If I were a young man and again had unlimited energy and time (for so it seems to the young, and it isn’t all that untrue, relatively speaking), I think one of my projects would be to write what might be called the suppressed history of the west.
In such a history I would incorporate the things that conventional histories omit because they are considered not quite respectable (that is, things that go against the accepted party line). When you go looking, you find whole threads that are systematically ignored.
Charles Lindbergh had a full-fledged encounter with spirits as a boy of 25 while he was flying alone over the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. Abraham Lincoln had a series of precognitive dreams including one the night before he was murdered. I could (if I had the time) probably find at least one incident in every other autobiography that the author sets down as unexplainable but nonetheless real. All this is swept under the rug, rather than gathered into a skein, because it goes against the party line. It isn’t acceptable.
What political biography deals with matters of ESP or UFOs? What history of civilization reports adequately on societies that are founded for reasons of religious cohesion or spiritual development? What intellectual history deigns to consider (or has the competence to treat) occult societies other than, at most, the sort of exterior gossip that leads one to think the members frivolous, indeed childish?
And what biography dares treat with respect a great man’s excursions into forbidden territory? Yeats was a practicing magician. Jung used the I Ching and studied alchemy. George Bernard Shaw — well, see for yourself. The following quotation is from one of his Fabian lectures of November, 1916.
“The religious man is no longer the man who has hidden his eyes in the bosom of the church, but one to whom God (if he uses that term at all) is an overwhelming intention in the world which he feels mysteriously interested in and impelled to carry out even when it is contrary to his immediate personal interests and intentions. He is no longer an Agnostic, because he recognizes a creative will in the world which can and does produce actual material live cellular tissue when it wants it, and because he not only recognizes a biological movement toward a destination, but perceives that the direction of that movement is always toward higher organization with the apparent object of becoming capable of greater knowledge and power: in short, toward Omniscience and Omnipotence. And as that destination is at an infinite distance, he is not troubled with a horrible fear that we shall presently arrived there and have nothing to do for the rest of our lives.”
See what I mean? You definitely knew of Shaw the playwright, probably knew of Shaw the socialist, but I’ll bet you didn’t know of Shaw the mystic. It’s all part of the systematically suppressed history of our times.
Hey Frank –
I quite agree with you, both that the common treatment of unexplainable incidents in anyone’s life is to see them as frivolous and not worth considering seriously, and that almost any man’s life will contain these incidents, often at critical times within that man’s experience.
I believe the reason for this may include our treatment of our own emotions. surface emotions come and go easily and often signify little. However, through the course of a lifetime of spiritual maturation, our emotions gradually become more refined and purified. Then the gates of deeper perception and true mystical experience open.
it seems vital to me to encourage seekers to value their own emotions enough to work with them in the athanor of experience until they ahve begun to deepen and open us to our own roots of consciousness. Only then, when we are connected to our own mysterious deeper nature, can we give value to others’ inexplicable events
Frank,
What a great idea for a book. As I was reading I remembered Albert Einstein’s coming out of the afternoon nap/haze that led to the theory of relativity.
Jimmy Carter’s seeing and officially reporting a UFO. Didn’t he promise if he became president he would release all UFO documentation? There’s one campaign promise he didn’t live up to.
Then we have Ronald and Nancy Reagan seeing a UFO that even Lucille Ball and Steve Allen confirmed. Then President Reagan’s war with UFO’s comment during a speech at the UN.
It also seems that conservatives, Republicans, and the religious right need to be reminded of a fact when they put down spiritual and/or alternative practices that is outside mainstream Christianity. They need to be reminded that President Reagan and Nancy consulted with astrologers in the everyday affairs of running our country.
Amazing how they forget these things, isn’t it?
Dan Bailey