Dyer and Garnes "Memories of Heaven"

Wayne Dyer's last book (written with Dee Garnes) “Memories of Heaven:Children's Astounding Recollections of the Time before They Came to Earth,” has so much behind it that I felt overwhelmed by the time I finished reading it this morning.

The authors explicitly built it around Wordsworth's Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, collecting thousands of anecdotes via their Facebook appeal for accounts of young (mostly under five) children's memories and visions of heaven. Dyer and Garnes then made a selection of those accounts, wrote them up and present them in this astonishing book.

We are all pretty much familiar with the main points of such accounts - the heavens of light and love, loved ones who have gone on, angels, choosing one's parents-to-be, etc. – and it would be easy to say as many do, “OK, we've heard this all before, there's no proof, it's all wishful thinking or fraud, it's all so simplistic and naive and childlike and dangerously unrealistic.”

I think it's as equally dishonest just to dismiss these accounts as it is to believe them uncritically. These children's reports may well be true and the materialistic scientist's view untrue.

The “a-ha,” the “click,” the “eureka,” that sense of opening and solution and release that comes with discovery, seems to be part of the scientist's experience as well as the non-scientist's experience. It's certainly one of the acid tests of when you've finally discerned what a dream is trying to tell you.

Dyer and Garnes like good quotes, from poets as well as scientists, and here are two of them from the book with which you may feel that “click:”

p.195, Albert Einstein:

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

p.198, William Blake:

      “The angel that presided o'er my birth

      Said 'Little creature, form'd of joy and mirth

      Go, love without the help of anything on Earth.”

Wayne Morse of Oregon

Senator Wayne Morse spoke the truth when it was needed, not just quietly coming around years later to say it, sheepishly, when it was safe to say it, and only when prodded, mincing words about it as much as possible.

Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon (1900-1974)

I once went to a speech he gave in the middle 1960's in which he said these words:

My grandchildren will be proud of me that I was one of only two people in the Senate who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

Ernest Gruening of Alaska was the other Senator who voted against it.

I see videos from time to time of the abuse Muhammad Ali took when he spoke out against that war, refused to participate in it, and lost his job and more for doing so.

I experienced the same kind of thing for telling the truth and refusing to participate in it: infinite abuse, subject to arrest every night I came home for years, wondering what the hell is wrong with everyone around me that they supported the horror with such superior fervor – I think you have to have lived it, experienced it yourself, in order to understand and to believe that it is even possible, never mind so very real.

It's been a long time since then – fifty years – and probably very few USA'ers remember Wayne Morse's name. But I remember his face when he said his grandchildren would be proud of him for voting against that resolution, against all those people posing as patriots around him. I can see his face as he said it, even now. Just to remember it brings that thrill of recognition of reality.

Grandma Moses Was Good with Snow

There is currently (21 Nov '15 through 21 Feb '16) an exhibition of her paintings and her needlework at the Dayton Art Institute, and seeing her delightful treatment of snow is still in my mind. There was a lot of old-time New England in her paintings that also went deeply with me.

There is a continually-running video at this exhibit of the Edward R. Murrow interview with her in 1955, during which you can see her painting snow into trees with pure delight. She was, by the way, 95-years old at the time of that interview and Murrow was 47 – twice his age – but she is far more youthful, alive, intelligent, exciting than Murrow. He sits there chain-smoking, unutterably sad, asking stupid questions while she is bright-eyed, full of fun, and painting snow with sprightly dabs into her trees.

But what struck me most at the exhibition was a stitch sampler done, not by Moses but by an 11-year-old girl named Elizabeth Sharpe, in 1809. There were several old samplers like that which the museum used to build context around Moses' needlework. Eizabeth Sharpe's piece had some faded samples of the letters of the alphabet and the following words:

By this piece of work you will see

The care my parents took of me.

When I'm dead and in the grave

This piece of work may you have.

I looked at that, came back to look at it twice again, and keep coming back to it in my mind as being right at the heart of the truly human life.