Living the therapeutic touch: healing as a lifestyle, by Dolores Krieger, Ph

Summer 1993

Magical and Mystical Sites: Europe and the British Isles by Elizabeth Pepper and John Wilcock; Phanes Press. 1993; paper.
My first trip to Europe was a mixture of shock and embarrassment. Like so many North Americans, I was tot ally unprepared for its inescapable wealth of sacred sites. Little do we know of the day-to-day spirituality still alive in Europe, or of its traditions of alchemical pilgrimage routes, sacred sites, special museums. Pepper and Wilcock's book is welcome for planning a meaningful trip. What began as a personal project to research mystic sites throughout Europe has resulted in a practical guidebook. Most such books are printed in Europe, making them hard to come by in the U.S. Wonderfully illustrated, this volume includes a useful bibliography for further research. I would have wished for a book three times this size, and one filled with local maps. At least we now have an easily obtainable guide for worthwhile pilgrimage travel planning.

-KENNETH O'NEILL

Summer 1993

The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth by Joan Halifax; Harper San Francisco, 1993; hardcover.
It is one of the necessary paradoxes of spiritual development that as one progressively disidentifies with the physical body and its passionate life, one exchanges or transmutes-matter for wisdom, thereby birthing a new body of authority. For Joan Halifax, noted educator, humanist, and transcultural peregrinator, that body is as big as the planet and its ethnographic myriad of peoples. Halifax's The Fruitful Darkness, a superbly wise and humble poetics of self-inquiry, transformation, and dynamic compassion, is the perfect illustration of this process. Her book is a wise-woman's account of how she discovered “new flesh in my mind,” how she found “the gold of compassion in the dark stone of suffering” - and how we all might, should we emulate her. But that stone- that dark inchoate mass of unknowing, of the shadow, silence, woundedness, and subterranean life-is ultimately fruitful. My life is the instrument through which I might experiment with Truth, says Halifax, who artfully employs key tableaux from her life of continuous initiation and quickening to exemplify the principles of her alchemy. She draws equally from her experiences in anthropology, deep ecology, Buddhism, and indigenous shamanism, inspiring us with the breadth of their fusion in one body of understanding. At the heart of all discourses, suggests Halifax, is the wound, the unexpiated pain. But from out of the personal wound that is identical with the World Wound comes the fruit of unrestricted empathy. Halifax's The Fruitful Darkness is a marvel of meditative reflection tempered with autobiography, a sensitive contemplation of the tenfold path by which Halifax seeks, on our behalf, “to weave my way back into the fabric of Earth.” There is gold in the darkness, she assures us, which we may mine through the ways of silence, traditions, mountains, language, story, non-duality, protectors, ancestors, and compassion. Each of these ways represents an element in her fugue of a fruitful darkness. Over the decades Halifax has traveled the inner and outer landscape with numerous lucid companions - Buddhist teachers. Huichol shamans, Native American elders, poets, scientists - whose presence and insights enrich her text. She honors all voices, puts her ear to the ground to listen to all members of the vast natural sangha of the planet, the community of biological beings, including whales, dolphins, stones, even extinct species, forests, rivers, now in the realm of planetary ancestors. “The true language of these worlds opens from the heart of a story that is being shared between species,” she says. “Earth is a community that is constantly talking to itself, a communicating universe.” To listen you must learn the ways of silence, solitude, and emptying. Only then can you find the place where the roots of all Jiving things are tied together, that point of non-duality, the root with no end, which is the life of the Earth, “this great distributive lattice” upon which we all live. Then, grounded, rooted, in touch with the Earth, we can practice intimacy, simple communion, warmth, and mercy with the world, says Halifax. The Fruitful Darkness, comprised of “observations, notes, stories, and realizations,” is the meticulously crafted, honestly sung log book of her journey down and in. After voyages through revelatory terrains, mountains of illumination, both actual and symbolic, through the Yucatan, Tibet, the Sahara, the Sierra Nevada, she knows: “We have greatly underestimated our true identity.” Early in her life she understood she, must spend time in the mountains, that she must be what the Shintos call yamabushi, one of those who lie down in the mountains. In 1987 she fulfilled a 25-year-Iong intention, to make the perikerama, the circumambulatory pilgrimage on foot around Tibet's awesome Mount Kailas. Even to arrive at this 22,000-foot-high giant, after weeks of jeep travel and overland walking, is a triumph. Kailas, like all majestic mountains, is so utterly daunting precisely because it mirrors our own Buddha nature, our true wild, cosmic identity: the mountain within is the more awesome. The recognition of this staggeringly simple fact fabricates the body of authority. “Little was left of me psychically or physically after circling it,” Regrettably for the reader, because she conveys texture, tone, and ambiance of place so vividly, Halifax is assiduously spare in her autobiographical delvings and changes meditative locale long before we've drunk fully enough from each well she has bored and presented to us. But that is the mark of a mature work, a few strokes, deftly, masterfully executed, no indulgence, no superfluity, no posturing- just the bone of experience. Maybe there isn't anything else to say: being there is the revelation. “Realizing fully the true nature of place is to talk its language and hold its silence.” Halifax, on behalf of the constituents of her body of authority –“all my relations” - urges us to reconnect with the body of Earth. We must awaken from our delusions of a separate self alienated from Nature the environment, and our fellow humans, correct the grave perceptual errors that have sealed us in a psychocultural cocoon that imperils the planet. The Earth Herself, through her polyphony of acknowledged tribal voices, will aid us. “The wisdom of elder cultures can make an important contribution to the postmodern world,” Halifax argues. This elder wisdom takes articulate living expression not as schematics, theories, and constructs, but as a direct experience of “stillness, solitude, simplicity, ceremony, and vision.” Western culture needs a strong purification in the autochthonous sweat lodge of the native peoples' worldview, says Halifax . Our goal, in part, is the attainment of what Buddhism calls the six Natural Conditions (or Perfections) which we find in the deep, soul-making ground of fertile darkness. Let us aspire to generosity, wholesomeness, patience, enthusiasm, communion, and wisdom, says Halifax, and grow incomparable roses from the garbage of our civilization. Reconnected, our wounds make a door into the World Body, a gate through which our spirit-hand reaches in phototropic trust to what is moving towards us. The body of authority is the wisdom of “interbeing,” our unassailable identity with the world. Halifax deserves our thanks for showing us how to travel a long way to find a bit of t rue nature. “The yield of the journey is ex pressed by the light pouring out of the window of our interior worlds, the deep ground of our actual lives.”

