Jackson, Michael

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Michael Jackson (1958 – 2009) was an American entertainer whose international celebrity status lead to his being known as the King of Pop.

Originally a member of the successful soul group, The Jackson Five, in an early TV appearance Ed Sullivan noted how he (the “little fella”) shone above his sibling who were also part of the act.

Jackson’s solo career took off in 1982 with the release of the album, Thriller, selling over 35 million copies. Part of its appeal, aside from slick musical arrangements by veteran producer Quincy Jones, was Jackson’s pioneering use of dramatic video.

Thriller belongs to the genre of schlock horror, arguably generating the kind of numinous fascination which is usually associated with the goul or zombie archetype.

C. G. Jung says that archetypes like these are part and parcel of humanity’s collective unconscious.

Subsequent albums and singles such as Bad and “Man in the Mirror” did very well but never equaled the near-hysterical intensity of Thriller.

Like the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga and other performers with outstanding talent, Michael has received much bad press and harsh criticism, particularly in regard to his use of cosmetic surgery and an alleged interest in archeology.

The media attacks intensified with his arrest on November 25, 2003 and subsequent trial over allegations of child abuse at his Neverland ranch. However, Jackson was found not guilty by jury.

Jackson’s untimely death on June 25, 2009, in Los Angeles took the world by storm. The shocking news contributed to internet crashes from excessive traffic, and the media covered the story with the same zeal that Jackson had helped to generate in his lifetime. Also, his record sales were at an all time high for the remainder of that year.

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St. Michael

Image by Lawrence OP via Flickr

St. Michael is one of the four archangels in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions. He’s generally regarded as a militant leader for God’s heavenly army against Satan and the spiritual powers of evil.

A popular Catholic prayer, the St. Michael Prayer, is addressed to him for protection from darkness and deception:

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who prowl through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

The prayer is said to have been written by Pope Leo XIII who, falling into a swoon while in a conference with the Cardinals, had a vision of the (Catholic) Church besieged by demons but victoriously defended by Michael and the heavenly host.

Search Think Free » Angels, Archangel, Fallen Angels, Gabriel, George (St.), Jehovah’s Witnesses, Raphael, Spiritual Attack, Uriel

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Talbot, Michael

My very own "hologram" by Lenara Verle

Talbot, Michael Coleman (1953-1992)

Australian born proponent of the holographic universe model, which essentially says the universe is like an interconnected, multidimensional web of energy, a view that opens the door to all kinds of unconventional possibilities.

A Discovery Channel TV series, The World’s Strangest UFO Stories, notes that some take the holographic metaphor literally, going as far to say that we live within a hologram created by an alien supercomputer–something like The Matrix Trilogy.

In his book, The Holographic Universe, Talbot mentions two dominant approaches to psi. On the one hand we have the reports of clairvoyants, on the other hand, the statistical approach of R.H. and Louisa Rhine:

[Real paranormal] discoveries…could arguably have as much impact on human history as Columbus’ discovery of the New World or the invention of the atomic bomb. Indeed, those who have watched a truly talented clairvoyant at work know immediately that they have witnessed something far more profound than the dry statistics of R. H. and Louisa Rhine. This is not to say that the Rhine’s work is not important. But when vast numbers of people start reporting the same experiences, their anecdotal accounts should also be viewed as important evidence. They should not be dismissed merely because they cannot be documented as rigorously as other and often less significant features of the same phenomenon can be documented. As Stevenson states, “I believe it is better to learn what is probable about important matters than to be certain about trivial ones” (New York: HarperCollins, 1991: 296).

Talbot essentially advocates a new scientific approach to psi, one where anecdotal accounts are not not dismissed out of hand but treated as data.

In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove entitled Synchronicity and the Holographic Universe, Talbot speaks freely about his various paranormal experiences, analyzing them from the perspectives of depth psychology and the supernatural.

