America’s Finest Are Coming: Teaching in The Age of Inspiration

~ David Biddle ~ 2 Comments
A teacher in the making.

When I was in college trying to figure out what I would do with my life, I knew that my “fall back” job could be as a teacher. It really didn’t matter what level of teaching — to me being a professor at a prestigious university was the same as teaching social studies to 7th graders or running a 1st grade class at a suburban or urban school. Teaching was an honorable profession with decent pay and usually quality benefits. But to me it was also removed from reality. I grew up in an academic household. To me, teachers talked about the world and educated about it, but they didn’t actively participate.

In the end, I became an environmental planner and activist. I put my social science education and math abilities to use as a consultant specializing in energy conservation, technology efficiency, and recycling. I had a marvelous and exciting 30-year career working with the public and private sector trying to make our energy and solid waste infrastructures more effective and safe. I’m a novelist and freelance writer now (something not so different than being a teacher). But that’s not what I’m writing about here.

I just looked at my FaceBook wall this morning and found an invitation to donate funding to help a 2nd grade teacher buy Kangaroo Pouch organizers for his students. This teacher is part of a new movement in education. He is 24 years old, with a newly minted masters in education from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been an adjunct teacher on and off for the past two years working with elementary schoolers in Portland, Oregon and Philadelphia. This 2nd grade class is his first full-scale appointment as a bonafide, credentialed educator. He is committed as hell to his job. Besides his education at Penn, he spent this summer training with Teach for America to prepare him for this coming school year. This teacher is my oldest son, Sam.

Now, I am just a poorly paid author, but I donated $20 to Sam’s Kangaroo Pouch project. Sam’s school is the Frederick Douglass Elementary School in North Philadelphia. It is a public school, but it was designated as one of many schools in Philly that needed extra special support. Sam doesn’t work directly for the Philadelphia School District. He is an employee of Young Scholars, a charter school non-profit contracted to help turn around Frederick Douglass Elementary. Young Scholars is one of many innovative private and nonprofit organizations working on new models for education and community development throughout the country. There are not enough organizations like Young Scholars…yet. But I think that’s about to change.

Other charter oriented education programs like KIPP and Mastery Charter are doing amazing work with inner city kids throughout the country. I don’t want to debate the value of charters over public school systems, though. I think that’s a ridiculous argument. The object is to adequately fund teachers and administrators to provide committed, informed, and effective education to kids everywhere in this country. There is no one system that will work. We are a nation of sub-cultures and neighborhoods that all blend in one way or another in schools more than in any other local institution. Whatever works! Right?

I don’t want to debate the economics of education here either. Although it is clear that if we don’t figure out how to adequately invest in our children, this nation is going to slide backwards on the world stage. We’re going to see more crime, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy, and unprepared adults in the work world.

What I do want to point out is that the message young teachers are now getting (usually from experienced and profoundly gifted older teachers) is both exciting and dynamic. The future of this country, I believe, is positive because of this message. There is enormous excitement in the world of teaching right now. Talk isn’t just about minimal standards, literacy, and basic skills, its about leadership, community development, and passionate commitment. Young teaching recruits are not taking “No” as an answer. I think this is possibly true of many teachers that we all had in the past, but today’s world of astounding media technology, social networking, and communication systems provides teachers with a virtually infinite toolbox of solutions to problems (Sam’s DonorChoose solution for Kangaroo Organizers is just an example).

From child preacher to teacher, Bernie Wilson.

I’m finding evidence of the extreme dynamism of this profession everywhere I look these days. Experienced teachers, men and women of my own generation — Boomers who have never truly chucked their aspirations for a better, more socially just world — are passing on their wisdom and the lessons they’ve learned to this next generation. Take a look at the video attached to this web page on a talk by my friend Bernie Wilson that just came my way through FaceBook last week.

The Age of Inspiration

Sometimes when I’m waiting for my computer to re-boot or while I’m making lunch, I wonder what we may one day call this next few decades here in America. We are at a major juncture in our history. The hippie generation is in the heyday of its leadership. Our collective knowledge about how easy it is to fail and to miss the mark is turning into wisdom. Bernie’s words give me goosebumps.

I think I know what we should want to call this next couple decades. These next 20 years or so need to be called The Age of Inspiration. We have so many drastic problems: global warming, health care, proper investment in our communities, and development of a more sustainable economy. If we don’t approach these problems as inspired, can-do citizens, we may stay mired in the past. And, quite frankly, the past didn’t work.

But we Boomers can’t be the only ones saddled with doing the inspiring. The real job is for this next generation of kids. I am amazed by the young people I know who are choosing education as a path. I end this essay with a very brief video of this year’s Teach for America recruits at the closing ceremony for their summer training in Philadelphia. As you read this, they have fanned out to eastern cities far and wide to begin the next phases of their lives. Some of them will stick with teaching. Some will move on to other professions. No matter what, you can bet they will be touched by their time teaching the generation coming up behind them. We are a great nation because of the inspiration of our young people. That inspiration comes from their teachers first and foremost. And so it goes.

The speaker in this video is one of the great heroes of my life. I couldn’t have become the man I did if he hadn’t been born. To be touched by a teacher in the making for the past 24 years has been quite a treat. But what’s more important about this video, is to listen to his peers as he speaks. This is what I’m talking about. This is who we can become. This is the world we can live in. They can be the ones who raise us all towards The Age of Inspiration. Teaching as a fall-back career? I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

 

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Therapy for the Writer: Learning to Trust the Subuncular Mind

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment
It’s all so simple!

