Michael Prescott's Blog

Tolle and toil

For some time I've been interested in mindfulness meditation, particularly as espoused by Eckhart Tolle. One thing I've discovered is that, for me, it's much easier to get into and maintain this state of mind if I'm doing something goal-oriented. In other words, when sitting and meditating, or even when taking a leisurely walk, I'm apt to let my mind wander, and soon the distracting thoughts start crowding in. But if I'm actively engaged in a project, I can stay in the meditative state for a much longer time, and the positive effects last longer afterward.

The best activity I've found is cleaning house. Any sort of cleaning - whether dusting, mopping up, or organizing items in my closet - seems to work. Ordinarily I hate cleaning, but using it as an opportunity to meditate makes it much more enjoyable. As a a bonus, I find that in the "mindful" state I'm more aware of what needs to be done and I'm more efficient in doing it.

So if you've had trouble learning Tolle's techniques, try picking up a wet rag! It works for me.  

Papa, don't preach

When I first became interested in psi phenomena, I went through a period of trying to convince other people that there was good evidence for many paranormal claims. But after a year or two of fruitless and sometimes acrimonious debate, I realized that most folks are not open to persuasion on this topic, and that arguing with them only makes them dig in their heels -- a natural reaction.

It took me quite a while longer to learn something more important -- that it is not only impossible but actually undesirable to "convert" others.

I'm not talking about an exchange of views with someone who is looking for a new, more spiritual path. I'm talking about trying to change someone's worldview when he is perfectly content with the outlook he already has (as most skeptics and materialists presumably are). If someone has a worldview that works for him -- a basic outlook on life that makes him happy and intellectually satisfied -- then it is probably the right worldview for that person. After all, people tend to develop and hold on to the worldview that best suits their temperament, values, priorities, and needs.

And if a given individual has a worldview that works for him, who am I to challenge it? Who am I to claim that I know what he needs, and that he doesn't? Isn't it far more likely that he has a better grasp (consciously or not) of his own needs and interests?

Moreover, a worldview is more than just another intellectual position that can be modified or discarded at will. It is an essential part of most people's sense of self. Ask the average person to define himself in terms of fundamentals, and he will very quickly start talking about what he believes -- how the world works, what is true and false, right and wrong, good and evil. These basic beliefs are incorporated into a person's identity at a deep level. To challenge them is to challenge his very personhood -- his sense of who he is and what he's all about.

Such a challenge will almost certainly be perceived as hostile. More important, such a challenge all too often really is hostile. Though it may be rationalized as "loving" or "helpful," a frontal assault on another person's selfhood is almost always an aggressive (or passive-aggressive) act. It's a way of saying, There's something fundamentally wrong with you, and I can fix it.*

Hard as it may be for us to accept if we are of a more "spiritual" bent, materialists like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are not wrong in holding to a worldview that works for them -- an outlook that organizes and structures their thinking, grounds their values, informs their intellectual work, and defines them as persons. They are wrong only in believing that everyone else "ought to" see things as they do.

But let's not judge them too harshly. Who among us hasn't made exactly the same mistake?

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*A patient in therapy may need to be confronted with a direct challenge to his assumptions. But this is a special case, and requires the skills of a trained therapist.

On hiatus

A few people have emailed me to ask about my blogging hiatus. So - although it violates the spirit of a hiatus to post a blog entry about it - let me clarify the situation.

First, I shut down the comments thread for my last post because, as more than one reader correctly pointed out, the argument was becoming too heated on all sides. Tempers (including mine) were fraying. It was best to take a time-out.

I closed the other threads because I figured that if they stayed open, the argument would simply migrate over there. Plus, those conversations were mostly played out anyway.

For the same reason, comments are closed on this entry. I don't want the argument to start up again.

As I said on the other thread, I'm a little burned out on blogging right now. It gets tiresome to produce a post every couple of days, and to participate in the threads on a daily basis. I need a vacation. With Memorial Day weekend coming up, what better time could there be?

