(Note: See this.)

As per strong, even insistent, advice of his brother Colin, who read A Soul’s Journey right after I wrote it, and found it “brutal.” That was 27 years ago. He tells me “I remember it as if it were yesterday.” Says the book would be too shocking for Sean, a gentle, sensitive soul, to absorb. That I need to wait awhile, talk for a few months with him about it first. Okay.

However, I am reformatting the damn thing, and it is an amazing document. Others might be tempted to call “A Soul’s Journey” a memoir, since it is autobiographical. But what I attempted to do in 1985-86 was write about the personality and its evolution from the point of view of the soul, by demonstrating, using myself as a case history, how meaning spirals gradually out of the flow of experience here on Earth. See Preface ASJ. Indeed, the whole endeavor still excites me, and makes me want to add yet another phrase to the tag line for exopermaculture.

Three years ago, when I began this venture, I called the tag line Bridging Above and Below —

Then, about a year ago, it morphed into Bridging/Blending Above and Below —

And now I’m tempted to expand it yet again to Bridging/blending Above and Below, Inner and Outer, because that’s what this manuscript is about, and that’s actually the dichotomy that has always grabbed my attention more than any other: how the Inner maps the Outer, or, I should say, how the Inner determines what shall be experienced in the Outer. How we really do “create our own realities.”

In permaculture, some of us dub the Inner “Zone Zero Zero.”

But what does it mean to say we “create our own realities”? Unlike the breezy “new age” interpretation (I’ve never read The Secret; but I do know people who think it says that we consciously choose whatever we want to manifest), I’d say, given my own long, hard, slogging experience, that mostly, we unconsciously choose what we manifest, and that in fact, perhaps 95% of what we think we know we don’t; that 95% of what we do know we don’t know we know; and furthermore, that we are mostly unaware of what we actually believe, or anyway, what we act like we believe. Therefore, I’d say with C.J. Jung, that the drive to make the unconscious conscious IS perhaps the most important, and most sacred task, that awaits us as self-aware human beings on this brilliantly mirroring Earth planet.

I’ve decided to publish A Soul’s Journey, as a paperback book, but not yet. I want to send it to an editor first.

Hopefully, the book will help others recognize and navigate their way through the same process that has so besotted me. For the sheer sense of limitless freedom that awaits us when we unravel this massive inner work is extraordinary. And for many of us, we do not need therapy, or pharmaceutical drugs, or anything other than tenacity and focus — aided by dreams, our journals, synchronicities, processing with friends, and our reflections on the experiences of daily life.

Transformation is the nature of the human. Evolution is what we’re all about. Like fierce, delicate flowers, we grow, and bloom, and bloom, and bloom again — before ultimately distilling from this dense Mama Earth where what matters is everything! It all matters.

For those who have written to say that they look forward to reading the rest of A Soul’s Journey, I include here the entire chapter from which Initial Scene was taken.

Note, just prior to when this chapter begins, I had taken mescaline for the first time, and danced like a sufi whirlwind, all night long. . .

Chapter 22 ASJ