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

Spring 1992

Sacred Paths: Essays on Wisdom, Love and Mystical Realization by Georg Feuerstein; Larson Publications, Burdett, NY, 1991; paperback.
Sacred Paths consists of twenty-six essays of penetrating insight into the human condition, including practical guidance on perspectives, attitudes, and practices capable of effecting fundamental transformation of that condition. Georg Feuerstein is a longtime student of the ancient tradition of yoga who has tested and proven many of the principles and practices of yoga in his own life. Here is a book with considerable historical and theoretical information, thus providing a broad context for understanding the varied forms of yoga. Even more important, given the widespread anomie and degeneracy of our age, the book offers a variety of proven methods for not just improving the human condition but for transforming it into its most transcendent possibilities. The author uses the word yoga to mean a spiritual discipline that aims at union between the lower or embodied self and the transcendental Self. The common Western use of the term to mean bodily postures or, even more mistakenly, physical exercise represents an extreme distortion of the great range and depth of yogic form s. After discussing briefly the common thrust of all forms of yoga and the philosophies that stand behind them, Feuerstein gives an overview of the channels by which yoga has been transmitted to the West. He then introduces several of the more important classic texts and presents some of the findings of modern science in its attempt to unravel the mysteries of yoga. The heart of the book lies in its treatment of the spiritual disciplines that lead to union. Three chapters present the paths of wisdom, action, and loving devotion. Another three treat the contribution of Patanjali, the second-century author of the Yoga Sutra, one of the most important of all yoga texts. Here the author undertakes a fascinating, imaginary interview with Patanjali in which the latter clarifies and expands on the 195 aphorisms that make up his work. Hatha yoga is sometimes mistakenly limited to body postures (asanas), the topic of one chapter in the book. Feuerstein shows convincingly that Hatha yoga is essentially a spiritual tradition, with connections to tantra and kundalini yoga. The latter topic is developed more fully in an interview between the author and Lee Sannella, who recently published a book on the subject. Two additional chapters take up path s centering in light and geometric visualization. In separate chapters Feuerstein addresses purification, meditation, silence, and nonharming (ahimsa). Two chapters present a refreshingly sane view of sexuality, focusing on what the author calls "sacramental sexuality." The relevance of yoga to ecology, death, immortality, and freedom is explored. The final chapter contrasts the Dark Age (Kali-yuga) of Hinduism with more optimistic Western interpretations. The author individualizes the sweeping theories by concluding: "We can embody either the dark actualities of our age or its luminous potential. The choice is always ours." Feuerstein's flowing and lucid style makes Sacred Paths a joy to read. The exceptionally fine index encourages frequent return to the book for refreshing one's memory. In sum, this is a work of exceptional breadth and balance that reveals, by means of factual information, insightful interpretation, and practical counsel, the relevance of the thought and practice of India to the conditions of contemporary Westerns.

-JAMES E. ROYSTER. PH.D.

