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Stephen Pickering

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  • The Essential Function of Mythology and Religion

    It’s to put the psyche in accord with nature. Once a hero begins an adventure he quickly learns he has to let go of his ego thinking and let the quest itself be his guide. In some adventures the hero is humbled (Odysseus, Parsifal, Job, Indra). In others he is completely eaten up or otherwise destroyed (Jonah, Jason). In all of these cases some kind of submission is required to an unintelligible, invisible force. That submission has to be utter (Actual death in the Christ story, and a complete willingness to die in the Buddha—at which moment his fulfillment is activated, and he achieves Nirvana). Yet all the while he is still striving for his goal. Though chaos may blow him all over the place for reasons that don’t seem fair, he somehow maintains his inner acceptance even in the face of the ultimate. And continues to try to move forward. The schizophrenic is the person who does the opposite: He won’t let fate wash over him, won’t let his consciousness transform, and keeps insisting on his ego’s program of control. He can’t accept the cards he is dealt and when the world around him won’t conform to his ego’s desire (which in truth like Jay Gatsby’s can never be fulfilled) he finally refuses to play the game. But that leaves him in a frozen state in which the intensity of suffering only increases until he feels he utterly cannot escape it and finally is left wailing on the ground.
    So the hero is representative of a psyche that has learned to accept, submit to, and otherwise come into accord with nature, which is also analogous to his subconscious and as Jung put it, his “undiscovered self.”
    Some heroes start out too proud and have to be humbled. Others start out too humble (Al-addin, many peasant types in the Grimm tales, Jack, etc.) And their adventure consists of realizing the diamond glowing inside. The lowly peasant boy, usually the third and youngest child, whom no one else respects either, turns out to be the only one in the kingdom with the courage to defeat the dragon and win the princess. Somehow his willingness to get in the game with the same type of straightforward intent, yet without expectation, and even more crucially without desperation, just like the Buddha’s acceptance under the Bo tree, and the Christ’s acceptance hanging ostensibly, metaphorically from that same tree, activated his superpowers, transformed his consciousness and that of the whole world around him.
    Religion is simply when the act of being with these stories, symbols, and rituals, has the same effect on your psyche. The labyrinth is your socially conditioned mind and body. What’s trapped inside is your undiscovered self, your soul. Adriane’s flax thread is symbolic of religion and mythology itself, the song of the soul’s calling. One only has to follow it. The Great Way, as the koan says, has no gate.

    Refusal of the call converts the adventure into its negative.

    Joseph Campbell

  • The Best Romantic Relationship Books According to Whitney Cummings

    • Getting to ‘I Do’ by Pat Allen — [Google Search Link]
    • Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendrix [Link]
    • Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow by Marnia Robinson [Link]

    This info was shared from Whitney’s appearance on Nikki Glaser’s Sirius XM show “You Up,” which is a lot of fun to watch in and of itself.

  • The Secret of Success: Having Fun

    I’m having a blast. It’s really fun. I don’t know why… But it’s just been a joy.

    Conan O’Brien Jan. 12, 2020, “Nikki Glaser” 1:12

    Why were you trying to find my extension?
    I have a friend who’s opening up a new restaurant in Soho and I was hoping you’d go with me.
    What?
    Do you want to go out with me tonight?
    Why?
    Because it would be fun, and you seem cool.

    30 Rock S1 E11 4:39
    “Did you ever imagine that your podcast would be…like where its at right now is crazy, man.”
    Joe Rogan: “No, there’s no way I could have imagined it. I wouldn’t have believed it.”
    Tom Segura: “It’s so nuts.”
    Joe Rogan: “It’s just…yeah, I just thought it was fun to do.”

    Let me ask you something, why do you do what you do?
    I don’t know. The only time I really feel alive is when I’m singing

    Jennifer Hudson’s character in ‘Sandy Wexler’ [-1:55:54].

    Johnny Cash is not cast in amber, this is the guy before he was canonized, when he was just a musician, when he had runway in front of him and was less worried about getting it right than just doing it. Yup, when done right music is here and then gone, you had to be there, that’s one of the reasons live is such a big deal these days.

    — Bob Lefsetz https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2019/12/04/matchbox/

    “And one does it not to be good for you, but just because you dig it. Because at last you find yourself in the center, the eternal now, in which past and future drop away, in which divisions created by words drop away.” — [YouTube Link]

    Alan Watts

    Something I do for like no reason besides the fact that it was just like for fun………Mmmm mmmm, I mean because making music is messing around. [Youtube Interview Link]

    Billie Eilish

    You’ve got to find something that you love to do in an of itself that could also become a career. I would even go a step further: the actual doing of it and navigating all of its challenges (like an adventure) actually gives you more pleasure, feeds your soul even more, or if you want to get unromantically scientific about it, releases even more dopamine, than all the other possible accoutrements it could give you (money, fame, sex, adoration).
    That’s a big ask. But I think it’s the key to not only giving yourself the best shot at not only the accoutrements, but producing work that is worthy of them. In another words, work that gives more value to the audience (and keep in mind, especially in today’s world this could literally be anything: arts, business, science, etc.) than the money and attention they are giving to it. This is the key fundamental law of business: B = V + D. Business equals Value plus Distribution. But it’s an equation that can be applied to any career. And thanks to the internet, or more robustly “technology” the definition of what a career can be (“Youtube Star”) has grown at least by an order of magnitude over what it was when I graduated from college in 1989, maybe two.

  • Attempting an Explication of the Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

    Are full of passionate intensity.



