Predator Nation

There is a section near the end of Charles Ferguson's new book, Predator Nation, that rang a lot of bells for me. The section is entitled “The Ultimate Insult: The Financial Penalty for Being Decent.”

Ferguson's main theme in the book is the perpetration of financial crime by high-income, high-education people in the US and in this chapter he is speaking of a certain consequent damage this has done which is rarely discussed, at least in public. He says of decent people:

Often they go along with the system, but they hate themselves for it. They play the game to survive and feed their families, but they and society suffer for it. In America, the issue is rarely mentioned in public or in the media, but in my personal experience it is increasingly discussed in private conversation.

I have a lot of feel for what Ferguson is talking about here and it deserves far deeper and more extensive treatment than he gives it.

Just seeing someone mention it in a mainstream book was a bit shocking as well as heartening to me. In fact, just seeing anyone even mention the problem was shocking and heartening. A fundamental issue is involved and I have just assumed that people have read Thoreau ("You must get your living by loving") and so many other authors who have earnestly recognized it and struggled with the serious, primary reality of it.

My very first take on this “Ultimate Insult” section of the book was that “insult” is the very least part of it, if a part of it at all, although there is probably more to that than I have realized. But the damage it does to youth who are loving and trusting and decent and hopeful seems a far greater horror than any “insult.” It's amazing to me that people can bring children into the world, to have babies, in view of the horror of the situation. “How can I bring a child into such a world?”

And it's not just that “the worst people have risen to the top” and exploited the “decent:” they want to destroy the “decent,” too. There is a positive animus against the existence of the poor and decent.

Isaiah comes to mind now, Mother Julian of Norwich, and there are many others who have seen through it all and glimpsed the Promised Land. I suppose it is the problem of Job and the problem of theodicy, way way beyond me, and yet somehow just speaking of it with you feels like it has a clue to the solution!

Life Is Empty Without It

The first time I heard of Noam Chomsky was over forty-five years ago, during the Viet-Nam war, when he wrote articles in the New York Review of Books and other places that were courageous, informed and undeceived. His writings helped me to break through the insanity of those times.

But some of his writings in the subsequent years were difficult for me. I just didn't have the depth of understanding of linguistics to evaluate his contributions to that field nor the background reading in history to evaluate his socio-cultural critiques. He says things such as that the 1990's were probably the lowest point in the intellectual history of the world. I now think he is probably right in saying that, and in the other things he says, but it certainly took a lot of background preparation to get excited about such statements and have them ring true to me.

Here is just one video of many of Chomsky speaking that are available on YouTube. It rings true to me in every detail, and the detail about the people who have impressed him the most goes right to my soul.

Two Good Books on Life after Death

That old question of what happens to us after we die is pretty much always on my mind, especially as I get closer to the hour of my death. Most of my acquaintances seem to dismiss the question, however, saying that we have no evidence one way or the other and, further, it's useless even to spend time and effort on the question.

I suppose that one of the most complex and influential statements of their position was the work of Immanuel Kant, who even wrote a book (Dreams of a Spirit Seer)  early in his career against Emmanuel Swedenborg. The whole search is impossible and unnecessary, is the position.

And I suppose the simplest statement of the dismissal is “No one has ever come back from the dead so we will never know.”

The trouble with the dismissal of the question is that it contradicts the direct, first-hand experiences of many people who do come back from the dead, of people who have “Near-Death-Experiences” as well as the experiences of people like Swedenborg who visit with the dead.

The latest book I've read on the subject is Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death-Experience, by Pim van Lommel.  Van Lommel is a cardiologist well within the Enlightenment empirical science tradition who shows from that approach itself that there is evidence that we are conscious beyond death.

The book is comprehensive and I think van Lommel's main conclusion is irrefutable. But I personally enjoyed and placed more weight in a much “simpler” book, written in a completely “non-scientific” way by a father about the death experience of his child. That book is Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back.

 My first reaction to browsing the book in a bookstore was sceptical and I didn't buy it. But what I did read stuck in my mind so I went back a month later and bought it. It just rings true to me and is a lot more fun to read than van Lommel's book. I think both are excellent books but I think that the one which I will read a second or even third time will be the little boy's book.

One of my friends worked for most of his life in his family-owned funeral home business  and says that you have all kinds of experiences in that business that tell you of there being life after death.

Two of Life's Great Pleasures

I remember walking with my mother in her old age in New Hampshire, walking out to her clothesline with a basketful of freshly-washed laundry, and she saying "Hanging laundry out to dry in the fresh breeze is one of life's great pleasures." I am sure that she always thought as she hung out the laundry, of my father's building that clothes line for her many years ago.

The symbolism of washing one's clothes and letting the fresh air blow through them causes many reverberations in my soul.

Doing the mowing around my parents' place in New Hampshire was one of life's great pleasures for me. Mowing carries a great symbolism, too: of death and life and maintenance and renewal. The symbolism and scents and sounds and sights combine with the sheer facticity of the labor and the everlasting truth of Robert Frost's line, in one of his poems about mowing, that goes "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." Then there is the subtle but substantial sociality of it that he brings out in the sequel poem, "The Tuft of Flowers."

