July 2017 Book Club

   July 12, 2017
   John Michael Greer
   126 Comments

   As mentioned last month, this week's post  is the first of a monthly series
   of open-discussion  posts focusing  on books I've  written. Our  theme this
   time is Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, Chapter One: An Ecology of
   Spirit.  I'd like  to  ask readers  to keep  their  questions and  comments
   focused on that  chapter and the ideas it contains;  we'll have another Ask
   Me Anything post later this month, and of course a substantive monthly post
   and another Stormwatch links-and-discussion post in due time.

   For the sake of clarity, here's a rough outline of Chapter One:

   1 - There exists a traditional body  of lore, dating back to ancient times,
   which deals with the deepest mysteries of human existence and the practical
   methods of  gaining personal  experience of those  mysteries. This  is what
   we're discussing when we talk about the mystery teachings.

   2 -  These teachings have been  passed on for  a very long time  by mystery
   schools, which  provide education, practical training,  and initiation into
   the mystery teachings.  These aren't the sort of thing  you get in romantic
   fantasies about Himalayan  adepts or, for that matter,  Hogwarts School; in
   our time, they're relatively quiet organizations that operate on shoestring
   budgets, so as to avoid the predictable downsides of wealth and influence.

   3 - Presentations  of the mystery teachings  vary from time to  time due to
   changes in culture. Just now, it's  useful to reframe the mystery teachings
   using  the language  of  ecology.  Partly this  is  because  ecology is  so
   important  for  understanding  the  predicament of  our  time,  but  partly
   it's because  ecology, like  the mystery  teachings themselves,  deals with
   whole  systems,  and whole  systems  are  what  shape  the context  of  our
   lives-mystically as well as ecologically.

   4 - Public  presentations of the mystery teachings  typically get distorted
   over time as  the normal human reactions  of greed and fear get  to work on
   them.  The notion  that  "you  create your  own  reality,"  which has  been
   marketed in  recent decades as  a mystery teaching,  is an example  of this
   distortion;  so is  the claim  that  the universe  is  set up  to give  you
   whatever material goodies you want, so  long as you pester the universe for
   them in the right way.

   5 - A  reframing of the mystery  teachings in the language of  ecology is a
   good antidote to these distortions, because it's relatively easy to see how
   things happen in the  world of nature, and apply those  to human nature and
   to our own lives. That's what this book attempts to do.

   Questions? Comments?  Discussions? Have  at it-subject,  of course,  to the
   usual rules.