Years ago I learned how weird the creative mind is. Subconscious thought needs to be given a great deal of leeway in the artistic process. One of the first real short stories I wrote (real meaning that it wasn’t written as an assignment for a creative writing of English class) was called “The Rapist.”

I’d been reading a lot of Russian literature, particularly Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Gogol along with European existentialism and theater of the absurd. I was 21 at the time and had taken a semester off from college because my major — anthropology — meant I wasn’t getting enough opportunity to read what I wanted (which was fiction — existential fiction in particular). I also wanted to see what would happen if I just got up every morning and wrote with no purpose and no planning.

At first I wrote pathetically pedantic plays with characters espousing idiotic philosophical notions about mortality, God, and religion.  What I really wanted to do, though, was try my hand at short stories — completely improvisational, off-the-wall fiction that was improbable, unpredictable, and ridiculous. I also wanted to fully escape the notion of symbolism, theme, or intention. 

So, eventually, I wrote this 24-page, single-spaced story called “The Rapist.” As I recall, I first typed the title at the top of the page, then I started with a sentence and just kept going. The story evolved into a kind of near-future thing filled with turn of the century Russian identity references. This guy in his late twenties befriends a young girl one night walking empty streets. He takes her back to his cube. Everyone lived in cubes. And they sleep together. The girl is a young teenager, maybe 14 or so. She is innocent and childlike and needs to be protected and taken care of. He means well in the beginning, but his desire gets the best of him. 
After the first draft, I felt like there was a lot missing from the story. Indeed, this was a world in which only two people existed. Who were they? Where did they come from? What did they do? How, especially, did this guy earn a living? 
It came to me in the middle of the night after a discussion with my girl friend about Freud and Sartre. The guy would be a psychiatrist and he would have these sort of Socratic dialogs with the young girl before and, then, after he had made love to her, and the dialogs would be different after sex. All along as I pondered through this weird little story, I also truly did not like the title. The Rapist? It was there to draw a reader in. It was there, too, I figured, because the idea of statutory rape always seemed to me strange. I lost my virginity when I was 14. My girl friend at the time was 15. I figured the title was plenty provocative enough all the way around. And I hoped that at least my housemates would get a kick out of such provocation. But still…the rapist? 
When the story was more or less the way I wanted it to be (except the title), I gave it to friends and they didn’t really say much. But I also gave it to my mother to read. My mother in those days was the age I am now — so full of piss and vinegar, an in-your-face feminist sociologist with lots to say about how men were the reason human history was so violent and chaotic. She read the story and loved it (what would any writer do without a mom?). I told her I thought the story needed a new title. She said, “Are you kidding? This is the best title you could possibly give this story. It’s perfect!”She was effusive and adamant to boot. I was a bit taken aback. “Really? You don’t think it’s a bit much?” She took off her glasses and rubbed here eyes. “You don’t see it, do you?” I shook my head. “The Rapist?” I shook my head again. “Put the two words together,” she said and then waited.
A little electric jolt shot through me. The Rapist = Therapist? “What?”
My mom was a Mary Daley reading feminist who had spent two decades in the care of psychiatrists. Why would she not see this? It was Feminism 101. But what about me? I honestly had no clue about gender puns. The story I’d written came out of nowhere. It seemed so off the wall and abnormal. It seemed at times like it was coming from somewhere else. The easier it was to write, the more bizarre it got.
I’d determined that I would write something with no intention and with no plan or meaning, and I’d come up with a very specific and culturally defining story about a therapist who seduces a girl and then tries to deal with the question of shame…and whether he should feel love for her. “The Rapist” indeed. 
Out of that strange interlude 33 years ago I learned to always let my sub-conscious mind have a major say in my work. There’s a balance, of course, and the truth is that “The Rapist” is written in a pedestrian style that makes me cringe whenever I look at it (it also has an extremely timid sex scene built into it). 
This balance between the conscious and unconscious is always taking place in my fiction. Writing stories is an endless exercise in self-discovery. I have two novels that will be published over the next year that wrestle with the interfaces between sex and love and whether life has any truly profound intrinsic meaning (yup, still at play with Russian and existential issues…sorry…any writer who isn’t is a fool and a waste of time for you, the reader). 
Both of these novels are fueled by the insanity of growing up and becoming an adult/parent/male/husband from 1980 through 2010. That was a really fucked up thirty years in a lot of ways for all of us. What the hell did we think we were doing? Ouch. It still hurts just to think about it. But there was so much more going on under the surface for all of us. These two novels (and a really weird aborted one full of truly twisted male sexual fantasy) developed from 2000 to 2010 as I personally grew to understand who I was and was not and how terribly stupid I was about love and sex and the question of the meaning of life. 
In short, these two novels — Beautiful Morning Blues and Ex:Urbia — came about as advanced and refined balancing acts between the conscious and the unconscious. Beautiful Morning Blues was so overwhelming that I wound up in the hospital and nearly died. And writing the first draft of Ex:Urbia so turned my sense of inadequacy and desperation about true love inside out, glowing on my skin, that I nearly lost the love of my life. 
Make no mistake about it, writing can get kind of dangerous. Letting the subconscious play some with words and meaning in the conscious world is just plain spooky. The closer one comes to producing metaphors and mythologies that get at the truth of being human in the 21st century, the closer one comes to the legitimacy of insanities, addictions, and nightmares. And yet, if we don’t come close to these things, how is it that we learn to rise above them and fully embrace the majesty and grace of real love and real meaning? 
This is my take anyway on what literature is about. As I learn to market my first novel, Beyond the Will of God, which is, at least in someways, about the reality of fantasy and the power of music and the creative mind, I am struck by how little people want to think about the nexus between their conscious and unconscious minds. What happened to people’s awareness about how essential it is to face the beast within that governs so much, that is before words? 
To me that beast is both sobering and amazing. The word I use for it is Subuncular. That’s a cross between sub/unconscious and avuncular. It’s there, we need to trust it, but it’s so deep and so hard to see. And yet…
I leave you with this new little oddity I’ve beein dealing with of late: 
I began my fourth novel, working title: Dawn of the Summertons, in January, the day after I hung up my spurs so dusty and worn out from a 30 year career as an environmental consultant. It’s a story about a family. I started out as I now know to do: deciding on point of view and narrative voice. As all writers understand, “head hopping” through multiple points of view is not good for the reader. You need to know what your voice is going to be. At first I wanted the story to be told by little Bess, the youngest of three siblings. But children’s voices are to my mind a cheap way to embrace the reader. Besides, I want this story to tell what it’s like to be an adult in this world — a parent, spouse, lover, and sharpened soul in this modern world of media and myth. 
After a bit of trial and error, I fastened on using a straight third person voice. But I was also sloppy enough (I like sloppy) to slide in omniscient observations of each family member’s thoughts. I got through the first third of the story (just under 60,00 words) in just three months. And then I hit a block. 
It wasn’t like I had writer’s block, exactly, not in the classic sense, anyway. What happened was that every time I got to work on this one scene I would become profoundly sleepy. It didn’t matter how much coffee I had. It didn’t matter how much sleep I got the night before. I would just become overwhelmingly tired. In the past three weeks it got so bad that I would literally fall asleep while I typed every day. I’ve written about 5,000 very sleepy words in the past four months. 
What the hell was wrong with me? Not only was I falling asleep trying to work on my novel, but all my other fiction began to seem confusing and meaningless. Today was no different. I tried working on the same scene and just oozed into dreamland. I stopped that, went downstairs, made a monstrous cup of coffee. Drank it down. Listened to loud Led Zeppelin and went to work editing stories that I’m going to be publishing soon in a collection called Implosions of America. But the words I was looking at made no sense. I decided to lie down. 
I am not sure why today I figured things out. But my head hit the pillow and within a minute I realized — truly, out of no where — that I needed to go back upstairs to my office and write something from the older brother’s point of view when he is a 50+ year old man looking back on his life. I fought this idea for a good 15 minutes, lying there in the heat of an early August morning with a fan blowing over my exposed legs. “What’s the point? I am not writing in the first person here. That’s not the plan!” 
And yet…by a little past noon I was back at my desk and I was writing in Lester’s voice fifty years in the future. His words came out of me like full spectrum waters lit in browns and grays and then glowing slightly with a rainbow shine, then silver and gold, and back to brown and gray. I wrote for two hours straight, Lester’s wizened voice just pouring out of me, explaining his view of why men are so desperate in their love and why life is so, so hard for all of us. 
I stopped when I realized that I needed his sisters’ voices to chime in too, and his mothers. I’m still not sure whether Reggie, the father, should have a shot at talking to the reader, but I know once again that the subuncular needs to have some room to express itself. I’m giving it all the rest of the day and know when I wake up tomorrow morning more will come and I won’t feel tired and everything will make sense again. 
That’s probably the hardest thing about being a writer. You can talk to as many people as you want about writing and publishing. Whatever. You can pay for a shrink. You can push and push and push. But sometimes the only therapy you need is balancing on that nexus between what you think you want to do and what you need to do. 
When you first start out its usually pretty easy. You don’t know what you’re doing. Your subuncular self is able to take over because the ego is an idiot. As you grow and develop, though, as you gain a bit of control and mastery over language, it’s easy to forget that interface between two minds. It’s also natural that one wouldn’t want to perch on that balancing point where the conscious and the unconscious meet. Like I say, it’s spooky. Staying close to what is spooky is pretty uncomfortable. 
And yet that’s where stories worth telling live. At least that’s the way it seems to me. 
So, back to the beginning of Dawn of the Summertons. I’m just glad we will be saving money on coffee now. Although, I will kind of miss my late morning naps.

