Spirituality

James George

Asking for the Earth was first released in 1995 after the author led the international mission to Kuwait to assess damages from Operation Desert Storm. This book is even more timely today as we face the possibility of further warfare and destruction. James George presents the convincing argument that our planet is suffering from twin crises, ecological and spiritual, with a common source in our deep separation from nature and from each other. Inspired by the teachings of Gurdjieff, Thomas Merton, Tibetan Buddhism, and other contemplative traditions, the author shows that to avoid disaster we must wed scientific truth to an awakening of consciousness and acceptance of responsibility.

Preface by His Holiness the Dalai Lama; foreword by the Secretary General of the United Nations conference on Environment and Development (the “Earth Summit”) in Rio de Janeiro, 1992.

Arnie Zane and Bill T. Jones

World renown dancer / choreographers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane were partners in art and life from 1971 to Zane’s death in the late 80’s, sharing a home, a dance company, and a celebrated creative process. Body Against Body traces their dramatic (and often controversial) careers as they intertwine and collide in a unique choreographic collaboration that has influenced much contemporary dance by merging cultures, races, and artistic styles. The book includes Zane’s haunting photos, Jones’ visceral poetry and prose, performance scripts and scenarios, a biographical essay (with performance catalog), dance photos of the company in action, and commentaries by dancers, critics, composers, musicians, visual artists, and a range of others. Among the artists who have contributed their creative visions to these collaborations are Bill Katz, Robert Longo, Peter Gordon, Keith Harring, and Max Roach.

OUT OF PRINT

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, M.D., is the woman who has transformed the way the world thinks about death and dying. Beginning with the groundbreaking publication of the classic psychological study On Death and Dying, through her many books and her years working with terminally ill children, AIDS patients and the elderly, Kubler-Ross has brought comfort and understanding to millions coping with their own deaths or the deaths of loved ones. From her work in war-ravaged Poland to her pioneering counseling of the terminally ill, to her legendary seminars on death and dying at the University of Chicago, to her eye-opening discussions with those who had been revived after death, each experience provided Kubler-Ross with a piece of the puzzle. In a culture determined to sweep death under a carpet and hide it there, Kubler-Ross consistently defied common wisdom to bring it into the light and hold it there for us to see and not be afraid.

In The Cocoon and the Butterfly, drawing on thousands of accounts of “near death experiences” that she has accumulated over the years from persons of all ages and circumstances, Dr. Ross develops the image of the butterfly’s emergence from a cocoon as a symbol for the new beginning that such experiences portend for us when we die.

Essential Reading for anyone who has ever loved the Grateful Dead, Crazy Wisdom Tales for Dead Heads takes aim at readers who are captivated by trickster and prankster stories with a deep resonance and the scent of enlightenment. In the tradition of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters of the 60’s, the Guide is a collection of magical, mystical, entertaining, and amusingly bizarre stories. Designed to bring forth an interactive experience for the reader, it creates a sense of being on an imaginative Trip into the hidden zones of crazy wisdom, where Startled Awareness awaits. Stories include unusual rituals, absurd prescriptions for action, and graphic illustrations. This uproarious self-help book creates its own genre – humorous, shamanic, rock-oriented, transformative fiction.

Omar Perez
With an Afterword by the translator, Kristin Dykstra

In 2002, while temporarily living in Europe (mostly Amsterdam), the poet Omar Pérez began writing in a notebook. His journey began as a short professional visit that shifted into something less defined after he fell in love. Eventually the notebook became Cubanology, a book of days reflecting on three years of life at a remove from the island: “A memory of a flight, a journey, jour.” Along with registering common and uncommon vicissitudes of everyday life, the result presents a fusion of languages. Simultaneously national and polycultural, Cubanology streams poetic thought and experience, excerpts from other writings in progress, and the coalescence of a new islandic consciousness – scenes reminiscent of many-minded Odysseus, if home were heart. Visual material appearing throughout Cubanology blends Pérez’s sketches with photographs from that period, as well as art he made after returning to his family home on Havana’s iconic Malécon.

Fall 2018

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Welcoming as the guenmai soup whose making recurs throughout this journal, Cubanology carries the flavors of zen intensives, languages, and housecleaning; Greek retsina and Dutch beer; murmured conversations with books, friends, strangers, cultures, countries, and conditions. Omar Pérez is equally home-leaver and home-maker wherever he travels. Language is his pillow; zazen his backpack; music and imagination’s freedoms his left and right shoes.”

