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For essentially 50 years, what I soon came to call “my studies” were directed by an experience acquired urgency of necessary theme, related to the important, no, the deepest facts of the past – history – as they manifest in the ongoing present. Now, with hope of influence, and its necessity of tasks receding behind me, I can choose my topics personally.

Imo:
History is not Psychology. (Or Psyche.) Psychology is not History.
The Self is not all History, nor is History the Self.
(Even among the aristos.)
The History, in fact, the Histories of the Ideas and Beliefs in and experiences and lives of mutimillionfold believers over thousands of years of time in God are not reducible to the Self. certainly not to some conscious manipulative distractions by Cabal/s.
To consider only our “Judeo-Christian” stream of History: for this to be true, one must reject not only for examples Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and on and on, but Moses, Jesus, et al. And what of age-old religious texts, art, cathedrals, temples,…
Jungians (for a century or so) turn the World, History, Life, Others,… into a reflection of themselves, hypertrophes of the Self. All the World, all of Nature, all of History — and “God” — are not the Self mistaking projections of Itself.
All humans, the aristos or polloi, live inside “History”.
The History/ies of the World, and the Idea/s of God, be it among the best, the modest, or the worst, and all of the beliefs and rituals and theophanic experiences all throughout the histories of societies throughout time in the World, are not reducible to the Self, and manipulative cabals.
Just simply not.

“…wenn er nicht den plan gehabt hätte, sich auf dieser materiellen Unterlage eine Pflanzschule für eine Welt von Geistern zu gründen” — Goethe-Eckermann, Sonntag, 11 März 1832

Wherein realistically, most are still kindergartners. Including most people I know.

I have taken in the last years to saying how I had moved from the incredible lightness of being in California to Russia.

Not by whichever judgments and standards of academia, but by one’s self burdensome, responsibility with self- and world awareness and knowledge – and Goethe knowledge and awareness – can one speak of him no longer a being of distant peak personage, but a personality, in fact, a person. After and above Goethe one stands more alone – if learned, matured and worn – in the world.

And what substance and sense the inevitable attitudes of those who have never lived beyond and above their inherited ways of thought, word and deed?

A trip to Italy for aesthetics and pleasure, or Bildung and historical insights?

Again: as Goethe found in Naples a deeply different attitude to life to that of Weimar and German-speaking lands, so I found a completely different mentality (then) in Russia to that I had experienced from San Francisco to the Berlin Wall. Goethe recognized (22 May 1787, 28 May 1787) a lightness of being in Naples, I left the lightness of being in Santa Cruz, California for the earnestness of Moscow, Russia.

From my first encounter with Russia in 1986, till my departure from there in 2015, I noted some six phases of society and mentality. I suppose by now there have been a total of eight or nine distinguishable phases of main social mentality in Russia.

Often those from German-speaking lands north of the Alps, praised the climate and blue sky of Italy, for example, Naples. I myself after a number of years felt the sunny blue sky of California was a kind of glaring mockery of my life.

Began studying Oppenheimer about four decades ago. Berkeley. Visited Trinity. John Donne and the deeper roots of “Trinity” learned in the home of Mabel Potter (just northeast of UCB), her late husband having been a specialist in John Donne and his sermons.

The title “to end all wars” and key moments in the documentary, show the accidents, limits, even trivialities of human aspects of enormous import snd impact in history.

http://agnothiseauton.blogspot.com/2013/04/atomic-apes.html

However full of details and complexities history was, men and women simplify it.