Week five- Reflective- Hesse and Trees

In between university exams, assignments, reading and journals, I sneak off to read philosophical novellas by great wordsmiths like Milan Kundera and Hermann Hesse. In one of those private indulgent moments of time, Hermann Hesse described so vividly, so poignantly the stillness and power of nature in such a numinous way I had to share it, even though it's a bit long. Absolute craft in arrangement of words.

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Hermann Hesse

Book
Hesse, H, 1917 Wandering, Picador Publishing, Germany.

Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=1382208

Week 5- Night clubbing and bush doofs as the religion of disenchanted youth

This weeks reading on religion, music and culture highlighted how music can evoke spiritual feelings in the maker or listener groups. Christopher Partridge uses the example of listening to the King's College Chapel at Cambridge and how the feelings the music evokes can make you feel 'a refreshing withdrawal and escape from the everyday pressures of things' (Partridge 2012, p. 183).

Throughout the article, Partridge examines how music embodies listening, feeling, identity and the transcendent. It could be argued that popular night clubbing or bush doof culture is the religion of disenchanted or subcultural youth. Weekend after weekend participants line up to go into small clubs just for a few hours, to 'lose subjective belief in their self and merge into a collective body' (Tramacchi 2000, p. 201). Many weekend clubbers or bush doof goers also take illegal drugs or psychedelics to enhance their transcendent experience. These altered states of spiritual consciousness and the events that drive them, could be modernity's ethneogenic ceremonies. These sacralized events 'share many features of mystical states and are not uncommonly interpreted by the experient within an idiosyncratic religious framework' (Tramacchi 2000, p. 202).

In addition, attendees of night clubs often engage in 'sacrificial and pilgrimage behaviors', whereby they become affiliated with a favourite club or haunt and sacrifice time, money and distance to spend their evenings there (St John 2008, p. 150). Clubbers enter a liminal phase as they get ready to go out, by stripping themselves of their mundane attire and proceed to put on clubbers wear. Initiates then enter the clubs, parties and doofs and engage in a collective community, leaving the mundane world behind for the duration of the pseudo-ritual. Night clubbers are now 'standing out from the surface of life's contingencies...[enabling] a more profound contemplation of being' (St John 2008, p. 153). Finally, as the sun begins to awaken, the initiates are reintegrated into mundane society.

Subcultural groups like ravers, hipsters and indie kids, all use the 'aesthetic and mind-body technologies...to produce a particular affective space' (Partridge 2012, p. 187). The problem with these modern rites and rituals is, there is no guide, shaman or sage to demarcate the healthy spiritual path from the overindulgent path.

Here is a video of one of Northern Rivers bush doofs, called Rainbow Serpent. You can see some of the attendees are engaged in ritualistic behavior and ecstatic experience.


References
Partridge, C 2012, 'Popular Music, Affective Space and Meaning', in Lynch G, and Mitchell, J with A Strhan (ed.), Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader, Routledge, London and New York, pp. 182-193.

St John, G 2008, 'Trance Tribes and Dance Vibes: Victor Turner and Electronic Dance Music Culture', in Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, Berghahan Books, London, pp. 149-173.

Tramacchi, D 2000, 'Field Tripping: Psychedelic communitas and Ritual in the Australian Bush', Journal of Contemporary Religion, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 202-213.

Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=937720

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouq3m-yR8NQ

'Warsaw'- Week four reflection in prose, By Billie Mackness

Below is a poem I wrote called 'Warsaw'. In light of Sylvie's lessons on how the world around us can evoke whimsical, spiritual or existential feelings; I thought I would write a little something about how I reflected on Warsaw in Germany, in Holocaust milieu. 

Warsaw

Grey jungle flusters

Masses wildly subsist

Shun vile clusters

We scantly exist

Divest antique cheeks

We taboo order

Venom alone bespeaks

Quell the border!

We scantly exist

We scantly exist

By Billie Mackness

Here is a video by the band Live, in response to 9/11. It was an emotional experience for the lead singer as an American Buddhist and this song was his way of expressing his feelings about life and such events through song. I think my poem and this song exemplifies how in hard times or faced with hard decisions, humanity turns their faces upwards to the sky and in prose and reflection, reaches out to spirituality.