—Jane Hirshfield

​”I’m quite taken by Cubanology, a book of the quotidian that rises to the universal. In morning we have zazen, in the afternoon we have language(s) and poetry, then later there is guenmai for 70 people (recipe included: carrots, onions, turnips, celery) but usually just for three or four or one. Are we in Amsterdam, or Athens, Munich? Yes. It is Cubanology, after all, and “He proposied realviciousization,/seated at the deskritorio” is the way poems are written when you are Omar Pérez. Part Pound, part Bolaño, add a Brechtian play, mix in some Hart Crane, spiced with Marianne Moore, Larry Eigner and Paul Hoover (Paul Hoover!), this is a global 24 hours that stretches time to eternity, consolidates place, and with a polyglot sensibility that seems bent on unifying all languages. Reading Cubanology is more like meditating than reading. Which is to say the ritual of the day. Which stays with you, and is tomorrow, the eternal day.”

—Bob Holman

“Omar Pérez’s Cubanology is a Book of Days for the new century, a clear-eyed account of his travels in Europe, in the form of journal entries, essays, poems, translations, and meditations dating from 2002-2005. “To one seeking the truth,” he writes, “I offer only this: don’t waste any time.” Hence he schools his readers in the art of making and measuring time according to the precepts of his Buddhist faith, the practice of which provides the scaffolding for this fascinating journey, which suggests that even if, as he writes, “travel intoxicates,” it also reveals the heart and soul of one of the most important artists of our time.”

—Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood

Namkhai Norbu

The Cycle Of Day And Night by Namkhai Norbu is a practical guide to a fundamental practice of the Dzogchen system of Tibetan Buddhism, presented in a clear and direct manner, written by an acknowledged contemporary master of this ancient tradition. Central to Dzogchen, the “Great Perfection”, is contemplation–the immediate experience of the primordial state of the individual, the unconditioned nature of the mind. This nature of the mind transcends the specific contents of mind, the incessant flow of thoughts reflecting our social, cultural, and psychological conditioning. Based on the teaching by Garab Dorje, the first human master of the Dzogchen lineage, The Cycle Of Day And Night gives a translation of the author’s Tibetan Text, together with a commentary drawn from the author’s extensive oral explanations. Actual methods are given for entering into contemplation and integrating it with our activities during the 24 hour cycle of day and night.

Elizabeth Cunningham

Always an imaginative writer, as The Return of the Goddess (1992) and The Wild Mother (1993) attest, in Daughter of the Shining Isles, Cunningham now mixes Celtic mythology with the emergent feminist tradition of the Magdalen to create a powerful, spiritually charged visionary novel. Daughter of the Shining Isles gives us a Mary Magdalen for our times: Maeve, a feisty Celt, raised by warrior witches to a life of heroism. When she arrives on a magical Druid island, she meets her cosmic twin (J)Esus of Nazareth. Together they become embroiled in an adventure of passion, betrayal, and human sacrifice. Sure to stir controversy, it brings fresh insight into the lost years of the young man called Esus, and the vital young woman who was his equal. Profoundly moving and often outrageously funny, Cunningham’s new novel is storytelling of the highest caliber. Maeve is sure to claim her place among the great literary heroines of our age.

Heide Hatry
The art of the human image arose millennia ago as a way beyond impermanence and, especially, to keep the dead among us. The pictorial object “the icon” often carried a charge as ritual or ceremonial artifact and, indeed, as a thing with a certain power. The artist Heide Hatry has extended this tradition by creating realistic portraits made out of the actual ashes of the departed person portrayed. Are the results reminiscent of ancient sacred and secular traditions and their complex, even mysterious function to, say, calm, enrich or transform our experience? Icons in Ash includes seventeen of Hatry’s portraits and twenty-seven contemporary writers who explore this phenomenon in original and engaging meditations on death, the dead body, art, relics, psychology, philosophy, religion, mourning, evolution, transformation, and immortality. Contributors include, among others, Hans Belting, Mark Dery, Eleanor Heartney, Siri Hustvedt, Jonas Mekas, Rick Moody, Mark Pachter, Steven Pinker, Wolf Singer, Luisa Valenzuela, and Peter Weibel.

