Quest Magazine

 by Marc Ian Barasch
Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1994; hardcover, 432 pages.

When Marc Barasch once caught himself shaming his daughter into doing her homework, he noticed that she withdrew into herself. She told him that it hurt her to be spoken to like that and made her want to leave her body. He was shocked to see that she had doodled a head torn from a torso, gushing blood, and he recalled his own similar childhood pain. For him it was a metaphor of the dissociation of mind from body that often occur s when we are made to feel uncomfortable about our selves. This theme is pervasive in Barasch's new book, The Healing Path: A Soul Approach to Illness.

A former editor of New Age Journal, Barasch has spent the past seven years gathering research in an effort to understand the nature of health and the role played by the medical and social communities. With a foreword by Bernie Siegel, this book is a comprehensive guide that is essential reading for anyone interested in health issues.

Barasch himself was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Desperate to get well again, but troubled by physicians' advice, he decided to check out the available alternatives. He also made an appointment for surgery, just in case. When he lost his nerve on the way to a rather unorthodox treatment in Brazil, he had the surgery and then wondered if he had made the right decision. The ambiguity plagued him enough to take on the immense project of exploring the world of illness and treatment. What he discovered will alternately anger, amaze, annoy, frighten, and encourage readers who are fed up with the tradition al Western belief that care of the body is rather mechanical while care of the mind is an unnecessary luxury.

One of the most disheartening aspects of illness is how isolating it can be: sympathetic friends often say the wrong things, while others simply leave or withhold their support. A life-threatening illness like cancer or AIDS draws the victim into another sphere. Faced with issues of mortality, one is never quite the same, and the people who were part of one's former realm of health may be unable to cope with the change. Yet a healing community is a significant factor in surviving a disease or increasing life expectancy. Thus, not only do the "journeyers" - people who go forth to encounter their disease rather than struggling to return to the "normal"- have to deal with the greatest challenge of their lives, they often have the added burden of finding new friends as well. Many people in Barasch's study lost the support of loved ones who could not accept the way they chose to fight their illness.

Barasch tackles these issues and others as he struggles to interpret the phenomena of healing. It is clear to him that a "one size fits all" philosophy, characteristic of our culture, makes little sense. A particular diet shrank one person's tumor; for another, it took intensive psychotherapy; for yet another, it was merely the belief in a medical breakthrough. Barasch believes in the wisdom of an integrated approach: don 't dismiss any angle. However, he makes it clear that one must become aware of one's potential emotional involvement in the onset and form of an illness, because therein may lie the key to healing. Although Barasch dismisses theories that find blame, he presents enough cases to indicate that early influences in the formation of our personalities may make us vulnerable to certain types of diseases. Healing, then, involves restoring communication with the self.

What makes this book so readable while also informative are the metaphors of illness and healing from familiar stories such as The Wizard of Oz and A Christmas Carol. Barasch effectively weaves them with research from psychoneuroimmunology to make the complex notion of immune defenses accessible and memorable. The reader is more likely to identify with the Tin Man's story than with scientific jargon. Barasch also makes frequent use of dreams as harbingers of illness and companions in healing. Although some of his interpretations may seem ad hoc, many correlation s are too startling to be dismissed.

Whichever way one chooses to go, it is best to be informed and thus wise; Barasch's book, although slanted toward the alternatives, offers a wealth of information about illness and treatment that should be considered on the path to healing.

-KATHERINE RAMSLAND

Summer 1994

by C. G. Harrison, edited with an Introduction by Christopher Bamford
Lindisfame Press, 1993; paper.

Startling occult machinations may have underlaid - in fact, distorted-the efforts of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky to found the Theosophical Society in America, argues C. G. Harrison, an independent American occultist who presented his controversial research findings in a series of lectures in 1893 to the Berean Society of London. Harrison, 38 at the time, presented himself as a self-initiated, unaffiliated Christian esotericist who, through his own clairvoyance, had made various discoveries "be hind the veil" of public knowledge and misinformed speculation regarding the manipulative power plays of the various secret lodges of Europe and America in the nineteenth century. H. P. Blavatsky -literally a "born" troublemaker, as her astrological natal chart indicated to the prescient-was at the center of it all. In fact, Harrison explains, for nearly a decade, she was imprisoned in a "wall of psychic influences" that paralyzed her higher activities, generating "a kind of spiritual sleep characterized by fantastic visions." One of these was the experiential illusion that she had in fact spent time in Tibet with the Masters when, Harrison claims, she never left Nepal and had been deceived by metaphysical impostors. Even so, "Madame Blavatsky emerged from 'prison' a Tibetan Buddhist and the prophetess of a new religion" called Theosophy.

