The
Modern Occultist
Interview #5
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James D. McCallister is a Columbia, South Carolina-based novelist, independent
business owner, and civic figure who has spent three decades building a life
out of disciplined intention. His Dixiana trilogy—a 600,000-word "prodigal-son" epic rooted in questions of consciousness, manifestation, and transformation—is
the centerpiece of a writing career he willed into existence one submission at
a time. He sat down with Modern
Occultist to talk about near-death experiences, sobriety, Neville Goddard,
and why reality is stickier than you think...
MODERN OCCULTIST
Can
you introduce yourself for our readers?
JAMES D. MCCALLISTER
I'm
an independent business owner. I'm an artist. I've been involved in civic
matters here in Columbia, South Carolina, and I've won awards in all three of
those areas. The store consistently wins awards. I've won awards for my
writing. And I was given an award for civic duty as well—I served on the board
of directors of the Five Points Association … To be a success in life, you have
to do something you love doing. That's one of the key tenets of my personal
philosophy—and how I've managed to pull all of this off. Whether it was running
the store, working on my books, teaching creative writing for ten years at
Midlands Tech—the emotional core of your daily activities has to be something
you truly enjoy. That's one of the legs of my manifestation scheme, I would
say.
MO
Tell
us about your writing awards.
JDM
The
first and most important was a short story competition from Pearl
Magazine—an old literary journal that had published [Charles] Bukowski and some
of the beat poets. I had been writing furiously for about six years, sending
out hundreds and hundreds of submissions. And finally, I wrote one that was
from the heart, about something I knew. I just sat down and did it—revised it
once or twice, and sent it out. And damn if it didn't win the journal's
contest. I burst into tears when I read
the email. I had to read it two or three times before it sank in. It said not
just that I was a finalist—I was the winner. Those were angels, the editor and
publisher of that journal. They gave me something I desperately needed. Around the same time, I finished my first novel—I'd
told myself I had to finish a draft before I turned 40. I finished it one month
before my birthday. Both of those events together were the foundation upon
which everything else was built. Before that, I felt like a failure. I had
nothing but rejections, and I still hadn't finished a novel. I had self-esteem
issues to work through, and alcoholism, too. While I was very functional, I
knew that if I wasn't able to quit drinking, I'd never succeed at anything.
MO
And
after those two milestones?
JDM
My
novel Dixiana was a finalist for the Faulkner Society Novel Award. I won
several awards from the South Carolina Writers Workshop. I was a finalist for
the Saturday Evening Post short story award. And the trilogy as a whole—that
was originally a 1,000-page draft that eventually became 600,000 words across
three books. I outdid myself. But winning that first award lit a fire. I was
able to start really cranking out material after that.
MO
Can
you tell readers what the Dixiana trilogy is about, and how
manifestation is woven into it?
JDM
The basic plot thread is what we call a prodigal son story. A very successful businessman returns to his southern small town when his grandfather dies. His grandfather owned a famous honky tonk called the Dixiana—and the protagonist has always despised it. He hated country music, bar life, being from a small town. He comes back intending to tear it all down. What he finds is that he was meant to come back—not to destroy, but to create. He has his epiphany: I'm going to tear it down and build it back better. But his real journey isn't about the physical world of the Dixiana. It's the interior journey from someone who believes that his money and power are the tools that make all things possible, to the understanding that it is actually the internal temperature—the state of his spirit -- that is the true tool for creating reality. He stops trying to control everything and begins to work on controlling himself, his emotions. There are eleven other major characters, each of whose story is given its due, all to serve the main theme: you are the creator of your reality. His reality starts to change when he himself changes.
There's
also a cousin of his who follows a magical path—a little “hippy-dippy, woo-woo,”
as I'd say. Through her, the book looks at the idea of magic: how to do it, and
how to do it wrong. That's another thread throughout.
MO
How
would you answer that—how do you do magic, and how do you do it wrong?