Photo

http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=124803

Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpCa7Ay596M&ob=av2n

Rain-A poem by four; Billie, Ainsley, Lisa and Astrid

Liquid drops rinse the ticking while

Racing down in infinite lines

The sun shines through the transperant drop

It's colours shine, it's beuaty is fine

The falling elixir, a blanket of grey on top.

Here is a video montage of one of my favourite surrealist poems, as an example of rich imagery, even absurdist writings and the power of the imagination.


Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=1094659

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u54o-pZxAzc

Week 4 Theoretical- Consumerist Spirituality

Wat Muang, Ang Thong Province, Thailand

Since modernity and the growth of capitalism spirituality has been practiced, lived and believed in more ambiguity than established religious traditions. Spiritualism is 'celebrated by those who are disillusioned by traditional institutional religions and seen as a force for wholeness, healing and inner transformation' (Carrette and King 2012, p. 59). We can see this in our society by the popular crystal healing and New Age type stores and with internet psychics and mediums selling their wares.

In this weeks article Carrette and King discuss the historical top-down change of capitalism on religion. How capitalism has entered into the religious or spiritual sphere with a 'specific economic agenda' (Carrette and King 2012, p. 63).  One only has to go to a shopping centre and see books like You Can Heal Your Life, or spiritual iconography in fashion, cosmetics, books and movies. Capitalism has discovered a renewed economic source within spirituality and has moulded it for re-production and economical expansion in the age of technology and industrialization.


With many shows like Crossing Over and Lisa Williams Live, and also spirituality laced self-help books, what needs to be examined is if these media actually help, hinder or even make a 'change in one's lifestyle or fundamental behaviour patterns' (Carrette and King 2012, p. 62). What now arises, is questions of authenticity. If you examine advertisements for such spiritual healing shows or books, one key loci of the ad is to promote the reality or authenticity of the experience and how that is attainable for the listener or watcher. This modern day mass mediated spirituality 'exploits the historical respect and aura of authenticity of the religious traditions' and it turn the authenticity is always firstly promoted and questioned by promoter and questioner alike (Carrette and King 2012, p. 64). 


A few key questions we may need to ask is; Does the economic agenda subtract from the pureness or authenticity of religious experience? Does the media produce and re package spirituality just for profitable gain or is it meeting the media demands for the technological age? For instance, is media re packaged as blockbuster movies and psychic television shows because now in our age, that is the preferred mode of engagement?

Here is a video for the aforementioned Lisa Williams psychic, just for interests sake.

Reference
Carrette J and R King 2012, 'Spirituality and the Re-branding of Religion', in Lynch G. and J. Mitchell with A. Strhan. Eds., Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader, pp. 59-70, London and New York, Routledge.

Photos
The photo is from my own personal collection of photos I have shot myself

Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtDnsjHsu-A

Week 3 Theoretical- Islam and Mediatization

I plan to use this week's theoretical reading and apply it to a specific example of Islam and mediatization. Firstly though, credence and respect must be payed to the relationship between modern media and religion. Modern media's discussion and portrayal of religion through movies, news reporting and so forth has made the intangible, tangible. Hjarvard states that 'the metaphysical realm is no longer something you can only imagine or occasionally see represented in symbolic forms in fresco painting or pillars of stone' as now movies like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings has made the supernatural a lived experience, albeit vicariously (Hjarvard 2008, p.9). Hjarvard here clearly exemplifies how ironically in our currently perceived secular state, we are put into contact with the numinous exponentially.

The media does not seek just to represent facts about religion but it also stakes opinions and incites changes to 'the ways in which people interact with each other when dealing with religious issues' (Hjarvard 2008, p.11).  For instance Hjarvard discusses Joshua Meyrowitz's discussion of media as conduits, where media engages in a cycle of sending and receiving symbols and images between audience and writer. Media colloquialisms and messages in this context can embody acrimony, as they implement negative trending attitudes towards groups of people, such as Muslims. For instance, on news television shows that report on Islam, the majority of reports embody images of violence, bombings, patriarchy and home made terror videos. This consistently portrays part of society in a certain demoralizing light and alters the way the public views Muslims perennially. 

