The Mystical Carl Blog

Summer's fun and hot and busy!

For a July post to my blog, here's some recent email with a new friend. It started when he sent a list of quotes that began:

The One You are looking for is the One Who is looking.
- Siddha Yogi Guru Mai

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our
freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth
and freedom.
- Viktor Frankl

Everyday is a gift; that is why we call it the present.
- Unknown

.... there were many more quotes but, perhaps significantly, i skimmed the first two and reacted to the third, writing back:

Up late writing, saw your quotes email, here's my devil's advocate contribution.

Everyday is a gift; that is why in German gift means poison.
- also unknown

ie. I'm expressing my cynicism for the profundity of puns which can cut both ways. Plus angels fly because they take themselves lightly.

peace,
Carl

My friend wrote back that he didn't get my quote, so I further explained:

>> Everyday is a gift; that is why in German gift means poison.

> I don't get it. Can you explain?

It's just true. It's called a false cognate, or a false friend, das Gift
means poison. Language is full of coincidences that can be construed to be
profound. It's fine to make interesting quotes that get people thinking,
but when people start believing that words have absolute power and meanings,
such as fundamentalists who obey the Bible based on a translation that was
designed to make them think a certain way, then I take issue. For example,
most Christians condemn channeling as demonic based on a few poor
translations of the original lines that were intended to make people less,
not more, vulnerable to manipulators who claim the authority of spirits. In
fact of course the Bible is full of channeling and spirits, father son and
holy ghost is at least three right there. When John was in the spirit and
wrote Revelations, which God knows too many people take too literally to
justify endless wars and killing, what spirit was he in? What spirit are the
quoters in? For another example consider the Bible Code craze, people who
like to find and believe in coincidental arrangements of words in the Bible,
when you can do the same trick with any text. I just watched this brilliant
religion debunking Australian show "John Safran vs. God" who used the lyrics
of Vanilla Ice to predict 9/11 better than the Bible. It's not just
Christians who do such nonsense of course, but they're natural for me to
react to because I have fundamentalist relatives (and past lives I suspect).
I also observe New Agers (ie. done this myself) who go gaga when they notice
a little synchronicity of language, they hold onto a passing thought like
it's a truth for all time. It all comes down to the brain being on the
lookout to prove its point of view, and language as a primary tool of
filtering reality - so I like to rebel by reminding people that there are
alternative perspectives. Hence, gift can mean poison or present in the
greater play of words. A narrow view could say oh, if gift means poison in
German, maybe that predicted something bad about Germans, like Hitler! Yeah,
that's just more Bible Code effect. English came from German, so there must
be tons of curious interplays that mean nothing in themselves. The
present/poison dichotomy is just a favorite that I picked up on because my
heritage is German. What people need to notice is not what they think, but
what they do with what they think, because what they think is never
absolute. Googling das Gift I see there's a musician named Adrian James who
last year made a goth influenced album called Das Gift full of German
English bilingual angst. That's funny, I did the same thing in the late
1980's, not as well as he did of course, and I rarely make music any more. I
guess I've found another connection for myself, but I think I'll stop
thinking about such thoughts now, because I've got other things to do.

I just went on a tangent to have a little fun in reacting to your email
list.

By the way, what is your approach to dream interpretation? Do you have some
articles on line that you can point me to?

peace,
Carl

The last line I added because I did write for hours in my journal yesterday to condense my approach to dream interpreting, after having a fascinating/confusing mix of lucid and symbolic dreams this week. Perhaps I'll make another blog entry to summarize this next. And as for the goth album, I later found some clips online and they weren't really my style (they may have been 20 years ago), so it was fine that I dropped the connection following when I did.