-RICHARD LEVITON

Autumn 1993

The Eight Gates of Zen: Spiritual Training in an American Zen Monastery by John Daido Loori; Dharma Communications: Mt. Tremper, New York, 1992; paperback.
If you still don't know what Zen is, it's your own fault. Library shelves are stuffed with books a bout Zen, and we probably don't need more of the kind that describe what Zen is. But a new kind of book has made its appearance in recent years and it is of equal or greater interest. That is the kind of boo k that reflects the actual experience of the first generation of Western Buddhist teachers. Such books are display cases for Zen students who have practiced for several decades, achieved some degree of spiritual realization, and have received Dharma transmission and permission to teach from their teachers. These books are valuable for not only the teaching we read but also for their tacit witness to the fact that spiritual attainment is still a reality. John Loori has been a student of Taizan Maezumi Roshi of the Zen Center of Los Angeles for many years. He is now the teacher and abbot of his own monastery at Mount Tremper, in the Cat skill Mountains in southern New York. The Eight Gates of Zen is not a “this-is-what-Zen-is” kind of book but rat her is ostensibly a description of what spiritual t raining involves at a no-nonsense monastery run by a teacher who knows that Zen is a religious path and not a hobby. His monastery is hard to get into and the life there is challenging once one is accepted. For those who are accepted and who settle in for long-term practice, the monastery offers eight “gates,” or entrances into the spiritual life of Zen. These are Zen meditation (zazen), individual study with the teacher, liturgy, ethical and moral self-education, art practice, body practice, academic study of Buddhism, and work as spiritual practice. These approaches to, and expressions of, Zen are followed over ten stages, which Loori likens to the ten stages of the well-known “Ten Ox-herding Pictures.” The structure of the eight gates and ten stages, which includes the elaborate and rigorous koan study that is part of this form of Buddhism, leaves no doubt as to the rigor of practice at Mount Tremper. But The Eight Gates of Zen is more than a mere description of the course of practice at one American Buddhist community, as interesting as that may be for students of religion , sociologists, and the like. Loori uses the structure of the eight gates as a device for exploring and commenting on the importance and relevance of each of the eight gates from the perspective of his own under-standing. To mention just three of the gates, I find that he speaks convincingly of the necessity of liturgical practice, academic study of Buddhism, and moral and ethical grounding. This is particularly important because Americans (and perhaps Europeans) who follow Buddhism are, as a group, abysmally ignorant of the teachings of Buddhism, and don't see the relevance of bowing, chanting, and other practices. They do not practice Buddhism as a spiritual path and often lack authoritative guidelines for conduct. It is little wonder that fundamentalist Christian preachers see Zen as cultlike and a refuge for hippies. Another area of discussion that will interest members of the Buddhist community is that of the nature of monk and nun practice and its relationship to lay practice. Loori insists on making a sharp distinction between the two forms of practice, observing correctly that in our culture we don't really know what a Buddhist monk or nun is, with the result that in many communities, “monks” have families, work in the secular world part or full time, accumulate property, and so on, so that beyond the robes that they wear, they are indistinguishable from lay students. Loori makes the distinct ion and discusses the importance of both kinds of practice and their interdependence. Still, Loori's permitting couples to live together or at least have a physical relationship as long as the couple does not have children, leads me to question whether he has completely settled the question of what a monastic is as opposed to a lay person. Should renunciation of worldly cares and attractions be extended to the greatest of all distraction s and attract ions? Is sex incompatible with a true commitment to a spiritual way? (Ancient Buddhism thought so.) Is the traditional Buddhist negative attitude towards sex simply outmoded and irrelevant today? And if it is all right to have a satisfying sex life, why can't one also own a Mercedes? Eventually the American Buddhist community needs to settle this issue. Loon 's book will be of interest to American Buddhists and to scholars and professionals who are interested in American religion. The book is well written and produced, thanks both to the literacy of the author and the excellent editorial work by Bonnie Myotai Treace and Conrad Ryushin Marchaj.

-FRANCIS DOJUN COOK

Autumn 1993

Islands of the Dawn: The Story of Alternative Spirituality in New Zealand by Robert S. Ellwood; University of Hawaii Press, 1993; hardcover.
