Some quotations to remember

Some quotations to remember and consider as relating to a 'whole idea', and how it was 'discovered' as it was revealed. It is evidence there is a way to communicate with 'man' from another 'world' outside of 'normal' experience. The remind me that events in Time may seem to be linear, but in the process of life that's not possible. These quotations help but do not explain the processes of mind, how attention is guided, held almost captive and how information grows, how understanding changes. Some of these quotations point to but do not explain mental processes that operate mechanically but efficiently in a visible way on material world content that is unique to every individual.

A process of 'abstraction' is what I hope to explain. The word 'abstraction' describes the process of finding and lifting out of embeddedness the information relevant to the idea, which was itself abstracted from embeddedness in two books I read when I was a young woman. .

This paragraph is abstracted from "War In Heaven" by Charles Williams fictional book to make a point about a function of mind that can be thought about as the 'abstracting sense'. It's a kind of mental highlighter. Read the paragraph through ignoring the underlined words. Then read only the underlined words that have been abstracted out. This is an accurate description of the process itself, the pattern itself and oddly, it's the interaction of opposites to create a fact, a truth.

"When Mr. Batesby had spoken that morning it had seemed as if two streams of things actual events and his own meditations had flowed gently together; as if not he but Life were solving the problem in the natural process of the world. He reminded himself now that such a simplicity was unlikely; explanations did not lucidly arise from mere accidents and present themselves as all but an ordered whole."

And always remember: "The philosopher is usually interested in a central idea that evolves over a long period of time, which may never be successfully completed and formulated into words , one that may appear to be mysterious and beyond scientific validation." Jean Piaget

This is a precise description of the process of life hidden behind the shadow of ordinary 'rational' experience that 'abstracts out' certain unique content, particular to the life of that individual: The underlined words describe the process, which is really not different I believe than the process authors use to create a bibliography. The author has read many books but only certain content 'registered' or fitted into the authors' needs. In this case the words: 'actual events and his own meditations flow gently together', is a description of the process of assembling the 'idea' that I became aware of in observing what was going on in my mind, since it was a visible process also, and distinctly separate from what was outside of my eyes and body, for several years anyway. Arthur Koestler uses different words in his nonfictional book, The Roots of Coincidence but he writes about the same idea:

"There exists a type of phenomenon even more mysterious than telepathy or precognition which has puzzled man since the dawn of mythology: the seemingly accidental meeting of two unrelated causal chains in a coincidental event which appears both highly improbable and highly significant."

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Plato , Education of the Philosopher Kings, Sophia Project

I quite admit the difficulty of believing that in every man there is an eye of the soul which when by other pursuits (is) lost and dimmed, is (however) by these (the study of arithmetic/geometry) purified and illumined; and is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen (Is more worthy of development than all the bodily senses..another translation from a different author. ) Now there are two classes of persons: one class of those who will agree with you and will take your words as a revelation; another class to whom they will be utterly unmeaning, and who will naturally deem them to be idle tales, for they see no sort of profit which is to be obtained from them. And therefore you had better decide at once with which of the two you are proposing to argue.

Plato , Education of the Philosopher Kings, Sophia Project

The following paragraph seems to me to be the same idea, written by another person 1600 years later in Time: Emanuel Swedenborgs' main ideas centered around 'hidden symbolic content, representational in form', through the literal sense, in the Bible. His term 'double thought' was in the first quotation I read from his writings, and because he wrote 66,000 pages, THAT is an example of 'coincidence' of a very high order. It was in Wilson Van Dusen's book, The Presence Of Other Worlds.

FROM Arcana Coelestia 9407 p. 4: [4] But a person who is unable to think on a higher level of understanding, that is, on a level altogether above material things, cannot grasp any of this, not even the idea that it is possible for a sense to exist in the Word other than the one perceived in the letter. If that person is told that the letter holds within itself a spiritual sense which has to do with truth, and that this in turn holds within itself a celestial sense which has to do with good, and also that these senses shine through the literal sense, he will be taken aback at first, then dismiss the idea as nonsense, and finally ridicule it. Actual experience has shown me that this is what people are like in the Christian world at the present day, especially the learned, and that those who reason against that truth boast of being wiser than those who uphold it. Yet the learning in earliest times, which were called golden and silver ages, had consisted in speaking and in writing in ways in which no attention was be paid to the literal meaning other than to enable hidden wisdom to shine through it, as becomes perfectly clear from the oldest books, including those by gentile authors, as well as from fragments in their languages. For their knowledge was primarily the knowledge of correspondences and the knowledge of representations, which forms of knowledge at the present day are some of those which have been lost.

