audio podcast - me talking about 3 types of yoga

Which is the most enlightened - to meditate on a mountaintop, go with the flow, or be your face?

An unscholarly comparison of Raja yoga, Kripalu yoga, and a yoga that nurtures personality.

Paris Hilton, genius

A few years ago, I suggested geniuses were people who had an inability to make a facial expression, and long-term channeled that expression into other behavior.

With my usual dense writing, I included

• how to spot geniuses
• why they have a positive impact
• what the face is for normally

What I didn't write - but could have - is that this definition expands the set of geniuses surprisingly. There just are people with this minor disability, but no particular math,writing or social skills. And some of these sublimate long term their frustrated facial expressions - finally converting them to something else.

For instance ... Paris Hilton.


Paris has trouble expressing things with her eyes.

If you don't believe this, click here, to see her talk.
(btw, I didn't get the idea from video, it's Paris dimly recognizing and self-deprecating this aspect of herself)

I suggest two things have flowed from Paris' minor disability

• her playing the role of someone who doesn't care what other people see
• I wouldn't say Paris volunteered to be the butt of sexual humor, but ultimately I think her sublimated face is converting the situation of her celebrity into something good.
  Just as you do pre-consciously, with your eye movements every day

All this is how Paris has found herself playing the role of the sacrificially degraded - humiliated for others sins (in their minds). Millions project their own guilt about sex onto Paris Hilton and this makes them happier about themselves.

Which is a good.

Getting Fuzzy about the extension of the self

This Get Fuzzy strip is a metaphor.

[shrunk here but linked, for copyright reasons]

I do not refer to the mild criticism of the wasteful consumer. Everyone spots that. I'm talking about the zen meaning.

This expresses it

“What is created, what grows, is the amount of life I can hold without it upsetting me, dominating me. At first this space is quite restricted, then it's a bit bigger, and then it's bigger still. It need never cease to grow. And the enlightened state is that enormous and compassionate space. But as long as we live we find there is a limit to our container's size and it is at that point that we must practice.”

[Charlotte Joko Beck, via]

It's New Age: the superficial consumer (Satchel, the dog) has found his container's size, and it is hardly bigger than he is.

*As far as I can tell, the name of the comic strip is a suggestion to think fuzzily. Which is excellent advice.

The Modern World itself needs to use more fuzzy logic (for instance, in its laws). People will complain because fuzzy rules are more complicated, but reality is complicated.

*

• Darby Conley gets a lot of the strips rejected because of their content
• Satchel is jokingly half-Shar Pei, half-yellow lab

updated: 2007-07-25

Gromit is the Buddha

Here is a old-world Buddhist account, with two proper names replaced with the letters X and Y:

"X tested Y to the maximum, but the master was patient, forgiving, humorous and full of love. He never asked X to abandon reason, and he faced all of X's arguments and examinations with infinite patience. In time, X accepted Y, and while he accepted, his acceptance was whole-hearted. While Y predominantly taught duality and Bhakti to his other disciples, he taught X ... the philosophy of non-dualism."

Since Y is described as 'the master' you may have to read it again to see that if moved to a modern world context, Y could be a dog.

My point is, I am pretty sure this is the unintentional, underlying plot for the Wallace & Gromit series!

These entertaining and soothing claymation movies (usually shorts) are often described as 'whimsical'.

I will only mention the 1st one. In it, the regular man (Wallace) announces he is short on cheese and thus will go to the moon to get more. His friend Buddha Gromit is non-plussed. The dog helps him build the spaceship and they successfully go for a lunar cheese picnic.
It it wise to be whimsical?

*Even if this is totally wrong, dogs clearly have some special meaning for other people, sometimes involving reincarnation. For instance, see TR's 2005 post and update.

more nonsense

• Gromit was originally to be a speaking part, but it became clear the clay dog's expressions alone would be sufficent. His meanings are literally wordless, like the Buddha's


• In the semi-crazy indirectEffect interpretation of the Modern World, cats and dogs have special importance. Cats are prana, while dogs are Buddha


• The closing credits for at least one of the W&Gs involve rising and falling bunnies. What are bunnies? ..they are rabbits fictionalized and unconsciously infused both with the Buddha and with prana.
  Yes, Easter is about reincarnation (don't get me started).