Teenage Wasteland: unanswered questions about the significance of music

~ David Biddle ~ 1 Comment

For the past three decades I’ve been looking for novels and stories that illuminate the power of music. Rhythm linked with melody seems to go all the way to the depths of the human soul. This astonishes me. I have loved music all of my life. My father played every form of classical music in our house when I was growing up. And he played his music loud. By the time I was four it was profoundly comforting listening to everything from opera to string quartets or solo piano at volumes
well in excess of five on a hi-fi system. During the heyday of the audiophile in the late ’60s and early ’70s, my dad built himself a monstrous stereo system using state-of-the-art electronics and Scandinavian components.I got to hear Mahler and Tchaikovsky so loud and so pure they went all the way into me and moved me forever.

Pop music touched me early on as well. I fell in love with The Beatles by the time I was six (summer of 1964) and its been clear sailing since. In 1971 my older cousin introduced me to Elton John, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Cat Stevens, and Joni Mitchell. A close friend in junior high school turned me on to The Jackson 5 and Stevie Wonder. My 8th grade girl friend got me to listen to The Allman Brothers Band. And when my younger brother received The Grateful Dead’s Europe ’72 for Christmas in 1973 we were hooked forever on improvisational music and the idea that guitars, drums, bass and keyboards could be blues, jazz, rock, country, and even classical all at once. By the time my ears and brain fully grew to be able to integrate and differentiate sound simultaneously, it seemed to me that music was as much a connector to spiritual ecstasy and joy as it was mere entertainment or just something that might give one a reason to do the twist.

