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Psychology / Literature / Philosophy / Poetry / Sex / Humor / Buddhism
Dolores Park
Michael Lyons
click here to go to Dolores Park press release / book club resource
click here to download the small but gorgeous 95k pdf version with color art
Dolores Park
Texas redneck pursues love interest into feminist Tantric Buddhist sex commune. Undergoes changes. A commentary and companion to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Contains graphic language, poetry, and explication du texte.
Dolores park uses the situation of the intentional commune to reflect robust experiments with religion, sexual generosity and lifestyle. We follow the main character, Walker, and watch as his mind grows in psychological depth and sophistication while his western ego crumbles under relentless onslaught of sexual ecstasy and group confrontation and spiritual insights.
The books develops from personal romance between Walker and Dahlia, to group psychology and then to exploring the profound effects of the psyche of group marriage.
We follow Walker Underwood just in from Texas exploring the strangeness of California lifestyle in San Francisco as he falls in love with a beautiful woman who belonged to a Tantric Buddhist commune. The story of this romance is one of the most well-written to ever flow through a human observer capturing man's longing for the grace and the lively loveliness of woman's mortal essence. We become involved with him as he attempts to write poetry and as the couple struggle against great odds to be together.
Following in romantic pursuit, we are brought through shifting points of view into the lives and struggles of the people of the commune and the Group Mind at the center of Tantric Buddhist spiritual practices. Eventually Walker finds a terrific sense of self-acceptance as he finally comes home to himself.
Dolores Park records the poignant year that began in the fall of 1982, when the nuclear freeze initiative was gaining momentum, and the AIDS epidemic was just starting to surface. A precious time of inner renewal and sexual self-discovery.
With humor, Walker describes how the experiences changed his attitudes, salvaged his sexual life and enriched his spiritual life.
Rich in psychological insight, flowing with lyrical beauty, and depicting the sadness at the heart of all attempts to live an authentic feeling life, Dolores Park invites the reader to join this hapless southern writer on his journey to a deeper understanding of the divine and the human community.
The book teaches the reader how to read itself gradually, as it develops the literary convention of Point Of View shift into a perfect vehicle to reflect the subject matter of the book --group processing. This simple principle generates a wholeness that at once hides, reveals and contain the energies of an ordinary man's unconscious.
What emerges is the picture of a modern mind imbued in, trusting and enriched by the penetrating abstraction in our world view especially that reflected in the description of how the laws of space and energy are invariants derived from group theoretical principles governing the transformations of symmetry. This perspective is born out in Piaget's account of human consciousness growing in stages from the inter-figural, intra-figural, and trans-figural relations as well as of transpersonal psychology in its maturation of object relations, self-psychology, and group psychology. This is the structure of the book and the story it tells.
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer of fiction,
technical manuals and theatre performance in San Francisco.
Dolores Park is the third novel in the "My Years of Apprenticeship
at Love" sextet. It is followed by
Seeing Through the Spell of Transference, then A
Blue Moon in August and then Thoughts
on Vacation. He is also the author of the "little house on
the prairie trilogy" --they are Cultivating
the Texas Twister Hybrid, The
Secret of the Cicadas' Song, and Knight
of 1000 eyes, published by HiT MoteL Press.
April 2001
508 pp. 5.5 x 8.5
ISBN 0-9655842-3-2 Paper $25.00