human potential

[I am currently immersed in old journal notes and accounts of various stops on the road from where I started to where I am at the moment. I’m learning a lot, putting it together. This account of an interesting retrieval was published Sept. 1, 2005]

Friends,

This is long, but I did a couple of retrievals tonight that raised some interesting points, and I got an explanation, after the fact, that may be of use to you.

Tonight Rita Warren and I set out to do retrievals primarily focused on New Orleans and the tri-state area that was hit by the hurricane. Before we began, I set my intent to do something that would help lots of people rather than doing retrievals retail, so to speak.

1) Immediately I found myself on a major street in New Orleans, under this unbelievably bright, glaring light perhaps 12 feet above street level. It was so bright! As it was nighttime, the light was a huge attractor. Whatever else happened, I know I didn’t make up the light: it was there practically before I faded into the scene, if you know what I mean.

I was “dressed” so to speak as a smallish, thin black man, not young , in fact past his prime, with a scruffy white beard. Later I realized I was basically imitating Fred Sanford!

I started yelling at the three or four guys around me. Rough paraphrase, from memory:

“They’re not going to help us. They’re not going to do nothing! They don’t care if they leave us hear to rot. I tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to march down to the river [or it might have been, to the canal]. They got a big barge down there, and if enough of us go down there, they GOT to take us somewhere! They GOT to do something with us. But it’s got to be a whole lot of us go down there. One guy by himself, that’s nothing.”

Well, a few of the people – there were a lot more now, between the brilliant light and the shouting – a few of them said they’d go too. I said, more or less: “But we don’t go down there looking like a mob, or they liable to shoot us! We go down there marching four wide, like we was soldiers, and we bring our dead, and we bring the kids, and somebody needs help getting down there, we help ‘em.”

So we formed up, and by the time we were ready to go there were maybe 70 or 80 people in ranks of four, and I think at one point I told them to hold hands four across, for some reason or other that I made up. (Like the rest of you, I’m a great liar in these states.)

So then I started revving them up. “Where we goin’?” Mumble, mumble.

“We’re goin’ to the barge!” I shouted. “Where we goin’?”

“To the barge.”

“Where we going?” “TO THE BARGE.”

“All right, now there’s people hiding in all these buildings. We’re goin’ to shout loud enough to raise the dead, `Come on Out!’”. And we did, shouting “Come on Out! We’re goin’ to the barge!” etc. [I privately liked that touch, loud enough to raise the dead.]

After some indeterminate time, not very long, we got to the barge which of course our friends upstairs had there, as specified. They had a neat touch, army or national guard or something (uniformed) and Red Cross too, flanking the entry to the barge, giving out paper cups (I think) of water to people as they went by.

Of course, once they were in the barge, it was duck soup to get them to 27. When they came out on the other side (basically they walked into the barge at the stern and came out another hatch on the bow) they were mostly or maybe were all met by people they knew – but, odd thing – they didn’t all stay in 27. Immediately some sort of sank a couple of layers (that’s what it looked like to me) and wound up in this or that belief-system territory somewhere in 24-25-26. I saw at least one guy go to what looked like a black church.

I got, later, that they knew by then that they were dead, but they sort of readjusted their afterlife to what they wanted it to be / thought it ought to be.

Now, the next thing that happened was weird and was unprecedented at least in my experience. I went back to that light and thought I’d try it again. Worked pretty well the first time, why not mobilize some more people the same way? If it didn’t work, nothing would be lost, and maybe it would. But instead, somebody else – a helper, not someone in a body, though I couldn’t tell you how I knew that at the time – went and did the same thing I’d done. Did the rabble-rousing, formed them up, told them not to leave anybody behind, etc. I was pleased, of course, because it was happening without my even needing to do it, but perplexed isn’t the word for it.

Well, Rita and I got back to the present, swapped stories (hers was very straightforward; she’s had A LOT of practice!), and she suggested we try another.

2) Back to 27, this time winding up not at my place but on a hill overlooking the ocean, a place I’d never been. Expressed intent, and went on down to the hurricane disaster area.

