Book Reviews

Surviving Suicidal Ideation: From Therapy to Spirituality and the Lived Experience
Gina Cavalier and Amelia Kelley
West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation, 2024; paper (274 pp.) and e-book, $19.95.

Mental health issues, including suicidal ideation, are rarely discussed in spiritual circles. Conversely, discussion of spiritual issues is often omitted when addressing mental health issues, including suicidal ideation.

Yet the literature regarding spirituality and mental health supports the need for combining the two. The website of the McLean psychiatric hospital observes: “Spirituality is a deep well upon which many people draw in times of crisis, unrest, or personal challenge. It reinforces inner peace and provides a sense of connection to a force greater than ourselves . . . Research shows that spirituality can benefit both the mind and the body.”

The value of a spiritual connection cannot be understated when addressing mental health. Surviving Suicidal Ideation weaves mental health and spirituality in a manner that is both supportive and surprisingly engaging, given the seriousness of the topic. The book is written collaboratively by Gina Cavalier, who shares her personal experiences with suicidal ideation, and Dr. Amelia Kelley, who shares strong clinical perspectives on the topic. The book is clearly written and easily understood. Cavalier’s drawings illustrate the book’s topics and share her own journey from suicidal ideation to strength and resilience. Cavalier also addresses her own spiritual growth based on her understanding of the teachings of the eighteenth-century visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, and she shares quotes from his work throughout.

The book provides encouragement, understanding, and awareness for those who are struggling with suicidal ideation and those whose loved ones are struggling with this problem. It includes exercises, journal prompts, and meditations focused toward healing and resilience, incorporating an opportunity for personal reflection and practice.

The book focuses on three main components: the five phases of suicidal ideation; the five phases of healing from suicidality; and the five phases of forgiveness. Each section delves into both the personal and the clinical, juxtaposing Cavalier’s story and Kelley’s clinical perspectives. Swedenborg quotes, journal prompts, exercises, and meditations facilitate the exploration of each phase. The book also includes a personalized safety plan for individuals experiencing suicidal ideation.

The five phases of suicidal ideation, according to the authors, include contemplation, hopelessness, despair, intent, and action. Each phase is discussed both from Cavalier’s personal experience and Kelley’s clinical perspective. The authors address topics such as the myths that surround suicidal thoughts, self-injury and its relationship to suicide, trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder, addiction, depression, poverty, men and suicide, and soldier suicide.

While readers may feel overwhelmed with the somber weightiness of these topics, Cavalier and Kelley find a balance between addressing them appropriately and focusing on the hope and resilience that develop through the healing process. They normalize the feelings and thoughts one might experience in each of these areas.

The authors skillfully guide the reader from an understanding of suicidal ideation to the healing portion of the journey. As in the other chapters, Cavalier’s personal experience blended with Kelley’s professional knowledge lay the foundation for the discussion. The five phases of healing include realization, clarity, motivation, resilience, and confidence. Each section is discussed in detail and, as in the previous chapter, allows for personal exploration and practice.

This chapter is followed by one entitled “Trailheads for Healing,” focusing on finding a “trailhead”: the beginning of a path toward healing. Kelley discusses three-evidenced based therapeutic modalities: dialectical behavior therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and internal family systems therapy. Noting that healing looks different for every individual, she honors alternative methods: “Complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs) are methods Gina used when overcoming trauma and suicidal ideation, including massage, cold plunges, breathwork, acupuncture, tai chi, and even something as simple as drinking green tea. If something is complementary, it is done in conjunction with other care (such as psychotherapy), whereas if it is alternative, it is in lieu of it.”

The chapter continues by highlighting several CAMs. Kelley also addresses the issues experienced by an empath or highly sensitive person who is healing from suicidal ideation, citing the need for setting boundaries.

The authors include a chapter exploring the spiritual principles that were essential for Cavalier as she walked her healing path. These principles include the connection between the soul and the body and all that it entails (including an afterlife) as well as the energetic component of the physical body and chakra balancing to overcome suicidal ideation. The discussion emphasizes that the individual is much more than the physical body.

Cavalier and Kelley usher the reader from healing toward forgiveness, a topic with which many individuals struggle. The authors cite a Berkeley study saying, “Forgiveness is a conscious, deliberate decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they deserve your forgiveness.”

Kelley reminds us that the path of forgiveness is not a linear one, but movement on this path is positive and helpful. She describes the five phases of forgiveness—recognition, deeper awareness, personal choice, the work phase, and release—and their value for the healing journey. Cavalier identifies forgiveness as her “superpower.” This chapter provides the reader with both a metta (compassion) meditation and a ho’oponopono forgiveness practice inspired by the Hawaiian Huna tradition.