Summer 1992

Food for Solitude: Menus and Meditations to Heal Body, Mind and Soul by Francine Schill; Element, 1992; paper.
Have you ever wondered what the Dalai Lama would tell you about being alone? Are you curious about what David Spangler, Gloria Steinem, David Steindl-Rast, and Gloria Vanderbilt have in common while in solitude? Did you know that Joseph Campbell meditated on the Tarot while swimming? Do you want to know about Mother Serena's experience of the inner rainbow; interested in William Irwin Thompson's thoughts about eating Light; and what about Leonard Nimoy on "tapping the center" or Nancy Ross Wilson on "being breathed"? These are just some of the savory interview tidbits from among the host of contemporary voices in Francine Schiff's Food for Solitude. Quickly scanned, the book is an afternoon's enchantment of personal conversation and spiritual comradery - an aperitif to stimulate the appetite for a nourishing solitude practice of one's own. Slowly savored, the book provides a feast , each chapter urging on the contemplative instinct for the creation of a soul-satisfying recipe of one's own. The text rests on the principle that "Solitude is an attitude,"
an attitude of gratitude. It is a state of mind, a state of heart, a whole universe unto itself. The early contemplatives in all traditions knew this secret of happiness. The anchorites and hermits and saints and mystics always knew that being alone was the greatest gift. And whether or not we sit upon mountain tops or kitchen stools, whether we seek sacred ashrams or simply stir the soup, the message is the same. For what does it mean to be alone, if not to be all one. To be who you are already-in your deepest self, to be happy. (p. xv)
Best of all, Schiff, like a fine host, encourages us to enjoy ourselves, to eat heartily and drink deeply at solitude's banquet. And for those of us uninitiated or more timid in the practice, with personal anecdote and charming whimsy she cultivates an easy confidence in our capacity to be alone with ourselves. The text is not meant to be a definitive exploration of solitude experiences, indeed her highly varied and eclectic cast of notables might be irksome to those more accustomed to lineage and precise metaphysics. Instead, in response to the query, "What is your food for solitude?" the simple and direct voices of the seekers interviewed by Schiff offer a rare opportunity to resonate with the variety of human preferences in, thro ugh, about, and around, what we choose as nourishment in times of solitude. Avoiding pedagogy and vegetarian polemics, and skirting the obvious "you are what you eat" platitudes, Food for Solitude provides personally revealing reflections and good practical advice from some very remarkable people on how to be "alone," but not alone. Like good garnish, the inevitable word-plays and subtleties of metaphor possible around the language of food, feeding, spiritual growth and inner nourishment, provide a pleasing presentation for the solitude menus and musings Schiff culled from her many conversations. From recipes for basic soups and breads, and even hermit "treats," to more specialized advice for a "Dinner Party for One," to instructions for nurturing right-brain processes, the reflections by Schiff, et al., provide memorable menus for a balanced life. There are included meditations, table prayers, even a shopping list for the well-supplied hermitage, and best of all, the personal testimony of 45 diverse practitioners on the fruits of solitude, each a famous and well-fed mystic in their own right. Like a good cookbook, the text is appealing in format, with an abundance of handsome mandalas and generous wide margins. Space aplenty for the accomplished practitioner to adjust the recipes to personal preference. It is the sort of book one buys in multiple copies. A copy to give to friends who have not yet cultivated a taste for solitude -in the hope they are inspired to try it. A copy to give to those who are already familiar with its beneficial properties-with new possibilities and fresh ideas for their practice. And of course, a copy to keep - in readiness for whatever it is that needs cooking in one's own kitchen. Finally, if there is a frustration. it is one common to most cookbooks – the more subtle ingredients take some searching out. Solitude in our prevailing American culture is a precious commodity requiring a dedicated practice. Food for Solitude provides an engaging resource. Francine Schiff is to be congratulated for finding this incredible diversity of solitude practitioners. Although the voices of the contemporary celebrities collected here are well annotated, the seasoned spice of older voices of other times and places generously sprinkled throughout the text are not so clearly referenced. But enough clues are given for the persistent practitioner to track down the essentials, and to realize that one and all, we are meant to relish solitude. Its food is our finest birthright and our deepest communion. As Francine her self quoted Nancy Wilson Ross:
We venerate all the great teachers

