I had a textbook about a year ago which had three coauthors (Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World, Second Edition, by Kaufman, Perlman, and Speciner). They had a novel way of indicating whose opinions were whose: they would use personal pronouns throughout, but attach numbered subscripts to indicate a specific author. (Luckily, they always wrote their names in the same order. I guess you could use letters instead of numbers…)
Some of the better samples:
The control zone is the region that must be physically guarded to keep out intruders that might be attempting to eavesdrop. A well-shielded device will have a smaller control zone. I1 remember being told in 1979 of a tape drive that had a control zone over two miles. Unfortunately, most control zone information is classified, and I2 couldn’t get me1 to be very specific about them… (NS, p. 17)
It does nothing other than its intended purpose (I1 have analyzed the thing carefully and I2 have complete faith in me1)… (NS, p. 21)
If you really care about all this, we1,3 recommend my2 book Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols. (I2 modestly abstain.) (NS, p. 427)
I1,2 found all of this very amusing.
(They also quoted Alice in Wonderland at random intervals, which made it approximately the best textbook ever.)
December 29th, 2005
Carl Jung was Freud’s student and apparent successor until they parted ways intellectually. In Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR), he recounts the period following his break with Freud, when he was thrown into a state of disorientation that lasted several years:
I lived as if under constant inner pressure. At times this became so strong that I suspected there was some psychic disturbance in myself. (MDR, p. 173)
Jung decided that since he knew nothing about where this might lead, he would do whatever occurred to him: he “consciously submitted to the impulses of the unconscious” (MDR, p. 173). He built model towns by the lake; experienced strong fantasies and wrote them down.
In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent… I had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world. Near the steep slope of a rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard and a beautiful young girl… The old man explained that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock. (MDR, p. 181)
Jung also had a long-lasting inner figure called Philemon, who was a pagan with “an Egypto-Hellenic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration” (MDR, p. 182). Here he writes about the insights given him by his experiences:
Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity… I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. (MDR, p. 183)
Jung’s experiences had a very large influence on the school of psychology he went on to found. I will have to write more about Jungian psychology at a later date.
December 26th, 2005
Escape from the Spirit Guides
Seduction of the Spirits
I’ve just heard this particular story way too many times not to comment on it. It usually goes something like this:
- Person talks to spirits and is happy for years.
- Person then gets freaked out over something.
- Person has beliefs involving the absolute division of spirits into inherently good and inherently evil; decides that since the spirits in question aren’t absolutely good, they must be evil.
- Person turns on the spirits and tells them to leave.
- The spirits, quite understandably, get angry at all this. A spiritual battle ensues.
- After some amount of trouble, the spirits eventually leave. Person retrospectively thinks of the happy years as the intentional deceptions of evil’s honeyed tongue, just like those people who talk about ‘that bitch’ after a nasty breakup even though the relationship was very happy for most of its length.
The fact is, as harmonious as the relationship is between the two of us, we would react the same way to attempts to get rid of us. And then you’d have the classic possession situation. Another casualty of absolutes.
December 21st, 2005
The LiveJournal multiplicity community now has an exhaustive categorized list of old posts. This probably makes it the largest reasonably organized collection of plural experience one is likely to come across.
December 19th, 2005
I found a really amazing quote by James Hillman in his book Healing Fiction (1983):
The fuller, more philosophical implications of the dialogue between Mark and Sheba are better presented by our final excerpt, this time from an eclectic psychotherapist with wide experience who came to Zürich for some deeper Jungian training. Again our refrain:
He: What do you want?
“I want out,” says a voice he called variously “soul-voice,” “anima,” “chest-voice,” “my person.”
He: Out! That sounds like you are a prisoner.
Soul-Voice: I did not say that. I am not blaming you. You keep me, for better or for worse, inside. Protective. But I want out.
He: I do not understand [that same sentence!]. It has taken me so many years first to find you and get you inside, as a psychological factor as Jung says, so we can have dialogues like this, that to let you out means to start all those projections once more.
Soul-Voice: You are afraid to let me out, then you are keeping me for worse: not protecting me, but yourself. I am a prisoner.
He: Just wanting to keep you inside and psychological makes you a prisoner?
Soul-Voice: A prisoner in your psychology. You have imprisoned me in your psychological system, preventing me from appearing wherever I please.
He: It’s the way you say that, that makes me afraid: “wherever you please” means anima attractions, foolish business speculations again, wild goose chases. When you are ‘out’ I become a silly goose. I can’t afford it. I must protect myself.
…More than a week passed before he took it up again, although he had been struggling with her “wanting out” without resolution. In fact, he did not take it up again, for it happened to him after swimming in the lake. On coming out of the water, he experienced his body wrapped in space that was full of presence, and air that had a density. He heard her say distinctly, so aloud that it was as if an hallucination: “Now I am out. Now you are in.”
When he told me this I remarked about the coagulatio of the soul in alchemy, its becoming thickened, sensed as a presence. This had evidently happened like a chemical process. After long cooking, stirring, and containing, suddenly, as in making a sauce, a coagulation takes place. (Healing Fiction, pp. 121–123)
I like to think of it like a seed, growing a long time in silence before pushing its way out into the light. I’m not sure what to think about being compared to a sauce… :D
December 16th, 2005