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Soulution: The Holistic
Manifesto
The Edge Life interview with William Bloom
Last of a two-part series
by Tim Miejan
Imagine, if you will, public schools teaching about feelings, about emotional intelligence,
to young children. William Bloom, perhaps the leading proponent of Holism in the
United Kingdom, if not the world, says that's what is happening in Britain. And it's
a very positive sign of good things to come.
Author of the new Soulution: The Holistic Manifesto (Hay House), Bloom shared in
the first part of this interview last month that he is encouraged by holistic trends
worldwide, but he also has concerns about people jumping aboard the holistic bandwagon
to earn a quick buck on on personal fulfillment schemes, and people who don't walk
their talk and generously support those in need.
Speaking with Edge Life by phone from his home in Glastonbury, England, Bloom continued
his dialogue on prosperity and connecting with Spirit.
I like this segment in your book, the chapter on money, where you share the
story about the greatest hunter who has the hut that's most plain.
Bloom: It's a different set of values. I just think those of us who are conscious
of this whole arena and a part of it -- and I speak of myself, I don't claim innocence
here -- I just think we need to walk our talk a little bit more powerfully and be
more powerful examples. But at the same time not be a party pooper, you know? Prosperity
is great. Partying is great. I love plasma television screens and all the rest of
it. But I just think we need to engage more seriously and...
...Have big parties and show Spiritual Cinema on your plasma screen.
Bloom: (Laughter) I'm a member of the Spiritual Cinema Club also.
In schools, there is a core holistic value that can be taught, if we choose to.
Bloom: What's interesting is, if you go back to the core piece of philosophy
or spirituality -- the private, personal experience that the universe is beautiful
and nature is beautiful and we're a part of this community -- that translates into
why you should be a good citizen, not because the Declaration of Independence or
whatever says so.
That's exactly right: instilling values that all humankind shares.
Bloom: That's right. And even atheists will go "Sure, I had that experience.
Just don't call it God, please. Don't try and manipulate me." So, I think there's
huge areas there where Holism can sneak through the door, without bringing in religion.
I liked your discussion of how we go about remaining consciously connected to
the whole of being while at the same time we get distracted by the task of being
human. What conclusions did you come to about this?
Bloom: I just think it's crucial for people to spend some calm time every day
connecting with Spirit. Spend some calm time every day checking out how they're doing.
Be intelligently self-reflective and check that their lives have integrity. I just
can't see how we can hold it together in a world of so much stimulation unless we
have some kind of spiritual practice that helps us hold a clear focus.
I've got my meditation practice. Meditation is not good for some people, but people
need to find what works to get them calm -- or what works to connect them and works
to make them self-reflective. This is, isn't it? This is the personal spirituality
in the middle of the holistic worldview, that privately all on your own you have
to be practicing compassion and connection and awareness -- not just words. It's
always in the heart, in the gut, in the body. Find out what works for you -- and
do it. We should be encouraging people.
You refer often to emotional intelligence and emotional literacy. How do these
related to Holism?
Bloom: They relate directly to Holism in two ways for me. One is that it's impossible
to live in a holistic and harmonious way if you're being governed by emotions of
which you have no awareness -- and people are. I'm just being totally realistic.
People's motivations -- how they are in relationship...to the plants in their backyard...with
their children...with their children's schools...with the President of the United
States, so often are driven by where they are emotionally. If they're governed by
their emotions, people don't make clear decisions. People behave stupidly.
Speaking of the core of emotional literacy is for children and adults to be aware
of what they're feeling, and then manage it, rather than being tsunamied by it. I
watch people who, with the best will in the world, are absolutely incapable of fulfilling
their ideals or serving their communities, because they don't give attention and
awareness to where they're at emotionally. That is the source of prejudice, conflict,
anger, jealousy, greed and all the rest.
It's vital for people to learn early on how to self-manage their own health, because
of the intimate relationship between emotions and the glandular system and the endocrine
system of the body. It's absolutely crucial that people manage their emotions and
guide them into a more comfortable and harmonious way of being, simply to avoid the
majority of illnesses in middle-age and beyond that in some way or another have to
do with tense tissue, which is caused by tense emotions. The statistics in Britain
show that more than 85 percent of illnesses past the age of 40 have to do with tense
tissue. The holistic approach to health care and a national policy absolutely requires
that people learn to self-manage.
I think that's one area of understanding ourselves that is quite lacking in most
of us.
Bloom: Well, we're not given the skills, are we?
No. Where do people start to get those?
Bloom: In England, I can only speak for here, there's a huge emotional literacy
movement -- emotional literacy as opposed to emotional purgence. Emotional literacy
is used a huge amount in schools, and at least half the schools in England have what's
called Circle Time in which children are taught how to notice what they're feeling.
Daniel Goleman's books have had a huge influence on business and organizations, because
he says you can't succeed as a manager unless you're aware of what you're feeling.
You also write that we must learn to engage with money, status and belongings
in a new way. Why is that?
Bloom: Because they govern, haunt, tempt, seduce and distract us usually, and
they need to be friendly companions that we enjoy with freedom. To put it bluntly,
the "developed" world's lack of emotional balance about status and belongings,
this lack of emotional balance, the sense of urgency to consume and to have the next
appropriate status symbol creates the culture, the thoughts, the commercial ambience
in which greedy and ignorant business people can create a world economy, which results
finally in the death of 30,000 children a day -- and the lack of sustainability in
developing countries. There is a direct link there.
You spoke earlier about how we need to get out of our comfort zone. I think that's
part of it. We need to step out and be who we are.
Bloom: But it's difficult. Privately, this is the kind of thing that I say depending
on where I'm at. Privately, there's this huge memory bank of getting burned or persecuted
or whatever for asserting that kind of truth.
