It was during the late 1970s, a period I may speak of as my Buddhist apprenticeship, that I was told about the Dragon's Head, Snake's Body. The term refers to a person with a highly-developed mental and rational faculty, but underformed emotional self and poor physical awareness. At the time that I came across it, the description was aimed primarily at certain Buddhist academics and scholars, whose fierce intellect was used to argue and defend all manner of dubious standpoint. The image is more apposite still today, however: we live daily under the constant spectre of the Dragon's Head, Snake's Body.
I am thinking primarily of the majority population of our current scientific and academic communities, a cartoon depiction of whom would portray a bulging brain wobbling atop a pimple-sized body. I have some first-hand experience of these malformed serpentine creatures, having passed some, in their fledgling form at least, in the darkened corridors of Oxford University during my undergraduate days. More recently, personal need has compelled me to delve into their dark world more deeply than I would normally wish to do, in the attempt to shed light on various shady goings-on that have been the subject of several previous blogs.
Various tools are available to analyse the reptilian hybrid - Jung's study of psychological types comes readily to mind - but, most simply, Dragon's Head, Snake's Body is not whole or complete. It takes one part of the human psycho-physical organism and treats it as the finished product. Unfortunately, this bloated rationality has no consciousness of anything else, particularly of what is often motivating it in the first place (unacknowledged emotional and physical drives and instincts, giving rise to unconscious initial standpoints and prejudices). As such, Dragon's Head, Snake's Body activity simply cannot be trusted.
These reflections come to mind as the carrion creatures gather in Cancun, Mexico, for another round of global warming scaremongering, along with 'let's see who we can screw for some more big bucks, and take away a bit more of their personal liberty in the process' in the name of the 'save the planet' chimera. A trawl of relevant blogs and websites shows a veritable plethora of statistics that finally give the lie to the fantasy of scientific objectivity. The endless to-ing and fro-ing of apparently contradictory data demonstrates mainly that you can prove anything you want; look long and hard enough, and the statistics will be there to back you up. The one clear fact shining through all of this is that global climate remains poorly and only partially understood. The people who we should be worried about are the scientific and political reptiles who would have us believe otherwise, claiming that anthropogenic global warming is an undisputed fact and an unprecedented danger, and that we should adopt all manner of drastic measure immediately or we'll all be doomed. This is dark sorcery indeed, the weaving of malefic spells.
And, because of our own predispositions, 'weaving a spell' is precisely what scientists, academics, and politicians are able to do. Science is the current religion, the means by which truth is apprehended; scientists are vessels for that truth, in the same way that priests and men of the church once were. Given our own faith in science as the means by which the world is to be understood, we modern folk are extremely vulnerable to the words, suggestions, and sometimes manipulations by the science-priests. Dress a notion in the cloak of data and statistics - any notion - and there will be people who will believe it. Given the already-discussed lack of self-knowledge of most of our reptilian friends, the danger increases twofold. And given the fatal conjunction of power (politicians, big business) and faith (scientists) in modern times, which replicates the conjoining of power (the State) and faith (the Church) in times gone by, we have a perilous and manipulation-prone condition indeed.
The general populace is fair game. How many times do newspaper articles and BBC Breakfast newsbites begin with the phrases: 'Scientists have found......','Academics have discovered....', 'In a report released today......', 'New research suggests....'? This is all magic, infecting the minds and hearts of people without their normally even realising it. Treat these magic incantations with the utmost caution, I beg you. The safest ways to avoid being a victim of these mind-warping dark arts is simply to turn off the television and stop buying the newspaper.
To repeat: science is a modern religion. It encompasses a belief system, a way of looking at the world. It is not infallible, and nowhere near a complete picture, especially in the stripped-down version, defined by the confines of rational materialism, that forms its mainstream. A cursory investigation of ancient and medeival western socieities, along with extant shamanic cultures, is all that is required to demonstrate that ways of looking at the world other than modern rational materialism can exist, and in their own ways serve a society quite well. Any modern believer who protests that our system is 'the truth, the whole truth, and the only truth' is repeating the same mantra that was used by the medeival priesthood. And, by the way, laying themselves open to the dark sorcery of the current age.
