Category Archives: collective unconsciousness

A Prophetic Word Offered in Eureka Springs, Arkansas

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Eureka Springs, Arkansas is one of my favorite spots on the map of our world. I lived for twenty years only a stone’s throw from this lovely Victorian Era village and visited it often. Here is a post from Facebook by a man who offered a prophetic for our world in 2013, Paul DeFatta:

Transfusions: (based on a disturbing dream that I had in Eureka Springs, Arkansas on 11/27/2013) Everything of genuine value, it would seem, must be earned and not stolen. Stolen goods come back to wreak vengeance upon their stealers. When precious gifts and persons come to us, stolen or unearned, we usually do not know how to properly receive them or even how to open them. To earn something—a lofty or profound insight, the heart of a rare and exceptional lover, a magnificent artistic creation—is to STRETCH to (or into) that gift, idea, heart, work of art, etc. Where there is no stretching and no earning, a human life begins slowly to wither, to ossify, to dry up, or to decompose. In short, there are countless ways to end our lives long before we actually die. Dying, withering souls that never bothered to learn how to stretch and to earn often become psychic parasites that feed off the morsels and crumbs they can filch from those around them—those whose hearts beat with even a slightly stronger pulse than their own does. When the psychic parasites in a society begin to significantly outnumber the dwindling number of vital “earners” and “stretchers,” things really begin to go downhill at a galloping pace. It becomes increasingly dangerous for healthy persons to venture out into the streets, where, as likely as not, they will be greeted by a blood-sucking, prattling army of the walking dead. They will suck the life out them with empty blather, each word of which hits the skin like a syringe or a gibbering little vampire bat. With every syllable, the host’s life blood trickles through a network of invisible tubes into tiny mouths that have gathered in the surrounding shadows. (from Facebook page, “Carl Jung and the Creative Bridge)

Plato’s Cave Analogy, Via an Intrauterine Dialogue

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Things are not as they seem. They never are; for we only can “see through a glass darkly.” But if darkness is accepted as our reality, and not subject to a mite of critical reasoning, then we will never see the light, i.e. “the Light.” Plato’s cave analogy put this on the table of human consciousness 2500 years ago. Here, I will share the same primordial truth from a dialogue between two children in the womb:

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other:

“Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

– Útmutató a Léleknek

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“Well Worn Words and Ready Phrases….

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…Build Comfortable Walls Against the Wilderness.” This quip from poet Conrad Aiken has captivated me for decades now as his work and that of other poets continue to erode my “comfortable walls.”

I was born into poetry but the hyper-conservative, linear-thinking community in which I found myself disallowed any consideration of a nuanced way of perceiving and organizing my world.  That is not to assign blame; if I had to assign blame, I would have to blame myself for lamely imbibing into the depths of my heart the world view and experience that was proffered me; I did not even try to find my own voice. I desperately felt the need to fit in, to belong, which is a very human “need.” But my desperation to obtain this belonging-ness probably created a sense of dis-ease with many of my classmates.  Decades later I would learn the label for this existential malaise was “alienation.” 

But in the mid-eighties, the breath of life breached my endungeoned heart when a friend gave me a copy of W. H. Auden poetry and I fell upon a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  I have quoted Kafka on the resulting experience often before, citing his note that literature is like a pick-axe that “fractures the frozen sea within.”  And that “fracturing” of my soul was painful, and continues to be…and will always be…as the “einfall” of Carl Jung will often be. (Jung employed the German term for an irruption into a person’s psyche of what had been excluded.)

Language is not static…though static hearts can attempt to “static” it, or “staticize” it, and often succeed at least temporarily.  But poetry, or some visit from the arts, will often breach the walls of the stale prison of thinking inside a bubble, even if the bubble is inside one’s own head!  But when the bubble takes place in a group, the value of language itself is threatened as words will be used merely for perpetuating group think and the language itself will die spiritually. Here is a poem by an Irish poet, W. R. Rodgers that addresses this issue and poignantly notes the “death” that hides in a sterile language. 

