The Seeker Academy Bookblog

A few people who know me only through The Seeker Academy have asked what I’m doing now. I’ll give half an answer; as I’m half unsettled. And, while this jumps ahead, I’ll add the detail that a couple of mornings each week I stop for coffee in a spacious strip mall that, until 2006, had been for decades a fenced-off Superfund site.

If you’ve read the novel, even the Amazon reviews, you know I’m a literary writer. One thing this means is that I won’t write again about New Age themes, in the serial way (Three Healing Paths, then Four Healing Paths, then, Five…) of New Age genre writers. Instead, I do my best in the pages of the story and then I pack my literary god figurines and move on down the line.

Being without funds, and worn out from writing my novel and searching for readers, my next station stop has been away from fiction. I remember a day last autumn when, resting, too worn out to read even a mystery, I saw in the Woods Hole library a book about the technologies coming alive to address climate change and rising global energy demand. I could barely scan the table of contents in a thoughtful way, but I understood at once that, as I had to earn a living and had a high tech background and saw climate change as an extra-ordinary threat, this was my next destination.

Eight months later, time spent working my mind more and, before a brief vacation, gasping from the effort, I’m back in tech, consulting to a solar module startup. My recovering attention has turned to electricity: I sing not Whitman’s poetic “body electric,” but electric power’s business value chain.

And so, arriving early to beat traffic, I stop near the San Jose company at a Starbucks set among other replicant storefronts. Gas costs and a new immorality of driving keeps me from going farther afield. Nearby are barren hills. The Superfund site grew from leaks by a semiconductor manufacturer. Solar companies are here because solar, like computer chips, has a semiconductor base. Well-intentioned, I work in the service of technologies whose ultimate influences I can’t know. I view this technical flowering as but one side of the hard-to-grasp changes to our lives that climate change will bring.

I wrote my novel of the holistic movement as an act of moral clearing. What words matter, now? From the words, what practices and acts? Now I’m back in the world, where I put my hero Grace Hudson at the novel’s end. Like her, I earn my way and try (my choice) in new circumstances to do good. Like her, I look for a sense of a path as I walk the foggy forest floor.

I’ll end with the novelist’s song: Read my book!

The bi-annual Integral Review is out with a new issue, which contains a 2,300 word review of The Seeker Academy by editor-in-chief Jonathan Reams. He appears to like the novel a lot. “There is realism to the writing,” he writes, “grounded in both the actions of the characters and Grace’s reflections on and perceptions of them.”

Best that you read the review and Ream’s discussion of Grace’s time at her retreat; I’ll only add his musings on how the story concludes: “Grace steps back into the world at large, having found in herself a confidence and awareness that many sought at The Seeker Academy. She finds that this is not something new or strange to her, but that she has simply not focused her attention on it before.”

With his Integral orientation, Reams ends his review by asking why so many New Age/ holistic/ Integral leaders refuse to review the novel. I hope you will read what he says. He sums up: “while these reasons may have contributed to the lack of reviews Gussin’s novel has received, they stand out for me as the strengths that make it a compelling piece of literature.”

Again, the review is here.

I am too low in spirit today to write the third and final post of this cycle (see below). I write by compression, rather than in the conversational tone good bloggers achieve, and I don’t have that sort of stone-and-chisel work in me now. I think I know what the post’s subtitle will be, though: “Two Bright Maps And A Broken Mirror.”

So I’ll postpone, substituting the anniversary of one spring Roman political killing for another: rather than publish, as promised, today, on the Ides of March, I’ll publish on Good Friday.

In the first post in this cycle, I pointed out that, while The Seeker Academy has so far received sixteen mostly very positive reviews on Amazon, some that run 700 words, Holistic/Integral/New Age leaders won’t review it.

Independent Amazon reviewers, most of whom review many other books, say the novel “reflects on extremely relevant issues for today and for the future,” has “parallels with the classic Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” “while delving into cultural philosophy, never loses the sweet flavor of storytelling,” and “shows real ambition for spiritual adventure.”

And yet, sixty of the sixty-one editors, retreat leaders and scholars who address Holistic/Integral/New Age themes, and got review copies of The Seeker Academy, have been unwilling to review it. Why? Do they think it threatens them? In a post I’ll mull over before writing, and publish March 15th (the Ides of March), I’ll give my best answer to that question.

Meanwhile, I hope you will read the Amazon reviews and three editorial reviews, and look at the list of the unwilling I provide below. If the novel is judged by its Amazon reviewers to mindfully and with “ambition” address the Holistic/Integral/New Age movement, why won’t the movement’s leaders review it?

