Scribblings From Another...transcendentalism

Transcendentalism...now that's  a long word. Felt it deserved some thought, so I found this nice piece written by Mitch Horowitz. Good history describing the period of independent thought called Transcendentalism or the individual search for meaning. Just thought you might enjoy a different perspective to start the New Year.

Why Thoreau’s Walden Matters Now More Than Ever

By MITCH HOROWITZ

December 30, 2016


Why should anyone still read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, a classic that seems to belong to grade-school reading lists, and whose author is sometimes targeted by hero-toppling literary critics?

Because Walden created a culture of rebellion and independent thought that reflects the best of American life, especially at the current moment when coarseness, unlearned opinion, and groupthink threaten to overrun us.

The philosophy called Transcendentalism, as shaped by Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and their collaborators, reflected America’s sharpest break with the religious dogma and intellectual conformities of the Old World. Transcendentalism embraced inner experiment, personal experience, and the individual search for meaning.

The New England Transcendentalists rejected the idea of rewards in the afterlife as the aim of religious practice. Instead, they believed in living out your highest potential in the present, deriving power and purpose from a palpably felt relationship to God. The Transcendentalists embraced mystical ideas from the East to which they gave a practical and can-do tone, familiarizing Americans with concepts of meditation, karma, and nonattachment. Thoreau and Emerson drew upon esoteric ideas from Hermeticism – the Greek-Egyptian philosophy that flourished in the decades following Christ – to suggest the creative and causative powers of the human mind, and how to apply them in the here and now.

"To ask, to seek, and to experiment – these are the most radical acts a person can undertake today." Thoreau

Thanks in part to Thoreau, the idea of the individual spiritual search now seems like a national birthright. In polls, most Americans agree that spiritual truth can be found outside of allegiance to any one faith or tradition. “Unaffiliated” is the fastest-growing category of religious identity. In recovery groups, twelve-step movements, and other nontraditional forms of spiritual search, we are encouraged to seek our own conception of a Higher Power. Even those Americans who affiliate with the traditional faiths are taught to believe that their own paths to the Divine are many – that the gates of prayer and forgiveness are always open; that the house of God, the seat of the ineffable, exists all around us. A spark of divinity, many believe, exists within.

Such concepts were foreign, if not heretical, in the hierarchical Christendom of Europe’s past.
Consider, for example, the physical structure of the fourteenth-century Pope’s Palace in Avignon, France. In the enormous church that dominates the palace’s ground floor, the front pews were, naturally, reserved for aristocracy. A few rows back, space was reserved for those who served the powerful, such as merchants and teachers. And the remainder of the enormous cathedral was designated for everybody else. Here was a structure built in the name of a man who taught, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” resembling nothing so much as an emperor’s court.
Thoreau and Transcendentalism upended that. Today one can visit Concord, Massachusetts, and walk to Walden Pond where Thoreau built his tiny cabin. Nothing remains of the physical structure, aside from the hearthstone. There is just open air where the cabin stood. But that empty space is, in a sense, Transcendentalism’s greatest monument, and perhaps America’s, as well. One can stand in this space and feel that this is a place in which one individual lived, determined to learn what it means to be a real human being, to look inside life and discover what really penetrates the human psyche. It is an invisible monument to the quest to know oneself. It is America’s sphinx. And that was Transcendentalism.

Read Walden not because it is old and venerated – but because it summons us to all that is new within ourselves. To ask, to seek, and to experiment – these are the most radical acts a person can undertake today. These are the tools of Thoreau.

At Play In The Field Of Now...Silence

At Play In The Field Of Now...Silence

Yesterday...that's an unusual word when you look at it, but our yesterday can yield to us a moment in today.

I spent my yesterday with great friends. Sharing good food, fond memories, a laugh or two and yes a yesterday moment for today.

It was a cool damp night looking across the calm water of the lake...when she said, "it's so quiet you can feel the silence." Exactly was my thought. Well said and well shared my friend.

“There are many fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout,” Henry David Thoreau observed in contemplating how silence ennobles speech. A year earlier, he had written in his journal: “I wish to hear the silence of the night, for the silence is something positive and to be heard.” It’s a sentiment of almost unbearable bittersweetness today, a century and a half later, as we find ourselves immersed in a culture that increasingly mistakes loudness for authority, vociferousness for voice, screaming for substance. We seem to have forgotten— that “silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech,” that it has its own aesthetic, and that learning to wield it is among the great arts of living.

The fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul... we seem to have most hastily forsaken this pursuit — and yet it is also the one we most urgently need if we are to reclaim the aesthetic of silence in the art of living.

Thanks my friends for sharing your yesterday...Doc

From The Study...a conservation of possibilities

As I am sitting at my desk on this eve of another new year, I am reminded of a quote from
a young writer in Melbourne, Australia by the name of Beau Tarplin...Beau, please
forgive me if I do not get it exact...it goes something like this...

"Don't stress so much about settling on a path for your new year.
The division of time into years is a human invention,
And the fact is, every moment of every day is an opportunity for resolution and growth.
So, when the fireworks fly, relax and enjoy the moment.
The rest will come to you."

So...as we honor the passing of 2016, I leave you with my prayer from last year

For those I may have wronged, I ask for your forgiveness.
For those I may have helped, I wish I could have done more.
For those I could have helped, I ask for understanding.
For those who have helped me, I am grateful.

Resolved to sense more beauty, express more gratitude, and experience more
forgiveness...Doc.

Scribblings From Inside The Sane Asylum...sensing the season

Sitting on my porch this cool evening, just pondering  this thinking concept, when I interrupted my thought with another thought..".what the hell am I thinking? You don't know crap about that  stuff." See I interrupted my thinking. There must be a dozen ways to interrupt your thoughts. What I've noticed, they always involve another thought, an endless stream of words that describe our world. Language. It's amazing how busy it keeps that part of our consciousness we call mind.

I recall a time walking with my grandfather. It was late one evening as we were making our way from the barn toward the dog trot house. I always wanted to carry the milk bucket but he was a wise man...just said the pale didn't fit my hand. Well back to my thought...see how easy you can get off thought? Now what was I thinking? Damn, now back to the story. 

About half way to the house, his broad hand pushed on my chest. "Quiet," he said. He paused and turned his ear to the sky and stood there in silence, just listening. I remember the silhouette of his face in the fading sky, and the sound of his voice as he answered my obvious question..."I'm listening for the farthest sound."

Interrupted his thought with sound. Now that was clever as it seems today, but it was and still is a good method.  Silence thought and think no thing from time to time. Listen for the farthest sound.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like...I assume that would be the case with you?

May you be filled with the joys and delights of this season...Doc

The Human Conservancy...field office

Once upon a time men took into your temple the first fruits of their harvests, the flower of their flocks. But the offering you really want, the offering you mysteriously need every day to appease your hunger, to shake your thirst is nothing less than the growth of the world borne ever onwards in the stream of universal becoming. Teilhard de Chardin, “Mass on the World

Wishing you peace and joy...Doc

From Inside The Sane Asylum...up shit creek

Yep...you guessed it. No post for a spell. Going up shit creek with my paddle and take a holiday break. Enjoy your family and friends...talk to you soon.

Partially true...partially fiction..as I recall

I was reflecting on those things I still remember this morning. Didn't take me very long as my recall seems to be in remission. Good memory, but my recall is not worth a shit. I remember growing up in this little sawmill village of Fisher. The entire village, from houses to church and Commissary owned by Four L Lumber Company.  A two room school house, sidewalks made of wood, mule skinners making their way to their company owned homes after a long day of logging. I remember Mr. Dewitt as he would always crack his mule skinner whip for my amusement. And how could I forget the gossip of the Funderburk girl and Miller boy being caught swimming nude in the mill pond. I remember Mrs. Tannahill saying she saw a bright flash of light the moment her son will killed in a logging accident. The rumors of how Mr. Curtis beat his wife. The visual and feeling of Christmas as each child, black and white, received a gift from the village tree. Compliments of "The Company"...of course.

Aunt Mae as I called her, lived across the street. She was important in my life. I had this ole bicycle
that was to tall and my toes barely reached the petals. Worked fine until I had to stop. Even at that young age a metal bar between the legs HURT! This is where Aunt Mae came in. She sat on her
porch each evening chatting with her neighbors, waiting for her husband and drinking a cup of coffee. She always sat in one of those cow hide, straight back chairs as I recall.  I would mount my ole bike from my porch and ride the dirt street that circled the village. Usually made a pass around the school

house, made my way up a steep hill in front of the Company owned Commissary and back home. Would yell to Aunt Mae to "catch me" and then make another round as she made her way to my rescue. Don't know why I called her Aunt? She sure saved me the recall of a lot of pain though. I could have rode up to my porch and stopped myself, but I think we needed those daily encounters of salvation. I know I did. I often wonder about Aunt Mae and to this day see her smile and feel her embrace as I rolled to a stop.

