One of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “10 Books Everyone Should Read”.
This fascinating study of democracy in the 21st century is a much-needed call for citizens to reach across the aisle and put power back into the hands of individuals—not Big Government.
Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer outline a simple but revolutionary argument for why our most basic assumptions about democracy need updating for the 21st century. They offer a roadmap for those looking for a way forward from an American life marked by divisive conversations.
In a world with widespread political upheaval, a deep wellspring of civic engagement and collective action is emerging. America is finding that our cultural and political dialogue is spiking over everything from racial and social justice to fighting the ever-widening income gap, to climate change—even how we might best collaborate as active citizens to heal our democracy.
Timely, inspiring, and highly charged, The Gardens of Democracy is a much-needed call to action for citizens to embrace their roles in a democratic society. To model positivity and good citizenship, plus ensure liberty and justice for all, we must achieve compromise by reaching across the aisle and putting the power to execute programs back in the hands of individuals, not big government.
We must redefine how we view prosperity in order to move from a dog-eat-dog mentality that perpetuates the top 1% to a communal and inclusive movement that illustrates that we’re all better off when we’re all better off.
“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.”
What we keep of our losses scaffolds who we become. What we let die within us — the tortured patterns, the ill-serving habits, the limiting beliefs — makes it possible to be reborn. And yet it is not easy, letting go of something we have lived with — a love, a dream, an idea of who we are. It can never be willed, only surrendered to, and not without the thrashes of denial, dissociation, and the thousand little lies we tell ourselves in order to hold on. To finally let go is to discover that life holds, that we can be held in something larger than fear, larger than grief, larger than ourselves.
Loosening the grip begins with the recognition that there is nothing solid enough in this world to hold on to, that transience is not a defect of things but their fundamental nature. Drawing on how plate tectonics revolutionized our understanding of life, Didion writes:
As the grandchild of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter Scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house… I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress… A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure… [The island] Oahu, an emergent post-erosional land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge, is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific.
When she took her husband’s ashes to St. John the Divine, Didion brought along a lei — the traditional flower garland of the South Pacific, made to be worn around the neck, often given to loved ones arriving or departing. Looking back on her life with John in the idyll of their young love in the Brentwood Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, looking back on her time living and writing in Hawaii, she leans on a poetic native ritual for letting go:
During the years when people still left Honolulu on the Matson Lines the custom at the moment of departure was to throw leis on the water, a promise that the traveler would return. The leis would get caught in the wake and go bruised and brown, the way the gardenias in the pool filter at the house in Brentwood Park had gone bruised and brown.
The other morning when I woke I tried to remember the arrangement of the rooms in the house in Brentwood Park. I imagined myself walking through the rooms, first on the ground floor and then on the second. Later in the day I realized that I had forgotten one.
The lei I left at St. John the Divine would have gone brown by now.
Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.
The daily deaths of hopes and plans, the failed projects and failed relationships, are our training ground for letting go, a scale model of life’s most difficult losses — the death of a parent, the death of a child, the death of a soul mate. Because the way we meet any death is the way we meet every death, Didion’s reckoning with losing the love of her life maps the disorienting terrain of navigating any loss, letting go of anything that has died, or must die, within us so we may go on living a deeper, truer life. In a poignant counterpoint to Hemingway’s insistence that “no one you love is ever dead,” she writes:
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead… Let go of them in the water.
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. It takes a great spaciousness and sobriety of spirit to be vitalized rather than paralyzed by uncertainty. Most of the time, we brace behind structures of certainty to keep the native chaos of the universe, the fundamental indeterminacy and unpredictability of life, from drowning us in helplessness. But each time we part the bars of conviction and opinion to step out from this cell of certitude, or are evicted from it by some existential cataclysm, we discover that the most interesting parts of life, the most fulfilling experiences, the richest relationships, are found in the spaces between categories, in the unclassifiable, the unnameable, the deliriously disorienting.
In 1969, after nearly two decades of living among the Ndembu people of Zambia, the Scottish cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (May 28, 1920–December 18, 1983) took up the question of how we classify and declassify life in his classic The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (public library).
Terming these fertile in-between spaces liminality — a word coined a generation earlier by the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep from limen, Latin for “threshold” — Turner observes that all rites of passage have liminality at their center: the moment between renouncing the familiar fixed point and reincorporating into the transformed state. This is why in every society those who live in liminality — those who either choose to or are forced to exist in the margins — are those most likely to be catalysts for transformation.
