James W. Bowers
Prologue I am sitting in my chair in the cabin built by my own hands, looking at the stream flowing through my property, with my feet elevated, piles of newspapers and my dog at my side. It is not that I am lazy. I'm retired, and retirement means not doing whatever I do not care to do, not talking with people I do not find interesting, not being anything other than what I want to be. It is the ultimate in freedom, just to be myself: no more games to play, no role to tell me how I ought to act, only silence and intuition. But that also involves getting to know who I really am. Memories from the past float to the surface, long-forgotten, painful, surprising. I am changing in unexpected ways: death and rebirth in my late sixties, as if one can start over again at that age. I am becoming more reclusive, more observant, delighted by the vast panorama of inward experience. Room after room I wander through the mansion of my soul, ascending stairs toward ecstasy, descending into a murky cellar of horror and evil, desperately trying to find some stability within the synergy between polar opposites. There are many faces populating my house of imagination. In the silence of meditation personalities gather in each room, conversing with one another, anxious to be bodied into words so that they can live in the light of the world outside. Most are unknown in the real world, yet resembling colleagues known, conversations overheard, small events that somehow reveal meaning. It is the meaning, the purpose of each unexpected observation that entices me now: how each piece of the puzzle begins to fit, how obvious it all is, how simple. The posts and beams, the tongues and grooves of a lifetime fit together so perfectly. I could never have accomplished such craftsmanship myself, yet here it is. Mine has been a life flowing between granite walls of necessity; now it is opening out into a huge expanse of still water, deep, reflecting the light of the sky, clear and green to the very botto
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