Thursday, August 16, 2012

VBTC Pit Stop - Eden:Regaining Our Spiritual Freedom by Chet Shupe Guest Post & Giveaway

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Chet Shupe’s professional background is in Electronics Engineering. As a young engineer never did he imagine he would someday be developing a thesis that addresses a broad spectrum of sociological issues. At some point at mid career however, he was inspired to apply his background in control theory to the human condition by looking at the brain as the controller of the life of the species. This has led to an engineering based, rather than a religious, sociological, psychological, or philosophically based assessment of the human condition. Out of this has come a unique perspective addressing the perplexing issues that increasingly face us, including, among others, our lack of intimacy and habitat destruction. Why is our world essentially without relational intimacy, when that is what we want most is to love and be loved? And why are we destroying the habitat that we need to survive?
To Shupe, the two issues are related, plus myriads of other ills from which our culture suffers. Shupe offers his answer regarding the source of these issues, and also suggests a path by which to recover our natural state of intimacy in our relationships and of harmony with the natural world.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Eden- Regaining our Spiritual Freedom - By Chet Shupe

Spiritual freedom, as presented in Eden, is rooted in brain dysfunction—mine.
Eden is an engineer’s perspective on the human condition—based on system control theory, not sociology.
What we each are looking for is to Love and to be Loved, but have created a world that offers only wealth and privilege.
In Eden we lived in the moment — according to the sensibilities of our souls
  • Loving and being loved is attending to one anther’s present needs
  • Seeking wealth and privilege is attending to the future
We expelled ourselves from Eden by trying to secure the future
  • Subjugated ourselves to legal systems—Kings, Gods, States, Institutions
  • To control our future we must that take care of ourselves according to the law of the land

In our natural state we gifted our brothers and sisters with our presence and unique skills
  • We didn’t worry about ourselves. Our brothers and sisters took care of us
  • To take care of life, and allow ourselves to be taken care of by life, is what intimacy is about. It is how we become part of the web of life. By trying to control the future we have separated ourselves from life.
What is happiness?
  • Happiness is intimacy. Given basic needs, if you have intimacy then you are happy.
  • Without intimacy, life is largely an issue of pain management – via religion, ideology, entertainment, technology, etc. Without intimacy, we live in pursuit of happiness.
Intimacy requires that we trust our lives to the human spirit.
Our spirits have existed for as long as our kind, upwards of 200,000 years, most of which was without legal systems. As such, our spirits are uniquely equipped to manage the future by attending to the moment.
Natural families are the key to intimacy
Trust our lives to others without separate legal and monetary identities, and without rules on the wall or on file that specify how we will serve one another.
The nucleus of that family, I speculate, will be a sisterly bond. The men, the brotherhood, will join, by the grace of the women, to help, support, and protect them and their children.
Eden is accessible to any body of people, who, having seen through the illusion of future control, are ready to trust their lives to the human spirit as manifest in one another.

Genre: Non-fiction Self-Help
A sociological view of the world we live in.
Publication Date: September 2011
Publisher: Acacia Publishing, Inc.
Featured Essay published in Palo Verde Pages – October/December 2010 issue, available on Kindle at:http://www.amazon.com/Verde-Pages-Magazine-October-ebook/dp/B0044XUYSM/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340053748&sr=1-3
GUEST BLOG ESSAY – Spiritual Zombies
By Chet Shupe