At first I thought I was back in New Orleans, at one of the places where the levee broke. I knew there was a body in the water, so I went diving into the water (quite deep; ten feet, maybe?) and brought the body back to this (small!) barge that had helpers acting as assistants, like we were national guard or some other organized rescue force. First time I’ve ever handled a dead body in a retrieval, but the kid (it was a young black girl I think, but might have been white) thought she was dead and didn’t have any concept that you leave the body after you die, so she stayed with it. I wound up doing five retrievals in a row, all told, two on the lawn right in front of a detached house – I thought that was an odd place even as I was hauling them back – and two from the upper story of a two-story detached house. Went right through the wall with them, as anything that would break the spell would be worthwhile. The four after the girl were all young men, in their 20s maybe, or 30s, hard to say. White I think but am not quite sure. This is relevant for reasons that will appear shortly.

With each one, we went through the same routine. I told my “men” that the dead person “was in shock, probably thought they were going to die, maybe thought they had died. You’ve got to get them sitting up and breathing, and get them dry, or they’re going to die.” Etc. The usual bare-faced lies that ought to qualify me for a high government post.

Now the interesting thing here is that at about this time I realized we weren’t in New Orleans at all, we were on the Gulf Coast. (I thought Mississippi, but it could have been what they used to call the Florida Parishes – the parishes east of the city to the state line. More likely, it was all over the place on the shore. I’m not positive the upstairs crew cares much about state lines.) And at that time, the helpers who were playing enlisted men to my officer—they called me lieutenant (I was white this time, by the way) – started telling the men we’d rescued that we needed their help. Roughly: “You men know these folks; they’re your neighbors. We’ve got to get them out of here or they’re going to die. We know you’re exhausted and hungry, and we’re going to get you taken care of, but we need you to help us first.”

And so the helpers organized the retrievees – if that’s a word – to go retrieve others. And I’m thinking, “what the hell?” I mean, I’m used to being the last to get the word, but this is ridiculous.

So when I see I’m not needed, I go back to 27 and sit on my metal lawn chair looking out at the sea, waiting for someone to explain as promised. A helper appears, dressed in a General’s uniform. I look at the uniform and smile, and he smiles back, because of course he’s a general like I’m a lieutenant. He’s just quietly spoofing me.

Turns out he isn’t someone I know; isn’t one of my “other lives” I’m connected with; he’s just the guy in charge of that particular operation, I suppose. Or maybe, more likely, there’s some tie between us that he couldn’t be bothered to explain at the time.

Anyway, what had happened? Very interesting! He says that as usual they took advantage of my presence to get the attention of the dead people. But (perhaps because I had specified that I wanted to do more than just retrieve people one or two at a time?) they had then leveraged that. My presence allowed the dead people to recognize the helpers. That in itself stopped the tape-looping process (as I call it), freeing them from being hypnotized by their preconceptions. And the neat thing is, since they could now relate to the helpers, they could respond to a request to assist them to waken others. And since they were as dead as the ones they wanted to awaken, and had died in the same circumstances (that seemed to be important for some reason I don’t quite get) they could be heard by the dead in a way that the helpers could not – UNTIL the first set of dead helpers brought them to the attention of the newly dead, so to speak. (Sorry if that’s an involved sentence; best I can do at the moment.)

This all suggests that we can vastly leverage our efforts in common-disaster situations, so I thought I’d better make the effort to write it out so as to give you ideas. Sorry this is so long, I didn’t have time or energy enough to make it shorter.

 

 

Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. (EdgarCayce.org) sends out a Thought for the Day for those who wish. (It’s a free daily mailing from Cayce’s readings.) Today, as so many days, i see so close a similarity to the basic attitude and orientation that the guys have displayed, ever since I came into contact with them, that they might be ghost-writing each other. The way the guys would put this would be something like, “You don’t need to change who you are. You need change only which parts of yourself you express. You lay down some threads and pick up others.”

From Edgar Cayce reading 911-3:

“(Q) How can I be less sensitive and more adaptable?

