Blog — November, 2007

John White's blurb for Wilber's (1981, 1996) Up from Eden:

Up from Eden is a colossal achievement. Sweeping and profound, it will rank in the annals of intellectual history with The Origin of Species and The Interpretation of Dreams.

What royalty rate do you figure White was collecting for shilling for kw by that point?

Regardless, the mentioning of any of Wilber's books in the same breath as Darwin's truly great work on evolution is, by now, so far beyond ironic as to be laugh-out-loud funny.

I already knew about film director David Lynch's interest in TM, but I didn't know about this.

Or this.

From there, on to the Eaton Centre where, it turned out, there was a live Santa Claus who you could get your picture taken with.

Obviously it's mostly kids sitting on his lap, and each one gets a candy cane after their photo is taken. But then a group of four teenage girls (three Asians) want to get their picture taken with him. So he's got one sitting on each knee, and you can tell he doesn't have to fake the smile!

Right after them, another group—seven cute teenage girls and one guy—do the same thing. The old man has not-even-legal-age cleavage in his beard from both sides. "And loving it."

And when they're done, he again makes sure that each one gets a candy cane.

'Cause, you know, "Is that a candy cane in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"

(Appropriate response: "Why don't you suck on it for awhile, and you tell me.")

Pressing on your eyeballs, in the jyoti mudra taught by Yogananda and others, makes pretty lights appear.

It also invokes the oculocardiac reflex, which slows down one's heart, sometimes even to the point of asystole and death.

And when you've found something that both causes "inner lights" to appear, and measurably slows the beating of your heart, you know you've found the "airplane route to God."

Never mind that both effects are purely physiological and non-paranormal.

Ach, this and some other recent research I've been doing has gotten me feeling a little wistful. Because it would be so sweet if the yogic (etc.) claims for spiritual advancement and paranormal activity were true, but they just aren't.

Some authorities have associated [Hindu Tantra] particularly with the Atharva-Veda, no doubt because of that Vedic hymnody's magical content with the marginal status it has within more strictly orthodox Hindu circles. Then again, the Tantras are sometimes referred to as the "fifth Veda."

—George Feuerstein, Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, p. 10

Me, I'm still working my way through the John, Paul, George, and Ringo Upanishads.

Jai guru deva Om.

P.S. Further to Sam Harris: I just noticed a treatment of his woo-woo tendencies at The Skeptic's Dictionary. And also this:

But as secularists have begun to take on religion there is a danger that in calling for a rigorous evidence-based examination of one area they leave other areas untouched. In banishing religion from the front door some of these secularists are happily letting other forms of supernatural thinking in through the back.

I walked down to Knox College on the University of Toronto campus today, to photocopy a paper from The Journal of Religion and Health.

It wasn't on the shelves in the Caven Library where it was supposed to be. So I had to ask the elderly woman at the Info desk about it.

Turns out that a couple of months ago somebody stole the entire run of that journal. Nothing left now but an empty, toothless-grin space on the shelves where it should be.

I was shocked, and told the good Church Lady so.

The Journal of Religion and Abuse next to it hadn't been touched.

Who would steal an entire religious journal run?

Some skeptic, I'll bet.

He took all the health, and just left the abuse!

From Oliver Sacks' An Anthropologist on Mars (p. 43-6):

Greg's first year at the [Hare Krishna] temple went well; he was obedient, ingenuous, devoted, and pious. He is a Holy One, said the swami, one of us. Early in 1971, now deeply committed, Greg was sent to the temple in New Orleans....

One problem arose in Greg's second year with the Krishnas—he complained that his vision was growing dim, but this was interpreted, by his swami and others, in a spiritual way: he was "an illuminate," they told him; it was the "inner light" growing. Greg had worried at first about his eyesight, but was reassured by the swami's spiritual explanation. His sight grew still dimmer, but he offered no further complaints. And indeed, he seemed to be becoming more spiritual by the day—an amazing new serenity had taken hold of him. He no longer showed his previous impatience or appetites [e.g., for drugs], and he was sometimes found in a sort of daze, with a strange (some said "transcendental") smile on his face. It is beatitude, said his swami—he is becoming a saint....

