Thought Moments

Watching faces up close and intimately.  This is a pretty amazing video.

Thought Moments

Hypnosis and neurology article.

Interesting article on some contemporary research on hypnosis.  As with any article on hypnosis take a lot of the conclusions stated as suspect as it's hard to find corollary studies.  The part about "10% of the population" leads me to wonder exactly how large a research group they used for said study.  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/sep/30/hypnosis-neuroscience-psychology

It amazes me how spending only twenty-four hours at Valley View leaves me with a sensation of dislocation when I come home.  Denver looks a little brighter, but a little less like home.  I feel like I had a week long vacation and yet I was only gone from Sunday morning to Monday afternoon.  Ashley and I decided to go at the very last minute, at eleven o'clock on Saturday night.  We packed up and headed out on Sunday, and called the office to reserve the room (that opened up miraculously) about five minutes after the office opened.  We drove through two snowstorms on the way there, and once there the wind was cold and the weather somewhat uninviting.

It was amazing.  There is no place else that I have been anywhere that leaves me feeling like this.  The feel of clothing is currently foreign.  It's not unpleasant, just foreign.  I will have to remind myself for the next few days that I can't go stand on my porch in the buff.

Trees and rocks, birds of every kind (especially noisy jays, jaunty magpies and a one lone bald eagle flying off to the north as we drove down the dirt road into the hotsprings) a tiny, white ermine and most of all the water.  It's not the hottest water ever, but that means I can stay in it for hours.  Getting out of the water can be excruciating for a second until I can get my wool cloak wrapped around me.  It's even more excruciating when I back into a snow covered tree. 

But really... I just feel different after spending time there.  I've never been for more than two days.  I can only imagine that after a week I might not ever come back.

'Tis the season.  Worked my first fire show in quite a long time.  The show went well, despite some rather serious moments in the middle.  Having Ashley on hand and ready to grab a wet towel when not asked was a fantastic thing.  I've never done Boo at the Zoo with Doug before.

I did get a small burn, myself, but I didn't realize it until we were headed out.

Took Ashley to Pete's Kitchen which apparently reminds her of The Phoenix which is a coney island in Michigan that she's fond of.  All in all it had the elements of a good night.

I'm not feeling much like being social of late, something I need to push through I suspect.  I have no real ideas for costuming or anything and part of me would rather work at Terry's tomorrow morning and spend the afternoon and evening working on my large pile of financial shit so that it will smell less come January or so.  I do plan to go out, likely to the gathering I was invited to through the session at the Snug.

People scare me though, they really do, and when I'm not feeling particularly strong in the head I get twitchy around them.  I don't like passive aggressive behaviour and I like it even less when it's directed at me.  People want to believe they're rational but if there really are stable, calm, thoughtful, rational people out there, I've yet to meet 'em.  I know plenty of people who think they're on the ball and quite honestly the saner someone claims to be, the further away from them I want to be.  It's not that I mind my friends being crazy, I just mind when the crazy runs their lives.

I feel like there's an angry hum underneath almost all social interactions of late.  It's where the crazy people trying to run me off the road come from.  It's why we have the Tea Party and why packages are being shipped from Yemen to blow up synagogues in the US.  It's a feeling that I can't shake, even on the good days and it seems to affect a lot of people other than just me.  Some get depressed, some get belligerent some just go catatonic.


Me, I just want to run off again.  I won't, at least not like that, but I want to.  It was so much easier when I didn't stay anywhere for very long.

It's quiet tonight but not in my head.  I should be worried about all kinds of things, how the recent money troubles can be dealt with, how to get the company website up and running, what new product designs we can invent or discover... further afield I could be wondering whether I will ever be truly independent or whether I really am stuck following in everyone else's wake as they create stunning new ideas and almost as often drop them again.

I'm not a terribly creative person, and my most creative and inspired talent is speaking, outloud, extemporaneously and to a very small audience.  My ideas appear and vanish over a cup of coffee and a slice of cake late at night in a badly decorated coffee shop that only remembers the past glory of the Denver scene.