And we are thankful for this food

The works of many other people

And the suffering and sharing

of other forms of life. (p. 48)
-GABRIELE UHLEIN
Summer 1992

The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that have Shaped Our World View by Richard Tarnas; Harmony Books, New York, 1991; hardcover.
Where are we, Daddy? How did we get here? What are we to do?- our first profound questions, and, for most of us with interests in the transpersonal, questions we still earnestly ask. Richard Tarnas seeks answers to all of these and more in The Passion of the Western Mind, and, more often than not, succeeds spectacularly in providing a response that is at least provocative and hopeful if not an outright guide to salvation. The "where we are," as Tarnas describes it, is in troubled postmodern times, caught in a cosmic double-bind between the inner craving for a life of meaning and the relentless attrition of existence in a cosmos that our rational scientific world view has assured us is empty, dead, devoid of all purpose. "How we got here" forms the body of Tarnas' work: a concise yet comprehensive account of the entire span of Western thought, from Plato and before, through early Christianity and the many permutations of the Christian-Hellenic synthesis of the Middle Ages, to the birth and transformation of the modern era through the world- shattering projects of Copernicus, Galilee, and Descartes, and, finally, to the postmodern apocalypse culminating in the systematic stripping away of certainty, soul, and sanity. This part of the book, which could have been as dry and debilitating as a sophomore seminar, is instead an exciting read, a page-burner of a mythic novel. Our history is, after all, the story of the Hero's Quest, with all that high drama – and with the inevitable Hero's tragic flaw. How that flaw is part of the solution as well as part of the problem is resolved in the exciting conclusion of Tarnas' story. "What are we to do?" It is the great gift of this book that we are not left to sink in the postmodern morass, but are invited - indeed almost compelled by logical and visionary necessity-to recognize that there is an underlying pattern to all this, an archetypal pattern , and a method of archetypal analysis, synthesis, and above all experience, that points to the coming of a new world to which we are not alien but , rather, are fully inspired participants in its formation. Tarnas finds the clearest expression of this underlying archetypal world structure in the work of consciousness researcher Stanislav Grof, whose thirty years of investigation with psychedelics and other depth psychological techniques (i.e., holotropic breathwork) have revealed a four stage sequence of birth experience that has the most profound resonance on physical, psychological, religious, and physical levels. (In addition to his Harvard degree and Ph.D. in psychology, Tarnas was for ten years director of programs at Esalen Institute and Dr. Grof's next door neighbor, friend, and collaborator.) I will leave it to Rick's extended argument to prove to you the efficacy of the perinatal matrix as the "new paradigm" we have all been seeking. Convinced or not, you will surely add richness and complexity to your understanding of transpersonal issues. Tarnas' conclusions will surely be criticized, misused - even abused. For example. they are subject to the lukewarm embrace of the reductivist: "Hmm, we all do go through a birth process; maybe he's right that coming through the birth canal preconditions human experience." or they may receive cavalier dismissal by scientific fundamentalists as "based on the ravings of the LSD-crazed." That the archetypal pattern revealed in the perinatal matrix underlies both mind and world, and thus unites them, requires an act of recognition that perhaps only the transpersonally experienced can accomplish with ease. However, on the whole Tarnas argues persuasively, and I urge you to encounter that argument. Particularly if you are somewhat new to these ideas, you must read this book to have any notion of what transpersonal psychology is truly about, and where it is destined to lead. The Passion of the Western Mind is well placed to get a hearing in academic and professional circles as well as to become a hit with the educated public. It is a book that could truly make a difference. We in the transpersonal movement should , especially, take it to heart. Note: I first heard the material that comprises the epilogue of The Passion of the Western Mind as a speech given at the 1990 "Cycles and Symbols" conference in San Francisco, where psychotherapists and professional astrologers gathered for the first time together to explore similarities in their disciplines and to jointly participate in presentations by Tarnas and Grof as well as other prominent astrologers and therapists. Tarnas brought the crowd roaring to its feet, both through the depth and breadth of his vision, and because he added to the written version an explicit encouragement to astrologers. (After all, if the "astrological premise"-that the movements of the heavens are correlated with human action-is verified, then the postmodern dilemma vanishes.) I for one am looking forward to further exciting developments from the Tarnas-Grof collaboration.

