SPIRIT MATTERS

Subtitled 'Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul', this bold book is a challenge to embody and apply our fundamental spiritual values within a world system that elicits the opposite qualities and is based on self-interest, greed, fear, dominance, control and exploitation: the logic of self-interest. Can we expect such a system to address and honour our fundamental needs? Or to provide us with an ecologically sustainable habitat? Lerner's answer is a resounding no! His message can be boiled down to a transition from a perception of the self as separate and individualized to one where we recognize the unity of being and our inherent interconnectedness: the central truth is this: we are embodiments of the Spirit of the universe and have the freedom and consciousness to make significant choices. The pace of change will depend in large part on the choices you and I and others make in the coming years and on how soon we are ready to act together toward achieving the kind of spiritual world described here' (p.330).

The book ranges widely over spiritual, social, legal, medical and ecological issues, with a central section on education which we shall come to below. Lerner defines Spirit in a number of ways: freedom, the ultimate shaper of matter, the source of consciousness, meaning and being, a force of love for healing and transformation. We are fundamentally that, so we can intuitively recognize the description (even while writing this review in Stansted airport after missing the plane!). The globalisation of Spirit rather than capital is our essential hope, and the means towards this is what Lerner calls Emancipatory Spirituality. This is contrasted with reactionary (fundamentalist) spirituality and represents a new bottom line of love and caring. Emancipatory Spirituality is defined in a number of ways: as a celebration of the wonder of the universe, as a capacity to see each other as ends, as a desire for healing and transformation, as a transcendence of the ego and corresponding experience of the Oneness of all Being, as an enhancement of our capacity to play and to experience joy and pleasure, as the encouragement of a feeling of love towards others, and as a seeking to redefine concepts like rationality, productivity and compassion. Although Emancipatory Spirituality can in some respects align itself with reactionary spirituality in resisting the ethos of selfishness and materialism, it must transcend its narrow interests and exclusive schemes of salvation.

These insights are applied to work, medicine and the law – pleading for restorative justice - before we reach a pivotal chapter on education: 'if your goal is to create a human being who is loving, capable of showing deep caring for others, alive to the spiritual and ethical dimensions of being, ecologically sensitive, intellectually alive, self-determining, and creative, there are ways of restructuring education to foster this kind of person'. (p.234) Lerner goes on to spell this out with a new vision for education that starts from being, proceeding to various kinds of knowing and thence to doing. This includes education for tolerance, diversity and citizenship. In addition, teachers would be chosen for their ability to be creative role models.

This leads on naturally to politics – 'spiritual practice and the socially engaged soul'. Here the emphasis is on attitudes and corresponding practices – giving, hospitality, letting go of control, grateful simplicity, building compassionate community, keeping the Sabbath. He then translates these principles into an agenda for a spiritual political party, one that would represent the Cultural Creatives identified in Paul Ray's research (see review of his book in the last issue). One way of implementing these ideas would be through a Social Responsibility Amendment based on ethical impact reports. These would shift the balance of power away from our current system of 'one dollar one vote' and give companies a new bottom line (beyond even the currently fashionable triple bottom line). Is this vision and programme possible? Lerner answers emphatically in the affirmative but so must we, if we 'act on our highest vision even when it doesn't seem realistic'. As Bernard Shaw so rightly said: 'Reasonable men adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable men try to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable men'. If you don't have time to read this book, then try www.spiritmatters.net more detail.