Tales of extraordinary madness

our tiny garden is a jungle

The St. Petersburg Times ran a three-part series on Scientology last week, with the focus mainly on bullying at the management levels. It was good for what it was, but it didn't go into the true madness of the thing.

I.
L Ron Hubbard's Admissions is like a madman's little book of wisdom. Keep it by your bedside and meditate on a section each night before sleeping. It's a list of platitudes, memos to self and self-aggrandizing asides in the second person. Examples:

You can sing beautifully. Your voice can imitate any singer. Your tones are round and true. You have no superstitions about singing at any time. Your oratory is magnificent. Your voice tones perfect, your choice of words marvelous, your logic unassailable.

Material things are yours for the asking. Men are your slaves. Elemental spirits are your slaves. You are power among powers, light in the darkness, beauty in all.

Your eyes are getting progressively better. They became bad when you used them as an excuse to escape the naval academy. You have no reason to keep them bad and now they can get well and they will become eventually starting now as keen as an eagle's with clear whites and green pupils. Sunlight does not affect them. Lack of sleep does not affect them.

Your foot was an alibi. The injury is no longer needed. It is well. You have perfect and lovely feet.

You have no fear of what any woman may think of your bed conduct. You know you are a master. You know they will be thrilled. You can come many times without weariness. The act does not reduce your vitality or brain power at all. You can come several times and still write. Intercourse does not hurt your chest or make you sore. Your arms are strong and do not ache in the act. Your own pleasure is not dependent on the woman's. You are interested only in your own sexual pleasure. If she gets any that is all right but not vital. Many women are not capable of pleasure in sex and anything adverse they say or do has no effect whatever upon your pleasure. Their bodies thrill you. If they repel you, it merely means they themselves are too frigid or prudish to be bothered with. They are unimportant in bed except as they thrill you. Your sexual power is magnificent and they know it. If they are afraid of it, that is their loss. You are not affected by it.

Part one here, but all the above are from part two.

II.
The clip below shows David Miscavige, the current 'head' of Scientology, announcing the death of L Ron Hubbard. It's great to see his face as spins the news of Hubbard having left his body to continue his research.



III.
This is my favorite. I sat and watched whole set [7 x 30 min] straight through. It's Steven Fishman in a seven-part video deposition that goes into his beliefs about himself and Scientology. The horror only grows over the running time, right up to the last scene - the tour of the library.

Steven Fishman is a former Scientologist whose inclusion of Scientology's secret Operating Thetan levels in a court filing led to the first public confirmation by the Church of Scientology of its doctrines regarding Xenu and the Wall of Fire. Wikipedia

Instruments of our passions

Thelonius Monk / me typing, from Pinamar

Botany is a study for an idle and solitary person: a point and a magnifying glass are all the apparatus he needs to observe plants. He walks about, wanders freely from one object to another, examines each flower with interest and curiosity, and as soon as he begins to grasp the laws of their structure, he enjoys, in observing them, a painless pleasure as intense as if it had cost him much pain. In this idle occupation there is a charm we feel only in the complete calm of passions, but which then alone suffices to make life happy and sweet. But as soon as we mingle a motive of interest or vanity with it, either in order to obtain distinction or to write books, as soon as we learn only in order to instruct, as soon as we look for flowers only in order to become an author or professor, all this sweet charm vanishes. We no longer see in plants anything but the instruments of our passions. We no longer find any pleasure in their study. We no longer want to know, but to show that we know. And in the woods, we are only on the world's stage, preoccupied with making ourselves admired. Or else, restricting ourselves to armchair and garden botany at the most, instead of observing vegetation in nature, we concern ourselves only with systems and methods - an eternal matter of dispute...

From the Seventh Walk in Rousseau's The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, p 98

Other posts in this series:

I resigned the post I then held
Reveries of a solitary wa*ker

Plant sex and consequences

My garden is small, maybe just 3m x 4m, one half of the gated yard in front of the house. We moved in a year ago and it was just dirt and creeping vines, two tall trees [5 or 6m each]. I cleaned it up, churned rotting vegetation into the ground, and began to move in some new plants. The flowers mostly died but the other things flourished, a great variety of green things, tall and short, and there's snails, butterflies, geckos. I worked hard on it for 4 months or so and then just let it be, my job just to trim things that grow too far out of bounds, pull the more aggressive weeds. I let things happen and watch it like a slow sport. Plants rock - they use sunlight to turn dirt and water into the living matter that lies at the base of every food chain.