I also want to say something about politics. Some people have the impression that I am a wildly partisan Republican. I can understand this impression, but I think it is mistaken. If you go back and comb through the posts on this blog, you'll see that I was sharply critical of President Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina and that I dismissed his plan for partial privatization of Social Security as too risky. Long before the Surge, I complained that the occupation of Iraq was going badly and that a new strategy was needed. I have said that some form of universal health insurance is necessary in America, and that our economic system will inevitably move closer to the social democratic model of most European countries. I've also said, quite recently, that Hillary Clinton would be a kick-ass veep for John McCain. I don't think these are wildly partisan positions.

On the other hand, I am very much opposed to the probable Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, mainly because of his twenty-year political and personal alliance with the odious Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but also because he strikes me, on the basis of his thin resume and shallow grasp of international affairs, as supremely unqualified for the presidency. I am also turned off by the strangely messianic tone of his candidacy and the near-hysterical fervor of his followers. If Hillary Clinton or Bill Richardson or Joe Biden or even Chris Dodd were the nominee, I wouldn't feel the same way.

Anyway, that's just my opinion. I may be wrong. I have been wrong before, believe it or not. I supported Jimmy Carter in 1976, and he turned out to be probably the worst president of the 20th century. (People who passionately hate George W. Bush should be reminded that he is a president of the 21st century.) I opposed Bill Clinton in 1992, and he turned out to be a reasonably good president, policywise, though his ethical standards left a bit to be desired. Maybe Obama will surprise me and govern well if he wins, but I would prefer not to take the chance. There is too much at stake.

Enjoy the long weekend!

A map of the world

Here is a very simple model I've been thinking about in an attempt to conceptualize different orders of consciousness. (Click image to enlarge.) The diagram is, of course, very crude, though it looked a little better before TypePad made me convert it to a JPEG file.

The large silver oval represents Cosmic Consciousness, a.k.a. the Ground of Being or the Mind of God. Every other level of consciousness exists within Cosmic Consciousness, and Cosmic Consciousness provides a shared environment in which these lower-level consciousnesses can function and interact.

Within the silver oval of Cosmic Consciousness, we find a blue circle labeled Personal Self. This is the totality of our own personal, individual identity, including (A) the mind limited by the restrictions of the physical brain and nervous system, (B) the unconscious, and (C) any past-life identities that may be accessible. (These could have been depicted as part of the unconscious, but some children, at least, seem to have conscious recall of these past lives. Adults seem to require hypnotic regression or some other alteration of normal consciousness to access the memories.) Only three past-life identities have been indicated, but of course the actual number could be much greater.

The unconscious is drawn as intersecting with the mind/brain because the mind/brain draws on the unconscious for inspiration. The unconscious occupies the boundary between the Personal Self and the surrounding environment of Cosmic Consciousness, in as much as there seems to be some exchange of information between the two. Pyschic impressions, premonitions, Jungian archetypes, etc. seem to bubble up from our unconscious; presumably their source is Cosmic Consciousness itself, or other minds operating in the matrix of Cosmic Consciousness.

At the top of the Personal Self, also at the boundary of Cosmic Consciousness, there is the Higher Self, a.k.a. the "Being of Light" (D). People who undergo peak experiences of a mystical nature, including people who experience full-fledged NDEs, apparently encounter this Higher Self directly. Although they may call it God (and sometime visualize it in terms of a particular deity, like Jesus), the Higher Self they encounter seems to be an expanded version of their own consciousness. It is in touch with Cosmic Consciousness but (at least in my model) distinguishable from it. The Higher Self or Being of Light typically introduces the "life review" in NDEs and functions as a wise, compassionate, attentive witness to the review, often reinforcing the lessons that need to be learned.

Elsewhere inside the silver oval of Cosmic Consciousness, we have other Personal Selves (E). These are the Selves of other people or any other conscious beings. Presumably there are billions of these, but the drawing represents them with only three blue circles. They are, of course, no less important than the Personal Self represented in the center of the diagram, and are drawn much smaller only to simplify the diagram and save space.

