"I of my own knowledge…"

Re-imagining yourself

Our internal life and external life don’t always coincide. How do we dance on the borderline without compromising our integrity?

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

6:05 a.m. Mr. Hemingway, you said you couldn’t stand phonies, and clearly you couldn’t. How do you reconcile this with so much pretending and rearranging and lying and misremembering and leading people on?[This referred to his early life as described in The Young Hemingway, a book that I bought and read in England.]

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A good counterpoint to the usual view, from my friend Gordon Phinn’s website http://anotherwordofgord.wordpress.com/

March 21, 2010

Confronting Your Immortality

In our modern times it is considered a move of great maturity and bravery to confront your mortality.

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Recognize yourself?

This is what the guys upstairs say we look like to them, more or less. Each of us “individuals” seems to them like a ring containing disparate threads. Those threads are shared with some others in 3D, and each thread resonates with one or more of “them” on the other side. So, if you have threads that resonate with 75 others on the other side, you can interface with any or all of the 75, plus any that any of them resonate with, etc. They spell it out in the material I transcribed and published as The Sphere and The Hologram — but it’s easier to get the general idea, I think, when you have a visual to look at.

Dmitri Orlov’s column is a bit too long and a bit too self-amusing, but, as usual, thoughtful. What struck me, skimming it, was that he was saying much the same thing that the guys upstairs said about the futility of trying to change people from Column A to Column B. From Club Orlov, http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/

The Great Unreasoning

Wherever we go, and whatever we do, we find ourselves surrounded by a variety of human and animal noises:  ”Woof!”—”Meow!”—”Moo!”—”Baah!”—”Tweet!”—”How about them Red Sox!”

And, naturally, we find ourselves wondering, What are they all saying? What does it all mean? Does it mean anything at all, or is it just a lot of meaningless background noise?

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The social hysteria about psychoactive drug use was caused  partly by cynical calculation by politicians, partly by profit-seeking drug lords themselves, I suspect, and partly by a deep pervasive unconscious fear of loss of control. For the moment it seems to be losing ground, and scientists are ever-so-carefully going back to what they were doing in the 1960s in the first place — exploring the fascinating inner potential these drugs can reveal. But nobody wants to be accused of being another Tim Leary (whose main offense appears to be that he was not apologetic about his belief in the potential for transformation), so, as usual, they wrap their experimentation in vigorously defended protocols. It reminds me of how they had to invent the protocol we know as “remote viewing” in order to give themselves permission to investigate even one aspect of extra-sensory perception.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html?emc=eta1

Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: April 11, 2010

As a retired clinical psychologist, Clark Martin was well acquainted with traditional treatments for depression, but his own case seemed untreatable as he struggled through chemotherapy and other grueling regimens for kidney cancer. Counseling seemed futile to him. So did the antidepressant pills he tried.

Nothing had any lasting effect until, at the age of 65, he had his first psychedelic experience. He left his home in Vancouver, Wash., to take part in an experiment at Johns Hopkins medical school involving psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient found in certain mushrooms.

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“You imagined yourself into your future”

I haven’t forgotten that the over-arching question here is, “What is the meaning of life?” Although it may seem as if this is merely of personal interest, I suggest that it applies to us all, at one level or another. Exposing my own shortcomings may be a way to make real what otherwise might remain only abstraction. Consider it my gift to you. This particular entry was written while I was visiting England, having just bought and read Michael Reynolds’ The Young Hemingway, which detailed how extensively Hemingway made up his past as he went along.

July 30, 2007

All right. My thoughts on Hemingway.

You were not particularly opposed to deceit, papa, and to making up your past as you went along. Didn’t that leave you frightfully insecure?

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It is precisely my objection to politics and ideology, that they encourage people to look outside themselves for the source of life’s problems. But, as Jung in his wisdom told this reporter, each of us has within us Mr. Hyde. Our job is to learn what we are

From an interview with the English journalist Frederick Sands in 1955.

“It seems to me we have reached the limit of our evolution — the point from which we can advance no further. Man started from an unconscious state and has ever striven for greater consciousness. The development of consciousness is the burden, the suffering, and the blessing of mankind. Each new discovery leads to greater consciousness, and the path along which we are going is merely an extension of it. This inevitably calls for greater responsibility and enforces a great change in ourselves. We must draw conclusions from what we know and discover, and not take everything for granted.

“Man has come to be man’s worst enemy. It is a clash between man and God, in which man’s Luciferan genius has produced in the H-bomb the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient God could. We must begin to learn about man until every Jekyll can see his Hyde.”

In going through some material I have saved, I found this email from my friend Robert Clarke, dated 2-12-2006. I can’t remember what I had written that he was responding to, but his own views are clear enough, and well worth repeating in public.

What a lovely man he was, a man wholly without malice, and well beyond pettiness. He bore his physical suffering patiently and enjoyed his quiet life as it came to him. Saint Robert, I sometimes thought him.

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C.G. Jung is an example of the fact that great men’s influence lengthens and deepens, rather than diminished, with time. It takes a while, when a great man dies, for us to see just how great a tree has fallen. But it becomes easier over time. Just as the dead tree decays and fertilizes the earth it lies upon, a man’s influence comes to permeate the lives of his successors until it has reached its natural limits.

With some, that limit may not extend beyond the family, or perhaps a business or similar enterprise. For others, though, it extends far beyond — and in any case, as the guys upstairs are perpetually reminding me, we never have the data to judge another person’s life. For all we know, the people all around us are making a huge difference, just by leading their lives.

In any case, I can’t see that there can be any question of the greatness of this particular man’s influence.  From an interview with the English journalist Frederick Sands in 1955:

“Without knowing it man is always concerned with God. What some people call instinct or intuition is nothing other than God. God is that voice inside us which tells us what to do and what not to do. In other words, our conscience.

“In this dark atomic age of ours, with its lurking fear, man is seeking guidance. Consciously or unconsciously he is once more groping for God. I make my patients understand that all the things which happen to them against their will are a superior force. They can call it God or devil, and that doesn’t matter to me, as long as they realize that it is a superior force. God is nothing more than that superior force in our life. You can experience God every day.”

And,

“All that I have learned has led me step-by-step to an unshakable conviction of the existence of God. I only believe in what I know. And that eliminates believing. Therefore I do not take His existence on belief — I know that He exists.”

“Look not to political or economic remedies for your salvation!”

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Michael Langevin and others asked if I had ever asked you to follow-up on the question of societies that had prevented hypertrophy of wealth.

All right, we will proceed to a few words on other social organizations. But you may find this less helpful than you may expect — for our priority is not that you change your societies, but that you change your being. Lay down certain threads of your being, and pick up others, and in effect you will be born again, and new people will call forth a new society as a sort of side effect. To try to change society first is an error of materialist thinking. Changing individuals and changing the society around them is a reciprocal process of continual readjustment, not a one way or straight line process. Nature works only in spirals, not in straight lines. How else could it be, given the influences on earth?

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