A Reflection on my Novels and What They Reveal

I’m editing the final book in my series of philosophical fiction, set in Egypt in 1934 and 1935. As I’ve said here many times, the stories simply came to me as a mental movie, playing in my mind’s eye and ear for five years, with all the dialogue and details already there. The story chose me to tell it. It was out of the blue. My job was just to write what I was seeing and hearing.

And yet, somehow, mysteriously, the books are all about me. I hope they’re also all about you. But I just came to realize that they’re about my deepest hopes and dreams and values and aspirations. They’re about my fears and joys and uncertainties and suspicions. They’re about weakness and strength, wisdom and virtue, friendship and animosity, uncertainty and hope, life and death.

The stories are all quite particular, but the lessons are universal.

And I’m bringing these tales into the world very differently from the vast majority of my books. Instead of contracting as I have for my nonfiction books with a Doubleday or Penguin to publish many tens of thousands of copies and place them into bookstores nationwide, announcing them in big circulation newspapers and magazines, as well as on radio and television, I created my own imprint, found the right people to help in this endeavor of love, and have published them in the new format of print on demand for paperback and hardcover, with the two basic ebook formats also available. That has allowed for something I’ve never been able to do before.

First, I have total control of what goes into print, including the great cover art done by my daughter. And there is something else. After the prologue to the series, The Oasis Within, was available for about the first six months, I realized I wanted to re-edit it. And I was able to, right then. I didn’t have to wait years, until 20,000 or 50,000 copies of the original edition had sold and that many people had bought less than the best I could do. I could make the improvements right away. And the same thing happened with The Golden Palace. Less than a year into its life, it got a new paragraph on the first page, and dozens of small changes throughout that enhanced it immensely. I had never been able to do that with a book before. And as readers have written me about their experience with these novels, their insights have helped me in editing subsequent books. There has been a feedback loop I’ve never had before. And it’s made the books better. This should be a universal experience for writers and readers.

The one problem is that I don’t have a national promotion and marketing machine behind these books. So they have to find their readers on their own. And they are, but very slowly. My workout partner told me today that he just finished The Mysterious Village and really loved it. I was so glad to hear and told him that he’s probably the fourth person to get that far in the series! I was exaggerating a little. But just a little. It will have been worth the seven years of work so far, and the rest of the eight years I anticipate, for them to have a few great readers whose lives are enhanced and maybe even transformed by the stories. And of course, it would be even more gratifying to see even more people enjoying and using the books for the renaissance of understanding about wisdom and virtue, life and death, that they can potentially provide. They’re about success and failure, struggle and victory, defeat and persistence, and the power of committed partnerships along the way. They’re about leadership and love, and staying on your path even when it’s hard, and giving others what they need as you also discover your own deepest needs and gifts. The stories are about so much. And they reveal so much.

In all my philosophy, business, and life nonfiction books, I tell stories from my own experience. You get to know my kids, my wife, as well as friends and neighbors and both the silly things and the deeper things that I’ve encountered along the way. And in the novels, there are no stories about my life. Yet, somehow, they’re the most autobiographical of anything I’ve ever done, the most deeply revealing, and if I had written nothing else ever, I would want to leave them for my kids, and grandkids, and anyone who might be interested in the experience of a philosopher meandering from the mid twentieth century into these first days of the twenty-first, and trying to get his bearings for making the world a slightly better place with the ancient wisdom that’s exactly what we need now.

For the series, go to www.TheOasisWithin.com.

Resurrection

I just realized on this Easter Weekend that I’ve been writing about resurrection for seven years without realizing I was doing so.

Our word comes from Latin roots, from a verb that meant to rise again or arise anew. Since February of 2011, I’ve been writing and editing a story about a boy and his friends in a reimagined Egypt in 1934 and 1935. As the story played out like a vivid movie in my spirit, I gradually learned that the story is about the power of the mind, the depth of the human spirit, the strength of love, the nature of true friendship, the vital importance of wisdom in everything we do, and the many contours of goodness. It's also about the special abilities we all have available to us that we too rarely experience. What I didn’t realize was that perhaps resurrection is the main thread around which all the others are woven.

