Book Reviews

Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living

David Fideler
New York: W.W. Norton, 2021. 265 pp., hardcover, $26.95.

Teachings are endless; we vow to learn them all.
—Zen promise

Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day.
—Seneca

One never knows when and where and under what situations we come across teachings that transform our lives. David Fideler had a crisis of unspeakable grief, and his help came from the writings of the Roman philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.4 BC‒AD 65). Seneca’s Stoicism presented to him “a steady stream of reliable and practical advice about the human condition, human psychology, and how to live a happy flourishing life.”

Later in Fideler’s life, a perfect morning was having breakfast with Seneca—a cup of fresh coffee, an e-reader with Seneca’s complete letters, and an omelette to go with it. I am indeed tempted to adopt the same routine, be it with ancient teachings like Seneca’s, or even a Zen koan.        

Fideler discovered that “nothing significant has changed in human nature over the last two thousand years.” What Seneca said through his letters is still very much alive for us in today’s world (the journey is not taken alone). Overcome stress, live a life with purpose and cultivated excellence, overcome grief, and contribute to society with our actions—how can one go wrong following these teachings?

Fideler’s book fills a void. It explains Seneca’s teachings to a general reader through various chapters addressing specific topics. One can be inspired to host one’s own breakfasts with Seneca, Fideler hopes.

The popular meaning of being a stoic has to do with keeping a stiff upper lip or holding your emotions in check. But Seneca’s stoicism comes with a capital S. The ancient Stoics never taught the repression of emotions. Their goal was to transform them through understanding. The fundamental question was, “What is needed to live the best possible life?” They believed that one could indeed do that regardless of the obstacles and turmoil of the world. Philosophy was the true art of living, not an abstract pursuit. Seneca called his own teachings “medical remedies.”

Fideler’s book delves deeper into the eight main ideas of Stoic thought using Seneca’s letters. They are:

Live in agreement with nature to find happiness.

Virtue or excellence of one’s inner character is the only true good.

Some things are up to us or entirely under our control, while other things are not.

While we can’t control what happens to us in the external world, we can control our inner judgment and how we respond to life’s events.

When something negative happens, or when we are struck by adversity, we shouldn’t be surprised by it, but see it as an opportunity to create a better situation.

Virtue, or possessing an excellent character, is its own reward. But it also results in eudaimonia or happiness—a state of mental tranquility and inner joy.

Real philosophy involves “making progress.” It’s essential that we as individuals should contribute to society.

Fideler gives us also an insight into Seneca’s life of adversity. He lived under the horribly corrupt reigns of the emperors Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. The adversity did not deter Seneca. He transformed it into something profoundly positive. Seneca used his own death (he was forced to commit suicide by Nero) to give a final talk to his friends.

Fideler’s book is a treasure. It gives the readers gems from Seneca’s letters on various topics and provides commentaries to help put them in practice.

Discussing why you should never complain, Seneca wrote, “Nothing needs to annoy you if you don’t add your annoyance to it.” We all know about the glass half full and the glass half empty. A complainer would worry about a smudge on the glass that could be carrying a virus. A Stoic would view it with gratitude, as a gift from the universe, and would be grateful for its life-giving properties.

I was drawn to the chapter on “Give Grief Its Due.” Seneca wrote, “Tears fall, no matter how we try to hold them back, and shedding them relieves the mind.” Seneca took grief seriously. He wrote five separate works consoling friends and family members. He gave advice on how to grieve well. Yes, we feel the loss, but we must acknowledge the happy memories of those we have lost. He knew that everything given to us is but on a loan.

It has been said about the Bhagavad-Gita that it would be enough even to experience only one verse. I am tempted to say the same thing about Seneca’s teaching. Just take one, and incorporate it in your life.

One never knows which saying a reader would take to. My wife, reading this book, looked at “Value your time: Don’t postpone living” and encouraged me to finish the pending house projects!

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. He reviews regularly for Quest and works as a volunteer in the archives department of the TSA.

The Magic of Makarasana: The Yoga Posture That Will Transform Your Life

Teresa Keast
N.p.: Smashwords, 2021. 48 pp., ebook. Available for download from https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1112319, $5.99.

The world is awash with self-help books purporting to improve or transform our lives. Some are deeply insightful; others are mediocre and in some cases irrelevant.

Occasionally an outstanding gem emerges, and this new offering from Teresa Keast firmly falls into this special category. Clearly written, engaging, and extremely easy to read, it offers deep, specific, and uncomplicated insights into our inner bodily and psychological workings and a highly practical approach to improving well-being. More than that, it can be applied by just about everyone.

In Hinduism, Makara is the crocodile creature guarding the gateways to places of spiritual worship and wisdom. Makarasana is a yoga technique designed to bridge the heart and mind in order to restore natural balance.

Negative emotions create barriers to the natural flow of subtle energies, which affects not only our vitality but our minds and bodies. These blockages play out as mental and physical problems, which can have a hugely detrimental effect on our lives.

