Papers by Nicholas E Collins
This paper explores an interface between the media ecological theories of Marshall McLuhan and th... more This paper explores an interface between the media ecological theories of Marshall McLuhan and the Indian philosophical system known as Pratyabhijnā (recognition). It is argued that our contemporary digital environment of networked electronic media reorients human perception, expanding our awareness to spatial and temporal ranges that are, metaphorically and in some ways actually, universal in scope. Conversely, this massive expansion condenses into a single, resonating sphere of electronic interpenetration, rendering all individuals simultaneously present. In this "discarnate condition" our metaphysical state approximates the condition of divinity and enlightened consciousness as conceptualized in the pratyabhijnā. Subjectivity itself becomes the locus or mirror of religious recognition and the site for the irruption of the sacred.
The function of music in relation to autobiographical memory is explored in terms of the Śaiva ph... more The function of music in relation to autobiographical memory is explored in terms of the Śaiva philosophy of Pratyabhijñā (self-recognition), and the aesthetic theory of one of its leading figures, Abhinavagupta. This philosophical system pictures memory as playing a crucial synthetic role in effecting the recognitive realization of one's identity, revealed here to include and perfect individual egoity through its unification with its transcendent and cosmic dimensions (Śiva, Śakti). Music, in its popular forms and in the ways it is engaged with by the contemporary populace, acts as a both collective cultural arena which provides publicly recognized and repayable sites for personal affective investment and also as an idiosyncratic lifetime soundtrack correlating with one's memory, giving shape and coherence to an underlying divine identity. Recognition, like profound aesthetic experience, involves the awareness and manifestation of a kind of transcendental memory in relation to direct perception. I propose this memory is correlated with affective investment in personal sites of significance such as music, and that musical autobiographical memory illustrates and participates in these dynamics of recognition. I'd like to begin with a quotation by Geoffrey O'Brien, from Sonata For Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears. He writes; "A length of audiotape, gathering sound to its surface as it uncoils: that is a lifetime… as long as it can be played back… the tape will be a history of what was heard. Everything enters there. The noises register the persistence of life as on a seismograph… All of it music, all the time." 1 Popular music has been viewed as related to mysticism through its visionary roots and aspirations, and in terms of its incorporation of religious symbolism. My aim here is to emphasize the mystical potential inherent in even the seemingly mundane practices of listening to music; of investing one's imagination and authority in songs and musicians as a matter of personal identity construction and coherence. In allowing music to become the soundtrack
The vitalist philosophy of Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) represents a particularly forceful critique ... more The vitalist philosophy of Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) represents a particularly forceful critique of prevailing transcendentalist metaphysics, hyper-rationality, and self-appropriating will, which are contrasted with a posited earlier phase of global culture - that of the Pelasgians who preceded classical Greek civilization and flourished in the Bronze Age. In this earlier cultural phase Klages finds modes of thought that are characterized by their triadic structure, reverence for a feminine, mother-goddess as the chief representative of the sacred, and, most importantly, a relative absence of rationalistic, ego-driven will, which is embodied in the malevolent figure of Klages' principle of Geist. In analyzing Klages' propositions through the lens of Wim van Binsbergen's aggregative-diachronic model of global mythology, certain of his assertions can be shown to have concrete historical bases, most notably the transformations in consciousness that attended the evolution of linguistic forms, and the establishment of a "Pelasgian substrate" of mythological traits that percolated throughout the old world and continued to exert influence on the structure of mythological and religious forms, even as more relational recursive and triadic modes of language and consciousness were superseded by the dominance of a mode of thinking predicated on binary separation. Klages' fierce arguments against industrialization and its abstractive-appropriative engines - a triumph of Geist - also find new relevance as an ecological critique whose hope for redemption lies in the retrieval of these earlier forms of culturally mediated consciousness.
