The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954. As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.
"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper. The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell.
In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people.
"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.
"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."
And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.
Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he told AFP.
is emerging that suggests the tentacles of the brotherhood reach out to many religions and cultures and extend thousands of years into the past, and that its members were once better known as the Friends of Truth, the Builders, the Masters, the People of the Way and numerous other appellations that had been circulating for far longer than the lifetime of Islam. The Friends, it is said, were already present in Medina during Muhammad’s lifetime and adopted the name Sufi after taking an oath of fidelity to the Muslim cause.1
A number of derivations of the word Sufi have been put forward, including Ain Soph, the Kabbalistic term for the unknowable, and Sophos, meaning Wisdom. This is in line with the view held by many students of Sufism who claim that it corresponds with the hidden esoteric wisdom-dimension that underlies all religions. Thus the British Sufi fellow-traveller and author Ernest Scott believes the Sufi tradition has impregnated Western culture to a degree we rarely realise, leading him indeed to call it the Invisible Tradition. Its covert influence, he says, has been strong in Manichaeism and the Cathar faith, in the Troubadour and Jester traditions of medieval Europe, in the evolution of Jewish Kabbalah, in alchemy and in Christianity itself. Scott quotes the Afghan Sufi teacher Idris Shah as saying that “there is evidence that at the deepest levels of Sufi secrecy, there is a mutual communication with the mystics of the Christian West.”2
Over the centuries, the claim has repeatedly been made that Jesus Christ not only walked the earth but also spent his early and post-crucifixion years in a variety of places, including Egypt, India, Great Britain, Japan and America. Indeed, traditions maintain that Jesus, the great godman of the West, lived, learned, loved and died in such places. Popular modern literature also purports that Jesus sired children, who then became the ancestors of various royal families of Europe, including France and/or elsewhere, depending on the author. This allegation is extremely convenient and useful for said European royal families. Unfortunately for the European claimants, however, India also has a tradition that Jesus went there and likewise fathered children. So too does Shingo, Japan, allege that Jesus ended up there after the crucifixion, having children with a Japanese wife. Other tales depict Jesus "walking the Americas" or bopping about Glastonbury, England, with his "uncle," Joseph of Arimathea. Not all of these tales can be true, obviously, unless Jesus is polymorphous and phantasmagoric, a perspective that in reality represents that of the mythologist or mythicist. To wit, regardless of these fables, or, rather, because of them, the most reasonable conclusion regarding Jesus and where he may or may not have been is that he is a mythical character, not a historical personage who trotted the globe.
Psychology Today has a great article that covers the length and breadth of magical thinking - the tendency to see patterns and causality where none exists.
Magical thinking is described in a number of ways. Superstition is the most common, where we assume rituals will somehow affect the future despite having no causal connection to what we want to change.
Apophenia or pareidolia describe the effect where we see meaningful information where none was intended. The Fortean Times has a wonderful collection of photographs that depict 'faces' or other forms in clouds, trees, rock formations or even food.
Superstition and apophenia are an interesting contrast, because superstition can be more easily rejected than apophenia. Our perceptual systems are just set up to detect patterns, and so the perception of 'faces' is unavoidable.
Often we don't even register our wacky beliefs. Seeing causality in coincidence can happen even before we have a chance to think about it; the misfiring is sometimes perceptual rather than rational. "Consider what happens when you honk your horn, and just at that moment a streetlight goes out," observes Brian Scholl, director of Yale's Perception and Cognition Laboratory. "You may never for a moment believe that your honk caused the light to go out, but you will irresistibly perceive that causal relation. The fact remains that our visual systems refuse to believe in coincidences." Our overeager eyes, in effect, lay the groundwork for more detailed superstitious ideation. And it turns out that no matter how rational people consider themselves, if they place a high value on hunches they are hard-pressed to hit a baby's photo on a dartboard. On some level they're equating image with reality. Even our aim falls prey to intuition. The article looks at seven types of magical thinking, and discusses some of the key psychology experiments that have shown us how magical thinking is influenced.
