Revisiting the past

I'm in the process of revising Space/Time Magic for the Revised edition. It's been about five years since I wrote it, and the biggest realization I come away with is just how different I am from the person who wrote that book. Even my conceptualizations of space and time have changed a lot, so that while I recognize the threads and concepts as my own, I also find myself at a place where I recognize how much has changed in how I think about those same concepts and ideas as well as my practice of them.

I told Lupa that I planned not to do any more revised editions of previous works, because not only did I not really want to revisit the works, but trying to revise them and not include everything I've learned (because I'm working on a sequel) is a task I really don't want to do. I don't find fault in her editing either, but simply in realizing that the person I am now, the magician I am has moved in different directions than the magician who first wrote that book.

I'm not even sure I recognize the person who wrote that book. I've spent the last five years doing very intensive internal work to become a very different person from the one who wrote that book. And now, at the beginning of a new phase of my spirituality, when at least for the meantime, I move away from some of the internal work to doing more of the external work, I also recognize that how I approach that kind of work has shifted because of the internal work. So revising this book is really strange in the sense that I'm dealing with an older paradigm that I don't agree with anymore. It's not that the book or its concepts or techniques aren't valid and useful. They are...but they were written by a very different me...and the current me looks at that and doesn't regret it, but does recognize that the door has closed and there's really no going back.