“(A) Just be that way! That is, as this: Do not worry self over the fact, or conditions that have so long existed where the body-physical and mental has depended upon outside influences for the abilities of activity.”

Cayce’s admonitions were always meant to encourage, to empower, to clarify one’s situation. Wonderful man.

[Good and evil still exist, but they are no longer so self-evident.] We have to realize that each represents a judgment. [But we must make ethical decisions.] Moral judgment is always present and carries with it characteristic psychological consequences…. [A]s in the past, so in the future the wrong we have done, thought, or intended will wreak its vengeance on our souls. [But when we realize that the basis for the judgment is uncertain, ethical decision becomes a subjective, creative act.] [T]here must be a spontaneous and decisive impulse on the part of the unconscious. [Sometimes people are involved in a conflict of choices.]

As a rule, however, the individual is so unconscious that he altogether fails to see his own potentialities for decision. Instead he is constantly and anxiously looking around for eternal rules and regulations which can guide him in his perplexity. [This is largely be blamed on education, which preaches unlivable ideals and never touches the question of private experience.]

Therefore the individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost, of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own wholeness. He must know relentlessly how much good he can do, and what crimes he is capable of, and must beware of regarding the one as real and the other as illusion. Both are elements within his nature, and both are bound to come to light in him, should he wish — as he ought — to live without self-deception or self-delusion.

In general, however, most people are hopelessly ill-equipped for living on this level, [though some can]. Such self-knowledge is of prime importance, because through it we approach that fundamental stratum or core of human nature where the instincts dwell. Here are those pre-existent dynamic factors which ultimately govern the ethical decisions of our consciousness. This core is the unconscious and its contents, concerning which we cannot pass any final judgment. Our ideas about it are bound to be inadequate, for we are unable to comprehend its essence cognitively and set rational limits to it. We achieve knowledge of nature only through science, which enlarges consciousness; hence deepened self-knowledge also require science, that is, psychology. No one builds a telescope or microscope with one turn of the wrist, out of goodwill alone, without knowledge of optics.

C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp 330-331

.2.

Jung’s Contribution to Our Time, by Eleanor Bertine, begins by stating that Jung found a way for each of us to find the central principle — a fixed point — to allow us to relate everything else in our life to. Today is a time of relativity to other relative things, Bertine says, but this is because it is an age in decay.  Artists lead the way to perception, as usual: artists from the turn of the century were expressing their horror at the end of their internal order and certainty. The perception of disorder spread. Panic and nihilism bred more disorder and disorientation. Yeats said it long ago, with the clear and pitiless intensity of the perception of a true artist and an honest man. Our hope, in these lost times?

“The relatively few who will use the key [Jung’s key to the unconscious] will so gain in the weight and authoritativeness of personality which comes from being all-of-a-peace that they may become the grain of mustard-seed or the leaven which leavens the whole lump.” Jung’s Contribution to Our Time, by Eleanor Bertine, Page 29

“One generation, like our own, lives in a time of the degeneration of a form of civilization, when it is hard for the individual not to lose his way and fall into unmitigated evil. But if mankind does not destroy itself outright, another generation will rise to be fired with a new hope…. The new hope will flourish only to fail, [because the new people will forget our hard-earned lessons] and another time of breakup will inevitably sweep away that moment of security. However, whatever phase of collective culture may prevail, the individual may always use his own experience in it as a basis for the realization of the Self. Indeed, it is only by separating to some extent from the collective cycles of change and seeking the one sure center inside, rather than outside, that the individual can transcend his time and achieve stability.” page 29

.3.

Jung came to five basic conclusions on the religious side of the psyche:

1 — a spiritual element is an organic part of the human psyche.

2 — such elements are regularly expressed in symbols.

3 — these symbols reveal a path of psychological development which can be traced backwards toward a past cause and forward toward a future goal.

4 — this goal is expressed by images of completion in a whole Self which is unique for each individual, formed by integration of the ego and unconscious.

5 — this whole is characterized by all the qualities of numinousness, unconditional authority, and value which also belonged to the image of God.

