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.
A Brief Delay, And A Subtitle
March 15, 2008
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.
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.
My Discussion Piece At Libraries For The Future
August 14, 2007
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.
Finally, A Reading Group Guide
August 1, 2007
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.
My First Six Amazon Reviews
May 30, 2007
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.
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.
The Holistic Movement As a Literary Subject
April 28, 2007
[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.