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan is examined as an esoteric figure, primarily with regard to the r... more Media theorist Marshall McLuhan is examined as an esoteric figure, primarily with regard to the role played by imagination in his thought in relation to the intersensory mediating function of the sensus communis. The influence of modernist literary figures such as Pound, Joyce, and Lewis in McLuhan's media ecology is examined, as are the dynamics of McLuhan's imaginal, symbolized by the processes of cliché obsolescence and archetypal retrieval, as well as enhancement and reversal. Additionally, certain key archetypal figures of McLuhan's imaginal are explored: the discarnate condition, the global theatre, and the place of identity. McLuhan's place as an esoteric figure is justified in terms of the criteria for esotericism developed by Faivre, Stuckrad and Versluis, with regard to his oeuvre and to his continuing influence on esoteric practitioners.
In the poetic mysticism of William Blake, a fundamental insight into the nature of the human indi... more In the poetic mysticism of William Blake, a fundamental insight into the nature of the human individual as a cosmic personality predominates. This personality he calls Albion. In the figures of American poets Kenneth Patchen and Allen Ginsberg this Blakean theme is resurrected, such that it grounds and informs their mystical cosmologies. Patchen’s major work, The Journal of Albion Moonlight is a direct allusion to Blake and attempts to recreate his central vision. And Ginsberg has confessed that, as a youth, he experienced visions of Blake, with the deceased poet reading some of his works to him, which accompanied an experience of divine cosmic consciousness in which the world appeared as a single universal body, with the sky itself as its “living blue hand.” These two Blake-inspired visions hint at a return of the kind of subjectivity and imagination-centric religious universalism exemplified by Blake in the American counterculture.
This paper explores the interface between the media ecological theories of Marshall McLuhan and t... more This paper explores the interface between the media ecological theories of Marshall McLuhan and the Indian philosophical system known as Pratyabhijñā (recognition). It is argued that our contemporary media environment composed of digital networked electronic media forms reorients human perception, expanding our normal awareness to spatial and temporal ranges of extension that are, metaphorically and in some senses actually, universal in scope. This massive extensivity is further compressed into a single, resonating sphere of electronic interpenetration, rendering all individuals simultaneously present. In this "discarnate condition" our metaphysical state approximates the condition of divinity itself as conceptualized in the pratyabhijñā. This is further indicative of more general transformations effected by the mediated environment in the sphere of religion, in which subjectivity itself becomes the locus of religious recognition and the site for the irruption of the sacred, due to its having become electronically externalized in the pervasive forms of media use.
The role of popular music and media in facilitating experience-based religious forms and cultural... more The role of popular music and media in facilitating experience-based religious forms and cultural practices in recent history is examined by Partridge in this book, with special attention given to the mechanisms of symbolic appropriation, affective categorical organization of identity, and transcendent experience in the absence of orthodoxy. While his study explores these issues within the context of recent popular music culture, these insights bear directly on the manner and organizational dynamics of religious affect, experience, and felt authenticity of practice more generally.
In The Origins of the World's Mythologies, Michael Witzel utilizes a historical-comparative metho... more In The Origins of the World's Mythologies, Michael Witzel utilizes a historical-comparative method to analyze mythologies across cultures and history, not only at the level of individual stories and motifs-the method developed by Vladmir Propp and Stith-Thompson-but at the more telling level of entire myth-structures, taking into consideration both content and chronology. Where Propp and Stith-Thompson"s respective concepts of "mythemes" and "taletypes" identify congruencies among the mythic narratives of various divergent groups, cataloguing a number of structural and substantive similarities, Witzel goes beyond this to compare entire bodies of mythology, while also considering their courses of development over time, in order to reconstruct their earliest form, that of a common pan-human or pan-gaean mythology originating in South Africa. Having determined a probable pattern of historical descent, he posits that, initially, at least two distinct migrations out of south Africa occurred around 65,000 BCE. The earliest groups travelled southeast toward what would later become Australia, New Zealand, the Andaman Islands, and Melanesia-collectively referred to as Gondwanaland (also inclusive of sub-Saharan Africa)-while successive migrations occurring anywhere between 65,000-40,000 years ago went northeast to Eurasia, Siberia, and eventually down to the Americas. These latter groups constitute what is termed the Laurasian stream, whose characteristic innovations with respect to mythology and culture have allowed it to develop into the overwhelmingly dominant system of thought undergirding ordinary perception for roughly ninety-five percent of humanity, its numerous present manifestations being both overt and subtle, religious and secular, restrictive and liberating.
