Inside-Out Thinking

ANGELS IN MY HAIR

Lorna Byrne's first interview has appeared today in Publishing News. I hear that Roger Tagholm, the journalist who conducted the interview, has become the butt of jokes for doing it, but he's entirely right that Lorna's story seems incredible - until you meet her. I think nearly everyone becomes convinced then. She really does communicate with disembodied intelligences ALL THE TIME.

I think that there are perhaps only a few individuals constitutes like her - Mother Meera might be another one (I'm trusting to their people's accounts) - alive on the planet at any one time.

Lorna met several American editors recently and at the end had both Dan Brown's editor and Rhonda The Secret) Byrne's editor were competing to publish her. All my instincts as a publisher are telling me she's going to be the Next Big Thing. It may take a little time to run back the tide of mockery, hostility and scepticism, it may be that she will make some churchmen uncomfortable and fearful of losing control, but, you know,it will happen.

Makes me smile when I remember Lorna's 'country mouse' demeanor when i first saw her and to think now that she has all of New York publishing at her feet! I smile, too, when i think of the extraordinary series of coincidences that led to that meeting.

I've read a lot of mystical literature over the years. Some of it has been vivid accounts of - usually fleeting - mystical experiences, for instance Boehme, Dee or Teresa of Avila.  Some of it has been more theological or theosophical - abstract, perhaps academic accounts making sense of the different orders of dismobdied intelligences, for instance Dionysius the Areopgagite or Aquinas. What is entirely new - to me at least - in Lorna's writings is the way she combines these two things. As you read her story, you gradually learn to experience, as she did, all the different orders of spiritual beings - to get a living sense of the entire 'spiritual ecology' of the cosmos.

I'm immensely flattered that she recogonised in my book the history of the cosmos she experiences.

Angels in my Hair will be published on 6th May. I recommmend you read it with all my heart.

The Death of John Wheeler

Since writing the Secret History I've realized how many scientists want to distance themselves from the militant secularism of Dawkins etc.

John Wheeler, who died a few days ago, was one the greatest scientists of our age. He helped devise the atom bomb, working with Oppenheim and Teller, and coined 'wormholes' and 'black holes'.

He wanted parapsychology expelled from the American Association for the Advancement of Science..

and yet and yet and yet he also argued for the 'anthropic principle' in cosmology - the idea that the universe has adapted itself to make human life, human intelligence possible. Allied with this, he also argued that the laws of physics have been evolving with human participation!

This is far wilder and weirder and wilder in its implications than any parapsychology department's experiments in remote viewing, for example. John Wheeler was asking himself the biggest questions we can ask, and if you do that and follow through, you end up with ideas that are not only contradictory to common sense, they call into question the very principles that underly the scientific materialism that is today's dominant world-view. You come face to face with humanity's primordial belief in mind-before-matter, the universal  experience of a meant and meaningful cosmos.

He also worked with the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr. I end my book with a quote from Bohr, to the effect that the opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement, but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Wheeler said of him, 'You can talk about people like Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Confucius, but the thing that convinced me that such people exist were conversations with Niels Bohr.'

Bodhisattvas are great teachers, superhuman in that they are not incarnations of human spirits but of the great controlling spirits of the universe. Very likely that in our own age a Bodhisattva would work as a scientist.

Bedfellows for Dawkins

Is it possible to think of a better image of the drive by militant secularists to eradicate spirituality from the face of the planet than China's oppression of Tibet?

Independent Thinking

I'm at at an author web day, organized by the Independent Alliance of publishers.

Just had an interestin' conversation with Ben from Fabers.

I think we maybe both believe publishing is going to change much more rapidly and radically than some of the other authors and publishers here.

If music and films can be grabbed from the web for free, then why not e-books?  ( Dunno why I've gone to italics - not because i think what I'm saying is so fascinating..) No reason at all.

Contrary to what our bosses are telling us, territories are going to be impossible protect. The part of British publishing which is about distributing big American authors, for example.

So... we'll focus on our own creativity more, and try to make sure we get world rights.

And the sensibility is changing from a supermarket sensibility to an internet one. i believe that in a year's time, publishers will be asking themselves 'is this an internet author?' in the same way that now we ask ourselves 'Is this a supermarket author?'

Yesterday I had lunch with Frank Skinner in my role as his editor. He asked me if I think that all authors are mad? I wanted to say that I think that being a celebrity tends to make you mad. That being a celebrity infantilzes you. That our celebrity-obsessed culture makes us all a little mad to some degree.

One of the things that makes being a celebrity very unhealthy these days is the new form of consciousness that is evolving with the web. We don't nurture our own private mental space the way we used to - we share the the same mental space. Someone like Frank who puts himself out there is very open to attack.  People think they have a right to him and that he has no right to privacy.

To some extent even just writing a blog puts any of us at risk, and adds to the danger that any self-generated sense of self is eroded and replaced by a sense of self derived from others.

Frank sense of self seems very self-generated, though - and I wonder if it comes from his catholicism?