"I of my own knowledge…"

My friend Robert Clarke sent me this article he published in his local newspaper — he lives in Burslem, which is one of the cities that comprise Stoke-on-Trent. Robert is an expert on dreams and dream symbolism, and at some point I will get around to telling his story, which is a fascinating one.

The Mythological/Religious Symbolism of Dreams

by Robert B. Clarke

We all have dreams, though some people fail to remember them. Often our dreams are about everyday concerns, our hopes, fears, desires, and ambitions, but now and then strange contents appear that impress us deeply, whether pleasantly or otherwise. This latter type of dream is what primitive peoples call “big dreams”, and if we take note of these over a sufficient period of time they are found to form processes, which, much to our surprise, can only be said to be mythological/religious in nature.

They cover a vast range, from the lower instinctual level (dragon depths etc.) to the higher spiritual, and anyone who follows the inner processes comes to realise that another spirit/soul reality exists behind the conscious/physical universe and that it speaks to us in symbolic language in dreams. Or it may come through to us in deep meditation, or occasionally even break through the veil as outer visions.

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This is a long excerpt from the book Civilization by Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark, writing in 1969. I was living in Florida in the early 1970s and I watched the ten-part PBS series “Civilization” (the transcripts of which comprise this book) and I remember how moving it was. The test of any work of art — including the art of accumulating and disseminating wisdom — is the test of time. Forty years one, I find little to criticize here. These were his concluding words, pp. 346-7

And yet when I look at the world about me in the light of this series, I don’t at all feel that we are entering a new period of barbarism. The things that made the Dark Ages so dark — the isolation, the lack of mobility, the lack of curiosity, the hopelessness – don’t obtain at all. When I … visit one of our new universities, it seems to me that the inheritors of all our catastrophes looked cheerful enough… In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed, as well-read, as bright-minded, as curious and as critical as the young are today.

Of course, there has been a little flattening at the top. But one mustn’t overrate the culture of what used to be called “top people” before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were ignorant as swans…. The members of a music group or an art group at a provincial university would be five times better informed and more alert. Naturally these bright-minded young people think poorly of existing institutions and want to abolish them. Well, one doesn’t need to be young to dislike institutions. But the dreary fact remains that, even in the darkest ages, it was institutions that made society work, and if civilization is to survive society must somehow be made to work.

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From http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/mailstory-clickthru/232024.php via a friend. There is always hope; you can never tell who’s going to get the word.

Patients teach doc lesson in spirit life
By Carla McClain
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 03.30.2008

He is a doctor in love with his patients.
It is to them he gives thanks for the unexpected, life-changing journey that took him beyond this world of scientific fact to the otherworldly realm of the spirit and the soul.
Never in his wildest dreams did Dr. Allan J. Hamilton — a renowned University of Arizona neurosurgeon devoted to the super-technology of his specialty — expect to go there.
Most doctors don’t. Some have called their colleague “a nut” for admitting he did.
Hamilton shrugs. He gets that.
“If you had told me 20 or 30 years ago that I would go through this kind of change in my thinking about what medicine — and life — is really all about, I’d have said you’re nuts,” said the Harvard-trained brain surgeon, now 58.
“When I started as a surgeon, I was really focused on surgical, technical skills. It’s a very mechanistic view — you go in and fix things. You are so focused on that, you tend to blow by anything you see that suggests the spiritual.

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More nuggets from my early journals, this one recorded in October, 1972

While one percent of society
has superficial awareness
of the existence of mathematical regularities
synergetically displayed by mass attraction
and supersynergetically displayed as precession,
no scientist has the slightest idea
what mass attraction is
nor why
synergy, precession, or radiation
exists or acts as they do.

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In my copious free time, I do some pottery, having been taking classes for about a year now with Nan Rothwell. Of the 23 pieces I had in our latest kiln firing, these are among my favorites. The horus holding the human head is 6” high (x5″x7″); the woman with the basket is 8” high (x9″x6″) and the blue-haired figure (I didn’t know it was going to come out blue!) that I am somewhat disrespectfully calling “Mr. Spock in Drag” is 5” high (x5″x5″).

Particularly pleased with the senora and her corn meal.

I didn’t realize, when I wrote down so many quotations that moved me, so long ago, that I was holding them for you who read this post. Glad I did?

“The coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital, and physical existence of man, but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal of humanity, and attempt to effect it in themselves and lead others to it and to make it the recognized goal of the race. In proportion as they succeed and to the extent to which they carry their evolution, the yet unrealized potentiality which they represent will become an actual possibility of the future.”
–Sri Aurobindo

Why is there not worldwide outrage at the reckless arrogance being displayed here? Does anybody think this will be kept within limits? But if it’s done in the name of “science” it’s okay, right? That was certainly the Nazi viewpoint.

Notice the explanations that amount to saying, “it won’t be carried beyond certain carefully restricted bounds.” Sure. That’s what they said about cloning, too, and you may remember how well that worked. This is the ghastly end-result — or rather, it leads to the end-result, for unfortunately we’ve a long way to go in the wrong direction before we come to the end-result — of turning “science” into a god, and worshipping it with money and power.

From the Times, April 2, 2008: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3663033.ece

We have created human-animal embryos already, say British team

Mark Henderson, Science Editor

Embryos containing human and animal material have been created in Britain for the first time, a month before the House of Commons votes on new laws to regulate the research.

A team at Newcastle University announced yesterday that it had successfully generated “admixed embryos” by adding human DNA to empty cow eggs in the first experiment of its kind in Britain.

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I think that this was written in the depths of the Great Depression, though I am not sure. (In my earlier days of journalizing I wasn’t particularly careful about my citations.) In any case, it seems appropriate for these times.

“I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time — the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.”

John Maynard Keynes

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If you have not yet heard of G.I. Gurdjieff, this may be your lucky day.

Back in 1972 I was introduced to the work of Gurdjieff by way of the work of P.D. Ouspensky. (The first book of Ouspensky’s I read was In Search of the Miraculous, the title of which in itself immediately grabbed me, as embodying my deepest yearning.) Here was evidence that deeper things that our culture denied nevertheless existed and perhaps could be found.

This was reinforcement that I needed, for I was very much alone, working without a school, without a religious tradition (having left the Catholic church as a teen) and without a teacher. If that is your situation, and you are of an intellectual bent, Gurdjieff’s work is in print and may take you far. Better, of course–in fact indispensible–is a teacher. But make yourself ready and the teacher will appear, though it may take you a while to recognize him, or her, as such. I well remember reading that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear” and desperately hoping that it was true, but not of course knowing that it was. In fact, I had already met the man who would become my first teacher,  but  I could not read my life forward and so didn’t know that he was. Oddly, neither at the time did he.

But the point of this post was supposed to be Gurdjeiff’s criteria for finding and recognizing our proper work:

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