"Yod, we're all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interf... more "Yod, we're all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer... Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney… We're all cyborgs, Yod. You're just a purer form of what we're all tending toward." -Shira (Piercy, 150) "One does not achieve it merely by being immortal, for even the lowliest laborer may achieve continuity of existence. Is it the raising up of an attribute? Of course not. I can design machines more powerful and more accurate than any faculty a man may cultivate. Being a god is being able to recognize within one's self these things that are important, and then to strike the single note that brings them into alignment with everything else that exists. One rules through one's ruling passions. 167) Marge Piercy"s cyberpunk novel, He, She, and It, and Roger Zelazny"s sci-fi epic, Lord of Light, engage the theme of humanity"s striving toward its own technological perfectibility, envisioned as a kind of ever-elusive utopian teleology, and reveal it to be fundamentally a paradoxical project of narcissism, one resulting in the increasingly-impaired ability to appreciate human individuality even as we continually augment its status relative to "everything else that exists." Technology in this sense works to remove the individual from his environment-that everything else-altering the relationship between them by appropriating elements of the other as part of one"s self, a process described by media theorist Marshall Mcluhan as the "extension of ourselves," a self-embrace characterized by numbness to this new appendage. (Mcluhan, 66) In continually grasping in this way, "we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms…to use them at all we must serve them as gods" in a self-perpetuating series of modifications of both parties where technology "reciprocates man"s love by expediting his wishes and desires." (Mcluhan, UM, 69) The initial emergence of media, technology which mediates our perceptual environment, in language, enables intellectual self-detachment from participation in the larger environment, and engages us in a process characterized by division that begins with this fundamental "conceit" of I-making, aham-kara. (Larson, 185) In human societies, as well as those natural societies beyond and inclusive of them, these novel media accelerate and disrupt the existing order, impelling us to further develop them to greater capacities in order to cope with the harsh new environments and difficulties we have created for ourselves. The world of He, She, and It displays such harshness, and its technological advancement is a reflection of this reality. Here, the dominant mode of communication technology is the "Net," an exaggerated version of our real-world internet whose function, as with all media, is to externalize aspects of humanity. This fictional Net does so to such a degree that the media environment inhabited by the user is indistinguishable from non-Net experience, yet it is infinitely malleable according to the talents of programmers. Drug-like "stimmie" programs, operating under thrall to egoistic pursuits of pleasure and self-worship, become so totally consuming as to compel some users to neglect the physiological necessities of their corporeal forms, at which point they waste away and die. (Piercy, 300) The Net is essentially the externalization of the ego as a whole, its perceptual consciousness, already altered by human cultural evolution and the interplay of various forms of media therein, extended outward onto the Net, which assumes the responsibility
Drafts by Nicholas E Collins
The relationships between deities and humanity in The Mahabharata are numerous, and the involveme... more The relationships between deities and humanity in The Mahabharata are numerous, and the involvement of these divine beings in the story is expressed on many levels. Most apparently, the human characters are all said to be manifestations or incarnations, to whatever extent, of particular deities both alone and in combination with one another. On one level, the story of the Bharata lineage and the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas acts out the interplay of vedic deities involved in the preservation and maintenance of cosmic order and dharma in the world against the forces of destruction and degradation, expressed through various other types of demonic beings, or raksasas. They act in the world by virtue of their presence within human individuals, who are in this sense, vehicles for these heavenly beings. In this sense the Pandavas are both collectively the incarnations of the five Indras, as well as individually a portion of the gods Indra, Varuna, Dharma, and the twin Asvins while the Kauravas represent those of various raksasas, with their feud acting out in the world that of these beings in the heavens. However, their existence as human individuals in the world is not wholly determined by the presence of these other divine beings, and while imbued with their presence, they remain individuals themselves, acting out of their own volition, forming their own conceptions of virtuous action, dharma, as it relates specifically to themselves, their svadharma.
