This World

Years ago, now. Sharing a joke,

Walking on water 🙂

 

Good times.

February 13, 1848:

“When a man’s own culture falls behind that of his time, he is conservative. When it outstrips and enables him to over-see his time, he becomes a reformer.”

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January 3, 1851:

“Foreseen and premeditated discourse seldom serves me for occasions, and I am happiest when left to the methods of intuition. The initial thought is all, and the rest follows according to the genius of the moment and the present company. The power comes, and comes only, when unsought. An abandonment to the instincts appears to be the state of mind necessary for the largest reception of the Spirit. Conversation is a gift of divine grace; and if the mind will but wait, it shall be filled and overflow.”

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January 10, 1851: [In which Alcott, unbeknown to himself, laments that he was born before the invention of tape recorders, which do for us now exactly what he wished could be done for him then.]

“’Tis a thousand pities that we have not caught the secret yet of daguerreotyping our thoughts as they are spoken in conversation. That would be a discovery worth while, and outlive all predecessors in the arts. … I shall not say as good things, much less write as good, about the Memory and Plato’s reminiscences, again, as I did today when conversing with my cousin…. O for a Hermes to report us!”

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January 10, 1852:

“’Tis so easy to blame and denounce; but for truth’s, for righteousness’ sake, as for that of charity and good manners too, let us abstain from pushing his duty (if duty it be) very far or frequently. Even good men may damn themselves in denouncing the damned.”

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March 11, 1852:

“The child’s body is a recollection of ancestral particles from seven generations preceding; and the like of its mind’s memories also. All instincts are recollections of foregone lives.”

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May 1, 1864: [Observing his young grandson.]

“To conceive his acquirements as originating in nature and dating from his birth into his body, it to me an atheism that human stupidity alone could entertain; an idiocy which our shallow metaphysical culture could alone have made possible in these days of such marvellous material knowledge, such victories over the natural forces.”

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Of course these are only bits and pieces, but perhaps they provide a hint of the richness and depth of his mind, the sureness and balance of his instincts.

 

If you had asked Alcott, “Was Jesus divine?”, he probably would have said, “Certainly, and so am I, and so are you, and so are all men and women on the face of the earth.” That would have been a good answer, hardly acceptable to most of his contemporaries.

But then, Alcott’s thought processes, his core assumptions, his perceptions, were often far in advance of his contemporaries. Even today what he writes may seem at first glance opaque, even meaningless. All I can say is, if these quotations seem at first indecipherable, sit with them a little, and see if they do not begin to open up new lines of thought.

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June 11, 1839: “Jesus.

“This, of all lives, is the most refreshing. It quickens hope and faith. What a noble fact this man is! He is the grandest hero of all history. He is the epic genius, developed in all its magnanimity and grandeur. I read of Jesus with the deepest delight. He demonstrates my most exalted ideal of true heroism. He is the bravest of men.

“His grandeur is in his meek self-trust, his constancy to the Soul. How vital his faith in it! How noble his reliance upon it, under all the varied circumstances of his grand life! He carried his principles into practice. He tested them on every occasion. His life was an experiment of the omnipotence of the Soul; and his death was divine!

“Alas, how few apprehend the depth and grandeur of this man’s character! Christendom has made its lofty epic beauty of no effect by its vulgar traditions. I will yet divest it of these, and reveal its glory.”

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March 28, 1850: “My dept to Plato is greater, perhaps than to any mind – greater than to Christ, I sometimes think, whose spirit is an element of humanity but whose genius I did not entertain and comprehend till Plato unsealed my eyes and led me to the study of his fair performance. It was in studies, however, for presenting the mind of Christ to the apprehension of my children in the Masonic Temple – a pleasure and a privilege greater than I can express – that I grew enamoured of the beauty and grandeur of his character, the delicacy and force of his genius, the simplicity and efficacy of his methods. Plato and Christ interpreted each other and the mind of mankind.”

 

For the past few days, I have been living among the thoughts of Ibrahim Karim and Bronson Alcott, almost to the exclusion of the world immediately around me. On Sunday, I went to UVA’s beautiful Shannon Library (formerly Alderman) and borrowed Alcott’s Journals and his Letters. A few excerpts. I could cite many more, but there’s only so much writing and typing one wants to do.

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October, 1838: “History is useful to me no farther than I am conscious of the same facts in my own existence. It is in the light of these that I apprehend the facts of history…. Erudition is not insight. It is not what I take upon my memory that sheds light until my soul, but what I see by self-intuition, that makes me wise.”

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April 13, 1839: “Vox populi is not Vox Dei, save where interest or passion are silent. It is the still small voice of the private soul that is authentic. Multitudes always lie. The single man’s oracle is alone authentic.”

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April 22, 1839: “[Theodore] Parker asked me today, on my saying that men must have behaved well in order to have such fine sunshine, what I would do with the Mosaic account, which gives the priority of creation to the elements. I said that was the historical, not genetic, account of the matter. It was the story told in the order of the senses. The man and nature are. The senses begin in the concrete, and analyze from the surface to the center. But this is not the order of generation. The Soul is prior to the elements of nature. It was the Soul which said ”’Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Light is generated from the Soul, and is the base of matter.”