If this model were rendered in 3D, perhaps the Personal Self and the past-life identities would be depicted as separate circles all connected  by lines, like those ball-and-stick models of molecules, to suggest that the so-called "past lives" actually exist simultaneously with the so-called present life in a timeless reality. As it is, the drawing represents a snapshot in time.

There's nothing really new here, but sometimes visualizing an idea can make it a little clearer and point up areas where it needs to be rethought.

Two cheers for the ego!

With all my focus on the problems caused by an overemphasis on the ego, sometimes I lose sight of the fact that the ego is a healthy and necessary stage of personal development. In fact, we need an ego if we're going to avoid becoming doormats in life. Perhaps some phenomenally advanced souls can tolerate being walked all over, but for the rest of us, the ability to stand up for ourselves when appropriate is essential. And if the Gospels are to be trusted, even Jesus placed a limit on how much crap he was will willing to take!

With that mind, I went Web surfing for information on assertiveness, and found this page, which includes, among other things, a list of the "ten assertive rights of an individual." Some of these rights are predictable enough, but others struck me as a little surprising. For instance:

Assertive Right  #2: I have the right to offer neither reason nor excuse to justify my behavior.

That's kind of interesting, don't you think? How many times are we called on to justify some opinion or action, not because the questioner genuinely wants more information, but because he or she is trying to intimidate us into backing down? 

The truth is that many of the things we say and do are hard to "justify" in strictly logical terms. I would rather watch a Ray Harryhausen movie than an Ingmar Bergman flick, but I can't say I could justify this preference through ratiocination. Any justification I came up with would probably be more of an excuse - a pretext  or a rationalization - than a valid reason. But why do I need a reason? What right does anyone have to demand a reason?

This ties in with another item on the list:

Assertive Right  #8: I have the right to be illogical in making decisions.

Refreshing, no? The Web page goes on to explain:

I sometimes employ logic as a reasoning process to assist me in making judgments. However, logic cannot predict what will happen in every situation. Logic is not much help in dealing with wants, motivations, and feelings. Logic generally deals with ''black or white,'' ''all or none,'' and ''yes or no'' issues. Logic and reasoning don't always work well when dealing with the gray areas of the human condition.

Hard to argue with that, though no doubt some bullying rationalistic types would try.

How about this next one? In an age when we are bombarded with demands for our attention and alerted to one "crisis" after another, here's an invigorating thought:

Assertive Right  #10: I have the right to say, ``I don't care.''

Do ya hear that, Save the Children/Whales/Planet? I don't care. I got my own stuff to deal with. Go away and leave me the frack alone. And that goes double for you, Sally Struthers.

There's a lot to be said for being able to stand up for yourself. At the same time, an out-of-control ego can be just as problematic as an underdeveloped one. Marcel Cairo sent me a link to an NPR story on Ayn Rand, which included this comment from a Rand supporter:

[Rand] gives egoists a positive case for why the world should revolve around them and around their efforts. If you are the person who is creating value, if you are the star, the sun really does revolve around you. And not only should it be that way, but that's the moral order of the universe.

Yikes! A philosophy that gives megalomaniacs even more reasons to admire themselves and expect the adulation of others! Just what the world doesn't need. (And what kind of metaphor has the sun revolving around a star, anyway?)

There's a proper balance to be struck here. Probably Aristotle had it right when he talked about the Golden Mean - the middle way between abject submissiveness and overweening arrogance. It's a fine line, sometimes as difficult to walk as a tightrope.

But, hey, no one ever said life was easy. Right?

Update: It turns out that the "Rand supporter" quoted above, Nick Gillespie, is not a Rand fan, after all. This was pointed out to me by Mark in the comments thread. I'm not sure how to interpret Gillespie's remarks - whether he was being sarcastically critical, or whether he does endorse this particular aspect of Rand's thought. Anyway, Rand's philosophy does inculcate this attitude in many of her followers, so I think the basic point is still valid.

