Hugo-Not: Crossing the Border of Tyranny

Sometimes, even those toward whom you are favorably disposed cross a boundary and make you question how you'd ever thought kindly of them.

Granted, I've never felt completely warm and fuzzy about Hugo Chavez. True, I defended his right to live when Pat Robertson was ready to call out the Death Squads of Christ to Venezuela. And I did find Chavez's UN speech, in which he referred to Bush as a "demon" both entertaining and revealing.

But now he has crossed the line from socialist revolutionary to petty despot. He is taking over the businesses and the press of his country and turning them into state organs of profit and propaganda.

However you look at it, this is a brute force example of Stalinism. Hugo Chavez has crossed the line, and he had better step back quickly, or else he has taken the first step on the road to the destruction of his government and his former vision of a better, more just nation.

Who else is blaming the media for all his problems? Our buddy Paul Wolfowitz, who is just returning to his old employer's favorite fallback excuse: the liberal media is to blame for everything we do and for every seeming error we commit.

I've been fired a number of times in my career, and I have never had to sling shit or spit backwards at anyone in public over it. Where does this guy get off? He swung his main squeeze into a corporate cushion so he could more easily slap her up on the desktop whenever he felt like it during the day. And this is the media's fault?

This last one would be as funny as that, except that it's about an author I really do care a lot about. There are reports that the final Harry Potter tome is being printed in secret and amid darkness by employees who are under threat of immediate dismissal if they are caught reading, let alone copying, the text they are printing in a perpetual night of police-state fear.

If this is true (and if it's not, I blame the media), and Ms. Rowling is endorsing this insanity, then she too is setting herself up for a fall. This kind of obsession over plot, this compulsion over suspense, is what makes for bad stories--the kind we have not gotten from Rowling so far. Literature is not about what happens; it is about the meaning that each individual takes away from the story. Before I ever read Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, I knew a lot about it, and I knew how it ended. But once I read it, it was just as beautiful and original as if I'd never heard about it before. I also remember seeing The Green Mile well before I read King's novel, and the book was still one of the most moving reads I've had in my life.

The same goes for Harry Potter: if you were to tell me everything that's going to be in this final book, I'd still read it and love it for its messages. In fact, I had seen the first movie before I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and its metaphor fairly leaped off the page at me nonetheless. Two years later, I was writing my own book about the penetrating social and personal messages contained in these stories of wizards and witches.

Ms. Rowling: if you are going to go stir-crazy over information leaks from printers, it will degrade the quality of your future work. Let go and let this phenomenon take its own course, so that you can remain an artist and not lower yourself to the level of a plot-hack. You stand in the forefront of fiction writers today because your work causes affliction to demagogues like this kook. Why do you think Bishop Burke (who, in addition to hating Harry Potter, also hates Ted Kennedy, Sheryl Crow, and Michael J. Fox) wishes to suppress your work, Ms. Rowling? Could it be that when he looks at Lord Voldemort, he sees himself? Could it be that you successfully strip away the purple veneer of piety and reveal the rotting corruption beneath it? Could it have something to do with the way a "Ministry"—either of "magic" (religion) or of state (no KR reporters allowed on our plane)—manipulates and intimidates the press? Yes, you've laid that bare as well, in front of the most dangerous audience of all—the children. Voldemorts like Bush, Burke, and Chavez can't stand that kind of treatment, you know.

So it doesn't matter to me, Ms. Rowling, what we hear or when about the outcome or the plot of the final book. What matters is the meaning, which no one can "spoil," try as they might. I am far less concerned about whether Voldemort dies in Book 7 as I am about whether we can succeed in killing him off in our world, before it's too late.
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And now, your Bush Administration MSE moment. We'll be presenting these quotations from one of the core texts of every psych graduate student's bookbag, The Psychiatric Mental Status Examination, by Paula T. Trzepacz and Robert W. Baker, throughout the coming weeks. Today's comes from page 51, in the "Mood and Affect" section—just think of the Bushian comedic "search" for WMDs at the Correspondents Dinner a few years back:

La Belle Indifference: Lack of the normally expected concern for an apparently serious condition...La belle indifference is associated with conversion disorder (previously known as hysteria) and various neurologic disorders. These patients typically lack insight regarding the emotions or conflict that underlie the conversion.

Friday Reflection: Harry Potter and the State

Click here to listen to today's post (AAC/m4a file for iTunes, 7.2MB)

In my book, The Tao of Hogwarts, I ask why it might be that a group of simple children's stories about magicians has inspired such malevolent hatred in our Muggle world. You don't see fundamentalist Christians burning copies of The Wizard of Oz or The Sword in the Stone, or boycotting Eragon. But the Harry Potter stories are among the most banned and reviled books to appear in the recent history of literature. Why?

The partial answer, which I mention in my book, is that the Potter tales reflect the truth of fundamentalism so clearly as to make the devotees of hatred want to smash the mirror.

Another facet of the answer appears in Ms. Rowling's treatment of the government. From the second book forward, she is increasingly acidic in her characterization of the state and its minions. The Potter tales are really startlingly sophisticated stories, full of piercing insight on the lazy arrogance and pandemic corruption within government.

Early on in the Potteriad, Rowling's satire focuses on the fat, wheedling incompetence of Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic. He's a John Bolton type: a classic kiss-up, kick-down type of official, who couldn't lead the way out of a wet paper bag, let alone an attack from the consolidated forces of fundamentalist evil.

Further on, in the fifth book, a new functionary of the state is introduced, Dolores Umbridge. She, like Fudge, is corpulent, petty, and always unhinged by any effort to look past appearances. What Umbridge adds to the portrait of government is its threatening, violent face. She injects the corruption of state-driven conformity into the school, and then applies the Kafka-esque needle torture to Harry's very skin.

Book six opens with a political scene featuring two oblique portraits of Tony Blair and George Bush. The characters representing the state are by this point so obsessed with the superficial that they are completely blinded to the glacier of death passing by their windows. The new Minister of Magic is a character named Rufus Scrimgeour, who has a Karl Rove streak in him. He proposes that if we can only improve our advertising message, add a few spotlights to the stage of state, then all will be well, and evil routed, or at least suppressed.

It is this attitude that Harry encounters in a chapter titled "A Very Frosty Christmas," from which our banner quote is drawn. Here is the full passage, from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, presented in context:

They looked at each other, long and hard. Finally Scrimgeour said, with no pretense at warmth, "I see. You prefer--like your hero, Dumbledore--to disassociate yourself from the Ministry?"

"I don't want to be used," said Harry.

"Some would say it's your duty to be used by the Ministry!"

"Yeah, and others might say it's your duty to check that people really are Death Eaters before you chuck them in prison," said Harry, his temper rising now. "You're doing what Barty Crouch did. You never get it right, you people, do you? Either we've got Fudge, pretending everything's lovely while people get murdered right under his nose, or we've got you, chucking the wrong people into jail and trying to pretend you've got 'the Chosen One' working for you!"

"So you're not 'the Chosen One'?" said Scrimgeour.

"I thought you said it didn't matter either way?" said Harry, with a bitter laugh. "Not to you anyway."

"I shouldn't have said that," said Scrimgeour quickly. "It was tactless--"

"No, it was honest," said Harry. "One of the only honest things you've said to me. You don't care whether I live or die, but you do care that I help you convince everyone you're winning the war against Voldemort. I haven't forgotten, Minister...."

He raised his right fist. There, shining white on the back of his cold hand, were the scars which Dolores Umbridge had forced him to carve into his own flesh: I must not tell lies.

"I don't remember you rushing to my defense when I was trying to tell everyone Voldemort was back. The Ministry wasn't so keen to be pals last year."

Extraordinary, isn't it? A pack of kids' stories, overflowing with an urbane and penetrating insight on the tyranny and duplicity of the modern state. In the magical world of Harry Potter, there is a Gitmo (Azkaban), where both the guilty and the innocent are sent, often without charge and with no hope of a fair trial. There is torture (Umbridge), ambition (Fudge), bureaucracy (the Ministry and its offices), the selling of the people's blood and treasure to corporate interests (Lucius Malfoy's bribes to Fudge), and always the unctuous, vain manipulations of the media and truth (Scrimgeour's attempts to purchase Harry's support, and Fudge's own FOX News media plant, Rita Skeeter).

If you happen to think that the Potter tales are a bunch of lame baby stories that benefited from a combination of dumb luck and devious marketing to become a multi-billion dollar phenomenon, I will make no effort to disillusion you (though Professor Moody might). The Potter novels are loved and lavished with popularity for the same reasons that they are banned and burned: they touch a nerve of truth and common experience that helps us to see and feel our own darkness. How the individual's reaction flows from that varies according to whether you are ready to expel your own Voldemort-consciousness--the corrupt knot of belief that was programmed into you before you could discern it as such--or whether you perceive Rowling's insight to be a personal attack upon your in-group's cherished blocks of granite, the belief system of the "Chosen One" of a church or a state. For, as I mention in my book, and as the last six years of the Bush tyranny have revealed, Church and State cannot be truly separated: they are fed by the same delusion.

