Toward Ecosophy

A few days ago I finished working my way through one of the correspondence courses I've studied -- the original Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD) course, to be precise. No, it wasn't the first time. I've gone through the complete three-year OBOD course of study four times now, and I have every intention of doing the same thing several more times before I wind up this incarnation. Not everyone does this with occult correspondence courses -- in fact, I don't think I've met anybody else who does this -- so it occurred to me that it might be helptul for me to say a few words about why this is a good idea, and why in fact you're missing most of the value of any kind of study program if you only go through it once. 

Most people I know who read at all have favorite books, which they like to read over and over again. I certainly do.  Partly that's because you never get everything that's going on in a book if you only read it once, and the richer and more skilfully written a book is, the more you can be sure of missing the first time through. Yet there's more to it than that. 

When you read a book you're literally climbing inside someone else's thought processes. (That's one of the extraordinary powers of written language.) A book is a sequence of thoughts arranged in order by the author, and as you read it, you think those same thoughts in the same order. In the process, if the book is any good, you get to experience a way of looking at the world that isn't the one you're used to. A good novel, or for that matter a good nonfiction book, shows you what things look like from the perspective of someone else's mind, and that in turn stretches your own mind and shows you different ways of making sense of the world. By reading it again, you get better at experiencing the world in new ways -- and the more often you read it, the more you learn. 

An occult study course -- again, if it's any good -- does exactly the same thing, but with the additional boost of practical exercises. To study such a course is to go through a set of structured ideas and inner experiences meant to help you stretch the range of your consciousness. You will get more out of it the second time than you did the first. You'll be coming to the exercises with some experience, and so that'll make them more effective, but you'll also be coming to the ideas in the course with a mind that's already been stretched a bit to include them, and so you can go deeper and reach further. 

So if you've taken an occult correspondence course already and it's been sitting in a box ever since, consider taking it out and working through the whole thing again from the beginning. You won't regret it. The same is true, by the way, of study programs published in book form -- yes, including mine. Give it some thought.