C. G. Jung, 1934:

The great events of world history are at bottom profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history. Here alone do the great transformations first take place and the whole future, the whole history of the world ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources: in individuals. In our most private and subjective lives we are not only the passive witness of our age and its suffers but also it’s makers. We make our epoch.

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From The Book of the Soul: The Bible, Rev. Goldsack, 1911

"So that we may conclude that history in its widest sense would be employed as the vehicle of Revlation.' Terms, words, things already known to prophet or scribe would be wisely, deliberately selected by God and put by God into the preachers' mouth and onto the paper through the scribes' pen and thus a Divine parable would be produced. The outward form and language drawn from the human mind: the inward thought and meaning from the mind of God. I say even so do we teach and educate our children and each other. From the known to the unknown: by the concrete to the abstract: through the natural to the spiritual. And therefore in making a Revelation to man, God would use and could use only the language already available. But God would use it, not to tell us about any historical person or event or subject; but to inform us concerning Himself, His nature, the human soul and concerning the connection and the relationship between Himself and humanitythe prime and constant fact of our existence."

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C. G. Jung: writing about 'patterns' although he named them 'archetypes', energized and 'affective' patterns that arose in Time. . I believe a pattern has to be named a pattern, and it's mechanical operation ness consciously understood.

"There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will, or else produces a conflict of pathological dimensions, that is to say, a neurosis."

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Emerson, from his essay The Oversoul: I wish I could describe what happened to me as I read these words for the first time, probably in 1985 or thereabouts.

The things that are really for thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. Let your feet run, but your mind need not. ……….O, believe, as thou livest, that every sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest to hear, will vibrate on thine ear! Every proverb, every book, every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall surely come home through open or winding passages. Every friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one.

….So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies, which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and learning, as the ancient said, that "its beauty is immense," man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart….Emerson, The Oversoul

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Myrtle Reed: The Weaver of Dreams 1909 This was the first experience I had in which reading words in a book caused a body response that I could not name, nor see a reason for happening when I read them for the first time in a book. Fifteen years later I realized they described a situation I was just beginning to experience, a 'bond'with another person, and that person alreadu had a 'bond' of sorts with the contents of written history. History as I had to discover and live through myself is his story. There is no female content in history but I didn't suspect that when I read the book. The first sentence was really a statement to me, being 'said' to me but I could not have recognized it. What happened for years in my daily life was somewhat similar, and it seemed the planet itself explained much that I didn't understand because I knew so little about 'psychiatry', or much of anything else from 'books' and education.

From The Weaver of Dreams on page 175 by Myrtle Reed,. It's a fictional book that I read in in the early 1980's. It was written when C. G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, P. D. Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, quantum physicists were 'discovering' what was implied by the discoveries of non-Euclidean geometries, i.e. that the physical world is maintained by and derived by 'another level' of energy.

In this paragraph she formulates an idea about 'man' that exceeds anything authored by any of the preceding masculine 'discovers'!

`"I don't believe you can live with other people and not absorb something from their ways of thinking and manner of expressing themselves. Moreover Aunt Cynthia has a very penetrating personality."

"All strong natures have." Chandler answered. "Some people are shaped wholly by their environment, as plastic material conforms to the receptacle in which it is placed. Others mould their environment to meet the demands of individuality."

"Can it be done?" asked Judith, thoughtfully.

"Always, if one is strong enough. From mysterious sources we draw to ourselves that which we require or expect. If a tree may lift into it's trunk the materials for sap and fibre, and if the moon may control the tides why should not thought which is the most wonderful and powerful of forces bring that which we require or expect into one's daily life, if not the absolute control of circumstances."

