Entering Merlin’s Domain
by Jason Godesky
In 1909, French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep published Les rites de passage, introducing the world to its titulary phrase, the rite of passage. Joseph Campbell’s 1954 The Hero with a Thousand Faces cast the monomyth—the archetypal template of all myths—as a representation of the rite of passage, which he divided into three phases: departure, initation, and return. Van Gennep distinguished three phases of the rite of passage: preliminary, liminaire, postliminaire. Liminaire translates into English as liminality—the state between. The preliminary stage, or Joseph Campbell’s departure, are rites of separation; they separate the participant from the community she was once part of. The liminal state is in between, where the transition actually occurs; this is Campbell’s initiation, when the hero attains the Golden Fleece, or the Grail, or satori, whatever the case may be. The final stage, postliminaire, the return, the rites of incorporation, involve returning to the community changed by the experience, bringing back what you have discovered. In a rite of passage, that can be adulthood, or a new spouse, or a college diploma. It is that thing achieved which changes who you are.
A wedding is a major rite of passage. Bride and groom are usually kept apart before the wedding as a rite of separation; the wedding ceremony itself is liminal; the reception is the first of the rites of incorporation, consummation the most blatant, and traditions like eating a piece of wedding cake on the first anniversary usually the last. In the process, both bride and groom shed their identities as single people, and create a new identity as married people. In Primitive Man as Philosopher, Paul Radin makes the case that tribal people emphasize, rather than denigrate, personal achievement and freedom. He suggests that anthropologists have it all wrong when they note the uniformity of ritual behavior: they see the tribe as a separate being in its own right, and that the tribe has the right to express itself—in song and ritual, mostly—as much as any individual. Ritual is not where tribal peoples express themselves; it’s where they allow their tribe to express itself. A marriage can be very similar: a third thing, whole in itself, created by both husband and wife, but belonging to neither.
But first, bride and groom must separate themselves from the lives they led before—the lives they are leaving behind. As Sheryl Paul discusses in The Conscious Bride, our culture neglects the wedding’s Shadow (in the Jungian sense), this sense of loss that necessarily accompanies the joy of a new life created. Because of this neglect, we turn to vapid consumerism to alleviate the feelings of sadness we view as illegitimate, we wonder what is wrong with us and why we would feel sad on “the happiest day of our lives.” Sheryl Paul approaches the wedding from a Jungian viewpoint, and with reference to ancient mythology.
Of course, this comes as a great help to Giuli as our wedding approaches in a week. For grooms, this is somewhat less severe. We don’t plan the weddings, usually, and a touch of sadness is expected for us.
But where women are encouraged to focus on the planning as a way to distract from their normal feelings or fear, grief and confusion, men are encouraged to joke about the transition. If they dare to bring up their more uncomfortable feelings, they’re met with a pat on the back and an old standard like, “Well, you’re going to the gallows!” or “Don’t worry, son. It’s just the old ball and chain!” While these statements actually do validate that it’s normal to be scared, they provide little comfort to the man and offer no guidance or support for how to manage their fear and confusion.1
Practicality puts Giuli on a train to New York tomorrow, and leaves me alone for the final week before our wedding. During that week, it seems everything from my old life is converging to a single climax: a new car, a new apartment, and other struggles unsuited for public discussion. Suffice to say that our rite of separation is a tad more separated—400 miles—and in that separation, fate has conspired to send me through a certain trial by fire. I cannot think of any other time in my life when I’ve faced such enormous pressures, from so many simultaneous fronts, and most daunting of all, I will have to face them alone. For men, rites of passage usually involve trials of endurance, bravery, skill or self-reliance, so this confluence is, in some ways, fortunate. My rites of separation will be far more profound for them, and hopefully, the reward of that trial will be to enter into my wedding in a week’s time a better man than I would otherwise have been—we are always more than we believe we are, but it is only when pushed to our limits that we learn how much.
I am fortunate to have a guide on this journey—at least, a myth.
