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The Golden Thread is that private, mythic thread of memory which
links our realest experiences back into our past. It is made of those
moments when I was fully alive; when my true self, my soul,
inhabited and suffused both the 'public' self and the environment-
and both were lit-up. The Golden Thread is these moments of
irradiation, joined-up.
Conversely, life led at the level of the external
and public self was lost, was empty, meaningless - and therefore hard
to remember as real. Whole years can be lost this way, barely
registered; even when these were experienced as years of
achievement.
Hundreds and hundreds of hours of life when I
merely-existed, lived according to the world, or my public self...
whereas when the soul was activated and dominant - even though that
be 'merely' in yearning, aspiring; even in states of profound
discontent and conscious misery - these times become linked into the
Golden Thread.
By the most rigorous criteria, I am forced to
regard the life as wasted
that was not part of
the Golden Thread; even when that includes much that others would
regard as most significant. And that is a great deal of my young
adult life.
I have experienced successes in several aspects
of life; but these have proved to be almost-wholly illusory; when
judged by the standards of the Golden Thread.
It took marriage to re-awaken the Golden thread,
and it too Christianity to recognize the Golden Thread as objectively
real and valuable - and not merely a guilty, childish, secret
fantasy; something merely in my mind which would die with me as was
vulnerable to loss and distortion of memory.
Before Christianity, then, I feared that the
all-but-forgotten hours, days, months and years might be reality, and
the Golden Thread merely subjective illusion, wishful thinking.
Now I realize that the Golden Thread is the only thing which is not
an illusion.
In an adult life which was mostly automatic,
unfree, reactive; the moments in the Golden Thread are probably the
only ones that are
finally-significant, endure into eternity.
"What makes the Golden Thread?"
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