Interview with John Nelson

The Remembering: A Novel of Karma and Global Peril
John Nelson
Outskirts Press (2006)
ISBN 9781598005424
Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (12/06)

Reader Views welcomes John Nelson, author of the gripping spiritual thriller, “The Remembering: A Novel of Karma and Global Peril.” John is being interviewed by Juanita Watson, Assistant Editor of Reader Views.

Juanita:  Thanks for the opportunity to talk with you today John.  We are excited to hear more about you and your new spiritual thriller, “The Remembering: A Novel of Karma and Global Peril.”  Would you start by telling us what your book is about? 

John:  Hello, Juanita.  My primary goal in writing this book was to tell a good story, one that entertains as it explores humanity’s most pressing issues, including overpopulation, religious fanaticism, genetic engineering, climate change, and the eternal dance of shadow and light in the human soul.

The novel’s protagonist, Shyloh Ravenswood, has experienced six lifetimes — three as a male, three as a female — during epochal moments of history from humanity’s early roots in Paleolithic Africa to classical Greece and its oracular mysteries.  From there Shyloh’s karmic trail leads to renaissance Venice and its fanatical Inquisitors, then on to San Francisco’s psychedelic-drenched Summer of Love.

Still seeking the elusive grail of wisdom, Shyloh ventures into the future and the paradisiacal island of Bali caught in the grip of runaway global warming and rising seas.  Finally, our reluctant hero’s quest comes to a suspenseful climax in the Himalayan summits of Tibet where she masters an esoteric Tantric mystery to prepare for a climatic encounter with humanity’s karmic legacy from dimly remembered ancient times.

Juanita:   John, you have authored two landmark non-fiction books in transpersonal  psychology, “Healing the Split: Integrating Spirit Into Our Understanding of the Mentally Ill,” and “Sacred Sorrows: Embracing and Transforming Depression.”  Why did you decide to write your third book as a spiritual fiction novel?  What inspired this particular story?

John: Well, writing fiction is simply more fun than writing serious non-fiction, and I yearned to explore my love of telling good stories.  But my primary inspiration arose from a growing sense that we humans are on the brink of engineering our own extinction for lack of a grand historical perspective.  And I felt my years as a student of transpersonal psychology, world history, comparative religion, and environmental science led me to a place where I could integrate these fields into a meaningful story that encompasses humanity’s past, present, and future.

Juanita:  Please tell us more about your lead character Shyloh Ravenswood. Why is she on a spiritual quest?

John: Aren’t we all?  I believe that deep within, each of us lives with a longing to seek meaning in life, to understand our place in the cosmos and perhaps the most elusive mystery of all, the nature of consciousness itself.  Shyloh’s quest, which forms the arc of the story, is to answer the old Zen koan, “What did your original face look like before your parents met?”

Juanita:  What other characters are key to the story?

John:  I borrowed an idea once developed by Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle of a karass — a group of people who meet over and over in different incarnations to accomplish a specific mission.  In this case the mission is no less than to rescue humanity from the fruits of its own folly.  As one of the characters is Shyloh’s lover, I found it challenging, and not just a little amusing, to write three love scenes from the viewpoint of a male and three as a female.  My female readers tell me I got it mostly right.

Juanita:   John, do you believe in karma and reincarnation?  What do you think is the purpose of this process, and do you think Shyloh’s seeking is common to all of us?

John:  Karma is no more than the fact that all our actions have consequences, though we may not recognize them from moment to moment.  So I have no trouble affirming that.  However as a scientist and writer who tries to choose his words carefully, I’m careful about saying I “believe” something that’s not readily demonstrable.  What happens after death remains one of life’s great mysteries, and I’m content to leave it as such. 

Juanita:   Your book not only relates to karma on a personal level, but as an issue of humanity as a collective.  Many people may not consider karma in this way.  Would you elaborate?

John:  I believe humanity is gradually awakening to the idea that we’ve become a powerful force within our planet’s ecosystem, and nothing we do as individuals or as a species, is without long-term consequences. 

Modern chaos theory confirms this by the principle of “sensitive-dependence on initial conditions,” which holds that seemingly insignificant changes during early stages of complex systems can escalate into large changes later on.  So a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo may affect the weather in Los Angeles a week later.

In another vein, James Lovelock’s “Gaia Hypothesis” envisions the entire planet and its biosphere as a single organism with internal checks and balances.  Lovelock likens us human beings and other life-forms to “organs” within the whole system, utterly inseparable from it and sharing a common fate.

Juanita:   What do you mean by “The Remembering,” and “The Forgetting”?

John:  The story’s prelude, titled The Forgetting, takes place before Shyloh’s first human birth in Paleolithic Africa.  I envision the process of taking human form as a falling away from a primal unity into a sensory world dominated by forms, instincts, and desires.  It is a kind of forgetting who we really are as conscious beings.  We all long to remember our authentic selves, which Shyloh finally accomplishes in the story’s epilogue six long lifetimes later.  It’s reminiscent of Plato’s idea that we never really learn anything new, only remember what was forgotten. 

Juanita:   Your novel is broken up into six chapters that spotlight significant times and places: Africa, Greece, Italy, San Francisco, Bali, and Tibet.  Why these particular settings, what do each of these different places represent, and how are they brought into the context of the story?

John:  Years ago, my wife Andrea and I caught the globetrotter bug, and we prefer to visit places that represent crucial turning points in human history, as well as being spectacular setting in their own right.  Some readers may recognize that the story’s arc follows the symbolism of the seven chakras from Tantric Yoga.  Each chakra represents an archetypical stage of psycho-spiritual development, both for an individual lifetime and for humanity-at-large.  Shyloh and his or her companions must master the tasks of each stage before they’re ready to pass on to the next.

