"I of my own knowledge…"

Friends,

About a decade ago, by way of an email from Colin Wilson, I got to know a remarkable Englishman, about my age, named Robert Clarke. Robert was a quiet man who had been led through the individuation process by the works of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and, remarkably, by some 30,000 dreams. These dreams, and that process, changed a relatively uneducated man into an independent scholar and mystic. Delving deeply into the realms of philosophy, religion, and psychology, he discovered unsuspected connections between the world of the unconscious and the world of our history, tradition, and scriptures, because the things that scripture and mythology describe, he had experienced as spontaneous productions from his own dream world. In other words, he had experienced just the process that Carl Jung’s work described.

Robert and I met only twice (when I visited England in 2003 and 2007 specifically to see him) but via email he and I became friends, or perhaps I should say we discovered that we were already friends and just hadn’t yet discoverer each other. Hampton Roads published his first two books, which sold modestly and not nearly as well as they deserved to do.

Then last spring he emailed me to say that he had only a few months to live, because the cancer that had been found was pretty far advanced. He was fine with dying – we owe God a death, and he who dies this year is quit for the next, after all, and Robert had long since lost any doubts he had ever had about immortality – but he had three unpublished manuscripts, and he hated to think that the work he had put into them might have been for nothing.

As he had no better prospects, I told him I would publish them. Robert died last fall, but not before he had a chance to review and approve my content-editing.

Today, nearly a year after his death, the books are produced and in house, ready for sale. I think they’re pretty important.

The Royal Line of Christ the Logos shows how the West lost its way when it began to regard the Christian mystery as an outdated superstition. This, in turn, happened because Christian orthodoxy ceased to realize that the Christ phenomenon was not a matter of someone’s biography but was a as a concrete, explicit expression of the psychological process of individuation. Gnostic Christians retained this understanding. (Robert explains that the Gnostics’ teachings sprang from direct experience, and that “these sects, largely Christian in esoteric ways, existed side-by-side with the orthodox Christians. Their teachings were based upon direct inner experience. Like Jung, the Gnostics had no need to merely believe, they knew.”) But the hierarchy did not, and the exoteric view they taught people ultimately failed, which is where we are now. In The Royal Line of Christ the Logos, Robert shows the path not taken.

Books such as Holy Blood, Holy Grail assert that Jesus was the originator of an actual physical bloodline. In The Grail, the Stone and the Mystics, Robert shows why he believed that this is a materialist misunderstanding. The Grail legends refer to psychological processes — the marriage of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as the sacred marriage through the unconscious, and the child is the divine child in the inner processes, ultimately what the Greek mysteries called the Logos. Using insights from the work of Carrion and from his own individuation processes, he investigates the related subjects of the Grail, the philosopher’s stone, alchemy, and the visions of saints such as St. Teresa of Avila.

The Sacred Journey is in two parts. Part one presents a remarkable treatise on Jung and his discoveries and what they mean to the world—particularly the West. Part two is divided among several elements: Mme. Blavatsky, Frederick Nietzsche, Marian visions, UFOs, and aliens. What holds the book together is that all of these elements in their own way further develop the theme of the interconnection of history (culture, civilization, etc.) and the processes and manifestations of the unconscious as experienced by individuals. The result is a stimulating re-visioning of what has been going on around us for the past hundred years—and an equally stimulating suggestion as to what lies ahead.

Thanks to the behind-the-scenes wizardry of my friend Rich Spees, webmaster extraordinaire, all three books are now available on my website, www.hologrambooks.com, and can be ordered separately or at a combined price that will save you a few dollars.

Trust me, this is important work, worthy of your time.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

5:30 AM. “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” running through my head.

A dream in which I and many others had gone — and paid — to hear — Carl Jung? Colin Wilson? — speak. I had spoken of it to dad and he was there — several of my family were there, I think. Jung, not Colin. He spoke briefly and then disappeared and the audience waited and realized he wasn’t coming back. I went after him, climbing up into the bleachers to try to see where he had gone. Went around back somewhere. Was told he had gone, and felt quite bitter about it — it wasn’t fair that he should arrive, speak a few sentences and leave. I said, I think, it was just what Colin did, or was Colin’s fault (meaning, for letting himself be over-scheduled).

Went out to find my car covered in snow needing to be dug out (like all the other cars, of course).

What was that all about, pray?

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Monday, June 28, 2010

5:40 AM. Indexed the last ten days of May last night, working backwards, having already done all of June. The question of how the information is to be put together was the subject of a dream, I think, but I don’t remember it. One thing that’s clear is that I do need to go along collecting unfollowed thoughts and threads — or maybe just rely on them to do it, given time.

So here we are again. I noticed, transcribing, that yesterday started off to be a discussion of the connection between politics and psychic exploration. We got diverted.

Or maybe not diverted. Maybe what followed was necessary groundwork.

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Sunday, June 6, 2010

All right, it’s about 5 AM. Anybody up besides me? What shall we talk about?

