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Diary of a DNA Potentiator: How 528 Hertz Was Music to My Ears
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Brendan D. Murphy
So many of us have battled—or are currently battling—some form of nagging illness or physical dysfunction that it staggers the mind. There may not be any magical, cure-all, “quick fix” solution—but then again, we may be closer than we think.
As someone with myriad physical injuries sustained over the years through athletic pursuits or just outright clumsiness (or bad luck)—as well as suffering from food allergies—I’ve longed for a natural, non-surgical and non-pharmaceutical solution to my ailments.
On a more transpersonal level, as an author and researcher, I’ve been obsessed with the notion of finding powerful and permanent solutions to such problems so that I could disseminate them as widely as possible for the benefit of others.
That’s why I’m going to tell you about my experience thus far with DNA activation, or more specifically, stage one of Sol Luckman’s Regenetics Method: DNA Potentiation. (Sol is author of CONSCIOUS HEALING and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA.)
Without getting too much into the nitty-gritty of the procedure, DNA Potentiation is a sound-based, “shamanic” healing technique that utilizes a unique property of a certain portion of human DNA: the 97% or so of our DNA which was dubbed decades ago “junk” DNA—because scientists at the time had no idea what its purpose was.
In fact, some “junk” DNA—in the form of about one million or more proteins—is incredibly valuable to us because of its capacity to literally shift locations on the DNA strand and re-code sections of the genome. Hence, this “junk” (discovered in 1983 by Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock) is referred to informally as “jumping DNA” (or transposons, more technically).
For a DNA Potentiation, you require (aside from the full set of instructions), a 528-Hertz tuning fork and something to strike it with (a hockey puck, for example). A fairly complex chanting procedure (involving all of the vowel sounds) is then carried out while you sound the tuning fork at specific intervals. Overall, the session lasts roughly twenty minutes.
So what does a 528-Hertz tuning fork and chanting have to do with jumping DNA/transposons? In short, it appears that the procedure makes your “junk” jump!
You see, our DNA is “tuned” to the Solfeggio scale—and 528 Hertz is one of the Solfeggio frequencies. As such, the resonance between our “jumping DNA” and the 528-Hertz tone means that a shift or migration of transposons can be initiated with the correct procedure.
I get into a lot more detail with this in my book THE GRAND ILLUSION: A SYNTHESIS OF SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY. If you want to know the actual Potentiation procedure in full detail, you’ll have to check out Sol’s fascinating book POTENTIATE YOUR DNA.
The whole point of this endeavour—for me at least—was to activate healing mechanisms in my DNA that were not functioning properly. First and foremost on my mind was the thought that this procedure might trigger some healing in my damaged rotator cuffs.
I damaged the connective tissue in both shoulder joints when I was sixteen and they never healed properly. I had long since resigned myself to a lifetime of shoulder pain, weakness, and stiffness—I couldn’t even lie on my side in a normal manner to sleep at night because of the slight pressure on my shoulders and the resulting pain!
My hope was to instigate some major healing in my shoulders through DNA Potentiation, and I wasn’t disappointed. On the 12th of September last year (2011), two days before my birthday, I performed my own Potentiation.
It left me with a subtle “buzz” or tingling in my shoulders—and virtually overnight I noticed my shoulder joints started feeling better. I actually kept a “Post-Potentiation Log” to record any changes I noticed over the subsequent weeks. Here are the first two entries:
12th September: Potentiation performed. Slept well. Shoulder not as sore to sleep on?
13th September: Significant reduction in pain [in] left shoulder. Hasn’t felt this good in years. Hardly any discomfort swinging [arms] across chest where before [there] was sharp pain. Slept better.
As you can see, there was an immediate improvement in the state of my shoulders. A little over a month later, my entry read:
20–27th November: Noticed in this time frame that right knee pain virtually gone. Had persisted for 7–9 months? Can sleep with virtually no shoulder discomfort either side.
