Book launch: Being

Book review — Authored by Alan

Being

On Saturday, 8 March, It Matters hosted a book launch event. B (Bill Sullivan) was launching his book Being which, he explained, is to prepare young children for modern life: “The new ones who are coming now really need to get the best start because the world is in crisis. I wanted to warn them about the road ahead, offer solutions, offer hope that all would be well. Certain things in my life that really impressed me or helped me in some way I put in the book. It’s my whole spiritual journey.”

The Way of the Sunlit Path

Such books are often dry, pedagogical, reading like a Victorian improvement tract, or else they try too hard to be uplifting. Being is not like this. It is light, fun, endlessly entertaining. “Wake up and piss boy, San Francisco’s on fire,” is how B describes his wake-up call, courtesy of a US Army captain. And so he dropped out of university, climbed a mountain, joined a seminary, tried changing the ‘corrupt’ church, was declared a heretic and finally lodged up in Auroville. Where, of course, his adventures have continued.

The learning from each experience, from each of his adventures – and there are many of them – is summed up in pithy quotes like “Every past can be healed in the present”, “You can deliver your own baby”, “Rule out the rules”. Every day, as he puts it, we have a choice between living in heaven and living in hell, depending upon how we approach and live our lives. “The startling imperative for me is just to be.”

This segues smoothly into the second book he was launching, or re-launching. For the 2nd edition of The Way of the Sunlit Path is a compendium of quotes on the path which, he says, is a “neglected and even misunderstood energy in the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother”. As he puts it, most people do not realise that in this yoga suffering is optional: or, as The Mother put it, “you don’t need to suffer; it’s not necessary.” In fact, she revealed she had a sort of ‘spiritual ambition’ “to bring to the world a sunlit path to eliminate the necessity for struggle and suffering”. Satprem had no doubt about the importance of this path: “This sunlit path may be the evolutionary contribution of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother to humanity.”

So what is the sunlit path? Sri Aurobindo defined it in these terms: “There is a sunlit path as well as a gloomy one and it is the better of the two – a path in which one goes forward in absolute reliance on the Mother, fearing nothing, sorrowing over nothing. Aspiration is needed but there can be a sunlit aspiration full of light and faith and confidence and joy. If difficulty comes, even that can be faced with a smile.”