Meet John Stahl

We recently connected with John Stahl and have shared our conversation below.

John, so many exciting things to discuss, we can’t wait. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our readers. So, maybe we can start by discussing optimism and where your optimism comes from?

Yes, I am an optimist. In the face of cascading catastrophes threatening the survival of life on earth, I remain an optimist. My father and grandfather were Methodist ministers, and when I asked the usual questions of a seven year old (“Where does the sky end ? Where did the world come from ? Who created God ?”), my father assured me that God created the world, and that God has always existed. Well, being a bright and thoughtful kid, I couldn’t fathom any of that, and before many years had passed, I decided that I was an atheist. However, even without a course in logic, I realized that it was not enough to announce Negation. If God didn’t create the universe, where did it come from ? And so I spent a great part of my life searching for answers to those and other primary questions of theology and metaphysics.
To my growing astonishment, as I studied everything from Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism to Taoism, Hermetic Alchemy, and Eliphas Levi, I began to figure it all out, encountering the same ideas over and over again. By the time I was about 26, and had just returned to Montreal from a Journey to the East (Afghanistan, India, Kathmandu), I prepared a manuscript of about 200 pages, setting out the results of my researches. When I inquired about the costs of publication, I quickly realized that traditional publication was quite out of reach of my budget. So, having taken a Print Shop class in Junior High School, I advertised for a small printing press, and purchased an Adana with a chase size of 8”x5”. Then I purchased a few fonts of Monotype from McKenzie & Harris, complete with furniture and reglets, and proceeded to set type by hand for a greatly condensed book.
I took my 200 page manuscript, and surveyed the ideas, and discovered that they almost all fell into regular categories. I sorted out the ideas according to the Numbers of Mathematics (this was before I had heard about Pythagoras’ dictum that “All is Number”) – collecting ideas that were related to the Number One, ideas relating to the Number Two, ideas relating to the Number Three, and ideas relating to the Number Four. Thus, I produced my first book in 1973 in Montreal, Symposium by God and the Devil, in an edition of 100 copies.
It may seem that I am rambling off-topic, but the point is that I came to an understanding of the underlying patterns of order in the cosmos. I believed that I finally understood the meaning of “God” and was able to relate that concept to the fundamental nature of reality. I am trying hard to avoid an extensive discussion of metaphysics in this brief essay, but I just want to mention the insight of Aristotle that “Nature strives for Perfection.” That is a clue to the meaning of God. So, understanding that our world is a work in progress, I have confidence that, in spite of all indications to the contrary, sooner or later the human race will evolve to a higher level of Consciousness and transcend all of the apparently hopeless problems besetting our world (accelerating consequences of climate change keeping pace with the accelerating world-wide political and military hostilities), leading to the Omega Point suggested by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man). There is still so much work to be done [understatement alert] but I remain optimistic that it will happen.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

