John Wolf — choosing your explanation

Reliving the Fall

by John Dorsey Wolf

Occasionally my experience of September 17, 2007 gets relived in some form.

In the early evening in a side canyon of the Grand Canyon, I slipped and fell 35′ feet backward off of a ledge into a small pool of less then 1′ of water and smacked onto a gravel bottom.  The area was surrounded by massive rocks, and since I was facing the sky I assumed death was a given.  I’ve made the calculations and it was like flying unprotected (except for a fanny pack) into a pile of gravel at 30 mph.  A dozen witnesses experienced it with me, and all saw me get up and walk out (very shook) with absolutely no physical sign of damage, not even a tiny bruise.  I have a picture of me sitting in the water on the gravel.

This kind of event sticks with you, as many people associated with this site who have had their own awakening experience know.

Twice during this month it has come up in conversation with friends, including one couple who were next to me on the trail when it happened.

My experience of unexpected survival garners three kinds of reactions in people.

Continue reading John Wolf — choosing your explanation

Try Defining Yourself In Words

[By John Dorsey Wolf]

This thought came through to me: “To illustrate a point about the difficulty describing an ever-changing reality, try writing down who you are.”  (After all, we are part of the total.) This comes along with the age-old question, “How can you fully appreciate your daily life experience, if you don’t know who you really are?”

I found several interesting aspects to this exercise:

  • Putting it into words brought out elements that I tend to gloss over when I just think about it and not actually write it out in detail.
  • I was surprised how my view of myself has changed, even over a relatively short period of time, and it’s not just my perception that’s changed; I believe I actually am different.
  • I realized how much my self-definition colors my perspective on everything else.

thinking it may be far more interesting and helpful to anyone reading this to write out their own self-definition than to read mine.

I can only suggest it of course.  If you do choose to give it a go, I suggest you do it before reading any more of this.

Continue reading Try Defining Yourself In Words

Emerson and guidance

Our age isn’t much into poetry, perhaps, and our memory of American saints such as Emerson is dimmed by so much that has happened since his day. But this morning a familiar fragment of Emerson’s poem “Terminus” came to mind: ““Lowly faithful, banish fear,” and i thought it would be well to share it. He wrote this when he was 64, younger than I am now, but his creative life was more or less over, and he knew it. Did he kick against fate? Judge for yourself. Emerson’s life, and Thoreau’s, are almost miraculously appropriate examples of living lives in close connection to guidance.

To recast it in a form perhaps more accessible to those unused to poetry:

Terminus

It is time to be old, to take in sail:— The god of bounds, who sets to seas a shore, came to me in his fatal rounds, and said:

“No more! No farther shoot thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root. Fancy departs: no more invent; contract thy firmament to compass of a tent. There’s not enough for this and that, make thy option which of two; economize the failing river, not the less revere the Giver, leave the many and hold the few.

“Timely wise accept the terms, soften the fall with wary foot; a little while still plan and smile, and,—fault of novel germs,— mature the unfallen fruit.

“Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires, bad husbands of their fires, who, when they gave thee breath, failed to bequeath the needful sinew stark as once, the Baresark marrow to thy bones, but left a legacy of ebbing veins, inconstant heat and nerveless reins,— amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb, amid the gladiators, halt and numb.”

As the bird trims her to the gale, I trim myself to the storm of time, I man the rudder, reef the sail, obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:

“Lowly faithful, banish fear, right onward drive unharmed; The port, well worth the cruise, is near, and every wave is charmed.”

 

Terminus

It is time to be old,

To take in sail:—

The god of bounds,

Who sets to seas a shore,

Came to me in his fatal rounds,

And said: “No more!

No farther shoot

Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.

Fancy departs: no more invent;

Contract thy firmament

To compass of a tent.

There’s not enough for this and that,

Make thy option which of two;

Economize the failing river,

Not the less revere the Giver,

Leave the many and hold the few.

Timely wise accept the terms,

Soften the fall with wary foot;

A little while

Still plan and smile,

And,—fault of novel germs,—

Mature the unfallen fruit.

Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,

Bad husbands of their fires,

Who, when they gave thee breath,

Failed to bequeath

The needful sinew stark as once,

The Baresark marrow to thy bones,

But left a legacy of ebbing veins,

Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,—

Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,

Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.”

 

As the bird trims her to the gale,

I trim myself to the storm of time,

I man the rudder, reef the sail,

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:

“Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward drive unharmed;

The port, well worth the cruise, is near,

And every wave is charmed.”