These are serious claims indeed and must be put into perspective. Without question, The Transcendental Universe is an exceptionally valuable work that fills in certain aspects of the hidden history of our time; after all, Blavatsky's Theosophy is generally regarded as one of the primary seeds of our late twentieth century's "new age" and its metaphysical aspirations. Harrison's lectures - which cover an astonishing range of interests including angelic hierarchies, secret brotherhoods, the mystery of evil, the War in Heaven, the nature of initiates, the importance of the Christ – were originally published and basically ignored in 1893. They shouldn't have been, because, according to editor Christopher Bamford, Harrison's lectures on the implications of Theosophy embody "courage and daring, remarkable coherence, impartiality, compassion, and wisdom." They integrate "occult knowledge of a very high order into reasoned, intelligent cultural discourse, also of a very high order"- a rare enough accomplishment in any age.

Bamford himself deserves high praise for his penetrating " Introduction," which lucidly sketches the probable history of European secret societies back to the Renaissance and profiles some of the dubious lodge members who may have worked the levers of the nineteenth century's most active occult brotherhoods, most conspicuous among which was the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. I Bamford provides an additional forty-five pages of notes and bibliography that put all the names, societies, dates, and metaphysical concepts at our fingertips-a great service to the reader.

Without preempting the richness of Harrison's insider's view, this is a brief sketch of events as he claims they happened. Around 1840, the various occult lodges of Europe perceived that Western culture had arrived at the point of " physical intellectuality," or extreme materialism. Lodge members, who for centuries had withheld from the public spiritually valuable information about the transcendental realms behind the physical world, decided upon an experiment. They would use psychics and mediums to provide the Western mind a startling glimpse into the unseen world of causes, energies, and influences; through this they hoped to leaven the evolutionary dead end of materialism. In other word s, they deliberately launched what became known as Spiritualism, a wildfire phenomenon that spread throughout Europe and America between 1850 and 1880, culminating in the founding of the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875 as an epistemological corrective for Spiritualism's wild excesses. Not long into the experiment those lodge members most concern ed with humanity's positive evolution saw their attempt to spiritualize culture had failed; everybody misconstrued the phenomena and thought they were conversing with the spirits of the dead when in fact it had been the living lodge members working astrally through the mediums. Lodges with more self-centered notions of their charter deliberately continued the ruse to further their own obstructive agenda, creating further confusion and misattribution that continues to this day.

Blavatsky- full of "wild eccentricity and almost willful freedom of spirit," says Bamford - was onto them and threatened to blow the whistle on their unwholesome activities. According to Harrison, a consortium of American brotherhoods decided to stop Blavatsky by casting a nasty "spell" on her, employing a form of rarely used black magic to wrap Blavatsky in a self-delusive veil-an "occult imprisonment"-in which she mistakenly believed all manner of events to be real, such as her contact with the Mahatmas in Tibet. It was only by cutting a deal with Hindu occultists that she would essentially favor their philosophies in her Theosophy that she was released from this psychic prison. These facts, Harrison claims, somewhat qualify Blavatsky's credentials, though he admits she should be regarded as "more sinned against than sinning." Her faults, says Harrison, are numerous: she was unaware of the true sources of her inspiration, the "instrument in the hands of unscrupulous persons"; on intellectual grounds her Secret Doctrine is "exceedingly faulty" and severely "tinctured and pervaded by her personality"; she perverted facts when they didn't fit her grand scheme; and "her sectarian animus in favor of any and every non-Christian religious system (Judaism alone excepted) all combine to render her a most unsafe guide to the Higher Wisdom." To be fair, Harrison praises Blavatsky for her "vigorous intellect," her enormous capacity for assimilating knowledge, regarding her as "a medium of a very exceptional kind," as a unique psychic personality gifted with second sight and copious energy.

Harrison's allegations of veiled events underlying the foundation of Theosophy will both annoy and elucidate readers, provoke and inform, spark controversy while illuminating shadows, as any important book ought to, and we're grateful for the opportunity, however unsettling, to reconsider the matter that the centennial reissue of this book affords.

-RICHARD LEVITON

Summer 1994

 by Francis L. Gross, Jr., with Toni Perior Gross; State University of New York Press, 1993.

The approach to the life of Teresa taken in this book has an aliveness and a n immediacy that are often missing from biography, especially when the biography reaches back as many hundreds of years as this one. Imagine a biography of Teresa beginning, "Truman Capote once wrote…"

It works, and exceedingly well. This is an engaging and provocative study.