In addition to my shoulder problems, I had been experiencing some anomalous and troubling knee pain in my right knee on the outer periphery of the joint for some months, which I reasoned may have been some kind of cartilage damage (all I did was crouch down one day and crack!—new injury). At some point post-Potentiation the pain simply disappeared.
The above was my last entry to date. I experienced no other major and obvious changes that I felt were noteworthy, but these alone were truly miraculous. By this stage my shoulders were feeling infinitely better than they had for twelve years, and they now give me virtually no pain or discomfort.
I was able to start lifting weights over my head again without pain or weakness—a monumental improvement (although I stopped lifting to help facilitate my shoulders’ recovery—never mind the fact that laboring during the day, combined with the stress of guitar playing on my left wrist, made for a brutal combination).
At this point post-Potentiation, I’m looking forward to the next stage in the process—Articulation—which you can experience no sooner than five months after Potentiation.
I should note that I’ve also noticed what seems to be a subtle improvement in my food sensitivities. I still have to avoid any significant amounts of dairy, but my tolerance for wheat seems to have been enhanced—though to be fair, this may well be partly (or entirely) due to my own interventions (including some EFT and some attitude assessments regarding certain foods). I’m not sure, just “throwing it out there.”
All in all it is quite obvious that Luckman and his partner Leigh have devised a truly revolutionary healing system—one that effects permanent change at the most fundamental biological level.
This healing system emerged from a horrific rollercoaster ride triggered by a catastrophic hepatitis and yellow-fever vaccine reaction that compelled Luckman to seek remedies to his deteriorating health for a grueling ten years. Truly, he embarked upon his own dark night of the soul—and what a long night it was! It was obvious reading POTENTIATE YOUR DNA that Luckman’s DNA was probably damaged, and no one knew how to repair it.
Just how bad did things get for him, physically? In his own words, “I developed devastating food and environmental allergies, extreme chronic fatigue, bizarre muscle twitching, facial neuralgia, awful bloating, terrible insomnia, horrific migraines, and twenty-odd other mysterious symptoms that baffled every doctor and therapist I visited—and I visited many.”
Eventually, Luckman despaired not only at the impermanent symptom relief offered by various healing modalities, such as allergy clearing and Chi Gong (which did, however, play an important role in his eventual recovery), but also at the futile input of allopathic doctors who could offer no insight into the reason for his condition—let alone real solutions.
Luckman’s story is a fascinating one, and I’m not going to attempt telling it all here. Needless to say, he eventually emerged transformed from his arduous dark night—which involved massive research and experimentation—with the Regenetics healing system.
Not only did this work eliminate his debilitating food allergies (among other wonderful effects), returning him to full strength, but it has done similar things for thousands of other people who did not know where else to turn for relief.
If it wasn’t for Luckman’s vaccine-induced downward spiral dating back to 1995, we wouldn’t have DNA Potentiation and the Regenetics Method—and I (and my rotator cuffs and right knee) will be eternally grateful that we do.
[Brendan D. Murphy is a contributing writer for MINDSCAPE magazine (UK) and VERITAS magazine (Australia). Based in Perth, Western Australia, Brendan is also author of the forthcoming science-meets-metaphysics nonfiction work in two volumes, THE GRAND ILLUSION: A SYNTHESIS OF SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY. This groundbreaking research project, to be published starting in 2012, is designed to blow minds wide open and transform consciousness. Visit THE GRAND ILLUSION fan page on Facebook for more articles, information, and free book excerpts: www.facebook.com/The.Grand.Illusion.Books.]
DISCLAIMER: The Developers and all Facilitators of the Regenetics Method offer DNA activation as educators and ordained ministers, not medical doctors, and do not purport to diagnose, prevent or treat illness of any kind. Regenetics Method information and sessions are offered, and accepted, as exercises of freedom of speech and religion. The Developers and Facilitators of the Regenetics Method make no recommendations, claims, promises or guarantees relative to specific health challenges. You are solely responsible for your own medical treatment and care.
The Art of Allowing
Sol Luckman
In the lonely and starkly beautiful high desert of northern New Mexico, my apprenticeship in the ways of spirit intensified as winter approached.