 

Rudolf Steiner on reality

One who attains really spiritual perception does not become a dreamer

One who attains really spiritual perception does not become a dreamer

I have often emphasised that one who attains really spiritual perception does not become a dreamer or enthusiast, living only in the higher worlds and not seeing external reality. People who are ever dreaming in higher worlds, or about them, and do not see external reality, are not initiates; they should be considered from a pathological point of view, at least in the psychological sense of the term. The real knowledge of initiation does not estrange one from ordinary, physical life and its various relationships. On the contrary, it makes one a more painstaking, conscientious observer than without the faculty of seership. Indeed we may say: if a man has no sense of ordinary realities, no interest in ordinary realities, no interest in the details of others’ lives, if he is so ‘superior’ that he sails through life without troubling about its details, he shows he is not a genuine seer.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 234 – Anthroposophy, An Introduction: Lecture VIII – Dornach, 9th February 1924

Translated by Vera Compton-Burnett

Roosevelt in 1937 and us today

I don’t put a lot of political stuff on this blog, but I’m going to make an exception — if indeed it is an exception — because of the way I came to this, and the striking light it casts on our current situation.
I was at the Monticello visitor center last week, browsing expensively through their excellent bookshelves, and I bought A Patriot’s Handbook, a thick reader compiled by Caroline Kennedy, packed full of essays, poems, speeches, history, all on various aspects of the American experience. A wonderful treasure-trove. I have it on my dining room table, available for reading little bits while I eat. Today I came to Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Inaugural Address, and I was struck by how much it applied to us. (I am not a whole-hearted admirer of FDR, but I do believe he did his best according to his lights, and which of us can hope to do more than that?) Because I imagine that few people are familiar with this speech, i quote it here in full. Parts of it you will want to skim, probably. Other parts may hit you as hard as they did me, because again, I read this with 21st-century America’s plight in mind.

Roosevelt’s second inaugural address, Jan 20, 1937
When four years ago we met to inaugurate President, the Republic, single-minded in anxiety, stood in spirit here. We dedicated ourselves to the fulfillment of a vision—to speed the time when there would be for all the people that security and peace essential to the pursuit of happiness. We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it; to end by action, tireless and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day. We did those first things first.
Our covenant with ourselves did not stop there. Instinctively we recognized a deeper need—the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men.
We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.
In this we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government.
This year marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Constitutional Convention which made us a nation. At that Convention our forefathers found the way out of the chaos which followed the Revolutionary War; they created a strong government with powers of united action sufficient then and now to solve problems utterly beyond individual or local solution. A century and a half ago they established the Federal Government in order to promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to the American people.
Today we invoke those same powers of government to achieve the same objectives.
Continue reading Roosevelt in 1937 and us today

Oliver Sacks

Some last thoughts from Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks has been a wonderful resource for the rest of us. If you haven’t read his books, you have a treat coming to you when you find them. But now he has discovered that he has very little time left to live, and in an op-ed article in The New York Times, he has a few words to say about it. (I wish i could get Rita’s material to him, as it might send him on his way rejoicing.) The following words struck me, particularly. How many times have I said something similar to my friends, and been met with incomprehension or amusement. Sacks said:.

“There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.”

Do you need to be sentenced to die before you consider how much of your life and attention you are wasting on things of no real importance to you?

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

My Own Life
Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer
By OLIVER SACKSFEB. 19, 2015

A MONTH ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. Although the radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye, only in very rare cases do such tumors metastasize. I am among the unlucky 2 percent.

I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.

It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”

“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”

I have been lucky enough to live past 80, and the 15 years allotted to me beyond Hume’s three score and five have been equally rich in work and love. In that time, I have published five books and completed an autobiography (rather longer than Hume’s few pages) to be published this spring; I have several other books nearly finished.

Hume continued, “I am … a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.”

Here I depart from Hume. While I have enjoyed loving relationships and friendships and have no real enmities, I cannot say (nor would anyone who knows me say) that I am a man of mild dispositions. On the contrary, I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.

And yet, one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”

Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.

On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Oliver Sacks, a professor of neurology at the New York University School of Medicine, is the author of many books, including “Awakenings” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”

First Copy

Yesterday Bob Friedman dropped off advance copies of my latest book, Imagine Yourself Well a book that was a long time in the making. A lot of practical experience went into this one, and I got it into only 100 pages.

Frank DeMarco holding copy of Imagine Yourself Well

 

I meant for it to be severely practical. Here’s the first part of the intro:

Introduction

In this book you will find simple techniques to improve your health. They are free, they have no side-effects, and they cannot interfere with any medicines you may be taking. You can mix them with whatever form of medical care you prefer. You can do them with your doctor’s blessing, or you can keep them to yourself.

You can use these techniques, no matter how serious your present condition. Are you in continual pain? Seriously injured? Enduring a chronic degenerative condition? Whatever, it doesn’t matter. You can use these techniques.

Continue reading First Copy