Well, he isn’t Jim though.

Fine Sentiment. Good Christian up there.

High-Tech Search for Legendary Warlord

By LEE DYE
Oct. 29, 2008

Somewhere beneath the wind-swept deserts of Mongolia lies the body of one of the most enigmatic warlords in history, a ruthless but brilliant leader who united his people and built the largest empire in the world. Nearly 800 years after Genghis Khan died, the legends continue to grow, as do the mysteries.

Somewhere beneath the wind-swept deserts of Mongolia lies the body of one of the most enigmatic…

Somewhere beneath the wind-swept deserts of Mongolia lies the body of one of the most enigmatic warlords in history, a ruthless but brilliant leader who united his people and built the largest empire in the world. Nearly 800 years after Genghis Khan died, the legends continue to grow, as do the mysteries.

(Getty Images)

Now, a young scientist at the University of California, San Diego, is hoping to succeed, where others have failed, and answer a question that has puzzled historians for centuries: Where, precisely, is the tomb of Genghis Khan?

Albert Yu-Min Lin doesn’t plan to search for his answer with the traditional tools of archaeology, a small pick and good brush. Instead, he will rely on high-tech, and if he is successful, he will find the long-sought tomb without turning a single space of dirt.

“We’re trying to locate the tomb, not dig it up,” said Lin, who lived for awhile in Mongolia with a family of horsemen.

Lin’s tools will be “non invasive” implements, ranging from satellite photos, ground-penetrating radar, and sensitive devices that can detect clues that the ground was disturbed hundreds of years ago.

Spaziani Dirty-Blond Monsignor and Cup Holder for Holy Father Benedict, often noted by Italian Catholics and derided as Gorgeous George with much howling and laughter in Catholic Italian Homes.

PS: When he was a cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger wanted to retire, stating he was exhausted.

MG: With his election as Pope something happened that he neither strived for nor wanted. But I am convinced that, as he by and by surrendered to God’s will, the grace of the office in his person and his actions has shown effect and still is. . . .

He’s old, but kindly is all Spaziani wanted relate.  It is odd though how little of anything anymore comes from the Castle in Italy (The Vatican).  Mr.Spaziani is attractive and young at least.  Perhaps he can ‘Spice Up’ the whole boring church of which he finds himself.  Christ himself is as stiff and bloodless as a Leech without his ‘Red Coat Boys’ with nothing exciting to go on.  Looking up to Jesus on his Iron Symbol surely isn’t going to thrill the Christ much, since the Two are nothing but Seperate.  The ‘connection’ is looking rather weak these days, is all.  The verbiage is indeed, just that, still Spaziani might one day want to put a few ‘drips’ into the old mans tea someday… after all Livia poisioned Augustus and with things being so very dull for such a sexy boy as Spaziani, he may want to consider this with Christ, upon his ‘kneelings’, of course, and without the insufferable baggage that comes with ‘The First one That Arrived’, Jesus, of course, The Love.

I don’t think a Catholic is looking for love as a Protestant is, but for the blood itself, where the true Religion is.  It’s not an easy undertaking to search for this, there is Hell, Death, Demons, Depression, War, Famine and many other unpleasant aspects, all of which ‘laymen and laywomen’ of present day ‘christianity’ would rather not face.

There comes an Individual then and soon from The Christ… who will surely see to your needs.

Spaziani… does he know how to type, as well as pray?

The day has begun as usual, poorly. Still although there is absolutely no life on Earth any longer I wonder how much longer it will take until Death lays its hands on the Humanity that is in the way. What more must be done for the final answer to arrive. Will Religion prevail, yes but not on any Earthly Plane, up there to be sure are the various ‘Dogma’s’ that strap the populace down here. The people on Earth are an amazingly ignorant lot. They arrive to work each day seemingly without any knowledge about anything but themselves. It is enough for them to be as comatose as any beings that have ever lived. It is the usual then, for this present lot, who have managed to strangle within themselves the very essence of anything that was unique or special with their own twisted and poor ‘interpretation’ of their very fiber, their religions. The grist of the conflict is that these adherents are literally unable to know and or contemplate anything outside of their own understandings. It is obvious that they will never ‘care’ in any way for any other approach, so it is the same day in and day out, with knowledge far beyond all things, living and or unborn or dead. It is the children then, who will see to the true change, as these present ‘elders’ those who have brought us here on the Merry-Go-Round, of their own ignorance who will fall and be eaten alive. The Rabid will surely return and hopefully at an accelerated rate. To often the impulse is to go to those who are ‘accomplished’ who wear the smiles of Infamy, as all about them fails and is eaten alive, inside and out.

This is surely a fine day for The Devil to contemplate as anything and everything that is Godly and or Holy has been stripped by the indifference of the multitudes upon the Earth. Look then, they will to their money, their laughs, their mockery as all about them continues without nary a complaint. Action will bring them unto themselves only, they are surely the despised throughout all of Creation, here and beyond. That they do not yet see the writing on the wall only adds to the ‘Delicious’ nature of their own ends. The wait has already been long and unpleasant in each and every way. Hearts beat and soon the ‘line’ in there will be tripped and the Burn Out will commence.

It is up to us, to look and observe the many failings of the Heart that will soon plague the Humanity of Earth.

The more I live the more I realize that I have a very serious life.

There is no such thing as a human survivor. There is carnage. There is surely DEATH but I have yet to encounter anyone on Earth who is as strict as I am about life and living. I don’t mean the pride… the endless competition that earth dwellers feel is their domain. Nothing could be further from my intentions. Or uglier to me.

Everything is far worse than man or woman can imagine. Things get worse, and worse and worse. And why not, we are “involved” in a creation of continual hurt. Isn’t it about time that we realized and faced this?

Often there is nothing but despair, depression, and feelings and emotions that go absolutely nowhere. But why do so many “turn off” at this time. This is, indeed, the only time to enter the Malestrom of life’s creation, when we feel at our worst… to extend our experience’s into what is most disturbing to us.

I often wonder when the Earth that I see will begin to mirror my own ideas and understanding. Ideas that are completely beyond what is said and written by secular men and women, of our day. What is containing and increasing our ignorance? Each other? Ourselves? Are we really in on something… or is it that this something isn’t big enough for a great and growing many of us.

Maybe God isn’t all that important to us after all. Commanding: assuradely. But God isn’t actually useful anymore. His things are his own and one thing about GOD is that he surely isn’t the helper that many religions oddly envision him to be. The question in this area may well be:

Will we ever face things without God?

Are we ready to stand alone?

Are we capable of doing so?