You mentioned in your book, which I thought was good, the description of people
who have spiritual pride. How does the holistic person prevent having an elitist
pride?
Bloom: I notice in myself, for example, one of the great shocks of Bush's re-election
for me was a realization that for several decades I haven't bothered to even think
about how I should be communicating with the right wing. And that was a form of snobbery
in me. And that was a form of elitism.
I feel that in my holistic identity, I'm so certain of how right it is, that I have,
in the past, gone into a kind of smug zone. When people like us are talking with
each other, we can have a self-reflective conversation and check each other out.
I live with people who challenge me, thank goodness, and I have friends who challenge
me.
But quite honestly, I was shocked as I began to think about after Bush was re-elected
about the fact that I needed to be able to develop a dialogue with the right and
I hadn't done this for three decades, because I was a snob. I need to engage as a
citizen now, as opposed to a happy, exuberant New Ager, or whatever it is. And as
I sit on school boards, I'm realizing increasingly that if I say I'm part of an intimate
community, that includes everybody -- including the conservatives. I have not been
loving them, you know?
Well, I think that's a challenge that affects a lot of us here in the States.
It's hard to believe that the Inauguration just happened for the next term, that
we have four more years, and it's a challenge. How do we begin to engage?
Bloom: We need to take them seriously, for a start. I mean it's all conversation,
but it's important to have an assertive spirituality. Liberals must have an assertive
spirituality, I think. But, that's a whole other conversation.
In 1987 the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development encouraged
the adoption of the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter Commission adopted the final
version in March 2000. What is this document and why did you include it in your book?
Bloom: The Earth Charter is, to my heart and to my mind, the best articulated
document asserting an environmental and social manifesto for our next steps forward
as a species. Many people have identified it as such. One of the reasons why I wanted
to present it and publicize it is partly to say to our community, "Look, we
don't have to reinvent the wheel." A huge amount of heartfelt thought has gone
into already creating some of these documents, and we need to honor them and work
with them. I admire this document very much.
And yet I would wager that, at least in this country, less than 1 percent of the
people know about it.
Bloom: Yes, so we need to mobilize so that our people at least know about it
and then ask, "What should we do with it?" We'll print it out, get some
posters, put it up in the schools, have it up on the walls in waiting rooms. It's
just there as a document. It helps raise people's awareness.
In every community there might be 50 or 60 people, but there's only two or three
people who are actually activists. Everybody else kind of watches. But in the holistic
New Agey world, it's like one or two activists for every 10,000 people. Everybody
else is busy creating ecological homes and doing self-development, but not doing
citizenship, not doing community building.
Why did you write Soulution? What inspired it, and how did you change as an individual
during the process of creating it.
Bloom: I was considering what I was going to do with the next two decades of
my life, and I had a very clear choice to make, it seemed to me. I make my living
by running groups of one kind or another, teaching meditation, and energy work and
holistic approaches, and I could very easily create a retreat center and retreat
into it and just have people come to courses there. My wife and I were thinking of
maybe doing that.
At the same time, in my youth, I was a social activist and that is still deep in
my heart. I listen to the news three or four times a day, I read the newspapers,
I read books about politics and I used to teach at the London School of Economics.
I taught about psychological problems in international relations, so I was very engaged.
With my wife and a friend, I started a program at St. James's Church in London that
is still the major holistic platform. So I've got a history of doing projects.
And, so, I was sitting there in this contemplation about whether to engage or retreat.
I spent 18 months feeling, thinking, meditating, dreaming my way into it and got
clear that my energy and my skills were to engage more. Several people were looking
at me saying that because in the last 10 to 15 years I've been quite often the spokesperson
for holistic, New Age stuff in the U.K., they told me that I needed to write a book
that tries to pull it together for them.
I remember waking up one morning and saying, "I'm going to give 20 years to
being an activist and not a retreatant and this will be the project." And, it's
not as if it was like creating something from scratch. Writing the book was like
doing a Ph.D. project that should have taken six or seven years, but was completed
in nine months. It was the most energized, excruciating piece of work I've ever done
in my life. In order to get it done, I came out of my normal, very harmonious lifestyle
and went onto coffee for six months. That's very ironic, huh?
It's really well done and you've written it very comprehensively, but you've written
it so people can understand it very well.
Bloom: Thank you. When it was finished, it felt like a kind of orgasm. I just
went "poof!" A lot of the time I felt as though it wasn't me doing the
writing. I don't experience any sense of ownership of this particular book. I feel
as though I wrote it on behalf of my friends, and I feel quite proud of that. It's
an interesting sensation, because I've written many books and never had that experience
before.
So, where do you go from here?
Bloom: Well, I keep doing my own program of teaching to keep food on the table
and we're getting the holism network off the ground. The website Holism.info is gradually
being built, and we're beginning just about to start producing documents that respond
to government initiatives. We have a project going with a consortium of schools to
help introduce experiential spirituality into the curriculum. And we're working on
the creation of a holistic chaplaincy program. There will be an election in the next
three months. Once that's over, we're going to do a survey of the 650 members of
Parliament to see how many of them have a holistic inclination.
Everything's going to go up on the website, and we're gradually creating a small
office, on the High Street in Glastonbury. A perfect place, you know. The monks of
1,500 years ago would be proud of us.
It's cooking. It feels good. It feels quite mellow and appropriate. We shall see
what happens.
For more info, visit www.holism.info or www.williambloom.com
Tim Miejan is editor of Edge Life magazine. Contact him at (651) 578-8969, toll-free
1 (888) 776-5687 or e-mail editor@edgelife.net
Copyright © 2005 Tim Miejan, all rights reserved. |
| July 2005 |
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