jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Initially, I was quite smitten with this slim volume because Colin McGinn’s central thesis–that movies share essential qualities with dreams–is intuitively convincing and inviting. Why is it that nobody has to learn to watch a movie, that the free-roaming eye of the camera and the time-and-space-dissolving qualities of montage don’t disorient us (unless they’re meant to)? What is the key to the movies’ powerful emotional hold over us?

In somewhat clunky prose, McGinn, a philosopher, diligently unpacks these questions. The first half of the book, where he investigates “the metaphysics of the movie image” and the way we perceive it, is required reading for anybody trying to get a better handle on what it is, exactly, those flickering shadows do to us in that dark room. He lays out a theory he calls “film mentalism,” which asserts that the movies present us with “consciousness externalized,” a highly charged way of seeing straight into the minds of other people. In the process, he reveals realism/formalism debates as a false dilemma. (Ken Wilber calls this strategy “transcend and include.”)

In the final stretch, though, McGinn loses himself in conjecture and pursues all the wrong angles. The psychological similarities between film and dreams he painstakingly ferreted out leads him to conclude that dreams must be subject to a production process that’s similar to that of a movie–written, produced, and edited ahead of time, stored up until triggered by emotional necessity or external stimulus. Unfounded assertions like these are dubious and somewhat beside the point. A quick excursion into lucid dreaming contradicts most of what I have read on the topic. Some of the most interesting conclusions to be drawn from his thesis are dismissed with brief paragraphs that miss the point entirely: if McGinn’s thesis is correct–and I believe it is–wouldn’t it be worth paying special attention to the movies’ immense power of suggestion and the shared nature of the experience?

Colin McGinn. The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact. 2005. ***

Wilber led to Steiner, and both kept mentioning lucid dreaming in such a peculiar way that I figured it’d be worth looking at. This is the popular book by the leading researcher, and there’s enough practical advice here to start practicing. I usually have trouble remembering my dreams at all, and that’s the first step. Then you have to get used to checking for “dreamsigns.” Once the critical state test becomes second nature, you can expect to check while you’re dreaming–and becoming lucid. I had a first success two nights ago, but the moment I realized I was dreaming I got so excited I woke up….

I got a second book about lucid dreaming from a Buddhist perspective–Tibetan Dream Yoga–that seems much less utiliterian than this one so far.

Brilliant. If anybody can map a way forward out of the exhaustion of postmodernism, it’s Ken Wilber. This book, written as socratic dialogue, is a boiled-down version of his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, and I’ll be damned if I can boil it down any further–the title isn’t as hyperbolic as it might seem.

My favorite idea here–and there are tons–is the concept of Transcend and Include, which according to Wilber is how evolution moves forward, how transformation happens. It is part of his integrative vision, which does a fantastic job at ferreting out useful insights from all disciplines of human thought. He places everything in a four-quadrant system (internal/external, individual/communal), and the beauty here is that suddenly everything from psychoanalysis to abstract painting, transcendental meditation, communism, and nanophysics suddenly fits together in a very baggy and appealling system.

As I read over this, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t make any sense at all. Here’s what Amazon has to say:

“This account of men and women’s place in a universe of sex and gender, self and society, spirit and soul is written in question-and-answer format, making it both readable and accessible. Wilber offers a series of original views on many topics of current controversy, including the gender wars, multiculturalism, modern liberation movements, and the conflict between various approaches to spirituality.”

Yeah, I guess that’s better. Either way, this is full of fresh ideas.

One Taste, a kind of journal, was probably a strange way to approach the work of Ken Wilber, prolific integral philosopher. Instead of one of his door-stop size dissections of religion, culture, spirituality, and science, One Taste offers a scattershot sampling of Wilber’s ideas (or the ideas of Wilber-4, the fourth phase of his development, which has recently been subsumed by Wilber-5, from what I understand.)

There are more fresh insights here per page than I remember seeing in a good long while. Wilber’s approach is very methodical. Everything comes in lists, numbered quadrants, levels, lines, waves, and he likes to capitalize his Concepts–such as One Taste, the awareness of non-dual spiritual reality he posits behind the Gross Realm of the physical. His project, as far as I can tell, is to integrate most of the world’s knowledge into one functioning system. “Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time,” and therefore every discipline has something to contribute: transpersonal psychology, quantum physics, Gaia theory, Buddhism, magic, sociology, and so forth. By stepping back far enough from each of these disciplines, he abstracts an essence, which is heavily influenced by what Huxley calls “the Perennial Philosophy,” the theory of the Great Nest of Being in which ascending levels of realization and awareness enclose each other, from the Physical to the Rational and beyond.

The aesthetic and political implications of his work are as interesting as the spiritual self-realization. From what he posits as the “pre/trans fallacy” (a confusion of pre-rational impulses with post-rational growth), he mounts a strong attack on extreme Postmodernism and the way in which Liberalism undermines itself by “embracing diversity” without fostering the growth of a world-centric view. He also has very little love for garden-variety New Age philosophy, which he considers merely regressive.

I’m probably not doing a good job of explaining or even summarizing any of this; it’s a complex system that’s doing a fine job of teasing out some of the more dumbfounding contradictions of the usual dualities we’ve come to live with (liberal-conservative, religion-science, body-mind, etc.), and in One Taste, it’s revealed in little glimpses, interspersed with private bits about the weather in Boulder, conferences he’s invited to, and his love affair with a grad student. It’s highly recommended reading, although there might be better places to start. I’m looking into The Eye of Spirit and A Brief History of Everything next, and save Sex, Ecology, Spirituality for some other time.

Wilber at Wikipedia
Wilber links on del.icio.us
Wilber on the Iraq War