• At the very beginning Gromit was to be a cat. This means that Nick Park's self-healing with clay --his creating a dog-that-once-was-a-cat-- follows the natural yoga arc of stumbling upon wisdom when out looking for prana. Sort of.

A lot more could be said, but I will save some for another post.

genius actually explained

I haven't read 'Genius Explained' but a (thumbs-up) review says the book says

“genius is the product of environment, personality, and sheer hard work, not a mysterious property that can't be analysed”

It sure sounds like the book doesn't explain diddley, and its title is a lie.

That's the kind of thing that happens when you stick to historical figures, all of which you necessarily read about in documents. How can an un-genius figure out what genius is via such indirect evidence?¹

As it happens, geniuses are around now, too. One encounters them occasionally.² There is no need to peer into books and extrapolate from extrapolations of observations made centuries ago.

that gut feeling you get
When someone says something to you two things almost always will occur to you:

• the mundane content of what they said
• why the person said it, in the most general way

Let's call the latter the 'the general cause', and abbreviate it 'GC'. In life, you will understand GCs. You may only process these pre-consciously, but nevertheless at some level you will be aware of which category each GC you hear belongs:

1. rote learning
2. fight (introjected)
3. flight (introjected)

To be specific, let's say you are talking to your best friend. He (or she) utters some opinion, let's say they angrily say: 'In high school everyone should be taught to drive'. Whatever.

You can tell (right?) from you friend's anger that their statement is about their underlying introjected fight against the universe (#2 on the list above).

In other words, you will always get the societal subtext of what people say.³ That is ..except for the thinking of geniuses. Some of their statements are exceptions. These expressions have have a free, origin-less quality. This may seem to you like a miracle or blessing, so you may respond: 'man, you are a genius!'

crazy but true - it's about faces!
To actually explain genius, additional terms are needed, which do not appear in psychology textbooks. Specifically 'Prana', 'prana-face', and 'will'.
prana is energy that cells use to relate to each other.

In my opinion, geniuses are the few individuals whose prana-face is not entirely connected to their will. This means, in practice, that they have trouble expressing some societal feelings that are normally expressed by the face.

The profound social nature of the face is in the prana, too - and naturally gets transferred to the genius. This is why these people characteristically have a hopeful, optimistic quality, because the face itself is optimistic.

For two examples, the flaring of the nostrils or the raising of the eyebrows. If - in any person - the myriad entirety of these expressions is not available, then the quasi-facial expressions can remain internal, like memories.

Because, for these individuals, these quasi-thoughts are not in any of the 3 categories above (not fight, flight or rote), but emerge instead from the 'good' aspect of the primate (the human face) these individuals over time can produce not just oddly free statements, but also works of art or craft which can transform the world and sometimes seem to shine with their own light.

To sum up
Genius is real and emerges from a particular minor disability (which cannot be defined without the recognition of prana). It is because they are disabled that geniuses are usually treated as second-class citizens.

one historical example!
A turn-of-the-century postal worker named Albert Einstein is the most famous genius. What characterized the prana of his face was a loose center and solid periphery.

In terms of his animal existence - Albert probably did not produce the full range of expressions with the nose and characteristic of this type of prana had an angelic expression which was reassuring because it held firmly without being at its center dogmatic.

His scientific theory formally matched the prana of his face (and is also - to intellectuals - angelic and reassuring). This theory - relativity - is firmly grounded yet not dogmatic.


notes

1. Imagine a field-goal kicker in the back of a van is gotten drunk and is blindfolded. He is taken to an empty stadium that has crowd noise piped in. The kicker thinks it's a real game. He is told where the ball is and where the goal posts are (very close, just ten yards away). He makes the kick. Cheers from the piped in crowd noise!! The kicker is told he made the kick. On the way back in the van the kicker feels surges of pride. More drinks!


2. But it is a mistake to tell someone they are a genius (or what they just thought of was genius). If if you do they might interpret this as an insult. They might get the impression that you are calling them an idiot, that you are really saying: "that moron figured something out I cannot, therefore it must be some attribute, seperate and uncreditable, called: 'genius". ..And you really might be saying that.


3. unless you are a moron

An I For An I

One of today's value systems is called "political correctness". People have reduced this name to an acronym: "PC".

An amazing thing about political correctness is that it is only indirectly about politics. Directly, PC is a set of speech guidelines for specific and general settings.