New Zealand is in many ways a conservative land, both politically and culturally, with a reputation for being more English than England. Yet since its settlement by the British in the 1850s and 1860s, it has -been a fertile breeding ground for religious movements that are alternatives to the conventional churches of European culture. For example, in proportion to the total population, Theosophists are about twenty-five times more numerous in New Zealand than they a re in the United States and have included such local worthies as Sir Harry Atkinson, Prime Minister of New Zealand. Islands of the Dawn treats this anomaly of spiritual radicalism in a conservative land by describing alternative movements both historically and contemporarily in New Zealand and by analyzing the cultural and historical forces that have led to their prominence there. The author, Robert S. Ellwood, professor of religion at the University of Southern California, has written widely and authoritatively on alternative spirituality in such book s as Many People, Many Faiths and Alternative Altars. He also has the rare gift of combining objectivity with a sense of participation and sympathy, expressed in engaging prose. The first chapter, “From Nineveh to New Zealand,” is a condensed but very readable overview of the history of alternative spirituality from its European backgrounds, focusing on Freemasonry, Swedenborg, Mesmer, Spiritualism, and the Theosophical Society. Thereafter separate Chapters treat Spiritualism with special attention to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; UFO-ism; Theosophy; other esoteric or Theosophically related groups (Co-Freemasonry, the Liberal Catholic Church, the Krishnamurti Foundation: Anthroposophy, Alice Bailey's Arcane School, I Am Activity, Summit lighthouse, a New Zealand movement called Beeville, and Builders of the Adytum); and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn with its offshoots. An appendix deals with smaller, 1960s and later alternative groups of four types. First a re Western and Islamic initiatory bodies; next, Eastern , mainly Hindu and Buddhist , organizations; third, some politically active groups like the Moonies and British Israel, as well as apolitical New Thought groups; and finally, neopagan and women's spirituality groups. The ferment of alternative spirituality in a small, culturally homogenous and conservative land like New Zealand begs for explanation. And Ellwood supplies it. By analyzing the reception of long-standing alternative-spirituality groups, like Spiritualism and Theosophy, in New Zealand, he arrives at a cultural profile that seems valid also for other times and places. Like the United States, New Zealand is a “denominational society,” that is, in contrast to a monopolistic society like Spain or Iran, religion is the concern of a number of competing churches which minister primarily to the needs of their members and none of which has responsibility for or authority over the nation as a whole. Denominational societies are pluralistic and, willy-nilly, tolerant, thus allowing new groups to find a place in society and become part of the accepted establishment. Unlike the United State s, whose eighteenth-century foundation gave it the birthmark of a rational, individualistic, empirical society, New Zealand was a mid-Victorian creation, reflecting Romanticism, nostalgia for the past, secular utopian ism and philanthropy, and populist reformism. The latter Zeitgeist is particularly open to mysticism and spiritual experimentation. It is notable that the area of the United States in which those characteristics are strongest is the Pacific Coast, settled heavily by Anglos at about the same time as New Zealand. Another difference is that, whereas parts of the United States were founded on religious motives and its population remains one of the church-goingest in the world, New Zealand was settled by working-class persons already alienated from the Church. They were culturally homogenous and faced no cultural threat in the new land from which they needed to be protected by the support of a church community. Their background was largely Anglican or Presbyterian, churches that did not play the same central role in the lives of their members as Baptist and early Congregational. These factors-an open ness to new foundations, a penchant for spiritual experimentation, a hankering back to ancient forms, an d a lack of vita l organized religion - inclined New Zealanders to embrace alternative forms of spirituality with an enthusiasm greater than that found in most other lands. Ellwood (pp. 198-99) has identified eleven factors from the time of New Zealand's settlement that have inclined its people to alternative spirituality. Most of them apply also to the western United States. It is noteworthy that a similar spirituality has developed in Australasia and the Pacific coast of America, just those places where Theosophical tradition says a new stock of humanity, with a new culture and spiritual outlook, is destined to arise. New Zealand , the islands closest to the international dateline, where a new day first dawns, may therefore be also a paradigm of the dawn of a new humanity.

