Trump is planning a giant military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., to coincide with his 79th birthday on June 14. According to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity, the parade was pushed by the White House.
Bad enough that the nation has to display its militarism in such a crude, authoritarian way. To do it at the behest of the most authoritarian president in the nation’s history who wants a big military parade on his birthday is disgraceful.
Plans call for 6,686 soldiers, 50 aircraft, seven bands and 152 vehicles, including M-1 Abrams tanks and vintage World War II Sherman tanks — moving past a reviewing stand near the White House, where Trump will be. The parade is scheduled to last nearly four hours and be capped off with a fireworks display.
The White House says the purpose of the parade isn’t just to celebrate Trump’s birthday but also to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, which happens to fall on the same day.
Rubbish. The only thing that happened on June 14, 1775 was the Continental Congress’s authorizing the enlistment of expert riflemen.
If any day deserves to be celebrated as the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army it’s the following day, June 15, when George Washington was appointed its Commander-in-Chief.
George Washington himself would have recoiled at any military parade in his honor.
When in 1782 Colonel Lewis Nicola, writing on behalf of army officers, proposed to Washington that he become the king of the newly formed United States, Washington vehemently rejected the idea, responding that he would not become “George the First” after fighting against “George the Third.”
The giant military parade planned by Trump dishonors the memory of the Army’s first Commander-in-Chief.
We have no kings in America.
If you’d like to make this point forcefully, consider joining the nationwide protest scheduled for June 14. More details can be found on the Bluesky thread here. Events will also be listed here.
Let’s make this a birthday King Trump will never forget.
60 Minutes • Apr 7, 2024 Artificial intelligence is being used as a way to help those dealing with depression, anxiety and eating disorders, but some therapists worry some chatbots could offer harmful advice.
“All those who have become nothing before they die have no self but I.”
–Charles Upton
New Thinking • May 4, 2025 Charles Upton’s first books of poetry were published in 1968 and 1969 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Light Books in San Francisco. He was then considered the youngest member of the “beat generation” as he was still in high school. He has subsequently written many books associated with the traditionalist school of spirituality including What Poets Used to Know, The Science of the Greater Jihad, Folk Metaphysics, Alien Disclosure Deception: The Metaphysics of Social Engineering, Day and Night on the Sufi Path, Dugin Against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory, System of the Antichrist, and Vectors of the Counter-Initiation. His most recent book of poetry is Wars of Love and Other Poems. His website is https://charles-upton.com/ Note: There is a GoFundMe page for Charles Upton who is dealing with colon cancer. See https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-charl… To download a copy of See, Sing, and Know: The Art of Poetry in Five Lessons by Charles Upton, as referenced in this interview, go to https://newthinkingallowed.com/See.docx Here Charles Upton reflects on more than a half-century of involvement in the world of poetry. He explains the three main functions of poetry as meaning, sound, and imagery. He laments the downfall that poetry has experienced in recent decades. He reads from some favorite poets as well as from his own work. He also reflects on the sad tendency of poets to die young. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:38 The price of being a poet 00:13:20 Good and bad poetry 00:28:59 The loss of meaning 00:44:02 The danger of poetry 00:55:13 The sound of poetry 01:05:20 Reading from The Wars of Love 01:30:32 Poetry needs an audience 01:37:24 Let meaning and wisdom find you 01:42:24 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on April 9, 2025)
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove • May 3, 2025 Debashish Banerji, PhD, is Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and Chairman of the East West Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He is author of Integral Yoga Psychology, Seven Quartets of Becoming: A Transformative Yoga Psychology Based on the Diaries of Sri Aurobindo and also The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore, a book about his great grandfather. He edited an anthology about his great uncle, Rabindranath Tagore in the Twenty-First Century. Another anthology is titled Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures. In this video, rebooted from 2019, he discusses the cosmology inherent in what is arguably the world’s oldest religious scripture, aspects of which are surprisingly modern. He points out that the Vedas share many Indo-European traits. So, the Vedic pantheon is similar to the Greek. He refers to hymns celebrating the use of a mysterious entheogen known as “Soma”. He elaborates upon the role of sacrifice in ancient India. He also notes that this ancient scripture can be viewed in a psychological context. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on May 22, 2019)
“In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.”
