NMR ISSUE 44

Astrological Forecast 44
Celtic Perspective on Samhain
Editorial 44
Empowering Your Imagination
Esoteric Symbology of the Tarot
How to Vote for Your Kids
Jaguar
Letters 44
Murry Hope
Namaste, Part II
Other Editorial 44
Pagan Safety
Ritual for Samhain
Spirit's dance
The Angel's Kiss
The Corn Wolf
Things That Go Bump in the Night
Wasp, Bobwhite & Barracuda

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The Editorial

By Scot Rhoads

And in This Corner

My wife Judith was the one who got me into Wicca a decade ago. In my spiritual search, my attention had wandered from Asia to America. My friend, Doug, who had helped me look into Native American spirituality, then told me about a new class he was taking. Maybe it was partly because she was such a stunning manifestation of the Goddess, but Judy's classes made me feel I was Home. She taught many classes in our shop, Mystic Moon, but that kept her so busy that she didn't have time to do more than a couple articles for New Moon Rising. Now that we are focusing just on the magazine, we plan for her to take a more active role. In my unbiased opinion, Judith is one of the best teachers. She is a Queen Witch in the Myjestic Tradition, a Cherokee Priestess of the Sun and Moon, and has experience with other Wiccan Traditions and Ceremonial Magick. I would say more, but I don't want to give her performance anxiety. Her editorial follows mine (because I got started first).

Anybody Out There?

Community is much a theme in Paganism and in New Moon Rising. We would like to get in touch with Pagan communities. We invite you to write to us about your experiences, or just contact us! And speaking of community

You Are Out to Get You

Why does there suddenly seem to be so much more hatred and fear of our government lately? With the tragic disappearance of the Soviet Union, the Evil Empire compasses simply swung toward the next most salient target, the United States. Sure, there are still some who pour over the word salad that is Revelations, finding obtuse evidence that dismantling the USSR and Communism is all a plot so they can sneak up on us. Commie sightings persist like Elvises. But for the most part, paranoids on the Left and Right can finally agree that the United States government should be listed in Guinness as The World's Worst Thing. The government would have to be that bad to excuse using clowns like the Freemen and nuts like Koresh as anti-government poster children. This is like using Mussolini in a campaign to make our trains run on time.

This is not to say that there is no cause for serious concern, just that an attitude of destroy it all before they enslave us, the whole thing is irredeemably evil does not constitute serious concern. Quite the opposite, this attitude is divisive and polarizing, and it turns attention away from real work toward hobbies like gun collecting and bomb making. The more visible the anti-government fringe becomes, the more the middle must put off addressing government's problems to preserve a society capable of maintaining things like an economy or an infrastructure. This is also not to argue whether gun and bomb collecting is a vital last-ditch defense of our freedoms. It is only to say that it should not be our first ditch!

Though there are few, I hope, actually planning bombings, the rabid government-hating individualists that grab the headlines seem to embody something present throughout our society. Government bashing has become so popular that even the government does it habitually. The hatred is sufficiently out of proportion that the issue of the attitude itself eclipses the surface issues. Our attitude toward government isn't healthy no matter how awful government really is. Here's why:

Hating government is self-hatred on a societal level because government is an aspect of our society. I could have used the word part, but that would imply something like a part of a car. You can pull out a carburetor and tinker with it, or even replace it. If you're good, you can make a very different one work in place of the original. There are other parts you can pull out and never miss, like the ashtray if you don't smoke. You can isolate the functions of anything we call a part in a car, understand linearly its entire meaning and function by itself and within the car process, and manipulate it readily. We like to think we can do this with everything, including government. We cannot.

Government is an aspect of society like the Maiden is an aspect of the Goddess, or like your work persona is an aspect of you. As distinct as it may seem at times, you can't separate government from the rest of society just as the Maiden cannot exist without the Mother and Crone, and you cannot truly be a different person at work. If we didn't have this government (pick one, it changes continually), we would have another, and no matter how different, it would still have to be made up of us or we wouldn't be there to perceive it.

