Premortal

"A forty-four-year-old social worker spoke in one of my midlife workshops about how as a child she experienced a peculiar sensation of 'homesickness.'  'I couldn't have been more than five years old,' she told the class.  'But I had this sense that I didn't belong to the people I was living with - my family, the house where I lived, the other kids in kindergarten.  I felt like I had come from another world.  I felt that somehow I'd been plunked down in the midst of these strangers as a test or trial.  The feeling was like being homesick, and was so real it frightened me."

Harry R. Moody
the Five Stages of the Soul

Liberty

No Prisoner there be -
Where Liberty -
Himself - abide with Thee -



Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 742

Escape!

"It was one of those days," a friend said, "when the only thing to do was read John Buchan."  I knew at once what was meant.  We all know days when the small irritations of life conspire to prevent one settling to anything.  There is work to be done but no motivation, arrangements to be made but no impulse.  Letters lie accusingly unanswered.  A vague sense of unease pervades one's being.  An inner voice tells one to snap out of it.  The will to alter one's mood is inexplicably absent.


There is a very English recipe for dealing with this condition - fresh air, physical exercise, direct contact with nature.  Getting out of oneself is the cure, particularly to hills, cliffs, high tops, where the turf is springy and the views stretch to the distant, blue horizons.  Oppressive days come, however, when such escapes may not offer.  City streets and crowds surround, unyielding pavements meet one's feet, horizons can only be imagined.  At such times, Buchan opens the door to the world one's being seeks - a world of thickets refreshed by a recent rain shower, of streams tinkling over boulders smoothed by uncountable winter floods, of the sharp cry of an unseen bird in a bush, of peat smoke rising lazily from a cottage chimney in the calm evening air, a world of nature utterly at peace and yet - here is the key Buchan ingredient - tinged with the menace of man the enemy."


Sir John Keegan
Introduction
to John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps

Persistence

"All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of the pick-axe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are levelled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that those, who have any intention of deviating from the beaten roads of life, and acquiring a reputation superior to names hourly swept away by time among the refuse of fame, should add to their reason, and their spirit, the power of persisting in their purposes; acquire the art of sapping what they cannot batter, and the habit of vanquishing obstinate resistance by obstinate attacks."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 43

Jungian Analysis - II

"I made the statement earlier that the reasons a person gives for wanting to enter analysis are rarely the true reasons.  They are, without a doubt, the conscious reasons, and the would-be analysand is completely sincere in advancing them.  Whether he offers marital problems, or coming to terms with the death of a member of his family, or not being able to succeed in his work, or drinking too much, or sexual impotence, or a generalized feeling of anxiety - it all boils down to a truth which seems deceptively simple but in fact is complicated and all-encompassing.  It is that he has looked at himself and does not like the person he has become, and that he believes that somewhere in him is rising the possibility of being another sort of person, the one he was meant to be."

June Singer
Boundaries of the Soul

Jungian Analysis

"Patients need to recognize why they have come to analysis: they have found themselves in a conflict situation that appears insoluble, and this discrepancy is between the conscious attitude they hold and unconscious factors which interfere with their carrying through on the intentions which correspond to their conscious attitudes."

June Singer
Boundaries of the Soul

Revelation

"Where is the voice of God in our day?  Where has it been found in times past?


….Today we live in a world of material wealth and technological convenience, with little emphasis placed on God's revelation through inner experience such as dreams, images, and primary intuitions of spiritual truth."


Savary, Berne and Williams
Dreams and Spiritual Growth

Individuality - 2

"In my experience, I have found that people rarely enter into analysis with the stated purpose of confirming that individuality which was born in them as a potential, and has somehow gotten lost in the pursuit of the practical goals of their lives."

June Singer
Boundaries of the Soul

Individuality

"The Jungian, as psychotherapist, approaches each new patient with interest, curiosity and wonder....Each person speaks a different language....Each one's way of being, ways of being, ways of thinking, and feeling and perceiving and knowing are distinctly that person's....No one has ever been exactly like this person who sits with me - I must regard this person well, for there will never be another who is quite the same."

June Singer
Boundaries of the Soul

A Christian Perspective on Dreams

"Psychologically, we view dreamwork as a holistic process leading toward personality transformation....

"Spiritually, we view dreamwork as an arena of relationship between you and God, and as a helpful resource on the journey towards holiness as well as wholeness....