Rowling's fiction thus recapitulates, with story, character, and metaphor, the lesson of Diderot that we quoted last week: men will never be truly free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Powerless at Fifty

As the number 23 appears to have some pop currency these days (if you like Jim Carrey, that is), it may now be revealed that I turned 50 the other day, on the 23rd of February.

It's not as if there weren't constant reminders and warnings coming along these past few weeks. I got a membership "invitation" from AARP last month. These people don't miss a beat—look at their logo: it seems that even when you're old you need "power." Well, for better or worse, I'm not interested. We have enough power in the world; we sure don't need any more of it, least of all from me. Power, I am afraid, does not "make it better."

Every time I've gone to the bookstore lately, there's another book about turning 50. I wish I had time or the disposition to read them; I'm sure they'd be very helpful. But this chicken soup phenomenon has just passed me by; perhaps it's after my time.

But the most significant reminder of my age has come from the relative silence of would-be employers. Yes, age discrimination is against the law and all that; but you can't very well disguise 25 years of corporate experience on a resume, and folks tend to jump to certain conclusions based on age.

We live in a culture where the only old men that have any influence or comfort are on executive row or in the White House. So it seems only natural, given the devastation, corruption, and greed that these 50-and-60 something men have wrought upon us, that we affirm our culture's animosity toward the elders—especially the white male elders such as myself. Therefore, as a reminder to any who are concerned about such things, and perhaps to encourage a reconsideration of the aggrandizement of youth that seems to define our Generation X-Y-Z society, I offer this excerpt from my Tao of Hogwarts, which is a celebration of a very old man (click the graphic to hear an "interview" with Prof. D):

In a youth-obsessed culture where middle age is deemed the onset of senescence, and particularly in this country, where the attitude of trust and respect toward the elders of a society breathed its last in the slaughter at Wounded Knee, the appearance on the world's literary stage of Professor Dumbledore is a welcomed blessing. Here is a man of indeterminate age (somewhere over a hundred, we are led to believe), still possessed of the strength and ability that have earned him the designation of "greatest wizard of his time." In Order of the Phoenix, he overcomes the attack of three younger opponents in one scene, and then personally tips the balance of the climactic battle scene. Yet he is the farthest thing from an "action hero" imaginable: he is gentle, yielding, soft-spoken, often unabashedly silly, meditative, and modest. He is, of course, the headmaster of Hogwarts School, and apparently has refused the position of Minister of Magic (the highest office of the wizarding government) in order to remain with the school and its students. Indeed, he appears to be entirely lacking in ambition, violence, contempt, impulsiveness, acquisitiveness, and the hunger for fame—in short, he is the human embodiment of Te, the cosmic principle of Modesty that Lao Tzu speaks of throughout the Tao Te Ching. This poem, from Chapter 56 of that work, appears to fit Professor Dumbledore very well:

Understanding doesn’t talk a lot;
A lot of talk lacks understanding.

Can you be guided by silence?
Can you shut down your outer senses?

Can you blunt your jagged edges?
Can you let the inner knots unravel?
Can you let your brilliance be dimmed?
Can you merge with the dust of the earth?

This is called “harmonizing light and dark.”
In this, you possess no one,
But are loved by many.
You are equally immune
To attraction and revulsion.
You are equally receptive
To profit and to loss.

You are unmoved by fame,
Yet you attract honor.
Because you make no claim,
You can be free of disgrace.

Thus are you lovingly received
Into the Heart of Nature,
Forever.

As a leader, Professor Dumbledore is everything that our current major world leaders are not. He retreats from display; is non-violent, even amid combat; his vision reaches beyond appearances; he embodies archetypally feminine traits; is simple in his needs; modest in both the amount and volume of his speech; and he promotes loyalty from his students and staff by nurturing their independence. His dignity and splendor are gifts of Nature; he makes no outer demand of others' respect, but his inner aura seems always to evoke it anyway. He is, in short, the "Tao Leader" of whom Diane Dreher wrote an entire book. Dreher writes:

Tao leaders affirm an inner strength that transcends ego. They know that their current leadership position is just that—a position, not a set role...They don't identify with their titles. They know that who they are is always more than what they do. (p. 200).

As will be further discussed in Chapters 8 and 10, Professor Dumbledore is indeed human, meaning that he is subject to error. But he again distinguishes himself from the current crop of political leaders in our society by displaying the capacity to admit his errors. He goes further than this even, in his ability to share the blame for the miscommunication that leads to some of the tragic events of the stories. In doing so, he reveals the defining nature of true leadership, which is the ability to open new paths to understanding and correct action for others, through the example of inner truth, expressed in speech, thought, and action. In acknowledging his error and accepting his share of the blame, Dumbledore engages the Cosmic energies that transform the ideological stain of guilt into the cleansing water of remorse. This is truly the mark of a "Tao Leader."

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For those who are used to "Mondays with McKenna", Terry has been given a week off (which is fine, since he doesn't get a dime for writing here), and will be back next week.

Selling Goods on a Sunday

Note: That petition at the top of the sidebar can be completed inline, without leaving this page. If you'd like to see an end to this insanity in Iraq (and perhaps more important, an end to the saber-rattling against Iran), then spend the 30 seconds needed to sign that petition. It's for Senator Kerry's Set A Deadline initiative.
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I had thought it would be harmless at worst, and maybe even nice, to give away the pdf of my Tao of Hogwarts book, until such time as a publisher came forward to purchase it from me.

But it would appear that publishers like famous people, crooks, or literary thugs like Coulter and O'Reilly; and I am none of these things. The problem is, however, that I had put roughly two years of fairly continuous effort into the making of Tao of Hogwarts, and I suspect it's worth every dime of $13 for a 193 page paperback. That's less than 7 cents per page! You'll also find that it has a lot to say about what we've endured these past six years.

My opinion, of course, doesn't count half as much as does yours. Anyway, I've self-published the book on Lulu.com; I've reviewed a copy of it and am satisfied with the quality of the publication; and I feel it can safely be recommended for purchase. If you'd like to buy a copy, I'd be grateful and I think you'll be pleased overall—just click the graphic of the front cover, above. The link will remain in the sidebar (along with my other three), and you can go back and read excerpts from it, here, here, and here.

By the way, that graphic on the front cover is from a fractal screen saver app designed by Ben Haller of Stick Software. It's called Fracture, and if you've got a Mac (PPC or Intel, it doesn't matter), I highly recommend it.

Firing a Lugar

Our demon of the week (it's not who you might think):

Senator Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the foreign affairs committee, opposed the resolution [to condemn the notion of troop surge].

"This vote will force nothing on the president, but it will confirm to our friends and allies that we are divided and in disarray," he said. But he added: "I am not confident that President Bush's plan will succeed." (The rest of this is here).

Let's be very, very clear about what Sen. Lugar is saying: it's OK for other people's children to die as long as we avoid the appearance of "disarray"—even if the plan is sure to fail, as all the others have to this point. So Moms and Dads around America, take heart: if your son or daughter is one of the 21,500 to go to Iraq and come back in a bodybag, it's for a good cause—harmony on fat cat Capitol Hill; the unity of Congress behind a failed president and his psychotic delusion. Senator Lugar will, I am sure, be willing to send a nice sympathy card to that effect.

Sen. Lugar, please accept the DR horns of the week—you've earned them.

Our runner-up for the horns is Laura Mallory, the Potter-hating priss who won't quit. By the time she gets her appeal through, the last story will have been published and who knows, she may get her most ardent wish fulfilled: the death of Harry Potter.

In the meantime, my response to her remains the same.

Tomorrow, our Friday author will offer an even better answer to such ideological totalitarianism.

Happy Global Orgasm Solstice, From Daily rEvolution

Hey everybody, want a holiday on which there can be no "war"? Something that everyone—even Bill O'Reilly—can celebrate in their own way, alone or with significant other(s)? Here it is, today: welcome to Global Orgasm Day. Yep, and now you know what G-O-D really means!

Kind of makes you want to ignore the rest of the news. But duty also calls: Remember the Pfizer ad we posted a little while back, here? Well, check out what the geniuses at Pfizer had to choke up for their ex-CEO:

McKinnell's package, which the company disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday, totals more than $180 million. It includes an estimated $82.3 million in pension benefits, $77.9 million in deferred compensation, and cash and stock totaling more than $20.7 million.

So make a note of whichever of the big P's products you're buying these days (and that's just the OTC stuff), and see if you can choose something else. I can't imagine trusting the health of my innards to a bunch of morons who would fork over $180M to some smarmy corporate con artist. Meanwhile, somebody get me a soma.

Now, to the really big news of the day. If you want to see the title of Book 7 of the Harry Potter series, click and drag over the white space between the lines below. But if you'd like to find out for yourself, go to Ms. Rowling's site, click the eraser, and start the journey. Hint: you'll know you're almost there when you start feeling like Saddam. I'll give you until after the holiday to check it out, and next week we'll start to consider what it all might mean.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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Friday Reflection

Whenever I begin to suspect that all the truly great writers are all dead, I pick up one of this lady's works. Our banner quote for the week (reproduced below) is from Holy the Firm, a tiny masterpiece (it's all of 76 pages long) from 1977.

The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we're all victims? Is this some sort of parade for which a conquering army shines up its terrible guns and rolls them up and down the streets for the people to see? Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can—and will—do?