WORDS (an excerpt) 

By W. R. Rodgers 

Once words were unthinking things, signaling 

Artlessly the heart’s secret screech or roar, 

Its foremost ardour or its farthest wish, 

Its actual ache or naked rancour. 

And once they were the gangways for anger, 

Overriding the minds qualms and quagmires. 

Wires that through weary miles of slow surmise 

Carried the feverish message of fact 

In their effortless core.  Once they were these, 

But now they are the life-like skins and screens 

Stretched skillfully on frames and formulae, 

To terrify or tame, cynical shows 

Meant only to deter or draw men on, 

The tricks and tags of every demagogue, 

Mere scarecrow proverbs, rhetorical decoys, 

Face-savers, salves, facades, the shields and shells 

Of shored decay behind which cave minds sleep 

And sprawl like gangsters behind bodyguards. 

That “Deep State” That Besets Us.

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I too have a “deep state” that is besieging me!  Yes, “they” or “it” is after me.  Oh, I used to think it was “out there” in the person of all those bad people and institutions who did not “see the light” as I did; but now I realize that my fears and insecurities were misdirected.  That “deep state” was within and will always be…as long as I remain a “paltry” human. I now realize that the “deep state” I always projected “out there” is merely the unconscious, that hidden domain of my heart which I did not have the courage to acknowledge.  And, yes it is a dark and ominous region of human experience, as in Goethe’s observations, “The heart has its beastly little treasures.”  My unwillingness to withdraw my projections for most of my life has cost me the store house of treasures in my heart which I catch faint glimpses of every now and then.  But the “beastly” dimension of the heart is always there! 

What is that “beastly” dimension of the heart?  In my experience, including reading and study but certainly including the intricate, frightening dimensions of “experience”, I have found that it is believing what you “believe” in an ironclad fashion, failing to recognize and respect the limitations of our human-ness, especially cognition.  We believe what we want to believe; and even if these beliefs might be very “noble” when we elevate them to sacrosanctity, we risk disregarding the wisdom of the Apostle Paul who noted that at best we only “see through a glass darkly.” 

The problem is “believing in our belief.”  One simple example is paranoia, If you believe the world is out to get you at some point it is likely to fulfill your unconscious wishes and “come after your ass.”  That is because the deep-seated distrust of life that you harbor will eventually spill over to the point that your judgement is gravely impaired, and the legal system will have to fulfill its responsibilities to intervene.  But the core issue is the insecurity, fragility, and terror that reigns in your heart. 

AND, on the matter of “believing in your belief,” I’m reminded of my favorite bumper sticker, “Don’t believe everything you think.”  So, you believe the moon is made out of cheese???  Why not consider what some of the other people in your world think about this notion?  So, you think “the Lord has ‘raised up’ Trump,” how about toying with the notion there might be some degree of flaw in that vein of thought?  But when a vein of thought is based on profound fear and anxiety that cannot be acknowledged, one will be enthralled with that vein of thought to the point of certainty. 

Aw, the sweet nectar of certainty!!! I remember it well.

Artificial Intelligence Has Become Eerily Human!

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The London newspaper, The Guardian, has a wonderful story several days ago about artificial intelligence, aka “AI.” The paper commissioned a very sophisticated computer, the GPT-3, to write an essay about computers and their power over life as we know it and as it might come to be.  They offered three “prompts” to give it guidance and then this inhuman “heart” wrote a beautiful, thoughtful, and even “human” essay which you should read.  It is very revealing about the human heart and mind, both of which are guided by certain “prompts” which are difficult to ascertain; and even those we do “ascertain” are not its essence.  This is because the heart is Infinite and can never be “plumbed” though human nature is wired to think it can, and that it has even accomplished this.

This dilemma is the Mystery of Life which gave rise to religion, in addition to other “art” forms.  That Infinite Dimension which we ARE is designed to be curious and this “curiosity” needs to be explored… though within limits; for, remember, “Curiosity killed the cat!”  This limit cautions us to remember we hold within us a “treasure” which is but in an “earthly vessel.”  But human reason does not like this limitation, an existential understanding that I am only learning each day, “with fear and trembling.”