Reading the words again: "Always, if one is strong enough. From mysterious sources we draw to ourselves that which we require or expect. If a tree may lift into it's trunk the materials for sap and fibre, and if the moon may control the tides why should not thought which is the most wonderful and powerful of forces bring that which we require or expect into one's daily life, if not the absolute control of circumstances."

The words 'require' and 'expect' are of very great significance, because the 'expectations' of the 'observer' have recently been identified as important, in regards to scientific experiments. Theodore Reik's statement that "No studies have been done about the effects of one person's unconsciousness on another."

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An essay on the Internet: Hermeneutics, Semiotics and Liminality

"By a playful thinking that is more persuasive than the rigor of science," Heidegger tells us, the Greek words for interpreting and interpretation—hermeneuein, hermeneiacan be traced back to the god Hermes.¹ However questionable the etymological connection between Hermes and hermeneuein may be, hermeneutics, as the art of understanding and of textual exegesis, does stand under the sign of Hermes. Hermes is messenger who brings the word from Zeus (God); thus, the early modern use of the term hermeneutics was in relation to methods of interpreting holy scripture. An interpreter brought to mortals the message from God. Although the usage was broadened in the eighteenth and nineteenth century to take in methods of understanding and explicating both sacred and secular texts from antiquity, the term "hermeneutics" continued to suggest an interpretation which discloses something hidden from ordinary understanding and mysterious. Ancient texts are, for moderns, doubly alien: they are ancient and they are in another language. Their interpreter, poring over a text in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin, cannot fail to convey the impression that he has access to a body of knowledge from elsewhere, is a bridge to somewhere else, he is a mediator between a mysterious other world and the clean, well-lighted intelligible world in which we live and move and 'have our being.

Hermes is just such a mediator. He is the messenger between Zeus and mortals, also between Zeus and the underworld and between the underworld and mortals. Hermes crosses these ontological thresholds with ease. A notorious thief, according to legend, he crosses the threshold of legality without a qualm. "Marshal of dreams," he mediates between waking and dreaming, day and night. Wearer of a cap of invisibility, he can become invisible or visible at will. Master of nighttricks, he can cover himself with night. Master of sleep, he can wake the sleeping or put the waking to sleep. Liminality or marginality is his very essence.

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"It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that like most men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics, science." Anaïs Nin, The FourChambered Heart

excerpt from: "The Politics of Experience" by R.D.Laing, chapter 3

The Mystification of Experience

It is not enough to destroy one's own and other people's experience. One must overlay this devastation by a false consciousness inured, as Marcuse puts it, to its own falsity.

Exploitation must not be seen as such. It must be seen as benevolence. Persecution preferably should not need to be invalidated as the figment of a paranoid imagination; it should be experienced as kindness. Marx described mystification and showed its function in his day. Orwell's time is already with us. The colonists not only mystify the natives, in the wasy that Fanon so clearly shows, they have to mystify themselves. We in Europe and North America are the colonists, and in order to sustain our amazing images of ourselves as God's gift to the vast majority of the starving human species, we have to interiorize our violence upon ourselves and our children and to employ the rhetoric of morality to describe this process.

In order to rationalize our industrialmilitary complex, we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s, if possible.

From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentiethcentury mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a halfcrazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.

Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other's own existence or destiny.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.

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~John Nash(Russell Crowe), A Beautiful Mind.

" I've always believed in numbers. In the equations and logics that lead to reason. But after a lifetime of such pursuits, I ask, what truly is logic? Who decides reason? My quest has taken me through physical, the metaphysical, the delusional, and back. And I have made the most important discovery of my career.

The most important discovery of my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love, that any logical reasons can be found."

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Ernst Cassirer, Mythic Consciousness page 235

