"I of my own knowledge…"

Friends, a couple of thoughts for Thanksgiving Day. What does it mean that we are all going to die, and none of us know just when? Yes, it means “eat dessert first,” but is that the limit of the conclusions we can draw?

If I were to die today (and it won’t be any different tomorrow or next week) the vast majority of what I am, what I think and feel, what I have learned, will no longer be accessible to anyone who might be interested. If I haven’t expressed it, although it may be still in “the mind of man” as Dion Fortune would have it, for most purposes it’s gone. And that’s true of us all. We are infinite mysteries to one another. So maybe it would be as well, while we still have time, when it’s possible and when it’s true, to: (more…)

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 it. So I asked the guys, who delivered this. 

All is well. All is always well. It was true in the time of the Romans when the lions were devouring Christians in the coliseum. It was true when Napoleon’s armies were massacring thousands, and Mao’s armies tens of thousands and will be true if future armies massacre tens of millions. “Well” doesn’t mean easy, doesn’t mean pleasant, doesn’t mean fair certainly. “Well” means nothing wrong. (more…)

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 — but by and large people continue to put their faith in political solutions, when political solutions in the absence of wisdom can only make the situation worse. Although this material was published in 1948, its relevance today is only so much clearer. (more…)

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.

“But our progressiveness, though it may result in a great many wish-fulfillments, piles up an equally gigantic Promethean debt which has to be paid off from time to time in the form of hideous catastrophes. For ages man has dreamed of flying, and all we have got for it is saturation bombing!”

 That was written more than half a century ago. Can anyone say that matters have improved in the intervening time?

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
Last Updated: 6:30pm GMT 16/11/2007

The scientist who created Dolly the sheep, a breakthrough that provoked headlines around the world a decade ago, is to abandon the cloning technique he pioneered to create her.

Prof Ian Wilmut’s decision to turn his back on “therapeutic cloning”, just days after US researchers announced a breakthrough in the cloning of primates, will send shockwaves through the scientific establishment.

Ian Wilmut, the creator of Dolly the Sheep

He and his team made headlines around the world in 1997 when they unveiled Dolly, born July of the year before.

But now he has decided not to pursue a licence to clone human embryos, which he was awarded just two years ago, as part of a drive to find new treatments for the devastating degenerative condition, Motor Neuron disease.

Prof Wilmut, who works at Edinburgh University, believes a rival method pioneered in Japan has better potential for making human embryonic cells which can be used to grow a patient’s own cells and tissues for a vast range of treatments, from treating strokes to heart attacks and Parkinson’s, and will be less controversial than the Dolly method, known as “nuclear transfer.”

His announcement could mark the beginning of the end for therapeutic cloning, on which tens of millions of pounds have been spent worldwide over the past decade. “I decided a few weeks ago not to pursue nuclear transfer,” Prof Wilmut said.

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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 me – I hope this will not insult them – of happy, wholesome, self-contained animals, something like otters.

I enter this not only out of pardonable avuncular pride and affection, but because I hope it will remind you of how we were long ago when we were that age. Or, if you are more like me and were nowhere near that contented, it will let you, like me, live vicariously! (more…)

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 one after the other in the archives of several months ago.)

I will be glad to send the file in response to a request via email to muddytracks@earthlink.net.

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 his metaphysical assumptions are — well, pathetic.

The story line, and his intent as an author, have a certain appeal to anyone fighting despotism and cruelty — but his materialist bias and his total lack of experience of anything beyond This World/This Time are embarrassingly obvious.

Summing it up to myself after finishing the third volume, I listed several things that must seem clear to him, but are actually severely confused. I know it’s fiction, but what a writer creates sheds light on what he believes is possible given certain assumptions. (more…)

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 the re-broadcast of the final episode) I was struck by the choice Glenn Dowling Frazier had to make, and the price he paid until he was able to make it.

Frazier had been a prisoner of the Japanese from the fall of Bataan in the spring of 1942 to the very last day of the war. He and his friends had endured sadistic cruelty that could only have been matched halfway around the world in the death camps of Nazi Germany. He had survived the Bataan Death March. He had survived four different POW camps inside Japan. He had spent months expecting to be killed the moment that American troops set foot on Japanese soil.

Unexpectedly, he had survived. He had made it home. He was safe – except, then the nightmares began. He had plenty of reason for nightmares, of course, but in 1945 there was little help to be found for the scars that veterans brought home that didn’t show. Ultimately, though, what nearly destroyed his life wasn’t nightmares, but something much worse. He found himself unable to stop hating. (more…)

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 sisters were Republican, conservative fundamentalist Christians. Sticking my nose in where it doesn’t necessarily belong (not for the first time!) I suggested that perhaps my recent experience might be relevant.

In 1958, when I was 12, my older brother joined the Air Force. In a very real way that was the end of our interaction for most of our lives. The following year, the brilliant meteor that was John F. Kennedy lighted my skies, and I became the first Democrat my family had ever known. A few years later I became a college graduate. And I had always been an avid reader of books. All these things sent me in one direction, my brother John in another. Plus, I left the Church while I was in my teens, and John stayed.

This only accelerated as time went on. Politically, his 22 years in the Air Force pushed him ever more to the right, it seemed to me, and no doubt to him I seemed to move ever more to the left. He liked to work with his hands at something tangible, and I liked working with my mind at something intangible. He lived among tools, I lived among books. Without antagonism, we went our separate ways. In the years between 1958 and 2007, I think we each visited the other’s home twice, and we didn’t often call, either.

In a way, nothing wrong with that. There’s no guarantee that being born to the same parents will make any two people close intellectually or spiritually. We had a certain respect for each other and we recognized that we were following different stars.

And yet -

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