New Self, New World challenges the primary story of what it means to be human, the random and materialistic lifestyle that author Philip Shepherd calls our “shattered reality.” This reality encourages us to live in our heads, self-absorbed in our own anxieties. Drawing on diverse sources and inspiration, New Self, New World reveals that our state of head-consciousness falsely teaches us to see the body as something we possess and to try to take care of it without ever really learning how to inhabit it. Shepherd articulates his vision of a world in which each of us enjoys a direct, unmediated experience of being alive. He petitions against the futile pursuit of the “known self” and instead reveals the simple grace of just being present. In compelling prose, Shepherd asks us to surrender to the reality of “what is” that enables us to reunite with our own being. Each chapter is accompanied by exercises meant to bring Shepherd’s vision into daily life, what the author calls a practice that “facilitates the voluntary sabotage of long-standing patterns.” New Self, New World is at once a philosophical primer, a spiritual handbook, and a roaming inquiry into human history.
Insights Attained through Heroic Quest Philip Shepherd, at the start of his book New Self, New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-first Century, reveals that the role of a hero is to respond to the call to adventure, which opens him up to an expanded reality. On his return, his task then is “not to threaten his society, nor to take it over tyrannically with his newfound perspective, nor to abandon it; his task is to bring his new perspective back to be integrated in such a way that the society’s self-definition loosens and shifts to accommodate what it has hitherto excluded.” Shepherd’s work, too, has much in it of the same heroic quest that seeks, based on the expanding of his own horizons through cross-cultural experiences that he first encountered in his youth, to inspire those among us who are not mired in the trivialities and mundane nature of our everyday worldly experience to strive for the unification of mind and spirit in our approach to our surroundings and to one another,Shepherd grounds his…
`The single greatest harm done by the story our culture tells, though, comes from the divisions it enforces within each of us.’ For centuries, people have relied on tradition and religion to provide stability and a sense of contentment to their lives. While there can be comfort in the certainty provided by ritual, there is often a separation between what we feel or know, using our whole body, and what we think, using our brain. There is a tendency in western society to separate mental consciousness from the body, which can lead to disorientation and unhappiness.In this book, Philip Shepherd talks about the dangers of living entirely within the head (by separating mental consciousness from the body), and offers a new model of consciousness that brings mind and body into balance.Philip Shepherd started writing this book in 2001, and spent nine years considering the issues surrounding the story of our culture and how it has become increasingly less relevant to our lives. He explains that part of the fiction of our culture is that the head and reason take precedence over the body and…
A New Way of Perceiving Reality! Imagine for a moment living in a completely “balanced” world where mind, heart, and body are synchronized and no dominance is present to distort life as we know it. The premise of New Self, New World moves even beyond that idea, laying out the possibility that life as we know it will take on an even greater experience, a fifth dimension as it is explained.Philip Shepherd takes the reader through mythology, various ideas about consciousness, what occurs when we place too much focus on the mind without consciousness, of just what encompasses an idea, of a lack of connection to the core of our heart and “pelvic” intelligence, several suggestions to reacquire our innate sensitivity that is meant to operate in balance with thinking and other parts of our existence, such as through the process of restoring consciousness of the body to awaken that pelvic intelligence.It also challenges previous understandings of male and female activity and passivity, a…