Francis L. Gross is professor of religion at Western Michigan University, and approaches religious subjects from the perspective of developmental psychology. His wife Toni Perior Gross is a psychotherapist in private practice. They use psychological tools drawn from Piaget, Freud, and Jung, by way of Erik Erikson, Robert Coles, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan, James Fowler, and others.

Erikson's biographies of Luther and Gandhi and Coles' studies of Dorothy Day and Simone Weil modeled the approach taken here. In looking at Teresa's life, the authors have drawn remark able parallels with Maurice Sendak's Max, J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Sylvia Plath, and others.

Of Teresa, they say, "She is by turns a coquette, a housewife, stern, compassionate, a banker, a mystic, an organizer, a solitary. We have found her to be the kind of person who cuts across male and female stereotypes and archetypes."

If she had a dark side, the authors conclude, it would be in terms of willfulness: "I thought of her running off to the Moors at age seven, of her being packed away to the convent boarding school in her teens, of her clandestine slipping off to join the Carmelites against her father's will at twenty. I thought furthermore of her tried and true method of making new foundations by buying a house in secret, moving her new nuns in by night, and confronting the local authorities the next day with a fait accompli and a charm that somehow managed to let her get away with such brass, boldness and, you have to say it, duplicity. We have a strain of willfulness and charm that runs through Teresa's life from the time she was two until her death at sixty-seven."

As the book states, she defied male/female stereo types; the "willfulness," one might observe, would be "determination" in a man. She got things done.

The book is organized in three sections -the first tracing her story from childhood through adolescence, adulthood, and old age; the second describing her family background and the Spanish situation; and the third taking up various themes of her life, such as "the journey to her own voice," psychology and prayer, and her playfulness.
-WILLIAM METZGER

Spring 1994

by Robert M. May
Element Books, Rockport, Mass., 1993; paper.

This is a significant work on mystical experience, carefully researched and including biographies of each figure included. The author experienced cosmic consciousness himself at the age of twenty, an occurrence that launched a person al quest for answers.

May hoped in vain to find answers in his academic studies in psychology and philosophy. He then turned to study with spiritual masters, efforts that inspired his earlier book Physicians of the Soul (1982). Then he turned to Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness, published in Canada in 1902. A considerable portion of May's book is devoted to Bucke's life and this earlier work, along with that of William James' Varieties 0/ Religious Experience.

Though an admirer of Bucke's philosophy, May has some difficulty accepting his optimistic view of the evolutionary development of humanity and of religion. May compares Bucke's stages of the development of consciousness to the theories of Jean Piaget, and asserts that Piaget, Freud, B. F. Skinner, and Noam Chomsky have all stopped short by ignoring the final step in the development of consciousness, cosmic consciousness, or the “Brahmic Splendor” of the East.

Each of the schools of psychology is included in this book, beginning with the stimulus-response psychology of John B. Watson, which May calls “soulless behaviorism.” May also finds that the determinism of Pavlov and Skinner “disposed of religion,” worshipping at the throne of scientism. On the other hand, the recovery of consciousness has come with the refutation of behaviorism. Figures familiar to most readers of The Quest and acclaimed by May are Rupert Sheldrake, whose concept of morphogenetic fields May calls “the most innovative theory in biology since Darwin,” and David Bohm, whom May describes as “an enlightened physicist” whose language resembles that of the great mystics.

May credits Carl Jung with esoteric understanding of the psyche, even though Jung disparaged cosmic consciousness.

An interesting comparison is made by May of the first meeting between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and the first meeting between Whitman and Bucke. As to Gurdjieff’s theoretical “objective consciousness,” or fourth stage of consciousness, May finds it the very same as Bucke's cosmic consciousness. Either is the same as enlightenment, according to May.

As to Abraham Maslow, May finds that the “peak experience” bears little resemblance to Bucke's cosmic consciousness or to mystical experience as described by Evelyn Underhill.

Related theories referred to in May's book include those of Claudio Naranjo, Jean Houston, Teilhard de Chardin, Roberto Assagioli, and Victor Frankl -along with near-death researchers Kenneth Ring and Raymond Moody.

May rounds out his work with an evaluation of the spontaneous mystical experience. He states that humanity has come full circle with the new-old paradigm of cosmic consciousness, and offer s ten con temporary instances. His book will hold interest for readers familiar with Bucke's book as well as those wishing to delve into the background of this realm of human experience.

–MARY JANE NEWCOMB

Spring 1994