    Surely some revelation is at hand;

    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

    Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

    The darkness drops again; but now I know   

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

    Update: April 1, 2021: On the whole this poem is metaphorically about what happens to a civilization and the psychology of the individuals within it, when the underpinning rug of it’s spiritual belief system is ripped out from under it, when there is no fundamental myth supporting it. The “cradle” of the soul is rocked. The mythologies of the past aren’t speaking to us anymore because everyone knows they aren’t literally true, and this creates a chasm in the psyche which gives birth to a monster. And we are that monster with our blank and pitiless gazes because this earthquake in the soul turns us metaphorically into “the hollow men, the stuffed men, headpiece filled with straw.”

    Update: 8/15/20: I still feel as vexed by this poem as the rough beast feels vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. Which leads me to the main point of this update: Who’s rocking cradle had the power to wake up twenty centuries of stony sleep? Was this Jesus in the manger?

    Some rough beast, a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Maybe the biggest question of this poem is why is the thing slouching? It’s a huge monster with a lion body. We think of lion bodies as being fierce, muscular, solar king-like, even devine in their beautiful symmetry (“What immortal hand or eye/ dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”) not slouchy! Lions are proud. People who slouch are ashamed and or dejected with being. For someone about to become Jesus 2.0, the next savior of the world, he’s not too excited about taking the job, that’s for sure!

    And why go back to the original place? London, Paris, or New York would seem a more appropriate place for a new savior of this day and age to be born. With going back to the Levant, I sense its a metaphor that the ideals of the pagan West, namely that of the ideal of the individual, which is what the sense of the Grail romances, the pagan myths and fairy-tales, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment are all about, have now been thoroughly overthrown, for the ideals of the Levant which are that of the group. If you’ve ever experienced a mob mentality break out, you definitely have seen gazes that are blank, pitiless, and soulless. That’s the equivalent of falling to all three temptations of the Buddha (Lust, Fear, Social Duty) in one fell swoop.

    But why use “the Sun” as a simile? That definitely catches your attention. The sun is usually a metaphor and simile used for bright and hopeful sentiments. But not if your walking across the desert, right? Also, if you think of the sun only in its scientific definition, if you leave out the romance, mythological dimension of life, and only understand it as a function of physics, groveling as it were before shear fact, then the sun is indeed dead, a ruthless fireball fusing hydrogen into helium, that cares not a wit about life.

    Some part of us knows something is wrong, but….

    We are vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.

    Say what? Here’s my shot: A “rocking” cradle suggests instability, an unknowingness in an instinctual way, of whose side the MOTHER is on. Is she Athena or Circe? Does she want to kill us or for us to be the savior of the universe? Or in a way, as only Greek Mythology can intimate, be both? Or in another sense, the ground of our own being, of life’s being. Is it an inherently good thing, evil thing, or indifferent? I.e. “Something that should not have been,” as Schopenhauer suggests. Is nature, this thing that our consciousness rests on, inherently nasty, disgusting, and evil? If one has that sense, you will certainly be vexed to nightmare all the way back to birth.

    This is when it gets exciting, the adventure. Because this is the entire sense of the burning point what is uniquely you that wants, that must be expressed, that has never been expressed before. Becoming imminent, and yet in a gesture to the East, most likely spontaneously, as the eminence of transcendence, completely without ego.

  • The Secret Voice

    The screen is up and
    Borough Boy is 
    being euthanized
    exactly as I write this
    5:18pm on Labor Day, 6:18 where
    it's happening in Saratoga, New York.
    The last race of the last day 
    of the iconic meet. 
    No one knows
    what is and what 
    is not.
    History is still
    and could break both ways
    in superposition. 
    People don't know if they 
    are themselves or someone else. 
    They believe its up to the mystery
    of another forgotten consciousness
    who has control for some unknown reason
    because its unfathomable that
    someone else exists.

  • Changing My Mind About Publishing in Today’s Media Landscape

    I pulled into Kroger’s tonight, and what I felt was a good poetic line seemed to flash into me —like so many do that don’t necessarily have a direct meaning consciously, but feel like they came from another place and I am just the receiver and feel like they are pointing towards something that is deep and true.

    Normally I’d put the line in Notes like I’ve done hundreds if not thousands of times before and that’d be the last I’d see of it. Today I said, “Screw it, let’s post it.” And there from my car, from my Chrome browser on my iPhone 7+ I opened up my WordPress, created a new post and typed in the line. After I hit save, another line came to me that I added, and while I was in the store a third.

    We’ll see how this experiment goes, but my point is, something keeps calling me toward this way of doing things in “real time” as the phrase goes.

    Here’s another example with music. A few months ago, I had a somber tune (sweet sad) come to my head on a Saturday night about like this one, and right here in front of this iMac I propped my iPhone, opened up Garageband and recorded it, knowing it would be my next single.

    But then a case of the “perfections” came in, and I still haven’t published it. I feel now like I should have gotten it out there, if not that night, for sure within the next week, even if it had a bracket of (Demo) beside it on Spotify. Now so many months later, the tune has sort of lost its “spark” inside of me, and even if I could lay down a technically better performance from taking my time, it would have lost its emotional spark that getting it at the moment or close to the moment would give.

    Of course ten years ago, much less twenty or thirty, this would have been a ludicrous approach, but as an example, I was just listening to Rick Beato talking about the B-Side Police single “Murder by Numbers” and as much as I love Synchronicity. I would just absolutely love as much a sort of “B-Side” album of the band recording the whole album live in the same mode of “Murder by Numbers” — mistakes and all.

    The great Carver Mead said “Listen to the Technology.” My gut is telling me that the technology, offering itself like this with its focus on immediacy, is telling us to publish, even in the formal arts of poetry and music, with the same immediacy that social media does.