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#3699 -
Thursday, October 29, 2009 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
CDs and DVDs of
speaker sessions from The Science and Nonduality Conference 2009
are available at
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The Little
Green Book on Awakening
A New Book by James George
Reviewed by John Robert Colombo
http://gurdjieffbooks.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/james-georges-new-book-review-by-john-robert-colombo/
Barrytown / Station Hill Press is the imprint of a lively book
publisher that has hitherto escaped my attention. This publishing
company is located in the town of Barrytown in New York
State’s historic Dutchess County, a comfortable distance
north of New York City. The only surprising feature of Barrytown,
besides hosting this lively publishing house, comes from the fact
that the town, as small as it is, serves as the seat of the
Unification Church’s Theological Seminary!
Here is how founders George and Susan Quasha describe their
operation on the company’s website: “The mission of our
Press is to seek out and publish exceptional, innovative, often
ground-breaking works which challenge and expand conceptions of
the possible by offering human alternatives in the arts,
philosophy, alternative health and healing, eastern, western and
shamanic spirituality, and social and ecological studies.”
The website arranges its numerous recent trade paperback
publications in some thirty categories, ranging from Alternative
Medicine to Women’s Issues. Here, almost at random but in
alphabetical order, are the names of some of its leading authors:
Paul Auster, George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, John Cage, Robert
Duncan, Clayton Eschelman, James Hillman, Anslem Hollo, Spencer
Holst, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Osip Mandelstahm.
In listing these names, I find I almost neglected to mention the
arresting name of the author of “Journey to the Ancestral
Self.” Amazingly, the author’s name is … Tamarack
Song! The catalogue describes Mr. Song in these words: “When
Tamarack Song is not out communing with The Mother, it’s a
pretty sure bet he’s either researching, writing, or talking
about it. He and his family have a primitive Wigwam camp on a
lakeshore in the Northern Wisconsin Forest.” And so on.
In the category of Poetry, there are original volumes by Cid
Corman and Rosmarie Waldrop, and various reprints, including
“America, A Prophecy,” an influential and important
anthology edited by Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha
(coincidentally the co-publisher), I was disappointed when I
checked the category of Sexuality. I found it empty, blank, nada!
A strange (and I hope temporary) lapse.
Featured in the category for Ecology & Environment is a
reprint of James George’s “Asking for the Earth”
(originally issued by Element in 1995) as well as a brand new
book of his which bears the title “The Little Green Book on
Awakening.” I will review this new title, after offering
some background information on its author.
James George is a distinguished Canadian career diplomat. In the
1960s he held the posts of High Commissioner to India and
Ambassador to Nepal. After taking early retirement from the
Department of External Affairs, he has devoted his energies and
talents to the causes of environmentalism and ecology. I see him
as being “our ambassador to the world of values.”
He has been no armchair activist, for he is actively involved in
a number of relevant undertakings. He is a founder of the
Threshold Foundation and former President of the Sadat Peace
Foundation. He served on the International Whaling Commission,
and he led the Friends of the Earth’s international mission
to Kuwait to assess the post-war environmental damage. Here are
some other achievements and associations: Lieutenant-Commander,
Royal Canadian Navy; Chairman, Harmonic Arts Society; founding
member, Rainforest Action Network, etc.
At junctures throughout his life he studied with Dzogchen masters
in India and with Madame de Salzmann in Paris. While in the Far
East he befriended the present Dalai Lama, then as now in exile
in Northern India, and the two became fast friends. The Tibetan
leader contributed an introduction to his first book.
One of his lesser-known accomplishments in India was arranging
for Canadian technicians to microfilm unique manuscripts that had
been secreted out of Tibet. The microfilming was done at the High
Commissioner’s official residence in Delhi, no less! This is
one of the many interesting stories told by Mr. George in his
earlier book “Asking for the Earth” (the one reprinted
by the present publisher). I believe the incident deserves to be
widely known, if only because it shows everyone – Mr.
George, the Dalai Lama, the Canadian Department of External
Affairs, the Government of India – in a good light …
everyone, that is, except the Chinese government.
The author is now in his ninety-first year, tall and erect, hale
and hearty, with a razor-sharp mind. He has not let his head of
flocculent hair and his abundant beard, as white as Ivory Snow,
to slow him down. He travels widely to meet with study groups
throughout North America. His home base is the eyrie in a Toronto
condominium which overlooks the Rosedale district of the city
where he was born the year the Great War ended. He is one of the
three “grand old men” of the Work in Canada, the two
other men being scientist and humanist Ravi Ravindra and veteran
film-producer Tom Daly.
At his side stands his wife, Barbara Wright, whom I like to call
“dynamic” because she is a force to be reckoned with in
her own right. She is a veteran of Group Work in San Francisco.
