Dispenza and Mayo read at Authors’ Sala,
Sept 1, 2006

Authors’ Sala Readings by Joseph Dispenza and C. M. Mayo Friday, September 8, 5-7pm, Posada San Francisco, Plaza Principal 2 50 pesos, includes wine reception

Writer, poet, translator and Mexico City resident C. M. Mayo and San Miguel resident and co-founder of LifePath Retreats Joseph Dispenza read from their work at the next Authors’ Sala gathering. Mayo presents the selection “The Sea of Cortés” from her book Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles Through Baja California, the Other Mexico. Dispenza reads from his new book, God on Your Own.



Joseph Dispenza

The full title of Dispenza’s new book is God On Your Own: Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion. He is also the author of The Way of the Traveler, Live Better Longer, and 10 other books and scores of articles about living a higher-quality life. He is a former university professor who lived for several years in a monastery, learning personal spirituality firsthand. Joseph is the co-founder of LifePath Retreats in San Miguel de Allende and is in practice as a spiritual counselor. 

Dispenza brings to his writing and counseling more than 30 years of teaching and spiritual practice. He entered the Order of Holy Cross early in life and lived as a monk for eight years—the first year of which he spent in total silence. Later, he left the monastery to pursue a more active life, working for social change with a number of humanitarian organizations. 

After earning a B.A. in the Humanities and an M.A. in Communication, he was for several years the director of Education Programs for the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C., and later a story editor for United Artists studios in Los Angeles. In the mid-1970s he left Hollywood for Santa Fe, where he took up the life of a writer. The House of Alarcon, an epic novel of a Spanish colonial family in New Mexico, was published in the United States and simultaneously in the United Kingdom. 

Dispenza created a highly successful academic program in Moving Image Arts at the College of Santa Fe and served as its founding chair for seven years, while also teaching courses in media ethics. In 1994 he met Dr. Hazel Parcells, a centenarian pioneer of holistic healing, who eventually became his teacher and the subject of his book Live Better Longer. 

After Parcells died at 106, Dispenza became the Director of the Parcells Center, an organization that disseminates information on holistic approaches to wellness. 

Dispenza’s dream for many years has been to create a retreat program away from the dominant culture for people sincerely seeking to question the great truths of life—to offer to others the unique experiences he had as a monk and a student of spirituality. LifePath, which he co-founded in 2000, is fulfilling that dream. 

Dispenza is a contributor and columnist for several online publications, including Beliefnet.com and Newtopia.com. His articles have appeared in dozens of magazines, including Spirituality and Health, American Way, Massage Magazine, and Yoga Journal.



Excerpt from God on Your Own 
by Joseph Dispenza

In the infancy of our species, we invented religion and later many other fundamental institutions to make us more responsible. We created religion in particular to be a structure to restrain our curiously inhumane tendencies, binding us to act responsibly—not to kill each other, not to steal from each other, and so on—or suffer the penalties, which would be levied eternally at the divine court of the afterlife, and often at the prisons, torture chambers, and scaffolds of this life. In fact, the word religion comes from the Latin religare, to restrain or tie back—a way of restricting us from behaving like rogues on a bender. Living under the yoke of religion did not necessarily mean we stopped raping, pillaging, and strapping each other to the rack (frequently in the very name of religion), but imagine what crimes we might have committed without religion.

In the sky-God religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, our rules of conduct were presented to us in a highly theatrical manner to underline their critical importance to humanity. Moses received them on Mt. Sinai literally from the hand of God, appearing as a lightning bolt and writing them in fire on stone tablets … but you already know this, having seen the movie. They are, of course, the Commandments, a list of thou-shalt-nots regulating human action, with an emphasis in tone on following them … or else. Depending on which source you consult and what belief you espouse, there are twenty-five, or nineteen, or ten of them. The Qur’an sidesteps their exact number and simply summarizes them with, “And We ordained laws for him in the tablets in all matters.”

Growing up Catholic, I was taught ten commandments. Briefly, the first three of them pertain to God himself. Do not have “strange gods” before him, clearly a reference going back to a time when Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews, competed for worship with many other deities. Do not take God’s name in vain, having to do with oaths, curses, and the like. Keep holy the Sabbath Day, the one day of the week given over to reflection on and gratitude to God.

The other seven commandments are about our relationship to each other. Honor our parents; do not kill each other; do not “commit adultery,” which has borne so many meanings down the ages that it would take another book to plumb them. Do not steal or even “covet,” which is to say lust after, the good reputations or possessions (including wives) of each other. Jesus, appearing on the scene thirteen hundred years after Moses, condensed all the commandments to a more compassionate (but just as forceful and apparently difficult to obey) three words: love one another. From his own Eastern tradition, the Buddha anticipated the commandment to love five hundred years earlier when he said, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”You would think that by now we would have grown up and grown out of having to be told the basics of species survival—do not kill, in particular—because it is so obviously in our self-interest. But just when you start to believe we have made some progress since we hurled rocks at each other from the entrance of our cave, the morning paper arrives to dispel the illusion. Being told what to do and what not to do, even under the threat of eternal punishment, has worked, but only up to a point. The time may be coming when we will have to leave our rebellious and antisocial moral adolescence, controlled by our God-parent, and step with both feet into a righteous adulthood where we stand, each of us, on ethical principles based on species brotherhood. Like the monk who has to turn the vow of obedience around to the idea of personal responsibility for it to be truly meaningful, we who are seeking God outside religion may have to find within ourselves a way to regulate our behavior on our own. This demands a personal code of ethics, an essential element in building a spiritual life.


The Authors’ Sala Special Series presents short works by local authors. The San Miguel Authors’ Sala presents author readings and workshops for writers and aspiring writers. For up-to-date information on upcoming events, visit www.sanmiguelauthors.com