[What follows are the foreword and excerpts from a pioneering new book about trans-faith spirituality.]

I am the voice of a generation starving for an adequate myth. Myths are the carriers and conduits of a vision – the metaphors and narratives around which we organize and accrete our understanding. Every generation has come together within a mythology, and used it to push forward into its fruition. In a way, we are nourished by our myths in return for fulfilling them.

It must be said that my generation has more mythology from which to choose than any before it. We stand before a global buffet of stories, food of all flavors, information crashing in from all sides, an unprecedented panoply of cultural richness. What we lack is an organizing directive, some way to handle all of this humanity without shrinking from its light or dissolving into incoherence at the spectacular diversity of it all. Imagine everyone in the café trying to force-feed you simultaneously, and you’ll get the idea. In spite of our wealth of culture, we hunger for genuine, hopeful, reconstructive narratives – that is, integral myths. Almost no one is telling my generation, or those to come, what to do with this orgiastic diversity of experience. Our myth has been one of dissipation, of dissolution – the end of oil, the end of modernity, the end of the biosphere, the end of western hegemony, the end of science, the end of childhood. We are born into a world that has come together just in time to discover it is breaking apart.

But Paul Lonely is changing all of that, with his new book, Suicide Dictionary. What Paul doing for us – the generation growing up alongside the academic reconstruction of integral theory – is offering us a new mode of experiencing these truths. And, I would like to note, Paul is a name with quite a pedigree for getting the word out.

one mind village