"I of my own knowledge…"

So You Think Your Life Was Wasted — Part Three (8)

This is a continuation of the very productive sessions I had one day in March, four years ago. This particular conversation took place at first with Claude Bowers, whose book The Tragic Era dealt with Reconstruction from a position of total sympathy with the white South of the day, then with Joseph Smallwood, perhaps a past life, who was one of the Union soldiers who counted the destruction of slavery among the results that mitigated the terrible suffering and dislocation that war caused.

Thursday March 9, 2006

(6:30 p.m.) I don’t mean to quarrel, Mr. Bowers, but the final taste your book leaves in my mouth is one of partisanship. All the nobility on one side, rascality the only motive on the other side. It is overdone, and ultimately doesn’t wash. This book looks to have been written at least in part for partisan purposes, not as a testimonial. It is somewhere between history, journalism, and propaganda.

Say that is so, it will not find itself alone on the shelf! As I said, books are written to be tools or weapons, not as monuments.

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Henry Thoreau’s words and example deeply influenced  my life since I first read Walden at age 24 and wound up writing my M.A. thesis on his early social views in the light of his personal religion. This is a man! And his stalwart, straightforward life is such an example of virtues lived that an earlier age would have named him as a saint. (That is, as a person whose life displayed virtues worthy of emulation.) I never thought, in that long ago, that  I’d be able to talk to him.

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Given the interest readers showed in Paul Blakey’s post on how he uses the Mayan calendar in his daily life, I thought it worthwhile to post this comment on the movie 2012. Dr. Carl Johan Calleman is author of several serious books about the Mayan Calendar, among them The Mayan Calendar and the Transformation of Consciousness, a study of the processes measured by the Mayan sacred calendar. Naturally, he takes a dim view of the latest cynical Hollywood fantasy  exploiting a theme it knows nothing about and cares nothing about. (So what else is new?) This blog entry appeared in The Mayan Calendar Portal http://www.maya-portal.net/blog

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Thursday March 19, 2009

 Miss Rita, anything you’d care to say on this anniversary of your escape? You see, you weren’t left here because they’d forgotten to pull the plug!

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I was writing to myself in my journal the other day: “My living is slipping through my life, unwritten, unrecorded save on the Akashic record. Why is that?” Then it occurred to me to ask! (It still slips my mind, continually, that I can always ask.)

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Wednesday, November 5, 2008

9:30 AM.

Mr. Lincoln, a proud day. We owe it as much to you as to anyone.

You owe it to yourselves. The angels of your better nature — as I said in my first inaugural address.

It is America becoming ever more the symbol of the world, isn’t it? That’s how I see it, anyway.

A symbol, yes — but perhaps more than a symbol. Perhaps you might say in truth and not in metaphor that is a magical miniature, still, as it was to a lesser extent in my time and as it may become to an even larger extent in times beyond yours. It is the form into which energies may be concentrated and hardened into reality.

For those who came in late – this is another in a series of conversations I have with people who have passed over to the other side. I have found that at least seemingly we can connect with anyone we have a reason to connect with. I call it The Cosmic Internet. The process has been described by some as Active Imagination, which is not the same thing as fantasy. I suggest that you read this not trying to decide whether it is Hemingway speaking, or my idea of Hemingway, or whatever. Instead, feel whether the material resonates, in and of itself. Truth is great, and will prevail, but you have to be open to the possibility before it can do so. This particular interaction took place on June 14, 2007.

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Several sessions with the guys upstairs on Monday, May 14, 2007 resulted in my talking to Gene Roddenberry, who provided some very interesting material about society and the individual and the process of inspiring society with new ways of seeing things. I had recently been watching Star Trek videos between re-reading Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd novels.

7:30 a.m. Star Trek and Lanny Budd. Strange combination.
All right, my friends, I am ready and willing.

There are several points to be considered together:
- quality in the external life of the individuals in the community
- individual interest as actually community interest seen out of context
- dissatisfaction – unnecessary dissatisfaction – in what is possible within community
- all this as a parallel to what we have been saying of your internal lives.

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I found this article, which was forwarded to me by a friend, to be most interesting in light of what Joseph Smallwood had to say (in Chasing Smallwood) about the causes of the Civil War.

SOUTH’S PRO-WAR HISTORY MAJOR FACTOR IN IRAQ WAR
By Sherwood Ross

The South is far more inclined to war than the rest of America and its politicians played a major role involving the U.S. in Iraq, a noted legal authority says.

“We’d better find some way of ending the solidly-conservative-to-reactionary-bloc- power of the South or it will cause us disaster again in the future,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

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Wednesday Sept. 28, 2005. Chalk it up to Powell’s in the Portland Airport, which was a great breath of fresh air: When have you ever seen an airport bookstore selling things much different than the usual run of interchangeable thrillers and topical best-sellers? When have you ever seen one selling used books?

I need to buy another book like the government needs to hire (or elect) another incompetent but we both keep doing it. I stopped in just to look around, and walked out with Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power by Garry Wills, and unfortunately that purchase will mark a major milestone in my intellectual life. I say “unfortunately” because I don’t like the things it suddenly brought into clear relief. Adding a few simple facts to things I had known and half-known and should have known, it made me realize things I should have realized years ago. By the time I got off the airplane in San Francisco, I was a somewhat different person, intellectually, than I had been before I opened the book.

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