At the surface PC's appearance shut down the common use of jokes demeaning groups of people. But a priori to these guidelines PC is a categorization of reality. Like other value systems, it dictates which entities are to be referred to by which words.

PC itself flouts PC
Generally, PC applies when the subject is gays, or people with disabilities, or people who are not caucasian. But PCs strictest mandate is that these must not be grouped together! For example, PC commands that homosexuality must not be spoken of as a disability.

This incongruity was humorously revealed recently when TV news' Cynthia Izaguirre substituted 'gay' when the teleprompter said 'blind'.

they're trying to make a better world
PC advocates share a motive with the proselytizers of classic religions. As the former demand the term 'gay' be used instead of 'homosexual', the latter demand 'the 10 Commandments' be put in every schoolroom.

Of course, these are not identical approaches. We can safely say one approach is newer & more intellectualized and the other is older & hoarier.

writing down a value system
The rules of PC are not supposed to be written down. Today people's pre-conscious pretends this is because of PC's superficial fascist nature (no PCer wants to be caught coming across like ten-commandment type). But in reality this is done because of 1) the contradiction 2) breath taboos.

New Age interpretation
The West is becoming more and more a settler culture (and less of a warrior culture. It is also merging with nomadic culture). As this happens its 'breath-death wish' is weakening.

Also weakening is what Alan Watts referred to in 1966 as 'the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are':

“It is said that humanity has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the problem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive, of individual existence and identity.” [from]

The weakening of this taboo means knowledge of the contingency of the breath is reaching modern pre-conscious. The (in some ways) over-educated middle-class of the West has now sensed what Watts sensed. But they disagree with his advice

“We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience--a new feeling of what it is to be 'I.'”

Instead these moderns invented a new value-system: Political correctness.

the current behaviour
In their relation to PC, Moderns behave one way or another

• some never flout it
  (or feel guilty if they do by accident)
• some flout it superficially
  (by making a joke demeaning one of the 'victim' groups, or a medical/political claim about one of the victim groups)

Each of these two groups pretends they are the free speakers, even as each of these two groups obeys different taboos. In other words: not everyone acquiesces to PC , but everyone acquiesces to its opacity.


added 2006/06/16:
The acclaimed-but-little-seen 2002 movie Far From Heaven represents a similar conflation (as PC itself does, as Cynthia Izaguirre did). In it the director -Todd Haynes- shows what it might have been like in the USA in 1957 for middle-class closeted gay men and their wives.

Haynes set the drama in Connecticut, and he has said this was partly to take advantage of the fall foliage. But for some reason Haynes included a sub-plot involving race-relations. This, even though in interviews it's clear he had done no work on what race-relations were there then (he makes it seem as if every white person in the state then was a committed racist).

Far From Heaven's twin themes do ring true. It's a good film. However, to me there is an echo in the movie not of reality but of the Western identity issues PC is partly designed to cover up. Westerners -trained to equate race prejudice with sexual-orientation prejudice (while simultaneously trained never to think about them together!) - have been largely ineffective in ending either.

If I haven't been clear: Both racism and prejudice against gays are wrong. And egregiously stupid. I just think there's a reason modern people who share with me the desire to end both have no idea why either prejudice exists. They think they know (they think these are taught behaviors) but they don't.

updated 2006/07/08

car headlights and the implied horizon (long)

I have a long list of modern-world-anthropology topics that I want to get to. This post is about fear and about how our experience of daytime itself is changing.

Here in the USA, many people are now driving with their headlights on in the daytime, even if it is sunny. They call what they are doing 'daytime running lights' (DRL). They say what they are doing is safer. Others doubt the cited research. I summarize the arguments I have seen about this new instrusive part of the American landscape:

against:

1. the DRL studies were largely done in countries close to the Arctic, countries with different daytime light conditions than the USA, and too much reliance is placed one one study done in the USA decades ago


2. if most vehicles have DRLs, it's harder to spot those who do not. Not to mention the pedestrians!¹

for:

1. DRLers say the single study done in the USA is enough evidence for them


2. some DRLers want what they call a 'DRL mandate' - a law which would make it illegal to drive in the daytime without your headlights on

the DRLers
There is unquestionably more going on than driving-safety concerns. Before getting into the cultural issues I will highlight the key question of headlight type. I would have thought this would be an obvious talking-point.

