Monday, April 11, 2022
5:10 a.m. Gentlemen, I get that I should set switches before even asking you if you have something in mind – to help me hear you, I presume. So, doing that. You’re up. [Pause]
Want me to prime the pump? How about reading mythology? Fifty pages in, on Bullfinch’s Mythology, and I am reminded how silly and arbitrary the stories sound when read merely at face value. They would just raise impatience in me – they still do, some of them – so I am confirmed in my decision to buy Robert Graves as well as Bullfinch. Bullfinch will tech me the characters, and Graves will, I hope and expect, tell me what the stories are really saying. Okay, I heard that. There is an analogy here to what happened to our culture. But you spell it out, or do you need me to?
No, we can begin on it, anyway. But bear in mind throughout this discussion – and apply the reminder retroactively, through 20 years of discussions, no less than 60 years of reading history and biography – that anything we describe or you surmise about 3D life may be more or less accurate, but is more or less accurate about something that is only somewhat real. The most exacting reconstruction of history, or the most revealing examination of social realities or of interpersonal relations, or of physical mechanisms such as electro-magnetism or geology or the laws of heredity or anything – it is all a careful focusing on something that is ultimately fuzz.
Yes, I understand. A precise photograph cannot in its precision make what is photographed realer, more precise, than it is.
Strobe lighting captures split-second images, but images of what? A split-second, high-definition image of something that is itself ill-defined will at best give you a precise-looking glimpse. Surely this isn’t a new thought to people, at least not the kind of minds that will be drawn here. It is easier to take precise photos than to assure that what is being photographed is real.
That is clear to me, and I know what you want to convey, but I am not sure it will be clear to those not in direct mental connection, and I don’t see how to express it more clearly.
After all, readers are responsible for doing some of the work of communicating. They need only intend to understand, and to slow down to allow the direct communication to take place, and then to trust what comes. They should examine what comes, and not just accept anything that comes to mind, but they can’t have anything to examine if they don’t first open up to receive.
So, Bullfinch and mythology and Graves and me.
Our point is that once a civilization moves on, once enough assumptions have changed, what was understood becomes misunderstood, or is dismissed as primitive nonsense or superstition, or becomes incomprehensible, or – worst of all – becomes invisibly transformed so as to appear obviously one thing when in fact it had been something else. We can show the process of transformation by using examples from the past, but the reason to do so at all is that this process is taking place around you, at a warp-speed and continually accelerating rate, and it will be well for those who can recognize it.
A lot of things appearing:
- Carl Jung and alchemy and astrology and the I Ching
- Joseph Campbell and one layer of interpretation, but not the only one.
- Edgar Cayce and Rudolf Steiner and their centering on the soul.
- Hollywood and social significance.
And more could be profitably associated. We repeat a point we have made more than once: As a culture changes how it sees, much that was considered nonsense becomes relevant once again, but never in quite the same way it was once seen. No cycle returns to where it was; instead, it echoes. A cycle is not a circle.
So, my talking to you is not at all the same thing even as Cayce talking to his source, let alone either of us being the same as ancient Greeks talking to oracles. What was once sacred and awe-inspiring (even though, in a way, taken as common-sense everyday reality), today is seen through different filters and is seen as common-sense everyday reality (even though, in a way, sacred and awe-inspiring). The difference is in how we see ourselves as well as in how we see “external” reality.
So, Jung had to repress his impatience and self-doubt, to follow the path his daimon had set him on, investigating alchemy. It set his teeth on edge, trying to make sense of what was obvious nonsense. The “obvious nonsense” reaction came from the part of him that had been shaped by his contemporary civilization. The urge to explore it anyway came from his individual explorations and experience while functioning within that civilization. It will be no different for any of you who find yourselves pushed to examine for truth what you are at the same time inclined to dismiss.
Yes, abstractly, intellectually, I know that mythology is a coded precis containing what our far predecessors knew about reality and couched as story. But emotionally, I have to restrain a continuing impulses to cast it aside for something more relevant, more accessible, more compatible with my – well, with my what?
Yes, good catch. What rebels against unaccustomed ways to see things hasn’t an easy name, because it isn’t clearly seen.
And that’s your point here, to bring it into focus for us?
It will be well if we succeed in doing so.
You think of yourself as a common meeting-place of many strands. True, of course, or we wouldn’t have spent so much time helping you so see that way of looking at yourself. But we haven’t spent time describing the platform as it exists, the day-to-day moving raft you live on.
The “habit system” you once described our minds as being. [“Habit-patterns,” I think it was, actually.]
Yes, the habit-system. At any given moment, you have a tentative but relatively enduring platform that you experience as “3D-you.” Over time, and slowly or quickly, the platform changes. You acquire and you shed; you move toward this and away from that. What you once valued comes to seem oppressive; what you once longed for loses its allure. What you once believed in shows its insufficiency, and what you once clung to unconsciously you now cling to in fuller knowledge of its worth to you. At any given moment you think of yourself as unchanging, but are you the person you were at 10? At 20? At 30 or 40 or 50? Are you the person you may become if you live to 80? 90? 100?
So, to complete your earlier thought, learning something new – learning to take seriously something previously disregarded or unnoticed or scorned – involves conflict between your intuitions of the future and your accustomed habit-system that is your self built upon past experience. This is why it is work to think – to construct, to deliberately associate, and weigh, and judge.
And our culture is having to do just that kind of thinking, just as we have to do as individuals.
Yes, but that’s a larger subject, for it is a reciprocal process. The culture is a form of continuation of memory for the individual. The individual is a sort of sniffer-out of new paths for the culture.
Shall we pursue that, next time?
Perhaps. We’ll see. Call this session, perhaps, “Learning and habit-systems,” or, perhaps, “Change v. inertia.”
I get the idea. We’ll see. Thanks for all this, as usual.