-JOHN ALGEO

Autumn 1993

Great Song: The Life and Teachings of Joe Miller edited with an introduction by Richard Power; Maypop Press, 196Westview Drive, Athens, GA 30606; paperback, 200 pages.
This remarkable book tells the story of a true American mystic, his travels through life, and his interpretations of teachings from many of the world's great religions. Joe Miller was a simple and profound man, a Theosophist, Sufi, Zen master, minister, but more importantly a friend. The book is a distillation of the many lectures Joe gave at the San Francisco Lodge of the Theosophical Society, or on his famous Thursday walk s in Golden Gate Park, when he and his wife Guin would be joined typically by dozens of people, and on holidays by hundreds. It is a beautiful tapestry of Miller's life experiences, including meetings with Annie Besant and W. Y. Bvans-wentz. In his introduction to the book, Richard Power wrote, “Joe was an authentic American revolutionary of the spirit…He had no formal education beyond the eighth grade. He held no hierarchical posit ion in any religious organization. Joe didn't publish any books or write any articles for prestigious reviews. He didn't 'travel the national lecture circuit. Joe had no videos to market, and he didn't organize seminars…He spoke for free, and he would talk to anyone who was interested.” Joe was deeply influenced by the teachings of Ramana Maharshi. He often spoke of realization and various states of consciousness. There is commentary on the Sutra of Hui-Neng and the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. “The Great Liberation is something that you individually find out and work with yourself,” Joe said. “Not by going with out, but by going within…you have to find that reality with in yourselves.” He would advise, “I tell people to keep a little place, just 10% inside your heart and know that little place doesn't belong to anybody, just God and you have access to it.” And he would say, “The truth IS, nobody can say it. You've got to BE it! You've got to live it. That's Sufism, that's Theosophy, that’s Christianity, that's Vedanta, Zen, Buddhism. Whatever name you want to put on it, you have to feel the at-one-ment with the reality.” And, “It 's all a Oneness in reality, all the different things are but the divisions of the lower levels of your consciousness, which you can understand if you come into awareness. We live in a world of duality and we have to learn to see through that duality. How can we see the Oneness if we're running one way or another? Whether it's money or energy, we say, ‘Oh, I gotta get to this, I gotta get to that.' But can we look at it and see that it's just two side s of one thing. Look at it all from the standpoint of equilibrium of the middle path.” The book packs a punch. Joe was never one to be at a loss for words. He talks about Sufism, Jesus and Muhammad, spiritual practices, marriage, sex, love, the bhakti path, Theosophy, spiritual hierarchy, psychic experiences, the River meditation, the Six Rules of Tilopa, and more. There is something in this for everyone: humor, warmth, and simple discussion of some very complex teachings. Most of all, it contains the essence of one man who incorporated spiritual teachings into his own life, and lived love, deeply and fully. “We're not pushing a religion,” he would say, “we're pushing compassion.”