At the same time that Giuli was reading The Conscious Bride, I was rediscovering Daniel Noel’s Soul of Shamanism. In the first part of the book, Noel reveals the imaginary foundation of the neoshamanic movement. Mircea Eliade’s novels, for instance, reveal his fixation on ascent and the heavenly—explaining why his famous work, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy focuses so much on ascent and the heavenly, to the neglect of descent and the infernal. The Carlos Castenada hoax,2, 3 and its essential role in beginning neoshamanism, is discussed in great detail. Even more honest attempts to reconstruct shamanism, such as Michael Harner’s “core shamanism,” suffer from a blindness to its own Shadow (again, in the Jungian sense)—colonialism, exploitation, imperialism and cultural appropriation. What emerges, even from honest endeavors, is distorted by that Shadow into a construct of the Western Romantic imagination, where those elements that match our image of the “Noble Savage” are retained, and those elements that defy it are eliminated, creating a wholly artificial construct made in our own image.
So the neoshamanism we have had is all about fantasizing around certain insistent and evocative themes of late-twentieth-century Western culture; the longings are sincere but the spiritual practices that are followed to fulfill them are simulated, with the danger of neo-colonialist misappropriation of indigenous cultural property and delusions of “direct access” to such indigenous wisdom.
That’s the bad news about this Western “reconsideration.” The good news is that a mindful approach to the fantasy and imagining process itself is possible which can make for a more honest and viable neoshamanism in the future.4
In the second half of the book, Noel notes the need for a new kind of shamanism, even if neoshamanism is but a colonialist fantasy pretending to fulfill that need. He sees something real and even shamanic in the “shamanovelists and shamanthropologists” who have so far led neoshamanism: their active restructuring of imagination is precisely what the shaman does. Their works about shamanism may have less to do with actual shamanic practices than they do with Western imagination, but the works themselves are examples of shamanism at work.
Literal reality alone is not enough. It is dysfunctional because it is not whole. “Neither the literal reality of the conscious world nor the nonliteral reality of the unconscious world is absolutely real.” …
Imaginal Reality is almost too over-simplistic a term for such a loaded concept. It is a concept that I feel is critical to this problem of perception we have been discussing. Noel developed his concept of imaginal reality from the work of Jung and Hillman and compares imaginal reality to Casteneda’s non-ordinary reality. Other comparisons might include the Australian Aborigine’s dreamtime and core shamanism’s SSC—shamanic state of consciousness. (Harner, 1990, p. xix) Imaginal reality is, as Noel quotes Hillman, “…An issue of a nonmaterialistic view of the real, the reality of private knowledge, and, ultimately, the reality of the soul.”5
Noel’s model of a Western shamanism eschews the Noble Savage to find echoes of shamanism in the European tradition—particularly in the work of Carl Gustav Jung.
Then, in the middle of the way, we come to his visit to Jung’s house, “where a modern man rediscovered the soul.” Of Jung he says words I could have spoken, for Jung had the same effect on me: “He gave us words with which to honor these imaginal realities of the soul, making possible another New Shamanism hidden and unrealized in the fantasized neoshamanism” (p. 106) of Part I. He points out that Jung “taught us how central fantasy and imaging are to our mental life” (p. 107). In this chapter he tells of Jung’s encounter with his inner depths, the objective psyche, from which evolved, in addition to outward events in his life, his personal myth, a prototype of the personal myth each of us has, whether or not we choose to find it. Noel came away from his studies of Jung and James Hillman with a major insight: “that there is a shamanic underworld or otherworld for Western seekers and Western methods for approaching it” (p. 114).6
Synchronicity itself is a fairly shamanic experience, but this particular instance—Noel pointing me to Jung as my guide to rediscovering our shamanic heritage, at the same time that Paul pointed Giuli to Jung as her guide in her transition from maiden to wife—was a powerful one. Noel’s next suggestion only planted me more firmly in that course, as he looked through the catalog of Western myths to find one that fit the shaman’s archetype.
