Book Reviews

The Spiritual Meaning of the Sixties: The Magic, Myth, and Music of the Decade That Changed the World

TOBIAS CHURTON
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2018. 672 pp., paper, $40.

One can dispute the ultimate value of the ’60s as far as the quality of the decade’s art, music, or social mores go—and many have. What is harder to dispute is the seismic impact that it made on global culture. On any number of levels it was a period that witnessed profound changes convulsing society, and which continue reverberating in our lives up through the present day.

Author of such books as Occult Paris and Aleister Crowley in America, Tobias Churton turns his gaze toward that volatile decade and tackles the complex question of what spiritual lessons may be drawn from it.

As someone who came of age during that time and who closely followed many of its popular trends, I thought I already knew quite a bit about it. So I was pleasantly surprised by Churton’s encyclopedic overview, which ranges from discussions about developments not only in music, cinema, and television, but in religion, civil rights, and feminism, among many others. It’s a sprawling and kaleidoscopic work, and along the way he manages to sprinkle in a host of curious tidbits that will surprise even close students of the era. (Who knew the great pop composer Burt Bacharach had studied with the pioneering classical composer Darius Milhaud?) In the process he attempts to provide a sense of historical context to the decade, involving side trips into such areas as Gnosticism, medieval troubadours, and Hindu philosophy; he also digs down to mine the deeper import of many seemingly secular manifestations of the time, including the movie Easy Rider or the TV series I Love Lucy.

The book is over 600 pages long, so I sometimes feared the essential thread of his argument was in danger of getting lost amidst the avalanche of facts, figures, and personalities he’s somehow able to marshal up with little effort. (Unfortunately, I suspect the book’s hefty length might also keep away some readers, especially younger ones, who are accustomed to consuming information in more sound-bite form.) But he’s an engaging writer and in the end manages to tie those diverse threads together in a way that reveals more ambiguity about the topic than I initially suspected he might bring to it. He doesn’t pretend to present the decade through the rose-colored glasses many now associate with that time, but neither does he give short shrift to its more profound and esoteric implications.

While the book is exhaustively researched, there are some areas I wish had been included that are mentioned only in passing. As an astrologer, I felt his book could have benefited from a discussion of the astrological dynamics at work at the time, since those are so critical to illumining the turbulent and creative manifestations of the decade. But that would have taken his book in a somewhat more arcane direction than he intended, and it would have expanded an already large book even more, so that’s more of a personal quibble than a damning criticism. For readers interested in adding just such a perspective to their understanding of this period, I recommend reading Richard Tarnas’s (equally hefty) volume Cosmos and Psyche alongside Churton’s, specifically its passages on the revolutionary interaction of Uranus and Pluto during the ’60s. Another useful resource complementing Churton’s would be Gary Lachman’s excellent volume Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, which focuses on the more turbulent and troubling elements at work during the decade without ignoring its more positive contributions. 

All in all, Churton has written a fascinating and important book, and it is a must-read for any reader with an interest in the ’60s or contemporary culture generally.

Ray Grasse

Ray Grasse worked on the editorial staffs of Quest Books and Quest magazine from 1989 to 1999. He is author of several books, including Signs of the Times (Hampton Roads, 2002), which includes an astrological discussion of the ’60s and their relevance to the emerging Aquarian Age. His website is www.raygrasse.com.

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Physicians’ Untold Stories

SCOTT J. KOLBABA, M.D.
North Charleston, S.C., 2016. 225 pp., paper, $13.22.

Can surprising events occur that science can’t explain—events that could be called miracles? Before coming to a conclusion about this quandary, I suggest reading Physicians’ Untold Stories.

The book was written by Scott J. Kolbaba, an Illinois doctor specializing in internal medicine. Kolbaba, an occasional speaker at the TS headquarters in Wheaton, has been in the medical field for over thirty years. He has used his own experiences and those of other medical professionals to help reveal if there is more than medicine involved when it comes to healing patients.

Kolbaba interviewed twenty-six physicians about their unusual experiences that could not be medically explained. He transcribed his notes and then got together with each doctor to make sure that everything he had written was correct. Some patients agreed to having their names in the book. If they did not, he changed the names to protect their privacy. At the end of the book there is a short description of each doctor who collaborated in this project. The author gives their names, the type of medicine they practice, the schools they attended, and some funny anecdotes about their lives and personalities.

The book starts out with an introduction by the author, and the main part is divided into four main sections comprising short chapters. Each is a story in which the individual doctors described some of their unusual medical experiences and their impact. I found all of the stories to be heartwarming and would like to share a short synopsis of one from each section.