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October 18, 1839: “Individual is the basis of general improvement. The democrats talk of improving the masses, but take small interest in individual reform. They seem to fancy that two or more men together become invested with powers not their own when apart—have somewhat superadded; and so speak of the might and majesty of masses, not of individuals. A rabble is respectable, God-inspired! A man is base, influenced by Beelzebub! Men possess the Godhead in their collective capacity, but apart are demons, whom the State must watch lest they rend it asunder, and the Church disown.

“I read men quite otherwise. I look for the Prince of the Devils in the midst of the mob; for God, in the seclusion of a single soul. Beelzebub rules the masses, God individuals. The Kingdom of Truth is within, not out there in Church or State. Vox populi, vox diaboli.”

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January 14, 1848: [A little premature, but we’ll get there.] “The age of insight and intuition is fast evicting that of observation and inference. From using contentedly the old eyes of a circuitous and painful logic, men are finding the superior power of a direct and instant intuition in all investigations of nature and spirit.

“New eyes for discerning the old things! New instruments for the old implements!

“It is easier to repair the eyes than to mend the spectacles.”

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June 24, 1849: “To say that all things were once created out of nothing is saying nothing has been created, or is.

“The assertion denies, as it undermines, the grounds of all existence, namely Spirit and God, as premise, and is puerile, atheistic, and impious. Spirit creates out of itself.”

 

Editor Odell Shepard says in a footnote that this entry from Alcott’s journal is “one of the clearest and most compact statements that Alcott ever made in writing of his main metaphysical idea.”

Reading it, I conclude that the guys upstairs that I have been in connection with for so long are themselves Transcendentalists. New England version? German idealists? Who knows? Who cares? All I know for sure is that the day I first opened Walden was a day of instant recognition, though it took me many a long year to grow into it.

Alcott, on Dec. 21, 1835:

I set out from the wide ground of Spirit. This is; all else is manifestation. Body is Spirit at its circumference. It denotes its confines to the external sense; it individualizes, defines Spirit, breaks the Unity into Multiplicity and places under the vison of man parts of the great Whole which, standing thus separate, can be taken in by the mind – too feeble to apprehend the whole at once and requiring all save an individual thing to be excluded at a single view. – Infinitude is too wide for man to take in. he is therefore permitted to take in portions and spread his vision over the wide circumference by little and little; and in these portions doth the Infinite shadow forth itself, God in all and all in God.

I wish the guys upstairs had been able to state so concisely their view of reality; it would have saved me an immense amount of writing and typing!

 

Prologue to the forthcoming book, “Only Somewhat Real.”

Prologue

This book is the latest of several books compiled from more than 25 years of exploration into the nature of reality. After so much time and effort, naturally you come to see some things more clearly, more deeply. But the more your world diverges from mainstream assumptions, the harder it becomes to communicate with those still in the mainstream. It isn’t impossible to bridge the gap, but it requires certain things of the reader:

• Be open to new ideas. That means not being unwilling to be convinced. You don’t need to (and probably shouldn’t) start by believing; it is only necessary that you start by not adamantly dis-believing.
• Reserve judgment until those ideas are fully understood. Resist jumping to conclusions. Don’t allow yourself to brush aside an unfamiliar argument as “nothing but” something more familiar. Wait and see where it goes.
• Wrestle with the ideas presented, to see whether they ring true. It would be as bad to automatically accept what you read as to automatically reject it. Neither reaction can change your life. Test what is said here; think about it; question whether your own life-experience supports it. Only when you wrestle with it will you know how much of it is relevant to the life you are making.

But communication requires things of the author too. It’s up to the author to provide a precis of any necessary background information, including specialized terms, so that the reader can dive right in. That’s the purpose of this prologue.

* * *

Years of explanations have left me with the following understanding of the reality behind our lives. This is not the place to explain or justify these ideas, only to set them forth clearly so that you may understand where we’re coming from.

The world is constructed of consciousness. Before matter, before energy (and, after all, matter is only energy bound into relatively stable forms), comes consciousness. All the world is alive, even the things we think of as dead. Animals, vegetables, minerals; all made of consciousness. That includes synthetic fibers, radioactive waste, and even Congressmen.

Our familiar world of three dimensions is only a subset of a larger reality which we call the non-3D world. Although we speak of them as separate, and usually experience them that way, they together form one thing. Call it the All-D.

The 3D aspect of All-D experiences three very distinctive conditions: separation in time and in place, delayed consequences, and one ever-moving present-moment. It was created (out of the All-D) specifically to provide that combination of conditions; together they constitute a crucible in which new souls may be forged, developed, matured, and passed along to the non-3D.

The non-3D aspect, by contrast, is much more fluid in its movement through time and place, experiences immediate (and immediately malleable) consequences, and allows one to range in time in the way we in 3D range in space. In other words, its prevailing characteristic is non-locality (both in time and space) and extensive inter-communication.

The two realms are usually seen as separate, but they interpenetrate, being indivisible. Together they constitute our outer and inner reality, the 3D world being experienced through the senses, the non-3D world through intuition.

Humans are souls animated by spirit; that is, we are structured intelligence animated by vast impersonal forces. Although we experience ourselves as individuals, it is equally true to describe us as communities of other threads of being, some of which some call “past lives.”

Finally, in investigating both the visible and invisible properties of the world, we find it useful to remember the ancient adage, “as above, so below.” Apparently reality is constructed to scale, with similar architecture at all levels.

Together this view of the world explains many things.