When first published David’s book sparked in many people the challenge to reexamine the central purpose of their lives.
The first third of the book examines how we got into the current “mess” we are in when we lost both the connection to the natural world as well as the focal point of how we see ourselves and others. We switched from a subject to subject view of reality to a subject objective perception of existence. When everything is an object to use or abuse we lose connection to ourselves and the natural world.
This all started in the West when the Benedictine Monks invented the mechanical clock. Lock, Descartes, Hobbes, Newton and many others began to describe the natural world, the universe, humans and even God in mechanistic terms. The challenge of the 21st century is to rediscover a new way of seeing ourselves and the world. The last half of the 20th century conditioned us to become mechanical in our thinking and response to this amazing world we live in.
To reclaim our souls we need to rediscover how to see again. This means breaking the mechanical strangle-hold on our minds, opening our hearts and learning to become Holy Mechanics that can change ourselves and the world from the inside out. In many ways it is returning to the seeing of indigenous and shamanic traditions that experience the interconnected of all things.