Can a boy rise anew from the life of an ordinary child in a small village to serve his kingdom as a prince? Can a nation rise from the ashes of turmoil and great political damage to a new and better life? But finally, and most importantly, is a moral and spiritual resurrection possible within the confines of this life or beyond for a individual whose journey has been corrupted by decades of wrong choices and motivations?

As a Christian, I celebrate a unique resurrection this weekend. But as the best theologians of my tradition have long pointed out, the myth of resurrection has long been present in the human spirit, across cultures, and throughout history. The distinctive Christian claim is that at one particular place and time, and in a distinct individual from another small village, the myth was finally embodied and made real at a new level, for the benefit of us all.

The idea reverberates through all of life. In the world of vegetation, there is death and then revival. In our careers in the world, we’re sometimes like the fantastical Phoenix, who goes down in flames and rises afresh from the ashes. We want to believe in radical and positive transformation. But is it really possible? I think it is. And that’s an implication of the message of Easter, when a tragic death brings new and transformed life. I see now that I’ve been writing about it without realizing I was doing so for the past seven years—its possibility and hope and reality.

My Easter wish is that we all experience that possibility and hope and reality anew in this special season and throughout the days to come.

Sapiens: Human Reality and Fiction

I just heard a fascinating TED talk, due to the recommendation of a friend. The young Israeli historian Yuval Harari gives a short and fascinating account of how human beings, of all creatures, rose to rule the world. The talk is reportedly a shortened version of his book Sapiens, which I have not yet read. The book is widely praised as not only historically astute but also deeply philosophical. I’m no historian, so I can’t judge that. I think his talk showed some interesting psychological and anthropological insight, but that it also displayed some overly simplistic and sloppy philosophy. We need to be able to disentangle the two.

Harari claims that we’re able to do two things that other species can’t manage. We can organize ourselves to work together (1) flexibly, and (2) on a large scale. Ant and bees can organize on a large scale, but their behavior seems determined, and not flexible in any robust sense. They don’t ever decide to displace the Queen and substitute a democratic form of governance, for example. They do what they’ve always done. Other species, like chimpanzees, can do things together flexibly, but not on a large scale. Harari gives the example of filling a large stadium with 100,000 people who come together in an orderly way to watch an event, as juxtaposed to what chaos would result with 100,000 chimpanzees in the same space.

He then claims that we are able to do both these things because of the power of the imagination. He says we imagine a God and a heaven with rewards after death for good behavior during life, and get a lot of people to believe this imaginative conception, and thereby bring about large scale order and cooperation. He calls any such story an imaginative fiction that brings people together. In his talk, he contrasts realities like a banana or a coconut or a mountain with what he calls the fictions that allow us to live in a distinctively human way. Another big example is what he calls the fiction of money. We are told that a dollar bill or a hundred dollar bill has value, and we all accept this fiction, and that’s what allows modern economies to work. We also buy into another fiction that people have rights, natural human rights, and that’s what allows modern democracies to work. But, Harari vividly and imaginatively suggests, cut open a human body and you’ll find a brain and a heart and lungs, but no human rights. Rights are a fiction, he says. But when enough of us accept the story, we can organize and do things we couldn’t otherwise have done. Chimps don’t buy into fictions. They deal with realities. But that severely constrains their possibilities.

Many others have talked about “the social construction of reality.” The great sociologist Peter Berger was the first I ever read on this topic, in his book of the same name. We do spin out stories, simple or elaborate narratives to make sense of the world and our lives, and when we come to believe them, that helps us live and work together in new ways. But why call these stories fictions? Harari’s examples seem to indicate that he accepts as realities only things that are manifest to the five physical senses, like human body parts, bananas, and mountains. But what of the postulated entities of physics that account for the manifest realities around us? What of the realities discerned by animals with senses other than ours? What of such things as love and friendship? Add up the manifest physical attributes of two people. Where is the friendship? Does it not exist? Is it a mere fiction? Why should our physical senses be in such a simplistic way the sole arbiters of reality? This isn’t science, at all, or even a sophisticated scientism, but what’s more widely known as a crude empiricism that we have no good reason to think is other than itself a fiction.

