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Reflections on Literary Spirituality
Why I Wrote The Seeker Academy
as a Realistic Novel
By L. D. Gussin
This is part one of a three-part introduction to The Seeker Academy; completed, it will have the title “Three Prefaces In Search of a Liberal Counterculture.” Part two will be called “A Preface for Social Liberals”; part three, “A Preface for Spiritual Seekers.” In The Seeker Academy, L. D. Gussin uses fiction to explore the often-maligned New Age Movement and its inherent tensions and rewards.
The Western spiritual-based counterculture called variously new age, holistic, human potential (its first name), east-west, integral and mind-body-spirit took direct inspiration from major Western literary figures. Yet, during most of its fifty-year history, literary critics have dismissed it as a subject—even while, as a maker of meaning, the movement reaches many more people than do literary works. Typically, a noted literary release has an audience in the tens of thousands; a noted new age release has an audience ten times larger. Among corporate publishers, literary and new age divisions at most share production facilities. Neither is interested in the other.
In fact, though, Henry Miller and Aldous Huxley, mid-century writers who hated modern life and tried, amid tyranny, slaughter, science, and business, to see beyond it, were the first guiding lights of this movement. Each withdrew from the mass culture fray—Miller to seek imaginative space, Huxley to seek social utopia. Both found their way to Esalen, the first of these retreats—as did some of the beat (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac) and hippie writers whom they influenced.
The modernist motifs of alienation, disgust, anxiety and fear are what matter here. Daily life was rife with these reactions. Most writers displayed them in their work—while some, like Huxley and Miller, sought also to change how they perceived life and lived. This activism followed a romantic line going back to Blake, Byron, Thoreau. . . . How, they all wondered, might people challenge Western materialism and scientific rationalism?
Huxley, for one, coming from a great scientific family, and having been at school with T. S. Eliot and E. R. Dodds and known E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury and traveled in Mexico with D. H. Lawrence, made considered artistic choices. He wrote philosophical novels in which (as in Mann’s The Magic Mountain) characters discussed their social and philosophical worlds. When he chose to explore non-ordinary (think Dionysian) states and Eastern ideas, and embed what he had learned in a utopian novel, it was not from being badly educated or naive. As for Miller, his great subject was human passion. This led him to a California wilderness (near where Esalen was just then rising up) and a quest for a personal freedom.
A broad brush literary criticism could say that since 1960 the literary culture has further fortified the modernist wall of anxiety and fear. A postmodern movement from irony to relativistic scorn, a narrowing of focus to what the Greeks called private life, and a parallel widening of focus into fantasy and sci-fi, all reflect how human society, the literary novel’s first subject, has seemed to move beyond interpretation. Daily life appears to mostly lack philosophical underpinnings, while the often unnerving fruits of science (brought to market by an army of MBAs, in service to an economy we all depend on) abound. Stoicism in its many varieties rules.
Returning to the human potential (a phrase Huxley coined) movement, we find that during its half-century emergence it has had little interest in Western secular literature (secular meaning in the world and so, while potentially spiritual, not shaped entirely by a religious orientation). While through the 1960s Kerouac and related writers piped people out of middle class lives, such people, finding the spiritual counterculture, came to Western psychology, mysticism and theory, and to a mélange of Eastern and aboriginal religious teachings—but not to secular fiction, drama or poetry. Hungry, even desperate for meaning and relief, the seekers barely tolerated conflict or irony, let alone scorn; and, with James Joyce, they or many of them saw history as a nightmare from which they were trying to awaken.
As a result, the movement today—which counts many people wholly involved and many millions with an ankle in the stream—is barely influenced by secular art. New age bookstores usually only carry art anchored in spirituality, religion, and the occult. And surrounding this art are the many nonfiction books that hold up similar mirrors to life. As individual identity with its reason and its relationships is at the heart of secular art, we see what is being lost.
We see this also in the guru-figure present in this movement—and in the needs of many seekers to go from one guru (or teaching) to another and another. Whatever practices, wisdom, or clarity the gurus bring, a master-seeker framework frequently turns them into untethered, often domineering priests. And the seekers themselves begin to look less and less like the citizens and moral agents that democratic secularism hopes that they will be.
In return, secular art ignores this movement, except to satirize it. It discounts the large, enthusiastic following, almost as if, despite the narrowing of its own lens, it felt it had a more truthful, engaging story to tell. This begins to bring to mind the vanishing, stoical Romans laughing at the early Christians. Nor is today’s secular art of much apparent use to counterculture forces that care most about political change. A member’s manual for The Network of Spiritual Progressives, an outgrowth of Tikkun Magazine, has a reading list for study groups that are pursuing a spiritualized politics. All sixty recommended books are nonfiction—there is no fiction, poetry, or drama. Yet a similar study group of a century ago would surely have been reading Dickens, Tolstoy, Ibsen, etc.
The movement as I have seen it asks important questions and takes important chances, but often gets lost when it tries to bind its many dreams to its responsibilities. This, I think, is because one needs to use secular tools, secular art in particular, to find out what some of one’s responsibilities are. Thus, in The Seeker Academy I sent a hero who had never truly tasted new age fare to a retreat for three weeks. In that brief period, she would, within the limits of literary realism, either learn to hate the place, or begin to follow a particular teaching, or taste some things offered and—as a hero figure—come to also better know who she had been when she arrived.
The novelists I sought to emulate: E. M. Forster, for pacing and moral suspense; Aldous Huxley, for telling a philosophical tale; F. Scott Fitzgerald, for the tempered use of lyricism.
Copyright © 2007 by L. D. Gussin. All Rights Reserved.
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