I really ought to write them down, but then they come out sounding like this, stilted and overblown, stuffy... which isn't to say that's not how they sound when I'm rambling on about mind and spirit and flow and pointing out how badly the art is hung, but at least I don't have to hear it.

I had a new thought tonight, new to me, about the human dichotomy, or trichotomy in some cases... we still have so many issues dividing this from that, mind from body, soul from heart and then we break it down smaller and smaller, to the cellular, the atomic and down to buzzing strings of energy but we really don't want to put it all together and just look at the thing that is, right in front of us and inside us.  The only division in perception that I can make sense of is between the state of precision and the state of the eternal.

Precision is the snap shot, the tiny little piece, and every piece when held up to the whole, is tiny.  A rock, a stream, a sneeze, a planet possibly slowly cooking itself to death, it's all tiny compared to a moment of completeness, even one held for just a second.  Every piece matters and it's not a bad thing to want to see the pieces but you can never see all the pieces, hold every one of them at once.  The mind isn't designed for it and I suspect there are no minds that are.

And the eternal... I have no belief about God in any sense.  I have no idea whether there is or isn't deity or afterlife or reincarnation but a person is a flow, a stream a continuance.  Life is, existence on any level is, continuous and continuously changing.  We can know a person by slices and snapshots or we can step back and just watch and engage with that person and know them as that continuity, not in a way that defines or limits or does anything but be one eternal presence connecting with another.  That eternity always ends, we lose it, start thinking about something else and it's gone, but we can always find it again as long as we engage with ourselves.

It's all very mystical, I suppose.  One creates two, two creates three and three creates all the ten thousand things.

I prefer a balance between a defined world and a world experienced in immediacy.  I can explain all day about a person and miss everything worthwhile, but then sometimes without the words and the explanation, I might forget to look at all.


Babble babble.  On other notes I've discovered that using hypnosis and massage together works pretty well.  I miss being able to get acupuncture treatments that don't require me to explain everything each and every time.  I want to spend a lot more time at Irish sessions and I wish I had the money to buy a bodhran.  Politics is likely to melt my brain as I watch the ineffectual battle with the morbidly obtuse.


Free from desire, one perceives the mystery/caught up in desire, one perceives only the manifestations./Mystery and manifestations arise from the same source./This is called darkness./ Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.  -paraphrased from memory from some translation or other of the Tao te Ching.

Cutting

Self Injury Leads to a Brief Lessening of Pain

Because of how I was exposed to this issue, I will always be fascinated by the ramifications of it.  This is not news to me, but for those who might have encountered it and truly not understood, it might help.  More knowledge might have helped me.

Logic and disbelief

I keep running in to the agrument that disbelieving in something is not a belief in itself.  I have trouble with this logic, most especially when it's presented by people I otherwise like and respect.  The argument that not believing in the Loch Ness Monster makes sense and holds water is perfectly reasonable, but to make the same case for the statement, "The Loch Ness Monster does not exist," is completely different.  It's semantics, but important semantics.  In the first case you are hazily dealing with probabilities such that the odds seem to be against the Loch Ness Monster existing, so I generally don't bother believing it.  If you state unequivocally that it Does Not Exist is a statement that requires proof, not hazy generalities.  Just like proving that something Does exist requires proof and rigorous testing, proving that something does not exist would require some kind of logical or scientific argument that allows for every possible effort of having searched for and not found the Monster.  It is easy and logical to say that such a beast probably doesn't exist as it has been looked for by amateurs and professionals and crackpots for so long that at this point it would seem that someone should have found something.  The trouble is, not finding something doesn't actually prove it doesn't exist unless you can show with a reasonable amount of scientific effort that you have looked everywhere it Could be. 

There is a subtle but powerful difference between saying that something is unlikely in the extreme and that something is impossible and/or truly Does Not Exist.  You can apply this argument to any form of Statement of Universal Truth and I often do.  I'll leave it to those reading to decide whether they can agree with me even if the Loch Ness Monster is replaced with other semi-mythical realities.