The delightful, frightening, though wryly-inspiring article can be found in the following link–https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3

Will a Fish Ever Learn To See Water?

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David Foster Wallace was a noted novelist of the late 20th,  early 21st  century who delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 entitled, “This is Water.”  The title was a reference to the famous quip, “To ask someone to see reality is like asking a fish to see water.”  Wallace used this address to explore the way in which education is usually designed only to reinforce the prevailing reality, i.e. “world order,” and not so much about teaching a young person to think. Wallace encouraged his audience to consider the value of “thinking about one’s thinking” and that failure to do so would be risking spending one’s life as a cog in the machine-like grid-work of a pre-existing socio-cultural matrix.

Wallace knew that meta-cognition was a necessary dimension of human consciousness without which one would be subject to manipulation by the whims and fancies of everyday human discourse, in modern times certainly including the media.  Without maturity in thought one is inclined to be readily influenced by manipulation, susceptible to a demagogue who knows that many people will believe anything if they hear it frequently enough. The demagogue does not to need intrinsic value to what he is purveying in his speeches, he only needs to have some lesser-value…maybe only a self-serving one…as he realizes it will find currency in many minds if they hear it repeatedly and with great fervor.

To state an obvious truth, thinking is a good thing.  To be “human” we must be capable of at least a rudimentary capacity to think and therefore engage in the world.  Without critical thinking to some minimal degree, we will be in the position that Emily Dickinson described as, “a mind to near itself to see distinctly.”  In that event, we will not be actually thinking but will be passively “thought” by a prevailing vein of thought we have found comfortable, living out the prediction of W. H. Auden, “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.”

Here is an excerpt from the Wallace address:

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

I’m Hearing, “That Giant Sucking Sound” This Morning!

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Step outside this morning and, if you listen carefully, you will hear that “giant sucking sound” of Trumpism and its abysmal ugliness returning to the void from which it emerged.  That experience, which inspired Edvard Munch to paint “The Scream” is a human tragedy. Donnie is just a little boy like I am, fumbling about on the “granite skirt” (W. H. Auden) of this lovely little speck of cosmic dust.  But, in his early childhood his soul suffered irreparable damage, leaving him without the ability to “play well with others” on the beautiful playground that we call home. He can’t handle the anguish of “I, too, will pass” as in the famous advice of an African-American radical from the 1960’s, “This too shall pass.” (I can’t remember his name.”)  I take hope in the astute wisdom of Voltaire, as the day breaks here in Taos, New Mexico, “Gentlemen, tend your own garden; or as” Eckhart Tolle put it more recently, “Be Here Now.”

A Further Sojourn Into Hannah Arendt’s Prophetic Work

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I continue to explore the work of Hannah Arendt from which I shared in in recent posts.  And, from this blog-o-sphere that I participate in I have received nice feedback as well from friends I know in real-time.  Arendt’s work details how the absence of critical thinking will leave one mired down in the unacknowledged recesses of the mind and heart.  This venture into the heart’s machinations is disillusioning and frightening. Arendt offers us a powerful exploration of totalitarianism and its impact, individually and collectively on critical thinking. Without it a mind-set emerges and marches on, grim faced and determined to cling to preconceptions and biases that harm themselves and others, lacking any “interior dialogue” or self-talk.

In my morning sojourn through the cyber world today, I discovered related wisdom that I would like to share.  The first is from Gene W. Marshall in his book “Jacob’s Dream,” in which he writes from what I would describe as a post-modern view of Holy Writ:

Spirit freedom is not the same thing as the so-called free will that is often written about. The ego (as I have defined it) has free will but the ego’s definition of free will is limited by the ego’s definition of itself.  The ego is a construction of the human mind.  This construction may allow for the presence of some elements of our essential Freedom.  But because it is a human construction, the ego also restricts the full expression of our Spirit Freedom. (As I noted in last week’s blog, “We want only what we want.” and cannot see beyond our narcissistic view of the world. “The world is my oyster”!)