"While many people look to a dream to find an answer to their problems, we have discovered that a dream is more helpful when viewed as a question....

"While many have viewed dreams as a piece of information to be conceptually grasped, we have found, in contrast, that a dream is more helpfully viewed as an invitation to relationship.

Savary, Berne, and Williams
Dreams and Spiritual Growth

Accomplishment and the Long Haul

"Thus too much vigour in the beginning of an undertaking, often intercepts and prevents the steadiness and perseverance always necessary in the conduct of a complicated scheme, where many interests are to be connected, many movements to be adjusted, and the joint effort of distinct and independent powers to be directed to a single point. In all important events which have been suddenly brought to pass, chance has been the agent rather than reason; and, therefore, however those who seemed to preside in the transaction, may have been celebrated by such as loved or feared them, succeeding times have commonly considered them as fortunate rather than prudent. Every design in which the connexion is regularly traced from the first motion to the last, must be formed and executed by calm intrepidity, and requires not only courage which danger cannot turn aside, but constancy which fatigues cannot weary, and contrivance which impediments cannot exhaust."

Samuel Johnson,
The Rambler, 43

Opposition

A Tooth upon our Peace
The Peace cannot deface -
Then Wherefore be the Tooth?
To vitalize the grace -

The Heaven hath a Hell -
Itself to signalize -
And every sign before the Place -
Is Gilt with Sacrifice -


Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 694

Predispositions

This passage reminded me of James Hillman's The Soul's Code.  Even Hillman admitted he was using extreme cases to indicate the reality of far more common (and subtle) patterns.  Johnson's doubt lines up with Hillman's recognition of a spectrum.

"Some that imagine themselves to have looked with more than common penetration into human nature, have endeavoured to persuade us that each man is born with a mind formed peculiarly for certain purposes, and with desires unalterably determined to particular objects, from which the attention cannot be long diverted, and which alone, as they are well or ill pursued, must produce the praise or blame, the happiness or misery of his future life.

This position has not, indeed, been hitherto proved with strength proportionate to the assurance with which it has been advanced, and perhaps will never gain much prevalence by a close examination.
If the doctrine of innate ideas be itself disputable, there seems to be little hope of establishing an opinion, which supposes that even complications of ideas have been given us at our birth, and that we are made by nature ambitious, or covetous, before we know the meaning of either power or money."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 43

The Power of Knowing How Much is Enough

Here is a concept I first found in Joe Dominguez's Your Money or Your Life.  He argued that it is not true that money can't buy happiness.  When a basic need is met, you can indeed become happier.  But money and happiness often have a relationship expressed by a bell curve.  As long as you are meeting real needs, happiness can increase with wealth, but as soon as your real needs are met, the odd thing is that happiness begins to decline with increased material possessions and wealth.  As human beings, however, we are seldom wise enough to stop our feverish acquisition at what Samuel Johnson would call "a moderate fortune."



"Of all those things that make us superior to others, there is none so much within the reach of our endeavours as riches, nor any thing more eagerly or constantly desired. Poverty is an evil always in our view, an evil complicated with so many circumstances of uneasiness and vexation, that every man is studious to avoid it. Some degree of riches is therefore required, that we may be exempt from the gripe of necessity; when this purpose is once attained, we naturally wish for more, that the evil which is regarded with so much horrour, may be yet at a greater distance from us; as he that has once felt or dreaded the paw of a savage, will not be at rest till they are parted by some barrier, which may take away all possibility of a second attack.

....But it almost always happens, that the man who grows rich, changes his notions of poverty, states his wants by some new measure, and from flying the enemy that pursued him, bends his endeavours to overtake those whom he sees before him. The power of gratifying his appetites increases their demands; a thousand wishes crowd in upon him, importunate to be satisfied, and vanity and ambition open prospects to desire, which still grow wider, as they are more contemplated.

Thus in time want is enlarged without bounds; an eagerness for increase of possessions deluges the soul, and we sink into the gulphs of insatiability, only because we do not sufficiently consider, that all real need is very soon supplied, and all real danger of its invasion easily precluded; that the claims of vanity, being without limits, must be denied at last; and that the pain of repressing them is less pungent before they have been long accustomed to compliance."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 39

Inflation

One of the real dangers of spiritual manifestations is what Jungian psychologists call Inflation:  The encounter with the divine, instead of producing a healthy humility, puffs up the ego and produces a self-centered response to the divine instead of a God centered response.

