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!

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.

Some work I do other than writing and (now) promoting The Seeker Academy, my novel about the liberal counterculture, concerns physical place and community in relation to the Internet. I’m proud to say that Libraries For The Future, a national advocacy group, has begun to publish on its blog, here, a discussion piece I wrote for them early in 2007. It is titled “Public Libraries In The Internet Age”; they are posting weekly installments and inviting comments.

If you favor value-based uses of technology, with the many predicaments this position entails–and if you believe in the institution of public libraries–check the paper out.

To Compete With Amazon.com,

Imitate And Improve On Its Reviewing Platform

I’m an indie publisher, a PMA member, and author of The Seeker Academy, a just-published literary novel that explores the holistic/ mind-body-spirit movement. I’ve also been an Internet media specialist for two decades: consulting in 2006 to Yahoo, and in 2007 to the nonprofit Americans For Libraries Council (ALC). My ALC work concerns how public libraries can best use the Internet, viewed as an emerging publishing medium. As an advocate for local empowerment, I find it natural to switch my concern from the 9,000 public library systems to the 1,800 independent bookstores.

I sense that many indie booksellers do not look closely at the Internet. One told me recently to take the Amazon reviews I’d brought to show him off his counter. He seemed to think he fully knew his business.

In fact, though, this bookseller’s business is being shaken, and uncertainties abound. For one thing—the subject of this letter—the reviewing infrastructure that sits upstream from retail on the book business value chain is coming apart. Two Internet-driven shocks are causing this to happen:

The print periodical business model is being upended. Much of the ad revenue it depends on is moving to the Internet—a more effective medium for most niche market advertising… for reaching fly-fishing enthusiasts, etc. Fewer print ads means fewer newspaper and magazine pages, thus fewer reviews. The book editor role is being reduced or consolidated.

The Internet’s emergence as a social space challenges the book editor’s cultural authority. A city with two daily papers and a weekly paper has at most three book editors and a few dozen freelance reviewers. Yet it also has many thousands of readers. With collective opinions about every topic, used to reading reviews and responding only rarely with letters to the book editor: these readers now can choose to also write reviews and to engage in more open-ended online conversations.

These shifts redefine the bookstore business. Customers, who until now consumed reviews, can have more of a say; they can join the taste makers. Amazon.com has begun to figure this out; ABA has not.

A book’s Amazon page displays editorial and customer reviews. If the customer reviewing platform can be abused—if an author’s cousins can write reviews—it is transparent enough to be reasonably credible. One can read and compare reviews, see reader comments on a review, and look at a reviewer’s other reviews. Once a number of reviews are posted, they give taken together a sense of what the book is like.

The ABA in its Web presences provides, on the other hand, a closed system, weak features, and a poor showing of its value. It has no customer reviewing platform. It only points to Booksense Picks, a tallying of the favorite books of member stores. Browsers see signed blurbs—not reviews—and lack a way to discuss a book or a blurb with other readers. ABA booksellers, rather than invite engagement, rest on what they must see as their positions of influence.

This attitude is shortsighted, as it sees neither Amazon’s game nor the chance ABA has to compete. The game is about online social networks, joining published works to conversations. These networks make print culture-exclusive bookstores (and libraries) relatively less valuable.

In fact, though, this network model points to an advantage ABA can have over vendors like Amazon, and to how ABA-member bookstores can extend their local reach. If the Amazon reviewing platform lets one gauge a book by browsing it, by comparing reviews and evaluating reviewers, and by tapping into reader discussions, it remains ungrounded: it offers no physical connection. It lacks the warm local presence and the communal air of, say, a Main Street Books.

Building An ABA Reviewing Platform

Booksense Picks samples at a miniscule rate the staff-written reviews displayed in most indie bookstores. Yet in the space-is-cheap frontier of online social networks, value resides in volume, not samples. Among 1800 ABA members, how many current and recent reviews have been written, on average, by staff—50 per store, or 90,000? And, was there a value to the staff reviews that carried beyond the local store, and offered prizes, how many might be written in the next year—again, 50 per store, or 90,000 more? And finally, could customers write reviews that would display across the network and be eligible for prizes, how many might they write in the next year—once more, 50 per store, or 90,000?

In this scenario, using what may be low estimates, we see gathered 270,000 reviews. Add the discussions that can augment reviews and you see the potential of an ABA-managed community-reviewing network. Then let it build over time. Readers would know that each review and discussion linked to a bookstore that, like our Main Street Books, is a local anchor. Each store would add its local accountability to the network. And each could use the network as a promotional tool: deepening its local ties by letting its staff do more than sell and by letting its customers be more than just consumers.

The ABA, by imitating the Amazon reviewing platform and by adding its based-in-the-local credibility, can build an online-and-physical social network more purposeful than those of its corporate competitors.

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.

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.

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.