Book Reviews

Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication

OREN JAY SOFER
Boulder, Colo., Shambhala, 2018. 286 pp., paper, $16.95.

Words exist because of meaning.

Once you have gotten the meaning you can forget the words.

Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words

So I can have a word with him?

—Chuang Tzu

I grew up in a traditional Hindu household. Communication was a one-way road then. After a successful high-school graduation, the edict was “Thou shalt become an engineer,” and I did. Did I want to be a statistician? Well, after a detour of thirty years of career in U.S. industry, I finally did! Communication took on a different meaning for me as I practiced mindfulness and studied under Zen masters during the last forty years.

Oren Jay Sofer has written a wonderful book resulting out of his journey of over two decades of integrating Buddhist meditation and nonviolent communication (NVC). I could relate to the message. Sofer’s book is a “synthesis of three distinct streams of practice.” First is mindfulness; second is the NVC system, developed by Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg; and the third is a therapeutic technique, called somatic experiencing, developed by Dr. Peter A. Levine for resolving trauma. Sofer’s book does not present individual treatises on these streams but rather a holistic integration.

What is “communication” then? Sofer’s framework for creating effective communication contains three steps:

1. Lead with presence.
2. Come from curiosity and care.
3. Focus on what matters.

Presence involves being mindful. Curiosity and care requires awareness of intention. Focusing on what matters means sharpening our attention. Sofer explores each of these in great detail with “practical suggestions on how to implement the tools and concepts.” Each chapter contains principles (“The more aware we are, the more choice we have”), practices (instructions for mindfulness of breathing), and a section on questions and answers. It is a useful map as one navigates the complex journey that is human communication. A fourth part brings it all together.

I found leading with presence especially useful. Being present means being mindful. Mindfulness is communication with oneself first. One tip is taking a single breath between every sentence we speak. Would this slow down our conversation? Yes, but it would also add a profound quality of awareness in the words we speak. Sofer mentions an acronym: WAIT, which stands for “Why am I talking?” There is a space between speaking and listening. The mindfulness practice provides a pathway to this space that Sofer calls “a choice point.” It is a moment of awareness when we decide when to speak and when to listen. It is also a way to avoid unconscious or impulsive choices in our conversations.

Coming from curiosity and care means becoming aware of our intention. Intentions are conveyed both verbally and nonverbally. How we say something is as important as, if not more important than, what we say. Sofer draws our attention to how we handle conflicts. This is where we learn to nurture our compassionate nature. Dr. Rosenberg says, “I developed NVC as a way to train my attention—to shine the light of consciousness on places that have the potential to yield what I am seeking. What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving of the heart.” This is noble communication.

Focusing on what matters means that first we become aware of our needs, because needs motivate our actions. Sofer stresses understanding the difference between needs and strategies: it is a “doorway to compassion.” The principle here is, “Conflict generally occurs at the level of our strategies—what we want. The more deeply we are able to identify our needs—why we want what we want—the less conflict there is.” Mindfulness teaches us to observe clearly. Sofer hasn’t forgotten about challenging situations. The section on bringing it all together has a chapter on how to handle difficult conversations.

This is not a book that you read once and put away. One will come back to it again and again to integrate the lessons present in daily communications, external or internal. Zen master Seung Sahn used to tell us that human beings are confused for a reason: “In our body, eye has only one job, seeing. Ear has only one job, hearing. Nose has only one job, smelling. But the tongue has two jobs, tasting and talking. Very confusing!” Sofer’s book offers help.

Dhananjay Joshi

Dhananjay Joshi, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. He is a regular reviewer for Quest and volunteers in the archives department of the TSA.

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Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises

JOSEPH AZIZE
New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 326 pp., hardcover, $99.

Years ago, I wrote a letter to Colin Wilson, the prolific writer on the paranormal, to thank him for his book The Occult, purely because of the book’s section on G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?–1949). It offered a reasonably good general description of Gurdjieff’s teachings. I recognized notions that were part of my own viewpoint on life: that we are asleep when we think we are awake; that we are mostly mechanistic in our responses, having very little objective control over what we do; that we are so deeply identified with our series of trances that we’ve lost the fundamental meaning underpinning existence.

 Inspired, I searched for Gurdjieff, found his chief exponents, and learned a great deal more, which was of enormous benefit to me. I did take issue with one observation of Wilson’s—he claimed that Gurdjieff had failed to pass his teaching along, in any powerful way, to his pupils. The fallacy, oft repeated, is that Gurdjieff had no methodology to work with, only shocking ideas.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Great exponents of the Gurdjieff Work, like Lord John Pentland, Michel Conge, Michel de Salzmann, Paul Reynard, William Segal, the late Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, and especially Jeanne de Salzmann, all attained to profound consciousness through the Gurdjieff Work. Many of their students grew into fine teachers of this merging of Eastern and Western esoteric teachings.