Don't get me wrong, those of you who insist on a black and white world, the opposite of belief is in fact disbelief but the opposite of a believer is not an atheist. 

Slowly... slowly...

So yeah, I think I am slowly coming back to myself.  I really like the kind of high-energy buzz I get when faire season rolls around in Colorado, but this year was a bit much and I did a crap job of taking care of myself, my home and my relationships this summer.  I begin to have more sympathy for my truly busy busy friends and I wonder even more than when I had never been there how in the hell ya'll do it. 


I have had an Evil knot about the size of the end of a coke can living under my left shoulder for a week and between the gracious stabbing by Darcy and the brutal crunching of Dr Yoder, it seems to have subsided a bit.  Of course, I then proceeded to work an eight and a half hour day of nothing but belt burnishing following the chiropractor which might not have been the best choice for my own well being but left Terry in a better place for it.  It's nice to see that I really can organize that mismatched crew into an efficient belt-making machine when the need arises.  We banged out somewhere along the lines of fifty belts today.  It's a lot, trust me.  Terry's killing himself trying to get everything done and once again I have some sympathy but only some because a lot of this is bad planning in action.  Every year....

The new vehicle makes me happy.  I'm still getting used to parking it and I tend to overcompensate for the size.  I drive an SUV of sorts now.  Don't laugh, it's an Element and I like it.  It's got room for two.

I'm driving with Ashley to Michigan this year.  It has been... a really long time... since I went on the road With someone.  I mean, I've done some cool little trips with Darcy in the past and other folks too, but really travelling with someone... it's been a long time.  More than ten years, depending on how I count it.  It's good that we're taking some time away this week so's we're both less made of stress when we load up and head out.

Looking forward to Valley View.  Warm water and sun on skin and quiet.  Yeah.  Nice thought.

Our house is still half moved in to, but I did hang some more art and Ashley manages to organize small places more and more.  It's hard when you realize right after moving in that it's not where ya want to be.  I dunno where we'll wind up.  It is we, and that's got a nice feel to it, but we have much to rearrange and not all of it is furniture.

Tired and sore but feeling pretty good.  Need to remember to avail myself of acupuncture more often.  Need to find other good options for moving the chi around too.

Just reposting some thoughts from a comment a made elsewhere:

Here's a thought... we need to find some small portion of the country that we don't really need and let all of the current crop of isolationist anti-immigrationists run it exactly how they want to, so long as those policies don't extend ove...r the border. Maybe build a dome around it. I'm thinking Nevada maybe, or perhaps Arizona. Here's the catchy bit: We fill the dome with billions of on demand cameras and then collect royalties when we sell viewing rights to the rest of the world, most particularly the Middle East and Central and South America. Germany too, they'll think it's a comedy.

I'm thinking we'd have something like the Truman Show crossed with Das Boot and the Donner Party.

Summertime

The last few months have been a whirlwind, and possibly some of the most unhealthy time I have spent.  I've exercised very little and have had to all but force myself to meditate at all.  I've worked weird hours and weird days and never once actually felt any real confidence in what I've been doing.  I smoke too much, wound up drinking myself sick for the first time in my life and am basically a wreck.

I'm glad it's over.  I'm not sorry I did it.


Ashley moved in with me in May, just a month before we needed to move again.  Bad planning.  And then when we finally did move, it was in to a place that time and circumstances have never really conspired to leave us feeling like we really live here.  It was a month before I managed to hang anything much on the walls, we're still lacking some pretty basic furniture, we don't really have a place where anything belongs, least of all us.  And now, we're about to leave back to Michigan for a while.

I took a new job at the faire this year, which started less than a week after we moved in to our new place.  I had to create a new crew from scratch at a job that I wasn't really sure of the dynamics of.  It took me at least half the show to gain any sense that I knew what I was doing and even then I missed a thousand small things and a few big ones.  The schedule clash between me and Ashley has been near horrifying and meanwhile the job that sustains me when there isn't a faire in town is way behind, and even though that's no entirely my fault I'm still tired and disorganized enough that I'm having trouble making up the difference.

