The Nirvaneans is my new book, due for publication by Humdrumming on June 21 next year. Here’s a little taster from the preface :

The basic premise of this book is that “Nirvanic experience” is more common than we might suppose, but often goes unrecognized. Moreover, it is not an abnormal event, but a sudden emergence of our subtle background consciousness: our Nirvanoception.

An American study showed that a majority of people claimed to have had spiritual experiences, but that a significant number did not want to repeat them. Even a glimpse of our real self-nature overturns every canon of the materialist world-view, and that can be deeply challenging to some.

Reality is clearly multi-layered, at least in texture. Quantum physics recognized the fact when it postulated an infinite number of dimensions in its mathematical equations. The danger of this particular approach, though, is that the further we stray from direct experience, the less our speculations are worth in any practical sense. Many of our religious woes are caused by the misconstrual of texts which sought to hide the secrets of our nature from the uninitiated. A simple adherence to phenomenology would make a difference to our understanding of many of the inscrutable mysteries of life.

Alan Watts once wrote : “It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus…are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their state of consciousness.”

I have set out here to describe the state of Nirvana—including detailed, attested descriptions of it—and the radical implications of its realization for the realizer. The process is mostly misunderstood in the West and is practically ignored in the East, where it originated in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. An extraordinary spin-off is that it delivers powerful confirmation of the survival of consciousness after death. It also gives us invaluable clues to the mystery of the Holy Grail and the wonders of the Philosophers’ Stone.

John M Evans

We’ve reorganized the distribution of book and publishing assets at Syntagma Media, so that what was “Publishing Corner” has now been moved over here.

The reason for this is that the three book blogs will not be active until just prior to their publication — people tire of hearing about a book for months before it’s published. Because these sites are not updated regularly, they lower the average traffic metrics of the whole of the network.

So, I’ve decided to separate them off to this quiet corner, where they can be themselves without jeopardizing the advertising revenues of the main network.

Some internal projects at Syntagma Media are going out to trade publishers. Two have recently done so: Naked Tales and The Nirvaneans.

Naked Tales: Stories By Writers Who Blog, is to be published by Humdrumming in early 2007. It has its own website within the Syntagma network: NakedTales.org.

The Nirvaneans: The Natural history of Nirvana and Those Who Attained It, by John M Evans (otherwise known as “me”), is also being published by Humdrumming in 2007.

Dial Publishing will initially concentrate on spin-offs from the network, which might not otherwise attract a mainstream publisher.

Other publishing models are also being tried out. For example, we are republishing my earlier book on technical and business writing on a blog: Tech Biz Writing, supported only by advertising. This will eventually form a comprehensive free course on these crucial subjects.

Dial will also produce eBooks which will be sold off the websites, and will utilize new technology in the production of its print books. No specific projects have been decided on as I write, but some will be announced soon.