I believe that we are, and that we must indeed, do so, as the future isn’t anything that the present promises us. Perhaps we should find our “hero’s” in this lonely place, instead of the vast coinage of more popular rescues.

I do see so much great talent, and probably like many of you, I’m often in admiration of these very talented individuals. Yet, unlike you, perhaps, but like death, I see and keep with the primordial ugly nature of man and his diseases. His life, you see, is becoming static… his greater numbers and modern approach are not the answer at all. Not an answer to anything.

There are so many who fail miserably when faced with what is truly ugly in life, when that very and vast area should be taken in with encouragement and courage! Death is not what it seems… and often the mirrors that hang before us are just that, smokescreens, that become self-serving and begin to seem almost pertinent to our very futures… but these things are complete lies.

I could focus on the specific ways in which many become “used” by ordinary life as the vessel grows older. But if you aren’t finding any ancient struggles, then what good is your life? Your life is, of course, valuable to you, but your life isn’t valuable to me at all. And why is this knowledge such a surprise? It should not be.

But if you have a true life, then I can surely see the value in you, regardless of my own interests… religiously or otherwise. I can only respect your Journey… after all “Life Is A Journey”… has been said. I mean that life may or may not continue, but need this be the “big” question? The Journey continues regardless of your emotions, religions, thoughts, values or anything else.

Creation doesn’t stop to “enjoy” our victories or our tears. Then why should we stop for the interest of others? Maybe we shouldn’t, maybe we should delimit what has gone on before. With religion on Earth at a standstill…a stalemate… maybe it’s time to “clear the board” for a while.

There is hate and anger, but so what, everyone is proficient with these… maybe we should begin to wield hate and anger… instead of looking at them as weaknesses. Perhaps we should address the “energies” that confront us from the past with War. God’s and Prophets should fall from the hand of the living. Perhaps we can reach and effect some astute ends to the “afterlife”… A very useful endeavor… Draconian to some, yet timely and valid in a world whose people have reached into a further understanding.

Are we living in times where life has become as difficult and meaningful as Death and the mysteries of The End?

-Clay Scott Brown

Although Buddhism has come to evolve as a religion with a characteristic body of scriptures and rituals, strictly speaking, in Buddhism scriptural authority cannot outweigh an understanding based on reason and experience.  In fact the Buddha himself, in a famous statement, undermines the scriptural authority of his own words when he exhorts his followers not to accept the validity of his teachings simply on the basis of reverence to him.  Just as a seasoned goldsmith would test the purity of his gold through a meticulous process of examination, the Buddha advises that people should test the truth of what he has said through reasoned examination and personal experiment.  Therefore, when it comes to validating the truth of a claim, Buddhism accords greatest authority to experience, with reason second and scripture last.

Yes, this is all to do, Mr. Tenzin Gyatso , but don’t forget that you aren’t The Buddah anymore than I am Jesus Christ.  Your book I couldn’t continue with, although you are sure to have many interesting things going in and around the science discussion.  I don’t really know how your Religion ‘works’.  I think it’s powerful, even though I haven’t encountered it!  You are The Lama, though, the Father of your Nation.

China could literally wipe you off the face of the Earth, and let’s face facts, you know it.  Yet visualize this outcome for a minute The Lama, what if China did Murder every single child, man and woman of Tibetan Ancestry?  What would occur then.  Well, Absolutely nothing, since China shouldn’t be there anyway, they are simply stretching themselves more and more thin with the large population, actually all they are doing is getting to know others and will probably be leaving in very friendly spirits!

China.  There will be no China expansion… it would be a disaster of monumental proportions.  The world could just as well as sit on the head of the Budda himself, who I don’t view as a ‘phantom’ by any means, simply mysterious is my guess, doing what needs doing out there in the after.  More power to him and may much Luck and Karma Guide his way into many Victories for Buddhism… which we are all graced with.  Still, I don’t see what the use is of ‘Visiting’ another people in this occupational manner, Mr. Gyatso.  You may actually have a high opinion of The Buddah, and that I can understand.  Still I think your young man awaiting is becomming more challenging than you.  I saw him on Television.  You may wish to pursue other interests at this time, but things may not go your way.  You are in no way required to participate in any ‘trouble’ Mr. Gyatso… saying no is simple.

I don’t know you as a man Mr. Gyatso, but I wish I did.  I don’t quite know what I’d say to someone like you.  You are stunningly Beautiful and rather than carp on the Chinese troubles of late, I’d much prefer to discuss the fascinations of water, or say the movements of a tea kettle.

Hello, I haven’t commented here for some time. As you know I’ve been keeping the days from month to month, and keeping is a good way to put it. I’m ‘pleased’ at what is occurring. With this new month (July 44) I’ve used my book The Tarot Arcana and also The Oracle that goes with my book to bring about a more personal reading from day to day. I feel that this offers me, and you a much more detailed understaning as pertains to the Future. It is indeed rather frightening to actually ‘know’ the future, although the word K-N-O-W isn’t a good one pertaining to the ’sight’ of an actual ‘Seer’. And if you are truly an actual ‘Seer’ you probably won’t be well known on this present Earth. Yet there is some hope that in the future their may someday be another Earth… this Earth we presently inhabit is far too small, literally for most of us.

It seems to me that a huge “Kick Start” is coming and with the Mayan Calendar coming close to it’s end in 2012 (48 by my Calendar) we will probably be witnessing some really interesting days coming up. The ‘whip-Snake’ is going to surely be coming back on most people who once thought they were in ‘esteemed company’. The fissures of experience have been showing in so many ways, that you may have not seen for yourself yet, still there is the hope that you may ‘live long enough’ to see things for yourself and up close. By all means see to your safety but at least attempt not to let a Risk go by. So many of you got caught up in the Maelstrom of what you were born into that the Clear Path must have seemed oh so sure.

If you’ve been around this boat for sometime now you may actually realize that your own perceptions were in fact correct, and if that is the case then you are in good stead!

The fact is that a great deal isn’t known. The ‘living’, as it were, isn’t much of a model for that other area that we commonly Fear and call the Spirit World or the After. I personally have come to the understanding that a great many things are yet to unfold. I consider the years past…

1980-2008 and counting to be the Age of Un-Enlightenment, the exact opposite of what ‘friendly’ Spirits and.or Soothsayers, that you may have encountered, have told you!

