Dark Pool of Light is divided into three volumes:

In Volume 1, Grossinger begins with the scientific and philosophical, analytical views of reality, exploring the science, parascience, philosophy, and psychology of consciousness. Covering topics as diverse as current discoveries in neuroscience and the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, the book gives a broad overview of the bodies of knowledge concerning the nature of reality and consciousness.

Volume 2 discusses the similarities and differences between European esoteric traditions and Buddhism in their approaches to the subjects, and gives a detailed description of the psychic training Grossinger undertook that informs much of his worldview.

This expansive inquiry into the nature of consciousness ends with this third volume in the series, The Crisis and Future of Consciousness. Grossinger addresses the perennial question of evil and shares the author’s hopes and fears for the future of humanity. While wisdom gleaned from such seemingly disparate sources as science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality might appear “very, very different things,” Grossinger nevertheless finds their meeting place in subjective, lived experience.

Some benefits include:

• Coconuts improve digestion and absorption of fat-soluble vitamins and amino acids.
• They help maintain a healthy immune system by naturally fighting off viruses, bacteria, and fungal overgrowth.
• They help regulate and support healthy hormone production.
• They are a natural precursor to the anti-aging hormone compound known as pregnenolone.
• The medium-chain saturated fatty acids in coconut products work to increase metabolism and help with weight loss. Coconut cannot be stored in the body as fat and needs to be burned on the spot, which helps fire up excess fat-burning metabolism.
• It contains virtually no cholesterol and can actually help normalize cholesterol levels.
• Applying coconut to the skin can help soothe and even prevent rashes and inflammation.

Specific benefits of fresh coconut water include:

• Coconut water can be great for re-hydration and cooling the body.
• It is a great tonic and nutrition source for people of all ages, including infants.
• It possesses organic compounds containing growth-promoting properties, which makes it excellent for improving muscle size and physical growth in children.
• It helps calm urinary tract infections and alleviates the pain of kidney and urethral stones.

Delicious Coconut Recipes to Try at Home:

Goji Coconut Balls
from Superfoods by David Wolfe

• 1 cup shredded coconut flakes
• ½ cup coconut oil
• 1 ½ cup raw cashews
• 1 ¼ cup hempseed
• ½ cup goji berry extract powder
• 1 ½ cup goji berries (another superfood!)
• 1 cup tocotrienols
• 2 ½ tbsps. raw honey
• 1 pinch or two of Celtic sea salt

Grind seeds and nuts separately in a coffee grinder, then add the remaining ingredients to a high-speed blender or food processor and blend until turned into a mush. Roll this mush into balls and refrigerate.

Coconut Ice Cream
from Sweet Gratitude: A New World of Raw Desserts by Matthew Rogers and Tiziana Alipo Jamborra

• 1 ½ cups of coconut milk
• ½ cup of coconut meat (wet measurement)
• ¼ cup + 2 tablespoons of agave syrup
• ½ cup coconut flakes
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• ¼ + 1/8  teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon lecithin

Add ¼ coconut flakes (in addition to the ½ cup already blended) to the ice cream maker before cranking. Blend all ingredients really well. This delicious vegan ice cream makes about 4 servings.

More raw food & nutrition titles are available from North Atlantic in our Food, Diet and Nutrition section!

Photo courtesy of Robert Wetzlmayr (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Sacred Activism Series Mission Statement:

When the joy of compassionate service is combined with the pragmatic drive to transform all existing economic, social, and political institutions, a radical divine force is born: Sacred Activism. The Sacred Activism Series, published by North Atlantic Books, presents leading voices that embody the tenets of Sacred Activism—compassion, service, and sacred consciousness—while addressing the crucial issues of our time and inspiring radical action.

The series will launch with the September 3 release of Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation from Reciprocity Foundation founder Adam Bucko and bestselling author and world-renowned theologian Matthew Fox, timed for the two-year anniversary of the Occupy movement. The series also includes The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by the bestselling author of Sacred Economics, Charles Eisenstein, and psychotherapist Carolyn Baker’s Collapsing Consciously, with more titles planned for Spring 2014.

Join the Sacred Activism Authors for a Pre-Launch Change-Makers’ Webinar Summit – June 25th

To introduce the series to press and organization leaders interested in applying the tenets of Sacred Activism to their own groups, North Atlantic Books will hold a special change-makers’ webinar summit on June 25 at 2 pm EST (11am PST) featuring a virtual panel presentation with all of the launch authors and North Atlantic Books Associate Publisher, Doug Reil.

Attendees will have the opportunity to:
• Get the insiders’ scoop on a burgeoning movement that aims to re-envision the Occupy Wall Street efforts for meaningful change.
• Meet the leading voices in the Sacred Activism movement, including Andrew Harvey, Adam Bucko, Matthew Fox, Charles Eisenstein, and Carolyn Baker.
• Get resources and tools for building a movement in one’s own community.

