https://rudolfsteinerquotes.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/the-dead-are-with-us-2/
Happy Birthday, Henry!
Henry Thoreau was born 200 years ago today, July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. A great American, a great citizen of the 3D and non-3D world alike.
Living almost entirely in New England, never venturing farther north than Montreal, never farther south than Philadelphia, never farther west than Minnesota (and that in his final few months, trying to recover from the tuberculosis that killed him), he instead, as he put it, “traveled extensively in Concord,” and affected the entire world, though it took many a long decade before his influence spread so far.
He set down his thought in words that have transformed the life of many a reader, and will transform the life of many persons yet to come. A gift America gave the world; a gift to the America that shaped him, and the America he would never see. He was only 44 when he died on May 6, 1862.
For context, he was born when James Monroe was president, only five years after the War of 1812. He died under the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, months before the Emancipation Proclamation. (Thus he lived his entire life under the shadow of slavery, with no indication that it would ever be eliminated, though in fact in three years more, it would be gone.) He probably never heard of Ulysses S. Grant, and he certainly never heard Antietam Creek, nor Gettysburg, nor Appomattox Court House. It would be another five years after his death before the transcontinental railroad would be completed, or Alaska purchased. He lived before radio, before telephones, before electric lights,, yet in many ways he’s still ahead of us.
Happy Birthday, Henry, and may your work live on!
Reality ain’t what it seems, and even science knows it now
Here is a very instructive analogy
“There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?utm_source=fbb
Notice, though, that if, throughout this article, you substitute the word “God” for “evolution” the meaning is unchanged. And that’s my objection to the way people think of evolution. They silently turn a concept into God. Is this good science? Or is it merely a way of talking about God without losing your official materialist credentials?
The value of forgetting things
Of course, just because “science” says something is no reason to take it as Gospel. (Yes, I did that deliberately. I’m very tired of scientism, the very destructive religion that warps our times.) Still, this is an interesting study.
Interview added to Interviews page
My interview with Aron O’Dowd has been added to top of the Interviews page.
Could depression be an allergenic reaction?
Thinking about so many people who have suffered lifelong depression: Hemingway, Lincoln, Churchill, make your own list, and then look around at your own family and friends, if not closer to home. Not conclusive, of course, but suggestive.
http://www.schwartzreport.net/depression-actually-nothing-allergic-reaction/?utm_source=Stephan+Schwartz%27s+Email+List&utm_campaign=a0633c87ac-SR_Daily_Digest_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0eb25d4404-a0633c87ac-221392153
JFK, 100 years old and still going strong
My column for Central Virginia’s The Echo World for May, 2017, noting that May 29th was the 100th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s birth.
JFK, 100 years old and still going strong
By Frank DeMarco
In communicating with the non-physical, you need to give up the idea of certainty. Who are you talking to, really? The person you envision? An imposter? A figment of your imagination? Certainty is for know-it-alls, not for the rest of us.
In these communications, we always have to bear in mind that our own ideas may contaminate the message. (For instance, the scripture quoted below was not used in JFK’s undelivered Fort Worth speech, but elsewhere.) That’s just the kind of thing that happens. Every so often, we’re going to get it wrong. We can only do our best.
Thursday, April 6, 2017
6:15 a.m. For my article for Echo I wanted to write something about John F. Kennedy, in recognition of his 100th birthday. I awoke thinking, use one of my old communications with him from 2006 or whenever it was – then I thought, what’s wrong with talking to him today if possible? And that had suspicious fingerprints on it, as if others had had it in mind, and I had only just caught on. Well, we’ll see.
Mr. President, if you had something to say to us about your life, or about our situation today, or anything at all, what would it be?
Keeping in mind that this may not be me, really.
I’m smiling, but it is always a feature of this kind of communication. I can only proceed on faith but not without skepticism, or anyway caution.
Yes, a familiar state of mind. That was me, too. There aren’t all that many things in the world that are as cut and dried as they appear.
As I look at your life, it seems a miracle of perseverance against impossible odds. Not just your political career but your lifelong battle for life itself, and for health, and for the active life that others take for granted but that you had to struggle for.
It is easier to be competitive when your whole life is a competition for health, only you have to refuse to define yourself as sick, or crippled. But if you think you may have only so many days of life, and you want to excel, and you can’t stand being bored, competition isn’t an effort so much as a redirection of effort that would be expended anyway. Fortunately, my father didn’t believe in babying, and he didn’t believe in second place, and he was as interested in his children’s lives as in his own. It made my life possible.
I have thought that your father’s wealth may have had the unfortunate side-effect of making you a guinea pig for the Mayo Clinic and other high-priced research medical places.
It was a demonstration of what money can provide in the form of opportunities. I didn’t forget that later as we thought about social problems. But yes, in a way an undiagnosed illness or set of illnesses is a great temptation to well-meaning and perhaps misguided doctors to try this or that and see what happens.
So, any words for us today, in 2017, on the life that began in 1917?
Everything changes, but human nature doesn’t change. That’s why we look to the arts as well as the sciences. Science tells us what the world looks like, and it can bring us greater insight into the meaning behind the appearance, but it is the arts, the inner sciences, that tell us who we are among changing circumstances.
Every generation’s challenges are unique, because the world around them is new. But every generation still contains the blood of its ancestors, and the habits of mind and the passions that impel them. There’s no need to stay in the same place when you were born to venture out into the seas. But it is foolhardy to travel the seas without compass, or radio, or chart, unless absolutely necessary.
No words about our present situation?
Everyone’s challenges are their challenges. You can’t fix someone else’s life, you can only provide the help they can use. The rest is up to them. In the same way, those of us who loved our country love it no less from our new perspective, but we see wider ramifications, perhaps more extensive threads connecting this and that manifestation, this and that line of cause and effect, say.
The scriptural reminder I intended to use on the day I was killed remains true, and remains appropriate and to the point:
Be strong and of good courage,
Be not afraid.
Neither be dismayed.
Thank you for this, and for the gift that your life was to us. I trust you found it satisfying in retrospect.
I still wish I had had more good times!
Smiling. As your press conferences used to end, I’ll say, “Thank you, Mr. President.”
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Frank DeMarco is the author of many books on communication with those in the Non-3D world. He writes a blog, www.ofmyownknowledge.com.