Neale Donald Walsch

A Sense of Accomplishment

Posted on by James C. Struck

I start way more things than I finish.

I think that’s pretty common for writers.  We get the idea, the great and glowing thing in our heads, and we dash off to our computer (or in my case, my notebook) and get to work, scribbling or tapping away.  Sometimes the idea just dries up and we stop.  Sometimes we keep going for a while and then we get another idea and drop the first one.  Sometimes we keep at it but our doubts and insecurities and lives and busyness and procrastination and what have you just get in the way.

But sometimes, just sometimes, none of this happens.

I’ve just today finished the longest thing I’ve ever written.  It took me 13 months (yeah, no NaNoWriMo for Jimmy) to write 157 pages of longhand YA modern fantasy novel.  It’s the first time I’ve ever finished anything close to this length that was fiction; most of my longer stuff is philosophical ramblings.  The previous story record was about 50 pages and that was in 2003.  And the best part is that I’m not done.  The story, assuming I finish it, is a trilogy.

So why am I bothering to document this in Cyberspace, and why do I think anyone else will give a crap about it?

We live in a society where accomplishment is measured in material things.  Success is weighed in square footage of house, names on clothing tags, shininess of car.  We rarely allow ourselves, or perhaps we are rarely allowed, to feel accomplishment for its own sake, to just feel good about “hey, I did that”.  It has to be “okay, you did that, now what will you do with it?”  Everything has to be a product.

Yet real accomplishment has nothing to do with that.  Our sense of worth and worthiness is garnered from being something, not having something.  Think of the times you really felt good about yourself.  Did it have anything to do with some material acquisition, or did it come from within?  Neale Donald Walsch once wrote that part of the reason our society is so unhappy is because we have what he calls the “be/do/have paradigm” upside down.  We think that, in order to be something, happy for instance, we have to have something first, like more money.  This having will allow us to do things (take a trip, buy a house, pay a bill) which will then allow us to be what we want (happy).  He says that we have this backwards.  We instead should decide what we want to be, then do things that move us towards that.  This will then create things to have that work with the doing and being.

Today I have finished my book.  I did this because I chose to be a writer and to stick to it, no matter what.  This led me to do something, which was to make time to write every day, even if it was just a few minutes to write a few words.  This made it possible for me to have a finished book, and a great sense of accomplishment because of it.

Mr. Walsch might be onto something. 🙂

The Purpose of a Snowflake

Posted on by James C. Struck

What is the purpose of a snowflake?  While this is a question I circle back to many times in TCS, I would like to answer it a bit more literally and personally.  What was my purpose in writing TCS in the first place? What was I trying to accomplish?

Before I wrote TCS, before I wrote any of my philosophical works (most of which have yet to see the light of day) I spent a good 15 years developing my personal philosophy.  I devoured just about any book on religion and spirituality I could get my hands on, from ancient classics like the Bible, the Bhagavat Gita, and the Tao Te Ching to modern writers like Neale Donald Walsch, James Redfield, and Richard Bach.  In doing this, I noticed a pattern.  Most ancient spiritual writings are simple.  They rely on repetition, patterns, stories, and allegories to get their points across.  They tend to use simpler language, yet they are not shallow.  On the contrary, they usually have multiple layers of meaning and leave themselves open to a certain degree of interpretation.  They can be understood on the simplest level by children, yet can be delved deeper into by older believers.

On the other hand, most modern spiritual writings tend to be thick, heavy-handed things that assume a certain degree of maturity on the part of the reader.  I would never dump Ram Dass or Eckhart Tolle into the lap of anyone under the age of 18 or so, for example.  Yet by the time someone is an adult or near enough, they already have some degree of a philosophical framework, usually one they inherited from their parents, so there is an unlearning that they need to go into in order to appreciate these new ideas.  Very little New Age writing is geared towards a younger reader or a beginner.  There are a few exceptions, The Little Soul and the Sun by Mr. Walsch comes immediately to mind, but they are far from the rule.

That, obviously, is where I want TCS to come in.

I intend TCS to be a primer, an introduction to what I call Unity Theory.  It covers the basic tenets of my philosophy: the Oneness of all things, the lack of a judgmental Deity or afterlife, the rough outlines of reincarnation, the purpose of life being experience, the (admittedly controversial) idea that good and bad are human concepts and not external absolutes.  But I try to do this in such a way that even children can understand them.

The world, as it stands now, is not a true reflection of what we as humans desire.  Our concepts of self, of right and wrong, and our priorities are out of phase with our actions.  We, as a species, are behaving in ways that are self-destructive and run counter to what we as a species actually want: love in our lives, health in our bodies, connection with others, and a sense of purpose.  The only way I feel this can change is if we change our core thinking about our relationship to each other and to all of existence, and this can only happen if we start teaching different core values from the earliest age.  Do I think TCS fits this bill?  Of course not, I am not that arrogant.  But I believe it is one small step in the right direction.