From The Globe and Mail, April 23: Letters to the editor

Conservatives understand human nature better than liberals do (What Liberals Can Learn From Conservatives – April 21)? What conservatives understand better is human fear. That’s made amply clear south of the border.

But even in Canada, fan that fear the right way and you can build a political dynasty based on secrecy and control, you can justify huge expenditures on prison systems, you can sacrifice the environment for the sake of economic security, and you can take the axe to indulgences such as culture, scientific research, food safety and support for the more vulnerable among us: the young, the poor, the elderly.

The real challenge the liberals face is how to disarm the rhetoric of fear and appeal to our better human nature.

Philip Shepherd, Toronto

When the male aspect of our consciousness detaches from the female aspect of our consciousness, it moves us into a state of anticipation.  That is the state in which most of us live almost all the time.  It is a state in which there cannot be peace of heart – in fact, it is mistrustful of a peace of heart.  For that reason, ‘anticipation’ and ‘peace of heart’ may be understood as opposites.  Peace of heart is a state of being that is liberated from all anticipation.  It is made possible by a deep connection with being, and by the unshakable security that that imparts.  It is a state that is wide open to the present, and is at rest within it, flinching from nothing: it opens to sadness, joy, urgency, love and even heartbreak.  It is a state of seamless connection that shows us the deepest roots of the moment’s necessity – the world’s necessity – and empowers us with them.  That is why we are so afraid of our own peace of heart – because it threatens to change everything.

On Monday January 3rd, Neil Reynolds urged readers of his Globe and Mail column to “Go forth, multiply and fill the provinces”. He was refuting the claim by biological anthropologist Helen Fisher that, “We have too many people on this planet.” Her claim is obviously not true, he asserted, because Canada has room for more. He then proceeded to demonstrate mathematically that all we need of the planet to house, water and feed the world’s population at the moment is the area of the United States – an exercise he himself admitted was silly, except that he felt sure it illuminated the fact that “Earth can sustain more people.”
Mr. Reynolds’ reasoning is weakened by a blindspot. His mindset is that of a factory supervisor, overlooking his facility and concluding that production can be increased. It is a mindset that was birthed by the Industrial Revolution, and is dangerously misapplied to our planet. The earth is not a factory, with well-fed humans as its product. The earth is an ecosystem that relies on diversity, and sustains itself according to a set of principles that humans currently violate at every turn.
I would like to present a contrasting claim: there is no major crisis we face as a species that does not trace back, in whole or in part, to the weight of humanity under which our planet is groaning. And central to that problem is the trait that most distinguishes us from other animals: we are an incendiary species. Quite simply, we control fire. Not only do we control it – we can barely live without it, as Richard Wrangham demonstrated in his book, Catching Fire. To live, we burn the planet. We burn it to cook our food, we burn it to keep ourselves warm, we burn it in engines to move ourselves about. We burn the planet ceaselessly: we do it to transform fire into electricity, for instance, which we use to make our clothes and furniture and newspapers. We burn it to melt its minerals to refine them for our use, often in making machines that burn more of it to run.
We burn the planet as if it were limitless, and the leverage this burning grants us in harvesting the earth – the power it puts into our hands – is used by us with a sense of entitlement. What Prometheus offered as a sacrifice and a gift has goaded us into shortsighted arrogance. The burning enables us to harvest the seas with nets that scour them clean of life. And our burning fouls those seas – not just with the by-products of burning that also poison air, soil and fresh water, but also with a level of endless noise pollution that disrupts the migration and breeding patterns of their denizens.
On land, our burning ways have catastrophically disrupted the delicate web of diversity on which the balance of the earth’s living systems depends. We burn and clear-cut trees – the lungs of our planet – to create the rectilinear stamp of agribusiness, which celebrates monoculture and systematically destroys whatever intrudes upon it. Our willingness to treat the earth as a factory does nothing to alter the ageless principles that keep it healthy.
I remember reading about an activist who had worked hard over years to create an alternative to clear-cutting in the Amazon. He established a program whereby tribes over a vast area were encouraged to harvest the forest, and a distribution network was set up by which those gently-harvested products could be shipped out to the world. As he sat on the riverbank one day, watching a procession of his barges loaded with harvested nuts make its way downstream, he began to think of all the forest creatures that would have relied on those nuts, and all the animals that relied on those creatures, and all the trees that would never be seeded into new life, and realized that, despite his best intentions, he had helped to create another form of holocaust.
However you slice it – or harvest it – there are too many people on the planet. If we don’t relinquish the scourge of our entitlement and moderate the demands we make on it, Mother Nature herself will demonstrate the need to respect its limits. And that won’t be pretty.

