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New book from Daniel Quinn! If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways "One of the most troublesome questions I've been asked--and it's been asked hundreds of times--is: 'Where do these strange ideas of yours come from?' In the beginning, I thought it was just the usual where-do-you-get-your-ideas? question that all authors receive. My readers soon set me straight. Read more ... Excerpt 1 Excerpt 2 Excerpt 3

Check out the News and Information Announcements...

Illusions Magazine Interviews Daniel Quinn

Like his character Ishmael, Daniel Quinn possesses and is possessed by a weary wisdom, and he finds himself unwittingly at the center of a cultural revolution of his own device. Teacher, speaker, and now reluctant prophet, he spends most of his free time answering questions, setting the record straight, and fulfilling his role as the progenitor of a new era...

Austin, Texas
&
The Fate of the World

Lance Pierce

We were coming into a little bit of turbulence. It wasn't enough to be unsettling, but it was there, small sudden shifts and drops that reminded me of our mercy at the hands of nature. A fine spray of water created trails across my wi ndow - held in situ by the massive air currents outside - horizontal rivers, it seemed to me, models in miniature of great wide tributaries rushing toward an unknown destiny. It reminded me of something Daniel Quinn wrote about rivers of vision.

I leaned forward suddenly and looked out the window; I thought I might have seen something...a rainbow. Not just any rainbow, mind you, but a certain, special kind. One for which I'd been looking all my life.

This odd search began when I was a small child. No bikes or balls for me; I loved to read puzzle books, books on logic problems, mind-teasers, and conundrums. One in particular I still remember: Reader's Digest's Tests and Teasers, a paperback full of trivia and entertainments. What do the letters in ANZAC stand for? Why, the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps, of course. Can you rearrange the letters in NEW DOOR to make one word? Yes: ONE WORD.

And this question: Can the rainbow ever be seen as a complete circle?

As it turns out, the answer is yes, but only from aircraft and only under certain weather conditions. In the ensuing 25 years, I've gazed from every airplane window (and it feels as if I've been in hundreds of planes) in hopes of seeing this phenomeno n. With each disappointment, I recline in my seat with a heavy sigh and turn back to my magazine, Dell Pencil Puzzles and Pastimes (some habits never die), and my small bag of honey roasted nuts, compliments of my frazzled but gracious attendants.

I was privileged to see a double rainbow once (one inside the other), some time ago as I walked from my car, my back to the sun. It was an intriguing and oddly wonderful sight. My heart, though, still longed for the one thing that had been denied me, and now, as always, my nose pressed to the glass, I saw nothing but the miles of white cotton clouds beneath me, rich with texture and shrouded in mist. As I invariably had before, I sighed as I relaxed back into my seat, but this time there were no puzzl es, no games, no recreations to divert me. I still had work to do.

I looked down at the notes on which I was laboring, trying to make certain I had everything in mind when I arrived. I was a little nervous, a little concerned. You see, I was going to Austin to meet Daniel Quinn, to ask him about Ishmael, The Story of B, and the fate of our species.

"The Story of B - a dangerous book?" I had written at the bottom. This was something I wanted to ask him about. In prepublication the book was already becoming controversial. Quinn was kind enough to provide me a copy some weeks befor e, and I read it in a day. It was the backbone of Ishmael dressed as one man's search for the Truth disguised as a murder mystery presented as a spy novel. I found it intriguing, captivating, and darkly uncompromising. Dangerous? Now, that's intriguing!

I worked on my notes some more, adding items, rearranging them, deleting some - I'm never sure if I'm actually sufficiently prepared for anything I guess - and before I knew it, the plane was touching down.

I'd been corresponding with Quinn for weeks by electronic mail, forcing a regular stream of conversation, feeling him out, getting to know him and his ideas. "When at last publication of Ishmael was assured,back in 1991 ," he wrote in an early letter, "I honestly (and, my goodness, how naively!) thought this episode of my life was finished. The ideas I'd set out to deliver had been delivered -- with immense difficulty, it's true, but at least the job was done a nd I could now go on to other things. If it didn't so nearly make me weep, it would make me laugh to think how far off the mark I was!"

Ishmael, Quinn found, was bigger than he was, and now had a life of its own - a life that swirled around him and enveloped him - and at the same time was him. Readers constantly write to ask for further clarification on this point or that , to criticize his points, or to thank him for illuminating a concern that had held them in limbo all their lives. It has become an awesome responsibility, but one that Quinn does not shirk nor complain about - he accepts it willingly, knowing that his li fe has been given great importance by the power of his ideas. Rather than it being the end of a long quest, Ishmael was the beginning of the journey that Quinn inwardly always knew, but rarely suspected, he would someday be on.

Stepping out of the corridor into the terminal area, I spied him instantly, recognizing him from his publicity stills. They always seemed to convey a man of thought, reflection, and kind consideration, and I saw immediately that this was not a fluke; the photographer had captured the essence of Quinn.

He looked at me through his glasses with half a smile and we exchanged the greetings of those who are waiting to see what the day will bring. Quinn turned out to be a very soft-spoken man, despite the force behind some of his communiqués, and he moved with slow, casual, and somewhat absent-minded deliberation as we headed for the exit where his car awaited.

Rennie, his wife, was minding the car when we arrived. She was slender and moved with feminine ease as she climbed into the back seat and settled in. Things were immediately apparent in her as well; beneath her gracious exterior was a sharply efficien t mind, one that could help manage the affairs of life after Ishmael, tracking the five-thousand-and-still-coming letters they've received from people around the world, helping to keep up with all the happenings everywhere related to Daniel's work.

"Some news came down the pike," Quinn said before I'd even buckled in. "Ishmael, it seems, is going to be a movie."

"That's great!" I said, truly impressed.

"No," he replied. "Not great. As it turns out, Disney has opted it, and rather than doing a Lion King treatment or some such - thanks for small favors - they have cast John Travolta as an anthropologist who is mistakenly arrested for po aching, and while he is in prison, he tells the stories of the Leavers and Takers to a prison psychologist."

I was silent for a long moment. "Where's the teacher? Where's Ishmael?" I asked.

"Exactly. I find it unfathomable that they could, for some odd reason that I will never understand or probably even be aware of, want to do a movie that is so counter to what Ishmael is. I can't even begin to imagine what can be going thro ugh their heads."

"I don't suppose that the writer - you - has any control or influence whatsoever."

Quinn shook his head. "Not in that regard. However, I will fight it. I think that there are enough people who will agree with me...and with the Internet we can reach thousands more. Disney probably isn't worried about me in the least, but I belie ve I have the resources and finances to put up a worthy and not inconsiderable amount of resistance."

Ishmael, it seems, is very important to Quinn. The ideas and teachings within are not merely a book he enjoyed writing or a project he completed before its deadline. They are the result of decades of consideration and reflection, years of search ing for answers to questions which have long been thought to have none. They are as essential to his existence as any man's religion. Understand one and you know the other.

The Quinn residence is a direct reflection of him and Rennie. Open, expansive, and comfortable, it wraps itself around you the moment you walk in the door. It is, at its bottom line, the perfect writer's haven."Rennie and I ha ve always wanted to live in a museum," he said as he led me through various rooms. "I think we've come reasonably close." In the living room, he and Rennie showed me a death cart constructed by a Leaver people formerly located in what is no w New Mexico. In the seat of the cart, le Morte himself, sitting straight and tall, but looking emaciated and plague-ridden. You knew, though, that the hands are strong and that once the grip was felt, he would never let go.

