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anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


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Monday 24 October 2016

In Praise of Woo

You may or may not know what 'woo' is (or woo-woo to fervent enthusiasts or detractors). Rather than attempt a formal definition, I shall present examples of some phenomena that may be considered to be woo. Telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, teleportation. Earth energies, Earth mysteries, ley lines, dragon lines, crop circles. Astrology, tarot, I ching, numerology, any form of divination. Feng Shui. Channelling, inner heat, walking on fire, rapid walking, astral realms, astral travel, astral anything, auras. Energetic healing, homeopathy, healing with fire, stones, soul retrieval, shamanic travel. Synchronicity, UFOs, gnomes, elves, dwarves, chakras. I think you get the picture.....

Should you wish to find out more about things woo, the place not to go is Wikipedia. Wicked Pedia is fine for important things like the population of Huddersfield, who won Wimbledon in 1958, or the birthday of Igor Stravinsky. But for stuff like woo, Wickedness Pedia is useless. You see, Wickerman Pedia has been got at. It's been distorted, rearranged. It ain't what it appears to be.

The most notorious instance of this concerns Rupert Sheldrake. To my knowledge, Rupert is a proper scientist. He does experiments, writes them up, considers the results, that sort of thing. His fatal error, however, is to extend his experimenting activities into the arena of woo. Telepathy, for example. And he has his theory of morphic resonance, which some people just don't like.

Recent years have seen a veritable hoo-hah about the Wikipedia entry on Rupert Sheldrake, which has been radically altered. It is worth checking out Sheldrake's own website on the nefarious activities of Guerilla Skeptics (Rational Wiki, one of the least rational things to grace the planet, naturally denies the existence of such a group at all). This is essentially a small group of ideological skeptics, who have taken on as their holy mission to the world to put it to rights on anything that may emit the faintest whiff of woo. Have a look at other Wikipedia entries on woo - homeopathy, for example, which can only get a soft-core woo rating, really. Of course, if you are a member of the Church of One-Eyed Scientific Materialism yourself, you will quietly murmur approval at the triumph of righteousness over the dark hand of woo.


For some reason, the prophets of 'rational humanism' (read 'irrational humanism') and 'scientific materialism' (read 'one-eyed scientific reductionism') have something serious against woo. It seems that they feel the need to attack tirelessly. Maybe they feel under threat; for sure they feel under threat.

Until recent times, the bastions of irrational humanism were upheld in the public eye by two figures familiar through the mainstream media.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, the Great God of One-Eyed Scientific Materialism sent as his emissary, his earthly representative, one Richard Dawkins. For many years, alongside his fellow henchman the archangel David Attenborough, he efficiently spread the word. Even the messengers of God are not forever, though. Not even, I bet my boots, Food-and-Mating Attenborough. Additionally Dawkins, in latter times. has developed the unsettling habit of speaking his own mind, which is not always spiffingly correct politically. It became clear a few years back that the time had arrived for the Second Coming. And thus came to pass....

Brian Cox - sorry, Professor Brian Cox - is our modern-day Christ figure, sent to put us right on how everything works. With his boyish looks, big shiny white teeth, and perpetual ever-so-slightly superior smile, he is indeed a guru for modern times. I mention his physical appearance not to have a go at him, but because it is such an integral part of his message. Cool, modern, smiley-smiley, maybe with a touch of the puer eternus. Truly a prophet for the modern era.

Cox truly has something about woo. It's a word that is embedded in his vocabulary, always uttered in a barely-concealed hiss between smiling yet strangely clenched teeth. The word is immediately registered by the listener's mind as a put-down. Something is 'woo' therefore it is automatically and
necessarily stupid, superstitious, non-existent, the fantasy of a sick mind. "That's woo" -job done.

It behoves one to ponder why this wholesale and automatic despising of everything woo. It is not very rational at all. It comes down, in the only conclusion I can reach, to a matter of ideology. Despite their facade of freedom of thought, liberalism, and the rest, the Dawkins and Coxes are rigid ideologists. In their own ways they are no more flexible than the Jehovahs Witnesses who knock on the door when you are in the middle of breakfast, or the Muslim fundamentalists. They come to preach scientific materialism, and the supposed benefits of the feeling of wonder in the face of an essentially mechanical, robotic, meaningless world. This is what is preached ad nauseam through much of the mainstream, particularly the BBC.

Woo is attacked so vigorously because it doesn't fit into this paradigm of mechanical meaninglessness. It is not easily measured: homeopathy can't work because the substances are diluted to an extent that cannot be measured, we are told. 'I measure, therefore I am' is the variation on Descartes. Instead of stopping to think the unthinkable - that maybe the instruments aren't capable of measuring everything that's going on, and that we haven't attained the apex of understanding - it is current hubris that wins the day. This cannot happen because I don't understand how it can happen. Or: I can't measure this, therefore it cannot exist. There are assumptions embedded in this attitude. Huge assumptions.

We can't take the views of these people too seriously. Small minds, tiny vision. Yet they are vicious, relentless in their attacks, tanks fuelled by ideology. They are out to twist your mind. If we want to get a bit conspiratorial, we can say that liberal humanism and scientific materialism are attempts to 'contain' the human mind. To disempower the remarkable human spirit in its magnificent flight. To cut us off from, to hide, those elements to reality that offer us the chance for insight, gnosis, call it what you will. Those aspects to life, and to each and every human life, that cannot be controlled, that are all of ours to explore, interact with, engage in divine rapture. Scientific materialism, like all organised religion, aims to control the masses, keep them in order. When Christianity no longer did the job, it was time to roll out another dogma, propounded by the dark agents of one-eyed science.