Jung, Psychology and Religion

 

All my friends are tired of hearing from me that Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” However, it is true, and the more you consider it in your own life, the truer it appears.

A few other thoughts from one of the wisest men of the Twentieth Century.

.1.

… people are content to keep some outstanding personality, some striking characteristic or activity, thus achieving an outward distinction from their immediate environment…. Usually these specious attempts at individual differentiation stiffen into a pose, and the imitator remains at the same level as he always was, only several degrees more sterile than before. In order to discover what is authentically individual and ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is.

• “The Assimilation Of The Unconscious,” in “The Relations Between The Ego And The Unconscious,” in Two Essays In Analytical Psychology

.2.

The idea of rebirth is inseparable from that of karma. The crucial question is whether a man’s karma is personal or not. If it is, then the preordained destiny with which a man enters life represents an achievement of previous lives, and the personal continuity therefore exists. If, however, this is not so, and an impersonal karma is seized upon in the act of birth, then that karma is incarnated again without there being any personal continuity….

I know no answer to the question of whether the karma which I live is the outcome of my past lives, or whether it is not rather the achievement of my ancestors, whose heritage comes together in me. Am I a combination of the lives of those ancestors and do I embody those lives again is to mark have I lived before in the past as a specific personality, and did I progress so far in that life and I am now able to seek a solution? I do not know. Buddha left the question, and I like to listen that he himself did not know with certainty.

… When I die, my deeds will follow along with me — that is how I imagine it I will bring with me what I have done. In the meantime it is important to ensure that I do not stand at the end with empty hands.

• Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp 317-8

.3.

Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about the daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the short-sightedness of the super-intellectuals. Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man’s task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upwards from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.

• Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp 326

.4.

Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. We stand perplexed and stupefied before the phenomenon of Nazism and Bolshevism because we know nothing about men, or at any rate have only a lopsided and distorted picture of him. If we had self-knowledge, that would not be the case…. [W]e have no imagination for evil, but evil has us in its grip. Some do not want to know this, and others are identified with evil. That is the psychological situation in the world today: some call themselves Christian and imagine that they can trample so-called evil underfoot by merely willing to; others have succumbed to it and no longer see the good. Evil today has become a visible great power. One half of humanity battens and grows strong on a doctrine fabricated by human ratiocination; the other half sickens from the lack of a myth commensurate with the situation. The Christian nations have come to a sorry pass; their Christianity slumbers and has neglected to develop its myth further in the course of the centuries.

• Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp 331

.5.

The communist world, it may be noted, has one big myth (which we call an illusion, in the vain hope that our superior judgment will make it disappear). It is the time-hollowed archetypal dream of a Golden Age (or Paradise), where everything is provided in abundance for everyone, and a great, just, and wise chief rules over a human kindergarten. This powerful archetype in its infantile form has gripped them, but it will never disappear from the world at the mere sight of our superior points of view. We even support it by our own childishness, for our Western civilization is in the grip of the same mythology. Unconsciously, we cherish the same prejudices, hopes, and expectations. We too believe in the welfare state, in universal peace, in the equality of man, in his eternal human rights, in justice, truth, and (do not say it too loudly) in the Kingdom of God on Earth.

The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites — day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

…

These two archetypal principles lie at the foundation of the contrasting systems of East and West. The masses and their leaders do not realize, however, that there is no substantial difference between calling the world principal male and a father (spirit), as the West does, or female and a mother (matter), as the communist do.

• Man and His Symbols, pp. 73-85

.6.

These psychic evolutions do not as a rule keep pace with the tempo of intellectual developments. Indeed, their very first goal is to bring a consciousness that has hurried too far ahead into contact again with the unconscious background with which it should be connected…. It is a task that today faces not only individuals but whole civilizations. What else is the meaning of the frightful regressions of our time? The tempo of the development of consciousness through science and technology was too rapid and left the unconscious, which could no longer keep up with it, far behind, thereby forcing it into a defensive position which expresses itself in a universal will to destruction. The political and social isms of our day preached every conceivable ideal, but, under this mask, they pursue the goal of lowering the level of our culture by restricting or altogether inhibiting the possibilities of individual development. They do this partly by creating a chaos controlled by terrorism, a primitive state of affairs that affords only the barest necessities of life and surpasses in horror the worst times of the so-called “Dark” Ages. It remains to be seen whether this experience of degradation and slavery will once more raise a cry for greater spiritual freedom.