Placed elsewhere around the house were artifacts, fossils, talismans, and statues from various cultures, all rich with age and history, all embodying the very essences of peoples long gone. On the fireplace hearth, Quinn displayed a chess set created by an Ishmael fan, the opposing armies artfully comprised of Leavers and Takers.

Also carefully placed in each room were works of art by Quinn himself, collages in 3-D, shadow boxes in the extreme. One was a combination of antique doll, soap can, and plastic lizards, and it burst forth from a bathroom wall. Another, a conglomerati on of items that could have come from a garage sale on the wrong side of town, blended, shaped, and fashioned to form a unique and possibly disturbing assembly that defies definition.

"What about these?" I asked, pointing to large emotional paintings, deeply rich in color and depth. They were abstracts that swirled and pulsed. I could almost sense a current on the canvas. "Oh, I did those, quite some time ago," said Quinn.

"Renaissance Man?" I asked him.

"Sorry," he said. "Can't carry a tune."

I turned to find Quinn sitting on a sofa beneath one of his works, looking at me with mild amusement.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"About what?"

"About the interview?"

He shrugged a little. "Let's do it."

You wrote a book called Providence, in which you detailed events in your life that led up to Ishmael.

Yes.

And in Providence you related a dream you had as a very young child, I think around the age of six, where you stood at the boundary between the world you know and the rim of a vast forest where the rest of the community of life lives. It was, I think, a dream of unusual depth for a child of six. Was this the start of Ishmael?

Well, I would say that my journey started with a dream. I wouldn't say the book started there, but my personal adventure in life, yes, very much so. In trying to make my life understandable to people and even to myself, I tried to organize i t, and in looking at it from that point of view, what I saw was that here at this point was where I wrote Ishmael and in looking further back and back and back and back - and I didn't think of it that way until I wrote Providence - but in as king where did this all start, it came to that dream.

You also wrote about the experience at the Garden of Gethsemani, when you were in training at a monastery, where you saw firsthand the "fire of the world;" everything appeared vibrant and alive and electrified to you. And you searched for years after that to find out what it could possibly have meant.

Yeah. Because it was not in the context of Christian mythology.

It must have been very disturbing for you.

I didn't think of it so much as disturbing as just without context. So I spent subsequent years searching for one - not constantly, but always coming back to it and saying, "What does this mean?" I didn't discover a context until after se veral years. I had to, in effect, write a theology that incorporated it.

What a challenge!

(laughs) I didn't know that I was doing that at the time I was doing it. During those times I was writing the books that eventually became Ishmael, I wasn't thinking in terms of writing a theology at all. I was searching for a theolog y, and I was trying to get a handle on what went wrong and what was going on.

I suppose a measure of my success is how so many people write to me and say that they have been struggling with this stuff, this same thing, for years or all their life, and that they're very grateful that I managed to find a way to articulate it. Wel l, I tried many different ways to articulate it. In Ishmael I finally came up with the model of "the story." We talked about the Taker story, which is that "The world was created for man to conquer and rule, man was made to conquer and rule the world, and that the reason it hasn't wor ked out is that man is flawed."

But actually, two stories have been enacted on this planet by mankind. One is the story of the Leavers which began about three millions years ago. Then we Takers came along, about ten thousand years ago, and we adopted a different story. Becaus e of our story, we believe that the world belongs to us, was made for us, everything in the planet and on the planet belongs to us, it is our property, we can do anything we want to it, and God will make it right.

This mythology began to be shattered about 45 years ago when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. This was the first time that anyone had come forward and said, "You know, you can't drench the world in DDT and expect it to be okay." Before that, the man who invented DDT won the Nobel Prize for this wonderful piece of work! (laughs) He almost destroyed the world, practically toppled the ecosystem! And for the first time, someone said, "There is a limit to what we can do t o please ourselves on this planet."

But we wanted to get rid of those fucking insects! And this is the best way to do it. "Sure it goes into the water. What's the problem? Sure it goes into the soil. What's the problem? So the birds eat it. Who cares?" This attitude of course still survives. You hear it on talk shows - Rush Limbaugh still promotes this - and people have not recovered.

Our story also says we are headed toward a glorious future and it just keeps getting better and better and better and better and better and better and better. And this seems to be so, because we look back 500 years ago and say, "Oh, God, who woul d want to live back in 1400? Oh, man, that was really rotten." But it got better in 1450, it got better in 1500, and so on, and it will just keep on getting better and better and better.

But in the last 50 years, people have seen it's not getting better. Our toys are getting better and better; no question about that. But it's impossible for people to continue to think things are getting better and better, because they're not. Every ye ar crime increases, every year suicide increases, every year drug addiction increases...you cannot look at this stuff anymore and say everything is getting "better and better and better." It's just not happening. So people are in a state of cult ural collapse. They question, because nothing make sense to them anymore.

In The Story of B, I talk about this in some detail. I talk about the fact that in any culture that is smashed to pieces you will see this happen. The old customs and laws come into disrepute. The elders can no longer explain things to the sati sfaction of the young, and the kids take up lawlessness, drunkenness, crime, and become suicidal and depressed. You can see this in a Navajo reservation, for example. But now we're seeing the same thing happen in our cities.

Visible symptoms of a culture under stress?

Highly visible. You would not have seen this 100 years ago. Something has happened here, and what has happened is that people have stopped believing in the story of our culture. And that's what I had to get at in Ishmael. That's what I wrote Ishmael to do, to bring out this story so people could see it.

Joseph Campbell was noted for saying that the difference between us and peoples in the past is that we have no mythology. People liken my work to his, but the fact is I'm contradicting him, because I'm saying he was looking in the wrong place for our mythology. He wasn't listening to what is said on television, what is said in the comic books and the cartoons on Saturday morning. He wasn't looking at the advertising that comes out, wasn't listening to what the people were saying in the pulpit or readi ng what they were printing in textbooks. There you find that we definitely have a mythology that is very distinctive, very much our own, that says, "the world was made for us and we can do whatever we please with it."

Now, this is not a fact, but many people regard this as just simply a fact. But it's obviously mythology. It couldn't possibly be anything but mythology, unless someone would come up and show me a deed signed by God giving us this planet. But this is what people of our culture believe. So what I did was to bring it forth and put it into words. We are newcomers on this planet. We can hardly claim that it belongs to us. The living community was here 3 billion years before we came along. So, far from it belonging to us, we are interlopers. That is the basic message of Ishmael.

In Providence you said that Ishmael is a book of mystery, even to you.

I did? Did I say that?

Yes, you did. And I'm kind of curious as to why it's mysterious, even to you?

(Thinks for a long time. Gets up, fixes himself another refreshment. Is gone for a long time. Comes back. Sits down. Thinks some more.) A mystery is something that you cannot finish understanding. So you can go on and on and on, and you neve r completely exhaust it. That's mystery. You never get to the point where you say, "Okay, I'm finished with that." I would say that what I'm exploring is a mystery in that I don't think it will ever be completely understood. I think that anyone who reads The Story of B will get a sense of someone who is struggling with a mystery.

You said that when Ishmael first came out you felt in some way that your destiny had been fulfilled, but you've had to revise that since then. If the mystery is perpetual, are you realizing now that this fulfillment probably will never be ful ly attained?

