How I saved the World with a Book

By Mark Campbell

There has not been a war or even a rumor of a war for over ten years now and I have not seen a homeless person in at least as long. Did I actually have a hand in this transformation? Can I truly say that without sounding too conceited, even to myself? I ponder the question for a while before I smile and say out loud “Yes I did!”. I did it by writing a book about how people could get the most joy out of their lives.

The Guts of the Heart quickly became a New York Times best-seller and sold over eight million copies. In the book, I laid out how you could use embodied knowing as a scientific process to discover the truth of existence. This rational embodied knowing then enabled us to see ourselves, in our true essence, as the source of joy that grew when engaging with others. The book referred to this as Big Joy since it is the most expansive and burdenless joy that is available. This is in contrast to the joy that we mainly pursue in the material society which is both fleeting and burdened by the harm that it causes to the rest of the world. Because that harm results in scarcity, wars, and the need to defend what you have gained, it is referred to as bunker joy in the book.

The success of the book was largely due to its ability to combine the works of some of our greatest minds to build a solid case for why Big Joy works. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke provided a rational language for embodied experiences while Carl Jung and Erich Neumann mapped out how and why human consciousness may have developed to block our access to embodied experiences. Frederick Nietzche meanwhile, provides the will and the why for alchemizing all of this knowledge towards becoming your best self despite what society or even morality are telling you to do.

John Vervaeke gave us scientific language for our embodied experiences in his video series called Awakening From the Meaning Crisis. The four forms of knowing allow us to describe these experiences rationally while expanding the concept of what we normally perceive as knowledge. This is mainly thinking and language which is referred to as propositional knowing. The other three forms are embodied knowing which allows you to know something directly through the body without the intrusion of thought. One example of embodied knowing is Procedural knowing which is knowing to throw a ball or ride a bicycle.

Once you understand that you can know something directly with your body then you can use that method to look beyond the limits of thinking. To do this, you could ask yourself a question that stumps your thinking and then investigate further using the three forms of embodied knowing. If you find an answer, it can then remain as embodied knowing while making it easier for your thinking and language to describe what it can.

If you ask yourself what was there before the universe even existed while dropping all stories about what you think or believe was there you will be left with the answer I don’t know. But if you ask the same question while breathing deeply into your abdomen to put your attention there you will get another answer. You will experience an embodied answer to the question that you can label as I don’t know in your mind. You may feel a spaciousness or a sense of relief that will prompt other sensations such as wonder or a faint sense of joy.

This provides you with an answer to your question that is known directly in the body and associated with I don’t know. If you direct this sense of I don’t know towards examining your body, you may find that the sense of wonder and joy is magnified as you move through the energy that feels like your body. This is your essence and you can label it I Am but the embodied sense of wonder and Joy confirms your existence much more powerfully than words alone ever could.

Once you can regularly view your essence as a source of wonder and joy, the ability extends to anyone with whom you engage. Just by turning your embodied attention to them, you will know them to be things of wonder and joy as well. Your embodied knowing confirms another’s essence directly in the same way as it confirms your own essence. This is extremely stimulating and pleasing to your own essence and results in the emergence of Big Joy which many people experience as love.

There are many scientific studies that point out the healing benefits of having loved ones around you. The book gathers many of these studies and uses them to demonstrate how the experience of Big Joy and the behaviours that result from it can facilitate dramatic healing episodes in the body and mind. After many years of intense scrutiny and hundreds of scientific studies, the healing effects of Big Joy became widely accepted. At that point, a movement began that gained even more momentum when examined by different scientific disciplines.

Depth psychology in particular, provided a more profound understanding of how and why the practice of experiencing the truth of I don’t know is so transformative. The pioneering work of Carl Jung and Erich Neumann tracks the development of consciousness through mythology, literature, and ancient artwork. The book The Origins and History of Consciousness uses this research to point to how human consciousness became disembodied to deal with the mystery of our existence and how we might regain that embodied knowledge.

The research tells a story of how ancient humans were confronted with this mystery of everything that was represented by the Uroboros, a snake that eats its own tail. Humanity turned away from the terrifying knowledge of our own death by developing an ego consciousness that was viewed as masculine and saw the Uroboros as the Great Mother, the unconscious total awareness, which both provided love and eros with one hand while dealing out death and deception in the other.