Secondly, if we examine media as languages our focus turns to the way media constructs negative stories about Islam, which in turn legitimizes the fear as a real and substantiated fear in the reader or watcher. A model of this was when the rumor of piggy banks being removed from British banks adverts due to Muslim offense. The media jumped at this opportunity, even in Australia where the story went to print like wildfire in the Daily Telegraph, the Mercury, the Advertiser, the NT News, the Newcastle Herald and the Courier-Mail, as well as online websites of Channel Nine, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald (Aly 2011). One particularly prominent Australian newspaper's version told the public quite manically that the banks were 'not merely withdrawing piggy banks from advertising, but no longer giving them to children...[and how]... the Muslim world is starting to control our thinking and actually our lives' (Aly 2011, p.50). This in particular reminds me of a certain character of The Simpsons, who always cries out at opportune moments "will someone please think of the children!". This example of media as languages through online, printed and oral news, shows the power between religion and the media and how the media if given the right mustard seed, can pugnaciously grow from it a moral panic.

Thirdly, we can examine media as environments, as how different facets of media operate communicatively with the subject, the story and the listeners. An example of this would be on talkback radio, when screening callers for a discussion on Islam and Muslims, only the most vehement callers would actually feature on a negatively inclined show for aggrandizement. This also allows the media to attempt to scapegoat societal problems on the current opinion of the most dangerous and threatening "other". An example of this scapegoating holds 'Muslims falsely responsible for an impressive range of social crimes from banning Christmas to risking the lives of hospital patients with unprofessional hygiene standards and mob violence against returned soldiers' (Aly 2011, p.53). In this instance the media exploits an already seated fear of the "other" in the once passive listener and transforms him or her  into an agent for perceived justice, or more rightly incited moral panic. The media in such cases acts with ideological fundamentalism, that is the media heightens "us" and "them" attitudes to meet societal attitudes and fear, for impact and for entertainment.

This is a funny video of Uncle Sam, a comic from the show Salam Cafe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSsAY0U66hE

References

Aly, W 2011, 'Monoculturalism, Muslims and Myth Making' in Gaita R (ed.), Essays on Muslims & Multiculturalism, Text Publishing, Melbourne, pp. 49-92.

Hjarvard, S 2008, 'The mediatization of religion: A theory of media as agents of religious change', Northern Lights, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 9-26.

Photos

Muslim woman- http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=490619

Newspapers- http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=527555

Week 3- Reflection on Nature and Spirituality

The sun rising over Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia

Sitting on the buffalo grass overlooking this slice of nature, amidst the asphalt and concrete jungle, a feeling of insignificance always emerges. This feeling is carved from the gargantuan spiritual and natural cosmos which has sustained human life and disposition. When you grasp those few moments of stillness amidst nature, one can't help but feel spiritual or whimsical as the beauty transcends our industrialized, mundane life, even if only for a moment. As the Sustainable Soul blog pronounces so poignantly:

'The Earth is Sacred. Beyond our differences; beyond religion, politics and culture, Earth remains, the (literal) ground of our being. Disconnected and distracted, we search for meaning. Overworked and overwhelmed, we struggle. Leave the struggle and the search behind. Whether or not you practice an established faith tradition, you are welcome here. By virtue of being a human being, you are connected to this Holy Ground. It is your birthright. Welcome' (Hecking 2010, p.1).

                 

A date with an elephant in Ayuttaya, Thailand

Perhaps as our modern lives have become so preoccupied with careers, goals, families and our metropolitan worlds that nature has evoked spiritual wonderment exponentially. Do not most of us prefer to go on holiday away from our cities? Do we not escape from the hustle and bustle of our lives to just exist, somewhere else even if only for awhile?

References

Hecking, R, 2010. The Sustainable Soul: Nature Spirituality, http://www.thesustainablesoul.blogspot.com.au, 14/03/2012.

Photos

All photos were from taken by myself and from my own international travels.

