Book Reviews

THE EYE OF THE HEART: Portraits of Passionate Spirituality

by Harry W. Paige
Crossroad; paper.

The Eye of the Heart takes its title from a Lakota word describing a way of seeing that is "not with the eyes alone but with the heart," a way that is meant to complement our already well-developed faculties of logic and rational thought. Harry W. Paige links this idea with the Christian concept of faith, finding much contemporary Western spirituality to be without passion, the yearning for God that has been the subject of the poems of Jalal al-Din Rumi, the medieval mystics, and the Indian ecstatic poets.

In these accounts of his experiences, mostly in the American Southwest among Hispanic, Native, and Anglo Americans, the author not only paints a living cross-cultural portrait of other people's passionate spirituality, but also investigates the spiritual emptiness and isolation he himself feels in the midst of such experiences. Although his perspective is mainly Catholic, he looks at the "double lives" of Christian Native Americans, who see no conflict between older spiritual practices and Christianity, and at the inner conflict of an atheist parishioner.

Paige describes himself as a "head" Catholic, one who has seen through the eye of reason for most of his spiritual life. The experiences described in his book, consisting as they do of an inner journey or pilgrimage, lead him to feel a personal emptiness and a yearning for the spiritual passion he sees in others around him. "I would like to shed the shackles of the mind…allowing the imagination to soar to a…greater faith ."

Of course, an overabundance of passion can carry risks as great as any posed by excessive rationality. Even as the author describes his loneliness and detachment from true feeling, we read horrifying accounts of acts of penance committed in moments of passionate spiritual excess. Whether it is a Yuwipi healing ceremony, in which pieces of flesh are gouged from the arms of petitioners, or a dangerous reenactment of the Passion in northern New Mexico, where a secret society publicly scourges and crucifies one of their number who volunteers for the role of the Cristo . we realize the extent to which a world seen only through the eye of the heart can blind us. And yet, Paige's yearning, his sadness at not being able to feel his beliefs strongly, despite his genuine desires to share the strong feelings of the people he writes about, made this writer wonder which excess is worse. Broken bones sustained from falling under the weight of a 200-pound cross can heal - but what about a heart, broken or in disrepair from lack of use?

Memory is another element that plays an important role in The Eye of the Heart. The memories of a mother whose son died in war, of the priest of a deserted "ghost church" without a congregation, of the author's own Catholic childhood, all playa vital role In passionate spirituality. Eastern and Western religious rituals often have much to do with remembering a story; and when we think of the origin of our word "religion"- from a Latin word meaning "to bind back" - the elevation of simple, personal memories to an almost sacramental role in the awakening of passion seems to fit. We make people sacred-ancestors. saints, teachers - because of our present use of them to reconnect with a higher reality. Likewise, it is the memories we associate with a place whether it is a son's grave, a military cemetery, an abandoned church, or a hometown-and our use of them now that make a place sacred, either individually or collectively.

The Eye of the Heart is recommended both as a first hand account of spiritual practices in the Native Southwest, and as a tale of personal discovery and aspiration to spiritual passion.

-JEFF ZETH

Spring 1991

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CIRCULAR EVIDENCE

by Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews
Bloomsbury, United Kingdom; hardcover.

The resourcefulness of Mother Nature appears to be boundless. If an objective can be accomplished in two or more ways it is almost axiomatic that they will all be used in appropriate circumstances. Eyes are a good example. For most creatures, this most valuable complex of sense organs appears to have been reinvented several times during the course of evolution, and includes compound eyes and independent eyes on opposite sides of the head in some birds, fishes, and insects.

It was with such thoughts in mind that I approached the problem of crop circles. These are areas of flattened corn or other crops that appear mysteriously overnight from time to time in various places in the world. The circles can be up to 30 meters (about 33 yards) in diameter. Inside the circle the corn is flattened to the ground in a regular pattern, while beyond the circle the standing crop remains undisturbed. Most of these depressions are precisely circular, but a few elliptical ones have been noted. Multiple circles and rings circumscribing a circle have also occurred, along with straight lines and other more complex forms.

Although these phenomena appear most plentiful in the western counties of England, similar events have occurred in many countries in the last few decades. Nobody has reported seeing a circle as it is being formed, because this appears always to happen in hours of complete darkness. The assumption that these were hoax circles would require use of heavy equipment, yet no tracks have ever been found leading to the circles. It is impossible to walk through a field of standing corn with out leaving a track.

Quite recently two seemingly incompatible theories as to the origins of these crop circles have been propounded. One is that they are due entirely to natural causes, namely whirlwinds. The second is that non-human intelligence must be involved. It occurred to me that these need not be mutually exclusive: non-human intelligences might be manipulating whirlwinds or other natural forces to achieve these ends. During a discussion at a Theosophical conference at Tekels Park, Camberley, Surrey, I suggested half-jokingly that the non-human intelligences might in fact be nature spirits.

