"I of my own knowledge…"

I saved this quotation in my journal many, many years ago. Every year that passes only proves the more how true it is.

Fear guiding what passes for policy in our national political circles leads us to put ever more reliance on the military, ever more resources into wars and the means of making wars, until we have become the danger, rather than the guardian against danger.

It is as if we have deliberately set out to reverse Confucius’ priorities. (more…)

Thomas Merton was a Protestant before he became a Catholic, a very worldly writer and critic before he became a monk, an intellectual before he began to try to become something more profound than an intellectual.

His language does not speak to us, perhaps, couched as it is in words like God and sin. This is too bad, because he has profoundly important things to say to us in these final days of an old civilization and (one hopes!) the dawning days of a new one. The old civilization was rooted in individual ambition and competition; the new one will perhaps become rooted in a larger, higher kind of ambition of which, in this still benighted time, it is nearly useless to speak.

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This 19-year-old risked his life on Marye’s Heights to give aid to the wounded on the other side while the battle was still going on. The federals when they realized what he was doing stopped shooting and sent thunderous cheers. The boy was killed the following September, a month after his 20th birthday–but his generous act had assured that his name would live.

Overcoming the real enemy

Last Friday and Saturday, my friend Jim and I visited the sites of two Civil War battlefields: Fredericksburg and The Wilderness. In 2006, similarly, we had gone together to visit the battlefield at Gettysburg,

Those who have been following this “Chasing Smallwood” thread know that I am in contact with a Union veteran named Joseph Smallwood. Jim is similarly connected to a Confederate veteran named Hank who, like Joseph, survived the war. But Hank, unlike Joseph, has continued to be bitter about the war, having lost his home and his previous way of living to what he considered to be an unjustified invasion of his homeland.

When Jim had suggested that we visit the site of Fredericksburg I instantly agreed–but I also felt butterflies in my stomach. I wasn’t sure that Joseph was looking forward to revisiting that particular ghastly experience. Yet I knew it was important.

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Do you think politicians are the important people who shape your world? Think again. Our world is shaped more by thinkers like this, it’s just that the effect takes longer to spread through the culture — and the effect, when it does arrive, is less likely to be chaos of the economic and political type. Notice, BTW, that his theory came from his “accidentally” leaving out some numbers, and then his thinking about what had happened as a result of his doing so. I put the quotes around the word “accidentally” not because I think he did it on purpose, but because it has become clear to me over the years that when the non-physical side of things wants to cause something to happen, such synchronistic events often precipitate them. This obit from http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Chaos_Theory_Scientist_Edward_Lorenz_Dies_At_90_16477.html

Chaos Theory Scientist Edward Lorenz Dies At 90

On April 16, the world lost yet another remarkable scientific figure that marked the 20th century with his ideas of the chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Edward Norton Lorenz, who revolutionized meteorology by studying the effects of small variations in the initial condition of a dynamical system, which can lead to large and unpredictable variations in later stages of the system, died of cancer at the age of 90 on Wednesday, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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One of the things that is wrong with our civilization is that it systematically falsifies its history, disregarding or ridiculing anything dealing with psychic experience, or the existence of a non-physical world, or anything demonstrating that time is not the simple obvious thing we think it is.

Wouldn’t it be something if such experiences were to happen to someone world-famous, who was brave enough to write about them straight-forwardly? And wouldn’t it be something if that book won the Pulitzer Prize and became a best-seller?

Enter into evidence The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh, written when he was in his fifties, describing the life-changing experience he had at age 25, while he was alone over the North Atlantic in a single-engine airplane attempting to fly from New York to Paris.

As you read these passages, you might ask yourself why none of this makes it into the history books.

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This is from a newly tweaked passage in the novel that I call Babe in the Woods, based on my experiences at the Monroe Institute’s Gateway program back in December, 1992. I wrote it in a couple of months (or in 15 years, depending on how you wish to count) and sent it to friends for a critique, and am finishing revising it. I am surprised, a little, at how much I had wanted to say that I neglected to say, and at how many things I never thought to say in the first place. Ah well, little by little….

There’s a thought. I came to a fir tree just as a prolonged burst of wind began tossing it back and forth. I moved to Interface, and instantly thought, this is another life form, after all, as alien to us as anything else, but no more so. Why shouldn’t I be able to communicate with it?
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A friend passed this on to me, and therefore I don’t know where it was posted originally. I liked it a lot, although — as i felt obliged to point out — it’s a little late for some of us!

What Do I Want to be Remembered For?

Peter F. Drucker February 1, 2008

When I was 13, I had an inspiring teacher of religion, who one day went through the class of boys asking each one, “What do you want to be remembered for?” None of us, of course, could give an answer. So, he chuckled and said, “I didn’t expect you to be able to answer it. But if you still can’t by the time you’re 50, you will have wasted your life.”

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More gleanings from my journals, these two from 1973:

Three Kinds of Souls, Three Prayers:
1) I am a bow in your hands, Lord. Draw me, lest I rot.
2) Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break.
3) Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!
Nicholas Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

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[Sunday, January 15, 2006]

6:45 a.m. So. Here we are again. I shied away from that discussion about TGU versus any one of you. Why? It is as if I wasn’t ready to hear it – or as if I hadn’t finished making up the answer! But in fact I don’t know why. So I guess I’m ready for you at least to tell me why I’m gun-shy, and then the rest if you can get it through the pipeline.

This is a bigger subject than you consciously know. You recognize that you almost wish the question had not been raised, but you don’t know why. It is because you know, too, that “here comes another hit on my belief system.” But that is a danger of exploration – that at some point you will find something that reevaluates – or forces you to do the re-evaluating, rather! – everything you think you sort of know from experience.

When you first go exploring, that is the easy part, at least for a certain temperament. You start, knowing that what you think you know is probably wrong and certainly inadequate. For the first long phase, it is all gain. Each discovery is an item, one more useful trophy. If it doesn’t seem to fit very well into anything, that’s all right, maybe it will fit better later; maybe further discoveries will demonstrate where and how it fits; maybe it will be the key to fitting in other things. And in fact this is your assumption, your reliance, and your experience.

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A little parable. I was lighting a fire in the stove, watching one spot intently to see if it would catch – and suddenly realized that although that hadn’t caught, it didn’t matter, because everything around it was aflame. That’s like our lives, in a way – concentrating so on this or that difficulty, and not seeing what is being accomplished at the margins while we are focusing elsewhere.

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