One of my favourites is an experiment by psychologist Emily Pronin who found that people would readily attribute another person's headaches to sticking pins in a 'voodoo doll'. Interestingly, the effect was much stronger when the other person (actually a stooge) was deliberately annoying. The irritating actor increased the likelihood of participants' wishing them harm, and so increased the perceived connection between their 'voodoo doll' pin-sticking and the actor's feigned headache.
Link to Psychology Today article on magical thinking.
While going for tea after the teachings I was putting on my watch and I told Ven Yangchen that when you do this you can visualize yourself as the guru deity and put on, offer ornaments to the guru deity. So this is not publicizing that I am practicing, but is a suggestion of how to make life meaningful, how to make your belongings meaningful and use them to collect extensive merits. This is just one example, one advantage, it helps to think when you offer to the guru deity that it's not yours, it is the guru's, so that helps you not to cling on to it as if it is yours.
At a tea shop I bought some pistachio nuts. If you visualize yourself as the guru deity and then take each nut in your mouth it becomes like a fire puja (jinsek in Tibetan), which means 'offering burning' practice. So with each nut you throw in your mouth and eat you collect the most extensive merits, more than having made offerings to numberless buddhas, Dharma, Sangha, statues and scriptures, all the holy objects in the ten directions.
Similarly when you go to eat in a restaurant, think you are offering to the guru deity, think that this food is not for you. This helps to prevent the thought of possession, this is mine. So this helps you to practice the bodhisattva vows. It is also an antidote to attachment. When you practice like this there is peace and happiness in your heart. Otherwise every single thing, whatever you do through attachment based on ignorance becomes negative karma.
Similarly when you go shopping, watch your motivation, prepare your motivation. When you are in the shop either fulfill the wishes of the guru or shop to benefit and serve other sentient beings. Think that the ultimate purpose is to fulfill the guru's advice. So you buy these things to survive and to fulfill the wishes of the guru or benefit sentient beings. In this way shopping becomes the antidote to attachment, becomes virtuous activity, Dharma, and you collect extensive merit.
Also in the street that same day as we were waiting for a taxi, as it took some time to get a taxi to go back, the thought came that it's good to practice rejoicing when the taxi comes and other people get into it. It's good to practice rejoicing that this other person got happiness, what they need. This is an excellent practice and helps negative emotional mind, anger, upsetness not to arise. This way you keep the mind in virtue, Dharma, because you are sincerely wishing happiness to others. So this is very pure Dharma and also keeps your mind in a state of happiness.
Wishing happiness for others opens the door of all happiness. Whether wishing happiness to one insect or one person or many. In Lama Choepa it says "The mind that cherishes all mother beings and would secure them in bliss is the gateway leading to infinite virtue." So this is from Buddha's Mahayana teaching. So this means it becomes a cause for enlightenment. If you want to be like His Holiness says, if you want to be intelligently selfish, in this case the common result of one time rejoicing in this life is that in hundred thousands of future lives you will have no difficulty finding a taxi, you will immediately find a vehicle when you are traveling. Even if it is difficult for other people, for you it will be easy to find [a taxi/vehicle], that rejoicing creates the karma for that. Your rejoicing, doing something good such as this practice of thinking of the karmic result which is happiness for yourself. You doing this is called intelligently selfish, because at least from this you get the karmic result of happiness in your future life, and at least it becomes Dharma, virtue.
A 30 millisecond, nearly subliminal flash of a logo can affect behavior, says a study from Duke University and University of Waterloo researchers. Flashing Apple's logo caused test subjects to describe about 30 percent more uses for a brick, while the IBM logo prompted less but more similar answers from subject to subject. This will be spun into an Apple story—Epicenter already did, for instance—but it's a fairly monumental acknowledgement of the power of logoforms if further study continues to bear out the same results. It follows to ask: how does a logo gain its meaning? And how can we uses logos of our own design to prompt our own willful, subconscious results? I'm reminded of the work of Austin Osman Spare, a 19th-20th century painter whose personal philosophy included the notion of "sigil magic." While Spare did not cotton to the ornate ritual of his hermetic peers such as the Golden Dawn or O.T.O., he practiced a simple ritual in which a statement of intent could be codified into a glyph. This sigil would then be "activated," through intense effort Pete Carroll referred to as "Slight of Mind," such as yogic concentration or deliberate forgetfulness. Spare used a form a sex magic, in which sustained self-pleasure was used to create a state of absent-mindedness in which the sigil could slip into the subconscious. Is it possible, then, that this logo study has borne out some theory to explain the mental workings of sigil magic? And that we've impregnated our subconscious with thousands of warring logos bursting with beneficent or malicious meaning? I'm just glad that I am usually not staring at the back of my Macbook every time I masturbate.
