Hemingway’s Puzzlement About the Soul

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

My recurring theme is that our culture, by turning its back on its spiritual roots, has lost contact with the reality of spiritual (that is, non-physical) life. In so doing, it has lost contact with reality, for how can you understand the meaning of things if you systematically disregard a significant portion of what exists? And how can you know who you yourself are, if you systematically discard millennia of tradition and scripture designed to teach that aspect of things?

In reaction to our culture’s downgrading of spiritual knowledge, some have turned to fundamentalism: blind belief. But this won’t do either. If you don’t know, you don’t know, and neither blind belief nor blind disbelief substitute for knowledge. And our culture is not teaching that knowledge, because it has forgotten where to find it.

In short, materialist civilization is lost, and those who are fated to live in it are lost too, no matter how intelligent, no matter how insightful, unless and until they free themselves from this delusion. As an example, I offer a long quotation from Hemingway’s posthumously published True at First Light, which was pieced together by his son Patrick.

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Making the transition

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This is a somewhat unusual post, for me, but it has its points of interest. It came to me via a friend, from the British paper (a very good one) The Guardian. Particularly note the website toward the end, http://www.transitiontowns.org/

NATURAL BORN SURVIVORS
By Harriet Green
The Guardian
May 2, 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/may/02/communities.fossilfuels/print

For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About
buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we
can safely survive the coming storm — famine, pestilence and a total
breakdown of society. I would wait for his lectures to finish, then return
to my own interests. I had no time for the end of civilisation. As an editor
on a glossy magazine until a few months ago, I was too busy. There was
always a new Anya Hindmarch bag to buy, or a George Clooney premiere to
attend.

But recently, I’ve wavered. Much of what he has been predicting has come
true: global economic meltdown, looming environmental disaster, a sharp rise
in oil and food prices that has already led to the rationing of rice in the
US, and riots in dozens of countries worldwide.

This week, the details got scarier. The UN warned of a global food crisis,
like a “silent tsunami”, while Opec predicts that oil, which broke through
$100 (£50) a barrel for the first time a few weeks ago, may soon top $200.

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How to sing like a planet

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Mark Morford is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle’s website SFGate. He’s often a little over-the-top but often entertaining and usually pretty right. This is from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/04/23/notes042308.DTL&type=printable

How to sing like a planet

Scientists say the Earth is humming. Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music. Can you hear it?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and sex and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment, so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had no idea.

This is the kind of thing we forget.

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Lindbergh Among The Spirits

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

lindbergh-spirt-of-stlouis

One of the things that is wrong with our civilization is that it systematically falsifies its history, disregarding or ridiculing anything dealing with psychic experience, or the existence of a non-physical world, or anything demonstrating that time is not the simple obvious thing we think it is.

Wouldn’t it be something if such experiences were to happen to someone world-famous, who was brave enough to write about them straight-forwardly? And wouldn’t it be something if that book won the Pulitzer Prize and became a best-seller?

Enter into evidence The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh, written when he was in his fifties, describing the life-changing experience he had at age 25, while he was alone over the North Atlantic in a single-engine airplane attempting to fly from New York to Paris.

As you read these passages, you might ask yourself why none of this makes it into the history books.

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The Mythological and Religious Symbolism of Dreams

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

My friend Robert Clarke sent me this article he published in his local newspaper — he lives in Burslem, which is one of the cities that comprise Stoke-on-Trent. Robert is an expert on dreams and dream symbolism, and at some point I will get around to telling his story, which is a fascinating one.

The Mythological/Religious Symbolism of Dreams

by Robert B. Clarke

We all have dreams, though some people fail to remember them. Often our dreams are about everyday concerns, our hopes, fears, desires, and ambitions, but now and then strange contents appear that impress us deeply, whether pleasantly or otherwise. This latter type of dream is what primitive peoples call “big dreams”, and if we take note of these over a sufficient period of time they are found to form processes, which, much to our surprise, can only be said to be mythological/religious in nature.

They cover a vast range, from the lower instinctual level (dragon depths etc.) to the higher spiritual, and anyone who follows the inner processes comes to realise that another spirit/soul reality exists behind the conscious/physical universe and that it speaks to us in symbolic language in dreams. Or it may come through to us in deep meditation, or occasionally even break through the veil as outer visions.

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Lord Clark on Civilization

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This is a long excerpt from the book Civilization by Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark, writing in 1969. I was living in Florida in the early 1970s and I watched the ten-part PBS series “Civilization” (the transcripts of which comprise this book) and I remember how moving it was. The test of any work of art — including the art of accumulating and disseminating wisdom — is the test of time. Forty years one, I find little to criticize here. These were his concluding words, pp. 346-7

And yet when I look at the world about me in the light of this series, I don’t at all feel that we are entering a new period of barbarism. The things that made the Dark Ages so dark — the isolation, the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness – don’t obtain at all. When I … visit one of our new universities, it seems to me that the inheritors of all our catastrophes looked cheerful enough… In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed, as well-read, as bright-minded, as curious and as critical as the young are today.

Of course, there has been a little flattening at the top. But one mustn’t overrate the culture of what used to be called “top people” before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were ignorant as swans…. The members of a music group or an art group at a provincial university would be five times better informed and more alert. Naturally these bright-minded young people think poorly of existing institutions and want to abolish them. Well, one doesn’t need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilization is to survive society must somehow be made to work.

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So now it’s human-animal mixtures?

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Why is there not worldwide outrage at the reckless arrogance being displayed here? Does anybody think this will be kept within limits? But if it’s done in the name of “science” it’s okay, right? That was certainly the Nazi viewpoint.

Notice the explanations that amount to saying, “it won’t be carried beyond certain carefully restricted bounds.” Sure. That’s what they said about cloning, too, and you may remember how well that worked. This is the ghastly end-result — or rather, it leads to the end-result, for unfortunately we’ve a long way to go in the wrong direction before we come to the end-result — of turning “science” into a god, and worshipping it with money and power.

From the Times, April 2, 2008: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3663033.ece

We have created human-animal embryos already, say British team

Mark Henderson, Science Editor

Embryos containing human and animal material have been created in Britain for the first time, a month before the House of Commons votes on new laws to regulate the research.

A team at Newcastle University announced yesterday that it had successfully generated “admixed embryos” by adding human DNA to empty cow eggs in the first experiment of its kind in Britain.

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