It seems obvious at a distance that government is not an outside force influencing an unconnected rest-of-society; but up close I know I'm not the government. Even when I was working for it, I didn't feel like I was the government. When I turned them in to the EPA (ironically also the government), I didn't feel like I was confessing my guilt. None, short of a Nixon or an Emperor Norton I, could be expected to believe, like Louis XIV, that they are the state. In our individual lives, government seems to us to be something completely outside ourselves.

This is disenfranchisement, a very serious problem. Though it is not getting near enough attention yet, people are aware of it and trying to address it without blowing people up. Many are exploring direct solutions, like motor-voter laws and community activism. Many focus on spiritual paths. Those striving toward the more sweeping, fundamental changes possible on subtler levels need to consider that disenfranchisement may just be a symptom of a subtler issue. A different understanding of the problem helps present different solutions.

Our society is highly, some say pathologically, individualistic. Individuality is as wonderful as it is inescapable, but its glorification is our society's Gift of Midas and I'm noticing an awful lot of gold around by now and am thinking it would be nice to have something to eat. Our individuality helps or forces me to see myself as distinct from the person next to me, the others in my family, the others in my society. Thus, at any level, any aspect of my society can become them, because it is not me.

But this just spices up the physical world disenfranchisement issue with societal predispositions. Not very esoteric. But there is something in the character of the various them's that hints at more.

They are not just a collection of everybody-but-me (or me and my friends). They seem to have shadowy agendas and powers beyond ordinary people (sometimes beyond established physics) and they usually threaten the individual (me). Though everyone may not be a conspiracy buff, just turn on the TV to see how fascinated we are with the notion. Another example I highly recommend is the game Illuminati. Great fun! (My personal favorite from that game is the Orbital Mind Control Lasers.)

We can assume that there have been oodles of real conspiracies over the years, many of which may be affecting us now and which may still be secret, whatever secret means, when like Area 51, everyone knows of it. That does not explain the fascination with conspiracies in the face of insufficient evidence, or questionable evidence, or conflicting evidence, or sanity. Why is it so easy to blame the Devil's minions, or Liberals, or Conservatives, (extant) Commies, the CIA, Trilateralists, Masons, the Illuminati, the Military-Industrial-Entertainment complex, UFO's, Big Government, the Elders of Zion, the W.I.C.C.A.? I am not sure the usual psycho-political truisms fully explain the perceptions leading to this behavior. (Or am I just being paranoid?)

My first clue was when I heard about functional conspiracy. A functional conspiracy is a conspiracy that so obviously couldn't possibly be a conspiracy that the sane have to admit it isn't really a conspiracy, but they still really really want to call it a conspiracy. It's something that acts like a conspiracy, but none of the participants are guiding its conspiratorial behavior in any conscious way.

One of my favorite examples comes from an old revisionist history journal. The article talked about how a society going to war seems to do so on many levels, it is not simply guided there by its leaders. The most compelling illustration was Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, who, on hearing that Serbia had acceded to most of the demands he had directed Austria-Hungary to make, declared that all reason for war falls away. His ministers, so taken by the spirit of war sweeping the society, acted like they had not heard him, thus Kaiser Bill became responsible for World War I.

This is not the only interpretation of the events, but it is fascinating to consider that there is a spirit, even a consciousness, behind what we call conspiracies that guides them without ever consciously manifesting in any one person. Can there be a disembodied will?

This is hardly a leap for those of us who see the gods or the planet, for instance, as having wills. It would be a corollary. But even when we see ourselves as participants in a world with a will of Its own, do we still have the tendency to distance our selves from whatever it is we sometimes call conspiracy?

We would do well, when we see a conspiracy to stop obsessing over those responsible; those who understand what's going on and are shaping events toward their own conscious ends. Now matter how real the conspiracy, such people may well not exist, or their leadership may be an ephemeral illusion passing when the conspiracy's will deviates their own, or they may just be the cog that looks like it's in control. If these things are true, looking for and even finding conspirators is one of the weakest ways of addressing a conspiracy. The place to look is within.

