• Escaping the Metaphor

    A few days ago I wrote a post called “A War on Hatred” and later it occurred to me that, although I had said more or less what I wanted to say, I had also fallen into the trap that has distorted our lives since at least 1940: The metaphor is, of course, that we…

  • Don’t wait too long

    I was having dinner with friends of a friend, a couple that I have come to like quite a bit. At some point in the evening she said that she had three sisters but hadn’t much to do with any of them because she and they had nothing in common, because among other reasons her…

  • Frazier’s choice

    As I have said elsewhere, in watching the Ken Burns film “The War,” I was deeply moved by Quentin Aanenson’s thoughtful comments showing how great the sacrifice soldiers make, not only in their suffering and in the danger they endure, but in their laying down their innocence. Tonight (I write this Wednesday night, after watching…

  • Pullman’s confused ideology

    Because my publishing company put out a book called Discovering The Golden Compass, I first learned of the existence of this very interesting trilogy by English author Philip Pullman. I bought the books and read them straight through. He is a good writer, able to hold you and interest you in characters and plot. But…

  • A New Model Of Consciousness In Space And Time

    Last April I posted, in ten installments, some great stuff I had gotten from my friends upstairs in January, 2006 over the course of a few days. I recently pulled up the ten posts, removed headers and continuation lines, and concatenated it into one long file. (It’s easier to read one file, I think, than…

  • Cooking Day

    When my brother’s daughter, who is a Junior at a college in Portland, Oregon, sent me a copy of a theme she’d written, I liked it well enough to ask permission to enter it here. What I like most about it is the sense of quiet contentment that pervades it. She and her friends remind…

  • Turning away from cloning?

    Can we put the genie back into the bottle? Probably not, but perhaps we can hope that at least a few scientists will start to question whether anything and everything that could be done should be done. From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=XFT2IYJUHGB4FQFIQMFSFF4AVCBQ0IV0?xml=/earth/2007/11/16/scidolly116.xml via the ever-interesting Schwartzreport. Dolly creator Prof Ian Wilmut shuns cloning By Roger Highfield, Science Editor…

  • Nemesis

    Our materialist civilization, in its lack of awareness of the reality of psychic forces and dynamics, continually brings forth unsuspected calamitous results from even its highest aspirations. It plays with dynamite and doesn’t even know enough to know the dangers it is  incurring. Read this quotation from The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, by Carl…

  • Jung’s warning

    Mighty powerful and important stuff in Carl Jung’s writings. The following is from “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales,” part of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Could anything make plainer the causes and consequences of unconsciousness in our cultural life? That unconsciousness and its consequences may yet be the death of us —…

  • All really is well

    My friend Rich sent me a news item that pointed out that food pantries across the country are struggling with shortages, and he said it was difficult to believe what the guys always say: “All is well. All is always well.” It was a serious question, and deserved a serious answer, but I didn’t have…