In this issue, David Shi describes the pleasures of simplicity and reminds us that the fullest lives are rarely those that are cluttered by excess consumption and the relentless pursuit of more and more stuff. The simple life is often the best life, and what better opportunity to explore it than a world-wide recession? After all, if the US economy were to grow by say 3 per cent a year for the next century, what on earth would we all do with the huge amounts of things with which our world would be encumbered by the time we reached 2109? Even if the ecosphere could handle this much consumption, our own psyches would long ago have rebelled against the relentless focus on overwork, acquisition, materialism and all the other short-sighted goals that have gripped our culture for way too long.

It’s time to slow down. Fortunately, Carl Honore shows the way with his soothing words on the Slow Food phenomenon. The need to stop, take a deep breath, and moderate the pace with which we live our lives has now spread beyond food to embrace Slow Towns. They’re springing up in Europe and it surely can’t be long until even compulsively frenetic America joins the crowds that choose to savor each moment – the peal of a church bell, the lapping of waves, the smile on a neighbor’s face – before running off to the next appointment while simultaneously checking our BlackBerries.

What can we learn from wiser cultures that have preceded us? Robert Bly offers us the wisdom of the poets of Andalusia where graceful architecture, reflective pools, and Sufi poets created a golden age of refinement and tolerance. Lapis is pleased to offer many video clips from the New York Open Center’s conference on Sufis, Kabbalists and Christian Philosophers in Medieval Spain. We suggest that you ponder the words of the speakers and imagine a slower, deeper, wiser culture that is still described with awe almost a thousand years after its apex.

Can our own culture ever become a source of wisdom for future generations? Some would argue that this only becomes a possibility if we have faced the shadow of our own focus on power and greed. The inimitable Peter Dale Scott, our greatest living exponent of Deep Politics, speaks at length on the invisible and often dark forces that have pushed America into countless engagements that contradict the ideals upon which it was founded. As in all matters, by first becoming conscious of the hidden elements driving our disturbing behavior, we pave the way for awakening and freedom.

There is much to ponder in this issue of Lapis as we continue our investigation of the inner meaning of contemporary life. We hope that you will kick back with your laptops, enjoy a cup of soothing tea, gaze out of the window at the world going by, and take sustained pleasure in the images and words we are delighted to bring you.

Ralph White

The magazine has gone through various incarnations over the last twelve years. First, it was published in a paper format, winning Utne Reader’s Alternative Press Award. Then it migrated online to a format in which individual articles appeared as we acquired them. Now, Lapis returns with streaming video and audio, a beautiful photo essay and high-quality articles that bear its trademark engagement with both the inner world of soul, spirit and esotericism and also the outer world of society, the environment and the overall state of the planet. Our aim is always to approach the inner and the outer with equal rigor and depth. This, for us, is authentic holistic writing and thinking.

This issue gives a great deal of attention to the rise of fundamentalism, both Islamic and Christian, and looks at what lies behind this disturbing and inescapable phenomenon. Michael Thompson offers a rare description of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian philosopher who is a primary source of inspiration to Al Qaeda. Qutb is a writer little known in the West but we would be well advised to become more familiar with his influential critique of American civilization if we wish to understand Islamic extremism. Chip Berlet offers an acute analysis of Dominionism, the movement that believes that godly Christians are asked now by God to take the levers of political power in America to create the pure and devout nation He desires. And we will soon publish Douglas Sloan’s comprehensive assessment of what lies behind all forms of fundamentalism – religious, economic or secular – and how we can respond to it creatively.

Our new video format enables us to show you fragments of a conference organized by the New York Open Center and the International Forum on Globalization on the resistance of indigenous peoples to economic globalization. Much of the planet’s last reserves of untouched forest, clean water, oil and minerals lie on the lands of native peoples and they are now under huge legal, political and economic pressure to open their lands up to exploitation. Watch the videos and see the moving ways in which indigenous leaders understand their spiritual responsibilities as stewards of the land and refuse to give in.