Interestingly, the book ends with a “forward” from both authors as they encourage the reader to continue the healing journey, recognizing that movement forward is a new beginning for one who has experienced suicidal ideation. Cavalier discusses finding Swedenborg and the messages that sustained her throughout her journey. She writes, “My desire to live a whole life became more substantial than my desire to die.”

Surviving Suicidal Ideation is a wonderful book for both professionals and nonprofessionals who wish to combine spirituality with a strong clinical perspective.

Barbara Hebert

Barbara Hebert, former president of the TSA, is a licensed mental health professional.

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Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 4: Philosophical Topics
Conceived and Introduced by His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Edited by Thupten Jinpa
Somerville, Mass.: Wisdom. 617 pp., hardcover, $29.95.

Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, the monumental series conceived by the Dalai Lama, concludes with the publication of volume 4: Philosophical Topics. The first two volumes are dedicated to science, while the next two volumes are dedicated to philosophy. (Volume 1 was reviewed in Quest, summer 2018; volume 2, in Quest, summer 2021; volume 3 in Quest, fall 2023.)

An integral part of any teaching is, in addition to study, how to integrate it into our lives. The understanding gained through study must translate into guiding our actions by that understanding. This fourth volume has selected key topics with that goal in mind. Many topics could have been included, but this volume focuses on six vital aspects.

The first part, “The Two Truths,” deals with reality, indicating that the way things appear to us is not the way things truly are. The second part addresses the important debate about the concepts of self and no-self.

The next two parts are titled “The Yogacara Explanation of Ultimate Reality” and “Emptiness according to the Madhyamaka Tradition.” These discuss the two major strains of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. The Yogacara (or Yogachara) school belonged to the Buddhist masters Asanga and Vasubandhu; it focused on understanding the nature, structure, and functions of consciousness, while the Madhyamaka was driven by Nagarjuna and his philosophical heirs. It emphasizes the Buddha’s teaching of the “middle way,” which, according to this school, entails a denial that things have any inherent nature at all.

Part 5, titled “Buddhist Logic and Epistemology,” discusses questions on nature and the limits of knowledge. The final part, titled “Denotation and the Exclusion Theory of Meaning,” looks at the philosophy of language, specifically how language relates to the world. For example, when we say “cow,” what does that actually mean? Is there a real cow, an image, or some “universal cow that is instantiated in all particular cows”?

Buddhist philosophy primarily engages in a search for the way things are in the ultimate sense. What is the motivation for this activity? It is to free ourselves from suffering (dukkha) and help others to do the same using meditative concentration and contemplation. It delves into the causes of suffering, examination of mental afflictions and their rising, and what causes “contaminated actions.” Ignorance arises because we don’t clearly understand the difference between conventional reality and ultimate reality.

This volume explores this issue in great detail. Vasubandhu states in his Treasury of Knowledge:

If something is no longer cognized
When it is broken or mentally separated apart,
Like a pot or water, then it is conventionally existent
What other than that is ultimately existent

What does this mean? Conventional truth relates to phenomena that, if broken or split up, are no longer cognized as such by the mind that apprehended it. The important point is that when an object such as a pot is broken, the mind that perceives it as a pot is broken as well. The same is true if a pot is analyzed cognitively, into the phenomena of touch, taste, smell, and so on.

By contrast, ultimate truth refers to a phenomenon that, if broken or mentally split up, continues to be cognized as such by the mind that apprehended it. Examples here are “directionally partless particles” and unconditioned space. Furthermore, the Sautrantika school defines “ultimate truth” as relating to “that which is ultimately able to perform a function” as opposed to that which is “ultimately unable to perform a function.” This is merely a miniscule glimpse into the depth of discussion of this topic from different schools and scriptures in this volume.

The volume also discusses the issue of “self” versus “no-self.” The non-Buddhist schools postulate a Self—atman—that has three characteristics: it is eternal, unitary, and indivisible. Buddhist schools reject such a notion.

The chapter on “Non-Buddhist Assertions of the Self” discusses various justifications for existence of self. For example, the Vedanta school teaches: “The essential nature of the self, or Brahman, is posited to be eternal, unitary, consciousness, the source of elements such as earth, the basis of the first arising and of the final dissolution of the world and its inhabitants, omnipresent and nondual.”

