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Rating: 
Summary: Healing the Hurts of Nations
Review: I am the author. Please ignore the star-rating I gave this book - I had to give one! This is why I wrote this book. I've been working on the material for over a decade, though the ideas formed over thirty years. It was 9-11 that transformed them from 'ahead of their time' to 'important for today'. I have been involved with history, international relations, inner growth, peace and reconciliation work since I was young - ever since being beaten up for refusing to take sides in the Protestant-Catholic rivalries in my home-city of Liverpool in the 1960s. Later I was deeply involved in flower power, inner growth and student politics (LSE), and embarked on a path of searching, study, social engagement and community leadership that I've followed ever since. I have long struggled with issues around conflict between peoples, and schisms between politics and reality. Why will the world not resolve its problems more willingly and constructively? What will make humanity wake up to change before it is too late? These questions are more pressing today than three decades ago - and they were pressing then. It has gone from Vietnam to Iraq and from the threat of crisis to its actuality. I've been finding clues from professors, Tibetan lamas, visionaries, aid-workers, people in the street, refugees, lovers, political commentators and allsorts, but each possessed only a viewpoint. I don't have a neat Grand Plan to propose. Yet current events and the deeper questions they expose seem to me to reveal answers and clarify ways forward. To see them we must 'think outside the box', particularly our own box. This book outlines what I have seen. A visionary book, it also has its hands in the soil, the blood and thunder. A panoramic view anchored in events and issues of recent years, and practical strategies for the future. Around the Millennium we crossed a divide where the past and the future met, and the future started exerting an increasingly causal impact on the present. Today, hidden feelings, voiced fitfully by the world public, contain many of the necessary clues and solutions. It's a question of translating these into action and official policy. We're heading for a crunch between public policy and mass intuition - between organisations and people. This isn't just about democracy but something much deeper - the nature of future civilisation. Public awareness is shifting its centre of gravity, its bottom-line human values. The intensifying grating between current events, popular feeling and global policy are proving painful, and this is churning up truth. We're in for an interesting time in coming decades! For me, this book represents a summation of all I have learned in my quest to resolve the psychological and spiritual questions of my own life. It contains insights I've gained from the social and educational projects I have created and run, and from my studies of history and world affairs.
It is a book of personal insights, yet the sheer number of people who tell me I speak for them implies there's more going on here. My lack of affiliation to political parties, economic vested interests, academic schools of thought or popular movements allows me a rare freedom of insight and expression few better-known commentators possess. I'm not into lambasting politicians, corporations or any other of the usual targets, and I'm not into negative criticism. Whether at the top or bottom of the ladder, we're all in the same boat and we're all responsible. I hope this book, whatever your viewpoint or background, adds something to your understanding of the enormity, and the concealed simplicity, of our world's problems today. May it be like a blast of multivitamins in a time which is rather under-nourishing, at least as far as constructive solutions are concerned. Palden Jenkins
Glastonbury, England
Rating:
Summary: Healing the Hurts of Nations
Review: I am the author. Please ignore the star-rating I gave this book - I had to give one! It's for you to judge the book's merits. This is why I wrote this book. I've been working on the material for over a decade, though the ideas formed over thirty years. It was 9-11 that transformed them from 'ahead of their time' to 'important for today'. I have been involved with history, international relations, inner growth, peace and reconciliation work since I was young - ever since being beaten up for refusing to take sides in the Protestant-Catholic rivalries in my home-city of Liverpool in the 1960s. Later I was deeply involved in flower power, inner growth and student politics (LSE), and embarked on a path of searching, study, social engagement and community leadership that I've followed ever since. I have long struggled with issues around conflict between peoples, and schisms between politics and reality. Why will the world not resolve its problems more willingly and constructively? What will make humanity wake up to change before it is too late? These questions are more pressing today than three decades ago - and they were pressing then. It has gone from Vietnam to Iraq and from the threat of crisis to its actuality. I've been finding clues from professors, Tibetan lamas, visionaries, aid-workers, people in the street, refugees, lovers, political commentators and allsorts, but each possessed only a viewpoint. I don't have a neat Grand Plan to propose. Yet current events and the deeper questions they expose seem to me to reveal answers and clarify ways forward. To see them we must 'think outside the box', particularly our own box. This book outlines what I have seen. A visionary book, it also has its hands in the soil, the blood and thunder. A panoramic view anchored in events and issues of recent years, and practical strategies for the future. Around the Millennium we crossed a divide where the past and the future met, and the future started exerting an increasingly causal impact on the present. Today, hidden feelings, voiced fitfully by the world public, contain many of the necessary clues and solutions. It's a question of translating these into action and official policy. We're heading for a crunch between public policy and mass intuition - between organisations and people. This isn't just about democracy but something much deeper - the nature of future civilisation. Public awareness is shifting its centre of gravity, its bottom-line human values. The intensifying grating between current events, popular feeling and global policy are proving painful, and this is churning up truth. We're in for an interesting time in coming decades! For me, this book represents a summation of all I have learned in my quest to resolve the psychological and spiritual questions of my own life. It contains insights I've gained from the social and educational projects I have created and run, and from my studies of history and world affairs.
It is a book of personal insights, yet the sheer number of people who tell me I speak for them implies there's more going on here. My lack of affiliation to political parties, economic vested interests, academic schools of thought or popular movements allows me a rare freedom of insight and expression few better-known commentators possess. I'm not into lambasting politicians, corporations or any other of the usual targets, and I'm not into negative criticism. Whether at the top or bottom of the ladder, we're all in the same boat and we're all responsible. I hope this book, whatever your viewpoint or background, adds something to your understanding of the enormity, and the concealed simplicity, of our world's problems today. May it be like a blast of multivitamins in a time which is rather under-nourishing, at least as far as constructive solutions are concerned. Palden Jenkins
Glastonbury, England
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