human potential

I suppose it is inevitable that as we age, we look back and say, “I wasted so much time! I might have done this, or that, or the other.” I am sure we have all missed opportunities. Who uses all his talents? Who takes advantage of  everything life offers? I don’t see how else it could be.

But maybe this lament belongs among what we might call theoretical regrets. Because nobody can take advantage of every opportunity, how can it be a tragedy or even a misfortune that we miss some? Maybe this is why people say, “All paths are good.”  On the one hand, every step we take forecloses other opportunities. On the other hand, foreclosing (or overlooking, or disdaining) an opportunity opens up new possibilities. Two ways of saying the same thing: There isn’t any one path. There are many paths, including the paths one makes oneself by wandering off on one’s own, and they’re all valid.

That said, I do have my own list of regrets, of course. Don’t we all? High on my list is, “Why didn’t I do the reading and studying that would have given me a comprehensive, first-hand knowledge and understanding of Carl Jung’s writings?”

I know the answer, of course. At least, I think I do. If I had received an academic understanding of Jungian psychology, or even if I had done enough reading early on to really understand what he was saying, I wouldn’t be where I am now, reading his work through the filter of 20-plus years of exposition from the guys upstairs. I would have been tempted to explain away their explanations as “nothing but” what I had read in Jung. Even as it was, I had read enough Jung to wonder. Had I made a through study of his work, it would have been much harder.

Still, as I read him now, in my old age, I see so much that it would have been helpful to have known long ago. While I am propounding a useless “if only,” I might as well concatenate them. So, if only I had:

• made a thorough study of Jung immediately after coming across Modern Man in Search of a Soul in 1970;
• acquired the theoretical background in psychology to feel at home discussing it;
• begun talking to the guys when I was in my twenties, instead of my forties;
• spoken to Jung long before I did, and had the background to ask more penetrating questions;
• begun working with Rita Warren or some equivalent (supposing there was some equivalent) 20 or even 30 years earlier;
• used those connections and that education and those sessions to produce a conspectus on reality as it looks when one looks at the description given by the guys when combined with a Jungian perspective.

I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I stumbled around in the dark, feeling my way toward an unknown goal, the way we do, and it all worked out, as I imagine it generally does.

But what a lot of work there is left for the future! We can only hope that others will take up the task as they do their own stumbling toward unknown goals.

 

I woke up between 3:30 and 4 because I could not breathe, and while I was using the nebulizer, my thoughts went here and there, and perhaps what I came up with will be of interest.
I thought, how did I come to live in such deep faith? I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but I find it striking, and I cannot believe I am wrong in this faith.
I was re-reading Teresa Crater’s Under the Stone Paw (a novel I edited and helped publish when I was still at Hampton Roads), and came to Dr. Abernathy telling Anne LeClair that the sun affects our consciousness. I jumped to thoughts about people’s fears of sunspots, solar flares, CME’s, etc. I don’t share those fears. I believe that the sun manifests life in the same way everything else does. Call it God, call it All That Is, call it whatever you are comfortable calling it. Where is room for fear of mishaps?
The test, I suppose, comes when you can’t breathe, can’t assume that the next easy breath will come on schedule. You have to get that next breath; you do what you need to, what you can do, but you know that ultimately it is not in your power to command, any more than you can keep the mysterious processes of the body functioning. We are always dependent upon life to maintain itself. And when we die, well, is that somehow a tragedy, an accident, an avoidable outcome?
Whatever produced in me this deep faith in life (regardless of the evidence; sometimes in the teeth of the evidence), I am grateful for it. It makes everything easier, even possible. The other day I noted that my good friend Jon seems to have moved beyond anger at various things he cannot command. I was very glad to see that. After all, what good does anger do us? It’s like fear, “the little death, the mind killer,” to quote Dune.
A while later, I thought, we are groups of strands, each with its own imperatives and its own will. That puts a different light on the saying that “It is better to be whole than good.” That saying recognizes that it is better to realize that we are many things, than to believe that we are one thing with which we can identify.
We aren’t simple, good, unitary, because we can’t be. We can only live our multiple, good-and-bad-mixed community lives as best we can, choosing as we go which strands we want to encourage and assist. And since this is always going to be sort of a messy process, the more faith you can bring to it, the better. The joker in the deck, though, is that trust in life doesn’t seem to come on command. You have to live it in faith before you can live it from experience.
Worth the effort of enticing it to come live with you, though!

