This is a true story. One of overwhelming joy, but it starts in East Berlin under the socialist dictatorship, where Der Herr der Ringe (The Lord of the Rings) was a book of legend.

All books printed in the West were illegal, so politically adventurous people like my parents who had some would lend them to each other, and sometimes not get them back, like if the borrower had been arrested. But Der Herr der Ringe was so special that the owner of the only copy in the city refused to take that risk, so he declared that anyone who wanted to read it had to do so at his home.

Of course ritual is an art form. Different from theatre, the performers and the audience/consumers are not separated. Like all art (indeed all indirect effort) it was used by religions a lot, but arts are eventually secularized and when that happens it is usually good for the art. You can make your own rituals, especially with the kids, and at weddings and funerals. The frankincense is over there, have fun.

Less obviously, all of that is true for meditation.

The intentional, deliberate design of conscious experience, which happens to be where all art cashes out. Its canvas is that non-obvious web of personal connections between “self and non-self representations” that filters perception and ideation.

Like all art (indeed all indirect effort) meditation finds therapeutic use, and when that happens it is usually bad for the art, but good for the patients, who matter more (says one of them). We don’t expect Mr Baker’s laudable overcoming of his trauma to replace Beethoven. Let’s not expect Jenny’s meditation on anxiety to represent all of what meditation can do, either.

The secularization of meditation is overdue, so in an accident of history, it is already being medicalized while a few old men on mountains still think it uniquely expresses the Cosmic Order.

In my own artsy meditations, I lean on poetry a lot, but that’s only an artistic choice. Music may be a more powerful weapon, dance certainly is.

You all must know how grief besets
us at the memory
of bygone times of happiness.
The Marble Cliffs call thee.

My review of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs became a finalist in the Astral Codex Ten 2023 book review contest, and now that the anonymous vote is closed, I can say that. So I got the opportunity to give Scott a link he’d post. This is to introduce my Big Writing Project, and explain why it may be especially interesting to ACX readers in particular.

Although the Sermons are far from finished, I have shared the finished parts with various people and groups in order to get feedback and improve the text – and also to learn how they affect readers and listeners. Here is what I have learned about that so far.

tl/dr: This article

• summarizes what is known about ecstatic and mystical experiences,
• argues that in order to end (supernaturalist) religion, it is necessary to have a nonreligious appreciation of these experiences and
• claims these experiences have specific advantageous effects that make them worth having for atheists.

It also contains sex, drugs and Sufi whirling.

Vast waves of researchers must crash
on cliffs of ignorance
to grind them down into a stash
of knowledge fine as sands.

I first saw automatically generated poems in 1998. They were randomly arranged picks from a corpus of clichéd goth lines, clearly terrible and presented as a parody on terrible goth poetry. I had run into them because I had just started to study IT and this was one of the first examples of CGI programming that I had happened to find. I played with it for longer than I might have, because I was writing terrible goth poems.

Anyway, I did know about the Turing test (where a machine passes if it cannot be reliably distinguished from a human) and I knew machines were getting better at seeming like humans, because my dad was having way too much fun coding a chatbot and pointing out how it was better than ELIZA. Those terrible poems seemed like the same kind of thing, where machines would inevitably get better at seeming human. And poems are clearly easier to fake than conversation. So, it has been twenty years. Did the machines get better at poetry? Oh yes. Oh hell yes.