Montreal Hour
17 February 2005

Self-starting spirit: Robert Lewis kicks off a self-publishing venture by exploring the philosophy of religion.
MJ Stone

One of Lao Tzu's most quoted sayings in the Tao Te Ching is that the journey of a thousand miles beginswith
a single step. So starts Robert Lewis' GAJ: The End of Religion , a spiritual diamond in the rough just waiting to be discovered.

The sage first effort by the Montreal writer seeks to prove that the underlying principles of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as revealed by the prophets, are not monotheistic. Rather, Lewis believes that the message is polytheistic in origin - that the collective consciousness of humanity forms the godhead. A Taoist by nature, the 36-year-old author marries religious thought with nuclear physics to reveal how the primordial force unleashed by the big bang lives in all of us. Lewis believes that the matrix of molecular energy shapes our consciousness. He writes succinctly of how the cosmic design manifests in every quadrant of time, space and thought.

GAJ is a tightly parcelled package that focuses on the quantum leap required by humanity to heal the world's current woes, especially in the war-torn Middle East . Lewis advocates a re-evaluation of spiritual rhetoric to incorporate the science of physics and its many divisions of subatomic mystery. "The problem with the Western religions, Jung insisted, is their extroverted focus... As a result the Western mind represses what it fears in itself, seeks to destroy in others what if fears in itself."

Lewis argues that monotheistic faiths fail to provide the foundations for an inward journey toward self-knowledge, and that until we learn to navigate through the vibrating energy of the universe with a Taoist sense of flow, humanity will never vanquish war and intolerance. Once in harmony with space and time, Lewis contends that we will naturally attune to one another.

Lewis, who is off to the island of Java on a four-month work project, describes his aspirations for the book as holistic. As the founder of Hay River Books, he believes his bottom-up publishing house, owned and operated by writers, is pushing new boundaries. Within his mandate of presenting writing in which philosophy is in collision with fiction, he is very much aware that publishing GAJ was only a tiny first step. The journey of getting the book into the hands of thousands has only just begun. (It is available for purchase at the Diocesan Book Room downtown, and at the bookstores of Concordia and McGill.)

ooo