Reminder: This isn’t the live blog

I actually forget, for days on end, that this blog continues to sit here in cyberspace, and I only remembered because an old friend stumbled upon it and dropped me a note.

So, this is a reminder: This blog has a new site, and a ton of new content, within my website.

The site: www.hologrambooks.com.

The blog:www.hologrambooks.com/hologrambooksblog.

If the hypertext links don’t work for you, highlight them, copy (CTL-C), and paste them (CTL-V) onto your address window. That should work. Once you’re there, bookmark the site to make it easy on yourself next time.

I will keep this site active for a while longer, if only so that people can find out where it went, but get into the habit now of accessing the hologrambooks blog. The new site has things on it that this one doesn’t, for (except for reminders such as this one) I post to it, not to this one.

See you there.

 

Going out on a limb, a long time ago

In 1987 I was an Associate Editor of the Virgninan-Pilot. When I returned from doing the first Higher Self Seminary (for reasons I describe in my book Muddy Tracks) I wrote this piece of the Sunday Commentary section. This was at a time when favorable articles about such things did not appear in mainstream newspapers. But I told it as I saw it.

In the spirit:
Shirley MacLaine isn’t the only one out on that limb

by Frank DeMarco

I was among those who paid $300 to attend Shirley MacLaine’s two-day seminar in Virginia Beach on “Connecting with the higher self” last weekend. Let me go out on a limb a bit myself: That weekend already has changed my life.
I know, from talking to others, that I was not the only person there who had questioned his own judgment for plunking down $300 to attend. It left many wondering, as the session started, if we had been ripped off. Someone questioned Shirley MacLaine about it, and she said she had struggled with the question of money and had finally set the fee so high in order, as she put it, to eliminate those who “might want to have a spiritual tea party with a celebrity” after reading her book or seeing her recent TV special, “Out on a limb.”
Correct decision. Those who came despite the fee were those who had a strong inner need to be there.
I deal first with the seemingly peripheral issue of money because when I tell someone I attended, the first (usually incredulous) response I get is: “You paid $300?” Which is to say” “You were that gullible?” Well, yes, we were tilling to risk being that gullible. We went not in blind sleep-walking assurance, but in confidence mixed with hope — and hope implies doubt. But doubt was removed — for me at least — before we trooped out again at the first intermission.

 

Who Would Jesus Vote For?

Who Would Jesus Vote For?

By John W. Whitehead
July 14, 2008

I’ve never been a fan of politics. By its very nature, politics is inclined toward corruption, deception and the accumulation of power. So I am always leery of religious individuals, Christians in particular, who turn presidential elections into a test of one’s religiosity.

Until recently, it has generally been assumed that God-fearing Christians vote Republican (Christians counted for more than 20 percent of voters in 2004). Yet to the consternation of those on the Right, that assumption is now being challenged by the emergence of a so-called Christian Left, led by activists such as Jim Wallis, editor of the progressive evangelical journal Sojourners, and by Barack Obama’s increasing popularity among younger Christian voters.

 

Dreams of a better world

This very interesting think-piece from the arch-druid came via a friend. If our age is characterized by any one trait, I’d say it’s mythic illiteracy.

 

Dreams of a better world

By John Michael Greer

Created Jul 17 2008 – 07:12

http://www.energybulletin.net/print/45939

As it launched the modern worldview on its trajectory, the intellectual revolution of the 18th century – the Enlightenment, as it’s usually called – passed on a legacy with profoundly mixed consequences for the future. Central to the Enlightenment ethos was the claim that myths were simply inaccurate claims about fact, and should be replaced by more accurate claims founded on reason and experiment. This seems like common sense to most people nowadays, but like most things labeled “common sense,” it begs more questions and conceals richer ironies than a casual glance is likely to reveal.

One of those ironies became central to a discussion sparked by last week’s Archdruid Report post, when a reader took issue with my characterization of progress as a myth. Like most people nowadays, he assumed that “myth” meant a story that isn’t true, and drew the usual distinction between myth and science – that is, between the cosmological narratives of other cultures, which don’t usually make experimentally testable claims about the natural world, and the cosmological narratives of ours, which does. It took, as it usually does, several exchanges before he realized that the popular definition of myth he was using is not the only game in town.

 

Lord Clark on our civilization

I well remember the series. Back in the early 1970s, I was living in Florida, working as an assistant audio-visual librarian for the Tampa-Hillsborough Public Library system. Somehow — can’t remember, now, it’s been so long — I found time to watch the ten-part television series “Civilization” by Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark. The shows were fascinating, a visual treat, an intellectual feast, an emotional turmoil. Some years later, as some second-hand book store or other, I found the transcripts of the series in book form. An old journal recorded these concluding sections of Lord Clark’s disturbingly prescient talks.

 

The vague intimations of D.H. Lawrence

When all you have is a hammer, they say, all the world looks like a nail. When all you have is a sure sense that “things aren’t right,” all you can do is cast about, hoping to find a way to make it right. If you cannot believe in that, you are reduced to trying at least to keep your own life on the rails, which is task enough for most of us! These two quotes from D.H. Lawrence, like the one from Hemingway that I posted a bit ago, seem to me to demonstrate the dead-end that western civilization came to in the 20th century. Naturally artists noticed it first, but you’d have to be pretty complacent, pretty unthinking, not to know it now. Lawrence wrote this two generations ago:

“Well!” he said at last. “I agree to anything. The world is a raving idiot, and no man can kill it, though I’ll do my best. But you’re right. We must rescue ourselves as best we can.”

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

 

Ouspensky on lying

“What is lying?