I don't know. It's possible. It will be fascinating to watch. For so long I was fixated on solving the problem that is solved in Ishmael, that when it was done, I just heaved such a sigh of relief. It didn't occur to me that there was anothe r problem to be solved that was just as great or greater and was only suggested in Ishmael.

Can you define the problems, the one that was solved in Ishmael, and the one that The Story of B addresses?

The problem in Ishmael is: how did we get here? We have our cultural mythology that explains how we got here and that says the world was made for us and we were made to conquer and rule it. This would have worked out fine, except for the fac t that supposedly there is something fundamentally wrong with humans, which is why it is all screwed up. But we're working on these problems and hopefully we will someday solve all these problems, and then everything will turn out to be just the way it's supposed to be, which is paradise on earth - for humans.

Now, this is not how we got to be this way. This is not how we got here. So I went back and I said, here is where we began - about three million years ago. In the past, people lived really the way other creatures on the planet lived. They took whateve r is given to them. If there was deer there, they killed it. If there was no deer, they didn't kill it. But now we think we have discovered a better way, and as we pursued this new vision, we developed a new way of looking at the earth, saying, "Well , whatever is here, we can do whatever we please with, and if there is a species, for example, that we don't want to be here, we can destroy it. This is our right. We will foster the life of the species that we prefer and we will get rid of the others.&qu ot; It wasn't people who did this...it was people of one culture. There were agriculturists all over the world, but they did not have this particular vision that the world had been given to them to do whatever they pleased with it. One key to this is that they stayed home. The Aztecs, for example, conquered the people around them, but they stayed home. They did not turn the people around them into Aztecs. They stayed where they were. What we did, though, was to overgraze the middle east, desertify the mid dle east, and move out. Of course, we moved upward into Europe, all across the continents, and finally into the Americas, where we arrived in the 15th century.

I present a new paradigm of human history. The old paradigm says for three million years people went along living the same way, accomplishing nothing, and then about ten thousand years ago, people suddenly decided to live a particular way, and they di d. Quinn's paradigm is, people lived for about three million years a certain way and still live that way to the present moment. But about ten thousand years ago, one culture began to live a different way and developed a distinct, peculiar, u nusual, and unshared cultural vision for our own. Because our vision gave us tremendous power, we were more powerful than any other people in the world, ever, and we spread that power all over the planet, because the surpluses in food and power also fuele d a population explosion.

In The Story of B, what I set out to do was to destroy the false paradigm of human culture that our children learn in school, universally, everywhere. In Ishmael, I presented the Taker story. In The Story of B, one of my goals was to reinforce an idea in Ishmael that we are subject to the same laws as all other species. One of the things that you will hear from people in our culture, that I hear from people all the time who write to me, is that we have put ourselves outside of nature. This is a deeply embedded notion.

But it is quite impossible for us to live outside of nature, and we do not live outside of nature, which is why we're in trouble. If we could live outside of nature it would be no problem. The fact is we live inside nature, we have always lived inside nature and we cannot live anywhere else. Because we live inside nature and are subject to all of its laws, we are fast on the road towards making ourselves extinct, as any other species would that lives this way. This point was made in Ishmael, but was made much more thoroughly, much more forcefully, in The Story of B.

One of the laws to which we are subject is that as a species the controlling factor in our growth is food availability. We know that this is true of any species. There is a mechanism in the natural community that governs population. When there is a decline in a food population, in vegetation perhaps, then there will be a decline in the population that feeds on that population. So if the greenery goes down, the deer go down. And because the deer are not eating as much, the greenery eventually comes back and the deer will come back. And as the deer population grows, the green population declines. And as that declines the deer population declines. What you have is a balance that goes on forever. Of course it is infinitely more complex than that, but t his way of putting it is understandable and absolutely true.

Now the human population lives under exactly the same regime. During most of its lifetime - nearly three million years - when food was available, our population increased. When it was not available, our population went down. So if you go to old desola te areas in Africa, you will find it very sparsely populated by Stone Age peoples. When food is plentiful, their population will go up, and when it is not plentiful their population will go down.

What we did, of course, from the bounty of our great generosity, was go ahead and say, "Hey folks! We can show you how to increase your population. We can show you better methods of agriculture. We can help you have a population explosion here.&q uot; And we did. And now they're starving. Then we say, "Oh, my god, we better rush in some food! We've got to keep these people from starving!" Agriculture gives us the means of defeating this negative feedback system.

A negative feedback system is like the system which governs your furnace. When it's warm the thermostat shuts your furnace off, and turns it on if it gets cold. This is negative feedback. Positive feedback, of course, is the opposite. If you had posit ive feedback on your thermostat, then if it got cold it would turn your furnace off, and if it got hot it would turn your furnace on. The hotter it got the higher the furnace would go. Of course, positive feedback is always destructive.

By adopting a certain kind of agriculture we were able to defeat the negative feedback mechanism that controls population growth in the natural community. Now we can say, "Hey, we can have as much food as we want." So, we say, "Oh, we'v e got a lot of people here, we better grow some more food." The result of this is that you have more people. And then we say again, "Oh, we have more people, we'd better grow more food." Well, more people, more food, more people, more food, more people, more food, more people, more food...This has gone on for ten thousand years.

Space is the other constraint. What we did was to move out from the east to all parts of the world. Every year we make more food for more people, and we say, "Oh, we can, if we want to, make more food and have less people." This is like sayi ng, we can put more food in a park and have less deer. It just doesn't work that way!

The thing that people don't realize is that we behave as a species. Individually, you can say, "Yes, I will not have any children." And you probably won't. But if you continue to provide more food for us, we will grow as a species, just like any other species. This is the sense in which I mean we are subject to the same laws as any other species. When we fall off a building, we fall to the center of the earth just like any other animal. We must not only follow the same aerodynamic laws, we m ust follow all of the same laws. We're not exempt from any of them. This is something people don't want to hear. And this of course goes against traditional Christian teaching, which exempts us from the same laws as other species.

The whole idea of birth control is that we can go on the way we've been going. People say we can have more food this year, but we can have fewer children if we can control birth. But I'm saying birth control is a futile strategy. If you're going to co ntrol human population, you're going to have to control the food. No one wants to hear that one. People say, "Oh, you shouldn't say that."

A common argument is to say we cannot let these people starve. We cannot let them starve.

Yeah, the idea of "letting" is an indication of how godly we have become. We let. We let the rains fall, we let the clouds form, we let people live, we let people die.

You wrote Ishmael, in a manner of speaking, over a period of twelve years, over eight different versions. Do you feel you were driven to write this book, that you had to write this book? That you were destined to?

Well, first, it was the thing that I knew I could do uniquely, that no one else could really do. If I didn't do it, I was never going to do the one thing that I was born to do. At the time, yes, I did think I was destined to do it. I felt that this was the meaning of the dream, and the meaning of the experience at Gethsemani, and that I was playing a part in the development of this planet and that the gods had set things up or picked me out to articulate something that needed to be articulated.

You see, the Leaver peoples of the world have been sitting on these things forever, and they've been saying them to us forever, but because they don't have a college education, they don't talk our lingo, nobody ever listened and nobody ever heard them . Everybody discounted them. They thought it was very pretty, thought it was very charming, but that it was all bullshit. And it took someone like me, someone inside the Taker culture, to make the Taker people see it and acknowledge it. So I did feel dest ined or selected to do that.