These imbalances often lead to a bewildering array of negative emotions, such as feeling at odds with life, irrational anger, tension, resentment, frustration, and overreacting to other people and situations, which undermine our ability to deal with life’s thorny issues. Imbalances can also often manifest as unexplained aches and pains, fatigue, a loss of joy, and a general feeling of purposelessness and malaise.

The Makarasana yoga healing technique is all about restoring harmony. When successfully applied, it prevents us from being trapped in the difficult emotional maelstrom which dominates and indeed ruins so many people’s lives. In a nutshell, it involves accessing and applying intuitive wisdom.

Unlike some other methods, this technique is essentially very simple and easy to use. Requiring only between five and ten minutes a day, it’s suitable for people of all ages and backgrounds. It simply involves lying down on your front in a relaxed and comfortable crocodile position, which assists yogic deep breathing, that is, breathing from deep in the diaphragm rather than from just the chest. The breath itself is the key to opening blocked energy channels and relaxes the nervous system.

The tangible benefits of Makarasana are extensive but hinge on restoring equilibrium, balance, and vitality as well as promoting mindfulness, self-awareness, better sleep, and improved sexual and creative energies. But this is a far from exhaustive list of the many positives this easy-to-use technique offers.

None of this is dry or dead theory but is based on many years of hard-earned experience. Teresa Keast has spent her life exploring the Ageless Wisdom, along with thirty years working in stress management. For the past sixteen years, she has been teaching yoga and meditation as well as running self-development workshops and retreats. She also has degrees in both physical education and nutrition.

As an added bonus, the book comes complete with background guided audio and video meditations to help those who are newcomers to yoga techniques. Its real beauty lies not only in its straightforward approach but in the fact that it can be used by virtually anyone, whatever their age and state of health—from Olympic athletes to aging reviewers.

In an age of increasing complexity, something as astonishingly simple as this makes a very refreshing change and proves that we all have the inner resources to transform our lives if we choose to do so. I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Tim Wyatt

Tim Wyatt is an international lecturer for the Theosophical Society and founder of the School of Applied Wisdom in Leeds, Yorkshire, England. His book Everyone’s Book of the Dead was reviewed in Quest, summer 2021.

Introducing Swedenborg

London: Swedenborg Society, 2021. 74 pp., hardcover, $14.49.

Introducing Swedenborg: Correspondences

Gary Lachman
London: Swedenborg Society, 2021. 68 pp., hardcover, $11.95.

Emanuel Swedenborg has inspired lofty praise for over two centuries. H.P. Blavatsky called him “the greatest among the modern seers.” For D.T. Suzuki, he was “Buddha of the North.” Emerson ranked him with Plato, Napoleon, Goethe, and other “representative men”: a “colossal soul,” one of “the missouriums and mastodons of literature.”

Today writers in the Swedenborg cottage industry follow this pattern, frequently rehearsing the long line of greats who admired the Swedish thinker, from Blake and Yeats to Jung and the father of William and Henry James. At times, though, the one-upmanship of acclaim and the persistent name-dropping in secondary sources mask the fact that the primary sources, the actual products of Swedenborg’s eighteenth-century mind, are virtually closed books for most contemporary readers, even those well versed in Western esoterica.

Hence the need for more introductions geared to present-day audiences. These two slim volumes, both commissioned by the Swedenborg Society in London, address the need with great skill, and the authors, each according to his own lights, attempt to translate Swedenborg into terms citizens of the secular world can understand if not appreciate. In many ways, they are representative men themselves—Peter Ackroyd, a living mastodon of letters in his own right, and Gary Lachman, arguably the most consistently readable master of occult and offbeat biography on the planet. With predictable eloquence, expertise, and lightly worn erudition, they take on their challenging tasks.

The most formidable: demonstrating the relevance for the twenty-first century of the Enlightenment polymath, whose divine madness, despite its audacity, often seems a little too close to just another version of bourgeois eccentricity.

Ackroyd handles the life, while Lachman concentrates on the thought, particularly Swedenborg’s signature idea of correspondences. What emerges in the life is the portrait of a virtuoso of spirit whose genius was tuned more to the Baroque than the Classical or Romantic. In his wig and mismatched buckle shoes, Swedenborg lived comfortably in a society of unquestioned class consciousness; bareheaded and unshod, he entered the other world before terrestrial armies marched for liberty in American or French revolt. He worked for monarchs in expanding colonial empires, drafting designs for machine guns and airplanes, never imagining that his dreamed-of utopian age might actually include a Wounded Knee or Hiroshima.

Even when he turned from “worldly science” to mysticism in midlife, sustained by bread, milk, caffeine, and angelic conversation, Swedenborg’s visions of heaven took on the same unique blend of domesticity, aristocracy, and intricate ornamentation with which Vivaldi, Rameau, and Swedenborg’s fellow Lutheran Bach infused their chamber music. We congratulate him for envisaging sex in the afterlife, but his eroticism evokes too much of the snuffbox and powdered peruke to stir less polite postmodern libidos.

