8 Books That Can Change How You See The World

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2021 holiday book list

BY DIANE BISHOP AND HARV BISHOP

This year’s book list makes a bold claim, but check this: a teen who represents the highest potentials of the human spirit in the face of adversity, how our healing journey is helped by understanding the holographic nature of the universe; the mystical side of Spiderman, other superheroes and their creators, and how the European enlightenment could have been a bust if not for indigenous intellectuals (this book that also challenges everything you thought you knew about the evolution of human cultures). Plus what’s on the way in 2022. Happy holidays from HarvBishop.com!

A Small If: The Inspiring Story of a 17-Year-Old with a Fatal Disease and a Mission to Cure It

Elijah Stacy is fighting for his life. In a wheelchair since he was 11 years old, Stacy suffers from a genetic muscle wasting disease known as Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. The diagnosis did not destroy his spirit, but instead fueled his passion for finding a cure. He believes, “No matter how big or small your suffering is, don’t let it go unused. Use it to empower others and to help minimize the suffering that the future generations will face.”

The book’s title comes from the author learning he needed back surgery to straighten his curved spine and prevent his organs from being crushed. Asking if there was any way the surgery could be avoided, Stacy’s doctor said he didn’t want to give him false hope, but a strenuous physical therapy routine possibly could delay or prevent the surgery. “I’ll give you a small if,” he said. That was all Stacy needed to hear. “There was a chance. I now had hope inside me and I was ready to do the impossible. … Some people talk about how they want something badly, but they aren’t willing to sacrifice pleasures in order to get it. They don’t want it bad enough. …  The dread of having a metal rod in my back created a burning desire to do whatever I could to avoid it.”

Stacy developed a plan and a mindset. “Every single day I imagined myself in the doctor’s office looking at new X-rays showing that my back was straighter and everyone in the room celebrating that I escaped having to get the surgery. I imagined the look of happiness and admiration on everyone’s faces. I imagined the excited way my parents and the doctor would ask how I did it, how I made it happen.”

Stacy doesn’t stop at visioning and affirmations to help him overcome obstacles. He started working out and eating healthier. The physical therapy was painful and grueling. Some days he wanted to scream, but instead bit down on his shirt and focused his mind on the future. He kept an X-ray of his back on his bedroom wall. He says, “It was a reminder to stay focused, never give up, and make greatness happen.” Stacy took a small possibility and made it happen through hard physical and mental work. He straightened his spine enough to avoid the surgery. He is now determined to overcome his disease by curing it, “even if my chances are a small if.”

Throughout the book Stacy reminds us that “when you tell yourself there is no chance and there is nothing you can do, that that is exactly what you are left with—nothing.” While reminding us that a positive attitude is an important part of healing, Stacy does not sugarcoat his journey. He is candid about the challenges he continues to face from learning to use the house bathroom independently and coming to terms with eventually losing the mobility in his arms to a greatly reduced lifespan if no cure is found. It is his ability to look for and find the good, the gratitude, despite his heart-wrenching reality, that makes this book a must-read. Each chapter ends with a series of lessons, such as “Defeating the Odds,” where he ponders why people say work smarter, not harder. “Why not both?” he asks. “You have to do both in order to make real change happen. I didn’t avoid getting spinal surgery by thinking my way out of it. I avoided spinal surgery by both training and working hard on a consistent basis.” That’s an important lesson from a teenager that many in the New Thought community are only beginning to grasp. Find out more about the nonprofit he founded, Destroy Duchenne, here.

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THE BOOK OF LOVE AND CREATION

Paul Selig, a former university professor, is one of the most well-known conscious channelers (he is not in a trance) in alternative spirituality today. His contact with the teachers he calls the Guides have led to an amazing 10 books beginning in 2010. His newest is The Kingdom (2021). One remarkable thing about this work is that every book has been dictated through Selig as a whole. The Guides present the information, the themes, the chapter breaks and titles in single take over several days. The books only have few and minor edits. These books are designed, the guides say, to attune readers’ consciousness to new levels solely through the act of reading the books and are a good fit with, and supplement to, New Thought teachings. My wife and I are taking a second dive into 2012’s Book of Love and Creation. We’ve been taken with the book’s clarity, guided meditations and affirmations so helpful given the current state of the world.