I'm not kidding.The success of Dan Brown's rather silly novel The DaVinci Code proves that a large public hungers for late-breaking news about Our Lord's wee-wee and the manifold uses thereof. In popular imagination, Mary Magdalene has become God's main squeeze. If you want your book to become a surefire seller, put "Mary Magdalene" in the title: Cooking with Mary Magdalene, Lose Weight the Mary Magdalene Way, Mary Magdalene's Guide to Southwest Vacation Spots, Mary Magdalene and the Goblet of Fire...
With all the recent literature capitalizing on the popularity of the MM+JC relationship, you may think that this lowly blog could offer no new revelations. Not true. The most shocking part of the story is -- you should pardon the expression -- coming.
A rotten pun, yes, but it contains more meaning than you can guess.
If you jump to the next page, I shall give you the foundation of your own bestseller, should you choose to write it. This is the Sacred Penis story to end 'em all. As Richard Burton says at the beginning of Hammersmith is Out: "Listen to me: I shall make you rich and strong, strong and rich..."
Hit PERMALINK for the Big Damn Secret of Sex MagicIn The DaVinci Code, Brown -- who is to scholarship as a molecule is to the Matterhorn -- offers a few observations about sex magic, most of which were cribbed from Clive Prince. But anyone who has studied the various sex magick traditions could instantly see that Brown was bluffing.
Why do I use the Olden Tymes spelling "magick"? Because such was the preference of Aleister Crowley, the foremost sex magician of the modern era. He argued that the K stands for kteis, Greek for "vagina."
Spiritual expression, and the religious organizational formats in which context it will take place, is always embedded in a social structure. For example, we could say that the tribal forms of religion, such as animism and shamanism, do not have elaborate hierarchical structures as they arose in societal structures that had fairly egalitarian kinship based relations. But the great organized religions, which arose in hierarchically-based societies, have intricate hierarchical structures, monological conceptions of truth, and expectations of obedience from its members. The Protestant Reformation and its offshoots took on the many democratic aspects which corresponded to the rise of a new urban class under merchant and industrial capitalism, and the many offshoots of the new age movements have clearly adopted contemporary capitalist practices of paid workshops, trainings, etc ... (i.e. taking the form of spiritual experience as a consumable commodity). In this essay, we will claim that contemporary society is evolving towards a dominance of distributed networks, with peer to peer based social relations, and that this will affect spiritual expression in fundamental ways.
To organize our thoughts, we will use a triarchical division of organizational forms, and a quaternary structure of human relations. Human organizational formats can be laid out as network structures, outlining the relationships between the members of a community. A common network format is the hierarchical one, where relations and actions are initiated from the center. It is graphically represented by a star form, but also often represented as a pyramidal structure. A second very common network format is the decentralized network, where agents actions and relations are constrained by prior hubs. In decentralized networks power has devolved to different groups or entities, which have to find a balance together, and agents generally belong to the different decentralized groups, which represent their interests in some way. Finally, we have distributed networks, which are graphically represented by the same hub and spoke graphic, but contain a crucial differentiating characteristic. In distributed networks, though there are indeed hubs, i.e. nodes with a higher density of connections, these hubs remain voluntary. Think of the difference between taking a plane that is going to go to the destination via a hub airport, and you have no choice but stay in the place, whose flight path has been decided by someone else, and the much greater freedom that you have in a car, where you can still pass through that big city hub if you want, and many people do, but you can also go around it, the choice is yours.
