HAMPTON ROADS PUBLISHING COMPANY

 

The very successful Hampton Roads Publishing Company is right here in Charlottesville, VA., a stone's throw from the ET. When I discovered that fact while surfing the net, I arranged an interview for The Enlightening Times. Never have I met more wonderful and deserving people. The Hampton Roads people walk their talk, all 100+ new age books! I spent half of a day with co-owners Bob Friedman and Frank DeMarco as well as marketing geniuses, Ken Eagle Feather and Quintin Parrish. We talked about life, certainly about books and the ideas which go into them and I left feeling like I had encountered four people whose life journey was one of mastery. I laughed most of the afternoon, feeling like I was with soul mates. That just doesn't happen every day. These guys have a real gift_they are able to talk to people about things that inspire them, and therefore they are very alive. _Editor

Everyone has heard of God! Well, luckily for Hampton Roads, people are also interested enough in whatever conversation God may be having with a mere mortal. Their author, Neale Donald Walsh's book Conversations With God, Book One has been on the New York Times best-sellers top ten list for 9 months and Conversations with God, Book 2 for four.

Hampton Roads acquired the book, and in a very savvy business deal, sold the publication rights to Conversations With God, Book One to Putnam for seven figures. This allowed both the book and Hampton Roads to expand. The book publishers updated their computer systems and hired a few extra hands. The ET encountered the company facing the proverbial catch-22.

The latest wunderkind of the book publishing world, HR owners, Bob Friedman and Frank DeMarco have manuscripts on every spare shelf awaiting their perusal. When I asked Bob Friedman what criteria he used to choose new books he laughed and told me how hard it is. He said one person who received a rejection letter wrote him back and said what did you use, Runes? Co-owner Frank has a very dry wit and we agreed that people would get the wrong idea if we said he used his intuition to decide which box to open. Unless of course I added that he is not being glib. They all get opened and eventually even catalogued on their new computer system. Presently, they receive about 10-20 manuscripts a week.

Hampton Roads was established in 1989 when Bob and Frank were re-examining their lives as many people do in their forties. Bob knew he wanted his work to make a difference. Frank told me that he was in the middle of a realization regarding the limitations of journalism.

It's fascinating to realize DeMarco's point, "Books may be the only economically viable form of written communication which can still be generated by one person and produced for few enough dollars that you don't have to sell to 10,000 people. Therefore a very limited audience can be served."

After meeting through a Shirley MacLaine seminar in Virginia Beach, Bob came to the epiphany that the difference must both affect consciousness and increase awareness. De Marco and Friedman were both previously in the field of journalism and publishing, so they began their mission by starting a small independent publishing house. They used this forum to bring astrologer Linda Goodman's visionary prose poem Gooberz, Mary Summer Rain's Phoenix Rising, Ken Eagle Feather's Toltec books, and many other cutting edge metaphysical books to the marketplace. Perhaps the secret to their success is that they committed to publishing books only in those areas that were interesting to them. A couple of years into their new business Bob and Frank decided to publish only those books that they truly loved. They chose to publish books only on alternative medicine, fiction that was visionary, and on cutting-edge metaphysical subjects, not quite this or that, but somehow new.

And ironically it turns out that those categories are exactly the ones which reflect a growth market, the only growth market in the book publishing business. What did Joseph Campbell say? "Follow your bliss?"

And then there's the - "Build It and They Will Come"- p.o.v. The pioneers of the New Age are finally sitting back as the world wakes up to the reality that many seemed to have been screaming, singing, and promising since the 50's. It's wake-up time for humanity. Our intention to see ourselves as we truly are, to discover our human potential, has delivered us a momentum, now seen reflected in our collective reading taste. One million people have purchased a copy of Conversations With God. If the loan request on my copies is any indication 4 million have read it.

A study of the folks at Hampton Roads reveals a formula. Live your truth, ultimately and completely. Use your talent to give something back to this world and you can always watch the return. But the return is not the focus. It is to make a difference. In much the same way Shakespeare and his Elizabethan company brought Renaissance thinking to the English language, there a lot of souls at play bringing New Age thought to the reading marketplace. William Blake and Herman Hesse are no longer such lone voices for awareness. Hampton Roads, whose logo reads, "For the evolving human spirit", is realizing Bob Friedman's vision. He is making a difference, perhaps helping to change the current paradigm under which the world is operating.

Happily for the readers of the ET, HR has published a number of very good books on the Millennium.