When [his parents visited him in 1975] they were filled with horror: their lean, hairy [i.e., hippie] son had become fat and hairless; he wore a continual "stupid" smile on his face ... he kept bursting into bits of song and verse and making "idiotic" comments, while showing little deep emotion of any kind ... he had lost interest in everything current; he was disoriented—and he was totally blind....

Greg was admitted to the hospital, examined, and transferred to neurosurgery. Brain imaging had shown an enormous midline tumor, destroying the pituitary gland and the adjacent optic chiasm and tracts and extending on both sides into the frontal lobes. It also reached backward to the temporal lobes, and downward to the diencephalon, or forebrain. At surgery the tumor was found to be benign, a meningioma—but it had swollen to the size of a small grapefruit or orange, and though the surgeons were able to remove it almost entirely, they could not undo the damage it had already done.

Greg was now not only blind, but gravely disabled neurologically and mentally—a disaster that could have been prevented entirely had his first complaints of dimming vision been heeded, and had medical sense, and even common sense, been allowed to judge his state....

He seemed bland, placid, emptied of all feeling—it was this unnatural serenity that his Krishna brethren had perceived, apparently, as "bliss," and indeed, at one point, Greg used the term himself. "How do you feel?" I returned to this again and again. "I feel blissful," he replied at one point, "I am afraid of falling back into the material world."

Yet amazingly, even after everyone concerned knew that Greg's "spiritual advancement" was a product only of the detrimental effects to his brain of a purely physical illness, his fellow "seekers" still managed to elevate it to transcendental status:

[W]hen he was first in the hospital [in 1977], many of his Hare Krishna friends would come to visit him; I often saw their saffron robes in the corridors. They would come to visit poor, blind, blank Greg and flock around him; they saw him as having achieved "detachment," as an Enlightened One.

A: Mike Batt's The Hunting of the Snark. (No longer available on amazon.com, so it's probably out of print; but thanks to our Russian friends and their dodgy copyright laws, you can get it here.)

Well, if there's one thing I know about, it's snarks, heh-heh-heh. If I were ever to give this blog an actual name, it would probably be "The Place for a Snark."

There's been a surprising number of rock songs inspired by Lewis Carroll's writings. The list is here. I've got a full album's worth of solid songs written myself, but Gord only knows when I'll find the time to record it all. Never mind the digital animation....

I've just started reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and was motivated to finally re-find a quote I knew I had seen on Steven Dutch's skeptical website, but for which I hadn't been able to track down the specific page in a number of previous tries:

Jared Diamond admires the hunter-gatherers he knows from New Guinea, noting that whenever they travel to a new area, they note new plants and sometimes dig them up to transplant at home. But what they are doing is simply a variation on a theme they already know well. He doesn't cite any cases of anyone wondering why certain plants grow in some places but not others, or wondering how a seed develops into a plant.

In his chapter "Necessity's Mother," Diamond argues that most inventions arose from initially useless discoveries produced by constant tinkering. (This chapter is the weakest in his whole book. It's full of nagging minor errors, omissions, and misconceptions that made me wonder how many similar faults are lurking elsewhere that I didn't catch because the chapters are outside my expertise. For example, he cites early internal combustion engines as being unsuitable for automobiles, apparently unaware that the first internal combustion engines were intended as stationary power sources running off piped gas.)

Likewise, so I never again lose track of this oft-searched-for quote from Ken Wilber's One Taste (p. 148), I'm putting it here:

Just as an individual with a near-death experience might "see" a review of his or her entire life, so upon causal death, one might "see" a review of the entire sweep of cosmic history, which is the history of the unfolding of one's deepest Self. (Such an experience, when I was twenty-seven, was the basis of Up from Eden.)

The subtle state is a type of deity mysticism (where individuals report an experience of being one with the source or ground of the sensory-natural world; e.g. St. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen).

—Ken Wilber, Waves, Streams, States, and Self

Contrary to prevailing tendencies of realism in European art, there has been a sporadic Western "tradition" of mystical and visionary painting over the last nine hundred years. Early evidence of this visionary symbolist art can be found in the twelfth century in the work of Hildegard of Bingen. She was a powerful abbess who created a major text explaining the symbols of her visions and had the visions illustrated or illuminated. These beautiful works are surely forms of transcendelia.

