• The world’s invisible Internet (4)

    , By the time I sat down to write, in late 2005, I had had 18 years’ sporadic experience of getting stories of “past lives.” Over the years I had discovered (invented?) a cast of characters that included: Joseph the Egyptian, a member of a priesthood with responsibility for their people’s spiritual and mental health,…

  • The world’s invisible Internet (5)

    On December 18, I told the TMI Explorers list what had been happening, and what had just happened that day: Email, 12-18-05: “Speaking of beyond time and space, something interesting has been happening these past couple of days. You may remember that I connected to that life as Joseph Smallwood, the young man who visited Emerson one day…

  • The world’s invisible Internet (6)

    In December, 2005, I began several months of regular altered-state “conversations” with a man named Joseph Smallwood, who had lived in 19th century America, had  gone west to Oregon in the 1840s, had lived with the Indians in Minnesota, and had fought as a Union officer in the Civil War. At least, that’s the story.…

  • Wholeness and love

    “What is ideally desirable, at this stage of man’s development, does not exist in any past form of man, either biological or social: not the pure Hindu, the pure Muhammadan, the pure Christian, nor yet the pure Marxist or the pure mechanist: not Old World man nor New World man. The unity we seek must…

  • Investing his life with meaning

    A long beautiful quotation from Anna Karenina has its application to many an unhappy young man out there. “Then, for the first time, realizing that for every man, and he himself too, there was nothing ahead but suffering, death, eternal oblivion, he had decided that to live under such conditions was impossible — he must…

  • How not to create a unified world

    “To be on friendly terms with every part of mankind, one must be on equally friendly terms with every part of oneself; and to do justice to the formative elements in world culture, which give it greater significance and promise than any earlier stage in man’s history, one must nourish the formative elements in the…

  • The same price Faust paid

    “By our overvaluation of physical power and scientific truth, aloof from other human needs, we have paid the same price Faust had to pay when he made his compact with Mephistopheles: we have lost our souls, or to speak in more psychological terms, we have depersonalized ourselves and have turned our conscious thinking selves into…

  • Oregon 2005 (1)

      1. Another mountain In October, 2005, when I came back from my first visit to the Pacific northwest, I wrote up a short piece on a day at Crater Lake and emailed it in various directions. I wrote another, and another, and before long I found that I had written more than a dozen…

  • Oregon 2005 (2)

    3. Vandalism and Pride Thursday Sept. 15, 2005. I get into Portland around noon pacific time. After picking up a rental car, I make my way to the older, western part of the city, and  (in order to be sure I can find it later) drive down to Lewis and Clark College, which is where…

  • Oregon 2005 (3)

    5. Cities Thursday Sept. 15, 2005. At suppertime I go back to Lewis and Clark and pick up Ari, and she and I go for supper downtown. (We get lost a little, or rather, get carried by traffic and slow reflexes across the river, and have to find our way back without being carried into…