In our individualistic society, this could be dismissed as blaming the victim. Clearly, I am not a part of whatever it is I see as a conspiracy against me. But if we can think of ourselves as an aspect of society, an aspect of the planet, an aspect of the Goddess including our conscious will, we can start to get a handle on a previously overwhelming problem. We can each consider ourselves a part of a process working towards its own goals. We can call this will a global deity (Gaia), an overmind/oversoul, the collective unconscious, an emergent property, whatever. More important than what it is, is what do we do with it.

First let's consider some models: The hive is popular. Blind termites can build intricate structures with no detectable blueprint. Seemingly out of all contact by any physical means, they can cooperate to construct vaults and galleries that couldn't be conceived within the nature of just one insect. But it is easy to see the individual's experience within the hive as merely unconscious mechanical labor; then, it can only illustrate how our actions can fit within a super-human framework. It is hard to see enough of ourselves in a termite to challenge the idea of self restricted to the conscious mind.

Perhaps the brain can offer a more illuminating model: The chaotic communication among billions of neurons produces thoughts that are not the thoughts of any one neuron or collection of neurons, yet all participate. We can experience this directly when we are of two minds about something, but the most dramatic illustrations are on an unconscious, or super-conscious, level. The retina is a good example since it can be considered a part of the brain, and is simple and well understood. There neurons are wired sometimes to encourage neighboring cells to fire, and sometimes to inhibit neighboring cells either in conditions of light or of dark. This is the first step of processing that eventually turns the chaotic firing of rods and cones, each generally responding to light, into the pictures we see in our heads.

A neuron is not just the simple on-off switch of a `60's science class filmstrip. On-off is a useful description of the neuron's firing, but the input that may eventually cause the neuron to fire is often complex and subtle. Various neurotransmitters diffuse across various synapses influencing a neuron's membrane potential up or down somewhat until somewhere it happens to hit the critical level. A lot of thought can go into whether a neuron fires.

With a dash of anthropomorphism, these influences from other neurons reflect the influences from other people in our lives. If we were neurons living in the retina, we might find it patriotic to want to fire together when there's light, or seditious to say not to, or selfish to tell others not to fire when one is firing. These feelings could be irrelevant to the process of vision, or they could be manifestations of our very nature as part of the process. In either case, the feelings would be an outcome, not a cause, in our role as neurons participating in the preliminary processing of a visual field. A visual field that is not only broader than we can encompass, but has details of color, shape and meaning that are beyond our capacity to imagine. And, of course, it would be futile to see our problems as evidence of a conspiracy through which some obscure but powerful retinal neurons are determining where the eyes are pointing.

This model can lead to a depressing nihilism where our thoughts and feelings don't matter. We are oblivious cogs in a consciousness that is not our own. There is no I that has any meaning. That would be mourning the loss of the illusion of self-hood, and it's an easy trap in this still too mechanical model. Unfortunately our mechanomaniacal society has trouble communicating with anything less mechanical. Our beloved cartesian duality of soul and machine, where I have a soul and everything else is a machine, leaves our soul vulnerable to disappearing from the picture. Using mechanical models for everything makes it easy for us to turn ourselves into machines, reducing the ghost in the machine (which is us, our consciousness) from the body, to the brain, to a piece of the brain, to nothing at all. As useful as mechanical models can be in many applications, where they lead to nihilism we should use something more appropriate, more alive.

Do not look at yourself as a mechanical neuron. Look at the neuron as a living you. Think of the activity of an individual neuron as manifesting its own thoughts and feelings, inherently valid on a personal level, but also weaving a larger consciousness, equally valid, even when it seems to be at odds with other neurons or the consciousness of the whole. From this interpretation, we can expand rather than contract the individual's significance. We can have a great thought, or an ordinary one, or a wrong one, and even without any recognition, it can be a part of a marvelous change in global consciousness. We deserve a lot of credit for being part of the great accomplishments of our species.

But we can also be part of an awful change in global consciousness. Though deities can be seen as always beneficent, experience tells us that group consciousness is not. Earlier I gave the unfortunate example of WWI. That's a moderate example. One reason so many conspiracies are evil is bad things happen, some of them even through the choice of a group consciousness that can choose self-destructive things as easily as we can individually.

