Barbelith Underground > Temple

Yeah, I'd like for there to be a new online space specifically adapted for this kind of conversation, and I have a couple of thoughts concerning how it might be implemented.

One of the useful features that Barbelith has is the need for amendments and deletions to be approved. As a moderator I have turned down a number of edit requests on the grounds that they will distort or remove important content to which other board members have already responded. It also encourages a level of accountability, in that arguments cannot be altered after the fact in order to save face. If a person changes their mind, revises their stance or clarifies their terms they cannot pretend that it's what they were writing all along by altering the original content.

A while back I made some comments in the Moderating the Temple Policy thread about the difficulty of encouraging experiential accounts while maintaining rigour when it comes to unexamined prejudice. My thoughts in that thread were that warts and all first draft accounts of experience – written as you would for your own journals and before any critique had been attempted – were not suitable for inclusion on Barbelith and should be discouraged. Those musings were made in the context of this site, in that many posters here have an approach to dealing with prejudice that they feel is appropriate for Barbelith and that they do not want to change. It was an effort to minimise future problems, both for people who might be hurt by such an unexamined account, and for the person giving the account receiving replies that are either hurtful or unhelpful. Those thoughts were all Barbelith-specific and for me the playing field is potentially altered when discussing a potential new forum. In that thread I did not believe the prevailing culture of Barbelith was likely to change, but with a new board we are all part owners in setting up a new culture from the outset.

Setting my own stall out, I would like to be part of a community whose members are able to cope with unexamined first draft accounts of experience in a sober, reasoned and thoughtful manner. My interest in the Temple forum has waned over the last couple of years because I believe that a forum that encourages experiential posting is mutually exclusive to a space in which prejudice of any form is not tolerated. I'm increasingly disinterested in discussing a subject of the depth and richness of magic in a space that's intended to be as safe as Barbelith, because placing limits on the discussion of a limitless subject means that it is incredibly hard to have discussions that go to the kinds of depths that I'd like to engage in. Magic that cannot deal with our deepest fears about ourselves and the world (the soil in which all prejudice is formed) is of little use to me. A forum that purports to discuss magic but that does not attempt to contextualise prejudice, understand its roots and see it transformed is also of little use to me. I believe that the Barbelith Temple forum is currently such a place because prejudice is almost invariably something that we point out in others and not ourselves, is almost always an accusation rather than an admission.

One would not typically expect a therapist to call their patient an ignorant idiot, get angry with them or ban them from their practise for being honest about dream experiences containing subject matter that may initially appear to be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. That would be monstrous. One would also not expect an internet message board to be a therapy practise, as posters are unlikely to define themselves as doctors or patients or to believe that the internet is a suitable place for such a transaction. It is absolutely the correct response for anyone in an internet community that encourages experiential accounts of altered states to read such an account and say to themselves, "I am not this person's therapist." Logically one would expect that the person admitting themselves to be both unqualified and unappointed as a therapist would tread carefully, with humility, caveats and permissions sought. Why? Because in this context the prerequisite for the observation that one is not a person's therapist is the recognition that a therapist may be exactly what is required. It could be argued that to recognise the need for a therapist while persisting in calling the person who you believe needs a therapist an idiot, or getting angry with them, is just as monstrous as the therapist who acts in that manner. And if we believe in the impossibility of an accurate psychic diagnosis in an online context then you'd think it would be more reasonable to assume that kindness is a more suitable response than unkindness, just to ensure being on the safe side.

In a similar vein, an admission that it is not incumbent upon you to be that person's educator is usually in the context of believing that person to be ignorant about a certain matter, often accompanied by the belief that you are the one who has the informed opinion, or at least knows where the informed opinion can be found. I doubt anyone would disagree that the world is a better place when people are informed and educated, and that to perceive a need for information and education automatically suggests the optimum response to that need. Again, I'm arguing for a default state of kindness directed towards people to whom some Barbelith members have sometimes been unkind. It’s tiring, frustrating and frequently thankless to say the same things over and over again, but restating our beliefs is a fact of life when we encounter new people.