The bonfire

Last night, reading some notes I wrote last year, I noticed one in which I jotted down the idea that information can exist only in consciousness - so if information is the essence of the cosmos, then the cosmos must exist in consciousness. In other words, the information "2 + 2 = 4" can exist only in some mind. If the physical universe is organized around information - such as the gravitational coupling constant, the strong nuclear force coupling constant, the weak nuclear force coupling constant, and the electromagnetic coupling constant, among many other relationships - then it seems logically inescapable that the universe exists in consciousness.

Of course, it might be argued that these various constants do not exist as information until they are observed by us. Thus, as information, they exist only in our own minds. But this argument overlooks the fact that these constants are not arbitrary, but rather appear to be very precisely fine-tuned to produce a functioning, stable, complex universe. They are like ground rules laid down with a great deal of care, much like the instructions in a recipe. As such, they really do constitute information, no less than a recipe or a formula or a set of blueprints.

Again, one might quibble that the universe is a product of consciousness, rather than being in consciousness, just as a meal is the product of a recipe or a house is the product of a blueprint. But in this case, I wonder if the distinction is even meaningful. For someone to build a table, the thought of the table must first exist in consciousness. Then the thought is translated into physical form. The resulting table could not have come into existence apart from consciousness, and it only has a function, meaning, and identity within consciousness. So basically, the table is conceived within consciousness and, in its capacity as a table, it exists and functions only within consciousness.

The physical universe seemingly begins as a conception -- a mental conception -- and it has meaning, function, and identity only when viewed from the perspective of consciousness. Without consciousness, then, there could be no universe because there would be no organizing ideas (such as the constants mentioned above) and no purpose (teleology). In Aristotelian terms, there would be no formal cause and no final cause.

The long and short of it is that it doesn't matter very much if the universe is seen as pure Idea or as the manifestation or implementation of Idea in physical terms. The distinction is largely academic, although it is the issue at the heart of the debate between idealism and dualism. Either way, the universe begins with and embodies an idea (or set of ideas), and can be understood and appreciated only in terms of that idea(s). What matters is that Idea as such logically precedes the universe, and consciousness logically precedes (or at least it is coeval with) Idea.

At this point, the million-dollar question becomes: What is the relationship between this cosmic consciousness and our own? Are they one and the same? Or are our own minds a small offshoot of a larger whole? Or is there no connection at all, and do we merely flatter ourselves in imagining that there is?

I don't pretend to really know, but consider the following image as one possible illustration. Picture a blazing bonfire lighting a dark night. A procession of people pass by, each one holding a candle to the bonfire and tapping its flame. Each candle now burns with a light of its own, a much dimmer light, of which the bonfire is the ultimate source.

Cosmic consciousness is the bonfire that illuminates the physical world. Each individual consciousness is a candle lit from that bonfire, tapping that flame.

A possible weakness of this image is that it seems to suggest that the bonfire and the candles are separate from each other, when mystics and others who have pondered these matters deeply will tell us that all consciousness is ultimately connected or even indivisible. But this difficulty may be more apparent than real.

Here it may be relevant to glance at the "problem of universals" (perhaps more accurately characterized as the "problem of properties"). This old philosophical conundrum asks whether the same property observed in two different places is really the same thing or two different things. For instance, if we observe the property of whiteness in a picket fence and in a sheet of typing paper, is the whiteness the same in each case, or different? It is possible to argue that the property is always the same. In this particular case, we could argue that the fire of the candle is logically indistinguishable from the fire of the bonfire. They are actually the same fire, merely observed in two different places (or in two different respects).

As a side note, the quantum physicists' idea of non-locality may be useful in suggesting how two properties can actually be one and the same, even when apparently separated by space; in a non-local universe, space and separation are an illusion (or at least they are not an aspect of fundamental reality).

We could say, then, that the property (or quality) of consciousness is always the same, and that its apparent dispersal among many separate entities is no more real than the apparent dispersal of whiteness among the various entities possessing that property.

So what are we left with? The universe is organized around information; information exists only within consciousness; so the universe is logically dependent on consciousness to exist. Our own consciousness may be thought of as a small flame lit from a larger fire, but just as the property of fire is the same in all cases, so the property of consciousness is always and everywhere the same.