For the first time, I glimpsed—if briefly and inchoately—a foundational truth that would go on to inform every aspect of my work in DNA activation:
Spirit is not just energy, as it currently is understood by most Westerners, but a form of consciousness that underwrites all being.
True healing, which I have called “wholing” but which also might be described as transformation, being fundamentally spiritual in nature, cannot be achieved without activation of higher consciousness through energetic means of one kind or another.
Since everything is a form of conscious energy, including our bodies, activating ourselves ener-genetically to raise our consciousness often, if not always, results in physical improvement.
Integrating this higher consciousness requires knowledge and acceptance of the fact that from the limited perspective of our egos, we really do not control much of anything in our lives.
To get at this important truth, I often say that “life lives us”—by which I mean something rather different from the old hippy adage to just “go with the flow.”
Going with the flow implies a lack of guiding purpose behind our existence, a disposition to let things happen as they may and accept whatever occurs with a detached expression and shrug of the shoulders.
When we acknowledge that life lives us, on the other hand, we still are riding the currents of our individual destiny.
But if I may reason oxymoronically, by embracing our true purpose and potential as beings embodying particular aspects of Great Spirit, which expresses itself through us, we embrace a decidedly more active role in our personal surrender and service to divine will.
Here, it is important to emphasize that unlike much Eastern spirituality, in no way do I advocate that we suppress, repress or attempt to destroy our egos.
Achieving healing and transformation does not mean that we instantly dissolve back into the primordial soup of Source where we completely lose all sense of individuality.
Rather, genuine wholing involves a willingness to evolve our perception of identity away from a self mired in separation and fragmentation, to an identity rooted in the Self from which all things of a seemingly individual nature flow.
Ken Carey eloquently describes the relationship between spirit and ego: “For if your ego is a reflection of spirit, then even at its core, your ego is spirit.” In a healthy state, “both spirit and ego perform their respective roles equally centered in God.”
During the healing process, as consciousness increases, Carey explains that
your sense of self blossoms into an accurate awareness of who you are. This transformed awareness includes your former sense of being one among many, but it also includes an awareness … rooted in the singularity of Eternal Being from which all individuality unfolds.
Lacking such awareness, you remain “a latent possibility, a programmed product of human culture. You are not truly yourself.”
The awakening process, the Shift in consciousness that is fundamental to genuine healing and transformation, can be envisioned as an evolutionary movement from “victim consciousness,” in which we see ourselves as separate from the world, to “unity consciousness,” in which we realize not just that we are part of the world—but that we are the world.
Surrender at the level of our ego to this thoroughgoing personal metamorphosis, which is guided in all instances by our Higher Self, is not optional.
Rather, surrender is the first, all-important step in our ongoing journey toward realization of our inherent potential.
To be absolutely clear, as I am using the term, surrender does not mean that we must maintain a lukewarm attitude relative to the occasionally frustrating and sometimes bewildering unfoldment of our lives.
To the contrary, as we evolve our perspective and raise our consciousness, we begin to appreciate surrender to the spiritual guidance of our Higher Self as a viable means to an end, the only workable strategy for healing, wholing and becoming the complete individuals we were meant to be.
The reason my partner Leigh and I counsel clients to listen to their intuition and engage their imagination when making decisions is that spirit always speaks to us through the heart. Anything coming from the head is likely unchecked ego and usually serves to sidetrack us.
Not that we ever fully surrender the ego. As we move forward on our path of conscious personal mastery, the ego continues to play a valuable role by, most importantly, helping us protect and care for our physical body so that we may fulfill our spiritual purpose.
But having awakened to our true divine nature through stepping into unity consciousness, the ego no longer is leading the way. Instead of being our guide, the ego is now a follower—and this is as it should be.
Qigong, which is associated with Taoism, was a wonderful teacher in what I like to call the Art of Allowing, for which the Taoist term in Chinese, Wu Wei, can be translated as “doing by not doing.”
