Shepherd Philip - New self, new world: recovering our senses in the twenty-first century

New Self, New World is an extraordinary workan awesome display of wisdom distilled from the worlds great wisdom traditions and the majestic individuals who have experienced them. This book is about achieving the highest dimensions of which humans are capable. Highly recommended.

Larry Dossey, MD, author of Healing Beyond the Body, Reinventing Medicine, and Healing Words

Shepherd has written a masterpiece. New Self, New World calls us back to source, artfully reminding us of the divine magnificence that we have long forgotten in our disembodied culture. As I read it, I felt my shoulders drop as my heart became more available to the moment. Read this book, and remember your self.

Jeff Brown, author of Soulshaping

Copyright 2010 by Philip Shepherd. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover design by Allyson Woodrooffe
Exercise photos by Jeremy Mimnaugh
Author photo by Christoph Strube
Cover dandelion photo courtesy of Julia Pepler
Exercise demonstrations by Leanne Dixon

New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-first Century is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our Web site at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shepherd, Philip, 1953
New self, new world : recovering our senses in the twenty-first century /
Philip Shepherd.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58394-402-8
1. Self (Philosophy) 2. Self. 3. Consciousness. I. Title.
BD438.5.S457 2010
128dc22
2010002415

v3.1_r1

This book is dedicated
to my mother, Jane;
to my daughters, Kate and Julia;
and to my true-hearted love, AW.

Of what use is a book that does not carry us beyond all books?

Friedrich Nietzsche

My space chums are concerned about our evolvement because they say were all connected. Everything is part of everything. They started talking about a little something they call interstellar interspecies symbiosis. To hold up my end of the conversation, I asked them to elaborate. So they brought up the Quantum Inseparability Principle. Every particle affects every other particle everywhere. They tried to bring quantum physics down to a level I could more clearly misunderstand. Then one of them mentioned the Bootstrap Theory, and at the point they got into the Superstring Theory, frankly, I think even they were in over their heads. But heres what I got from it all: seems like theres some kind of cosmic Krazy Glue connecting everything to everything.

Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life
in the Universe; performed by Lily Tomlin

In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be, and in order to find myself I must go out of myself, and in order to live I have to die.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

The deepest meaning of the all-embracing world crisis of our time, which threatens the future of the human race and of much of nature, is that it is an evolutionary crisis. It is, at once, a death of all our agendas, illusions and fantasies of uniqueness, domination over nature, and endless growth, and a birthwhose crucible is tragedy, heartbreak and devastationof an embodied divine humanity capable of and inspired to work directly with the Divine to transform all existing ways of being and doing everything. Seeing the crisis in this wayas an unprecedented and inescapable dark night of our species that could lead to the unprecedented birth, on a massive scale, of a new embodied divine consciousness-in-actionnot only enables us to endure its necessary horrors and ordeals with faith, perseverance, and grace; it aligns us with the design of the divine intelligence of evolution itself, a design that has been made available to us, with majestic passion and precision, in the divinely inspired works of great modern evolutionary mystics such as Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Teilhard de Chardin, Father Bede Griffiths and Ken Wilber. It is the essence of our terrifying and amazing timeits central and potentially all-transforming paradoxthat in our darkest hour, the most all-encompassing and transfiguring vision of what we essentially are and could be is also arising to give us the passion and the peace, the knowledge and hope and strength that we will need to rise to the full height of our evolutionary destiny.

Philip Shepherd, in his profound and original masterpiece New Self, New World, now adds his distinctive, elegant, fierce and tender voice to those of his distinguished evolutionary predecessors. His bookwritten over a decade of painstaking, grueling self-exploration, and with the highest nobility and clarity of soulprovides us all with an indispensable guide to why a radically embodied divine humanity needs to be birthed now, and birthed fast, and it also shows us how to allow this bewildering and majestic destiny to be worked out in and through us through divine grace. This is not a book to be read casually or fast; it is not a self-help book with easily assimilable, facile practices, false promises of instant healing and risibly superficial quick fixes. It is that rarest of works in our agea brave, magnificent manifesto for a new kind of divine human life, a life lived in conscious dynamic harmony of illumined mind, impassioned and tender heart and increasingly, consciously, divinized body.

Those of us who are already experiencing the rigors, demands and glories of the birth that is now taking place will find in New Self, New World both a brilliant forensic analysis of our current dead-end, flatland obsession with reason and the mind and all the tyrannical, matricidal and suicidal structures and actions it engenders; and a luminous, inspiring, exact and exacting description of the embodied divine human life of the birtha life in which soul is embodied and body ensouled and the masculine energies of clarity, control and forceful action dance in abandoned, perfect lucid rhythm with the restored and celebrated feminine energies of adoration, tender erotic love of all creation, and wise, sustaining, humble, nourishing interrelationship. Both in the way it is structured and in the precise but richly poetic and full-breathed, almost mantric way in which it is written, New Self, New World not only describes this sacred marriage of transcendence and immanence, body and soul, masculine and feminine, but also embodies it with a magical power and force that is at once challenging and healing.

Philip Shepherds book presents three ways of understanding ourselves that go so against the grain of habituated, sclerotic thinking that they can be considered revolutionary. These three radical contributions are: a new model of human consciousness; a new vision of our evolutionary history; and a new vision of the interrelated environmental, political, social and economic crises that now threaten our survival and demand a collective evolutionary leap in embodied, divine consciousness.