(Note: the context for this post are the first two posts in this cycle, below)
As my novel came out, in April 2007, Oprah was helping to make Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret the best-selling U.S. book. Now she does the same for Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to your Life’s Purpose. The New York Times doesn’t even stop to sneer at these authors; up the Hudson River, The Omega Institute gushes over them.The demand for these books shows a moral and spiritual hunger in the land, but it is dismissed by the critical elite as unimportant. They instead seem content with description and irony: with describing the forces in our lives as out of reach to us, and with showing us (e.g., The Daily Show) the inherent gallows humor. So the fact is that many people laugh bitterly at our sense of helplessness, while some people look for a way out.
With a late-Roman quality, the guidance of the critical elite starts to look like mostly the advice to be stoic.
And so, before saying what I oppose, and why I think the ironic elite and the elite among those trying to escape avoid my novel, I’ll try to say what I’m for. Writing, I have, first, a point of view: I share in this hunger too much to be artistically impartial. Poking around, I have something in mind to build, to fortify, to mend. What that is is the counterculture, a Western movement of several centuries (now global along with its host), which opposes the acquisitive rationalism embodied in science and business with a very open-to-interpretation humanism. How, the humanists ask (stripping it down) in varied ways,can we make the society we live in feel good to us.
Right off, we see disputes, and an ambiguous relation to technology. Ike builds our roads just as Kerouac takes to the road to feel good. We carry grand, personal recorded music collections in our pockets. Yet with another shake of the kaleidescope we are reminded of how stuck out on the margins we feel.
In the 19th century this counterculture begot socialism and communism, which for a time gave followers a sense that they could make life better. Yet as these movements fell, often becoming evil, their members and next generation newcomers who might have been members were left without a plan. It was then that this tribe or elements in it lost its political thread and turned inward. And, a few decades later, these wanderers, now calling themselves new age, holistic or Integral, are guided by two bright but dangerous maps. The maps are bright in offering directions and solutions, and dangerous, I think, in leading a movement of rebels away from both direct experience and civic engagement.
The first bright map is mysticism. To use Oprah’s blockbusters as guides, the mysticism ranges from mechanistic to contemplative. The Secret promises a code that lets us get what materially we want from life: a top notch car or spouse or job. Less attached, A New Earth tells us to become detached from flesh-and-blood life. Both views have long legacies. Jesus uses mechanistic mysticism (loaves and fishes) to light up his crowds. Contemplative mysticism (finding experience richer than what everyday life offers) runs deep in human history. But each type turns from matter to mind, a journey few people make on their own. So mystical traditions focus our thoughts, and are in this way, I believe, highly rational. Also, entrepreneurial mapmakers and readers abound.
The second bright, dangerous map I see is theory, when it sets aside sense and experience. One can gain a head wind around a set of ideas and sail farther and farther into them, especially if a teacher urges the voyage on as a flesh-and-blood substitute. However thoughtful Integral Theory, for example, the guru-led movement it anchors often creates a cerebral, sheltered, close-minded experience, blinkered by codes.
I think the counterculture today is over-influenced by mysticism and theory, and so forgets or ignores its heritage and (with contemplation) its greatest resources. I also see its critical work as the reviving of these resources. Yet the movement’s momentum and its money-making seems to lie, instead, regrettably, with mysticism and theory.
Which brings me to the broken mirror. Studying the catalogs of Omega, Esalen, etc., I find pride of place given to an art called mystical, transcendent, visionary, fantastic or Integral, but not realistic. That is, the movement with its present mystical and theory-ridden influences wants an art that watches people fly through a world of ideas. It soon gets pedantic, I think: the art, driven by attitudes of self-help, tells people what to see and what to feel.
What this self-help art can be contrasted to is realism, the great thread of Western culture, the showing of people half-uncomfortable in flesh-and-blood life. Yet the mirror realism uses has been splintered by history and rarely shows us much we believe. We are also saturated with narrative entertainment, depleting drama, a crucial realistic form, of its force. We are hungry, and the realism we know of doesn’t seem to be very nourishing.