—Ken Wilber, Collected Works

And yet, from Oliver Sacks' fascinating and entertaining The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (p. 166-70):

The religious literature of all ages is replete with descriptions of "visions," in which sublime and ineffable feelings have been accompanied by the experience of radiant luminosity (William James speaks of "photism" in this context). It is impossible to ascertain, in the vast majority of cases, whether the experience represents a hysterical or psychotic ecstasy, the effects of intoxication, or an epileptic or migrainous manifestation. A unique exception is provided in the case of Hildegard of Bingen (1098 to 1180), a nun and mystic of exceptional intellectual and literary powers, who experienced countless "visions" from earliest childhood to the close of her life, and has left exquisite accounts and figures of these in the two manuscript codices which have come down to us—Scivias and Liber divinorum operum ("Book of divine works").

A careful consideration of these accounts and figures leaves no room for doubt concerning their nature: they were indisputably migrainous, and they illustrate, indeed, many of the varieties of visual aura.... Singer (1958), in the course of an extensive essay on Hildegard's visions, selects the following phenomena as most characteristic of them:

In all a prominent feature is a point or a group of points of light, which shimmer and move, usually in a wave-like manner, and are most often interpreted as stars or flaming eyes. In quite a number of cases one light, larger than the rest, exhibits a series of concentric circular figures of wavering form; and often definite fortification-figures are described, radiating in some cases from a coloured area. Often the lights gave that impression of working, boiling or fermenting, described by so many visionaries...

Hildegard writes:

The visions which I saw I beheld neither in sleep, nor in dreams, nor in madness, nor with my carnal eyes, nor with the ears of the flesh, nor in hidden places; but wakeful, alert, and with the eyes of the spirit and the inward ears, I perceive them in open view and according to the will of God.

One such vision, illustrated by a figure of stars falling and being quenched in the ocean ... signifies for her "The Fall of the Angels":

I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars which with the star followed southwards ... And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals ... and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more.

Such is Hildegard's allegorical interpretation. Our literal interpretation would be that she experienced a shower of phosphenes in transit across the visual field, their passage being succeeded by a negative scotoma. Visions with fortification-figures are represented in her Zelus Dei ... and Sedens Lucidus ... the fortifications radiation from a brilliantly luminous and (in the original) shimmering and coloured point. These two visions are combined in a composite vision (first picture), and in this she interprets the fortifications as the aedificium of the city of God.

Great rapturous intensity invests the experience of these auras, especially on the rare occasions when a second scotoma follows in the wake of the original scintillation:

The light which I see is not located, but yet is more brilliant than the sun, nor can I examine its height, length or breadth, and I name it "the cloud of the living light." And as sun, moon, and stars are reflected in water, so the writings, sayings, virtues and works of men shine in it before me...

Sometimes I behold within this light another light which I name "the Living Light itself" ... And when I look upon it every sadness and pain vanishes from my memory, so that I am again as a simple maid and not as an old woman.

Invested with this sense of ecstasy, burning with profound theophorous and philosophical significance, Hildegard's [migrainous] visions were instrumental in directing her towards a life of holiness and mysticism.

Or, as Kensho's flatland-chested 'Becca must have said many times, while still reeling from wave after mindfuck-blowing wave of her own integral meditative visions:

"Not tonight, Ken, I've got a headache."

• Evel Knievel To Attempt Huge Leap In Logic

• Archaeologist Tired Of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils

• Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics

• God Answers Prayers Of Paralyzed Little Boy

• World's Scientists Admit They Just Don't Like Mice

• British Government Releases Scandalous Benny Hill Tapes

• Science-Fiction Novel Posits Future Where Characters Are Hastily Sketched

• Astronomer Discovers Center Of Universe

• Stephen Hawking Builds Robotic Exoskeleton

I just have to add a couple of my own favorites:

• Report: Swelling Hippie Herds Pose Threat To Delicate Freakosystem

• New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System Downloads Real-Time TV Programs, Displays Them On Monitor

The more things change, the more they stay the same....

From Ram Dass's (1979) Miracle Of Love: Stories About Neem Karoli Baba (p. 129-30):

Once in Vrindaban before Guru Purnima Day (a day honoring the guru), Maharajji was feeding us by hand. One by one he would feed us each a pera. I tried to feed him one, too. Of course he didn't eat sugar, but I was insisting, with the thought that this was also prasad. "You must eat it, please eat it." So he pretended to eat it.