I don’t think we can conceive of these matters–how to relate, as Westerners, to a shamanic spirituality—without psychology. So that relates us to Jung, among other shapers of modern Western psychology. Moreover, Jung was involved in the areas that are, to me, most relevant: imagination, the reality of the psyche, dreams, the need for spirituality and “the symbolic life,” etc. The connection from Jung back to Merlin is not ironclad, by any means, but his own personal fascination with the Merlin figure and legend, as attested in part by the anecdote you recounted about his Bollingen stone, seems at least a suggestive connection, an opportunity to imagine possible parallels. I also suggest in my book that as Merlin disappears from the outer affairs of Arthur’s court and military concerns and is enchanted into invisibility by Niniane/Viviane/Nimue, he becomes a figure of story, an inner figure, a part of the Western psyche. Thus he inhabits a realm where psychology and aesthetics overlap—he takes his “Celtic shamanism” there, if you will–and that is a realm where Jung set up shop in our century. Merlin is a possible Western shamanic role model—one whom I connect, somewhat loosely, to Jung. But there are other figures that have been thought of as Western arch-shamans: Orpheus, for instance, or Faust. I needed a model, with a story, to lend flesh and bones to my abstract points about Western (neo)shamanism as a possible, a viable, enterprise. But there’s no Merlinian orthodoxy here. I could’ve gone with Orpheus or Faust—and could even have drawn connections to Jung. But Merlin, and the Merlin-Jung connection, such as it is, spoke to me most evocatively, elicited my imagining—which is halfway to shamanic practice, for the likes of me.7
I still remember the first book I read about King Arthur, and not long after, Warriors of Arthur, my first introduction to the notion of an “historical King Arthur,” an obsession that gripped me for ten years, leading me to a study of Late Antiquity and the collapse of the Roman Empire (I retain several full book shelves on the topic), flowering in the now-defunct Saxon Shore (my first website). Even years later, friends and family joked about the release of Antoine Fuqua’s movie, about how nice it was of them to produce a major motion picture just for me (I did enjoy that movie—and I also completely understand why it didn’t do so well anywhere else). While I’m on the topic, I’ll point to the websites of colleagues I often corresponded with in those days: Robert Vermaat and David Nash Ford. I had, at the time, considered it a matter of purely academic interest, but revisiting it now, I can see the parallels to our own situation make my former interest much more prurient.8
The name “Arthur” burst into the medieval imagination sometime around 1135, thanks to the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Historia Regum Britanniae is his best known work, and most known for introducing the non-Celtic world to the legend of King Arthur, but Geoffrey’s work was not about Arthur nearly so much as Merlin. Merlin is the central character throughout the Historia, which is preceded in Geoffrey’s work by a series of apocalyptic prophecies attributed to Merlin titled Prophetiae Merlini, and followed by the Vita Merlini. In the Historia, Geoffrey relates how Merlin was concieved in Carmarthen as the illegitimate offspring of a demon, and thus had the gift of prophecy. For this reason, he was brought before King Vortigern,9 who was trying to build a tower that fell down every night. Merlin told Vortigern it was because there was a lake beneath the ground, and at the bottom of the lake, a chest, where two dragons were struggling—one white, one red. He prophesied the fates of the British and English based on the conflict of the two dragons; the English were the white dragon, the British, the red. Geoffrey goes on to describe how Merlin created Stonehenge as a memorial for Ambrosius Aurelianus,10 and how he helped Uther Pendragon magically change his shape in order to concieve Arthur.
In Robert de Boron’s treatment, Merlin’s tale takes on a very different and fascinating twist. In Robert’s version, the demon that fathers Merlin is hoping to create the Antichrist—an infernal balance to Jesus, the son of Satan in the same way that Christ was the Son of G-d. Unfortunately for the devil, the child is baptized by Blaise, who raises the child, but being half-demon, Merlin still possesses great powers and occupies a very ambiguous niche. “Robert de Boron lays great emphasis on Merlin’s power to change his shape, on his joking personality and on his connection to the Grail.”11
Going the other way, backwards from Geoffrey, we find immediately that the name “Merlin” was made up. He was originally Myrddin, but Geoffrey changed the spelling to avoid comparisons to the French word merde, meaning excrement. The connections to Carmarthen go back to this name, as well. In Latin, it was Moridunum, or “sea fort,” but it was later known as Caer Myrddin in Welsh, from which its current English name derives.
