"Modern man does not understand how much his "rationalism" (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put hinm at th emercy of the psychic 'underworld.' He has freed himself from 'superstition' (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.

Anthropologists have often described what happens to aprimitive society when its spiritual values are exposed to the impact of modern civilization. Its people lose the meaning of their lives, their social organization diseintegrates, and they themselves morally decay. We are not in the same condition. But we have never really understood what we have lost, for our spirutal leaders unfortunately were more interested in protectiong their institutions than in understanding the mysetery that symbols present.

...We hve stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer. 

Man and His Symbols, p94

People speak of belief when they have lost knowledge. Belief and disbelief in God are mere surrogates. The naive primitive doesn't believe, he knows, because the inner experience rightly means as much to him as the outer. He still has no theology and hasn't yet let himself be befuddled by booby trap concepts. He adjusts his life --necessity--to outer and inner facts, which he does not-as we do -feel to be discontinuous. He lives in one world, whereas we live in only one-half and merly believe in the other or not at all. We have blotted it out with so-called "spiritual development," which means that we live by self fabricated electric light and --to heighten th ecomedyd-believe or don't believe in the sun.

"in the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from having lost contact with our instincts, the age old forgotten wisdom stored up in us."

"Western civilization is scarcely a thousand years old and must first of all free itself from its one-sidedness. This means, above all, deeper insight in to the natur eo fman. But no insight is gained by repressing and controlling the unconscious. Collected Works 2, par 876

The exxaggerated rationalization of consciousness...seeking to control nature isolates itself from her and so robs man of his own natural history. He finds hinmself transplanted into a limited present...The limitation creates af eeling that he is a haphazard creature, without meaning, and it is this feeling that prevents him from living his life with the intensity it demands if iti s to be enjoyed to the full. Life becomes stale and no longer the exponent of a complet man...People live as though they were walking in shoes too small for them. That quality of eternity. l which is so characteristic of the life of primitive man is entirely lacking. Hemmed round by rationalistic walls, we are cut off from the eternity of nature."  Colected works 8, par 739

On technology:

"Technology is an imbalance that begets dissatisfaction with work or with life. It estranges man from his natural versatility of action and thus allows many of his instincts to lie fallow. ...Whether it be used for good or ill depends entirely on man's own attitude, which in turn depends on technology. Collected Works 18, Par1403-7

"Can we not understand that all the outward tinkerings and imnprovements do not touch man's inner nature, and that everything ultimately depends upon whether the man who wields the science and the technics is capable of responsibility or not?" CW 9.l par 454-5

Zola once aptly remarked that the big cities are  "holocaustes de l'humanite," but the general trend is set in that direction because destruction is an unconscious goal of the collective unconscious at the present time: it is terrified by the snowballing population figures and uses every means to contrive an attenuated and inconspicuous form of genocide.

Faith Fades Fast

Born into an alienating alien nation.

[Written as I struggled to think within my religious ideas while becoming progressively more and more skeptical about the modern world, dogmatic  assertions, technology and belief in progress, American politics and capitalism.]

I've had so many doubts about the concept of community here in suburban America. Can community exist in a capitalist economy which by its nature thrives on peoples isolation. There is no solidarity here. Only masses of individual consumers lining up to satisfy psuedo needs which further fascilitate the concept of being a god of ones own personal space. Is community a group of isolated individuals in a certain geographic span who all share a common spiritual belief? If so, that can be met without any change. This seems to be only a social network of diverse people who find their value in believing they posess the same absolute truth. They are united by doctrine, yes, but their social ethic is different from one another. Unless we assume they all adhere to the values of their surrounding culture. It would be ideal for this community to unite in their spiritual fervor to know God and also to live out a social ethic which resembles the teachings of Jesus the Messiah and the early church only its been adapted to fit this culture and our modern knowledge.

I like the idea of community being a diverse group of people who live in the same neighborhood. They could disagree on every aspect of life but still come together to help one another thrive in this existence. But for one thing, this presupposes a dependence on others which does not exist. There is only a dependence on the spectacle of the ruling economy. A "community" which lacks a united vision is merely a group of neighbors whose interests clash with one another.

But I long for a community united in not only their goals, but their conception of life. I want friends who share a vision of changing the world, who don't accept the status quo. I want friends who look around them and see the need for change not only in people's dogma but in their economic and political worldviews.

Poem and Essay Critiquing Time

Soul Deconstruction

the puzzle is blurred
with jagged edges and gaps
each day a new piece to find
is the self amongst them
or is the spirit in my mind?
this piece alone is hidden
and when I've deconstructed myself
it seems i've lost my soul
for whatever truth and beauty exists
it portrays itself as a whole
-----------------------------------------------
On Time as commodity disconnecting us from nature and being.

Time was once seen in a process of natural change, and was not measured in exact amounts. Humans lived within the intricate rhythmic webwork which is life on Earth - the rise and set of the sun, the phase of the moon, the cycle of the seasons, the growth cycles of various plants and animals, and even the very long cycle of our own lives. The cost may be an increased level of stress, a greater feeling of disconnectedness, and increased physical fatigue resulting from the dissociation of the clocks' rhythm from the rhythms of the natural world -for instance, it is dark in the winter when you go to work, but it has been light for two hours when you go to work at the same hourly time in the summer.

"The clock provided the means by which time - a category so elusive that no philosophy has yet determined its nature - could be measured concretely in more tangible forms of space provided by the circumference of a clock dial. Time as duration became disregarded, and men began to talk and think always of 'lengths' of time, just as if they were talking of lengths of calico. And time, being now measurable in mathematical symbols, became regarded as a commodity that could be bought and sold in the same way as any other commodity."
Time is money, don't waste time, don't kill time, make time, buy time, spend time.

"The new capitalists, in particular, became rabidly time-conscious. Time, here symbolising the labour of workers, was regarded by them almost as if it were the chief raw material of industry. 'Time is money' became on of the key slogans of capitalist ideology, and the timekeeper was the most significant of the new types of official introduced by the capitalist dispensation.

in the early factories the employers went so far as to manipulate their clocks or sound their factory whistles at the wrong times in order to defraud their workers a little of this valuable new commodity. Later such practices became less frequent, but the influence of the clock imposed a regularity on the lives of the majority of men which had previously been known only in the monastery. Men actually became like clocks, acting with a repetitive regularity which had no resemblance to the rhythmic life of a natural being. They became, as the Victorian phrase put it, 'as regular as clockwork'. Only in the country districts where the natural lives of animals and plants and the elements still dominated life, did any large proportion of the population fail to succumb to the deadly tick of monotony." -George Woodcock, The Tyranny of the Clock.

Clockwork Revolt

How militantly I keep track of time
waste has such a bitter taste,
I'll wash it down with coffee
the question of what time it is gets my constant attention,
as if being too long diverted would signal the world's end.
the changing formation of numbers numbs me
am I a number too?
not a number on a clock, but a number of production
frequently checking other numbers to maintain my efficiency
what am i doing for the next 20 minutes?
; Its 3 AM I can still sleep four hours,
I am a machine

Stop!
I don't care what gets done in 20 minutes,
my only concern is living in this moment.
The machine destroys itself day by day
some of us choose to live life itself
throw off our watches and take back our hearts
People ask why I'm always late,
"haste is of the devil," I reply
time flies when you watch the system crumble,
I don't waste time but I'm not enslaved by it.
who am I being for the next 20 years?
a human being himself

-me