This World

My recurrent theme here is, “learn it for yourself.” As long as you’re taking someone else’s word for something, you don’t know.  Even if they are reliable, even if they are great reporters, even if they are experts in their field, and even if God almighty were to assure you that they were right in every particular, unless and until you experience it yourself, you won’t know. Belief is a valuable halfway point between not-knowing and knowing,  but that is all it is. We believe because we do not yet know.

That’s not to say that everything we  would like to know can necessarily be known. I have resigned myself to the fact that I am going to die ignorant, as are we all. But perhaps we can learn the things that are most important to us. That seems the logical place to put our effort, anyway.

My friend Richard has absorbed experience that includes Monroe Institute techniques and, more recently, the shamanistic techniques taught by Hank Wesselman. Richard has his own blog, “The Sacred Path” — http://thesacredpath.wordpress.com/ — which is well worth your time.  I mention him here because of his most recent post,  “The Power of Intent and Commitment.” No point in my summarizing it for you when you can go to his site, which I highly recommend.

Yes, it’s still second-hand. Reading and understanding and believing are not the same thing as the knowing that can only come from first-hand experience. But, like faith, other people’s testimony may serve to keep the spark alive against the time when first-hand knowledge is to be obtained. That’s what this site is about too.

Do you understand what Mr. Lincoln was driving at in his second inaugural address? I’ll bet you don’t. Or, let’s put it this way, I learned something from this little talk, which afterward seemed obvious but hadn’t seemed so beforehand.

[Thursday March 29, 2006 (4:32 a.m.)]

I awoke thinking about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address as an act of war against the vindictive policies of the Radical Republicans, sensing that Mr. Lincoln wanted to come in. So I found it at http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/inaug2.htm. This is the speech in its entirety, saying more in four paragraphs – four paragraphs! – than any political speech I have heard in my lifetime with the possible exception of John F. Kennedy’s currently underrated elegant inaugural address, which shared many of this speech’s qualities.

I leave the introductory material because it seems to me important. Continue reading Mr. Lincoln on his second inaugural address

[My friend Michael Langevin, publisher of Magical Blend magazine, had heard me raving about Lincoln Steffans’ autobiography, and got the idea to have me ask Mr. Steffans for advice on the subject — as Henry Thoreau once put it — of how to aspire and respire at the same time.]

8:30 p.m. Monday March 13, 2006

I remind myself, I told Michael Langevin I would see if Lincoln Steffans had any advice for him.

Mr. Steffans, if you are here, I want to say explicitly what I gather you know anyway – having access to the content of my mind, it seems – that I found your book the single most enlightening book I ever read. Plus, I love your ideals. Do you have any words for Michael on how to transform society and make a living at the same time?

The only way I could ever figure out was to do what was important to me and figure there would be a market for it sometime, some way, or I wouldn’t be led to do it. You do remember that I was blacklisted for the decade of the twenties after I came back from Russia and told what I saw. If I had not had independent means during that time it would have gone hard for me. Continue reading Lincoln Steffans on transformations

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

(7:40 a.m.) Somebody described yesterday’s exchange as “author to author” which is a different way to think of it! Not one that had occurred to me, or would have occurred to me. I suppose it is true enough from one point of view.

All right, Mr. Sinclair, shall we talk about spiritualism and this process and where we (our society, and the human race in fact) go from here?

The prime difficulty today will be your usual nervousness around facts, regardless of whether you really know the fact or are painfully aware that you don’t know it, or are firmly convinced of something that didn’t happen, or in some way isn’t true. It is so easy to tie yourself into knots over all this — easy enough at best, without adding difficulties. So if you will just let it come, good bad and indifferent, and will let each person sort out for himself or herself what is believable, and useful, you will get along easier. This is what they will do anyway, of course!

Well, how about if we do this as a sort of Q and A? That might make it easier for me.

Certainly. You will have bite-sized information that way, and will retain control, and it will contain your anxiety. Continue reading Upton Sinclair (2)

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

(7:30 p.m.). Finished The Return of Lanny Budd, Upton Sinclair’s most vehement novel, far more vehement against the Communists as a threat than against the Nazis, perhaps because the communists had become a greater threat even than Hitler had been.

It occurred to me a while ago today, maybe talk to Upton Sinclair. Would that be of interest to you?

I know what you think of me, of course, or what you think you think of me. It comes with the territory, as you say.

“Think I think” because opinions change over time?

Because at any given moment we are aware of only those facets of a subject that meet us in that moment, and so most of anything is hidden from us. The best we can do is accumulate viewpoints and try to modify rather than redraw the total picture time after time. Continue reading Upton Sinclair (1)