As opposed to mentally directed action, considered artificial, the philosophy of Wu Wei, which is at the heart of both Taoism and qigong, encourages intuitive, or natural, action.
As a practical example, the doing nothing of remaining motionless “hugging the tree” results in doing something obviously life-affirming by pooling huge amounts of bioenergy that can be used for healing, creativity, sex, and many other activities.
From a more philosophical perspective, the practice of Wu Wei can be thought of as your ego—“you”—learning to get out of your spirit’s “way” so that “thy will be done” and miracles of personal healing and transformation can occur.
As an American with a background in mainstream academics, the idea that there was any art to allowing initially was every bit as foreign to me as the words “Wu Wei.”
Although I considered myself a “free thinker,” I quickly discovered that I was far more culturally conditioned in the ways of ego, individualism, materialism and having to “make things happen” than I was comfortable admitting.
Shockingly, for something whose chief requirement was doing nothing, Wu Wei was the hardest thing I had ever (not) done. I came very close to throwing in the towel, cutting down the tree instead of hugging it every day.
Having facilitated the Regenetics Method for years now and worked with many westernized clients, I know I am far from alone in my culturally ingrained tendency to doubt the power of spiritual energy and resist allowing things to manifest naturally.
Not infrequently, Leigh and I receive emails from clients following their Potentiation like this:
Client: “I just can’t tell if I’m making any progress. I’m trying so hard.”
Us: “We’re sorry to hear that. How in particular do you feel that you’re not making progress?”
Client: “Well, I just feel rough all the time. I know I’m detoxing. Our last conversation really helped me understand that part of the process. But it’s just so uncomfortable.”
Us: “It certainly can be difficult. If you don’t mind our asking, are you doing any other things besides Regenetics to get well?”
Client: “Oh, yeah. Lots of things.”
Us: “Like what?”
Client: “Well, I’m doing ionized footbaths to draw out toxins—three times a week. I’m also getting regular lymphatic drainage and using a zapper several hours a day for parasites. I take a lot of homeopathics and supplements. And I just started a round of colonics and a colon cleansing diet—”
Us: “Hold on. You’re doing all of that, in addition to having just received Potentiation a few months ago?”
Client: “Yeah. What’s the matter?”
Us: “Didn’t you read in our materials to proceed gently with other modalities, since Potentiation can be a powerful activation?”
Client: “Of course. I just thought that, you know, since Regenetics only involves energy, I had to make something happen here. Do you think maybe I’m pushing myself too hard?”
Fortunately, I had an excellent qigong teacher who helped me integrate the Art of Allowing into my life because he was a living example of its power to strengthen the body.
From a chronically fatigued and emaciated young man on his deathbed, he had transformed through his own practice of qigong and Wu Wei into a robust, physically imposing martial artist who appeared the epitome of radiant physical health.
I am forever grateful to my teacher, a generous and gifted person whom I credit with helping me get back on my feet at one of the lowest points of my dark night of the soul.
But as one suffering acutely from chronic fatigue myself, I observed two subtle behaviors on his part that made me question whether he really had cured his illness—or simply had put it into remission by building up vast chi reserves through continuous qigong practice.
My teacher’s dependence on qigong was itself a possible sign that all was not entirely well in him. By his own admission, if he skipped hugging the tree more than a day or two, he started to feel “lousy.”
But even more indicative that his health probably remained compromised at a deep level was that he felt compelled to maintain a very strict diet, one nearly as severe as my own that almost completely avoided sugars and starches, which he admitted he still did not tolerate well.
In retrospect, my teacher’s unrelenting food sensitivities were a “red flag” that, despite years of qigong practice and an ascetic lifestyle, suggested he remained damaged genetically—most likely by vaccines.
Later, as I became aware of the role vaccines play in inducing autoimmunity, and thus many allergies, by negatively programming DNA, I started to wonder if it might be possible to “reprogram” damaged DNA to a state of healthy functioning.
I asked myself if this kind of reset might be capable of undoing sensitivities and other symptoms experienced by individuals suffering from autoimmune conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), and other essentially empty diagnoses.
