Book Reviews

REIMAGINATION OF THE WORLD; A Critique of the New Age, Science, and Popular Culture

by David Spangler and William Irwin Thompson
Bear and Company, Santa Fe. Late September 1991; paperback.

"A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions. Rather, it is a mailer of having the courage f or an attack on one's convictions. "- Nietzsche

Nietzsche liked writing that was done with one's “blood”: self-critical writing. The use of blood as a metaphor which synthesizes the earth, air, water, and fire of life into the complexity of one's experience in history seems appropriate in a descript ion of the reflections of these two writers who have had their hearts beat in the midst of the media's “New Age.”

Bly has used “sewerage” to rhyme with “new age,” a judgment that is perhaps less kind than Ken Wilber's portrayal of the new age as an expression of baby-boomer narcissism. And other critiques of new age writing have suggested that its intellectual and spiritual roots are no thicker than a tarot deck – the mere difference between getting stoned and getting crystalled.

Spangler and Thompson, however, locate their roots prior to their work with Findhorn and Lindisfarne. Spangler was a student of science, for example, and Thompson cites a mystical experience he had while reading Whitehead's Science and the Modern World as a teenager.

These two thinkers, then, are far from any stereotype of the typical “new-ager” as an undisciplined, irresponsible, and mindless wanderer who seeks direction and escape from thought and reality through form s of divination. They are two knowledgeable thinkers who know philosophy, science, religion, and art. And their reflections and critiques of the movement they are associated with carry with them the scent of enough blood and courage to satisfy Nietzsche who, like them, was willing to challenge the paradigms of academia and popular culture.

The chapters of the book are based on seminars delivered in Washington at the Chinook Learning Center in 1988 and 1989 and possess a vitality that gives one a sense of being there as a witness in the way one witnesses Socrates in Plato's dialogues. These men speak of their lives, their spiritual and intellectual development, their former hopes scaled down or restructured by their experience over the last twenty years. And while they find plenty of things to dismiss in the so-called new age movement, they both understand to their depths what that movement was opposing in our society.

So while Thompson may decry the “sloppy syncretism” and “vulgarization” of the movement and Spangler may characterize it as “a kind of metaphysical Disneyland ,” they both see the movement as a thrust to express qualities of the “soul of the planet itself.” Spangler sees his fellow workers promoting “the capacity to empower co-creativity and to manifest connectedness, intricacy, complexity, and synergy.”

Spangler and Thompson look back into history and look straight into the emerging future and find value in this movement after they criticize it and themselves. And in being so vibrantly honest, they offer insights into how science may provide a new sense of spirituality based on quantum mechanics and how the idea of “holarchy” may supersede “hierarchy” in esoteric thinking.

I think this book is worth reading for academics who have dismissed the new age with little knowledge of it, since Spangler and Thompson relate new age ideas to the history of thought quite gracefully with all the caution of scientists. And think this book is important for anyone familiar with the new age movement who wants to reflect on her/his own experience. And this book will be a great joy for any critical spirits who like writing to be done with one's blood.

-ANTON LYSY

Autumn 1991

FULL CATASTROPHE LIVING

by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D.
Delacorte Press, New York, 1990; hardcover.

This book is based on ten years of experience at a stress reduction clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center , where the goals are regaining health and attaining peace of mind. Much of the work is taken up with instruction and exercises as practiced at the clinic. The program is based on mindfulness, a form of meditation derived from Buddhist tradition. The author acknowledges J. Krishnamurti, Ken Wilber, and poet Robert Bly as contributors to the clinic's program.

The title of the book is derived from Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek in which the title character responds to a companion's question as to whether he had ever been married, “Am I not a man? Of course I've been married. Wife, house, kids, everything… the full catastrophe.” Dr. Kabat-Zinn states that the word “catastrophe” represents not a lament but a supreme appreciation of life and its dilemmas: catastrophe relates to the human ability to come to grips with life.

Kabat-Zinn describes the clinic program, which includes a process in which groups of patients attune to the moment during sessions of ten to forty-five minutes. Participants must agree to daily practice for the eight-week period of the program, in which mindfulness is emphasized in all areas - eating, breathing, walking, concentration. Hatha yoga is done mindfully as a meditation, with emphasis on unity between the individual and the universe.

Throughout, emphasis is placed on wholeness of mind, body, and behavior. It is presented in the language of lay persons, and provides a clear outline of mindfulness practice and its benefits. It should be of interest to those wishing to interrelate Eastern and Western approaches to dealing with the stress of contemporary living.

- MARY JANE NEWCOMB

Autumn 1991

THE YOGA OF THE CHRIST, by Ravi Ravindra; Element Books, England, 1990; paperback.

SCIENCE AND SPIRIT, edited by Ravi Ravindra; Paragon House, New York, 1991; paperback.