Alex Grey paints souls. His work shows human bodies — rendered with medical-illustration precision — wrapped in layers of sacred energy. Whether you believe Grey's work depicts the reality of divine auras or a particularly vibrant artistic license doesn't much matter. His paintings have an uncanny effect on viewers, making them sense — or at least consider the possibility of — the subtle energies that surround us and how these personal force fields might change depending on our intention, actions and moods. They are modern-day religious icons and mandalas for 21st century Westerners. Grey, 55, lives and works in New York City with his wife, the painter Allyson Grey, and their daughter, actress Zena Grey. The Greys host regular full and new moon all-faiths-welcome gatherings at their Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, a sanctuary and art gallery where selected paintings of Grey's are on permanent display. I spoke to him by phone about art's power to transform, Tibetan Buddhism and the danger of chasing many rabbits but catching none. In an essay of yours called "What Is Visionary Art?" you wrote that the artist's mission is to make the soul perceptible. How do you do that, if you can put that into words? I think that that's why artists make art — it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this. Their edict was, in order to paint the mountain you must become the mountain. That's one way to make the soul perceptible, when one mirrors something and then expresses it from that perspective. Then there are what I think of as gifts of the divine imagination, when one can gain a glimpse into the visionary realm. Some of these visions are so intense that they burn themselves into your neuronal fabric. And so you remember them, and then you make a drawing or, if it was an auditory thing, you write down or hum or do whatever the musician does. You had a kind of vision as a young man that changed your life and work. Can you tell me about that? It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money. I came back exhilarated and exhausted, not to mention slightly suicidal. I was pretty young, like 21. I'd been searching, and I just didn't understand what my life was all about. So at one point I kind of asked, "If there is a God, then please give me a sign." Then, on the last day of art school, I was standing on a street corner, saying goodbye to my professor, when this woman drove by and invited us to a party later that night. My professor picked me up that evening and offered me a bottle of Kahlua and LSD, and since I felt like I had nothing to lose — I had never done psychedelics before — I tried it. I drank about half the bottle. And when we got to the front door of the lady giving the party, I told her what was in the bottle, and she drank the rest of it. I went into her apartment, sat on a couch and closed my eyes; inside of my head it seemed like everything was in a big, dark tunnel, but I was revolving around in a spiral toward the light. There was this beautiful, amazing kind of luminosity, a kind of light that I'd never imagined. It was the light of love, the light of redemption, in a weird way. I felt a kind of ecstatic joyfulness that was a real release from my depression, and I saw the experience as symbolically important in that I was in the dark, going toward the light.
I can recall that day in the 1930s when a “news” (sic) magazine appeared in Washington, D.C.; it was called Newsweek: meant to be a counterbalance to Time Magazine’s uncontrollable malice. In due course the two became sadly alike as Vincent Astor morphed into Henry Luce: Was it something in the water? I once asked Henry Luce why he called Time a news magazine when it was simply Uncle Harry’s means of venting his rage (this was 1960 or so) at liberals, and “degenerate art” like the plays of Tennessee Williams—he had no answer. At Newsweek Vincent Astor was far too stupid to answer any such complaint. Now here we are in the Newsweek of 2008, and it’s still lousy. There have been a few decent writers in between that were less nutty than today’s Newsweek hacks.
But why is Newsweek currently lousy? Here’s an example provided by an editor who keeps a sharp eye on their crimes. He sent me their recent obituary of William F. Buckley, a hero to those who feared democracies.
Buckley bridled at bullies [we are assured]. But one of the rare times he lost his temper was debating Gore Vidal, who “got under his skin,” says son Chris. When Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” Buckley responded, “Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” But usually his public manners were genteel [I think they mean gentile]. With “Firing Line” guests who seemed nervous or over their heads, Buckley was gentle. Behind the scenes, he could show remarkable kindness. In 1980, a rising conservative star, Congressman Bob Bauman, was soliciting a 16-year-old [male] for oral sex. Bauman had been a gay-basher, and he instantly became a pariah. The next day, knowing what lay ahead for the disgraced congressman, Buckley quietly gave him an envelope containing $10,000. “He was a knightly man,” says Chris.
