[Saturday, January 28, 2006]
I notice this in Dion Fortune’s novel Moon Magic that I don’t think I had noticed before.
“The churches wouldn’t agree with you.”
“The churches can please themselves. It is no business but their own what conditions they make for admission to their communion. The mistake comes when they use their influence to legislate for people outside their communion.” (p. 193-4)
Speak, friends; I will listen.
Learn to manage your depression of spirit. Rather than being overmastered by it, channel it, use it, and all will go well. So you get to feeling grim. No big deal, as you say – just express it. Your pain is real and of long standing. So is that of innumerable others. You could help some who could come to the knowledge that a path exists, and could perhaps come to it only by your words.
I guess that what I know is walking the pathless path, the Path Without a Clue, so to speak.
You know more than that. You know a life of never fitting in, of being as outcast as Robinson Crusoe though in the midst of what they call civilization. You know a life lived in books as refuge. You know a little of the life of reporter, programmer, editor, even writer. You have been husband, father, lover – and always alone. You have had a warm tribal environment and a chilly world beyond. A rich imaginative life – in a re-creating way, rather than an imagining-form-scratch way. And you have become an initiate of sorts, into a secret society of sorts. You have broad reading and shallow learning. You even played politics. But notice that what is strongest in you, what always meets response, is connection to the inner world. Even in politics you couldn’t imagine people as fundamentally different, even while it was obvious that they were. Your life has been interior, not exterior, and you hardly realize that. people do live exterior lives. Literally, you can’t imagine it.
No, not really. I can’t. There is no handle for me to grasp it by.
— Joseph, I sure would like to hear your Civil War experiences, and if you will tell me I will listen and won’t try to correct you.
[Omitted, as my conversations with Joseph about his experiences were printed as Chasing Smallwood.]
Sunday January 29, 2006
The events of the past few weeks have showed me that I was going about it all wrong – 180 degrees wrong – in trying to deduce past-life connections. In fact, it applies to anything that is connected below (or above) consciousness. Search first – and you can hardly call it searching; it will be right in front of you – for what you resonate to. If you feel connected to the South Seas (I don’t) chances are that the South Seas are important to you. If you like cowboys, it doesn’t mean you were a cowboy – but look. It’s only sense. I don’t know why it took so long to penetrate.