If you have a cell of poetry in your being (you've got plenty more than that, whether you're aware of it or not), this book is worth reading, and then reading again. Many of you probably know Dillard from a truly diamond-like book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In books like Pilgrim and Holy, you can hear the singing of a unique voice of our time, a voice of whom none less than Eudora Welty wrote, "A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled..."

Let's have another selection from Holy The Firm, in which she comically compresses this Aristotelian notion of a primum materia:

These are only ideas, by the single handful. Lines, lines, and their infinite points! Hold hands and crack the whip, and yank the Absolute out of there and into the light, God pale and astounded, spraying a spiral of salts and earths, God footloose and flung. And cry down the line to his passing white ear, "Old Sir! Do you hold space from buckling by a finger in its hole? O Old! Where is your other hand?" His right hand is clenching, calm, round the exploding left hand of Holy the Firm.

I think it was Joseph Campbell who once said that writers, poets, and artists are the leaders of every age's most transformative cycles, the beacons to every bloodless revolution. I can sense such a voice in Annie Dillard, who teaches us that the artist is simply the medium for something else, whose name is elusive, personal, and infinite:

How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.

A Note to My Brainstem

Unless you're Bill O'Reilly, fighting pretend wars, or just tend to be depressed this time of year (quite understandable), the holidays are supposed to feature laughter and jollity. Nobody's better at that than our friends across the pond; so click the graphic and have a Merry Mithras laugh with Stephen Fry (of Harry Potter audiobook fame) and crew.

I can't claim to have known about this study while I was writing "God's Nose" over the weekend, but it's nice to know that my work can be topical, even though by accident.

Today, I happened to have a glance back at the DR archives, just to see what we were up to last year. I had actually forgotten the transit strike here in NYC, but that was the big event here one year ago. I can't recall what made me do the "Baghdad Bob and Crawford George" piece.

It's a holly-jolly season, after all: the roundball thugs are having their usual brawls; the battle over the O.J. / Fox debacle continues apace; and the latest statistics on violence in Iraq are...well...exactly what we all knew they would be.

So let me suggest, Bill-O, that the war is not on Xmas; it's just around it. Why this is so is anyone's guess, but my astrologer friend Eric Francis has a theory:

I recognize that the holidays are a difficult time of year for many, if not most, people -- myself included. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's also a somewhat frightening time of year, as the cave-person or primate part of our brains is indeed wondering where the Sun went and whether it will ever come back (note to brainstem, it will).

Perhaps the solstice time is, after all, a moment for giving the forebrain a well-earned rest and affording some primacy instead to nose, brainstem, and heart. This is a theme I found in Harry Potter's first solstice moment:

The cloak is a Christmas gift—one of the first of Harry's life, since he was never given any by the Dursleys—which comes to him from his dead father through his mentor, Dumbledore: the unsigned note which accompanies the cloak only says, "your father left this in my possession before he died. It is time it was returned to you. Use it well." The invisibility cloak is a magical (and therefore metaphorical) object of immense value and beauty: it is "fluid and silvery gray…strange to the touch, like water woven into material." Clearly, Mrs. Rowling is not writing this in a vacuum of invention: this is a metaphor of great historical depth and psychological meaning, particularly within the mythology of England and Ireland:

In the story Tochmarc Etaine (The Courtship of Etain), the god of the Otherworld, Midir, demands in compensation for the loss of an eye in a brawl, a chariot, a cloak, and the most beautiful maiden in Ireland as his bride…This was a cloak of invisibility (like Siegfried's tarnkappe in the Nibelungenlied) and of forgetfulness…The god Lug wore a similar cloak which enabled him to pass through the entire Irish army without being seen when he came to aid his son…To put on the cloak is to show that you have chosen Wisdom (the philosopher's cloak). (Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, pp. 205-206)

The invisibility cloak is an image of transformation, and not of self-obliteration, depersonalization, or disembodiment. For Harry, his body is still manifestly there—he can feel it, and so can others if they bump into him (indeed, this is part of the challenge in using the cloak). Whenever he wears the cloak over the course of the five stories, Harry's physical and intuitive senses seem to become more acute and penetrating: he becomes more open and alert to experience than when he is visible. The cloak's virtue is to take him to, and through, the experiences that will contribute to his inner growth—indeed, it is an active metaphor of the practices involved in the development of the true self. These include inner movements of one's total being—the intuitive, feeling, and spiritual capacities of our nature, that live and glow in quiescence beneath the often-repressive monarch known as intellect.

Harry discovers this the first time he uses the cloak: he goes to the library, thinking that this is where he "should" go, in order to obtain information. But he quickly discovers that he is being called beyond the realm of "should" and "ought," once he has put on this cloak—that he is being called to penetrate deeper regions of the psyche than he can reach through the symbols and instruments of intellect. This message is brought to him very quickly: the library is said to be "pitch-black and eerie"; the books "didn't tell him much," because they are written in "words in languages Harry couldn't understand." Finally, he comes to a book that screams into the night as soon as he opens it, and that drives him out of there, toward the place where a more potent image of self-discovery lies, which will engage his entire being. In his retreat from the images of intellect and the representatives of Authority (the caretaker Argus Filch and Professor Snape, who come looking for him), Harry encounters exactly what he needs to further his inner learning: the Mirror of Erised.

Friday Reflection: Life Beyond Belief

Before we get to our usual Friday fare, a brief update on the outcome of the effort to ban the Harry Potter literature in Georgia schools. Fortunately, the Georgia Board of Education has ruled out such a ban. That is, the books are staying in the school's library. There's an interesting footnote to that story:

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, published by London-based Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, have been challenged 115 times since 2000, making them the most challenged texts of the 21st Century, according to the American Library Association.

Now this is the kind of ass-backwards, topsy-turvy morality that we live amid in the 21st century. Too often, it seems as if all that's light is made darkness; all that's right is made wrong. It is what very commonly happens with morality: when we carve the rules of belief and behavior into stone, then anything different or difficult to fit into the iron frame of morality must be deemed the work of the Demon. Fundamentalism operates on a false principle of division; its morality actually tends to bury our natural moral senses under a shroud of belief.

This, in fact, is one of the salient messages of our banner quote author for this week: she is a teacher of the I Ching, who (like J.K. Rowling) has written a series of books that contain a wealth of insight. Her name is Carol Anthony, and the quote in the banner comes from her first book, A Guide to the I Ching.

Anthony is one of my own teachers; much of what I write down in this space is drawn from my experiences in her workshops, seminars, and publications. In the same section of the Guide's text where our quote may be found, the following observations appear—think of the "Mission Accomplished" moment of the Bush presidency:

Good luck is the result of a humble and unassuming attitude toward the Unknown. The minute we congratulate ourselves on having good luck, it disappears. We may not presume on God, so to speak...When we depend on a situation in a presuming way, we may expect it to fail.

Anthony's work is loaded to the brim with acumen of this sort; my own copies of her works are scrawled throughout with underlining, notes, and exclamations. Her work will be found valuable to anyone with an interest in self-growth and the development of a lively inner life—no experience or even any particular interest in the I Ching or Taoist philosophy is required. Here's a list of her titles, all of which may be found here:

A Guide to the I Ching
Philosophy of the I Ching
Love, An Inner Connection
I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way (with Hanna Moog)

One of Anthony's most helpful teachings can also be found in the Guide, where she discusses the psychological basis of successful relationships of any kind. Here is an excerpt:

Conflict with others can generally be avoided at the beginning if we carefully determine fair and just terms. In business relationships the written contract serves this purpose, but contracts are reliable only if they correspond with what everyone, in his heart, would consider to be just.

As just contracts prove helpful in business relationships, thus do they also in marriage. To put that relationship on a firm footing one must take the time to allow an understanding of fair and just principles to develop. However, before we can successfully marry another, we must first marry ourself, for being true to ourself is the only basis for loyalty to others. Marrying oneself does not mean we rigidly hold to dogma or to belief systems; it means that it is our responsibility to be true to our inner feelings, and to our personal experiences of truth.

It is true love which gives space, which waits patiently, which perseveres without regard to self and reward, and which has nothing to do with surface manifestations, displays of affection, statements of love, or possession. Selfless love invisibly sustains another and pulls him toward the good within himself. It is a love whose only reward is privately to oneself; in maintaining it, we are at peace.

Carol Anthony and her teaching partner, Hanna Moog, still give regular seminars and workshops in the I Ching; if you're in New England or can travel to the Boston area anytime during the year, you may wish to see their teaching schedule for 2007—just visit their website. Their new book Healing Yourself the Cosmic Way is to be released next month.

Troll in the Dungeon

Today's graphic is something I found all by itself on an Internet page. I think it's great, so if anyone knows the source that I can credit for it, let me know.

Anyway, it's a timely picture to show today, now that Dennis Kucinich has tossed his hat into the ring again. Could he beat Hillary? Like a rented mule. But Obama? Doesn't look like it. Doesn't matter: Kucinich's voice is one we need to hear plenty of in the 2008 campaign. Click that link and watch how he handles the Wolf-man, and I think you'll agree.