“For the deer and the grasses I have written this book, so that we may again be At One with them.” Thus writes Tamarack Song, in this extraordinary, practical guide to native lifeways- the essential wisdom connecting all native peoples. The book speaks to readers of every background who seek a connection with their essential self- that person, deep within each of us “who dances to the Drum around the ritual Fire, who knows healing lore from times when plants spoke, who yearns for the peace and Blessings of walking again in the Balance of Our Earth.” In clear but evocative language, the author shares his unique message: that the lifeways of all Native peoples are essentially one, sharing not just the same ceremonies and life transitions, but the same spirit and reverence for life; and that all of us, regardless of ethnic background or religious upbringing, are essentially Native people. The book begins by demonstrating how native lifeways- the ways of the Guardian Warrior, the caretaking of children, the reverence for elders (“Keepers of the Ancestral Voice”)- are intrinsic to the human experience. Drawing on a series of native traditions, from fasting and feasting- to dreams and the receiving of visions, the book shows the reader how to bring to life intuitive, sensory, and spiritual powers long-hidden.

Kundalini and the Art of Being is the soulful memoir of a young man’s profound experience of unanticipated kundalini awakening. It details both the events leading up to his life-changing spiritual experience, and how he learned to cope with its bewildering and multi-dimensional aftereffects. Part spiritual adventure story, part wandering travelogue, Morris relates both his inner and outer struggles and adventures as he criss-crosses the western United States traveling to Rainbow Gatherings and music festivals, backpacking alone in the wilderness, and visiting assorted communal settings. Unknowingly, he follows the path of Chris McCandless, subject of the book Into the Wild, as he hitchhikes the same stretch of highway through Canada and Alaska taken by McCandless just a few months earlier to a different fate. Documenting the challenges faced by many young people in today’s world, this book is both a gripping adventure tale, and a wise and genuine account of one such person’s process of spiritual awakening and discovery.

As we confront the challenges of climate change, author James George calls us to wake up and stop our careless treatment of our planet before it’s too late. At the same time, he shares his own practice towards waking up – the practice of Presence, known to all spiritual paths, and simply and eloquently presented in this book.

From The Little Green Book…

“To become aware of the omnipresence of Consciousness may be the next great leap in human evolution and the foundation of the new paradigm in which both science and spirituality can find common ground. For consciousness is the field that connects – not separates – everything with everything, at all levels, and everything with the All, in one Wholeness.”

Advance Praise:

“The ecological revolution needed for a sustainable society will involve our technologies and institutions, of course, but it must also involve a radical shift in our relationship with ourselves, with each other, with other species and with the planet as a whole, in short a revolution of consciousness. This book is highly recommended.” – Ravi Ravindra, author of Science and Spirit

“What is needed above all, James George writes, is a radical awakening of our consciousness, a transformation of what we have mistakenly called human nature. This book eloquently cries out to the world for a radical blending of environmental sensibility and spiritual insight. – Jacob Needleman, author of The American Soul

“The Honorable James George has put into his thoughtful and timely book a lifetime of wisdom and helpful insights as to what human beings can and must do in the face of the plundering and polluting of the planet by our species.” – Dr. Brent Blackwelder, President, Friends of the Earth

Satya Barti Franklin

In 1972, Franklin left for what was intended to be a three-week visit to India. Instead, it was the beginning of her intimate involvement with the Bhagwan Rajneesh, one of the most infamous spiritual teachers of recent decades. In this extraordinary and passionate memoir, Franklin provides an insider’s view of the manipulation, sexual exploitation, and internecine struggles, as well as the more publicized joys and ecstasies, that characterized one of the most talked-about religious experiments of the 20th century.

Starting with the pretext that the only constant in human development is change, this unique theory of the cycles of individual growth and creative evolution integrates the psycho-therapeutic and the spiritual to map six phases of change: Dream, Creation, Communication, Inspiration, Solidification, and Achievement. This book is a manual for self-understanding with great potential for use in therapy. It allows readers to identify themselves by psychological type and then progress to the next phase of their own development.

“One of the most original contributions to the theory of personality.” – Alexander Lowen, MD, author of Bioenergetics

“To know how to enter into the mystery of the rhythm of change is to cooperate with the transformative. Here, in terms of our age, change is richly and beautifully explored through a whole range of human endeavor.” – Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, Professor, Temple University

Patton Boyle

This visionary narrative, reminiscent of Robert Bach’s Illusions, follows the spiritual initiation of a white Christian into the Native American tradition and reveals a deeper Christian impulse that is consistent with Native American wisdom. Set in the western United States on an unnamed Indian reservation, the novel describes the seeker, a White Man who has come to the home of Native American medicine man, Flying Eagle. Through Flying Eagle’s teachings on a variety of subjects, the protagonist awakens to a new understanding of self, the nature of truth, and the role of a warrior for truth. With reverberations of Carlos Castaneda, Screaming Hawk becomes not just a novel of traditional and Native American religion, but also a compelling spiritual journey for its readers.

