Saturday, December 31, 2011

The Community of Life, Intelligence, and The Personality of Nature(?)

Some notes:

The Personality of nature is the best I can come up with for right now. I'm following a thread and I don't know quite where it is leading me. Like Jung said, personal growth is not linear but circular, so I keep coming back to this thread when I get to thinking about otherworldly subjects and the nonhuman community.

“Thought creates the thinker of the thought and that which is being thought—a dichotomy. This dichotomy divides us from intelligence. I have inherited the notion that I am the thinker of the thought. I am not going to let anyone tell me that my thoughts make me up, and that my idea of who I am is getting in the way of some great intelligence out there somewhere.” [Pg. 191, Rezendes, The Wild Within]

I think what Mr. Rezendes is getting at is there is an intelligence out there that can't be understood if the ego gets in the way. The ego is part of the psyche along with intelligence, when it is allowed to be. The problem might be that intelligence is tuned out when we concentrate so much on our ego. The ego, of course, isn't bad nor good, it just is. Perhaps we can inflate or deflate it at will and that is dependent on our awareness of it.

Friday, December 02, 2011

Lifeline Quotes and Poems

There are poems and quotes that I consider to be "lifelines." They are basically words that have at times kept my head above water. Here is one by Robert Bly.

"A clean break from the mother is crucial, but it's simply not happening. This doesn't mean that the women are doing something wrong: I think the problem is more that the older men are not really doing their job.
"The traditional way of raising sons, which lasted for thousands of years, amounted to fathers and sons living in close--murderously close--proximity, while the father taught the son a trade: perhaps farming or carpentry or blacksmithing or tailoring. As I've suggested elsewhere, the love unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution has been the father-son bond.
"There's no sense in idealizing preindustrial culture, yet we know that today many fathers now work thirty or fifty miles from the house, and by the time they return at night the children are often in bed, and they themselves are too tired to do active fathering.
"The Industrial Revolution, in its need for office and factory workers, pulled fathers away from their sons, moreover, placed the sons in compulsory schools where the teachers are mostly women."--Robert Bly


I like it because it points to the effect the Industrial Revolution has had on men.