As a reminder, the one leader in sixty-one who did review the novel, Nancy Slonim Aronie, author of Writing From The Heart, who teaches every year at all of the major retreats, and lectures at Harvard, said of The Seeker Academy: “With exquisite facility of language, L.D. Gussin takes us on a very real spiritual journey; the ups, the downs, the all around. I’ve been there. L.D. Gussin nails it!”

UNWILLING EDITORS

Editor in Chief, Shambhala Sun Magazine

Editor in Chief, Yoga Journal

Book Editor, Alternatives Magazine

Editor in Chief, What is Enlightenment? Magazine

Managing Editor, Tricycle Buddhist Review

CultureWatch Editor, Sojourners Magazine

Managing Editor, Foreward Magazine

Editor at Large, Utne Reader

Editor in Chief, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature

Prose Editor, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature

Editor, UUWorld Magazine

Managing Editor, Yes! Magazine

Editor, Communities Magazine

Managing Editor, In These Times

Editor in Chief, Beliefnet.com

Contributing Editor, Beliefnet.com

EVP Content and Community, Beliefnet.com

Publisher, Conscious Choice Magazine

Book Review Editor, Conscious Choice Magazine

Editor in Chief, Whole Life Times

Editor, Ascent Magazine

Editor, Insight Journal

Culture Editors, Spirituality and Health Magazine

Managing Editor, Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness

UNWILLING RETREAT ADMINISTRATORS

I sent review copies to twenty managers and trustees representing Kripalu Center, Esalen Institute, Omega Institute, Breitenbush Hot Springs, The Crossings, Hollyhock Centre, Spirit Rock, and Chautauqua Institute. Not one has been willing to review it.
UNWILLING RETREAT WORKSHOP LEADERS

I sent review copies to a dozen authors who teach workshops every year at one or more of the retreat centers listed above. Only Nancy Slonim Aronie has reviewed it.

UNWILLING SCHOLARS

I sent review copies to ten scholars of this movement, whose academic associations include California Institute Of Integral Studies, Wisdom University, Goddard College, Rice University, JFK University, The Graduate Institute and University of Oregon.. Not one has been willing to review it.

Nine months since publication, and, like most any novelist who gets a book out, I’m on to something else, to earning money and not by writing novels. You won’t likely be the “one in a thousand”: we all know this.

For me, the four years of drafts, hand-to-mouth living and then book-promoting, all while trying to stay true to the page, has given way to new work, in technology. I’m again on that river where business and science provides the current. The journey has a logic but it leaves out (or buries, perhaps) a lot of human experience.

All of us who know this about life in the world realize that there is a weakening of perspective, just when it is most needed. In my case, this week I’m reading about synthetic biology-a topic that sounds scary and yet promises (in a context of climate change and biofuels) hope.

What do I think about the growing human power to alter nature? Am I willing to join in? What is my spiritual anchor, from which I might form a moral point of view?

Meanwhile, I age, while people I love are older still. A hike I took yesterday I’ll find too hard in ten years. All my gathered musings stay with me… needing only memory triggers to emerge. What I affirm (adding up what I’ve said and implied) is that I, a writer with a novel out, again feel the spiritual and moral hunger and doubt that led me, upon spending July 2001 at the Omega Institute, to begin The Seeker Academy.

The book, to date, has sixteen Amazon reviewers and three editorial reviews. Some are brief, a hundred or so words; others are six or seven times longer. I will leave it to readers to form their own views of the reviews and the reviewers, but I’ll assert that there is now a body of reviews that finds the novel compelling, important and accomplished.
Important also or first, I’ll add, because the subject is important.

And yet, the leaders of the secular spiritual (or holistic, mind-body-spirit, integral or new age) movement refuse to review the novel. This even as twenty independent reviews affirm it as a respectful, gripping story about a subcultural they are devoted to. I sent copies to over sixty leading editors and retreat leaders and teachers; of these, only one has read the book and given comments.

Her name is Nancy Slonim Aronie; she owns the Chilmark Writing Workshop, is a Harvard instructor and teaches every year at Omega, Esalen, Kripalu and other major retreats. This is what Aronie wrote:

“With exquisite facility of language, 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!”

Despite this review from an insider, and the engaged comments by Amazon reviewers, movement leaders won’t review the novel. Why? I’ll approach this question in my next post. I may also publish the names of all the gatekeepers who won’t give my novel a chance.

This guide will evolve, with reader participation*, but here it is in a first draft.

Write me at 4361press@gmail.com when you have discussion points to add.

[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.

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.