In the audio section, we have an initial selection of radio interviews conducted by Lapis editor Ralph White. These include a conversation with Robert Bly on Sufi and Spanish poetry, John O’Donohue on Celtic Spirituality, Peter Gabel on holistic activism and Marta Moreno Vega on living African spiritual practices. We have a large store of audio interviews and future issues will carry a lot of compelling and contemporary discussions on issues of real importance.

John Beebe’s photo essay on Buddhism in Sri Lanka continues the Lapis tradition of presenting beautiful imagery to its readers. Peggy Moss offers her evocative text to the slide show and an accompanying full-length essay, providing us with an in-depth look into Buddhism as it is expressed in modern Sri Lanka, where the photographer and writer lived and worked together for one year with their young children.

Those readers who love the esoteric dimension of reality can examine our in-depth, illustrated article on Charting Rosicrucian Europe. It tells the rarely told story of how a beautiful and noble movement in 17th Century Europe survived war and oppression and spread subtly and widely throughout the continent. One of those familiar with its philosophy was Goethe, the incomparable poet, novelist, playwright and scientist, whose own story of falling in love with a young woman in Marienbad while an old man will be told by Christopher Bamford in Lapis later this summer.

I should also mention Jacob Needleman’s original article on Gurdjieff’s teachings as seen through the lens of philosophy. This offers an analysis of exemplary clarity of one of the 20th Century’s most enigmatic teachers. And Robert McDermott’s article, taken from the Lapis archives, offers many shrewd observations on the differences between East and West Coast America’s approaches to spiritual exploration.

Finally, our emphasis in this issue has been on the quality and depth of writing. In the future, we aim to make the Lapis site more beautiful and visually compelling. We encourage you to return often, tell your friends, and enjoy the trove of profound articles available in this issue and in our archives at Lapis online. None of this would be possible without the New York Open Center, from which this magazine springs. Many of our articles first emerged from conferences, lectures and interviews organized by the Open Center. As this precious institution heads toward celebrating 25 years as New York’s leading center of holistic learning and world culture, our hope is that Lapis will expand the Center’s reach and bring to the broadest possible audience our commitment to quality holistic writing.

An Esoteric Quest in Central Europe

After a quiet period here at Lapis online, things are starting to quicken in pace. We are delighted to be co-sponsoring with the Open Center a truly unique conference in the Czech Republic and in Weimar, Germany on the western esoteric tradition. Something of a shift in focus after our work on the religious right last year, this event will look at the often forgotten spiritual streams that characterized renaissance Bohemia when alchemy, kabbalah, neo-platonism and hermetic philosophy were the essence of the magical worldview.

Sadly, the spiritual and cultural brilliance of Sixteenth Century Bohemia and early Seventeenth Century Heidelberg were lost in the horrors of the Thirty Years War. The tragic battle of the White Mountain outside Prague took place in the same year that the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. But as America began to emerge, Europe descended into a morass of religious prejudice and wanton violence. By the time the continent emerged from this nightmare, the renaissance understanding of the world was lost and in its place we had the powerful concepts of the universe as a machine and the inescapable split between mind and body.

Had the philosophers of nature, the alchemists, continued their fusion of spirituality and science, we would never have found ourselves with the ravaged and abused planet that we inhabit today. In the late Eighteenth Century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great German playwright, poet and novelist, developed his own approach to science that had much in common with that of the alchemists. It involved a deep, meditative attunement and close observation of nature. Goethe's method allowed the thoughts hidden within the natural world to come alive in his own creative imagination. In this way, he was able to understand the metamorphosis of plants and the nature of color. For him, this achievement rivaled any of his literary creations.

The conference at the beginning of September will focus on this neglected spiritual and scientific tradition. Perhaps it can finally find a place of respect in the 21st Century as we desperately struggle to restore ecological balance. I invite you to learn more about it at http://mail.opencenter.org/webdev/esoteric5.pdf

A further note:

As mentioned above, after a rather quiet time at Lapis online, we are now redoubling our efforts to make this site dynamic and innovative.