I am thinking primarily of the majority population of our current scientific and academic communities, a cartoon depiction of whom would portray a bulging brain wobbling atop a pimple-sized body. I have some first-hand experience of these malformed serpentine creatures, having passed some, in their fledgling form at least, in the darkened corridors of Oxford University during my undergraduate days. More recently, personal need has compelled me to delve into their dark world more deeply than I would normally wish to do, in the attempt to shed light on various shady goings-on that have been the subject of several previous blogs.
Various tools are available to analyse the reptilian hybrid - Jung's study of psychological types comes readily to mind - but, most simply, Dragon's Head, Snake's Body is not whole or complete. It takes one part of the human psycho-physical organism and treats it as the finished product. Unfortunately, this bloated rationality has no consciousness of anything else, particularly of what is often motivating it in the first place (unacknowledged emotional and physical drives and instincts, giving rise to unconscious initial standpoints and prejudices). As such, Dragon's Head, Snake's Body activity simply cannot be trusted.
These reflections come to mind as the carrion creatures gather in Cancun, Mexico, for another round of global warming scaremongering, along with 'let's see who we can screw for some more big bucks, and take away a bit more of their personal liberty in the process' in the name of the 'save the planet' chimera. A trawl of relevant blogs and websites shows a veritable plethora of statistics that finally give the lie to the fantasy of scientific objectivity. The endless to-ing and fro-ing of apparently contradictory data demonstrates mainly that you can prove anything you want; look long and hard enough, and the statistics will be there to back you up. The one clear fact shining through all of this is that global climate remains poorly and only partially understood. The people who we should be worried about are the scientific and political reptiles who would have us believe otherwise, claiming that anthropogenic global warming is an undisputed fact and an unprecedented danger, and that we should adopt all manner of drastic measure immediately or we'll all be doomed. This is dark sorcery indeed, the weaving of malefic spells.
And, because of our own predispositions, 'weaving a spell' is precisely what scientists, academics, and politicians are able to do. Science is the current religion, the means by which truth is apprehended; scientists are vessels for that truth, in the same way that priests and men of the church once were. Given our own faith in science as the means by which the world is to be understood, we modern folk are extremely vulnerable to the words, suggestions, and sometimes manipulations by the science-priests. Dress a notion in the cloak of data and statistics - any notion - and there will be people who will believe it. Given the already-discussed lack of self-knowledge of most of our reptilian friends, the danger increases twofold. And given the fatal conjunction of power (politicians, big business) and faith (scientists) in modern times, which replicates the conjoining of power (the State) and faith (the Church) in times gone by, we have a perilous and manipulation-prone condition indeed.
The general populace is fair game. How many times do newspaper articles and BBC Breakfast newsbites begin with the phrases: 'Scientists have found......','Academics have discovered....', 'In a report released today......', 'New research suggests....'? This is all magic, infecting the minds and hearts of people without their normally even realising it. Treat these magic incantations with the utmost caution, I beg you. The safest ways to avoid being a victim of these mind-warping dark arts is simply to turn off the television and stop buying the newspaper.
To repeat: science is a modern religion. It encompasses a belief system, a way of looking at the world. It is not infallible, and nowhere near a complete picture, especially in the stripped-down version, defined by the confines of rational materialism, that forms its mainstream. A cursory investigation of ancient and medeival western socieities, along with extant shamanic cultures, is all that is required to demonstrate that ways of looking at the world other than modern rational materialism can exist, and in their own ways serve a society quite well. Any modern believer who protests that our system is 'the truth, the whole truth, and the only truth' is repeating the same mantra that was used by the medeival priesthood. And, by the way, laying themselves open to the dark sorcery of the current age.
P.S. The photo is of Prof Phil 'Climategate' Jones, from the University of East Anglia, who has no connection whatsoever with the practice of the Dark Arts as described above.