Week 2 Reflection: Traditional Owners "Ghostology" and Ghosts in Modernity

In keeping with this weeks supernatural theme, I found a discourse which interests me; Traditional Owners "ghostology" in comparison to popular culture's portrayal of ghosts. In Indigenous Australia, ghosts or spirits make frequent appearances in the stories and lore. The numinous is integrated into stories and the cosmology as a way of constructing and interacting with the outlying world. In Indigenous Australian ghost milieu spirits or ghosts 'protect the country and uphold its protocols, ...[and]... watch human activities closely' (McDonald 2010, p.52). Ghosts are known to exhibit aggressive or disaffected behaviour towards new people or people who do not behave in the right way.

In autochthonic ghost stories, ghosts and spirits are terms sometimes used interchangeably to describe the dead or ancestors via allegories. This is an important part of the tradition, as Ancestors are seen to watch over their mortal counterparts. After a loved one's death ghosts 'live normal human lives, traveling through the bush, devising song ceremonies...' (McDonald 2010, p.57).

Popular culture's relationship towards ghosts is very different, despite some commonalities. Ghosts are often romanticised through humanisation. For instance, in any of the popular ghost hunting television shows like Ghost Hunters or Paranormal Detectives, the typical fear element is cogently portrayed on initial investigation. As the episode unfolds, the cast members often discover some story of a wife who died in childbirth, a man who lost his children or some such similar humanisation. It is like these shows build and encourage the fear up into a rising crescendo, then reintegrate the ghost back into the mortal world, where we humans can make sense of it once again.

Traditional Owners vernacular also uses stories and tales to make sense of death and ghosts, however popular culture's portrayal is much more distanced as we lack kinship connections to the featured ghost to connect as wholly as Indigenous Australians. In Indigenous Australian milieu 'ghosts and spirits...help them to make sense of events occurring in their environment' (Clarke 2007, p.141). Meanwhile in popular culture, although the ghost stories evoke emotional responses in the audience, there is a core goal of detached entertainment.

Below is a music video by Indigenous Australian artists-Makaratta Mob. The song is aptly named 'Ghost Trees'.Avant-garde and quite moving.

References
Clarke, P 2007, 'Indigenous Spirit and Ghost Folklore of "Settled" Australia', Folklore, Routledge, London and New York, pp.141-161.

McDonald, H 2010, 'Universalising the particular? God and Indigenous spirit beings in East Kimberley', The Australian Journal of Anthropology, Australian Anthropological Society, pp.51-70.

Multimedia
Mask picture-http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=1155518

Makaratta Mob YouTube Video-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk5e4cxDqp0

Week 2 theoretical- Religious Sensations in Mainstream Media, Theoretical-Week 2

Religious Sensations in Mainstream Media, Theoretical-Week 2

After reading this weeks theoretical article, a few things resonated with me. Meyer talks about sacred images or representations such as the Christian cross, Hindu deities or sacred drums. Although these images may at first seem a mere tool in the larger scheme of the religious show that is put on, they are sensational forms (Meyer 2012). These aesthetic sensational forms not only exemplify the large void between humans and the Divine, but 'bridge that distance and make it possible to experience...the transcendental' (Meyer 2012, p.162). The deity, sacred drum or cross is no longer profane but sacralised by the ritual or context in which it appears. Eliade posit this beautifully when he said, 'The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adorned as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere' (Eliade 1957, p.12).

Whether it be a beautifully ornate statue, a televised sermon or singing bowl chanting, 'the phenomenological reality of religious experience...[is]... grounded in bodily sensations' (Meyer 2012, p.164). What Meyer is trying to emphasize here is that the ecstatic experience is not attributed to one single factor, it is the sum of all sensations, the beautiful music playing as one enters the holy place, the holy imagery that its decorated with and also the participation in song or chanting that grabs the spectator and turns him or her into a participator. Meyer discusses how media in the current age now plays a role in inducing sensational transcendence (Meyer, 2012).

