Book Reviews

Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck

David  Nichtern
Somerville, Mass., Wisdom, 2019; 225 pp., paper, $16.95.

Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining. Stop crying. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do.

  —Barack Obama

Many years ago, I arrived in the U.S. for graduate studies and was also staying in a monastery for training. On the second day, the senior monk approached me and said, “So you are in America. You need to know four things: baseball, hot dog, apple pie, and Chevrolet, and you have to make a few bucks to get the last one.”

With graduate studies in the rearview mirror and after six years in the monastery, I started a career in a multinational corporation, creating complex algorithms. I also cofounded the Chicago Meditation Center, which I ran from my three-bedroom apartment. Many retreats were held there, and many wonderful spiritual masters visited. Now that I’ve retired from the industry and am not making bucks any more, my spiritual journey continues.

I was naturally drawn to Nichtern’s book, which weaves a tapestry integrating the three aspects of a unique journey. He has an impressive background for writing the book. He has been teaching Buddhism for most of his adult life. He has also been a professional composer (receiving four Emmys and two Grammys) and an entrepreneur, running several businesses. Nichtern’s deep practice of Buddhist teachings, received from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, resonates throughout the book and forms the underlying thread in his creative and entrepreneurial endeavors as well. This book is a result of his own direct experiences.

Commonly we think of success as making a buck. Nichtern looks at success a little differently. It is not just getting what you thought you wanted but incorporating a sense of wholesome well-being in your life.

The book is divided into six parts. Appropriately, the first part introduces a mindfulness practice. It is, so to speak, an operating system for enlightened living. The core principles are “As It Is” (what is presented to you) and “Up to You” (what you do with it), with help from clarity, intention, and effort.

The second part, “Getting Down to Business,” reminds us that conducting business is not separate from our innate wisdom. Nichtern offers profound tips, such as “Link your creative offering to your livelihood offering.” Trungpa taught the concepts of ground, path, and fruition. Simply put, ground is the starting point, path is the practice or the journey, and fruition is what we receive after persevering on the path. Nichtern reframes these principles for business purposes as “vision, plan, and execution.”

Part 3 addresses “Some Simple Business Principles” grounded in “confidence, simplicity, and authenticity.” Nichtern points out that having confidence in our business and having faith in our mindfulness practice are not different.

Part 4, “Interpersonal Skills and Ethical Conduct,” is a guide to behavior in business relationships. Blaming, making excuses, and whining have no place here. We learn to appreciate everyone and to be kind. In this section, Nichtern points us towards “the notion of Karma, the dance of cause and effect.” Our thoughts, speech, and actions may be impermanent in a higher sense, but they do matter on another level. He quotes one lojong (traditional Tibetan aphorism): “Don’t bring things to a painful point.”

Part 5, “Personal Attitude and Cultivation,” migrates from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal. Nichtern explores the strengths that one can cultivate. We look at “As It Is” and activate “Up to Us.” Here we contemplate impermanence. We may have vision and a creative plan, yet we also have an open door when change occurs. It is like examining the game plan at half-time and making adjustments. We need not take ourselves too seriously! Just as we train our body in the gym, we train our mind by honing our attention.

Part 6, “Creativity: The Wild Card,” reveals that creativity is pervasive if only we look. It is not just bringing a new product to the market; we are creative when we cook dinner! Nichtern challenges us to be daring and at the same time to “know when to stop polishing the turd.”

This book includes a treasure of resources such as websites and links to videos and music. Meditations for individual practice are included throughout (“Put the book down and practice!”). The lojong aphorisms are direct pointers. The most important resource is the workbook in every chapter. Nichtern provides probing questions for our own workbook. It is the door to spontaneity and expressing ourselves with utter honesty. It is asking a question to ourselves: “How are you doing?” Saying “fine” is not good enough. The journey begins by looking inward. Nichtern provides help at every step.

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.

Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart

Diane Musho Hamiton, Gabriel Menegale Wilson, and Kimberly Loh
Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala, 2020. 212 pp., paper, $16.95.

Three practitioners of Zen meditation, each from a different nationality and professional background, have set out to meld concepts from the practice of Zen and Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory with their own experiences in facilitating conversations professionally. Diane Musho Hamilton, Gabriel Menegale Wilson, and Kimberly Loh claim that talking about our differences is something human beings are just now learning to do in a new way. They wrote Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart to show how we can let our differences inform and inspire us in conversations rather than overwhelm and divide us.

Each of the twenty chapters employs crisp, clear language to explore relevant evolutionary and Zen concepts, and applies them to skills readers can use in approaching difficult or even confrontational conversations. Real stories from the authors’ experience illustrate some of the points.

I especially appreciated the authors’ efforts to add an additional perspective to the individual adult development stages as articulated by Ken Wilber and others. They point out how as adults we may mature from an egocentric through an ethnocentric toward a cosmocentric worldview. Awareness of this fact can help us see beyond our own biases and accord validity to the values and priorities of others who may appear at odds with us.