But then, we made, it didn't we.  It's been rough and hard and scratchy and both Ashley and I are bruised and battered by it (I won't go into the things Ashley's got on her plate, that's her story) ands still, we smile at one another through the bruises and say nice things and do nice things and we made it.  Not that it's over, not by a long shot, and not that I think it will inherently be easier from here on out, because we're going far away and she'll be confronted and distracted by the novelty of being home but not home and I have a shop to run and a new vehicle to make payments on and really, it's a mess.  It's my mess.  I don't like it this messy, but it's my mess, and it's our mess and if it were easy, it wouldn't be me.

So we cram in the last few gatherings, some laundry and cleaning, a trip to the hot springs and meanwhile I try and help with the worst of the load for renleather and get the car registered and maybe plated and still we're pulling our hair out, but hey, it's an adventure, right?

Oh, and as for the job, I think I made a few new customers along the way, increased sales enough to pay my wages at least (maybe a little more) and it'll be even better next year, or at least I have the skills to start really building something with the masks and the crew and the shop and Tiffany and Lynn and all. 

It has been a rough summer.  I'm in terrible shape.  I need more duct tape, some string and a long vacation.  I get a short vacation and I get to buy my own duct tape and string.

So far the summer seems to be pretty okay.

It's been a horribly good week and it's only Wednesday.  Well... Thursday now.  The music tonight was amazing.  When I got to a show I really like, or even a club where the DJ is just right on with my mood or maybe where I can slot in my mood to be right on with the DJ and the dancers and the floor, all I want to do is let go and dance.  I'm sure I look something strange when I do.  I see how... restrained everyone else looks and I know I don't look like that.  I've been told by some folks, some in particular who's opinions I value, that they love to see me dance.  Secretly I'm sure they're in the minority, and sometimes when I'm in my darkest moods, I'm sure their humoring me.  Logically I know that doesn't make sense, but I also know just how unlikely a thing logic is when applied to how people behave.

People confuse me.  They always have.

It's not just dancing either.  Conversation, self expression of any kind, I have to reach a place where I really don't care what people think about how I'm going about it.  It's a strange place to be, because to make it work, I have to stay connected, connected to the music, or to the person I'm talking with, or anything that I'm trying to stay in a creative and open space with.

When I have energy at all, I have a Lot of it.  I'm overwhelming, I've been told.  Exhausting.  I am fascinated by a spirited exchange, in experiencing the ebb and flow of conversation or of music, of experiencing the dynamic changes as they move through.  I have to stay connected or I'm just flailing my arms and wasting my breath and someone else's time.  It takes a lot of effort.  From an outside perspective, I never know how I look, not when I'm really on and feeling alive.

And there it is.  I start to wonder, to worry and then to stumble.  I lose the beat or I started being too loud or talking too fast.  It would be nice to have a hand up, or just someone to tell me, yeah, you're a little over the top, but it's worth keeping up with you.  It would be nicer still not to need that.  Or not.  I'm still tempted by the tiny little castle, the bricked in monastery of one with a slot in the wall that I can close when I start to feel afraid of what people are thinking.

It would help if I didn't like people.  As painful and frustrating as they are, it's so much cooler to have a friend to share a joke with, or a box full of owls.  It's maybe even a little nicer to be able to say, yeah, wow, I'm not doing so well tonight and I'm feeling like I'm going too far and too fast and I'm a little wild, feeling a little on the edge and it might be a good thing if there's someone there to steer me away from the worst of it or at least to tell me what it was they saw me doing, see me doing.

I still feel like I have got to be embarrassing or overwhelming or just plain obnoxious and yet these are the nights when I feel most alive, most enthusiastic.  I'm not ever quietly enthusiastic.  It's a big thing.

An exhausting thing?

I had a really good night.  I hope the people around me did too and more than anything, I hope I contributed to their good night or at least didn't cut into it.  I worry about that bit.  A lot.