Years ago most cars were equipped with what were just called 'running lights'. These were used to make the vehicle more visible in bad light conditions like fog, dusk, and dawn. They did not illuminate forwards, and were almost always amber. The lack of projection and the color was designed to ease the eyestrain on the oncoming drivers.

DRLers do not seem to be very interested in seeing if the old-style running-lights would produce the same safety statistics found for DRLs in far Northern countries (and yes, maybe in the USA too). This is not very scientific of them, and it's a clear indication that driving safety is not their only concern.

Following DRL logic to its end, switching the amber brake-lights on the backs of their cars to high-beams would make sense. Maybe a study in Siberia could be done showing this reduced rear-end collisions! [sarcasm]

Just look at the extreme DRL trends. Some drivers add extra banks of headlights which they use in the daytime. Some even drive with their brights (high beam headlights) on all the time.

There are sufficient numbers of these true-believers that Honda apparently will be selling 2006 Civic and Accord models whose high-beams go on when the engine is turned on. Or you can buy a kit for this purpose.

DRLs can be annoying

An opponent of DRLing writes:

“Good bloody hell, so (most of) you're the murderous scum using headlights during the day. The idea is simple, make sure that YOU are seen but in the process make it harder for anyone else to be. Just part of the reinforcement of the concept that it's a right, not a privilege, to drive--drunk, drugged, blind, or extremely stupid. "Put your headlights on and you can safely make it home from the bar." ... I consider Charles Manson a saint compared to you evil pea-brains.”  [ellipted]  from 'putrid'

But people have always been selfish², so the trend cannot just be about selfishness any more than it can be just be about driving-safety³. This is clear from the timing of the trend in the USA (right after the 9-11 attacks here).

it's about the horizon
In my opinion DRLers are trying to communicate to others that they do not feel safe, and they want the others not to feel safe either. It's an unconscious political movement, designed to increase the collective protection against all dangers.

I believe they are trying to hide the implied horizon.⁴ Simply by the act of driving back from the shopping mall the DRLers are wiping out the implied daytime horizon for everyone.

What I do not get at all, is why progressives do not oppose DRLs with all their might.

Over millions of years 'nothing from here to horizon' has been felt as meaning 'all is safe'. And much of the USA is flat. When driving thru these parts (in the daytime), the sky itself might make a driver feel relaxed and safe.

It's not that DRLers specifically want to eliminate this natural nurturance - it's just that they want .. something. Something done by collective will that will result in themselves feeling safer.

Which means .. goodbye to the pleasure of experiencing the daytime sky.

other wild possibilities
Before I decided this I considered a lot of other possibilities. The DRLers postition seemed that irrational to me. Among the idea I considered:

• with so many working two jobs the USA no longer is so much a dayime-working culture. Could that be related?
• do DRLers feel their headlights give them power in a God-like kind of way?
• is it that they don't want to be so visible thru their windshields?
• is it like a moth thing (with tranference), because they are lonely?
• Could be related to the Rapture movement ('end times') .. DRLs do produce a kind of antiChrist ambience, right?

this is serious, folks
Even if half of this is wrong - even if driving safety is all DRLers are looking for - the use of these daytime headlights is profoundly changing the culture. In my opinion.

And not a value-free change, either. DRLs produce a daytime experience that meshes with authoritarian ways. Seriously. Think of the the cliché of baving a bright light on you as you are questioned by sinister police, or the cliché of having a bright light on you as you are trying to escape from prison. These are veridical, they are about fundamentals in human experience.

Or -to go on a tangent- think about the late Johnny Carson, 20th century America's most popular late night talk show host. Carson grew up in Nebraska and had a sunny dispostion characteristic of many from the region then. My claim is his friendliness in part came from being nurtured day after day as a child by the then-magnificent Nebraska sky and clear horizon. My claim is even that Carson transfered this sky-nurturance to the nightime 'airwaves' when his show was on. People felt safe when they watched his show.

If we allow DRLs as they are now it means no more Johnny Carsons. That's my opinion.

about the progressives (lwers)
What I do not get at all, is why progressives do not oppose DRLs with all their might. Popular progressive bloggers understand the relationship between collective fear⁵ and the popularity of authoritarian govts. The entire lw spectrum in America sees a cultural, authoritarian abyss opening up under their feet. So why don't they get the relationship between fear and DRLs?⁵

DRLs threaten the day itself, guys!