The problem cannot be solved collectively, because the masses are not changed unless the individual changes. At the same time, even the best-looking solution cannot be forced upon him, since it is a good solution only when it is combined with the natural process of development. It is therefore a hopeless undertaking to stake everything on collective recipes and procedures. The bettering of a general ill begins with the individual, and then only when he makes himself and not others responsible. This is naturally only possible in freedom, but not under a rule of force, whether this be exercised by a self-elected tyrant or by one thrown up by the mob.

• The Archetypes And The Collective Unconscious

 

I have been on a reading jag lately, and I find myself reverting time and again to Colin Wilson’s work, currently his novels. Re-read Ritual in the Dark yesterday; re-reading The Glass Cage today. Probably I’ll go on to re-read Necessary Doubt, the novel of his I go back to most often. Once in a great while, I re-read The Mind Parasites, but not too often. That book changed my life: In an odd sort of way, to re-read it too often would be almost to devalue it. (I don’t claim this makes sense. It’s just how I feel about it.)

I remember Colin with such fondness and gratitude. It is literally not possible for me to imagine what my life would have been like, had I never come across his work. If I had never met him, never become friends with him, never published any of his books, he would still rank among the most important influences in my life.

Few things he wrote about failed to interest me. (His books on wine and on music didn’t do anything for me, but that is a fault of my testes, rather than of his readability.)

First for me came The Mind Parasites, in 1970, when I was 25 years old. Then, for decades, I read everything of his that I could find, fiction or non-fiction.

Finding those books wasn’t as easy as you might think, back in those pre-Amazon days. In my early years, economics mandated that I buy very few new books, almost none of them hardcovers. What I could afford was second-hand books, or books from libraries. For years and years, I carried a list of titles in my wallet, against unforeseen opportunities, because finding what you want by haunting used bookstores was chancy. You had to be in the right place at the right time (they didn’t have indexes of what they carried, so you were at the mercy of their alphabetizing) and had to work hard to be sure you weren’t missing something right under your nose. And of course, used bookstores were shrines to the Three Princes of Serendip, which often meant that the book that lightened your wallet wasn’t anything you had hoped to find.

As to libraries? Municipal libraries were likely to have a few of his books, but never many. Academic libraries were better prospects, but of course they weren’t a sure thing either. (And for all those years when I did not live near a university library, the opportunity was only theoretical.)

So suppose you’ve never read a single Colin Wilson. On the one hand, so much the worse for you. On the other hand, what a prospective feast you have in store for you! In no particular order except how they come to my mind:

(novels)

The Mind Parasites; Philosopher’s Stone; Necessary Doubt, The Glass Cage, and perhaps Ritual in the Dark. The Personality Surgeon (though it lets down badly in the final chapter, the rest is excellent). . The four-volume Spider World series.

(non-fiction)

The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel; Voyage to a Beginning; Alien Dawn; Dreaming to Some Purpose; The Books in My Lif;, the Starseekers; The Occult; Mysteries; After Life; Access to Inner Worlds.

If you can’t find entertainment and provocation in even one of these, you’re hard to please. But even if so, don’t give up. He wrote more than a hundred titles. Look around a little.

 

I know of no better mirror than the record other people leave of their life stories. Some things are very familiar to us; other thing are about as far from our reality as they could be. But either way, if we pay attention, we learn something about ourselves. Consider Colin Wilson’s battles with depression, and his way of working himself out of it – and then consider what happened when despair led him to set out to kill himself.