-PEGGY TAHIR

Winter 1993

The Strange Life of P. D. Ouspensky by Colin Wilson; Aquarian Press, Harper Collins, 1993; paperback.
Colin Wilson's latest in his series of short biographies of the “greats” of alternative thought in the twentieth century is a critical but sensitive exploration of the life and work of one of that group's most important figures, the Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky. This is an extremely readable attempt to make up for Ouspensky's status as an unsung genius. Ouspensky is best known as the diligent but dry expositor of “The Work,” the system of self-development taught by the legendary George Gurdjieff. Wilson's thoughtful account is a much needed counterweight to this assessment, and goes far in establishing Ouspensky as a powerful thinker in his own right. As in other books in this series - Wilson's biographies of Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, C. G. Jung, and Rudolf Steiner - the author's aim is twofold: to draw out the essential genius of his subject, but also to point out where Wilson feels he went wrong. If you are a reader of Ouspensky who cannot imagine him making a mistake, then Wilson's book is perhaps not for you. But if you are intrigued by the lives of complex characters who areas fascinating for their mistakes as for their deep insights, then this book should prove captivating. Wilson's thesis that “even if he had never met Gurdjieff, Ouspensky would have been one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century,” is based on two works, the exhilarating pre-Gurdjieff Tertium Organum (1912) and the chapter on “Experimental Mysticism” in New Model of the Universe, which Wilson believes to be “the fullest description” of mystical consciousness “on record.” Those earlier works have an infectious enthusiasm and love of ideas that the later ones lack. Wilson asks the quest ion: What happened to the poetic philosopher who believed that “a new humanity” was near at hand, to change him into a puritanical, sometimes pedantic teacher of “the System”? Two things, Wilson argues: Ouspensky's own romantic pessimism, and its tragic exacerbation by his meeting with Gurdjieff. Wilson concludes from an analysis of works such as The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin and the collection of stories Talks with a Devil, that Ouspensky suffered from a common complaint among late nineteenth and early twentieth century romantics: “world rejection.” Wilson believes Ouspensky had already glimpsed the “secret” in Tertium Organum, that the book is full of insights, of the essence of “higher consciousness,” the Holy Grail for which he searched all his life. Indeed, according to Wilson, Ouspensky would have followed these insights to their logical conclusion if it hadn't been for one thing: meeting Gurdjieff. Wilson contends that Gurdjieff's pessimistic philosophy resonated too well with Ouspensky's world rejection. The last thing Ouspensky needed, Wilson argues, was a doctrine emphasizing what was wrong with human beings and that hammered away at their weakness. Wilson’s account is commendable for its unbiased view of the temperamental differences between the two men; it is salutary to find a writer unafraid to say that they were simply very different kinds of men, and that the romantic intellectual Ouspensky would sooner or later have to cut himself off from the Zorba-like man’s man, Gurdjieff. Saddening, however, is Wilson's account of Ouspensky's last years as a heavy- drinking, lonely teacher of “the Work.” Wilson himself has tackled the problem of “sleep” Ouspensky's nemesis –in various ways for nearly forty years. One difference between his approach and that of “the Work” is that he begins with the cheery belief that things are not as bad as Ouspensky and Gurdjieff believed, and that an optimistic outlook coupled with a capacity for intentional perception - i.e., attention- can work wonders. We may not agree with his analysis of Ouspensky's, and indeed Gurdjieff’s, failure, but we should certainly not ignore it, nor his tribute to one of the most exciting thinkers of our time.

-GARY LACHMAN