As for methodology, it is the core of Gurdjieff’s teaching. Gurdjieff did not say that we’re in the awful state of waking sleep hopelessly. He said that there is a way out: there is a praxis leading to real consciousness, inner freedom, higher being. Only it is hard and unsettling work.

Until recently, the methods were nearly all passed along orally, in person, by teachers of a Gurdjieff group. (Hence Wilson didn’t hear of them.) Speaking of them out of school was discouraged. This is a time-honored means to keep an esoteric school relatively pure. Certain methods were indicated in Gurdjieff’s unfinished work Life Is Real, Only Then, When I Am; certain others, such as the practice of intentional suffering (not as scary as it sounds), can be found in his gigantic allegory, All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. Books by his followers, like Maurice Nicoll’s Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, provided samplings of his methods. The movie Meetings with Remarkable Men has a good presentation of the Gurdjieff Movements, a form of sacred dance with its own special music (based on traditional temple music and Middle Eastern folk music). The Movements offer a potent means of inner transformation through a challenging terpsichorean discipline.

 But in recent years two books have emerged to offer us in-depth entrée into some of the most esoteric methods Gurdjieff taught. The first of those books is The Reality of Being by Jeanne de Salzmann, which startled and dismayed certain hidebound Gurdjieffians with its crystalline exposition of Gurdjieff’s methods. The second has more recently come upon us, and it may be equally controversial: Joseph Azize’s thoughtful exegesis, Gurdjieff: Mysticism, Contemplation, and Exercises.

Azize’s volume is constructed in three segments: “Part I: Introductory”; “Part II: Gurdjieff’s Contemplative Exercises”; and “Part III: Exercises from Gurdjieff’s Pupils.”

The introductory section includes a sound biographical sketch of what is known of Gurdjieff’s life and the development of his institute in Fontainebleau, France, followed by a condensed but relatively inclusive summary of his cosmological, anthropological, and psychological ideas.

Part II delves into Gurdjieff’s contemplative exercises, involving subtle but deep inner work with attention and an array of energy forms. It also provides a good sense of the legendary Stop Exercise. Azize culls a sharp description from a 1924 transcription:

The pupil must at the word “Stop” . . . arrest all movement. The command can be given at anytime or anywhere. Whatever he may be doing, whether at work, repose, at meals, on the Institute premises or outside, he must instantly stop. The tension of his muscles must be maintained, his facial expression, his smile, his gaze, must remain fixed and in the same state as they were . . . The Institute’s method of preparation for the harmonious development of man, is to free him from automatism . . . The physical body being maintained in an unaccustomed position, the subtler bodies of emotion and thought can stretch into another shape.

Azize quotes Gurdjieff’s student Kenneth Walker on one of the fundamentals of Work exercises:

An exercise for sensing various parts of the body . . . a method by which I should become more aware of the energy I was originally throwing away. He suggested that I should draw an imaginary circle around myself, beyond which my attention and my energies should never be allowed to stray, so long as I was engaged in doing this exercise.

One of the keystones of Gurdjieff’s praxis is the harmonizing of the inner self through attention intentionally directed to the “three centers”—essentially, the mind, the feeling center (emotions), and the machinery of the body; these are all contemplated and objectively studied, and then united in a sphere of alert, benign attention. Azize’s book spells out various exercises to accomplish this. The aim is to activate all three centers at once so that they occupy our minds fully (mindfully) and use their distinct energy forms intelligently and with ever more refined vibrational attunement.

Gurdjieff taught that the soul can be developed into something lasting, something more independent and attuned with the Absolute, partly by means of “coating” it, little by little, through conscious breathing, drawing in a special food that is in air itself, which combines with the “food of impressions.” The food of impressions is harvested by means of his powerful method of self-observation. Exercises of this kind are found in several parts of Azize’s book.

Joseph Azize is a priest of the Maronite Catholic Church, so it’s no surprise that he relates much of Gurdjieff’s contemplative exercises to Christian esoteric practices. Gurdjieff did refer to his teaching once as “esoteric Christianity” and gave practices that he said were from the Orthodox monastic center at Mount Athos, Greece. Azize points out that Gurdjieff used mantras resembling the Orthodox Jesus Prayer, but with words relating to the Fourth Way, especially the “I Am” exercise, in which the phrase “I Am” is repeated and in a sense projected into the body and emotional center, along with other phrases which provide a particular nourishing resonance.