The tree

My last post has inspired many interesting and helpful comments, one of which spurred me to a burst of poetic eloquence. I like it, so I'm putting it up as a separate blog entry. Be warned that, because of a sinus infection, I am currently taking prescription cough medicine laced with codeine; thus, what follows may be only the ravings of a fatigued and drug-addled brain.

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My best guess - which is only a guess - is that Mind does give rise to the physical cosmos, and that in some mysterious way our own individual minds are minuscule offshoots of this larger Mind.

Here's an image: There is a tree deeply rooted in good soil, with a profusion of leaves on its branches. Soil, roots, trunk, branches, and leaves are all one system, and when the leaves drop off they will return to the soil as nutrients. The soil is Universal Consciousness, the ground of being. The roots the means of translating the soil's stored energy into the form of a growing tree (i.e., translating Mind into physicality). The tree trunk and branches are the physical world. The leaves are our own individual consciousnesses, separate from each other, but grouped together, and fed by the same root system that supports the whole tree. And our ultimate fate is to drop from the branch, lose our form, rejoin the soil, and merge with the ground of being.

The trouble with idealism

I sort of want to be an idealist. Philosophically speaking, that is. I certainly don't want to be a materialist, and idealism is the main alternative to materialism (though dualism and neutral monism are other options).

The problem I have with idealism, though, is that it doesn't quite make sense to me. It doesn't quite click into place. According to idealism, consciousness creates the world. All the physical things around us, even our own bodies, are actually manifestations of consciousness.

This means, of course, that our brains are created by consciousness. After all, brains are part of the physical world, and idealism ascribes all of the physical world to consciousness.

But here's the rub. Clearly our own particular consciousness is tied to our own particular brain in very obvious ways. We see only through our own eyes, smell only through our own noses. We cannot see what someone in China is seeing, and he can't see what we see.

Our brains, then, seem to constrain our consciousness. They provide sharp limits to what we can know and perceive. These limits may not be absolute; remote viewers apparently can see places that their physical eyes have not gazed on; but such exceptions are rare and still controversial. For most of us, most of the time, our consciousness functions in lockstep with our brain.

But if the brain is only an illusion created by consciousness, then how can this be?

How can a mere appearance (the brain) constrain a fundamental reality (consciousness)? How can an object within consciousness constrain and delimit consciousness itself?

If this is too abstract, consider a slightly more "scientific" version of this idea. Karl Pribram and David Bohm developed the theory that the physical world is a holographic illusion projected out of a substrate of wave patterns. Only the wave patterns are real; everything else is appearance, a mere image. What projects this complex illusion? What makes wave patterns look like tables and chairs and palm trees and Sno-Cones? Well, it's the brain, we're told. The brain is the projector that transforms the wave-pattern substrate into the illusion of physical reality.

But wait. The brain is itself a physical object - which means, according to the theory, that it's a holographic illusion. So do we have one holographic illusion (the brain) projecting the rest of reality as a holographic illusion?

In actual holography, the image may be unreal (in the sense that it is only the appearance of the object portrayed), but the projecting beam of laser light that reconstructs the image is quite real. But in the holographic brain theory, we seem to have unreal brains producing (how?) an equally unreal cosmos.

In either case - whether the purely philosophical argument or the somewhat more scientific argument offered by Pribram and Bohm - there seems to be a fallacy at the heart of the story. Essentially, it's circular reasoning (or begging the question). There doesn't seem to be any place to start, which means there is no solid ground to stand on. Or at least that's how it's always seemed to me.

Any thoughts?

The sliding scale

Here's something I'm just noodling on. I don't know if it has any validity. Much of what follows isn't very polished - it's just a slightly cleaned up version of some notes I scribbled to myself. As such, it's repetitious and disorganized. But maybe it will strike a chord with someone.

I was thinking about a series of séances in which Victor Hugo participated while he was exiled on the Isle of Jersey. The subject came up because I'm in the middle of reading a very interesting book about these séances, Victor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World, by John Chambers. Despite the title, the book does not insist that these communications really came from spirits. They may have been mental projections of the sitters, especially of Hugo himself. Little evidential material was obtained, and when tests were applied, the spirits usually failed. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that the séances were the result of conscious fraud. They continued over two years, during which time a variety of people handled the planchette (a precursor of the Ouija board), obtaining many messages. No money was involved, and only friends and family participated.

