"I of my own knowledge…"

I have found an awful lot of wisdom over the years in the novels of Dion Fortune. As a “for instance,” this from The Winged Bull, pages 155-157. It reminds me of an old Sufi saying, “Words are prisons; God is free.”

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Haven’t been posting. Writing another novel. This popped up, though, and I thought I’d mention it. This passage is from Dion Fortune’s novel The Goat Foot God (p. 365-6)

“…one expects psychic phenomena to be reasonably tangible and to have something of the miraculous about them. We’ve had nothing of that…. We’ve had nothing that you can’t father onto the subconscious if you have a mind to. nothing you could call evidential if you’d got any notion of the nature of evidence. But all the same we’ve had — or at any rate I’ve had, some pretty drastic experiences. I couldn’t prove them to anybody else, and I’m not such a fool as to try to; but I’m quite satisfied about them in my own mind. Anyway, whatever they are, subconscious, super-conscious, hallucinations, telepathy, suggestion, auto-suggestion, cosmic experiences, bunk, spoof or hokum, I feel as if I had been born again….”

“How do you know it isn’t all your imagination, Hugh?” asked Jelkes, watching him.

“I don’t know, T.J., and don’t care. It probably is, for I’ve used my imagination diligently enough over the job. But via the imagination I’ve got extended consciousness, which I probably should never have been able to make a start on if I’d stuck to hard facts all along and rejected everything I couldn’t prove at the first go-off. It’s no use doing that. You’ve got to take the Unseen as a working hypothesis, and then things you can’t prove at the first go-off prove themselves later.”

I frequently cite John Michael Greer’s Archdruid weekly columns in my other blog, The Context, which centers more on political and social issues than on the potential of consciousness. But this week’s column spans the gap. The original is at http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/06/magical-thinking.html

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2010/06/magical-thinking.html

Magical Thinking

As I write these words, the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico continues unchecked. It seems almost obscene to suggest that anything positive might come out of an oil spill that is already the largest in US history, and of course it’s true that whatever good might be salvaged from the situation will offer little consolation to the ravaged ecosystems and destroyed communities of the Gulf. Still, as teacher and Foxfire founder Eliot Wigginton noted, learning is only made possible by failure, and a failure this gargantuan and many-sided can at least offer us some pointed lessons for the future.

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If you ever wondered what it would be like to go through a program with a couple of dozen people all looking for extraordinary potential — here’s an easy way to get the idea.

Babe in the Woods is about a skeptical news reporter’s entry into a world that he had always assumed did not exist. As he goes through the program he is surrounded by others at very different levels of being. Some are beginners, some are experienced. Some are skeptical, some credulous. Some are able to go with their experiences, some are not. Kind of like real life….

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A friend quotes Gandhi as saying “become the change you want to see.”

In this connection, I remember a line from a Dion Fortune novel (The Sea Priestess), in which the heroine, a woman working magic, says that in order to put a new pattern into the mind of the human race, it is necessary to put it into its unconscious mind, not its conscious mind, and that is done by living it. It is necessary not to say it or write it or believe it, but – to live it. (more…)

 [I have a long list of books that could be important to you, and as time permits I intend to create a list here, and give a hint as to why you may wish to read them. Pardon a parent's pride if I put my own two at the top of the list.]

Muddy Tracks: Exploring an Unsuspected Reality
This is what I call my interim report, discussing what I tried and what I found up through 1997, including among other things hypnotism, dream analysis, “past-life” exploration and four programs at The Monroe Institute, especially the Gateway Voyage in late 1992, which finally got me through the door. And if I could do it, there is no reason to assume that others could not.

Messenger: A Sequel to Lost Horizon
James Hilton’s wonderful novel introduced the word Shangri-La to the world’s vocabulary in 1932. Many years ago I began thinking — how could the lamasery at Shangri-La survive the coming of the Communist Chinese? By the time I finished my fourth version, Messenger had become a tale about human possibilities, and how we could develop them. If you could live forever…? How would you spend your time?

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[If you wish to know something about the books here that I have not yet described, or even said why I think you should read them, you could always do what I do: go to Amazon.com and see if they have a description. Of course this is only a stopgap measure, but it may be a while before I get around to annotating this list.]

Fiction

The Demon Lover, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

Moon Magic by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Goat-Foot God, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Mind Parasites, by Colin Wilson. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Philosopher’s Stone, by Colin Wilson. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Sea Priestess, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Winged Bull, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

Winged Pharaoh, by Joan Grant. I am obliged to place this in fiction, but it doesn’t feel like fiction to me. It made me homesick for a place I had never been.

Non-fiction

The Ancient Atlantic, by L. Taylor Hansen. A strange and fascinating book that may be difficult to find. Copyright 1969, published by Amherst Press, Amherst Wisconsin.

In the Dark Places of Wisdom, by Peter Kingsley

Medicinemaker, by Hank Wesselman.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by Carl G. Jung.

The Outsider, by Colin Wilson. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Secret Vaults of Time, by Stephan Schwartz.

Serpent in the Sky, by John Anthony West. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

Spiritwalker, by Hank Wesselman.

Visionseeker, by Hank Wesselman.