Not an easy task, because while we believe that the world was here for us, don't we also believe that the world was not here for the Leavers, in a manner of speaking, that we are the guardians of the world and the Leavers are not?

Yeah. I see what you mean. (thinks for a moment) See, the mythology can't deal with current events. Our own mythology started about ten thousand years ago with our culture. With the development of our particular strange agricultural revoluti on and with the development of our particular civilization in the near east, progressing to the far east, and then spreading into Europe...during this time it was forgotten that there was any other way to live. In The Story of B I call this The Gre at Forgetting. The intellectual founders of our culture were literally unaware that there was any other way to live. They thought that humans had been born growing their food and building cities. Aristotle had no way of remotely realizing that people had lived quite a different way for quite a long time. Working back from what they saw in the world, they said, "Well, the earliest known cities are there in the middle east, those are the most ancient cultures, and they go back about four thousand years , and so one can assume that people appeared on this planet not very long before that and began building what we see here." Now, in the 18th century and the 19th century when paleontology began to change this vision, people began to realize that the human race was much older.

When paleontologists forced us to rethink the history of the human race, people of our culture were eventually compelled to see that, yes, humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps millions of years, and they were not living like us. They were living like these despised primitive people that we still see from time to time. But, you see, there's no real mythological way of handling this news, and so it was just put aside. "These people don't count. This part of history do esn't count. This is merely prehistory. History is what began when we began, when we Takers began, that's history. Before that, these people don't matter."

You mean instead of changing our mind or revising our view in light of this new knowledge...

Right. And going back and saying, "We have to go back and throw out everything we started with and rethink the whole thing." That's my task, my personal task, and that's what I've done in Ishmael and much more successfully in Th e Story of B. It is to go back there and say, "What would it have looked like to Aristotle if he had known that humanity was three million years old? How would he have dealt with that? What would he have thought?" He would not have thought w hat he did then. Nor would any of the founders of our civilizational culture think what they thought, if they had known that humanity had lived a different way for three million years.

One of the reasons for despair among people is because the assumption is if we don't know how to solve the problem, then there's no way to solve it. We are the smart people here, we are the favored, we are the chosen of God. God didn't start speaking to humanity until he began to talk to us about 3,000 years ago. Before that God was silent. This is our cultural mythology. And so whenever we come up to a problem we say, "Oh, sure, prisons don't work, we know that, but it's the only solution there is. We don't know of another one, so there isn't another one." Makes sense, doesn't it? And almost everything we currently use doesn't work. Government doesn't work. Laws don't work. Everyone knows that laws don't stop crime...they only addres s it after it happens. We say, "Thou shalt not use drugs anymore." It doesn't work!

But where else would we look? Where else would we look for solutions except in our own past, the Taker past? History. We say nothing existed before that. All we've got is a big vacuum there. And instead, I'm saying, "Well, look at how people got along for three million years, folks. Perhaps there is some wisdom there that we could learn something from." And in fact, people who lived that way, three million years ago, not only lived very successfully and lived well, but people who still live that way think of themselves as living well. They're very reluctant to join us and to live the way we live. They think we live terribly.

I can understand why they would think that.

Yeah. Given a chance to see it as opposed to it just gradually happening...such as has happened among the Eskimos for example. Their contact with us has been gradual. They were subverted over a period of time by the offer of trade, and lost their v alues a little bit every generation so that now it's mostly gone...as opposed to suddenly taking a bulldozer and driving it into the rain forests of Brazil. People who live there are Stone Age people, pure and simple, and all they have heard about us are rumors. They can look at us and say, "We would rather die than live like you do." And they do. They die. We kill them. They fight us to the death, whereas the Eskimos, because it was done gradually say, "Well, it's not very appealing, but i t's not so horrible that I would say I'm ready to die."

Would you say most takeovers are done gradually, as opposed to...?

No, not now, most are brutal, except in areas where we have absolutely no interest. The Kalahari Desert, for example. Who wants it?

So most takeovers, then, are driven by economic factors.

Well, it's driven by the same thing that's driven it from the beginning. When we arrived in this country, we said, "Oh, this is our land here." We planted flags and said this belongs to the Queen or King of England at that time, or to Spa in, and people here were just out of luck. So they moved in and said, "You can join us and live this way or we will kill you. Take your pick. Or we will set aside some land and you can live there." It depends on the situation. There is no prime land left that is still inhabited by Leaver peoples - that's all been taken away - and it is a signal to us that God is on our side and that we have the One Right Way because we can kill them and they can not kill us back. That proves we have the better w ay.

Why do you think we don't see the flaws in our own paradigm? Are we blinded by our success?

Mythology says the flaw is in humans, not in the system. I will hear from people who read Ishmael and write to me almost universally and say, "You finally made it clear why humans are no good." I have to write back and say that's n ot what I said, over and over again. It's not humans who've done this. It's the people of one culture. Everywhere else in the world people went on living exactly the same way they always had. This is the Great Revelation that I have to bring , and this is what puts it in startling contrast to every history book that children use throughout our culture. So the problem becomes a different one than saying, "How will we change people?" You can't change people. It becomes a problem of on e culture.

Perhaps an easier one to solve.

I think so, yeah. Because it has nothing to do with the nature of humanity. We are not this way by nature; there's no evidence for that at all. If you had to look at what we were by nature, you could say that we were hunter-gatherers by nature. But we are capable of not being hunter-gatherers, as well. It doesn't mean it's in our nature to not be hunter-gatherers, or that it is or isn't in our nature to build civilizations. In Ishmael, you gave more than one definition for "Leavers.& quot; The one, though, that seemed the most fitting is that Leavers are people who leave the care of their lives in the hands of the gods.

I would say rather that they leave the rule of the world to the gods. That includes them, of course.

And the Takers, of course, take that control. I got the sense, though, that you weren't quite happy with those terms, as if they didn't convey exactly what you wanted them to.

(laughs) It isn't that they don't convey what I want, it's almost that they convey too much. It would almost be better to have used nonsense syllables for them.

As opposed to words that might be loaded with some meaning or the other.

Exactly. Taking is viewed as a naughty thing. And leaving is now viewed as a good thing. I've had people "improve" on them and say, "Well, there are Givers and Takers." Well, this is not what I'm talking about at all! So there i s an implied virtue and viciousness that I'm unhappy about, that Takers are a vicious people, and that it is vicious to be a Taker. That's bad in itself, too, because people will write to me and let me know that they believe that they have become Leavers by reading my book. They believe that being a Leaver is a matter of something in your heart, that it is an attitude thing. It's not. It's a lifestyle. You become a Leaver by changing your lifestyle. It's an entirely different problem. You could become a B uddhist by changing your mind. You cannot become a Leaver by changing your mind. So I've never been quite content with those terms.

It's very natural to try to project things you want into the term. For example, to say that one of the basic qualities that Leavers seem to have is that they live in accord with their environment...

I don't even see virtue in attempting to define it. To say that they live in accord with their environment to me is as meaningless as saying that cockroaches are in accord with their environment, or rattlesnakes, or sea urchins. Well, yeah, but it isn't something you would maybe have sat down and said, "Well, how would we live in accord with this place here?"

So it's not a deliberate intent; it's just the natural condition of things...

But, you see, so do we; we live in accord with our environment. We are unable to stop living in nature. I think it would be very useful if people will stop making decisions along those lines. "The Leavers live close to nature and we do not.&qu ot; It's a useless way of thinking about it.