Talbot’s sincerity, intelligence and tremendous ability to communicate made him a bright light in psi studies. His untimely death in 1992 due to leukemia brought his promising career to a close but he left behind an important legacy for those keen on bridging the gap between science and spirituality.

Fausto Intilla adds:

How many significant (important) coincidences can happen to a person in his life, living in a unorganizated and stupid Universe?…I think no-one. Every synchronism in our life, is like an open-eyes-dream (Jung taught)…and we can thank the fine intelligence of our Universe…if they happen. » Source

» Synchronicity, UFO

On the Web:

Michael Talbot – The Holographic Universe (Thinking Allowed) pt 1/2

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Brown, Michael H.

Brown, Michael H. (19??- ) Catholic writer and former columnist for the New York Times.

In his book Prayer of the Warrior Brown says that he left his post at the newspaper because of an increased perception of spiritual pollution in the bustling world of business.

From his perspective he saw Satan lurking practically everywhere–in downtown streets, during business lunches and in the popular media.

In Prayer of the Warrior he writes about the alleged influence of Satan in popular culture:

Instead of Yoruba drums, we had movies, the stereo, the television. One of the hit TV shows was called Bewitched (Milford, OH: Faith Publishing Co., 1993, p. 103).

If perhaps a bit overzealous at times, Prayer of the Warrior illustrates a popular belief in the importance of humility and prayer in overcoming what many religious traditions see as “attacks” from evil spiritual beings, forces or powers.

In Catholicism this theme is generally understood to fall within the realm of “Spiritual Warfare.” » Spiritual Attack

On the World Wide Web:

• “When You Are Obsessed Or Blocked, Kick Out Evil And Watch God Take Its Place” by Michael Brown.

Image Information:

• Saint Michael vanquishing Satan. No copyright symbol was seen at this web site » http://mrsnancybrown.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_archive.html  If you own the copyright to this image and would like it removed contact us and we’ll do so immediately.

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Saint Michael Prayer

Saint Michael Prayer » Michael (St.)

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Wood, Michael

Wood, Michael (1948- ) Popular British filmmaker and historian whose innovative on-site productions are a delight for thinking persons around the world. » Troy

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The Bible Code

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The Bible Code is a best selling book by Michael Drosnin which, if anything, demonstrates the popular craving for novelty and a sense of wonder.

I’ve talked to otherwise intelligent people who are impressed by this highly questionable book. But when you try to talk with them intelligently about what it says, they’ll usually blank out. They don’t want their fun ruined.

The author claims that meaningful words may be discerned when an ELS (Equidistant Letter Sequence) method is used to rearrange transliterated Bible characters.

Critics note that the same kind of results can be found when the method is applied to non-biblical books. Also, the choosing of the specific grid pattern is not well explained. The inside book cover merely says that “the computer” generated the pattern. No explanation is given as why a certain number of rows and columns were chosen for the matrix found in The Bible Code.

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Beatnik

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Beatnik is a slightly derogatory, superficial or amusing (depending on how one looks at it) term for those belonging to the 1950s youth subculture called the Beat Generation. In the 1960s the term also described listeners of rock and roll, hippies and those advocating anti-authoritarian lifestyles and social arrangements.

Wikipedia puts it this way:

Beatnik was a media stereotype of the 1950s to mid-1960s that displayed the more superficial aspects of the Beat Generation literary movement of the 1950s and violent film images, along with a cartoonish depiction of the real-life people and the spiritual quest in Jack Kerouac‘s autobiographical fiction.

The Beat Generation (Photo credit: N▲POLEON IN ▲QUAMARINE)

The beatniks wore unconventional dress, hairstyles, imbibed in psychotropic drugs and listened to jazz and bebop. Among Beat writers Jack Kerouac (On the Road, Dharma Bums), William S. Burroughs‘s Naked Lunch (1959) and poet Allen Ginsberg reigned supreme.