Half a century before Rebecca Solnit insisted in her epochal manifesto for active hope that “power comes from the shadows and the margins,” Turner writes:
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention… Liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.
Liminality is a function of, and made possible by, what Turner terms communitas — the recognition of “an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society.” Different from community in that it doesn’t necessarily involve “an area of common living,” communitas is a kind of social anti-structure — an alternative organizing principle to the standard model of society as “a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating [people] in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.’”
Ursula K. Le Guin, whose daring defiance of gender, race, and class structures was greatly influenced by Turner’s work, captures the contrast perfectly:
Structure in society… is cognitive, communitas existential; structure provides a model, communitas a potential; structure classifies, communitas reclassifies; structure is expressed in legal and political institutions, communitas in art and religion.
Turner writes:
Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or “holy,” possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency… Instinctual energies are surely liberated by these processes.
Intuition — what we call these “instinctual energies” — may indeed be nothing more than those rare moments when we break the rim of our structured reality and glimpse, however briefly, a truth larger and more fluid than any container can hold, touching within it the sacred liminality of life itself.
This original and lucid account of the complexities of love and its essential role in human well-being draws on the latest scientific research. Three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain.
A General Theory of Love demonstrates that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.
“When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.”
~ Hermann Hesse
Hermann Karl Hesse was a German-Swiss poet and novelist, and winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature. His interest in Eastern religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions, combined with his involvement with Jungian analysis, helped to shape his literary work. Wikipedia
“We are beginning to understand, and for ever, that the only acceptable religion for man is the one that will teach him first of all to recognize, love and passionately serve this universe of which he is the most important element.” (quoting “Tielhard de Chardin tel que je l’ai connu” by G. Magoire, in Synthèse, November 1957)
“As Tielhard de Chardin has stated, only the fantastic is likely to be true at the cosmic level. We believe that human phenomena must also be measured against the cosmic scale. The thinkers of antiquity said this. Our modern world, with its planetary rockets and its efforts to contact other intelligent beings, is saying it.”
“‘The new man is living amongst us now! He is here!’ exclaimed Hitler, triumphantly. ‘Isn’t that enough for you? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the new man. He is intrepid and cruel. I was afraid of him.'”
“‘In uttering these words,’ added Rauschning, ‘Hitler was trembling in a kind of ecstasy.'”
“As [Robert] Musil has pointed out: ‘If only a single one of the ideas which influence our life were taken really seriously so as to leave no room at all for its opposite, this would be enough to change the whole character of our civilization.'”
“We have a magical relationship with the Universe, but we have forgotten it. The next mutation of the human race will produce beings who will be conscious of this relationship, demi-gods. Already this mutation is having an effect on a few Messianic souls . . . “
“The physicist. George Gamow has conceived of a parallel Universe in which, for example, a billiard ball can go into two holes at he same time.”
–Excerpts from The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier (1960)
The claim by Louis Pauwels (co-author of the famous occult-history book The Morning of the Magicians) is factually incorrect and likely a humorous linguistic mix-up.
Adolf Hitler did not have an astrologer named “Führer”. Der Führer (German for “The Leader”) was, of course, Hitler’s own title. Substack·Spionage +3
The confusion likely stems from a blend of historical fabrications and real-world figures:
The British Astrologer Named “Louis de Wohl”: Ironically, the person most famously tied to this narrative was a man named Louis de Wohl—an astrologer hired by the British intelligence agency MI5 during World War II. De Wohl convinced British authorities that Hitler was making military choices based on astrology and offered to cast Hitler’s horoscopes so the Allies could “predict” his next moves. It’s highly probable that Pauwels confused the name of this British asset (Louis de Wohl) with his own name (Louis Pauwels) or distorted the story entirely. Encyclopedia.com +3
Hitler’s Real Views on Astrology: Mainstream historians agree that Hitler himself despised astrology, privately calling it a “swindle” and “complete nonsense”. While other high-ranking Nazis like Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess were deeply obsessed with the occult, Hitler explicitly banned astrologers, clairvoyants, and occultists across Germany in 1941 following Hess’s unsanctioned flight to Scotland. Bookforum +4
Actual Nazi-Era Astrologers: When Nazi agencies did secretly use astrologers for propaganda purposes, they used men like Karl Ernst Krafft or Wilhelm Wulff. None of them were named Führer.