Most regrettably, what this omits from the picture are people. And so, when I began, fascinated, to write about the counterculture as it is now, I based my story not in the ideas of the many factions, but in the people who were involved. They all have backgrounds and passions that while driving them to the movement, exceed it. With my personal artistic inadequacies, and with a broken mirror that reduced me to using a jagged-edged, thin shard of glass, I set out to show these people, these seekers, encumbered by social forces in their flesh-and-blood lives.
The culture’s critical elite hate the journey, and so are unwilling to read the novel. The journey’s elite—the retreat leaders, gurus and self-help publications—having gotten into the habit of providing answers, are now too theory-driven to like mirrors, and so are unwilling to read the novel.
I learn of and begin to question “2012″
September 27, 2007
Just before a bookstore reading I attended by Daniel Pinchbeck, author and the founder of the online magazine Reality Sandwich, Pinchbeck had fought (during a radio interview) with Whitley Streiber. Pinchbeck’s current book is “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”; Streiber, who writes best-selling horror novels and who claims to have been abducted by aliens, has written “2012: The War for Souls.” I’d not heard of 2012 or Streiber; I’d found Pinchbeck via his magazine (its coda: “Evolving Consciousness, Bite by Bite”), whose themes include Psyche, Eco, Tech, Commons and Art. The reading packed the bookstore, with people and with hardware made by Apple Computer and RIM. I recognized an actor, whose name I didn’t know.
It was the kind of crowd where everyone despised the current government, for the best of reasons. The world is a mess and Dubya is at best the King of Fools.
2012 refers to the year prophesied for an apocalypse by the old Mayan priesthood. In the fight, Streiber says that the prophecy must lead to mass human “die-offs.” Pinchbeck says that we can let this insight of the spirit world provoke us into saving the world.
Pinchbeck cross-posted a piece about the fight to his Amazon Blog and to Reality Sandwich. The latter has received well over a hundred comments and the back and forth has sometimes gotten nasty. Psyche, eco, tech, commons, art–the subject touches everything. There is a consensus belief that the prophecy (perhaps because others has made it) will come true. A faction sees, on Dec. 21st, 2012, a sudden end, the other faction sees a sudden change.
Writing to Daniel, I pick at this consensus:
I base this criticism on two points of agreement I have with you. One is your call for a sustainable society, another is your belief (as I sense it) that the Western liberal world view must be re-spiritualized. And I criticize not your argument with Strieber about evil spirits (it doesn’t interest me), but two of your underlying assumptions.
1. “We in the West are obsessed with free will - with individuality… free will on an individual egoic level is not possible”
2. “…we are now learning that consciousness and intention have actual effects on physical reality”
Individuality is a Western tradition that sprouted nervously in Greek and Hebrew societies, flamed out amid Greco-Roman cynicism, and then after 1000 years reappeared (in a beautiful, integrated way, to the people witnessing it) in Dante and Giotto, etc. It is a tradition, and only secondarily an obsession; and it is to be approached with wonder and caution–not dismissed as impossible using pseudo terminologies that date to the last century, a period of high confusion we obviously remain in now.
Claiming knowledge that mind effects matter directly, instead of through human activities, may or may not misuse or even misunderstand the quantum model in physics. It does, though, unleash a wide platform for fantasy. To say that negative thinking can breed negative outcomes and so be harmful in itself is to forge a chain of fantasy. It argues ultimately for a kind of mandated happy talk that Orwell illustrated in 1984. It argues against the kind of “Jeremiad” or harsh criticism and warning that began with the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah and extends in the romantic reaction to William Blake, Dostoevsky and Orwell himself. See what will happen (these Jeremiads say) if we keep BEHAVING this way. Here’s some negativity:
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.
Here is Pinchbeck’s post on his Amazon blog; here is the extended discussion (including other comments I make, and some reactions) on Reality Sandwich.