In working on my novel, I came to a place where the non-3D group is explaining something to the 3D group that is practicing functioning as a group mind, and a thought came to me that doesn’t (or at least doesn’t yet) have its place in the novel, but seems worth thinking about.
• We are composed of many individual strands, each of which may be its own lifetime currently in process.
• Every life has unfinished business.
• Quite possibly we carry our unfinished business from one lifetime into the here-and-now of another lifetime, perhaps neither we nor it knowing it.
• We all know how unslaked emotions demand attention, like little kids saying, “Deal with me!”
• What if our strands experience the equivalent of sibling rivalry? What if they experience each other (and, by extension, us) as interference?
We have been thinking in terms of helping other lives, but what if, in fact, the primary beneficiary of such assistance is we ourselves? If there is any truth in this, perhaps it would be worth our time to treat each of our different moods as individuals and offer to help, as we would if we saw a 3D person in pain.
Calling Max Goodwin! “How can I help?”

It was the night of Thursday, December 10, 1992, and I was alone, downstairs at The Monroe Institute’s Nancy Penn Center. The Gateway course that we had just completed had been quite a roller-coaster, opening chambers within me that would take years to explore. I didn’t know how my life would shape up from there, but I knew that something decisive had happened.

I had plenty of mistakes yet to make, plenty of illusions yet to be baffled by, plenty of blunders and forgettings and stupidities to commit and suffer from. In no way could it be said that I now “had it all together,” as people used to say. But – if only for the moment – I was awake, and if I could wake up once, presumably I could wake up again.

This was only partly because of the psychic exploration encouraged and facilitated by the tape exercises. I had taken to that like a man dying of thirst who comes to an oasis. My liberation from the constrictions that had bound my past came partly from tape-assisted experiences, but more from interacting with the other participants, and with one in particular. I had always found it hard, dealing with people. Really, in ways I can scarcely remember at this distance, I was afraid of people. Gateway took that away. Long story, not one to go into here.

The point here is that on that Thursday night, after everyone else had gone to sleep, I was roaming around the darkened silent building in a state of quiet exultation, my senses and intuitions wide open, with no internal doubting-Thomas interfering., and three things happened.

The first thing: In the debrief room at Nancy Penn was a little goldfish bowl, complete with two pretty unimpressive fish. That night, roaming around, my attention was caught by the bowl and I sort of focused on the fish. (I don’t know how to describe what I did without making it seem special, which it was not.) I really, really concentrated on them – and both fish suddenly moved, in a jerky, startled-seeming way, as if they were people who had just heard a loud noise and realized there was somebody else there. (I know it sounds crazy, sounds like wild imagination.)

The second thing, I was in the exercise room, on the bottom floor, and I looked out the window and saw a fir tree, whipping back and forth in the wind. Following impulse, I went out the door and embraced the tree, like putting your face into a cat’s fur, and felt an emotional bond. But then, I have always loved trees. I was out there in my bare feet, standing in the snow, using what I have been taught about maintaining my body temperature, and the very cold seemed to reinforce my mood.

The third thing came next morning, looking up at the sky and seeing birds interacting with each other, making complicated recurring patterns as they soared.

A while later, I put my feelings into this little poem.