Here, Mr. Marshall’s thought leads us directly into the abyss that I shared from Arendt’s observations about Hitler and totalitarianism.  My vein of thought was very convoluted and even involuted as I tried to put into words that which cannot be put into words. This effort can take us into a murky world which is very “Zen like,” a state of being which I used to formulate in terms of “the working of the Holy Spirit.” And this biblical formulation still has merit for me.  The Apostle Paul described this process as the “Spirit” furrowing into the depths of our heart where we can “discern the thoughts and intents” of our heart, individually and collectively. (I recall a note by Rumi pointing this truth out in 13th century Iran, “Out beyond the distinctions of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.”)

In the on-line journal, “The Mind Matters” I also discovered this morning a paragraph from Andre Gorz that is relevant:

For society is no longer to be found where it institutionally proclaims its existence…Society now only exists in the interstices of the system, where new relations and new solidarities are being worked out and are creating, in their turn, new public spaces in the struggle against the mega-machine and its ravages; it exists only where individuals assume the autonomy to which the disintegration of traditional bonds and the bankruptcy of received interpretations condemn them and where they take upon themselves the task of inventing, starting out from their own selves, the values, goals and social relations which can become the seeds of a future society.”

Gorz, who was a Marxist philosopher, captured the dynamic dimension of a social body and described bringing it to life, paralleling the process of a“human body”…an individual… self-reflect ing itself into “coming to life.” His term, the “interstices of the system” in sociological thought parallels our own individual heart in which components are roiling about in an effort to come to grips with our interior life, aka those “thoughts and intents of the heart’ that the Apostle Paul wrote about. This process can produce “life”, aka “Life” that is beyond the pale of the perfunctory life that our world offered us as a child. This makes me want to scrutinize further the bromide from my youth, “being born again.””

I know that my thoughts here are again convoluted and involuted.  I am trying to summarize that life is more than we know it to be.  I am more than I “think” that I am and I live in a world which is more than it “thinks” it is.  I am exploring a dimension of life that is mysterious and incomprehensible.  I can never “figger it out,” I can only pay attention to what is going on in my heart and what is “going on” out there as I “chop wood and carry water” for another day. Presently, I can only “pay attention” to the glory of a beautiful doggie lying here beside me, the cup of coffee I’m sipping, and the crackling of the fire in the wood stove. Shortly, the morning will begin to dawn and I will saunter outside into the cool of the morning air, pay homage to the plants and flowers that are thriving, and bow before the majestic tapestry of morning stars that linger before disappearing for another day. One poet described this as the mystery before which we can only, “glory, bow, and tremble.”

 

The Prophet Pogo is Speaking to Us!

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I’ve been banished to my “penalty box,” which is the sunroom of our house.  My precious doggie Petey has been banished also, and he is actually the reason for this “banishment.” An harpsichord tuner is arriving shortly and he will need quiet to pay his professionally keen “listening” skills to the tuning of this lovely instrument.  Petey would not permit this, having so much to say to any stranger with his raucous voice. And after all, this “penalty box” is one of my favorite places to set and watch the spring morning unfold, with Petey and I exploring philosophical intricacies!

“Limits” is on my mind so often with this pandemic that besets us.  And even this visit from the tuner brought this to mind when my wife reminded me, “gloves and face mask” when he arrives. This same precaution is relevant anywhere I go, even to Wal Mart where I patiently wait in line with others in queue to “get stuff.” And even there, the queue will be donned with the same PPE I now have at my side.

Having a religious upbringing, of which I’m so proud, my mind goes biblical at times like this. The gods are speaking to us collectively and sternly telling us, “Limits!” (But I prefer the simple term “God” even though I occasionally I will refer to them with the plural pronoun.) Any people will get wayward here and there and will need a lesson like this, painful and deadly thought it might be.  This god-sent “pestilence” is a message from “On High” that we need to look at ourselves closely…and I don’t mean look at “them” more closely unless we look at ourselves with equal intensity.  In the words of the prophet Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