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ON BECOMING AN ALCHEMIST

This classic, first published in 2008, is one of my perennial favorites. Author Catherine McCoun combines her studies in Tibetan Buddhism and western mysticism and magic to distill wisdom for the path and what seekers are likely to encounter as they work on their consciousness. McCoun is a gifted writer and presents her themes with clarity and humor. Alchemical mysticism stresses working with, and transforming, difficult emotions and situations as grist for the mill so she doesn’t neglect the dark parts of life and cover only the light. Her exercises go beyond the tried and true and include ways to perceive and interpret the non-physical symbolic realms. McCoun is also a ghostwriter who has refined the books of many famous spiritual teachers so you have likely read her work without knowing.

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LEAP TO WHOLENESS

Science and religion ask the same question: How do we get something from nothing?

That’s completely the wrong question, says author Sky Nelson-Isaacs. In this book, he skillfully weaves cutting-edge holographic science with his personal healing journey to turn that age-old question on its head. “How do we get something from everything?,” he asks. His answers go beyond quantum theory to chart a course for greater wholeness, healing, creativity and flow for your life.

I’ve been a fan of Sky’s work since reading his book Living in Flow a few years back. He is fearless in addressing mind-bending questions about the power of choice, thought and intention, and the nature of time in ways that can be grasped and applied. Unlike a fundamental approach to the Law of Attraction, Nelson-Isaac’s writes that our intentions and choices make events more probable, but not a certainty. And we can’t minimize other’s feelings or suffering because life is real despite a higher truth or reality. He writes that the hologram metaphor is useful in thinking of the timelines of our lives as future consequences are shaped by our shifting choices. It is not unlike when we have a destination programmed into our GPS, but the route shifts as we make new choices. Reaching the destination isn’t guaranteed, but is more probable with the accumulated weight of our intentions and choices.

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THE SCIENCE OF CHANNELING

The Science of Channeling by Helané Wahbeh, director of research for Institute of Noetic Sciences (the research organization founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell) is a fascinating new read. Wahbeh conducts research with one of our favorite authors Dean Radin, and is herself an experiencer of psychic phenomenon. Here channeling is broadly defined to include intuition, telepathy, mediumship and actually having otherworldly entities speak through a person. She provides a comprehensive overview of serious research on channeling and provides an updated take on ways it may work. One remarkable experiment showed that when research subjects used intention to increase the intensity of a red light hooked to a random number generator it didn’t matter how the back end of the generator was programmed. If it needed more zeros to increase the red light it would produce more zeroes. Likewise, if it needed to produce more ones. That, to me, was mind-blowing. Several chapters use research-driven ideas for you to experiment with in your own life.

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MUTANTS AND MYSTICS; ALL OF THE MARVELS

What could a superheroes secret identity have to do with spirituality? Plenty  says the celebrated professor of comparative religion Jeffrey Kripal in the now classic 2011 book Mutants and Mystics. In fact, like Superman, Batman or Spiderman, we all metaphorically have a secret identity via our spiritual higher self, hidden from our everyday personality. Comics and science fiction, writes Kripal, are closely linked to the paranormal and mystic, sometimes overtly, as with Dr. Strange and the X-Men and sometimes more hidden and coded. The radiation that serves as a plot device conferring superpowers for many Marvel heroes symbolizes metaphysical and spiritual energies. The X-Man symbolize the plight of those with paranormal gifts not understood by society. And many science fiction and comic authors have been open about their mystical experiences and influences. Barry Winsor Smith, whose art graced many 1970s Marvel classics, experienced what he thought were two day dreams in East London 1970. In the first he saw a man with a mustache say “They’re gonna love it.” A woman replied laughing, “Oh Yeah.”  In the second, Smith saw a New York City traffic jam from a window. In 1973 he was working at a New York City studio owned by a friend. The friend asked for help  with a Levi’s jeans ad. Smith did a quick drawing and left it on his friend’s desk. When Smith came back into the room, he saw his mustached friend and his woman assistant looking at Barry’s drawing and the scene he had “seen” in London played out word for word. The next day he saw the traffic jam from the vantage point of the upper floor window. The shock of both events pushed him into a mystical state where he had a vision of “new-forming globes burning like suns.” I was late to this now classic book, but it is one of the most memorable I’ve read this year.