The Buddhists refute this idea from three levels: (1) refutation of a permanent, unitary, autonomous self; (2) refutation of a substantially existent, self-sufficient self, and (3) refutation of an inherently existent self. The first two points appear in Vasubandhu’s Treasury of Knowledge and its commentaries, and the third appears in Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Treatise on the Middle Way.

The argument goes this way: if the self were permanent and not dependent on conditions, then who creates karma and who experiences results of the karma? Since the self cannot be seen apart from its aggregates (mental factors), it cannot be unitary. To say that the chapters on “Buddhist Proofs of Selflessness” and “Repelling Objections to No-Self” are compelling and exhaustive is an understatement!

A section on sources and additional notes is a pathway to further investigations into these profound selections. My Zen teacher used to urge us to assimilate teachings into our blood. The Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita contains 9,000 verses, and it is said that experiencing just one of these is enough. Volume 4 of this series provides ample opportunities to take such a journey.

Dhananjay Joshi

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Education without Fear and Comparison
Vicente Hao Chin Jr.
North Caloocan City, Philippines: Golden Link College; 209 pp., paper, $14 plus shipping. For ordering, go to publishing@goldenlink.ph.

Teaching is my inner calling. I come from a family of teachers. I remember holding my grandmother’s hand, walking with her to her class of elementary children, and how they gathered around her, smiling. I learned from her how to bring joy to a class. Every time I start a new class, my first sentence is, “Let us find joy in learning.”

So you can understand my excitement when I received Vic Hao Chin’s book, which talks about nurturing individuals and giving them an understanding of human nature. It is a transformative approach.

After my detour from being a teacher for thirty-plus years of working in industry, I went through a certification curriculum to become a high-school teacher in America. The state of Illinois has teaching standards for areas such as content knowledge, learning environment, student management, and professional conduct and leadership. Chin discusses the missing ones, such as self-awareness, self-mastery, self-development, human relationships, and meditation.

The principles discussed in this book have been in place for more than twenty years in schools established by the Theosophical Society in the Philippines, with the main campus being the Golden Link College in Caloocan City. As of 2020, there were six such schools in five cities.

In these schools, the key driving element is character building that is not based on fear, competition, or ranking. There is no punishment for making a mistake. The school is a community where everyone respects everyone. The canteens offer healthy vegetarian food.

Education at any level is also about building relationships and resolving hurdles, academic and emotional. “The Golden Link schools, therefore, incorporate lessons in self-transformation in their curricula—how to eliminate fears, resentments, hatred, depression, anger, and similar distressful coping behaviors,” writes Chin.

It is not my intent to compare these methods with education systems in more developed countries. In America in the seventies, I was personally involved in an innovative engineering education program. The curriculum involved self-mastery: students studied core engineering principles on their own and passed assessment exams designed for mastery without ranking or punishment. Projects were designed to teach teamwork. It was a precursor to education for the twenty-first century. A reader of this review can understand my passion, then, about Chin’s book.

He poses a fundamental question: why do we send children to school? Why aren’t schools a source of wisdom and enlightenment? He asks the reader, “If you had the power to mold your children into anything you want them to be, what top five qualities would you like to see in them by the age of 40?” One can guess most of the answers: have a stable income, be responsible, have a happy family, and so on. Chin asks, how about happiness?

The answer is, of course, a resounding yes. But are our educational systems designed to teach children to become happier people? Chin wonders how many of us have used a quadratic equation after leaving school. (The math teacher in me paused for a second! A course in trigonometry replaced by a course in serenity 101 or introduction to integrated vision?)

Chin acknowledges that such systems exist in other parts of the world, with examples being Montessori, Theosophy, Waldorf, Summerhill, and Krishnamurti schools. The country of Bhutan aligns its national educational goals with its national goal: gross national happiness (GNH) rather than economic progress.

The twenty-four chapters in this book cover topics like understanding human nature, the goals of education, character building, life aspects of education, teacher training, and intelligence. This book explores areas we may not have thought much about as educators, and Chin nudges us to do exactly that. His approach brings a wholesome energy and balance to the classroom.

Two chapters in particular touched me to the core. The chapter “Difficult Children” talked about “resolving the root cause and not suppressing the symptom.” If children are violent, there is a reason. I taught in a school where instances of violence caused frequent lockdowns. My approach to violence in class was to only offer patient love. Nothing else would have worked. At the end of the year, a student left a tiny note in my mailbox that said, “Thank you for not giving up on us.”