Medicine and politics 1: Funny, I never read any headlines about power-shifts when Dick Cheney's doctors were wondering whether the man's ticker would withstand the VP-stress. But today, power-shifting is all the rage in the media, because a Senator from South Dakota suffered a stroke. This is what happens when your media are themselves infected with that solipsistic corporate frigidity: the impulse becomes the product. Pretty sad stuff.

Medicine and politics 2: If I wrote a blog that somehow caused people to want to kill themselves, do you think I'd get off with putting a warning label in the header? (don't laugh—a guy named Goethe wrote a book called "Sorrows of Young Werther" that reportedly incited a wave of youthful suicides in the Europe of its day). Well, the drug companies are being told to put a warning label on certain anti-depressants that have a similar effect. The problem is that some docs are siding with the pharma companies on this one. This, by the way, is another demonstration of the urgent need for experts in the research methodology known as "naturalistic observation", which has been somewhat demonized in modern science as too New-Agey. Guess what—you can't design a double-blind, laboratory-style, randomized control study on this sort of thing. Not unless you don't mind much of your control group winding up dead, that is.

To my mind, this situation represents another call for a fresh look in this society at how we use medicines. I've written some thoughts on that point, with a focus on anti-depressants, here.

Medicine and politics 3: Circumcision is a good thing. It's front-page, headline news today, and until I've read the studies, I have only one comment. This doesn't change my view on the practice of slicing a newborn boy's Mr. Happy—it is one of the truly decadent and primitive practices left over from our evolutionary past that's still commonly done today. If the findings of this study are validated and circumcision is found to be a small component in preventing the spread of AIDS, then maybe it would help to educate young men on it and offer the option in the context of a voluntary program of adult circumcision, perhaps supported by government funding and with some sort of carrot tied to the scalpel (a tax break or even a small payment for young men submitting to it). The message could be, "hey tough guy, you handled getting that tongue-ring like a real trooper; now go get this done." But I'm still uncomfortable with even that: there are alternatives to managing the spread of AIDS that do not involve surgery, and I feel strongly that we have to get beyond this societal obsession with solving all problems with a knife, a pill, or a bomb.

But let me repeat one basic point about which there should be no debate: to do this to newborns does damage that we can't even measure yet. But I'm reminded of a story that Robert Bly told in Iron John: he said that during one of his men's seminars, he had passed around a sword through the group, and found that many of the men in the group cringed even at holding it. Well, I'd like to know how many of those guys had been circumcised long before they had any choice in the matter. If your dick had been sliced up when you were small and helpless, but acutely aware, wouldn't it be natural for you to cringe from knives for the rest of your life?

I thought I'd continue with my ruminations on the intersection of corporations and government, in light of the news that Bush is putting his finger far enough up his ass to check his own prostate, re. movement on a decision for the future in Iraq. Hmmm...I wonder if that's even possible...it would certainly be preferable to having it done to you. If any of our readers are urologists, let me know what you think.

So the Chimpster from Crawford, the Great Decider, can't make a decision, even though hundreds will likely die horrible deaths while he sits on the can over the holidays trying to figure out how to achieve "peace with honor," to use an old Nixonian bromide.

Well, if you work in corporate America, are you surprised? There's a TV commercial that I laugh at every time I hear its slogan: "moving at the speed of business." In corporate America, there is indeed a lot of busy-ness: people rushing around, clacking away at keyboards, buzzing impolitely on the telephone or the wireless set, scanning the Blackberry, oblivious of their surroundings. But how quickly do things really get done; how fast does accomplishment of the remotest stripe really happen in corporate America?

In my book, The Tao of Hogwarts, I discuss the true workings of the corporate body in the context of Ms. Rowling's metaphor of "the troll in the dungeon."

What’s big, ugly, smells really foul to anyone in their right senses, and can’t seem to move without stumbling or locking up in confusion? Well, if you work for a big corporation, you might have answered, “my department” or “the company I work for.” And you might be right.

In fact, you could take your pick: the mountain troll that corners Harry, Ron, and Hermione in a girls’ bathroom in Sorcerer’s Stone could be a metaphor on the monster of the modern corporation or the government. Since the government comes in for enough rough treatment from Mrs. Rowling in “The Ministry of Magic” (see Chapter 9), I prefer to think of the mountain troll as a massive corporation whose various parts can’t communicate or coordinate with one another. It stinks horribly, meaning that it’s offensive to people’s most basic and feeling-oriented senses: every time I read about another company downsizing (that is, ruining the lives of) its workers, I sense that same repulsive odor that Rowling’s children smell as they encounter the troll. The corporate troll solves every problem by trying to stomp it into oblivion or by trying to eat what’s in the way of its lumbering, juggernaut movement. But for all its vast physical size and the ungainly length of its various parts, it is only part-being: its intelligence is blunted by its massive, organizational-chart body, and therefore it can act only through domination—swinging the dull club of Power onto anything and anyone that comes within its myopic visual scope.

Finally, as in the story, the corporate troll is inevitably knocked out by the wooden immensity of its own size and force: how often do we see the company that yesterday was bludgeoning other smaller firms into bankruptcy or submission suddenly subjected to the same treatment by another, larger “troll”? Or worse still, consider the fate of some of the ugliest of corporate behemoths—those that fell under the weight of greed as well as incompetence. The trolls known as Enron, Worldcom, and their like, collapsed amid their corruption, poisoning an entire nation with the foul stench of their depravity, while leaving investors and customers robbed, broken, and destitute. Ron, Harry, and Hermione were lucky to escape the mountain troll with only a brief scare and the vague breath of its odor in their memories; the investors of the corporate trolls of Greed and Excess are often left with ruined lives and uncertain futures.

So as it is with our personal lives and relationships, seeing clearly the reality of the Bush administration and corporate America is all about looking beyond appearances. We have to stare past the superficial hubbub of activity and rhetoric and ask, "what's really being done?" The answer, for a culture so obsessed with action, will only be surprising for a moment: very little, if anything, gets done—and what does get done happens with a positively reptilian sloth. That goes back to the nature of the beast, the troll: its movement is all veneer, so when you seek substance or real accomplishment, there's nothing there. For all their jerky, compulsive activity, government and the corporate body are dead from the neck when it comes to results. That's because all that action lacks the guidance of the clarity born of reflection. Our banner quote author has plenty to say about that, and we will meet her tomorrow.

Joining Dumbledore's Army

Before we return to another week of deconstructing fundamentalism as it appears in government, religion, politics, corporate affairs, the media, and the culture at large, how about a few moments of fun on a Sunday?

Harry Potter: The Turning Point. For me, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is the turning-point story of the Potteriad. It may also be the best written tale of the lot, but that's very much a matter of personal preference, so I won't insist on it. But clearly, the themes of OOTP make it a transformative tale, which is why it is featured so prominently in my own Tao of Hogwarts. If you have a glance at the pdf download of the entire text (in the banner above), you will find that OOTP is featured in Chapters 2, 7, 8, 9, and 10. OOTP is loaded with political, psychological, and transformative metaphor: the death veil, the Department of Mysteries, the Ministry of Magic, the character of Dolores Umbridge, Grimmauld Place, the Room of Requirement...it goes on and on.

That's why the next film, to be released in July, 2007, is of such interest to a fellow like me. There's an extended trailer/preview over at Google Video which is worth a look. And the kids at Mugglenet have a load of material about the film, including ever-increasing sets of still photos.

Dark Energy: Of equal importance to my mind are the recently-published findings regarding dark energy. I don't exactly agree with the term, which probably raises the wrong sorts of associations. I'd prefer to see it called something like "expulsive energy," meaning that it's responsible for the cleansing, expansive, outward movement of the universe--the negative pole in Einstein's original vision:

The findings are consistent with the idea of dark energy behaving like Albert Einstein's cosmological constant. The cosmological constant describes the idea that there is a density and pressure associated with "empty" space.

In this scenario, dark energy never changes; it has the same properties across the age of the Universe.

That this phenomenon comprises roughly three-quarters of the universe's activity (I feel that the universe, like god, is best conceived as a verb rather than as a physical entity), while so-called light matter, or the stuff that you and I are made of, makes up a mere 4% of the total, shows us something about how important we really are in the context of the totality of the cosmos. Once it's more thoroughly understood, this expulsive energy will, I suspect, have a lot to tell us about our own energies, which are not, after all, separate from our cosmic environment. It may also help to solve one of the more intractable disputes in philosophy, about what place death has in the flow of matter and energy.

In other words, it may help us to understand where exactly Sirius Black "went" when he was shot into that veil on the ancient pedestal in the Department of Mysteries...

Finally, there will be another film to watch for in 2007: Michael Moore's examination of the American pharmaceutical industry should be appearing next year. I was reminded of Moore's film when I found this Pfizer ad in the Washington Post: well, does it fill you with confidence in the future? It made me wonder, "hey, isn't it time that some energetic filmmaker had another go at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?"

No. 12, Grimmauld Place, and the Voices of Neurosis

Every so often (and it's been nearly a year since I've last done this), I offer up a chapter from one of my books here, just in case there's anyone with the patience to read a long piece of prose about self-development and the like. And if you're an editor or a lit agent who's passing by, have a look and give me a ring, if any of this strikes your fancy. Today's offering is from my Tao of Hogwarts, and it's about the medieval roots of ego and the modern delusion of human supremacy. Off we go, then, to No. 12, Grimmauld Place in London, with Mr. Harry Potter.

