which the outsides of two faces are visible to each other from within each viewer’s subjective isolation booth, the encounters made possible by Bergman’s photos provide sudden moments of the discovery of mutual Presence, in which we are pulled out of our customary withdrawn state, the key symptom of our illness, and into a sacred contact with the humanity of the other behind and through the image of the face itself. I call these works breathtaking because they unfailingly cause an interruption or disturbance of my breathing as I experience the shock, and the relief, of being brought into an experience of mutual recognition with one after another of the human beings Bergman portrays – and I believe they will do the same for anyone who contemplates them at full size in the gallery. In each case the trappings of a social identity are there that convey a definite impression of a particular life’s circumstances – of one or another legacy of suffering and solitude and also of resilience, determination, and effort – but the accumulation of past influences is in every case transcended by an uncanny illumination, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that conveys a sense of universal vulnerability and at the same time invincible spiritual strength.

Culture

How can we mature enough so we share the salmon?

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Long ago–actually not that long ago, less than two centuries–the peoples of the North American Pacific coast knew how to maintain salmon stocks and share them so everyone had enough. They had the technology to wipe out the salmon as well as we do. They restrained themselves. More on that below. Today, those of us who eat fish wonder what salmon is safe to eat.

Culture

Michael Jackson's PTSD Archetypes

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A radical change in the social infrastructure of any society must be preceded or accompanied by a change in its consciousness. I first posted this article analyzing the content of Jackson’s videos on Daily Kos and ePluribus Media after his death in July of 2009 .The start of the new year seems a good time to repost here at Tikkun. Perhaps this diary will add to the ongoing dialogue sparked by Avatar about the role movies play in the evolution of our collective awareness. Jackson frequently invoked two powerful archetypes central both to the experience of PTSD, and to the evolution or maintenance of empire: playful Hermes, puer aeternus, child genius, trickster, thief, messenger, god of healing, the lyre and all that is liminal; and the more menacing Dionysius, lychenthrope, trickster, Lord of the Animals, Beast Within. I waited out most of the 1980s in Japan, and had not seen any of Jackson’s videos before his death.

Culture

Happy New Decade from N. California

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Thanks: Alana and I (the two staff here who do the print magazine production and Tikkun Daily) have both been away the last ten days and it’s been wonderful to see Tikkun Daily continuing on without much attention from us. Thanks to all who posted and to interns who helped behind the scenes before the break. Special thanks to Hamza van Boom who monitored the comments to remove any abusive ones during the critical five days when neither Alana nor I could even do that. (Last week Alana was at work attending a conference, but found she had no wireless access from the conference floor where she was staffing the Tikkun table.)
Song and dance: My wife, Debi, and I took a couple of nights away in Sebastopol, an out-of-the-way bohemian town about the same distance (in driving time and property values) north of San Francisco as our pre-Tikkun home on the edge of the Catskills was from New York City. We felt totally at home there.

Culture

Avatar and Freud

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What are we to make of this strange tribe, the American? During the day, in their conscious minds, they actually believe that the 1000 military bases they have built throughout the world, the huge nuclear arsenal, the attempts to militarize space, the half million men and women in arms, the aircraft carriers, the drones, the nano-drones, and all the rest are there to “protect” them from the 1-2000 person ragtag band of al queda and affiliates. They cannot imagine any other way to deal with conflicts abroad except through expanding their military. They believe that people don’t like them because they are “free” and not because they are bullies. And they imagine that by hiring a good talker as their front man, no one will notice that their pugilistic culture has not changed.

Culture

Avatar: the Spiritual Progressive Movie of the Decade?

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So we are deep in “Avatar” here. It came out about a week ago and my son, Rowan, home for the holidays from the USC Cinema School, has seen it three times already. Yesterday he took his mother, his aunt and myself, insisting we had to see it on the giant IMAX screen as well as in 3D. He wasn’t sure we would like the total immersion experience. We were enthralled.

Christianity

Christianity and the crash

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At The Immanent Frame thirteen esteemed scholars and journalists offer their responses to Hanna Rosin’s December 2009 Atlantic article, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” Below is an excerpt from Sarah Posner’s comments:
The prosperity gospel is a lot older than derivatives, credit default swaps, and other byzantine Wall Street “products” that leveled the financial markets. Moreover, the fact that humans – not God – dreamed up these contrivances doesn’t poke holes in the prosperity gospel at all, at least from its adherents’ vantage point. If you believe and sow your seed, God will reward you, even as the secular Masters of the Universe greedily orchestrate a global economic collapse. Surely the prosperity gospel plays a role in persuading its followers to buy into risky financial schemes, including sub-prime mortgages.

Culture

Spiritual Wisdom of the Week – In Praise of Santa Claus!

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Thomas Moore, the psychotherapist and author of many books, including Care of the Soul and The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, wrote this beautiful piece, “The Eternal, Holy Night,” about Christmas for Tikkun in 2003. It is no accident that the festival of Christmas occurs at the time of year when the darkness has reached its low point and winter light begins to appear. Christmas is the honoring of light and the hope that comes with the end of nature’s and the human soul’s dark night. In the symbolic turning of time, Christmas is that part of the annual cycle that invites us to leave darkness behind and enter a new way of being, to start a new “year,” that is, a new era of enlightened decisions rather than unconscious acts. The most stirring songs of the season, “O Holy Night” and “Silent Night,” and the popular verse-tale “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” explore the emotion of night, especially this night on which light once again shows itself.