I thought I’d post here the materials I just posted in response to the Imaginal Institute’s request for a brief account of what I am trying to accomplish. It’s in three parts, the first dealing with mapping / modeling using the HipBone toolset, the second with monitoring religious violence, and the third with applying the toolset to mapping conflict in the middle east.
Here goes:
I seem to have two fairly distinct directions that I’m working in, and they offer, respectively, a form and some content.
The form: the HipBone family of games and analytic tools:
There is a natural mental process we all use every day, by which one thing reminds us of another. As with so many such naturally occurring processes, it turns out that if you formalize it into a system, it has tremendous power — just as formalizing humming, whistling and tapping one’s fingers on the table, if formalized, yields the symphony, the marching band, the gamelan and shakuhachi, the slalom of notes pouring from a bebop saxophone.
Wherever two thoughts can be associated, they can be annotated using my game boards. In terms of conversation, what this means is that we have a way to “score” conversations as though they were works of music, omitting the “straightaways” where talk continues down a single linear path and focusing in on the “elbows” where the direction of conversation shifts, where the linearity becomes non-linear, where complexity and richness enter into the process.
A HipBoneGame can therefore be thought of as a distilling of conversation or thought into a more potent, concentrated form. Compared with other thinking, it is demanding in that it insists on “creative leaps” which connect one line of thought with another. But compared with other constrained forms such as the fugue or villanelle, it is astonishingly liberating, since it allows people who have no skills at complex rhyming or playing contrapuntal music to work a tight form using their natural power of association alone — and the result is the creation of beauty, of a sort which generally requires extensive artistic training to achieve.
So among other things,a HipBone game is an art form which relatively few barriers to entry, in which an architecture of thoughts — a variant on Hermann Hesse’s “hundred gated cathedral of mind” — can be realized.
The games can be played solo, in pairs or in a group, and the experience when more than one participant is present often feels almost telepathic. It also involves “digging beneath appearances” to see patterns, and thus comes close to, and sometimes embodies, archetypal experience. And since HipBone play exercises the analogical / metaphorical capacity, it can also engender an enhanced appreciation for synchronicities and parallelisms in life itself.
Spiritually, the games present a new form of meditation in which the parallelisms between two objects of contemplation are additive (like stereophony in sound and stereoscopy in sight, two distinct but similar percepts become one in such a way that the rich detail of each is maintained while an additional “depth” dimension emerges) rather than subtractive (as in abstraction, whereby only the parallelisms are retained and all richness of differentiating detail are omitted). That by itself is a profound addition to meditative discourse.
In addition, there are many purposes to which the games can be put, from education to business brainstorming to therapy, and variants using what I call “HipBone Analytics” offer users the possibility of mapping / modeling complicated social problems in which multiple stakeholders or points of view are in a continuing, shifting web of tensions, an approach which is specifically pitched at the human voice, emotions and insights in play — rather than at statistics and feedback loops.
I would like to offer this set of tools to the world under a form of licensing which allows free use for non-commercial purposes and profit supportive of my life and continuing projects, and am working with Leigh Melander and Derek Robinson here at the Imaginal Institute to create web-playable game software and spread the word…
http://www.beadgaming.com
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The content: religious and apocalyptic violence and terrorism
I have been monitoring apocalyptic groups and religious violence for at least a decade, both as a Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston U and as the Senior Analyst at The Arlington Institute and informally.
I believe that we do not sufficiently appreciate that the terrorism which we abhor for its indiscriminate violence is, in the performer’s eyes, an act of devotion — that it involves achieving an aroused and impassioned state in which a vision of purity, honor and justice on earth is as much the aim as a favorable status in the afterlife.
I have a passionate wish to understand that passion, not intellectually (though that is a part of it, its meniscus if you like) but as it is felt in the heart, and to be able to communicate what it must feel like to those who need to understand it or in some purposive way respond to it.
