She

With the thought processes of the head, you can only develop and organize what you see. With feeling, or thoughts from the heart, you are exposed to what you don't see, to an entirely new way of looking at what you thought you saw.

As feeling helps you grope through the darkness of your own ignorance, she not only raises your level of consciousness, but also gradually reveals the way you must go, which lies hidden out there in Nature. For feeling is a whole different way of thinking. While thinking is like walking through a room with your eyes open, feeling is like walking through that same room only with your eyes closed. It's like putting your trust in the hand of another, as she leads the way.

To help you find the way, she separates the wheat from the chaff, that is she gives insight into what your senses have gathered. For her vision, she demands not only blind faith, the letting go of cherished concepts, but also blind obedience, the embodying of insight, for she needs a body in which these seeds can take root and bear fruit.

The Veil of Matter

Only when the individual and the collective realize their indebtedness to each other will we tear down the iron curtain that so divides our collective psyche. Only then, will we realize that our future lies not out there in our own self-centered materialism, but on the other side of the iron curtain within the collective unconsciousness of our beings. Only then, will we see the iron curtain as the veil of matter, which has so blurred our vision--our materialism as the wall, which has so divided us. Only then, will we take the next great step and cross the threshold to embrace our humanity, a life given to us for the sake of each other, as exemplified in simple living and the right use of the material goods of this world.

The Red Scare

As I chipped away at all the hype and hysteria surrounding communism, I began to see it as a rather ambitious attempt by the have-nots to right the wrongs of capitalism, which has only succeeded in globally impoverishing the many for the benefit of a few. However, in their struggle to purge from the masses the sins of capitalism, that is its rugged individualism, greed and failed trickle-down economics, the communists have only succeeded in creating a totalitarian nightmare instead of a utopia. As this nightmare invaded the collective consciousness of the world, it struck fear into the heart of the American dreamer and created mass hysteria. For this Red scare threatened to take everything away from the American dreamer in order to redistribute the wealth, he had misappropriated in the first place, more equitably amongst its rightful inheritants, the have-nots of the world.

Feelings and Emotions

Many of us erroneously confuse feelings and emotions as one and the same, when in reality they are as different as night and day. For feelings are actually thoughts from the heart rather than from the head, while emotions are the packets of energy that surround feelings like a dark cloud, and move them into consciousness. Furthermore, emotions are the body's first line of defense, in that they alert us somatically, i.e. in the language of the body, to any penetrations of consciousness by our feelings. Where feelings' arrows of truth strike our bodies, emotions quickly surround the wound and immediately surrender the intruding feeling to consciousness as pure thought. And as we incorporate the words of this thought into our lives, this wound miraculously heals itself, leaving not a trace of a scar behind.

Feelings also help us sort through the limitless possibilities of life, to determine which, if any of the countless thoughts and ideas we have, are real. For feelings have access to a primordial wisdom of instinctive truth that allows us to get quickly to the heart of a matter while our intellects tarry around with any number of meaningless thoughts. When our feelings evaluate a situation for us, we know immediately in our heart of hearts what we must do, even though we may not have yet formulated the reasons why.

In our unwillingness to see through the thick clouds of stormy emotions that occasionally engulf us in their wrath, we piss away untold opportunities to hear out our feelings. Or if by chance, we do catch the contents of a feeling that has somehow slipped through our defenses, we often dismiss the message as unbelievable. Or we may believe in the feeling, but lack the courage to overcome the fear and the inertia of expressing the feeling in spite of the incredible strength of the emotional energy surrounding it.

And though our feelings, with their concomitant emotional energy, whether positive or negative, arise purely for the sake of increasing our awareness, we often put down their ingenuous efforts, due to our fear of enlightenment. For in their manifestation, we are ultimately being asked, according to the laws of nature, to respond to life one way or the other, with either the raw emotions of an unconscious animal or the genuine feeling of an enlightened human being.

Imagine That

Like some of our animal brethren have we been endowed with a sixth sense, the ability to imagine--to see a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality. Yet we find it hard to imagine why anyone in his right mind would want to see things that aren't there.

When I sat down to write A Different Kind of Sentinel, I stood on the precipice of utter darkness, until I ran into my soul, on the way to work, one morning. Having been invited up to her room, one, I might add, with an amazing view, I proceeded to have intercourse with her in a way no two human beings ever could.

As I sat there poking around in the fire of my heart's desires, with a stick, I grew uncomfortable with the feelings I had stirred up. Fearful of letting the beast in me take over, I jabbed the stick, quickly in and out of the coals, before plunging it all the way into the fire and letting go of it.

Gone was the fire that burned between us. Gone, too, were the two of us, for in our place stood, for just an instant, an invincible being of neither sex, before it returned to its former glory as a writer in search of soul.

Such was the nature of my first encounter with soul in years. For is not the ultimate act of love to create consciousness--to free our humanity from the fetters of a purely instinctive response?

To this end, have I dedicated my life and now this book, that you, the reader, might decide to join the fray to save humanity from its self and the destructive side of its animal nature.

Imagine that!