H.M. Forester
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hmforester.bsky.social
H.M. Forester
@hmforester.bsky.social
210 followers 250 following 1.9K posts
Author of sci-fi, psi-fi, and mystical adventure novels • Avid reader • Wikipedia editor • Webmaster • Lover of nature • Peacefully resisting.

Blog: mystical-faction.blogspot.com

Original photo by Gabriela Palai, cropped. Creative Commons Zero licence.
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hmforester.bsky.social
“We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore the judgement of the intellect is, at best, only a half-truth, and must, if it is honest, also admit its inadequacy.”

~ Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 6.
Image: Paris - Playing chess at the Jardins du Luxembourg - 2966 / Jorge Royan / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0. Old retired man wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat playing chess in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris. His right hand is hovering over the board as he considers his next move. On the left, beside the chess board are two timers.
November 12, 2025 at 7:32 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: Robin Robertson, Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Godel, and the History of Archetypes.

Image: Shadow of a person on a cobbled street / Magdalena Roeseler / Wikimedia Commons (orig 500px) / CC BY 3.0.
A black-and-white photo of a person casting a long shadow in front of them as they walk along a cobbled street.
November 10, 2025 at 9:42 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
“Until the shadow is integrated into the personality, the world appears filled with opponents or adversaries who are actually products of the unconscious; afterward, people can be seen as individuals, even people who disagree with us.”

~ Robin Robertson, Jungian Archetypes.
Image containing a text quotation, with the grey silhouette of a dragon in the lower left-hand corner. The text, from Robin Robertson, Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Godel, and the History of Archetypes, reads in part: Products of the Unconscious: “Until the shadow is integrated into the personality, the world appears filled with opponents or adversaries who are actually products of the unconscious; afterward, people can be seen as individuals, even people who disagree with us. ... Shadow figures initially appear as feared or despised creatures. As we confront the shadow figures and regain the parts of the [collective] shadow that are actually part of our own personality, the shadow figures evolve, until they are represented by close friends or relatives. By regaining these previously denied character traits, the ego expands; its range of choices of possible behaviors expands. When confronted by situations which previously led to a single behavior—much like the behavioralists' stimulus-response model—now we have a choice. Successful integration of the personal contents of the shadow enables us to accept that there are other parts to our personality. Until the shadow is acknowledged, we are like cardboard figures with no depth. Afterward, we have more faces than the one we present to the world.”
November 10, 2025 at 9:42 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Collected Works 18.

Image: Monarch emerges from chrysalis (48716467887) / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Flickr) / Public domain.
An orange, black and white-spotted monarch butterfly emerges from its chrysalis amidst green foliage.
November 8, 2025 at 9:44 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
“As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it thru. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round & to wait for somebody else ...”

~ Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life.
Image containing a text quotation, with the grey silhouetted profile of a man like Jung lighting his pipe, in the lower left-hand corner. The text, from Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Collected Works 18, reads: Can You Spare any Change? “As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. As nobody knows what he could do, he might be bold to ask himself whether by any chance his unconscious might know something helpful, when there is no satisfactory conscious answer anywhere in sight.”
November 8, 2025 at 9:44 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: Roberts Avens, Imagination Is Reality: Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman, Barfield, and Cassirer.

Image: Poem of the Soul – On the mountain / Louis Janmot (1814–1892) / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.
Poem of the Soul – On the mountain by Louis Janmot (1814–1892). Two young female figures in long, flowing dresses ascend a steep, grassy slope. One is leading and holds the other's hand.
November 7, 2025 at 8:07 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
“Western distinctions have been reduced to a Cartesian framework ‘between outer tangible reality & inner states of mind, or between body and a fuzzy conglomerate of mind, psyche, & spirit. We have lost the third, middle position ... soul.’”

~ Roberts Avens, Imagination Is Reality.
Image containing a text quotation. The text, from Roberts Avens, Imagination Is Reality: Western Nirvana in Jung, Hillman, Barfield, and Cassirer, reads: The Forgotten “Third”: “Western distinctions have been reduced to a Cartesian framework ‘between outer tangible reality and inner states of mind, or between body and a fuzzy conglomerate of mind, psyche, and spirit. We have lost the third, middle position which earlier in our tradition, and in others too, was the place of soul: a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both. By having its own realm psyche has its own logic—psychology—which is neither a science of physical things nor a metaphysics of spiritual things.’”
November 7, 2025 at 8:07 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
“The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.”

~ Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart.

Image: The Art of Stating the Blindingly Obvious 1129253 [with added border] / David Lally / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Geograph) / CC BY-SA 2.0.
Photo showing a steep tarmac footpath with five steps at the far end, leading to a row of houses and bungalows. To the left of the path is a wide rectangular white sign at the top of a metal pole, that reads: "Caution: Footpath is not suitable wheelchair or mobility scooters." The photo is aptly titled "The Art of Stating the Blindingly Obvious".
November 6, 2025 at 2:34 PM
hmforester.bsky.social
“According to [Jean] Gebser, we are in the late stages of ‘the deficient mode of the mental-rational structure’, and the rise of left-brain dominance – up the proverbial creek without a paddle, you might say ...”