Cynicism

There has always been bias in the teaching and interpretation of history.  There is literally no way to prevent this, and corrections, such as they are, rarely involve new facts and are simply yet another reinterpretation of data that has been around for a long time.  History is not only written by the winners but is rewritten endlessly to fit the viewpoint of the modern age, and endless view starting from now and looking backwards without even a real sense of the biases that shape us.

Most of the time this process is done by people who are genuinely well meaning, who believe that their perspective really Is based on better facts and less clouded judgment than previous interpretations. 

I can't buy it this time.  The rearranging of history coming out the Board of Education in Texas reeks of cynical maneuvering.  I have been find genuine belief behind some of the most tragic acts in history, been able to imagine that if I believed as the people involved believed that I might have done the same thing, regardless of how easy it is for me as a modern person to look back and scold folks that are often long dead.  With a little work and a beer or two I can bring these skills into the modern world and apply to them to the people who's opinions I find to be most vile and to see that whatever else, they truly Believe in the things they are saying, even if from my view those actions and those beliefs are heinous and destructive.  I can in fact not hate the sinner and still revile the sin, as it were.

Not this time.  The mention of the McCarthy hearings makes the whole thing so sadly, sickly ironic to me. Joe McCarthy didn't check for communists under his bed at night.  He didn't attack communists because they were strong, he attacked them because they couldn't fight back. 

So, yes, Texas educators, teach sympathy for McCarthy.  Sin, the only sin I believe in, is the silencing of open dialogue.  The people who have pushed this change through in Texas are devils in their actions, as was old Joe.  The devil knows when he's lying.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions but the devils are always ready to pass out paving stones.

If government in this country had Any noble purpose, it is the defense of the weak from the strong.  It rarely ever works that way, but it's all we have.  Freedom from religion and religion's freedom from government control go hand in hand.  Capitalism is a progressive policy that can lead to more and more economic freedom for the individual unless those who have climbed their way to the top are given the 'freedom' to halt progress at the lower rungs.  Every freedom we have has to be tempered with the rights of those who that freedom will impinge upon.  Free trade without regulation becomes oligarchy.  Unchecked power in religion leads to theocracy.  Unchecked liberalism leads to totalitarianism. 


Bah.  I'm sounding preachy.  I won't erase what I wrote, but I'll let it rest.  The right to choose your religion, live your own life and not be owned, body and soul, by kings or corporations are what My interpretation of history says the founding of this nation gave us.  Protecting the rights of the individual Requires limiting the rights of all group entities: churches, companies, political parties, unions and most especially governments...



Then again, freedom is an every day choice.  Maybe they're just trying to remind us how complacent we are about it all.  If they take away the parts of American history that have to do with fighting for equality and personal freedom maybe a few people will remember that that fight never ends.

Butterflies, bees and wasps, oh my.  It might be that Spring really does follow Winter.  The grass is getting greener, the air warmer, all in all it's a beautiful day today.  There are no buds that I could see on the trees, so perhaps the old ones remember how the weather tricked them last year and how painful the late season cold was.  I suspect we may still have some snow and icy rain to wade through, but even as broken as my perceptions are (as they always are when my spine, and especially the top of my spine, is this out of true) I can feel Spring starting to bubble up through my bones.

                                                                     - - -

I went out walking, camera in hand, for a while this afternoon.  It always overwhelms me how busy the parks get on the weekend.  It makes me wish for a less normal schedule, one with the occasional weekday free and clear.  Maybe I'll do that this summer when I've got faire and Renleather going at the same time.

I was talking to Cass last night at the gallery showing and she asked me if I ever feel like I'm an alien.  The question made me smile because that's been a growing sense over the last decade.  I've been exploring just how far away from normal I feel and I keep building more and more bridges back to something like the everyday.  It leaves me feeling like an anthropologist trying to interact with a tribe in the Andes.  Not so much with the smug sense of cultural superiority, more of the deep fascination combined with the frustration of the myriad failed attempts at communication on even the most basic level.  There is also a feeling of how dangerous it is not to understand which overwhelms my desire for interaction at moments.