Although I enjoyed qigong and never had been opposed to hard work, I wondered if there might be an even purer form of Wu Wei, an even more effective method of engaging the Art of Allowing that would empower me—and maybe others—to heal at a more profound level and leave behind meditation and daily practice in favor of being fully present in the world of daily activity.
It was this line of “passively purposeful” questioning, made possible by Wu Wei in the first place, that steered me unerringly downstream during the development of Potentiation.
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
DISCLAIMER: The Developers and all Facilitators of the Regenetics Method offer DNA activation as educators and ordained ministers, not medical doctors, and do not purport to diagnose, prevent or treat illness of any kind. Regenetics Method information and sessions are offered, and accepted, as exercises of freedom of speech and religion. The Developers and Facilitators of the Regenetics Method make no recommendations, claims, promises or guarantees relative to specific health challenges. You are solely responsible for your own medical treatment and care.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD, from which the above article was adapted. For information on the “revolutionary healing science” (NEXUS) of the Regenetics Method, check out www.PhoenixRegenetics.org. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. Characterized by Reader Views as a “modern-day ALICE IN WONDERLAND” and by Apex Reviews as a “mind-bending journey through the mind of the ultimate iconoclast,” BEGINNER’S LUKE is also, as literature professor Niama Williams has written, a “spiritual journey that you do not want to put down.” Share the Adventure of an imaginary lifetime by visiting www.BeginnersLuke.com. View Sol’s paintings and learn more about his work at www.CrowRising.com.]
Vision Quest (Crow Medicine)
Sol Luckman
No sooner had I left graduate school at the end of May, 1998, than I was on my way to a brand-new variety of education that tremendously broadened my horizons—while also imparting much life energy, or chi (sometimes spelled qi), to my depleted and struggling systems.
Qigong is an ancient technique of energy healing related to tai chi. Through one of my remaining friends, I had been put in contact with a gifted qigong teacher, an American also in his early thirties who, several years previously, had traveled to China to study this venerable art to cure his extreme chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS or CFIDS).
I did not travel to China. But after the yard sale of yard sales, I crammed my scant belongings into my car and spent two days driving nearly twenty-four hours from the East Coast to New Mexico, where my qigong teacher taught a popular class attended by as many as a hundred students three times a week at dawn.
I think of this transitional, challenging and magical period of my life as my own personal “vision quest” that, for the first time, opened my eyes to the often misunderstood and underestimated worlds of spirit and energy.
In many indigenous cultures, the vision quest is the form initiation takes and constitutes the transition from adolescence to adulthood. When the initiate is old enough for vision questing, he (or she) typically spends several days or weeks alone in the wilderness, often while fasting.
Eventually, a particular animal, sometimes called the “totem animal” or “animal medicine,” visits the initiate in a dream, vision, or (more rarely) waking state.
The appearance of the totem animal embodying a specific spiritual power indicates the individual’s innate calling—which after returning to the tribe, the newly initiated young person pursues following a time of apprenticeship.
Curiously, I did not realize (at least consciously) that I was on any kind of vision quest. To be honest, I did not even know what a vision quest was.
I simply was living like a hermit in the windy, sage-covered high desert; eating the few foods my ravaged immune and digestive systems could tolerate; and practicing qigong often half the day because I intuitively felt I had to in order to survive.
Certainly, I had no awareness of being a shaman in training!
Now, anyone who has ever regularly spent half an hour “hugging the tree,” the primary practice in medical qigong, knows two things.
For starters, an enormous amount of bioenergy (chi) is pooled by maintaining this oddly difficult position between standing and squatting, arms loosely draped around an invisible trunk, eyes remaining calmly unfocused on nothing in particular.
The first time I experienced this powerful energy, it literally knocked me on my rear. I lay on the ground outside my rental panting for thirty minutes as waves of electric heat like cosmic hot flashes shook my body again and again.
