Spiritualism first appeared in the 1840s in the "Burned-over District" of upstate New York, where earlier religious movements such as Millerism (Seventh-Day Adventism) and Mormonism had emerged during the Second Great Awakening. ( wikipedia )
Spiritual Split Personality
Less Can Be More
The material in the previous post was edited out from the manuscript for Original Faith; in the discussion thread, Pauline asked why I removed it.
To me, an interesting aspect of writing the book was that in the end, I found myself deciding to omit quite a bit of material that I thought was fairly good and at times very good. At some point in refining and organizing my drafts, the following criterion emerged for whether to include material:
Does it contribute to developing the book’s message? Does it contribute to the flow of the whole?
If not – if, say, it was a redundant idea despite being expressed well, or well written and yet somewhat off topic, or personally meaningful but not really such a great illustration or example of a particular point – then I found that such material detracted from the impact of the book as a whole. It bogged it down.
Running on Empty
Also in the previous post’s thread, this from Lady Luxie: "How can I disappear to emerge nothing but myself?"
I like this question, which gets straight to what Original Faith is about. Here I can just point in the general direction of an answer.
What comes to mind is the expression “full of oneself.” If someone is full of themselves, what they’re full of is pretty small. The more that disappears, the more that who the person really is can emerge.
We can take this approach to our work. We can even take it to our lives generally. The editing procedure I sketched above is a small example. I needed to leave myself behind a bit to do that. But who did that? Me.
The other me.