Our emotions at any given moment are like surfaces in the dimension of awareness that precedes language. The way I see it, when music reaches inside of us, when the spirit of sound filters and flows through our ears and skin, the vibration and integration of beat and melody and song in the depths (and shallows) of the listener has the potential to deeply color and touch that dimension.

Sometimes it seems to me that music is what allows us to most fully feel our souls, to know that we are able to feel the entire universe all at once. By soul I don’t mean some mystical or spiritual force. I simply mean the essence of who we are summed into the moment — whatever emotions we’re feeling; whatever ideas we’ve had up to that moment during the day; whatever knowledge we have about others and how others feel about us.Music, of course, has a way of lighting up other emotions, often complex. You feel one way when you listen to Beethoven’s 9th and another driving down the road blasting The Rolling Stone’s “Street Fighting Man” at full volume. If you love music and if you are able to let yourself go, you can’t not feel something.

But here’s a question that I ask myself often: how much of what I feel is what you feel? More important, maybe, how much of what I feel comes from what I bring to the music and how much is the song itself coming to me? The easy answer would be that most of what you feel, maybe all of what you feel, is what you bring to the music. It almost fully has to be that way…solipsists that we are, ultimately, whether we like it or not.

And yet, there is still that common equation at work when we are at a party all dancing to the same beat. Or consider a concert and that feeling you have during a particularly powerful performance — that electricity or current of … of what? … connection? groove? synchronic linkage? commonality? communion? It doesn’t matter if it’s the Christmas opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” or Carlos Santana plus a 15-piece percussion ensemble.

I search for evidence of these issues in the arts. I read interviews by musicians and performers looking for references to these questions. The ecstasy and release at a Bruce Springsteen concert is legendary. The networked single mind created by a Grateful Dead concert (and now Furthur) was the magic that drew so many of us into that world. And the ancient communal connections created by everything from tribal to Gregorian chant — and then beyond — was a central motif to experiencing the divine — and still is, if you are so inclined.

I seek evidence of this magic in literature and poetry. It’s not easy to find. The tendency is to externalize this magic or to reduce it to some basic stimulus-response/cause & effect explanation. If you are reading this, I fear, in fact, that somehow my words may come off sounding idiotically mystical, supercilious, or mixed up and reminiscent of Don Quixote jousting with windmills. That is not my intent. My concern here is to get at what I think is the real magic of being human. This same issue of psychic connection and emotional power is at the core of love, sex, good food, and dance. It is at the root of all aesthetic experience — from viewing a sunset or a beautiful painting to reading a poem, watching a comedian or a movie, or even just taking a long hot shower.


We move through life knowing that we should pay attention and take the measure of that which brings us pleasure. But all too often what we actually do is move too fast. We don’t behold the world with much wonder.Think about this! So much of human experience is beneath the surface and before language and thought. Aesthetic emotion is real and possibly the most important aspect of being human. I think of it as what constitutes our souls. I think of it as the magic and mystery that gives life its power. I also know that the soul of who you are, that thing that can be touched and colored by loud or soft music (and so much more) is what truly connects us to each other. It seems to me that this soul I define is our life force and our essence. It seems, too, that so few people really get this, so few people understand how grand and fantastic this power is.Either that or this is my own little musical fiction and I’m half crazy, and these unanswered questions about the human soul are just the musings of a mind lying to itself far too confidently for its own good.

And maybe that’s why it is so hard to find novels and stories that go to the heart of this. Some come close, but they don’t go all the way. Maybe, too, that is why it is so hard for people to get along in this world and why the default psychology of so many is cynicism, nihilism, hatred, fear, and hostility. With that, I sign off. I’m going to go listen to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”at full volume, then The Who doing “Baba O’Riley.”

 
I don’t need to fight, to prove I’m right./I don’t need to be forgiven.

It’s only teenage wasteland.

___________________________________________

This issue is explored much further through story, myth, character, and metaphor in my novel, Beyond the Will of God. You can check it out in Amazon. (Click Pete’s name, above, to see a video he did connected to all of this).

 

Great Blogs to Read: Truth and Beauty – Young Adult Old Soul

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

I want to point you to a couple of independent writer/artists I’ve been in touch with while on vacation in Florida. See photos that have nothing to do with either author. 

I read a great post by Laxmi Hariharan in early July titled “Dare to Be an Indie?”. That post inspired me to think about the end product of writing, particularly the product created by indie authors. So I explored Laxmi’s offerings a bit and saw that she is a quality, thinking, vibrant author living in Londan. I just had to reach out and tell her how great I thought she was. I also let her know why her piece inspired me. She responded back with a guest blog request so if you’re interested, you can see the result of her request at her website right now. Check out “Letting Go: Indie Marketing Made Easy” at Laxmi’s site, Young Adult Old Soul. I mean every word I wrote there. 
Today, I also happened to stumble onto Dan Benbow’s website, Truth and Beauty. I’ve reported on this site in the past. Dan has been my editor at Kotori Magazine on and off over the years. I’m hoping I can get Kotori to consider publishing a sample chapter from Beyond the Will of God for their readers.

