What an impact George had! Lead guitarist of the greatest rock and roll band of all time, he was a ‘musical innovator’ in the words of Eric Clapton, someone who could always find the perfect note and tone. One of the sweetest scenes in the film shows the mature George watching a clip of The Beatles performing This Boy and singing along as you and I might. His glee and his shining eyes show the sheer happiness their music gave him. Certainly, as a teenager in northern England in the mid Sixties, not far from Liverpool, I knew every note of his guitar solos, and that music really helped me get through a dark and dreary adolescence.

Then George played a prominent role in turning the world’s attention to the mystical traditions of India. Long after The Beatles’ legendary trip to Rishikesh to visit the Maharishi’s ashram and practice transcendental meditation, George retained his love of Eastern spirituality. Ravi Shankar remained his close friend and spiritual advisor, and the Indian notion that music more than any other mode of expression has the capacity to take the listener closer to the Divine, inspired George for the remainder of his life.

For the millions for whom traditional religion had become largely meaningless, he made mysticism cool and hip. He opened the door to a deeper path, one that was authentic and devoid of churchly cant. Not bad for a rock and roll star!

When he produced and starred in The Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Gardens he created the first ever rock benefit. In embracing the sitar and the musical traditions of India, he was a pioneer in world music. He also financed Monty Python’s irreverent Life of Brian. Without him, that comic masterpiece would never have been made – the film establishment was far too terrified of its edgy humor.

It’s also clear from Scorsese’s exquisite documentary that George had the gift of friendship. Anyone who has seen Concert for George, the film of the show performed in his memory at the Royal Albert Hall one year to the day after his death, knows that he lived in the hearts of numerous gifted musicians. Their warmth and affection for him stream from the music and shine out from their radiant faces as they play his songs.

Less well known may that he had a serious temper and he loved women in a way that strained both his marriages. But then he was a fiery and strong being beneath the veneer of the so-called Quiet Beatle. There’s a moving moment in the early footage from Hamburg, where The Beatles played the Reeperbahn, the notorious red light district, that even at seventeen George had an inner composure and calm that was so helpful to a distraught John Lennon when the band’s first bassist Stu Sutcliff died unexpectedly.

For me, George was always a soul companion. I remember being in high school and seeing a picture of him with a moustache. A rock star with facial hair? It was unprecedented. As soon as I saw him, I knew I’d found a look that would work for me. When all around me in industrial Northern England all I saw were mills, factories, smoke and grim lives, his music injected vitality, hope and sexiness. On my first trip down Route 66 at Christmas 1970, My Sweet Lord was the soundtrack from the car radio as my consciousness expanded with the vast landscapes of the South West. When I left graduate school to follow a very lonely mystical path on the West Coast, the picture of a gnome-like George in his garden from the great album All Things Must Pass hung on the back of my bedroom door, giving me strength, reminding me why I had chosen this journey, validating the reality of spiritual experience.

His songs have cropped up, often totally out of the blue, as aids at crucial moments throughout my life. Even today the serene and transcendent track Mahwah Blues from his posthumous album opens and closes the radio show I host in New York City.

Go and see Living in the Material World if you possibly can. I emerged last night from its three and a half hours with my heart glowing. It’s a film filled with unending moments of joy and delight. There is also sadness and shocking detail of the gruesome personal attack at his home Friar Park. But above all there is so much upbeat, foot tapping, soulful, deep, ecstatic music that you come away yearning for more, and more.

George was a culture hero of the first order, a working class guy from damp and difficult origins who helped turn those who could hear toward the spiritual light. His music had that infectious beat, great beauty and irresistible charm, but it also had truth and soul. Even in the midst of the riotous realm of rock, he reminded us that All Things Must Pass, even George himself.

When he did pass from this material world a decade ago now, he left a gorgeous legacy. Martin Scorsese’s outstanding film is a worthy tribute to a powerfully gifted artist who cared little for the trappings of fame. George’s humor and wisdom  continue to touch our hearts and give our spirits a lift each time one of his songs wafts from an open window or a car radio. Beneath the scruffy Liverpool Teddy Boy in leather jacket and drainpipe jeans with the cheeky grin and the Elvis hair, beat the heart of a great soul. Thank you George, for everything you gave. Your life and your music were magnificent.

