I have decided to release my book on a limited free basis as Podcast over the next 14 weeks.
I still have the last chapter or two to write, kind of an epilogue and reflection on what it means to me as well some ways to explore questions that this book leaves open.
In my thirty-year exploration and meditation on the concepts we associate with religion I have found common threads of specific ideas and stories in every culture. This set of ideas and understandings is about who you are and what you are, and then how you work. I invite you on a journey into a world that exists all around us and within us, but we do not see; to discover a profound way of self-exploration and transformation.
The old sacred stories give us a map, not to some long-lost manuscript with the answer to everything, but to a fragmentary pattern of glimpses of the sacred, of what might be called enlightenment, of heaven, of the world of ancestors and spirits. These glimpses have been documented by mankind over centuries and woven into the sacred stories of people of the four nations of the earth.
My goal is to share that map with you, so you can discover parts of yourself you never knew existed, so you can engage those parts to become a more whole and fulfilled person.
Our ancestors forgot these aspects of human capacity many generations ago, as we were domesticating ourselves, and as many losses of knowledge occurred. In modern parlance, which I detest, our souls were colonized by bigger and bigger institutions over the centuries, and we forgot the nature of our souls on the way.
One could think about this as the search for the Holy Grail, or El Dorado, or the Golden Fleece. The search however is inward, we delve into a world of sense and perspectives that we cut ourselves off from for the sake of this modern society. I call this problem The Great Forgetting.
I wrote Chasing Quicksilver to help people Remember who they are. It is dedicated to my precious child; Anwen-Celeste. Named for this very domain of existence, the domain of soul.
Authors Note: the narrative of colonization as it exists and is being perpetuated in the public sphere today is contested and should be questioned in many ways. In this piece I speak about the numbers of people who were in the Americas before Columbus and the horrors of the residential schools.
The numbers of people, the causes of death, the “agency” or blame assigned to nations, empires, and historical figures and how we deal with those issues today as a society is a controversial subject that needs to be scrutinized more than it currently is. Certainly the toxic narrative, that people today should be held guilty for what happened hundreds of years ago is a destructive story and belief that sadly only leads us towards more of such atrocities. This is the dark part of human nature that emerges when we divide people against people instead of bringing them together.
I have heard stories directly from dozens of people who were raised in residential schools in a therapeutic “Healing Circle” setting. The impacts of policies of previous generations of government, specifically on Indigenous People who were stolen from their parents by the state is unquestionably real, the real abuses and horrors people suffered in many of those schools is a terrible stain, and if we are wise, a lesson we will learn from and never repeat.
This book is about the soul, and we can only understand forgiveness and healing at the soul-level.
At that level we learn Tat Tvam Asi,
I am You and You are me. We are Warriors of the Four Nations
Chasing Quicksilver - Full Prologue - Main Street and Broadway