Unknown to them and everyone else who might read that publication, my views on many matters do not conform to the tired hacks who’ve taken over Newsweek, a magazine that has convinced itself that Bobby Kennedy Sr. was a great liberal. They love throwing about misunderstood terms like liberal and conservative that seldom suit their superficial, not to mention malicious, standards. Recently, their words of mourning for the fallen “genteel” paladin were incredible. As my editor friend knew that I seldom read the wilder attacks on me, he deconstructs Newsweek’s obituary of Buckley:
Parenthetically, I should note that, back in 1968, ABC TV had asked me and Buckley to “debate” each other at the Democratic and Republican conventions. Although Buckley was often drunk and out of control, he was always a spontaneous liar on any subject that his dizzy brain might extrude. When we were in Chicago during the Republican convention, the Chicago police decided it would be fun to attack the young co-ed demonstrators in Grant Park, not far from our studio. It was one of the worst displays of police brutality I’ve ever seen, and so I said on air; he liked what the police had done; in no time, the whole country was as shocked as I, but not Buckley. On air he was hissing like a cobra against the young people in Grant Park because, he said, they were egging on the Viet Cong to kill American Marines. They were not, of course. Buckley was a world-class American liar on the far right who would tell any lie he thought he could get away with. Years of ass-kissing famous people in the press and elsewhere had given him, he felt, a sort of license to libelously slander those hated liberals who, from time to time, smoked him out as I did in Chicago, when I defended the young people in Grant Park by denying that they were Nazis and that the only “pro- or crypto-Nazi” I could think of was himself. He sued me and got nowhere. He sued Esquire, in which our words appeared. By then the coming right-wing surge was in view. And so Esquire cravenly agreed to settle with him for a few paragraphs worth of free advertising for his weird little magazine The National Review, hardly the great victory he claimed.
As wax melts near a lit wick and burns, it emits light near the tip of the candle. For the most part, this place from which light is emitted remains the same and appears as a fixed shape; it is this seemingly unchanging shape that we refer to as flame. That which is called I is similar to the flame. Although both body and mind are an unceasing flow, since they preserve what seems to be a constant form, we refer to them as I. Therefore, actually there is no I existing as some substantial thing; there is only the ceaseless flow.... That there is this seemingly fixed form based on various conditions is interdependence.
Within all religions today there is a common core, an inner spiritual transmission going back to the dawn of human consciousness, to a time when religion was not necessary. The original purpose of religion was to bring sacredness to life. Imagine a time (whether prehistorical or transhistorical) when human beings lived moment-to-moment in the presence of the sacred. Religion was unnecessary. There was no separation between spirituality and life, no distinction between the sacred and the mundane, no division of the Godly and the worldly. When we lost the ongoing and immediate sense of sacredness, then we needed religion to bring us back to it. "Religion," after all, means "that which renews our connection."
No matter that modern religions have been distorted into a force for separation and not connection. If we look carefully within any one of them, we will find traces of the Original Religion, the religion borne from that immediate, experiential identity with the divine. Born from the divine, it also has the potential to bring us back to the divine.
In 1963, for the first time, the Dalai Lama allowed a Westerner, Desjardins, to film the heart of the Tibetan tradition. These two films were originally shown on French television in the 1960's and are a wonderful testimony, revealing some of Tibet's foremost masters as they were then. It includes footage of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the Sixteenth Karmapa, Dudjom Rinpoche, Ling Rinpoche, Chatral Rinpoche, Sakya Trizin, and the yogis Abo Rinpoche and Lopon Sonam Zangpo. The original sixties commentaries have been retained, even though it may sound a bit dated in places.
Also via Boing Boing...this should be a documentary!
Mike Belleme's Uncle Dirty was a bodybuilder on New York City's muscle beaches in the middle of last century. He and his wife Alga now live in Jacksonville, Florida. Uncle Dirty still rubs himself down with baby oil and parades around in thongs that he makes himself. Sometimes, the police hassle him about it, especially when he goes to the beach. One of Uncle Dirty's hobbies, besides sewing thongs, is pasting photos of giant penises on male bodies he finds in magazines. Belleme recently decided to do a photo essay of his great Uncle Dirty, a real character. Link (NSFW)
The mythology of our modern, high-tech culture teaches us that the last frontier for humanity is outer space. Somehow, according to this emerging mythos, the fragile human body is supposed to be able to survive the rigors of travel in outer space over vast distances. The writers of science fiction and Star Trek-style television shows would have us believe that human beings can somehow endure every kind of radiation and danger to successfully colonize other planets and solar systems.
