"I of my own knowledge…"

 [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?

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[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.