More nuggets from my early journals, this one recorded in October, 1972
While one percent of society
has superficial awareness
of the existence of mathematical regularities
synergetically displayed by mass attraction
and supersynergetically displayed as precession,
no scientist has the slightest idea
what mass attraction is
nor why
synergy, precession, or radiation
exists or acts as they do.
In my copious free time, I do some pottery, having been taking classes for about a year now with Nan Rothwell. Of the 23 pieces I had in our latest kiln firing, these are among my favorites. The horus holding the human head is 6” high (x5″x7″); the woman with the basket is 8” high (x9″x6″) and the blue-haired figure (I didn’t know it was going to come out blue!) that I am somewhat disrespectfully calling “Mr. Spock in Drag” is 5” high (x5″x5″).
Particularly pleased with the senora and her corn meal.
I didn’t realize, when I wrote down so many quotations that moved me, so long ago, that I was holding them for you who read this post. Glad I did?
“The coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital, and physical existence of man, but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal of humanity, and attempt to effect it in themselves and lead others to it and to make it the recognized goal of the race. In proportion as they succeed and to the extent to which they carry their evolution, the yet unrealized potentiality which they represent will become an actual possibility of the future.”
–Sri Aurobindo
I think that this was written in the depths of the Great Depression, though I am not sure. (In my earlier days of journalizing I wasn’t particularly careful about my citations.) In any case, it seems appropriate for these times.
“I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time — the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.”
John Maynard Keynes
A little long-winded, perhaps, but not the less insightful for all that. I copied out this quotation back in 1972. It doesn’t seem any the less applicable to the 21st century than it did to the last third of the 20th.
In human terms, how are we to describe… our own Western civilization, or any other of the 10 or 20 civilizations which we can count up on our fingers? In human terms, I should say that each of these civilizations is, while in action, a distinctive attempt at a single great common human experience, or, when it is seen in retrospect, after the action is over, it is a distinctive instance of a single great common human experience. The enterprise or experience is an effort to perform an act of creation. In each of these civilizations, mankind, I think, is trying to rise above mere humanity — above primitive humanity, that is, — toward some higher kind of spiritual life. One cannot depict the goal because it has never been reached, — or, rather, I should say that it has never been reached by any human society. It has, perhaps, been reached by individual men and women. At least, I can think of certain saints and sages…. But if there have been a few transfigured men and women, there has never been such a thing as a civilized society. Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. No known civilization has ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance.
Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial
I have been going through more than 40 years of journals, finding and indexing quotations from various writers and others who have influenced me over the years. In the first rank among these, certainly among the first in point of time and among the longest lasting in terms of continued influence, is Colin Wilson. Perhaps this quote from one of his earliest books, which I copied in April,1970, will give you a sense of how and why he was so significant. As slightly later with Carl Jung, when I first came across Wilson’s work, I recognized immediately a mind that worked as mine did, that valued what I valued.
“This is the problem of our time: to destroy the idea of men as a `static observer,’ both in philosophy and art. All imaginative creation is involved with the three absolutes: freedom, evolution, religion.”
Colin Wilson, The Strength To Dream