So, bring on the woo. I'm not saying that all of it is 'real', 'exists', or anything like that. There's plenty that I just don't know enough about to be able to say. Yet some of the contents of the basket of woo I have experienced personally, and have subjected those experiences to questioning and a degree of rigorous examination. Which is the most we can do, really.

Images: Top: Rainbow Chakras. OK, but why do we always have to sit in lotus position for the chakras to appear?

              Centre: Steady on there, Carl.

              Bottom: Ah, yes.....

And today's quiz: One of the three images is not at all woo. Not in the slightest. Guess which one.

      



Tuesday 11 October 2016

Meeting on the Ridge


It's April 9th, 2011. A Saturday. 11.45am.  The sun, when it deigns to shine, does so with strength and ferocity in the Highland spring. I am soon warm as I ascend the zigzags rising from the floor of Glen Shiel, away from the weekend trippers and motorbikes and towards the stark clarity of that springtime sky.

The path which steadily climbs up onto the spur is a grand piece of architecture, almost a thing of beauty. Not one to normally wax lyrical about things Victorian, I nevertheless concede that these old stalkers' paths are works made with pride, sensitivity, and out of a certain love of the environment through which they pass. What contrast they make with the modern estate tracks, blasted through glens and up hillsides by bulldozers, great mechanical scars cutting deeply through the silence. Creations of a mentality that knows not beauty, sensitivity, love.

I reach the top of the spur and behold the climb ahead of me. The broad grass-and-bog ridge leads onwards and upwards, to give onto steeper rock which rises up to eventually reach the first peak on the ridge proper.

Today is a big one. Having got myself to the first summit, I shall head westwards along the ridge to two more peaks, then more-or-less retrace my steps to catch the evening bus home. By then, I anticipate, I will be tired.  

Walking along the spur, I become aware of another person ahead of me. Their pinpoint becomes steadily bigger: they are progressing slowly. Eventually this pinprick, which has expanded into a sizeable inkblot by now, stops altogether. What is clearly a tea-and-relaxation break on the part of the slow-mo ahead is my opportunity. I step up my pace with the clear intention of overtaking and continuing to the top of the ridge unimpeded.

Approaching this figure sitting upon the meagre bog-and-grass that ekes out its existence at this altitude, I see that it is a man. Quite a senior one, in fact. He is enjoying refreshment from his thermos, clearly enjoying the warm sunshine of spring. I bid a cheery 'hello' with an energetic wave of my hand, but it's no good. I am not adept at passing by people on the mountains who would like a brief dialogue about the weather, the hill, and the rest. I have been well and truly waylaid.

My newfound friend must be, I guess, around eighty years old. His gear is straight out of the 1950s; in particular, he is using as an aid to walking an alpenstock. I have never seen an implement such as this close at hand; it is something which I thought was only used long ago, for early ascents in the Alps. It sports a long, straight, wooden handle. I have never set eyes upon such a magnificent yet simultaneously unwieldy and impractical walking aid in all my life.

"May I accompany you up the hill?" he asks. It's got to be a rhetorical question, hasn't it? It's not exactly easy to say "No, look. You're really slow, and I've got some extremely important walking to do today." It's not easy, for me at any rate.

We begin to snail pace our way up the narrowing ridge. My companion is, to borrow an unfashionable word from a fellow blog-writer, cultivated. He has this air about him, and an accent that marks him out as hailing from well-heeled Surrey. "I live in Middlesborough" he exclaims, almost causing me to tumble into the coire below. He tells me his name, which I have forgotten. He also confirms his age as eighty. And, lowering his voice conspiratorially, as if to tell me a great secret, he proffers a deep confession: "I am staying at the Kintail Lodge Hotel. Splashing out a bit." For a moment his eighty years are stripped away, and he appears beside me as a rather naughty little boy up to no good.

We amble on slowly, gradually gaining height. At one point the ridge narrows, and the path climbs a small rocky turret, requiring the use of hands for its ascent. My Teeside companion finds this tricky. His legs aren't up to it and give way, leaving him dangling. I am alarmed, and rush to help him up the mini 'bad step'.

We finally reach the top of the mountain, a Munro no less, and sit beside the cairn for another break and to soak up the view of ridge and sky. I cast my eye in the direction of the peaks to the west. "This is enough for me" my companion states definitively. "I'll stay for a while, then head back to the hotel for early dinner."

I stride off into the afternoon sun, leaving this man to feast his eyes on the landscapes before retracing his steps downwards. I look back one more time, apprehensive about his descent: will he negotiate the rocky step without tumbling head first and smashing his skull open on a protruding piece of rock? Several hours later, as I descend a parallel ridge, I see no sign of a crumpled body beneath the bad step, so assume that he made it OK. And I complete the day in reflective mode.

There, at 650 metres above sea level, somewhat below a rocky step on a northern spur of Maol Chinn-Dearg, I had the privilege to encounter a rather remarkable human being. I partook of his company, but then sped off along the ridge, intent on my own very important programme for the day. Was this an opportunity missed? A deeper, richer communication spurned for the sake of my own mad goals and agendas? My not fully appreciating the wonder before my very eyes, intent instead on finding it somewhere else - in this case, along the ridge? The answer to all of these is simultaneously 'yes' and 'no'. Did I miss out? Yes. Would I do the same, should the situation arise again? Most probably 'yes'.

The one thing I do know is that, should I reach such an age, it would be marvellous to be able to do as this man from Middlesborough. Know my limits, know my ever-dwindling physical abilities; realise without regret that those epic multi-peak marathons of yore are no longer. Yet to hone what I know I am still capable of, to still breathe in magnificence from expeditions which appear more modest, yet with age and the waning of physical ability take on proportions of enormous magnitude.

Photos: On the South Glen Shiel Ridge