So if we are looking at things anew in this context as I would indeed recommend you do, you will see then that 30 years may be the final end to many ‘old fashioned’ ideas and outmoded concepts. Yet every breath you took is one for yourself, so regardless of your present ‘time of life’ feel pleased that you were even alive during such turbulent times. I’m not one for looking at a Wide Universe and seeing myself as a dot of light. I see more of a Universe that will someday explode or fizzle to nothing, and I don’t count years like a Scientist! Gazooks! 6 billion years isn’t much to hang on! Indeed time isn’t anything but a means to keep that dinner date, but it does inform the Imagination if not the Creative side.

Now let me say a few words about the Present Deck of Tarot Cards that I’m using. I bought these on an interesting trip that I took to The Bodhi Tree on Melrose in West Hollywood. I had quite a long ride, as I had to take the Bus. I bought these they are called the Pagan Tarot and are generally pretty interesting cards, I’d say. There is that one woman generally throughout the deck, but interestingly I don’t see the Pentacle as being very Feminine actually. I sure don’t mind others looking at The Pentacle in any way they see fit and If they do find something of note there I would encourage them to pursue it to the furthest of their interest… yet the owner of The Pentacle isn’t going to be a ‘happy one’ to adherents and I would caution ‘blanket beliefs’ and ‘good feels’ as not the ‘whole story’. I’d generally advise a very serious mind for anyone truly interested in what some Religions have deemed “Satan”. I look at these so called ‘negative interpretations’ as weak of the various religions that harbor such ignorance. I’m not one to correct an ignorant religion, however. I don’t mind seeing one go belly up, as it were.

With that said I will be using the present Tarot Deck in the Coming month of August. It allows me a chance to see further where this is going. It is interesting that many woman in particular are seeing the Pentacle as Pagan. The word Pagan is one that I’m not entirely sure denotes a history. History isn’t anything that can be stamped down by any one Era in my view. Indeed we may not see the actual thrust of our own times until far into the future when future peoples see into our little corner of the Universe!

Until then however, we can remain as cozy as can be… or as cozy as we can manage. Either way things are sure to get interesting.

The year 1968 is being remembered, memorialized and celebrated for many reasons in 2008. Valerie Solanas, failed assassin and crackpot writer, is not one of them.

That’s because Solanas represents the opposite of anything society wants to celebrate any year. On June 3, 1968, two days before the assassination of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, Solanas entered the Manhattan office of Andy Warhol and shot him.

Solanas, a panhandler who had been sexually abused as a child and had appeared in one of Warhol’s films, was the author of “SCUM Manifesto,” a tract calling for the elimination of the male sex. But it wasn’t only as the founder and lone member of SCUM — the Society for Cutting Up Men — that Solanas attacked Warhol. After he misplaced the manuscript of a play she’d written, she concluded Warhol “had too much control” over her life.

Warhol survived, but physically and in other ways, he never fully recovered. He died in 1987, not even 60 years old. For a long time he’d been telling people he already felt dead. Solanas, who served three years in prison, outlived him by 14 months, dying in a San Francisco SRO hotel.

If the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. represent the death of hope in 1968, the strange confluence of Warhol and Solanas pointed the way to a new era when hope was beside the point.

It was in 1968 that Warhol first noted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. But in 1967, Solanas had prefigured that with a warning of her own. In the future, she wrote in her characteristic mode of threat-laced irony, “it will be electronically possible for [a man] to tune in to any specific female he wants to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this.” These twin predictions sum up the world we find ourselves in now, the world of reality TV, Facebook, Twitter, the entire free-range panopticon. Solanas made her prediction in a footnote to “SCUM Manifesto,” but the whole essay is like that.

For a 50-page, sexually confused diatribe against men, the manifesto is filled with an odd glee, a kind of joy in the freedom to put down words with precision and wit. “SCUM,” Solanas wrote, “wants to grab some swinging living for itself.” The manifesto isn’t just anti-men. It’s anti-everything: anti-hippie, anti-work (and pro-”unwork”), anti-art, anti-military, anti-boredom, anti-you-name-it. Its nihilism is a form of utopia for Solanas, a pre-punk aesthete who fearlessly tossed out ideas that people are just now beginning to raise. She predicted reproduction without men, the elimination of aging, the end of reproduction itself and the dawning of an age of quasi-immortals. For Solanas — who saw the extinction of men as inevitable, an evolutionary process — these were all signs of hope that future generations, like men and all the other things she couldn’t stand (”landlords, owners of greasy spoons and restaurants that play Muzak”), would become unnecessary and disappear.

As a mixture of social philosophy and fine shtick, her work has the rare virtue of seeming at the same time totally insane and totally right. That’s a virtue we used to look for in philosophers, from Diogenes and Socrates up to Nietzsche.

Pressing a dubious scientific eureka — “the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene” — Solanas built a remarkably coherent attack on maleness as a lethal, crippling defect of the body and the spirit. Rather than dispute traditional anti-feminist stereotypes about hysteria or neurosis or neediness, Solanas simply applied them to the other gender.

And because automation and “technically feasible” artificial reproduction are making maleness itself obsolete, the real battle for the future is not between men and women but between “SCUM — dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, thrill-seeking, free-wheeling, arrogant females” and “nice, passive, accepting, ‘cultivated,’ polite, dignified, subdued, dependent, scared, mindless, insecure, approval-seeking Daddy’s Girls.”

Grrl-powered passages like these are one reason “SCUM Manifesto” sounds fresher today than many of the era’s speeches, statements and other orotund pronouncements — not to mention “Hello, I Love You.”

The manifesto’s effect is impossible to detach from the author’s story of rape, rage and attempted murder. But for a deranged criminal who committed an indefensible act, Solanas has remarkable staying power. Although Lou Reed wrote in a song about the shooting, “I believe I would’ve pulled the switch on her myself,” she was the subject of the excellent 1996 movie, “I Shot Andy Warhol,” and “SCUM Manifesto” came back into print in a handsome edition in 2004. In this year of mania for 1968, Valerie Solanas nags the conscience. “SCUM gets around,” she wrote.