Jean and Wallace Clift describe it in Jungian terms this way:

“In fact, a major danger at the times of encounters with the Self is that the ego may become inflated by identifying itself with the Self, instead of realizing the Other to be the ‘heavier body’ in the relationship.”
 

The opposite of inflation is described in much more powerful words by a believer, Thomas R. Kelley, an American Quaker-

“The sense of Presence is as if two beings were joined in one single configuration, and the center of gravity is not in us but in that Other.  As two bodies, closely attached together and whirling in the air, are predominantly determined by the heavier body, so does the sense of Presence carry within it a sense of our lives being in large part guided, dynamically moved from beyond our usual selves.  Instead of being the active, hurrying church worker and the anxious, careful planner of shrewd moves toward the good life, we become pliant creatures, less brittle, less obstinately rational.  The energizing, dynamic center is not in us but in the Divine Presence in which we share.”

 

Alienation

One of the effects of the fall is a very real sense of alienation.  We are separated from God and from each other by gulfs that only grace can bridge.  I find many modern descriptions of the phenomenon of alienation to be quite suggestive.  Here is one from a Jungian analyst:

“A sense of dividedness or separation seems to have been basic to the human condition, probably since coming to consciousness, and the vocational ‘call’ to wholeness arises in moments of special conflict and crisis.  Every human heart longs for the overcoming of the sense of alientation….some sense of being connected to a larger reality is basic to healing that separation and finding meaning in life.”

  

Jean and Wallace Clift

Symbols of Transformation in Dreams

Jung's God

Jung found it hard to commit himself to any traditional theological position.  In practice, his approach to the inner archetype of the Self fulfilled many of the functions which a deity would provide -

“Jung saw this central archetype as the organizer and inventor of dream images – the inner guiding factor that continually extends and matures the personality when the ego is willing to listen to the messages of the Self.  The ego perceives the Self as ‘other,’ and the subjective experience conveys the feeling that ‘some suprapersonal force is actively interfering in a creative way.  One sometimes feels that the unconscious is leading the way in accordance with a secret design.’  Jung spoke of the Self as the ‘god image’ in the psyche, and encounters with the Self have all the qualities associated with the concept of God.”

……………..

 

“Jung says that those who have developed a kind of dialogue between the ego and the rest of the psyche sense themselves as the objects of an unknown and supraordinate object.  He closed his Answer to Job with this passage”

 

            'Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.'

 

These descriptions are remarkably like those of many Christian Writers.”

Jean and Wallace Clift

Symbols of Transformation in Dreams

A Vicious Cycle

"There is a general succession of events in which contraries are produced by periodical vicissitudes; labour and care are rewarded with success, success produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins that reputation which accuracy had raised."

Samuel Johnson,
The Rambler, 29

How do dreams mean? A Jungian Answer

I went through the Topical Guide to the Scriptures on the topic of Dreams and found the collected references quite insightful.  The scriptures do not give us a dream encyclopedia, just a reminder that the interpretation of dreams is a spiritual gift.

Fascinated by how dreams communicate to us, I have collected some examples (with a little bit of underlying theory) of what people have learned from dreams.

One Jungian theory is that some dreams are "compensatory or complementary."  They "balance a one-sided attitude of consciousness" or "complete what is lacking in the contents of consciousness which are too narrow or are not considered sufficiently valuable."

Some examples of such balancing dreams

1.  "...someone who suffers from feelings insecurity and inferiority and in a dream finds himself in a hero role."
2. "Jung relates the case of a lady who was well known for her stupid prejudices and her stubborn resistance to reasoned argument.  One night she dreamed she was invited to an important social affair.  Her hostess greeted her with the words, 'Oh, how nice you have come!  All your friends are here already and are expecting you.'  The hostess then led her to a door, opened it and the dreamer stepped into - a cowshed!  'The woman would not admit at first the point of a dream that struck so directly at her self-importance, but its message nevertheless went home.'"

"Sometimes a dream...gives advice like a well meaning person."

