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Thought for the Day – June 17, 2026

June 18

I can’t stop thinking about what I experienced in today’s acupuncture vision.

The scene began as usual. No lights in the tower. The door was closed. For a long period “nothing” happened. Then I became aware (not a voice, just an infusion of awareness from “somewhere” not of my doing) that I was to “see into” the scene and to listen to the silence. I was aware that I had spoken of this in the seminar today. Then as I settled into seeing and listening, everything began to “ripple.” I was made aware that this rippling was the process of becoming and as long as I was aware of the rippling, the becoming was not yet “complete.” If the rippling was in process, the becoming will be still in the future. Then I became aware that when dreams are being assembled, they will be rippling. However, as the dream becomes coded in the brain as memory, then the rippling stops and the dream becomes “real.” But it is not the dream that becomes real, it is the “memory” of the dream that becomes real. Once it becomes real in this sense, it cannot be changed. It becomes as real as a table. It is no longer subject to the “possibilities” that existed in the rippling assembly stage. Like the visions. Once the session is finished, the vision becomes real as a memory. When I am in the vision, the rippling is happening and many things are possible. I understood I needed to stay aware of this. 

Saturday Memory for June 13, 2026

June 13

It was my senior year in high school. I was Boy’s League President. Part of my responsibility was to arrange a car show and a talk by someone. I was able to get Bob Yeakel’s specially designed Oldsmobile for the show and Ronald Reagan agreed to give his General Electric talk. Yeakle was a paraplegic and the car was modified so that everything operated by hand. On the day of the event, I picked up the car and Ronald Reagan at the airport. It was difficult to get used to driving with all controls by hand instead of by feet. At one point, as we proceeded through an intersection, a car went through as well from the right. I was able to stop in time to avoid a collision. The car and Reagan arrived safely at the school. I remember this event as my one chance to really alter history. One could say I muffed it.

ral

Thought for the Day – June 10, 2026

June 10

Since acupuncture this morning, I cannot stop thinking about the vision I had.

Acupuncture. The scene began with the tower lights on and the door open. Nothing came out, so I went in. The lift took me to the third floor, where a sliding panel revealed a room that I had not been in before. On the wall were three large TV or computer screens, one on top and two below side-by-side. For quite some time as I watched, nothing happened. Then, the top screen came on, but I could not see anything. It was intensely black but somehow “alive.” After a while, the bottom right screen lit up with blue light filaments that were moving very actively. As I watched, the filaments began to form an “image,” not so much a full image but the “shape” of an image. The lights were forming themselves into many images of what looked like the outline of tables. At one point the sequence of table images stopped, and one image became pronounced in some way. When that occurred, the left bottom screen lit up with an image of a “real” table, like one that we would call “a table.” I could not tell whether the top dark screen was somehow making the right lower screen outlines, or whether they naturally occurred that way and the dark screen “chose” the final image to become real. This all seemed possible in the experience. There followed a sequence of images: a dream that went through the same process and finally became a “real” dream in the lower left scree. Then there was a soccer match that became a real match (Peru was somehow involved). This whole process occurred several times, with the colors of the light filaments becoming the series of objects, inner and outer events becoming real. Then for a while, the lower right screen went dark but was still manifesting. In this case, I understood this was from the light spectrum I could not see, but nonetheless produced reality. The top screen never showed anything I could see but it was very “alive.” The final sense of what it “meant” for things to become “real” (in our experience) was that the manifestation from the lower right dimension was not longer required. The real objects, inner events, and outer happenings became “fixed” in the dimension we call “reality” and operated by the laws of that dimension. I was dizzy when the session ended.