My first and second grade school teacher was named Ms. Farsheets. :). You read me correct. I came  home one day and told my mother that Ms. Farsheets called me a scurvy elephant. Of course my mother asked her why. I think it was at Wednesday night church service or maybe at one of those revival nights where our little village would all be saved and have a revival of sorts in our hearts. Said it would come in handy when the roll is called up yonder... Anyway, when confronted, Ms. Farsheets promptly responded, " I did not call him a scurvy elephant, I said he was a disturbing element."


Funny...those things we recall when recall has to make another lap around the block to be embraced by our memory...

...pictures from my little village, some years ago...be well, make peace with yourself and get along with it all...Doc

                       May you be blessed with much peace and joy during this holiday season.

From Inside The Sane Asylum...super, supermoon rising

Jess and Ego pondering the Super SuperMoon rising...

Ego: "Jess, think of it as consciousness = (energy), works as a TV-projector and there exists infinite channels= (dimensions) at once, simultaneously...and those channels contains pictures = (realities) and when those pictures go quickly through the TV-projector it creates the illusion of motion and time.
All dimensions and realities exist simultaneously. Existence is no subject to time. Time is only a concept within the existence. So you see, the Universe is not out there. There is no out there. It's nothing more than an optical illusion. Sight, sound, taste, and smell are "illusions" from our senses. Everything exist in the same "location". You are shifting from parallel reality to parallel reality billions of time per second that have a frequency that match with your vibration.

So you see Jess, that huge moon on the horizon is not that big...it's just an illusion."

Jess: "Makes you want to put on an English riding helment and have one of those out of body experiences of the world coming to an end."

Stopped To Ponder...democracy

A democracy need not believe that the majority will always reach a wise decision. It should, however, believe in the necessity of accepting the decision of the majority, be it wise or unwise, until such a time that the majority reaches another decision.
– Bertrand Russell 

Scribblings From Inside The Sane Asylum...

Just A Thought This Morning...A little cooler perhaps, but the mornings of our lives always yields their little surprises. The sunlight breaking over the ocean casting her spell of shadows. Storms forming on the eastern horizon. The sound of high tide as the waves white with foam caress the sand. The sound of a sea bird lost in migration, or maybe just Jonathan Sea Gull spreading his greetings of another day.

"Life is more than just looking for fish heads."
Jonathan Livingston Sea Gull

So many things we can distinguish in our thoughts...
an idea or opinion produced by thinking
or occurring suddenly in the mind.

An idea, notion, impression,
a theory, and many more.
Deliberate, perhaps.
Or just musing, ruminating, or even brooding.
All the thoughts that make it so.
Try reflection, rumination and mediation,
It all leads to contemplation does it not?
Pondering and deliberation.
Introspection? I reverie that reflection.
Thinking...
Is it not language that makes all thinking so?


And who sits at your pilots wheel?
Some say fate steers us through,
But most of the time it's just you.
With your cargo of language
and yes your fate,
Press on...the morning still breaks.

For some odd reason, out of nowhere, I recite the poem Invitcus in my head, as I watch eight pelicans disappear toward the southern shore. Thank you William Earnest Henley. Great combination of words that made thoughts which one never forgets. First damn poem I every learned. Ms. Grumbly, as I called her. My eighth grade English teacher, or was it Language teacher?  So much wisdom in that lady.  I remember well her thoughts on how I was steering my ship. " Young man", she spoke, "If you don't learn how to spell and write, you will amount to No Thing." How smart she was...nope, not a good speller or skilled on the rules of verse...and now I amount to No Thing...but I lived long enough to use this damn Spell Check....

...just language, sparked in my brain, making a sea of thoughts in my mind, packed and stored away for the journey.


It matters not how strait the gate,
    How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
    I am the captain of my soul.

And so it goes...Doc

Scribblings From Inside The Sane Asylum...

Know What I Mean?

