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“Self-help books that offer over-simplifications as solutions to life’s problems seem to be the most popular.
I think it is harder for serious books to get attention precisely because they require more time and thoughtfulness to review.”

— Charles Hayes

Alaska Writers Homestead talks with Wasilla, Alaska author and self-learning advocate Charles Hayes, owner of Autodidactic Press, about his 2004 nonfiction release, The Rapture of Maturity.

AWH: Explain briefly this peculiar term “the rapture of maturity,” and what it means to you. How did you arrive at this concept -- and what inspired the book?

CH: Self-education has radically changed my life for the better. I’ve gone from contempt for those whom I perceived as being different to having compassion for humanity as a whole. I’m 61, a stage of life in which maturity is of great interest to me. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the high points of my learning experience are something that can be characterized as rapturous.

My definition of rapture is similar to the idea of being swept up in a great sense of joy, but not as a one time experience. Rapture may come in a multitude of subtle but insightful flashes of realization that life is indeed worth living, coupled with the inspiration that, given a choice, we would trade places with no one on this planet. So, rapture in the simplest sense amounts to the sheer intellectual joy of being alive and the fleeting moments when one appreciates the feeling as such.

The inspiration for the book was at least, in part, the realization that it would be a real shame not pass on such advice to others so that they might be able to have this kind of experience. I wrote this book for people who want more out of life than they consciously realize, until they take the kind of steps which begin to make it clear, that knowledge and an ever enlarging worldview adds quality to life. For people who are becoming more and more aware of their own mortality and are beginning to think about their legacy and for people wanting to believe that their lives have made sense. The original working subtitle for The Rapture of Maturity was: One Last Chance to Live a Life that Really Matters. I thought it was a bit too pretentious for the title, but this truly, is, in my estimation what the book is about.

AWH: Many people ask what's wrong with young people today. Your book raises another issue: that older people have perhaps given up their role in raising or setting a good example for those younger people. So, here's a different question for you: What’s wrong with older people -- and what can and should they/we do to fix it?

CH: Based on years of study and my own personal experience I believe that millions of people live in varying states of arrested intellectual development for the simple reason that they have never really experienced the natural effects of learning as its own reward. Far too many people suffer a bruised intellect from having spent too much time learning for extrinsic reasons. Too much time reading “required” material. As a result they fail to make the connection that learning is a principal elixir of life. In my view, the process of growing old and wise begins when we gain enough comprehension to begin to appreciate the enthralling idea that what the whole world needs in a cultural sense, is precisely the same thing we need as individuals to live better lives: an all-inclusive effort to better understand the world and our place in it.

AWH: A book-selling question: You are rare among many writers in that, when it came time to market your book, you already had an extensive e-mail list -- and, basically, a readymade e-mail marketing list (who knew you as the Autodidactic Press editor/self-education expert). How did you seek to inform your existing "fan base" of your new book, and new role? How responsive have they been?

CH: I’ve frequently mentioned the book in newsletter essays and have made a few special offers to subscribers. The response has been good but modest. One college professor bought 24 copies for friends and associates, and several newsletter subscribers have bought extra copies for gifts. The most encouraging thing about this book from a marketing standpoint is that the subject it covers will grow exponentially more important during the next two decades.

AWH: I know from our conversations that The Rapture of Maturity is far more to you than a commodity to be sold. Tell me about your feelings regarding the book -- and how you have decided to define "success" when it comes to marketing/selling it.

CH: I regard the book as a summing up of my life experience with self-education. It’s extremely rewarding when I hear from people whose enthusiasm for the book validates my reasons for writing it. The positive and sometimes life-changing declarations I get from people would seem to be reward enough, except that imagining The Rapture of Maturity on the best-seller list and the effect of reaching so many more people can be discouraging if it fails to happen.

AWH: This book may present a challenge for readers in that it's not a light read. Rather, you are advocating a philosophy of life and pushing for societal change. What have been the highlights of the responses you've received from readers?

CH: It may not be a light read, but not because it’s particularly hard material. Readers tell me it’s just unusually dense with thoughtful substance and that they have had to read it slowly. They tell me that the book describes their own life experience, but before they read The Rapture of Maturity they lacked the perspective to put it in context. Here are a couple of comments I received this week: “The learning never ends, and I am eternally grateful for the profound understanding that it never will.” “Wow, what an important book. It's rare to see so much wisdom pulled together in such small volume!”

AWH: What have been the special difficulties in marketing this kind of book?