Moore’s Law and The Law of Attraction
March 12, 2007
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.
How “The Secret” Harms Holistic Communities
February 26, 2007
With the ground frozen in cold lands, with more darkness still than light and with the new year having already brought a U.N. report that affirms the enormous threat of global warming, the #1 best-selling book and video at Amazon.com is The Secret. Propelled by online viral marketing and made iconic by presentations on daytime TV, it is in February 2007 the most-discussed cultural object in the developed world. Oprah Winfrey calls its central message (that a “law of attraction” causes like to attract like) the one she always most tries to convey; Ellen Degeneres pledges to bring The Secret up often on her show.
So The Secret is already a financial tiger, purring with spin-off products and services. And now a long-respected voice in the holistic healing movement, The Omega Institute, has announced that it will co-host the film’s May New York City theatrical premier with Oprah, and then hold a workshop on The Secret at its retreat center. A scan of the Internet reveals several other holistic programs that are planning similar screenings and workshops.
Very quickly, though, The Secret was ridiculed in the mainstream media. A week after the first Oprah interview with the film’s personalities, the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a deeply ironic piece that pictured using the “law of attraction” to change the Bush-Cheney policies in Iraq.
At first glance, Dowd wrote, “The Secret might seem like inane piffle, a psychobabble cross between Dr. Phil and The Da Vinci Code.” However, understanding the secret to be that the universe and its beings respond to one’s thoughts, that like attracts like, Dowd realized that to get “certified chuckleheads to stop mucking up American foreign policy, all I have to do is let the universe know.” Dowd’s attack, however contemptuous, made its point: magic-makers who say they can bend life’s brutal, exhausting reality might show us how in Iraq.
Those forces in the common culture whose orientation is defensive, ironic and distancing, who make their mark and profits by exposing the ridiculous and linking it with other points of ridicule in a daisy chain, will have a party with The Secret. Oprah’s guidance that one should be open and uncritical and Stephen Colbert’s guidance that one should be critical and closed appear to be the only pop culture rocks left to hide behind.
Still, many people spend at least parts of their days trying not to hide. While largely this is managed in the context of everyday living, of family life and work life, some people try to be better personally, some try to make the common, political world better, and some try to do both. How such seekers respond to The Secret seems a different matter from how the popular culture does.
In this context, a critique of The Secret by Julian Walker, an integral healer and writer who blogs at the social networking site Zaadz.com, is worth reading. It is in three parts, though I’ll react only to the first part here.
Walker, a student of the philosopher Ken Wilbur, begins with observations. In the healing circles he inhabits, he says, he had begun to hear about The Secret everywhere. He hesitated to watch it, because of a previous New Age film, What The Bleep, that he thought drove “towards all sorts of misguided spiritual and psychological conclusions,” and, more elaborately, from “having been around the spiritual community my entire adult life and being perennially surprised, amused and infuriated with … the naivety, superficiality and gullibility of most ’spiritual’ people, [and by] the basically banal nature of the material that gets recycled and marketed … year after year.”
To Walker, The Secret (which he finally watched) is hucksterism. He notes its use of “meaningless titles/qualifications, very badly constructed arguments, category errors, logical fallacies etc., [and] scientific seeming images that then never go anywhere to strengthen its points, and examples/case histories that are anecdotal at best.” He calls its message less “high spiritual truth passed down through the ages” than “narcissistic delusion, bordering on the psychotic, plugged into the akashic records by a tinfoil hat.”
… the makers of The Secret want us to believe that if your mental focus is strong enough and the intentional “joy” in your being is brimming over enough, everything will happen as you want it to. That’s the highest spiritual truth and the secret to life…. They assure us that the reason a tiny percentage of the world’s population has so much of the wealth is because they know this secret. Never mind social conditions. Never mind racism, homophobia, colonialism, world history, psychology, trauma, economic oppression. Everyone, absolutely everyone could be wealthy, happy and in love if they just knew how to use the Law of Attraction. Um, what does that mean for people who are not happy, wealthy or in the perfect relationship? Well, for lesson number two - see lesson number one. You’re just not doing it right, silly.