The development of this masculine ego continued as humanity learned how to separate more opposites and study one thing at a time in isolation from its complex background. Jung and Neumann saw this as the birth of the patriarchy which culminated in the scientific method in Western society and allowed humanity to survive and thrive. At the same time, however, we lost the ability to truly experience each other and exist in stimulating and embodied ways with the world. This also cut us off from most of the insight, and intuition that is provided by the total awareness of the unconscious mind.

Nevertheless, both Jung and Neumann assert that the development of a strong ego grounded in rationality was very necessary for the next stage of the development of consciousness which involves re-engaging the feminine unconscious. One example of this might be using rationality and reason to recognize embodied knowing for its utility in confronting the truth of the mystery of our existence. Neumann explained how doing this could open up humanity to the full insights of the unconscious mind.

Jung thought that we currently live in a world in which both women and men celebrate the masculine over the feminine. Thinking and science is seen as the ultimate truth while acquiring material goods, extolling your own merits, and benefitting in the short term at the long-term expense of others is the way of the world. We cheer the aggressive hero because this is the archetype that slays the Great Mother and conquers death itself. It is part of who we are as humans but according to Jung it is only one stage of conscious development.

The next stage of development involves a new coexistence of the masculine and feminine in what Neumann calls the hermaphroditic ring of existence that will replace the Uroboros as our mystery of everything. This coexistence of opposites can be facilitated by validating the feminine perspectival, participatory, and procedural forms of knowing in a propositional way. That may be a big reason why the four forms of knowing started to become part of our common speech. This provided the perfect climate for my book The Guts of the Heart to be introduced.

The title is taken from a line that was attributed to Frederick NIetzche. He asserted that humans should live to be their ultimate selves by paying attention to their nature and desires while avoiding the trap of simple hedonism. He suggested that the body could provide knowledge from which values might emerge that were much more robust and meaningful than those that could be derived purely from abstract thought. The mind should serve the heart by digesting and interpreting what the body knows to be true. He encouraged us to live in such a way that the mind becomes the guts of the heart.

Naturally, people compared the book to the ideas of Frederick Nietzche but they were only partially right in doing that. Although I do sense that Nietzche wanted people to experience as much joy as they could, I think he missed out on the biggest sources of joy and I showed that in the book. Even so, I don’t fault him since he inspired me and many others like me to value joy. The problem was that our culture and almost all organized religions seemed to suggest that it was somehow wrong to derive joy and tangible benefits from caring for those around us.

That was the key – learning how to access a deep and lasting joy by first using daily practices to appreciate your true essence. Once that is accomplished, caring for yourself comes quite naturally since you see yourself as a source of wonder and joy through the four forms of knowing which also allows you to see others in this same way. Engaging with others in their true essence is what provides the Big Joy that outshines the other materialistic and hedonistic forms that became known as bunker joy since they would lead to us living in bunkers.

Immediately some copycats claimed they had shortcuts to this same joy. Some had a measured success but in time they all failed to achieve even a fraction of the joy that true practitioners were experiencing. As con artists attempted to game the system, they were either ignored or converted as their practices came too close to the real thing.

But my book was only the beginning of the transformation. Soon many other books, movies, songs, and works of art exploded onto the scene with an impact that dwarfed the launch of my work. The book How to Have the Best Intimate Sex of Your Life sold over twenty million copies and was loosely based on the practices outlined in my book. Divorce rates dropped off quickly while the porn industry suffered a total collapse two years after that. I was grateful to the author for both the positive changes she brought about in the world and the relative anonymity her fame offered me as a past celebrity.

How to Crush the Competition was the very unlikely name of a book that taught employers how transparency and care could facilitate a productive workplace with committed employees and fiercely loyal customers using some of the practices I had outlined. Companies who adopted the practices quickly outcompeted all others who refused to change. Again, there were those who tried to fake their way but they met with only marginal success after heavily investing with consultants who promised that they could guide them through a process of joy-washing as it came to be known.

In the end, it became impossible to fake the personal rewards of the joy practices since they became so prominent and recognizable as people got better at it. Healing and longevity quickly became the most sought-after side effects but the personal embodied experience of joy was the biggest payoff that allowed the cultural movement to sweep the globe in less than fifteen years with a religious fervor.