Mercifully, it's not as bad as the plethora of frightening conspiracies would suggest. Since we look to blame problems on anything, the conspiracy tag gets used a lot more than is justified even with a super-conscious definition of conspiracy. There aren't always conspiracies in any form where we think there are. The fear of conspiracy is so popular not because group consciousness is a pervasive and evil influence, but because group consciousness is a real threat to our cult of the individual. Why is every conspiracy obsessed with taking away our personal freedoms? Because group consciousness, even the idea of it, challenges our strict concept of individuality. Even to be more than an individual is to be less, in the view of our group consciousness. Never mind that it is embarrassingly easy to demonstrate that our individuality does not even extend to arm's length in any sense, the illusion is cherished and protected in the form of protecting our freedoms from conspiracies.

That is one important way that group consciousness can be self-destructive. By giving in to our fears on this level, by denying our participation in the group, we default to a subconscious participation. Our subconscious reflects our fears, in many ways it embodies them, so we can expect to often be self-destructive. And as we blind ourselves to our group nature, so the group mind is blind to our individual nature, oblivious to the sufferings of the individuals it rolls over in pursuit of its goals. We say that only the individual is important to the group mind it is the individual.

But if we abandon our desperate hold on individuality (not individuality, just the hold on it) and consciously choose to participate in all levels of our being, we can take our Power on this transcendent level as well. This would not mean that any one of us would get to dictate what we all do. Unless there were unanimity (which may happen some millennium), the group will would only coincidentally match the will of some of its members. It would mean that we would interact, co-create, with this group consciousness to define and serve mutual needs, making us more readily self actualizing as individuals, and definitely more self actualizing as a group. It would be fun and rewarding.

What should we do, then? That is the easiest and the hardest part. Since we already participate in a group consciousness, all we have to do is attend to ourselves. The group mind is different enough from ours that it would be meaningless to choose a specific physical goal, well mostly. We can see the Apollo program, for instance, as a manifestation of the group mind, reaching out to touch the moon, and looking back at earth to see itself. We shouldn't rule out physical goals playing a big role. But in everyday life the process is to try to live the best life you can for yourself without trying to live other people's lives for them.

Don't invoke the St. Nuremberg Defense that you were just following divine orders to excuse dictating other people's thoughts. Consciousness is not built with force, only tainted by it. Instead, when you see a conspiracy you don't like, look within. Find your own thoughts, feelings and actions that reflect this illusion and work to change them. When you see a conspiracy you like, look to encourage the thoughts, feeling and actions within that reflect that.

As simple as this is, it can be difficult. Negative thought forms usually become obvious only after they already have considerable inertia. And since we are a part of the group mind thinking them, we share that inertia. It is frighteningly easy to think, and even easier to feel, that government is a conspiracy that wants to take away our liberties. If enough of us think that way, some will act. When they blow up buildings, government will take away our liberties. But remember, it'll be us taking away our liberties.

Fighting this negativity does not demand we affect a Pangloss or Pollyanna attitude that there really is no problem and anyway if we ignore it, it will go away. That is just repression. The problem demands we find paradigms that allow us to take our Power and recognize that we can address these things in our own lives, on a scale that we can work with, if perhaps with difficulty. To say that the resources lie within each of us does not, as the popular cynicism would say, mean running away from our real world problems. It does not mean avoiding real world solutions. We still have to address the physical problems physically, but real success demands that we also address problems in a new way. Cynics dismiss this as futile and too easy because it can be frighteningly difficult. You think it's easy to control your thoughts? Don't think of an elephant. (Especially challenging during elections) People can devote years to mastering an exercise like that. And that's easy compared with not thinking of yourself as powerless, or worthless, or unlovable, or undeserving. It is easier to blow up the local IRS building. Mental self-discipline is the hardest path. Ask any magician. So why do it? Because it is the most cost-effective and considering it's the most costly, that's a lot of effective.

Fortunately, we can make the path easier by following it through our own spirituality. In Paganism, we have an advantage in seeing ourselves, everyone and everything as manifestations of the God and Goddess. But even in spiritual devotion to a distant lonely sky god, we can get in touch with beauty and love through the kind of thoughts and actions that serve to make our group mind one that strives for the best, for itself and for each of us.

Blessed Be!

SR