Ultimately, Pauwels’ assertion is part of the sensationalist “Nazi occult” myths popularized in the 1960s, rather than an accurate historical account. Encyclopedia.com +1
Humanity is facing an unprecedented phase of evolution, planetary revolution, and the acceleration of time. More and more people are seeking guidance as they wake up to a connection with something far bigger than what they were taught about human life. Channeled by Lee Harris and prompted by Regina Meredith’s incisive questions, Lee’s guides, the Z’s, expose the lies promulgated throughout history and explain the past and the future,
• why consciousness is driving you faster than your mind • the positive and negative effects of artificial intelligence and other technology on intellect and the brain • the changing landscape of relationships, sexuality, and self-awareness • why the next decade will be a genuinely revelatory time on earth • why the most significant influencer in the development of humanity’s new potential is you
The Z’s remind us that everyone on Earth is being affected by the waves of higher consciousness now flooding the planet. Meant to be experienced, absorbed, and understood, the message from the Z’s is creating a new world is your job. The Future Human tells you why and how.
ChatGPT: Yes, nemo is Latin for “nobody” or “no one”. [1]
The word has a long history in literature and popular culture:
The Odyssey: In Greek mythology, the hero Odysseus tells the cyclops Polyphemus that his name is Outis, which translates to “Nobody” in Latin as Nemo. [1]
Captain Nemo: Jules Verne used the name for the famous captain of the Nautilus submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to show that the character had rejected his past identity and become a man of no nation. [1, 2]
Finding Nemo: The Pixar animated movie uses the name as a nod to Verne’s nautical captain, leading to popular fan theories that the title playfully means “finding nobody”. [1, 2, 3]
Here are a few prominent literary references to the name Nemo, expanding on its meaning of “nobody” or “anonymity”:
Captain Nemo (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne) The most famous Nemo in literature is the mysterious, brilliant commander of the submarine Nautilus. He has severed all ties with civilization and the surface world. By choosing the name Nemo, he literally strips himself of his past identity, country, and allegiance, declaring himself “nobody.”
Nemo (Bleak House by Charles Dickens) In this classic novel, a mysterious character goes by the alias “Nemo.” He is a law-writer who dies early in the story from an opium overdose. The name is a direct commentary on his status in Victorian society—a forgotten man who has been completely wiped out and reduced to “nobody.”
Little Nemo (Little Nemo in Slumberland by Winsor McCay) Though from a classic comic strip rather than a traditional novel, this character is highly influential in literary history. Little Nemo is a young boy who has fantastic, surreal dreams every night, only to wake up in the final panel. The name highlights that he is a “nobody” in the waking world, but a hero in the world of dreams.
The Odyssey (Homer) While originally written in Greek, the Latin translation of this epic poem solidifies the concept. When Odysseus is trapped by the Cyclops Polyphemus, he craftily claims his name is Outis (Greek for “Nobody”). When the Latin translation came about, this was translated directly as Nemo, cementing the name as the ultimate literary tool for trickery and hidden identity.
CommonwealNewSchool Oct 9, 2025 In part 1 of this series, Host Michael Lerner talks with author and professor Jeffrey Kripal about his book The Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions. Jeffrey considers this unusual autobiographical journey through his work as the key to much of the rest of his 13-volume oeuvre, which will be examined throughout this series of conversations. Jeffrey J. Kripal Jeff holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He also co-directs the Center for Theory and Research at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Jeff is the author of numerous books, most recently How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. His remarkable website jefrreyjkripal.com describes his groundbreaking 13 books and his entire oeuvre. This series of conversations explores all 13 books. Host Michael Lerner Michael is founder and board chair emeritus of Commonweal. His principal work at Commonweal is with the Cancer Help Program, CancerChoices.org, the Omega Resilience Projects, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1983 and is author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Therapies (MIT Press). *** The New School is Commonweal’s learning community and podcast — we offer conversations, workshops, and other events in areas that Commonweal champions: finding meaning, growing health and resilience, advocating for justice, and stewarding the natural world. We make our conversations into podcasts for many thousands of listeners world wide and have been doing this since 2007. Please like/follow our YouTube channel for access to our library of more than 400 great podcasts. tns.commonweal.org
In part 2 of this series, Host Michael Lerner talks with author and professor Jeffrey Kripal about his book Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. This was a revised version of his PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago. It was greeted with acclaim in the West and with vitriol by Hindu fundamentalists. It begins Kripal’s long study of homoerotic themes in world religions.
Consciousness, spirituality, biography, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
As the grandchild of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter Scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house… I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress… A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure… [The island] Oahu, an emergent post-erosional land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge, is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific.