Thought for the Day – June 3, 2026

June 3

Thought for the Day
Wednesday, June 3,2026

One of the first things to understand about the word olmelleon is that it is not to be judged by it’s absence from any known language or dictionary. It is not there at all. This is because the other is speaking a new language. This illustrates that the psyche (the “other” as I call it) is originating a new language, as it also originates new myths, new stories. I take this to be a word that applies in some way to the conflagration my dream referred to. When I experience a new word like this, the first thing I do is to close my eyes and repeat the word out loud until “something” happens. As I noted last week, “seeing with the eyes closed” is the literal meaning of the word “mystery.” Doing this (closing the eyes) is one way into the mystery the word presents. Repeating the word becomes a chant, a kind of mantra. Speaking this way with the eyes closed has all the qualities of a ritual and begins to excite the deeper psyche. One of my experience in doing this brought an image of smoke on a distant horizon, billowing clouds of dark smoke, a major blaze to be sure. This image presented itself autonomously and without any conscious effort on my part. Another experience produced an image of smoke as well as flames—closer this time. A third time, the image was looking out over a fire ravaged area completely engulfed in flame and smoke over a vast area. When I was saying the word out loud I would say it in “threes.” This reflects my habitual use of the “Rue of Three” Whenever I can when faced with the unknown, uncertainty, or doubt. It is one way into holding Keats’ negative capability. So, doing the experience with the eyes closed and saying the word olmelleon led to three images. My sense is that images were providing the “meaning” of the new and created word. It might be synonymous with the word “conflagration” that the dream referred to. But the important thing I feel is that this word means more than just the destruction of a conflagration. It’s pointing to something far more destructive and I believe it is pointing to what is transpiring now on our way to the future. I take it now as the name of what is happening culturally, politically, economically and socially: utter destruction. Olmelleon is what it is. It is, I believe, one aspect of the sixth extinction manifesting on many levels.

Saturday Memory for May 30, 2026

May 30

Saturday Memory
May 30, 2026

I was 8, If I remember correctly. I was widely read particularly in science. I had started many science projects, with my chemistry sets, microscopes, telescopes and other such things. I collected bugs of all kinds. My parents were Methodists and I was in Sunday school every Sunday. One Sunday the pastor was giving a talk on Revelations. At one point, I interrupted and asked him to talk about evolution. He said he would continue with Revelations. I persisted and asked him why. I was surely being a little snot, but I was keen about evolution. He ended the talk and asked me to come to his office. He called in my parents and told them I was no longer welcome in Sunday school. They told him they would no longer be members of his church. I was greatly impressed that my parents stood up for me this way. That is not very common.

Thought for the Day – May 27, 2026

May 27

Here’s what I’m thinking.

Reality and Quantum Reality

At macro levels (the major content of our experience), reality is consistent, stable and predictable. The physics of reality is elegant, understandable, explainable, and testable. This gives great weight to materialist views of reality. The goal of science at this level was to reduce everything to the principles of physical reality. This reductionist determinism ruled until the end of the 19th century.

As experiments became possible at micro levels (that is atoms, electrons, photons, etc.), this “classical” view of reality became unexpectedly relative rather than absolute. The results required a different way of thinking and this became the basis for two levels of reality: the classical world and the quantum world. In the quantum world, particles can have two forms: solid particles and waves. These waves are not like waves of water, but are waves of probabilities of all possible measurements. Approaching this reality with a classical mindset kept leading to “impossibilities.” So, a totally different form of thinking was required. Quantum thinking embraced these impossibilities as necessary to make sense of what was being discovered and verified by experiments and measurements. These “impossibilities” required rethinking of the nature of matter, time, space, energy, and basically all fundamental concepts.
Gain
It turns out that measurement and experiment must be done involving what has become known at the quantum level. If experiments and measurements adhere too closely to classical traditions, the quantum effects often disappear. But when measurements and experiments are more sensitively designed, the quantum level becomes “visible” again. So observation effects what is being observed, but not in the sense of observation as seeing. Observation is a physical intrusion at the sub-atomic level ands this changes what happens. This leads to the idea that quantum reality is not hidden or distant. It is, rather constantly present in classical reality but it so consistently “disrupted” by massive interactions that it as if the quantum world (and its “strangeness) disappears. Realization of this shows that determinism is not fundamental. At the deepest level, reality is not a conglomeration of “fixed” entities, but a structured layering of probabilities embracing all possibilities. At the macro level, the quantum world is invisible as certain probabilities become smooth realities through interference as described above.

The understanding of classical reality is now thousands of years old in its basic form. The quantum world has been known for less than 150 years.

