Stray Thoughts

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

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.

 

Saturday, June 22, 2024

9:05 a.m. This is the day Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, a fatal mistake. I was thinking, a while ago, someone could look back at our history since at least 1914 and reinterpret everything as the gradual reemergence of the non-western world, partly through the west’s civil wars and partly through the natural effects of western ideas and technology on the other old civilizations. It would give people a different way to look at things.

So many contenders:

• The Latin Americans, closest to western culture, and their attraction to and resistance to the Colossus of the North.
• The Chinese, recovering from 300 years of decay and stagnation, first reawakened by Japan in the 1930s and then finding their way once they rid themselves of their fleeting dependence upon Moscow.
• The Japanese, first imitating, then defying, then conquering, then being conquered, then beginning again.
• South Asia, profiting from European institutions and then rejecting Europe’s role. India, Indonesia, Indochina, Thailand, etc.
• The Muslim world, taking advantage of the war against the Turks, then Hitler v. the West, then the U.S. v. Britain, then Russia v. the West. Oil its greatest asset and greatest problem. Its greatest internal problem, secular v. extreme religious beliefs.
• Russia and the other borderlands, half western, half anti-western, continually vacillating but always seeking a valid path into the future.
• Finally, Africa, the land of the future in the way people used to call Brazil the country of the future. Sub-Saharan Africa looks like its going to take a long, long time to emerge, but you never know.

And there is the West itself, in all its contradictions. It is no longer Christendom. At the moment it appears to be secular materialism, but there is a remorseless quiet backlash growing, from several directions. It will take an external defeat, perhaps many of them, before the ruling paradigm is overthrown, but it must come.

And from all these competing fragments, each previously sovereign in its own area, each driven to distraction by the newly intrusive presence of the others, something new will arise, a world civilization infinitely complex and both familiar and alien. We who are alive today will not live long enough to see it, though the youngest among us may see the beginnings.

 

When I learned that Ken Kesey had died, I wrote a poem and sent it along, which Ken Babbs was gracious enough to acknowledge and say he liked.

Riding Point

Kesey’s son went over

in a cosmic instant, in a car wreck,

and later Kesey sent a book

“to Jed, across the river

riding point.” I always liked

what that showed he knew:

that death is change, not end;

that Jed remained himself,

if also something more; that

all our trails cross a river.

 

Yesterday, perhaps they met

and shared a fire, and coffee,

and, Kesey still being Kesey,

perhaps some hash. It’s dusty work,

riding drag; good to change over

and finally ride in,

across the river

– Ken Kesey died November 10, 2001

A friend mentioned that I am not posting regularly anymore, which of course is true. It set me to remembering when posting was a daily occurrence, over many years. How many posts? Over how many years? I looked at the site’s dashboard for statistics:

My first post was on March 9, 2007, nearly 17 years ago. Since then:

• 4,356 posts, of which all but three are mine, or are credited to me. (Sometimes people would write something I would use as a guest posting, but the stats still attributed it to me.)
• These posts have drawn 7894 comments, of which 1833 were mine, presumably in response to something someone said.

March 2007 to now makes 201 months. Divide 4,353 posts by 201 and you get an average of a little more than 21 posts per month, the equivalent of one every business day for nearly 17 years. That’s a lot of postings, enough to make something of an afterthought of anything that may follow.