Sometimes I worry about calling my novel what it is — A Psychedelic Mystery. But I know Kotori Readers will appreciate that concept. Most other people just get tongue-tied and sadly PC about the idea. There should be more psychedelic frolics in the art world. The plasticity of consciousness and creativity is rather important to consider…

But I digress. Last Friday, Dan posted a nice piece on Charles Bukowski at Truth and Beauty. It’s a great essay, and I put in my two cents worth at the end in the comments section. Dan offers a couple good poems to read by Chuck B and also by one Thomas Waits, along with his own intelligent thoughts. I did not know about the documentary Dan notes in his piece. It looks damn good and you can watch it on YouTube, so go to Truth and Beauty to read and to link. 
I will be back from our family outing to South Florida on Wednesday. Saw great minor league baseball  (though Jesse Biddle struggled some on the mound…just one of those games…we still got watch young batters try to hit his 93 mph fastball and fail a lot); have been taking long beach walks under an electric sun; lots of time sitting quietly in an out of the way part of our hotel working on my next short story “The Scent Leaver;” and have been part of the unofficial Loggerhead Turtle siting committee, though last night I fell asleep while the crew was out under bright moonlight. We’ve had a fair number of turtle confrontations. The best was a 7:30 AM encounter with baby loggerheads on their maiden run from hot sandy nests into the sea. About 40 of ’em in a 15 minute span making their fin flapping “run” into the infinite green. Awesome!
My love to all. My novel wants you to buy it! And then read it…follow the path with a heart.
Make sure to bookmark Dan’s and Laxmi’s blogs, too. They both offer independent insights you probably won’t find anywhere else and interesting, quality writing to boot.

-db

The Powers of Mind: An Introduction to the Mystery of the Cosmic Egg

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

My introduction to how mysterious and seemingly magical the human mind is came from a reading of POWERS OF MIND, at one time a national bestseller written by Adam Smith (a pseudonym for George Goodman, a high-end journalist and editor). I read this book in the mid-1970s.

Powers of Mind was basically a long set of straightforward descriptions of everything from biofeedback and memory quirks to meditation, rolfing, and psychedelics. I was 17 at the time. From there I devoured books by Carlos Castenada, Aldous Huxley, John Lilly, and Ram Daas. My favorite — then and now — was THE CRACK IN THE COSMIC EGG, by Joseph Chilton Pearce.

Needless to say, like so many people back then, I did my own experiments with consciousness, going as far as I felt comfortable on the outskirts of Mind and Reality. This experimentation lasted about six years. By the time I was 22 I just didn’t have the emotional strength and intellectual stomach to run around on the frontier of psychology anymore.

That said, I’ve never stopped thinking about and questioning the mysteries of the cosmic egg and the human spirit. Through most of those days of exploration and then for several decades after, I took the route that a lot of folks do with this stuff. I wanted to know what the underlying mechanisms were. I wanted to know the chemistry of altered states and the physics of energy flows and the cosmological explanations for things like precognition, remote viewing, and ESP. I tried reading books like Jung’s SYNCHRONICITY and the McKenna brothers’ INVISIBLE LANDSCAPES and followed neuroscience and psychology closely (at least as close as a layperson can).

But around the time my first son was born, and then extending out through raising him along with his two younger brothers, I came to the conclusion that understanding the science and math behind the power of the mind is a fool’s game. For some folks, perhaps, it is necessary to get at what is really going on during, for instance, an explosive DMT encounter, or with someone who can communicate with the dead. But for me, the real power of the mind comes from the mysteries that it can behold…just simply behold.

Some people seek profound transformative connections with the cosmos (or God…or whatever). Some understand so much more than I ever will because they practice meditation regularly. Some folks seek that all elusive thing called Enlightenment. And, I dare say, mathematicians, physicists, and neuroscientists may one day chart the full scientific logic of every altered state and mind power we have cataloged. I wrote about that recently HERE.

For me, though, there is a real and astounding magic that can be discovered in so many different aspects of just living on the earth. It is clear to me that the power and magic of the mysteries of life is that they will never be understood adequately. Reason and faith both seem to miss the point.

Encountering the mystery of life not just in the ecstatic or profound moment but in the quiet moments and the hidden corners of my little world is often dumbfoundingly satisfying. As a fiction writer, artistically and poetically, my stories are always about some mystery — whether a middle-aged man is wondering about his sanity or a woman is struggling with enjoying her sense of loneliness. Sometimes the question is bigger, like what are the implications of telepathy, or if the psychedelic experience is real, how is that related to the idea of a higher consciousness?

I’m intrigued most in life by the conundrum of romance. Related to that, I am fascinated with the strangeness of love that dies. I’m also amazed at how hard it is for people to get along and to be rational when it’s so obvious that not getting along and being irrational makes life dangerous and stressful.

Writing about these things, letting my mind wander into regions that are hard to get at, playing with words to create fiction about human realities that we have no language to understand, somehow there is an aesthetic process that goes deeper than intelligence. Writing takes the author and the reader into a realm where both art and emotion have tremendous possibility.

The greatest mysteries, of course, are: the question of God; what happens when we die; and how is it this physical existence actually came to be? Those three mysteries can make you crazy if you try to be rational about them. Thankfully, they will always be impossible for science to grapple with. They should, in fact, make us all humble. Very, very humble. They should shine a light on how limited we really are (even those who are supposedly Enlightened!). But that’s a good mystery too — how is it that so few of us are humbled by such profound questions until it is too late?

It is oddly satisfying to be at peace with these big questions. It is also strange to realize that the power of the mind becomes virtually infinite when you stop groping for answers and just let the beauty of the puzzle of life be what it’s supposed to be — the mind at play, beholding the mysteries, and giving your love to the world.

