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.

]]> http://theseekeracademy.com/2008/02/24/why-do-holisticintegral-leaders-fear-my-novel/feed/ http://theseekeracademy.com/2007/09/27/startled-i-begin-to-pick-at-2012/ http://theseekeracademy.com/2007/09/27/startled-i-begin-to-pick-at-2012/#comments Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:52:32 +0000 L. D. Gussin http://theseekeracademy.com/2007/09/27/startled-i-begin-to-pick-at-2012/

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.

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.

I have so far six Amazon.com reviews, none from people I’d met before the reviews were posted. One is from a reviewer on a social network thematically related to my book. Four men, two women; a romance novelist, a poet, two psychiatrists, a tech writer; one focuses on the story’s relationships, another its ideas. Chance starts to play a part, interesting juxtapositions to emerge.

One reviewer, a physician and professor of holistic medicine with a multi-decade practice, and an inveterate reader, reviewer and blogger, has the background to discuss the novel’s themes. As I read other of his reviews and his blog, I begin to want to know what he will think about my story. He writes this:

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Recovering, Re-connecting and Re-Awakening: A Novel of Hope, May 27, 2007

By	Dr. Richard G. Petty (Atlanta) - See all my reviews

The book is deceptive. When I was asked if I would be interested in reviewing it, I expected a novel about holistic medicine and the spiritual path that I would polish off in an evening. Instead it has taken me three weeks to read. Not because it is badly written: far from it. After a slightly clumsy prologue, the book uses a story as a skeleton around which to wrap a careful examination of some very important ideas. Gussin is a very good writer and some of the prose and the images that they conjure up are luminous.

Grace is a forty-something woman whose twelve year-old niece has been going through the ups and downs of chemotherapy for leukemia. Grace is a former actress who is still acting her way through life. After the turmoil of her niece’s illness and days spent with other sick children, she is emotionally and spiritually drained. Not because of what has happened or what she has experienced, but rather that the events have uncovered a deep existential yearning.

So it is that she finds her way to the Seeker Academy, which could be any one of a hundred personal growth centers that I have visited. Here she meets an interesting and insightful group of people who are among the estimated thirty million Americans who describe themselves as spiritual seekers. The book does a superb job of describing the spiritual and emotional hunger of so many of us. How many of us have an uncomfortable feeling that there is something missing in our lives? That there is something important that we have all forgotten?

The characters have all brought their own emotional baggage, and amidst all the love and peace we still see people who can be mean and defend their positions and beliefs with religious fervor. Gussin captures the narcissism and spiritual elitism that can crop up amongst spiritual seekers and so disappoint people when they meet this world. There are the anti-science counter-culture folk who believe that to reason is to lie, and representatives of an array of beliefs and positions, including those who refuse any help from conventional medicine, even when in serious trouble. Grace samples classes, therapies and ideas like a person who is starving and stumbles into a five star restaurant.

There are discussions of Karma; survival after death; whether there is a purpose and a meaning to life that we sometimes miss because we have to focus on the mundane world; whether it is possible to have a spiritual life and to remain engaged in the material world; the advantages of controlling our reactions to, rather than escaping from the world; romanticism, reason and tragedy; the nature of reality and much more besides.

Grace learns at first hand how emotions can be stored in the body, and how skilled bodywork can release them. She also discovers that the seekers at the Academy are there for a dozen reasons. They are not just trying to heal some ill defined something, recover from trauma or find enlightenment. Most are just trying to re-connect with another human.

A car crash involving some of the characters sharpens the beliefs and actions of the cast, and leads into scenes where concepts and ideas are explored with rare intensity.

Gussin is clearly writing from experience. In the course of the book Grace discovers that real change is possible, and sometimes in a short space of time. But she then realizes that she no longer wants to change. She has a world to go back to. Yet despite her reluctance to change, it is giving nothing away to say that the experiences do change her beliefs and perceptions. Despite some of the difficulties that people bring with them to places like the Seeker Academy, for the person who arrives at the right time in his or her life, the experience can be life changing.

Teaching stories, parables and analogies have been used since the beginning of time, and in expert hands can be an extremely effective way of communicating difficult ideas. I have read some books in which characters discuss abstruse ideas and have sometimes come away scratching my head, thinking that even the most earnest angst-ridden undergraduates don’t talk like that! Gussin, though, succeeds very well indeed. The characters are lively, the ideas clear and the dialogue does not feel contrived. The format allows the author to talk about some complex and important ideas, without the formalism of a book about philosophy.

The best books, movies, articles and scientific papers do not give you all the answers, but make suggestions, challenge us and suggest new questions. More than once I saw parallels with the classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Both books suggest answers, challenge assumptions and pose a great many questions.

It was those questions that forced me to read the book far more slowly than I would normally. Despite the apparent certainties of some of the characters, the author does not pretend to have all the answers, and the book is the stronger for it.

If you are interested in some of the big questions in life, or if you feel that hunger that I described above, this is an excellent, well-written and engaging book.

Highly recommended.