Mowing

by Robert Frost

   There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

   And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

   What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;

   Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

   Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—

   And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

   It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

   Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

   Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

   To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

   Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

   (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

   The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

    My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

My father, who had a lot of New Hampshire in him, once visited Frost's classic farm in Derry with me and said of it, "I may not understand Beethoven but I understand this."

 

Robert Frost's Farm in Derry, New Hampshire

The Tuft of Flowers
by Robert Frost

I went to turn the grass once after one

Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen

Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

As all must be,' I said within my heart,

Whether they work together or apart.'

But as I said it, swift there passed me by

On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night

Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,

As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,

And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared

Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,

Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

Whether they work together or apart.'

Communing With The Stars

It's 4:00 AM and I have just come in from communing with the stars. There are usually too many lights, too much cloud cover, or some other obstructions here in downtown Dayton for me to see the stars. But this morning they were clearly visible from hundreds of years ago when their lights started their journeys over here to Dayton.

I remember that I have looked out at them many times during the course of my life and feel connections to those past moments and to the other people whom I know to have viewed them in the past, especially my father. As Thoreau said, “The stars are the apices of what triangles!”

I am a little like the navigator of a submarine who every now and then has to come up and see the stars to get a true bearing on where he is and to make sure that his instruments are truly in tune.

Buckminster Fuller often noted that the light from the stars takes a long time to reach Earth, often hundreds of years, depending on how far away each star is, and therefore what we see and live at any instant on Earth is a “universe of non-simultaneous overlapping events.” All this is way beyond me and I have the sense that time and space are not what I usually take them to be.

What I do clearly sense is an eternal communion with loved ones regardless of place or time.

"The Wisdom of Your Dreams," by Jeremy Taylor

Jeremy Taylor published in 2009 an updated and expanded edition of his classic work on dreams entitled The Wisdom of Your Dreams. It has an excellent, spare, annotated bibliography and a few emphases that are new to me.

One of these emphases is on a technique he calls the ''If it were my dream...” technique. Taylor likes to work on dreams with small groups (about seven people) in which the individuals each relate a dream and then each of the other members of the group say “If this were my own dream, it would mean this or that.” It apparently works well and avoids the danger of having another person violate the dream's true points. Taylor repeats many times that the only true test of whether or not you've got the correct interpretations of a dream is if you yourself have an “aha” experience, if they “click” for you.

Another point he brings up that I myself haven't seen much is that “The sacred texts of all the world's religions proclaim the inherent and universal value of dreaming, usually by saying simply that 'God speaks to us in our dreams.'” I know that even the title of a new book I mentioned recently, “Communing with the Gods,” speaks of this and perhaps I just haven't been reading as much as I should in the literature on dreams.

Taylor also mentions that there are now courses about dreams at universities and private educational institutes, of which I've known nothing.

His approach is very much based in Carl Gustav Jung and he mentions Jung's concept of “archetypes” a lot, but he clearly has read widely on other approaches to dreams. I get the feeling on reading Taylor as I do so many other writers on the human mind, that the theoretical parts are often eclectic, energetic to even frenetic, earnest, brilliant, but not reaching philosophic adequacy. For example, he surely is aware of the problem of solipsism, of the need to make sure that what you're thinking is not just what's in your own head. His great emphasis on group work, with proper safeguards, helps deal with the problem on a practical level, but the philosophic problem is still there and is important, at least for me.

The word “love” comes to my mind right now. You find that the speakers of the word “love” are actually and usually using it with the underlying view that love and every other human activity is a negotiation of some business kind, of reward or punishment, pleasures or pains, or releases of impulses deriving from heredity and environment – every self-centered, solipsistic, false thing you can think of except truly and actually putting yourself in the place of the other! And how very central this is to understanding the wisdom of your dreams! Love just happens to be in the middle of everything human, and as trite as that sounds, it is of immense philosophic sophistication and depth and implication.

Anyway, here are the ten basic assumptions that Taylor uses and articulates, pp. 8 and 9, as result of over forty years of study, teaching and practice in dream interpretation:

1. All dreams come in the service of health and wholeness.
2. No dream comes just to tell the dreamer what he or she already knows.
3. Only the dreamer can say with any certainty what meanings his or her dream may hold.
4. The dreamer's aha of recognition is a function of previously unconscious memory and is the only reliable touchstone of dream work.
5. There is no such thing as a dream with only one meaning.
6. All dreams speak a universal language of metaphor and symbol.
7. All dreams reflect inborn creativity and ability to face and solve life's problems.
8. All dreams reflect society as a whole, as well as the dreamer's relation to it.
9. Working with dreams regularly improves relationships with friends, lovers, partners, parents, children, and others.
10. Working with dreams in groups builds community, intimacy, and support and begins to impact on society as a whole.
    
    
    
    
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The Pure in Heart

“Blessed Are The Pure In Heart, for they shall see God.” - Matt. 5:8

“To the pure in heart, all things are pure.” - old common saying

“Honi soit qui mal y pense.” - motto of the Order of the Garter

“Blessed is the man... in whose heart there is no guile.” - Psalm 32

"Create in me, oh God, a pure heart." - Psalm 51

“Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the fruit of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” - Genesis 3:11