So You Think Your Life Was Wasted – Section Three (2)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

You may think you know where this entry is going after the first couple of paragraphs, but I think that, like me, you will be surprised.

January 7, 2006

A friend gave me the DVD of “Dances With Wolves” for Christmas. and I am watching it on my computer, a little at a time. The following is from this morning’s journaling.

I do not understand why watching this movie still hurts so much. Whenever it is of the white man learning the Indian ways, for one thing. My active raw pain is no less than it was in 1992 and I understand it no better. I was building a little fire and I realized I perhaps haven’t been seeing those scenes just from the white man’s side – as I had thought. I have called myself, so many times, a white Indian. And I suddenly realize it is more like I am caught between the two. And now I know why. This can never be validated but it can be experienced.

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So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (33)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This completes the second section, “Shaping Ourselves,” of my projected book to be called So You Think Your Life Was Wasted. Next week we’ll start on Part Three, “Society and the Individual.”

Life and Achievement

Friday, August 10, 2007

5:45 a.m. somehow frittered away three quarters of an hour doing — what?? Story of my life, that.

Joyce, where do I go from here? If psychic powers and abilities aren’t an end in themselves — and clearly they aren’t, any more than anything else is — and if no form of external achievement is my focus —

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (33)

So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (32)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

“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?

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (32)

So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (31)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

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.]

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (31)

Orlov on the Great Unreasoning

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

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/

The Great Unreasoning

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?

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So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (29)

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

“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?

Continue reading So You Think Your Life Was Wasted (29)

Carl Jung: “There are demons, all right”

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

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.
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