CSI Rubik’s Cube

this lampshade appears as a hovering mass of ornaments, opulent and bombastic. when viewed more closely it dissolves into single bodies, which are twisted in fear and seem to be frozen in mid-fall. their rhythmic order becomes slightly perplexing and finally renders the bodies an ornament. softly, the fleshy parts of the bodies, legs and stomachs reflect the light. because of the shadows the bodies cast on themselves, only parts of them appear in the foreground. only fragments of the lit interior of the lamp are distinguishable. the aspects of the lit core change dramatically whenever the observer changes his position. these movements of the observer transform the stiff bodies into dynamic objects. the association with the fall of the damned - a metaphor for guilt and punishment - gives the lamp a certain amount of ambivalence: is it a moralistic message, an act of formalism or both? the design of this lamp undermines several taboos imposed on design in the 20th century: it is figurative, ornamental and narrative.
The Late Show with David Letterman Hooded Sweatshirt

Now we turn to The Road by Cormac McCarthy. A writer that I’ve never encountered before. I assumed he was the one who wrote Lonesome Dove but that was by Larry McMurtry. I didn’t expect anything with The Road it had already been demolished, psychically by america’s wonder wheel media… I think Oprah read it or something. So therefore I could easily ignore it without thought of course. Still, although I can’t trust our Media any more than I can etch-e-sketch Mount Rushmore, I must admit that the Pulitzer Prize does astonish me a bit. Some selections can be odd. The weight and dimension of any critical thought these days is not what it used to be! Honestly I don’t think there’s much actual thinking going on anymore, do you? If your not insane then you would have to agree with me, not your most pleasing prospect, I’m sure!

At any rate, let me not be sidetracked. The Road is a sparse book, I’m certain that Mr. McCarthy was going over his paragraphs with a fine tooth comb. The writing is very concise, it would appear almost simple to many, still, there are masters in this area, Hemingway is one, is all one need say. Mr. McCarthy is actually engaged here in his book The Road. The story of The Road is generally straight forward. A father and son after an Apocalypse are barely surviving on A Road. That’s really all there is to The Road, and sure any one can write this story, still you’d have to be over 3 years old though to make it look like anything for real and all. And I believe that Mr. McCarthy has succeeded. It is a heart rendering tale as the starving man and boy go through what is left of their lives.

The Father of the boy knows that his son may or may not have much of a future, because there are the usual atrocities from men and women of humanity all around, that is not surprising. Regardless of our so called ‘evolution’ and the musings of ‘Chick Lit’ the snake does bite back, does it not? So I’m not reading or looking upon Mr. McCarthy’s book as a way to view the surroundings with sentiment, I’m putting myself on the back-burner, as it were to see where his perspective has brought him. I don’t mind not being a ‘part of the scene’ unlike a politician or egotist, with such tenuous situation as The Road it seems that I can get more by being respectful. Mr. McCarthy delivers rather well.

“The Boy” is this Fathers entire life, he’ll do anything at all to protect him.. and his own life doesn’t mean Shit (excuse the verbiage) to him when it comes to his son. We go through this very astonishing tale with a sense of fascination as they pick and scrim and meet some sparse folk upon the road. Mr. McCarthy is indeed extremely careful not to lose his train of thought. Any error in judgment on his part would indeed sink this little endeavor, but he is honest, and although we know of ‘the best policy’ it sure isn’t easy, ‘being honest’ for a great many in these days! It’s our own Apocalypse then, one which we haven’t yet brought upon ourselves yet… and indeed, I did like that in one part of The Road of the father speaking to an Old Begger in the road with his son about the ‘past’ a bit. It’s not the sentimental stream of religion and thought that surrounds our ancient hatreds and fears… but an exact telling from an older man who has lived through this present Apocalypse… The Old Begger tells the Father that he knew it was coming… that he saw that it would happen.

I actually read The Road in only two days! In fact I was beginning to wonder how Mr. McCarthy would end his work here. I was indeed rather surprised about being rather ‘emotional’ at the end. Surprised in that I’m not that kind of guy. It was hard to let ‘the boy’ go for us as readers nearly as much as his father! I did feel though at the end that Mr. McCarthy pulled a dis-service on us. By having a woman crone on about God… women can place their emotions on the Cloud up there, that is a common procedure of religion these days… but in this case it is best to let us have our own tears and meanings without ‘the dead ones’ we so admire! I felt that this was Mr. McCarthy’s only slip in the entire book… after all he isn’t Hemingway!

Darkroom Gallery presents Colin Remas Brown’s haunting photographs of what happened to our park after last year’s fire.

A moonscape that had previously been green.

“The last day I was there,” says Brown, “there were green sprouts pushing through the blackened soil everywhere.”

A deer whose antlers got caught in a tree most likely while trying to escape the blaze. The exhibit marks the one year anniversary of the Griffith Park Fire.

50 best cult books

Our critics present a selection of history’s most notable cult writing. Some is classic. Some is catastrophic. All of it had the power to inspire

What is a cult book? We tried and failed to arrive at a definition: books often found in the pockets of murderers; books that you take very seriously when you are 17; books whose readers can be identified to all with the formula “<Author Name> whacko”; books our children just won’t get…

Some things crop up often: drugs, travel, philosophy, an implied two fingers to conventional wisdom, titanic self-absorption, a tendency to date fast and a paperback jacket everyone recognises with a faint wince. But these don’t begin to cover it.

Cult books include some of the most cringemaking collections of bilge ever collected between hard covers. But they also include many of the key texts of modern feminism; some of the best journalism and memoirs; some of the most entrancing and original novels in the canon.

Cult books are somehow, intangibly, different from simple bestsellers – though many of them are that. The Carpetbaggers was a bestseller; Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a cult.

They are different from books that have big new ideas – though many of them are that. On The Origin of Species changed history; but Thus Spoke Zarathustra was a cult.

They are different from How-To books – though many of them are that. The Highway Code is a How-To book; Baby and Child Care was a cult. These are books that became personally important to their readers: that changed the way they lived, or the way they thought about how they lived.

The Bible, the Koran and the Communist Manifesto, of course, changed lives – but, in the first instance, they changed the life of the tribe, not of the individual.

In compiling our list, we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that

We were able to agree, finally, on one thing: you know a cult book when you see one. And people have passionate feelings on both sides: our appeal for suggestions yielded enough for a list at least three times as long as this one.