Well, it is difficult for some people to grasp. How can we be living in nature and yet be so out of balance with it, so destructive toward it, so callous of it?

Because there is slack in the system. This is an essential concept. The same is true of the thermostat. There has to be slack in the system, otherwise, the furnace will go on and on and on and on, and destroy itself in a very short time. So, there has to be 8 or 10 degrees of slack. Somewhere on the thermostat it will stop for a while and then the temperature will go down 4, 5 or 6 degrees until it goes on past the ideal point before the furnace kicks in again.

Our system is a huge and extremely complex system, and a tough system, also. We have inflicted a lot of damage on it, and it can obviously stand a lot more, but it will eventually reach the end of the slack, and then it will very quickly go to pieces. It will give us as much slack as is possible, but you will be eliminated very quickly when the end comes.

As a culture, you mean.

Well, by now, if a calamity occurs it will wipe out our culture but it will also wipe out most if not all of humanity as well, because most humanity belongs to our culture. Still, people living in the Kalahari probably will survive; it depends on h ow catastrophic it is. What we need to be clear on is that once we topple the ecological system of which we are a part, all of the people and all of the species like us are probably going to go. We will become extinct. When I say like us, I mean, the prim ates are going to go, the elephants are going to go, the cows are going to go, the antelopes are going to go, the rabbits are going to go, probably all mammals will go. Probably most of the reptiles or all the reptiles will go. However, the world will sti ll turn and at the base, this wouldn't even be noticed. Life will go on.

We are, in fact, more vulnerable than those further down the evolutionary scale. We talk about how hard it is to stamp out cockroaches. You just can't do it! But there are lots of things that we can stamp out. We can stamp out lions. We can stamp out elephants. It would be easy. The estimate is that we're killing off 40 to 250 species a day. One of these days, we're going to be one of them.

Funny thing is - and I think this is typical - I was invited to be the keynote speaker at a renowned forum on population. I kept asking them, "Are you sure you want me doing this?" and they kept saying, "Yes, definitely. You are just wh at we're looking for." So I prepared my material and brought some free literature to give away, some of which was incorporated into The Story of B. I made all the same points we're making here.

How did it go?

Disastrous. In fact, it became the scene in Stuttgart in The Story of B; what happened there ended up as part of the novel. They basically said, "You have not said anything. What you said does not exist. There is nothing here to think a bout, there is nothing to talk about, what you said doesn't apply to anything."

The most dangerous thing I'm saying in The Story of B is this material on population and I keep showing it to biologists and saying, "Is this right? Have I got this right?" They say, "Absolutely, you've got it right." Wow, t his is incredible! Biologists know this, ecologists know this, but the populous doesn't know it. Historians don't know it, social scientists don't know it, lots of us don't know it. When they hear it, they just say "Pigshit! This is nonsense I will n ot accept!" And you can say, "This is just biology, folks," and they will say, "Nope I didn't hear it. No, no, no, this is completely irrelevant."

Which leads us to another topic that I was wanting to touch on...you've received a lot of feedback through correspondence and other sources. Many readers of Ishmael and Providence, for whom you've tried to clarify a lot of the issues, still have misconceptions and misperceptions about what you are saying.

I know, and I can't nail them all down. People are actually debating why they should even care. It is just amazing to me. I answered a question not long ago. These were people who were asking, "Why should I care? Why should I work to save the human race? Why is the human race worth saving?" What I said was, "Ishmael does not at any time say why the world is worth saving or even that the world is worth saving, and if you don't think life is worth saving, then find someth ing else to do. It's not for everybody." I mean, if it doesn't seem to you worth saving, what's the problem? But this person was really upset - really upset.

As a matter of fact, if I remember correctly, all Ishmael did say was, "If you do this, this is what will happen."

Yes. I don't - I can't - provide motives for people. I just don't think that way. It occurred to me at 3 o'clock this morning; I was awake and thinking about this. And I was thinking that many people - not necessarily this person, but many - are li ke someone who goes into a restaurant. They can't find anything they want on the menu and so they say, "I want you to cook me a meal to my specifications." But then they get angry if people in the restaurant won't do this. People say, "Well , I can't find anything on your menu that I want, so cook me a meal to my specifications." Of course, I can't do that. I don't have time to cook a meal to the specifications of everyone who has read Ishmael. I'm good, but this is the menu, fol ks.

But that is what The Story of B is. It is, in effect, a new menu - it has a whole new intellectual cuisine. And again, if you don't find anything you like in Ishmael or here, don't expect me to come up with something. I may, but it isn't that I owe it to anyone - it can't work that way. So many people seem to say, "You can't just say this. You can't just say that. You've got to do something for me." No, really I don't. I'm sorry...I can't.

And yet, you continue to make yourself available. Would you have changed that direction earlier if you had had this foresight?

No. I would not. In hearing all of these things, all of the questions that people ask and the thoughts they have, it compelled me to reassess what I had given them in Ishmael and say, "Okay, here is what is missing. Here is the cuisine I have to offer now. So The Story of B is a totally new offering. Providence is not. Providence was people wanting to know how the book had come to be, and I was glad to tell them. I enjoyed it; that is something that I wanted to do. But, the new offering is in The Story of B.

One example is: "Does this mean we should all go out and be hunter-gatherers?" Now that was the question that I got so many times from people who read the first edition of Ishmael that I revised the book. So in the second edition, the question is specifically answered - and the answer is no.

Ishmael says it is totally absurd to think of going back and becoming hunter-gatherers. It is out of the question. You can't have five billion people on this planet going out and being hunter-gatherers; it would never work! There is no such thin g as "going back." It is the same with the people who talk about putting the Great Plains back to the way they were some 400 years ago. It's ridiculous. It's unevolutionary. It's unbiological. Change is what evolution is about. There is never an y going back, never, never, never, never. You can't go counter to the flow of life, as if that was the good way; that was the perfect way for life to go on forever and ever and ever, as if the world was finished ten thousand years ago. That again i s a cultural thing. In our culture, the world was finished 10,000 years ago. There are lions, bunches of giraffes, gazelles, geese, ducks. That was the stock. God made this stock on this planet, here you are for all time.

But this was not final then; the Great Plains were not finished, the Climax Forests were not climaxed. It is all going to change. It is all going to change whether we are here or not.

And there are certain other topics that people seem to have problems with over and over and over again. For instance, technology. And, of course, one that seems to come up everywhere: agriculture.

I have said over and over that many Leaver peoples are agriculturists. That message does not get heard, and that's why it was necessary in The Story of B to give a new name for our style of agriculture: Totalitarian agriculture. We pr actice agriculture of a special kind. The Navajos did not practice totalitarian agriculture. No one practiced totalitarian agriculture but us. It was our way, our contribution to the world. I go into this in depth in B.

And as for technology, this is a knee-jerk reaction. This is the Unabomer crap. It's that, "Technology is a bad thing" that people say. Well, the fact is, humans were technologists for 3 million years. It was not a bad thing. Of course, we d idn't think of the first 3 million years of human life as the life of technology, but technologists we are. We already had different kinds of technologies and we did not go in to the big destructive technologies that we currently use. Nobody was making a living as a technologist and nobody was making a living by proving technologies. Nobody was hired to sit down and work on tools the way we are. But technology is as much a part of humanity as laughter or story tellers. So don't blame it on technology, tha t is just so simple minded. People are looking for simple answers when they go there.