Analytical tools for an experience of an altered state are not the same as you would use for a film. Analytical tools for a written account of that altered state are not the same as you would use for a book, poem or article. Yes, you would expect to find some areas of overlap. But you would expect those overlapping skills to be employed in a completely different manner. The creators of a film or book are not typically present when people on an internet site debate their work, and typically their film or book will be highly constructed and sculpted by conscious processes, no matter how deeply it might have originated in their unconscious. If it is revealing of them and their deepest fears and prejudices then it will usually be presented at several levels of abstraction from those depths rather than being a direct and deeply personal glimpse into the unfiltered, unexamined psyche of a person who is present for you to engage with. My point is that the depth and type of analysis of altered states is not the same as you would use elsewhere, nor is the type of debate or discussion that you would have about an account of an altered state if the person who experienced it is present (and arguably even if they are not present).

Deciding whether 'Liminal Nation' is going to be either a magazine or a community – or some kind of meshing of the two – is essential in order to establish how you approach these issues. In a magazine one would hope for any articles that contain experiential account to be self-assessed and critiqued with a relatively high degree of rigour. It's about expectations. Members would be expected to contribute something polished and considered and also expect to read contributions that are polished and considered. Posts to a forum or community will not have the same expectations. But to an extent the distinction between magazine and forum is irrelevant, because as soon as you have a group of people together in a space you have a community by default. It's really only a choice about what kind of community you have.

Forum fatigue is a common phenomena, in that people get tired of having the same conversations over and over again. I would argue that forum fatigue, while being understandable, is often a case of unrealistic expectations. When a community exists it is to be expected that certain issues will crop up frequently because in any healthy community people are born (join), grow old (change/adapt) and die (leave). People who are administrators and moderators need to know that this is what they're getting into and need to be prepared for constant reiterations of the same subject matter, because they will constantly be dealing with different people at different developmental stages. We might change some of the persistent topics of conversation by changing the community, but we can almost certainly expect that there will still be persistent topics and patterns of discussion that arise.

Please understand that I am not making an argument for opening the floodgates and allowing anyone to come along and post whatever they want without fear of consequences. I don't expect anyone to cuddle or buy roses for someone they find despicable. I do expect intelligent people to do their best to differentiate between a person and their beliefs and behaviours and to target their responses at the correct level. I also expect intelligent people to do their best to differentiate between conscious and unconscious beliefs and behaviours, to do their best to attempt to account for a person's intentions behind what they write or to allow for the fact that a person might be genuinely ignorant of the meaning of the words they are using. That's not bending over backwards to appease or apologise for someone, it's just good manners. I loosely define good manners here as a form of 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' I wholeheartedly expect that there will be people who turn up who cannot be reasoned with, who troll and deliberately target people's orientation, race and class with hateful language, who resist all attempts at communication and who need to be removed. The subject matter alone will attract people like that, and those people can be dealt with according to pre-agreed principles on a case-by-case basis.

In effect I am arguing for a higher level of discussion and critique than is typically found on Barbelith, increased honesty and self-examination, an even greater commitment to clarity and depth, a kinder and more thorough questioning of ideas and assumptions, from contributors who genuinely care about making the world a better place through educating and sharing their thoughts. My friend Gypsy Lantern writes above: I strongly believe that, for various reasons, western culture has wilfully overlooked and stepped away from many important areas of human experience, that have been consigned to a kind of waste paper basket called "magic". Inside that bin are some very valuable things, and "magicians" have the job of sorting out what they are, how they work, and what they are used for. Some of these things might well help us to better understand our human condition, our position within nature, and our possibilities for the future. I wholeheartedly agree with him. The best of us are engaged in the exploration and transformation of ourselves in ways that are indeed overlooked and stepped away from by a huge majority of people in our society, and in order to demonstrate that our beliefs and practises are worthwhile we need to show them that what we have is worth having. We need to write about the limits of human experience, powerful change tools and ideas that can take a person who is hurt, confused and afraid and change them into someone who is strong, aware and can process their fears. I believe that taking a different approach to prejudice is key to this. It's something the world is crying out for. People all over the world are mired in ignorance of each other, misunderstandings about each other, invested in the act of demonising each other for their own ends. It is not enough that we merely say that this is bad, attribute it to people other than ourselves and leave it at that. We need to be honest, recognise it in ourselves and offer up solutions that have worked for us.

