“If you missed some chances, so what?”
At the cost of some slight embarrassment, I offer this for those whose life situation it may echo, who may take encouragement from it.
August 9, 2007
Joseph, my friend, long time no see, but I just got the sense that I ought to contact you.
You will notice that you are listening repeatedly to the Paul Potts album and finding tears in your eyes when he sings “Time to say goodbye.” I don’t think it’s because that’s the only line in English, do you?
Re-imagining yourself
Our internal life and external life don’t always coincide. How do we dance on the borderline without compromising our integrity?
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
6:05 a.m. Mr. Hemingway, you said you couldn’t stand phonies, and clearly you couldn’t. How do you reconcile this with so much pretending and rearranging and lying and misremembering and leading people on?[This referred to his early life as described in The Young Hemingway, a book that I bought and read in England.]
Dmitri Orlov’s column is a bit too long and a bit too self-amusing, but, as usual, thoughtful. What struck me, skimming it, was that he was saying much the same thing that the guys upstairs said about the futility of trying to change people from Column A to Column B. From Club Orlov, http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
Wherever we go, and whatever we do, we find ourselves surrounded by a variety of human and animal noises: “Woof!”—”Meow!”—”Moo!”—”Baah!”—”Tweet!”—”How about them Red Sox!”
And, naturally, we find ourselves wondering, What are they all saying? What does it all mean? Does it mean anything at all, or is it just a lot of meaningless background noise?
“Look not to political or economic remedies for your salvation!”
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Michael Langevin and others asked if I had ever asked you to follow-up on the question of societies that had prevented hypertrophy of wealth.
All right, we will proceed to a few words on other social organizations. But you may find this less helpful than you may expect — for our priority is not that you change your societies, but that you change your being. Lay down certain threads of your being, and pick up others, and in effect you will be born again, and new people will call forth a new society as a sort of side effect. To try to change society first is an error of materialist thinking. Changing individuals and changing the society around them is a reciprocal process of continual readjustment, not a one way or straight line process. Nature works only in spirals, not in straight lines. How else could it be, given the influences on earth?
Here is a Carl Jung quote from long ago that I think highly appropriate to our time. It comes from the book C.G. Jung Speaking, edited by William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull, volume 97 (XCVII) of the Bollingen Series of publications.
This interview with Peter Schmid was published on May 11, 1945 — only four days after Germany’s unconditional surrender at the end of World War II — in a Zürich periodical under the title “Will the souls find peace?” I think Jung’s incidental prophecy of the danger faced by the victorious Americans was fully realized in the following decades. Indeed, it often seems that most people haven’t yet realized that we, no less than the Russians, succumbed to the power demons. The underlinings below are mine.
Continue reading Carl Jung: “There are demons, all right”
It is no pleasant thing to spend an entire lifetime watching one’s beloved country descend into insanity, but this has been my fate, and of the fate of any who have come into consciousness within the past half century. I say “who have come into consciousness,” because it is not enough to live; it is necessary to understand what you are living, if only after the fact.
So many people around me are giving in to fear — nameless fear, formless fear, often enough the product of mistaking television for reality. Many others continue to believe in political or ideological panaceas that are, and must be, nothing but illusion.
Obviously these two phenomena are connected, and connected in an unsuspected way — they stem from the loss of meaning which in turn stems from loss of sure spiritual connection. For 150 years at least, and gathering momentum as it proceeds, the descent of our culture into materialist superstition has cut cord after cord that used to tie us to sanity. So now we are in the position of being spiritually rootless, incapable of perceiving what is reality and what is illusion, fearing shadows and continually sowing the dragon’s teeth that spring up as armed men, and wondering why we have no peace.
Why is it that people will follow every sort of leader but the ones who offer wisdom? The following quotations are from an interview that Carl Jung gave in April, 1934. He could be talking about us today:
Continue reading “I exist, you exist. But mankind is only a word.”
It wouldn’t surprise me for a second. In fact, my deepest intuition has told me, for years, that this is exactly the case. This world, the physical 3D so-real-seeming world, is only a projection from a realer world that underlies it.
I once, for a matter of moments, “appeared” in that realer world and conversed with some of its inhabitants. I perceived them as sitting around a table, but of course, who knows what the reality was. The mind has to interpret things somehow, and it seems to prefer to pick something as close as possible to be the symbol for the incommunicable.
Anyway, for the short time I was “there” I knew without question that it was realer than this world, and if you don’t think that’s a funny sensation, you need an imagination implant! But I could only hold myself there very briefly, before I ran out of the energy it took to maintain myself there.
I had that first-hand experience years after having become convinced that this world is spun from an underlying non-physical one, but years before being given the word from the other side, as related in The Sphere and the Hologram. So it’s nice to see that science is catching up, or at least considering it. That said, I admit, I understand very little of what is said in this article. Science is not the altar that I worship at.
This, from the New Scientist, was called to my attention by a friend. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true