Wilson, a born intellectual without the social advantages that would have allowed him to go to university, as a young man found himself in dead-end jobs that held no interest for him, a long way from the world of books in which he longed to live his life. Anyone who has ever slogged through a meaningless workweek without any clear hope of escaping to something better – particularly anyone who has done it at a young age – will recognize the bleak hopelessness that threatened to engulf him.

But then he made a discovery: From Dreaming to Some Purpose: An Autobiography, pp. 2-3.

“I had listened to a radio programme about Samuel Pepys, and decided to start keeping a journal – not just a diary of my daily activities, but a record of what I thought and felt. I had borrowed from the library a book called I Believe, full of statements of faith by people like Einstein, Julian Huxley, and H. G. Wells. One Saturday … I bought a fat notebook, and settled down to writing my own statement of what I believed about my place in the world.

“I wrote for page after page, with a sense of freedom and release. I was objectifying doubts and miseries, pushing them to arm’s length. When I put down my pen, after several hours, I had a feeling that I was no longer the same person who had sat down at the writing table. It was as if I had been studying my face in a mirror, and learned something new about myself.

“From then on, I used my journal as a receptacle for self-doubt, irritation and gloom, and by doing so I wrote myself back into a state of optimism.”

 

Of course it wasn’t as easy as all that. Recurrent swings of optimism and pessimism threatened to overwhelm him, until finally he decided on suicide.

“I felt angry with God – or fate, or whoever had cast me down into this irritating world – for subjecting me to these endless petty humiliations. I did not even believe human life was real; it had often struck me that time is some sort of illusion. But surely, I could turn my back on the illusion by killing myself?”

He knew just how to do it, too. He had only to drink hydrocyanic acid, easily available to him at his workplace, and he would be dead in half a minute. He procured the vial and stood ready to drink.

“Then an odd thing happened. I became two people. I was suddenly conscious of this teenage idiot called Colin Wilson, with his misery and frustration, and he seemed such a limited fool that I could not have cared less whether he killed himself or not. But if he killed himself, he would kill me too. For a moment I felt that I was standing beside him, and telling him that if he didn’t get rid of this habit of self-pity he would never amount to anything.

“It was also as if this ‘real me’ had said to the teenager: ‘Listen, you idiot, think how much you’d be losing,’ and in that moment I glimpsed the marvelous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons.”

And that was the passing of his lowest point. From that moment on, through ups and downs, “I no longer felt trapped and vulnerable.”

 

University of Virginia’s Alderman Library reopened yesterday, after being closed for a long four years. I went to take a look, and i was not disappointed.

Mr. Jefferson, in his old age, said, “I can not live without books,” and of course this was true his whole life. Life-long readers know the feeling.  About the only thing that could tempt me to want to live forever is the prospect of unlimited access to an academic library.

In those same final years, Jefferson was the man above all others responsible for the creation of the University of Virginia. He centered it physically, as well as conceptually, around the library, which was housed in the Rotunda.

One or two things have changed since the early 1800s, and the university library system today is not one but many, including the Charles L. Brown Science and Engineering; Clemons; Fine Arts; the Harrison Institute (Special Collections), and Music libraries. But first and foremost is Alderman, the main library. Built in 1938, later expanded, it served the university and the wider community until 2020, when it was closed for a complete overhaul.

And what a job they did!

The library building as it was may be envisioned at two boxes, joined by a common wall, each oriented east-west  That is, there was the original building and the expansion built directly behind it, which housed the new stacks. (The new stacks greatly increased the number of books that could be housed. ) The renovation made the two boxes one, oriented north-south.

The stacks used to be the same as university stacks have always been : poorly lit, very bare-bones, something between an attic and a storeroom . In the new building they are front and center, the entire space suffused with air and light.

As it happened, an entire generation of UVA students – those who entered in 2020 and graduate this year – missed the Alderman experience. But for those currently enrolled – and, more to the point personally, for those of us in the surrounding community who know how to value our access to this wonderful resourse –  the best is yet to come.

Don’t take my word for it. Look at these lovely photos.  https://www.library.virginia.edu/news/2024/renovated-main-library-set-open-january-8