The first line from Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1955) epitomizes the dark side of the Beat Generation:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.

beatniks in the summer of 1969 (Photo credit: Martin Pulaski)

From this, it seems a bit simplistic to suggest the Beatnik culture was an entirely positive spiritual quest. From a Catholic perspective, illegal drug use rarely, if ever, culminates in genuine spirituality. It might represent a stage a seeker passes through before coming to a place where he or she can appreciate an experience of true grace and holiness later in life. But drug use, itself, arguably messes with the mind (and brain) and obscures the pure spirituality of the Holy Spirit.

On the other hand, it would be equally simplistic to entirely dismiss the insights and societal benefits that came out of the movement. Like anything, one has to sift through the entire phenomenon to discern the good from the bad.

I Feel Like Saying A Beatnik Poem 1950′s B Movie Style

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Roland Barthes

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Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French semiologist, best known for his book Mythologies (1957). Barthes argued that most of what we assume to be natural could be products of history and culture. More specifically, linguistic and artistic representations play a crucial role in the naturalization of arbitrary and morally ambiguous historical events.

By way of example, politically active gay persons usually challenge the following argument:

Homosexuality is ethically bad because it is unnatural, and heterosexuality is ethically good because it is natural.

Critics will say that, according to this line of reasoning, a deadly rattlesnake could be good for children because it is natural. And this seems a valid critique of this kind of argument. Regardless of one’s beliefs about the joys or horrors of homosexuality, to challenge it with this type of reasoning is philosophically weak.

Barthes also makes a distinction between readerly and writerly text, outlined well at Wikipedia:

Readerly text

A text that makes no requirement of the reader to “write” or “produce” their own meanings. The reader may passively locate “ready-made” meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of texts are “controlled by the principle of non-contradiction” (156), that is, they do not disturb the “common sense,” or “Doxa,” of the surrounding culture. The “readerly texts,” moreover, “are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature” (5). Within this category, there is a spectrum of “replete literature,” which comprises “any classic (readerly) texts” that work “like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded” (200).^[6]

Writerly text

A text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: “… to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text” (4). Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and traditions. As opposed to the “readerly texts” as “product,” the “writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages” (5). Thus reading becomes for Barthes “not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing,” but rather a “form of work”¹

However, this distinction seems spurious, for readers are always interpreting and creating as they take in a text, regardless of if being a so-called “classic” text or an “avante-garde” text. In fact, avant garde texts usually emerge within some new kind of clique or arts group that can be just as “bourgeois” as traditional groups. This was made abundantly clear whenever I attended a Cultural Studies class in university, which usually reeked with the snobbery of style exuded by some students living on their wealthy parents’ credit cards.

—

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes#Key_terms. See more on this distinction here: http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~raha/700_701_web/BarthesLO/readerly.html

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Bahai

Image by Michael Hoefner via Wikipedia

Bahai is a relatively recent world religion. Adherents of Bahai claim that God is progressively revealed through a sequence of teachers, including Abraham, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad, and its Persian founder, Baha’u'llah (1860′s).

The religion is monotheistic, emphasizing monogamous family life, obedience to government authority, personal honesty and cleanliness. Bahai schools and media programs are flourishing.

Baha’u'llah originally went by the name Mirza Hoseyn, a Shi’ite Muslim. Hoseyn aligned himself with the Bab, head of the Babis, a Muslim sect claiming to have privileged knowledge about ultimate truth. The Bab was executed for treason by the Iranian government and Hoseyn was then exiled by orthodox Sunni Muslims.

Hoseyn went to Constantinople (Istanbul). There, in 1867, he declared himself to be the Imam Madhi (“rightly guided leader”), as foretold by the Bab.

Violence ensued and he was banished to Acre, where he developed the contemporary doctrine of Ba’hai: Universal brotherhood and the unity of all religions. Pilgrims from Iran and the USA journeyed to Acre to learn about his teachings.

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