1. "I had a rich elderly woman analysand who had been alcoholic and had given up drinking.  But the neurotic problems that lay behind her alcoholism, especially a general demoralization and slovenliness, still had to be worked out.  Once she dreamed that a voice told her, 'You need a breakfast corset.'  I asked her in great detail what time she ate breakfast, what kind of corset she wore, when she put it on, etc.  I discovered then that out of vanity she wore a very tight corset but never put it on in the morning; rather she breakfasted in her dressing gown, then dawdled around the apartment in her negligee the rest of the morning and put her corset on around noon.  Only then did her day actually begin.  After this information, the dream no longer needed interpretation, and we both laughed heartily.  I would ask her, 'How is it going with the breakfast corset?'"
2. "I once had an analysand who had to give up alcohol, which he did bravely for a couple of months.  Then he said to me, 'Listen, don't you think I could dare now to have one glass of beer in the evening at the Sternan Hotel with Betty?  Just one glass?  I am always so lost in the evenings, so lonely.'  Although I knew this was not advisable, I just said, 'I don't know, I don't want to be your governess.  Try it and we will see how your unconscious reacts.'  He did this, drank his glass of beer, and went home.  That night he dreamed of driving his car up a mountain, all the way to the top, but when he got there he did not brake properly and the car rolled backward all the way down the mountain until he was back where he started....He immediately realized that 'only one glass of beer' would not work."

Quotes from
Marie-Louise Von Franz
Dreams

A Jewish "Falling Away"

Like Christianity, which must confront the difference between modern times and the miraculous, charismatic events of the first century, Judaism has had to ponder the end of the prophetic era.

"After the death of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, the last of the prophets, the Holy Spirit ceased from Israel."

Tosifta Sot. xiii, 2
quoted by
Abraham Cohen
Everyman's Talmud

"By the rabbinic period, prophecy - direct communication from God - had given way to textual interpretation: exactly what we are doing.  The sages preferred to interpret the Torah actively rather than passively awaiting new revelations.  Further, I suspect that they were suspicious of new revelations, which potentially undercut their authority.  They preferred an established system of commentary to charismatic religion.  For the rabbis, active prophecy ended with the biblical books of the Minor Prophets, Haggai, Malachi and Zechariah.  From that point onward, the rabbis engaged in midrash, the searching out God's will through interpretation of the scriptural canon."

Rabbi Burton L. Visotsky
Sage Tales

"The men of prehistoric times, being able to use the Holy Spirit, gave names to their children which indicated events that were going to happen to them later in their lives; we, on the other hand, who cannot employ the Holy Spirit, name our children after our ancestors."

Genesis R. xxxvii, 7
quoted by
Abraham Cohen
Everyman's Talmud

Self Regard

"Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine, that he possesses some qualities, superior, either in kind or in degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world; and, whatever apparent disadvantages he may suffer in the comparison with others, he has some invisible distinctions, some latent reserve of excellence, which he throws into the balance, and by which he generally fancies that it is turned in his favour."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 29

Jung and the source of Dreams

I've been reading and thinking about dreams a lot lately.

Jung and his disciples had a fascinating approach to the dream that verges on the religious.  The following quotes are from Marie-Louise Von Franz, a close associate of Jung and a well known interpreter and influential diffuser of Jungian ideas.

"Who or what is this miraculous something that composes a series of dream images?....it must be a being of the most superior intelligence - judging from the depth and cleverness of dreams....each time we succeed in understanding a dream and morally assimilating its message we 'begin to see (the light)'....one sees oneself for a moment through the eyes of another, of something objective which views one from the outside as it were....This eye which looks at us from within has to do with what we usually call conscience."

Marie-Louise Von Franz
Dreams

While neither Jung nor Von Franz would go so far as to claim the "objective existence" of God, they put the kind of faith into the unconscious self (the "image of God" inside man) that allowed them the ability to have spiritual experiences in which they received guidance, and were even given glimpses of the future.

Symbols

"Symbols are the universal tongue. … Symbols bring color and strength to language, while deepening and enriching our understandings. Symbols enable us to give conceptual form to ideas and emotions that may otherwise defy the power of words. They take us beyond words and grant us eloquence in the expression of feelings. Symbolic language conceals certain doctrinal truths from the wicked and thereby protects sacred things from possible ridicule. At the same time, symbols reveal truth to the spiritually alert."

“… Symbols are the language in which all gospel covenants and all ordinances of salvation have been revealed. From the time we are immersed in the waters of baptism to the time we kneel at the altar of the temple with the companion of our choice in the ordinance of eternal marriage, every covenant we make will be written in the language of symbolism.”

