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

Gnostic Christians . . .castigated the orthodox for making the mistake of reading the Scriptures-and especially Genesis-literally, and thereby missing its “deeper meaning.” Read literally, they said, the story of creation made no sense. [Here follows a recounting of absurd statements in Genesis. S.A.H.] Certain gnostic Christians suggested that such absurdities show that the story was never meant to be taken literally. . . .These, gnostics took each line of the Scriptures as an enigma, a riddle pointing to a deeper meaning. Read this way, the text became a shimmering surface of symbols, inviting the spiritually adventurous to explore its hidden depths, to draw upon their own inner experience-what artists call the creative imagination-to interpret the story (pp. 63-64).
The repression of the creative imagination, recognized by the late C. G. Jung as one of the great shortcomings of orthodox Christianity, did not begin with Augustine in the fourth century, but much earlier with Irenaeus, Tertullian and other anti-Gnostic fathers. In the hands of the orthodox, the myth of Genesis logically leads to the unfortunate conclusions which Pagels deplores, while in the hands of the Gnostic, the myth is turned into a revelatory instrument of self-knowledge. One cannot escape the impression that Pagels neglected to draw the kind of conclusions from the above recognitions which naturally would suggest themselves. Would it not be more reasonable to say that the literal interpretation of Genesis, beginning in the earliest Christian times, and not the relatively late pessimistic theology of Augustine, was responsible for the loss of freedom-whether political, moral or imaginative-and thus for so many unfortunate conditions evident in our culture? It may be that the praise lavished on Prof. Pagels by the heterodox, and the criticisms directed against her by the orthodox in the wake of the publication of her The Gnostic Gospels have made her doubly uncomfortable and made her shy away from a more forthright thesis. While this may be regretted, her work in general is to be recommended.

-STEPHAN A. HOELLER

Spring 1989

OTHER PEOPLES' MYTHS: The Cave of Echoes, by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty; Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, N. Y., 1988; hardcover, 194 pages.

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty's new book Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes is a study of myths from both the West and the East that deal with the mysterious other. According to O'Flaherty, in myths of this type the other is usually represented by strangers, animals, gods, and children. In addition to what these stories tell us about the function of myth in general and about the beliefs of other peoples, O'Flaherty says: “But we also learn things about ourselves by studying these stories. For, as we progress, we may find that we are among the others in other peoples' myths.” O'Flaherty wants to use these myths to shake us, her readers, out of any complacent views we might bold regarding our so-called classical texts of Western civilization. And she goes further, suggesting that these much touted but rarely read classics are actually the texts of a small elite, not the general population. O'Flaherty is Mircea Eliade Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago and this book is, in part, a response to her colleague at the University of Chicago, Allan loom and his book The Closing of the American Mind. In that book, Bloom states his claim that we still have access to our classics, a point which O'Flaherty denies. She says: “We in the West tend to indulge in two different but related misconceptions about our own classics: we think that our classics are in a sense eternal-forever fixed, frozen in the amber of carefully preserved written documents-and that they provide a shared communal base for all educated members of our culture. But neither of these assumptions is true; our classics are not fixed and eternal, and all of us do not have access to them.” As a noted scholar of classical Indian texts (among her earlier books are The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology and Hindu Myths) Professor O'Flaherty is in a unique position to bring some new light to bear on the discussion of what exactly are the texts of Western civilization. Along the way she offers challenging insights and tells some truly wonderful stories. For instance, she takes the reader into the intricate world of Indian myths about sacrifice (both animal and human) and uses these myths to bring out the incongruity of the practice of animal sacrifice in Hinduism, a religion which advocates vegetarianism. She uses an old Hassidic tale about the circuitous fulfillment of a rabbi's dream to make one of her main points which is that reading other peoples' classics and myths will help us ‘re-vision’ our own classics and myths precisely because of their differences. In an earlier book, Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, O'Flaherty showed herself to be an adept interpreter of the mythologies of many people by exploring some commonalities in the myths of the ancient Indians, Greeks, and Celts. In this book, she not only attempts to integrate an equally diverse group of myths but to put them into a meaningful context for thoughtful readers.

