Much of basic psychology today instructs us to beat down our negative emotions by " getting out of our minds and into our lives ." It is called acceptance and commitment therapy. Certainly such advice can be valuable to those of us who are living lives full of what psychologists call the "negative self-scripts", or influence emotions, that we generate from feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, self-consciousness, and feelings of inferiority. To overcome these negative self-scripts we are instructed to develop "self core skills" with mindful self-scripts based on affirmation, assertion, focusing, humanizing, and tension-sensing to rationalize and diminish the debilitating negative emotions we all live with. We are to use the polarity of our two basic kinds of emotions -- innate emotions and influence emotions -- to wage a war between our soul and our mind to keep us on the straight and narrow. There is something of "wild gnosis " in this kind of psy...

Melancholy, coming in paroxysmal storms of depression and self-pity, casts its dismal gray shadow over me from time to time. I am appalled by this weakness in myself, and ashamed, too, but nevertheless every so often dark clouds of it settle into my psyche, controlling my thoughts, making them as black and foreboding as the dank recesses of a medieval dungeon. When melancholy comes, it tries to destroy me – to drive me into madness over my Zahir. It takes all of my emotional strength to stand before these gale-like fits of melancholy until they pass. They seem to be swooping down on me, like an eagle over a coot, more and more frequently, and so I have decided to write about them in an effort to face them now – head on at a time when my spirits are solid – with the hope that confronting the next one before it arrives will allow me to ward it off with a shield of awareness, understanding, and rejection. It is the longing for her that drives me down, lays my heart bare, allowing the mela...

Paulo Coelho, in his most recent Warrior of the Light issue, listed an Inventory of Normality , which includes 47 items about what society considers to be normal behavior in everyday life these days. As he points out, all of these situations are absurd, but two in particular caught my eye, for they profoundly illustrate how utterly lacking we are in our search for knowledge about 1) who we really are and why – a search that should be the primary goal in life of each and every one of us – and how we are conditioned (actually brainwashed) by the patriarchy to 2) believe that our own personal religion is the unconditional, inalienable, Truth – and that you are dead wrong about yours. The first item that struck me this way was this one: 9] Comparing objects like cars, houses and clothes, and defining life according to these comparisons instead of really trying to find out the true reason for being alive. In my essay Looking for Felicity on this blog, Paulo explains that this same situa...

For more than a year now I have been in love with and obsessed by a woman nearly twenty years my junior. She is my Zahir (as I have described in a previous post). Our relationship is one full of deep currents of eclectic waters converging from many tributaries, pushing both of us this way, that way, and pulling us down in whirlpools – sometimes together, sometimes separately. My love for her is boundless; her love for me is heartfelt platonic compassion. She is married to a fine man. In a sensual sense my love is unrequited. In nearly every possible way we are polar opposites, as far apart as two people can get in terms of human and spiritual interests, education, social standing, expectations, obligations, and family. She has an active robust life; I am a recluse. Yet, in our souls, we both know we are somehow one – kindred spirits – who belong together. For that reason we are mystically drawn together. We may never have a life together here on earth, but even if we don't we will ...

During nearly three years in the Nevada state prison, I completed six handwritten manuscript drafts of novels, and had begun a seventh prior to my release on parole in June, 2007. While in prison I was not allowed to draft the books on electronic media, which I am now in the process of doing. They are large manuscripts (more than 250 thousand words each) and still require several iterations of editing to condense and organize to publishable construct, and some research remains that could not be done in prison. Six of the novels comprise an anthology that I call “ Sophy’s Way: Parallel Worlds of the Moon ” in reference and reverence to the lost goddess Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom, whose essence and presence saved my life and, yes, my very soul from certain death during my prison time. The underlying theme of the novels concerns man’s inherent cruel and duplicitous nature, but primarily the books deal with the lost intimate relationship between immanent sexuality and transcendent divin...