I have a few ideas on how this can be built into a new site. Firstly I don't believe that it should be open from the outset. What it is and what it should achieve should be agreed upon by a small, trusted group of people first of all, who will begin the act of filling it with content and exemplifying the type of writing and debate they want from others. It's about building a reputation slowly and in stages and is about the only way in which I think we'll attract the kind of people that we want to attract. Invitations can then be extended to specific people to contribute, and we should set our sights high in this regard, not just to friends but to experts in related fields. There should also be an email address to which people outside this circle can send unsolicited articles to appear on the site, which are vetted by a core group of people before inclusion. People who contribute good material can be invited to join. People should want to come to us to read the very best of what's on offer, and having established a high level of signal with minimal noise we can slowly stagger opening membership to people outside the original core group and invited guests. By operating in this way it should become clear which people are trustworthy to be moderators and administrators and if we manage it right we can make sure there are enough of these for whatever membership demands organically develop so that no one is overworked or feels that it is a burden or unwanted responsibility. Staggering the opening over time will also minimise any initial feelings of fatigue over subject matter, as we will be the ones dictating what is discussed and when rather than an open membership.

Staggering membership will also completely remove our vulnerability to attack while we are establishing a reputation for ourselves. It ensures that by the time we do slowly open ourselves that there are contingencies in place for people who come along only to disrupt. One thing that Barbelith is definitely lacking is reporting functionality. All this needs to be is a button labelled 'Report this post' that flags it for attention of the moderators, preferably with reasons why. A discussion can then be had, possibly with varying degrees of openness, regarding what should be done. For example, that could be a moderator forum in which only moderators can post but that anyone can view, in order that parallel discussions can be had elsewhere that are open to anyone to discuss the actions of the moderators.

I think we should be careful about what kind of material gets posted to begin with. It should be rigorous, tested and experiential, but it should also be grounded in an understanding of its audience and what we want to achieve. I'm a believer that any writing on this subject should make it clear exactly why a belief or ideology is important and what a tool is useful for. Too much writing on magic lost in abstract thought and isn't clearly grounded in people's daily lives. Too much of it can be dismissed as an evasion of reality rather than a brave attempt to better understand and adapt to reality. Consideration of audience is paramount, not only in terms of the people we want to attract but also in terms of the changes we want to make in the world and how we want to effect people with ideas. It stops being about the kind of debate we have on Barbelith and becomes more about how we actively change the world.

I'll leave things here as that's long enough already. I hope you'll interpret my frequent use of the word 'we' as enthusiasm and desire to be involved rather than arrogant presumption. There are a lot of exciting possibilities.

aim for joviality: no offence taken, I guess I just was concerned that you might be attempting to use my race, sexual orientation and gender identity to discount me from understanding the debate and thus marginalising my voice. I didn't know it for sure, hence asking for clarity (thanks for providing). I agree that your definition or Barbelith as equally unsafe is better than my inaccurate one, and I also don't think that inaccuracy harms the case that I am making.

zippy: One of the first considerations should be whether a person is actually, in practise, posting something that is genuinely unfiltered by the conscious mind. Of course you could argue that the first filter is the transcription into language of an experience that is not an easy fit for language, to which I would answer that the best we can do is operate the principles of best-practice in journaling: be as true to the original experience as you can with the first words that come to mind for accurately describing it. Those words might be value loaded to a degree that they are seen as prejudicial, but at least they have been arrived at honestly and can be key to interpreting the experience. I have found from my experience that sometimes the more problematic the word is the more useful it is in the act of interpretation, and not in the manner that one might initially think (seemingly discriminatory language in dream journals, even when used to describe what would usually be considered prejudiced representations from the original experience, can still be signifiers for something else entirely when interrogated at their deepest level) However, this first translation stage into written language is unavoidable unless you choose not to journal. We wouldn't be having this conversation otherwise.

If a person is using the account as a basis for an agenda that is clearly discriminatory then that's a clear cut example of abuse of the system (and plain bad practise in my humble: it is rarely possible to use a visionary account as actual evidence of anything, let alone an agenda that causes harm to other people). However, it is at this point that it ceases to be what we are talking about here, because by the point at which the account is used to advance an agenda it has to have been assessed and filtered as useful evidentially to make the person's case. In practise this will be easy to spot, as a person's analysis and conclusions will be there for anyone to read.