This was the energy I ultimately used to strengthen myself enough to go on with my life. But I needed an entire summer of practice just to be able to accommodate it gracefully.
The second observation made by serious “tree huggers” is that in that meditative state where you are supposed to think about nothing, sometimes you successfully empty your head. But more often, you think about anything and everything.
Such was my case at first, but then an odd thing started to happen: every time I hugged the tree and aligned myself with the flow of spiritual energy, I thought of crows.
Ever since I was a kid, strangely, I had felt a strong affinity for crows, learning to imitate their caws and always appreciating their presence. But now, whenever I did qigong, crows were all I could think about. Not just that—crows started to appear everywhere in my life.
They circled raucously around me as I hugged the tree under the autumnal sky and perched beside me on my porch as I sipped herbal tea and wrote in my journal. Crow statues seemed to appear like weeds, suddenly and uncontrollably, all over my quaint little New Mexican town.
Almost every night, I dreamed of crows. I realized I was into the music of the Counting Crows. And when I started dabbling with watercolors, for the longest time crows were all I wanted to paint.
A fellow student in my qigong class, overhearing me describe my weird fascination with crows, was kind enough to loan me a copy of MEDICINE CARDS: THE DISCOVERY OF POWER THROUGH THE WAYS OF ANIMALS.
Turning to the section on Crow Medicine, I learned that in many native wisdom traditions, Crow is the totem animal, or “medicine,” that “knows the unknowable mysteries of creation,” guards holy texts, and upholds the sacred laws of being.
As keeper of the Creator’s linguistically-based knowledge of creation, as recorded in sacred texts, Crow is gifted with the special ability to modify universal rules and “shape-shift,” both personally and collectively.
In other words, Crow’s innate talent involves knowing how to manifest new ways of living and being.
When shortly thereafter I was prompted intuitively to read a magazine article (featuring a crow graphic) on vision questing, I realized in an epiphany that for months I had been receiving visits from my totem animal!
Apparently, Crow was trying to tell me through its repeated cawing that my calling involved recalling that I knew something important about creation, holy texts, and sacred law.
Humorously, I visualized myself as a phoenix-crow hybrid, a jet-black bird engulfed in indigo flames, hugging the tree with my wings alight as I stood pooling chi in the middle of my ashes. I actually painted a little watercolor close to this description.
The only problem was, while the phoenix imagery was crystal clear, it was years before I was able to grasp the meaning of the crow part of the picture.
But eventually, as I came to fathom the true nature of DNA—which you will not find in biology textbooks, but will learn more about shortly—while developing Potentiation, I understood why Crow had come to me so insistently.
DNA is the language-based holy text, the sacred law of creation that Crow guards and shape-shifts by calling out its inherent potential through linguistic means.
In fact, as I explain in detail in CONSCIOUS HEALING, the Regenetics Method very well may be an example of a type of ancient healing speech applied to genetics referred to in the Koran as the “Language of the Birds.”
(Excerpted from POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD)
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
Acknowledgments
SOL LUCKMAN
First, I would like to thank my dear mother for her intense labor of love in delivering yours truly safe and sound into the world. I apologize for the pain I caused you, mother, on my rather late arrival. As you know better than anyone, I’m a slow learner—always running behind.
I would also like to thank my father for sparing his precious seed to co-create me. Let me take this opportunity to remind you, father, you still owe me for the not inconsiderable pleasure I afforded you on the glorious occasion of my conception. I’m prepared to accept cash, credit card, personal check, travelers cheque, money order, gold bullion, real estate or a sizable inheritance.
I would also like to thank the Academy. You guys don’t know me, but I think you’re really great. Keep up the good work!
Next, I would like to extend a special expression of gratitude to all my family, friends, lovers, teachers, employers and coworkers who one way or another, overtly or covertly, through thick and thin, encouraged me to keep writing this imaginary life. There aren’t many of you, which makes my appreciation all the greater.
