This picture is potential…
I have finally started my next book. The road ahead will be slow and arduous. My vision is to elaborate on themes introduced in Waking and connect them to larger questions that we all share. My aim, however, it to explore these more philosophical issues with a very intimate and accessible voice.
Below is a very short intro (less that 2 pages) that could very well introduce AfterWaking. After reading it, my question is: Would You Wanna turn the page?
Of course it’s coming. It’s always coming, that is the way of things.
The October sunlight travels through the yellowing leaves, illuminating their translucent flesh while outlining their subtle veins. The gentle wind challenges their connection to the branch and sometimes makes the leaves flutter slowly to the ground. Everything keeps changing.
I am starting a book right here, right now. The sunlight, in combination with the leaves, is beautiful and the moment is right. I can almost see the sun’s luminous shape but the leaves shield me from hurting my eyes. This is necessary for the journey ahead: Exposure and protection at the same time.
This book will be about living and dying simultaneously while inhabiting a body. I do not apologize for this. In fact, I want you to know. I want you to know and read on anyway. I no longer want us to avoid the truth. I am ready if you are, but gentle is how we’ll go.
I am approaching my forty-eighth birthday. My life is coming together and coming apart at the same time. Isn’t everybody’s?
I have been studying the mind-body relationship for nearly thirty-five years. For the first twelve, I did not know it. I was simply a boy surviving a devastating car accident. At age thirteen, our family car tumbled down an embankment and killed my father and sister and left only minor visible injuries in my mother and brother. I, on the other hand, sustained unrelenting physical injuries, including permanent paralysis from the chest down.
So began my unwitting journey within the mind-body relationship. At twenty-five, I was in graduate school studying philosophy and the mind-body problem in particular. I withdrew and started studying yoga in 1991. This began my real study of minds and bodies. I have been practicing and teaching ever since.
Each of us gets only one, distinct life. This life has a beginning that predates our memory and an unforeseeable end that is impossible to truly imagine. Instead, we live in the middle, without direct connection to either. This is the ground upon which we stand. This is what we share…everyone, without exception. This is the point of my departure.
I propose investigating all sorts of things: living and dying, energy and sensation, loss and transcendence, faith and religion, innocence and hope, but all through the lens of the mind-body relationship. I propose using story and reflection to appreciate the experience of human consciousness while living within the fabric of a wondrous existence. The leaves and the sunlight at the same time.