I just watched a promo on TV about History Channel’s new three-part movie about U.S. Grant.  The narrator pointed out that when Lee surrendered to him at Appomattox in April, 1864, it was a solemn occasion.  Grant did not “rub it in” to the vanquished South and his opposing general, U.S. Lee. There was no taunting or jeering as the diplomatic graciousness of Abraham Lincoln had filtered down to Grant and his troops. It was a grievous occasion and Grant knew that merriment from him or his troops was not called for.  I am reminded of a similar moment of graciousness to a defeated foe in the Spanish-American War of 1899 as a U.S. ship had blown a Spanish ship out of the water.  The American troops broke into raucous cheer, happy to see their hard and dangerous work had been successful as the Spanish ship, the Vizcaya, went down in flames.  The captain of the American ship, John Woodward Philip, chided his cheering troops with these famous words, “Don’t cheer boys.  The poor devils are dying.”

Our history offers us many examples of graciousness and respect in moments when our leaders could have responded differently. The humility needed in the moment requires deep-seated respect for boundaries, for the “other” even when our hearts are bursting with “the thrill of victory.” Those two events in our history reveal vividly the emotional/spiritual courage of leadership in a moment of crisis.  These men had boundaries.  I even remember a similar humility in the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1969 when, devastated with shame and humiliation he solemnly and graciously stepped into that helicopter, turned around and waved good-by , allowing Gerald Ford to take his place. Nixon was a broken man as our government had stepped in and firmly set a limit for that very fragile man, telling him, “That’s enough.”  May our leaders always be able to muster up the courage and demonstrate the dignity that is required of all leaders.

This is a moment in the history of mankind when we can dare to tell ourselves, “It is not just about me/”

Here I Elaborate Further on Recent Post About Hannah Arendt…

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My last post was dense, convoluted, and “self-reflection” running amok.  That is ok as it was “me” and I shared from this “me” that has helped me stumble through “mite near” seven decades of life. But two days later, I’d like to simplify things…once again, “a mite”…and kick around for a moment “internal dialogue.”

Hannah Arendt described Adolph Eichman as totally bereft of this human quality, not able to stand apart from the mausoleum of thought that he was.  This character flaw of his was symptomatic of the Third Reich which Arendt, in assessing Eichman, described as “the banality of evil.”  This banality is what happens when we are so immersed in our cognitive grasp of the world that we disallow the possibility of other humans having a “cognitive grasp” of their own which deserves respect.

This internal dialogue is the capacity to have a vein of “self-talk” in our heart which allows us to occasionally pause, look at some of the things we are most certain of and ask ourselves, “Hmm.  Maybe this “rock of Gibraltar” in my consciousness merits another look-see.”

There are so many examples in life today of this malady, but I want to put on the table a trivial anecdote from decades ago.  A news clip in the mid-seventies described a man in Dallas, Texas who became so frustrated and angry when his Cowboys football team lost a game that he grabbed his shot gun and blew out the TV screen. This must have stunned his neighbors as a gun shot next door led them to calling the police. I love sports myself and the Dallas Cowboys were, and still are, my favorite team.  I have suffered many disappointments with them over the decades as too often I’ve suffered the ignominy of watching them get beaten.  BUT, I’ve never been THAT upset! That poor bloke, demonstrated what it is to be “a brain stem with arms and legs,” allowing his seat of emotions to overwhelm him and suspend judgement.  He acted without the presence of the “pauser reason”  that Shakespeare has given us. The Grace of God has equipped most of us with this discretion and we are able to check ourselves throughout the day and avoid “acting out” like that.  Without this taken-for- granted contrivance in our heart, we too would that “brain stems without arms and legs” and catastrophe would unfold.

The complicated machinations of the human heart that I wrote about two days ago can be simplified with Arendt’s notion of, “internal dialogue.”  It is this human quality that permits us to reduce that cognitive/emotional tumult with an automatic filter, of “common sense.”  Without this “common sense” that most of us comply with routinely we will wreak havoc on our world.  Only if  we happen to live in a world, or even a little corner of a world that has also suspended common sense and shut down this “internal dialogue,” we can get by with it.

“Lord, in your infinite Grace, help us.”