The séances, then, seem to have been on the up-and-up ... but how to account for the bizarre messages that came through, many of them from historical figures liker Hannibal and Shakespeare, or from entities calling themselves "Death" or "Civilization"? Was it all some kind of psychic projection on the part of the sitters? Were real spirits involved sporadically? Mischievous entities? How to make sense of all this?

Musing on this question, I found myself thinking of some excerpts I'd just read from the book Consciousness Is All, by Peter Francis Dziuban. It occurred to me that the problem might be easier to address if I adopted, at least provisionally, the idea that consciousness is the ground of being - that ultimately there is only one consciousness, and that everything that is specific and individual, whether trees and houses and mountains or thoughts and personalities, is ultimately an expression or manifestation of this great consciousness.

Now, in this case, hard-and-fast distinctions perhaps become more difficult to maintain. After all, the ultimate hard-and-fast distinction is that between consciousness and external reality. But if there is no clearcut line of demarcation between consciousness and external reality - if external reality emerges from consciousness - then not only is that fundamental distinction blurred, but many other distinctions may be blurred, as well.

The idea that ultimately there is only one consciousness may get some support from science. According to most interpretations of quantum physics, the observer affects the quantum phenomenon that is observed. But no two observers of the same event ever get different results; their observations always agree. Why is this? Perhaps the simplest explanation is that, in reality, there are not two observers, but only one. One consciousness, one observation, and therefore no possibility of disagreement.

In other words, if there is only one consciousness, then its division into separate minds is an illusion - or at least not the final truth.

Getting back to the séances, perhaps we can say that if there is only one consciousness, then Hugo and the spirits are all one. The spirits can be real or can be projections of Hugo's own mind - it makes no difference, or at most it makes only a superficial difference, of secondary importance.

To put it another way, suppose there is a vast field of consciousness that can produce innumerable varieties of manifestations. We cannot discriminate as finely as we might like among these manifestations. So we mix up real spirits with mental projections, and we mix up objective phenomena with subjective. We are hampered by the belief that hard-and-fast distinctions can be drawn, when the actual nature of reality is more like a sliding scale. We believe in hard-and-fast distinctions because we start with the fundamental hard-and-fast distinction between physical reality and consciousness. All our other discriminations follow this pattern.

If we start by saying "consciousness is all," then we can still draw distinctions, but they are more shaded. Since everything is ultimately one, we expect the lines of discrimination to be blurred. We do not expect hard-and-fast distinctions, but subtle shadings.

Instead of the Aristotelian duality of A or non-A, we have a range of possibilities, a spectrum in which each possible state of being blurs into the next, as colors on the color spectrum blur into one another. It is still possible to discriminate, but the categories cannot be so neat.

So we can say Hugo's spirits are mostly mental projections, while Leonora Piper's "control" George Pelham is mostly real (in the sense of apparently having more of an independent existence), and her later "control" Imperator might be somewhere in between. Imperator is more abstract than Pelham, but more independent than Hugo's spirits. Of course this independence is merely relative. All these entities are ultimately manifestations of the one and only consciousness, as is Hugo himself, and Piper, and all the sitters, and all the rest of us.

Similarly, poltergeists may be mental projections in some cases, spirits in others, and a combination in still others. Ditto for apparitions, which may be telepathically received or seen with the senses, and may be astral shells or memory patterns or actual spirits or mere hallucinations. Ditto again for electronic voice phenomena, which may exist on a continuum ranging from imagination to hallucination to psychic projection to spirit contact.

The key advantage of seeing consciousness as the ground of being is that it frees us from the supposition that absolute, hard-and-fast, black-and-white distinctions are normal and inevitable. It gives us the flexibility to say that different phenomena may overlap, and that there is a sliding scale rather than a sharp division. Dualism invites and requires two-sided, bifurcated thinking. Monism or Idealism allows for subtle shading. A particle can be a  wave. A spirit communication can be, in the same sitting, a genuine message and a case of mental projection.