 In part 1, entitled “Divine Intervention,” is a chapter called “Music in the Emergency Department.” An emergency-department patient clinically died in a hospital. He was revived through a heroic measure. When he was able to speak again, he said he wanted to return to the white room with unfamiliar instruments that played beautiful music, because it was so peaceful there. The emergency department did not play music. Conceivably he had returned from a near-death experience.

In part 2, “Death and the Afterlife,” the story “Grandma O’Hanlon” describes a woman in a hospital delivery room who was about to give birth to her fifth child. She was in a lot of pain. The patient’s grandmother, a midwife, walked into the room and informed the patient that she should not take the relaxing medicine offered. The patient pushed the mask away and refused anesthesia. Declining it prevented complications that could have taken her life. The family connection was still strong, even though her grandmother had died twenty-two years before.

In part 3, “Healing,” there is a story called “The Dream.” A general surgeon had a dream about a friend who was lying dead in a funeral-home casket because of an acute heart attack. The doctor called his friend and told him to get a physical. It was found that two of three main arteries of his heart were 90 percent blocked. The friend had cardiac bypass surgery and is doing well fifteen years later. His life was prolonged with positive results because of a precognitive dream.

In “The Morning Miracle,” a story in part 4, “Prayer,” a doctor recalled his high-school days when he played soccer and was kicked in his flank. He went to the hospital in excruciating pain. The doctor thought about removing the ruptured kidney if things did not get better. The patient was in pain from Tuesday to Friday. On Friday, the pain vanished. After he was able to return to school, a teacher told him that the faculty had prayed for him that Friday.           

The book is easy to read and understand. No medical technical jargon is involved. It is not only for doctors but anyone interested in the medical field and the unusual things that can occur, including healing miracles. These stories can inspire a deeper understanding of mortality and the possibility of the existence of a higher power. It can arouse deep emotions and a tear or two from the reader.

Physicians’ Untold Stories is full of recollections of medical challenges, miraculous recoveries, and inspiration. It does not come to a conclusion about whether scientific or unexplained phenomena helped to resolve the medical dilemmas it describes. That is up to the reader.

Marie Otte

Marie Otte is a writer, meditation teacher, and astrologer. Her work has appeared in Quest, DreamNetWork.net, and Satvidya.

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Gurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy

By Roger Lipsey
Shambhala Publications

Surely there’s a great deal of ground covered in Roger Lipsey’s formidable new tome on the spiritual master Gurdjieff that has been well tracked over before. Yet the word reconsidered is well applied here. Armed with new information, only recently available, and many years deep involvement in the Gurdjieff Work, Lipsey has done some lapidary reconsidering, cutting more deeply, clarifying, and divulging buried gems in the mass of stories about G.I. Gurdjieff. It can’t have been easy, as there was so much to assimilate, to parse; so much to challenge objectivity. Gurdjieff’s metaphysical ontology, his powerful teachings about escaping the slavery of sleep, his redefinition of the human condition, his startling methods for liberation from our mechanical responses to the world, was counterbalanced by his colorful, enigmatic style, the historical uncertainties of his life, and his tendency to attract negative press.

Gurdjieff Reconsidered… offers us nine bulging chapters comprised of hefty paragraphs, which, despite a certain denseness of data, are entertainingly written. Perhaps the book’s considerable scope and depth will appeal mostly to fervid Gurdjieffians, but then again Lipsey frequently opens hidden doors between Gurdjieff and other traditions. Theosophists will be interested to learn, here, that Gurdjieff read most of Madame Blavatsky when young, and even tried, unsuccessfully, to confirm some of her claims in his quite arduous travels. Lipsey tells us that Australian scholar Joanna Petsche has initiated a detailed study of parallels between Gurdjieff’s ideas and Theosophy—the parallels are many, especially in Gurdjieff’s cosmology. Some of this is probably due to Blavatsky and Gurdjieff both having gathered input from the same esoteric traditions, including Christian mysticism, Neoplatonism, Plotinus, Tibetan Buddhism, esoteric Hinduism, and quite possibly the Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus. But when prominent student of the work Louise March asked Gurdjieff about Madame Blavatsky, he said she “was almost right.” Coming from Gurdjieff, that is a big admission.