“As it is understood in ordinary language, lying means distorting or in some cases hiding the truth, or what people believe to be the truth. This lying plays a very important part in life, but there are much worse forms of lying, when people do not know that they lie. I said… that we cannot know the truth in our present state… How then can we lie?… We cannot know the truth, but we can pretend that we know. And this is lying. Lying fills all our life. People pretend that they know all sorts of things: about God, about the future life, about the universe, about everything, but in reality they do not know anything, even about themselves.”

P. D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution

 

Sri Aurobindo on the coming of a spiritual age

“The coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital, and physical existence of man, but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal of humanity, and attempt to effect it in themselves and lead others to it and to make it the recognized goal of the race. In proportion as they succeed and to the extent to which they carry their evolution, the yet unrealized potentiality which they represent will become an actual possibility of the future.”

Sri Aurobindo

 

Hemingway’s Puzzlement About the Soul

My recurring theme is that our culture, by turning its back on its spiritual roots, has lost contact with the reality of spiritual (that is, non-physical) life. In so doing, it has lost contact with reality, for how can you understand the meaning of things if you systematically disregard a significant portion of what exists? And how can you know who you yourself are, if you systematically discard millennia of tradition and scripture designed to teach that aspect of things?

In reaction to our culture’s downgrading of spiritual knowledge, some have turned to fundamentalism: blind belief. But this won’t do either. If you don’t know, you don’t know, and neither blind belief nor blind disbelief substitute for knowledge. And our culture is not teaching that knowledge, because it has forgotten where to find it.

In short, materialist civilization is lost, and those who are fated to live in it are lost too, no matter how intelligent, no matter how insightful, unless and until they free themselves from this delusion. As an example, I offer a long quotation from Hemingway’s posthumously published True at First Light, which was pieced together by his son Patrick.

 

Making the transition

This is a somewhat unusual post, for me, but it has its points of interest. It came to me via a friend, from the British paper (a very good one) The Guardian. Particularly note the website toward the end, http://www.transitiontowns.org/

NATURAL BORN SURVIVORS
By Harriet Green
The Guardian
May 2, 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/may/02/communities.fossilfuels/print

For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About
buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we
can safely survive the coming storm — famine, pestilence and a total
breakdown of society. I would wait for his lectures to finish, then return
to my own interests. I had no time for the end of civilisation. As an editor
on a glossy magazine until a few months ago, I was too busy. There was
always a new Anya Hindmarch bag to buy, or a George Clooney premiere to
attend.

But recently, I’ve wavered. Much of what he has been predicting has come
true: global economic meltdown, looming environmental disaster, a sharp rise
in oil and food prices that has already led to the rationing of rice in the
US, and riots in dozens of countries worldwide.

This week, the details got scarier. The UN warned of a global food crisis,
like a “silent tsunami”, while Opec predicts that oil, which broke through
$100 (£50) a barrel for the first time a few weeks ago, may soon top $200.

 

Two quotes from James Hilton

Years and years ago, I was entranced by James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. (It was to continue that story that I wrote my own novel Messenger.) It has seemed to me that much of the essence of that book can be deduced from these two quotations:

First, the high lama saying to Conway, “Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue.”

Second, the narrator saying of Conway, “… he was doomed, like millions, to flee from wisdom and be a hero.”

 

Lecompte de Nuoy on certain teachers

The history of humanity … evokes the picture of a creeping vine. If its prop is pulled up or broken, the plant creeps along the ground, unknowingly seeking a new support, another occasion to raise itself above the weeds, and as soon as it has found one it clings to it in an unconscious but untiring effort toward the light. It is sometimes mistaken; its choice may be bad; the branch it has adopted may be rotten; that is not its fault. The human flock obeys an obscure order: it must rise, and it cannot do so without a leader. Thank God, if there have been evil influences, they have been counteracted, on an average, by that of certain rare privileged men, comparable to the transitional animals who were in advance of their time. These men attained a higher stage of evolution, and had a great part to play, a high duty to fulfill, namely, to orient the march of humanity in the path which leads away from the animal. Strange to say, in spite of their handicaps, of the fact that the doctrine they taught was less pleasant and demanded sacrifice, it is they who gained the higher prestige in history, and their teachings outlasted and outshone all the others.

Lecompte de Nuoy, Human Destiny, p. 110-111

 

How to sing like a planet

Mark Morford is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle’s website SFGate. He’s often a little over-the-top but often entertaining and usually pretty right. This is from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/04/23/notes042308.DTL&type=printable

Scientists say the Earth is humming. Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music. Can you hear it?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and sex and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment, so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had no idea.

This is the kind of thing we forget.

 

Toynbee on society and spirituality

In human terms, how are we to describe… our own Western civilization, or any other of the 10 or 20 civilizations which we can count up on our fingers? In human terms, I should say that each of these civilizations is, while in action, a distinctive attempt at a single great common human experience, or, when it is seen in retrospect, after the action is over, it is a distinctive instance of a single great common human experience. The enterprise or experience is an effort to perform an act of creation. In each of these civilizations, mankind, I think, is trying to rise above mere humanity — above primitive humanity, that is, — toward some higher kind of spiritual life. One cannot depict the goal because it has never been reached, — or, rather, I should say that it has never been reached by any human society. It has, perhaps, been reached by individual men and women. At least, I can think of certain saints and sages…. But if there have been a few transfigured men and women, there has never been such a thing as a civilized society. Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. No known civilization has ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance.

Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial

 

Confucius on the foundations of the state

I saved this quotation in my journal many, many years ago. Every year that passes only proves the more how true it is.

Fear guiding what passes for policy in our national political circles leads us to put ever more reliance on the military, ever more resources into wars and the means of making wars, until we have become the danger, rather than the guardian against danger.

It is as if we have deliberately set out to reverse Confucius’ priorities.