ALAN CLEMENTS

SPIRITUAL ACTIVIST & HUMORIST

“As a speaker, [Alan Clements's] eloquence moves audiences to ask the questions behind questions about how we live, why we work, and how it fits together. Alan's presence—his remarkable ability to engage an audience, connect with their heart—stands alongside the best talent I have seen in the world.”
—Robert Chartoff, producer of Rocky, The Right Stuff, and Raging Bull

“Alan's life is material for a legend. An intellectual artist, freedom fighter, former Buddhist monk, he shares his insights and experience with a passion rarely seen and even more rarely lived. He'll make you think and feel in ways that challenge your entire way of being.” —Catherine Ingram, Passionate Presence

Riveting lecturer, revolutionary humorist, author, and spiritual maverick Alan Clements is a man of paradox, brilliance, and daring. “Blend a former Buddhist monk with Noam Chomsky and Lenny Bruce, ”declares the Maui Times, and what you get is “the most spiritually astute humorist in America today. ”Alan's high-definition and articulate lectures are described as “raw,” “real,” “edgy,” “existentially cathartic,” “enthralling and hallucinogenic.” His presentations, whether as speaker or performer, confront a central question of our time: how to transform the real conditions of the world through compassionate action. Alan's quest to bring freedom, dignity, and human rights into a dynamic interplay with conscience, creativity, and compassion has brought him international recognition. He tells of this quest in his book, Instinct for Freedom: Finding Liberation Through Living (New World Library), a blend of adventurous autobiography and provocative inquiry, that chronicles his pursuit of truth and freedom. Instinct for Freedom was nominated for best spiritual teaching/memoir by the National Spiritual Booksellers Association in 2003, and will be released in paperback in May 2006.

Alan has led a revolutionary life and is no stranger to struggle—for Alan, freedom is rooted in real life experience. He has worked as a war correspondent, photographer, and human rights activist; has visited and lived in the often volatile countries of Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Bosnia, and Croatia; and he was the first American to ordain as Buddhist monk in Burma, where he lived from 1979 to 1986 and trained extensively in existential Buddhist psychology and mindfulness (vipassana) meditation. Later, Alan served as script revisionist and advisor for Beyond Rangoon, a feature film depicting Burma's struggle for democracy, directed by John Boorman.

Alan is the founder of The Buddha Sasana Foundation, and its sister organizations, The Burma Project USA/Canada and the World Dharma Network. World Dharma is a nonsectarian, multicultural community of artists, writers, scholars, and activists dedicated to exploring the integration of consciousness through art, activism, and service. Alan has toured widely as a lecturer and seminar leader, and also as a performance artist, specializing in high-political satire and “comedy that ignites conscience.” The Maui Times called his theater piece Spiritually Incorrect: In Defense of Being, Human, “a hilarious and brilliant deconstruction of contemporary spiritual cows and geo-political issues that illuminates the importance of understanding human consciousness as the most effective means of social, political and spiritual transformation.” Alan has presented to Mikhail Gorbachev's State of the World Forum, the Soros Foundation, the United Nations Association of San Francisco, Harvard, Amnesty International, and universities around the world. He has been interviewed on ABC's Nightline, CBS Evening News, CBC television in Canada, ABC television in Australia, Voice of America Radio, BBC, CNN, and in the New York Times, London Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek, Yoga Journal, New Age Journal, Shambhala Sun, Inquiring Mind, Quest, Utne Reader, Yes, Hope, and scores of other media worldwide.

BURMA
In 1990, Alan returned to Burma, and undertook a dangerous two-month journey into the dark heart of the land, when Burma's ruthless military regime had closed the country's borders, prompting the BBC to call Burma a “land of 40 million hostages.” There, he spoke with hundreds of ordinary citizens, as well as freedom fighters and with Burma's Prime Minister, who had fled with other elected officials fled into the mountainous jungles of northeastern Burma. Alan thus became the first journalist to witness and document the grave human rights atrocities perpetrated by the military dictatorship, including the “ethnic cleansing” of the country's Karen and Shan minorities. Alan's experience during these months led to his first book, Burma: The Next Killing Fields? Soon after, he was invited by a senior officer of the United Nations to travel to the former Yugoslavia, where, based in war-torn Zagreb, he consulted with NGO's and U.N. personnel on the possibility of achieving spiritual, social, and political change through an understanding of human consciousness. Also at this time, Alan was commissioned by Robert Chartoff, the producer of The Right Stuff, Rocky, and Raging Bull, to write Burning, an original screenplay exploring the complexity of love and nonviolence in the context of terror and war. Clements is also the co-author, with Leslie Kean, of Burma's Revolution of the Spirit (Aperture).

In 1995, the French publishing house, Editions Stock, contracted Alan to reenter Burma again to try and make contact with Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected leader of her country's pro-democracy movement and the 1991 Nobel Peace laureate, who had just been released from six years of incarceration. The goal was to invite Aung San Suu Kyi to tell her courageous story, as well as to illuminate the philosophical underpinnings of her country's feminine-inspired, nonviolent spiritual revolution, a nationwide struggle for freedom known by the people of Burma as a “revolution of the spirit.” Alan succeeded in this task, and the transcripts of six months of conversations became the book The Voice of Hope. Translated into 13 languages, The Voice of Hope offers penetrating insight into the psychology of totalitarianism and nonviolent revolution. Said the London Observer: “Clements is the perfect interlocutor.... whatever the future of Burma, a possible future for politics itself is illuminated by these conversations.”

“What is most urgently needed in the world today? A revolution of consciousness born from the conviction that true and lasting change occurs only when one first learns how to overcome one's own fear, ignorance and apathy.”—Alan Clements