Light in the Static Attic

--a Memoir for Banyen Books' 25th Anniversary

by Nowick Gray

When I received my first "Branches of Light" catalogue in the fall of 1992, I was ready for new intellectual and spiritual direction. Politics was on the wane in my life; drumming was on the rise. I was getting into volleyball and computer games, and trying to improve my family life. Wondering if the slide into yuppiedom was inevitable, even if I was neither young nor urban nor professional.

Jurassic Park (chaos theory for the masses) was the hottest thing I'd read recently, followed quickly by Sphere (you manifest the products of your own consciousness) and Rising Sun (the economic rug is being pulled out from under us). And I'd come across a ten-year old William Irwin Thompson book called Gaia, a disappointing rehash of earlier ideas. That rogue historian had first fired up my planetary circuits back in '79, when I discovered At the Edge of History, in the Banyen store: required reading for a course at SFU called "Educating Awareness." A seminal idea of the course was that evolution consists of periods of slow horizontal growth punctuated by sudden jumps to higher plateaus. Those heady days were far away, when 1993 rolled around.

Then I received that first, tentative Banyen shipment: Talbot's The Holographic Universe and McKenna's The Archaic Revival. My cozy home turned inside out; time and space were up for grabs; I spent hours in rapt conversation with a local mystic; my partner was afraid she was losing me.

Not quite true: I was just taking a long overdue excursion into cutting edge thinking on the state of life on earth. Could my emotional, psychic and financial budgets handle more? Yes! Another order arrived in due course and I delved into McKenna's collaboration with Abraham and Sheldrake, Trialogues at the Edge of the West, exploring yet more outlandish connections between chaos theory, fungoid consciousness and morphogenic evolution. On into Mander's disturbing condemnation of modern society, In the Absence of the Sacred: this one threw me back on me heels but I pulled out fast with Rheingold's paean to Virtual Reality. Finally, attoning for my excesses via a stint of wage slavery, I paid my Visa bill and landed back home safely through Russell's The White Hole in Time.

The rest of '93 and '94 I spent recovering: dealing with the implications of these revelations--reconciling them with my otherwise "normal" life, and said life, in turn, with the drift of the planet along its twin-railed course to ultimate enlightenment and ultimate catastrophe.

In short, I passed on further orders during this time but by the winter of '95 was ready for another evolutionary boost. My reading had reverted to sci-fi, mystery, biography and sex. (My primary relationship had survived the brief supernova of conceptual energy, but now was suffering from more earthly distractions). Meanwhile I was wading through a slough of creative and spiritual stagnation.

"Branches of Light" to the rescue! Christopher Kilham got me exercising and meditating again, with the powerful new techniques of The Five Tibetans; and Julia Cameron got me writing again, and finding inner resources I didn't know I had, with The Artist's Way. Robert Masters solved the split between body-mind theory and practice with Neurospeak, and Alexander Besher spoke a near-future world into virtual existence with Rim. Finally, Bob Frissell said all there is to say when it comes to matters of communication through the magic prism, language: Nothing in this Book is True, But it's Exactly How Things Are.

And now? Is that all there is to know, to learn? Quiet--I'm still assimilating. I'm hearing great reports about Ishmael, though; so who knows where that's going to lead. . . .

Where's that toll-free number?

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