So if you’ve loved or hated or grown out of or grown into one of these books – or another book we’ve omitted – please visit our website and tell us about it. Sam Leith

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Sideways fantasy from the Diogenes of American letters, a comic sage who survived the firebombing of Dresden and various familial tragedies to work out his own unique brand of science-fictional satire. Like much of Vonnegut’s stuff, this is savage anger barely masked by urbane anthropological sarcasm. Very much the place to start. TM

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)

The great modern Baroque novel. Made it possible for the middle classes to embrace the Mediterranean. No such Alexandria ever existed, nor did the potboiler thriller plot of space/time exploration, Kaballa, sex, good food and drink (it came out during rationing) or philosophical enquiry. Some beautiful sentences, sure; but lots of them don’t make sense. AMcK

A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)

Plotless, morality-free salute to decadence. An individual based on its French author lounges about his luxurious home indulging in pursuits such as embedding gemstones in the shell of a tortoise until, loaded down, it expires. Dripping with Baudelairean ennui (and not a little dull itself), A Rebours was a bible for the Symbolists, Oscar Wilde and alienated creative types everywhere. SD

Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)

Childcare experts go in and out of fashion, but Dr Benjamin Spock remains the daddy of them all. From his reassuring first sentence – “You know more than you think you do” – he revolutionised the way parents thought about their children, asserting the right to cuddle, comfort and follow your instincts. He also tells you how to deal with croup. SC

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)

The woman who made feminism sexy by being gorgeous and shaving her legs also taught her readers to eat a hearty meal. This book argues that a cult of thinness has desexualised and disempowered women just when, after the acceptance of free love and the introduction of the contraceptive pill, the opposite should have happened. The most important feminist text of the past 20 years. SD

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)

In one of the original misery memoirs, Sylvia Plath delivered an intense, semiautobiographical story of growing up at a time when electroshock therapy was used to treat troubled young women. The narrator is a talented writer who arrives in New York with every opportunity before her, but buckles. The Bell Jar became a rallying call for a better understanding of mental illness, creativity and the impact on women of stifling social conventions. Plath killed herself a month after its publication. CR

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

Bitterly bouncy military farce, responsible for inventing the dilemma to which it gave its name: you’re only excused war if you’re mad, but wanting an exemption argues that you must be sane. Literary history would be entirely different if Heller had followed his original intention and called it Catch-18: it was changed to avoid confusion with a Leon Uris book. TM

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)

Ur-text of adolescent alienation, beloved of assassins, emos and everyone in between, Gordon Brown included. Complicated teen Holden Caulfield at large in the big city, working out his family and getting drunk. You’ve probably read it, be honest. TM

The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)

Deep in the South American jungle an intrepid explorer is about to stumble on a sequence of ancient prophecies that could change our way of living, even save the world. If only we didn’t have to buy the other novels in that the series to find out what they were! For a similar effect on the cheap, rent an Indiana-Jonesalike film – Tomb Raider, say – and ask a hippy to whisper nonsense in your ear while you’re watching it.

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)

Blame a burgeoning mistrust of conventional psychiatry for the immediate impact of The Dice Man – a novel whose hero, a disillusioned psychiatrist, vows to make every decision of his life according to the roll of a die. As one might have expected from the times, chance sends him into violence and anarchy, which also explains the book’s enduring appeal. AC

Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968)

Those Easter Island things, they’re blokes wearing space suits, aren’t they? Er, no. Hugely influential work of mad-eyed fabricated Arch & Anth, responsible for decades of pub pseudoscience as well as for splendid stuff such as The X-Files. Increasingly common at jumble sales these days, though Von Däniken happily got another 25 books out of the idea. TM

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)

Ignatius J Reilly is a fat anti-hero to thwart Promethean selfdramatisation in any reader. With the medieval poetry of Hroswitha swirling in a head jammed into a green hunting cap with earpieces, Reilly eats steadily, despises modernity, seeks solace in canine fantasies and remembers with terror his one experience of leaving New Orleans. CH

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)

In the age of titles such as “No, Please, Daddy, Not There!”, the soul-searching autobiography looks about as cutting edge as a Findus Crispy Pancake. But when Rousseau told his story, confessions had never been so confessional. “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent,” he declared, rightly. He added, wrongly: “…and which, once complete, will have no imitator.” SL

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)

A Calvinist convinced of his indefectible election to salvation is led to acts of murder by Gil-Martin, his devilish doppelganger. More a myth than a religious satire, it vividly survives James Hogg’s not entirely satisfactory manner of recounting it. Consider this: there may be a Gil-Martin near you. CH

Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)

Do you often feel unhappy? Depressed? Ill at ease with others? You will if you read this. Creepy bit of mind-mechanics by the indifferent sci-fi novelist who founded Scientology. TM

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)

The book that launched a thousand trips. William Blake said that if we could cleanse the “doors of perception” we would perceive “the infinite”. Huxley thought mescalin was the way to do so. In this essay, he pops a pill, goes on about “not-self” and “suchness”, and decides love is the ultimate truth. He also took LSD when dying, but hardly stuffed it down the way his fans did. Jim Morrison was one: he named the Doors after Huxley’s book, gobbled mouthfuls of acid and was dead by 27. SD

Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)

Sandworms, ornithopters, Atreides, Harkonnen and spice: chop and blend for sci-fi fantasy, strangely like an intergalactic cousin of James Clavell. The first in an increasingly soap-operatic sequence. Equally cultishly adapted for the screen by David Lynch, and the root of many a lifelong passion for complex character names and/or arcane ceremonial weaponry. TM

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)

Forget Asimov or PKD. Douglas Adams was so brilliant a visionary that even in the late 1970s he was able to foresee a time when digital watches would look pretty silly. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – a radio show before it was a novel, and a film, and a game, and a TV show – was incredibly clever and wildly funny. Thanks to the Guide, an entire generation of Britons was nursed to adulthood with the phrases “Don’t Panic” and “Mostly Harmless”, and the number 42. SL

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)

New journalism, non-fiction novel – however you define it, Tom Wolfe’s 1968 account of the novelist Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus ride across America with his “Merry Pranksters” established a style of free-associating, hyperbolic writing (count the exclamation marks!!!) that spawned countless imitations. To a generation of readers it fostered a burning envy that they had not been in San Francisco when the Kool-Aid dispensers were being spiked with “Purple Haze”. Now a vivid social history of a period that seems as remote as Byzantium. MB

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)

More 1970s searching for “authenticity” and “selfhood”: a housewife has an affair with a radical psychoanalyst (”Adrian Goodlove”, geddit?) and fantasises about sexual liberation. At the end, though, she goes back to her husband. John Updike called it the most “delicious erotic novel a woman everwrote” – but really, what on earth was all the fuss about? DS

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)

Women should taste their own menstrual blood to reconcile themselves to their bodies, declared Germaine Greer in the seminal feminist text of the 1970s. Greer told a generation of women that society had turned them into meek, self-hating, castrated clones. The book was an international best-seller which earned Greer a mixed but enduring legacy. CR

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)

Bewilderingly popular and extremely silly Nietzschean melodrama, in which Ayn Rand gives her mad arch-capitalist philosophy a run round the block in the person of Howard Roark, a flouncy architect. Loved by the kind of person who tells you selfishness is an evolutionary advantage, before stealing your house/lover/job. TM

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)

About what it means to think, and how that happens, this is written in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Pattern recognition in the work of geniuses. Loved by maths geeks and anybody with Asperger’s syndrome and anyone with sense. But at root a chess textbook. AMcK