[Written under the influence of an endless stream of songs by Beach House and Frou Frou]

Indie Book Sites: Helping Readers and Writers

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment
Photo Source: A Knife and a Quill homepage

In the past 10 days two online indie book websites have featured my novel, Beyond the Will of God. On Sunday, July 8, Indies Unlimited provided a Sneak Peak both at their website and on their FaceBook page. Today, A Knife and A Quill is featuring BWG. I am grateful to Kat Brooks at Indies Unlimited and Luis Vera of A Knife and A Quill for the quick work and turnaround time. 

When both of these features were run, I dutifully posted information to FaceBook, Google+, and Tweeted proudly. I write today because I’ve received a number of responses from people who were surprised at the information offered about Indie Work at these two sites. These responses made me realize that a lot of folks are still not clued in to the Indie options out there. Www.indiesunlimited.com/ and aknifeandaquill.wordpress.com/ are two of several dozen quality information sites for readers and writers both.

I’m going to post a list of my favorites below, just so people know about ’em.

The Indie vista is becoming a bit cluttered these days if you check out Kindle Store, Smashwords, iBooks or any number of other amalgamated independent book sites. Special indie book websites are one way of getting direction about what is worth checking out and where the deals are (many of these sites have postings on “Free Books” that indie authors offer).

What’s most clear to me these days is that the standard approach to book buying used to be a sort of passive “maybe I’ll go to the bookstore on Saturday morning”approach to things. The new digital world of books, coupled with the demise of Borders and other big box stores, means that readers need to be a bit more active. You now have the option to say to yourself, “maybe I’ll sit in my bathrobe with a second cup of coffee after reading the paper on Saturday morning and check out some books online.” You may be sitting on your ass before taking a shower, but you’re actually required to be more active than when you used to just saunter into Borders or Barnes & Noble letting their table and shelf displays catch your eye.

When you add the Indie concept into this equation, it gets even more complicated. That’s what these independent book sites are all about. And that’s why you want to know about them. You can spend $12.99 on a new bestseller, or you can spend $2.99 on a first novel by an independent author. In either case it’s a crap shoot. Indie sites help with that … and help you save money.

The other thing I want people to know about is book bloggers. If you’re looking for great Indie and non-Indie e-books, there are now literally hundreds of “super readers” out there who run blogs reviewing the books that they’ve read. I’m going to save that info for another day. For now, check out the brief list below. If you want more, I’m sure by now you know how to use Google. 
More in few days on book bloggers and other review platforms. Remember, too, there are probably two or three dozen undiscovered Fifty Shades of Grey out there. You just need to find ’em.

And, for what it’s worth, remember that Beyond the Will of God is waiting for you to buy it and read it. You can get it as a paperback or as a Kindle e-book.

Small Molecules in Chemical Space: we don’t know the half of it…

~ David Biddle ~ 1 Comment
 www.catenane.net/home/naturepaper2009december.html

Growing up in the 1960s, I watched my mother take handfuls of Thorazine, phenobarbital, and God knows what else, every morning after her first cup of coffee. She’d already been through electro-shock treatment and spent time in psychiatric facilities. Later in life they got her on the old psycho-salt diet treating her mental illness with lithium. The funny thing here is that near her death several years ago we talked about how they’d never diagnosed what was wrong with her definitively. Was she schizophrenic? Bi-Polar? Manic? Dissociative? Something else? She said sometimes it seemed like the drugs were what caused her illness after her first breakdown in the early ’60s.

The medicines my mom took kept her functional more or less for most of her adult life. She was once a brilliant sociologist with feisty political energy and a penchant for picking fights with people about women’s rights and taking care of the poor. By the time she was in her late 60s, though, the drugs she’d been taking pretty much destroyed her ability to interact with others. She spent the last decade of her life shut in a studio apartment in Section 8 housing watching NBC television shows and smoking three packs of cigarettes a day.

I wish there’d been a better way. I wish the pharmacological world of the near future could have been there for her in the early 1960s when the shit hit the fan in her world. She was a great and funny woman. But she had to deal with psychological and emotional imbalances that at times were devastating and other times just stultifying and limiting.

fMRI
We now have the ability to move with purpose on so many fronts of the human mind. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows neuroscientists and psychologists to map the human mind by tracking blood oxygen flows in the brain. Developments continue in this field allowing scientists to refine imaging in both time and space so that they can understand how the brain reacts to various drugs — both current and experimental.

In essence, as fMRI technology progresses, it appears that we have for the first time in history diagnostic and research tools that allow scientists to map the mind in all sorts of different states. In theory, as technology continues to develop, this mapping capacity should refine to highly defined levels of both time and space.

As noted in a post earlier this week, research is already being done using fMRI as a tool to understand religious and psychedelic drug effects on the brain.

What’s a novemdecillion?
David Jay Brown published an interesting report on advances in psycho-pharmaceutical drugs a few weeks ago that I found very encouraging. His article is called “Psychedelic Medicines of the Future,” with the sub-title “more undiscovered drugs than stars in the sky.” The link to this piece by Brown can be found at the end of this entry. As always, he provides important insights on the interface between science and mind.

Brown references a paper written by chemists for the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) journal Chemical Neuroscience reporting that “scientists have synthesized barely one tenth of 1 percent of the potential drugs that could be made.” The emphasis by the authors of the paper is on “small molecule” medicines that can essentially cross cell walls. These small molecules can now be engineered by advanced computer applications. Our ability to manipulate chemical structures is diving deeper and deeper into the microscopic world of chemistry and the combinatorial capacity to literally manufacture new molecules.