Joseph Fielding McConkie and Donald W. Parry, Guide to Scriptural Symbols (1990),

 

 

 

"Symbolic language is a language in which inner experience, feelings and thoughts are expressed as if they were sensory experiences or events in the outer world.  Symbolic language is different from the language ordinarily spoken in daily life.  It has a different logic.  Time and space, for example, are not the ruling categories that they are in outer life.  Rather the ruling categories are intensity and association....

 

"Symbolic language is not only the language of dreams, but it is also the language of myths and fairy tales. It is the most basic way in which people are able to grasp an idea....

 

"Even when the symbol used denotes a physical, limited thing, it carries enlarging connotations.  The meaning is usually somewhat ambiguous, but still it carries emotional power and suggests multiple meanings.  It intimates a larger reality....

 

"....genuine symbols cannot be precisely 'interpreted' by any one single meaning.  Jung says they are always 'ambiguous, full of half-glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible'....Jung pointed to the danger of reducing a symbol to some specified rational interpretation."

 

Clift, Wallace and Jean

Symbols of Transformation in Dreams

Ancient associations between the temple and creation

I remember that somewhere in Nibley's writings there is a reference to the Egyptian word Benben, the primordial mound or first earth which formed the center of creation.  The temple (at least at Hieropolis) was supposed to be the site of the Benben.  I've run onto a similar tradition from the Talmud:

"Tradition relates that in the temple there was Eben Shetiyyah (a foundation stone) which was so named because upon it the world was founded, and from this as a centre the was created....

Since the Sun was not created until the fourth day, whence did light have its origin?....the light emanated from the site of the temple which...was the centre of the world's creation."

Abraham Cohen
Everyman's Talmud

The Talmudic references were Joma 54b and Gen. R. III, 4.

A Jewish Elijah Story

I collect incidents of possible translated beings.  Sorry, it's just who I am.


"A third of a century ago, on the day I was ordained a Rabbi, I went on a journey to save Jews from an oppressive government.  I traveled to the city of Bukhara...then part of the USSR.  We had the name of a family there....My mission was to bring them blue jeans to trade on the black market so they could put food on their table, let them know they were not forgotten....

"We set out on foot from our six story hotel...looking for Ulitsa Zagorodnaya 8....We got profoundly lost, wandering through the warren of winding lanes for an hour or more....I gave up finding the address I was sent to visit and approached any and every passerby, asking in broken Russian where the hotel was.  No reply....No luck....

"And then I saw a wizened old man dressed in a long, dusty black caftan, carrying what looked to be a shepherd's crook.  Gray beard down to his chest, he seemed as old as Bukhara itself.  I approached him with the hotel card in my hand, but as I drew near to him found myself saying Ulitsa Zagorodnaya?"  I didn't say the house number....With a brief nod, the old man signaled that we should follow him  In and out of the maze we went....

"The old man stopped and with his staff, rapped on an arched wooden door.  There, outlined faintly in chalk was the number eight.  Was this the house we were looking for?  Using mime, we gestured for the old man to stay put while we knocked on the door and stuck our heads in....We asked for 'Goldberg' and were immediately informed....We had found the right place.  The entire conversation took no more than twenty seconds.  We popped back out into the street to thank our elderly guide, but he had vanished into the shimmering hot air!  We looked down the street the way we had come.  Not there.  We looked the other way.  Not there either.  But we notices that the street took a short dog's-leg bend, so we scurried down the road to see if our nice old man was yet there, just out of our sight lines.  But he was gone, gone."

Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky
Sage Tales: Wisdom and Wonder from the Rabbis of the Talmud

Verbal Restraint

"In forming this opinion of the easiness of secrecy, they [The Persians] seem to have considered it as opposed, not to treachery, but loquacity, and to have conceived the man whom they thus censured, not frighted by menaces to reveal, or bribed by promises to betray, but incited by the mere pleasure of talking, or some other motive equally trifling, to lay open his heart without reflection, and to let whatever he knew slip from him, only for want of power to retain it."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 13

Irrational Man

In High School I had my first experiences with 'Bible Bashing.'  For several months my Baptist friends and I would muster Bible verses we felt supported our positions and undermined the others.  It was fun for a bit, but generated a little heat and very little real light.  Over time I found any actual religious conversations of value would occur when one or the other would listen to those experiences that were the actual underpinnings of our respective religious commitments. 

In my Micro-Economics class I was introduced to  "homo economicus," the rational sorter of personal benefit who would choose the most lucrative path in any given situation.  Economics these days finds the model considerably less useful than they once thought.