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

Europe-hopping comic metanovel of war and power, stuffed with maths, shaggy-dog stories, childish humour and ravishing sentences. And lots of rockets. Genius, though long enough to lie unfinished. TM

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)

Similar territory to The Da Vinci Code but earlier, less balefully stupid and with the nerve to claim factual accuracy (its authors took Dan Brown to court and lost). The usual song and dance about Templars, bloodlines of Christ and global conspiracies, but somehow still chilling for all that. Staple text of the bonkers brigade. TM

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)

This heady mix of romance and reality opens with its teenage heroine Cassandra Mortmain writing while sitting in the kitchen sink. It ends with the words “I love you” scribbled in the margins of the imaginary journal that forms the substance of the novel. In between a story unfolds that feeds the fantasies of every lovelorn young girl; but its status owes much to the way that, as in life, things don’t end happily ever after. SC

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)

A book composed of the first chapters from other invented books. Either a classic work of literary snakes and ladders or a tiresomely recursive bit of postmodern sterility depending on your interlocutor. Italo Calvino was arguably better elsewhere. TM

Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)

For decades, the cowed menfolk of the world ambled about in pinafores, dusting ornaments and saying “yes, dear”. Then Robert Bly wrote Iron John, invented mythopoetic masculinity, and the daft creatures all rushed off into the woods together, hugged, bellowed, wept, painted their furry parts blue and felt re-empowered to wee standing up. SL

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)

The book that gave 1970s idealism a bad name, the nauseating story of a seagull who defies his fellows to soar into the heavens. “The only true law,” the bird solemnly tells us, “is that which leads to freedom.” Richard Nixon’s FBI director, L Patrick Gray, ordered all his staff to read it. Later, he resigned for gross corruption, a fitting punishment for his dreadful taste. DS

The Magus by John Fowles (1966)

Posh young teacher goes to idyllic Greek island, there to be exquisitely tormented by young women and a Prospero-like figure. Like most John Fowles, this is solid middlebrow dressed as highbrow, but stunning setdressing, TS Eliot quotations and a twist at the end guaranteed a lifelong place in the hearts of a certain type of bookish male. TM

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)

Miniature literary mindwarps from the world’s most famous blind librarian, a writer – like Kafka – whose work, once encountered, adds a new adjective to the mental lexicon. Unforgettable stuff, after which mazes and mirrors will never be the same again. Often beloved of the kind of person who agrees with its author that “there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition”, and none the worse for that. TM

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)

A thing of beauty, the sole bequest of the last in the line of Sicilian aristocrats on whom the novel is based. An ineradicable elegy for a vanished society, and, despite its risorgimento setting, still the best psychological and botanical guidebook to parts of southern Italy. TM

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)

Satan live and in person, a mansized black cat, a magician and his helpmeet, Pontius Pilate… Classic text of dissident magic realism, banned for years under Stalin: now you’ll struggle to find a Russian who hasn’t read it. Essential stuff, and with the finest description of a headache yet committed to paper. TM

No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)

Few books have caught a political moment better than Naomi Klein’s stylish and impassioned report on the abuses of brands, and the activists who fight them. It was published in 2000, just as “antiglobalisation” crashed into the mainstream, and Klein was adopted as its poster-girl. SL

On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)

Supposedly filled in under three caffeine-fuelled weeks, the roll of paper on which Kerouac typed his seminal novel recently sold for more than two million dollars, and has spent the past few years on the road itself, travelling from museum to museum in the US, where it attracts queues of bearded jazz fanatics. It is the result of seven years of road-trips across America during the 1940s. Initially it celebrates the alternative lifestyle, although by the end it is coloured by disappointment. TC

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)

Needs little introduction. Bad craziness as the Duke of Gonzo and his helpless attorney blaze a streak of pharmaceutical havoc across 1970s California, all in demented bar-fight prose and fever-dream set-pieces. Now also a core text for ex-public school drug bores, which tends to obscure the anarchic excellence of HST’s journalistic talent. TM

The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)

Required reading in the coffee bars of the East Midlands in the late 1950s; unbelievably, some people paid good money for this study of the outsider figure in Western literature. The TLS found 285 mistakes in a sample of 249 lines, but in its young author’s eyes, it confirmed him as “the major literary genius of our century”. Modesty was not one of his virtues; nor, sadly, was literary ability. DS

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)

Pocket-sized set of aphorisms that sound like they were written by a medieval monk but were actually the product of a Lebanese-American alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1931. The Prophet is a beautifully phrased exercise in pointing out the obvious but Sixties hippy kids loved it. SD

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)

The Americans had Upton Sinclair, and we had Robert Tressell – the pen-name of painter and decorator Robert Noonan, chosen because it sounded like one of the tools of his trade. Tressell’s posthumously published saga of “12 months in hell” with the exploited working classes – their trousers the victims of poverty and their minds the victims of false consciousness – is a totemic text of British socialism. SL

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)

This is among the best-selling volumes of poetry of all time, and does all that a translation should: it introduces the idea of an exotic, different culture; and it expresses what its readers feel, but lets them blame it on someone else. Here, in an age of doubt, aesthetics and Darwinism, these mysterious verses, drawn from 11th-century Persian, stand as little examples of how to celebrate life even as it slips away. TP

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)

Modern travel writers such as Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin were inspired by Robert Byron. Travelling through the Middle East and Asia in the 1930s, Byron provides detailed descriptions of Islamic architecture, with pungent asides: “The Arabs hate the French more than they hate us. Having more reason to do so, they are more polite; in other words, they have learnt not to try it on, when they meet a European. This makes Damascus a pleasant city from the visitor’s point of view.” SR

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)

Hermann Hesse’s allegorical novel sounds a bit Buddhist but is actually saying that experience (including of wealth), rather than contemplation, is the key to enlightenment. It’s persuasive, especially if you read it, as many do, chillum in hand, in the Himalayas. Although, thinking about it now, profundities such as “the secret of the river is there is no time” don’t make much sense out of context. SD

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)

The book that was supposed to have lovelorn young men reaching for their guns. Even if it didn’t inspire as many suicides as people thought, it’s still a vital work. As Werther tromps about the countryside, reading Homer and Ossian and agonising over his host’s wife, he shows how much you’re allowed to feel in the Romantic age Goethe did so much to invent. Before he smashed the Mamelukes, Napoleon said he wished he’d written it (and surely so did the Mamelukes). TP

Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)

Deliberately discomforting, Story of O takes as its subject the objectification of women. O is a beautiful woman who submits to the sadistic whims of various men after she is kidnapped and taken to a chateau to be blindfolded, whipped, branded and pierced. It ends with an odd sense of triumph, O wearing nothing but a mask before a group of strangers. Bewildering, creepy and joyless, it’s a guaranteed detumescent. TC