According to a press release from the ACS journal, the paper estimates that the actual number of these so-called “small molecules” could be “1 novemdecillion (that’s 1 with 60 zeroes), 1 million billion billion billion billion billion billion, which is more than some estimates of the number of stars in the universe.” That’s a very big number — more than some estimates of the number of stars in the universe!

The paper’s authors, Jean-Louis Reymond and Mahendra Awale, write in their abstract that “Small molecule drugs exert their action by binding to specific molecular constituents of the cell such as to modulate biochemical processes in a disease modifying manner. The magnitude and specificity of binding depends on the complementarity between the drug molecule and its target in terms of shape, polarity, and chemical functionality.” Small molecules aren’t that new. They are, in fact, typical of most medicines. What’s new, though, is the vista of opportunity. We like to think that science has a handle on pretty much everything (us non-scientists think this, anyway). However, a novemdecillion is kind of a big number. We have barely begun to scratch the surface.

When you couple the research advances that fMRI technologies offer with these future “small molecules,” it’s clear that psychologists and psychiatrists should now be thinking very big in solving the problem of mental illness. Perhaps they would have been able to use computerized imaging to clearly characterize my mother’s illness, while a pharmaceutical company could have engineered the correct recipe to truly compensate for that illness.

Take this all one step further. As a culture we have an extreme prejudice against performance enhancing drugs in today’s sports world. But over the next 50 years it’s very likely chemists are going to invent nano-tech type amplifiers that increase, for example, auditory perception for musicians. Or, perhaps, we’ll have special memory retention drugs for learning situations.

As Brown writes in his piece: “Perhaps even drugs that improve extrasensory perception, psychic abilities, or facilitate mystical experiences or spiritual transformations, could all be developed with more specificity and efficacy over time.” Do we draw a line with this stuff? Do we put on our “old-school” blinders and say if it’s not natural then it’s not good? Curing cancer and mental illness are one thing, but what about turning up the notch of human potential? What if we could engineer ESP drugs or boost precognitive perception?

R&D, Baby!
All of these developments point to the need for increased investment in psycho-pharmaceutical research and development. New technologies and computer applications will certainly come out of the private sector. But public R&D is also going to be essential if we’re really going to boost the potential of the human mind. Reymond and Awale point to a novemdecillion new drugs to deal with all human health. What portion of that new chemistry actually involves the domain of the mind is anyone’s guess. After a century of emphasis by the medical establishment on keeping people alive, the benefits of more focus on the mind is all too obvious.

Just as scientists and psychologists need to have vision, it is time for the rest of us to have vision as well and to pay attention to the full potential of human beings. The implications are profound. If we shut ourselves off from this, if we limit our full understanding of the power of science to enhance the mind and the nervous system, don’t we defeat the purpose of being human?

My biggest challenge growing up was watching my mom struggle. But the challenge wasn’t just her struggle with mental illness, it was her inability to envision getting better. It’s understandable. In those days medical science was all about telling her she had to cope with her illness, that it was inevitable. But they couldn’t even really tell her what her illness was.

Things are changing now. We’ve cracked DNA codes, we understand the Genome. We’re learning how to chart the mind, and we can synthesize drugs and chemicals like never before. It’s no longer about coping, it seems to me. It’s about using our creativity, and thinking into the future — envisioning and evolving out of our limits. If only they had a drug for that kind of thinking! I don’t think I need it, but without doubt there’s some folks in Washington who do.

*

My thanks to David Jay Brown for inspring this commentary piece. His Catch the Buzz article, “Psychedelic Medicines of the Future,” may be found HERE. Follow the links in his article for original source material from the Chemical Neuroscience paper. 

A New Lift: Re-Opening the Investigation of Consciousness

~ David Biddle ~ 3 Comments

Can you feel it? There’s some lift going on again. The doors are open. So are the windows. And we’re starting to move. We’re not flying yet, but we’re certainly not tethered to asphalt anymore, either.

The potential of the human mind is now a big deal again, and it’s getting to be a bigger and bigger deal if you’re paying attention. That lift you should have noticed by now is a surge in rising awareness about the powers of the human mind. I find it interesting that my novel, Beyond the Will of God, so much about the validity and mystery of these powers, was ready for publication in 2000 but didn’t make it to the light of day until this summer…makes total sense, though. Twelve years ago few people wouldn’t have gotten it at all.

Let me explain as briefly as I can. A whole bunch of stuff is coalescing out there causing this lift.

First, over the past several decades diagnostic tools for mapping the chemistry of the human mind have advanced dramatically. Something called “functional magnetic resonance imaging”(fMRI) basically gives neuroscientists the ability to track blood flow on a fairly detailed level in the human brain and spinal column. And other computer-based diagnostic tools are on the horizon as well.

These tools mean scientists are now able to see how the brain reacts to anything from reading a book, to laughing at a joke, saying something nice to someone, meditating, or taking any number of psychoactive drugs. Two of the more “famous” neuroscientists to report back on their research are Andrew Newberg and David Eagleman. These guys, and so many more, are looking at what happens to the brain during meditation, near death experiences, religious ecstasy, psychedelic excursions, and memory and perception events. 

