Search for Values:

I. Introduction

How do we search and how do we develop values? How do we transmit those values to the next generation?

We have talked about this initiation this week, with some really interesting ideas.

Nudist camp: loss of inhibition, humiliation, acceptance

Stoning: Acceptance of guilt, loss of innocence

Hazing: respect for elders

Musical/Athletic performance: Risk, failure, acceptance

Others we didnπt talk about

Bar Mitzvah

Confirmation

Driverπs License

Breeching

≥Crossing the Line≤

Debutante Balls
Scarification

All of these share the following ideas. The child learns an important skill, is recognized by an adult, and is presented as one to society.

Deb-dressed, carries feathers, presented at court by a woman who was also a deb

Confirmation: Learn, get tested, get sponsor, get new name

Crossing the Line: Pollywogs are tortured by the shellbacks, then dumped overboard and dragged, before being brought back on board and given a certificate for having crossed the line.

http://www.alexanderandbonin.com/exhibitions/benedict/2003/benedict3.htm

The question: What do you have to do in order to become an adult? What does the intiation show?

Religion: The traditions of the past carried into the future.

II. Initiates who touch a larger power

Harry Potter

Lightning bolt from Voldemort, protected and lived for no reason that he knows.

11 years with Dursleys

Selected by Dumbledore

Sorting Hat (Slytherin vs. Griffendore)

Tested (rely on friends, be true to goodness)

Blacks Out

Rescued by Dumbledore

"I think he sort of wanted to give me a chance. I think he knows more or less everything that goes on here, you know. I reckon he had a pretty good idea we were going to try, and instead of stopping us, he taught us just enough to help."

Think Telemachus and Odysseus

Jesus Christ:

Lectured the religious leaders as a small child.

Baptised as an adult (30äLuke)

Goes into the desert and confronts the devil. Three temptations

Testing his divinity

Returns and begins teaching

Sermon on the Mount.

Intiiation: rely on the self, mortify the flesh, seek out the spirit within. Ego Death

Both cases maturity comes from submitting to something larger than themselves.

One follows the lead of an older man transmitting values

One goes out on his own.

II. Ego Death

Beatles: Tomorrow Never Knows

Turn off your mind, relax

and float down stream

It is not dying

Lay down all thought

Surrender to the void

It is shining

That you may see

The meaning of within

It is being

That love is all

And love is everyone

It is knowing

That ignorance and hate

May mourn the dead

It is believing

But listen to the

color of your dreams

It is not living

Or play the game

existence to the end

Of the beginning

John Lennon Song

Last Song on Revolver.

Inspirtation came from Timothy Leary and the Psychedelic Experience. Supposedly written while on LSD

Ego Death

Ringo Starr title: throwaway lines

Song is considered the beginning of psychedaliaãculture associated with LSD and Acid.

Theory was that the drugs unlocked the powers of the subconscious mind. The ≥Ego≤ prevented you from understanding the flow of the universe around you, but by killing your ≥self≤ you could experience the world in a pure state.

The self is not just your conscious mind, but everything that has been taught you from the earliest of ages, including language and the seperation between you and it. By taking LSD or meditation or peyote or sensory deprivation, you strip everything that has been taught you and get to the basics of your brain, whether Jungian or religious

Jungian: A shared series of archetypes or images that are at the root of consciousness.

So, in order to get the wisdom of Jesus, you must strip away the culture you grew up in.

IV Hesse

Herman Hesse

1877 in Calw Germany

Parents were Missionary Lutherans: idealist

Entered and was expelled from a seminary: Depression followed.

Dropped out of school several times

Read many of his grandfatherπs books on Eastern Philosophy.

Writes two autobiographical novels of men who abandon studies to find something else.

World War I broke out while he hit 40

Pacifist

Lots writing and editing

Got a divorce

Attempted Suicide

Was psychoanalyzed by Jung and got into Freud

Pubishd Demian to great acclaim: anti-war novel with Freudian echoes

Student is tortured by bully.

Creates a duality in Demian

1922 publishes Siddhartha to huge success

Never visited India

Nobel in 1946

Book becomes best seller in US in 1967

Why was it popular?

Idealist, between the wars

Youth culture and rejection of the old

≥The years after 1918 in Europe were filled with literary turmoil and experimentation, and the results of both the psychoanalytic movement and the new orientalism then in vogue are much evidenced in Siddhartha. The importance of what Hesse termed Weg nach Innenãthe individual's struggle to transcend the materialism of bourgeois society through art, mysticism, and loveãis especially palpable in Siddhartha. Highly influenced by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hesse had vowed to reject traditional religion and morality and lead a life of individualism and isolation.≤

Hesse hoped, in Taoist fashion, ≥to fulfill the will of God precisely by letting myself drift (in one of my stories I called it åletting oneself fallπ) ä≤

all spoke to a generation who often viewed America as a materialistic, mass-oriented, and morally bankrupt society.

"Our inner compass is deflected by every book we read; every outside mind shows us from how many other points of view the world can be considered. Then the oscillation gradually dies down, and the needle returns to its old orientation, inherent in the nature of each one of us." Hesse

V Siddhartha

Not a Campbell novel as it seems. He receives the call, but keeps mis-interpreting it.

He keeps looking for teachers

Dad

Samanas

Buddha

Kamala and Kamaswami

Vasudeva

He attempts to teach, to be Dumbledore

Fails with his son.

Canπt pass on what he knows.

Ultimate Failure.

In the end, reaches enlightenment by stripping it all away and accepting the river. Ego Death.

"In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of the sallow wood and the fig tree, Siddhartha, the handsome Brahminπs son, grew up with his friend Govinda."

He had been full of arrogance; he had always been the cleverest, the most eager-always a step ahead of the others, always the learned and intellectual one, always the priest or the sage. His Self had crawled into this priesthood, into this arrogance, into this intellectuality. It sat there tightly and grew, while he thought he was destroying it by fasting and penitence. Now he understood it and realized that the inward voice had been right, that no teacher could have brought him salvation. That was why he had to go into the world, to lose himself in power, women and money; that was why he had to be a merchant, a dice player, a drinker and a man of property, until the priest and Samana in him were dead. That was why he had to undergo those horrible years, suffer nausea, learn the lesson of the madness of the empty, futile life till the end, till he reached bitter despair, so that Siddhartha the pleasure-monger and Siddhartha the man of property could die. He had died and a new Siddhartha had awakened from his sleep.

"He looked lovingly into the flowing water, into the transparent green, into the crystal lines of its wonderful design. He saw bright pearls rise from the depths, bubbles swimming on the mirror, sky blue reflected in them. . . . He saw that the river continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new. Who could understand, conceive this? He did not understand it; he was only aware of a dim suspicion, a faint memory, divine voices."

"This," he said, handling it, "is a stone, and within a certain length of time it will perhaps be soil and from the soil it will become plant, animal or man . . . I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything. I love it just because it is a stone, because today and now it appears to me a stone. I see value and meaning in each one of its fine markings and cavities, in the yellow, in the gray, in the hardness and the sound of it when I knock it, in the dryness or dampness of its surface . . . But I will say no more about it. Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different; immediately they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another."

VI Do we initiate by bringing the culture in or by stripping it away?