It turns out that the ancient religions were a paradox that took us close to the point of experiencing this same phenomenon while at the same time providing the impassable barrier that prevented us from getting there. How was it that a religion that held Love thy neighbor as thyself as the highest commandment could at the same time direct that you should not gain any personal reward in doing so? Because of this, we have been prevented from reaping the highest rewards of being human – experiencing a real and intense healing and empowering love with everyone else on earth.

The experience of Big Joy also had a positive effect on values and morals. It became very difficult to treat people in a harmful way when each person was seen as a potential source of Big Joy and healing. Eventually, these feminine, embodied ways of knowing began to replace the more masculine thinking and propositional knowing as the dominant modes of being. Over time, fewer words were spoken and even those tended to be playful and from the heart as the hunger for Big Joy grew.

In 2024, I wrote a book about Joy that changed everything for me and a lot of other people. Now it is the first day of the year 2050 and, because of that book, I feel like a child heading to a giant toy store. The lines on my face tell a little different story, however, and so do the heavy bags under my eyes unless I am wearing my glasses. I have left the spectacles behind today so that I might take the rays of the sun directly into me along with the wonderful crispness of the morning air in this newly revitalized city. I will just have to remember to smile so that I do not scare small children.

“Can I hold your face!” Did I hear that right? I look over and there is a small boy with a red toque on his head eagerly taking off his matching red mittens. He is beaming up at me as his mother struggles to regain her balance after being forced to stop so suddenly. She laughs and bends partly over the boy as she places her hand lightly on his shoulder. Her lithe body curls forward and then straightens up in a smile.

“He must really like you!” She says after gathering her breath again. “I’m okay with it if you’re okay.”

It is an unexpected offering but I will not refuse it since it is the young who have blossomed the most in this more connected world that we have become. As soon as I start to bend, my body reminds me that I will be ninety-two next month. I continue downwards anyway, through the expected pain in my hip and the unexpected pain in my shoulder until my knee touches the cold cement a foot away from the boy who immediately clamps both of his hands onto my temples.

He stares first into one eye and I can feel his essence immediately. He is ancient and full of a mystery that pours into me through the left pupil upon which his gaze is fixed. He switches unexpectedly to the other eye and I am swept away by a giddiness that rushes up through my toes and my chest to the top of my head and sends me floating above the three of us. My right side tingles as healing hormones rush through my blood. This never gets old.

He flips back and forth several times more, from one eye to the other in what feels like an eternity that ends much too quickly. He releases me and bows slightly with his head. “Thank you for sharing your essence with me. You are wonderful.”

I return the nod. “The honor is all mine little one.” As soon as I say it, I want to correct myself but there is nothing to correct even though my body-mind senses that he is an ancient presence. I stand instead, only a little surprised that there is no pain and the movement is both smooth and strong. I have been renewed by his gift and my body-mind revels in the feeling of it as I look into the tear-filled eyes of his mother. It is always very moving to witness an interaction like this one. We exchange warm looks and nods as her essence briefly flows through mine and firmly connects my feet to the ground beneath me. Another gift.

As I near the next corner, two young men embrace and then head their separate ways. “Don’t sell out!” the one says. The other replies “Yean man! Don’t sell out!” He then heads down the sidewalk towards me. I smile as I recognize the words as a reference to a practice that I helped to popularize. Some say that these practices feel like a new religion but to me, it is much more like truth and science.

I close my eyes and silently go through the steps. They flow through me now as one embodied experience:

I don’t know

you

mystery of everything

Now experience everything and everyone around you in this way while allowing the joy and healing of their unique essence to permeate your own essence.

The saying “Don’t sell out” came later as people used the term to refer to what was routinely marketed as joy all around us. Money, casual sex, and material possessions still have a magnetic pull even today although their marketing has dwindled to almost nothing. And yet the term is a reminder of the true, powerful, and lasting joy that is always available as a healing gift of the present moment.

As I open my eyes, I notice that the young man has stopped two feet in front of me. He extends his right arm and I grasp his forearm as he grasps mine. He closes his eyes for a second and takes a deep breath before reopening them and staring warmly at me for a few moments. He smiles, releases me, nods his head, and moves on. I am renewed by his essence and feel a wrinkle or two straighten out on my face. Maybe I am not so scary looking after all.

How I saved the World with a Book

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