― William Blake
William Blake (November 28 ,1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake has become a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. Wikipedia
“Because you love one human being, you see everyone else very differently than you saw them before—perhaps I only mean to say that you begin to see—and you are both stronger and more vulnerable, both free and bound.”JAMES BALDWIN
For activist and writer James Baldwin, falling in love was, ‘Not merely the key to my life, but to life itself.’ In this excerpt from his essay Take Me to the Water, featured in the book, No Name in the Street, he talks about falling in love, an event not directly relevant to the narrative, but a powerful force that shaped him and how he interacted with the world. In his childhood, Baldwin suffered at the hands of a tyrannical father and eventually left the United States for France in despair at the intensity of societal inequality at home. In the many essays and novels that he wrote and the activism that he engaged in, Baldwin worked to articulate his subjective experience of race and sexuality, and how that reflected American history and culture. His work often exhibits a nakedness revealed here to be galvanized by love, that ‘bondage which liberates you into something of the glory and suffering of the world.’
Well. Time passes and passes. It passes backward and it passes forward and it carries you along, and no one in the whole wide world knows more about time than this: it is carrying you through an element you do not understand into an element you will not remember. Yet, something remembers—it can even be said that something avenges: the trap of our century, and the subject now before us.
I left home—Harlem—in 1942. I returned, in 1946, to do, with a white photographer, one of several unpublished efforts; had planned to marry, then realized that I couldn’t—or shouldn’t, which comes to the same thing—threw my wedding rings into the Hudson River, and left New York for Paris, in 1948. By this time, of course, I was mad, as mad as my dead father. If I had not gone mad, I could not have left.
I starved in Paris for a while, but I learned something: for one thing, I fell in love. Or, more accurately, I realized, and accepted for the first time that love was not merely a general, human possibility, nor merely the disaster it had so often, by then, been for me—according to me—nor was it something that happened to other people, like death, nor was it merely a mortal danger: it was among my possibilities, for here it was, breathing and belching beside me, and it was the key to life. Not merely the key to my life, but to life itself. My falling in love is in no way the subject of this book, and yet honesty compels me to place it among the details, for I think—I know—that my story would be a very different one if love had not forced me to attempt to deal with myself. It began to pry open for me the trap of color, for people do not fall in love according to their color—this may come as news to noble pioneers and eloquent astronauts, to say nothing of most of the representatives of most of the American states—and when lovers quarrel, as indeed they inevitably do, it is not the degree of their pigmentation that they are quarreling about, nor can lovers, on any level whatever, use color as a weapon. This means that one must accept one’s nakedness. And nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.
In any case, the world changes then, and it changes forever. Because you love one human being, you see everyone else very differently than you saw them before—perhaps I only mean to say that you begin to see—and you are both stronger and more vulnerable, both free and bound. Free, paradoxically, because, now, you have a home—your lover’s arms. And bound: to that mystery, precisely, a bondage which liberates you into something of the glory and suffering of the world.
Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the accidents that befall us — these dwarf in consequence the sum total of our choices. Still, our choices are the points of light that flicker against the opaque immensity of chance to illuminate our lives with meaning, just as stars, all the billions of them, comprise a mere 0.4% percent of a universe made mostly of dark energy and dark matter, and yet those same sparse stars made everything we know and are.
The most life-shaping choices we can make are those of our mindset — we can choose the best orientation toward the world, we can choose the best orientation toward each other, but where we seem to struggle the most is orienting with clarity and compassion toward our own lives, toward the choice we have in the dialogue between our inner world and our circumstances.
The novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence (September 11, 1885–March 2, 1930) took up these questions in a moving letter to his closest friend, Cynthia Asquith, found in the out-of-print treasure The Letters of D.H. Lawrence (public library).
The two had met as young writers both searching for their voice, both hungering to be heard — he was working as a kind of literary assistant to titans like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and she as a secretary to Peter Pan creator J.M. Barrie. Their friendship was quick and deep and largely epistolary, their letters a sandbox for playing out the life of the mind that becomes literature, a found of mutual encouragement for the twin arts of writing and living. On these pages addressed to the other, they each became themselves.
D.H. Lawrence and Lady Cynthia Asquith
Shortly after his thirtieth birthday, a year into the world’s first global war, he sent her what he called a “parting letter” — he was about to make one of the most courageous, disorienting, transformative choices a human being could make: to leave everything one knows and loves, to dismantle the superstructure of daily life that houses the life of the spirit, and begin again someplace new. He didn’t just choose another city, or another country — he chose another continent, another culture of young and untested idealism. He tells his friend:
I feel I must leave this side, this phase of life, for ever. The living part is overwhelmed by the dead part, and there is no altering it. So that life which is still fertile must take its departure, like seeds from a dead plant. I want to transplant my life. I think there is hope of a future, in America. I want if possible to grow toward that future.