And then sometimes it just leaves me with a feeling to observe, almost afraid to move because I feel like I'll interrupt something.  Knowing full well that just by observing I'm still interacting, still there is the desire to keep my impact as small as possible, to observe the natives in their most natural state.

I find that I'm even more that way when I have a camera.  I don't want to be noticed.  I want to build a blind and just shoot with a really long lens, capturing everything as purely as possible.  I know intimately how disruptive it is to have the giant, black eye of a camera pointed at me.  Maybe I'll buy a birding lens for my anthropological research.

It was nice sharing that moment of a mutual sense of alienness.  I'm pretty sure Cass and I don't come from the same far away as she comes from somewhere where people are graceful and lighthearted and where heads are shaped to be beautiful when bald and wherever I hale from I suspect it is not so green or so graceful, but one alien to another, it's good to have that moment.

                                                                    - - -

I checked out the book Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain on Lyn's recommendation and so far I find it to be well worth reading.  I need to find and/or make a few tools that I don't have if I'm to follow along with the text.  I did the initial three drawings, one of my face, one from memory and one of my hand.  They were terrible.  The one from memory especially.  I can tell where they tried to teach me 'how to draw faces' when I was a kid.  Terrible.

What's funny is that the one of my face... and maybe even the one of my hand... weren't as terrible as I would have guessed.

Which does not mean you get to see them.  You're not that special.

Well, okay, some of you are.  But really. 

Compromise

So there was an involved discussion on Talk of the Nation this afternoon and it spawned an interesting notion in my head.  I gave up on the notion of making guns illegal a while ago.  It really is a matter of civil liberties as well as a few other odd and ends that I'll gleefully ignore for the moment.  I often say that the best gun control would be a strict enforcement of a one strike policy on the use of a firearm in the commission of Any crime.  I still believe this, though it would require removing from prison a whole lot of other folks we have locked up.

But, here's the new question:  What about liability insurance?  Here's the thing, to drive a car, to open most types of open to the public businesses, to be any of a dozen different kinds of performers, you have to have liability coverage.  But not for guns.

Don't get me wrong, I hate the insurance industry with a passion but it's the very excesses I despise about their way of doing business that make this work in my head.  They don't want to have to pay.  So, if the guvmn't says that you have to carry a million dollars of liability insurance to own an operable firearm, they will require proof that you're not likely to blow your own foot off cleaning your gun and equally they'll want Some kind of evidence that you're not going to go on a mad rampage. 

Now, for those that like your guns, the comment about mad rampages might scare ya.  But here's the thing, if they can't sell policies, they make no money.  So the insurance industry won't limit access to firearms on anyone who is anything other than a major risk.  Just look at the number of wingnut drivers on the road, you'll know I'm right. 

So will this top gun crime?  Nope.  Gun control does fuck all to stop actual gun Crime.  It might give people some pause though and might weed out the small number of people who through accidents of birth or injury are too stupid to own a gun.  Might weed out a few unstable crackpots too.  Maybe.

A million dollars of liability sounds like a lot but it's not really.  And it won't fix shattered lives and money can't pay for everything, but sometimes it might help with a medical bill or two.  I figure this one to run around fifty bucks a year but that's a raw guess with only a little data to back it up. 

My apologies to my co-worker who has been scowling at me since this occurred to me but really, while I am almost certain this will never pass, I believe it to be perhaps the best compromise I can imagine.  I can support gun ownership as a right, but all rights come with responsibilities and I don't see this as an unfair.

I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks

There's an ongoing discussion about whether one believes in evolution or creationism.  Every time I run into the argument I twitch a little, less because of the ardent creationists than because of the ardent evolutionists.  Personally I find the arguments put forth by a scientific discussion of evolution as the means by which species change over time and possibly give rise to new species over even longer periods of time to be compelling.  When someone asks me if I believe in evolution however, I'm being asked a religious question, not a question about science and understanding.

In the context of the discussion a creationist will use the term belief to mean roughly the same thing as belief in God or Republicanism.  It's a statement of faith of trust in the unseen and unknowable.  For those that think I'm being too snarky about Republicans, I'll point out that I can show you a Republican and even offer reasonable, scientific evidence of their existence.  I can't show you God and I can't show you Republicanism in a laboratory setting.