Briefly, the seven tasks are: survival, discovering selfhood, developing will, opening the heart, achieving wisdom, cultivating intuition, and returning to the unity from which we’ve all come.

Juanita:   What does “an epic quest to master the arts of a gentle warrior” mean?

John:  This is Shyloh’s final task, which requires the wisdom of an “old soul” who has seen beyond the ego’s craven fears and petty desires.  Such a person grasps the unity of all beings, so is free to surrender everything.  Only then can an individual be free to focus the full power of his or her consciousness — spirit if you like — on overcoming all obstacles for a larger purpose.  

Juanita:   John, how do you explore humanity’s most pressing issues, including overpopulation, religious fanaticism, genetic engineering, and climate change, in “The Remembering”?

John: Wow, that’s a big question!  But yes, they are big issues, ones that affect us all and may determine our future on this planet.  Any species whose population exceeds the sustainability limits of its ecosystem inevitably confronts nature’s time-honored methods of restoring balance: war, famine, and plague. 

Climate change is a direct result of overpopulation.  Religious fanaticism is a major impediment to our recognizing our true place among nature’s creatures.  Genetic engineering may be one way to solve the problem.  Or is it?  That’s one of my story’s surprises.

Juanita:   What are your thoughts on the eternal dance of shadow and light in the human soul?

John: We who were raised in Western cultures were taught that good and evil — as symbolically represented by God and Satan — are forever locked in conflict that can never be resolved.  So life becomes an eternal battleground, or at least a testing-ground for judgment day. 

An alternate viewpoint is that good and evil create each other and require each other to sustain their meaning, the way valleys couldn’t exist if their were no mountains, or left without right.  A dance, if you will, between friends, lovers.  We’re all caught up in it, so we might as well relax and enjoy it while it lasts.  A gentle warrior masters this lesson, which is what makes him or her gentle.

Juanita:   John, how important do you feel it is in these times, for individuals to reflect on world history in the context of comparative religion, the bigger picture and our place within it? 

John:  There’s a common saying that those who fail to learn the errors of history are doomed to repeat them.  From humanity’s earliest tribal days, shamans, priests and seers have constructed great myths to address mysteries of creation, death, and suffering, to guide us as we seek to understand our purpose.  As Joseph Campbell pointed out, these myths can be useful, inspiring, fortifying in troubled times.  But they are never to be confused with history or science. 

It seems obvious to me than many of these myths have outlived their relevance to life as it is in modern times and are in desperate need of critical examination and revision.  Perhaps we need better religions.

Juanita:   Do you think you were channeling some of the material in your book?

John:  I’m not sure about that, but sometimes it felt that way.  Many artists, improvisational musicians, and writers characterize themselves as a radio that tunes in to unseen wavelengths.  I’ll put that in the broad category of “might-be-true,” but there are plenty of other reasonable explanations for that experience. 

Juanita:  What are your thoughts on the wave of spiritually oriented books and movies that have been released in the last few years?

John:  I think these books and films represent a longing to discover more culturally relevant, up-to-date pathways to spiritual realization.  For example, let’s take the most popular of these, The DaVinci Code.  It’s certainly not great literature, and the story-line is a recycled version of an old tale — knights-errant on a grail-quest.  What makes the novel so compelling is that Dan Brown recast the central myth of Western culture to include the sacred feminine, which had been all but lost in a culture that’s been fed a steady-diet of patriarchal male sky-gods. 

Juanita:   How do you spotlight the feminine in your book?

John:  Although the main character, Shyloh, is a woman in three lifetimes and a man in three, the character is generally stronger and more effective as a woman.  Sometimes stories tell themselves, and that’s how this one turned out. 

Juanita:  John, what type of research did you do to prepare for writing “The Remembering”?

John: As I said, my psychologist wife Andrea and I love to travel and study the history and customs of our destinations.  When a psychiatrist and psychologist find themselves on the road together, interesting things tend to happen — creative ideas, inspirations of all sorts — though there’s plenty to disagree about too. 

Juanita:  What conclusions have you come to through your 30 years of professional experience as an  integrative psychiatrist, and your knowledge of spiritual practices, history and culture, about the similarities within the human condition?

John:  That we’re all more alike than different.  That when we find ourselves negatively judging other individuals or cultures, it’s a sure sign that we haven’t taken the time to understand them or ourselves.  That anger and fear blind us to love.  That there is a unity underlying all creation, and that we can directly experience that unity in this lifetime. 

Juanita:  John, what are you ultimately trying to convey, or what is the underlying message of your book “The Remembering: A Novel of Karma and Global Peril”?

John:  The book’s central message is that we human beings are not a special case of creation outside of nature and generally impervious to its changes, but an integral part of nature.  In other words, we’re not simply custodians of the natural world, but participants in it.  If we are to survive, we must understand the planet’s vulnerabilities and attend to them as we would for ourselves and our families.

Juanita:   Do you plan on writing any more fiction novels? 

John:  You’ll have to ask my muse, who is notoriously elusive and currently on sabbatical.  I’m sure that when she’s ready, she’ll whisper in my ear again.  But after seven years obsessed with The Remembering, I’m enjoying a little break.

Juanita:   John, thanks for the opportunity to talk with you about your new novel, “The Remembering: A Novel of Karma and Global Peril.” How can readers find out more about you and your endeavors?

John: My website is: www.johnnelsonmd.com.  And Juanita, I want to thank you for the opportunity to tell your astute readers about my book and its purpose.

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