Does the imagination only invent? Or does it sometimes discover? Often, the advance of science and technology consists in someone, or many people, imagining something and then subsequently finding it to be true, or to be feasible because of what is now discovered to be true. The imagination in such cases seems to be as much an apparatus of discovery as of invention. It builds stories, yes, and in that sense, it fabricates. But are all its fabrications fictions? Of course not. The idea of a fiction, or a concocted falsehood that many people are somehow made to believe isn’t at all necessary or crucial for the story Harari is telling. Some of the imaginative narratives we tell bring us together to create conventions of usage, as in the case of money, and other stories may limn realities invisible to the crude senses on which we otherwise depend. Harari gives us no evidence or argument to the contrary. He merely asserts. But what might make us suppose that's ever been a reliable path of discovery, or a good sign of truth?

When we do think flexibly and on a large scale, we discover logic and the many dynamics of evidence assessment related to truth. And we come to see that assumptions like those Harari makes are more than merely questionable. They’re simply indefensible. Unless you want to think like a chimp.

For the book that Mark Zuckerberg loves and is recommending to everyone, and that I hope to read soon, click: http://amzn.to/2ur8xDR

Self Examination

In a talk I gave this week to the 160 top executives in a great company, I began with some drawings I had done of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle And William of Ockham. I mentioned what I think of as their greatest gifts to us, gifts we would use in our hour together.

Socrates called us to self examination and self knowledge. He even went as far as to claim that "The unexamined life is not worth living." He taught me that we should examine our beliefs, assumptions, values, emotions, and attitudes on a regular basis, and relentlessly.

Plato clearly expressed the difference between appearance and reality, and pointed out that most of us live our lives in bondage to illusions that constrain us and hold us back, distorting what we're able to know and do in this world.

Aristotle called us to dig deep in order to rise high, and base our lives on the virtues, or strengths, that we can ideally bring to any challenging situation, the chief of which is courage.

Ockham helped us to understand the importance of simplicity. In any complex situation, however complicated, there is a simple core. If we can grasp that essence, we can deal more properly with all the other issues.

For the first time in a talk, I suggested that we could all heed these pieces of advice in an interesting way. We should at some point take some time and do a personal inventory of the general beliefs and assumptions we have about life and work that we may never have examined before and that just might be among those illusions that Plato suggested affect us all. What have I been assuming or taking for granted? Is it really true? Or is it a mere illusion I need to shake free of? This sort of self examination, testing appearances and pursuing realities, will require a dose of Aristotelian courage and may bring us to some simple truths that might be liberating.

It's worth pondering.

Dinner with Jeb Bush

I had chicken. He had a baked sweet potato with kale or something else equally exciting.

So. Yeah. I was having dinner with Jeb Bush the other night, along with a few friends, and was explaining to him that I'm not at a university any more, but for 22 years have been an independent philosopher. He said, "Wait. People PAY you for that?" I should have said, "Not enough." But I just said, "Yeah, for a long time now." He couldn't quite wrap his mind around it, even though he's often said to be the bright son in the family. He had to ask again: "Let me get clear on this. You can make a living by just being a philosopher?" Yeah. I know. It's strange. But, hey, so far: Mission Accomplished.

And yet, like Socrates, I'd do it even if nobody ever paid me a penny. I'd surely have to do something else in addition, as many philosophers of the past did. Even Socrates had bills to pay. You need a new toga now and then. Or a tunic. But the vital issues of our lives, the ultimate questions of this life and beyond, are just that important to me. And it's also important for me to share the answers I get with anyone who will listen. For the first two years that I unexpectedly became a public speaker to business and civic groups, like Ralph Waldo Emerson about a century and a half ago, I spoke without any charge. It was fun. And meaningful. I just wanted to do some good. And Notre Dame was paying the bills. Barely. But then the fun activity turned into a thriving business and allowed me to move back to my home state near family and live at the coast, like Epictetus when he himself was freed from the grind. Full time pondering at the beach. It's hard to beat.