A moment that I’d anticipated and imagined and fantasized about for ten years finally strolled into my life on Saturday evening. I’d arrived in Chicago to participate in Andrew Harvey’s week-long course at the Institute for Sacred Activism, and some copies of my book, New Self, New World, were waiting for me at the hotel, hot off the press. Once I’d checked in, I picked up the box, carried it to my room, and opened it. There was none of the expected exhilaration, no whoop of joy, no one else around but me. What there was, though, was a perfect stillness, a spaciousness of such magic I barely noticed it. I merely drifted inside of it. The moment of pulling the first book from the box and holding it in my hand seeped into my every pore. I was empty of any great or overt emotion, but I could describe to you the quality of the light in the room, the hum of the air conditioner, details of the carpet and curtains and furniture – all of it quietly luminous, specific, and felt as a single, singing unity. And I whispered, “Thank you.” It was that simple.

“Meetings of nations are always better than not having meetings of nations. I think, however, they should have their meetings on that island of floating plastic [garbage] in the Pacific. They should sit there, and look at that and make their decisions.” — singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn

The G20 is coming to Toronto, and the city is being bent out of shape to accommodate it: concrete barriers cutting across public spaces, chain-link fences erected down the middle of city streets, businesses closed, snipers strategically positioned. What I find most interesting about all of this is that the way we defend our heads of state from the unruly inconveniences of reality exactly parallels the way, within our own bodies, we defend the rule of the head from the nitty gritty inconveniences of reality. And that nitty gritty is what most deeply informs us about the world’s reality.

This is something I write about in New Self, New World. When we live in our heads, we shut out the sensations of the world: we position ourselves in a realm that is largely cut off from feeling. Here’s the main difference: instead of erecting chain-link fences, we erect our ideas about the world, like a set of theatre flats that stand between us and the eloquent flux of ‘what is’. And the way we presume to act and think – not in harmony with ‘what is’, but according to our static ideas of ‘what is’ – is exactly how our heads of state debate policies to shape our future. Cossetted at every turn, spared every possible inconvenience, fed only the information they have agreed to listen to, they inevitably seek to perpetuate the fantasy they have chosen to live. In their deliberate exile from the world’s reality, they cannot do otherwise.

And so I agree with Bruce Cockburn. Send the lot of them out to live for a week on that growing continent, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – which we inadvertently created and contribute to every day. Let them smell it and live with its unthinkable, massive expanse. Let them feel the despair. And then let them begin the conversation.

The book is finished.  I’m bewildered, amazed, spent, ecstatic and grateful beyond speaking.  After a decade working at it – tracing out miles of pencil lead over countless sheets of paper – and decades more than that researching it and living out its premises and preparing for the task of writing – it is finally done.  For the first time in many years I am suddenly no longer someone who is writing a book.  No more changes, corrections, edits or new perceptions to weave into it.  And the funny thing is, I’m not being tugged at by regrets or desires to rework or add or delete.  New Self, New World seems to have become what it needed to be.  It has come to rest in itself.  And now I begin a new chapter in my own life.