We also find the same story of the dragons related by Geoffrey in Nennius, but there, it isn’t Merlin, but Ambrosius. Ambrosius Aurelianus is one of only a very few British “tyrants” mentioned by name in contemporary sources. This leads us to the possibility that Merlin and Ambrosius are the same person—and if we accept the reading of Gildas that makes Ambrosius the victor at Badon Hill12, 13 then we face the possibility that Merlin is Arthur.
Of perhaps even greater interest in our pursuit of Merlin as a shamanic figure is the antecedent of Lailoken, sometimes named Myrddin. Sometimes he is a warrior named Lailoken; sometimes he is a bard of Gwenddoleu, but it is usually the Battle of Arfderydd, against Riderch Hael, that he goes mad when he watches his side slaughtered in battle. The 15th century Lailoken and Kentigern records his encounters with St. Kentigern after this.
One day, he encountered Kentigern, described in the text as “Blessed”, “Bishop”, and finally, “Saint.” Lailoken’s madness came about because he felt responsible for the deaths of his men. He was absolved of his guilt by the good Bishop Kentigern. Lailoken prophesied his own death to Kentigern’s priests on the day it is supposed to happen. He first said he would die by being stoned and clubbed, then he told them he would die by being impaled on a wooden spear, and lastly, he would die by drowning. Lailoken wished to receive Communion before his death and Extreme Unction afterward, and extracted a promise from Bishop Kentigern that he would receive these sacraments. Lailoken received Communion and ran back to the woods. King Meldred’s shepherds found him and stoned and clubbed him. According to the tale, at the exact moment of his death, Lailoken rolled down a hill and was impaled on a stake sticking up from a pond. With his head under water, he drowned. Lailoken had predicted his death correctly.
Another tale of Lailoken involves King Meldred, who captures Lailoken and places him under arrest until he makes a prophesy to the King. Lailoken tells him a riddle about his adulterous Queen in riddle, wrangles a promise to be buried in a Churchyard, tells the King what his riddle meant, and departs for the woods. It is in the woods that his predicted three-way death comes. Lailoken is buried in a churchyard thirty miles from Glasgow.14
The three-fold death, the shape-changing, the ambiguous origins and powers of prophecy are all common traits of the shaman. The shamanic connections of Merlin are pursued in greater depth by Nikolai Tolstoy (a relative of the famous Leo Tolstoy) in The Quest for Merlin. As a shaman, Merlin is a permanently liminal figure; he is always in between, always separated. Such is the essential, defining nature of the shaman’s existence: he mediates the boundaries between the human community, and the non-human communities around it.15 This liminal nature of the shaman makes him the guide for any rite of passage, because he is the permanent resident of that liminal state through which we pass. Merlin is baptized by Blaise, so he is not simply an agent of hell; but neither can a half-demon child ever be fully human. He stands between the demons—the dark, unseen forces feared by monotheists because they are blind to them—and us, and mediates the relationships between us. Note that in most treatments of the legend, Merlin’s primary role is sherperding young Arthur to the sword in the stone: the sword of his fathers, the sword that establishes his unknown paternal line. We see the very same symbolism, for the very same purpose, in the Greek legend of Theseus.
Giuli is off to New York tomorrow, going ahead of me to make necessary preparations for our wedding. It has a post-Roman Celtic theme. While she is gone, I will be travelling through Merlin’s domain, and if I can prove myself to the old wizard, he’ll let me proceed, to leave the sword in the stone and drink of the grail.
Bibliography
Eliade, Mircea. 1972. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
Harner, Michael. 1990. Way of the Shaman.
Noel, Daniel. 1999. Soul of Shamanism.
Paul, Sheryl. 2000. The Conscious Bride.
Tolstoy, Nikolai. 1987. The Quest for Merlin.
Hey, it’s not like I know much about merlin or anything, but thanks for telling us more about it. as far as the rest of the subject matter of the post, cool, very cool.