Well, it's one thing that they can blame everything on. It seems that we need to think systemically. We need to think about the system as a whole, but that is so counterintuitive for some...

One of the difficult things about my teachings is they do not lend themselves to bumper stickers or billboards. And people try to reduce them to bumper stickers and billboards and inevitably fail to get it. This is too complex for that. No one has ever managed to reduce subatomic physics to a bumper sticker - or even a set of Cliff notes. Ishmael is a book where you make new connections all the time as it penetrates all of your reflexes and you begin to see in a new way. That's unusual. Not many people write books that you have to read many times, that you want to read that many times.

Another book that shares that quality is Illusions by Richard Bach, but the ideas there are of a different nature, being individualistic rather than dealing with society. It's a wonderful book.

Yes, there is plenty of room for the internal exploration. And you know, I suppose this is why the Celestine Prophecy is successful. It continues that internal journey. But I keep trying to say to people, "I'm not talking about an inter nal journey here. If you're on an internal journey, good for you. You go on. I'm talking about something else."

It's not what people want to hear. They want to hear about the other, you see. They say, "What counts here is my internal journey." I say, "Forget your goddamned internal journey for awhile, because we have got to keep this planet alive ! We've got to keep it habitable so our children will have a place to live. Your internal journey can wait. This can't." There are people who are ready to hear that, and there are people who are not ready to hear that.

But some readers out there are getting what you're saying - maybe not the whole mosaic, but perhaps large chunks of the it.

Yes. I think the way to look at it is as a mosaic. I think I say it in Ishmael, but much more clearly in The Story of B, that you can't look at every single piece. You have to get an impression the first time, a little more the second time, and more and more. I would be surprised if anyone who got the book got a tremendous rush of discovery all at once. If you gave them a quiz and said, "Well, what position was he taking by this? What is he saying about this? Where does he stand here?" You would find out it is more impression than exact knowledge, but this is a beginning.

And it also seems to be received in a wide variety of ways. Where a person might see it as a great message of hope, as I do, another might see it as a dismal message of doom.

They do, they do. It's certainly the "Rorschach" test in this way, that people who are depressed, get depressed when they read Ishmael. (laughs) It happens every time.

Ishmael has obviously had an impact. What do you think it has accomplished? We know, or we have a general idea of what there is to be accomplished, but what do you think has been?

I think it's created a seminal group who are aware what the problem is. They don't say "Oh, it's technology," or "Oh, it's flawed humanity," because so long as you are thinking along those lines we cannot make any progress. If y ou were to ask Sigmund Freud, five years after publication of his first book, what he had accomplished, I presume he would have said "Nothing." That's because at that point probably a thousand people had read his book. Yet, a century later every one in the world has taken in those ideas. They have filtered down, and filtered down, and filtered down, and they no longer even think of it as Freudian. They don't know it has anything to do with Freud, but his conception of the human personality is so close to being universal in our culture, that people think it's just simply the truth.

Almost ambient in our culture like many of the myths Ishmael addresses.

Absolutely. It's sort of like if you drop something it falls toward the center of the earth. Who could argue? That's what I'm aiming for exactly, and my rate of progress is a thousand times better than Freud's. I'm not writing for scholars, I have a different approach. The scholars are ignoring me and they will go on ignoring me probably for some time because I'm not playing their game. I'm not writing for them. I'm a popular writer, so I don't deserve their attention.

Well, their world has not changed in a hundred years. To go that way would take another century for these ideas to become commonplace in the world. I had to go the other way. I had to go directly to the people, and let the people spread the message in stead of waiting for the ideas to trickle down from the academic top the way Freudianism did.

So that's what I want...when people look at these ideas as no longer me, when they don't even know where they came from, and the name Ishmael is meaningless to them...when they all know this stuff, then it will be done.

So your vision for Ishmael is that it becomes ambient in our culture...

Absolutely.

...and replaces the current cultural vision. Some would say, quite a lofty goal.

(laughs) Yeah, right!

But that's the only thing that will save us. What Mother Culture says is "Wait. Others will take care of this for you. Government leaders will take care of this for you. Industrial leaders will take care of this for you."

I don't believe it. I'm not going to wait. We can't wait. The six billion of us cannot wait for the one to come and make it all right. It's not going to happen. We're the ones who are eating up the world and no one else will save us. You can't have po lice coming down and making us live another way. That's what we're hoping for, that there will come a leader who will say, "Okay, here are the laws that need to be promulgated, and those who disobey them will be punished, but if you obey these laws, then all of this pollution will go away, all this poison we pumping into the world will disappear," and so on and so forth.

No. That's not going to happen and it wouldn't work if it did. It has to be we who change it. But of course, then you have the typical response: "Well, what do we have to give up?" Again, this isn't something I've gone into in either of the books, but it isn't a matter of giving up. If you look at the way we live from a Leaver point of view, they say, "God, how can people live such a miserable life as you live? How can you stand living in such poverty as you live in? How can you stand living behind locked doors? How can you stand being afraid to walk in the streets? And you account that to your wealth?! You make me laugh!"

What I am talking about is wealth of a different kind that people really want, and that people really had for a long time. People who live in Leaver cultures still have it and they will not give it up. When we look at it, though, we say, "Where's the wealth?" Well, it isn't visible in terms of objects. It isn't there in terms of microwave ovens and computers and VCRs. It's a different kind of wealth. It is real wealth. It is a wealth of support for people. For you and me. That's inconceivabl e to us. Our security must be purchased. Okay, I'm pretty well off so I can have a high quality security system and you can't. And I can have great medical care, and you can't. If you're poor, that's just tough shit. I don't have to worry about ending up my life living on the streets, but you do.

In Leaver societies, it just doesn't work that way. There are not happy classes and miserable classes. The Marxists in my audiences will always make this point to me, just to let me know that Marx was there before me, that indeed our troubles began wi th classes. I'm saying, "No, they antedated classes." If you go back and say, "It's just classes," it's like saying "It's just technology."

It is perfectly true that in Leaver societies, particularly in hunter-gatherer societies, there were no classes. Leadership was really a thing of very little importance. It usually is very casual. There's no government as we would recognize it. There' s no elections. There's nothing like that, usually because people were living on the band level - sixty people. You don't need a very elaborate organization to keep sixty people going. They all knew what their jobs were. It didn't need a lot of supervisio n or anything like that, and nobody was particularly better than anybody else. This sounds like a dream, like a utopia, but that's just the way it was. That's why it was so beautiful, and they liked it, and they don't like what we're doing.

You talk about this quite a bit in The Story of B, which you referred to as the other shoe. I noted where Ishmael examined Takers more than Leavers - and why that is has become more clear since you talked about the problem that Ishm ael was written to address - but it struck me that The Story of B examined Leavers more than Takers.

Because I knew I'd not done a great job with them in Ishmael. The two things I didn't really nail down in Ishmael was the Leaver Story and the population question. A few people have asked me, "Well, how have you changed the way y ou live? How do you live that is different?" Of course, they're still thinking of the old Jesus paradigm, when he said, "Live the way I live," which is not what I'm saying at all. I'm not setting myself up as a model. I'm in search of a mod el.

What I'm saying more clearly in B - what I certainly set out to say in Ishmael - was that our story is killing us. It isn't technology, or consumerism, or the idea that there is something wrong with humans. This story is deadly. I think people read it and said, "Oh, that's very nice. It's a metaphor." But it's not a metaphor. I mean it literally. It is our worldview that is killing us. With this worldview, we're going to destroy the world. Now, my attack is on worldview.