He knew that Cynthia did not have this kind of freedom. He knew that, despite her talent and her passion, she felt trapped in her circumstances — a marriage too small for her, to which she felt tethered by her children, in a country still too corseted by Victorian mores to allow a woman the full freedom to claim her life. But he also knew the power of personal choice in any given set of circumstances. A generation before Viktor Frankl in his stirring memoir of surviving the concentration camps that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” Lawrence urges his friend in that way we have of giving others the pointed advice we most urgently need ourselves:
You must get the intrinsic reality clear within your soul — even if you betray it in reality, yet know it: that is everything. And know that in the end, always you keep the ultimate choice of your destiny: to abide by the intrinsic reality, or by the extrinsic: the choice is yours, do not let it slide from you, keep it always secure, reserved… Keep the choice of the right always in your own hands. Never admit that it is taken from you… Keep the choice of life… always in your hands: don’t ever relinquish it.
There are things in life that come over you sudden as a flash flood, total as an eclipse — the great loves, the great creative passions, the great urges to conquer a mountain or a theorem. They can feel like an alien invasion, like the immense hand of some imperative has seized your soul from the outside. But when you look back on them once they have had their way with you, if you are awake enough to your own life and conscious enough of your unconscious, you come to realize that they were not a possession by some external force but dispossessed parts of you yearning for integration. This is why our states of possession are some of the most profound experiences we can have as human beings — they are both revelations and transformations of the self, those eruptions of the psyche that raise new summits of possibility for our creativity and our vitality.
The Jewish German analytical psychologist Erich Neumann (January 23, 1905–November 5, 1960) devoted his life to investigating these invisible processes, finally formulating his ideas in four essays published under the title Art and the Creative Unconscious (public library) just before his death.
Erich Neumann
Almost entirely forgotten today, Neumann influenced some of the great modern shamans of the psyche — particularly Carl Jung, who was once his teacher and in whose own writings on creativity I first came upon the passing mention that led me to Neumann’s work. He was especially interested in the relationship between creativity and the archetypal undercurrents of the psyche, the complexes pulsating beneath our conscious experience, the psychic transformations possible when we fully own our creative energy — transformations that often begin with an experience of possession. He writes:
Every transformative or creative process comprises stages of possession. To be moved, captivated, spellbound, signify to be possessed by something; and without such a fascination and the emotional tension connected with it no concentration, no lasting interest, no creative process, are possible. Every possession can justifiably be interpreted either as a one-sided narrowing or as an intensification and deepening. The exclusivity and radicality of such “possession” represent both an opportunity and a danger. But no great achievement is possible if one does not accept this risk.
Remember: “You are here to risk your heart.” And if love and work are the twin strands of meaning in our lives, the two great creative endeavors of being alive, it is there that we are most prone to possession, there that we risk the most. What we risk, of course, is ourselves — the transformation of the self by the force of what the possession reveals in us: the abandoned and alienated parts of us longing for inclusion in our conscious experience.
[States of possession] presuppose a disunity of the psyche, whose integration is an endless process. The world and the collective unconscious in which the individual lives are fundamentally beyond his mastery; the most he can do is to experience and integrate more and more parts of them. But the unintegrated factors are not only a cause for alarm; they are also the source of transformation.
Transformation, however, is one of the great human paradoxes and one of the starkest illustrations of the limits of our imagination — we can never fully imagine who we are and what life is like on the other side of a total transformation, and so we either dread it or dismiss it. (See the excellent Vampire Problem thought experiment.) This, Neumann observes, is because our only reference points are partial transformations:
The word transformation… embraces every change, every strengthening and slackening, every broadening and narrowing, every development, every change of attitude, and every conversion. Every sickness and every recovery are related to the term transformation; the reorientation of consciousness and the mystical loss of consciousness in ecstasy are a transformation.
[…]
Most striking are those transformations which violently assail an ego-centered and seemingly airtight consciousness, i.e., transformations characterized by more or less sudden “irruptions” of the unconscious into consciousness. The irruptive character is experienced with particular force in a culture based on ego stability and a systematized consciousness; for in a primitive culture, open to the unconscious, or in a culture whose rituals provide a bond with the archetypal powers, men are prepared for the irruption. And the irruption is less violent because the tension between consciousness and the unconscious is not so great.
We have all experienced such “irruptions” that feel like alien invasions whenever the physiological foundation of the psyche is dysregulated — in illness and pain, in extreme hunger and thirst, in states of exhaustion or intoxication. In such moments, the unconscious begins to bubble up through the cracks and produces moments of epiphany, conversion, sudden illumination. (Virginia Woolf experienced it in the context of illness and physicist Freeman Dyson contacted it by “going into a sort of semistupor after forty-eight hours of bus riding.”) And yet these personal transformations, as sudden and strange and all-consuming as they may feel, can only ever be partial because, Neumann observes, they “apply only to the affected ego and consciousness, not to the total personality,” that fractal of the universal. Drawing on Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, he writes:
What we encounter most often are partial changes, partial transformations of the personality… Unless changes in consciousness go hand in hand with a change in the unconscious components of the personality, they do not amount to much… Possession by a personal complex, an emotional content, leads only to a partial transformation that overpowers consciousness and its center, the ego… Whereas partial changes in the personal unconscious, in the “complexes,” always influence consciousness at the same time, and changes effected through the archetypes of the collective unconscious almost always seize upon the whole personality.