In politics I hear a lot of facts and historical precedents recited, and careful arguments mustered, but I detect very few signs of any one really listening to each other.  Like Bible Bashers, the political disputants seem largely ignorant of the fact that political convictions are seldom reached through careful logical procedures.

A couple of quotes I've run across -

"In times when passions are beginning to take charge of the conduct of human affairs, One should pay less attention to what men of experience and common sense are thinking than to what is preoccupying the imagination of dreamers."

Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America

"The heart has its reasons, that reason knows not of."
Blaise Pascal
Pensees

Pride and Anger

"Pride is undoubtedly the original of anger; but pride, like every other passion, if it once breaks loose from reason, counteracts its own purposes. A passionate man, upon the review of his day, will have very few gratifications to offer to his pride, when he has considered how his outrages were caused, why they were borne, and in what they are likely to end at last."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 11

Growth

I could not prove the Years had feet -
Yet confident they run
Am I, from symptoms that are past
And Series that are done -

I find my feet have further Goals -
I smile upon the Aims
That felt so ample - Yesterday -
Today's - have vaster claims -

I do not doubt the Self I was
Was competent to me -
But something awkward in the fit -
Proves that - outgrown - I see -


 Emily Dickinson
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Franklin), 674

How we use the time that is given to us...

"If the most active and industrious of mankind was able, at the close of life, to recollect distinctly his past moments, and distribute them in a regular account, according to the manner in which they have been spent, it is scarcely to be imagined how few would be marked out to the mind, by any permanent or visible effects, how small a proportion his real action would bear to his seeming possibilities of action, how many chasms he would find of wide and continued vacuity, and how many interstitial spaces unfilled, even in the most tumultuous hurries of business, and the most eager vehemence of pursuit."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 8

A Prophetic Dream

"About ten days ago I retired very late.  I had been waiting for important dispatches from the front.  I could not have long been in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary.  I . soon began to dream.  There seemed to be deathlike stillness about me.  Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping.  I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs.  There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible.  I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress  met me as I passed along.  It was light in all the rooms.  Every object was familiar to me, but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break?

"I was puzzled and alarmed.  What could be the meaning of all of this?  Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered.  There I met with a sickening surprise.  Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments.  Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully.

"'Who is dead in the White House?'  I demanded of one of the soldiers.

"'The President,' was his answer.  'He was killed by an assassin.

Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awakened me from the dream.  I slept no more that night and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since."



This version is from Carl Sandburg's Lincoln.  The ultimate source is a recollection written down many years later by Ward Hill Lamon, an old friend and associate of the president.  As with most things historical, the account is not without its detractors or doubters.  The time of Lamon's anecdote was just a few days before Lincoln's death.

Opposition

"He forgot, in the vehemence of desire, that solitude and quiet owe their pleasures to those miseries, which he was so studious to obviate: for such are the vicissitudes of the world, through all its parts, that day and night, labour and rest, hurry and retirement, endear each other; such are the changes that keep the mind in action; we desire, we pursue, we obtain, we are satiated; we desire something else, and begin a new pursuit."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 6

Some Rabbinic Musings on the Nature of God

"The divine appellation, Elohim, translated "God," was understood to denote His aspect of judgment and JHVH, translated "Lord," His aspect of mercy...."

…..………..

"Another parable...tells: 'A king's son fell into evil ways.  The king sent his tutor to him with the message, "Return, O my son."  But the son sent to his father the reply, "With what can I return?  I am ashamed to come before you."  Then the father sent to him, saying, "Can a son be ashamed to return to his Father!  If you return, Do you not return to your father?"'

Abraham Cohen
Everyman's Talmud

Careful what you ask for...

Johnson, in replying to a reader who expressed a desire to be closer to the 'torch of truth,' replied

"The torch of truth shews much that we cannot, and all that we would not see."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 10

Self Evaluation

Μηδ’ ὑπνον μαλακοισιν επ’ ομμασι προσδεξασθαι,
Πριν των ἡμερινων εργων τρις ἑκαστον επελθειν·
Πηι παρεβην; τι δ’ ερεξα; τι μοι δεον ουκ ετελεσθη;
Αρξαμενος δ’ απο πρωτου επεξιθι; και μετεπειτα,
Δειλα μεν εκπρηξας, επιπλησσεο, χρηστα δε, τερπου.