Belief is a loaded term.  If I shout, "I Believe!" spontaneously in the street, the assumption is that I'm talking about something religious, not about the accuracy of signposts or the efficacy of crosswalks.  Evolution the theory is a testable, scientific approach to certain kinds of information and even allows for some amount of testable prediction.  Evolution the belief is simply a rejection of the beliefs of a subsect of certain Children of Abraham and is no more based on a scientific evaluation of evidence than the argument it rejects is.

Here's why I think it matters:  We live in a country where the right to practice, and by extension, believe what you will and to pass those beliefs on to your children is protected by law and by common practice.  So when the vast majority of the people making the case for teaching children about the theory of evolution treat evolution as a belief, as a set of facts that are written down and immutable they play right into the hands of the folks in the opposite camp. 

We as a society have always protected the right to teach whatever the prevailing belief in a localized society is.  For anyone who doesn't believe me ask someone from north of the country about the civil war and then ask someone from the south.  Their history books aren't quite the same.  Belief is protected territory in the US.  You can make the argument that it shouldn't be and you will almost certainly lose.

Spiritual atheism?

So, yeah, I get all thinkin' about religion and spirituality sometimes.  This one apparently interested me...


Kayti: There's a discussion on *atheism on my favorite MOO, LambdaMOO, about whether it's possible to be simultaneously spiritual and an atheist. They're looking for a good working definition of spirituality from someone who's actually spiritual. I'm an atheist, but I don't consider myself to be particularly spiritual, so I can't really help them directly. However, I'm pretty sure that among my friends I have at least a couple who are spiritual atheists who can help with this definition. Failing that, I'd like to here from theists who nonetheless think atheists can be spiritual and have a definition for spirituality that supports that view.

Anyone?

****: Not a definition, but what immediately comes to mind is that atheism seems to accept the rigid idea of what religion or being religious means that comes from the rigid religious zealotry itself, i.e., that either you believe in God as a man in the sky, or you believe in absolutely nothing. IMO, "religion" and "spirituality" are not necessarily ... See Moretotally separate-- actually, it seems like if you are religious, a lack of spirituality would make that religion pretty empty. I guess what I'm kind of saying is maybe it's not that we need a separate definition for "spiritual", but that we need to expand what "religious" means to encompass more than big-man-in-the-sky-type beliefs.

****: My opinion? In the traditional sense, no. But if you focus in on the qualia of the "religious experience", the experience transcends the choice to believe in any invisible friends.

There is a shared sensation that we monkeys can feel, some sort of feeling of combined awe, connection, humbleness, alone-yet-comforted. It's the glimpse of infinity. Frequently associated with religion, but it doesn't have to be.

I happen to get it occasionally on mountaintops or while stargazing in the desert or occasionally through really deep introspection.... See More

I don't call that experience "spirituality", but I don't really name it, either.

Ian Hawkins: Wow. There is no short answer to this. Mostly it's a semantic trap as stated. One would need to define atheist and then define spiritual before even tackling it. So I won't even try to answer it, but I'll throw some ketchup on the bun...

Atheism seems to mean at least two very different things in the modern day with a lot of shades of grey. ... See MoreOne side is the outright and utter rejection of Godlike or mythical entities as well as in some cases everything outside the immediately experienced, phenomenal world. The "if science can't detect it, it ain't there" model. For my purposes I call that religious atheism, as it entails the belief that one can prove a negative.

The second form of atheism is a rejection of organized religion and pretty much all forms of deity. It verges on agnosticism but differs in the somewhat strong view that personalized deities do not exist. Faeries, mystical energy, chakras, honest politicians maybe even ghosts, but God, and most specifically the Sky God of the Children of Abraham sects is a boogieman that doesn't exist.

Ian Hawkins: Spiritual is even harder. Some people mean very specifically a belief in mystical energy or at the minimum a kind of collective consciousness model that means that all life is at some root level connected. This doesn't require a Sky God at all, but the first form of atheist is unlikely to believe in anything that isn't laboratory tested. Tim ... See MoreMinchin comes to mind here.