Starting soon we will be posting audio interviews with remarkable thinkers and writers on a regular basis. These can be downloaded and listened to on your computer. First up in our series will be Henry Barnes, now 94 years old and one of the most knowledgeable men in America in the work and legacy of Rudolf Steiner. He studied at the original Waldorf School in Stuttgart in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, and is perhaps the only person alive today in the English speaking world who can describe how the noble spiritual impulses of Germany in the Thirties were strangled by the malicious intent of rising fascism.

The primary goal of this event is to educate and enlighten the public on the theocratic aims of the Dominionist Movement, an increasingly influential force among Christian conservatives. How is it attempting to weaken the boundaries between Church and State, and how does its apocalyptic theology of the End Times, the Rapture and Armageddon affect the US government's view of the Middle East, the environment and the United Nations?

These are weighty questions that need to be posed because most of us living outside the Bible Belt have little or no idea of the actual beliefs that guide so many devout fundamentalists. And there can be no possibility of responding seriously to these aims if we remain totally ignorant of them.

Already this conference, co-sponsored with The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has attracted enormous media attention. It is clearly being presented to the public at just the right time as questions grow with increasing intensity about the influence of fundamentalist Christians on national policy. We can hardly keep pace with the number of documentary film makers, radio and television reporters, and print journalists who will be in attendance or covering our press conference. Without doubt, the country is hungry to learn more about the beliefs that guide a good portion of the Republican party's base, and this appears to be the first conference to pull together an impressive array of experts on Dominionism and Christian Reconstructionism, religious phenomena that have hitherto escaped almost entirely the attentions of the mainstream media.

Why has it fallen to Lapis and the Open Center to initiate this deeply necessary educational event? My view is that it is our consistent engagement with spiritual as well as social and environmental issues that makes us unusually alert to this volatile and disturbing mix of religion and politics. Our constant awareness of the power of the need for meaning in people's lives give us, I believe, a deep instinct for the use and misuse of the spiritual dimension of reality.

A link on the Lapis site informs your further about the conference itself. Most of you will not be able to attend, but we hope to make this information available both through a television show of conference highlights that will be accessible to all public tv stations, and through a possible book of the proceedings. So get ready to lobby your local PBS station to download this forthcoming program for free from a satellite. The Lapis Institute is just starting but, boy, what a start!

As Lapis is a magazine with a long-standing interest in the relationship between politics and spirituality, I thought I'd put the term Dominionist Movement‚ into a search engine and see what emerged. The results were stunning and deeply disturbing. I spent the next twenty hours and then the rest of the weekend reading everything I could find on the internet (see links below) about the growing power and influence of a movement otherwise known as Christian Reconstructionism.

As the hours of reading progressed, I can truly say that I felt the scales falling from my eyes regarding the true agenda of major elements in the Bush administration. Regardless of who wins the election next week, America urgently needs to wake up to the bizarre, shocking and secretive intent of people like Tom DeLay, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, the members of the innocuously named Council for National Policy, and arguably George W. Bush himself. The evidence seems to point to the existence of a truly messianic presidency in which our head of state feels directly guided by God Himself. It is George Bush's gut instincts (a strange source of divine guidance to any student of the mystical traditions) rather than any intellectually rigorous analysis that have led us into the war in Iraq, the outrageous tax cuts, and the constant impulse to reward the rich and punish the poor.

In Dominionist Theology or Christian Reconstructionism we have a Calvinistic throwback to a world of the elect who are chosen by God to do his works on earth. The objective is a Christian fundamentalist America ruled by the laws of Deuteronomy, and ultimately a crusade to make the whole world conform to the same religious practices and beliefs. If the war in Iraq and blind support for Ariel Sharon lead on to The Rapture and Armageddon, so much the better. Righteous believers will be lifted up to sit at the right hand of God and the millennial kingdom of Christ will eventually be ushered in.

While the rough outlines of this belief system will not be new to many Lapis readers, what is fresh is the extent to which this strange, disturbing and extreme faith has penetrated the conservative religious and political establishments in a manner far beyond what most of us realize. For instance, what lay behind the raging, Old Testament outburst of Zell Miller at the Republican Convention? I encourage readers to examine closely the web site of the courageous reporter Katherine Yurica whose Yurica Report lists numerous enlightening articles on this whole subject. Theocracy Watch, whose name says it all, is another excellent source of crucial information.