The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)

“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” The beach, the sun, the Arab, the gunshots, the chaplain: the stuff of millions of adolescents’ fevered imaginings. If you don’t love this when you’re 17, there’s something wrong with you. In the film Talladega Nights, Sacha Baron Cohen’s snooty French racing driver reads it on the starting grid. Strange but true: George W Bush read it on holiday two years ago. DS

The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)

Take an enterprising anthropology student (Castaneda) and a Mexican shaman (Don Juan), mix in liberal quantities of peyote, and you end up with a text rooted in “nonordinary reality”. Castaneda’s multi-part account of his adventures, which started to appear in 1968, and includes lessons in how to fly and talk to coyotes, has always elicited queries as to its veracity. But when you’ve taken that many drugs, it may not matter. AC

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)

A record of a lost generation in the shape of the contemporaries Vera Brittain loved and lost in the First World War, this memoir is also a poignant, passionate and perfectly poised study of a woman trying to find her place in a changing world. A bible to the generation who read it on publication, its influence continues thanks to a Virago reprint. SC

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)

Incendiary declamation through a megaphone. If only one knew what he was on about. Put six Nietzscheans in a room and it ought to be a bloodbath; except, since they’re all nancies who fancy themselves as Supermen, there wouldn’t be one. Nietzsche was brave and mad enough to kill God: but look what happened to him. His acolytes are, largely, less brave. AMcK

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

Economical Deep South drama around perennially hot-button racial questions, further exalted in literary mythology by being the only thing its author ever wrote. Even those who think they haven’t read it often have. TM

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

Burnt-out hippy takes son on bike trip. Remembers previous self: lecturer who had nervous breakdown contemplating Eastern and Western philosophy. Very bad course in Ordinary General Philosophy follows. If he’d done Greek at school and knew what “arête” meant, we could have been spared most of the 1970s. AMcK

• Reviews by Mick Brown, Alex Clark, Toby Clements, Sarah Crompton, Serena Davies, Christopher Howse, Sam Leith, Tim Martin, Andrew McKie, Tom Payne, Ceri Radford, Sameer Rahim and Dominic Sandbrook

B. Kamins Chemist Male Anti-Aging Soothing Eye Gel

Talking to ourselves

Americans are increasingly close-minded and unwilling to listen to opposing views.

By Susan Jacoby
April 20, 2008

As dumbness has been defined downward in American public life during the last two decades, one of the most important and frequently overlooked culprits is the public’s increasing reluctance to give a fair hearing — or any hearing at all — to opposing points of view.

A few years ago, I delivered a lecture at Eastern Kentucky University on the history of American secularism, and was pleased, in the heart of the Bible Belt, to have attracted an audience of about 150. The response inside the hall was enthusiastic because everyone there, with the exception of a few bored students whose professors had made attendance a requirement, agreed with me before I opened my mouth.

Around the corner, hundreds more students were packing an auditorium to hear a speaker sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ, a conservative organization that “counter-programs” secular lectures at many colleges. The star of the evening was a self-described recovering pedophile who claimed to have overcome his proclivities by being “born again.” (And yes, it is a blow to the ego to find oneself less of a draw than a penitent pedophile.)

It is safe to say that almost no one who attended either lecture on the Kentucky campus that night was exposed to a new or disturbing idea. Indeed, virtually everywhere I speak, 95% of the audience shares my political and cultural views — and serious conservatives report exactly the same experience on the lecture circuit.

Whether watching television news, consulting political blogs or (more rarely) reading books, Americans today have become a people in search of validation for opinions that they already hold. This absence of curiosity about other points of view is the essence of anti-intellectualism and represents a major departure from the nation’s best cultural traditions.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Americans jammed lecture halls to hear Robert Green Ingersoll, known as “the Great Agnostic,” attack organized religion and question the existence of God. They did so not because they necessarily agreed with him but because they wanted to make up their own minds about what he had to say and see for themselves whether the devil really had horns.

Similarly, when Thomas Henry Huxley, the British naturalist who popularized Darwin’s theory of evolution, came to the U.S. in 1876, he spoke to standing-room-only audiences, even though many of his listeners were genuinely shocked by his views.

This spirit of inquiry, which demands firsthand evidence and does not trivialize opposing points of view, is essential to a society’s intellectual and political health.

Richard Hofstadter, in his classic 1963 work, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” argued that among “the major virtues of liberal society in the past was that it made possible such a variety of styles of intellectual life — one can find men notable for being passionate and rebellious, for being elegant and sumptuous, or spare and astringent, clever and complex, patient and wise, and some equipped mainly to observe and endure. … It is possible, of course, that the avenues of choice are being closed and that the culture of the future will be dominated by single-minded men of one persuasion or another. It is possible; but insofar as the weight of one’s will is thrown onto the scales of history, one lives in the belief that it not be so.”

Hofstadter was of course using the word “liberal” with a small “l,” in the sense that the term had been used in the past — as a synonym for open-mindedness and concern for liberty of thought instead of as the right-wing political epithet it has become during the last 25 years.

When I recently spoke about the militant parochialism of American intellectual life on a radio talk show, a caller responded by telling me that there was nothing new about Americans preferring to bask in the reflected glow of their own opinions. Talk radio and political blogs, in his view, are merely the modern equivalent of friends — and haven’t we always chosen friends who agree with us?

Well, no. Tell it to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who certainly had many, often bitter disagreements about politics and whose correspondence nevertheless leaps off the page as an example of the illumination to be derived from exchanges of ideas between friends who respect each other even though they do not always share the same opinions.

“You and I ought not to die, before we have explained ourselves to each other,” Adams wrote Jefferson in 1815.

It is doubtful that today’s politicians will spend much time trying to explain themselves to one another even after they leave office. They are, after all, creatures of a culture in which it is acceptable, on the Senate floor, for Vice President Dick Cheney to tell Vermont’s Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy to “go [obscene verb] yourself”

There is a direct connection between the debasement of political discourse and the public’s tendency to tune out any voice that is not an echo. “Swift boating” can succeed in politics only because of the correct assumption that huge numbers of Americans lack the broad knowledge that would enable them to spot blatantly unfair attacks. If Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, we will surely hear, from the slimier corners of the blogosphere, a renewal of the lie that he is a Muslim. John McCain got the same treatment from George W. Bush supporters in the 2000 campaign, when the rumor that his adopted child from Bangladesh was really his own illegitimate African American baby cost him votes in the Republican primary in South Carolina. Voters of any political persuasion who watch only cable news shows or consult only blogs that support their preconceptions are patsies for these kinds of lies.

