The Seeker Academy Bookblog

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.

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

A Preface For Literary Readers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few days to publication!

“With exquisite facility of language, L.D. 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!” — Nancy Slonim Aronie

For an unknown writer, particularly of literary and philosophical fiction, it is a struggle to get reputable reviews. In my case, I sent, last November, seventy review copies of The Seeker Academy to writers, editors, and leaders I admired in literary circles, in holistic circles, and in spiritual progressive circles. I’d met three of these people, and knew none socially. Four months later, ten or so say they are reading the novel or working toward reading it, and I am grateful to them.

Nancy Slonim Aronie, who I’ve not met, has now given me her brief comments. She is an author and writing teacher who leads workshops at Esalen, Omega Institute, Kripalu, Naropa, The Crossings, Rowe, and other holistic retreats. A longtime NPR commentator, she has taught at Harvard in the Literature for Social Reflection course led by the writer, psychiatrist, and professor Robert Coles. At Harvard, she has twice received a Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching award.

Aronie’s Omega Institute profile is here; her website is here.

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.

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.

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.