Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

It was a Wednesday early in 1996. My friend Ed Carter was at The Monroe Institute taking one of their weeklong residential courses, and he called me at work, suggesting that I come down there Friday morning for breakfast, as there was someone I ought to meet.

Ed had invested in Hampton Roads a few years previously, and, at his request, we had had a few business cards printed up for him listing him as Vice President for Development. In his spare time during the program, he had been functioning in that capacity. That is, he had gotten into a conversation with a fellow engineer, a tall thin guy from Colorado named Bruce Moen.

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I picked up catalog for fall 2008, and I fell to reading the backlist. What memories it brings!

When Bob Friedman and I founded Hampton Roads in the summer of 1989, what a different world it was then. No Internet, no e-mail in common use, even fax machines and answering machines were fairly new. In those days independent bookstores made up perhaps 60% of our customer list, before they were decimated wholesale by the onset of the chains.

A bigger difference, though, could be seen, looking back, in what was considered “far out” then as opposed to now. I like to think that we contributed our bit to that change.

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An article Robert Clarke recently wrote for his local newspaper shows a little of the unsuspected depths Modern man is missing. These ideas are well worked out in the two books of Robert’s that Hampton Roads published.

The Symbolic Meaning of Religion

I once had a dream in which a tattered old Bible lay on the pavement. People passing by were kicking it out of the way as worthless. When I picked it up and opened it, however, I found that every page was made of the purest gold. That is what the unconscious, or the spirit through the unconscious, thinks about the Bible. It teems with processes of the spirit, experienced largely through dreams, that are symbolic in nature, and which matches similar symbolism found in myths and religious texts around the world. As the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung said, myth is not fiction, but rather expresses truths largely of another reality experienced through the unconscious.

When Moses slays the Egyptian, flees to the land of Midian, and sits by a well, the seven daughters of Jethro appear. Moses then immediately goes up the mountain, experiences the burning bush, in which there is an angel, and God speaks. In the religious Mysteries of mankind water symbolises feminine spirit and fire masculine spirit, so in his movements from the well to the burning bush Moses is unifying these opposite spirits, the main goal of the spiritualising processes through the unconscious, called the Sacred Marriage.

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Robert Clarke is the author of two book published by Hampton Roads: The Four Gold Keys: Dreams, Transformation of the Soul and the Western Mystery Tradition; and An Order Outside Time: A Jungian View of the Higher Self from Egypt to Christ. I know him as well as a sincere and profound observer of Western man’s precipitous decline. Herewith, an introduction to how a man’s life can be saved by someone he has never met.

CG Jung, Robert Clarke, and the way forward

Years ago, Carl Jung saved Robert Clarke’s life. He did so without ever having met him - in fact without ever knowing that he was alive. He did it in the ultimate arm’s-length manner, by appearing on a television show. The results of that TV program continue to spin themselves out as the years go by, as Robert follows where he was led, creating lessons and opportunities for the rest of us.

Robert Clarke was born during the final years of World War II and grew up in the English midlands town of Burslem, one of the towns that they call The Potteries. His family was working class, his economic and educational horizons were limited, to say the least — college was out of the question — and he wound up in series of dead-end jobs. Unable to believe in the religion he had been raised in, he became to all extents and purposes an atheist. After a while, more than 30 years ago now, the accumulated meaninglessness of his life resulted in his having a nervous breakdown.

Then one night, watching the tube, he saw a documentary that included extensive clips of Jung speaking on his life and work, and suddenly, intuitively, he knew that this was the way forward for him. (Good thing he was in England. Had he been in America he probably would have gotten something on the intellectual level of “Car 54, Where Are You?”)

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A friend of mine has been saying for years that global warming probably isn’t happening, and he cites mounds of evidence for his position. So I was struck to come across this, by an engineer who became the first Australian astronaut, in The Australian, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23583376-5013480,00.html

Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh

Phil Chapman

April 23, 2008

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

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I get a sardonic smile from those supporters of China who say the Dalai Lama is being “unfair” to China. Oh well. This article from http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080420/NEWS05/80420034&imw=Y

Dalai Lama calls for greater focus on inner contentment and compassion

By TINA LAM • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • April 20, 2008

The United States and other wealthy countries need to downscale their lifestyles and try to focus more on inner contentment, the Dalai Lama said today.

There simply aren’t enough natural resources on the planet to support all 6 billion people on Earth imitating Western lifestyles, which consume large amounts of water and electricity. Because there are limitations on external material resources, but not on internal ones, it’s better to seek contentment and peace rather than material things, he said.

The Dalai Lama, the head of the Buddhist church, gave two lectures today at Crisler Arena in Ann Arbor, one on Buddhist texts and, in the afternoon, a lecture on the environment sponsored by the University of Michigan. Both were attended by more than 7,000 people.