Solstice Shift: Magical Blend's Synergetic Guide to the Coming Age is Hampton Road's latest offering. Due to be released in September of 97 Solstice Shift includes writing by many influential and well-know authors of the New Age and New Thought movements. On Summer Solstice 1996, 23 writers gathered to create the world's first synergistic book. The writers were asked to "tune in" to the planetary or Gaia Consciousness and write about the coming global shift in consciousness. The resulting experiment in consciousness is both a road map to the coming changes and a guide to flowing with them. Contributors include Shakti Gawain, Jean Houston, Neale Donald Walsch, Ken Carey, Robert Anton Wilson, and others. The ET has the pleasure of presenting you with a sampling of what these authors have to say about mankind's fate as we turn the page on one century, and face the year 2000. Here are a few stimulating and thought provoking comments.

The Storm Before The Calm

Neale Donald Walsch has written two books: "Conversations With God", Book 1 and Book 2. He has two new releases in the fall of 1997.

... In this new millennium, we will also create a new paradigm around the matter of personal choice. We will evolve into a society of limited laws and unlimited personal freedom. There will be only three guidelines, or "rules" by which we will be asked to live: awareness--— of the impact and the effect of our thoughts, words, and action upon one another. We will be asked to be totally honest with ourselves and others as to those thoughts, words and actions. And we will be invited to accept full responsibility for all outcomes fairly attributed to them.

Will it be possible for people to live this way? Can human beings (much less corporations and governments) operate within such a paradigm? On the beach that night, I knew that the answer was yes. Not only can the human race do it, it now understands that this is the only way it can evolve any further. We know that we have come just about as far as we can with our present system of withholds and deceits, judgments and condemnations.

And so for a while the waters will be choppy. Yet that is not what drags us down. This is what I learned on that delicious night in June of 1996. We have been swimming in the waters of life with all our "stuff" on, and have been drowning. It is time to throw off everything, accept what is true about us, and swim free at last...

Destiny In The New Millennium

Lynn Andrews is the bestselling author of 14 books, including "Medicine Woman" that have contributed greatly to our understanding of feminine spirituality.

Enlightenment is the absence of illusion and your vision of the world turned right-side up. We see the truth of things and the divine humor in them, as when we take the challenges of life too seriously. The quality that I value the most in my teachers is their humor. Even though I have not reached their level of understanding and seeing, and am certainly less experienced in spiritual pursuits than they, it's their humor that brings me clarity. This humor teaches me and brings me to a place of understanding within myself. Understanding our destiny pertains to humor, magic, power, and our ability to see what is real as we journey across the dimensions.

What is your destiny in the new millennium? It is to find your own truth. How do you do that? By letting go of what no longer serves you. It certainly doesn't come from acquiring more and more knowledge but from letting go of the mentations we humans so love. We take an idea and become attached to it and therefore corrupt it. We lose the truth of something by seeing it as more than simply an idea, a thought, a way to exercise certain aspects of ourselves.

Does destiny even mean anything crucial? That's a good question. We can get stuck in this concept of a destiny and lose what we're here to do.

Our destiny in the new millennium is enlightenment. Acquiring consciousness is becoming easier, even though it doesn't look that way. It is just light—so let us allow the light to touch us. We can talk more freely about it now. We may be criticized, but the most important and powerful people, the people who are way ahead of their time, are always criticized That's the nature of human existence. The new millennium is a time of coming together.

The New Myths For Our Time

Jean Houston is an internationally known philosopher, author, cultural historian, and teacher, who, after many years of work as a behavioral scientist has developed and continues to develop revolutionary new ways of unlocking the latent human capacities existent in every human being. She is the author of 15 books. For the past 30 years, she has co-directed the Foundation for Mind Research.

A new story is emerging in our time. A new story is coming out of the woundings of culture, of crisis, of consciousness. ... It is a new story. It may be a new mythology. It's not yet in shape. You might say, "Can we ever really invent, or reinvent a myth? Can we actually bring it into time? Go beneath the surface crust of consciousness anywhere, of anybody in the world, and you find repositories of the imaginal world, the mundus archetypes that the Sufis refer to as the "El Lam el Mithal." It's a whole energetic system with its patterns of creation yearning at the threshold to enter into time. You find within everyone a teaming terrain of myth and archetype: holy men, wise women, flying horses, talking frogs, sacred spaces, rainbow serpents, and death and resurrection. The journey of the heroes and heroines are a thousand, yea, a million faces.