Good luck and brave journey!
Tony
Comment by Tony — 14 July 2006 @ 10:03 AM
I have been reading a book called “Man’s Rise to Civilization” by Peter Farb. It analyzes cultures and why their cultures are the way they are. One I just read was about the Inuits. It talks about how shamanism in that culture or really any culture is about filling a need that can’t be met with other social constraints. And in their culture, the shamans are usually schizoid and that they are envious of ones who are too good at something like gets too much game or gets too many women. And he works to see this stops. He performs sacred rituals but also does tricks like swallowing an animal bladder filled with blood and bursting it with his stomach muscles to make him spit up blood so the ceremony looks fantastical, but he still believes he is doing what he is doing because he is schizoid. And the taboos that are made up by the Inuits may even harm them a little like a rule that you can only use whaling tools for one season or not hunt for a period of mourning, so they are creating a sort of thing they have to suffer with together that they choose to do because of who they are and it creates a bond between them.
Comment by planetwarming — 14 July 2006 @ 11:09 AM
best wishes, Jason, to you and Giuli both.
see you on the other side, postliminaire!
neighbor
Comment by neighbor — 14 July 2006 @ 11:41 AM
Tony & neighbor, thank you!
Planetwarming, I also much enjoyed Farb’s book, but I think he’s quite out of his depth when he gets to Inuit shamanism. Most cultures have an array of taboos–some fundamental to the practical functioning of society, others fairly arbitrary and set to define the group. However, it can often be surprising how few arbitrary taboos there really are. We assumed the sacred cow of India was such a taboo for a long time–the term “sacred cow” has come to be a euphemism for any arbitrary taboo that sets off a group culturally–but Marvin Harris’ “Sacred Cow of India,” he showed that there were several practical reasons for the taboo. Also, the theory connecting shizophrenia and shamanism once had a lot of circulation, but actual investigation into the claim has revealed that it’s quite baseless. Farb has a lot of good ideas, but unfortunately, some parts have fallen out of date.
I’ve written quite a bit about shamanism, but you may have missed my main article from some time back, “The Shaman’s Vision.”
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 July 2006 @ 12:47 PM
I know this isn’t the proper venue, but I just wanted to say that the podcasts have been excellent! A great addition to this site, concise and timely discussions. I strongly encourage everyone to check them out if you haven’t already.
Comment by Bubba — 18 July 2006 @ 11:27 AM
Thanks, Bubba!
Though I’d guess if you’re worried about the appropriate pigeon-hole, you might’ve made a comment on one of the episode entries, or the podcast forum.
(And we’ve got a special wedding episode that’s already rigged to go off on Saturday at 4:00 PM, so you can listen to me & Giuli talking to Sheryl Paul at the same time that we’re getting married in Poughkeepsie, NY.)
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 July 2006 @ 11:42 AM
Do you mean THIS Saturday (July 22, 2006) ? Which time zone?
The Sheryl Paul link doesn’t work. Conscious weddings, huh? And I bet you thought you could get away with being unconscious at your wedding! (from too much drinking the night before).
I hope you can post some wedding photos for all us to swoon over.
Comment by Nim Chimpsky — 19 July 2006 @ 9:31 PM
I couldn’t find any other way to contact you guys than posting a comment on the blog.
Your Theory of Power wiki is getting hozed by spam. The newer versions of MediaWiki suppor spam-blocking plugins which may help curtail this.
How come there’s no “contact us” link on the site?
Comment by Anonymous — 24 July 2006 @ 7:01 PM
We’re aware of the spam problems on ToP, and one of these days, I might even have the time to fix it!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 26 July 2006 @ 8:46 AM
Spam has all but killed my own efforts. I’ve been hacked, spammed, and ignored. I think part of this has to do with the google weighting. If you get more references in google, you move higher up on the search results returned. This has made google useless in many cases, as this can so easily be abused. It would be nice if google offered a way to know who has associated with a website, so the website has a chance to black list at the search site, or even in the robots.txt file. In the meantime, spam has become my worst nightmare trying to get something started and my family over the walls of hierarchy. I’m experimenting with the google tools to remove sections of my site, but I want links to specific domains killed, not pages of my site. What a bother if I have to use every search engine tool and still can’t quite get a handle on it. I’d say phpBB sucks, but they were probably just an early target for floating google rating spam.