There has clearly been a stealth campaign to advance this unlikely theology to places of power and influence. Most members of the mainstream media are secular in outlook and fail to see how serious this development is not only for this country but for the whole planet. We at Lapis, however, are well aware of the power and significance of spiritual movements and it is our goal to work with the Open Center to present an important conference in the spring on this subject. Regardless of who wins next week's election, America urgently needs to wake up to the growing power of the Dominionists and their true and shocking agenda.

Recommended Reading:

http://www.yuricareport.com/Dominionism/DirectoryRiseOfDominionismInAmerica.html

http://www.4religious-right.info/audio-video.htm

http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeVII/Secrecy.htm

It certainly feels that the more enlightened forces live mostly in the Democratic Party these days, as the Republicans slide deeper into the grip of both market and religious fundamentalism, and outdated fantasies of empire.

How has the country come to this pass? The spate of striking and original documentaries currently playing nationwide holds some serious clues. Any viewer of "Out foxed" can only conclude that the Fox news channel is little more than a major propaganda operation that has been foisted on millions using all the most sophisticated techniques of mass manipulation. And "The Hunting of the President" confirms all our darkest suspicions about the very literal right wing conspiracy that spent millions in its ultimately successful efforts to entrap Bill Clinton. In other words, our present dire situation has not happened by accident. There has been a very sophisticated and well financed effort to tip America hard to the right, and the true agenda has never been revealed to the public.

How far will it all go? Here in New York we recently learned that the Metropolitan Transit Authority is about to solicit corporations to adopt and name our subway stops. While this seems little more than a response to simple financial stress, one can only sympathize with the letter writer to the New York Times who asked how long it will be until we are entitled to a twenty dollar tax deduction if we have a corporate logo tattooed on our foreheads.

Thankfully, the film "The Corporation" comes to our aid. It proceeds from the observation that, since the mid-Nineteenth Century, corporations have been considered persons in a court of law and accorded the relevant privileges. But if a corporation is a person, what kind of person is it? It’s certainly time someone asked that question, and the film concludes that corporations are plainly out and out sociopaths. Their mandate to focus exclusively on the pursuit of shareholder profit to the detriment of all other factors is, the film argues, overwhelming evidence of profound psychological disturbance. Yet the corporate grip on the heart of America grows tighter with each passing day.

Coenraad van Houten, in a recent article in Lapis, notes the growing "economic, technical, commercial determinism which demands that economic prosperity must have priority over everything else," and that places "human needs under the dictatorship of economic necessity." Behind the corporatization of American life it appears that deeper forces are at work that ultimately, if left unchecked, would strip us of our full humanity.

That’s why we can only be grateful that civil society is rising up in the form of independent documentary makers to bring the country back to some kind of sanity and balance. Can anyone fail to ponder the significance of the epidemic of obesity in America while billions of people around the world subsist or starve on less than two dollars a day? Certainly not the viewers of "Supersize Me," the hilarious film in which one valiant soul decides to eat nothing but McDonald’s food for a month and suffers a massive and immediate collapse of health as a result.

We’ve certainly got a long way to go before our dietary, agricultural, economic, and media practices truly lead the world in a way worth emulating. But at this profound moment, when a strong sense pervades the land that this is the most important election of our lifetimes, hope is indeed on the rise. The spirit of freedom and justice, too long repressed and intimidated, is starting to shout from the roof tops with wit and insight. And those of us committed to a holistic and spiritually awake future for the world can only trust that America will make the right choice and permit the planet to breathe, with gusto, a huge sigh of relief.

A nightmare world of constant war, ethnic hatreds and threats to democracy at home and abroad beckons if we are foolish enough to follow our current direction. The moral emptiness at the heart of America's imperialist foreign policy stands naked for the world to see in Abu Ghraib. Somehow the forces of neo-conservatism, misguided Christian fundamentalism, and the oil/military/industrial complex have combined to turn the whole planet in exactly the wrong direction.

