The Book I Wrote
The Seven Stone Path turns two, and I have some thoughts about that
This month my book The Seven Stone Path: An Everyday Journey to Wisdom turns two.
I’m meeting a lot of new folks here on Substack, so it seemed like the right time to catch them up on what the rest of us already know. And also write something about that strange feeling that washes over you every time someone introduces you an as author.
Where it All Started
I’ve been a professor of philosophy and humanities for thirty-four years, teaching just about every philosophy and humanities course there is, but mainly focusing on world religions, Asian philosophy, ethics, and world mythology. At the end of a semester, or after a community lecture, the question often comes up: Can you recommend a book that continues the conversation we’ve been having? It’s not an easy question to answer—from the trailhead we’ve been walking there are thousands of great books that lead in a thousand different directions. But many of them require time-consuming preliminary work—learning the context and lingo of the tradition you’re about to dive into. It’s tough to go it alone. Where is that serious, substantive, but accessible book that puts the insights of the world’s wisdom traditions into everyday language and breaks down barriers instead of raising them?
Through the years of my teaching career a yearning began to grow—to write just such a book. Not an academic book, but a book for regular folks like us who are interested in these things, but have full lives, and don’t have the time or inclination to crack the code of these ancient texts and traditions. It seemed a shame to me that all of the life-changing tools in the world’s wisdom traditions were hidden behind jargon and needless complexity. It was time to put these tools into people’s hands.
I wanted my book to be a conversation over coffee, not a tedious task.
Philosophy as Therapy
At the heart of the project was an ancient idea, that philosophy is best viewed not as abstract intellectual analysis but as a healing-modality as real and immediate as the pain it addresses. For all its virtues and beauties, Plato revered philosophy most for its therapia—its therapeutic value.
Although we now live in the Age of Psychology when all maladies of the spirit are called mental illness and treated with talk therapy and pharmacology, for most of human history when you found yourself suffering from depression, anxiety, or existential dread you went to the shaman, sage, or priestess. I have taken advantage of talk therapy a few times in my life, as well as psychotropic medications, and they have proved tremendously helpful. I am not proffering wisdom teachings as a substitute for medical treatment. But as an amendment? Absolutely. I say use every tool in the box—whatever it take to help the broken parts heal themselves back together.
The Seven Stone Path
So in 2009 when I finally decided to really do this thing, to write this book, a structure emerged from the deep pool of consciousness we all dip our toes into—seven key words or guiding ideas. And then the image came—seven stepping stone across a stream. This visual analogy helped me see the ideas as sequential—each stone an evolutionary stage—you had to step on the first one to get to the second one and so on. And the way the visual analogy tied all of the ideas together. By the time you got to the fourth stone, for example, the first three stones were still with you—a cumulative effect.
This proved to be a fruitful analogy, so I stayed with it. In the same way that in order to do long division you first have to understand multiplication, and before that addition and subtraction, and before that, simple counting. In the education business we call it scaffolding—building new ideas upon the structure of already-establish understandings. So the title of the book became The Seven Stone Path: An Everyday Journey to Wisdom. The whole writing, editing, revision, design, and publication process took fourteen years—I wrote when I could between full-time teaching on and off campus, two magazine columns, and a busy schedule as a performing singer-songwriter, not to mention being a husband, taking care of a home, and staying connected to friends. I needed to be a lot of different people, and I needed to be in a lot of different places—and I wanted to be in all of them fully. That was my spiritual practice—presence. Sometimes I even got close to acheiving it.
Along the way Lori was always my biggest coach and partner in this process. I wouldn’t have gotten through it without her. Hell, I wouldn’t even have started it without her encouragement and faith. She knew I could do it, so I started to believe her. The book was finally, physically born on August 23, 2023. Do I take on too much? Probably. But it’s joyful to create, and I’m a sucker for joy.
What is Wisdom?
At the heart of this project is the concept of wisdom—what is it, why do people need it, and how do we get it? The introduction of the book takes up these questions and sets the stage for the work to come. Socrates reminds us that wisdom begins with the admission of ignorance. The biggest obstacle to wisdom is pride, or thinking we know when we do not know. How delightful to discover that the journey to wisdom begins not with knowledge acquisition, but with emptying out and ridding ourselves of all of our false opinions. Only when we deepen into humility does the path to wisdom begin to reveal itself.
The First Stone—Acceptance
The journey starts with the wisdom of acceptance. Rooted deep in Buddhism and Stoicism, this first chapter makes the case that the best stance from which to affect real change—within oneself or in the world around you—is a state of deep acceptance of current conditions. Gently releasing resentment and expectations frees our energies to align and begin creating new and effective understandings and solutions.
The Second Stone—Surrender
Then comes the wisdom of surrender. In many ways, surrender simply means falling deeper into acceptance. Here, we let go in order to receive. And in this chapter I give considerable attention to this question: Surrender to what? That means we have to address the concept of ultimate reality, both in personified form (as God or gods), and in impersonal forms (Brahman, Tao, the Spirit within, and all the rest.) This chapter also gives us a chance to deepen into Stoicism, the insights of the recovery movement, as well as the practices of prayer and meditation.
The Third Stone—Engagement
With acceptance and surrender embodied within us, it’s time to move into the wisdom of engagement. Our most effective actions in the world come from a core of stillness and resolve. No longer plagued by ego-expectations and small-mindedness we step into the field of action willing to perform the work that is ours to do not for personal gain, but in the consciousness of service to something larger than ourselves.