Comment by -Sean. — 27 July 2006 @ 4:44 PM
Mario A. Grajales wrote:
Can you extend this for me ??? I will appreciate it a lot:
“and those of us who wish to find a new way to live should be able to find that the beginning of collapse has left enough space for us to do just that. By 2012, curiously enough, the door of heaven may well be open for anyone who wishes to pass through it and create the future.”
So, is it here where you say what must we do now? because, I don’t have enought to buy an island yet.
Thanks and Congratulations again.
July 20th, 2006, at 11:29 pm #
Mario A. Grajales wrote:
I know the part of -. . . 2012 . . . door. . . heaven . . . - is a metaphorical one.
Isn’t it?
July 20th, 2006, at 11:32 pm #
Mario A. Grajales wrote:
mmmm . . . honeymoon? Uh.
btw ¡CONGRATULATIONS! for your marriage. I already listened the podcast. How I did? . . . internet archieves.
July 21st, 2006, at 11:27 am #
Comment by Mario A. Grajales — 27 July 2006 @ 8:05 PM
Mario, I responded once to your question, but my reply seems to have bounced.
As for what we do now. I can tell you what I am doing. First, I have no intention of going to an island. With global warming melting glaciers, the sea level is rising, so island seem to be a poor bet. Second, I am learning to identify plants in my area and learning which are edible and which are poisonous. I am also moving much closer to national forest land. I am powering down and learning to live with fewer comodities and making more of the things I need. When civilization becomes obviously frayed, I intend to disappear. Hopefully I can find some people to be with so we can help eachother through the chaos. And live as a tribe in the time beyond that too.
-Chandra
Comment by ChandraShakti — 27 July 2006 @ 10:57 PM
Sean - PageRank isn’t nearly so bad as you make it sound. I have problems with any single criterion of relevance, but if you buy that premise, PageRank is a pretty good way to go about it. It’s true that slimy, underhanded SEO’s are constantly trying to game the system with spam, but it’s also true that the search engines are always trying to find some new way to beat them. Cops & robbers. But you can still come out ahead—it’s just a matter of writing content that people are interested in reading, and getting it in front of people who’d be interested in reading it. It takes time, dedication, hard work, and the ingenuity to come up with content compelling, novel and important enough to warrant attention, but it can be done.
Mario - In the book version of the Thirty Theses, that becomes thesis #30. Basically, my contention is that cultural materialism acts on memetic variety, so something like collapse simply changes the nature of the game. Memetic varieties that are adapated to a situation of perpetual growth and ever-greater complexity will find themselves suddenly unable to compete with other varieties, adapted to a sustainable, dynamic equilibrium with their local ecology. So what do we do? We begin creating memetic varieties adapted to the context of collapse. We create tribes.
Since finishing the Thirty Theses, I’ve been writing more articles on how to think like a “Leaver” (to use Quinn’s generally problematic term). “Writing, Language & Thought,” “Spirit of Place,” “The Trickster, the Devil, and an Ambiguous World,” and “A Pirate’s Life for Me,” as well as this article, all talk about various aspects of “Leaver” mentality, the things I’ve identified so far as crucial elements of a sustainable memetic variety.