Books, movies and video games that feature zombies are presently quite the thing. Could this be because, at some deep level, we feel like zombies? For eons, our spirits – or our emotional natures, if you prefer – evolved to react to the exigencies of the immediate future. But we modern humans have abandoned that successful model. We have given up our freedom to honor our feelings of the moment in return for a legal and monetary identity through which we plan to secure our material and emotional needs for life. In return for this promise of security, we must nurture and serve that legal and monetary identity and those plans as fervently as our ancestors once celebrated life by caring for one another and the land that sustained them.
From childhood, we are taught to plan for our future. Indeed, not to do so is considered mindless. I suggest quite the opposite is true: This need to realize our plans results in mindlessness by either blinding us to one another’s needs in the moment, or even when we recognize such needs, out of concern for the wellbeing of our monetary identity, we are unable to respond. Furthermore, in trying to realize our hoped-for future, we repeatedly find ourselves stuck in classrooms, domestic arrangements, or work situations, etc. which are the last places on earth we feel like being – often without our even complaining about it. By such blindness and imprisonments we are, spiritually speaking, zombies – we are the walking dead.
The only way to be alive to the moment as members of a social species, is to secure our lives in relationships, not in plans. This is not by design, law, or intent. It is simply the nature of things. Indeed, in my view, that is what defines a social species: It is a species that survives and thrives by its members trusting their lives to each other through their relationships as embodied by extended families. Only through serving one another directly can we know relational intimacy – that sense of being as-one with others, with our surroundings and with the essence of life itself, where all time, past and future, folds into the present. But what are we doing? Instead of trusting our lives to our relationships, we employ legal arrangements to secure them. Our relationships are not based on trust, but just the opposite, on distrust!
The problems we face, ranging from divorce and spousal violence to habitat destruction and atomic weapons, are not real, but only symptoms of trusting our lives to institutions, instead of to our relationships. But even if institutional subjugation is the problem, how can modern humans possibly trust our lives to the human spirit when, through illicit sex, crime, violence, greed, holocausts, and all manner of misbehaviors, we seem utterly untrustworthy? Though it may appear otherwise, it is wrong to think that, by instinct, humans are born untrustworthy. We are trustworthy when our lives are secured in relationships. This is evident in that our species has survived for so long. During the millennia of human evolution, up until money and law took possession of us only a few thousand years ago, humans successfully managed for their survival by securing their lives in their relationships. Our species flourished when we functioned as “bodies” of people bonded by our emotional and material need for one another.
This ability to manage for our species’ wellbeing is key to our survival. It is therefore the only kind of trustworthiness that is of any conceivable significance. But to comprehend that significance requires that we value our own existence more than our plans. For spiritual zombies this is the stumbling block: In the absence of others to care for through interdependent relationships, realizing personal plans and dreams is our only reason for being. We therefore value our plans more than our existence – which is also to say, we value our illusions more than existence. That we worship our plans above all else is evident when we enthusiastically place our lives on the line to defend the institutions that authorize them. In rising to defend our institutions, we experience a facsimile of the emotional intensity and utter reality of being alive. We thereby temporarily cease being the zombies we have been turned into by our enslavement to the very plans we are defending. This also explains the madness of both habitat destruction and atomic weapons. To stop destroying the habitat would interfere with our plans – i.e., with who we think we are. And without A-bombs, the institutions that authorize our plans would be vulnerable to being taken over by other nations. By such madness, we reveal that our national identity, as it exists on paper, is more elemental to our sense of being than our identity as manifested materially and emotionally. Worshiping paper identities in preference to one another’s actual existence virtually seals the fate of our kind, should we remain trapped in this “plans-over-existence” or “future-supersedes-the-present” state of mind.
We are not free to be true to ourselves nor to life when we trust our lives to plans based on serving personal needs. We are free only when we, instead, trust our lives to the human spirit, which, by being true to feelings, instinctively manages for our species’ wellbeing. Our most basic desire is to care for one another, as did our forbearers for the millions of years while they, by being true to their spirits, nurtured the process that has gifted us with life. But, instead of serving our species, by caring for one another in the moment, our survival requires that we serve the state by securing personal lifetime needs through the legal system by which it is manifest. How can we possibly be trustworthy when not free to be ourselves – the life-sustaining entities that Nature created?
Once we began securing our lives in legalities, it became a vicious circle, the unavoidable consequence of institutional subjugation: The more we view one another as untrustworthy—as a result of having to abide by legal edicts, instead of by our deepest sensibilities—the more dependent on legalities we become. The law is its own justification!
Can we break free of this self-energized loop of spiritual zombieism, this “dog-chasing-its-tail” spiral to self-extinction? Maybe. Maybe not. Only the future, to which we presently have no access, contains the answer. One thing seems certain. To find a way out, we must understand what happened, and why ours is the only species whose members consider their plans and their paper identities more important than their existence. That knowledge is what my book, Eden, strives to offer mankind. Only with such awareness in hand can we hope to uncover the path that will return our species to a state of wellbeing, a state in which knowing intimacy and living in the moment are as natural as breathing. Only love can save our species and its habitat, and thus humanity, from the death spiral of spiritual zombieism.
And what is love? Love is the gift we receive for being true to life. It is that mystical experience by which Nature rewards us, via our emotional natures, for being faithful to the life of our species – the true source of our being – in our relationships with one another and with the land. Love is circumstantial, unplanned, unintended. Intentions, by imposing plans, pave roads to hell, not to love. Love and happiness are one and the same. Love happens on its own, whenever we are serving others directly instead of indirectly by legal or monetary edicts. To love those to whom we are trusting our lives is our natural state of being, indeed, our only possible state when not possessed by money and law. Given basic needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter, if we have love, then nothing else really matters. And if we do not have love, then nothing else really matters anyhow.
Please contact me for events or interviews at:

Follow The Tour
August 17 - Author Fav Recipe & Fun Facts at Writing Innovations E-zine
August 20 - Guest Blog, Book Feature & Excerpt at Whoopeeyoo
August 22 - Interviewed at Reviews & Interviews
August 29 - Interviewed at The Bunny's Review
September 4 - Guest Blogging at The Golden Pen Review

Giveaway:
There will be 4 paperbacks given to 4 lucky tour followers that comment. Winners will be drawn during the tour. Leave a comment and don't forget to include your email address.



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