Thus far we have attempted in line with the general task of the philosophy of Symbolic Forms to represent myth as a unitary energy of the human spirit: a selfcontained form of interpretation which asserts itself amid all the diversity of the objective material it presents. From this standpoint we have attempted to disclose the objective categories of mythical thinking—not as though we were dealing with rigid schemata of the spirit, fixed once and for all, but with a view to finding definite original trends of formation. Behind the vast abundance of mythical forms we have thus sought to lay bare a unitary formative power and the laws according to which this power operates. But myth would be no truly spiritual form if its unity signified merely a simplicity without contradictions. Its basic form does not unfold and imprint itself on new motifs and figures in the manner of a simple natural process; its development is not the tranquil growth of a seed which was present and ready made from the very first, which merely requires certain definite outward conditions in order to unfold and make itself manifest. The separate stages of its development do not simply follow but rather confront one another often in sharp opposition. The progress of myth does not mean merely that certain basic traits, certain spiritual determinations of earlier stages are developed and completed but also that they are negated and totally eradicated. And this dialectic can be shown not only in the transformation of the contents of the mythical consciousness but in its dominant "inner form." It seizes upon the function of mythical formation as such and transforms it from within. This function can operate only by continuously producing new form—objective expressions of the inner and outwards universe as it presents itself to the eye which the law that governs it becomes a problem. This may seem strange at first glance for we do not usually give the naïve mythical consciousness credit for such a change of attitude.

And indeed we have not to do with an act of conscious theoretical reflection, in which myth apprehends itself and in which it turns against its own foundations and presuppositions. Even in this turn the mythical consciousness remains within itself. It does not move out of its sphere or pass into a
totally different "principle" but in completing its own cycle it ends by breaking through it. This fulfillment which is at the same time a transcendence, results from the relation of myth toward its own image world. Myth can manifest itself only in this image world; as the mythical consciousness advances it comes to see this manifestation as something "outside" which is not wholly adequate to its own drive for expression.

Here lies the basis of the conflict which becomes gradually sharper which creates a cleavage within the mythical consciousness and yet in this very cleavage discloses the ultimate depths of myth. The positivistic philosophy of history and culture as formulated especially by Comte assumes a hierarchy of cultural development by which mankind gradually rises from the primitive phases of consciousness.

The goal of myth and religion must here be sought outside themselves in a fundamentally different sphere. But then it becomes impossible to apprehend the true nature and the purely inward dynamic of the mythicalreligious spirit. This dynamic is truly disclosed only if it can be shown that myth and religion have within them their own source of motion, that from their beginnings down to their supreme productions they are determined by their own motives and fed from their own wellsprings. Even where they pass far beyond these first beginnings they do not abandon their native spiritual soil. Their positions do not suddenly and immediately shift into negations; rather it can be shown that every step they take even in their own sphere, bears as it were a two fold omen. To the continuous building up of the mythical world there corresponds a continuous drive to surpass it but in such a way that both the position and the negation belong to the form of the mythical –religions consciousness itself and in it join to constitutes a single indivisible act. The process of destruction proves on closer scrutiny to be a process of self assertion; conversely the later can only be effected on the basis of the former and it is only in their permanent cooperation that the two together produce the true essence and meaning of mythicalreligious form.

In the development of linguistic forms we differentiated three stages which we designated as those of mimetic, analogical and symbolic expression.

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The Roots of Bachs' Art Some artists are subjective, some objective. The art of the former has its source in their personality; their work is almost independent of the epoch in which they live. A law unto themselves, they place themselves in opposition to their epoch and originate new forms for the expression of their ideas. Of this type was Richard Wagner. Bach belongs to the order of objective artists. they are wholly of their own time and work only with the forms and the ideas that their time proffers them. They exercise no criticism upon the media of artistic expression that they find lying ready to their hand, and feel no inner compulsion to open out new paths. Their art not coming soley from the stimulus of their outer experience, we need not seek the roots of their work in the fortunes of its creator. In them the artistic personality exists independently of the human, the latter remaining in the background as if it were something almost accidental. Bach's works would have been the same even if this existence had run quite another course. Did we know more of his life than is now the case and were we in possession of all the letters he had ever written, we should still be not better informed as to the inward sources of his works than we are now. The art of the objective artist is not impersonal but superpersonal. It is as if he felt only one impulse to express again what he already finds in existence but to express it definitively in unique perfections. it is not he who lives, it is the spirit of the time that lives in him. NB:(IT IS NOT HE WHO LIVES, IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE TIME THAT LIVES IN HIM.) All the artistic endeavors, desires, creations, aspirations and errors of his own and of previous generations are concentrated and worked out to their conclusions in him. NB; (ALL THE ARTISITC ENDEAVORS, DESIRES, CREATIONS, ASPIRATIONS AND ERRORS OF HIS OWN AND OF PREVIOUS GENERATIONS ARE CONCENTRATED AND WORKED OUT TO THEIR CONCLUSIONS IN HIM.) In this respect the greatest German musician has his analogue only in the greatest of German philosophers. Kant's work has the same impersonal character. He is merely the brain in which the philosophical ideas and problems of his day come to fruition. NB: (HE IS MERELY THE BRAIN IN WHICH THE PHLOSOPHICAL IDEAS AND PROBLEMS OF HIS DAY COME TO FRUITION.) Moreover he uses unconcernedly the scholastic forms and terminology of the time, just as Bach took up the musical forms offered to him by his epoch without examining them. Bach indeed is clearly not a single but a universal personality. He profited by the musical development of three of four generations. When we pursue the history of this family, which occupies;IRS so unique a position in the art life of Germany, we must have the feeling that everything that is happening there must culminate in something consummate. We feel it to be a matter of course that some day a Bach shall come in whom all those other Bach's shall find a posthumous existence, one in whom the fragment of German Music that has been embodied in this family shall find its' completion. Johann Sebastian Bachto speak the language of Kant, is a historical postulate.

