Author's Preface
These essays are being written at a time when those who experience themselves as truly committed to service to mankind's spiritual evolution may be facing the greatest imaginable hope conjoined to the greatest conceivable fear: The hope for an awakening among the populace in response to the gross insufficiencies of present-day political leadership, and the fear that such an awakening will not occur. These pages are dedicated to the possibility that an awakening like the one in question will be forthcoming if those in the position to hope for it do not fall prey to insufficiencies of their own.
Human insufficiency is part and parcel of human life. What matters to those serious about human spiritual potential is not this insufficiency--however gross--but the good will that can open the heart to be willing and thus able to learn; and where there is true learning, there is inevitably progress towards the overcoming of all human insufficiency. The character of such true learning is the subject of this preface.
From the perspective of a way of thinking that recognizes physicality as an obstacle to learning, it is evident that repetition has the power to overcome this obstacle. Physicality resists learning like a stone resists penetration; this analogy's equation of learning with being penetrated is one which forms the ground upon which certain succeeding thoughts can stand:
In the act of lovemaking, it is through repetitive penetration that a point is reached where two souls can find the quality of mutual devotion and reverence for the feeling life of the other that teaches the transcendent unifying power of giving (thrusting, on the crude physical plane, as a giving gesture) and receiving love.
In the act of encounter constituted in writing or speaking (giving on the plane of soul) and the reading or hearing what has been written or is being spoken, a similar quality of mutual devotion and reverence for the thinking life of the other can teach the spirit the transformative creative might in communication that is truly complete. And, as in lovemaking, the key to this point of complete communication being reached is:
Repetition.
John Stirling Walker
Minneapolis, Minnesota
October 2006
Further prefatory note:
Two years after writing the above, I find it possible to complete this series of seven essays. We approach, in October of 2008, a political turning point in contemporary world civilization. Attendance to the thoughts of Walt Whitman, as given expression in his own essay "Democratic Vistas", holds, I may now suggest, the key to grasping the Spirit that has sought to find on-going expression in the thoughts set down here. For any insufficiency in giving that Spirit voice, I most humbly apologize.
JSW
Greeley, Colorado
October 18, 2008