It’s been three and a half weeks since the manuscript was sent off to the printer, and that’s how long it’s taken me to begin to pull the neglected corners of my life back into the light, and into a semblance of order.  The cord of wood at the side of the house has been split and stacked.  The toilet repaired.  My study excavated and two boxes of drafts and notes stashed away in the crawlspace (maybe someday an archivist will thank me, or perhaps the papers will just go up in flames over the course of a dark winter, starting evening fires.  Either way, I’m content).  When I first started the book (and I was ambushed by it, awakened in the night by its sudden arrival, and it wouldn’t let go, not even when the light of day appeared, not even when weeks turned into months) I talked with my wife about it and told her that if I worked on it full time, I thought I could have a first draft completed in about six weeks.  I don’t know if there has ever in the history of writing been as grave an underestimation as that, but the fact is that if I had been told at the time how long it would actually take to complete, I would have said, “Forget it, then.  I just can’t afford to.”  Ignorance may not be bliss, but sometimes it’s a blessing.

Now that New Self, New World is wrapped, I’ll need some place into which my ideas and questions can be channeled, so I’ll be blogging on a regular basis.  I note wryly that I wrote two blogs in ’08, and only one in ’09.  Well, I was still in labour, bringing my book forth into the world.  My fondest hope is that, once it arrives, it will strike up some close friendships, and initiate some rich conversations with its readers.

Okay, so I’ve been a bit remiss on the old blog-making front.  It hasn’t yet been a year since I last checked in – but it would be if I waited another week.  All I can say is, I’ve been busy.  The book.  The travails.  The rewritten, completed manuscript.  The publisher interested.  The publisher suggesting a Fall ’09 release date.  The publisher offering a contract.  The contract signed and countersigned.  The distributor’s deadline approaches.  Some questions about the title working or not working.  Different ideas for new titles going back and forth.  World around us in economic collapse.  And … publication date delayed.  Not just the title problem.  The industry problem too.  That is, people aren’t really buying books in these ‘tough economic times’.  Especially from an unknown, uncredentialled, below-the-radar luminary such as myself.  The understanding at the time was that it was only delayed for three months – but that has translated into an unconfirmed length of time.

I did talk to the editor assigned to me, trying to get a sense of where it all stood, and she told me, in effect, that there were too many words – which reminded me of the Emperor telling Mozart, “Too many notes, Herr Composer”.  The problem is, it’s not a book that can be edited without leaving a hole.  It would be like pulling strands out of a basket and expecting it to still stand. But her comments sat with me, and I talked to the publisher, who loves the book, and he allowed that, yes, if it were shorter, it would be easier to market.

Now it was never my intention to write a tome.  I don’t really enjoy unwieldy books myself, and strove with mine to make it as concise as possible.  So I thought about it, and I realized that the only way to shorten the book would be to journey deeper still into its material and find a simpler grace to it, a more precise pivot point on which the material as a whole could balance.  That realization was enough to draw me into the valley of the shadows of sensing, questioning, flailing and finding – and though it felt a little like tearing myself asunder, I did get there, and came back to the surface world of light, like Gilgamesh with the life-giving plant clutched in his hand,  equipped with an understanding of that deeper grace at the heart of the book.

What bringing that grace to the book has meant is that the scaffolding that was necessary to support certain ideas can be done away with, because they arise naturally from a deeper place now.  So although the book will have lots of new material, it will actually be a shorter, more coherent read.  A little more direct, too, I think.  And perhaps a little more challenging in a good way, too, in that it comes at some ancient, unseen paradigms with cleaner vectors.

It is, as I pen this, though, the sheerest agony, jettisoning polished phrases, polished chapters, and starting with a clean slate, and allowing the book to become what it needs to be.  And knowing this is the fourth time I have rewritten it.  The pain of the process is compounded by the fact that I haven’t earned much money while working on the book over the past seven and a half years,  and I don’t know how long it will take.  Can’t know.  The pain, of course, is matched by the joy, the profound pleasure, of doing what I must, discovering more and more clarity in the book’s expression of itself, and keeping the faith that, as my grandmother used to assure me, these things have a way of working out.  So the writing continues.  And the way it feels to me is almost as though by tearing the book apart and recreating it, I am doing the same thing to myself.  I am reminded of a poem by Rumi, translated by Andrew Harvey in his book The Way of Passion:

The grapes of my body can only become wine
After the winemaker tramples me.
I surrender my spirit like grapes to his trampling
So my inmost heart can blaze and dance with joy.
Although the grapes go on weeping blood and sobbing
“I cannot bear any more anguish, any more cruelty”
The trampler stuffs cotton in his ears: “I am not working in ignorance.
You can deny me if you want, you have every excuse,
But it is I who am the Master of this Work.
And when through my Passion you reach Perfection,
You will never be done praising my name.”