JDM
I
think they're both in here (touches his heart). Many systems of creating
reality are actually the same thing with different words for it. What's the
difference between wishing and praying, for example? Many people are praying to
their vision of God for something they need. I, rather than praying, would
meditate, visualize—not ask for something, but try to bring it into existence.
Not just me, but with my invisible helpers, if they're there, or simply my
higher consciousness. That's what I feel I've been able to access since I got
off the alcohol and began a meditation and yoga practice.
MO
How
did you first discover manifestation?
JDM
It
was a gradual realization more than a lightning bolt. I was doing it in an
undisciplined way for years without realizing it. I came to understand that
consciousness precedes matter— believe that. And when your consciousness is
undisciplined, how can you produce results in what I call “sticky-icky
reality?” Manifestation isn't instantaneous. It isn't waving a wand like in
Harry Potter. It takes commitment. You can't just wish for something and have
it happen—though sometimes, maybe, that does work.
MO
Is
that what manifestation teachers call inspired action? As opposed to forced
action?
JDM
Right.
And in terms of reading about what I seemed to already be doing—Neville Goddard
was one. The main part I've taken from him is the emotional state: putting
yourself in the feeling of having achieved what you want, and doing it every
day, especially at night just before sleep -- the theta state, as you'd call
it. Not saying, “I hope it happens,” but experiencing the emotional state of
having already manifested it. I was doing that in an untrained way without
realizing it. That's partly why I was so surprised when I won the contest—I had
just been hoping and writing and hoping, without the discipline behind it.
MO
How
about Dr. Joseph Murphy or Florence Scovel Shinn?
JDM
Possibly.
I was a sponge for a while. I think one of her quotes is up on my bulletin
board at home—my vision board. Various messages to keep me going. And in
general, the New Thought movement of the early twentieth century. That whole
tradition—the outgrowth of theosophy and the Blavatsky and Alice Bailey lineage—these
are some of the people that shaped my thinking.
MO
What
would you recommend for a young writer who wants to get published, and for
someone just discovering manifestation?
JDM
In
both cases: you've got to get out of your own way. For writing, you have to
learn to turn off your internal editor, turn off your conscious thought stream,
and access something else—write without thinking. One of the cards on my board
says, “Don't think.” It goes beyond just silencing the voice that says you're
not good enough. It's almost like channeling. It felt like channeling to me—
from my higher self, or from something else. The writing itself. That happened
to me endlessly once it began. For manifestation,
the main thing I'd say is that it isn't one thing you're going to do —it's
many. Some are more difficult to grapple with. It's about how disciplined your
consciousness is. Do you give away your energy rather than cultivating it? You
have to learn to direct it. Sometimes that means directing it inside yourself
in a big circle—like Yogananda's kriya yoga, the circulation of energy from the
base of your spine to the crown chakra. I would also tell young people to look
into the chakras, and to read Vadim Zeland's Transurfing Reality—he's
not a great writer, but the ideas about energy meridians are fascinating.
And don't have a fixed idea of what success
should look like. Open yourself to the possibility that you will succeed—and
that you might not even recognize it at first, because you'll have to look at
the world through a different lens. Like reading a piece of literature and
suddenly understanding the subtext: looking at something you thought was not a
success and realizing, “Oh, it is, it just happened this way instead of the way
I'd fixed in my head.”
MO
What
is one book, film, lecture, or teacher that helped shape your journey?
JDM
Neville
Goddard was the moment where I said, “Okay, I see what he is up to and how it
relates to my life.” And Constance J. Foster—that quote appears at the opening
of the third Dixiana book. Let me show you:
What you prepare for, confidently expect, and think about most, you get. It may be trouble, or it may be joy. It's up to you. — Constance J. Foster
The
first book opens with Cornelius Agrippa:
But who can give soul to an image, life to stone, metal, wood or wax?... no one has such powers but he who has cohabited with the elements, vanquished nature, mounted higher than the heavens, elevating himself above the angels to the archetype itself, with whom he then becomes co-operator and can do all things. — Cornelius Agrippa
And
Robinson Jeffers—a very important American poet from northern California—he's
in there too. Terence McKenna as well. The death of the grandfather in the
first book is the catalyzing event, and for that I used Jeffers: “Death
greetings are the sweetest. Let trumpets roar when a man dies, and rockets fly
up—he has found his fortune.”
