Living Deliberately / Book Review

Harry Palmer, author of the Avatar Materials, tells AJ about the evolution of Section I of the Avatar Materials. Illustrations are from Living Deliberately.

The first release (at least the first that I had anything to do with) was entitled Section One Avatar. It set forth an explanation of how consciousness works and why it works that way. The purpose was to provide an orientation for people who were about to take the Avatar course and to give a rear-view mirror perspective on what had happened to the twenty or so people who had already done the course. It wasn't really a book per se, but a pack of mimeographed confidential essays and lecture transcripts. Less than a hundred copies were made. Students shared them until they were so stained and dog eared that we threw them away.

After the mimeographed copies were gone, there were several generations of photocopies each generation increasingly faint and hard to read.

Finally, even though I considered the written materials only a minor part of the Avatar experience, I had to take a look at the quality of the copies we were giving people to study. They were awful! A writer, Ingo Swann, took me aside and gently insisted that I sit down and write out a legible manuscript of what I meant to say and send it to him for editing. The result of that was a white paperback manual called The Avatar Materials, Section One: Creativism.

It was a big improvement, and in March of 1988 we lifted the confidential restrictions on Section I and began to sell the book to the public. I think
we sold about 20,000) copies.

Those copies brought a lot of people to Avatar and for a year or so, I barely had time to catch my breath. After two years of deliveries, hotels and airports I took time off to catch up on the research and feedback I was getting from students. The results were new processes and a restructuring of the original materials to make them simpler and clearer.

The third release of the Section I materials was Creativism: The Art of Living Deliberately. Star's Edge still gets one or two orders a week for this edition, but there are no copies available. Creativism was the edition that took Avatar international. It was published in Italy, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, Brazil, Israel and Korea. There were also some Russian copies and some Japanese copies. There were about 150,000 copies of that edition sold.

Between the 1991) printing of Creativism and the 1994 printing of Living Deliberately, the size of the Avatar network grew by 500%. As an organization, our own understanding of how to present the materials grew even more. We collected research from over a million hours of masters delivering Avatar. That's not only an impressive amount of time, but it also reflects a multilingual, multicultural investigation of universal mechanics underlying consciousness.

When you live every day with something, you begin to see patterns and can predict the consequences of certain ideas. We began to see patterns in the operation of human consciousness. We learned what worked globally and what merely had fad appeal within a certain group or belief system. We also learned about paradigms, indoctrination and transcendent experiences, and everything we learned we used to raise the quality of our masters and refine the effectiveness of Avatar. The results that are currently achieved far exceed the results that were envisioned in 1986.

Along the way I learned that there were ideas that needed clarifying and theories that needed to be presented. People needed a bridge between the things they experienced and the realizations behind why they experienced them. There was also a lot of inquiry along the line of, "How did you ever come up with this stuff?" and, "Why don't you write a book that everyone can understand?"

So that was the research and motivation that shaped the fourth and current release of the Section I materials, Living Deliberately: The Discovery and Development of Avatar.

Book Review

Living Deliberately: The Discovery and Development of Avatar

Reviewed by The Village Wordsmith/Linda Decker, freelance writer.

If you're through with the psycho-babble-du-jour bunch and are tired of esoteric incantations that only the initiated can mumble or pretend to understand, boy are you in the right place! You'll love this fast-paced, provocative new gem of a book by consciousness researcher Harry Palmer.

With a clarity attainable only by someone with an absolute command of his subject matter, Palmer masterfully takes what could easily have become a dry, complex drone of philosophic musings and turns it into a ringingly clear, engaging and usable book. You'll see yourself on nearly every page--Palmer calls you by name and warmly invites you into his exploration.

It's been a busy nine years for Palmer and his staff. In 1986, he released the Avatar course for the first time. Since then, his work had been translated into 12 languages, while more than 44,000 people in 46 countries have experienced the speed and effectiveness of the course. Now, at last, he has released this chronicle of his own search for an operating manual for life--the journey that led him to create Avatar.

The book begins with the story of Harry's days as a hippie seeker in the sixties and tells of his various encounters of a familiar kind with institutions of higher indoctrination, as well as his explorations of the belief systems of those who were supposed to have "the answers." He learned that for those in search of more evolved states of consciousness and freedom, any number of story-telling impostors are ready to tie disciples' hands and point them towards a "new, improved" movie screen. Sadly, what's playing is a different set of assertions for the student to believe. Palmer determinedly walks out of the theater, ready to do his own research. Off we go with him into sensory deprivation tank experiments and the formative stages of his new technology. And we are there for the first demonstration of its awesome power.

Part two of the book presents the principles that illustrate the structure of belief systems, the effect of one's perspective on experience, the anatomy of honesty and the relationship between belief and reality. Here, you're bound to find questions for all of your answers and a fresh enthusiasm for considering new viewpoints--most notably, your own.

In the last section of the book, Palmer describes the initial spread of Avatar and takes us through an overview of the kinds of experiences that await in the confidential procedures of sections II and III of the course. The course equips people with the tools to explore consciousness to its very limits--from the most fixed, opinionated reality to the broad expansiveness of source awareness. With these very practical tools, one can create the reality he or she prefers--moment to moment.

The availability of Living Deliberately has caused a sharp up-tick in the growth of the Avatar network, because it gives the curious a secure foothold from which they can launch their own explorations, free of indoctrination. Do yourself a favor and savor Living Deliberately, as well as its companion workbook, ReSurfacing®. Both are available from the publisher, as are referrals to licensed Avatar instructors, by call 1-800-589-3767.