The Seeker Academy Bookblog

“With exquisite facility of language, L.D. Gussin takes us on a very real spiritual journey; the ups, the downs, the all arounds. I’ve been there. L.D. Gussin nails it!” — Nancy Slonim Aronie

For an unknown writer, particularly of literary and philosophical fiction, it is a struggle to get reputable reviews. In my case, I sent, last November, seventy review copies of The Seeker Academy to writers, editors, and leaders I admired in literary circles, in holistic circles, and in spiritual progressive circles. I’d met three of these people, and knew none socially. Four months later, ten or so say they are reading the novel or working toward reading it, and I am grateful to them.

Nancy Slonim Aronie, who I’ve not met, has now given me her brief comments. She is an author and writing teacher who leads workshops at Esalen, Omega Institute, Kripalu, Naropa, The Crossings, Rowe, and other holistic retreats. A longtime NPR commentator, she has taught at Harvard in the Literature for Social Reflection course led by the writer, psychiatrist, and professor Robert Coles. At Harvard, she has twice received a Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching award.

Aronie’s Omega Institute profile is here; her website is here.

Deciding to Listen

Further confusing Grace, it was Trumpeter who twice tried to step the group down from his minute of turbulence. Maybe the imp had tapped his forehead, too. On the bridge—she drove ten miles per hour but there was no long delay—he told, in flat tones, the story of a Catskill Mountains meditation trip he had taken in early autumn after his first year at the academy. It was an alien tale of unintended smugness, with him as the Martian and with vacationers (from a taut ethnic community he had met in the town he camped beside) as Earthlings. Then, nearing the gravel road into Seeker, he spoke of “Retreat Week.” The old mummer Grace allowed him a cautious but much-needed cue by asking what this was. He described it as the one week each year that every workshop had an entirely spiritual theme. Well-known teachers of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Western mysticism, and shamanism strolled the grounds. Most meals, with seven hundred people present, were taken in silence. This would all begin in five days.

Grace, who could catch but not hold his gaze in her mirror, saw that all her riders—Trumpeter and Willa behind her, Monk nearer the blasted windows in the seat behind them, and Moira Kathleen on her right—had fallen into private reflections. She turned her own mind back to the road and her thoughts. “I’ll see some of Retreat Week, then,” she said. “I have to go home next Tuesday.” She added, with more force than she had intended, “This is all pretty bewildering.”

They parked at the maintenance shed near the entrance. Trumpeter, obdurately, and Monk, who had obvious business together, waved their goodbyes as the women headed up the road. Turning in toward the main grounds of the campus at the café, Grace saw that it was the sweet period after breakfast, just before workshops began, when a dozen people lingered insistently in the garden with their coffees. To her relief, Moira Kathleen seemed to still feel the rise in confidence that the midnight crisis had engendered. Grace was glad to see that the ledge she had walked herself onto at the mall had not interfered: the woman seemed able to pick which of her moments she retained. What practice, Grace thought briefly, must lead up to this!

“I’m smelly and tired,” said Moira Kathleen with a small laugh, “but I think I’ll get my guitar and give the workshop a new try. I guess I have some new things to write about.” As she walked off, Willa bent to re-strap her sandals—in fact, she waited for the woman to go far enough down the path for her to follow on her own. Grace above her own dismay recalled that of them all Willa had been the one most turned to rock salt by the accident. Now she had Trumpeter’s whipping about to contend with as well. Grace didn’t know why the car crash had upset Willa so deeply—why it had seemed to signal not injury and a rehabilitation trial but the end of something.

Willa stood and frowned. “I’ll see you later,” she said, and began to make her way on the path. Then she turned back. “I know a few of us will visit Francine tonight, unless we go back in a few hours.”

“I’m signed up for a staff wellness orientation that goes into the evening,” Grace said, speaking fast. “It’s time I dug in—I mean, began to really learn about this place. In some ways, I’ve enjoyed a free ride. Who knows, though, if after all this my courage will last into late afternoon?”

Willa rocked her weight onto her back leg but seemed hesitant to move. Grace extended her smile, but felt an underlying agitation.

“Back in the hospital waiting area,” said Willa, “he told me twice he’d had about enough of the academy.” That again, and more fuel for the fire, thought Grace, but before she could respond—before she could think what to say back—the young woman told her something else.

“He and I share something important,” Willa added. “I rarely mention this, but after I took my degree I spent fifteen months working for a media company. I only quit last Christmas. I was shipped around Europe for a year in training programs; then, for what came to be my last eighty-two days, I worked back in Africa.”