MO
What
is one daily activity you believe is a must for all who seek manifestation?
JDM
Meditation. I'm not going to say it should be transcendental or any other specific kind. Meditating is how you wrangle your consciousness—what some call “the monkey mind” —the chattering stream. Inwardly, that's where the magic is happening. If you start your day with some sort of discipline like meditation, you're setting the tone. Maybe you had a bad dream. Maybe you're worried about money, or fearful about something. The meditation routine is how you get in control of all that—not suppress it, but trade that energy for something on the other end of the polarity. For me, I wake up and I'm already fairly aligned. Not always—I'm a human being. But when I sit down to meditate, I begin with a gratitude ceremony I've been doing for many years. It grew out of experimenting with magic, making and opening circles. I have a little altar with sacred objects —including my late mother's ashes. I call it venerating the ancients: the key people in my life who have died. I light candles, ring a bell, burn incense, and say, 'None of this would be possible without you. Thank you.' Then I meditate for about thirty minutes.
After
meditation, thirty minutes of yoga. Then thirty minutes to an hour of what I
call "study time"—right now, working through a long book on Buddhism, making
notes as I go. Once I've done all of that, I'm ready to enter the world. I get
up at 5:30 or 6:00 at the latest to do all of this before 8 o'clock. And I
would say to anyone: if you can develop a morning routine like that, you're
disciplining your mind not to be scattered. That's the key to building any sort
of life—any success, any project, any endeavor.
MO
How
did you discipline your mind in the first place?
JDM
A
lot of it was getting off alcohol. I believe that when you drink to excess,
your higher self withdraws. It's uncomfortable for your higher self to be in an
intoxicated body. That's my theory for why people do things intoxicated that
they'd never do sober—the higher self just isn't there. Once I stopped, the
initial physical detox wasn't the hardest part. The spiritual, intellectual,
and emotional detox—that took about a year. But once I came through it, my mind
settled, and I began meditating, and everything I talked about began. And everything I've ever wanted has come true in some
fashion. Not always the way I imagined. I wanted to be a famous literary
novelist— Norman Mailer, someone like that. I'm not Norman Mailer. But somebody
walked into my store once after reading King's Highway—my first
published novel, set in Myrtle Beach—and he said, “Your book changed my life. I
got in my truck and drove to Myrtle Beach and saw my son for the first time in
months.” And he walked out before I could even respond. That's a small example.
I said I wanted to write a book that changed somebody's life. Someone came in
and told me it had.
Another
time, at a book festival, the moderator introduced the featured authors. When
she got to me, she looked at me in front of the full ballroom and said, 'I want
you to know that your book has some of the most beautiful sentences I think
I've ever read.' That was a fantasy I used to have: the idea of someone
thinking my work was the most beautiful thing they'd ever read and wanting to
tell the world. And that's what happened that day. That's probably a good way
to finish.
MO
What
is one daily habit you believe is "a must" for new writers?
JDM
Simply to write. Because the more you write, you will eventually get to that place—what I call the other place, where you're out of your own way, where it's flowing and time has no meaning and you don't know where it comes from. That feeling.
MO
Elmore
Leonard told a friend, “Write every day, whether you feel like it or not.”
JDM
“Whether you feel like it or not, write every day…”
Elmore Leonard—I love him. A great crime writer. Very successful. I used to
hand out his ten rules of writing in my creative writing class. Good advice.
The best advice.
James D. McCallister online:
Website:jamesdmccallister.com
Store: looselucyscolumbia.com
Amazon author page: amazon.com/stores/James-D.-McCallister
Instagram: @loose_lucys5pts | TikTok: @looselucyscola
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