All of which Walker finds “so insulting of the true nature of suffering, so ignorant of the realities of privilege and oppression, so authoritative in its endorsement [of] magical thinking and [its] judgment of those who are not doing it right as to set any nascent spiritual development and self-awareness back a good 5 to 10 years.”
Interested in neither gullibility nor ironic remove, Walker looks for answers to these problems. He calls first for critical thinking in spiritual development circles-for “studying actual philosophy, psychology, literature and art that grapples with the universal spiritual themes that great minds have been expressing since at least the ancient Greeks.” Then he turns to the central issue, which he sees as the fears, low feelings and real-world problems that in different arrangements shadow us all. Addressing his readers, he brings his own spiritual practice to bear:
Your so-called “negative emotions” have value and meaning. They are communications from your psyche. Be curious about them… Spiritual practice requires that you turn to face your shadow. That you get real about your social conditioning, your political situation, the distinction between what you have power over and what has power over you.
Spiritual practice is inspiring, but it’s also deeply humbling. It does not tell you that you can have anything, be anything, do anything, without limit. Sorry. That’s the kind of fantasy high The Secret promises-and the hangover is a real drag.
Many people believe that the holistic healing (or mind-body-spirit) movement, born in the beatnik-hippie counterculture, is shedding fresh, needed light on how people might live their lives in our confusing era. A growing network of retreats and learning centers offer workshops that in a variety of ways take participants behind their everyday experiences. Meditation in its different schools is the central teaching, and meditation bears a relation to the idea of like attracting like only in the sense that through it one learns to relax and see one’s life with less personal urgency and then, if it is important, to act based on this broader perspective. All this means in terms of action is that meditation gives you a clearer idea of what you should do. People often respond well to clear-headedness, and being clear-headed can make it easier to get things done. A fact of life does kick in here: an honest smile brightens the world. But no physical or physical-spiritual (that is, magical) laws are at play, and no material outcomes are guaranteed.
Where there is magical thinking, though, is back out in our everyday life. The half-century that gave rise to this movement saw the rise of TV, PCs and the Internet, the breaking of the genetic code and the start of cloning. It also saw the consolidation of business power and a resulting physical and social world that is largely shaped by these seemingly untouchable business forces. The circumstances and things these forces create fill up our lives as if by magic. Making this even more confusing is the fact that when we step back to think about these subjugating forces, we feel conflicted. Given a choice, what in our culture would we accept and what reject? And could we have the good without the bad?
It seems to me that, as with fifty years ago, when, during McCarthyism, Gary Snyder climbed his tower at Desolation Peak to study Buddhism and begin to write his poems, spiritual seekers and their communities face a social world that is deeply lacking in moral perspective. The holistic movement, borrowing and inventing, is working out spiritual practices that let people, in Julian Walker’s words, turn to face their shadows. This facing up to things perhaps can lead to a new moral perspective—liberal-minded but also rooted in soil that is fed by a deep course of multicultural (including Western) spiritual investigation.
What the holistic movement also often cultivates, unfortunately, is magical thinking, with The Secret and its promise that one can mechanistically have whatever one asks for as the current crop. Whether it does so to bring in revenue or because it sees magical thinking as something other than a harmful misdirection is unclear.
Themes of This Weblog
February 12, 2007
From a binding idea that life in the world, for non-fundamentalists, today holds extreme uncertainties, this weblog will comment and report on and gather resources around three thematic groupings. They are related, often plainly and at other times less so—that is, the postings and conversations will try to work out the relationships.