And I really appreciate you all who read these little postings, now and then, where I often just put up small ideas that have occurred to me as I sit at my computer. I can't always be out giving talks across the country. I love to be at home. And posting like this gives me a chance to still interact during the day, even when I'm mostly writing or editing a book. So thanks for reading and commenting. I think this way of doing philosophy would make more sense to Jeb, because no money whatsoever is exchanged over it. Just like politics, right? Cheers!

Resurrection: The Insight of Easter.

Resurrection. It's about radical transformation and new life. It's about disaster and even death as the doorways for redemption. It's about apparent failure and ultimate success. It's about vivid appearances and unsuspected realities. It's about having these treasures in earthen vessels.

The original disciples, our predecessors and paradigms of faith, abandon the one in whom they had hoped, and give up their aims in despondency—they flee the path and the project, in a failure of both understanding and courage, and thereby provide an example for all of us unfaithful, weak, panicked souls that we need not be shamed by our lack of sturdy steadfastness, but rather inspired that strength can come of weakness, that honor can come of humility, and that the plan for all things is a massive, wonderful turnaround.

In the darkest of times, the light still shines. Happy Easter.

Exuberant Spontaneity And Its Limits

There’s apparently a new book and documentary out on the lives of news reporter Anderson Cooper and his ninety-two year-old mother, the famous Gloria Vanderbilt. And in connection with all this, the New York Times just ran an article about the two of them in Sunday’s paper. 

At one point in the article, Anderson says about his mother:

“She has this enduring optimism and this sense that the next great love or the next great adventure is just around the corner, and she’s about to embark on it.”

What a wonderful thing, I thought to myself.

The writer of the piece later quotes Gloria making a relevant remark, and comments after it:

“The phone can ring, and your life can change in a blink,” she said, emphasizing that last word and concurring with her son’s assessment of her nature.

We rightly value spontaneity and optimism, and even an enduring exuberance about life. These can be wonderful things. But, as Aristotle once cautioned us, for every human strength that we can identify, for every virtue, there are two corresponding vices—the extreme of too little, and an equally problematic extreme of too much.

In response to need, for example, generosity can be a great virtue. In such a situation, the “too little” would be miserliness or a disinclination to open up and provide help to someone who genuinely needs it. The extreme of “too much” would be perhaps an over-the-top magnanimity that's simply out of control, a tendency to take care of others so lavishly as to endanger one’s own resources, or even health.

Likewise, in the face of danger, courage is a virtue. Cowardice is one opposite. But there is also a “too much” of crazy carelessness, or rash foolhardiness. The key to living well is to find the virtue and avoid the vices.

Optimism is good. And the sort of spontaneous exuberance displayed by Vanderbilt can be a wonderful thing. But there can also be, not just a “too little,” but also perhaps a “too much.”

Toward the end of the Times piece, we’re told this about the exuberant mother’s son:

Mr. Cooper’s own nature is signified by a profound wariness and a strong belief that disaster is always around the corner. He sees himself not just as a realist, but as a catastrophist. “I always wanted there to be a plan,” he said. “And with my mother, there wasn’t one.”

Apparently, Anderson's mother was always super excited that “the phone can ring and your life can change in a blink.” And he became equally worried and anxious about the same thing, but going the opposite way. Can an attitude of exuberance, an openness to spontaneity, and an enduring optimism be taken too far? Can they even come to damage people close to us?

I ask this as a person who admires exuberance, feels it often, and always tries to take the path of optimism myself. But does Aristotle have for us a cautionary note we should take in?

Perhaps spontaneity and exuberance, in order to be the good things they can be, must be understood and embodied in the right way, balanced between the potential excesses that they not only allow but, in one direction, even invite. Then, the free spirit doesn't so much endanger or worry those around her or him who may in response develop their own distinctive attitudes about the next time the phone might ring.

The Empty Tomb and Plato's Cave

Today I came across a vivid Easter Sunday representation of the Empty Tomb of Jesus, as described in the Gospels. In this depiction, as viewers, we’re inside the tomb and can see that it’s essentially underground and dark, and yet an attractive bright light draws our attention beyond the now open door. Right away some thoughts came to me.