It seems so long since the Earth Summit in Rio back in 1992. There, for a brief, shining moment in the aftermath of communism's demise, a moment of wisdom occurred when we looked beyond the politics and economics of short term gain to embrace sustainability and conservation as keys to a healthy future. But then we became caught up in the frenzy and heady attractions of globalizing free market capitalism, and the media forsook the state of the earth for the pleasures of stock market cheer leading.

The dot com crash should have been enough to bring us back to our senses. But instead a new American government embraced an extreme agenda that can fairly be described as actively opposed to the well-being of our planet. The esotericist within us ponders what forces lie behind this ominous twist of fate. Mixing the esoteric and the political is always a delicate business, but perhaps we can draw on the perception of Rudolf Steiner in 1919 when he remarked that the powers inimical to spiritual evolution would in future take the form of inappropriate forms of nationalism (and tribalism), religious fundamentalism, and the supremacy of economic values in all spheres.

Sound familiar? The last thing the world needs is an arrogant, bullying America that asserts its supreme position above international law and environmental policy. Or a leadership that believes it is guided by the divine to make needless war and favor its corporate and political donors. The deep disturbance in the Arabic and Islamic world, the sense of rage and humiliation engendered by our one-sided Middle Eastern policy and our violence and abuse in Iraq, cries out for a new kind of wisdom, and a holistic vision of the future.

American needs to show the world that we support prosperity and justice for the whole planet, not just this country. We need to stand unwaveringly for universal human rights and the Geneva Convention. We need to wake up to global warming and develop an energy policy that frees us from oil dependence. And we need to proudly embrace our multiculturalism, the presence of every religion within our borders, and our commitment to spiritual tolerance and equality.

Surely the long-term security strategy for the West involves showing the world that our religion is not consumerism and materialism, let alone fundamentalism. The impoverished and disempowered of the world need to see a West that has nobler values than national self-interest and the pursuit of power. At bottom, we need to show our authentic spiritual selves expressed through actions and policies that favor the whole human future, not just one economic class or one nation. Our struggle with Al Qaeda is, after all, intensely spiritual not just military.

No doubt it all sounds idealistic given our current dire situation. But the last six months have shown conclusively that the naked pursuit of power only gives strength to our enemies. It's time the shock and awe of bombs and missiles were replaced with stunned amazement that the genuinely noble heart of America is alive and well, and committed to the equality of all human beings, religions, and races. There's even an appropriate place for our warrior spirit: an unyielding commitment to "eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the mind of man" as Jefferson so nicely put it. I strongly suspect that a huge swath of the planet would greet this reappearance of our true nature with a huge sigh of relief, and parties would break out in all kinds of places to celebrate the return of the freedom loving, friendly, generous spirited country many are just waiting for a chance to love again.

The alternative, of course, is to continue our slide into darkness. There seems little doubt that this is truly a time of destiny, and we can only hope that our better angels prevail. Human wisdom must find its way into the affairs of the world and the looming prospect of decades of war and terror must be shunned for the madness it is.

As regular readers will have noticed, we now have the beginnings of the Lapis archives on line. Currently only one or two articles in each archive category are available but more will be appearing at the rate of roughly ten pieces a week. We are also working on the visual dimensions of the site. Lapis in its paper format was known for the beauty of its artistic design and we want to include strong elements of this in the new look. So watch this space for interesting changes.

Meanwhile, news of the latest assassination in the Middle East can only make all conscious people shudder at the prospect of the inevitable retaliation by Hamas. You wonder how anyone in their right mind could have imagined that this would contribute to peace in the Middle East. We live in dark and dangerous times. Who would have imagined that little more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, when optimism and peace seemed assured for generations, that we would be embroiled in a deadly new global battle and that so many foolish steps have been taken by our own government that have only exacerbated the rage in the Arabic and Islamic world toward the West?

