The Un-TV and the 10MPH Car: Experiments in Personal Freedom
& Everyday Life
by Bernard McGrane, The Small Press, 18603 Hwy.1, Suite 15,
Ft. Bragg, CA (paper, 265 pgs. $17.50)
This book should be required reading for every American. It tells us how to teach ourselves to truly see ourselves, and the society we have each helped to create, and sustain. It suggests that so many of us are willing participants in our own imprisonment. The book then goes on to instruct us on how to free ourselves, by simply seeing ourselves.
McGrane, a disciple of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, teaches what he terms "Zen sociology." What he's done is translate traditional Zen teaching into a contemporary American context. This book is essentially his textbook.
Through various exercises, all presented and outlined in the book, he has his students teach themselves how to see, in the Zen sense, and see our society, and its illusory freedom, in order to move beyond it, into true freedom.
His students are instructed to: stand in a public place for ten minutes without moving; watch a turned-off TV; stare, first at a light bulb for ten minutes, then a candle flame; drive a car at 10 miles per hour for ten minutes; stand backwards in an elevator; answer a telephone without saying hello; take a walk which has no destination.
What do they learn? That the greatest sin in our society is to do nothing. That so much priority is placed upon speed, movement, and going somewhere, we never really experience where we are. That we are so obsessed by doing, we are incapable of being. That our technology, especially television and the computer, while seeming to connect us, actually isolates us, by becoming substitutes for true human interaction and relationships, and even reality. That because undue emphasis is placed upon "looks," and a media-created standard of perfection, we are all dissatisfied with ourselves, and constantly worrying, to the point of obsession, how we appear to others, and what effect we are having upon them.. That we are a nation of insecure egomaniacs. And each other's jailers. And, ultimately, our own.
And that, finally, the most rebellious act one can commit is to take a destinationless walk in the woods, simply seeing nature, the real earth, the real world from which our false technological world has exiled us.
This is the first book I've read in years. Primarily because, like McGrane, who is essentially teaching his students how to teach themselves, through experience, I believe that the only true, valid knowledge comes not from books, or the media, but from first-hand personal experience.
But I'm glad I took time to read this book. It was worth it. Read this book, then DO IT!
--©1996 New Frontier Magazine. All rights reserved. Reviewed by Christina Howe, who dropped out of corporate America some 8 years ago and now lives in a one-room log cabin with no electricity atop an mountain near Waynesville, NC