Pressing a finger to her lips, she led him on tiptoes past a pair of long, moth-eaten curtains, behind which Harry supposed there must be another door, and after skirting a large umbrella stand that looked as though it had been made from a severed troll's leg, they started up the dark staircase, passing a row of shrunken heads mounted on plaques on the wall. A closer look showed Harry that the heads belonged to house-elves. All of them had the same rather snoutlike nose.
Harry's bewilderment deepened with every step he took. What on earth were they doing in a house that looked as though it belonged to the darkest of wizards?
—J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Chapter 4

In the opening chapters of the fifth book in the Harry Potter series, the fifteen year-old boy wizard is attacked by a pair of "dementors"—malevolent ghouls with the power to suck one's very soul out with a single "kiss." Harry successfully defends himself from this assault and is then rescued from his Muggle home by a group of his adult friends, who take him to an obscure house in a darkened, low-income neighborhood within London. This house is the headquarters of the "Order of the Phoenix," the social defense association that has been hurriedly re-formed in response to the threat posed by the return of Lord Voldemort, the complex embodiment of evil whose shadow floats throughout the Potter series.

Nothing about his new environment is particularly encouraging to Harry: garbage is piled up in the street; dirt and filth seem to define the homes at Grimmauld Place, sticking to their exteriors like a gloomy mood. The door to the place is "black…shabby…scratched"; the darkness inside is dominated by a "sweetish, rotting smell" which gives it "the feeling of a derelict building." Gas lamps are lit, which cast "a flickering insubstantial light over the peeling wallpaper and threadbare carpet"; there are other haunted-house features, such as a "cobwebby chandelier" and "age-blackened portraits" on the walls. The question that occurs to Harry, as he walks through the house at Grimmauld Place, seems entirely natural (the name says it all: "grim and old," or "grime and mould"—throughout these stories, Rowling reveals an uncanny talent with names): what on earth is he doing here?

The question is not answered for him immediately: he only knows that he is in the headquarters of the Order, that it seems an uncharacteristic place for his friends and allies to be calling home, even if only as a temporary measure, and that its pervasive gloom feels poisonous to him. And from a metaphorical perspective, it is, as Rowling swiftly demonstrates in this tour through the realm of the neurotic tenement.

For it is here, at 12 Grimmauld Place, that Harry's smoldering emotions of fear and anger are appropriated by the ego and thus find expression in a completely misdirected outer attack on those closest to him. Why does this happen? Why, after less than a quarter hour within this house and its threatening metaphorical presence, does the ego within Harry explode in a cacophony of bile against his two deepest and most enduring friends?

One answer to this is obvious: 12 Grimmauld Place is decidedly not "a safe place." I am borrowing that phrase from a 1989 book by a Harvard psychologist named Leston Havens. A Safe Place is a compact volume of poetic clarity that calls those who would follow the way of helping people in torment or crisis to remember that "every theory acts to suppress…the real person who consists of much else," and that furthering another's inner growth is really about offering a safe and open place in which true healing may happen. Havens writes compellingly about the inner requirements for "safe place making:"

We have to learn how to be still when the other needs to be left alone but asks for intervention, to give confidence when the patient induces despair, to find strength when everything suggests madness and deviance, to bring sobriety to those who would set us afire, and…sometimes to be what the patient needs….(p. 131)

In this respect, young Harry has not been given "a safe place" for a moment during this his fifteenth year of life, and we can all observe from our own lives how common this unfortunate truth is within our culture, especially for adolescents. For Harry, it is only at his school—particularly within Dumbledore's office and Hagrid's hut—that he's allowed the freedom and safety to expose his inner demons to the light of clarity, and gradually uncover his true self. As this story proceeds, Harry will discover that learning and healing are possible beyond Hogwarts, and even within the lugubrious confines of Grimmauld Place—but that understanding will reach him only after a metaphorical process of "inner cleansing" is allowed to unfold. At this point in the story, there is no safe place for Harry to grow or heal: he has been delivered from the plastic world of Privet Drive, into the frosty but insubstantial air of escape (the broom-flight to London), and finally to this moribund home at Grimmauld Place.

So, Harry is hustled upstairs, into another glowering space ("a gloomy, high-ceilinged room"), left alone by the adults who have important, grownup business to attend to downstairs, and he is then almost immediately excoriating his friends Ron and Hermione with demands, claims of right and privilege, bitter, paranoid accusations, and viperish, self-referential pettiness.

Even as he spouts this venom, Harry is obliquely aware ("self-ashamed") of the fact that he is being overtaken by the power of ego. Yet he carries on in the shrill voice of the neurotic realm—the power-hungry impulse to be in the know, the self-consciousness of the hierarchy implicit in one's relative proximity to the seeming center of things, the obsessive demand that he owns priority above others for his past actions. His bitterness is a function of the fact that a more natural expression of his fear and anger has been closed off to him; it is also a reflection of and response to his environment. As Havens points out in his book, our spaces, in both their outer and inner formations, will show us whether we will be allowed a healthy and disburdening expression of our distress, or be left with a narrow, restricted, and distorted projection.

Rowling's use of environment illustrates this principle. Compare the way Harry accounts for identical actions from his past in two separate spaces, first during his tirade at Grimmauld Place (above) and later at Hogwarts (below):

…before he knew it, Harry was shouting…
"I'VE BEEN STUCK AT THE DURSLEYS' FOR A MONTH! AND I'VE HANDLED MORE THAN YOU TWO'VE EVER MANAGED AND DUMBLEDORE KNOWS IT—WHO SAVED THE SORCERER'S STONE? WHO GOT RID OF RIDDLE? WHO SAVED BOTH YOUR SKINS FROM THE DEMENTORS?..WHO HAD TO GET PAST DRAGONS AND SPHINXES AND EVERY OTHER FOUL THING LAST YEAR?…BUT WHY SHOULD I KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON? WHY SHOULD ANYONE BOTHER TO TELL ME WHAT'S BEEN HAPPENING?"
(pp. 65-66)

"Just listen to me, all right? It sounds great, but all that stuff was luck—I didn't know what I was doing half the time, I didn't plan any of it, I just did whatever I could think of, and I nearly always had help—I got through it all because—because help came at the right time, or because I guessed right—but I just blundered through it all, I didn't have a clue what I was doing—STOP LAUGHING!" (p. 327)

Returning to Grimmauld Place, the full impact of this reflection of environment and inner state is revealed as the textural details of this house are drawn. To the ghoulish and dystonic images already provided, the author adds more over the next two chapters. Harry soon understands the necessity of silence and darkness in the entryway to the building, when an accidental noise sets off one of the more intriguing images of the book:

The moth-eaten velvet curtain Harry had passed earlier had flown apart, but there was no door behind them. For a split second, Harry thought he was looking through a window, a window behind which an old woman in a black cap was screaming and screaming as though she was being tortured—then he realized it was simply a life-size portrait, but the most realistic, and the most unpleasant, he had ever seen in his life.

The old woman was drooling, her eyes were rolling, the yellowing skin of her face stretched taut as she screamed, and all along the hall behind them, the other portraits awoke and began to yell too, so that Harry actually screwed up his eyes at the noise and clapped his hands over his ears…the old woman screeched louder than ever, brandishing clawed hands as though trying to tear at their faces.

"Filth! Scum! By-products of dirt and vileness! Half-breeds, mutants, freaks, begone from this place! How dare you befoul the house of my fathers—" (pp. 77-78)

This portrait represents the figure of Sirius Black's dead mother, and now it becomes clear where Harry has landed—in the ancestral home of his godfather's ancient family. Now as tempting as it may be for us to see certain Freudian (specifically, Oedipal) analogies in this concatenation of images and relationships, it would seem more consonant with Mrs. Rowling's development of the story to focus on this metaphor from the perspective of a more human and less ideological psychology.

For we have now entered the metaphorical realm of what Karen Horney called "neurotic pride" and what Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog refer to as "the demonic sphere of consciousness." Kierkegaard called it "the sickness unto death," and specifically "the despair of weakness," which he describes pointedly in terms of false self-perception:

…there are essentially two forms of illusion: that of hope and that of recollection. The adolescent's illusion is that of hope, that of the adult recollection. But precisely because the adult suffers from this illusion, his conception of illusion itself is also the quite one-sided one that the only illusion is the illusion of hope…What afflicts the adult is not so much the illusion of hope as, no doubt among other things, the grotesque illusion of looking down from some supposedly higher vantage-point, free from illusion, upon the illusions of the young. (The Sickness Unto Death, p. 89)

Anthony and Moog describe this "demonic sphere" of illusion in terms of a false use of language, the product of fantasy and myth:

The false use of words in describing the Cosmic Reality leads to mistaken ideas and beliefs: about the nature of the Cosmos and its ways, about life, about Nature, about human nature, and about the place of humans in the Cosmos…The false thoughts and emotions coming from this false consciousness project themselves into reality…the parallel reality created by the collective ego, which can be described as the domain of suffering. (I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way, p. 713)

Horney speaks of this illusory, projected consciousness as the product of a neurotic error, in which "a wish or need, in itself quite understandable, turns into a claim." We may see that Harry himself falls into this neurotic trap: his self-important tirade (quoted above) comes from the same inner milieu as that of the portrait of Sirius' mother. Under the influence of ego, his need for personal autonomy becomes a claim to superiority above others, based on his past accomplishments. This claim is a brand of "personal racism," which parallels the more global and stereotypical racism of the portrait's rant against "half-breeds, mutants, and freaks." Certainly, their tone and volume are very well matched: Harry and the painting are both loud, biting, offensive, and imperious. This involves an acceptance or embodiment of what Horney refers to as "the expansive solution of mastery," in which "the individual prevailingly identifies himself with his glorified self." To do so, however, is to separate from one's own true self, one's human needs, and from the Cosmic Reality. This inner act of dehumanization springs from the same seed, which condemns others as "the enemy," "the traitors," "the mob," or "the ignorant," and subjects them to oppression and demonization, usually in furtherance of some proclaimed "noble end."

