Re: Truth-loving Persians.+..

[Guest guest]

In talking about the power of blues music, Bob Dylan said in 1985:"For me, this is a deep reality: someone who's telling me where he'sbeen that I haven't, and what it's like there - somebody whose life Ican feel." There is that quality in Thermopylae, too, becauseCartledge understands that his readers will not grasp the significanceof Thermopylae unless they understand what it feels like to be aSpartan soldier, a Spartan mother, a Spartan king, and what it waslike, on the other side, to be part of the world's most powerfulunified empire before the Roman Empire

Thanks, Deb, for the fasc quote!

I copy this one bec it reminded me of an overwhelming exper I had during the Viet War. It validated for me much of wh Jung has writt. My son , a conscientious objector, had renounced his official waiver of serving bec of being a student at Stanford, n then had to write senators to get permission to volunteer to serve in Vietnam. His idea: to undo the harm.

So here he was in uniform on his last leave standing on the doorstep, saying goodbye as an unarmed soldier going to war.

I stood on the stoop and embraced him n had an incredible emotional rush. It was as if my consc expanded to identify w/ALL THE MOTHERS DOWN THROUGH HISTORY! who had been thru this archetypal wrenching event: saying farewell to a beloved son, borne n cherished, now off to danger n potential death!!

The specific image included the Spartan mother< who resigned her son to come back w/his shield or on it! I have never forgotten that moment n that par brought it back to mind. Only yesterday 11 American n hundreds of Iraqi n other mothers have gone thru that final goodbye.

Talk of waste! Think of the hours n days n months of carrying a child, raising it, educating it, all canceled out in an instant by a bullet or a bomb! Each one a living miracle of creation.

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At the peace nonf on Iona, there were sev retired generals who revealed the post WWII existence of an internat grp of them discussing ways to peace. All 74 of us debated the archetype of the warrior n his best function. The results were as follows:

1. Positive function: defence of the weak n preservation of life. Archetype of Knight n his night vigil in church w/sword on altar vowing only to use it justly.

Imagine ev milit officer doing this w/Ak- 7 n rifles today!

2. I quoted Edinger on the sublimation of fighting n instinctive need for opposition on the higher level of sports n games, provided the vessel was not broken! He also mentioned the double-entendre of the word PLAY. As in sports or theatre, esp. the coll wisdom in Greek classical drama, through which in the "Oresteia" trilogy, the shift fr the Furies n revenge to the Apollonian judge/jury n law was traced.

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Today, thru ignorance the 'vessel' of sports is constantly being broken by brawls on or off the field. Those crazy alchemical drawings of things taking place in bottles symb the 'vessel' which translates to 'it's as if.....'

Astrol. this is Aries,Mars, combat vs Libra, balance n 'fairness' of univ laws. Libra, Venus, also rules harmony n beauty. [anoth verbal double-entendre!]

Dan's manifesto is a gd descrip of our current situat. But history offers a grim reminder that coll shadow proj 'axis of evils' does not work. To 'love yr enemy' is to befriend yr own enemy w/in n to fight against the wrongs peop do, not the peop themselves. As the I Ching says, rather than fight ag evil, fight FOR the good.

Dan is a most valuable voice on J-F. I can't thank him enough. His viewpoint is like an off-stage reminder of what the material here/now is up against. Jung was both an idealist AND a realist. We can do no better than to heed this.

A man who walks w/his eyes constantly turned heavenwards falls down the proverbial hole. - Gezeebius says.

gotta go!

love

ao, Silly Old Woman Dept.

[Guest guest]

> Jung was both an idealist AND a realist. We can do no better than to

heed this.

>

> A man who walks w/his eyes constantly turned heavenwards falls down the

> proverbial hole. - Gezeebius says.

>

I'm reading Christabel Bielenberg's When I Was A German, An English

Woman In Nazi Germany, 1934-1945. She was an liberal intellectual

( " Frau Dr. " the 'peasants' call her) who married a German from

Hamburg, moving there and then on to Berlin, starting a family. A

different perspective from the usual history of those years. It's

fascinating. Of course, you keep wondering the overwhelming why didn't

they leave, why didn't they see it coming, all of them. And she

explains that it was the optimism of their class, their disbelief that

a country that had been so brilliant, could not find its way out from

under Hitler, the chaos and the mass mind that chaos had allowed to

rise to domination. It was a mass mind that they felt strongly around

them; " the glassy eyes, " she says, describing it. And so they quietly

observed it all with their old friends, their network of Rhoads

scholars, globe trotters etc., resisting with care, making fun of the

idiot buffoons each step of the way, as they had their fireside

drinks. They cared about the world, about Germany, about ideas. Smart,

modern, they had the high road that would eventually make things

right. Above all, they wanted to serve, to heal things, and were sure

that -- knowing there were many in the civil service, military,

universities in Germany who felt and intellectualized identically --

they were part of the great tide that was going to soon turn.

It never happened.

The illusions of elites, our various republics of letters. I've

watched it here. Been part of it.

Dialogue is essential. And getting out beyond the divide is essential.

Red State, Blue State: mythologies, true, as well as effective pigeon

holes. Delusions. Vessels serving who?

And all the wars we did not fight are victories we have to remember

alongside the paths that paved the wars. How are ideas and identities

come by, sold, used? Interpretive filters, the " hidden threads that

link ideas to the invisible will of the time. " I suppose the first

step is taken in selling us that there is a Time, a Will, a Geist.

The gods are always evoked.

And we understand:

Only the change in the attitude of the individual is the beginning of

the change in the psychology of the nation. ~CGJUNG (CW7,4)

(Ah, my old Philoctetes complex acting up. Must be the rain.

DMConner

" Listen, Moirai (Fates) ... hear our prayers ... send us rose-bloomed

Eunomia (Good Order in civic government) and her bright-throned

sisters Dike (Justice) and garland-wearing Eirene (Peace), and make

this city forget its heavy-hearted misfortunes. " - Greek Lyric V

Anonymous Fragments 1018 (from Stobaeus, Anthology