The Seeker Academy Bookblog

[This is part one of a three-part introduction to The Seeker Academy; completed, it will have the title "Three Prefaces In Search Of A Liberal Counterculture." Part two will be called A Preface For Social Liberals; part three, A Preface For Spiritual Seekers.]

A Preface For Literary Readers

The Western spiritual-based counterculture called variously new age, holistic, human potential (its first name), east-west, integral and mind-body-spirit took direct inspiration from major Western literary figures. Yet, during most of its fifty-year history, literary critics have dismissed it as a subject—even while, as a cultural influence, the movement reaches many more people than do literary works. Typically, a noted literary release has an audience in the tens of thousands; a noted new age release has an audience ten times larger. Among corporate publishers, literary and new age divisions at most share production facilities. Neither has any interest in the other.

In fact, though, Henry Miller and Aldous Huxley, mid-century writers who abhorred modern life and tried, amid tyranny, slaughter, science and business, to see beyond it, were the first guiding lights of this movement. Each withdrew from the mass culture fray—Miller to seek imaginative space, Huxley to seek personal and social utopia. Both found their way to Esalen, the first of these retreats—as did some of the beat (Ginsberg, Kerouac) and hippie writers whom they influenced.

The modernist motifs of alienation, disgust, anxiety and fear are what matter here. Daily life was rife with these reactions. Most writers displayed them in their work—while some, like Huxley and Miller, sought also to change how they perceived life and lived. This activism followed a romantic line going back to Blake, Byron, Thoreau…. How, they all wondered, might people challenge Western materialism and scientific rationalism?

Huxley, for one, coming from a great scientific family, and having been at school with Eliot and E.R Dodds and known Forster and Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury and traveled in Mexico with Lawrence, made considered artistic choices. He wrote philosophical novels in which (as in Mann’s The Magic Mountain) characters discussed their social and philosophical worlds. When he chose to explore non ordinary or altered (think Dionysian) states and Eastern ideas, and embed what he had learned in a utopian novel, it was not from being badly educated or naive. As for Miller, his great subject was human passion. This led him to a California wilderness (near where Esalen was just then rising up) and a quest for a personal freedom.

A broad brush literary criticism could say that since 1960 the literary culture has further fortified the modernist wall of anxiety and fear. A postmodern movement from irony to relativistic scorn, a narrowing of focus to what the Greeks called private life, and a parallel widening of focus into fantasy and sci-fi, all reflect how human society, the literary novel’s first subject, has seemed to move beyond interpretation. Daily life appears to mostly lack philosophical underpinnings, while the often unnerving fruits of science (brought to market by an army of MBAs, in service to an economy we all depend on) abound. Stoicism in its many varieties rules.

Returning to the human potential (a phrase Huxley coined) movement, we find that during its half-century emergence it has had little interest in Western secular literature (secular meaning in the world and so, while potentially spiritual, not shaped entirely by religion). While through the 1960s Kerouac and related writers piped people out of middle class lives, such people, finding the spiritual counterculture, came to Western psychology, mysticism and theory, and to a melange of Eastern and aboriginal religious teachings—but not to secular fiction, drama or poetry. Hungry, even desperate for meaning and relief, the seekers barely tolerated conflict or irony, let alone scorn; and, with James Joyce, they or many of them saw history as a nightmare from which they were trying to awaken.

As a result, the movement today—which counts many people wholly involved and many millions with an ankle in the stream—is barely influenced by secular art. New age bookstores usually only carry art anchored in spirituality, religion and the occult. And surrounding this art are the many nonfiction books that hold up similar mirrors to life. As individual identity with its reason and its relationships is at the heart of secular art, we see what is being lost.

We see this also in the guru-figure present in this movement—and in the needs of many seekers to go from one guru (or teaching) to another and another. Whatever practices, wisdom or clarity the gurus bring, a master-seeker framework frequently turns them into untethered, often domineering priests. And the seekers themselves begin to look less and less like the citizens and moral agents that democratic secularism hopes that they will be.