For the film’s official web site see:

http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/george-harrison-living-in-the-material-world/index.html

“Bill Gates‘d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” SJ

Among the countless words written about the passing of Steve Jobs, it sometimes escapes our notice how completely different his values seem to have been from the materialistic norms enshrined in most business schools.

As he made clear from the outset, the key to his worldview lay in the West Coast Seventies counter culture that has been so deeply influential, despite mainstream efforts to dismiss it as a time of stoned hippy excess. During his brief academic experience at Reed College in Oregon, it was a calligraphy class that first awakened his feeling for design and developed his sense of beauty. He made no secret of the fact that taking LSD was one of the two or three most significant experiences of his life. As a young man, he journeyed to India to find Ram Dass’s guru, Neem Karoli Baba, only to find that the spiritual teacher had died before he could get there. Nevertheless, he returned wearing beads and embracing Buddhism.

Steve was throughout his life a huge fan of The Beatles and Bob Dylan. One of his major sources of inspiration was the San Francisco Bay Area’s Whole Earth Catalogue, an endlessly inventive holistic and ecological compendium edited by Stewart Brand. Jobs described it as a kind of paper pre-Google. When it ran its final edition, the back cover left this parting message, ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish,’ words he found inspirational.

Jobs chose to be married in Yosemite by a Zen Buddhist priest. His wife founded a natural foods company and, by all accounts, his family ate simply and organically. His home was modest and his clothes unpretentious. In his famous commencement address at Stanford Business School, he encouraged the graduates to live their own lives, not someone else’s; to trust their heart and intuition; to listen to their inner voice, not follow dogma.

And it seems clear from remarks by his Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, that his goal was to empower people through technology, to make computers available to everyone, to do good in the world, to make our lives more creative and enjoyable. Yes, he was a hard driving business person, his demeanor was sometimes irascible, he was a compulsive perfectionist who didn’t hesitate to criticize colleagues if they didn’t match his standards. He was clearly not a saint.

But he does represent a new paradigm in the world of business and technology. In an era when the ubiquitous presence of computers carries the threat of dehumanizing us, making us slaves to the machine, he devoted himself to finding a way for human beings to use technology for enhanced creativity. In the Apple ethos, computers are designed as vehicles for self-expression and enjoyment. In essence, Jobs gave technology soul when it could have easily have made us increasingly soulless. What a huge contribution!

At the end of his life, the doctor at his bedside was Dean Ornish, a well known integrative health advocate. The fact apparently is that Steve lived as long or longer than anyone ever diagnosed with his form of cancer. Those who saw him during the final days described him as suffering pain, but with his humor vibrantly intact.

Many commentators have remarked that few people affect society as powerfully as he did. When his biography is published, I suspect we will learn that his vision of changing the planet for the better first came to him in his youthful counter-culture days of spiritual searching and experimentation with consciousness. Perhaps we can say that he took some of the psychedelic experience and made a taste of it real for millions through tools that seemed to come out of the future. He followed his own heart and vision, he never compromised, and now for future generations he will represent the strong, free spirit who shapes the world from his inner essence instead of being shaped by it.

Steve Jobs was a holistic pioneer, authentic, honest and direct, a questing person with the rare capacity to unite art and technology, poetry and science. On a personal level, he inspired great loyalty in those who worked with him and knew him as a friend. And let’s not forget that he emerged from a vibrant Californian counter culture that carried the seeds of a new, more life-enhancing worldview. He aimed to stay true to its ideas until the end, and in doing so he changed the world.

But for me the highlight was the session with the novelists Amitav Ghosh and Nuruddin Farah. I sat blinking with joy at these two deeply gifted men as they spoke humorously, unpretentiously and very entertainingly about their art. I felt privileged to be in the presence of two of the finest writers on the planet.  A friend of mine whose wife is Indian had turned me on to Ghosh’s novel, Sea of Poppies, this summer. It’s a multi-leveled tale of the 19^th Century opium trade developed by the British East India Company, They grew poppies along the banks of the Ganges, cooked it into opium in vast factories, and shipped it at great profit to the Chinese, all the while motivated by an absurd conviction that they were bringing the glories of Free Trade and Evangelical Christianity to the heathens. It’s an absorbing tale of imperial hypocrisy, but also of the lives of the Bengali villagers in the poppy fields, the Lascar seamen, Indian aristocrats, and a young, black American sailor who stumbles into this riveting world.