But Naima caught him: "You didn't eat it, Maharajji." He looked guilty, as if to say, "Oh, you caught me." There it was in his hand. He'd palmed it. That precipitated wonderful play, as he went into his whole magician act:

"Which hand is it in? Ha! You're wrong, it's in this hand." I don't think he was even using his powers for this game. He really was palming it, hiding it in his blanket, and using sleight of hand—all tricks that any magician can do. But he was saying, "See! See! I'm like Sai Baba. I can make it appear; I can make it disappear. I can do anything. Magic! It's magic!"

Neem Karoli Baba (a.k.a. Maharajji) was, of course, the same guru-figure who supposedly ingested 900+ micrograms of LSD, given to him by Ram Dass, with no ill effect. In fact, the story is told in the very same book (and elsewhere), on pages 229-30:

The whole thing happened very fast and unexpectedly. When I returned to the United States in 1968 I told many people about this acid feat. But there had remained in me a gnawing doubt that perhaps he had been putting me on and had thrown the pills over his should or palmed them, because I hadn't actually seen them go into his mouth.

Three years later, when I was back in India, he asked me one day, "Did you give me medicine when you were in India last time?"

"Yes."

"Did I take it?" he asked. (Ah, there was my doubt made manifest!)

"I think you did."

"What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Oh! Jao!" and he sent me off for the evening.

The next morning I was called over to the porch in front of his room, where he sat in the mornings on a tucket. He asked, "Have you got any more of that medicine?"

It just so happened that I was still carrying a small supply of LSD for "just-in-case," and this was obviously it. "Yes."

"Get it," he said. So I did. In the bottle were five pills of three hundred micrograms each. One of the pills was broken. I placed them on my palm and held them out to him. He took the four unbroken pills. Then, one by one, very obviously and very deliberately, he placed each one in his mouth and swallowed it—another unspoken thought of mine now answered.

As soon as he had swallowed the last one, he asked, "Can I take water?"

"Yes."

"Hot or cold?"

"It doesn't matter."

He started yelling for water and drank a cup when it was brought.

Then he asked, "How long will it take to act?"

"Anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour."

He called for an older man, a long-time devotee who had a watch, and Maharajji held the man's wrist, often pulling it up to him to peer at the watch. Then he asked, "Will it make me crazy?"

That seemed so bizarre to me that I could only go along with what seemed to be a gag.

So I said, "Probably."

And then we waited. After some time he pulled the blanket over his face, and when he came out after a moment his eyes were rolling and his mouth was ajar and he looked totally mad. I got upset. What was happening? Had I misjudged his powers? After all, he was an old man (though how old I had no idea), and I had let him take twelve hundred micrograms. Maybe last time he had thrown them away and then he read my mind and was trying to prove to me that he could do it, not realizing how strong the "medicine" really was. Guilt and anxiety poured through me. But when I looked at him against he was perfectly normal and looking at the watch.

At the end of an hour it was obvious that nothing had happened. His reactions had been a total put-on. And then he asked, "Have you got anything stronger?" I didn't. Then he said, "These medicines were used in Kulu Valley long ago. But yogis have lost that knowledge. They were used with fasting. Nobody knows now. To take them with no effect, your mind must be firmly fixed on God. Others would be afraid to take. Many saints would not take this." And he left it at that.

So what do you think? Given that NKB knew sleight-of-hand magic well enough to fool his disciples, in palming sweets, does Dass's always-credulous reporting of Maharajji swallowing the LSD deserve to be taken seriously?

No, it does not.

"He took the four unbroken pills." But not the broken one. Why? Because he wouldn't have been able to switch that broken one with the dummy pills he was already concealing. (He knew what they should look like from the previous time in 1968, when he had indeed palmed them.)

Note that NKB didn't take the unbroken pills, one by one, out of Ram Dass's hand. Rather, by Dass's own testimony, Baba took all four unbroken pills from Dass—surely into his (NKB's) own, empty hand—before swallowing any of them.

