Unity & Oneness

The challenges we face can be difficult to even think about. Cbook-active-hope.jpglimate change, pandemic uncertainty, extreme inequality, economic upheaval, and mass extinction together create a planetary emergency of overwhelming proportions. Active Hope shows us how to strengthen our capacity to face this crisis so that we can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power. Drawing on decades of teaching an empowerment approach know as the Work that Reconnects, the authors guide us through a transformational process informed by mythic journeys, modern psychology, spirituality, and holistic science. This process equips us with tools to face the mess we’re in and play our role in the collective transition, or Great Turning, to a life-sustaining

Ishmael is a half ton silverback gorilla. He is a student of life, freedom, and the human condition. He is also a teacher. He teaches that which all humans need to learn — must learn — if our species, and the rest of life on Earth as we know it, is to survive. The book opens with a deceptively ordinary personals ad: “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world.” Seeking a direction for his life, a young man answers the ad and is startled to find that the teacher is a lowland gorilla named Ishmael, a creature uniquely placed to vision anew the human story. Ishmael’s paradigm of history is startlingly different from the one wired into our cultural consciousness. For Ishmael, our agricultural revolution was not a technological event but a moral one, a rebellion against an ethical structure inherent in the community of life since its foundation four billion years ago. Having escaped the restraints of this ethical structure, humankind made itself a global tyrant, wielding deadly force over all other species while lacking the wisdom to make its tyranny a beneficial one or even a sustainable one. That tyranny is now hurtling us toward a planetary disaster of pollution and overpopulation. If we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to work our way back to some fundamental truths: that we weren’t born a menace to the world and that no irresistible fate compels us to go on being a menace to the

In undertaking a spiritual life, we must make certain that our path is conbook-a-path-with-heart.jpgnected with our heart. Since 1974 (long before it gained popularity in the 1990s), Jack has been teaching westerners how to integrate Eastern teaching into their daily lives. Through generous storytelling and unmitigated warmth, Jack offers this guidebook on living with attentiveness, meditation, and full-tilt compassion. Part of what makes this book so accessible is Jack’s use of everyday metaphors to describe the elusive lessons of spiritual transformation. For example, he opens with “the one seat” lesson taught to him by his esteemed teacher. Literally it means sitting in the center of a room and not being swayed or moved by all the people and dramas happening around you. On a spiritual level it means sticking “with one practice and teacher among all of the possibilities,” he writes; “inwardly it means having the determination to stick with that practice through whatever difficulties and doubts arise until you have come to true clarity and understanding.” The same could be said for this “one book.” Among all the spiritual self-help books, this is a classic worth sticking with and returning to–a highly approachable teacher that can only lead to greater clarity and understanding. – Gail