Outside, about 600 to 700 people protested, university officials said, most supporting the Chinese government and the Olympics.

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This in some ways could be a big deal. Maybe it’s nothing; time will tell–but it could be a big deal. Gradually this disastrous federal administration seems to be reviving the ability of the states to think and act for themselves, together. For this we should probably thank the fact that the governor of California is constitutionally prohibited from becoming president (not having been born in the United States). Maybe we should prohibit more governors from becoming president, so that they would cease to regard their governorships as stepping-stones to a larger candidacy!

This story is from http://www.courant.com/news/politics/hc-global0419.artapr19,0,1146491.story and I was alerted to it by the morning Schwartzreport, as so often.

Governors Convene At Yale To Fight Global Warming

By DAVID FUNKHOUSER | Courant Staff Writer
April 19, 2008

NEW HAVEN - The moment he strode into Woolsey Hall Friday afternoon, late but just in time for a photo op, Arnold Schwarzenegger changed the climate of Yale’s austere gathering of governors and gave the sweltering crowd a boost of energy — and a lot to think about.

In what was intended as a historic replay of a landmark meeting on conservation called by President Theodore Roosevelt 100 years ago, Yale brought together governors and officials from several states this week to sign a declaration calling on the federal government to get moving on climate change.

Schwarzenegger came to sign the declaration and to deliver his own brand of eco-politics: As a fiercely independent Republican governor of California, he perhaps has done more to fight global warming than any other governor in the nation. And he makes no bones about his differences with Congress and the Bush administration.

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Do you think politicians are the important people who shape your world? Think again. Our world is shaped more by thinkers like this, it’s just that the effect takes longer to spread through the culture — and the effect, when it does arrive, is less likely to be chaos of the economic and political type. Notice, BTW, that his theory came from his “accidentally” leaving out some numbers, and then his thinking about what had happened as a result of his doing so. I put the quotes around the word “accidentally” not because I think he did it on purpose, but because it has become clear to me over the years that when the non-physical side of things wants to cause something to happen, such synchronistic events often precipitate them. This obit from http://www.efluxmedia.com/news_Chaos_Theory_Scientist_Edward_Lorenz_Dies_At_90_16477.html

Chaos Theory Scientist Edward Lorenz Dies At 90

On April 16, the world lost yet another remarkable scientific figure that marked the 20th century with his ideas of the chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Edward Norton Lorenz, who revolutionized meteorology by studying the effects of small variations in the initial condition of a dynamical system, which can lead to large and unpredictable variations in later stages of the system, died of cancer at the age of 90 on Wednesday, at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Free Tibet? Hell, free America!

Support the humble monks? You bet. But oh, let’s not forget our own wonderfully abundant atrocities

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

I know I know I know — we don’t exactly have huge platoons of nasty jackbooted soldiers storming through the streets in riot gear and gas masks and large sticks bashing down on the shiny heads of peaceful monks.

We don’t exactly have smashed and burning vehicles and dead bodies in the streets and vicious martial law, ethnic cleansings and curfews and media lockouts and blocked Internet access and all sorts of nefarious, disturbing reports of brutality and beatings and death. Well, except for parts of Oakland. And Los Angeles And Chicago. But never mind that now.

Overall, even under the deformed and wretched Bush regime and despite how much Dick Cheney’s dead raisin of a heart leaps with excitement when he sees the videos of those bloodied and dead Tibetan protesters (”Damn hippies had it coming”), America is still far from the brutality and inhumanity happening right now in Lhasa and beyond.

Or maybe not. For here is what we do have: We have torture. We have a frighteningly simpleminded cowboy-wannabe president who supports and endorses the most inhumane treatment of prisoners imaginable despite its utter failure as a tactic, and this violent belief, this dark energy infects the national bloodstream like prehistoric malaria.

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Chinese-Christians Are Paying a High Price for the Olympics

By John W. Whitehead
April 14, 2008
The world is finally seeing China for what it is: a totalitarian dictatorship.

It’s widely known that China has been rounding up and persecuting First Amendment advocates. These Chinese dissidents who use the Internet and demonstrations to protest what China has been doing often disappear or are sent to re-education camps.

Little, however, is said about China’s religious persecution, especially of Christians. Yet it is on par with, if not worse than, the harsh and oppressive treatment of demonstrators in Tibet that has received widespread news coverage and caused public outrage. And it’s been happening for years.

Nevertheless, the 2008 Olympic Games were awarded to China in July 2001, with the expectation that the Games would act as a catalyst for the improvement of human rights in China and cause China to change its image. And over the past seven years, China has invested huge amounts of time and resources in preparing for the Olympics in order to make a good impression on the world. Unfortunately, these preparations have included the “religious repression, torture, sexual abuse and arbitrary detention” of many religious individuals, particularly Chinese Christians.

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