Ironically, the unprecedented array of choices, on hundreds of cable channels and the Web, have contributed to the decline of common knowledge and the denigration of fairness by both the right and the left. No one but a news junkie has the time or the inclination to spend the entire day consulting diverse news sources on the Web, and the temptation to seek out commentary that fits neatly into one’s worldview — whether that means the Huffington Post or the Drudge Report — is hard to resist.

Genuine fairness does not mean the kind of bogus objectivity that always locates truth equidistant from two points, but it does demand that divergent views be understood and taken into account in approaching public issues. In re-reading Hofstadter several years ago, I was struck by the fairness of his scholarship, a serious, old-fashioned attempt to engage the arguments of his opponents and to acknowledge evidence that ran counter to his own biases. I had not noticed that when I read the book for the first time in the 1960s because fairness was, to a considerable degree, taken for granted in those days as an ideal for aspiring young scholars and writers.

A vast public laziness feeds the media’s predilection today to distill news through polemicists of one stripe or another and to condense complex information into meaningless sound bites. On April 8, for example, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq, testified before the Senate in hearings that lasted into the early evening. Although the hearings were on cable during the day, the networks offered no special programming in the evening, and newscasts were content with sound bites of McCain, Obama and Hillary Clinton questioning the general. Dueling presidential candidates were the whole story.

Absent from most news reports was testimony concerning the administration’s ongoing efforts to forge agreements with various Iraqi factions without submitting the terms to Congress for ratification — a development with constitutional implications as potentially serious as the Watergate affair. No matter. Anyone who wanted to hear Petraeus bashed or applauded could turn to his or her preferred political cable show or click on a blog to find an unchallenging interpretation of the day’s events.

The tepid interest in the substance of Petraeus’ testimony on the part of the public and much of the media contrasts sharply with the response to the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973. All 319 hours of the first round of the hearings were televised, and 85% of Americans tuned in to at least some of the proceedings live.

I remember those weeks as a period when everyday preoccupations faded into the background and we found time, as a people, to perform our civic duty. An ongoing war may lack the drama of Watergate, but it is doubtful that anything short of another terrorist attack on our soil would convince today’s public that it ought to read the transcript of a lengthy congressional hearing or pay attention, for more than five minutes, to live news as it unfolds.

It is past time for Americans to stop attributing the polarization of our public life to the media, the demon entity “Washington” or “the elites.” As long as we continue to avoid the hard work of scrutinizing public affairs without the filter of polemical shouting heads, we have no one to blame for the governing class and its policies but ourselves.

Like Hofstadter, I yearn to live in a society that values fair-mindedness. But it will take nothing less than a revolutionary public recommitment to the pursuit of fairness, knowledge and memory to halt, much less reverse, the trend toward an ignorant single-mindedness that threatens the future of democracy itself.

When I met Harrer, who was much better with things mechanical than anyone I knew in Lhasa, I presumed his expertise in science was as profound as his command over the few mechanical objects we had in the Potala.  It is funny that years later I discovered he had no professional scientific background - at that time I thought all white men had deep knowledge of Science.

In 1956 I went to India to take part in the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha’s death, whose main event took place in Dellhi.  Later, the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru became something of a counselor to me and a friend, as well as my host in exile.

Theosophy was an important spiritualist movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that sought to develop a synthesis of human knowledge, Eastern and Western, religious and scientific.  Its founders, including Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, were Westerners but spent much time in India.

Although Buddhism has come to evolve as a religion with a characteristic body of scriptures and rituals, strictly speaking, in Buddhism scriptural authority cannot outweigh an understanding based on reason and experience.  In fact the Buddha himself, in a famous statement, undermines the scriptural authority of his own words when he exhorts his followers not to accept the validity of his teachings simply on the basis of reverence to him.  Just as a seasoned goldsmith would test the purity of his gold through a meticulous process of examination, the Buddha advises that people should test the truth of what he has said through reasoned examination and personal experiment.  Therefore, when it comes to validating the truth of a claim, Buddhism accords greatest authority to experience, with reason second and scripture last.

So by the mid-1980s, on my numerous trips from India I had met many scientists and philosophers of science and had participated in various conversations with them, both in public and in private.  Some of these, especially at the beginning, were not very fruitful.  In Moscow once, at the height of the Cold War, I had a meeting with some scientists where my discussion of consciousness met with an immediate attack on the religious concept of the soul, which they thought I was advocating.  In Australia a scientist opened his presentation with a somewhat hostile statement about how he was there to defend science if there were to be any attack on it from religion.

When I speak with open-minded scientists and pholosophers of science, it is clear that they have a deeply nuanced understanding of science and a recognition of the limits of scientific knowledge.  At the same time, there are many people, both scientists and non-scientists, who appear to believe that all aspects of reality must and will fall within the scope of science.  The assumption is sometimes made that, as society progresses, science will continually reveal the falsehoods of our beliefs - particularly religious beliefs - so that an enlightened secular society can eventually emerge.  This is a view shared by Marxist dialectical materialists, as I discovered in my dealings with the leaders of Communist China in the 1950s and in the course of my studies of Marxist though in Tibet.  In this view, science is perceived as having disproved many of the claims of religion, such as the existence of God, grace, and the eternal soul.  And within this conceptual framework, anything that is not proven or affirmed by science is somehow either falso of insignificant.  Such views are effectively philosophical assumptions that reflect their holders’ metaphysical prejudices.  Just as we must avoid dogmatism in science, we must ensure that spirituality is free from the same limitations.

Did Anais Nin Cultivate Carlos Castaneda?

    “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Anais Nin

    As mentioned some time ago in this blog, Anais Nin introduced Carlos Castaneda via her literary salon in Los Angeles in the late 1950’s.

Isn’t it remarkable that Nin, a strong anima figure, believed that truth and beauty were the basis of all she wrote, but then she distilled the writing, drawing out the essence.   Much like, she said, one distills a dream.

To do this, she said, she used  the mesonge vital or  necessary lie.

Was this distilled writing technique  something Castaneda assumed from Nin?

Having read all of  Nin’s work and Castaneda, I can only conclude, yes.

In his recent book, William Patrick Patterson writes with remarkable insight into the making of Castaneda, placing Castaneda in Nin’s orbit.  Soon to be available as a quality paperback, you can get a copy  of The Life & Teachings of Carlos Castaneda.

The Life & Teachings of Carlos Castaneda
By William Patrick Patterson