The question “And?” entered Grace’s mind, but before she could speak a staff person she and Willa knew passed, with a little finger-wave hail, in an electric cart. In an afterthought, the woman cut her current and turned to ask after Francine. Grace, splintered by a sense of all she didn’t know, suggested with some remorse that the driver ferry Willa to a place nearer her tent. Willa, with a small shrug, seemed to accept this brush-off as minor or circumstantial and got in the cart.

To keep the cart there, Grace put a hand atop its windshield. She smiled at the driver, glanced beyond her, and turned back to Willa, all without knowing what to say.

“Maybe Trumpeter is right,” said Willa. “In Africa, I worked on the reselling of old European television shows. What the West brings begins and ends with making money. It’s not a culture to live humanly in, let alone sell to others in one’s native land.”

“I don’t know,” said Grace. “About all of this, I don’t know.”

An hour later, Grace reluctantly arrived for her kitchen shift. It hadn’t made sense to grab the shower she had missed at dawn, and she instead spent her time in the staff mess rereading lists of workshops and other activities the Seeker staff were offered. It felt like she piled strain upon strain, but she kept at the task. When work began she for the first time acquiesced to the received kitchen wisdom that old-timers like her couldn’t handle much. The move backfired, though: she never got into the dining room and instead spent two hours compacting boxes and moving trash and two more at the dishwasher—which seemed ghostly with the absence of Francine. Yet, it may have been the best outcome, as she got through most of her shift in a welcome silence. She saw this as a process—here it truly was a process—where the body just tried to wear itself out, at a time when the mind would not agree to come along.

She took her shower, finally, in mid-afternoon and then loped to her tent. By now, she had seen no one from the morning for six hours. The clouds had cleared finally and it was a beautiful hour for a swim; however, this would have set her on a sure path for missing the wellness orientation, as it began in an hour, and she had to sleep before forcing her mind to a choice. When she started up, seemingly a minute later, it was from a sleep deep enough to ensure that she would feel panic before her deadline and see nothing clearly. Having slid into her warm sleeping bag, she had also begun to cook like malodorous dough. She felt utterly cruddy, knew the feeling would last for a while, and wanted nothing. So, she would have to decide based on form instead of substance.

Correcting herself, she now reasoned: This is something I don’t want to miss.

Singularity and Synchronicity

When Destinies Collide

Five months after the release of The Secret, its DVD remains the #1 seller on Amazon, with a million plus purchases and nearly 500 customer reviews. Of the ten reviews voted by readers “most helpful,” the top one (528 votes!!) gives the video Amazon’s highest rating; it is titled “FINALLY - The Truth Be Told.” “All my life,” it begins, “I have secretly known what THE SECRET exposes to the world in this fabulous DVD.”

The next eight “most helpful” reviews, though, dislike the video. One is title “Yet another New Age Psuedo-Spiritualist Materialistic Multi-Level Marketing Gimmick.” A few say the video simply twists out of proportion a sometimes-useful old idea.

Called “the law of attraction,” this idea is now debated in Amazon reviews and holistic forums. Mention is made of the underlying resonance of the “law,” called once “the power of positive thinking.” When one is clear about goals, they can be more achievable. Anyone counseling a friend would obey this lowest level of the law. To become a professional web developer—one might tell a student—get at it, and take the technical classes you’ll need. Yet, one’s advice to a friend with weak eyes would likely point to different goals. Most often, common sense suggests, the universe listens best to those who can best be heard.

This idea of aligning one’s life, specifically, in a careful practice, is a tenet among holistic students; so, many of them cringe as The Secret turns the idea into a mechanical process whose successes it guarantees. Be materialist and be specific, the video declares. If you want an Italian villa, you will get one whatever your situation. Beneath the guarantee is a prospect of mystical forces that help people who are believers. So, the law pertains potentially to everyone. And giving it conceptual cover is Carl Jung, who in the 1950s extended his theory of the collective unconscious to an idea that a non-causal pattern of meaning he termed synchronicity shapes some life events. Tap into, exploit the pattern, The Secret (unlike Jung) promises, and you’ll be given whatever you want.

The kernel of cultural wonder present in all this—think of Homer, whose gods, to suit their moods, play with human lives—is fueling a discussion (my input is here). Yet, to me, the Amazon numbers spoke as much of The Secret as a mass culture phenomenon. So, I took a detour with my browser, using The Secret as a Technorati search term and filtering the search to find blogs that had “a lot of authority.” Outside of Amazon, Zaadz and my book-marked holistic blogs, what would the larger world say? On the first results page I saw a blog not clearly pro or con, with two hundred incoming links. Clicking it, I turned away from this milieu of impressions to a law that is written in stone.