The webinar is open to a limited number of attendees. Please reserve your space today at http://nabcommunities.com/webinars.

Debut Titles in the Sacred Activism Series:

Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox, afterword by Lama Surya Das, foreword by Mona Eltahawy and Andrew Harvey (9/3/2013)

Overview: A call to action for a new era of spirituality-infused activism. Authors Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox encourage us to use our talents in service of compassion and justice and to move beyond our broken systems–economic, political, educational, and religious–discovering a spirituality that not only helps us to get along, but also encourages us to reevaluate our traditions, transforming them and in the process building a more sacred and just world. Read more on Occupy Spirituality

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein (11/5/13)

Overview: The bestselling author of Sacred Economics and The Ascent of Humanity relates real-life stories of interbeing in action: how small, individual acts of courage, kindness, or self-trust have made the world a little more beautiful, and how the worst crises of our past and present have stemmed from a fundamental sense of separation–the very opposite of interbeing.

Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times by Carolyn Baker, Ph.D., foreword by John Michael Greer (11/19/13)

Overview:  A collection of probing essays and weekly meditations, this book addresses how to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the impending collapse of industrial civilization. Author Carolyn Baker offers wisdom, inspiration, and a sense of spiritual purpose for anyone who is concerned about the daunting future humankind has created.

The answer?

Well, it’s tricky, because the answer could be all three, OR, none of them!

A coconut is actually considered a drupe, which the Library of Congress defines as “a fruit with a hard stony covering enclosing the seed.” That said, what you see in the store is not the full coconut — it’s actually the seed, and the fruit, which is why you can consider a coconut to be both! When coconuts grow on the tree, they’re not the round, brown bowling balls that most of us picture. They actually grow in hard, green, oblong husks that encase the brown shell that covers the delicious fruity “meat” inside.

And why could you consider it a nut, besides the fact that “nut” is in the name? Well, the Library of Congress says that a loose definition for a nut is “a one-seeded fruit.” That definition certainly fits the coconut.

To read more about the coconut classification and origins, visit this coconut info page from Library of Congress.

Some other cool facts about coconuts:

• Coconuts are a superfood, which means that they pack a powerful punch of vitamins and nutrients.
• Coconut shells make great compost material, so don’t throw them in the garbage, throw them in the garden!
• According to Superfoods author and raw nutrition expert David Wolfe, coconut water is an excellent source of potassium and electrolytes, making it an ideal and refreshing choice after a workout.

Check out this video of  David Wolfe sharing how he uses every part of the coconut at his beautiful NoniLand ranch and retreat center:

Broken Coconut image by Tom Woodward, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Suppose you discovered that we—you, your loved ones, all of us—have been trying to solve our health problems in the manner that most ensures failure, that guarantees we remain sick.

That may seem such a peculiar proposition as to be unworthy of attention. Until you recall that, indeed, our physicians cure few of our ills, if any. And that, over time, despite competent medical care, most of us become gradually sicker, not healthier. There is, by the way, nothing controversial about these assertions; most physicians will acknowledge their validity. I know because, being a physician myself, I have worked with many hundreds of medical colleagues over the years.

But why can’t they cure us? This question demands an answer, for chronic and recurring maladies, both physical and mental, even among the young, dominate our lives as never before. Diseases previously vanquished, such as syphilis and tuberculosis, have reappeared. Other diseases have vanished, only to be replaced by new ones at least as menacing. Succeeding generations of Americans have become progressively less healthy. (If you doubt this claim, consider our societal epidemics of obesity, diabetes, asthma, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, antibiotic-resistant infections, autism, eating disorders, adolescent depression—and, indeed, the proliferation of all psychiatric disorders—to name just a few of our woes.) Why? What has gone wrong? In a word: our ideas.

As strange as it sounds, our ideas about health and illness have made us sick. They have led us astray, toward collective disability and away from health. This is a book about those ideas. And about other, seemingly crazy ideas that can make us well. For unless we radically transform our ideas, all the broccoli and vitamins and treadmill training, all the heart surgery and gene transplants and stem-cell manipulations in the world cannot cure us.

To understand why so many of us are chronically ill despite the discoveries of modern medicine, we must ask questions. Fundamental questions. And because the easy and comfortable ones have already been asked, these must be disturbing questions. Threatening questions.

And so, if we dare, suppose we question our notions of biological reality, hence our notions of medical reality, thus our notions of reality in general. And what if we find them amiss to a shocking degree, say by 180 degrees, if we are mathematically inclined? What if we discover that, like the disoriented footballer of bygone notoriety who ran the ball into his own end zone, medical science has been racing mistakenly in the wrong direction for generations, with these misguided notions tucked under its arm?