Even without being a close-up magician yourself, you can figure it out from there: Baba casually discarded those real LSD pills/tablets into his blanket or elsewhere, transferred the dummies from his other hand into the one that had formerly held the drug while misdirecting Dass's attention, and then "very obviously and deliberately ... placed each [of the dummy pills] in his mouth and swallowed it." Or something very like that.

"He started yelling for water." More misdirection, probably to allow him to properly dispose of the original pills.

If NKB had really wanted to put Dass's doubts to rest by actually swallowing the LSD in 1971, he would have had Dass put the pills into his (Baba's) mouth himself, one by one, with a thorough mouth-check afterwards. That's how it's done in clinical drug studies, so that you can't get away with palming the drug, or hiding it under your tongue or along your gumline, etc. (They wouldn't have those safeguards in place in the clinical-testing world if people hadn't tried all of those tricks in the past.)

Or at the very least Baba would have taken the real LSD pills, one by one, out of Dass's hand, and put them directly, one by one, into his own mouth, letting Dass's eyes follow each pill all the way, chewing or swallowing them, and then opening his mouth for a thorough inspection. (In Grist for the Mill [p. 89], Dass says that Maharajji "took each tablet and stuck it in his mouth and made sure that I saw, and he munched them up." But, of course, there's "many a slip 'twixt cup and lip," when it comes to the steps between Dass's hand and Neem Karoli Baba's mouth.)

As usual, Ram Dass got utterly snowed by a simple trick, and he still hasn't figured it out, even three and half decades later.

Some people just never learn. If the world ever needs a patron saint for the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, no one could play that role better than Dass himself: Few people have done more harm, with better (and unendingly credulous) intentions, than Ram Dass.

From Yvonne Kason's Farther Shores (p. 175):

[W]hen a person is on the verge of death by suffocation, it is believed that the kundalini mechanism can activate and send a potent stream of prana and ojas to the brain, nourishing it and protecting it from the deadly effects of oxygen deprivation. The activated kundalini stimulates the brahma randhra, and the experiencer enters a paranormal or mystical state of consciousness.

That this belief has long been held in the yoga tradition is evinced by an arcane, dangerous yoga technique called khechari-mudra. In it the yogi, over a number of years, bit by bit, cut the frenulum—the flap of skin that attaches the tongue to the bottom of the mouth—to enable him to bend his tongue further and further back. The yogi's goal was, eventually, to deliberately block off his air passage with his tongue, and, with this asphyxiation, trigger a kundalini awakening. His years of yoga would then—he hoped—provide him with enough disciple to manage to remove his tongue while he was in the midst of a profound mystical experience. This is a dangerous practice and one that I would never recommend; many yogis are said to have died while attempting it.

I can imagine. Egad.

But, um, might there possibly be other explanations for the phenomena undergone in such deliberately induced near-death experiences, that don't need to invoke the existence of a subtle "kundalini energy"?

The pentagram has long been associated with the planet Venus, and the worship of the goddess Venus, or her equivalent. It is also associated with the Roman Lucifer, who was Venus as the Morning Star, the bringer of light and knowledge. It is most likely to have originated from the observations of prehistoric astronomers. When viewed from Earth, successive inferior conjunctions of Venus plot a nearly perfect pentagram shape around the zodiac every eight years. (Wikipedia)

Our Earth, like all the planets in the solar system, orbits in an ellipse around the sun, spinning on its own axis as it does so, and creating alternating periods of day and night for each region on its surface as it spins. As it traverses that ellipse, the range of "fixed stars" and associated constellations visible to observers on the night side of the planet—that side facing away from the light of the sun—changes.

Because of that annual periodicity in the range of constellations that are visible at night, it is natural and common for the zodiac to be represented in the form of a circular "pie"—i.e., a "map of the ecliptic," with the constellations inscribed around the perimeter. Further, since as early as the first millennium BC, that pie has been cut into twelve equal "slices," with each of the latter corresponding to one zodiacal "sign," from Aries through Pisces.

Now, the planet Venus is the brightest point-like object in the sky—brighter than anything, in fact, except for the sun and moon. It owes that luminary distinction to its proximity to the sun, and to being covered with an opaque layer of highly reflective clouds composed of sulfuric acid. Being alternately visible either just after sunset or just before sunrise, in a 584-day cycle, it has been known traditionally as either the Evening Star or the Morning Star.