If "consciousness is all," one would actually expect the sitter or the medium to contribute to the phenomena. After all, there is no clearcut dividing line between the consciousness of the sitter and the consciousness of the medium or of the spirit. There are no clearcut dividing lines, period.

And how about synchronicities? Aren't they simply cases where the dividing line between objective and subjective is more obviously blurred than usual? I think of something, and a moment later it appears in my "external" world. But really it appears in my consciousness, just like the thought itself.

Again, this is not to say no distinctions are possible. We can still distinguish between thoughts and objects, and so forth. But the distinctions are gentle, not severe; relative, not absolute; provisional, not final; there is room for ambiguity.

Perhaps the difficulty we encounter in studying the paranormal lies precisely in our habit of thinking dualistically and thereby missing the fine gradations that take us subtly but inexorably from "objective" to "subjective," from "real" to "unreal." Perhaps the scientific method, which is rooted in Aristotelian logic, is not the best way to approach these phenomena or to establish their legitimacy. Perhaps what is needed is a new way of thinking.

Or perhaps not. I'm not sure!

Don't blog angry

I got very worked up about the Obama-Wright controversy - probably too worked up for my own good. I apologize for overreacting to some of the comments and for persisting in the argument after I should have let it go. Honestly I remain baffled that some people can see Wright's rhetoric as anything but hate speech; any defense of  his more extreme statements is simply incomprehensible to me, like saying the sky is green or fire is cold. But we all have our own mental maps of the world and those maps don't always overlap.

When I thought about why I got so angry, I realized there were two main reasons. The first is that I am a little tired - more than a little, actually - of hearing about the prevalence of white racism in America while black racism, of the sort embodied in James Cone's theology and Jeremiah Wright's diatribes, goes uncondemned. This ridiculous double standard has made it impossible to have an intelligent dialogue. It serves the interests of no one except the demagogues who insist on it.

The second reason is that Wright, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, gave a sermon arguing that America was to blame for it and that we should look to our own failings in order to understand the attacks. Here I think John Edwards was almost right when he said there are two Americas - only, the two Americas are not the rich and the poor, but those who felt personally affected by 9/11 and those who did not. This appears to be largely a question of geography. Those of us who live in the Northeast, and especially those who are fairly close to Ground Zero, simply have a different perspective from some of those who live in other parts of the country.

To people outside the Northeast, 9/11 was an event on television. It was not quite real. It inspired a certain amount of philosophical rumination and water-cooler chatter, but its impact was necessarily limited. For people close to the attacks, 9/11 was not a TV show. My most vivid memory of that day is seeing the debris cloud spreading south along the horizon of the Atlantic as I walked on the beach. I've spoken with two people (separately) who were at the World Trade Center that morning. A local couple lost their son, a firefighter, in the collapse of the towers (he was off duty but rushed to the scene to see if he could help). Another couple, who lived down the street from my parents, were on Flight 93.

And so I simply have no tolerance for any nonsense on this subject. I refuse to give any consideration to 9/11 conspiracy theories of the "Loose Change" variety. I don't take kindly to suggestions that the threat of terrorism is overblown or that we should be more worried about traffic accidents, global warming, or slipping in the shower. And I especially dislike being told that really it was all America's fault - "blowback," as Ron Paul likes to say - or chickens coming home to roost. Not only do I regard this analysis as faulty (because the jihadi movement predates most of the foreign policy moves in question and was inspired by quite different motives, as this book makes clear) but I see it as insulting - the ultimate example of blaming the victim, or I should say victims - the 3000 dead Americans whom one apologist for terrorism likened to "little Eichmanns." (And don't you think Ward Churchill and Jeremiah Wright would get along famously?)

Well, I can feel myself getting pissed off all once again. This is a subject that pushes my buttons. So I'd better stop.

Anyway, from now on I will try to stick to less controversial subjects, like ESP and life after death. At least nobody disagrees about stuff like that.