The Fourth Stone—Allowance
Thinking further about the wisdom of engagement, or right action, it becomes clear that a certain type of action was most effective—action in harmony with the currents flowing around us. In other words, with acceptance, surrender, and engagement behind us, it’s time for the wisdom of allowance. By allowing instead of forcing outcomes, we achieve more while struggling less. For this chapter we turn to Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, the world’s mystics, and many other sources to reinforce the wisdom of creation as co-creation.
The Fifth Stone—Enjoyment
With the first four stones embodied within us, we notice that life is becoming easier and more enjoyable. The fifth stone is the wisdom of enjoyment. Reflecting on the deeper nature of joy and happiness, we discover that joy is our essential nature, and is to be allowed more than achieved. Happiness can’t be chased—it is best understood as a by-product of a well-lived life, not an object to be acquired. It arises on its own when we remove the obstacles. Soon, the whole world begins to shimmer with beauty simply because we have learned how to see.
The Sixth Stone—Love
We have to talk about the wisdom of love. Across all cultures and wisdom traditions love is the word reserved for the highest levels and deepest depths of human experience. But what is love? By philosophically exploring the nature of love we come to realize that like all of the earlier stages or stones, it is already within us, and is accessed more readily through allowance than assertion. Love is not an object we gain possession of because of our worthiness—it is something that rises up from within when the first five stones (acceptance, surrender, allowance, engagement, and enjoyment) are rooted in our lived experience and shape our consciousness and decision making. Love is what happens when you show up—really show up. And then you realize it was there all along.
The Seventh Stone—Integration
Now it’s time to pull it all together—the wisdom of integration. In this final chapter we explore the nature of paradox, that is, how truth often shows up in pairs of conflicting statements, and refuses to be wrestled into tiny boxes. We move from either/or to both/and. In the end, religion and philosophy are about integration—unifying the disparate elements of ourselves, and unifying the scattered conflicts that define the world around us. Wisdom doesn’t solve all our problems, but it moves us past the place where our problems have power over us. The etymology of words like religion and yoga reveal that they are both about this primal longing—to reintegrate and unify. In a very real way, the previous six stones were leading here, and in the end, it is integration or oneness we’ve been longing for all along.
Bonus Features
Each chapter ends with two recurring sections: A Wise Person and Closing Meditations. A Wise Person re-frames the essential ideas of each chapter as personal qualities, as if they were already embodied in us. For example, “A wise person accepts current conditions and then gets to work.” And so on. This section serves two functions—as a handy summary of the key points of the chapter, and by providing vision of what embodying those ideas would look like in our everyday life.
Finally, each chapter ends with a Closing Meditation. Obviously you can’t read and meditate at the same time—not really anyway—but in these sections the voice of the prose shifts into that of someone leading a guided meditation. One reader told me that she records herself reading the Closing Meditation sections of the book on her phone’s voice recorder, and then listens back with her eyes closed, in effect, leading herself in guided meditation. What a great idea!
My reason for ending each chapter with these Closing Meditation sections: After all that thinking it was important to move out of the intellect and bring the work deeper into the mind-body consciousness that we are. By allowing the ideas to sink beneath the waves of the thought-stream and into our essential being, they become something larger than conceptual knowledge—they become who we are. In the end, wisdom isn’t a bunch of pretty ideas—it’s a way of being in the world.
A Free Seven Stone Path Workbook
In the early months after publication I kept hearing from readers, “Peter, is there a workbook? Our book club is reading your book and we’d love to have some supplemental materials.” Fantastic idea. So I wrote one. It’s called The Seven Stone Path Workbook and it’s available for free on my website. It’s full of discussion questions, exercises, and journaling prompts, all connected directly to the book. You can read it on my website, or download it into your device, and even print it out if you want to. Whether you buy The Seven Stone Path or not, go get the free workbook right now anyway—it might prove helpful for your own reflection and self-inquiry.
I Guess I’m an Author Now
These last two years have been rewarding in ways I could not have predicted. It feels good to finally have this thing out there. And the feedback has been so nourishing—from the face-to-face conversations at book events to the Amazon reviews from strangers all over the world. Self-publishing is a substantial financial commitment, so the best I can hope for is to one day break even. And if it goes further than that, well that’d be groovy too. But for now the book has been selling steadily, even if not in overwhelming numbers. Still, it’s doing much better than expected, and I can never express how gratifying it is to know that there are thousands of people all over the world who have read this book. The mantra that kept me going through the long years of the writing process—if even one person reads it and gets something good out of it, then I’ll be satisfied. So I’m satisfied.
The Seven Stone Path: An Everyday Journey to Wisdom is available wherever books are sold. Walk into any bookstore on earth and ask them to order it, or order it yourself from your favorite online bookseller. Here’s the Amazon link. And could I ask you a favor? If so moved, please consider writing a review on the book’s Amazon page—that’s the best thing you can do to help any author. The more reviews I receive, the more Amazon’s algorithims will share my book on its recommended reading lists.
Thanks for indulging me and letting me write about my own book for this edition of Finding a Way. I just couldn’t let this book-birthday go by unnoticed.
Thank you again, Peter, for doing all the work of synthesizing so much ancient and more modern philosophies into a concise understanding of ideas we can easily understand and try to incorporate into our lives. What a terrific gift you created!
Best,
Gail
Your book remains at my bedside & continues to be an inspiration.