Fiction. Paperback, 334 pages, apx 65,000 words. $20 for author signed copy via ND Media Bookstore; $19.95 via Barnes and Noble
DIY E-Book Edition $5 via ND Media Bookstore
E-book, $2.99 via Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, or Book Locker.
Release date: April 15, 2022
“Be humble for you are made of stardust; be noble for you are the Maker of stars.”
A God-seeking peasant from a mythic kingdom is unable to find peace within the doctrinal constraints of his people’s religion. One day he is called to undertake a pilgrimage to the heavenly mountaintop Palace for an audience with the King. But the hero’s journey he had imagined takes many unexpected turns that stretch his faith beyond its limits and shatter every bone of truth in his body. In his brokenness, he learns that his destination was never far away, though only his ultimate failure in chasing it could reveal what he truly was all along.
Modeled after the great allegorical tales among the world’s heritage of sacred scriptures, The Peasant and the King is a revival of traditional mythic storytelling with a unique rendition of timeless Perennial wisdom. Combining elements of Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, Christian mysticism, Spinozan pantheism, panpsychism, and modern quantum theory, it reinvokes the ancient art of mythcraft as a contemplative exercise, while exemplifying the modern value of finding unity in diversity.
Traditional spiritual teachings still hold sway over our hearts in this era of mechanistic thought. But their guardians have mostly abdicated the role of consciousness expansion in favor of fundamentalist politics and literalism. If you sense the treasure hidden among these seminal texts, The Peasant and the King delivers a needed dose of mystic insight and metaphysical heft, all within a time-bending motif that will drop you at your doorstep after a long, deep ride into the Void within.
THE PEZ KING BLOG
Do We Live the Gospel? –3.4.18
Every. Single. Human. Life. is represented by the birth-death-rebirth cycle of the Christ. I say this as a non-Christian pantheist: it is not just the greatest story ever told, it is the only story ever told, the monomyth at the heart of our existence. It is the story of our journey back to from whence we came, and then back out again, in a timeless cycle without beginning or end.
Try to Stop Trying — 3.6.18
You cannot reach enlightenment by trying. But you also cannot reach it by ceasing to try. That just leaves you back where you started, and if you were satisfied with that state, you wouldn’t have started trying. Not to mention the futility of trying to stop trying.
So no, do not try, and do not stop trying.
Stop being the thing that is doing the trying.
The Peasant and the Queen? — 3.15.18
As much as I will always admire the insight and academic legacy of Joseph Campbell, I agree that he biffed it to the extent that he offered the tale of the Vanquishing Hero as the monomyth. It is a very Western and yang-centric lens on our collective literary and folk history. The hero may have had a thousand faces, but few if any of them were yin-feminine.
Salvo: A Preemptive Strike Against Your Rejection — 6.9.18
Let’s get this straight, world. I don’t write for you.
Consciousness, Embodiment, and the Divine Feminine — 2.22.19
Consciousness –the boundless web of interrelationship connecting all things– is not something that you have, it is what you are. The conventional belief is that a sentient body has consciousness, but it is much more accurate to say that Consciousness has sentient and insentient bodies.
It is also Truth that you are one of those temporarily embodied beings, experiencing humanness.
Universalism: That All Shall Be Sózóed — 4.6.21
Salvation is the existential state that is experienced by someone who has been delivered, restored, healed, and/or made whole by some kind of spiritual process. Theology lays out that process as understood by a specific culture or subculture. The perennialist observation of the commonalities of salvation across diverse theologies gives us reason to suspect that “all paths lead to the same mountain peak.”
RELATED ARTICLES AND LINKS
The Four Evolutionary Stages of Human Consciousness — 3.30.19
If the cosmos is a unitary field of matter whose numeric value is One, then consciousness is also a unitary field of Mind that is One in number.
Spiritual Anarchism: an Introduction — ND Media e-book
The common thread through all aspects of anarchism is a bottom-up approach to empowering the individual to live by self-control. Ammon Hennacy’s oft-cited ideal of an anarchist as “someone who doesn’t need a cop to make him behave” is a reflection of this emphasis on self-governance.
Pez King Teaser (Chapter 1) –1.18.20
Once, upon the timeless arc of the circle of time, there was a peasant. He lived in a small village in the heart of the Kingdom, near the towering, cloud-obscured mountains where the King was said to dwell.
Beyond These Four Walls — 12.12.20
if your ego is the main character at the center of your unique “I am” story, your soul is what your character experiences as it starts to suspect that it is being played by an actor. This experience makes no sense in the context created within the walls of the stage, but something tells you nonetheless that it’s true, that when the curtain falls on this stage, you, the actor, will persist.
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