It was at this point that I came across an excellent book on the topic, Circular Evidence by Pat Delgado and Colin Andrews. It represents the work of a group of engineers and trained observers who have painstakingly investigated hundreds of these crop circles and other formations. It is highly commended to anyone seriously interested in these phenomena.

The book presents numerous "explanations" that have been put forward to explain the crop circles, and ultimately discounts all of these as implausible, concluding that unknown forces must be causing the circles.

Since the book was published, an international conference at Oxford in June 1990 sought to present whirlwinds as the definitive explanation. A whirlwind is essentially a column of rotating and rapidly rising air. This causes air to be sucked in from all directions. The damage done by whirlwinds is caused partly by objects being lifted by the rising current and partly by sideways pressure from the air rushing in. It should be obvious that such air movements are quite incapable of producing crop circles. It could almost be said that the air is moving the wrong way, because the crop within the circle is flattened and not pulled upwards. Moreover, whirlwinds are extremely noisy, and usually move across the ground at a considerable speed and are rarely stationary, so that a swath rather than a precise circle could be expected.

However, the most telling objection to whirlwinds as an explanation is the circles themselves, which invariably show sharp demarcations between the circle of flattened crops and the surrounding standing crop. This would be quite impossible to achieve with a violent column of air moving either upwards or downwards.

Attempts to duplicate the flattening effect by researchers were unsuccessful. No known natural forces could account for the characteristics of the circles. There are many reasons for concluding that these circles are not made by brute force, but by some far more subtle means. In the true circles, no real damage is done to the crop. Each stem appear s to be bent sharply at right angles close to the ground, but normal growth continues with the stem remaining in the horizontal posture.

The circles in rape crops are particularly puzzling. Rape stems are hard and brittle, particularly close to the lower end, and it is quite impossible to bend them sharply without breaking them. Yet in such circles all the stems are in fact bent without damage.

The book presents considerable detail about the numerous complexities of these crop circles, including copious illustration by diagrams and photographs.

I follow Delgado and Andrews in attributing the circles to the work of unseen intelligences. They must use natural forces to perform the actual operations, but these appear to be forces not yet recognized by science. If we examine these phenomena without prejudice we are obliged to concede the existence of superior unseen intelligences and hitherto unknown forces in nature. Moreover, these are not evanescent phenomena such as materializations at séances seen by only a few people. They are massive demonstrations persisting for many weeks, and available for inspection and photographing by many people.

For the moment it seems we are being provided with irrefutable evidence and are being left alone to ponder upon its meaning. Further enlightenment seems probable in the years to come.

E. LESTER SMITH

Spring 1991

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IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE: Making Worlds of Myth and Science

by William Irwin Thompson
St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1989; hardcover.

“To construct an imaginary lost cosmology from a mere six pages of Grimm…”

Every now and then there is a book that witnesses to the sheer joy of journeying in the real of mythic imagination. In Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science, William Irwin Thompson provides as a point of departure, a brilliant reconstruction of Grimm’s Rapunzel. We are taken on an analytic journey deep into the imagery of this Marchen and discover it describes the experience of our psycho/social transformation of human evolution through historic time. We are invited to travel along on this Bateson-inspired quest to find “the pattern that connects.” Perhaps in the journeying, we might just be fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of a future born of observations and imaginings as bravely new and all-encompassing as the once novel notion of a round Earth. In Thompson’s words, the tale holds the very

…setting up of an order that is not simply familial or societal, but planetary; that in fact, the story is one of the setting up of a new world system with its relationships between the sexes, its new societal organizations, and it’s new arrangements of the planets in the solar system.

In touring Rapunzel’s mythic landscape, Thompson articulates for us a cultural history shaped of the stunning empirical correspondences in our myths, and the hidden mythic images in the very stuff of our sciences. We are led through Rapunzel only to find that our fairy tales

…have their roots in prehistoric darkness, and the hidden geometry that survives in them is not simply the obvious stuff of phallic symbols and devouring maws, but a lost cosmology of correspondences that connect the flowers to the stars. It requires an act of the imagination to bring it forth, much in the same way it required an act of the imagination to look in a new war at the dripping of a faucet.

Literally, Thompson asks for a revisioning of the very geography of what we view in out mind’s eye. It is no less than an excursion to the most compelling of new paradigm horizons.

As companions on this journey, lest we be unconvinced of the potential vistas, Thompson invites four friends to join us- Ralph Abraham, Jim Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and Francisco Varela. All are pioneers in their respective fields, and witness by their work to radically different modes of looking. Through personal anecdote and empirical explication, Thompson provides passage to the very center of the correspondences between these independent thinkers.