~ ET, “Re-enchantment in a Materialist World”.

archive.org/details/@eso...
Image: Up the Creek 604188 / Peter Church / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Geograph) / CC BY-SA 2.0. A sunken barge in Hessle Haven. An area of boarded up building on the left above a row of piles used to be a shipyard.
November 6, 2025 at 9:41 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
“Somewhere, right at the bottom of one's own being, one generally does know where one should go and what one should do. But there are times when the clown we call ‘I’ behaves in such a distracting fashion that the inner voice cannot make its presence felt.”

~ Marie-Louise von Franz.
Image: Inner Voices / James Tissot (1836–1902) / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain. Three men rest and sleep in a ruined building amidst much rubble. In front of them is a bundle of belongings tied to a long stick which one of them presumably carries over his shoulder, suggesting that these men are taking a rest from their travels.
November 5, 2025 at 9:39 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.

Image: Convict Chain Gang / Unknown artist / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.
A drawing of a group of perhaps twenty convicts in prison clothes carry a huge tree trunk on their shoulders, some on the left, some on the right, while two guards in uniform, with swords by their sides supervise the men. Despite the title, they are not in chains.
November 4, 2025 at 3:32 PM
hmforester.bsky.social
“In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. And in order to realize that one is indeed in a state of sleep, one must recognize and fully understand the nature of the forces which operate to keep one in the state of sleep ...”

~ G.I. Gurdjieff.
Image containing a text quotation, with a black-and-white drawing of a shackled man in the lower left-hand corner. The text, from George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, reads: Sleep and Slavery: “In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. And in order to realize that one is indeed in a state of sleep, one must recognize and fully understand the nature of the forces which operate to keep one in the state of sleep, or hypnosis. It is absurd to think that this can be done by seeking information from the very source which induces the hypnosis.” ... “One thing alone is certain, that man's slavery grows and increases. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man. “Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.”
November 4, 2025 at 3:32 PM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

Image: Schiller liest die Räuber vor / Anonymous / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.
Schiller reads The Robbers to his friends in a secret place while the Duke's henchmen approach. Here he is standing under a lamp on a raised area, his book held out in his right hand, reading it aloud to a group of men standing and sitting in a circle around him.
November 4, 2025 at 9:25 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
“‘Utility is the great idol of our time,’ Schiller wrote, ‘to which all powers pay homage.’ Profit, productivity & consumption had become the guiding light of modern societies. Even philosophy, with its celebration of rational thought and scientific progress ...”

~ Andrea Wulf.
An image containing a text quotation, with a stylised artist's palette and paintbrush in the lower left-hand corner. The text, from Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, reads: As Much Use as a Chocolate Teapot: “‘Utility is the great idol of our time,’ Schiller wrote, ‘to which all powers pay homage.’ Profit, productivity and consumption had become the guiding light of modern societies. Even philosophy, with its celebration of rational thought and scientific progress, had pushed the arts out of sight. But it was beauty that transports us towards ethical principles and makes us better people, Schiller claimed in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Art improves the character, and without beauty there is no sense of morality. For Schiller, taste and beauty were the bulwark against brutality, greed and immorality.”
November 4, 2025 at 9:25 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
The Root Causes of Why We're FUBAR
or “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” ...

mystical-faction.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-...

#PostTrust #PostTruth #Materialism #Disenchantment #Resist #Resistance #Underground #Survival #DarkAges
Image: The Unholy Worship / Gwabryel, Illustrator of Weird Fiction / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0. A painting by Gwabryel, based on H. P. Lovecraft's story The Call of Cthulhu. It shows a man with arms outstretched worshipping a very tall, black figure. To his left and right, victims are suspended upside down from gallows, and in front of the dark figure are several other, perhaps tormented figures.
November 4, 2025 at 9:20 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, the year of the Peterloo Massacre.

#Shelley #Peterloo #Resist #Resistance
Image: Percy Bysshe Shelley / Alfred Clint (After Amelia Curran) / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain. A portrait of Shelley from the waist up, against a dark background. He is sitting with his right elbow resting on a light-brown wooden desk, wearing a dark jacket and an open-necked shirt with a large collar pulled up almost to his ears. In his right hand he holds a white-feathered quill.
November 3, 2025 at 9:27 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

Image: Backhoe loader Cat420E left / Shaun Greiner from Creve Coeur, United States of America / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Flickr) / CC BY-SA 2.0.
A yellow Caterpillar backhoe loader moving to the left amidst a vast expanse of levelled ground, with not a plant, bush, or tree in sight.
November 3, 2025 at 9:23 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
“At a time when states like Prussia were managed as though they were factories by an army of civil servants – a ‘mechanical administration’, as [Novalis] described it – & when the industrial revolution began to turn Europe into a clanking machine ...”

~ Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels.
Image containing a text quotation, with a grey silhouette of the side of a human skull and white cogs in place of a brain, in the lower left-hand corner. The text, from Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, reads: The Romantics Explore Within: “At a time when [Germanic] states like Prussia were managed as though they were factories by an army of civil servants – a ‘mechanical administration’, as he described it – and when the industrial revolution began to turn Europe into a clanking machine, Novalis took up his pen to fight against a sense of disenchantment with the world. As steam engines, clocks and manufacturing rationalised daily life, he turned inwards. It was a reaction against the increasing materialism of the modern world; against a new reality where people became cogs in this great big machine and money ruled everything.”
November 3, 2025 at 9:23 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

Image: Scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania and Bottom / Edwin Landseer (1802–1873) / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.
Painting showing a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Titania, the Queen of the Fairies rests her head against Bottom, a weaver whose head has been transformed into that of a donkey by Puck. Sitting there, they are surrounded by magical creatures.
November 2, 2025 at 8:38 PM
hmforester.bsky.social
“It wasn’t Freud who first explored dreams and the darker regions of the mind, nor William Blake or Coleridge, but the Jena Set [the first German Romantics] ...”

~ Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels.
Image containing a text quotation, with a yellow and white circular symbol in the lower left-hand corner showing the cosmos, sun, moon and star. The text, from Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, reads: The Early Psychonauts: “It wasn’t Freud who first explored dreams and the darker regions of the mind, nor William Blake or Coleridge, but the Jena Set [the first German Romantics]. Whereas Enlightenment thinkers had declared reason as humanity’s path towards light, the Jena Set shone their torch into another reality. ‘The world becomes a dream, the dream becomes the world,’ Novalis would later write in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen.”
November 2, 2025 at 8:38 PM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

Image: Spider web with dew / TGoeller / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.
A spider's web strung between the thin branches of a tree, and covered in dew, the background being very much out-of-focus.
November 2, 2025 at 9:40 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
“Instead of a fragmented, mechanistic world where humans were little more than cogs in a machine, Schelling conjured up a world of oneness. The living and non-living worlds, he explained, were ruled by the same underlying principles ...”

~ Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels.
An image containing a text quotation, with a couple in fancy dress at a masquerade ball dancing in the bottom left-hand corner. The text, from Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, reads: To Be One with Everything Living: “Instead of a fragmented, mechanistic world where humans were little more than cogs in a machine, Schelling conjured up a world of oneness. The living and non-living worlds, he explained, were ruled by the same underlying principles. Everything – from frogs to trees, stones to insects, rivers to humans – was ‘linked together, forming one universal organism’. Unlike Kant, who had shown the limits of knowledge by explaining that we can only know things-as-they-appear-to-us but never the thing-in-itself, Schelling revealed a world that was intuitively knowable. Why? Because the system of nature was also the system of our mind. As Schelling put it: ‘Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind.’ If mind and nature really were one, it meant that we must have direct access to and understanding of the workings of nature.”
November 2, 2025 at 9:40 AM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.

Image: Jena Paradies 1900 / Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.
Photo of Paradies at Jena in Germany, showing a wide river with lush green banks and trees. On the river in the foreground is a man rowing a boat, and there is another boat further away near the far bank of the river. Beyond that, a bridge crosses the river. The river disappears in the distance, and in the far distance are steep hills and clear blue sky.
November 1, 2025 at 8:55 PM
hmforester.bsky.social
“... [A]s Schelling’s ideas spread, the young Romantics began to feel a deep sense of connection to the world around them. They wanted to see the world through the lens of their own selves. Instead of just visiting museums ...”

~ Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels.
An image containing a text quotation, with a female walker, in the bottom right-hand corner, staff in hand, standing and admiring the view. The text, from Andrea Wulf, Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self, reads: Being at One: “[I]n the early nineteenth century, as Schelling’s ideas spread, the young Romantics began to feel a deep sense of connection to the world around them. They wanted to see the world through the lens of their own selves. Instead of just visiting museums and cities, this new generation scrambled into caves, slept in forests and hiked up mountains to be in nature. They wanted to feel rather than observe what they were seeing. They wanted to discover themselves in nature and ‘to be one with everything living’, as Schelling’s friend, Friedrich Hölderlin, wrote in his novel Hyperion.”
November 1, 2025 at 8:55 PM
hmforester.bsky.social
Source: Iain McGilchrist, “How faith can re-enchant a left-brained world” hosted by Seen & Unseen.

Image: Grüne Augen [border added] / Theresa09 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0.
Image of a young woman's green eyes and a wisp of blond hair.
November 1, 2025 at 8:43 PM