Letters to the Editor
Hecate
Published Letters: 40 Editor's Choice: 6
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World Enough and Time
[Read the article: The dark legacy of Carlos Castaneda]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]By net standards this discussion is long over, I suppose. It's so last week, and there are already over 100 responses, after which the law of intellectual attrition seems to set in.
I enjoyed reading this article. I've been interested in Castaneda and ideas of spiritual exploration, since I was a teenager in the '70s. I read an expose of his fictional anthropology several years ago, so that part wasn't surprising. I didn't know he was such a stereotypically swinish hippie guru cultish type until this article, however. His way with women reminds me rather of Ira Einhorn, another charismatic spiritual type who ended up offing his girlfriend for failing to believe in him anymore.
What I don't get is the arguments for or against the authenticity of spiritual experience that have been expressed here. It is not logical to argue that because Castaneda, and others like him are exploitative con men who emotionally abuse their followers that spiritual belief, or experience of other dimensions of reality is a dangerous illusion. Nor is it logical to argue that men like Castaneda are tapped into some deeper spiritual reality despite their behavior, simply because they describe such experiences.
I've seen some of the sorts of things Castaneda describes in his books, and other sorts of things that he doesn't. Lots of people do. It's not that big a deal. Reality is a very large place, and under certain conditions, ones perceptions of reality go beyond the immediate. But so what? Such perceptions really aren't particularly special, and the ability to perceive them doesn't make anybody more spiritually advanced.
On the other hand, I've met a handful of truly spiritually advanced people. None of them exploit and abuse their followers. truly spiritually advanced people don't exploit their followers. Spiritual advancement and abuse and exploitation of others are mutually exclusive modes of living by definition. Such advancement doesn't have anything to do with perceiving other modes of reality. That's a party trick. It has to do with recognizing the interconnectedness of all things that exist, and the fact that those connections matter, make us who and what we are. It means treating other people and the world around us accordingly.
Anybody can do that. It's nothing special. And many people do--the quiet ones. The ones who tend to children and messed up family members every day. The ones who seem to know exactly the right thing to say. The ones who work tirelessly for social change because they believe in humanity.
Seeing white glowy orbs isn't difficult or special. Living in a way that's fully alive and fully responsive to others is incredibly difficult and sometimes very painful--for no other reason than because there is not a lot of support in this world at this time for the hard and quiet work of just being, and just trying to make being a little easier and a little brighter for others.
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Getting Fixed
[Read the article: Goodbye to the Fix, for now]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was kinda indifferent about the Fix. I can't stand celebrity gossip. But what I do like is chatty and sharp culture critique like Cintra Wilson does and Joyce Millman used to do. It's one of the things that actually initially attracted me to Salon. There's not a lot of culture crit out there that isn't either overly academic (Berube) or overly lowest common denominator (Slate, People, etc).
Since Salon's gone all half bloggy anyway, the ideas that others have suggested about a blog shared by current A&E staffers might not be half bad, if they're willing.
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Bleah
[Read the article: Rabbit Bites: We're all Alec Baldwin]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Used to check into VideoDog every day. Liked the freshness of the humor.
Now I've stopped. Never liked the rabbits and now they're breeding like.... And the Baghdad stuff is just weird and sorta depressing.
New material please?
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Oddly enough,
[Read the article: "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I enjoyed AWE immensely--far more than I expected. I loved the trippy, surreal parts--the stuff with Calypso and the crabs was like something from a Garcia Marquez novel--poetic, mythic and silly all at once. The Being John Malkovich Depp parts were just seriously amusing, and I loved Davy Jones' Locker. I'm not sure I've ever seen a Hollywood blockbuster summer flick that edged onto purely strange as much as this one sometimes did. All the typical Bruckheimer crowded noisy overwrought explodey stuff caused cheerful sensory overload--and really, it wasn't that convoluted.
It did bother me that most of the extras who died were Chinese--is this a new variant of 'the Black guy always dies first?' And the resolution of the Will/Elizabeth relationship ticked me off for feminist reasons--but one doesn't expect progressive social messages from Hollywood summer movies.
It's always odd to have such a different reaction to a movie from most of the rest of the American public--the last time I felt this at odds with general concensus was Spiderman II, which I found entirely repellant and the rest of the world apparently adored.
But seeing things differently is part of the fun, I guess.
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Lies and Whispers
[Read the article: Did Facebook give Obama a secret advantage?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't necessarily agree with AA that Salon as such has anything against Obama (though sometimes I do wonder). But I do agree that this post has the distasteful flavor of an "inquiring minds want to know" gossip smear rather than any substantial expose of possible wrongdoing.
I really don't see the problem with Facebook contributing technology to Obama's campaign. As AA pointed out, Facebook is not a for-profit enterprise, nor a public media outlet in the usual sense of the term, nor does its influence currently extend beyond a fairly narrow demographic of high school and college students. Many of them aren't even old enough to vote and most of them probably don't have a lot of disposable cash to contribute to a campaign. So what if its founder, a voting citizen, wishes to support Obama in his campaign by offering an avenue of publicity? I truly do not see what is "unfair" or even remotely questionable about this. On the other hand, I do find Mr. Manjoo's unfounded implications of wrongdoing to be both.