The Mind/Body/Spirit movement sets its sights on wellness and spiritual presence and more generally on how to conduct one’s life. Practical and philosophical, it looks beyond consumer culture and codified religions to take an individualistic, experiential approach to self discovery. Following or adapting various wisdom teachings, its members explore, give attention to their minds, their bodies, their hearts and their souls. For a tangle of reasons the explorations can feel to participants and observers alike both deeply meaningful and deeply silly.
The Spiritual/Progressive movement, founded in recent years, is taking steps to build a progressive political movement anchored in spiritual beliefs and practices. It opposes the politics of conservatism and reaction, which has a fundamentalist and often hierarchical spiritual orientation. Yet, it is emerging in a progressive movement that is now weak; it faces opposition from some progressives, who don’t think spirituality matters or should matter in politics; and its leaders are taking positions that the movement will probably wrestle with further as it matures. Having just begun, spiritual progressives may have also just begun to know what they believe and what their questions are and who their allies are.
These first movements undergird The Seeker Academy, my literary novel, which 4361 Press is publishing; and an aim of this weblog is to foster a conversation about ideas the novel presents. My posts will provide journalism and commentary. These movements, Mind/Body/Spirit (or Holistic Healing) and Spiritual/Progressive, complementary at times, both against the grain of mainstream culture, provide a rich, worthy subject.
A third thematic area, Virtual/Physical, seems not to fit the other two. Yet it is a point of entry for this weblog to the vast ongoing technology-driven changes to everyday life that are a source of this era’s uncertainties. A reason to seek spiritual grounding and a related political stance must be to better face life’s turmoil. Thus this weblog will on occasion probe the Internet, a creator of turmoil and the one technology I am equipped to write about. My primary area of study will be the impact of virtual space and community on physical space and community. I now consult on this question, which has strong moral components, to the non-profit Libraries For The Future.
The Shaky Household
February 7, 2007
Recently, visiting another city, I was twice at the Torah study group of a politically progressive synagogue. I was happy to find that the readings followed the story of Jacob. I only get back to the Jewish and Christian testaments every few years, but I always feel glad, and no one in them moves me more than Jacob, selfish, pompous, yet with a need (strange-sounding today) to be “blessed.” On each visit, I found about fifty people assembled; the age spread was twenty to eighty and there were other first-time visitors. Over two hours, we in the room painted these intense stories with our own intense, varied interpretations. Jacob’s need, leading to his night-long wrestle with an angel, and his way of living in the world, leading arguably to the murders committed by his sons, in being so recognizable, were cathartic for us.
Afterwards there was a friendly potluck lunch. On my second visit, I sat beside a man in his twenties. After some further Torah talk, I learned that he’d recently moved from across the country for graduate work he now was ready to abandon. He thought he might get a job in high tech, he was exploring rabbinical school, and he wondered if he should travel. He was also uncomfortable where he lived. Two of his housemates, a man and a woman, both heavily invested in gender politics, were about to take some kind of Buddhist vow. He’d had an interest in their discussions, but, based on their changeable convictions, they also dictated rules to live by for the group house. Two other housemates had rebelled, and the dwelling was ever at war.
This story speaks to a problem I see with the spiritual progressives movement as it is so far evolving. Created to counter the religious right, by providing a progressive political vision that incorporates spiritual longing, it seems rather to send a message of spiritual conviction. A multifaith group, it interprets many world religions to make them building blocks for a political position. The Network of Spiritual Progressives website points in this activist direction, and it is truly what is required. Yet it gives those who feel longing but little conviction, who are lifted for a morning by Jacob’s story but go back fatefully to their shaky lives, little to grab hold of. Living so unsteadily, does one continue to act politically or, in time, fall away?
Can a spiritual progressives movement admit our cultural dislocation and our uncanny, science-driven historical moment? Can it create practices that support both action and meditation? Can it allow in outlanders, shaky seekers, the people that many of us are?
The Chautauqua Institution, begun by Methodists in 1874, progressive, meditative, is an example to be studied. A potential large ally is the mind-body-spirit movement, which admits the shaky seeker. It, though, has not yet been very willing to look history in the eye.