Part III contains some surprises: the strikingly esoteric Four Ideals exercise, for example, and the Color Spectrum exercise, which combines inner sensation with color visualization.

 George Adie, a teacher of the Fourth Way, apparently learned the Clear Impressions exercise from Gurdjieff. Azize offers it in detail, painstakingly describing a practice of dividing the attention and turning it to both the inner and the outer world in multiple levels of conscious presence.

Azize does a good job of showing us how Gurdjieff—who was always experimenting with new ways to convey what he’d discovered for himself—tried various techniques of exposition, his teaching evolving over the decades as he gradually revealed more and more.

Work with attention—which requires a firming up of will—is the consistent thread through these exercises. Directing attention within oneself is basal to esoteric work in many traditions, and it’s essential in the Gurdjieff Work. Reading Azize’s valuable, crisply written compilation, we soon realize that ordinary mindfulness efforts, while useful, are like a child’s wading pool. To really swim, you need to get into the deep end.

John Shirley

 John Shirley is the author of Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, and many novels including The Other End, Demons, and Stormland.

         

         

         

         

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The Yoga of Jesus: Teachings of Esoteric Christianity

MAURI LEHTOVIRTA, translated by Antti Savinainen; edited by Richard Smoley

PDF. Available for free download at https://teosofia.net/e-kirjat/TheYogaOfJesus.pdf. An audio version, recorded by Richard Smoley, is available for free download at: https://www.teosofia.net/audio/The_Yoga_of_Jesus/.

This inspiring volume is a reminder of the cultural and linguistic reach of Theosophy, to which English-speaking readers can sometimes be blind. Finnish author Lehtovirta draws heavily on Finnish Theosophist and Rosicrucian Pekka Ervast (1875–1934) as well as other Finnish writers and cultural references. I was delighted to be introduced to a side of the Theosophical family that I did not know and will certainly explore further. Lehtovirta helpfully includes a guide to writings from Ervast that are available in English translation (including The Divine Seed, published by Quest Books in 2010).  

Lehtovirta takes “yoga” in a broad sense, referring to practices that lead to spiritual integration and union. He carefully explores the teachings of Jesus from a practical yet esoteric standpoint. What would it mean for us to strive to understand and take up what was given to humanity through Jesus? Most of the book focuses on the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s Prayer as the core of the guidance on self-giving love from the Gospels. How do we enact these teachings, and what happens when we do?

In his preface, Lehtovirta says that Ervast “probably was the first one in the world to talk about the changes that take place in those who follow Jesus’s five commandments in their lives.” In this, he points to one of the most illuminating threads running through the text. Drawing on Ervast as well as his own insights, Lehtovirta shows how taking up the ethical path of Jesus opens higher spiritual potentials in the human being. For example, one who keeps one’s thoughts pure (such as following Jesus’ directive to avoid not only adultery but looking upon another with lust) will gradually come “to see others’ emotions—to see their energy bodies, that is, their auras.” When we are committed to speaking the truth, no matter what, we develop the ability to accurately perceive the talents, inclinations, and characteristics of other people. Furthermore, “extending love and doing good acts have profound psychic influences and consequences, allowing us to see God, the Heavenly Father.”

Much more detail on the developmental potentials in the path of Jesus can be found throughout the book. If Lehtovirta and Ervast are to be taken seriously, undertaking this yoga, this ethical life, following in the footsteps of Jesus, is the most powerful fuel for psychic and spiritual development. If one wants a balanced unfolding of the true nature of the human being and our greater capacities, there is no better way than through a life of self-giving love extended to all—or at least taking that as far as one can at the moment. Years ago, I recall Theosophical speaker Ed Abdill saying that if one cannot yet take on the loving of all people, one can always start with an animal or even a plant. We begin where we are, with what we can do, and the doing of what is possible allows for the unfolding of further capacity.

Lehtovirta takes Finnish Lutheranism to task for emphasizing grace and faith in a way that set aside the development of the moral life in the yoga of Jesus. One might have some sympathies for this point of view when one recalls that we all find ourselves in the place of St. Paul: “What I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that I do” (Romans 7:15). How do we navigate when we find our will seemingly bound and unable to do the good we know? How do we keep the yoga of Jesus from becoming a long and burdensome list of ethical imperatives rather than an invitation to loving freedom? Perhaps the key is Lehtovirta’s reminder that God always remains “in the depths of our hearts as a divine spark, a monad, an invisible sound of silence.” No matter where we are on the path, we are never separated from God, as we are held in existence at every moment by divine love. Knowing God’s ever present love, “we also understand that grace and mercy are essential features of karma.” When we fail in our strivings, even when there are karmic consequences to work out, we are always, first of all, met by mercy.