In the contemporary digitally mediated cultural landscape, the traditional lineage lines, forms, ... more In the contemporary digitally mediated cultural landscape, the traditional lineage lines, forms, and structures of cultural systems, including religious traditions, have become "cut loose"
In this bibliographical essay, I have attempted to chart a course into the religious dimensions o... more In this bibliographical essay, I have attempted to chart a course into the religious dimensions of Jung's thought, focusing on his relationship to his own mystical experiences and to the religious ideas to which he was drawn in the endeavor to clarify what such experiences meant in the context of his psychology. The majority of Jung's own experiences are recorded in The Red Book and his auto/biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, as well as the forthcoming Black Books, which I have not had the opportunity to include here. In his writings on religion and its relationship to psychology it is evident that these experiences served as the foundation for Jung's theoretical work, which exhibits a dyadic structure that oscillates (and often bridges the gap) between the metaphysical and the psychological. This parallels Jung's dual aims of creating a psychological theory and helping his patients individuate while also prophesizing and proclaiming the emergence of a qualitatively new religious consciousness. Jung is more or less always relating the ideas he sees in religious traditions, both western (Christian) and Asian (Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist), to his own emerging psychological-metaphysical theory (which he will be quick to qualify isn't really metaphysical, even though it is), which is his primary concern. He is in this sense a syncretist, trying to coax out the new consciousness contained as a seed within older religious forms, integrating them by reading them through the lens of his psychological theory. However, Asian religions also offered Jung a different cultural psychology with which to contrast (sometimes unnecessarily) that of modern European westerners. While some of these distinctions have been eroded by our now thoroughly electrically interconnected global civilization, the contributions made to Jung's thought by Asian religions is considerable, as is their influence on contemporary ("new-age") spirituality, for which Jung serves as a kind of cultural guru figure. I have only been able to wade into the shallow waters of the seemingly endless ocean of Jung (and Jungian scholarship) in this bibliography, but my hope is that it may serve as an initial orienting map for the significance of Jung in the study of religion.
The shift from oral to literate culture in India is accompanied by development of the ideal of as... more The shift from oral to literate culture in India is accompanied by development of the ideal of asceticism and renunciation of the social and cultural world. World renunciation, in the Upanisads and especially the heterodox religions of Buddhism and Jainism, increasingly competes with the previously dominant values of the earlier Vedic religion which emphasized proper social participation as the defining basis of self-identity and religious and moral virtue. A new understanding of selfhood and the nature of the divine can be seen to follow a novel way of experiencing the world produced by a literate mode of thinking, where self-abstraction, detached observation and examination of the cultural/social world and one’s place within it generate dissatisfaction with the sense of identity present in the pre-literate culture. Reconciling these two ways of being became the dominant force behind evolution within Hinduism, and also some traditions of the heterodox religions.
This essay provides a brief examination of the concept of God in the process philosophy of Alfred... more This essay provides a brief examination of the concept of God in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. The role of God in Whitehead's metaphysical system is explored in three distinct dimensions relating to the three essential natures of the divine; the Primordial, Consequent, and Superjective. Additionally, God's proper classification within the Whiteheadean system is considered in terms of an eternal actual entity or as an everlasting society with personal order.
This paper explores the role of mysticism in religious studies scholarship, both as a fundamental... more This paper explores the role of mysticism in religious studies scholarship, both as a fundamental part of religion and as a dimension of the scholarly endeavor. The essay, written for a graduate class, serves as an introduction to a (hypothetical) journal issue which focuses on this topic. A Transdisciplinary paradigm is found to be necessary to the study of religion, and four dimensions of transdisciplinarity are explored: an inquiry based emphasis, integration of the inquirer into the study, a metaparadigmatic perspective, and attention to complexity of thought. The integration of the scholar into the religious inquiry is basic, and is essential to the unity of experience in the world that religion always asserts. A path dependency theory of culture argues for the deep embeddedness of religion in human cultural history and its persisting influence on contemporary modes of thought.
Uploads
Papers by Nicholas E Collins
Drafts by Nicholas E Collins