Focus 21
The fish were startled.
They saw me. Out of nowhere
a kindred consciousness appeared.
The fir tree, tossing and shaking
from the wind’s rough caressing hand,
called me. I went. The circling
fir arms said “joy.” The playful birds
making patterns said “joy.” The ice
engaged my feet and it said “joy.”

A long sad lifetime changes.
The view from here says “joy,” and says
that’s all it ever was.

When people have asked me about my Gateway, I sometimes tell them, it was the beginning of my life as a conscious individual. But I don’t find it very easy to say why, and certainly not how.

Hi all,

Somehow I feel that you all are well aware of these quotes, but I had to send them along anyway. Onward… Peter

Favorite quotes from Albert Einstein 🙏

“I didn’t arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. Matter is spirit reduced to point of visibility. There is no matter.”

“Time and space are not conditions in which we live, but modes by which we think. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by the external world.”

“Time does not exist – we invented it. Time is what the clock says. The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in silence, and the truth comes to me.”

“The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.”

“A human being experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

“Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.”

“When something vibrates, the electrons of the entire universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

“We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.”

“When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.”

“The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.”

“The ancients knew something, which we seem to have forgotten.”

“The more I learn of physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.”

“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. It is entirely possible that behind the perception of our senses, worlds are hidden of which we are unaware.”

“I’m not an atheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books.”

“The common idea that I am an atheist is based on a big mistake. Anyone who interprets my scientific theories this way, did not understand them.”

“Everything is determined, every beginning and ending, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”

“The religion of the future will be moving God and avoid dogma and theology.”

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

“Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you can not help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.”

“I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care about money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. I claim credit for nothing. A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.”

 

Some excerpts from “Magic,” a 24-page essay by W.B. Yeats written in his thirties, in 1901, contained within the book Essays and Introductions, published in 1961, 22 years after his death.

“I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are –

(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

…

“In coming years I was to see and hear of many such visions, and though I was not to be convinced, though half convinced once or twice, that they were old lives, in an ordinary sense of the word life, I was to learn that they have almost always some quite definite relation to dominant moods and moulding events in this life. They are, perhaps … symbolical histories of these moods and events, or rather symbolical shadows of the impulses that have made them, messages as it were out of the ancestral being of the questioner.

…

“I could tell of stranger images, of stranger enchantments, of stranger imaginations, cast consciously or unconsciously over as great distances by friends or by myself, were it not that the greater energies of the mind seldom break forth but when the deeps are loosened. They break forth amid events too private or too sacred for public speech, or seem themselves, I know not why, to belong to hidden things. I have written of these breakings forth, these loosenings of the deep, with some care and some detail, but I shall keep my record shut. After all, one can but bear witness less to convince him who won’t believe than to protect him who does, as Blake puts it, enduring unbelief and misbelief and ridicule as best one may. I shall be content to show that past times have believed as I do….

…

“Examples like this are as yet too little classified, too little analysed, to convince the stranger, but some of them are proof enough for those they have happened to, proof that there is a memory of Nature that reveals events and symbols of distant centuries. Mystics of many countries and many centuries have spoken of this memory; and the honest men and charlatans, who keep the magical traditions which will someday be studied as a part of folk-lore, base most that is of importance in their claims upon this memory.

…

“I cannot now think symbols less than the greats of all powers whether they are used consciously by the masters f magic, or half unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist. At first I tried to distinguish between symbols and symbols, between what I called inherent symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the distinction has come to mean little or nothing. Whether their power has arisen out of themselves, or whether it has an arbitrary origin, matters little, for they act, as I believe, because the Great Memory associates them with certain events and moods and persons. Whatever the passions of man have gathered about, becomes a symbol in the Great Memory, and in the hands of him who has the secret it is a worker of wonders, a caller-up of angels or of devils.”

 

This is a small taste only of a very compressed and powerful statement of out his experience, for Yeats was an accomplished magician, quite as much as he was a powerful poet and playwright. But I thought it would be of interest to us, his intellectual and spiritual heirs, twelve decades on.