In return, secular art ignores this movement, except to satirize it. It discounts the large, enthusiastic following, almost as if, despite the narrowing of its own lens, it felt it had a more truthful, engaging story to tell. This begins to bring to mind the vanishing, stoical Romans laughing at the early Christians. Nor is today’s secular art of much apparent use to counterculture forces that care most about political change. A member’s manual for The Network of Spiritual Progressives, an outgrowth of Tikkun Magazine, has a reading list for study groups that are pursuing a spiritualized politics. All sixty recommended books are nonfiction—there is no fiction, poetry or drama. Yet a similar study group of a century ago would surely have been reading Dickens, Tolstoy, Ibsen, etc.

The movement as I have seen it asks important questions and takes important chances, but often gets lost when it tries to bind its many dreams to its responsibilities. This, I think, is because one needs to use secular tools, secular art in particular, to find out what some of one’s responsibilities are. Thus I sent a hero who had never truly tasted new age fare to a retreat for three weeks. In that brief period, she would, within the limits of literary realism, either learn to hate the place, or begin to follow a particular teaching, or taste some things offered and—as a hero figure—come to also better know who she had been when she arrived.

The novelists I sought to emulate: E.M. Forster, for pacing and moral suspense; Aldous Huxley, for telling a philosophical tale; F. Scott Fitzgerald, for the tempered use of lyricism.

With publication achieved, my first author events are coming up:

Blog Interview at Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21st Century, May 1-3.

Reading at 7:30 pm on Saturday, May 12th. Location: Uncommon Grounds Coffee House, 403 Stockbridge Road, Great Barrington, MA.

Radio Interview on Nancy Slonim Aronie’s show, Writing From The Heart, on Lime Radio, a Sirius satellite station, Channel 114. Sunday, May 13, 7 pm.

In addition, I’ll soon publish here prefaces to The Seeker Academy, one with a literary frame and one with the frame of political liberalism. I’m also writing a review of a new nonfiction book, Esalen: America And The Religion Of No Religion, by the religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal.

To arrange a reading, write 4361press@gmail.com.

Zaadz is a Web-based social network defined by its owners as “a community of seekers and conscious entrepreneurs.” I’ve read blog posts and conversations there that I find interesting and qualitative; I’ve also had the sense when visiting it that, like other online social networks, Zaadz jumps ahead (despite having 50,000+ “members”) to call itself a community. The entire medium has just begun the work to prove itself in that regard.

Still, I respect the effort, and plan to involve myself more and to see if my novel can be part of the Zaadz conversation. Thus I’m pleased to say that The Seeker Academy has received its first review, here, from a Zaadzter, Bruce Tanner. It is, to me, thoughtful. An excerpt:

I kept reflecting as I read about the resonances between Seeker and the Zaadz community. The academy is anything but homogeneous, is an intense experience for many there, and is full of differing opinions about what it is there for, which approaches to spiritual growth and healing are vital or important, what exactly the purpose of living might be…. What Grace is living through her brief stay of less than three weeks is the heart of this novel, and I was a little surprised to find how much I was moved and was identifying with her hero’s journey of self-discovery.

On the issue of online communities, I note that I’ve also chosen–being more a believer than not–to call my Amazon reviews not customer reviews (Amazon’s name for them) but community reviews.

Hoping for provably objective Amazon.com customer reviews, I read the profiles of three hundred reviewers. I then queried thirty who review literary fiction and some nonfiction books that can be deemed holistic. Seven of those queried asked for review copies, and two have now posted reviews. One review finds the book well written, but thinks I take the holistic movement “too seriously.” The second, in six hundred words, has several specific, reflective, and often complimentary things to say.

To read the reviews, and see links to the reviewers’ profiles and other reviews, click the text above the book cover image to go to the book’s Amazon.com landing page.

A few days to publication!