Monday, July 26, 2010
4:40 AM. Well, here we go again. But I am blank this morning, so I hope somebody is primed to go. Who’s up?
Nobody? Maybe I’ll just go back to sleep. Good thing for you the coffee’s on. How about you, Papa?
Sure. Your queued-up questions refer to my relations with my parents.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Nearly 5 AM. Funny, these guys. Subtle, too. I’m lying there asleep — at least I assume I was asleep — and I hear the doorbell, “ding dong” — only low, muted, and anyway this house’s doorbell doesn’t sound like that. And so with an internal smile I realize that it is my slave-drivers suggesting that it’s time. Out of hand, these guys. And of course they remind me of my friend Rich’s conceptualization of his Guidance. When he wants an answer, he visualizes a doorbell and pushes it. Calls them The Doorbells, which ranks up there with Frank And The Guys Upstairs as a good name for a singing group.
All right, Ernest, I see the point now of a list of queued-up questions. I was just fishing around, wondering how to begin, when I remembered that I have a couple of questions left.
“My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to commune with the spirit of the universe, to be intoxicated even with the fumes, call it, of that divine nectar, to bear my head through atmospheres and over heights unknown to my feet, is perennial and constant.”
Thoreau, February 1851 (age 34)
A good counterpoint to the usual view, from my friend Gordon Phinn’s website http://anotherwordofgord.wordpress.com/
March 21, 2010
In our modern times it is considered a move of great maturity and bravery to confront your mortality.
Continue reading Gordon Phinn on Confronting Your Immortality
C.G. Jung is an example of the fact that great men’s influence lengthens and deepens, rather than diminished, with time. It takes a while, when a great man dies, for us to see just how great a tree has fallen. But it becomes easier over time. Just as the dead tree decays and fertilizes the earth it lies upon, a man’s influence comes to permeate the lives of his successors until it has reached its natural limits.
With some, that limit may not extend beyond the family, or perhaps a business or similar enterprise. For others, though, it extends far beyond — and in any case, as the guys upstairs are perpetually reminding me, we never have the data to judge another person’s life. For all we know, the people all around us are making a huge difference, just by leading their lives.
In any case, I can’t see that there can be any question of the greatness of this particular man’s influence. From an interview with the English journalist Frederick Sands in 1955:
“Without knowing it man is always concerned with God. What some people call instinct or intuition is nothing other than God. God is that voice inside us which tells us what to do and what not to do. In other words, our conscience.
“In this dark atomic age of ours, with its lurking fear, man is seeking guidance. Consciously or unconsciously he is once more groping for God. I make my patients understand that all the things which happen to them against their will are a superior force. They can call it God or devil, and that doesn’t matter to me, as long as they realize that it is a superior force. God is nothing more than that superior force in our life. You can experience God every day.”
And,
“All that I have learned has led me step-by-step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take His existence on belief — I know that He exists.”
I think that some of you will find this fascinating. Not just a first-hand description of a near-death experience, but her response to the standard questionnaire about specific aspects of that experience. Sent to me by a friend, originally from http://www.nderf.org/anita_m’s_nde.htm
Continue reading “I now realize that we did not come here to suffer”
I have added subheads to this record of an altered-state conversation, merely to assist clarity
C.G. Jung on exploring and mapmaking
[May 16, 2006]
(7:50 a.m.) Dr. Jung, can you provide some context for what is going on here? I’m beyond suspecting that I am “making this up” except that the more I think about it the less I have any idea what’s really going on, how I should really be looking at all this. I’m not really simple enough to take all this at its face value either as legitimate contact or as construct of my own mind. No, that isn’t the way to put it. I mean to say, I am not simple enough to be sure of anything! So, I would appreciate how it seems to you – even while recognizing that asking your opinion is like – well, anyway –
You are in deep waters, and you prefer to be able to stand firmly on the bottom.
Boy that’s the truth!
And yet you want to go sailing. Very well, if you wish to sail and you cannot swim, it is well for you to not fall out of the boat, or else go sailing wearing always a life preserver! But life preservers are not much fun, so you must learn to swim, or be sure to not fall out of the boat, or stay ashore.