Patton Boyle

In this sequel to Screaming Hawk, Flying Eagle, the gruff and prankish medicine man, conducts his Christian student, Screaming Hawk, along the “Principle Paths of Divine Circumstance: The Paths of the Greatest Good, the Inner Journey, Silence, Humor, Illumination, and Indifference.” Together they discover the need to laugh at themselves as Flying Eagle turns out to be a rather fallible mentor who must learn lessons as poignant and incisive as the lessons that he teaches.

David Meltzer, Editor

The book is a re-issue of a long out of print collection of Jewish Kabbalistic writings from Hellenistic times through the seventeenth century. Since its publication in the ‘70s much scholarly and popular writing has whetted the appetite for authentic Kabbalistic texts, but few have been forthcoming. In addition to well-known works such as The Sephir Yetzirah, the anthology includes texts by Moses Cordovero, Isaac Luria, and Chaim Vital, Luria’s well-known disciple. David Meltzer’s anthology was gathered for and by important poets of the “San Francisco Renaissance:” Meltzer himself, Robert Duncan, Diane DiPrima, Jack Hirschman et al—for whom the Kabbalistic tradition has been an abiding inspiration. It is an important document of the period.

Bradford Keeney

Bradford Keeney’s extraordinary odyssey began in 1963, when, as a respected professor, psychotherapist, and author, he found himself suddenly visited, without the influence of hallucinogenic drugs or shamanic teachings, by remarkable visions of “shamanic realities” that called him to some of the most remote areas of the world. Shepherded on his journey by the spirit of the Oglala Sioux medicine man Black Elk (whose time of death was virtually the same as Keeney’s birth), Keeney was initiated into the healing practices of tribal peoples in North and South America, of Christians in the African-American sanctified church, of songomas, sanusis, and healers throughout Africa (among them the bushmen of the Kalahari and the Zulu of Southern Africa), and finally one of the only living masters of a pre-Buddhist healing art in Japan. Illuminated with the author’s own photographs of his life among the shamans, and blessed by elder healers throughout the world (who passed along not only their sacred knowledge but their spirit guides as well), Keeney’s story gives voice to the mind, heart, and soul of shamanic healing.

Vusumazulu Credo Mutwa

OUT OF PRINT

These words and images provide a contemplative and affirming counterpart to recent images of tragedy and heroism in New York. With rich and textured photographs that complement and interact with the timeless verse, the author of Indian Summer brings a new and unexpected vision to both New York City and the Tao Te Ching.

Jay Bremyer

This is the true story of several young people in the 1960s who encounter a remarkable teacher of the occult in the menacing world of rural Georgia. The teacher, an elfish woman named Elsie, turns chance events into mystical symbols through poetic speeches that keep the group awe-struck while giving object-lessons (including alchemical cooking!) in the teachings. Includes an epilogue recounting characters’ lives since the 60s.

Mary Elizabeth Thunder

Abandoned by her mother when she was three years old, Mary Elizabeth Thunder survived abuse, a broken marriage, and a heart attack to become one of the most highly esteemed leaders in the Native American movement -healer, visionary, teacher, and chosen successor in a native tradition. Her story is also the true tale of a remarkable elder, Grandma Grace Spotted Eagle, who adopted her and guided her to spiritual awakening as a messenger. At once harrowing and uplifting, this memoir takes us from her early life and experiences with the legendary elders Chief Leonard Crow Dog, Wallace Black Elk, and Rolling Thunder, through a near-death experience that utterly transformed her, to nine remarkable years spent traveling America by van, culminating in her inclusion in the Sun Dance, one of the world’s oldest and most venerable initiation ceremonies. Intimate, painfully honest, essentially and overwhelmingly spiritual, this is a book about a woman’s quest for meaning amid two cultures and a compelling account of the visionary underpinnings of Native American life.

Tenzin Wangyal

This book is a presentation of Dzogchen as taught in the Bon tradition. Dzogchen has began to be familiar to Westerners parincipally through the teachings of Nyingmapa school. In WONDERS OF THE NATURAL MIND, the author presents the Dzogchne teachings based on the Zhang Shung NyanGyud, the fundamental Bon text. The test gives an epitome of the main points of Dzogchen, its relation to the various systems of Bon teachings, and the authoer’s personal relfections on the practive of Dzogchen in the West.