For the simple, pragmatic measures we’re looking at, I wrote an article a little while back called, “The Escape Plan,” that gets into the nitty-gritty issues. Primitive skills are easy to learn, though difficult to master; fortunately for us, we only need to learn them soon, and we’ll have the rest of our lives to work on mastering them. We’re still learning new things, but we’re already to the “luxuries” phase—it took little more than a few months to learn the basics of mean survival. Everything from here on in is quality of life (mind you, that leaves a lot of room still—right now, our quality of life would be fairly abysmal, but it’s comforting at least to know that we’re no longer worrying about whether or not we’d survive, just whether or not we’d want to). In general, I haven’t made up my mind on Tamarack Song, but this particular quote speaks to me:
I’m currently reading The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. Just the abbreviated version of the first chapter, “The Ecology of Magic,” was enough to draw me in. I just finished the introduction last night, and already he’s drawn together the phenomenology I studied in college, with the orality vs. literacy argument I wrote about in the article I linked above, with shamanism, and synaesthesia—basically, tying together all the strands I’ve been pursuing for quite some time into a single whole. I’m only through the introduction, but I think this may well be the most important book I’ve read since Ishmael—and as far as the question, “What do I do about all this?” it may be a better answer than anything I’ve had to write so far.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 July 2006 @ 10:32 AM
The wedding was beautiful, the moving less so, the new apartment more so, the new car makes me happy, and all of this will soon be summarized and presented to you—with photos, no less—once we’ve straightened away more pressing concerns in our new home, like “electricity,” and “internet access.” In the meantime, G-d bless libraries and local coffee shops so I can at least check in often enough to see that this place doesn’t go to hell in a handbasket.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 July 2006 @ 5:12 PM
well it’s un-avoidable but the hypocrisy in it does give off a certain negative factor about it all.
to survive now and prepare for the future as well as getting the word as with this site you basically need to be in the rat race like everyone else.
this can put people off, many will think if you can’t walk the walk then your talk is meaningless even though they have no way to know you do walk the walk other then your word for it.
for me there is the problem of purpose in general. i am not religious, so much so i consider most forms of it as a crutch used by people who are unable to wrap their minds around the world as a whole so they go into their little corners and account the rest to a deity of their choosing. after learning about stuff like this and peak oil the original purpose to at least be well off and successful has no meaning anymore. money and fame can’t give you anything but trouble once good times go bad, everyone near you including family and friends will look at you as a source of income while others will just look at you in envy. also on the other hand to live life just to live seems to lack a certain appeal to keep you getting up in the morning for me. also i am getting worried as i get older that i am seen as a old dog unable to learn, there is a perception of a belief from allot of people that once you reach your mid 20’s your considered unable to learn new things. personally i don’t really think it’s true but it matters what others think of it when it comes down to it..
Comment by truekaiser — 9 August 2006 @ 7:21 PM
Whoa! You lose the ability to learn new things in your mid 20’s?! When did that line of thinking get popular?
I must have really broken the mold when I learned C++, Java, and Python at 25….
Comment by jhereg — 10 August 2006 @ 8:47 AM
What hypocrisy? We’ve written many times previously about why we think that building a new culture is important, and why marriage is a good thing to have in that culture. Or do you mean the moving? We’ve also stated quite explicitly that we’re in the midst of our exodus, which implies that it’s not complete yet, which implies that, for now, we’re still in the civilized world. Things like moving and internet access are part of that. So … where’s the hypocrisy?
As a child, you learn things easily and quickly. As you get older, that ability deteroriates, but it’s never completely lost.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 10 August 2006 @ 9:17 AM
truekaiser… Why exactly does it matter that others think? You can learn if you believe you can. Others’ opinions on the matter can at most make it so that you have to search harder for opportunities that’s all.
Comment by ChandraShakti — 10 August 2006 @ 4:14 PM
sorry first off i wasn’t accusing you of hypocrisy jason only pointing out how the whole situation could look as such on the outside. i personally do not think you are being a hypocrite, just doing what you have to do to get by and pass the word on to those who will listen. i should of worded it better and thats my fault.
second that part was just a lamenting of what i can gather from people around me. their common view is that the human brain gets set in it’s ways in the mid 20’s and it becomes very hard to change the person’s views afterwords. as for what other people think. it has great power over what you can and can’t do in the way things are today, everything from what job you can get to how well off you can be and this won’t change till it all ends in someway or another.
Comment by truekaiser — 10 August 2006 @ 6:28 PM
Well, actually, there will always be some sort of imposition set on you by any community you’re a part of. That’s pretty much inevitable.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference. “
Comment by jhereg — 11 August 2006 @ 7:47 AM