With gentleness and great clarity, Lehtovirta invites us into a path of transformation and service, following in the way opened to us in Jesus. Like the Master, he says to those drawn to this way, “Come and see.”

John Plummer

John Plummer is a member of the Theosophical Society. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft from the Ice Age to the Present

CHRIS GOSDEN
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020. 512 pp., paper, $20.

Magic has a history. It encompasses all cultures and climates and was developing long before the emergence of anatomically modern humans some 200,000 years ago. It is a history with no beginning and no end in sight. Evidently, to be human means somehow to believe in or practice magic, or both.

In this ambitious work, one of the world’s leading archaeologists tells one of the most varied and fascinating stories imaginable. According to Gosden, magic is not a survival from the discredited past or a sideshow in what some would call an age of progress. It is a window into the mystery of human experience in all times and places—from paleolithic to postmodern, from south to north.

Gosden is well known among scholars of prehistory, including the handful who can read hieroglyphics. An Oxford professor long associated with Britain’s Pitt Rivers Museum, he has worked at some of the world’s most important archaeological sites and invested a career into the pre-Roman history of the British people. His research is especially notable for its attention to the tragic effects of modern colonization on ancient cultures. Though committed to the rigor of his discipline, Gosden comes across in his publications as a real person, with genuine respect for persons of past eras. He knows the classic literature of E.B. Tyler, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and James Frazer, but patronizing armchair theory is part of the past he is willing to discard.

Still, there is hubris behind the humility, or at least remarkable confidence. No one writes a 40,000-year survey without some acquaintance with audacity. Throughout the text, Gosden takes on one of the most contested questions in cultural studies: the meaning and relevance of magic. In harmony with G.K. Chesterton’s notion of the democracy of the dead, he maintains that the majority of people who have lived on earth have professed and performed some form of magic. The evidence for this claim, he says, is stretched across six continents and buried beneath the modern world’s secular cities. Some of the evidence is on the bookcases and domestic altars of the residents of those cities. Gosden traces the long arc of magic’s storied past, but he also speaks in present and future tense. What is most important about his account is the recognition of magic’s normality. Magic is as human as cooking food, making love, counting days, and caring for the deceased. It may even be the source of some of those phenomena. 

The defining characteristics of magic, according to Gosden, are kinship and participation—feelings of connection with a universe that feels back and the exercise of agency in processes that foster alignment with (and alteration of) an interactive cosmos. He contrasts magic with other strands of a “triple helix” woven into the fabric of history. Religion orients life toward deities and sparks hierarchy and institution building. Science detaches people from nature and divorces morality from knowledge. Magic highlights the power within human personality, while eliminating any sense of human privilege. Contending with the paradigm that dismisses magic and religion as failed attempts to do what only science can do, Gosden acknowledges that all three elements are in a state of constant flux, with only blurry boundaries between them. He sees twenty-first-century science, liberated from Victorian pretense, as amenable to a new chapter in magic’s evolution.

Gosden’s marshalling of support for his argument is wizardry itself. Proceeding at a rate of a century a page, his ten-chapter narrative moves seamlessly from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to east Asia, the Eurasian steppe, prehistoric Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Americas—from the end of the Ice Age to today. The book’s generous images paint a panorama of one generation after another, “curating,” as he puts it, a direct relationship with a living universe: scarab rings from Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty, plastered skulls from Jericho, monoliths in the middle of Asia’s vast prairie, onions stuck up the chimney of an English pub, mouse oracle bowls from Côte d’Ivoire, and the first known written use of “abracadabra.”  

When Gosden was face-to-face with a much older illustrated history of magic, on rock walls far below the surface of the French countryside, he said he felt a “shiver.” This is the reaction triggered by his stunning chronicle. Other histories penetrate deeper into lineages and treasures of forgotten libraries. Gosden’s is the saga of anonymous magic enacted by people who invented things like agriculture, architecture, gods, and beer. Thanks to his craft, we touch the “fine textures of past lives”—lives whose audacious genius may offer everyday wisdom for the newest age of global warming.

Peter A. Huff

Peter A. Huff, an academic administrator and professor of religious studies, is the author or editor of seven books, including the forthcoming Atheism and Agnosticism.

                                     

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