-BOB CRAFT

Summer 1992

Being-in-Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerer's World by Florinda Donner; Harper San Francisco. 1991; hardcover.
Lila: An Inquiry into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig; Bantam. 1991; hardcover.
Reading Donner and Pirsig is uncannily like slipping into a time warp and rematerializing back in the mid 19705 without the least thread of identity remaining from the 1990s. Pirsig, an unknown philosophical iconoclast, stamped the 1970s with his quirky, passionate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. a desperate inquiry into the nature of Quality as father and son motorcycle across the country; then he lasped into public silence for 17 years with-- almost unprecedented in hyperbolic, celebrity-idolizing America --no sequel, no talk shows, no follow-up. Donner, a German woman born in Venezuela and author of two previous neo-shamanic narratives, took initiation from the legendary Carlos Castaneda (and his guru, Don Juan Matus) twenty years ago, and his presence looms powerfully if enigmatically in this dreaming-awake chronicle of life in a house of Sonoran “sorcerers and witches” way beyond the confines of consensual reality. We're virtually back with Castaneda and his ontologically elusive Mexican cabal of shape-shifters and wind-born shamans as if the Yuppie 1980s had never happened. It's not a rerun either; it's grippingly fresh, as if it never stopped and we're only now re-establishing our attention after a long distraction. But since most of Donner's narrative takes place in the dreamtime, which is an atemporal virtual reality in which perception is completely manipulable, it doesn't matter at all. That 's precisely what Pirsig and Donner/Castaneda are on about in these new books: manipulating perception, breaking free of the somnambulant bonds of ordinary, physical reality, “expanding the limits of normal perception and breaking the agreement that has defined reality,” as Donner puts it. Their strategy is to dissolve consensus reality, to “break that frail blanket of human assumptions,” that “culturally determined construct” called reality, to gain self mastery, to dream-awake into the detachment of silent knowledge and intent, to finally walk into the vastness of unbounded freedom. Pirsig has high goals, too. He's looking for the philosophical basis of morality and for the cutting edge of Dynamic Quality, the spontaneous, unpatterned response to life. Pirsig’s narrator, Phaedrus, has been about as far as the Western philosophical agreement about reality allows one: insanity and institutionalization. Insanity is freedom, a heresy, an illegal value pattern, the end of role playing, an uncorroborable culture of one, argues Pirsig. But if sanity is culturally defined as the ability to see reality in a set way, “a geography of religious beliefs shows that this external reality can be just about any damn thing.” After all, the Balinese definition of a madman is “someone who, like an American, smiles when there is nothing to smile at.” That's a fair description for the perceptually inconclusive adventures beyond the reality principle in which Donner, Castaneda, and company spend most of their time in quest of the sorcerer's profound freedom: to be awake in dreaming. They're inconclusive because neither Donner nor the reader ever gets quite enough explanation, but that's probably part of the initiation. This is far more than lucid dreaming; there are no psychedelic drugs, no ETs speaking through channels -just self-mastery. It 's more akin to the Alcheringa, or Dreamtime, of the Australian Aborigines, an intensely fluid, creative, world-making energetic domain where consciousness and manifestation co-exist seamlessly. The young Donner is an anthropology graduate student at UCLA when she meets her dream sisters and Castaneda somewhere in Sonora, Mexico in 1970. She'd heard of the hermitic, dangerous Castaneda, but maybe wasn't too well versed on his sorcery of philosophy. Her taste in reading was more likely Vanity Fair than Journey to Ixtlan, and anyway, Donner thinks she is a liberated, smart American woman who doesn't need magicians. She just wants her chronic nightmares to go away. Her female cohorts strenuously try to convince her that women a priori are the slaves of men and male culture, they're “befogged by sex,” wasting their true power which lies in the tremendous potency and organic disposition to dream from the womb. Between the band of dreamers, stalkers, and naguals, they skillfully divest Donner of all her presumptions about femininity, time, space, linearity, identity, and consciousness. They deftly play on her emotional reactivity like an electric piano and toss her about from ordinary waking consciousness to dreaming-awake adventures with such facility that she never knows where she is, and usually gets it backwards when she tries to guess. Identity is a hall of mirrors; time-space is a mutable fiction. Her principal teacher, Zuleica, has two other distinct dream