It is a shame that the Work scene in Toronto is so fragmented
– otherwise it would engage the full resources of this
formidable couple.
Mr. George’s prose is more descriptive than dramatic, more
explanatory than expressive, though it cannot be bettered for its
clear, unencumbered, reasonable, and sturdy style. Chogyam
Trungpa called him “a wise and benevolent man, an ideal
statesman.” Indeed, like the man, his writing is
statesman-like: designed to convey a position, express
conviction, allay doubts, and win friends. That is certainly the
case with the prose of “The Little Green Book on
Awakening.”
But before I describe the book’s contents, let me report on
its physical appearance. It is a trade paperback, 5.5 x 8.5
inches, x+176 pages, ISBN 978-1-58177-112-1. It has a handsome
cover that is green in colour – not to recall St.
Patrick’s Day (March 17) but to celebrate Earth Day (April
12). It will be officially published to mark Earth Day. The list
price is US $15.95.
Let me now qualify one point that I made above: that the
“writing is statesman-like.” While that is true of the
writing itself, the form that the prose takes in this book is
that of the sermon. Here is a series of sermons or homilies
rather than a sequence of essays or a succession of chapters of a
book.
These are addresses that could be delivered to attentive and
educated members of congregations in Anglican or Episcopal
churches. The intent is high-minded, the tone is hortatory, and
the anecdotes, insights, quotations, and references are such that
they are meant to gently persuade audiences that the speaker
knows and feels what is talking about and senses the urgency of
his message.
And he does know his own mind, he is master of his message, and
he is sincere. I have a few reservations about what he says
– the reservations I have are mainly about what goes unsaid
– but I am prepared to give Mr. George top marks for doing
exactly what he has set out to do. If this book does not result
in a multitude of converts to the cause of environmentalism, it
will at least strengthen the resolve of the host of readers who
were already converts.
In the title of the book, there is one word that gives me pause.
That word is “little.” There is nothing little about
this book. In fact, it is quite long, intelligently organized,
seriously presented, and devoted to a subject of considerable,
present-day importance. It is a “big” book the same way
that “Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People
Mattered” is a big book. I am referring to the influential
work by E.F. Schumacher, the German-born, English economist and
theorist, whose 1973 study did so much to supply a new, cultural
context for the energy crisis that was then facing the Western
world.
Mr. George is very much a latter-day Schumacher. who went on to
publish “A Guide for the Perplexed” which places
science and society in the context of the sacred. Schumacher was
influenced by the thought of G.I. Gurdjieff; in a major way Mr.
G.’s thoughts and practices are the underpinnings of Mr.
George’s life and his work. It is no stretch of the
imagination to suggest that Mr. George wants to do for the
ecology crisis what Schumacher did for the economic crunch of the
1970s.
If I am able to summarize this book in one word, that word is:
“awakening.” But I can do better by summarizing it in
six words: “awakening to consciousness and climate
change.” This summary should come as no surprise to those
people who know Mr. George who will read this book – or who
are now reading this review of it.
As I read it, there kept reverberating in my mind that touchstone
line of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “You must change your
life.” The only point Mr. George might add is the following
sense of urgency:”Thereafter you must change your world
– and quickly!”
Rilke goes unquoted in these pages. Indeed, literature plays
hardly any role in the arguments of this book, which is one way
for me to make the observation that the role of the human
imagination in the construction and deconstruction of the world
– in its enchantment and disenchantment – is barely
noted. Maya and sleep and illusion and imagination go hand in
hand. The author uses other than literary arguments to make his
points.
I think the book will be reassuring to those readers who wish to
be reminded of the relevance of spiritual values to the salvation
of souls, but more urgently perhaps to those vitally concerned
with the precarious state of the world today, politically and
ecologically. The natural world is being threatened as never
before. The author’s vocabulary is contemporary and
up-to-date – replete with references to “tipping
points,” the brain’s “neuroplasticity,”
Mother Teresa, Al Gore, Lester Brown, quantum physics, implicate
order, Gaia, etc.
Allow me to compress the book’s arguments, to convey a sense
of the ground that is covered. There are eighteen chapters, so
here are eighteen sentences, one to summarize each chapter:
1. Our inner life and our outer life need to be reconciled
through “the WAY of NOW.”
2. Man’s spiritual crisis is the root-cause of the social
and environmental crises that today threaten all life-forms on
our planet.
3. We are asleep to ourselves and our world; unless we awaken, we
accomplish nothing.
4. Global warming threatens our very survival; we must reign in
our self-serving selves.
5. The ecological crisis is at core a spiritual crisis.
6. Conscious evolution will occur through a coalition between
thinking ecologically and thinking spiritually.
7. Only a sense of presence will “unbury” our
conscience.