One particularly important point is that as one moves through this process of maturation, an adult person comes to experience himself or herself as less fixed and solid. The self becomes more fluid, shifting according to varying situations and conditions. This allows for more confidence and stability, especially when facing potential conflict. At the same time the process also affords greater personal humility.

The concept of developmental stages offers many other understandings that run counter to the assumptions of our mainstream culture. For example, allowing ourselves to (compassionately) confront difficult situations and divergent opinions allows us to practice trusting in our common humanity and allowing awareness itself to support our healing. Insulating ourselves against stances that diverge from our own chains us to a growth-limiting provincialism. Rather, these authors claim, “it is a sign of health to want to include and integrate what’s hard, uncomfortable, or deeply painful into a wider appreciation of our experience.”

This book also adds dimension to the Jungian concept of the shadow—those “aspects of the personality that remain out of the light of awareness because we find them unacceptable, shameful, or dark.”

Sometimes we project our own shadow aspects onto someone else. Such projection may occur innocently, even in groups that otherwise think of themselves as inclusive, socially aware and/or centered around a philosophy of fighting injustice. A simple exercise is recommended when such groups meet. Each person could be asked to tell one incident in which they had oppressed or injured someone else. Getting people to admit that they too have created human suffering would leave them less polarized against someone whose view of the “right” way may differ from their own. This leads to greater integrity, a freer and more flexible (therefore more spiritually mature) identity.  

This kind of freedom allows a person to focus on the present moment, releasing preoccupation with the past and the future. It is our behavior and the choices we make in the present moment that contribute to a more positive future for everyone, and we can only do this if we free ourselves from pain and injuries from the past.

Hamilton, Wilson, and Loh assure us that loosening our grip on our personal identity (that is, expanding our worldview, or the amount of the universe we can see ourselves as part of) will bring greater humility, patience, and generosity into our engagements. It is a road to a greater and more vibrant personal freedom.

Despite vocal elements in our society that seem to want the opposite, many quieter but far wiser voices are expressing ways we might move our culture forward toward a more inclusive, evolved, and compassionate stance. This book is a very solid contribution to that effort. 

Margaret Placentra Johnston

Margaret Placentra Johnston is the author of two award-winning books on spiritual development: Faith Beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind (Quest Books, 2012) and Overcoming Spiritual Myopia: A View Toward Peace Among the Religions (2018).

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

Brian Greene
New York: Knopf, 2020; 428 pp., cloth, $30.

Reading H.P. Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine opened up for me the worlds of science and Eastern philosophies. That led to my studies of quantum science, in addition to those of Hinduism and Buddhism, over the past twenty years. Many times while reading the latest book by Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, I was reminded of The Secret Doctrine, especially as he traced the history of the universe from the Big Bang to—well, whatever would come next.

I knew from the outset that this was going to be different from Greene’s previous books, The Elegant Universe (1999), The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), and The Hidden Reality (2011).All of these take us deep into the cosmos and the laws of the universe,which provide order, symmetry, and pattern (something we humans like) as well as exploring new ideas such as string theory and the multiple universe (multiverse) theory.

Until the End of Time however, sets a different tone. It addresses ideas that Greene did not address (or mentioned briefly) in his previous books, such as mind and thought, philosophy, and the big questions, including why we seek immortality, meaning, and purpose in life. I was introduced to a different Brian Greene—one who is now twenty years older than when he wrote his first book, and who may himself be pondering the big questions of life, including Gottfried von Leibnitz’s question: why is there something rather than nothing? We can answer these questions only by going beyond in our search for meaning.

I am reminded of Bill Moyers’ PBS interviews of Joseph Campbell. At one point Moyers asked Campbell, “What is the meaning of life?” Campbell gave an answer that I’ve never forgotten: “Life has no inherent meaning. We bring meaning to it.” Greene also quotes from Campbell: “We are tasked with the noble charge of finding our own meaning.” It is your experience of life and my experience of life that give meaning to each of us.

Greene speaks of his feelings, writing that there are times when he rises above his “own identity,” which has been “subsumed by what I can only describe as a feeling of gratitude for the gift of experience.”

Greene opens his book looking at man’s search for immortality. He quotes Jean-Paul Sartre: “Life itself is drained of meaning ‘when you have lost the illusion of being eternal,’” hinting that this comment may hold some meaning for Greene himself.

Greene injects some stories from his life into his book. One significant story was of the time in the 1960s when he and his father went on a walk through Central Park in New York.A group of Hare Krishna devotees with shaved heads were drumming, chanting, and dancing. Seeing that one of the drummers looked familiar, Greene saw that it was his brother. Greene, who was raised Jewish, at that moment learned of the divergent paths he and his brother had taken. Greene notes that both “Hinduism and Buddhism seek a reality beyond the illusions of everyday perception, a characterization that also describes many of the most surprising scientific advances of the last hundred years.”