selves, one of each gender, Castaneda is also called Joe Cortez, Charlie Spider, and Isidor Balthazar; even Don Juan has a couple aliases. It's an utterly unreliable, unpredictable, unsettling magic show on the other side of the daily world, a metaphysical cartoon entertainment, a Gilbert and Sullivan romp on the astral plane. Paradoxically, it all usefully confuses, edifies, even agitates us with relevance and glimpses of “other possibilities” outside of time and culture, something that won't leave us alone until we attain it ourselves. Philosophy and sorcery are metaphysical siblings, says Donner. They're both “highly sophisticated forms of abstract knowledge,” and philosophers are “intellectual sorcerers.” Except that the sorcerer goes one step further than the philosopher by acting on his findings, and except that philosophers on the whole uphold the social order even if they don't agree with it-in short, they are sorcerers manqué; they might have been, but missed it, says Donner. That's largely true of Pirsig, whose passionately, intelligently-reasoned inquiry into what he calls the Metaphysics of Dynamic Quality as an intellectual basis for twentieth-century morality is somewhat stale and uncarbonated after Donner's effervescent dream jinks. Pirsig wisely copies the successful literary structure of personalized Platonic dialogue in the context of a vividly realized road trip that worked so marvelously in his first book. Now it's not motorcycles but a yacht sailboat which he plies in solitary contemplation from Lake Superior through inland waterways to the Hudson River and down to the “Giant” at its mouth, New York City. Pirsig interrupts his philosophical ruminations and nearly ruins his reclusive lifestyle when he picks up and beds a “ bar lady” named Lila. It' s a flamboyant mismatch: Sherlock Holmes and Mae West arguing about dinner and existence on the Hudson. She's sexy, hostile, broke, and on the edge of insanity -not his type, surely, yet the perfect living, suffering, perplexing question mark he needs to have tossed disruptively into his neat stacks of 11,000 index cards filled with his thoughts on Victorian morality, static quotidian patterns versus spontaneous dynamism, the dead -end of anthropology, culturally static immune systems, a Peyote sweat lodge in Wyoming, the dialectic of native American Indian mysticism and European formalism in the American psyche, and his twenty-year search for the Good. Regrettably, Pirsig's philosophy is far less engaging than his passionate narrative presence. Phaedrus is a character from Plato's dialogues and maybe the issues of Platonism in general are a little boring today. Pirsig's prose is vigorous and taut his story-line innately compelling, but the long excursions into the Metaphysics of Quality are more often tedious, digressive, and inconsequential than vita l. His specific inquiry is less riveting than the sheer energy and presence he imparts through his inquiry. Pirsig's Phaedrus is inquiry incarnate and this is irresistibly exciting. That he asks, and invites us livingly into his asking, that the energy and persistence of his inquiry is so alive and precious - that's the dynamic quality of his metaphysics, not his final revelation that Good is a noun. And anyway, it's probably all made up, a fictional conceit to serve a philosophical purpose. Just because Donner says she's a blond-haired, blue-eyed attractive, intelligent anthropology student at UCLA doesn't mean anything. She could be another dream self of Castaneda. He's so protean he may have ghost-written, or dictated it while dreaming-awake. Many readers think “Castaneda” himself was made up by another writer. In a recent interview Pirsig admitted that Phaedrus, Lila, Richard Rigel (an antagonist in Lila), even the yacht, “is really me.” Lila is blond-haired and blue-eyed, too, and if Richard Rigel hadn't whisked her off for institutionalization again, she could have taken just one more step and have been “out of hell forever,” free of the cultural straitjacket of static patterns and “the righteousness of the sane.” So both Pirsig and Donner-whether they're sorcerer-manqué in a river-faring yacht or sorcerer-nagual in a white Chevy van- have crafted for us a plausible cover story for a profound philosophical intent: the existential domain of pure freedom and some signposts on reaching it along the way. And for voracious readers accustomed to disappointment in each year's harvest of new books, it's gratifying, even nourishing, to encounter Pirsig and Donner/ Castaneda again, emerging from that time warp absolutely untainted by the new age narcissistic excesses of the 1980s and the profound uncertainties of the 1990s and bearing messages worth heeding.

-RICHARD LEVITON

Autumn 1992

How Like an Angel Came I Down: Conversations with Children on the Gospels By A. Bronson Alcott, introduced and edited by Alice O. Howell; Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, NY, 1991; paperback.
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.