Today's media has shaken hands in renewed friendship with religion. With new technologies, has come new ways of promoting and reaching out through religion. Meyer claims that with these new technologies the relationship between media and religion has opened up in new ways, such as audiovisual religiosity used as empirical evidence for faith based truths (Meyer 2012).  As humans rely on what is visible to prove authenticity, some people's 'belief becomes thus vested in the image, it becomes hard to distinguish between belief and make-believe, miracles and special effects, or truth and illusion' (Meyer 2012, p.164). In addition paradoxes arrive with religion and modern media's new friendship, paradoxes of ethics. Partridge discussed the release of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and how although there was extreme violence in the film, there were Christian letters written to the board of movie rating classification arguing the age should be lowered from 18 to 15 because of the 'importance of the film's religious content' (Partridge 2001, p.496). For a faith that renounces violence, the paradox of enforcing a religious yet violent film is evident.


Multimedia
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=1359386

References
Eliade, M 1957, The Sacred and the Profane: The nature of Religion, Harcourt Inc, Orlando.

Meyer, B 2012, 'Religious Sensations: Media, aesthetics, and the study of contemporary religion', in Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader, Routledge, London and New York, pp.159-169.

Partridge, C 2001, 'Religion and Popular Culture', in Religions in the Modern World; Traditions and Transformations, Routledge, London and New York, pp.489-521.

Week 1 reflection- Jennifer Aniston and Hollywood versus Shamans and Ayahuasca

I was recently reading a news article on Jennifer Aniston's new movie 'Wanderlust', in which she drinks the South American holy plant brew of ayahuasca. The article describes how Jennifer through her movie character portrays the taking of the sacred brew in a stereotypical and reductionist light. For instance, the ayahuasca ceremony is filled with stereotypical hippies representing the 1960s LSD era.

The negative portrayal of ayahuasca ceremonies in the movie has caused outrage, as the spread of ayahuasca has reached as far as anthropologist and psychiatrist academics as well as lay people. Ayahuasca in its purest form is used in traditional healing ceremonies and for these to be portrayed as drug fueled hippie encampments angers ayahuasca drinkers and ceremonial attendees alike.

Ayahuasca in itself is the drinking of a tea brewed by several plants, one which contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT). I have learned from my own research that DMT occurs in the human brain but lies dormant until we die or almost die, then it is secreted into our brains. So by drinking DMT, it releases the DMT in our brains which one could argue creates a near death experience (NDE).

Far from hippie encampments with mindless drug taking, ayahuasca ceremonies combine nature spirituality with story telling, healing and guidance. The shaman of such ceremonies is someone 'capable of restoring order and harmony in the group. Someone who, when there is a dysfunction in a group-a tribe- he or she is capable of resynchronizing the elements of the group with nature and cosmos' (Narby, Kounen & Ravalee 2010, p. 9).

In Aniston's movie, 'Wanderlust' once she takes the ayahuasca as emotionlessly as a street drug, she suddenly appears perched on a tree singing a top forty song (Phillips 2012). This experience seems to emulate a street drug or acid trip, not a ceremonial medicinal plant. Ayahuasca drinkers who take the plant in shamanic ceremonies say that by all of us, even Western people taking ayahuasca it forces 'us to suddenly perceive the conditioning of the ideas we think are ours but in fact are artifacts implanted by culture, from childhood with your parents, in the end, all these things' (Narby, Kounen & Ravalee 2010, p31).

Far from being a drug addict, the shaman believes 'the vast majority of illnesses have a spiritual cause' and so when the shaman takes part in an ayahuasca ceremony, the 'trance forms part of the cure...by his ecstasy he finds the exact cause of the illness and learns the best treatment' (Eliade 1964, pp. 327-328).

The question to be posed is how damaging is such portrayals of traditional nature healing? Not only is the shamans nature spirituality threatened by such cavalier representations, his home is by the encroaching bulldozers in the Amazon. How can we preserve and or represent this nature spirituality without ethnocentrism or reductionist bias?



References
Eliade, M 1964, SHamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.

Narby, J, Kounen, J & Ravalee, V 2010, The Psychotropic Mind: The World according to Ayahuasca, Iboga, and Shamanism, Park Street Press, Vermont.

Phillips, JT, 2012, Ayahuasca, What Jennifer Aniston May Not Know About the 'Spirit Vine', Huffington Post, 2/3/2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-talat-phillips/jennifer-aniston-and-ayahuasca-explained_b_1303999.html


Photo
http://www.sxc.hu/photo/904610