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.

Introductory note and index to ‘Journals, Volume 2’

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Volume 2 of my journals is now available from Sarnath Press. Here’s a portion of the brief introductory note that appears at the beginning of it. It describes the rising sense of exposure that I felt while creating this volume, as the entries I was transcribing grew more and more recent:

For a full introduction to this journal, including an autobiographical sketch that establishes the wider life context of each entry, see volume 1.

Regarding the many significant gaps in coverage during the years encompassed by the present volume, in some instances these gaps represent places where I have omitted content. In a few such instances, I have briefly summarized the nature of the excised entries. Other large gaps represent either periods for which I have now lost my notebooks or periods during which I went silent and did not write in my journal. In both such cases, I have entered brief explanations.

Finally, on a personal note, as I worked my way through my notebooks chronologically to create the manuscripts for both volumes, I found that whereas the older entries often felt like someone else’s writings, as if I were unearthing old bones in a textual-archaeological dig, the more recent entries progressively began to feel more like “me.” Thus, the content of the latter years in this second volume, which extends all the way to last summer—less than twelve months ago as I sit here writing this introductory note—makes me feel distinctly more exposed and vulnerable. I simply point this out for whatever it is worth. The fact that future “me” will look back on these same entries, and on the sense of vulnerability just described, with the same detachment that present “me” currently feels toward the older ones, is just one more testament to the fundamental strangeness of the ego self, and of its relationship to the wider, deeper world of timeless total identity and reality, that I grapple with throughout this journal.

MATT CARDIN
Pyatt, Arkansas
March 2023

Additionally, here is is a downloadable PDF of the book’s index, showing the multitude of topics that entered my journaling inferno during my thirties, forties, and early fifties:

Index to Journals, Volume 2: 2002–2022

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On feeling the call to absolute stillness

Read more about the article On feeling the call to absolute stillness

Are you ever tempted to abandon all of your creative projects? Let them collapse? Maybe even let your whole outer life crumble as you sit there silently and just watch it all burn down? Is there ever an inner spiritual call to do this?

This is a question and a temptation that has suggested itself to me multiple times over the course of my adult life. The peculiar nature of my mental-emotional makeup apparently renders me highly susceptible to such thinking. Naturally, this has made itself known in my private journal. The example below is a case in point that shows me grappling with the pull toward absolute inertia.

When I wrote those words, I was deep into editing my mummy encyclopedia and conceiving the proposal for my paranormal encyclopedia, while also carrying on a full-time job as a college writing center instructor and English faculty member, even as I was managing all the necessary responsibilities to my family. In the center of this swirl of competing calls and obligations, the desire just to let everything go was a constant whisper, a silently thrumming inner suggestion that hovered on the margins of my awareness and sometimes converged toward the center.

And into the midst of this came the above-quoted passage from the works of Oswald Chambers—who would later become the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation—to amplify the whole thing. That particular journal entry will appear in volume 2 of my collected journals, whose proofs I’m currently editing for publication later this year. I share it here for those who will immediately grok what I’m talking about, those who are personally familiar with the inner call to total silence and stillness.

I have no particular advice to offer about this experience, other than to state that it needs to be recognized and honored. Just a couple of days ago I encountered the following words from nondual teacher Robert Wolfe, from his booklet “Elementary Cloud-Watching: Contemplating the Meaning of Living in the Moment” (excerpted in his biographical essay at Amazon). They convey the mood of this inner stillness as well as anything possibly could:

Civilization and stillness—quiet, inactivity—do not go together. Civilization is a continual process of choices; stillness comes without choice. There is nothing which can be done to create this stillness. It is not something which is to be acquired; it has no value as currency. It is, put another way, priceless.

One must relax, to breathe this stillness. Not just the body: the mind, the psyche. One must relax ambition. Ambition and stillness are not compatible. There is no ticking of the clock here. There is no effort in stillness.

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