Venus orbits the sun approximately thirteen times for every eight orbits (i.e., years) of Earth. Because of that near-"orbital resonance," if the positions of Venus (relative to the fixed stars) are plotted on a zodiacal "pie chart" over a mere eight-year period, that planet will trace out a five-pointed star, within the circular representation of the zodiac.

If one knows the ecliptic ... and can pinpoint the present position of the planets in relation to the constellations of fixed stars in the zodiac ... it is possible to mark the exact place in the 360 degrees of the zodiac where the Morning star first appears shortly before sunrise after a period of invisibility. If we do this, wait for the Morning star to appear again 584 days later (the synodic orbital time of [Venus]) mark its position in the zodiac, and then repeat this process until we note [Venus] back on point one again (six notations on five different positions in the zodiac) as the Morning star, we will find that exactly eight years have passed. If we then draw a line from the first point marked to the second point marked, then to the third, and so on, we end up with a regular pentacle or pentagram [i.e., a five-pointed star]. (Symbols.com, 29:14)

Found scrawled in caves of ancient Babylonia, the five-pointed star was copied from the star shaped pattern formed by the travels of the planet Venus in the sky. (About.com)

The pentagram was probably discovered as a result of astronomical research in the Euphrates-Tigris region about 6000 years ago....

Isolated pentagrams have been found on broken fragments of burned clay in Palestine, in layers dating from around 4000 BC. It was a common sign among the Sumerians around 2700 BC. (Symbols.com, 27:21)

Like the moon, the stars, and everything else in the sky as viewed from the Earth, Venus rises in the east, regardless of whether it is rising in the morning or in the evening. It is thus not merely the Morning Star, but also, in its own way, the Star of the East—which, in its primitive zodiacal representation, is again a five-pointed star within a circle. (Of course, even early astronomers could tell that Venus is actually a planet rather than a star, simply by observing how quickly it moved through the heavens. Still, the object has indeed traditionally been called a "Star.") When that "Star" rises in the morning, it may continue to be visible near the sun even after sunrise—when seen from the Earth, Venus never strays more than 48 degrees from the sun. In that case, it will appear to be a point-source of white light, in a blue sky.

The aforementioned apparent "orbital resonance" between Earth and Venus is not actually dynamically significant: on timescales of thousands of years or more, the relative position of the two planets is effectively random. More accurately, every eight years the "starting point" of the pentagram traced out by Venus shifts in the zodiac by 1.5 degrees. That is the pentagonal star rotates within its containing "circular" zodiac—a phenomenon which would have been visible within the lifetime of even a single prehistoric astronomer, or at most over several generations. (It is unlikely that the early Egyptians, for example, lived past the age of thirty [Blackmore, The Meme Machine, p. 30].)

So, we have the movements of the planet Venus giving rise, quite naturally and unavoidably, not merely to a five-pointed star, but more colorfully to the idea of a Star of the East, as symbolized by a rotating five-pointed (white-light) star (in a sky-blue background) within a containing circle.

The fact that the brightest object in the night-time sky traces out a slowly-rotating pentagonal star (with respect to our one planet only) in its traversing of the zodiac is, of course, nothing more than dumb luck in how our solar system was thrown together. (Venus is the only planet in our solar system "that can clearly be identified with a simple graphic structure unambiguously derived from a plotting of its astronomical movements in space.") Yet, that mere coincidence has not stopped the phenomenon from spawning important religious symbolisms and calendars in cultures around the world, where the five-pointed star contained within a circle is treated as if it were a sign from God Himself, which was then imagined to be reflected by the same Creator in the microcosm of the human body.

Thus, from Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi:

During deep meditation, the single or spiritual eye becomes visible within the central part of the forehead. This omniscient eye is variously referred to in scriptures as the third eye, the star of the East, the inner eye, the dove descending from heaven, the eye of Shiva, the eye of intuition, etc....

"[Lahiri Mahasaya] touched my forehead. Masses of whirling light appeared; the radiance gradually formed itself into the opal-blue spiritual eye, ringed in gold and centered with a white pentagonal star"....