The treatments that medicine devises—drugs, surgery, irradiation, even psychotherapy—seem rational and scientific. But they leave too many of us unwell. Could it be that the reason for this inadequacy is that, in its understanding of the living organism, modern medicine (as preposterous as this may sound) is neither rational nor scientific? And therein lies the purpose of this book, for in dissecting medicine’s presumptions of scientific rationality, it reveals a radically different, less commonsensical approach to healing. But what seems to make the least sense, it turns out, may make the most sense. This is not because biological processes operate irrationally or perversely, but because modern medicine does not understand them. That is the bad news.

But the good news is that if we are willing to challenge our long-held but misguided convictions about ourselves, we can achieve levels of personal and societal health that now seem unattainable. For we can learn from the experiences of once-sick individuals, including me, that things are not what they seem. And we can discover a variety of experiments and unorthodox treatments that debunk the most cherished tenet of modern medicine and, by so doing, herald a revolution in our concepts of health, illness, and life itself.

The tenet to which I refer, the fixed idea that guides all “scientific” medicine of the modern era is this: the laws of biology—and therefore medicine, which is a branch of applied biology—are merely special cases of the laws of chemistry and classical physics that have governed our understanding of inanimate objects for centuries. What is good enough to explain the action of billiard balls and the antics of molecules in bubbling beakers is good enough, it is assumed, to explain the behavior of living organisms. If this is correct, then we are on the right track. But what if it is wrong?

A corollary of this notion is the linear, Manichaean, military model of disease and its treatment that dominates the medical establishment. According to this model, disease is our enemy. In this connection, readers may recall our bureaucratic “wars,” trumpeted at presidential press conferences, declared on cancer, AIDS, drug addiction, and the like. Though politically motivated, such declarations are not hyperbole, for medicine perceives itself as a combatant against disease, with physicians and scientists the grunts under its command.

After all, disease is an Evil entity, an invader as alien to our bodies as the hijacked planes were to the Twin Towers. Effective treatment (the Good) must oppose and overpower it. And in our struggle with disease, only one of us can remain standing when the smoke clears, with no truce or treaty permitted. We must annihilate it, or die trying. Modern medical treatment conflates this militant moralism with pre-twentieth- Century basic science, deploying an arsenal of medications, surgical procedures, and beams of radiation as the smart bombs and bunker busters in its crusade. But what if this philosophy is not only wrong but harmful, ensuring that we can never get well? How is that possible? And how would we know?

Stories of campaigns against dreaded diseases can inspire us and promote admiration for those scientists and clinicians battling on medicine’s front lines. As well they should. The only problem with modern medicine is that it does not work very well. Any reader who doubts this claim may wish to pop a Valium (or a Librium, Xanax, Ativan, Klonopin, Serax, Tranxene, or Buspar) before beginning chapter 6. But, by way of preface, I can summarize here the results of modern medicine’s century and a half of struggle against its alleged terrorists.

For starters, cancer continues to menace us, only slightly deterred by the most radical and toxic remedies at medicine’s disposal. And we continue to cower before infectious disease. Consider the medical scares that erupt on the evening news with the regularity of malarial fevers: anthrax, smallpox, toxic shock syndrome, SARS, MRSA, the NDM-1 gene mutation, West Nile virus, pandemic influenza, meningitis, monkeypox, mad cow disease, E. coli, flesh-eating streptococci, AIDS, Ebola, and so on. Worse, we hobble through our daily lives tethered to serious chronic diseases that limit the lives of young and old in increasing numbers. And not to be outdone by that rogues’ gallery of intractable physical woes, mental illnesses, most of which psychiatry labels incurable, abound in numbers that continue to rise, even among the young.

Superintending all our maladies stands a system of “managed care,” a limbo to which patients are consigned because physicians rarely prevent or cure. Instead, our physicians largely manage (read “contain”) chronic and recurring illness, so that proportionately few of us remain fully well. It is really a system not of health care but of sickness care. A system so fragmented and dehumanized that your medical appointment schedule can resemble the itinerary of a whirlwind European tour—if it’s Tuesday, this must be your dermatologist’s office; if Wednesday, your otolaryngologist’s; if Friday, your psychiatrist’s. And need I mention the cost of care, which swells like an unchecked glioma? Or the insult added to injury, medicine’s self-inflicted wound: the “side effect”?

No one needs to read a book, including this one, to know that contemporary medicine has shortcomings. But what is less obvious is that the cure for medicine’s ills lies not in more advanced technologies or more powerful or more specific drugs. Rather, such a cure lies in new ideas about the nature of disease and of living systems generally. As you’ll discover in the course of this book, these ideas are more consistent with the findings of twenty-first-century science than those of mainstream medicine.

Though I describe these ideas, this book is not simply a theoretical disquisition. I also examine experimental findings, epidemiological data, and the outcomes of weird treatments that, if valid, overturn mainstream medicine’s claims and suggest alternative models all by themselves. In the terms of philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn, these are anomalies in medicine’s flawed paradigm.1 It is this book’s primary purpose to diagnose these seeming quirks of nature for what they are—rabbit holes through which we can plunge in order to perceive a new biological reality.

And become well.

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