There are three important phases of my life work. In my early years I was consumed with the desire to come to an understanding of the primary questions of philosophy, metaphysics, and theology. After the publication of my first book in 1973, I continued to develop the ideas in further books, culminating in Theophany, 1979, by which time I had already set up complete facilities for making paper by hand from cotton, linen, hemp, and kenaf fibers in northern California. Theophany, the Pattern of Order: 134 copies; 24 pages, hand set letterpress, hand bound over cords in hard covers, hand made paper, four full color illustrations; leather covers, gold tooled, gilt edges.
Theophany was the result of a major epiphany in which I realized that, by stacking my sequence of four primary mysteries of philosophy vertically instead of horizontally, I had reproduced the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah. At first I was astonished at the precise correspondence, but then I reflected that, after all, what I had done was to express the fundamental nature of God, and the evolution from God to Man, which is precisely what the Tree of Life expresses. From there I further realized that the elusive Tetragrammaton (the meaning of which is universally lamented by every scholar to have been lost ages ago) was a more abstract expression of the same four primary mysteries (also expressed by Pythagoras in the Tetractys).
The second phase of my life work was to apply the ideas from my understanding of philosophy to solving the problems of the world. I very early on decided that the biggest blunder the human race committed was the destruction of the primeval forest, the original organic backbone underpinning the biological integrity of our planet. Just about all of the problems besetting out planet can be traced to the monumental folly of the destruction of the Trees. I went so far as to understand the importance of the Trees in our world as representing the highest expression of God on earth. I was always a bit troubled by the idea that “Man was the image of God.” To me, this looked too much like Man worshipping himself ! By putting the Tree in the primary position, I did not mean to suggest that Man was not the image of God, only that all of life bore the unmistakable imprint of the hand of God, and my reverence for the importance of the Tree was to recognize that God was much more than just the image of Man.
Accordingly, I established the Church of the Living Tree in 1992, calling for a new appreciation for the importance of the Trees, and calling for more Trees to be planted by the millions, by the billions, and by the trillions. The first “saint” of the Church of the Living Tree was Richard St. Barbe Baker, who “with a little help from his friends” planted 26 trillion trees over the course of his life. That is the scale of what has to happen in order to reverse the scourge of climate change and the concomitant problems, all of which can be traced ultimately back to the loss of the Trees, including the lamentable decline in Consciousness which is inexorably dragging our world down now. “We must go back to the Garden.”
Later on I became involved in a project to set up a mill to make pulp and paper from non-wood fibers like hemp and kenaf. This project is a long story, and it is still going on. The short message is that everyone wants such a mill, but no one wants to pay for it. Everyone wants to grow hemp, but no one wants to build a processing facility that can turn the raw hemp into money (i.e., paper).
The third phase of my life work is really a continuation of my concern for the Trees. In my retirement I write essays all the time which I publish on my website (tree.org), which started out mostly concerning ideas of philosophy, but more and more became expositions of all the massive and radical changes that I see are required along the way to a regeneration of our world. These ideas range all over social, economic, and political themes, but I may mention one very radical idea, which is to establish an International School of International Studies composed of students enrolled from candidates from all over the world, starting from early youth (perhaps ages seven to ten), seeking out some of the most promising young people, world-wide. The idea is to provide a completely endowed school in which the very best education can be provided, with direction from all the best authorities from all disciplines, including art, music, literature, philosophy, and logic, in addition to the histories of all regions of the world, and the related social, economic, and political problems. The specific mandate of this school would be to discover and implement solutions for all of the problems of the world. This school would be an “alchemical vessel,” out of which we literally expect an Avatar of God to appear and lead the planet to a new Golden Age.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

As I have already described, very early on I began a search to understand the primary mysteries of life. I have continued these investigations all my life long, and I really believe that I have a clearer understanding of the mysteries of philosophy, metaphysics, and theology than anyone I have ever heard of, from Heraclitus and Pythagoras to Lao Tzu. This is all very abstract, but along the way I have developed the arts of making handmade paper, letterpress printing, and hand bookbinding, so that I could produce books of my own design.
As to advice to others, I think my approach, when considering any problem, is not to try to come up with a limited, temporal solution for a specific problem, but to search above and beyond to discover a Prior Problem, whose general and antecedent solution would address any specific problem much more easily and directly. In this way, I continue to look for Prior Problems everywhere, which always leads me back and back to the problem of declining Consciousness world-wide, and further back to the loss of the Trees. The principle, in every case, is that solving a prior problem is by far the most efficient way to address any problem.

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?

I want to answer two of these questions. First, the book which was most influential to me, among many thousands I might mention, would have to be the Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu. When I first read this, I wanted to sue Lao Tzu for plagiarism ! I thought I had invented most of those ideas. But finally I realized that I hadn’t invented anything – all I had done was to discover ideas that were already there. In much the same way that I re-discovered the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah, I had come up with ideas very similar to the ideas expressed in the Tao Te Ching – the ideas were there before I discovered them. The essence of Taoism is to “follow the way of Heaven” (the Tao). The more clearly you understand the original patterns of nature, the easier everything becomes, and the easier it is to discover the appropriate action in every situation. This is in brilliant contrast to the way of Confucius, who created a huge body of recommendations for how to act in every situation. I mean no disrespect to Confucius – on the contrary, his instructions for life are exemplary – but once you understand the pattern of the Tao, the appropriate action is always spontaneously obvious, which appeals to me much more.
Next, as to folks to collaborate with or partner with, I definitely want some help. All of my printing presses and equipment for making hand made paper and books are all in storage, but I would really love to set all of that up again in a suitable location as an artists’ cooperative to produce more creative work with handmade paper and letterpress printing. For purchase of the building, I need about $350,000, which would include some renovation, a new roof, and a complete rooftop solar array to power the Hollander beater and everything else. And I want three or four apprentices or partners to do most of the work, while I supervise and show them what to do. I want to make this place a showplace and museum of the arts of making paper by hand and producing fine press books by letterpress from hand-set type (along with a photo-polymer plate-maker).

Links:
www.tree.org
www.tree.org/CV.htm
www.gaiaaura.com
www.tree.org/Selected Articles.pdf
www.tree.org/One Planet Makeover.pdf

Contact Info:

• Website: www.tree.org — www.tree.org/CV.htm — www.gaiaaura.com