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Alcott on spirit and matter

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Editor Odell Shepard says in a footnote that this entry from Alcott’s journal is “one of the clearest and most compact statements that Alcott ever made in writing of his main metaphysical idea.”

Reading it, I conclude that the guys upstairs that I have been in connection with for so long are themselves Transcendentalists. New England version? German idealists? Who knows? Who cares? All I know for sure is that the day I first opened Walden was a day of instant recognition, though it took me many a long year to grow into it.

Alcott, on Dec. 21, 1835:

I set out from the wide ground of Spirit. This is; all else is manifestation. Body is Spirit at its circumference. It denotes its confines to the external sense; it individualizes, defines Spirit, breaks the Unity into Multiplicity and places under the vison of man parts of the great Whole which, standing thus separate, can be taken in by the mind – too feeble to apprehend the whole at once and requiring all save an individual thing to be excluded at a single view. – Infinitude is too wide for man to take in. he is therefore permitted to take in portions and spread his vision over the wide circumference by little and little; and in these portions doth the Infinite shadow forth itself, God in all and all in God.

I wish the guys upstairs had been able to state so concisely their view of reality; it would have saved me an immense amount of writing and typing!

 

A few thoughts from Alcott’s Journals

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I have begun reading Odell Shepard’s selection of Alcott’s Journals, which Alcott kept for more than 50 years, and it is like finding an old/new friend. A few samples from the first few pages:

  • The idea that half my life is gone and so little is accomplished worthy a mind and hearty destined for such noble activities and acquisitions, overpowers me. but I soon rise and again plod on my way, hoping and regretting. [11-2-1829, Alcott not quite 30 years old.]
  • … and I see clearly what before was obscured by the gloss of exterior matter: Spirit all in all – matter its form and shadow. [May, 1833]
  • [Comparing America to the rest of the world:] Circumstances are widely different. Man is operating in vastly different external relations. We are spread over a wider space; we have freer air; Nature spreads itself around us on a wider scale; our situation is wholly new. [April 24, 1834]
  • We investigate the qualities or apprehend the laws of this universe to little purpose if the relations which they hold to our being are not made the primary objects of observation and thought. [January, 1835]
  • When God would reveal himself to a people, he entrusts the sacred truth not to that people in their aggregate capacity but to a gifted spirit among them, who transforms it from himself into them. [Jan. 2, 1835]

Someone said that the 19th century was Emerson’s, the 20th, Thoreau’s, but the 21st would be Bronson Alcott’s.  I am beginning to believe it.

Memories, hindsight, self-refinement

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

While working on getting the Bronson Alcott book ready for publication, I came across this journal entry, which amounts to a message in a bottle.

Wednesday, May 26, 2021

5:20 a.m. The smallest disruption of routine can send you off the rails. I am still waiting for my printer’s cartridge to arrive through the mail, and in the absence of being able to print out work materials, I’m sort of stalled on the task of revising Alcott’s first 50 sayings. Perhaps I’d better keep going on the second 50, since I already have them printed up. Yet – something said don’t do it that way, but pause between the two sections.

You gentlemen have anything you’d care for us to do while  we wait for the ink? Or, should I revise on the machine and treat it as a tentative exercise until I can put it onto paper?

You could do that if you wished. It wouldn’t really waste any time, in the end. Or we could talk here, but of course you are somewhat under the same constraints.

No, not so much. Here I would transcribe and send out, and I could print for my own record later. It isn’t a matter of revising on the machine.

Do you hear the humorous echo of your childhood?

I do, in fact. It’s funny how things sneak in, isn’t it? The nuns used to refer to cars as our “machines.” That’s what they called them, and here am I, going on three–quarters of a century later, and I call a computer “the machine,” in much the same way. I wonder what that is about, if anything. Or do you intend to tell us, using that as an example of something?

We could; we don’t need to, but it’s like that  Hemingway short story title.

“I guess everything reminds you of something.” Are you accusing yourselves of plagiarism?

If we didn’t, no doubt you’d be willing do. We smile.

Me too. Well, what, then?

Not everything needs to be a big deal, you realize. Sometimes things you notice are relatively trivial, but even trivial things can prove to be quite illustrative.

Well, I notice that my friend Louis is finding that nearly every Hemingway story he reads sends him back to a very clear memory of something earlier in his life, often something he hadn’t thought of, literally, in decades.

Receptivity is everything. And perhaps that’s our theme du jour, as you like to say: receptivity. It is proverbial that as you age, short-term memories fade in importance, and longer-term memories resurface, often in great detail. Can something that is so universal as to be proverbial be accident? Can it, for that matter, be unmeaningful?

Rhetorical question, I take it.

It is. Not too hard to figure out, given that nothing in life is accidental. All great art contains everything needed, and no more. You think life isn’t art? So if the latter part of your life reminds you of specific and general incidents and themes from earlier in your life, it is superficial for you (anyone) to shrug off the process as “just getting old.” It is far more meaningful to say, “It is part of getting old: What purpose does it serve?”

The second half of life isn’t just a long coasting downhill, putting in time waiting for the curtain. Yes, it often feels that way, we realize.

It’s a long downhill coast if you don’t know how to take it, maybe.

Even there, your non-3D component hasn’t lost the script. Or do you think that this part of you is bored, too? Your life has purpose, from the first minute to the last. It is  increasingly a matter of choice, though it may appear to be the other way around.

Let me clarify that, because you didn’t actually say what I feel you mean. I think you mean, we tend to think our life is one of first greater choices, as life opens up, then of fewer choices, as life closes in. And I know you are talking about our internal life rather than our external life.

That isn’t quite right, but close enough. Your internal and external life, we remind you. are two ways of experiencing the same thing. So in reality they do not diverge. However, in appearance they may, and in function they definitely do, and for good reason.