For those interested in seeing the Marvel comics with a wider lens, the 2021 book All of the Marvels is a must. Long before the Marvel Universe spawned epic films and streaming series, Spiderman, Doctor Strange, The Black Panther and multiple other superhero characters lived in more than a half million pages of the 27,000 Marvel comics from 1963 to date. Author Douglas Wolk has read them all, an amazing achievement.

In All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told Wolk analyzes that gigantic repository of American hopes and fears using the complex narratives “as a prism to view the landscape of American Culture” from Cold War fears of nuclear conflict to our contemporary technology and political polarization. Marvel comics, he writes, have been political “since the beginning” when stories about Captain America advocated US entry into World War Two while the US was publicly neutral. Captain America has morphed with the times and has been portrayed as an ardent nationalist, a progressive and even as a closet fascist.

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THE DAWN OF EVERYTHING

In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that our view of the upward arc of human history from life in a primitive dog-eat-dog state of nature 30,000 years ago to the modern democratic nation-state is wrong. Recent archeological evidence suggests small and large scale cooperative democratic societies without hierarchy and domination. This precedes Greek Democracy by tens of thousands of years. The authors also argue North American indigenous intellectuals greatly influenced enlightenment political philosophy.

The authors argue that western political theory takes as its starting point a “state of nature” imagining what life was like prior to governments. For the right, and Hobbes, it was a war of all against all where life was nasty, brutish and short. For the left, and Rousseau, it was a primitive, but idyllic egalitarian era of cooperation, and then, at some unknown point, people found themselves chained after being convinced inequality was a good idea. Graeber and Wengrow argue the idea of the state of nature is fiction. It never existed. As such it is perilous to use it to make assumptions about human nature and what humans are capable of in terms of self-governance. New archeological research shows that modern humans have existed for around 40,000 years, and all that time were capable of many ways of organizing and undertaking collaborative public works projects. People showed a fluid and adaptive approach to politics. They might rely on an authoritative leader during a hunt, but be democratic in times of plenty. There was no sharp evolutionary division between hunting, gathering and agriculture and cities. All modes of production existed at the same time and even within the same peoples. Most of all, they note, it makes no sense to characterize these people as animal-like or stupid. They had all the intellectual capabilities we take for granted now. Given that, it makes no sense to assume they drifted along in small, warlike hunter-gather bands until suddenly embracing agriculture and cities some 10,000 years ago.

The authors also note the concept of a state of nature was based on European contact/conquest of the indigenous peoples of North America. It gave intellectual cover for conquest and genocide by portraying Europeans as representing the civilizing role in a continuing upward arc of history and progress. by displacing peoples portrayed as “primitive” and “savage.”

In truth, Graber and Wengrow write that indigenous intellectuals were more reasoned and sophisticated than the Europeans, and were the source of the emphasis on reason, freedom and equality during the European enlightenment. In short, they had much deeper experience in terms of democracy, and far greater freedom than the Europeans.

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Coming in 2022

Mitch Horowitz’s Daydream Believer is due in July 2022. The hints around this book are tantalizing. Not everyone can generate the positive emotions believed to be necessary to manifest your desires, he says. He is experimenting with the idea that belief in the causative powers of the mind is by itself enough to get the job done. This is welcome news to people like myself who deal with bouts of anxiety. He’ll also grapple with the juxtaposition of our infinite spirits in a world with crisis and mortality. These are “the paradoxical limits that create the tension of existence,” he writes. Tension is essential to creativity. “I hope the book takes the past 150 years of experimentation in mind causation to its sharpest peak” he says, “and sets us on the path for the next 150.”

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The always fascinating Gary Lachman’s Dreaming Ahead of Time: Experiences with Precognitive Dreams, Synchronicity and Coincidence will be released in late January 2022.  Lachman, a guitarist and songwriter who was a member of Blondie and worked with Iggy Popp has since become an insightful writer on mystical/spiritual topics. He wrote recently of his forthcoming book:  “In it I look at some of the dreams I have been recording over the last 40 years, in which bits and pieces of the future have turned up. How does this happen? Beats me, but I am as convinced that it does as I am about anything else.” The book includes explorations by Carl Jung and others.  “I have a premonition you will enjoy it,” Lachman says.

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