"I of my own knowledge…"

“But the subtler contents never appear on the surface; they always come to light outside the consulting hour. I therefore asked her cautiously, `Tell me, how do I seem to you when you are not with me? Am I just the same?’ She said, `When I am with you, you are quite pleasant, but when I am by myself, or have not seen you for some time, the picture I have of you changes in a remarkable way. Sometimes you seem quite idealized, and then again different.’ Here she hesitated, and I prompted her: `In what way different?’ Then she said, `Sometimes you seem rather dangerous, sinister, like an evil magician or a demon. I don’t know how I ever get such ideas — you are not a bit like that.’”
C.G. Jung, “The Archetypes Of The Collective Unconscious” in Two Essays In Analytical Psychology

“The times through which we are passing — and even more terrifying, those through which our children and grandchildren will pass — are difficult ones. Difficulty, however, has always been life’s stimulant, awakening and goading all our impulses, both good and bad, in order to make us overleap the obstacle which has suddenly risen before us…. At the instant when a man contracts like a spring in order to undertake the leap, inside us the entire life of the planet likewise contracts and develops its propulsion. This is when we clearly sense that simplest of truths which we often forget in comfortable, barren moments of ease: that man is not immortal, but rather serves Something or Someone that is immortal.”

Nicholas Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, p. 412

This is from http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080813192458.ud84hj9h&show_article=1, kindly sent me by HRPC author Robert Bruce. At some point science is going to have to conclude that the brain is not the mind is not the spirit, and I do suspect that experiments such as this one may be leading them in that direction.

A ‘Frankenrobot’ with a biological brain

Aug 13 03:25 PM US/Eastern

Meet Gordon, probably the world’s first robot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue.

Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter was designed at the University of Reading by scientists who unveiled the neuron-powered machine on Wednesday.

Their groundbreaking experiments explore the vanishing boundary between natural and artificial intelligence, and could shed light on the fundamental building blocks of memory and learning, one of the lead researchers told AFP.

“The purpose is to figure out how memories are actually stored in a biological brain,” said Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading and one of the robot’s principle architects.

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If you’ve been following our progress here, you know that we have been working step by step. First we moved the blog to this site, then came the process of constructing what we call the Hologram\Books store. Most of that work has been behind the scenes, of course, a combination of technical stuff (at which I am no help whatsoever) and writing descriptions.

We have now gotten to the point that Messenger, Muddy Tracks, and Babe in the Woods can be ordered on line. My three books of poetry can be downloaded, free. And you can see what’s coming up.

So here’s how you do it.

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“Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man’s life and society’s activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

“If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

“This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.”

Thursday, June 8, 1978

I was reading Mumford back in 1974 while ostensibly engaged in running in the Democratic congressional primary. What a misfit between my inner and outer lives! Yet what I was reading did apply, it’s just that I couldn’t figure out how to apply it. I knew more than I could express, and I could express more than I could yet embody. My instincts for truth were good, but as yet I had no way to live what I was beginning to know.

From Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, p 444:

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Thomas Merton was an extraordinary man, a Protestant who became a Catholic, a secular hedonist who became a monk, an ambitious writer who cloistered himself away from the world. His autobiography, The Seven Story Mountain, though heavily censored by the religious authorities he had subordinated himself to, remains a fascinating window into another man’s soul.

I have thought about the following quotation a lot: it might be said (though Merton wouldn’t have thought of it that way) to deal with the question of which takes precedence, the part of ourselves that lives within time-space or that part that lives beyond.

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Want to know why the coming age will be different from the one that is dying around us? It is because no person and no civilization is large enough to encompass everything; for every truth we accept there is an equally important truth that we reject, and so some things that are true must seem mere superstition to us, and some things that are self-evidently true to us are not, in a larger sense, or seen from another viewpoint, nearly so self-evident, and perhaps not nearly so true.

Lewis Mumford in Interpretations and Forecasts quotes T.E. Hulme as saying, The difference between historical periods is the difference between the categories of their thought.

When are 50 million fleas more valuable than one elephant? When the fleas are volunteers and the their efforts are coordinated. As this article demonstrates. People doing something for the love of it, directed by those who know how to coordinate their efforts, are accomplishing more than the professionals alone could do, just out of sheer volume. You’d almost think there was a lesson in there somewhere….

From http://news.aol.com/article/sky-watcher-spies-gassy-cosmic-ghost/119539?icid=200100125x1207156595x1200357017

Sky Watcher Spies Gassy ‘Cosmic Ghost’

CHICAGO (Aug. 5) – A Dutch primary school teacher and amateur astronomer has discovered what some are calling a “cosmic ghost,” a strange, gaseous object with a hole in the middle that may represent a new class of astronomical object.
The teacher, Hanny van Arkel, discovered the object while volunteering in the Galaxy Zoo project, which enlists the help of members of the public to classify galaxies online.

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Does this begin to sound familiar? This, from The Age of Arthur: a History of the British Isles from 350 to 650, by John Morris.

[As the Roman occupation of Briton ended]
“Old men mourned; but younger men were capable of looking to the future with confidence, even welcoming escape from a dead past. One young Briton wrote home from Sicily:
“You tell me that everyone is saying that the world is coming to an end. So what? It happened before. Remember Noah’s time…. but after the flood men were holier.”
The continuous history of a thousand years of Greek and Roman civilization had suddenly snapped, leaving men nakedly aware, at the time, that the end had come. Those who could look beyond the deluge with assurance had already written off the headless corpse of the Roman Empire. They were the conscious architects of Christendom, impatient to clear away the debris of the past that they might build upon its ruins a new society, that which in retrospect we call the “middle ages.”