"I of my own knowledge…"

It is no pleasant thing to spend an entire lifetime watching one’s beloved country descend into insanity, but this has been my fate, and of the fate of any who have come into consciousness within the past half century. I say “who have come into consciousness,” because it is not enough to live; it is necessary to understand what you are living, if only after the fact.

So many people around me are giving in to fear — nameless fear, formless fear, often enough the product of mistaking television for reality. Many others continue to believe in political or ideological panaceas that are, and must be, nothing but illusion.

Obviously these two phenomena are connected, and connected in an unsuspected way — they stem from the loss of meaning which in turn stems from loss of sure spiritual connection. For 150 years at least, and gathering momentum as it proceeds, the descent of our culture into materialist superstition has cut cord after cord that used to tie us to sanity. So now we are in the position of being spiritually rootless, incapable of perceiving what is reality and what is illusion, fearing shadows and continually sowing the dragon’s teeth that spring up as armed men, and wondering why we have no peace.

Why is it that people will follow every sort of leader but the ones who offer wisdom? The following quotations are from an interview that Carl Jung gave in April, 1934. He could be talking about us today:

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I don’t know where this story came from originally. A friend sent it to some of his friends (including, I’m proud to say, me) with this comment:

“The story Pickle Jar is an old story that has been passed around the internet many times. If a story wore out from being passed around then this one would have worn out long ago. Good stories never wear out in their retelling. Instead, happily enough they expand, taking on a larger presence than the original author likely would have ever imagined. Nearly each time this comes into my mail box I pass it along to the few of you who it makes me think of.”

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I have added subheads to this record of an altered-state conversation, merely to assist clarity

C.G. Jung on exploring and mapmaking

[May 16, 2006]

(7:50 a.m.) Dr. Jung, can you provide some context for what is going on here? I’m beyond suspecting that I am “making this up” except that the more I think about it the less I have any idea what’s really going on, how I should really be looking at all this. I’m not really simple enough to take all this at its face value either as legitimate contact or as construct of my own mind. No, that isn’t the way to put it. I mean to say, I am not simple enough to be sure of anything! So, I would appreciate how it seems to you – even while recognizing that asking your opinion is like – well, anyway –

You are in deep waters, and you prefer to be able to stand firmly on the bottom.

Boy that’s the truth!

And yet you want to go sailing. Very well, if you wish to sail and you cannot swim, it is well for you to not fall out of the boat, or else go sailing wearing always a life preserver! But life preservers are not much fun, so you must learn to swim, or be sure to not fall out of the boat, or stay ashore.

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A lack of imagination, and a means of approach

Thursday March 16, 2006

(9:15 a.m.) Well, I suppose I should get to work. You splendid gentlemen and ladies – feel free to chime in. Say, while we’re on the subject, is it that I have mentally categorized you as “the gentlemen upstairs,” or “the guys upstairs,” that no women have appeared? Why have no other lives as a woman come to the fore, and no women appeared to talk, in the way Mr. Lincoln did, or Henry, or others.

Perhaps it is a lack of imagination on your part?

Imagination?

Well, if you cannot feel your way toward someone, it is harder for her to manifest.

You mean, it is easier for me to imagine myself a monk than a nun, say.

Exactly. And easier to imagine yourself “modern” or western than “ancient” or eastern. And the only two “ancients” you remember are closely tied to your work connecting to the other side.

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Our matter-benumbed culture makes a commodity of everything it touches, and it is for us, the individuals enmeshed within it, to work our way back to the sacred nature of ourselves and the rest of the world. That is, the spiritual and the sexual are not necessarily adversaries. At their best, they are mutually reinforcing.

An interesting essay from what is usually a political source, Fred Burks, available online at http://www.WantToKnow.info/inspiration/spiritual_eyes

“The spiritual eyes see beneath all physical matter to the place where everything in the universe is interconnected in a divine cosmic dance. When I see, express, and interact in harmony with the vision of my spiritual eyes, transformation flows and miracles happen.”