Let not sleep (says Pythagoras) fall upon thy eyes
till thou hast thrice reviewed the transactions of the past day.
Where have I turned aside from rectitude?
What have I been doing?
What have I left undone, which I ought to have done?
Begin thus from the first act, and proceed;
and in conclusion, at the ill which thou hast done be troubled, and rejoice for the good.


Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 8

Three Mathematical Discoveries by Poincare

In a long section where Pirsig summarizes Henri Poincare's thoughts on scientific and mathematical discoveries, he focuses on the fact that observing facts and applying rules and making and testing hypotheses are simply unable by themselves to supply progress.  The sheer number of potentially observable facts and possible mathematical combinations and reasonably believable hypotheses is prohibitive.  Poincare spoke of a 'subliminal self' that chooses among the facts, combinations and hypotheses on the basis of an emotional reaction to beauty, harmony and elegance.  "This is the true esthetic feeling which all mathematicians know, " said Poincare.  Pirsig uses some examples from Poincare's own brilliant mathematical career to illustrate the process:

1) "For fifteen days, he said, he strove to prove that there couldn't be any such functions.  Every day he seated himself at his work-table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results.
     Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn't sleep.  Ideas arose in crowds.  He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
     The next morning he had only to write out the results.  A wave of crystallization had taken place."

2) "He left Caen, where he was living, to go on a geologic excursion.  The changes of travel made him forget mathematics.  He was about to enter a bus, and at the moment when he put his foot on the step, the idea came to him, without anything in his former thoughts having paved the way for it, that the transformations he had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.  He didn't verify the idea, he said, he just went on with a conversation on the bus; but he felt a perfect certainty.  Later he verified the results at his leisure."

3) "A later discovery occurred while he was walking by a seaside bluff.  It came to him with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty."


Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Mindfulness

"After crossing his legs and adjusting his body, he turned his attention to what was before him."

Diamond Sutra
tr. Red Pine in
The Diamond Sutra: Text and Commentaries

"He" is the Buddha.  Buddhist see this simple phrase as an example of the meditation technique of paying full attention to "whatever is present, whatever one is facing." 

Buddhism's Six Perfections

In Buddhism this list has a function similar to medieval Christianity's list of the seven virtues -

     Charity
     Morality
     Forbearance
     Vigor
     Meditation
     Wisdom

Vigor catches me by surprise as a Buddhist goal.  The actual example Red Pine gives from a day in the Buddha's life is the discipline of cleaning up and putting things away after a task is completed.


The list is from
Red Pine
The Diamond Sutra: Text and Commentaries

Faith from a Buddhist perspective

"Belief marks the beginning of the path.  It is the mother of virtues, and the protector of all good Dharmas."

Avatamsaka Sutra


"Belief is the first gate on the path."

Chiang Wei-nung

Both translated by
Red Pine in
The Diamond Sutra: Text and Commentaries

Walking

"A French author has advanced this seeming paradox, that very few men know how to take a walk; and, indeed, it is true, that few know how to take a walk with a prospect of any other pleasure, than the same company would have afforded them at home."

…………….

"He that enlarges his curiosity after the works of nature, demonstrably multiplies the inlets to happiness;"

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 5


As I have grown busier in life, and more distracted, I have missed the simple, restorative joys of a good walk (one where my awareness was focused on my surroundings) and a deeper awareness and acquaintance with nature.

Self-Deception

"...for we are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude; but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 8

all the arts of destroying time

My eye was caught by a single phrase today from Samuel Johnson:

"all the arts of destroying time"

In our age of electronic distractions, those arts have truly reached their zenith.

Two things a writer should be good at

"The task of our present writers is very different; it requires, together with that learning which is to be gained from books, that experience which can never be attained by solitary diligence, but must arise from general converse and accurate observation of the living world."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 4

Keep your eye on the goal...

"He that directs his steps to a certain point, must frequently turn his eyes to that place which he strives to reach;"

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 2

My wife and I have begun using this concept as a framework for our family 'presidency meetings.'  We are finding that writing down and reviewing frequently our progress on the goals we have set gives us a power to reach them that has often escaped us in the past.

Hope

"The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 2

Criticism

"Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey, than others, and detected faults and follies, which escape vulgar observation."

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 2

This is as true of myself, I am afraid, as it is of any other man.

Living in the Moment

"That the mind of man is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity; and that we forget the proper use of the time, now in our power, to provide for the enjoyment of that which, perhaps, may never be granted us, has been frequently remarked;"

Samuel Johnson
The Rambler, 2