But the word spiritual really has no requirement that spirit have a mystical underpinning. If one thinks of spirit as a psychological sense of connectedness with the world or other people or perhaps even just a very zenlike sense of oneself as a point of conscious awareness, one can still lay claim to the idea of being 'spiritual'.

Ian Hawkins: Personally I think there's truth in all of it with the exception of the most extreme forms of religious atheism. To claim that you know absolutely that God doesn't exist is to claim knowledge beyond the scope of science and is a religious claim from someone specifically stating that they are a-theist and generally one could say a-religious.

But then I'm averse to extremists.


I blocked out the names of the two folks I didn't know.  The rest is reposted with permission.

And then in a follow up where I was chatting with Ashley:

Ian: I think admitting ignorance is the beginning and middle of knowledge.  There really isn't an end.

Ashley: I'd hate to think that learning comes to an end.  What would be the point of living?

Ian: Pretty much where I'm at.  Which is really where the difference between what I consider 'religious' and what I consider to be 'spiritual' lies.

Strange weekend, strange week, strange year.

I spent this past weekend somewhere between wonder and terror. Or at least wonder and acute discomfort. On the one hand I experienced something completely new in the form of Valley View Hot Springs, a place of warm water, beautiful views of the Sangre de Cristos, snow on the ground and lots of people occasionally wearing no clothes. I've been naked before so joining them was easy.



What was hard was talking to them. Especially hard was talking to the people I'd actually traveled with. I'm not generally the person someone goes to for pleasant conversation. I have been known to fascinate people, but that requires I'm not so lost in my head as to think I'm actually fascinating. And it requires that I do a lot of shutting up. That got driven home when a rather harsh but deadly acurate comment to that effect was made. It shut me up. For a little while. It also reminded me to stay conscious and not just babble.

The funny thing about that is that the folks I was with were some of the noisiest people I've been around in months. They chatter. It's delightful in its way to be surrounded by three intelligent, highly conversational people. It's not so delightful to be asked to shut up under the circumstances.

Thing is, I really was probably talking too much, but more than that I wasn't managing to integrate my conversation into the already existing structure that the three friends had. I think some people are naturally good at this, maybe they listen better or there's a cultural rhythm that I lack the skills to see, I have no idea, but I've seen some people slip into a group conversational dynamic like the most graceful, naked fat man into the delightful, warm water of a mountain hot spring where I cannonball like a deranged twelve year old on too many pixie sticks.

And then I get truly nervous which makes me talk even more.

And I think, I hope I didn't do any lasting damage to my ability to interact with these three wonderful people.

And I think and I hope that they also haven't left marks that will make me even more skittish around them.


And for all that it was an amazing weekend and I am very grateful that I was offered the chance to join them and will almost certainly go again, especially if invited to join them and others and maybe again still on my own sometime to be even quieter than anyone who has ever seen me nervous could possibly imagine my being.

I'm made of fear sometimes, from toenails to slightly chewed fingernails.

But this weekend, in some of the quieter moments, drifting in the water I felt like some things started to unclench, to let go a little. Late at night when all the pools were empty, and really it was too cold to want to step out of the warm water and into the sharp night air and I was by myself, that was nice too. A balance really, of trying to interact with the people around me, the ones who'd put the effort out to meet me and get to know me... and the quiet where maybe I can actually relax in a way that sitting in my apartment never does.


I saw a bald eagle on the way there, and the way the mountains were swallowed by clouds and released again. When I was falling asleep on Sunday night, in my own bed I dreamed I could still feel the slow movement of the soaking pond as I hung there, just drifting. On Monday I noticed that I had been naked long enough during the weekend that I felt my clothing as a physical, palpable sensation.

Perhaps if I can find that quiet and connect even more with my own self I might find the words and the silences to connect better with the people around me.

If not, there's still the sensation of warm water, the blue and bluer sky and the frost riming the perpetual fall leaves.

It's just nicer to share.