-SERENITY YOUNG

Spring 1989

MANY MANSIONS: A Christian's Encounter with Other Faiths, by Harvey Cox; Beacon Press, Boston, 1988; hardcover, 216 pages.

There is a crisis in relations between the religious traditions of the world, Harvey Cox argues in his new book. The nature of this crisis is that “the universal and the particular poles have come unhinged.”
Faced with a world in which some form of encounter with other faiths can no longer be avoided, the ancient religious traditions are breaking into increasingly bitter wings. Those who glimpse the universal dimension advocate dialogue and mutuality. They search out what is common and that which unites. Those who emphasize the particular often shun dialogue and excoriate their fellow believers who engage in it more fiercely than they condemn outsiders.
“This ugly chasm,” Cox says, “runs through all religions, and is a source of considerable pain.” Though Cox counts himself as a universalist, he insists that both poles are needed. This book is his personal account of his own developing encounter with those of other faith traditions than his own Christian Baptist experience. Early in this account he is forced to confront his own ignorance about other traditions, and his own limited perspective on how dialogue ought to take place. For Cox, a theologian at the Harvard Divinity School, this was an often uncomfortable, even painful experience of self-discovery. Cox will be remembered by many readers familiar with his work as the author of The Secular City and a revised version of that early work produced many years later. More recent works include Feast of Fools and Turning East. In Many Mansions Cox offers a series of linked essays on dialogue among world faiths, “the Gospel and the Koran,” “Christ and Krishna,” “Buddhists and Christians,” and “Rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph.” From these interfaith dialogues he moves on to the question of dialogue between Christians and Marxists-including “the Search for a Soviet Christ.” He examines his own exploration of recent years into liberation theology. In a revelatory chapter on his own delving into Marx's ideas about religion, he finds that the often quoted line about religion as “the opium of the people” assumes a very different perspective when taken in the context of the whole passage in which it occurs. The complete paragraph in Marx is this:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
The sigh, Cox says, can be viewed as an expression of our deepest fear and pain. Furthermore, be writes, “Dorothy Soelle says in her book Suffering that a movement from ‘muteness’ to ‘lament’ is essential if suffering and oppressed people are to rise in protest and dignity.” Cox does not believe, as Marx did, that religion will die out; indeed he notes that there has been a resurgence in religion everywhere. What is demanded is that we take charge of that resurgence, that we shape it and reconceive it so that religions will “unite and enlarge us” rather than divide us and lead to self-annihilation.

-WILLIAM METZGER

Spring 1989

UNITIVE THINKING, by Tom McArthur; Aquarian, Wellingborough, Northants, 1988.