Gurdjieff’s memoir, Meetings with Remarkable Men, tells of his early travels with the Seekers of Truth, a group which sought for an underlying esoteric revelation, a primal teaching, that would decrypt the secret of life. A sort of backroom controversy in Gurdjieff studies has been the question of his claim in Meetings… of having traveled extensively in Tibet. Did he or didn’t he? No record is found of his having been there—however, as westerners weren’t encouraged to visit Tibet seekers had to travel to its sacred places in disguise, and under false names. And Lipsey offers the indirect evidence of well-informed inferences: Gurdjieff’s knowledge of Tibetan cookery, the particulars of Tibetan tea, the extreme conditions of life in the Pamir mountains. He had bullet scars, visible in the sauna, that fit the accounts of woundings by stray bullets in his memoir, including one he received in Tibet. In his gigantic parable, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, in which he tucked bits of real history, Gurdjieff’s description of massacres carried out by British soldiers under Younghusband concurs with historical fact. Lipsey quotes his casual descriptions to a group of students in Paris, elucidating his travails in Tibet, including arresting details:

He tells how he used to have to butter his whole body, then cover with rubber underdrawers (made in Germany), then over all about six inches of thickness of fur garments—and even then he was cold in Tibet—only part of body have satisfaction was face under hood, warmed by breath. Such cold you never can imagine. Also such smell after many week!

Such an account has the redolence of reality. His “Movements”, an intricately choreographed series of dances (which were also exercises in developing inner harmony and consciousness), were partly drawn from temple dances and a sort of dance/yoga he’d seen in esoteric monasteries, and they too are recognizably connected to real traditions. All this is very reassuring to Gurdjieffians troubled by accusations of falsity--accusations coming from those who, as Ouspensky said, awarded Gurdjieff “his fair share of slander”. Some of the confusion arises from Gurdjieff’s tendency to try to create “legominisms”—works of art that symbolically express sacred truths. Art has its fanciful side, and Gurdjieff’s tendency to insert parables as part of his autobiography can make researchers frown.

Lipsey quotes a student in Paris, Alice Rohrer, who asked Gurdjieff if some of the more colorful imagery in Meetings with Remarkable Men was just fable. Gurdjieff replied that the book was true; “only ten per cent fantasy”. Thus he “owned” his tendency to weave fable and factuality.

 Gurdjieff Reconsidered offers us more detail than we had before on Gurdjieff’s wife, Julia Osipovna; he gifts us new anecdotes about the famous Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Le Prieure, and he renders new spins on the already familiar stories. Lipsey’s chapter on Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson offers acute observations and fresh insight on that gargantuan work.

Toward the end of the book, with gratifying honesty, Lipsey recounts the turbulent 1930s, as Gurdjieff—having suffered a brutally injurious car accident, and the loss of his institute headquarters—struggles for steady progress toward the long-term goals he’d set for his work. The chapter is called Lux in Tenebris…light in darkness.

In the latterly chapters Lipsey explores Gurdjieff’s poignant years in Paris during World War II; he tells us of Gurdjieff’s final years, a tired, secretly ill elderly man working feverishly to finish revising his magnum opus, Beelzebub’s Tales… and his final, highly arduous work on his Movements, continuing to within days of his death. These are the efforts of a man who deeply believes in his life’s work.

In a chapter called Derision, Lipsey takes on Gurdjieff’s detractors, demonstrating that for the most part that these outside observers hadn’t a clue as to what Gurdjieff’s teaching was really about. Most of them seem inspired by a single book authored by Louis Pauwels in 1954. Pauwels’ malicious misinterpretations of Gurdjieff’s methods set in motion a concatenation of misunderstandings which duly echoed through the untutored proclamations of later detractors—for example, the much-repeated canard that Gurdjieff failed to sufficiently illuminate his students; that none of them became conscious. Anyone who has seriously investigated the life of his greatest student and the woman he set to carry on his work, Jeanne de Salzmann, knows that isn’t true. Numerous other spiritual powerhouses emerged from his school: Henry Tracol, Lord Pentland, Louise March, Paul Reynard, Michel de Salzmann, to name just a few; certainly Pyotr Ouspensky, A.R. Orage and John Bennett were profoundly altered. The Fourth Way vibrance passed on by such people brought us such luminaries as James George and Jacob Needleman.

Of course, you’ll find failings in Gurdjieff’s comportment, as you will in examining any man’s life. Great men and great women are still just men and women, and that goes for beloved spiritual teachers. Gurdjieff sometimes drank too much, and he produced children with the wives of some of his followers. Alan Watts had a drinking problem and a tendency to irresponsible relations with women, and so did Chogyam Trungpa; I could name many other potent spiritual teachers who stumbled on the steep path up Mount Analogue, and fell into the pit of their own vanity, or slid into the quicksand of self-indulgence. Gurdjieff seems to have had a somewhat erratic connection with the higher conscience that he extolled, but he at last settled down to the deadly serious business of transmitting his own dharma, and that transmission has had vast repercussions.