I'm not saying recycle your papers. Recycle your papers or don't - it makes a very, very, very small difference. I'm sorry, but that is the case. It is, as Paul Hawkens says, pretty. It looks nice, but it has very little effect. It is a nice thing to do, and you cannot fault it. Most of the products you recycle, the product that you get, represents a 5% residual of what has been thrown away. So you are recycling five percent of what went into this product - and not all of that gets recycled anyway. So it is a gesture. It's an effort.

Changing our worldview is the key. It's not just something that would be nice to happen. This is the salvation of the human race. So that is my work, and when people say, "How have I changed the way I live?" Well, I live to do this thing. This is my life's work. That's how I changed the way I live. I'm a writer. This is the thing I can do to do to accomplish this.

Now, where you are is, "What can I do to change our worldview?" There is no one who can say, "Oh, I can't do anything. There is absolutely nothing I can do." That's untrue. Everyone is in a position to be influential in this effort . And every bit of it counts, unlike the recycling thing. But when you change a mind, you are really accomplishing something. It doesn't matter, change just one mind, and boy, you have really done something terrific! I'm in a position where I can change h undreds of thousands of minds. Fabulous! That's great! I worked hard to get to this position. I didn't fall into it. When people write to me they often want to fall into something. They want to quit school, for example, so they can immediately go and do s omething great, something good. I try to persuade them, I say, "Look, I'm not telling you to stay in school because of the same reason other people are, but you have to realize your fullest potential so you can do the most good. It would be different if it was something you could take care of this summer. Then we could all quit our jobs and do it this summer, but it's not going to happen that way." Changing this culture's destructive worldview is a goal that is attainable and decisive.

Do you think there's enough time?

Oh, you see, that's the difference. We are not in those days anymore. We are in these days. In these days, we have the Internet. We can do things that were unthinkable a hundred years ago. We can accomplish things a thousand times faster. Ye s, it can be done and it can be done quickly.

The reason I ask is because in The Story of B, I was surprised to see that you had actually laid down an estimated time of when a collapse might occur. One of your main protagonists, Charles Atterleigh, said we're about two generations away.

That isn't a number that was just picked out. It's a number that is given by folks at World Watch. I'm not remotely qualified to make such a guess as to how long, so I wouldn't stand behind anything as far as it being X number of years. It could be a hundred years; it could be two hundred years, for all I know. It could be tomorrow. World Watch does nothing but examine this question, and they say about forty years. So, if we say forty years, I say that's plenty of time.

So the mission of The Story of B, then, is to not only further the message in Ishmael but to make it as widely available to as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time. And yet, the book isn't even out yet and you've alre ady encountered some resistance to it.

(Laughs) Yeah!

You've told me about certain reviewers who called it a dangerous book. Not that anything in it was not true, or unfactual, or intellectually dishonest, or anything like that...they just said it was a dangerous book. Why the resistance? Why is it so dangerous? What is so threatening about it, do you think?

Well, it's threatening for the same reason Ishmael is. The difference between the two is that many people who love Ishmael did not perceive what is dangerous in it. They will perceive it in The Story of B because I've exposed i t and made it clear. I thought I was being pretty clear in Ishmael, but it turned out I wasn't. When I began to hear from people who I expected to hate the book, they loved it. So, I knew that I'd muted the message too much. Well, I've taken the mu te off in The Story of B, and been more confrontive, as well.

One writer is a great admirer of Ishmael and has said great things about it. The publisher sent her a copy of The Story of B, hoping that she would give us a quote for the cover. Her reaction was that the book should be withdrawn from pu blication! Now what happened between Ishmael and The Story of B, I think, was that she saw what I was saying. That's just my theory. But I also think the books that you burn are the ones that tell the truth, the ones that threaten you. Of co urse, you don't feel threatened by silly books, or by those books that are unpersuasive, or are nonsense. Nobody ever burned Dr. Seuss's books, and nobody ever would.

I was gratified that in Ishmael you provided a new destiny for us. You were very perceptive in pointing out that you cannot take a culture's destiny away without giving them one to replace it with. However, you've said that Ishmael fai led to provide a new vision...

What people sensed in Ishmael is that it is a religious vision, and they came back to me and said, "Well where is it? What is it? You haven't told us what it is. You haven't given it to us." I knew that was the case. That's why The Story of B had to come into being. I was constantly surprised when I would go into classrooms and people would say, "Well, what is your vision - your religious vision?" My rationale was, "Well, you don't want to know that. That's ju st me." But no, they wanted to know.

In fact, this isn't something that I invented. What I articulated in The Story of B is the vision that makes it possible to see the Leavers as one people. Leavers had a universal religion in the sense that they all shared this vision that I cal l Animism. It wasn't a terribly abstruse vision; it was a vision that kept them centered in their lives.

I don't want to go to deeply into it here, because I think people should go to B and discover it there, and that's only because I can't say it any better than it's said there. But I think everyone knows secretly that if we're going to save the world, it will have to be by a new religious awakening that technology isn't going to be able to address. Governments aren't going to do it, laws aren't going to do it for us, police aren't going to do it for us. It has to be an awakening among people of a religious kind. This is so serious here, we're talking about the extinction of the human race; that's what's at issue. If the extinction of the human race isn't a religious issue, what is?

But you see, all of the salvationist religions of our culture, of which I include Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism...among many of them is recently seen the desired ability of becoming environmental, of suddenly passing themselves off as caring about the world. People are very upset with me when I come along and say, "Yes, well, where were you five thousand years ago? Where were you two thousand years ago? Where were you a century ago? The vision I'm talking about was there be fore you were even dreamed of, and it's just as fresh and as strong and as good today as it ever was, and it was environmental from the beginning. In fact, you are betraying your roots, when you pretend to care about the world." There isn't a single one of these religions, that if you look at the roots, isn't a denial of the world. There's not a single one of them that doesn't say the world is shit. There isn't a single one of them that doesn't say salvation consists of getting out of this world, one way or another.

For Christianity, of course, this world is meaningless. It's the empire of the Devil - Satan rules the physical world - and when it's gone this will be good. Many of the Christian sects are just eagerly awaiting the end of the world. Our true home is in heaven. So don't come to me and say that you love the world. You may, but your culture doesn't.

The vision I'm talking about is the vision of loving the world, and we better start loving the world in damned short order. But there has to be a basis for it, there can't just be gibberish. It can't be bogus crystal rubbing, and aroma smelling. I'm t alking about something that is as solid as 3 million years of human history.

This thing that I'm talking about, this Animism, is about perceiving the world as a sacred place, and of our having a place in this world, as opposed to being wretched creatures who should be destroyed, or being flawed. Animism sees us as no more flaw ed than sparrows or tarantulas or sharks or deer. Rather than seeing us as enemies of the world, we have a place in this world, and this world is a sacred place.

But none of this is self-evident to our culture or in any of our religions. They all begin with the premise that the world is trash and that what counts is spirit. They all say that God - if there is God; there's no god in Buddhism, but when you have a God - you generally find that he is some remote being, certainly remote from the earth, that he looks down on us from a very, very, very, very, very great distance. Now, where did that come from? I don't know, but it's clearly antithetical to Animism, w hich does not look up to the sky. Animism looks here.

