A Different Kind of Sentinel

Having survived the war in Vietnam, without physical injury to himself, Sir E. J. Drury II “had nonetheless incurred the deeper wounds of a house divided against itself.” As a child, had not he experienced his real father’s schizophrenia and, later, his stepfather’s alcoholism as war related, he may very well have written a different kind of story than A Different Kind of Sentinel.

For Sir E. J. gives to the imagination what Carl Jung gave to the world—via Active Imagination and the Transcendent Function—a reality “that is just as accessible to one’s faculties as the material world.”

From the first page of the book to the last, does the author slip so seamlessly from one world to the next, as if there were truly no distinction between the two. While standing, for example, in front of a mirror, one day, he sees an image of his soul, a woman “standing opposite” him in the mirror. Alarmed at first, he steps “back from the mirror only to find himself being inexorably drawn back into her world through the smile on her face.” In the end, is he “left standing in front of the mirror, smiling at an image of himself dressed as a white knight.”

And therein lies the whole story in a nutshell. For this remarkable story is as much about the author as it is about the soul and their eventual reunion. While he fears the white knight, she loves the White Knight “above all else.” Where he longs to be free of his indenture to the beast, she longs to be free of her imprisonment in nature. “I am the way,” she boldly proclaims when he finally admits he is lost. And though the two suffer the same agonizing pain of separation from each other and their respective worlds, both seek the one person they are meant to become.

As a sailor, does he reluctantly set off in search of she who must be obeyed if he is to overcome the beast that burdens him and the rest of humanity with self-destruction or destruction of the self. “Whatever you do,” is he forewarned by a fellow shipmate, “don’t let them rob you of the most precious gift you have, your humanity, for the wraiths will claw away at it until all that remains is the shadow of what was once you.” So must he, at all costs, resist the temptation of his fathers before him, “to live out the visions of others rather than the one with which he had been entrusted at birth,” a vision that eventually pits him against the Navy as he comes to a fuller understanding of the true meaning of military service.

Filled with many insights into the workings of the soul and the trinity, human sexuality and creativity, war and the beastly side of human nature, the book is intended for those intrepid souls who will venture to open its pages in search of what might free them from the clutches of the beast that threatens to destroy us all before we destroy our selves—the beast’s only mode of operation.

1019234646
A Different Kind of Sentinel

Having survived the war in Vietnam, without physical injury to himself, Sir E. J. Drury II “had nonetheless incurred the deeper wounds of a house divided against itself.” As a child, had not he experienced his real father’s schizophrenia and, later, his stepfather’s alcoholism as war related, he may very well have written a different kind of story than A Different Kind of Sentinel.

For Sir E. J. gives to the imagination what Carl Jung gave to the world—via Active Imagination and the Transcendent Function—a reality “that is just as accessible to one’s faculties as the material world.”

From the first page of the book to the last, does the author slip so seamlessly from one world to the next, as if there were truly no distinction between the two. While standing, for example, in front of a mirror, one day, he sees an image of his soul, a woman “standing opposite” him in the mirror. Alarmed at first, he steps “back from the mirror only to find himself being inexorably drawn back into her world through the smile on her face.” In the end, is he “left standing in front of the mirror, smiling at an image of himself dressed as a white knight.”

And therein lies the whole story in a nutshell. For this remarkable story is as much about the author as it is about the soul and their eventual reunion. While he fears the white knight, she loves the White Knight “above all else.” Where he longs to be free of his indenture to the beast, she longs to be free of her imprisonment in nature. “I am the way,” she boldly proclaims when he finally admits he is lost. And though the two suffer the same agonizing pain of separation from each other and their respective worlds, both seek the one person they are meant to become.

As a sailor, does he reluctantly set off in search of she who must be obeyed if he is to overcome the beast that burdens him and the rest of humanity with self-destruction or destruction of the self. “Whatever you do,” is he forewarned by a fellow shipmate, “don’t let them rob you of the most precious gift you have, your humanity, for the wraiths will claw away at it until all that remains is the shadow of what was once you.” So must he, at all costs, resist the temptation of his fathers before him, “to live out the visions of others rather than the one with which he had been entrusted at birth,” a vision that eventually pits him against the Navy as he comes to a fuller understanding of the true meaning of military service.

Filled with many insights into the workings of the soul and the trinity, human sexuality and creativity, war and the beastly side of human nature, the book is intended for those intrepid souls who will venture to open its pages in search of what might free them from the clutches of the beast that threatens to destroy us all before we destroy our selves—the beast’s only mode of operation.

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A Different Kind of Sentinel

A Different Kind of Sentinel

by Sir E. J. Drury II
A Different Kind of Sentinel

A Different Kind of Sentinel

by Sir E. J. Drury II

eBook

$9.99 

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Overview

Having survived the war in Vietnam, without physical injury to himself, Sir E. J. Drury II “had nonetheless incurred the deeper wounds of a house divided against itself.” As a child, had not he experienced his real father’s schizophrenia and, later, his stepfather’s alcoholism as war related, he may very well have written a different kind of story than A Different Kind of Sentinel.

