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As I noted in a earlier email this year, my busy-busy over-committed
life
has really led me to not use the email account on which I get
Nabokov-online
for sometime. As I'm sliding now toward a retirement by spring or early
summer, and have been preparing this big archive of Nabokov materials
for
the new McGuire Center for tropical biology at the Univ. of Florida,
I've
taken some moments to visit from time to time. I got set back in my
working
up that archive by a very serious illness in late summer but that
appears
now to be in hand. Meantime, Dubi Benyamini visited Univ. Florida and
hand-delivered there the first batch of what will become a Nabokov's
Blues
Reference Collection there. We hope this will be available for
permanent
use as the many many specimens donated by me and Zsolt Balint to the
American Museum of Natural History over the years are now nearly
useless as
that institution no longer has any staff in butterflies and the
collection
is moth-balled. There a still at least a half dozen new species of
Nabokov's blues to be named from southern South America-- believe it or
not,
there are still more! Recently you saw that DNA work showed that
Nabokov
was right about "hybrid species" in the blues-- something in this
thinking
that had been previously ridiculed. This was written up in the NY Times
after work at several universities.
Below I'll mention a couple other threads that have come up recently
re:
Nabokov.
Recently when Stephen B. was here in NY (NYU I believe) and presented a
paper on some aspect of Nabokov and science, someone who attended
brought me
the abstract. I didn't even know about the meeting. What is very
interesting for me right now is that I've been contacted by a major
academic
institution about joining them in retirement and helping set up
programs
that address in a responsible way issues of integral studies, integral
models, and this matter of integrating "higher consciousness" frontiers
in
spirituality and quantum mechanics and string theory in physics etc. I
have been involved with that now for a number of years and this work
got
very serious after the death of Catholic monk Bro. Wayne Teasdale in
2004,
nondual mystic and theologian (PhD in Theology from Fordham here in NY
etc.
and a close colleage of The Dalai Lama etc.). Some of us who were close
to
Wayne got very involved in setting up the network (www.isdna.org and
others)
that furthers that work, along with several other networks and
coalitions
since. Wayne and I became such close friends mostly because we both
shared
backgrounds in Christian and Hindu traditions and he had a huge
understanding of the role of ecology and physics re: the future of our
species. Now that the species seems to be reaching possible "tipping
points" re: survival it becomes even more timely. But it's tricky
because
work in this area involves figuring out credible ways to discuss things
that
are really on the cutting edge, or even margin, of what is going on in
human
thinking and experience. This really came up in an interview recently
of
James Watson (of Watson and Crick [DNA]) and E.O. Wilson on PBS...they
suggested there has to be an integration of the what is scientifically
being
understood about Consciousness and what have been written for centuries
in
the many "Great Wisdom Traditions".
If indeed there can be more and more integration with responsibile
acadaemia
about this whole frontier of integral models and integral studies it
would
be quite helpful. So I am going to look into following that thread,
even if
it means moving from New York to this other coalition of institutions
in
another state etc.
Re: Nabokov I was interviewed on NY TV a week ago with two other
consciouness workers, one who works prominently with what the business
community is doing with integral models, and the question of Nabokov
came
up-- i.e. was there any connection between what I'm doing now and the
book
we did about Nabokov.
I said, for the first time to the media, that now that "peak states" or
"peak nondual states" are generally understood to occur in many many
artists
(and also be the source of considerable angst to some) (wow, how Van
Gogh
would be looked at today in that context as opposed to the old
"schizoid
model" etc.) I simply had to say that I think Nabokov's statements
about
heightened senses of "oneness" with nature, very strong in his
childhood
[when he would sneak out of his bedroom to be alone in nature etc.] and
captured again from time to time in his adult life, have to be taken
very
seriously in that regard-- that these were not just "casual asides"
from
him.
The fact that he said, even in adult life, that that "communion"
("being
their with butterflies in their natural habitats and with their
foodplants"
etc....something like that) was more important/exhilirating to him then
his
fame from science/literature (or something like that) indicates that
these
moments-- or series of moments-- were extremely compelling for him and
that
what he remembered of them kept him always coming back to them. This is
SO
COMMONLY how a temporary nondual state is looked back upon by the mind
(especially an intelligent mind) when it later creates a story about
it; and
it creates this incredible desire to return to that comprehension. For
instance I know many many people who experienced such heightened states
while studying with, or living with, this or that eastern "sage" but
cannot
"find" or "re-experience" those in "normal life". Similarly, they have
this compelling notion that the state was qualitatively, not just
quantitatively, different etc. So, we discussed that a bit in light of
Nabokov's exhilirating expressions about the moments he felt both in
nature
and "in the well of the microscope" etc.
But we are many years from understanding these things. And, as I said,
it's
tricky stuff because you have to find a credible context in which to
discuss
many things along the cutting edge, or even margin, of where science is
operating. Integral models are very important in this regard. So, that
is
what's new here. Since Nabokov came up recently in that context
publicly, I
thought I'd mention it.
Dr. Kurt Johnson