I have a confession..one of those confessions that feels good to make. A confession of regret.... even though we say "we want to live a life without regrets."  That's a tough affirmation. I do have regrets. Just think of the things I could have done better. What beauty in life I have missed but just  did not notice. How many people have I trespassed against, with me not knowing? How many conversations have I had that with just one more word of encouragement could have made a difference. When was I not present and that small child tried to get my attention. What life celebrations have I missed. How many times have I turned my eye from others who cling to the torn fragments of Humanity, and just needed to be acknowledged. Did I ever laugh when I should have cried. And why at three score and ten do I regret at all?

These are not burdens you see, these are my life's lessons. I try to acknowledge as many as I can and let my mind know they were only choices I made. Some with knowledge, some not so much. Some made out of boast and confidence and some not so much. Just a collection of my life experiences.

That brings me to my deepest regret..."wish I would have made the distinction... that through all those years doing my best, I could have done better." But how would I have known?

When you finally collect enough of those experiences you can look back and kinda grade yourself on your tribal behaviors. Yep, that sucked...and still does kinda. No, not kinda, it still sucks.  Something like that. I tend to focus on the ones that suck first. But just any kind of system to make you smile about some pretty stupid choices. It was only today at lunch I wished I had not ate that large bowl of chili with beans...a regular bowl would have been fine. But right now that grande bowl really sucks. See what I mean? It can be any stupid shit we do, and hell, sometimes I do them over again, knowing full well I'm going to regret it. So don't give me that bull shit about no regrets...

Just teasing. You stay strong and determined not to have any regrets your whole entire life if you wish. Just don't eat that big bowl of chili and beans... know what I mean?

 I even regret this silly scribbling...just teasing...:)RSVP vs Regrets Only... Doc

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Therapy...intuition

"Can one really distinguish the difference between their intuition and their subconscious fear?"

Notes From The Underground...

The “primary consciousness,” the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what is at this moment. The ingenious brain, however, looks at that part of present experience called memory, and by studying it is able to make predictions. These predictions are, relatively, so accurate and reliable (e.g., “everyone will die”) that the future assumes a high degree of reality — so high that the present loses its value.

But the future is still not here, and cannot become a part of experienced reality until it is present. Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements — inferences, guesses, deductions — it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.

Psychology offers another humbling epiphany. There is a vulnerability that you must accept once you start to unravel the biases, fallacies, and heuristics. The story you tell yourself to explain yourself is imperfect. Your personal narrative is bent and twisted and inaccurate, and that's beautiful because it's true for all of us.

I take great pleasure in accepting this because I feel a unity in the humility, in the recognition that we are a community of messy, stumbling, fumbling beings tumbling through space wrestling with a confusing gift of consciousness. For me, that has led to a sense of empathy I never knew until I saw my own flaws reflected in the species as a whole, and the flaws of the species reflected in myself.

And so it goes...Doc

Stopped To Ponder...division

There are no absolute boundaries and divisions in this world, only transition points where one set of relations yields prevalence to another. 

So in essence...we are Edgewalkers...

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Therapy...coping Practice

"Coping...it is an on going daily process. Some days better than others. Deal with it..."

Balancing the anger and hurt of your yesterdays with the fear and anxiety of your tomorrows is an awareness, a consciousness that your brain and mind are trying to weave it's way through life without dying. The brain does not know the difference. It just wants to retain its oxygen to live. Welcome those moments of adjustment each day. May as well... they will always show up like visitors to your door. Your bag full of emotions just needing a little attention which could lead to new choices... or not. Just a friendly thump on the head. We can ignore and live with tension and dis ease, or we may even think about our choices and draw some conclusions about our personal state of affairs. We may ponder those choices. Sometimes we even change our beliefs about our life and try to live with those new thoughts for a while. Like a warm sweater in that moment, but this new way of thinking takes practice to test your new perceptional bias.

These visitors show up as perturbations in your mind. Like...thoughts that go bump in the night. Interesting how the mind/brain works. No, a fascinating process. You see, you can be an observer of your thoughts and even participate in that inner dialog.

There is one dynamic that seems to hold some truth about our current state of being human. It is this..."a person will not alter behavior of thought until the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of change itself."

You see, your brain and mind are always active in states of "dis ease". If not acted upon we will surly suffer "disease". Sometimes we fail...we learn...try again...coping practice... as we weave our way through this beautiful process called living and dying in three quarter time...No guarantees, no time out, and no do overs...

Your success in life is not measured by the happiness you attain, but by the way you adjust to life after it hands you a bum deal...it is learned behavior...so practice...Doc