If you agree with what FDR said, that 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself⁶- then logic impels you to be afraid of DRLs, if you also think DRLer's driving-safety fears have merged with other fears they have.

other relationships
That is pretty much what I have to say on this in basic terms. The rest is more abstract. Right now I am confident that:

• DRLs are somewhat for the same reason they have been a tradition for funerals: someone is dead / people are reminded of their mortality / they want to remind other poeple of their mortality



• the DRLer subset of the populartion has some interesting correlations that we don't know about since academics are not bothering to check .. Easy would be the prediction that DRLers roughly consist of some of the same people that believe SUVs are safer. The craziest correlation I will predict is that DRLers might roughly be those adults who did not ever try marijuana



• the Rapture movement religous belief originated in places that had too much visible horizon relative to real dangers [Crime and empty landscapes is a weird combination]. Look at it this way: heaven-arriving formally matches horizon-arriving in the form of daytime headlights. . It is possible 'end times' operates at a cognitive level, a concept born from attempts by the animal to balance out the information coming in in terms of light itself [see also my post about Don McLean's famous song]

More could be said, but that will have to wait for another day.

the extended notes

1. Not just the pedestrian statistics - accidents not involving DRLs (but possibly because of them) do not get recorded that way. An account of a car accident in North Carolina in 2004(?)
   “I *think* I'm OK, but was in a pretty serious car accident this morning.
   
   I was on my way to meet my wife at our son's new pre-school, was traveling about 40 mph down a hill in an area where I had unquestioned right of way. There was no traffic light, no yield, I was simply on a straightaway. There were several pickup trucks stopped at a stop sign ahead of me and to my right. They had been sitting there as I came down the hill, and all of a sudden as I got close, the lead truck pulled out to turn left in front of me (crossing in front of me to turn into the opposite lane). I *could not* believe it, I was going, as I said, 40 mph and was at this point *very* close to him. I have no idea what he was thinking. Anyway, I slammed on my horn, my brakes and tried to swerve around his backside to miss him... and I did. However, the pickup truck who had been waiting *behind* this genius at the stop sign decided to ALSO pull out in front of me to turn left into the lane opposite mine - he followed the original pickup so closely and without hesitation that it was almost as if he thought he was at a light and it had turned green.
   
   I slammed further on my brakes, but there was no where left to attempt to steer to to miss him - I hit him head on, perpendicular to him, in the bed area of his pickup. In the second before the impact, I thought 'Oh God, this is going to be realllllllly BAD.
   
   BOOM! The hood in front of me collapsed like an accordian, and both airbags deployed, and the windshield was cracked, but no blood, no cuts - my legs were not crushed as I expected them to be. ... The doctors think I have a concussion, but I feel ok so far.”  [heavily ellipted]
   The driver did not associate his mysterious invisibility on the road with his not having his headlights on. I remember someone asked him this later on and he said he did not have them on.



2. Some people argue that selfishness has been increasing since the Reagan years.In my opinion even if this were true it would still not be enough to suddenly blossom into banks of high-beam headlights in the daytime



3. Not to mention the complexity how people displace risk has never been widely understood. Properly understood, this also works against the use of DRLs. See the discussion of 'risk compensation' here or read this:
   “The key principle is that any safety feature will produce changes in behaviour: most people, as natural risk managers will barter some of the increased safety with perfomance enhancement, thus either negating the safety benefits or transfering the increased danger to other players.”
   From memory, one of just many instances of this was when NYC mandated its taxis get airlock brakes and accident rates went down -but only for a few months (eventually the drivers drove faster, since they felt safer with their new brakes). This effect is seen universally and will apply to DRLs.



4. the implied horizon: In my opinion, when there are visual obstacles to the horizon modern humans make up an implied horizon, where it would be if the obstacles were not there. I am no expert but I think we feel comforted by a vista even while standing in a small town in the Midwest (minus the headlights). Even though there are buildings, the implied horizon is there as a universal comforter. This is why I inlude the 'implied'.
   
   Also I do not know if the symbol is at all passed from generations. ASFAIK for some of the ancient past humans lived on the savannah. During those epochs safety consisted of scanning the horizon for predators. This line in the distance -by my amateurish guess- has been internalized. Over millions of years 'nothing from here to horizon' is felt by us as meaning 'all is safe'. I do not know if each generation entirely relearns this.