An absorbing creative process — one characterized by what later psychologists have termed “flow,” or what Octavia Butler called “a sweet and powerful positive obsession” — can begin as such an “irruption.” (That is what I experienced with my bird divinations, which arrived as a kind of possession that took hold of me daily for months.) And yet, Neumann observes, while all creative work requires some element of possession, what distinguishes great art is that the possession is not the end point of the creative process but a stepping stone to a higher-order motive force serving not self-realization but universal revelation. With an eye to philosopher Martin Buber’s concept of the I-Thou relation, he writes:
The individual who stops in his possession and whose productivity is based on a monomania, an idée fixe, occupies only a low rank in the hierarchy of creative men, though his achievement may still be significant for the collectivity.
Creative transformation, on the other hand, represents a total process in which the creative principle is manifested, not as an irruptive possession, but as a power related to the self, the center of the whole personality. For partial possession by a single content can be overcome only where the centroversion that makes for wholeness of the personality remains the guiding factor. In this event the law of psychic compensation leads to an unremitting dialectical exchange between the assimilating consciousness and the contents that are continuously being newly constellated. Then begins the continuous process characteristic of creative transformation — new constellations of the unconscious and of consciousness interact with new productions and new transformative phases of the personality. The creative principle thus seizes upon and transforms consciousness as well as the unconscious, the ego-self relation as well as the ego-thou relation. For in a creative transformation of the total personality, a modified relation to the thou and the world indicates a new relation to the unconscious and the self, and the clearest, though not the only, indication of psychic transformation is a change in the relation to extrapsychic reality.
Although the creative process, in all its gripping possession, feels so profoundly personal, in its highest form it is inseparable from the universal, from the immensity of the one reality we share, the one experience we share — the fundamental unity which sparked quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s koan-like pronouncement that “the over-all number of minds is just one.” We habitually lose sight of that oneness as the mind splits into consciousness and the unconscious. Creativity is what we call the process of integrating the two so that we may feel more fully and see more deeply into the nature of reality. Neumann observes:
When we consider the totality of the human psyche, in which consciousness and the unconscious are interdependent both in their development and in their functions, we see that consciousness can develop only where it preserves a living bond with the creative powers of the unconscious… It must not be forgotten that the outside world that we apprehend with our differentiated consciousness is only a segment of reality, and that our consciousness has developed and differentiated itself as a specialized organ for apprehending this particular segment of reality… We pay a heavy price for the sharpness of our conscious knowledge, which is based on the separation of the psychic systems and which breaks down the one world into the polarity of psyche and world. This price is a drastic curtailment of the reality that we experience.
The triumphs of creative work invite a return to that unified reality:
In [great works of art] a fragment of the unitary reality is apprehended — a deeper, more primordial, and at the same time more complete reality that we are fundamentally unable to grasp with our differentiated conscious functions, because their development is oriented toward a sharper perception of sections of polarized reality. In the differentiation of consciousness we seem to be doing the same thing as when we close our eyes in order to enhance our hearing, in order that we may be “all ears.” Unquestionably this exclusion sharpens and intensifies our hearing. But in thus excluding the other senses we perceive only a segment of the total sensory reality, which we experience more adequately and fully if we not only hear it but also see, smell, taste, and touch it.
[…]
In the rapture and beauty of the creative moment… consciousness and the unconscious momentarily become a creative unity and a third term, a part of the one reality.
And so Neumann locates creativity at the crossing point of possession and openness — the place where the intrapsychic forces impelling us in a certain direction meet the willingness to look outward in all directions, to open the self to the universe and the oneness of reality, the world in its completeness and its infinity. With an eye to what he calls the essential “receptive component” of creative work, he observes:
Always and everywhere [the creative person] is driven to rediscover, to reawaken, to give form to this world. But he does not find this world as though seeking something outside him; rather, he knows that this encounter with full reality, the one world, in which everything is still “whole,” is bound up with his own transformation toward wholeness. For this reason he must, in every situation, in every constellation, refresh the openness into which alone the open world can enter.
I feel I must leave this side, this phase of life, for ever. The living part is overwhelmed by the dead part, and there is no altering it. So that life which is still fertile must take its departure, like seeds from a dead plant. I want to transplant my life. I think there is hope of a future, in America. I want if possible to grow toward that future.
