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Sam! We are playing in the same field of resonance! So glad to have such a brilliant companion in this magically lucid and mysterious place.

Aurobindo’s work has impacted me in physiological ways that I think are still reverberating. I also am feeling an incredibly strong resonance with the naming of the Dark Feminine and hope Schuyler continues to expound on this topic. Thank you for sharing your understanding of Gebser and his work.

Yes, I sense that this project is working on bringing greater consciousness to collective fractal bloodlines and opening closed looped systems of human relationships and lineages to new information (and composting stuff that no longer serves) that allows for more harmonic patterns to evolve. So exciting to be feeling this and having it change my body chemistry, which is simultaneously my ancestor’s and the Earth’s chemistry.

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Hello again, lovely Schuyler. I'm a little out of step in that I read the first few chapters, then missed a few, then picked it up again. I apologize therefore if this is a discussion that's already been had, but I wanted to ask if there's a reason you've fictionalized yourself and your story, in the sense of writing about yourself in the third person. I ask because I'd like to make the case for writing it in the first person, as the memoir that it really is...

When Martha Beck first wrote Expecting Adam, her memoir about expecting her Down syndrome son, she wrote it as a novel. For whatever reason, creating that distance was initially helpful, until everyone working on the project recognized that since it was really a memoir, that it would be most powerful as one. I don't know if you've read that book, but it's extraordinarily magical, to the extent that when I read it, not only do I experience full body chills at regular intervals, but the sorts of magical things that happen to her in the book start to happen to me in my life for as long as I'm reading it. It's a beautiful book for many reasons, but the most powerful thing about it as far as I'm concerned is that it is tantamount to being proof that magic is real. Had she published it as a novel it would have seemed like... a nice idea, but just fiction.

What I sense in your story is the potential for something similar. As a reader, I stand to gain validation for my own experiences of magic by reading a first person account of yours. If I think S is a character you've made up, I lose that... and it's the thing I want the most. Even if you tell me S is you, if she's written in the third person, she comes across as fictional, and I lose that connection with the events as being real.

I don't read fiction anymore, or very rarely, because it no longer gives me what I'm looking for. But I devour spiritual memoirs. I recognize of course that the Katherine parts involve some poetic license, but I think the hybrid form is exciting and beautiful.

There have been times where I've had the peculiar feeling that I may have been Jane Austen in a previous life, the thought that my engagement with her work might go beyond that of just being a fan. It's riveting to me to read your account of this experience, as well as the descriptions of what spiritual experiences feel like in the body (I didn't comment on it that week, but there was a chapter that ended with a description of an energy rising up through Katherine and changing her whole world and I thought yes, this, I'd read fiction if it was like this, because this has been my experience, and most fiction doesn't cater to me and my experiences at all).

Again, I apologize if this discussion was already had. And I must also slightly apologize for being so forceful in making my case. As always, I trust that you'll let it float by if it doesn't resonate for you.

Much love to you x

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Schuyler,

It has been profound, to say the least, witnessing the way this whole writing project has been unfolding. 

First, I want to share that, as a man, I’ve been increasingly drawn into the recognition that I have my own complex relationship with the Dark Feminine in certain modes of her expression—a relationship that I am still very much in the process of working with. I don’t yet know how, but I imagine that this may be a catalytic read in relation to that process. Only time will tell, though.

Secondly, I will yet again morph into my Gebserian caricature-self for the sake of fashioning my own stylistic response to your yearning to be a writer of consequence, making a case for why I feel that what your are doing here is of deep value.

Gebser, after all, is one of many “big” personalities to inflect the unfolding spiritual mystery into a powerfully individuated articulation. Gurdjieff, of course, was another. Whereas you clearly have a strong karmic tie to the latter, I have sensed I have one with the former.

Gebser wasn't without his own karmic threads. Later in life, he claimed to have found an explanation for his own karmic task “in the fact that I was in some way brought into the extremely powerful spiritual field of force radiating through Sri Aurobindo.” Aurobindo, as you may know, enacted his own sacred marriage—a consort relationship with Mirra Alfassa, more widely known as "The Mother," which was, at least by all accounts I know of, only consummated spiritually in the subtle realms (but, in light of your work, who can be absolutely sure of such things, in the end?)



Anyway—here is a deep part of why I find this endeavor to be consequential. Gebser articulated several features of what he considered to be the dawning integral structure of consciousness which is currently struggling to be born—a spiritual task requiring our participation. Gebser sensed that "the spiritual" would find a new level of concrete realization for humanity through this mutation in consciousness.

Here are a number of those features—each of which I recognize to be weaving through the content, and process, of your writing journey here:



-the spiritual


-the supersession of the ego

-the realization of time-freedom

-the recognition of energy

-the mastery of movement

-the supersession of patriarchy

-the acquisition of intensity

-the transformation of the creative inceptual basis

I don’t want to prattle on too much further here by elaborating on the places that I see these elements either being included, or realized, in the midst of this work (many are no doubt obvious). I’ll just let it stand. However, given that Gebser transmitted these as urgent spiritual tasks for the times in which we live, I would say that what you are doing is of profound value.



One last thing I find quite interesting: you agreed to gift Katherine the fruits of your spiritual work in exchange for her assistance with your calling to write. I’m finding it so easy to imagine that this writing project itself—at once a profound spiritual accomplishment and an excellent literary achievement—becomes a kind of "mysterium coniunctionis," a subtle circuit fulfilling both souls’ ends of the agreement simultaneously.

Just one take—offered in the spirit of divine play.

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