To which I can only reply, tears in my eyes, “To winemaking!”

To set the stage: for the past six years I’ve been obsessed (more like ‘possessed’, according to my long-suffering family) with the writing of a book, and am only just emerging from that incinerating passion (burning away old structures, making room for the new).  One sign of my return is that I’ve been finding time, bit by bit, to work out again.  There’s an hour-long, fairly intense workout I’ve been revolving through for a couple of decades, and getting back to it recently has been a bit of a shock (“I used to be able to do this without dying?”)

Last night I had another shot at it.  I put on my favorite working-out music (The Last Prophet – a RealWorld CD by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: gorgeous, gorgeous), did my warm up, and a series of pikes from a chin-up bar, and got ready for the bench-presses.  The last time I faced these suckers was two weeks ago and they demolished me.  Couldn’t even finish three full sets.  But here’s the funny thing: the day before yesterday I’d been talking to a friend about releasing the body by really paying attention to the core, and last night as I lay down on the bench, I shifted my awareness into a place of grounded subtlety, the pelvic floor sensitized; and in the relaxed calm of that state I became aware of a quiet, unassuming, clear energy within.  I just let that energy be, and let its subtle stirrings move me through the reps.  My focus was on feeling and following that energy.  And I sailed through them, sailed through all three sets.  I was closing in on the limit of my strength by the end of it – but the experience was easy and calm and pleasurable.  And so was the rest of the workout: with my focus on that subtle energy, honouring its – what? wisdom? – the exercises carried me into a place of spaciousness and ease.  Grounded grace.

So I wonder how to account for being able to pull off the hitherto devastating bench presses with so little effort.  It was the same weight, the same bench, and had been two weeks since my last foray.  Did shifting the scale of my attention to that of such previously invisible subtlety release the body from the mechanics of ‘doing’ and allow it to melt into an awakened whole?  Possibly.  But in the midst of the workout there was also a sense of being fed by the currents of the world, buoyed by them.

I am not unaware of a glaring irony in all of this: having just completed writing a book New Self, New World, the central theme of which is surrender, I am still discovering what that means, that surrender.  I expect and even hope, though, that my learning curve in that regard will continue for the rest of my life.  In the meantime, a workout that I have tended to face with a sense of resistance (am I really up to doing this now?) is suddenly something I now look forward to, seeing it as a conveyance back into that wakeful place of grounded, subtle energy.

So I read last week in a magazine that the top-selling book in Canada in 2007 was The Secret. Excuse me? Is there really any hope for humanity? To come clean – I haven’t read the book, and doubt I would be able to. I tried watching the DVD once, but its polished appeal to those paragons of human virtue, fear and greed, was too much for me to bear. I was in danger of grinding my teeth to nubs, and had to turn it off as an act of self-preservation.

It seems that people will pay you any amount of money if you can convince them that you have The Solution. And that only confirms how eager people are to collude in their own self-delusion. The Solution? Forget it. Doesn’t exist. Never has, never will. There is no instruction manual for life. It has neither predictable outcomes nor objective meaning. What it does have is beauty, wonder, destruction and constant renewal. Objective meaning is abstract and dead. In the meantime, meaningfulness abounds, if only we can open to our own experience of the fathomless miracle in which we participate, and which we express – unwittingly and otherwise – with every breath.

THE SECRET, the true secret, lies in the liberation of body, soul and mind from the prison of self-absorption. The whole world waits for that to happen, just as every blade of grass and sailing cloud waits to be discovered by us. We become whole once we sense the whole to which we belong. Not the whole as in “the sum of all parts”; the whole as in the infinitely sensitive unity that breathes together with us. Sensing that whole, though, means transcending the corrals of our own fear and greed – something which Canada’s best-selling book of 2007 works strenuously to keep us from.