5. historical note: FDR said this on March 4 1933 on the radio, in his 1st inaugural address. I have seen it written that FDR said this two days after Pearl Harbor was bombed. But it is not in a transcript of his 12/9/1941 radio speech. So it does not seem FDR repeated himself. In 1933 was FDR talking in coded terms about authoritarianism? ..Read up on the period and make up your own mind.



6. Nurturance is not political-spectrum neutral. And most progressives believe this. Often mentioned a semi-famous academic paper by George Lakoff, comparing the liberal 'Nurturant Parent' model to the 'Strict Father' model.

[modified]

McLean was singing about the Rapture

Don McLean first performed American Pie in 1971. This link includes the lyrics, which probably have been more discussed than any other song in pop history.¹

Referring to the repeated line 'the day the music died', the sites say the song is about the death of rock 'n roll.². What's interesting is that these websites give scant attention to three lines that are sung over and over again:

“And them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye,
Singing, 'This'll be the day that I die.
This'll be the day that I die.'”

In these lines, it's the good old boys that are preparing for death.

I believe McLean had sensed that the new music (rock 'n roll) added to some people's feeling that the end of the world was coming. I believe he was singing about the American Rapture movement (whether he knew it or not).

This would help explain the song's title. The 'pie' could be an allusion to heaven, and derived from the phrase 'pie in the sky'.

Heaven, of course, is where people hoping for 'end times' imagine they will go. This as part of their hope that everyone in the world dies simultaneously, causing everything to end.

The song does highlight one thing that will die -rock music- like a movie might focus only one character as they approach the end of the world. Apparently what makes it resonant for McLean is this character (rock 'n roll) isn't just a spectator to the 'end of times', it's an actor as well.

But once the 'end times' aspect to it is seen, it could even be argued McLean's lyrics describe an apocalypse that is suddenly, horribly revealed not to be a Rapture! that the song itself is a commentary on such wishes - that is makes the argument people should not wish for the end of the world.

For instance, here Mclean jokes the  Catholic Trinity bails out on the (Midwest) rapture at the last minute:

"The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.
 They caught the last train for the coast
 The day the music died"

and that is why Satan was chuckling

"'I saw Satan laughing with delight The day the music died"

Of course, the meanings are inexact.

My point is that in 1971 McLean might have been observing a cultural trend that is now stronger.

What is 'the Rapture?

A belief with its roots in US Protestant fundamentalism. Bill Moyers has just written about it. See also this George Monbiot piece from last year. Here is a current site by believers.

1. Whiter Shade of Pale 2nd?
2. a New Age piece written this year is an exception

the West does not have a death-wish exactly

Artificially dated - this blog did not exist back then.
This has been copied here in revised form.

Three days ago, Frank Rich in the NYTimes made the case that the USA has a death-wish.

What Western society has is a breath death-wish. They have this because they are both a settler culture, and also a (repressed) warrior culture. Something of a contradiction.

The breath-death-wish is the West's answer to the question: 'what is the relation between two of us?' It is the urge that no-one breathe in a way to produce a third-eye (or that no-one breathe in conflict with their born primate status).

The West accomplishes this partly with ... the birthday party.
[It has done so since the maturity of the Industrial Revolution].

The defining moment is when the individual blows out his own candles.

The unconscious knows of the breath's contingent relation to memory. It understands that the animal literally can choose which of its own memories to send more of the body's resources to.

Only when the child extinguishes these symbols of his own potential enlightenment does he get a) his true, secret wish and b) the sweet cake and ice cream.

the affinity for black

The unconscious breath-death-wish is so significant it appears on the surface of society in many ways. It often appears as an affinity for blackness or death-symbols.

The black in these cases means multiple things:

• The person is mourning the childhood death of their own enlightenment (and their participation in it)
• the person wants no-one else to be enlightened, so unerringly they wish to 'kill' a certain type breathing by other people (this is the breath-death-wish)

This (primate) contradiction makes it confusing, makes it difficult to parse the symbols. Not seeing deeply enough, some conclude that Western culture has a death-wish, even though it is something else.

[Frank Rich's column arguing the USA culture as a death-wish discussed the Terri Schiavo phenomenon and the death of the Pope]

Ultimately some people who have profoundly internalized this ceremony and crippled their own memories accordingly see on TV a woman they never met in a coma (but blinking her eyes), or they see a passed-on religious figure in white (who they normally could figure out was an ass****), and project their own loss onto that person, and mourn.