I would also like to take this opportunity to recognize all my family, friends, lovers, teachers, employers and coworkers who one way or another, overtly or covertly, through thick and thin, attempted to derail my creative aspirations and mire me in the quotidian mediocrity to which you—you know who you are—have become hopelessly inured. There are a lot of you, more than I could count, which makes this, the Moment of penning my Acknowledgments, all the more satisfying.
Finally, I must say a word about the places where substantial parts of this work (play?) were composed. I mean specifically the Cafés of the World where I’ve whiled away so much of my time (and yours!) in the vain but amusing pursuit of capturing an ineffable existence: mine.
If I learned anything writing BEGINNER’S LUKE, it was that contrary to myth, heaven is filled with cool little cafés with Leonard Cohen over hidden speakers, groovy abstract expressionist art on the walls and superior Java from obscure South American countries. I was born to sit out on the terrasses of such glorious establishments of leisure on such splendid afternoons, chain-sipping specialty caffeinated beverages while daydreaming impossible episodes in impossible places—
Excuse me, my cappuccino just arrived. I can’t tell you how thankful I am. I’d like to acknowledge this cappuccino. I sweeten it liberally with three sparkling sugar cubes, stir the tan frothing brew with the tiny silver spoon, hoist the cup with trembling anticipation to my lips and, smelling Italy, visions of panforte and biscotti dancing in my head, take a sip.
Ecstasy! The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well. I’m so thankful for this ability that has taken me an entire imaginary lifetime to perfect.
I’m also thankful for the fine pair of legs strutting by just now on the sidewalk. You have to feel good knowing there are thighs like that in the world. A toast to the miniskirt’s inventor!
I raise my eyes and lock gazes with the proud owner of these exquisite limbs—and it’s almost like making love in this instant. The passion, though invisible, is nearly palpable beneath her stoic façade and my whole body tingles with glimpses of erotic encounters that could theoretically, but will probably never, occur.
There—it just happened again, with another set of eyes: the riveting glance, oxymoronic perhaps but with a rush like spontaneous combustion, then the looking away and the tragic vanishing forever. How I adore you, whoever you are!
By way of closing these Acknowledgments, I shall paraphrase one of my personal heroes, the great flâneur Baudelaire:
O you I could have loved!
O you who knew it!
O we who blew it!
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of comic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
Sacred Foothill
Sol Luckman
The Sacred Foothill
Becomes especially important
In wintertime
When the driving snow comes
And you can no longer see
The Sacred Mountain above
Small though it may be,
As one ascending
Out of the darkness
Toward the Light,
I need this foothold in sanity
To remain steady
In the whiteout of chaos
That is the world
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of seriocomic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
Manifesto for a New Fiction
SOL LUCKMAN
The problem with much contemporary American—some would say, world—fiction is twofold. If we understand many commercial novels these days to fall somewhere on the spectrum between literary and visionary, with much in the middle that scarcely deserves mentioning, it’s hard to ignore the fact we’re living a classic Catch-22. Literary novels are just not that visionary, which is another way of saying they’re often boring and unimaginative, slaves to a dogged realism—whereas visionary novels are, typically, none too literary, which is another way of saying often poorly, if not execrably, written, cobbled together with their narrative machinery clanking and clunking.
Historically, the exceptions confirm the rule. Tolkien’s THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS are indeed consummately both literary and visionary. These classics have also been imitated so many times—unsuccessfully, even laughably—it beggars belief. Here and there a contemporary novel pops up on the radar in this magical Twilight Zone where craft and invention seem indissolubly wedded—Robert Coover’s THE PUBLIC BURNING comes to mind—but those of us literary-visionary hybrids who scour today’s fictional landscape in search of inspiration usually come up empty.
The fly in the ointment is that old bugger, realism. Nearly two centuries after Stendhal’s novel-as-mirror traveled the tedious highway of fiction, and despite the influences of modernism and postmodernism, the majority of today’s novel readers, like Coca-Cola addicts, still want the Real Thing. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. The beauty of a metaphor is it doesn’t have to be real to ring true. The instant a metaphor becomes real it ceases to be a metaphor, which suggests a disconnect between truth and what’s commonly referred to as reality. This is a pivotal point—that the real world probably isn’t what you believe it is, or rather, that it’s precisely what you believe it is—which, if you still don’t get it, I can only trust someday you will.