This in turn leads me to explore anthropological, depth psychological and comparative religious avenues for going beyond easy dismissal — “they are hideous madmen” — towards the sort of understanding Michael Scheuer, who ran the bin Laden desk at CIA, exhibits when he portrays bin Laden thus:
According to his closest Muslim associates and many of the Westerners who have interviewed him, Osama bin Laden appears to be a genuinely pious Muslim; a devoted family man; a talented, focused, and patient insurgent commander; a frank and eloquent speaker; a successful businessman; and an individual of conviction, intellectual honesty, compassion, humility, and physical bravery.
That, to me, is Scheuer’s appraisal uninfluenced by reactive hatred and disgust at his actions and their impact on us, and thus it is a first step towards a richer understanding in which the nature of genuine piety itself, in warrior mode, becomes something we understand as motive rather than as verbal formulation.
In understanding how a crusader — devoted to the Virgin Mary and all too closely acquainted with the Stations of the Cross — might feel, we come to understand what we are in fact up against in the jihadist.
And this level of insight then allows us to see al-Qaida to some extent as pious Muslims may see it. For though the means bin Laden uses may be critiqued from an Islamic and even a strict Wahhabi point of view — as the recent publication of a devastating book length attack by one of al-Q’s earliest major theological supporters, Sheikh Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, shows – it is still the case that his actions can have different resonance when “read” through Islamic eyes.
When bin Laden, at the lowest point of his jihadist efforts, leaves the Yemen for Afghanistan and betakes himself to the Tora Bora caves, he will inevitably remind some Muslims of the Prophet himself, who at the lowest point of his prophetic vocation left Mecca for Medina and sought sanctuary in a cave — where by the grace of his God, a spider’s web covered the entrance in such a way that his enemies could not see him.
Our natural tendency in the west is to see Tora Bora in terms of military topography, as a highly defensible, almost impregnable warren of caves deep within some of the world’s most difficult mountain territory. What we miss may be precisely what Muslim piety will in some cases see — that bin Laden’s retreat there is symbolically aligned with the “sunna” or life of the Prophet, and thus with the life of Islam itself — in much the same way that Christians, in the words of Thomas a Kempis, may practice “the Imitation of Christ”.
War is an aroused state, and apocalyptic expectation likewise. The content which most interests me is the emotional and archetypal content of apocalyptic arousal, and (for practical reasons) its potential expression in jihad should the Mahdist (messianic) tendencies already visible in both Sunni and Shiite circles reach the tipping point and add their intensity to an already inflamed situation.
I am currently working on a book-length treatment of these issues, and hope to see it completed in the next months and published (I have a publisher in mind), not too long after that.
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A marriage of form and content: Edward Said’s Game:
As I’ve described above, I have developed a form for the expression of multiple ideas in multiple voices, and I am also passionately engaged in monitoring and mapping the various voices to be distinguished within the complexities of contemporary religious violence.
I have a particular interest in the Temple Mount or Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem, where the al-Aqsa mosque now stands, and where some Jews and supportive Christians feel the Third Jewish Temple should by rights be built. Since both Jewish hope of the Messiah, Christian longing for the Second Coming and Muslim expectation of the coming of the Mahdi or Rightly Guided one all converge on this one point, Gershom Gorenberg has aptly called it “the most contested piece of real estate on earth”.
The Palestinian public intellectual Edward Said once wrote:
When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes — opposites in the Hegelian sense — that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out. It would require the imagination of someone like Edmund Burke to fathom.
Edward W. Said, Power, Politics, and Culture, p. 447
Said’s words resonate strongly with my interest in the religious and political conflicts in the Middle East, but I also see them as describing an approach to those conflicts for which my own games and analytic tools — viewed as methods of scoring a polyphony of contrasting voices — are uniquely suited.
I thus have the project of mapping many of the voices in Middle Eastern religious and political discourse onto a “conceptual map” using HipBone analytic methodology.
I intend to present this project in web-based form, as an artwork with implications for education, diplomacy and conflict-resolution.
