The moments before expression, the purposive spirit of the before of action or speech, thinking… before one moves or forms one’s mind, there is intent. And there are an array of intention-forms. Purposes. Methods. Methods even … of forming intentions. But the act of expression should be sacred. If it is not, our minds become ‘newsy, grandstandy, and self-trivializing’.

The before is a manifold. The after is the shape of its collapse (translation of originary dimensionality/potential into derivative structure and form).

When I ‘talk to people’ in the regular way, what they get and share is (almost always) ‘newsy’. But we are not like this in our souls. This is a mask we have learned to invent, sustain, attend, criticize, celebrate, ignore, replicate, and so on. No one likes it. It’s a lying-way. I don’t even trust my own mouth when I am doing this. It’s like a ghost of my presence, insight, attention and intelligence ‘took over’ and is trying to »convert … not only others… but »me… into adherents to fictions and biases and projections and fears. This is not me. When I am doing this? It is a signal that something has gone terribly wrong, and I am missing from my own soul and the act of communion.

But when I »write, or if I »orate… »then, I can begin to remember and speak with my soul’s spark, rather than the spark of my relatively disembodied ‘thinking, newsy, courtroom’ mind. And when I begin to attempt this, my mind, history, future, purpose, and identity transform. Instantly. I cannot be pure, but I can do something amazing: I can use the structure of the other thing to disclose and surpass it. I can use the dangers in language — to exceed both the traps and usual limitations it otherwise demands. I can see with my heart, my soul, my relationships…

… and I have learned to guard the sanctity of expression, and even of the purposive habits that precede it. I have realized that some things are holy by nature, not by comparison with ideas about gods or no gods. And, slowly, this way has leaked into my common communication, so that, over time, I became first ‘resistant to newsyness’ and then… something like ‘the sudden unexpected appearance of its antidote’.

Hold the act of expression in grave respect. Each gesture will prefigure and inform all previous and future gestures of this nature. This means that each gesture of communication has the power to lift the entire history of such gestures beyond its traps and horrors, into its origins and beauty. This is a power that would inspire jealousy in gods or demons. Indeed, the fictional gods of our common waking culture despise, attack, counterfeit and otherwise forbid it.

I am unequal to this task myself, and in many ways can demonstrate only failure. But, having become aware of this, and my failures, I continue to insist upon the awareness and enaction of this in such ways as I am able to learn or accomplish. Usually, this requires that someone either hold or establish a context in which all have agreed this is good, necessary, important, beautiful, and true. Where this is not the case, the myriad swarms of competing degradations and superficial aggrandizements will generally set and rule both the context… and… ‘the news’.