I don’t mean any of this theoretically. Theory does everything in its power to remove the living soul of literature, tear its heart out, make of the study of Art a hard-edged Science. Never mind that Art is as far removed from measurement as Science is from love. As writers confronting theory, it’s incumbent on us not to let our prose dry up in that desert, but to allow it to become a desert rose, our prose, flourishing in the heat and sands of what passes for knowledge.
We must, then, for them to be of any worth whatsoever, live our theories practically. For writers this means, inevitably, doing the deed—not just having the idea but putting it on paper, writing down not just the bones of our dreams but their flesh and blood as well. Literature, at its best, and despite the recent attempts of critics, can never be murdered and dissected, as it’s an immortal yet organic thing, drawing on the richness and complexity of Experience yet somehow managing to transcend its mundane origins like an alchemist transmuting base metals. The current twin foci on theory and realism conspire to dry up the spirit and wither the soul, blind the eye and deafen the ear, broil the brain and microwave the heart—and perhaps most disturbingly for us radical wordsmiths who still haven’t sold out to the Man, brown the nose and pucker the rectum.
If we’re to avoid becoming fiction robots in a corporate world, we must stop adding to our educational excesses, eschew the assembly line of MFAs and bottom-line publishing houses, commit ourselves to a way of writing that engages in a valiant struggle to push the limits of plot and language so as to awaken, not anesthetize, the reader. Anything rather than live in the dead world of those cold people, the Intellectuals. Anything rather than subject ourselves to the fusty chain of academic command, the savage petty politics where the arguments are so heated because the stakes, as someone once astutely quipped, are so small.
We must lay our ears back and push on into the literary fourth dimension, realm of feminine chaos and infinite possibility, forego regionalism and play with farce—and, especially, always appreciate the bizarre. Love for the bizarre is, itself, transformational. When you welcome the bizarre into the fiction of your life, anything and anybody can be transformed from dogsh*t into gold.
Let’s begin a new literary movement. I don’t care what we call it. Let’s start writing novels for people who don't like novels. Because these days who can blame them? You can please all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t please all the people all the time. So let’s at least please ourselves. Years from now when verisimilitude is finally understood as a terribly limiting proposition, let our daringly experimental books (often self-published, often ignored by the mainstream) be remembered as the Rubicon fiction crossed on its journey into multidimensionality. There can be no turning back, for readers or writers, after our historical strokes of madcap genius. Or so my story goes.
Once in every generation, if we’re lucky, a character shows up who can teach us about reality because he’s more real than ourselves. Melville called such a character a “Drummond light” after the type of light once used in theaters that was capable of providing illumination in many directions. May one of us create such a character. Better yet, let’s buck tradition and create a string of Drummond lights, each a brilliant facet of the Hope Diamond that is our new fiction. Let’s turn away, once and for all, from old Enlightenment tropes toward a new narrative of Enwritenment. Together let’s write light.
In so doing, maybe, over time, our inherited and mostly dysfunctional posterity urge based on ego will gradually give way to something more stable, healthier, that might be called simply the urge to be. To have been versus to be. Product versus process. In the face of a literature of monoliths and petroglyphs, we have the choice to opt for incompletion. May our new writing shine with the protean power of now. May imagination become the new faith.
Copyright © 2012 by Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.
[Sol Luckman is a prolific visual artist and critically acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction. His numerous books include the international bestselling CONSCIOUS HEALING: BOOK ONE ON THE REGENETICS METHOD and POTENTIATE YOUR DNA: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO HEALING & TRANSFORMATION WITH THE REGENETICS METHOD. Sol is also author of the BEGINNER’S LUKE Series of comic novels that hilariously foreground the role of imagination in creating our individual and collective reality. You can learn more about Sol’s nonfiction, fiction and art at www.CrowRising.com.]