When it comes to Swedenborg’s thought, current readers may find more traction. Lachman’s account, informed by his trademark double commitment to empathy and critique, goes far to place Swedenborg in the context of the fullness of Western mystical speculation and experimentation. Lachman’s own virtuosity is on display as the book’s strings of Baudelaire, Blake, Boehme, Balzac, Goethe, Coleridge, Henry Corbin, David Bohm, and Andrew Jackson Davis all vibrate simultaneously and with equal resonance. From Lachman’s perspective, Swedenborg operated in a vast network of God-intoxicated sensibilities who sought universal truth in the twin books of nature and scripture, discovered secret codes buried in the matrix of biblical grammar, and discerned signs of continuity—correspondences—between seen and unseen in the great chain of being from mundane to miraculous.

Lachman also reminds us of the long legacy of nonliteral interpretations of the Bible, stretching from Philo of Alexandria and early church exegetes to early modern Kabbalists and left-wing sectarians. The problem is, he admits, that Swedenborg exhibited almost no interest in reflecting on his exact place in any lineage. He was on confidential terms with unfettered human souls in England and across much of Europe, Moravians, and radicals of various types, but when he did his thinking and writing, it was with sola scriptura on the desk and the voice of God in the ear—or cerebrum.

After Emerson generously hymned the person he named the modern world’s representative mystic, he expressed frustration that the expansive vision of Swedenborg’s inner world appeared on second thought to be little more than the conventional desires of a “Lutheran bishop’s son” projected onto a screen the size of the universe. Something similar, of course, could be said of the Concord sage and his life’s work.

But Swedenborg struck a chord: there is no doubt about that. Many other unleashed—or unhinged—imaginations have too. Some do it through the adventures of their lives, some through the magic of their words. Curiously, Swedenborg continues to attract and influence, but not through the contagion of his career or his many volumes on the shelf, which are largely unread. The Swedenborg of Ackroyd and Lachman is a mystery introduced and a mystery unsolved.    

Peter A. Huff

Extraordinary Awakenings: When Trauma Leads to Transformation

Steve Taylor
Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2021. 252 pp., paper, $19.

The concept of posttraumatic growth—that the experience of types of trauma, such as illness, injury, divorce, economic hardship, or the loss of a loved one can lead to emotional growth in the period of healing and recovery—has received much attention from psychologists in recent years.

In Extraordinary Awakenings: When Trauma Leads to Transformation, transpersonal psychologist Steve Taylor takes things a step further, positing that trauma itself can generate sudden and intense spiritual transformation on a par with enlightenment.

Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Britain’s Leeds Beckett University and chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society, calls this “transformation through turmoil.” He builds a convincing case that spontaneous illumination can be forged within the heat of trauma itself, with the suffering generating the force needed for realization.

Taylor has been researching instances of spontaneous spiritual awakening for fifteen years. He makes his case for transformation through turmoil using detailed case studies of individuals who have experienced sudden moments of clarity while on the battlefield, on the brink of suicide, suffering the sudden loss of family members, and similar hardships. These were not fleeting moments of adrenaline-driven emotion or that strange ecstasy that can hit us at our lowest points, but revelatory moments that lasted and permanently changed those who had experienced them.

Taylor also explores how the long-term trauma of incarceration can be transformative. Many former prisoners have recounted how their time without physical freedom led them to spiritual maturation. Taylor examines the similarities between a lengthy jail sentence and the elective “imprisonment” of monastics in certain Christian traditions, who spend their days in tiny cells, giving up even the freedom to speak.

Somewhat less convincing are the sections dedicated to those who say they experienced transformation through turmoil while in the bonds of drug addiction. Taylor shares several stories of individuals with addictions to hard drugs who say they woke up one morning with their addictions gone. While the reader must be happy for anyone who escapes addiction, such cases are very rare.

Taylor does not fully discount the traditional understanding of addiction and recovery—he writes favorably about the Twelve-Step process—but does express skepticism about the notion of chemical addiction to drugs. Interpreted incorrectly, this skepticism can be dangerous.

Taylor’s main argument is that moments of trauma strip away the armor from guarded humans, leaving them raw and exposed. This results in a sudden ripping away of the ego, the necessary step to enlightenment. He does not present trauma as desirable or as a shortcut to understanding, but instead focuses on how such sudden transformation can improve the human condition.

Taylor’s writing style is refreshingly readable for a book of this sort. He avoids the vagueness and generalities of many popular wellness books, as well as the hard-to-penetrate terminology of medical literature. He adopts an upbeat tone without glossing over the true suffering his subjects have experienced.

Extraordinary Awakenings is most likely to be picked up by a reader seeking literature on surviving her or his own trauma. Going in with an open mind, such a reader will find much of value. However, Taylor’s book is more than self-help. It opens the door to a new understanding of trauma and spiritual growth that merits attention and further study.

Peter Orvetti

Peter Orvetti is a political writer and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C.