For Sir E. J. gives to the imagination what Carl Jung gave to the world—via Active Imagination and the Transcendent Function—a reality “that is just as accessible to one’s faculties as the material world.”

From the first page of the book to the last, does the author slip so seamlessly from one world to the next, as if there were truly no distinction between the two. While standing, for example, in front of a mirror, one day, he sees an image of his soul, a woman “standing opposite” him in the mirror. Alarmed at first, he steps “back from the mirror only to find himself being inexorably drawn back into her world through the smile on her face.” In the end, is he “left standing in front of the mirror, smiling at an image of himself dressed as a white knight.”

And therein lies the whole story in a nutshell. For this remarkable story is as much about the author as it is about the soul and their eventual reunion. While he fears the white knight, she loves the White Knight “above all else.” Where he longs to be free of his indenture to the beast, she longs to be free of her imprisonment in nature. “I am the way,” she boldly proclaims when he finally admits he is lost. And though the two suffer the same agonizing pain of separation from each other and their respective worlds, both seek the one person they are meant to become.

As a sailor, does he reluctantly set off in search of she who must be obeyed if he is to overcome the beast that burdens him and the rest of humanity with self-destruction or destruction of the self. “Whatever you do,” is he forewarned by a fellow shipmate, “don’t let them rob you of the most precious gift you have, your humanity, for the wraiths will claw away at it until all that remains is the shadow of what was once you.” So must he, at all costs, resist the temptation of his fathers before him, “to live out the visions of others rather than the one with which he had been entrusted at birth,” a vision that eventually pits him against the Navy as he comes to a fuller understanding of the true meaning of military service.

Filled with many insights into the workings of the soul and the trinity, human sexuality and creativity, war and the beastly side of human nature, the book is intended for those intrepid souls who will venture to open its pages in search of what might free them from the clutches of the beast that threatens to destroy us all before we destroy our selves—the beast’s only mode of operation.


Product Details

BN ID: 2940044327580
Publisher: Sir E. J. Drury II
Publication date: 02/18/2013
Sold by: Smashwords
Format: eBook
File size: 425 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Handicapped by an alcoholic stepfather, Sir EJ Drury II set off on a crusade, after high school, in search of the very soul he had lost to this ogre. Upon entering the Navy after a brief stint at the US Naval Academy, he struggled, for two long years, with the true enemy of mankind—the Beast.

As a sailor in the Navy circa 1967, did he continue his search for she who must be obeyed if he was to tame the beast within and reunite himself with soul. And so did he, at all costs, resist the temptation of his fathers before him, "to live out the visions of others rather than the one with which he had been entrusted at birth"—a quest that pitted him against the Navy as he came to a fuller understanding of the true meaning of military service.

Returning to St. Louis after his eventual discharge, he joined a loosely knit community of antiwar activists and free-spirited thinkers who published the city's only underground paper, The St. Louis Free Press. After not quite a year of leafleting the induction center downtown and of helping disaffected GIs from a nearby army base, he joined another community forming a Catholic Worker House on the near south side of the city. There he stayed until he left for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, later that year, to work at an alcoholic treatment center. After suffering through one of the coldest winters he had ever experienced, he moved back to St. Louis to work on a psychiatric floor at Lutheran Hospital. Upon leaving there in protest, with other health care professionals, over the performance of a lobotomy on a 15-year-old patient, he wound up working on an orthopedic floor, and later, a psychiatric floor at Jewish Hospital.

At the same time, he purchased a farm about a hundred miles south of St. Louis, where he began growing organic vegetables, he marketed back in St. Louis. There he built a cabin and began acquiring the tools and equipment he would need to farm 15 acres of organic fruits and vegetables.

On leaving Jewish Hospital around 1980, he went to work for T C Construction as a carpenter. In '82, he married and began to raise a family. As his oldest son approached the age of two, he started building a new house on the farm, only to have his well-laid plans dashed by an unfortunate but permanent injury to his back, that left him unable to ever again perform any kind of manual labor on a daily basis.

Thrown into a quandary, he eventually went to work for the City of St. Louis, for two years, as a building inspector, before taking a similar position with the City of Richmond Heights, where he worked until he retired in 2015.

After a series of dreams he had in his second year with the City of St. Louis, he started writing, two hours a day until he had completed the book, recounting his first year in the Navy, his encounters with soul and their brief reunion. The book was so poorly produced, it went nowhere. Crushed but not defeated, he continued to work on the book until it reached its present form, a work of psychological and social import entitled A Different Kind of Sentinel, that was released in 2010, printed twice in 2013 and again in 2016 as newer editions became available.

A self-taught, self-made man, Sir EJ has struggled mightily to live up to his soul's expectations of him, acquiring along the way, whatever it took to get them through the next stage in the development of the one person they are destined to become. His teachers have been the writings of such notables as the contemplative Thomas Merton, psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Zen Master D.T. Suzuki, and self-described philosophical anarchist Mahatma Gandhi. He has studied the beastly side of human nature for 30 years, and is now considered a leading authority in his field.

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