The blog, Schlueterica, has the tag line “Yet Another Web Geek’s Web Site.” The blogger is a web developer, and most of his posts and links are techie: concerning Javascript, DOM, FreeBSD, etc. Yet, he is also, as he says, an atheist, an objectivist and a capitalist, and his atheism and perhaps his other leanings led him to The Secret. “Get in on the New Hot Thing in Religious Bullshit!” his post about it begins. “Christianity? Islam? Hinduism? Old hat! We need shiny new idols to pray to! How about a picture of a bike? Yeah, that’s reasonable… ” Then, two paragraphs down, he adds some opinionated cultural reporting:

“Shame on Oprah for pushing this cult on her brain-dead legion! They might be mindless, but she should know better…. Though I’m blessed to be in a relatively nonreligious place, Los Angeles seems to be the veritable Holy Land for stupid ‘we’re all energy’ new-age cults like this one. It’s no wonder that Scientology is so rampant in this place. The Secret is all over the place.”

Reading this, my thoughts flew in several directions. From opposing positions, this blogger and many holistic students came to a similar dislike for The Secret. His Los Angeles as a “veritable Holy Land, etc…” sounded like the Amazon forum, which in turn seemed to represent people everywhere or at least in the old USA. And then I thought: “Oprah[’s]… brain-dead legion.” Was or wasn’t that a little harsh?

Then—probably with the word “synchronicity” in my synapses—I began to think about “the singularity.”

More accurately, I thought about “technological singularity,” a scientific theory that when borrowed by science fiction is called “the singularity.” Fiction and theory aside, it refers to an altering of human life far greater than any in recorded human history, which science and business may bring about in forty years. A respected technologist, Raymond Kurzweil, is forecasting this time frame. The singularity predicts an earth governed by a superhuman intelligence. This may come from human-computer interfaces that increase dramatically (quoting Wikipedia) “the power of human thought,” or from computers themselves coming to have “at least human-level thought.”

The validity and time frame of this theory are scientific matters, and sci-fi is imagining what this new species might be like. What relates it to the current anxieties of Oprah, Los Angeles and Amazon is Moore’s Law, which is the basis for Kurzweil’s projections on the singularity, and for much of the everyday reality that fills the life of the atheist blogger at Schlueterica. Actually, it greatly shapes how we all live today.

Moore’s Law, articulated in 1965, states that every two years, twice the transistors fit cheaply into half the space on an integrated circuit. This law has remained in effect, and a circuit design unveiled this year extends it for decades more. Kurzweil and others think new computer technologies will replace these circuits and extend the law forever.

If we are to lose our human sensibility, of course, “forever” may only refer to the next forty or fifty years.

The journalist Thomas Friedman, in his 2006 book The World is Flat, describes ways in which market forces, riding Moore’s Law, are reshaping everyday life. Largely, he is speaking of the Internet. Its making information cheaply publishable and accessible may mostly encourage readers of this weblog. Yet these decentralizing energies are matched by centralizing energies in terms of outsourcing and supply-chaining: these terms take us quickly to the Wal-Marts and Macdonalds down our roads and on our screens, and to economic forces that both favor big companies and make them even less responsible to actual human communities.

Wherever our society is in half a century, the march from now to then will be defined at least in part by continuous, momentous technological change. To Friedman, the many Moore’s Law-driven shifts are and will continue magnifying one another. Today among other end-results, we have high definition TV, which comes enticingly to further reorient our lives. As with facing east to pray, facing this carrier of continuous entertainment is a chosen or an imposed fate.

These changes, even as they captivate and sometimes inspire us, grind into us at various personal, family, local, generational, communal, and occupational levels. Physical life and its mandates continue to change, and objects functional in one decade are nostalgia in the next. Meaning and value becomes harder and harder to pass on to the young. Reasons why a society might choose not to adopt any particular technology or even not to mate with machines become less and less identifiable. A rampant cult of people hungry for connections that they feel they need begins to roam around Los Angeles.

In various ways and with varied levels of self-awareness, others try to deepen—beyond this materialistic reckoning—their sense of what the human experience can be. Many see The Secret as a cultish object, but they would, I think, view our society’s faith in strict materialism, capitalism, and science as equally and more ominously cultish.

Seen this way, the cult-laden, Oprah-watching L. A. (e.g., everywhere) viewed by the Schlueterica blogger is a place he fits into perfectly. To borrow from Firesign Theater, we are all of us now bozos on this bus.