John Shirley

John Shirley is the author of Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas and numerous novels, including Doyle fter Death and the forthcoming Stormland.

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Living on the Inner Edge: A Practical Esoteric Tale

CYRUS RYAN
Alresford, Hampshire, U.K.: Axis Mundi, 2018. 219 pp., paper, $23.95.

What is an esoteric group? Often it consists of a collection of people sitting around and discussing a standard text like The Secret Doctrine. This can be a useful activity—at the worst it is harmless—but one wonders if esoteric groups have greater possibilities than this..

Cyrus Ryan’s Living on the Inner Edge provides a welcome perspective on this question. The book is about some esoteric practitioners who gathered initially at the TS lodge in Toronto. They began to pursue group work under a man named only as RN, whom the author first encountered as “a short, round oriental gentleman in a sports jacket and tie.” Ryan and a small collection of other students pursued work under RN’s direction for over thirty years until his death in 2011. Its sources were diverse: “Our Work follows the Sanatana Dharma, Ageless Wisdom, or the Esoteric Traditions that have existed for ages, only trimmed down and made applicable for the Western world. Along with the teachings of the Master D.K. as presented by Alice A. Bailey, we studied different schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, plus Kabala, Sufism, Western traditions and the teachings of Gurdjieff as given out and explained primarily through the writings of P.D. Ouspensky and Maurice Nicole [sic].”

The group had higher contacts as well: “We were contacted by one of the Masters to see what would happen to a group of Western aspirants subjected to various spiritual energies and events. We were contacted by one of the Masters in 1978. It was not at all as we would have imagined. . . . The Master didn’t magically send letters through space as they did with H.P. Blavatsky, nor did the Master appear and dictate lessons as in the case of Alice A. Bailey. . . . The contact was very short without any explanation. The Master gave  us a ‘word of power,’ a mantra with a particular tune, rhythm, and focus. . . . This word of power was like a seed and in time, through trial and error, grew into a tree of knowledge.”

RN focused on the Fourth Way approach of Gurdjieff, because it takes place in and through ordinary life, without retreat or isolation. Nevertheless, Gurdjieff’s teaching is skimpy on love and compassion, so the group turned to other teachings as well. Ryan says, “Our group was a blend of Theosophical knowledge and Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism.” The book features a number of esoteric diagrams which show the influence of Gurdjieff, the Kabbalah, yoga, and Buddhism.

Ryan’s account, both accessible and fascinating, takes us through the group’s adventures, including inner practices (“Our chanting was creating a ‘cone of fire’ which not only protected the group, but also allowed for the downpour of energy from the higher planes”); journeys to India and Tibet; and the dynamics of relations among the members. Ryan discusses “elemental” attachments to the sexual center by describing the relationship of one member, Samantha, to another, Frank. “They went out for some time and Samantha was definitely ready to settle down and hope for marriage. Frank . . . had an elemental in his 5th [sex] center. He liked to keep women hanging, he couldn’t make a commitment. RN gave him a special discipline so he could truly face the force of the center, learn to observe the thoughts and feelings it created and then counter it. But it was very powerful and one night we found him rolling on the floor yelling like he was in pain, but it was the elemental force causing this. This elemental, as all elementals, didn’t want to be made visible. Once it was seen, then the process of detaching from it and overcoming it was possible.”

As this suggests, the work was often laborious and painful. Finally, though, “by early 2000, the group had become very tight and close knit in an occult sense. Each individual knew what they had to do, both for themselves as aspiring souls and for the group. Each group member knew every other group member in an Essence intimacy, the beginning of true brotherhood, disciple relating to disciple. The Work became more esoteric and intense in discipline, to the point that we really couldn’t discuss what we were doing with outsiders, even other spiritual people.”

I myself don’t know any of the participants, so my only knowledge of this group comes from this book. Nevertheless, it has an authentic ring to it. It resembles certain esoteric groups that I have known: small; eclectic; led by one teacher who was, however, not a guru; willing to take knowledge where they could find it; and indifferent to publicity. I believe that groups of this sort represent the best possibility for spiritual development today.

This book also fills a real gap in esoteric literature, which has tended to pass over group work. Indeed the only other book I would recommend in this area is School of the Soul (originally published as School of Kabbalah) by the British Kabbalist Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi. But Halevi’s work is a manual for practice: it does not describe the history of any particular group. Living on the Inner Edge is a fascinating, persuasive, and inspiring account of how collection of spiritual seekers have tried to lift themselves up by one another’s bootstraps.

Richard Smoley

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