CH: The difficulty is the same with marketing any book today in which the subject matter is not at the moment, the center of public attention. Media are flooded with titles covering myriad subjects. Self-help books though, may have a harder hill to climb in that there are so many of them. Moreover, the books that offer over-simplifications as solutions to life’s problems seem to be the most popular. It may just be my perception, but I think it is harder for serious books to get attention precisely because they require more time and thoughtfulness to review.

AWH: You have created a column to help interest others in The Rapture of Maturity -- also you've developed a Web site (or portion of your site) dedicated to the book. What's worked -- and not worked?

CH: Overall, the new September University column appears that it is going to work, but contacting newspapers through email and via the telephone is a very slow process. I’ve barely started, but the results are encouraging, and I don’t think it’s out of the question to expect to have several hundreds small newspapers carrying the column if I continue to promote it long enough.

My main web site pulls in a fair number of readers, which spikes with the posting of each quarterly newsletter. Sometimes this results in book sales, and sometimes it doesn’t. Determining cause and effect is not easy.

AWH: You had a difficult year personally. If you wouldn't mind talking a little about it, could you address what it's been like to launch this book at the same time?

CH: My father passed way two years ago. My mother is eighty years old. She is confined to a wheel chair and insists on living by herself. My brother and sister and I are nearly at wits’ end trying to figure out how to help her without forcing her to do something against her will. It is most unfortunate and indeed existentially disappointing that my mother is one of those people who has not engaged in lifelong learning. She refuses to live in this century and clings to reality as she perceived it amid the 1950s. Her life is not enjoyable and fulfilling. Like so many of those of her generation, she is increasingly growing more self-absorbed and lives on the edge of despair. It is particularly upsetting to have written a book claiming the kind of enthusiasm I have for learning and yet to be unable to break through the barriers to convince my own mother of an approach that offers so much more to life.

AWH: What is the inspiration for your deep thinking, and how can the rest of us cultivate the philosophizing habit? (I expect you will suggest we read more, for one...)

CH: My inspiration comes not from specific knowledge per se, but from the self-reinforcing process of learning. Our brains have built-in pleasure centers activated by three primary stimuli: food, sex and learning. My experience has taught me that nothing important about the world can be assumed from appearances, but that we are hardwired for getting beyond appearances and thus reaching new levels of understanding. This process is not only its own reward, but it is in a much larger sense, precisely the kind action required to civilize the world.

We humans live in our heads, and the quality of everything in our lives depends upon what we do there. Everything we do in life, everything we see, everything we hear, and everything we care about, hope for or aspire to, is mediated by the quality of our thoughts and by our increasing ability to make compassionate choices and discriminating judgments. That we can in anyway become stalled in this overall process of discover and never make the connection between learning and quality of life is one of life’s greatest detractors and disappointments.

In The Rapture of Maturity, I have provided many avenues with which I hope others can use to find ways to cultivate the “philosophizing habit” as you say. But there are no magic bullets, and I suspect each of us have differing thresholds of intellectual achievement to reach before our learning becomes a reward in its own right and is, therefore, self-reinforcing. My advice is to read, read, read, and to continually try to learn in such a way as to add context and meaning to your place in the world and to compare it to the lives of others, not just in your community, but throughout the world. It may or may not ease your existential anxiety about the big questions in life, but the perspective will very likely bring will make more room for others and the process will help make the world a better place.

About Charles Hayes
Charles D. Hayes is a lifelong learning advocate, a self-taught philosopher, and an author and publisher. At age 17, he dropped out of high school to join the U.S. Marines. After four years of duty he became a police officer in Dallas, Texas, and later he moved to Alaska, where he has worked for more than 20 years in the oil industry. In 1987 Hayes founded Autodidactic Press, committed to lifelong learning as the lifeblood of democracy and the key to living life to its fullest.
In 2000, his book Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong Learning and the Search for Meaning in a Postmodern World was selected by the American Library Association’s CHOICE magazine as one of the most outstanding academic books of the previous year. Other books include The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning, as well as Training Yourself, Proving You’re Qualified: Strategies for People without College Degrees, and Self-University: The Price of Tuition is Desire. Your Degree is a Better Life, and the novel Portals in a Northern Sky.For more about Hayes, see his Autodidactic Press Web site at http://www.autodidactic.com.

See our previous interview with Charles Hayes. Hayes also authored the AWH tip “Book Promotion for Introverts.”