If science and spiritual traditions had once been light-years apart, the twentieth-century’s foray into the quantum world, far beyond the materialist’s sensible realm, along with the introduction of Eastern philosophies to the West, brought the two together in remarkable ways. Greene tells of the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in an epilogue to his What Is Life? “raised some eyebrows (and lost his first publisher) when he invoked the Hindu Upanishads to suggest that we are all part of an ‘omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self.’”

Greene reminds us often that we are all merely “an enormous number of particulate constituents”infused with consciousness, called by some atman, anima, or immortal soul. These names all imply “the belief that the conscious self taps into something that outlasts the physical form, something that transcends traditional mechanistic science.” This is a clue, he says, “to why the hard sciences have long resisted all things [related to] consciousness.”

How will it end? We don’t know, but Greene assures us that all is impermanent. Ultimately, the particles—“star stuff,” as astrophysicist Michio Kaku calls it—from which the phenomenal universe is made disintegrates, and all things die. Stars die. The sun will die. We will die. “The examined life examines death,” says Greene. 

You can read Greene’s other books and learn about the formation of the cosmos through the Big Bang; the continual expansion of the universe into the far reaches of space; and string theory, matter, and reality. In this latest book, however, you will get to know Brian Greene and learn of the experiences that have shaped his life and given it meaning and purpose. While he may never find the physicists’ Holy Grail—the theory of everything—I think he is well on his way to solving the mystery of Brian Greene.

Clare Goldsberry 

Clare Goldsberry has been a member of the Theosophical Society for twenty years. Her newest book, on death and dying, will be out this year from Monkfish Book Publishing.

Awaken the Power Within: In Defense of Self-Help

Albert Amao
New York: TarcherPerigee, 2018. 287 pp., paper, $11.99.

Finally someone arises to call out the hucksters and frauds who promise to make you rich, make you wise, make you whole, and make you over. Albert Amao, PhD, is just that man. He is a sociologist, author, and national lecturer for the Theosophical Society in America. His recent book casts a shadow over false saviors while examining some of the most effective elements of self-help practice from traditional esoteric thought.

Hucksters in self-improvement are nothing new, Amao complains, but they continue to pop out of nowhere with promises to take away our pain, worries, and confusion, announcing themselves as New Age messiahs. Typically they disguise themselves as authors, workshop leaders, teachers, or life coaches who offer self-help to misguided souls.

Amao’s book suggests how many teachers and healers in the so-called self-improvement arena will simply dumb down ancient insights and attempt to repackage them in a diluted form for mass marketing.

 Amao debunks many of these attempts, outlining what has worked and not worked in the history of self-help. He distinguishes modern self-help culture from earlier mystical and occult movements and shows how we got to the current interest in the power of positive thinking.

Real growth, understanding, and transformation, Amao argues, come only from deep within you. The Indian sage J. Krishnamurti famously said that truth is a pathless land that everyone must negotiate personally. That is the hero’s journey of self-discovery.

Amao’s earlier work, Healing without Medicine, published by Quest Books in 2014, offered a similar message. Real healing comes from within you. Spiritual unfolding is uncomfortable, like peeling away layers of skin, but only you can do it. The answers are all inside you. The truth is there too. And you will find your true inner self along the way.

As Amao sees it, you won’t typically hear any of that from the snake-oil sales agents who offer to make your transformation easy, bring you instantly to self-realization, and grant you enlightenment in a few easy lessons.

Yet this popular self-help culture has become a pervasive social system worldwide and a staggering $12 billion industry in the United States alone. There are more than 300,000 self-help books available on Amazon.

The hidden harm Amao sees in this market is the blind faith people often place in seminars, books, and tapes. Self-help gurus tell them that redemption comes by empowering themselves with a new life script, as provided in the books, CDs, DVDs, and workshops they sell. Discouraged customers blame themselves when the material doesn’t deliver promised benefits. Thus the effects can be detrimental, and the self-help program can do much more harm than good.

Amao believes that a pattern of powerlessness plagues many people. From early childhood, they have been disempowered and indoctrinated with false ideas about their true nature by parents, mass media, and conventional wisdom. Over time, these acquired ideas of disempowerment become part of a personal belief system, and they subconsciously create a wrong self-image. Moreover, Amao says, some religious organizations create a sense of guilt in people.

Amao counters that quantum physics and metaphysics demonstrate how humans are creators of their own reality and destiny. As William James wrote, “Man alone, of all the creatures on Earth, can change his own pattern. Man alone is architect of his own destiny.”

People are responsible for creating their own reality with their thoughts and beliefs, Amao argues, and they are the only ones who can take back their power and correct whatever isn’t working for them. With that in mind, Amao’s book offers a deeper perspective on the culture of self-help and self-improvement. It empowers individuals to rely on their own inner voices for authentic self-empowerment and self-reliance.

In Defense of Self-Help is well worth exploring for anyone serious about self-empowerment and would be a welcome addition to professional libraries as well.

Von Braschler 

Von Braschler is a Life Member of the Theosophical Society and author of several books on consciousness, including two forthcoming works on conscious thought forms.