Enter AI. As quantum computers become possible, and as AI comes to use quantum computers, it becomes possible for the nature of quantum reality (and perhaps other realities not yet known), to become known. This is cleverly the future. But we have no idea what that future will be. What we do have is the phenomenon of human presence (AI) in quantum reality.

But human dreams may already be there. It is those deepest dreams that reveal what is there and what is coming from there and what can become known. Do dreams “interfere” with quantum reality in the way “observation” does?  Maybe so. But if not, then deep dreams and visions became a way of observing that does not interfere and can thereby come to “see” more of the reality of this level. My thinking is leaning in this direction. So I see deep dreams as a counterweight to AI.

Russ

Saturday Memory for May 23rd 2026

May 23

I’m recalling my first international conference where I presented a paper at the International Congress of Psychiatry in Madrid, Spain. This was in 1965, I don’t recall the title of my paper, but what I do recall is that I and several colleagues went for a walk. At one point, we found ourselves behind the conference cater and discovered a number of large posters covered with tarps. In looking at the posters, we found they were all the image of Franco, that had been taken down from their posting on the conference center. As we were doing this, we were chased by the police. We escaped back inside the conference center before they caught us. They were really rough looking hombres!

What is the purpose of remembering this today?

I was not trying to remember but I did open this file to write down whatever presented itself. So I can’t claim any conscious success. I’m just scribing what appeared when I stared at the blank page. I can’t help but feel there is someething to learn from these “presented” memories. I’ll post whatever I come up with.

Thought for the Day – May 20, 2026

May 20

Thought for the Day – May 20, 2026

The foundations of postmodernism are best exemplified in texts by Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” is the foundational text where he coined the concept of hyperreality. Baudrillard posits that understanding is impossible and when one thinks otherwise one is seduced into a simulated version of reality he calls hyperreality. Meaning is obliterated and there can be no “grand theory” of understanding. The real, the objective, the rational, the true, become simulations, copies, and real understanding disappears in favor of simulacra. The dominant simulacra (as we see today) values the false copy and insists it is the correct understanding. This puts nonsense on a par with sense, falsity ion a par with truth, irrational on a par with rational. This is the character of the hyperreality we are living in.

In his book, “The Postmodern Condition,:” Lyotard argues that seeking of grand narratives of understanding have collapsed and efforts to resurrect this approach are destined to collapse as well. The collapse of grand narratives points to the collapse of any formulation of absolutes, including ethics. Lyotard pointed to childhood as a state that is desirable but unattainable. Seeking it anyway, is what one can try in the face of all else.

Saturday Memory for May 16, 2026

May 16

Today I am remembering Jon Fosse’s Nobel Prize speech. I think I am remembering this because I am working on how to get people to write from the geography of “the other” rather than ego-based writing. The seminar I’ll do for the C. G. Jung Society of Seattle, starting June 3, will focus on this.

Here is what Fosse said in his speech:

“… when I write, I never prepare. I don’t plan anything. I proceed by listening. When I write, at a certain point, I always get the feeling that the text has already been written, it is out there somewhere, not inside me, and I just need to write it down before the text disappears.”

This captures the way I write most things I have written.

Saturday Memory for 5.9.26

May 10

It was February 8, 1971. The tree cutters cut down a large tree that was near our swimming pool. The tree consultant had said there was likely to be damage to the pool if not cut down. So, despite our misgivings, we ordered it cut down. The next morning at 6:01 am, the earth quaked in what came to be known as the Sylmar earthquake. It caused a lot of damage. What it caused in me, as I tried to get up from our waterbed and stagger to the glass doors overlooking the pool, was the feeling that the quake would crack the pool in retribution for our cutting down the tree. As I watched the pool, the water splashed onto the deck, but I could see no crack. And later examination of the whole pool revealed that it was intact. Later that day, I asked students to write out what they experienced as they woke up from the earthquake. When I examined these reports, I discovered that more than three-fourths of the responses indicated fantasies or dreams of retribution. I had an impulse to publish these findings, but did not do so. It remains an interesting question.

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