No, they didn't kill him, but they would soon drive him away. Did I say that this had been a defining moment? So I did. And so it was, but not because of John Bohac's uncharacteristic moment of kindness.
Sam's reaction to Lucy's LOUD comment about Prozac was to innocently observe "that has to give one pause", not knowing that Lucy had already made sure to pack the audience with her own unbalanced supporters. The reaction to this bit of common sense was one of screaming hysteria about how Sam was "discriminating against" and "oppressing" Lucy and chemically imbalanced people everywhere.
"You're saying that you wouldn't date somebody who was bipolar? You're complaining that you're being discriminated against for being a Gemini, and yet here you are, discriminating against somebody for being a manic depressive." They were absolutely serious, and foaming at the mouth over this, the shocking news that Sam, when he went looking for his future life partner, would greatly prefer than she not be psychotic.
Sam, of course, wasn't saying that. He had decided that he didn't want to date Lucy within a few minutes of first meeting her, a fact that some of the community members, with their fixation on sex, had a hard time grasping. (And some of the others, having been recruited by Lucy, weren't even trying to grasp). He was saying that he was just as glad to not even get to know her as a friend, having an aversion to being around crazy people for some odd reason.
The hysteria grew even louder.
Announcing that she had brain chemistry by Serzone, and was "(expletitive deleted) proud of it", with a number of her classmates more happy to confirm her manic-depressive status privately when they heard about this later (in a less than complimentary way), one of the self-appointed protesters spoke out on this non-issue. She said that Lucy was better off without someone who went to rituals to pick women up, referring to Sam's scandalous willingness to have a pleasant conversation with a woman in public. In a masterful display of bipolar logic, she added that having done so made him "a double dealer", which was an odd complaint to be hearing out of somebody who then bragged of having two regular sexual partners who took turns bedding her.
It was even odder because Sam had not arrived with Lucy that night, or any other night for that matter, having never dated the woman (a fact known to all involved), and that ending even the casual acquaintance that the two had enjoyed had been a choice made by Lucy. How does one find the suggestion of a committed relationship in circumstance like these? And would one really want one, considering what we were seeing here of what this other bipolar person's idea of reasonable expectations within a relationship would be? An example which is in no way atypical.
What would one think of somebody who felt that having a pleasant conversation with another woman would constitute some sort of betrayal? This is the sort of person one seeks shelter from, and here Sam was being given abuse by the Pagan community, in effect, for saying that he'd rather not go out looking for a prospective stalker. Bipolar disorder is no light-hearted joke. Behavior is erratic, occasionally violent, punctuated with paranoid rages and notoriously vindictive, unprincipled behavior when the sick individual doesn't get what she wants.
Come to think of it : how would you describe the behavior we've been telling you about so far? Sam had found the beginning of clarity.
"My, you guys are getting a lot of people mad at you. Maybe you're the problem". A stupid argument under any circumstances - by that logic, if one sees a gang rape in progress, one should drop one's trousers and join in the fun because there are more people there taking the side of the attackers than that of the victim. Nevertheless, one should know better. And, in real life, we found that most people did know better. We and the people we've known have seldom had problems like this when we've avoided Pagandom and other segments of the Counterculture. So, what's going wrong?
"Dreams" would have to be part of the answer. "Dreams?", you might say. "What's wrong with having dreams?" Nothing, so long as one knows where the dreams end and one's real, waking life begins, and far too many people at this event didn't. Part of the problem was that in the search for that supernatural power that the acolytes were being taken on by the elders, the dreams didn't always take place in the student's sleep. The students would be taken on "astral projection" sessions, in which they would witness magickal "wonders", on this other plane of existence that they imagined themselves being on.
Out of curiosity, we took a look through some of the writings of Starhawk, which some of the locals treat almost as holy scripture, and listened in as rituals were described. What we read and heard was not altogether unfaimiliar, and wouldn't have been to almost anybody with a completed college education. These rituals sounded a great deal like hypnotic inductions we had heard described elsewhere, and a hypnotic trance can, apparently, partake of much of the character or a dream.
That the resulting dreams, waking or otherwise, that many would have would be strange and vivid ones should be no surprise. Mythology, as Jung has argued (and many have agreed), connects to some very powerful images buried in the subconscious, and as we talk about those stories, we're putting ourselves in mind of these images and pulling them up. Even if we are skeptical about Jung's concept of a collective subconscious in which these images (or "archetypes") are to be found, the concept of an archetype itself is one which we find most plausible on philosophical grounds, (1), even if we certainly don't agree with the notion that a deity is nothing more than that archetype. What we truly must take issue with is the idea, popular among the fluffies, that religion is to be reduced a search for supernatural capabilities, to be given to the seeker with no strings attached. (2)
But such an arrangement is exactly what the seekers in the community that Sam was encountering expected, and were offered by their elders, with no soul searching on required on the part of the acolytes at any point along the path to their imagined enlightenment. Nor was any attempt to suggest that they ought to engage in any sort of self-examination tolerated by the community, any attempt to criticise the reasonability of the actions or comments of somebody who wasn't one's acolyte being referred to as being a form of persecution, playing into what was already a well-developed martyr complex being encouraged in those followers.
Some would go so far as to seek out opportunities to be "persecuted", indulging in such odd behaviors as walking into a Catholic bookstore downtown, and asking for black candles, announcing that they were witches and needed them for a seance. The strange look that these followers got from the bookstore owners was then considered to be a sign of "bigotry", as was the patient explanation that Catholics didn't use black candles, and so the bookstore would have little reason to have them in stock. These horrors were related to an appreciative audience back at one of the socials, those who had bewildered the bookstore owners gaining added credibility in reward for their imagined victimization at the hands of the evil Christian evangelists.
What was being reinforced in moments like this, was a habit of refusing to listen with an open mind when others were trying to reason with one. This tended to close the door to any input from those in the true believers life who might have, at the appropriate moment, said what some of these people truly needed to hear: "get a grip on it, this isn't reasonable and here is why". Not surprisingly, when the time came for these same acolytes to examine their own attitudes and their own behavior, they had no difficulty in following their old habits, not bothering to do any soul searching at all. Is it in the nature of any creature to do that which is harder, when it has been trained to do that which is easier? What could be easier than acting on impulse, not bothering to ever examine any of one's gut reactions or attitudes? Especially when one has gained such great skill in screening out the points of view of those in one's life who care about one for reasons that have nothing to do with the desire to sell one magical items of lessons in spellcrafting?
But examining one's attitudes and gut reactions is exactly what one must do, if one is to seperate fantasy from reality, or fixations from reasonable reactions. Think about how it is, that prior to Paganism, one would generally know that an interpretation of what one had seen was an unreasonable one: by comparing one's interpretations with past experience. But if one can create a hallucinatory world to escape into, in which one's imagination defines reality, and one confuses that hallucination with reality, what becomes of one's sense of reality, now that experience is being remade by one's flights of fancy?
If one's perceived reality can be so easily be remolded by one's will, how difficult will it be, really, for one's wishes to remold it into a form that makes one's actions reasonable ones, transforming one into the hero in the imagined drama that is one's life?This all becomes a matter of pure behaviorism: that which is repeated with encouragement is reinforced. The experience of having their intuitive leaps 'confirmed' in this manner time and time again gave the acolytes that which is least likely to encourage reasonability: overconfidence.