Apart from the inventiveness and relevance of the story, what impresses is Ghosh’s multicultural sophistication – the way he is able to enter the psyches of characters from so many different cultures. Writers like Ghosh and Farah are truly artists of the 21^st Century with a deep knowledge of so many languages, countries and cultures in a way far beyond any writer I know exclusively based in the English speaking world. Farah first read Dostoyevsky in Arabic, and speaks nine languages. Ghosh reads in multiple Indian languages, studied in Egypt, picked up a Ph.D. at Oxford, and now divides his time between Brooklyn and Goa. Their capacity for imaginative empathy is inspiring and necessary.

Both of them also possess warmth, openness and humor, and worldviews enriched by deep familiarity with phenomena like African shamanism and Indian spirituality. It’s a long way from the thin, dark worldviews of so many contemporary British writers, and the anxiety filled musings of American counterparts. It was a tribute to the multicultural ambience of Brooklyn itself that writers like this, plus helpful and expansive panels on topics like The New India and The Arab Spring, were featured along side sessions with American writers like the redoubtable and prolific Larry McMurtry (who I was surprised and happy to see in the new film Magic Bus about Ken Kesey and the psychedelic Merry Pranksters. He said in response to a question of mine that he was a lifelong friend of Kesey whom he had known since they were classmates at Stanford).

So I strongly encourage anyone in New York next September to go this festival – www.brooklynbookfestival.org. It was founded by Johnny Temple, a former punk rocker and publisher of Akashic Books, and has been going now for six years. Only one of my Manhattan friends had even heard of it, even though it has become one of the largest book festivals in America and is gunning to be the coolest, hippest and most exciting of them all. Brooklyn has, surprisingly, turned into the literary capital of America without many people noticing. Its literary roots extend as far back as Walt Whitman and now, with the unrivalled cultural and ethnic diversity that characterize Brooklyn and Queens, it’s poised to change the shape, intensity and relevance of book fairs of the future. Highly recommended.

Perhaps in the return of the Happiness to a central place in our consideration of the purpose of life and society we have finally found a word or concept big and relevant enough to speak to everyone. It just doesn’t work with enough people to talk about personal or spiritual growth replacing economic growth as the true focus for human development. This language is too narrow. But Happiness is a theme big enough for us all to feel engaged.

We have the philosophers of The Enlightenment to thank for their interest in the greatest happiness of the greatest number and, of course, who can forget Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of the Rights of Americans to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? But we have to go all the way back to Aristotle for the first clear statement in the West that the goal of human life is happiness or eudaimonia, something he felt could be achieved by the balanced practice of the virtues such as courage, wisdom, justice and reverence.

It’s increasingly clear that Aristotle was on to something really important here and the rise of the new science of happiness, the social psychology and neuroscience of joy, seems to be confirming his wisdom. And it’s a good thing too. Philosophers are supposed to offer us wisdom and it’s increasingly obvious that the wise men of antiquity thought long and clearly about these most important questions.

I’ll be returning to this theme of the Rise of Happiness over the coming months but for now I want to recommend a few books that have brought the topic into clear focus for me.

The Geography of Bliss by Eric Wiener is an amusing and enlightening account of one grump’s search for happiness all round the planet. He starts off at the World Database of Happiness in Rotterdam containing 40 years of research on everything known about Happiness, including which countries are the most and least happy. His quest is in danger of concluding prematurely half a block away in a haze of smoke at the Alpha Blondie CoffeeShop, but he gamely soldiers on to Bhutan and Iceland (some of the most cheerful places) and even manages a research trip to Moldova, sadly bringing up the rear on the happiness charts. This book evokes distant places, introduces the reader to the whole recent literature on happiness, and it’s also laugh out loud funny. Strongly recommended.

Reverence: Rediscovering a Forgotten Virtue by Paul Woodruff is a book that Eric Weiner turned me on to, and is a delight. Scholars of Happiness have learned a truth long known to esoteric thinkers like Rudolf Steiner that the practice of reverence or veneration, whether toward worthy people and scenes of natural beauty, or simply toward truth and knowledge, opens the doors of perception to higher things and better feelings. It was the foundation of culture and the heart of wisdom in Ancient Greece. The leader who forgot it fell victim to hubris and its attendant calamities. The modern world has forgotten this truth, with serious costs all around us.

Six years ago I organized a conference entitled Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right in New York City. It was just after George W. Bush’s ‘re-election’ and a lot of people were deeply concerned about his intention to use his ‘political capital’ to further the aims of fundamentalist Christians. The event sold out at CUNY Graduate School with over 500 attendees, and was made into a television show.