I'm a big fan. So this story in the NY Times caught my eye, Plants Shown to Show Preferences for Their Relatives.

... scientists have found evidence that the sea rocket is able to do something that no other plant has ever been shown to do. ... [It] can distinguish between plants that are related to it and those that are not. And not only does this plant recognize its kin, but it also gives them preferential treatment. [...]

The finding is a surprise, even a bit of a shock, in part because most animals have not even been shown to have the ability to recognize relatives, despite the huge advantages in doing so.

“I’m just amazed at what we’ve found,” said Susan A. Dudley, an evolutionary plant ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who carried out the study with a graduate student, Amanda L. File.

“Plants,” Dr. Dudley said, “have a secret social life.” [...]

The studies are part of an emerging picture of life among plants, one in which these organisms, long viewed as so much immobile, passive greenery, can be seen to sense all sorts of things about the plants around them and use that information to interact with them. [...]

Some plants, for example, have been shown to sense potentially competing neighboring plants by subtle changes in light. That is because plants absorb and reflect particular wavelengths of sunlight, creating signature shifts that other plants can detect.

Scientists also find plants exhibiting ways to gather information on other plants from chemicals released into the soil and air. A parasitic weed, dodder, has been found to be particularly keen at sensing such chemicals. [...]

The problem, for many scientists, is that as obvious as the behaviors sometimes are, they can seem just too complex and animal-like for a plant. “Maybe if we understood more mechanistically how it’s happening,” Dr. Karban added, “we’d feel more comfortable about accepting the results that we’re finding.” [...full article at the link above]

So that's cool, as I'm about other ways of being, and it also links slightly into this thing on Bee Porn that I came across a while ago. I saved the page in Google Reader and didn't read it, assuming that it was going to be about floral mimicry gulling bees into copulation, which it was, although the main point is the movie that it links to, which depicts a graphic scene of inter-kingdom love. And also this quote from an abstract, which suggests why the slightly exotic attracts us.

The theory of mimicry predicts that selection favors signal refinement in mimics to optimally match the signals released by their specific model species. We provide here chemical and behavioral evidence that a sexually deceptive orchid benefits from its mimetic imperfection to its co-occurring and specific bee model by triggering a stronger response in male bees, which react more intensively to the similar, but novel, scent stimulus provided by the orchid. [Details at the Bee Porn link]

Note: While it may seem dumb that bees are aroused by the obvious fakery of orchids and such, don't forget that some men have been driven to a state of pseudo-copulation by ink on paper arranged in such a way that the two-dimensional image, a few inches high, resembles the naked form of an adult female.

Related posts:
What's so wonderful about flowers

Being moss

Mushrooms from dead wood

Above is a picture of some oyster mushrooms growing in my garden. I inoculated the log last summer and then a week ago they started popping out.

The garden is only about 2.5m x 4m, but it has two tall trees - 3m and 5m - and plenty of variety. I worked on it a lot at first and then let it go. The idea is for it be a self-sustaining experiment in permaculture and emergent behavior. Only dead plant material is used for nourishment, I just add water and introduce new species, then let them work it out together. With regard to size and apparent vigor, the yam plants are kings of the patch, but there are various smaller things, a lot smaller, who thrive in the undergrowth, some of which are the fungi I've introduced through spore prints and inoculated wood.

I should make it clear that I don't really know what I'm doing, but I pay attention and let the plants teach me things. The names are not that important, I just need to see what they do, which are fragile and which are unstoppable.

Plants [and fungi, which are different] are highly evolved technology. All the energy we use is at base solar power, and it's plants that are on the front line of using solar energy to convert dirt and water into edible, flammable or wearable material. I'm not up to comprehending animals yet. I still look at our cat and can't quite figure out how it can be so self-contained, to move about with only a piece of fish and handful of biscuits a day as the energy source. Plants seem a lot more tractable, the processes essentially graspable and hence the sense of awe fully owned rather than just default.