(June 1998) [Printed in "Reality Module No.4."]

Two Journeys

Each of us is travelling on two journeys.

Outermost is our linear path through life - the events in our lives and our evolving relationships with the people we know.

Inside is another journey. A journey through mindspace - a universe of fleeting thoughts and evolving belief systems. Primeval stuff erupts from deep inside and memory drifts in deeper from the surface - they interact and both get changed.

For me in my journal "The Enchanted Diary" I record both journeys. (It was named in a time (1985) when I was less circumspect than I am now. Carl Jung called his books of dreams and imaginings "The Black Book" and "The Red Book." Doubtless if I was starting a journal now I'd give it an enigmatic title to conceal its nature.)

The volumes record events and happenings - I know, for example, that I joined the MSFC on Friday 21st August, 1988. But they also record my inner journey - my emotional states, the patterns of my thoughts, and the spiritual malaise I was suffering from back then.

I used to suffer badly from depression - owing partly to circumstances. It was never clinical depression, more akin to a despair - seeing life as grey, alienating, soul-destroying.

It is all recorded in that book - my darkness nailed to the pages, my struggle to find wings of joy in a prison of despair, my journeys so deep into my own psyche that images were required for language never reaches that far inside, rescuing my child and my older anima from their repose and their own silent bleeding, plunging willingly into the deep deep dark and fathoming its contents, building a new mind and engineering a new self.

I learnt how to laugh, confronted and defeated most of my inner dragons, and succeeded in bringing magic back into my world. (A continuing active process, because of a still unresolved 'crisis of belief': the continuing dynamic exchanges between my scientific rationalist side, and my poetic mystical side. I find I do and do not believe in my own magic. There is a mystery here in the mind/matter interface which I am still after twelve years unable to resolve.)

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Last Updated: 22 June 2002