We think in grooves. We think in little grooves we call habit and conditioning and inclination. We think in bigger grooves we call education and folkways and mores. We think in even bigger grooves we call environment and heredity and human nature. Whatever we call it, much of our thinking is preprogrammed by earlier thoughts that we have had, or that others have had before us. Such thinking is not really ours. We are its. The metaphor of the groove suggests that we are following a path, perhaps a furrow plowed before by ourselves or by many others. However, as the groove of past experience becomes deeper and wider-as it changes from a furrow to a ditch, then a trench, a channel, a ravine, and finally a great canyon-something remarkable happens. We get so deep into the groove we and others have worn in the surface of the land that we can no longer see anything but the groove. The vast surface of the land, with all its glorious variety, stretching to the uttermost horizon, is beyond our ken. We see only the sides of the groove we have worn into the earth. And then, instead of its belonging to us, we belong to the groove. The comfortable, familiar path has become a prison, shutting us in. Much of our grooved thinking is in dualities. I and the other. Mine and not mine. Happy and sad. Helpful and hurtful. Male and female. Patriot and traitor. And so on through an infinite number of such oppositions by which we structure our everyday thinking-by which we wear our grooves ever deeper into the earth. Dualistic thinking is helpful sometimes. Indeed, it seems nigh inescapable. True, every pair of oppositions implies a third term that synthesizes the opposing thesis/antithesis and so resolves them. Thus “I” and “the other” are synthesized by “we”; “male” and “female” by “human”; and so on. But as soon as we have synthesized one pair of opposites, the synthesis calls forth its own opposition: “we” versus “they” and “human” versus “nonhuman.” And so duality reasserts itself. This continuous pattern of the reconciliation of opposites only to be followed by the re-establishment of a new dualistic opposition is called, in the philosophy of Hegel, the dialectic process. Grooved thinking is dualistic thinking. It is useful sometimes, but if we abandon ourselves to it we fail to see the landscape all around us. The sides of our groove become our only view. The great problem, however, is to get out of our groove without tumbling into another, and perhaps deeper, one. The problem is to reconcile the dualistic struggle of thesis and antithesis without generating a synthesis that will only provoke its own antithesis, and thus continue the process. We think in grooves. But we need not. Sages and saints throughout the ages have pointed the way to another kind of thinking -a grooveless, nondualistic thought process. That kind of thinking is the subject of Tom McArthur’s book, Unitive Thinking. It is an old subject, but in this book it is approached in a new and fresh way. Tom McArthur is an authority on communication and a lexicographer. He edits a magazine called English Today published by Cambridge University Press; he has written dictionaries and books about dictionaries; he is currently engaged in editing a new work, The Oxford Companion to the English Language; but he has also done books on yoga and the Bhagavad Gita. His integrated knowledge of linguistics, communication theory, and Eastern lore allows him to bring a new view to the old subject of nondualistic or, as he calls it, unitive thinking. McArthur begins with the ancient symbol of the yin and the yang as typifying all oppositions, all dualities. We may, he says, view them as exclusive choices: either yin or yang. Or we may rise above exclusivity and say we can, indeed must, have both yin and yang. But then we have a new duality: either-or versus both-and. How do we rise above, not just a particular pair of oppositions, but all duality? How do we come to unitive thinking about the world? McArthur answers:
You get this effect by rising above or distancing yourself from the first two options. Call it “transcending” them if you wish, or think of it as more elbow room, and a refusal to be limited by one vision of how things are. At this level of understanding one has, as it were, two visions. One can (at the very least) choose to go the way of division and either/or, or go the way of cohesion with both/and.
That is the secret -allowing oneself more elbow room. Accepting alternative views, as valid, recognizing that one can go in diverse ways, and doing what is most effective in any circumstance, without preconception about what is “best” in an absolute sense. What McArthur calls “more elbow room” others have called by other names. The modern sage Krishnamurti called it “choiceless awareness,” and in a statement known as “The Golden Stairs” it is called “an open mind.” It is refusing to be bound by the limitations of any one theory or view of life. It is realizing the truth of the culminating statement in The Messiah's Handbook from Richard Bach's Illusions: “Everything in this book may be wrong.” It is waking up from the sleep of ordinary perception, as the Buddha became awake to the infinite possibility of reality. It is leaving the groove to look at the landscape around. Unitive thinking involves respecting the differences we encounter in the world. Unitive thinking involves realizing the unity within ourselves and of ourselves with all others and ultimately with the All. The sense of separateness that divides us from others and that infernally fragments us is the illusory result of the limits we place on our thinking. In a sense, of course, we are separated; were it not so, the world would not be. But in another sense we are unified. Unitive thinking accepts both the separateness and the unity. McArthur refers to Unitive Thinking as a “how-to” book. And so, in a sense, it is. But it is no ordinary, no run-of-the-mill “how-to” book. Its central idea is that unitive thinking is possible for everyone who knows how to develop it. Its purpose is to show how to go about doing just that. Intellectually, the book ranges over Taoism, Kipling, Shiva-Shakti, yantras, maya, science fiction, time, Patanjali, the Bhagavad Gita, Plato, St, Thomas Aquinas, brain structure, metaphor, Darwin, Piaget, Maslow, Zen, Toynbee, cosmology, Pythagoras, Colin Wilson, Robert Pirsig, and a lot more besides. It distinguishes vertical from lateral thinking, and illustrates what the latter is by its own presentation. Its sweep embraces the wisdom of the ancients and the insights of the moderns -and it aims at making all that relevant to the here-and-now life of the reader. Each of the ten chapters of the book ends with a few pages of “follow-up,” which are puzzles, exercises, and applications of the concepts of the chapters. In one way, these follow-ups are the heart of the book. For they challenge the reader to come to grips with the ideas -not just as intellectual constructs, but as motivating impulses. Those who do these exercises will have their view of reality stretched and enhance their ability to climb out of the groove and see the landscape. Tom McArthur writes perceptively, and also clearly and entertainingly. The book is a lively presentation of vital ideas. This is no dry-as-dust academic tome. It has no jargon. It is simple, direct, and lively. But it deals with matters that are as important and weighty as any the human mind can wrestle with. The last chapter of the book concludes with a quotation from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that ends as follows:
If you're going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool.
A wise teacher in the last century wrote to a would-be student that to succeed, he was asked only to TRY. That's what Unitive Thinking is about -gumption and trying.