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For what it’s worth, yes I did communicate with Elvis. At least, I think I did. I made the attempt in response to a joke from Michael Ventura, but this statement of Elvis’ life made perfect sense to me, as perhaps it will to you.

Elvis Presley: Fame as prison

Friday March 10, 2006

Michael [Ventura] had said if I started channeling Elvis to be careful – but that made me think about it and I had a vivid sense of how imprisoned his life became. Hell. Elvis, if you’d like to me to pass a message to Michael I am willing.

Thank you very much. (That’s a joke.) We do hear when our name is called, or anyway it’s sort of that way. And what the connecting mind knows, we know. At least, I do, or that’s how it seems to me. So I know your conversations. It seems to me that communicating through email isn’t much different from talking between the worlds, as you say.

I do have this to say. You both made the right decision, avoiding fame. Prison describes it exactly. I used to look out at the room full of people, in Vegas, say, and they all liked me, they weren’t mean about it, but they envied me, and I thought how they were all going to go back to wherever it was they lived and they were going to do what they wanted and nobody would much care. And my world kept getting smaller. I had my little bunch of pals – but that wasn’t really healthy, for me or for them. Hangers-on aren’t really pals. And my wife and even my baby – how was I to have a normal family life when nothing in my life was normal? But there wasn’t any way to get back to normal, even by failure. And the funny thing is, I’d have been happy being just somebody normal who sang. I loved performing, and I’d have sung for myself if nobody had listened – but all that money, and everybody wanting a piece of me, and people looking at me with this craziness in their eyes, wanting something that God Himself couldn’t give them—

People criticize the uppers and downers and the booze, but they don‘t understand, that was what was real in my life after a while. That wasn’t the craziness, it was the escape from the craziness.

Yes, I was created to open up the doors and blow in some fresh air and I did that. But at the same time, I had to live a life as a human being, and that proved to be too much to do. You two stop and think – you think of me as older than you because that’s how it started – but you’re much older now than I ever got. And you’re managing your lives.

I hope you don’t think I’m complaining about getting to be Elvis Presley! But part of that involved living in a box that just got smaller and smaller the longer I went on. It was good to squeeze out of it.

Thank you for listening to me – and Frank, if you’ll think on why your father liked me, it will tell you something about him.

Yes I get it already. Thank you. [I got that my father admired Elvis’ wildness, his joy of life.]

Live the knowledge

It’s one thing to know a thing abstractly, or theoretically. It’s another thing to know it emotionally as well. And it is yet a third thing, the vital thing, to actually live what you know. As the guys said, a while ago:

[Monday, January 16, 2006]

It is more than a matter of writing a book, or of writing many books. More important by far is the need to live the knowledge. To some extent one serves as a model to others in anything one does, and that serving as a model can occur – must occur – in every aspect of life. If various aspects contradict each other, each aspect – and the contradictions among aspects – serves a different model. This is not to say that one is primarily a model for others. Is one’s life primarily lived for the sake of one arm, or one ear? Yet the arm and the ear are as integral as any other past of the whole

So – this is a time to be transformed. Clever phrasing, eh? It may be and should be read two ways. The times are to be transformed; you are to be transformed in these times.

It is more than a matter of writing books. But you always knew that.

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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.

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I have been re-reading my book Chasing Smallwood, because I gave it to someone who hasn’t any background in altered-state communication, and wondered how it would strike the unprepared reader. It had been some time since I’d looked at it, and so I could look at it from a detached perspective.

My first reaction was, I needed a good editor! The editor who edits his own copy has a fool for a client. I was so close to the material that I couldn’t see that some things needed spelling out.

My second reaction, though, was, “wow, what good material this included! What great communications!” And that’s still my reaction. Here’s a little dialogue with Bertram, an English monk — well, he’d have called himself Norman rather than English, I suspect — from the 1200s.

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