Unity & Oneness

The Seat of the Soul> became a national bestseller when it was first publbook-seat-of-the-soul.jpgished, but more people are buying it now than ever before. Why is this? It is because a new species is being born. >The Seat of the Soul> is about this birth. This new species longs for harmony, cooperation, sharing, and reverence for Life. It uses higher orders of logic and justice — those of the heart. The number of people who are becoming aware of this birth is growing very fast, because the new species is being born inside all of us. The Seat of the Soul> provides a vocabulary for this new species — a vocabulary of authentic power, the alignment of the personality with the soul. Human experience is exploding beyond the five senses, and >The Seat of the Soul> is about that, too. This is the most exciting time to be on Earth, and >The Seat of the Soul> describes

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

Inspiring hope, solace, and courage in living through our losses, author Mbook-the-smell-of-rain.jpgartín Prechtel, trained in the Tzutujil Maya shamanic tradition, shares profound insights on the relationship between grief and praise in our culture–how the inability that many of us have to grieve and weep properly for the dead is deeply linked with the inability to give praise for living. In modern society, grief is something that we usually experience in private, alone, and without the support of a community. Yet, as Prechtel says, Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it

Anger serves as a bodyguard for our personal pain and suffering. When book-love-and-rage.jpgrecognized and handled with attention, love, and compassion, it can be a powerful mobilizing factor in our solidarity and commitment to enacting social change. However, too many activist communities have an ill-informed, immature, and romanticized relationship to it. What is needed, says Owens, is a relationship to the heartbreak of anger that is embodied, nondestructive, and deeply healing for all. Here he offers personal insights, stories from others, as well as Buddhist teachings and meditations for tapping into anger’s liberating