-JOHN ALGEO

Spring 1989

NEW WORLD, NEW MIND: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution, by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich; Doubleday, New York, 1989.

Have you ever wondered why it is that we humans spend more than a million dollars on an international effort to save three gray whales trapped in the ice, while we pay little or no attention to the fact that thousands of people die annually on our highways? Or that we spend millions trying to apprehend a small group of terrorists who highjack a cruise ship and kill a single passenger while paying little attention to the fact that more people die each day with handguns in this country than have ever been killed by terrorists? If these and similar anomalies puzzle you, you will find some possible explanations in New World, New Mind by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich. In exploring the origins of such cultural contradictions, these two eminent scientists have concluded that “The human mental system is failing to comprehend the modern world . . . because our nervous system evolved to select only a small extract of reality and to ignore the rest.” Because of the “evolutionary mismatch” between our “mental machinery” and the modern world, “many of the predicaments of our society come about from the way people respond to, simplify, and ultimately 'caricature' reality in their minds.” Pointing out that the human brain has evolved to respond to the immediate, the sudden, the different, and the obvious, the authors argue that it is not prepared to deal with the long-range, the subtle, and the similar. They claim “our brain is wired to respond to the bear in the entrance to the cave but not to the more subtle, long-range changes that could lead to nuclear war.” They compare our situation to the “boiled frog” syndrome-where a frog placed in a pan of cold water that is slowly heated will be unable to detect ,me increasing heat so that it will sit still until it dies. This mismatch is not limited to biological evolution. In their view, “Cultural evolution has not compensated for the baggage of an outdated human perceptual system.” Indeed, they argue that “Most of us fail to realize how the human outlook, designed by our heritage, actually obstructs understanding of humanity's increasingly precarious situation . . . there is no longer sufficient time to rely on the normal pace of cultural evolution to deal with today's dilemmas” (their emphasis). One of the authors' purposes is to help us understand the origins of our present limitations because only by recognizing “the fundamental roots of our many problems” can we resolve the “paradox that our minds are both bur curse and our potential salvation.” Almost three quarters of the book focuses on these limitations, with particular emphasis given to the limitations of what they refer to as the “old mind”-our brain, our nervous system and our senses. Highlighting the similarities between our brains and those of other primates, between human perceptions and those of the bee, butterfly, frog, and chimp, and between our nervous system and those of tasiers, frogs, chimps, an' cats, the authors conclude that our brain, like the brain of other animals, is primarily responsive to those things that we see or hear first hand rather than to evidence reported by others. A second purpose of the book is to propose a solution to the dilemmas which have resulted from these limitations. Pointing out that the rate of change has outpaced the ability of even cultural evolution to respond appropriately, they suggest that “The time has come to take our own evolution into our hands and create a new evolutionary process, a process of conscious evolution” (their emphasis). In spite of their belief “that the world is changing faster than people can adapt to it,” they conclude that “if we learn how we think, how our mind is structured, and how to overcome the innate limitations and biases of mind, we can to a significant degree, learn how to act on that knowledge.” They propose that we “reprogram” our mental routines to “create a new mind suited to the demands of the new world.” They call this new process “newmindedness.” Recognizing the influence that education has on the way people think, they propose a “curriculum about humanity.” Four themes seem to run throughout their proposed curriculum: “Adaptation to change must be the center of any new kind of teaching” (their emphasis); a need for the integration of all the knowledge that is being produced,” training in a “long-view, long-term understanding,” and finally, a need to “learn to depend on our instruments more than our gut feelings.” I must confess my ambivalence about this book. On the one hand, I was fascinated by the research studies on the brain and human perception which they describe. I also found their brief overview of biological and cultural evolution useful. Their perspective gives a sharp focus to our human tendency