It is, however, the professed "noble end" that usually contains the seed of the delusion, the fuel which drives the engine of tyranny. Mrs. Rowling reveals some of the corrupt ideas that perpetuate delusion in her account of the cleansing of the house at Grimmauld Place, which, as Harry discovers, is more a process of "waging war on the house" than mere dusting and cleaning. In one scene, the children join the grownups in clearing out a collection of glass cabinets that contain some of the relics of "the noble and most ancient house of Black." The scene evokes Harry's earlier experience of the second book (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), in which he was misdirected within the magical fireplace network into "Knockturn Alley," a kind of parallel, subterranean commercial world to that of Diagon Alley. These cabinets hold "an odd assortment of objects: a selection of rusty daggers, claws, a coiled snakeskin, a number of tarnished silver boxes inscribed with languages Harry could not understand, and, least pleasant of all, an ornate crystal bottle with a large opal set into the stopper, full of what Harry was quite sure was blood." (p. 106). During the actual clearing of these cabinets, Sirius sustains a bite from one of the silver boxes, Harry is attacked by another object, and everyone present is almost clinically sedated by "a musical box that emitted a faintly sinister, tinkling tune when wound," until one of the girls has the good sense to force the lid shut.

The common theme to all of these threatening objects is their decadent, medieval character: metaphorically, they are the demons of an ancient, culturally-conditioned consciousness that seem to exude decay and a kind of inner contagion. They must be dealt with summarily: as each object is removed and its corrupt energy subdued, it is thrown into a trash bag. There is the bottle of black, rotten blood of a racist nobility; the silver trinkets of excess; various seals, lockets, and medals won for empty deeds or else bought with money and influence; and finally the mythic embodiment of this rank, feudal anthropocentrism: a massive book entitled "Nature's Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy".

Now we must be very clear about the reference of these metaphors: though their character is collectively medieval, they represent acutely modern problems—demons of the psyche that inhabit the neurotic realms of both group and individual consciousness today. They are embedded in our culture, our law, our moral codes, our religions, our educational systems, and even in our arts and sciences. To free oneself of these demonic elements derived from cultural conditioning is the object of insight teachings such as those of Lao Tzu, who advised us:

Drop the struggle, silence the demons,
And your natural self will be free.
(Chapter 8, Tao Te Ching)

The I Ching also encourages us to "silence the demons" in several passages of its text, most notably in Hexagram 18, whose title has been variously translated as "Working on What Has Been Spoiled (Decay)"; "Corruption"; "Ills to be Cured"; and, simply, "Illness":

Illness.
Working to cure an illness is supremely blessed.
It is favorable to undertake the crossing of a great river.
Begin three days before the first day—
And you will end three days after it.
(from Rediscovering the I Ching, tr. Greg Whincup)

The "illness" is a metaphor that relates directly to Mrs. Rowling's feudal metaphors from the cabinets described above: it is nothing less fundamental than the delusion of human supremacy over Nature and the Cosmic Whole—the ultimate racist prejudice. The I Ching's text repeatedly underscores the centrality of humility and modesty in human conduct as an active means of overthrowing such "uber-racism," and much of Rowling's work in the Potter stories is devoted to exposing the myths and false perceptions that underlie and perpetuate this ancient and monumental form of prejudice. In their commentary to Hexagram 18, Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog add the following insights:

Once the images of human superiority were established by the heroic myths, rationales were created by the rational mind to support their validity. These rationales were then combined with the threat that people who were perceived as being disloyal to their heritage, were guilty of betrayal. (One of the greatest taboos is to be disloyal to one's heritage.) These threats were directed as well toward anyone who questioned the presumptions on which the rationales were founded. By such devices the presumptions have been maintained and passed on from generation to generation. In sum, they represent the feudal mindset that has dominated people's thinking worldwide for the last 3,000 years. In time, the societies that created these myths wrote them down and declared them as ancient wisdom, further intensifying the power of the fantasies, and the rationales that supported them. (I Ching: Oracle of the Cosmic Way, p. 239)

This describes precisely the thrust of Rowling's feudal metaphors found in the contents of that ancient cabinet in the house at Grimmauld Place! The I Ching and Rowling also intersect in their respective views of the specific character and consequences of this feudal delusion that has been carried into our own time and lives, and it all centers on the notions of patriarchy and hierarchy—as intricately knotted together as braids in the head of Medusa.

The corruptions of patriarchy are exposed in the lines of the text to Hexagram 18, where the phrase "setting right what has been spoiled by the father" is repeated three times. The patriarchal consciousness is inextricably bound up with the more generalized notion of hierarchy as an inherent attribute of human nature, the universe, and spiritual life. As Anthony and Moog observe, this elevation of the Father (as a symbol of humankind's presumed supremacy over Nature, God's supremacy over Man, or the King's supremacy over the people) amounts to "the deification of humans," which has led people to see themselves "as the ones who were designated by heaven to bring order to the multitudinous things of Nature." (p. 239) This false consciousness is present today in our political, judicial, educational, and corporate structures, and of course persists in the fundamental concepts of most religious and psychological ideologies, which divide spirit and body, or mind and matter, between qualitatively higher and lower realms of being. The I Ching encourages us to "work on what has been spoiled" (by the father, mother, tradition, ancient wisdom, etc.) through disburdening ourselves from within of the erroneous myths, images, and hierarchical concepts that support and perpetuate the feudal delusion. We will return, a little later, to consider some practical means by which we may approach this task of "setting right what has been spoiled."

Mrs. Rowling's contribution in this vein comes in the same chapter as the "cabinet-cleaning" scene summarized earlier. During a break in their work, Sirius and Harry pause to contemplate an enormous tapestry hanging on the wall:

The tapestry looked immensely old; it was faded and looked as though doxies had gnawed it in places; nevertheless, the golden thread with which it was embroidered still glinted brightly enough to show them a sprawling family tree dating back (as far as Harry could tell) to the Middle Ages. Large words at the very top of the tapestry read:
THE NOBLE AND MOST ANCIENT HOUSE OF BLACK—"TOUJOURS PUR" (p. 111)

Sirius spends some time explaining to Harry the identities of certain individuals represented on that tapestry, and it is a history of folly, murder, corruption, and deceit that he depicts from its discolored golden braid. Anyone in the family who dared to question or separate from the feudal prejudice that characterized the ancient house of Black has had their names "burned out" of the tapestry (including Sirius himself).

Now we must consider that Rowling is obliquely attacking the royal decadence of the British nation itself, and perhaps someone better versed than I in the history of England and its nobility would be able to directly identify some of Mrs. Rowling's satire in this vein. But it cannot be presumed to stop there, for it is the very structure of human hierarchy that is being held up to the light of insight. This image of the tapestry simply completes and reinforces the other metaphors that Rowling has chosen to expose the feudal mindset and its legacy of outer destruction and inner delusion.

The Noise of Neurosis: Kreacher the House-Elf

The essentially neurotic character of this corrupt realm of depraved nobility is revealed in the physical rot that infests all of the objects in this scene. It is also betrayed in the voices which are heard behind the story's main action: the occasional screams of the portrait of Sirius' mother, which pierce the air whenever someone rings the doorbell downstairs, and the muttering, malevolent rant of Kreacher the house-elf. Kreacher, who is the house servant, steals into the room where the children are cleaning. He is a tiny monster, ancient and ill-appearing, with drooping skin, bloodshot eyes, and a hunchbacked gait. But his most alarming trait is his voice—a muttering, psychotic drone "in a hoarse, deep voice like a bullfrog's." His word-salad diatribes croak out of him unconsciously, in schizoid bursts that counter his conscious servant's officious wheedle. The disorganized commentary runs like a subterranean echo to the rant of his former mistress in the painting, in both its content and muted volume:

"Smells like a drain and a criminal to boot, but she's no better, nasty old blood traitor with her brats messing up my Mistress's house, oh my poor Mistress, if she knew, if she knew that scum they've let in her house, what would she say to old Kreacher, oh the shame of it, Mudbloods and werewolves and traitors and thieves, poor old Kreacher, what can he do…" (pp. 107-108)

Hermione alone senses that the old house elf is ill, and intuits the cause; this insight is later confirmed by Dumbledore in the final interview between he and Harry. The others, including Sirius himself, see only insolence, hatred, and utter depravity in Kreacher; Hermione sees, or rather feels, the demons that have enslaved his inner truth, and she wishes that they could be exposed and driven out of him. But Hermione is ignored, and even playfully ridiculed for her insight, and the book ends with the revelation that Kreacher has betrayed Sirius and Harry to Lord Voldemort, causing death to the one and yet another bitter loss to the other. Dumbledore provides the perspective in the epilogue to the story: "Kreacher is what he has been made by wizards, Harry…we wizards have mistreated and abused our fellows for too long, and we are now reaping our reward." (p. 834).