And all this is self-evident to our ancestors; it is evident to the people who still live as Leavers today. They don't write works of theology. It's no big deal for them. It is part of their world view. Our world view is that the world is shit, we are treasures, but only as spirits, and there's something wrong with humans, and the world belongs to us, and all this crap. (laughs)

Hand in hand with this, you talked in The Story of B, and I thought it was an important concept, about the idea of implementing programs versus implementing a new vision.

Yeah. In Ishmael one of the favorite parts for people is the jellyfish story. What they will take away from The Story of B will be the river of vision. This came to me after I got hundreds of letters asking me for my program, and grap pling with this question of why I didn't have a program. I'd already said to them in Ishmael that it is the story. We must spit out the fruit of this tree...the tree of knowledge of good and evil that says we know how to run the world. We must get rid of it. What's the program? There's no program. This is about knowledge. This is about worldview. And so, why ask me about programs? I'm not talking about programs. But people kept saying, "Well, what is your program? I'd like to be part of your p rogram. Please send me information about your program."

As if you were setting up another Greenpeace or Sierra Club.

Exactly! I felt very inadequate because I couldn't tell them what my program was. I think they were duly unimpressed by the fact that I didn't have one. So over years of struggling with it, I eventually reached this point which I explained in Th e Story of B in a metaphor.

The metaphor says that what proceeds as vision, what is supported by vision, is like a river. I give as an example the Industrial Revolution, which began as a trickle in the 14th century, became a brook in the 15th century, a stream in the 17th centur y, a river in the 18th century, a giant flood in the 19th century, and an overwhelming inundation in the 20th century. No one during all that time ever had a program for the Industrial Revolution. Never in all of that did anyone need to have a program for it because it was supported by our cultural vision.

Anyone who attempts to oppose the river of vision is putting sticks in the river to impede its flow. If you say, "Oh, yeah, we've got this great technological river flowing here and it's polluting our air, I'm going to sponsor this stick here...w e'll put this stick in the river...this will make it more difficult to pollute our air. This is a law that I'm going to have published, passed in Congress, making it difficult for them to pollute the air. Here it goes, I'm going to put this stick in the r iver." And, by golly, it does impede the flow, microscopically, but it does a little something, you know. Now another person says, "Well, we've got to have a lot of sticks like this," so you've got whole bunches of people putting sticks in to try to impede the flow of this great crashing river. Of course the river just keeps on going. That is vision.

The current idea for most people is, "Where do I put a stick? Tell me what stick do I put in the river? I will get all my friends to help put sticks in the river." "Well," I say, "I'm not interested in putting sticks in the ri ver. I'm talking about diverting the river." Get a new vision and you don't need sticks. When the river moves in a new direction and away from catastrophe, then all you have over there is a dry bed with sticks sticking up out of it. If we don't do th at, no amount of sticks is going to stop this river. So, now, when people ask about my program, I send them this excerpt from B and say, "Here is what I have to say about programs." In effect I've said, "There is no program. I don't have a program for you. I never will. You are already doing what is necessary. You are telling your friends. You're passing Ishmael around. That's all I do. That's all I know to do."

We think in terms of our destiny as being what is fated for us, but Ishmael says that we are at a point now where our destiny is going to be of our own choosing. If we continue the way we are, then our destiny will be to collapse. If we chang e what we are doing, then our destiny will be to succeed. You say it is attainable and decisive.

It's like you're hanging over a ledge and someone is saying, "There is a tree branch just over the edge, and if you can grab the tree branch, then you can pull yourself up. Otherwise, you're absolutely going to slip." You can only hold on the cliff edge so long, and then you are going into the chasm. So, you can either make an effort to reach up to grab the branch or you can wait and fall. Of course, if you reach up you may fall anyway. I think given the choice I would have to take the ch ance of reaching up for salvation rather than just waiting for the ultimate catastrophe, and we can be sure that the catastrophe will come if we do nothing. We can possibly succeed if we can get a new direction, but we will certainly fail if we don 't. So I have to keep going with what I do because the alternative is to sit here and wait for the inevitable.

Well, you've put Ishmael out there, and its impact is markedly evident. The Story of B is getting ready to come out. You're not done, are you?

No. Not at all. A sequel is in the works: My Ishmael. It is told by Ishmael's unnamed narrator. It's too early to reveal very much of the plot, though. The transcript should be done by next spring, and it will not be a retellin g of the original. I'll just say that our narrator finds someone.

I trust you'll be ready for the new wave of correspondence and feedback. Have readers brought you any revelations or insights concerning Ishmael or his way of thinking?

They revealed to me my shortcomings and failures. Not meaning to be ruthless, of course, but when someone asks, "Does this mean that we should go and become hunter-gatherers?" I say, "Whoops." When many people ask the same thing , I say, "I need to do something about this. I need to fix this."

But it's not just that. I am very inspired to see people taking this new vision. They ask, "How do I change my life so that my vision is closer to this vision? And how do I get people around me involved and take them with me?" This is the th ing in action. I've been shown that I was right not to give people my 12-step program and to say to them instead, "Look, start with where you are, wherever you are, it doesn't matter. You can do something. I can't tell you what to do. I have no idea what you can do. Only you know what you can do." That's the difference between this and a 12-step program. A 12-step program is for anybody, I guess. That's cool, but I don't know any 12-step program that's going to save the world. It just isn't goin g to happen that way. It has to happen by everybody, where they are, changing the way they live where they are. Who can tell them that? They have to see it themselves. Five, six million people say, "Oh, I have to change the way I live? How do I do th at? Let's talk about this. Let's get together. How do we do this?" Not saying, "What are the 12 steps?" There is just no such thing. The people in this community have to say, "Okay. How do I do this?" My problem is what I c an do, yours is what you can do...and everybody can do a lot. You can do a lot. Believe me. You can.

Boarding the plane home was uneventful. The flight was only half-full, and I found myself able to rest comfortably with three seats to myself. It was still misty outside and the water once again cut trails on the outside of the cab in window. Armrest up and tape recorder in hand, I listened to Quinn's voice at 37,000 feet. "You can do something," he was telling me. "Only you know what you can do." I stopped the tape for a moment and reflected on the hours I had j ust spent.

There've been special days in my life, but since we started working on Illusions I seem to have had more than my share lately. Quinn's hospitality and generosity touched me deeply. His ideas colored my own.

Something shimmered. I leaned forward quickly and looked out the window. My eyes were pulled downward, my gaze instantly focused almost directly beneath me. There, cast against the bed of clouds below, was a bright, near-blinding, radiant disk of ligh t - a reflection of the sun. Centered within it, in precise relief, was a shadow of our plane, sharply defined and exact in proportion. And surrounding the light, shimmering and iridescent, glowing and miraculous...was a perfect, circular rainbow.

Each band of color blended marvelously into the next. The entire assembly of light, shadow, and rainbow shot across the clouds like a frisbee, keeping absolute pace with the airplane. It danced on the mist below me and silently sent a message which I heard and only think I understand. I watched this phenomenon for what seemed like quite some time and pondered again on special, magical days. Quietly, I said, under my breath, "Thank you." As if in answer, everything slowly faded away, like the Cheshire Cat, until only the memory of its smile remained.

"The world is not indifferent to us," I thought, "and not only do we hang from the cliff and reach out for the branch, it reaches out to us." And from there, my thoughts turned to home, evening, and a quiet, quiet dinner with my wife...