to caricature reality by responding to the immediate, the obvious and the personal, rather than recognizing the more subtle, long-range trends which, in the end could destroy us. As an educator, I appreciated their curriculum recommendations, finding them to be both provocative and appropriate. On the other hand, I have a fundamental problem with the narrow frame of reference from which the authors view the dilemmas which they address. Although they acknowledge that “Scientists’ penchant for simplicity. . .can lead the unwary old mind to inappropriate caricatures.. .” they have created highly selective and simplistic caricatures of both biological and cultural evolution. In short, they have reduced the vast, complex, multidimensional panorama of evolutionary history to the single dimensional caricature defined by a materialistic, empirical science. Although they call for a new way of thinking which incorporates the “integration of all knowledge that is being produced,” they have ignored substantial bodies of knowledge which would broaden their context, strengthen their argument and enrich their conclusions. For example, there is no evidence that they are even acquainted with the literature of the so-called “paradigm shift” which seems to be occurring in our culture. The work of thinkers and writers such as Alvin Toffler, Marilyn Ferguson, Fritjof Capra, and Willis Harman are not even mentioned in their rather extensive bibliography. There is no reference to the body of knowledge which has grown out of the human potential movement which focuses on the rediscovery of intuition, peak performance, creativity, higher consciousness, and the evolution of consciousness. I don't think the word “intuition” appears in their book. It certainly is not important enough to be listed in the index. The obviously relevant work of scientists like Karl Pribram, Rupert Sheldrake, Ilya Prigogine, John Eccles, and David Bohm is totally ignored. Finally, there seems to be no awareness of what Joseph Campbell called “the literature of the spirit,” those spiritual traditions whose perspectives reflect precisely the kind of newminded thinking which Ornstein and Ehrlich call for. While they recognize the potential of “the rational and the spiritual to support each other,” they are critical of those who use spiritual disciplines to “come to grips with the nature of their minds.” Unfortunately, their limited perspective precludes any comprehension of the multidimensional nature of the human mind or the potential depths of the human spirit. When they call for a “new” kind of conscious evolution, they seem to be unaware of the possibility that there may be deep and fundamental intuitive processes at work in the evolution of the human mind and spirit which, having brought us to this point in time, also have prepared us with precisely those cognitive, psychic, intuitive, and spiritual capacities required to address the global dilemmas which confront us. One consequence of the authors' limited perspective is that the reader is presented with many “half-truths” in the guise of THE truth. For example, in typical reductionist fashion, they often use the two terms “brain” and “mind” interchangeably. While they cite evidence which points to the limitations of the physical brain, they ignore equally substantive evidence which suggests that the potential of the conscious mind may be virtually unlimited. In short, they ignore the possibility that what the brain may not be “hard wired” to know, we nevertheless know intuitively. Preferring to rely on what they call “instrument flying” the authors apparently find it impossible to accept anything as scientifically unsound as “gut feelings.” Although they acknowledge that “the scientific method produces. . .an even more extreme caricature of the world than our normal one,” they seem unaware that by reducing reality to that which can be empirically measured, the extreme caricature of logical positivism may have done more to create our cultural dilemmas than the inherent limitations of the brain. There is ample evidence to support the view that both the wholistic, integrated, long-range, intuitive way of thinking and the short-range, fragmented, pragmatic way of thinking are equally intrinsic to our human mental equipment. In spite of what I perceive to be its shortcomings, I think New World, New Mind is important reading -especially for the skeptic who prefers “hard” evidence. Writing in the empirical tradition, these two scientists open up new vistas of possibility and thinking which are both necessary and useful. I think their case would be strengthened immeasurably if they were able to recognize that “newmindedness” may well be an evolutionary way of thinking whose time has come and that what Willis Harman calls a “global mind change” may already be well advanced. What they and we need to remember is that things are seldom “either/or,” but are usually if not always “both/and.”

-EDWARD T. CLARK JR.