Book Peek: Woo-Woo World

The second tentative chunk of Slicing and Dicing Buddhism

From a marketing standpoint, I have no idea whether bringing a group of my subscribers into my book’s early formulation is a good idea. You all may get sick of hearing about it before it’s published. I’ll continue, though, because 1) my goal is to spread the ideas, 2) this helps motivate me to make progress, and 3) I’ll benefit from any comments you may leave below or email to melpine@substack.com.

I expect to have a proposal ready for my first choice of a publisher by some time in February and to complete the first draft by my 79th birthday on May 23. Again, the book’s tentative title is Slicing and Dicing Buddhism: The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

While all From the Pure Land subscribers receive my regular posts, intended as five-minute reads, only paid subscribers have access to the full book segments, which are longer. You can upgrade (or downgrade) your subscription at any time.

You can also share this introduction with your friends.

The segment I released on January 8 looks like it will be Chapter 1, and the one I’m releasing today, revised and reorganized from previous From the Pure Land posts, is tentatively the second chapter. It’s all uncertain, so nothing you see now is final. The first three paragraphs below are visible to all subscribers.

---

Woo-Woo World

Has a recently departed loved one touched you in some way? Were you certain about it at the time? And did you eventually push the experience to the back of your mind? Did you avoid talking about it? My answer is yes to all four questions. I thought I was too rational to let my mind or my mouth stray into Woo-Woo World, even though I’d had several glimpses of it. I practiced a mindfulness-based form of Buddhism but avoided anything esoteric, like the Tibetan path.

That changed for me after 1:50 a.m. on June 1, 2015. That’s when I awoke from a deep sleep with a jolt of anxiety more acute than any I could remember. I checked the time. I was reluctant to take an anti-anxiety drug for fear of sleeping late in the morning. Then I remembered it was Sunday, and my anxiety was so strong I doubted I could return to sleep without the pill, so I took it.

I did wake up on time, which was good because, at exactly 8 A.M., two Loudoun County (Virginia) deputy sheriffs rang the doorbell to tell my wife and me that our son Thomas had died after falling off his skateboard in Charlottesville, more than 100 miles away. Later, when the details became clear, we learned that he had died almost instantly at 1:50 A.M. of blunt-force trauma to the head—the time of my anxiety jolt.