This was the first major conference to take a serious look at Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism and, to my knowledge, it remains the only one. (I plan to post the conference brochure soon and a DVD is also available). What it told us is that a certain element of the religious right truly believes that godly Christians are mandated by the Lord to take control of the political direction of the United States. Their objective is to purify and reform the country along conservative religious lines, and many of them believe that The Book of Revelation constitutes a geopolitical road map of the world today, especially the Middle East.

I bring this up because we must all wonder where the extraordinary level of conviction comes from that enabled the Tea Party Republicans to hold the American and world economy hostage in the recent Debt Ceiling debate. I’m not saying that all Tea Partiers subscribe to the writing of R.J. Rushdoony, the founding father of Christian Reconstructionism. But we do see strong echoes of his reach in the economic thinking of Gary North, his former son in law, who has apparently long held the influential view that there is little to worry about if the US were to default and lose its credit standing and trust. What’s more important to his admirers is that government is cut back, and that a Christian agenda comes to dominate political discourse.

In my article on Sarah Palin’s beliefs that appeared in Huffington Post (see the Writings section) I addressed the failure of the media to take seriously the rise of ‘prayer warriors,’ the belief that conservative Christians are engaged in ‘spiritual warfare,’ and that those who stand in their way, including of course Obama, are in the service of regressive spiritual powers and must be stopped at all costs. Here the interests of big corporations and the religious right come together very conveniently, an alliance first fully developed by W. Bush and highly active again in the recent debt ceiling debacle, at great cost to the unemployed and hopes for a desperately needed green infrastructure.

For a fuller discussion of Dominionism and Reconstructionism I refer you to www.talk2action.org , a site run by Fred Clarkson who spoke at our conference and is one of the few people to keep track of these political/religious influences. If we want to understand what we’re dealing with on the American Right these days, we need to know about this material. Thank God for the work of Jeff Sharlet, another conference speaker, whose books I heartily recommend – The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, and C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy.

This stuff is serious and most progressives are walking around in a state of more or less total ignorance about it. The secular left is simply too dismissive of anything spiritual to grasp its power. The debt ceiling crisis and the Tea Party’s disturbing influence should be all we need to wake up and take a deeper look at the extreme theology underlying so much determined opposition to a more ecological and prosperous future.

I’ve met some of the people who hold these disturbing metaphysical views and they can be sociable and nice. Let’s not demonize them. They’re entitled to their opinions. But if Americans realized the shocking religious worldview that underlies the current domestic threat to our economy, a phenomenon far beyond the crazed egotism of Ayn Rand, they’d take a much more active interest in bringing to public awareness an impulse that seeks to blur the separation of church and state.

Postscript

For further insight into the Dominionist mindset, check out the website for Texas Governor Rick Perry’s The Response, his recent call for Prayer in America.

Read the FAQs here.

I’m delighted to see Ryan Lizza’s profile of Michele Bachmann in the New Yorker. At last the mainstream media is beginning to grasp that people like Bachman and Palin subscribe to ideas about political Christianity way beyond most people’s imagining. It’s way past time for an awakening about the influence of Dominionism and Reconcructionism on American politics and economics.

Read More.

Here is the brochure for the ground-breaking conference on the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right that I organized some years ago when the influence of Dominionism was on the rise in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s second ‘election.’ It begins with this quote:

“Until progressives come to understand what fundamentalists read, hear, are told and deeply believe, we cannot understand American politics, much less be effective.” Joe Bageant

Most Americans outside the Bible Belt have little idea of the beliefs held by millions of fundamentalist churchgoers. We have an almost total lack of awareness of the rise of Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism, forms of theology that advocate a biblical vision of God’s kingdom on earth. Some fundamentalists also foresee events such as The Rapture, the Times of Tribulation, Armageddon, and the Second Coming of Christ as we enter The End Days.

This conference will give rigorous attention to the worldview of Dominionism, its influence in contemporary political culture, and its agenda for America.”

There’s a DVD from this conference too that was shown on almost 20 TV stations throughout the US. If anyone would like a copy, just get in touch with me.

Thankfully the media are beginning to wake up to what this is all about, and candidates are starting to be questioned about their politico-religious views. But much more  attention needs to be given to a deeply disturbing influence almost invisible to the vast majority of voters.