You’ll notice that the first question, being rhetorical, couldn’t receive response, and the second, being direct and pointed, can. This is so in general, communicating between the worlds as people say, or between the sides as you sometimes say. Now, many times an implied question lies between two people, or a continuation of a previously begun topic has the floor, but when nothing is next, blankness may follow until something is next. All this, of course, unless it is we on the other side who are setting the agenda.

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Thursday, May 27, 2010

6 AM. So. Quite a different feeling, taking a day off deliberately, rather than doing it behind my own back, so to speak.

Told you. It puts you back in charge of you. Now, you must understand, this isn’t a problem I had in my life. Unlike you, I always felt in control of my life, so all I ever had to contend with were external forces. And after I got free of the Star, I never really had an outside employer who could tell me “do this, do that” — and I never had an office job, never had to count off the hours from 9 to 5 and then go home and get ready to start again the next day. My life was mine to shape, and I did plenty of active planning, to shape it, as you know from your reading. (Yes, I guess biography has its uses.) But of course that kind of freedom only meant I had to find my obstacles in a different way. We do, of course. What would life be, without obstacles?

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…than somebody really getting it?

Babe in the Woods is being offered on Amazon and in other places by Doyle Whiteaker, a friend from one of the Monroe Institute-oriented email groups. He requested that a friend of his read it, and he sent me her review, which follows:

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I have been going through more than 40 years of journals, finding and indexing quotations from various writers and others who have influenced me over the years. In the first rank among these, certainly among the first in point of time and among the longest lasting in terms of continued influence, is Colin Wilson. Perhaps this quote from one of his earliest books, which I copied in April,1970, will give you a sense of how and why he was so significant. As slightly later with Carl Jung, when I first came across Wilson’s work, I recognized immediately a mind that worked as mine did, that valued what I valued.

“This is the problem of our time: to destroy the idea of men as a `static observer,’ both in philosophy and art. All imaginative creation is involved with the three absolutes: freedom, evolution, religion.”
Colin Wilson, The Strength To Dream

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 [I have a long list of books that could be important to you, and as time permits I intend to create a list here, and give a hint as to why you may wish to read them. Pardon a parent's pride if I put my own two at the top of the list.]

Muddy Tracks: Exploring an Unsuspected Reality
This is what I call my interim report, discussing what I tried and what I found up through 1997, including among other things hypnotism, dream analysis, “past-life” exploration and four programs at The Monroe Institute, especially the Gateway Voyage in late 1992, which finally got me through the door. And if I could do it, there is no reason to assume that others could not.

Messenger: A Sequel to Lost Horizon
James Hilton’s wonderful novel introduced the word Shangri-La to the world’s vocabulary in 1932. Many years ago I began thinking — how could the lamasery at Shangri-La survive the coming of the Communist Chinese? By the time I finished my fourth version, Messenger had become a tale about human possibilities, and how we could develop them. If you could live forever…? How would you spend your time?

* * *

[If you wish to know something about the books here that I have not yet described, or even said why I think you should read them, you could always do what I do: go to Amazon.com and see if they have a description. Of course this is only a stopgap measure, but it may be a while before I get around to annotating this list.]

Fiction

The Demon Lover, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

Moon Magic by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Goat-Foot God, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Mind Parasites, by Colin Wilson. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Philosopher’s Stone, by Colin Wilson. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Sea Priestess, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Winged Bull, by Dion Fortune. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

Winged Pharaoh, by Joan Grant. I am obliged to place this in fiction, but it doesn’t feel like fiction to me. It made me homesick for a place I had never been.

Non-fiction

The Ancient Atlantic, by L. Taylor Hansen. A strange and fascinating book that may be difficult to find. Copyright 1969, published by Amherst Press, Amherst Wisconsin.

In the Dark Places of Wisdom, by Peter Kingsley

Medicinemaker, by Hank Wesselman.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by Carl G. Jung.

The Outsider, by Colin Wilson. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

The Secret Vaults of Time, by Stephan Schwartz.

Serpent in the Sky, by John Anthony West. See Travelers and Mapmakers.

Spiritwalker, by Hank Wesselman.

Visionseeker, by Hank Wesselman.

This blog is about you, or rather us.

I was well into middle age before I discovered what I knew all along had to exist somewhere. Even when I was very young, I knew that human life as we commonly experience it is not right, is strangely not the real thing.

When I was 24 I happened upon a science fiction novel by Colin Wilson called The Mind Parasites that expressed perfectly what I was feeling: the mental and spiritual powers commonly unsuspected in our benighted society were our birthright, but had been somehow lost. It took more than 20 years before I found the key to recapturing them, but I did find it — or rather, I found them, for there are different doors for different types of people, and we each can enter only the ones for which we are fitted. But the important thing — the thing worth shouting from the rooftops — is that the doors, and the keys, exist!

Your life has meaning, and with sincere effort you can find that meaning. When you do you will realize that it is the pearl of great price: You will gladly sell all that you own to obtain it.

If I can do for you what Colin’s book did for me — if I can encourage you and point you in the right direction — I will be well pleased.