The second chapter that drew me was “The Regular Practice of Silence.” We are driven by deeper layers of consciousness rooted in our conditioning. The capacity to be in touch and aware of our inner being must start at a young age, before even more conditioning builds up. A regular practice of silence for young children helps them become aware of their emotional, mental, and bodily inclinations. It teaches them to respond to their inner voice. True satisfaction lies in the ability to respond to life in that manner. It need not be a formal meditation practice, but can be a skillful journey into silence guided by the teacher in the classroom. Chin provides practical instructions akin to guided meditations that can be easily used in this context.

The principles invoked in this book are global in nature and offer a real ability to transform. The teacher in me is saying, “Thank you for your teaching.”

Dhananjay Joshi

Dhananjay Joshi is a professor of statistics and has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. His book No Effort Required; No! Effort Required contains anecdotes from his years of spiritual study.

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What I Don’t know about Death: Reflections on Buddhism and Mortality

C.W. Huntington Jr.
Somerville, Mass.: Wisdom Publications, 2021; 167 pp., paper, $16.95.

Death would seem to be the greatest human mystery, although it appears to be only a bit more mysterious than life. C.W. (Sandy) Huntington Jr. acknowledges that in the first sentence of his book: “I know next to nothing about death.”

 Written during the six months Huntington had left of his life after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in January 2020, this book is his final gift to those of us who are left pondering the meaning of life and its end, death. “Science can tell us a great deal about dying and death from an objective point of view but nothing at all about what it means to directly face one’s own imminent demise,” he writes.

Huntington grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and attended Michigan State University. He earned his PhD in Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. Living in India from 1976 to 1979, Huntington studied with the teachers Ambika Datta Upadhyaya and Ram Shanar Tripathi. He traveled to India many times in his life, taking students in his Buddhist studies program (first at the University of Michigan and Denison College, and then to Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York), to experience that country.

The life of the Buddha and the nature of the spiritual path are the subjects of the beginning chapter of Huntington’s work, in which he notes that the spiritual path is often rooted in discontent, as was the Buddha’s. When the questions loom large in our minds, the search for answers begins. Most of us seek to know why. How can we attain happiness? The search is often a struggle to find the meaning in what confronts us in life, and “how ultimately futile our struggle for control” is.

Some people are critical of Buddhism’s seeming obsession with death and dying, which, as Huntington observes, sees “spiritual work as preparation for death . . . obvious in the case of the Tibetan Book of the Dead,” in which “the message is communicated . . . throughout Buddhist teachings, where meditations on death are commonplace.” But there likely is no more profound teacher of suffering and the way out of suffering than being given a terminal diagnosis of a “dis-ease,” as Huntington terms it in the chapter of that title. Wanting life to be other than it is brings on suffering “whenever our experience runs counter to our desires. What I don’t get what I want, or when I get what I don’t want, I become restless, worried, fearful.”

That reminds me of the phrase in a song by Sheryl Crow: “It’s not having what you want; it’s wanting what you’ve got.” That’s true even if what you’ve got is a terminal diagnosis. This quality—wanting nothing more than what you are given—is called desirelessness in Buddhist philosophy, as Huntington notes as one of the lessons of living and dying. It’s the only way out of suffering.

Huntington explores waking up and what it means as we move through life seeking enlightenment, which more often than not eludes us. His chapter on “A Pathless Land” also discusses waking up. We try too hard to attain enlightenment, which is our greatest impediment: “The harder I twist and pull, the tighter the knot gets. At some point my only choice is to give up trying to not try.” Does waking up (enlightenment) come gradually, through our own efforts, or in a sudden insight? He quotes J. Krishnamurti, who said that “‘truth is a pathless land’ . . . some problems will not yield to rational analysis, so there are skills that cannot be learned by mastering a formula.”

While most of Huntington’s insightful book is focused on the basics of the Buddhist philosophy of living, including nonattachment, equanimity, and desirelessness, ultimately one must learn to let go. “Letting Go” is his final chapter, both literally and figuratively. “I am dying, and what I don’t know about death has become a metaphor for what I don’t know about life. As I’m compelled to give myself over to this darkness of unknowing, I’m finding a new and deepened understanding about what it means to come to terms with what I’ve been given—with what Buddhism calls the ‘suchness’ (tathata) of things.”

Learning nonattachment and the practice of letting go is a lifelong effort, but one that finally gives us the peace and courage required to die. As my late partner, Brent, said to me in one of his last lessons to me: “Dying is easy; it’s living that’s hard. Dying is so easy.”

Huntington died on July 19, 2020, at 1:45 p.m., says his epilogue. “It was an entirely quiet passing. He simply let go.”

Clare Goldsberry’s latest book, The Illusion of Life and Death: Mind, Consciousness, and Eternal Being, was reviewed in Quest, spring 2022.

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