In contemplating the character and fate of one such as Kreacher, we are again reminded of Kierkegaard's insight: the "sickness unto death" has many faces. It has a face of power-blinded evil, such as we find in Voldemort; it has a face of smug superiority, such as the Ministry of Magic has in its way, and as even Harry and his friends in the Order of the Phoenix succumb to sporadically; it also has the face of enslavement to the false and feudal ideologies of tyranny, such as we find in both the "noble and ancient house of Black" and in its servants. The voices and the visages of the illness may vary, but the demons whose distorted energy fuels them are found squealing in the swamp of the same foul and vapid abstractions: the ideas of human supremacy, the mastery of Nature, and the division of being (and of beings) into higher and lower, chosen and damned, good and evil, pure and unclean. The "sickness" that Kierkegaard describes is not one unto physical death, but rather unto the only death that need be truly feared—the death of one's true and natural self:

Finitude's despair is just so. A man in this kind of despair can very well live on in temporality; indeed he can do so all the more easily, be to all appearances a human being, praised by others, honoured and esteemed, occupied with all the goals of temporal life. Yes, what we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one may so express it, pawn themselves to the world. They use their abilities, amass wealth, carry out worldly enterprises, make prudent calculations, etc., and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not themselves. In a spiritual sense, they have no self, no self for whose sake they could venture everything, no self for God—however selfish they are otherwise. (Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, p. 65)

Silencing the Demons: An Approach to Healing

Let us suppose that a certain individual shows no inclination whatever to recognize his projections. The projection-making factor then has a free hand and can realize its object—if it has one—or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power. As we know, it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to a…condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable. —Carl Jung, from Aion, CW 9, ii, par. 17

Jung was able to show, and then to poetically describe, how every person seems to create a parallel world of his life, through the projective activity of an aspect of personality that Jung called shadow. Now my own feeling is that there is no such integral portion of personality as shadow (especially as a universal and timeless entity, or archetype), and that what Jung was really referring to is what I have consistently called ego throughout this volume.

Ego has arisen out of error, out of something that we have done, rather than something that we are. It is a wandering maelstrom, whose energy—stolen from our true nature—adopts the kinetic shape of a hurricane, around whose stillness a storm of destructive and distorted energy swirls. The solution to the problem of ego is in the act of returning to that silent "eye of the hurricane," for that is where the pure energy of natural being may be discovered and experienced, in its deep and original clarity; that is the "safe place" of which Leston Havens writes. To get there, we must "silence the demons," and like Harry and his friends, clear our inner cabinets of false thoughts and negative emotion, by breaking the inner bonds of feudal belief. Later in Rowling's novel, after Harry has had another outburst of paranoia, bitter anger, and the howling, self-absorbed energy of heroism, his ego is stopped dead in its tracks by a remark from a girl who had been possessed by Lord Voldemort in an earlier story (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). At this point in the story, even though some threatening and disturbing events are swirling through his life, there is a measure of clarity for Harry at 12 Grimmauld Place—due in part to the space-clearing done earlier—and his inner truth responds in sincerity. These moments do occur in every life, it seems, and we must squeeze them for all they're worth: this means turning within and examining the ego in its suspended, frozen state, to clearly identify and root out what is repressing our natural self.

Unfortunately, too often we allow the ego to recover from the concussion, and it leads us further in the wrong direction. In Rowling's novel, this is demonstrated in Sirius' treatment of the house elf, Kreacher: he is drawn into opposition against Kreacher; and the elf, as ego, feeds off the negative, combative energy coming from Sirius. At one point, Sirius physically attacks the elf, throwing him bodily out of a room. The result is inevitable: the elf becomes a cauldron of passive-aggressive energy, leaving the house to rot in its decadence as he stubbornly persists in preserving the relics of its corruption. Finally, as mentioned earlier, Kreacher eventually betrays Sirius to Voldemort, completing the arc of fate initiated by Sirius' choice to follow the delusory way of power and oppression. The projection, as Jung predicted, becomes the trap in which "reality remains forever unattainable."

Of course, Sirius is not to be condemned for this: he has been "burned out" of his family, his identity extinguished by a feudal ideology, and his inner truth denied by the very people through whose bodies he received his life—not to mention the fact that he was falsely imprisoned for twelve years. When we are conditioned as children to deny our natural selves, then we become, as the psychologist John Welwood expresses it, "an open hand that gradually starts to contract and close:"

Although clenching the hand into a fist may be a fitting response to immediate threat, it would obviously be inappropriate to walk around that way for the rest of our life. Yet this is exactly what happens in our psyche! Our first response to emotional pain is to flinch, which is not a problem in and of itself. But then we start to take refuge in this contraction, and identify with it. It feels safer to be a closed fist than a vulnerable open hand. This protective tightening becomes installed in our body/mind as a set of chronic, rigid defenses that cut us off from our feelings and thus shut down our capacity to respond to life freely and openly. In our attempt to say no to the pain, we wind up saying no to ourselves instead. In this way, we inflict on ourselves the core wound that will haunt us the rest of our lives. We start to separate from our own being. —John Welwood, Love and Awakening, pp. 12-13

Our choice, of course, cannot be to say No to the pain—for pain (as Jung recognized) is a messenger designed to provide helpful information—our choice must be to say No to the ideas, beliefs, and images that perpetuate the pain, that are its actual source. When understood correctly, we find that pain—whether it is physical pain or the psychological pain of emotional distress or mental illness—is pointing, very specifically, to someplace within, where lies the ectoplasmic residue of false ideologies and beliefs. If we can identify the ones that were drilled into us during childhood, we have an excellent chance of pulling down the inner pillars that hold up the collective ego and its influence within our bodies. As Welwood points out, it is the body in which these false defenses, with their supporting belief systems, are trapped; to rid the body of their cellular detritus is to free the psyche from their illusory power.


Uncovering the Seeds: A Regressive Meditation

What we will now learn is a new meditation, in which we will return into childhood and the earliest phases of the conditioning process, through the familiar metaphor of the home. The starting point for this work has been suggested in the above discussion of psyche and body. The fact is that there is no true separation between them; to speak of them as if divided is a necessary nod to the cultural assumptions that seem to guide our dialogues about body and mind, or body and spirit.

Consciousness is, by nature, "embodied"; every living cell is formed of energy and expresses consciousness. To divide psyche and body, and then to declare that one is "higher," "holier," "better," or "dominant," is one of the fundamental illusions of the institutional ego, which we must deprogram from our total body-consciousness. The falseness of the belief in division is betrayed to the simplest reflection of common sense: you may as well say that one ventricle of your heart is "higher" than the other; that one lung is "the master breather"; that zero is "holier" than one. Our heart needs both its ventricles; our breath works best when both lungs are present and equally healthy; the computer needs both elements of its binary language, with no discrimination toward, or against, either.

Begin by sitting comfortably, with your spine straight but not rigid, your shoulders relaxed, and your feet grounded beneath you. If you have a background in, or preference for, cross-legged meditation such as is practiced in Buddhism, you may of course use that: just remember that it is not only unnecessary, but counterproductive, to intentionally assume a painful or uncomfortable position in meditation.

Now take a few gentle, regulating breaths as you close your eyes and ask for help from the invisible world of the helping Cosmic energies. Ask simply that you be shown the cause of your emotional or physical pain, or the source of your anger, sorrow, or loneliness—let the request come from your deepest body and finds its own unique expression.

Now, see yourself approaching a house—it could be your current home; a home of your childhood; another house that you've been to and which evokes detailed memories for you; or it could even be a fictional house like 12 Grimmauld Place. It need have no specific physical character, shape, or inner association (big or small, dark or light, friendly or malignant, empty or cluttered): it just has to be a place that you're familiar with in either experience or imagination, and which you feel as if you can walk through safely and in some detail. See yourself going up (or down) the steps to the entrance—count them as you go—and then step through the door and see what impressions meet your inner senses. There is no time limit on this exercise, so pause to observe the details, textures, and sensory experiences that each phase of your journey within this house brings.