The Christian diagnosis of the human condition turns on a Greek word, hamartia, that’s most often translated as “sin” but that in the original language meant “falling short” or “missing the mark,” as in the case of an arrow shot toward a bullseye failing to make it to the target, falling short, and thus missing the mark.

The Christian claim is that we all naturally fall short of our proper ideal. We fall short of what we’re shooting for as human beings who deep down want a good, meaningful, successful, fulfilling and loving life that makes its best potential impact on the world. We’re all somehow metaphorically buried in a tomb of mistakes and illusions, and the gospel claim is that there is one who has escaped that tomb, leaving it empty, and has invited us all out of it as well, while actually also empowering us to leave it and move into the light that awaits us.

Plato had this image of a cave. He suggested that we’re all like men chained in an underground cave, watching shadows dance across its wall and mistaking those shadows as realities. We fear them or we desire them. We want to chase them or run from them. They monopolize our attention and define our lives. But they aren’t the realities among which we’re meant to live.

The philosopher, Plato tells us, is the person who breaks his chains and leaves the cave, ascending into the light of the true sun outside, to see the realities within which we’re ideally meant to live. But then, this philosopher descends back into the cave to spread the word to the other captives that they, too, can escape these illusions and the darkness that envelopes their lives. The light awaits them all.

The tomb from which Jesus escaped can be viewed as symbolically representing that same cave, where we're cut off from the true light and life that we’re meant to have. The Easter message is that the one who left that tomb empty invites us all to leave the realm of illusion and get out where we can hit the intended mark, following him into the light.

It's a Wonderful, Spooky Life

It’s a wonderful life, and good-spooky, sometimes.

If you’ve been reading my blog recently at TomVMorris.com, you know I’m super excited about the publication of the new books, The Oasis Within and The Golden Palace. Almost every day, I get some nice affirmation that I’ve spent the past five years well, in writing the big series on Egypt that these books together launch. If you're a regular reader, you’ll also know that all this came to me as an inner vision, a movie playing in my head—something that I had never experienced before. An older physician friend asked me the other day, “Did it ever feel scary?” 

I had to smile. I said, “No. It was sort of spooky in its radical difference from anything I'd ever experienced before, but it all came to me with a tonality of goodness and benevolence, and a sense of joy.” Sometimes I think that life has more strange and cool stuff waiting for us than we ever might imagine.

Today, a shiny new black sedan was waiting for me outside my hotel in Philadelphia. I had just spoken to a group of CEOs and CFOs in The Lincoln Financial Field, where the Eagles play football. The driver took my bags and I slid into the comfortable backseat. I asked him how his morning had been so far. And his accent was interesting, sounding a little like some friends who are from northern India. So I said, “Is your accent Indian?”

He said, “No. Egyptian.” I instantly had one of those little spooky moments where you sort of can’t believe what you just heard. 

I said, “I’ve spent the past five years of my life writing a series of novels about Egypt, set in 1934 and 1935.”

He said, “My father was born in 1932.” Ok then. I had hit the jackpot here. So I told him the whole story, the movie in my head, and the feeling that I shouldn’t do any research on Egypt but just write what came to me. But I explained that I had also Googled stuff after writing it, just to see if there was any connection between my mental movie and reality, and that I was amazed at how much stuff had checked out to be true, even though I knew that my stories were about a re-imagined Egypt. I then told him that my main character is a boy named Walid.

He said, “That’s my name.”

“What?” 

“My name is Walid.”

I said, “That’s amazing.” The man pulled out his wallet and handed me his beautiful business card. Walid Omar. I was curious. “Could you pronounce your name really clearly for me?”

“WaLEED,” he said.

“Wow. That’s great. That’s exactly the way the people in my mental movie say the name. And my wife has been dubious. She’s thought I’m surely mispronouncing it, because a lady I know from Morocco had said it differently, as ‘WA-Lid.”

“No. It’s WaLEED. It’s spelled W-a-l-i-d but pronounced WaLEED.”

“Thank you so much for confirming what I heard in my movie.”

“You’re welcome.”