888888888888888888888 The Future Of Man de Chardin A Note on Progress The conflict dates from the day when one man, flying in the face of appearance, perceived that the forces of nature are no more unalterably fixed in their orbits than the stars themselves, but that their serene arrangement around us depicts the flow if a tremendous tidethe day on which a first voice rang out, crying to Mankind peacefully slumbering on the raft of Earth: "We are moving! We are going forward!" It is a pleasant and dramatic spectacle that of Mankind divided to its very depths into two irrevocably opposed campsone looking towards the horizon and proclaiming with all its' newfound faith: "We are moving", and the other without shifting its positions, obstinately maintaining, "Nothing Changes. We are not Moving at all." These latter, the "immobilists", though they lack passion, Immobility has never inspired anyone with enthusiasm!, have commonsense on their side, habit of thought, inertia pessimism and also to some extent, morality and religion. nothing, they argue appears to have changed since man began to hand down the memory of the past, not the undulations of the earth, or the forms of life, or the genius of Man or even his goodness. Thus far practical experimentation has failed to modify the fundamental characteristic of even the most humble plant. Human suffering, vice and war, although they may momentarily abate, recur from age to age with an increasing virulence. even the striving after progress contributes to the sum of evil: to effect change is to undermine the painfully established traditional order whereby the distress of living creature reduced to a minimum. What innovator has not retapped the springs of blood and tears? for the sake of human tranquility, in the name of Fact, and in the defense of the sacred Established Order, the immobilists forbid the earth to move. Nothing changes, they say or can change. The raft must drift purposelessly on a shoreless sea. But the other half of mankind, startled by the lookouts cry has left the huddle where the rest of the crew sit with their heads together telling time honored tales. Gazing out over th dark sea, they study for themselves the lapping of waters long the hull of the craft that bears them, breath the scents born to them on the breeze, gaze at the shadows cast from pole to pole by a changeless eternity. And for these all things, while remaining separately the same the the ripple of water, the scent of the air, the lights in the sky become linked together and acquire a new sense: the fixed and random Universe is seen to move. No one who has seen this vision can be restrained from guarding and proclaiming it. To testify to my Faith in it, and to show reasons, is my purpose here.

*****************I hope these two abstractions about Bach and Chardin's thought will begin to operate so that a similar understanding of the 'common denominators' of the two books becomes available. The 'literal sense' as I refer to it is quite different than you understand it, I don't know if I could explain it except that it may not be operative in you at this time, then again it may be what causes you to experience 'highlighted moments, events, etc'. The Eastern way of speaking of 'feminine principles' and 'masculine principles' was not literally about males and females, but about attributes, qualities, aspects, etc, I believe. At a point in Time, a chrystalization apparently rendered them into categories of 'weak/strong' and 'me/not me'. I did not know anything about Oriental philosophies (except what I'd read in Men Who Walked With God, just before I chanced to read The Spirit of the Valley by Suki Colegrave. The history of the world manifests certain points of very great changes, indirectly visible but Chardin knew the greatest change was beginning in his time, when so many great authors wrote about what they were experiencing.