"I of my own knowledge…"

Sunday, August 8, 2010

5 AM. Something different today. Just spent most of an hour posting a couple of conversations from May so as to have that chore done — I was too tired to do this, maybe, but couldn’t sleep longer. We’ll see if I drained the batteries or did something efficient.

It was interesting to read the pieces from May 24 and 25. I had forgotten that it was from Carl Jung that I first got the concept that Hemingway represented a complete man, that his great attractiveness to people stemmed from his wholeness. Obviously that didn’t prevent him from experiencing and ultimately succumbing to serious personality problems, but it does change the picture.

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This was my column for September in The Meta Arts, an online magazine, which is to be found at http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html

“The Evangelization Of The World In This Generation”

I got involved in one of those arguments. You know the kind, where the two sides start from so far apart, believing “facts” that are diametrically opposite, that there is no real way to come to agreement. What’s more, she was a friend of a friend, and I wanted to be careful not to let an argument become a heated dispute.

But the “facts” she was quoting with such certainty were just not so. Missionaries, she said, were merely agents of imperialism, using their religion as a weapon to destroy native institutions. Like so many people – political liberals, mostly — she assumed that religious institutions are automatically corrupt, that missionaries are automatically bigots, and that efforts to convert natives of other cultures were mere manifestations of racism.

But in this she, as most people in our generation, was the victim of ignorance fostered by leftist ideology and propagated by lack of historical memory. For instance, she had never heard of the slogan “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” and when I quoted it, had no idea what it meant or why it was adopted.

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Someone said that she had come late to the discussion, and was having a hard time orienting herself in the material. I can certainly see how this could be a problem, so I promised to try to deliver a road map. Here is my first attempt.

In this blog, I am attempting to confine myself to what I know from my own personal experience. It is true that what we “know” may be wrong. Nonetheless, what we know from experience has more validity for us than things that we have merely heard, or read, or in one way or another have been led to believe, without personal experience having ratified it.

However, a good part of what we know from experience begins with the experience of resonating to something we hear or read. When I first read Carl Jung’s book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, something within me immediately said, “this is true.” He thus provided a link between who I was then (or rather, who I thought I was) and who I would become. This happens to us a lot. In relating my experiences, I am hoping and expecting to serve the same function for others. If they need to hear what I have to say, they will wind up on this site “by accident,” because our Upstairs guidance knows how to steer us to whatever influences we need.

So, one continuing thread in this series of posts consists of transcripts of my interactions with the other side, beginning in 1993. To follow them chronologically, begin with the series of Black Box Session transcripts, then proceed to the TGU Session transcripts that I am still in the process of posting. These will be followed by another series of black box session transcripts from 2004. By reading these sessions in chronological order, you will walk along with me, so to speak, and will acquire terms and ideas that are built upon later. I must say, it has been quite an extensive educational process.

A different way of approaching the material, and one that some may find more accessible, would be to follow the long thread I call Chasing Smallwood. This is a series of transcripts of active-imagination sessions that I had with a “past life” personality who lived in the 19th century, went west to Oregon, came back east and served in the Union Army during the Civil War. These sessions began as my attempts to understand and obtain documentation for his life — at least, that’s what I thought was going on. As usual, however, the other side had its own agenda, and the series took an unexpected and remarkable turn. This is still unfolding, and I cannot quite see where it is going to end. Whether it will be as important to others as I think it is, I can’t tell. But it certainly is changing my life.

So there are two ways to approach this material: Start following the Black Box and then the TGU Session transcripts, or follow the Chasing Smallwood material. A third way, equally valid, would be to begin with the earliest posts and proceed chronologically, browsing. If anyone has suggestions on other ways to proceed, I would be glad to hear them and pass them on.

 [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.