It often seems like science and spirituality are bitter enemies, incapable of playing nicely together. Scientists are not fond of ideas that can't be tested; spiritual people say that the important things in life are beyond quantifying.
But Dean Radin firmly believes that both can get along, at least out on the far fringes where most of his work is done, investigating the extreme reaches of human consciousness. Radin has been conducting experiments on psychic (or "psi") phenomena since he was 13, an interest that led to appointments at Princeton University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Nevada, SRI International and Interval Research Corporation. At SRI International he worked on a then-secret government-funded program of psi research, now declassified and dubbed Stargate.
In 2000, he cofounded the Boundary Institute and since 2001 he's been the senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, in Petaluma. He's the author of the book "Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality," which looks at how theories of quantum physics and other scientific discoveries may provide a logical explanation for psychic phenomena. I spoke with Radin last week about mind-matter interaction, intentional thinking, New Age guilt and the power of chocolate.
Deep in the basement of a dusty old library in Edinburgh lies a small black box that churns out random numbers. At first glance the box looks profoundly dull, but it is, in fact, the ‘eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future. The machine apparently sensed the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened, and appeared to forewarn of the Asian Tsunami.
"It's Earth shattering stuff," says Dr Roger Nelson, Emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the USA. "But unfortunately we don't have a box for predicting the future that we can sell to the CIA. We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark."
This is a story of bi-location and in particular, a personal account of a journey through a mirror which was designed to reverse the order of reflection between object and image. We assume that our journey begins, originating in the organic fabric here on terra firma. But then this experience lent itself to a consideration that the opposite may be a possibility in the sense perhaps all of us are changelings of an unrecognized order, and that our temporal journey through life may be a dream which has as it's foundational origination, a realm without location, which we participated within as it's co-creators. If this is so, it only leads to more questions, if this existence is an extension of another extra dimensional reality, why are we here and not there? Is our sensate materiality an adaptation necessitated within a nested hierarchy that we are unable to either recall or penetrate in reverse order to whence we originated? Which dream is our natural environment of habitation from our current location as if positioned upon an isthmus between the two? The quest of eternal return has undoubtedly has been the focus of human efforts to debate since we first arrived on the shores of this island. Is there a realm where the outside is inside and the inside is outside? Is the intangible organ of imagination, a vestigial means of sensate perception originating from a non local natural world that can embody all possibilities all potential only limited by our perceptual conceptions?
Advances in the History of Psychology has alerted me to a gripping video lecture on the development of CIA psychological torture techniques from the Cold War to War on Terror. It was an invited lecture at the University of California by historian Prof Alfred McCoy who has long specialised in the history of the US secret services. He argues that the results of CIA research into psychological torture can be clearly seen in both the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo bay and images of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
McCoy discusses how these techniques were researched and developed by some of the most distinguished cognitive scientists of the time and were reflected in now uncovered CIA documents, including the 1961 'Manipulation of Human Behavior' research summary, the 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, and the 1983 'Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual'.
He notes that these techniques have been developed and legitimised by a legal framework that was deliberately designed not to outlaw existing techniques, despite the fact there is no strong basis for their effectiveness and evidence suggests that psychological torture has a similar long-term impact to physical torture.
Via The Enneagram and MBTI: An Electronic Journal In the previous parts of this paper we have presented strong prima facie evidence that the Enneagram, as a symbol, alludes to personal transformations of the most profound kind, 'spiritual' transformations involving a shift of the center of personality from the 'Ego' to the 'Self'. We have shown how, by treating the Enneagram as a MANDALA, we can extract from the symbol information regarding not only its own nature, but the fundamental nature of the mind as well. We have learned that as a classic mandala figure, the Enneagram symbolizes an advanced stage of the individual's development, in which consciousness as a whole is revealed as organized in a 'liminocentric' fashion that makes possible a reconciliation between two 'orders of existence' that are usually treated as incommensurable and irreconcilable.
We have also seen that when the figure is viewed as a 'double mandala', we can learn something important about the PROCESSES associated with such structures. We have looked at the manner in which the Enneagram, in its own unique way, explores a type of 'movement' that is associated with profound transformation, a primordial 'movement of mind' that plays a key role in all of the spiritual traditions. '