This isn’t just science in a bubble or test tube. Neuroscientists and psychologists are now able for the first time to get a read on thoughts and emotions. There are people attempting to connect minds to computer graphics programs that can draw images from dreams and visions. If you pay attention to the details of newspaper accounts and magazine stories about the mind you will bump into fMRI research more and more. Scientists don’t know what a lot of the mapping means yet, but they’ve only just begun to get a real handle on consciousness. 
The world of mind altering drugs, then, is partly being opened up by fMRI research. At the same time, over the past decade or so the “moratorium” on study and clinical use of psychedelic compounds has finally been lifted. While most Americans were “re-educated” about the question of psychedelic drugs beginning in the late 1960s, prior to that the psychiatric and psychology community did ground-breaking research on how to use these drugs to treat everything from mental illness and alcoholism to PTSD and other forms of psychological trauma. 
As David Jay Brown reports in “LSD & ESP: Scientists Study Psychic Phenomena and Psychedelic Drugs”, LSD research is now back in a big way and it’s providing scientists at quite prestigious universities with truly exciting discoveries about the open-ended powers of human consciousness. Brown has a new book coming out in the spring of 2013 called The New Science of Psychedelics. That will create more lift for sure.
Perhaps the biggest and most profound cultural awakening of the past decade, though, is in the expansion of interest — for scientists, artists, and knowledgable citizens alike — in dimethyltryptamine (DMT). Long considered one of the ultimate mind altering substances, smoking DMT creates what apparently amounts to a 15-minute interplanetary adventure that usually changes peoples’ lives forever. Check this out if you think I’m full of shit.

You may have heard of ayahuasca ceremonies in South America. Ayahuasca is a plant-based infusion that was ceremonially consumed by some South American tribes for thousands of years. Since the mid-20th century when people like William Burroughs and, later, Terence McKenna sought out these tribes, there has been a steady growth in interest in these ceremonies. Competing “tour” groups now make it possible for anyone to experience this deep altered state.

The DMT experience is said to be profound. One of the important things about this new lift I’m talking about is that, for the most part, participants and practitioners are not being so reckless and recreational in their approach to transforming their minds. Most people recognize that psychedelics were never about “getting fucked up.” Back in the ’60s and ’70s we were rather stupid and innocent at the same time. We understood what we were dealing with, but we still made huge mistakes — mostly because this stuff went underground and became part of a rebellious counterculture.

I did my mental adventures partly as a way to separate myself from everyone I knew in high school, but also because I knew there was something I needed to figure out. There was no supervision. No understanding of the idea of the right time and place. My friends and I were on our own. I wish we’d had even just a small amount of guidance. I might not have rolled up to the edge of insanity for five years…(that’s another story altogether).

Perhaps the most interesting cultural artifact out there right now that is openly talking about the possibilities of DMT, and psychedelic experience in general, is the dual book and documentary film, DMT: The Spirit Molecule. The book, with the subtitle “A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research Into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences” was written by Dr. Richard Strassman. It is a detailed account of DMT research he performed on 400 subjects from 1990 to 1995. The film, inspired by the book and directed by Mitch Schultz, was released in 2010. I purchased it for my iPad. It’s rather amazing and well worth the investment. As I understand it, Mr. Schultz is touring the country on invitation presenting his film and discussing the implications of DMT here in the 21st Century. The book and movie combined are probably the biggest source of lift out there right now.

The implications of this lift I’m talking about are pretty incredible. They will be the topic of conversation at a conference called Psychedemia for four days in Philadelphia this fall (September 27 -30) at the University of Pennsylvania.

But this is a meeting of the minds that is only the latest element of lift going on. For the past decade research has quietly been implemented seeking to understand the relationship between religious/spiritual consciousness and psychedelic consciousness. There are quite interesting parallels. In addition, psilocybin (an active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) has been used to treat anxiety and depression for terminally ill people. Read here and here to find out what this is all about. It’s pretty important.

A lot of us (I’m 54) are getting close to the end of our biological potency. You can’t stay on earth if you aren’t biologically potent. It’s not practical. Are you scared of dying? Are you, maybe — even if you think you’re religious and spiritual — just a little bit concerned about the end of things?

It’s truly criminal that we abandoned research into this area back in the early 1970s. It’s also sad that our culture got so confused by the potential of mind expansion. There were “forces” at work, of course. We all know that. But the truth is that somehow mind experimentation got linked to intoxication problems. We lost about 40 years of time. But its not too late. The human race has at least another thousand years before it starts to wipe itself out (my rough estimate). There’s still time to make me wrong.

So pay attention to this lift I’m talking about. It’s real. We’re all in this together. This really ain’t no hippie thing. It never was. It’s just that the hippies were the only ones really hip back in the good old days.

Now we’re all hip. Trust me. I’ve been watching. We all have creative intelligence and we’re all connected now (although I’m the only person in my family who doesn’t have an iPhone). I wrote Beyond the Will of God as a piece of fiction — a mystery, if you will. But I also knew the whole time I was concocting my weird little story that I was creating an allegory and using the mythology of that amazing time that began about 50 years ago to help open the doors and windows again…and to make a small contribution to lightening the load of being alive in a seemingly mundane world.

Now we got lift! It’s very real, and very soon it’s going to become a movement (or at least a trend). Just watch. Pay attention. Don’t hang up. Just breathe. We’re all here, together, now. There’s no telling how far we’re going, but we’re going.

What is it Jimi Hendrix advised? “Just float your little mind around…”. He knew a thing or two about lift. So do you I bet.

A Free Sample Short Story from IMPLOSIONS OF AMERICA

~ David Biddle ~ Leave a comment

Uph! Ya’ missed it. The story, “So Beautiful,” self-destructed at 10:37 PM, July 9, 2012. 



You can find “So Beautiful” again in the story collection Implosions of America, due out in September and available in both Kindle and paperback editions. Check back here for another free story next month. 


Don’t forget to buy the Kindle edition of my novel Beyond the Will of God. It’s still a steal at only $2.99. Just go to the top of the page and click on the cover of the book. Check out Trying to Care as well, and my short singles, too.