Why color the outer (zodiacal) ring gold? Presumably because that ring represents all the stars of heaven, and the gods (in constellations and otherwise) therein. (The alchemists' [and astrologers'] symbol for gold was actually a circle with a point at its center.) Gold, as we know, does not rust, and has long been a symbol of purity and royalty.

[T]he Kriya Yogi learns, and practices daily, a technique known as Jyoti Mudra, the purpose of which is not only to see but to pass the life force and consciousness through the spiritual eye into infinity. (Swami Kriyananda, The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita, p. 355)

The astral spiritual eye, as described by Yogananda, was simply borrowed from early astronomical observations—it doesn't really exist as a "third eye," and thus won't be seen by any meditator except in an Imagination Run Amok way. But why, then, would that symbol of the physical macrocosm have been internalized, to be used as one of the most important images upon which one is advised to meditate, in the kriya yoga path? For that matter, why appropriate any primitive symbol of the macrocosm—from the World Axis ("of the spine") to the hemisphere-like dome ("of the sky/skull")—and use it not merely as a pragmatic image upon which to concentrate, or as an architectural principle in the building of temples and houses, but as a pretend-aspect of a nonexistent, microcosmic subtle body? Why would extended focus upon such a transplanted symbol/structure be supposed to raise one's consciousness and ultimately to yield transcendent spiritual experiences?

The answer, I suspect, has to do with the sympathetic-magical mindset of our distant, primitive ancestors, when they were developing their external rituals and (later) internalized visualizations, the latter of which we now consider to be esoteric techniques of meditation. That is, "content" techniques of (kundalini, etc.) meditation may well have arisen as attempts at mimicking, and thus literally encouraging, a climbing of the World Axis to reach the Pole Star, in precisely the same way as pins stuck into a voodoo doll are believed to cause real pain to the actual person in whose image the doll was constructed.

In our "esoteric" meditations the "pins" exist only in imagination, and the "doll" is an equally imagined "subtle body" rather than, say, a physical ladder or smoke-hole in the roof of a yurt. But the difference between that and the mindset of the literal voodoo practitioner is only in the degree of abstraction—a natural and inevitable improvement in the slow evolution of our species. The central expectation that the sympathetic magic will work, and the primitive reasons for that expectation (i.e., that "like affects like") are no different.

So, in meditating on the five-pointed star at the center of the golden ring, we are riding in sympathetic magic along with the brightest "star" through the literal sky-heavens, i.e., through the literal abode of the gods. That is the "transcendence" to which the ancient sages of India aspired, when visualizing the spiritual eye.

And we, as "spiritual seekers," have received those primitive-mindset techniques, and taken them not for the "abstract voodoo" that they are, but rather as real means toward effecting spiritual transcendence via the visualized manipulation of imagined astral and causal bodies. Beautiful.

The whole edifice is built on primitive ideas of magic which never worked in the first place, any more than homeopathy works today. (In defense of most consumers of homeopathic remedies, they at least are probably ignorant of the "like affects like" theory underlying the quack/placebo medicine, and so are not generally guilty of explicitly endorsing the magical worldview from which that "medicine" arose. Not so for the doctors who prescribe those ineffectual "sugar pills," nor for the manufacturers of the same "candy.") No surprise, then, that when the methods of meditation we use, from mantras to attempts to raise a kundalini "energy," are tested with competent experimental protocols, they amount to nothing more than techniques of relaxation, having no greater, measurable effect than the placebo/control techniques against which they are tested. After all, how much effect should "mental voodoo" have?

In one study 109 college women rated how upset they would be if a man they did not know, whose occupational status varied from low to high, persisted in asking them out on a date despite their repeated refusals. On a seven-point scale, women would be most upset by persistent advances from construction workers (4.04), garbage collectors (4.32), cleaning men (4.19), and gas station attendants (4.13), and least upset by persistent advances by premedical students (2.65), graduate students (2.80), or successful rock stars (2.71). When 104 different women were asked how flattered they would feel by outright sexual propositions from men with various occupations, the responses were similar. (David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology, p. 319)

Hmm. Go back to school ... or practice guitar?

Go back to school ... or practice guitar?

Let me sleep on it
Baby, baby, let me sleep on it

—Meat Loaf, "Paradise by the Dashboard Light"

Blog Search Engine