We know that accounts of dreams about a person are often used as a means of harassing that person, something that we get reported to us at the bizzies with surprising regularity. That something described as 'you' has been appearing in someone else' night-time experiences is a peculiarly intimate thought, usually described as creepy if you don't happen to like the person (but is often something you'll get a kick out of it you hold them in esteem or are attracted to them). If someone feels individually aggrieved by this we'd have to look at the context, at what other behaviour might have been exhibited outside of dream accounts to support a case of harassment. This is true for situations outside of the harassment of individuals, including the use of such accounts as covert discrimination: does the account exist in a wider pattern of similar conscious behaviour that clearly targets people?

Another test would involve the immediate context of the specific account. It is rare that a dream is a simple metaphor for anything, even rarer that a literal interpretation seems the best option. It is even rarer still that the account would be a single apparently discriminatory snapshot that was not itself part of a longer and less obviously intelligible dream. If the account seems overly simple, is not couched in admissions of the difficulty of accurately finding words for the experience and admissions of lapses in memory, is not framed within a wider dream narrative and seems too obviously to be a literal blow-for-blow code for something else, these are also telltale signs.

Questioning technique is by far the best when attempting any dream interpretation. Just the first account of the dream itself is rarely sufficient in analysis, a huge number of questions must be asked about the life of the dreamer. Good questioning technique is also useful in the context of our problem of covert abuse behind experiential accounts. A person should be able to answer numerous questions about an experience that they've had. In fact infinite questions could be asked, as anyone who is familiar with submodality distinctions can attest (ie: questions about perceptual positions, colour, brightness contrast, focus, distance of image, border, frame, quality of 'film stock,' associated/dissociated… and here you haven't even come close to exhausting just the visual modality). Then you have the symbolic associations of everything that appears (what does your father mean to you? What does red mean to you? What does the attic room of the house in which you lived between the ages of three and seven mean to you?). There's also the emotional content of the experience, which is again one of the most important keys to interpretation. Some of the questions might overspill into any private area of a person's life and they should be primed and prepared for the possibility of those questions before giving the account.

My point is this: anyone posting an unfiltered account probably only does so for reasons of wanting assistance. If they don't want to be asked searching questions about their lives then they probably shouldn't post the material in the first place. The basic application of questioning technique will probably become a joyless exercise for most people who might forge an account for the purpose of targeting a person or group of people. If they disown it part way through the process as 'just a dream' you can reasonably ask why they have wasted our time with it in the first place. If they don't take it seriously as something that's worthy of analysis, why should we? Questioning technique is useful not only because it helps to highlight fakers and those with an agenda, it is also the skill set that anyone who knew what they were doing would be applying as a matter of course. No one would be able to accuse the questioner of being unfairly interrogative.

Finally there's the boy-who-cried-wolf phenomenon. A person who uses IWOAJ can probably get away with it quite a lot before they become Alex' Grandma. On a forum that discusses magic you can only use IWOAD/IWOAV once. Once you have used it you are seen as a timewaster when it comes to any experiential accounts in future, because you have shown that you do not take them seriously. The hit-to-pride back-pedalling ("I've changed my mind, visions are important really!") that a person would have to do to make us take a future account seriously would probably be too much work for them to bother with. IWOAV could therefore not be used to mount an extended campaign of abuse.

Those are a few ideas for practical tests. I hope people will excuse me of primarily making reference to dreams when talking about accounts of altered states. It's not because I believe it to be the only type of visionary experience that you can have, it's because it's a relatively uncontroversial example of a type of first-draft account that we're happy to have on Barbelith (or that at least no-one has mounted a case against yet) that nevertheless can throw up all sorts of problematic images and associations, and for which I think most of us would agree require different analytical tools than are used elsewhere on Barbelith.

It's difficult to know in practise how many of these types of discussion we might have. I would argue that we might have significantly fewer if we take the approach of a staggered release in order to build a reputation for excellence from the outset, with part of that approach being to demonstrate the type of analysis that I'm talking about if anyone is willing to do it (I'm happy to give it a shot). A staggered release means that the people who post these kinds of accounts initially are likely to be trusted individuals with whom we're already familiar.

A possible future