8. Science will have to develop a paradigm that allows for the
evidence of scientific research along with the testimony of
personal experience.
9. We need to release through inner work the potential powers of
love, both affectionate and amative.
10. The ecological urgency, facing our generation in particular,
is such that we have no fall-back position.
11. The grand evolution of consciousness in the cosmos requires
on this planet the burgeoning of human consciousness.
12. The effects of global warming may be mitigated by efforts of
international co-operation, inspired by an innovative thinker
like Adam Douglass Trombly, a follower of R. Buckminster Fuller.
13. We must learn to be responsible for the problems we have
created, and we should be aware of possible assistance from
“off-planet cultures” identified with UFOs.
14. Scientific thinkers regard consciousness as a byproduct of
man’s brain, whereas spiritual thinkers regard Consciousness
as proof of the wholeness of man, nature, and the cosmos.
15. We have yet to appreciate that the field of Consciousness
engulfs us all, a ground or plenum called by Ervin Laszlo
“the Akashic Field.”
16. Real change follows recognition of the seven levels of
Consciousness from the highest to the lowest.
17. There seems to be among mankind today an increasing
acceptance of the paradigm of interconnectedness with the greater
whole.
18. Yes we can, if we work together.
Then there is an epilogue about “awakening awareness”
and the text of Al Gore’s 2007 Nobel Prize acceptance
speech, followed by a reading list and a viewing list.
By reducing each chapter to a single sentence, I risk turning Mr.
George’s arguments into a series of clichés, but I assume
the reader will take my word for it that the expected conclusions
are not haphazardly handled, but are intelligently (perhaps
consciously) evolved, so that reading the book is rather like
turning the pages of a primer or a handbook on the relationship
between (very generally) state of mind-spirit and state of
society-nature.
If there is a sentence that epitomizes the argument of the book
as a whole it could well be this quotation from Mohandas K.
Gandhi: “There is enough for everyone’s need, but not
for anyone’s greed.” If there is a problem that the
book presents, it is the fact that while many desirable
principles are stated, with intellectual backing and with a
commendable sense of urgency, all the counter-arguments are
absent.
Now I am not knowledgeable enough about ecological thought to
have at my fingertips the counter-arguments of the nay-sayers to
global warming – Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were
always inviting scientific scoffers or critics of global warming
to visit the White House – but their names (or more
important their arguments) do not cross these pages.
Yet I do have at my fingertips the counter-arguments behind the
intriguing chapter that deals with “off-planet
cultures” identified with UFOs. The chapter opens with a
well described account of the author’s experience (shared by
one other person) at his cabin on McGregor Lake, Quebec, late
summer of 2002. There they observed the play of a mysterious
light in the night sky, a light that seemed to be responsive to
their thoughts. Later, the chapter closes with the suggestion
that there exist “Extra Terrestrials,” intelligent
alien entities or powers that may be in communication with us, a
form of extra-solar grace or baraka, I suppose.
Between the author’s personal account and his tentative
conclusion, there is information about UFOs taken from public
opinion polls, word-of-mouth, television producers, former
Ministers of National Defence, etc. But there is no critical
literature cited, despite the existence of interpretive studies
of all aspects of the UFO phenomenon by astronomer Carl Sagan and
other physicists, psychologists, and sociologists.
Indeed, the sense of interacting with a light, a big star, or a
“circular craft” is not unknown in ufology – or in
the literature of Polar exploration, where the Inuit and
explorers have described how they felt themselves in communion
with nocturnal lights that were responsive to their thoughts
– they would snap their fingers and the lights would be
extinguished, etc. Psychologists have reasoned explanations for
such phenomena, and also for the sense of personal elation it
generates.
I am pausing over this chapter, admittedly a personal and a
speculative one, is because it illustrates how it is possible to
advance agreeable positions without weighing the pros and the
cons of the relevant research on the subject. Assertions are fine
on their own, but only become super-fine when accompanied by
reasoned argumentation.
That single qualification aside, “The Little Green Book on
Awakening” should take its place on the shelves of books
written by Schumacher, Eckhart Tolle, Barbara Ward, R.
Buckminster Fuller, Jared Diamond, and Al Gore … not to
mention the works about the Work.
There is an old Ontario folk-saying that I recall from my
childhood. It goes like this: “Disaster precedes
reform.” I hope that there are enough readers of “The
Little Green Book on Awakening” so that it is not
necessarily so.
~ ~ ~
John Robert Colombo is a Toronto-based author and anthologist
whose latest book is a collection of poems titled “A Far
Cry.” This fall will see the publication of “The Big
Book of Canadian Hauntings,” the companion to the already
published “The Big Book of Canadian Ghost Stories.”
The Little Green Book on Awakening, by James George
may be ordered through Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1581771126?ie=UTF8&tag=nondualitysal-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1581771126