The oracle in your private journal

If you do any private writing like I do, maybe you’ve shared my experience of finding a kind of oracle in your private journal, a bracing realization that this kind of writing can become a divinatory forecast of the themes and obsessions you’ll spend your life on. Pretty much everything I’ve ever been destined to write about first appeared in my private journal many years ago. Sometimes I stumble back across this fact.

Here’s an example that’s included in volume 2 of my collected journals, as shown in the accompanying page image:

If you really want to produce anything worthwhile, anything authentic and full of your soul’s life, you can’t allow yourself to think about your “life’s work,” the eventual outline of what you will have produced and accomplished when it comes time for you to die. You can, you must, only turn your attention to what’s here. What’s to do now? What is true or right for this moment, this work? The recognition of and reflection on the overall “meta” outline of your life is the business of others to attend to, or for you if you’re at that moment when you know your story is over. Aside from that moment, your proper focus, your proper business, resides in the present, in the now, inside this. You have no business trying to step outside and view this moment sub specie aeternitatis, as an entry in the eventually completed story of your life.

I wrote that in August 2003. Fast forward 22 years, and there I was, publishing Writing at the Wellspring just five months ago. And that book talks in depth about giving up the attempt to plan or plot your creative or life path into the future. Instead, “live into the dark” by realizing that your proper business is to focus exclusively on taking the next step before you in the present moment, devoting yourself to whatever your work is right now, and letting any larger pattern or meaning simply reveal itself spontaneously across time.

When I wrote that, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I first articulated this principle to myself in private more than two decades ago.

Which, come to think of it, effectively illustrates the principle itself.

The algorithm of experience

Everybody talks about “the algorithm” these days, the invisible principle, or rather the collective set of them, that governs what’s delivered in our daily, individual interactions with the interwebs. An enormous slice of what we see and hear every day, the content that fills the container of our experience, is determined by hidden code. But there’s a deeper layer to consider: what might be called the algorithm of experience itself.

This is a metaphor just waiting to be extracted. In an age when the notion of “the algorithm” has become iconic, rising from the level of a mere technical term to become a universal, zeitgeist-level principle suffused throughout the cultural aether, it’s interesting to remember and reflect on how reality at large is essentially the expression of an algorithm that’s perpetually serving up everything that arises. And by “reality” I mean our individual experience—what Peter Brown, the late nondual spiritual teacher, helpfully characterized as our “experiential field.” Because at root, for each of us, it means the same thing. Reality is what’s experienced, what shows up. It’s all that’s ever encountered or known. Even thoughts or speculations about what might lie beyond immediate experience are only ever known in and as immediate experience.

This algorithm of your experience—which, again, is synonymous with reality, the only reality you can ever know—is fine-tuned with sheer, perfect accuracy, better than any tech company could ever build into their social media feed, for giving precisely what’s needed, whatever it is that inevitably has to emerge. A perfectly calibrated experiential feed. How else could it be? How could anything arise that wasn’t “meant” to?

When the point hits home, it marks a significant and subversive shift in perspective.

My bias

A brief note on a bias that I’m aware of within myself:

I fundamentally don’t care about finding ways to quantify qualitative data. I’m much more interested in finding ways to qualify quantitative data.

I have a Ph.D. and a master’s degree, and I’m a college vice president, and I’m obliged to work with and think in terms of numbers every day. But the data that drive me in our current culture of the “data-driven” imperative are humanistic, philosophical, spiritual, and meaning-based. Enough with numbers and the obsession with them. What’s important is the human stories and existential realities these numbers abstractly represent.

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How Ray Bradbury’s ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ haunted my youth

Cover of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes – the edition I read at thirteen

Today at Facebook I came across a post that’s amazingly effective at conveying both the plot and the emotional impact of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which came for me—as it has for so many people—at a crucially vulnerable and susceptible point in my life, when I was the same age as Will and Jim in the story (13 years old). The FB post is from an account that goes by the title “Classic Literature.” And though I suspect it may have been written or at least assisted by AI, I still find it distinctly effective at articulating the darkly autumnal appeal of a novel whose importance to me I’ve always felt I failed to communicate whenever I have tried to tell people about it.

Here’s the post:

I finished Something Wicked This Way Comes last week, and I swear it’s still following me around like a shadow. You know how some books just… stay with you? This one crawled right into that part of my childhood where I used to lie awake at night, convinced something was watching me from the hallway.

Bradbury tells this story about two thirteen-year-old boys, Will and Jim, living in this perfect small town when a carnival rolls in at three in the morning. But it’s not just any carnival—it’s this twisted, beautiful nightmare where the carousel spins backwards and makes you younger, or forwards and ages you to dust. The carnival master, Mr. Dark, literally wears people’s souls as tattoos on his skin. Can you imagine?

What got to me, though, wasn’t just the horror. It was how Bradbury captures that moment when you’re thirteen and desperate to grow up, but also terrified of losing what you are. I kept thinking about my own childhood, how I used to sneak out at night just to feel brave, and how the world seemed full of both magic and menace. The way he writes about Will’s father, this middle-aged librarian who feels like he’s missed his chance at heroism—God, that broke my heart. There’s this scene where he literally fights the carnival with laughter and love, and I found myself crying because it felt so true.

The book reminded me why October always feels haunted, why carnivals still make me a little nervous, and why growing up is both the most natural and the most terrifying thing we do.

You can read the original at Facebook.

The cover photo I have uploaded is from the exact edition I read as a young teen. I bought the book from one of those book order forms we regularly received in school. I still remember sitting in my junior high/middle school science classroom and reading through that form, and absorbing the description of Bradbury’s book, and feeling magnetically drawn to both the story and the cover. Together they generated a sense of dark magic that the book not only fulfilled but, astonishingly, exceeded when it finally arrived. I had already read some of Bradbury’s work by then, including stories in his classic collections The Illustrated Man and S Is for Space. And I had felt the force of the delicious spell that his stories cast. But Something Wicked elevated that effect to a whole new level, reaching right down into my soul.

Such experiences are few and far between in one’s life. They deserve to be savored. And I have indeed done that, with Bradbury serving as a significant influence on my life and thought.

When reality outweirds fiction

At what point will we no longer need to read weird fiction or watch weird cinema anymore because we can just look out the window, step out the door, watch the news, or introspect for five minutes to encounter everything we always sought from such art and entertainment?

There’s a great deal of strangeness and dread afoot these days as we navigate collectively—and, it seems to me, rather blindly—through a kind of transformational gauntlet across every dimension of life: social, cultural, political, psychological, economic, educational, religious, spiritual, ecological, and even biological. It will be fascinating to see what this all does to art and literature. Or maybe, with the meteoric rise of the weird to an unprecedented level of cultural prominence and centrality in the early twenty-first century, we’re already seeing it.

The real question may be just how truly weird reality will end up becoming. On this note, one can’t help wondering: Would—or will—that quality of weirdness be located only in our subjective experience, in our minds and perspectives, standing as a mere mental interpretation and emotional coloration laid over an objective world that remains unchanged? Or will it also, in the manner peculiar to the very mode or genre of weird storytelling, manifest “out there” in the world, revealing a nondual identification of outer and inner? Will it perhaps take on the guise, role, and unsettling force of the Old English root of our modern word “weird”: wyrd, meaning fate, destiny, and/or a supernatural force that controls both.

More: Has the weird already done this, already alchemized the inner-outer field of our experience, working a fundamental and still-unfolding transmutation upon it, while we simply weren’t paying attention?

Is our current global weirding not an aberration, but an indication, an unveiling, a revelation of a deeper order?