Ravi Ravindra, raised in the Hindu tradition in his native India, and now a professor of physics and chair of Comparative Religion at Dalhousie University in Canada, has produced a quite remarkable book in The Yoga of the Christ. As a self-described “outsider” to the Christian faith, he has nevertheless long loved the Gospel According to St. John.

In the book he draws forth the Christian story as related by John and shows how it fits with other traditions, especially the Hindu Bhagavad Gita.

Ravindra has long been a student of the core of divine wisdom which is found at the center of all great religious traditions – “the perennial wisdom,” as Aldous Huxley put it, “Theosophy,” as Blavatsky expressed it.

“I am persuaded that the major division in the human psyche is not horizontal or regional, dividing the Eastern from the Western soul,” Ravindra says at the outset of his exploration. Instead , the division is “vertical and global, separating the few from the many, and the spiritual, inner and symbolical way of understanding from the material, outer and literal one. . . .”

John's gospel has long been considered the most mystical , the most interior and esoteric of the Christian gospels. It is the inner message of the gospel Ravindra seeks in his reading of and commentary on John. “The basic question is of the right inner preparation for understanding spiritual truth,” he writes, “which is the same as believing in Christ.”

And : “As far as Jesus Christ is concerned, the right preparation consists in dying to one's self-will, and in denying oneself, so that one could obey the will of God . His yoga consists of this; and of this the cross is the supreme symbol.”

The literal events - for example, whether Jesus was actually physically crucified - are of less import than the psychological and spiritual significance of the symbols, Ravindra contends. “Every moment, whenever a man is present to it, he is at a crossing; at this point of crossing he chooses whether to remain in the horizontal plane of the world or to be yoked to the way of the Christ and follow the vertical axis of being.”

The point Jesus makes again and again, Ravindra says, is this: “no man can make himself God, but a man can empty himself so that he will be filled with God …” And: “ In the way of the cross, there is no place for man's own egoistic ambitions and projects; as a Hasidic saying has it, 'There is no room for God in him who is full of himself.”

In his other recent book Ravindra has collected a number of essays bearing on the relation ship between religion and science. Ravindra's unusual dual appointment at Dalhousie makes him a leading spokesman for efforts to overcome the barriers to communication between religion and spirituality.

These essays address a number of questions at the borders of science, technology, and religion - for example, recent assertions that science (especially physics) and mysticism are more closely related than one might think. The various authors also consider the place of values in the relationship between science and technology, the contributions East and West have to make to each other, and in what sense science can be a spiritual path.

More than half the 25 chapters are by Ravindra himself. Most of the papers gathered in Science and Spirit grew out of conferences supported by the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS) and held in Los Angeles and Atlanta.

- WILLIAM METZGER

Autumn 1991

PRAYERS OF THE COSMOS: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus

by Neil Douglas-Klotz
Harper & Row, San Francisco. 1990; hardcover.

Prayers of the Cosmos contains the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, and three biblical passages in the Aramaic language and then translated into English free verse. Commentaries follow each passage, and after many sections a “body prayer” is included. The use of these body prayers is to assist with re-establishing harmony in all creation.

The Lord's Prayer is considered especially useful in the movement toward harmony by Douglas-Klotz, who perceives that Jesus presented it to all of humanity and all of creation in the interest of unity in the world. The meditations frequently contain a recommendation for utilizing them with a partner, although this is optional. There is often an earthy quality about the meditations, and many of these passages go beyond inner peace to peace in the community.

Douglas-Klotz maintains that humanity has tended to assume an intellectual and metaphorical viewpoint toward the words of Jesus, while the universal, or mystical, viewpoint has been neglected. He considers that Jesus the mystic would have included all the layers of meaning that were inherent in Aramaic. Thus the “kingdom of heaven” becomes the kingdom within as well as that among humans and other entities in nature.

Some of the meditations recommend the intoning of certain sound s from the Aramaic language in order to enlarge on the use of “the many facets” of the ancient language. The writer finds that the rich “sound-meaning” of certain words in Aramaic has similarities to words used in native Middle Eastern chants for thousands of years.

The author is committed to viewing Jesus as a mystic, a feminist, and an environmentalist. Lacking an inclusive term as a substitute for “kingdom,” he used queendom alongside it. He translates the Aramaic word for neighbor as a coming together to form a bond among all humans, plants, and animals. He ties this in with the Sufi stages of evolution by which the division between self and God disappear, Douglas-Klotz relies on the work of George M. Lamsa and other contemporary scholars who have found evidence that the New Testament originated in the Aramaic language. 

Douglas-Klotz' English versions admittedly are influenced in form by the poetry of Walt Whitman and William Blake. The resultant free verse creates some pleasing lyrical lines from the words of Jesus, while taking nothing away from the beauty of the familiar language of the King James Version of the Bible.

-MARY JANE NEWCOMB

Summer 1991