As you move through each room, each part of the space, note the people, presences, sights, sounds, smells, feelings, and memories that are evoked. If you find yourself feeling constricted, panicky, or in darkness in any particular place within the house, simply move on, or if possible, open windows, letting in light and air: see yourself being helped in this work of opening to fresh and light-giving energy. Aside from this, do not try to change, move, or "fix" anything within your house; for now, just make note of your feeling-responses to the various rooms, spaces, things, and people you encounter during your tour of the place. Stay as long, or as briefly, as you feel is right for you—again, there is no maximum, or minimum, time limit to this practice. You need not even tour the entire space in one sitting: if you feel as though you need to stop, then leave and return to your breath and your body. For some people, this exercise is best done alone; however, if you feel safer or more comfortable doing it in the company of another—a counselor, therapist, or just a close friend—then follow your intuition as to what is best for you. When you are ready to finish the meditation, it is best that you actually "leave the house"—see yourself going back out of the place and into the light of the outdoors. Then take a few more regulating breaths, open your eyes, and gently begin to reflect on what the Cosmic teaching energy is showing you through this experience.

Now, if you're by yourself, and you feel safe and ready to work with the experience, write down as much as you can about the most vivid aspects of the meditation: the emotions, memories, sense-impressions, people, and feelings you encountered. See what images, patterns, objects, and significant inner responses were presented to you. If you are in a group or with another person, talk about them if you're ready to do so. If you're by yourself, you may prefer to simply write down all you can remember and felt deeply from the exercise, as if you were writing down a dream; then you can set the work aside and allow a period of inner assimilation to develop on the unconscious plane, perhaps overnight, as you sleep. Later, you can come back to your notes and see what insights now appear to you. If you wish, you can use an oracle such as the I Ching to draw further upon the Cosmic teaching energy to nurture the clarity of your inner learning. Your experience from this will be utterly unique to your personality, your life circumstances, and your moment in time; however, you may wish to consult the list below in organizing your own learning.

o Approaching the house: Did you sense any feeling of weakness, age, wear, structural imbalance, or disproportion in the images of the house, as you approached its entrance? Was there anything about the look or feel of the place that made you fearful or otherwise apprehensive? Follow those images, and see where they might lead you; if you like, you can draw pictures of what you saw, and be nourished by their teaching energy.
o Entering the house: Note in particular here the change in lighting and mood; any smells that appeared to you in the meditation; the look and feel of the door and its condition; and any other feeling-impressions that came to you on entering the house.
o Experiencing the movement of time within the flow of space: As you move through the house in your meditation, you may find yourself moving in time as well—specifically, backward. This is why it's called a "regressive meditation," because many people seem to be drawn back, often to childhood, in the context of the "house meditation." If this happens for you, then obviously it will be important for you to note memories, impressions, feelings, and objects that were prominent in your experience as you moved through the house.
o Experiencing the ordering (or lack thereof) within and throughout the space: Note any feelings of disorientation, loss of perspective or proportion, fears, clutter within certain parts of the house, changes in the balance of light and darkness, changes in the size or look of the rooms, and any claustrophobic inner sensations you may have experienced.
o Leaving the house: Recall what your feeling was about leaving the place: was it a relief to get out of there? Did you get lost or stuck on the way out? Did something or someone try to obstruct or prevent your leaving? If you found yourself looking back at the house, compare your inner feeling then with the sense you had on first approaching the place.


A Few General Guidelines on Interpretation:

Once more, and it cannot be overstated: your experience from this work will be entirely unique to you, and so should its interpretation (which will itself change or develop over time, as you repeat the meditation). Given that proviso, here are some orienting points that you can "take off" from in discovering your own interpretation:

Images of breakage, age, wear, decrepitude, or waste: These often indicate a belief or system of beliefs that is incorrect, no longer applicable or furthering to your own life, obstructive in the sense of "holding you back" to a dead past, or a tradition that must be either updated or simply discarded. See what associations arise to you, based on the images themselves and your feeling-response to them. To borrow the ready example of Harry's experience, he was aware of a foreboding, limiting presence as soon as he approached the house at Grimmauld Place and had walked through its front door. Should you encounter such images and feelings upon entering your own house in meditation, that's the time to ask for help from the Cosmic helping energies in clearing out the encrustations of a false and lifeless past; this especially applies to any group-centered ideologies, doctrines, commandments, or moral strictures that may have occurred to you in connection with the images, either during or after the meditation.

Images of clutter or feelings of "microsmia": We all know what clutter is, and how narrow, limited, and uncomfortable it makes us feel: clearing out any clutter you find within your house is crucial to growth. If an accumulation of objects had appeared during your meditation, go back in the next time and see yourself throwing them out; it's best if you have a feeling of a helping presence beside you, assisting with this work. Microsmia, on the other hand, is a less familiar term to most people; but the experience to which it refers is more common than many may imagine. Microsmia is the sense of space imploding, foreshortening, or closing in one; it is often experienced as a feeling of being small, insignificant, and impossibly, dangerously vulnerable within a shapeless, distorted space that seems to shut itself around one's being—a space that seems both dauntingly immense and hideously compressive and restrictive at once. This is a demon of the psyche that has installed itself, probably from earliest childhood, and shrieks in malevolent terror within us, like that painting at Grimmauld Place. It is telling us that we are insufficient, weak, and helpless as individuals—it may have been a message installed by a parent or other caregiver, a teacher or minister, or some other authority figure. As Welwood says, this kind of demon becomes implanted in our very bodily cells, where it will fester and obstruct the free flow of the life force, causing illness and the perpetuation of negative emotion. It must be exorcised, firmly destroyed, and forever silenced. This can only be done with help from the invisible world of consciousness: no human expert, psychological method or school, and certainly no drug, can completely and enduringly disperse such a demon. Ask for help from within your deepest heart to have this demon killed and silenced, for otherwise it will become what Rilke refers to as the "stone coffins of the ancient world," in which our hearts are forever caged in fate and fury.

Images of specific rooms, and any people, objects, or aura they may contain: Let's begin with the bathroom. It is a private place, in which the processes of elimination and the cleansing of the body occur; it is meant to be a place of solitude, comfort, and intimacy, but it is often the metaphorical vessel of our most terrible and insidious inhibitions and fears. Mrs. Rowling herself has demonstrated a wonderful understanding of this inner dynamic: the bathroom takes a central place in several of the stories and substories of her Harry Potter novels; this is a theme that will be considered in detail in Chapter 12. The fact that trolls, screaming dragon eggs, mournful ghosts, and the entrance to a pit of darkness should be found within a bathroom in these stories should come as no surprise to most people in our culture. We should add, in fairness to Freud (whose ideas have come under some criticism in these essays), that one of his more significant contributions toward a better understanding of mental health and socio-cultural threats to healthy inner development can be found in his clear and open discussions of toilet training issues in childhood. However, since much of this discussion occurred within his rather skewed and rigid developmental ideology, I would prefer to cite the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan in this respect:

Some of the really unfortunate people of the world have been exposed to strict bowel training well before early childhood, and as a result of their parents' preternatural interest in their toilet habits…have come to suffer rather grave disturbances of life thenceforth. —from The Psychiatric Interview, p. 139

Thus, any clutter, filth, constriction of space, or other abnormality that you may encounter in the bathroom of your meditation-house may be calling your attention toward a need to examine your feelings about your body and its natural functions. Should you discover any false ideas, negative emotions, or obsessive or ritualistic aspects of your thinking associated with the bathroom and its imagery, try to make note of them and then face them down with a firm inner No, along with a call for help from the Cosmos in dispelling these limiting ideas about the body as unclean, about its natural eliminative functions as sinful or dirty, or about one's nakedness as a source of guilt and moral vulnerability. Such ideas must be firmly and forcefully dispersed from consciousness, again with help from the Cosmic realm.

Another area to attend to inwardly, in the context of this meditation, is the kitchen or eating area: this is where nourishment is brought into the body, and where many of the daily family gatherings and interactions of life happen. Unfortunately, many difficult, troubling, and even violent scenes are played out in this setting amid the family, and quite a lot of people have very unpleasant associations with this area of their inner house. During your meditation, any clutter, filth, bad smells, scarcity, or disproportion in the kitchen or dining area will probably stand out for you and be easily remembered. Follow the path of these sensations and images to see what insights may develop from them. As Anthony and Moog mention in the Commentary to Hexagram 27 of the I Ching ("Nourishing"), "the Sage distinguishes between what nourishes the true self and what feeds the ego." They add that this applies to both the food we eat and the ideas we accept into our psyche, and that "many ideas are taken into the psyche simply because we have thought they might be true and thus have accepted them by default." This especially applies to many ideological notions that are bred into children from before the time they can speak or walk, often having to do with a demonization of the body and its natural desires and functions as "sinful" or grounds for guilt.

You may also find some of the baggage and dust of patriarchy lying on the floor of your kitchen in particular, in the form of gender-defined roles and responsibilities which usually mark off the kitchen as an area of the woman's domain. The problem with domains, however, is that they are restrictive: when your identity is confined to a specific functional space within a home, then your true self is held captive to that place and that function. You can free yourself by saying an inner No to the beliefs that embody the restrictive image, and by seeing yourself step free of the boundaries so defined, in your next house-meditation exercise.

Overall, you will find that, as you progress, the house that you return to in this meditation will become increasingly more stable, welcoming, and clear of obstruction and inner debris. This effect is the action of the helping energies of the Cosmic Consciousness at work; no human method, ideology, treatment, or medication can deliver the same transformative energy as the healing that comes from within, through one's personal and harmonic connection with the Cosmic realm of inner growth.