So I'm saying the reweaving of the myth also requires its redemption. This may be as critical a task as one could attempt at the cusp of the millennium. The task is how to enhance the dominant myths by guiding people into the realms of the psyche, where they have the power to change their own essential story.

We are in jump time. A few hundred months from now we're going to be out there as stewards of the solar system, terraforming Mars and creating biospheres around the solar system.

And I believe that the strides our souls are taking must carry us through every shadow towards an open possibility, in a time when everything quite literally is up for grabs. We can do no less. The psyche requires its greatness as do our times.

Future Dreaming

Merilyn Tunneshende is a scholar, author, and student of nagualistic/shamanic and visionary healing practices. She holds degrees in Spanish and Religion/Philosophy and spent years studying and traveling in Mexico. Her first book, "Medicine Dream: A Nagual Woman's Energetic Healing", was published in 1996 by Hampton Roads Publishing.

... What the current social order and world view have done is to close the aperture between the physical and energy body. When this happens, there are several possible scenarios. One is that earth energy will rip open the closure and the dam will break, allowing the flow of repressed energy to resume. This is the "vengeance of Gaia."

Another is that the social order creating the blockage will disintegrate, and there will be a series of revolutions. This is the violent social reconstruction scenario. A third would be that human kind will strive to balance itself, this scenario would be supported energetically by the zero wave due in the year 2012, beginning a new vibratory era.

And finally it could be like letting the string of a balloon go. Being irreparably sealed the aperture would wither to a faint, hair-like strand and finally separate. It would float away into the unknown vastness, leaving the physical, which remains here to die. This is the extinction scenario.

... Where the energy will take us we do not know. Therefore, all expectations must be released. We may evolve beyond the human. The indoctrinated glosses and limitations of perception may fall away, yielding a view of pure energy. None of what we know may be important anymore. It is, however, a mistake to have a co-dependent view. This work does not require a united New Age front to be realized. Throughout time, advancement has always been achieved by individual practitioners. One is dealing with one's undiscovered, unexplored, infinite energetic potential as a luminous being. Therein lies the journey. The permission of a calendar or a society is not required. Energy is the ultimate authority. 

Message From Gaia

John Nelson has pioneered the New Age novel," claims writer Jess Stearn; and he "has been pioneering this literary form since the late seventies" notes Magical Blend in a recent article on the author. His three novels explore the relationship between metaphysics, modern psychology, and the "new science." His chapter "Message from Gaia" is his first published channeled material.

.... Spirit first knows itself as the whole and then sees that whole manifest in each division of itself, down to the infinitely small. And, at each level, it too feels a sense of great individuality, but it does not lose awareness of itself as the whole and never sees itself merely as the part.

The hologram reflects that awareness, and this technology became manifest at this time because it expresses humanity's greater vision of itself. This is not unlike the U.S. space program, whose real goal was not to reach the moon as a mere technological victory, but for humanity to see the globe from afar as a whole. Did you not feel, if only for a moment, that the forces that unite humanity as a whole were more vital than those that separate?

So, as you can see, there is , if not a plan, a movement afoot. And one, unfortunately for many who refuse to open themselves, that will be greatly accelerated--the divine boot I mentioned earlier. Those unable to ride this heightened energy to greater awareness of themselves as the whole will fall aside.

This is not punishment or even karma. These are concepts of limited thinking. The whole does not punish itself or see itself as a part trying to reunite. it merely absorbs and transforms itself on its journey to higher levels of self-awareness and integration.

This is the essence of the spiritual perspective or orientation. It is a way of being, and the only mode of being that will survive in the coming shift to global or planetary consciousness: humanity's awareness of itself as the greater whole, one body, one planet.

If you are willing to accept the challenge of this movement of awareness, of consciousness, of Gaia consciousness, then you must be willing to release yourself to a flow that will leave behind most of what you have--even what you know--for what you are becoming: planetary beings...Those changes, the falling off of boundaries, are the result of a change of consciousness, not a new voting choice.

...The shift to planetary consciousness will precipitate the most drastic realignment of a civilization you humans have ever witnessed. And it will be more of a falling off, a walking away from, than a reengineering.

To prepare yourself during this transition period-- aside from stilling the mind and residing for ever longer periods of time deep within yourselves awaiting the moment-- emulate, as far as possible, the indigenous tribes around the globe. Take their clue and head back to nature, live in the forests, on moutaintops, in the valleys, on seashores: absorb my rhythms, free your minds, and allow your souls to come forward. The God-force in me, and make no mistake that all of me, every grain of sand on my beaches, is imbued with it--embraces the God-force in you.