A Journal Discovered Among the Papers of Thomas Kjar  

I have, sometimes, what I would term a "medieval mind." It's an intuition, correlated to some actual place or person or thought who has actually existed in reality- in the middle-ages. Sally says its evidence of past lives and wanted me to go to some character who "reads" past lives. I imagine myself sleeping under the roof of a gabled church, listening to bees and the coming and going of women.

Without something profound and true a the center of the person what can there be but bullish cannibalism going nowhere but to the intestines?

Lately I've had a certain distrust of progress. Emotion. I've had enough of it: primitive, cultic, theosophical evangelical stuff coming from the abandoned buildings of our souls.

Of course, I am not the caretaker of humanity.

My first reaction to technology was essentially moral. Conscience as against the object.

Conscience is bold when it has the support of the other aspects. Separated from the other aspects and it becomes a menacing, growling beast wanting to destroy everything but an icon of perfection perceived at some time in the past.

Sometimes I think I've lost thorough contact; lost the bearings, driven too far inward in an age that demands action of some kind. Obviously I can't do it all. Sometimes I am not even sure what it is I do. the punishment for this is sometimes beyond description. Oh, I know what sort of job I do.

The intellect obviously reaches a point where it is either absorbed in the on-going activity of the society or plunges into the abyss. And into this abyss are all the devils and temptations well chronicled in history.

Do you look at the self-evident activity of the world and explain them in relation to all the other activity going on or criticize that activity?

I suppose that old human practice, Philosophy, has disengaged itself from the practical world for a long time.

To say that there are no intellectual resources in the US is ridiculous. The intellect can't decide whether or who exactly it is speaking to. Is it speaking to university men and women? Is it speaking to intelligent elected officials? Is it speaking to that class of intellectuals called journalists, pundits, and so on? Is it speaking to the secure , the restless, the ambiguous? Or is it speaking to some ideal image of itself projected outward to an 'other'? Or is it speaking to its past?

There is thinking for the pure thought- thought as an activity which brings itself to that point where it is describing reality and finding laws for that reality. Scientific thinking being the most obvious and most successful thus far found.

But what is scientific thinking? And what happens when scientific thinking ' can not see what it has brought into being? It's works and deeds? Well- this is a huge area-which would take more than simply inventories of the good and bad of science.

The two propitious relations to science and technology are 1) its self-evident reality 2) its effects

One of the more obvious results of this development is that it divides the world into those who use and have access to these things and so have the power to determine future and those who are used by them; are victims of it and so on, setting up this wave counter-wave of political, social struggle.

The present world is unintelligble without understanding the process that led the mind from perceiving sensuously its experience on the earth and, eventually, fixing the earth in an orbit in relation to the universe around it. This has been a great achievement in human thought.

One reaches a point when this great development has put human being on all fours again; groping toward a future, broken up and dissolving at every step.

Like any other normal person I love to observe what enters my own mind and spirit.

To be an 'enemy* of religion would be absurd, even a sin.

Religion bothers me when I see it rampaging and abusing as in the old days. Religion is quiet contemplation. It is peace and well-being. It is not armies. It is not bombs. It is not dancing with snakes. And that reminds me of the people I met out in the woods who worshipped snakes or danced with them. If that is religion than I want to see the Pope dancing too.

If you allow your religion to cloud clear thinking and concentration isn't that singing hosannah's while walking backward toward an abyss?

There comes a moment in life when the energies of life are thrown back on themselves and the fire is fatal.

The times are always dangerous!

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