As I gazed on the smoking ruins of the World Trade Centers two and a half years ago I remember the clear intuition arising in my mind that we must have a more even handed policy in the Middle East and also that evil is far too subtle and devious to work only from one direction. Clearly it came in nightmarish manner from the terrorists but the danger has always been there that the American reaction would generate equal if not more horror in the world. Now Richard Clarke, the long-standing White House terrorism czar, has clearly revealed that the war in Iraq has seriously increased the power of Al Qaeda and its related groups. Osama Bin Laden was issuing propaganda for years warning that the US was intent on invading an oil-rich Arab country. Now we have done exactly that, we have played straight into his hands in a way that countless anti-war demonstrators could see coming over a year ago. Our worst predictions have sadly been fulfilled with who knows what consequences.

The Open Center's award winning magazine has returned in a new incarnation as an on-line publication. Instead of the old paper format in which we produced fifteen articles every four months, we are now publishing a new article every week.

Lapis has always expressed the aspect of the Open Center that is deeply engaged with social and ecological issues. But, rarely among magazines, it also gives equal attention to spiritual and esoteric matters. In fact this commitment to a balanced and engaged spirituality is at the core of Lapis' mission. It is a magazine where informed coverage of the contemporary world mixes comfortably with an ancient sense of soul to create to create the kind of awake and penetrating media so deeply needed today.

We are in process of archiving the back issues of the magazine so that readers will be able to access the many outstanding articles published between 1995 and 2001 by such outstanding writers as Bill McKibben, Joscelyn Godwin, John O' Donohue, Fritjof Capra, Jeremy Rikfin, Terry Tempest Williams, William Irwin Thompson and Kathleen Raine.

While the major media are becoming increasingly homogenized and timorous, alternative media are exploding with fresh insights and perceptive social analysis. The response to the Iraq War has truly revealed the power and value of on-line media as a place for original, fresh and courageous writing. So please enjoy the current articles while we build the site. Just click on the titles to find recent work by Jerry Mander, Robert Sardello, Andrew Kimbrell, Christopher Bamford, Andrew Samuels and many others.

Why a magazine called Lapis? For many people, the association will be with the azure stone, the lapis lazuli, but for others there will be an echo of an old wisdom tradition – the lapis philosophicus, the philosopher's stone, of alchemical origin. The name was actually inspired by a visit to Spring Street books in New York City where a glance at Fortune magazine inspired the thought, "If those pages are about material wealth, what about a magazine name that evokes instead a richness of soul and spirit?" A glance at the Oxford English dictionary confirmed that Lapis is short for both the semi-precious stone and for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the object of inner transformation.

And so the premier issue of Lapis lies in your hands. In putting it together our intent has been to give voice to a way of looking at the world that is badly needed in our often heart-sick and angry times. The writers in this volume, whether world leaders, poets, philosophers or travelers, all speak of a fundamental need to reorient our lives away from the emptiness of a materialistic culture towards the needs of the earth and towards the needs of the soul. Lapis stands for the spiritual and ecological values that wise individuals throughout the world in countless professions recognize to be essential if future life is to have any meaning or, indeed, if there is to be any future life worth speaking of.

This concern with values that resonate with our deeper selves is not, however, a matter purely of the inner life. It has political, sociological, technological, cultural and, of course, environmental implications that cannot be ignored. Lapis intends to pursue those implications thoroughly and will present fresh insights and ideas from across the full spectrum of human endeavor from many disciplines and from many countries. It will also look beneath the surface of curious social and religious movements, both good and bad, to explore the fundamental belief systems that lie behind them.

This magazine would not be possible without the New York Open Center whose devotion to holistic learning for the last eleven years has been a blessing to those of us who have worked there as well as to the thousands who have attended its programs. A significant portion of Lapis will consist of edited transcipts of talks given at the Open Center which deserve a wider audience.

In general our gaze will be towards those writers and speakers throughout the world who understand the need for a profound change in contemporary life, a tilt towards inner meaning that will enable us to begin to create societies that are healthy and infused with hope. Such a change will not happen overnight but this magazine stands as a foundation stone, a lapis angulorum, for the construction of a new and necessary world view.

Ralph White