My long time friend Rita Warren would have been 89 today, had she not moved over to the other side — died, in other words — last March. So this is the first time in nine years that I won’t raise a glass with her in honor of her birthday and Franklin Roosevelt’s: “Happy Birthday, Mr. Roosevelt, God bless you.”
So, here’s a virtual toast. Our traditional “God bless you, Mr. Roosevelt,” and now “God bless you, Rita,” as well.
In case you’ve ever wondered what he looks like, here’s a photo of Robert, at supper last weekend in Virginia Beach.
In these days of instant availability of documents it isn’t hard to obtain a copy of nearly any speech you care to read. So I thought at first that I would excerpt a few lines from President Barack Obama’s inaugural address, to highlight what I think it shows about his values and focus. But as I re-read it, I found it remarkably concise and hard to cut.
So I will make a few remarks, and then (even though you could google it as I did), I will append the entire speech for your convenience, as I think you will find it worth re-reading.
What I note:
* We have carried on in hard times past because “we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents”
*Our current catastrophic difficulties are the fault not only of some particularly guilty or stupid scoundrels, but of “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”
* It’s time to put away childish things: “we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.” That doesn’t sound to me like saying one side or the other is right but that both share the blame. Like Lincoln, he reminds us that we must disenthrall ourselves.
* He included the immigrants, the poor, the slaves in our common experience, and remembered the soldiers of two centuries. Rather than indulge in “victim-ism,” he extended recognition that the way was hard for most of our ancestors.
* “With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.”
Robert Clarke is the author of The Four Gold Keys and An Order Out of Time. His exceptional life has led him — via tens of thousands of dreams and consequent study of their meaning — to an understanding of the way dreams express our lives that is absolutely critical to our times, and nearly absolutely unsuspected.
Robert, who lives in England, has dreamed that Western civilization’s spiritual rebirth will begin (is beginning?) in the United States. One can only hope so!
The Symbolism of the Fish
by Robert Clarke
I recently wrote about a star being a symbol of the Self through the unconscious in the world’s myths, including the Star of Bethlehem with Christ. This is the Self in cosmic, higher spirit aspect, sometimes as Divine Son or Logos. But from the opposite, lower angle, as a content from the soul depths the Self often has the symbol of a fish, sometimes as Son of the Earth Spirit/World Soul. Christ in this aspect is thus the Ichthys (Greek “fish”) and indeed, the fish was the first symbol of Christ, even before the cross.
In the first high culture we know of, Sumeria, Enki was “The Sublime Fish” and “The Fish with Seven Fins”, called the latter to express the Self with his seven constituent parts. Enki was a saviour and helper of mankind, and the appearance of such a figure in world mythology invariably means the raising of mankind out of the mire and a blossoming of culture. Even atheistic scholars admit that Western civilisation was forged by the advent of Christianity.
I suppose most people know that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has something wrong with his health again, something serious enough that he’s taking three months off, and serious enough to cause widespread suspicions that he’s not being candid about it.
Nearly three years ago, having survived pancreatic cancer, he gave the commencement address at Stanford which immediately became recognized as a classic. Someone sent me a copy of the text, and I sent it around to people on my send-interesting-stuff-to list. Many, many people said how much they liked it, and how it changed their opinion of Jobs for the better.
But the best thing that occurred still puts a lump in my throat. My brother sent it on to a friend whose daughter wanted to study art in college but her parents had been insisting she study something horribly practical and boring, can’t remember what. As a result of them reading the piece, they let her study what she wanted!
Isn’t that lovely? Think what a chain of people it took – Jobs himself, the person who sent out the piece, me, my brother – to get that little girl her freedom! When I heard that, I sent it out to my list again, just in case someone who needed it — as ammunition, perhaps? — hadn’t seen it, or had forgotten it. And here it is again.
The original link is http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
and it’s still active, or was Friday morning when I tried it. For your convenience I also include a copy here.
Long but very interesting. From the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/books/19read.html?emc=eta1
From Books, New President Found Voice
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 18, 2009
WASHINGTON — In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written, “that people had begun to listen to my opinions.” Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power “to transform”: “with the right words everything could change -— South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”
Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.
Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.
Part IV: Monroe’s Philosophy
What impressed me most about Journeys out of the Body, however, was not the author’s narrative of his metaphysical adventures (as captivating it was), but rather, the underlying philosophy of the narrator. This philosophy would find further elaboration, not only in Bob’s later writings, but also in the creation of Hemi-Sync and this Institute. His pragmatic approach was one of word and deed, because, I believe, he intuitively grasped the central importance of uniting theory with practice.
Bob Monroe–a philosopher? You bet he was.
To be a philosopher, one does not need advanced academic degrees or specialized training. This is what I had learned from the work of R.G. Collingwood, whom I mentioned earlier. As I slowly came to realize, Collingwood and Monroe had several important ideas in common.