Living Dangerously

This book, edited by Alan Jacobs, is a collection of extracts from the speeches & teaches of Osho, also known as Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh - a man who were it not for this excellent netflix documentary series I wouldn't have heard of probably. As you'll know if you've seen the doc - things got strange; but as you'll know if you're read this blog much - I love it when things get strange, and I'm always happy to suspend disbelief a bit when the lines between genuine wisdom & odd cultic dogma seem to be blurry. So, without making any judgments whatsoever - I decided it wasn't worth only having an impression of the man's life and/or philosophy without actually exploring some of it directly rather than just via a probably-somewhat-dramatized retelling of all the juiciest highlights. And my verdict is - I mean, my personal jury's still out on the nature of the cultic community his ashram turned into, but in terms of his actual outlook and ideas? The man makes some excellent points, which are highly uncomfortable to hear for anyone from settled ideological perspectives: his reflections on the nature of meditation, modernity & the mishap-overlap in-betweens therein are some of the most striking new poignancies I've heard from any thinker on the subjects of mindfulness and modernism, and much of the rest of his philosophy in my view does bear striking similarity to the clarity of insight and quasi-prophetic character of properly, dangerously enlightened thinking. That's not to say I necessarily agree with him about all the things he said - far less endorse all the things that happened under his watch - but you know, shit happens when you start trying to fundamentally question & uplift the human consciousness beyond the boundaries of convention, so I'm not gonna throw stones. Think for yourself if you want to dare to try to.

[edit - June: I've lent this book to a colleague of mine who's into spiritual mysticism and all that after we had a conversation about the documentary. He's still very skeptical which is totally fair enough - they did have those pink police people...]

Little Turtle Turns the Tide

This book, from author Lauren Davies and illustrator Nico Williams, is an absolute gem of a children's book. It's got every vital ingredient: fun slick non-clichéd rhyming prose and inventive, beautiful pictures, which both work together to tell the story instead of just one following t'other as is so often the case; it squares up to some sea creatures that most kids' books wouldn't touch with a bargepole and succeeds in making them characterful. 
   And it has a strong, praxis-based, optimistic ecological moral, which engages the reader in the turtle's quest to clean up his corner of the reef without its ever having to preach or infodump - it respectfully assumes some general environmental consciousness on the part of children reading,* and then dives headlong into "well no point moping, let's Do Stuff Together & Try & Make Things Better!" in a fully coherent and exciting way. If part of my inclination toward an activism of pessimism could be laid at the feet of certain children's books in the absence of an activist education, this one no doubt could spur many a child onto hopeful practical paradigm-shifting ladders. Or maybe they'll just like it as a book and that's fine too cos it's a damn good** children's book.

* Children like nature, don't they? And the ones who don't are little shits who probably don't read anyway. JOKING

** Weird story, I found out about this book by meeting the illustrator in person. She lived downstairs from some friends I was visiting and came back a bit pissed from a night out at the same kind of time that we got back, and we all got chatting (at first about the fact that my friends' toilet had been leaking through her ceiling, y'know, normal London small-talks) and I ended up reading a copy of this book to my friends in their flat, which actually went down surprisingly well considering reading a childrens' book aloud at an aftersesh-type-gathering usually just doesn't happen. I then proceeded to very enthusiastically tell her that I'd been reading lots of kids' books recently*** & could confirm as a connoisseur that this was indeed a really damn good one.

*** That's another story, and is predominantly Big Isaac's fault.