Thompson constructs an opportunity to view through their eyes a reality literally laid down in the shaping.” We are provided an intriguing glimpse of a possible perspective, a Thompsonian cosmology that has the carrying capacity worthy of these thinkers’ paradigm-challenging research. In a vital and imaginal conversation between cognitive biology and geo-physiology, as well as non-linear Gaian and chaos dynamics, we are treated to an intimate viewing of the fullness of possibilities that outdistance the individual horizons of each of the disciplines. The most spectacular view is at the composite vista point.

Thompson divides his synthesis of this possible view into five great cosmological emergences, providing an analysis of each according to its prevailing mode of consciousness and technology, its constellated cultural identity, the concomitant cultural complex, and the resultant societal victim. He considers these evolutional realities as polities, that is, five different mental landscapes that externalize themselves in these five great emergences.

Scanning the period from the remotest Paleolithic to the present time indicated as the period of Planetization, Thompson concludes that our present emergence has as its prevailing mode of consciousness the press for participation or “attunement.” To arrive at this point, Thompson leans upon the empirical historical evidence of our contemporary experiences. To help us envisage the future, he draws upon the cosmological implication sin the research of his four friends, demonstrating that it is possible for the multi-dimensionality and “inter-relatedness of all sentient beings” to inhabit the new imaginal landscapes shaped of transformed and transforming participation.

Dealing as it does with the future, Imaginary Landscape is perhaps the most personally revealing and intimate of Thompson’s books. Here he reveals his own passions, exuberances, and cautions for the razor-edged path participatively emerging before us. This is for Thompson the “middle way of the Mind” that

…lies between the angelic height of the macrocosm and the Gaian atmosphere and the elemental depths of the microcosm of the material earth.

Here imagination is the passport, and in tribute, Thompson concludes the book with four poems, one dedicated to each of his four traveling companions. As epilogue to the text, they provide a proper container for the late-night conversations and encouragements among friends. They serve to inspire, for in the end what matters is that we, too, must cultivate together the imaginal possibilities for our brave new land.

–GABRIELE UHLEIN

Spring 1991

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The Spiritual Life of Children

by Robert Coles
Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1990; hardcover.

Gentle Reader (to begin as books often began in Bronson Alcott 's day), you are holding in your hands a most precious and extraordinary book, truly an America n heirloom, which has almost vanished from our ken. Yet, if its time to resurface is right, it may well affect you as profoundly as it did me when it fell into my hand s. I cannot imagine anyone 's attitude toward children not being altered by the perusal of this work. And I can imagine the child in us wishing wistfully, “Oh, that I might have had a teacher like Mr. Alcott!” Alice O. Howell, in the introduction to How like An Angel Came I Down.

This remarkable book of Bronson Alcott's “conversations with children on the gospels” is edited and abridged from two volumes originally published in 1836 and 1837. Nevertheless, it reveals Alcott as nothing less than a depth psychologist 150 years ahead of his time, a perennial philosopher par excellence.

Alcott was a Transcendentalist who contended that “besides the combative Catholic and Protestant elements in the Churches, there has always been a third element, with very honourable traditions, which came to life again at the Renaissance, but really reaches back to the Greek fathers, to St. Paul and St. John, and further back still.”

This “third element” is the ageless wisdom that lies often obscured at the center of all the great religious and philosophical traditions both Eastern and Western. It is the Theosophy re-presented by H. P. Blavatsky later in the nineteenth century, and re-presented again by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy. It comes to us in many garbs, in many times and places, but its core element remains always the same.

As Alcott wrote, this is 

... a spiritual religion based on a firm belief in absolute and eternal values as the most real things in the universe –a confidence that these values are knowable by man– a belief that they can nevertheless be known only by wholehearted consecration of the intellect, will, and affect ions to the great quest –an entirely open mind towards the discoveries of science– a reverent and receptive attitude to the beauty , sublimity and wisdom of the creation, as a revelation of the mind and character of the Creator –a complete indifference to the current valuations of the worldling.

Alice O. Howell, an analytical astrologer and counselor who has taught Jungian analysts, has provided a splendid introduction to this book.

The free-ranging conversations in Alcott's class were not scripted; he said on the first day of his class that he did not know what he would say, nor the children what they would say, but that something wonderful, wise, new, and fresh may come up. And many wonderful, wise, new, and fresh things did indeed come up. The depth of these children’s responses to their reading of the life of Christ is a marvel, evoked by Alcott's genuine interest in the children and his willingness not to impose an understanding on their reading of the life of Jesus and the values by which we seek to live our lives in response to that exemplary life.

The Alcott book is a wonderful companion to Robert Coles' The Spiritual Life of Children. Coles, too, recounts his own conversations with children on spiritual matters, revealing a depth of insight by young people of which adults today are largely unaware. More than a century and a half after Alcott, Coles has, like Alcott, made himself a real friend of children, someone to whom they can truly express themselves, revealing the feelings and thoughts at the very center of their experience of life.

-WILLIAM METZGER

Autumn 1992

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