What makes the Golden Thread?

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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.

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