  • Your physical life (barring “accident” or termination prior to the normal lifespan) is a process of expansion, maturity, contraction.
  • Your mental life is usually experienced as absorption, homeostasis, and either stagnation or generalizing.
  • Your – we’ll call it “spiritual” – life is one of certainty followed by confusion, then proceeding either to new confidence or the assumption that no certainty is available.

These three processes may seem to diverge. They may seem to proceed independently. But, as we say, how could they? Only, each manifests according to its nature, and the manifestations may seem to have nothing to do with one another.

If you will look at your lives as meaningful, undefeated, always in process, and never completed by the completion of a given physical life – we know that may seem paradoxical – you will see your lives in better perspective.

Unlike Yeats, who thought of life as a long preparation for something that never happens.

He wouldn’t have been wrong to say that, provided that he added, “so far as external observers can see, and so far as one expects 3D death to be the end.” And the difficulty here is that it is the end, and isn’t.

Yes. I have the sense of that.

But not everybody does. It is a matter of faith, more than anything, and faith cannot be purchased or stolen or even earned; it is a gift, given or withheld.

By whom, and according to what criteria?

Some other time, perhaps. For the moment, let’s stick to the point.

Life as a given individual does end with 3D death, in that that particular mixture of elements will not return to another 3D life. If it returns, it is as a strand, not as the entire bundle. But it does not end in 3D dearth, in that living is forever, as your old friend [Ed Carter] wrote. The “you” you forge in life is a real achievement; it does not go away. It functions as it always has functioned.

Do you have any reason to feel that your being as it exists at this moment is perfect and needs no further work? To put it another way, do you think there is nothing more you could do, could become, “if only”? Well, it is always that way, up to your last 3D moment, and beyond. But there is a difference between what may be doable in 3D and what may be doable in a larger sphere of action.

This will strike some people as merely words. I have heard someone say you engage in double-talk – which I take to mean, some of your words went dead on her – but still there is the possibility to be guarded against.

The reason your old memories return in or out of context is so you may return to other points in your life. Your added days provide you with added perspective, with added wisdom. If hindsight is 20-20, why not use it?

Use it – I take it – as part of our continuing process of self-refinement, self-creation.

That’s all there is, of course. You will find your “declining years” to be far more satisfying, far more interesting, if you keep in mind that retrospection and rumination is a valid and therefore appropriate activity for this part of your life. The frantic striving to keep your head above water is past; the tangible 3D goals and aspirations are mostly or entirely past. What is now appropriate is the summing-up and the further preparation – for life doesn’t end with 3D death, any more than the 3D world ends with evening.

 

An amazing talk

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

A friend sends me this interview by a Columbian of an Egyptian architect who studied in Zurich. I haven’t listened to it all yet, but it is important.

 

About an hour and 30 minutes into it, Dr. Karim discusses the human-AI interface and offers some disturbing thoughts about what it portends. (Regardless you position on AI, this is probably not what you have been thinking.)

https://youtu.be/WC7lqEHaNL4?si=NPuFnQAxJLXhJ3dz

Synchronizing spreadsheets

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Absorbing new material intellectually is satisfying, sometimes exciting. But how hard it can be to actually live it!

It is good to become thoroughly familiar with the Cayce work, or Seth, or scriptures, or the guys upstairs. Certainly all that wisdom can enrich our lives. But if we can’t apply it, what good does it do us? We know so much more than we know how to live. But every once in a while…

Last month, my friend Charles and I were shown a simple concept to overcome a stubborn underlying problem.

Charles is very rational, very intellectual, quite at home with metaphysical concepts. He has done extensive reading in metaphysical and philosophical subjects. (Also, he has a positive genius for explicating complicated concepts by clothing them in entertaining stories. For instance, Motorcycle Enlightenment, the novel that Hampton Roads published.)

But sometimes life and matters of feeling and human relationships leave him baffled. [Gee, I wonder what that would feel like!]

On the one hand, he knows that things don’t “just happen” in our lives; that problems are opportunities, in that they are manifestations of things within us that need attention. But on the other hand, sometimes he looks back on his life and has to ask himself how he could have made this or that bad decision.

From years of introspection, he had come to identify a pattern. As long as a problem involved the rational mind, he could deal with it, and usually quite easily. But anything that involved the emotions – and what human relationships don’t involve the emotions? – led his rational, thinking mind to flee, turning over the helm to an emotional part that reacts – as one would expect – emotionally.

The result was bad decisions made impulsively and regretted at leisure when the thinking part came back. He knew that this pattern developed as a result of an early childhood trauma (which is his business, not ours). But knowing it is not the same as overcoming it.

Talking about it, we found an insight forming, and a practical way to apply it.

Charles is a Virgo, God help him. 😊 He is at home with spreadsheets and anything practical. Business was always easy for him, because, as he says, “numbers made sense.”

As we discussed his situation, the metaphor arose. I said, in effect, “You have two spreadsheets, one intellectual and one emotional, and the problem is that the two don’t communicate. When one enters the room, the other leaves. What you need to do is to sync the two, so that they will learn to work together.”

(Charles points out that the understanding seated in for him when I said that when the emotions were triggered, his IQ went to 0. He says, “That’s what registered first for me. I guess it was because my mental-rational part found it both humorous and partly insulting, so it wanted to understand how it could improve itself…I don’t know. I just know it worked.”)

He tried it, and that began a cascade of positive changes. We can see the results already, sometimes in minor things, sometimes in things that are not so minor. I don’t’ see any reason to think it won’t continue to work for him.

Now, this idea of syncing your emotional and rational spreadsheets may not seem like any big deal, but, if you sometimes find yourself making bad decisions for reasons that baffle you, you might try it. I offer it for what it is worth.