We continued to talk. He’s from Alexandria. And one of the books to be published will feature some events in that ancient city. I almost never carry my own books with me, but on this trip, I had a copy of The Oasis Within inside my computer bag. I was planning to re-read it on the flight home. But at that moment, I was overcome with a very strong conviction that I was supposed to give it to my driver, Walid. So I did. A book about Walid for my new friend Walid.

It’s a wonderful, spooky world in which we live, and a wonderfully spooky life we can have when we open up and step out and talk to people about things that mean something to us—and then listen.

May your day and week and upcoming month be wonderfully spooky, as well.

A Sunday Reflection on Religion and Faith

I've been away from blogging for a couple of months. I first took a break in honor of the holidays. And then I got busy editing my new series of novels for a quicker than normal schedule of publication. I hope you've already seen the prologue to the series, the book The Oasis Within. It's been out for a few months. And just this week, the first numbered volume in the series Walid and the Mysteries of Phi, The Golden Palace, appeared on Amazon. In two or three months, I hope to have volume two out as well, The Stone of Giza. 

I'm almost done in my editing of the eight books I've already written for the series. And today, Sunday, I want to share a passage I just edited. Even though the books are set mainly in Egypt, certain things happen in faraway places, like Tunisia, or Berlin, or New York City. This passage comes from a story line in numbered Book Seven, The Ancient Scroll. The setting is New York City in 1935 at a Methodist Church. The minister, Bob Archdale, is working on a sermon. We get a chance to see into his head and heart as he makes notes. I hope you enjoy this passage.

Bob at the moment was in his office preparing his sermon for the next morning. He was planning to talk on the nature of faith and how it’s more about perception and values and commitment than just belief. He had decided to use as his biblical text the famous meeting at night between Jesus and the Jewish Rabbinical leader Nicodemus, as reported in the Gospel of John, chapter three. At a time when most of the religious establishment either disliked or feared Jesus, this prominent teacher had gone to see him at night, when, presumably his visit would not be public knowledge. He approached the controversial figure and actually said, “Teacher, some of us know that you were sent by God, because no one could do the things you do without divine support.” And then Jesus, rather than acknowledging the scholar’s rare open-minded reasoning and remarkable belief, says something instead that can be very puzzling on more than one level. His words in response were: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus is of course perplexed and says, “How can anyone return to the womb and be born a second time?” And then Jesus answers in such a way as to indicate that his entire ministry and mission aren’t primarily about reasoning and belief, but personal transformation into what’s really a new life, with new perceptions, values, and commitments.

Bob knew that, at almost any time, many of the people in his church were showing up, week-to-week, to make a deal with God. They would believe whatever they needed to believe, and do whatever they needed to do, in order to gain divine favor and everlasting life. Some were likely just hedging their bets and maybe living out the famous Agnostic’s Prayer: “Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul, if there is a soul.” They were there in an effort to perhaps improve their lot and maybe defeat death. But God wanted them there to defeat spiritual blindness and deafness and idolatry and selfishness. He wanted to see them born anew, raised from the death of alienation and separation and selfishness to a new life of union with him and each other. He wanted an eternal life for them now, which was more about quality than it was about quantity. 

He really wanted to get this point across to everyone who showed up for the service. The faith they were being called to embrace is about new life, new values, and new commitments lived all day, every day. He wanted them to understand that when the insistent felt needs of the untutored ego can be released, its real needs can be met. And then, we can experience the genuine power of humility, compassion, and deep faith. The reverend was hoping to get all this across in a persuasive and illuminating way, so that at least many of the members of his congregation could perhaps see the issues of faith in a new and richer light.

When people approach religion for what they can get out of it, they ironically make it nearly impossible to get the most out of it. It becomes a tool—an instrument the ego is merely using to enhance its own interests, whether those interests are healthy or not. That’s why we’ve had so much war and violence and oppression in the name of religion throughout history. These things have nothing to do with true spirituality, but are perversions or deformations of what faith and the quest of the spirit are supposed to be all about. We often come across people pursuing their own greed, with their own ambitions, and superstitiously seeking to assuage their worst fears under a false patina of religious language, ritual, and sentiment. And this wasn’t just a danger for other times and places, Archdale knew, but it’s a temptation for any of us unless we can come to a true understanding of spiritual things.