Book Reviews

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.

This remarkable book of Bronson Alcott's “conversations with children on the gospels” is edited and abridged from two volumes originally published in 1836 and 1837. Nevertheless, it reveals Alcott as nothing less than a depth psychologist 150 years ahead of his time, a perennial philosopher par excellence.

Alcott was a Transcendentalist who contended that “besides the combative Catholic and Protestant elements in the Churches, there has always been a third element, with very honourable traditions, which came to life again at the Renaissance, but really reaches back to the Greek fathers, to St. Paul and St. John, and further back still.”

This “third element” is the ageless wisdom that lies often obscured at the center of all the great religious and philosophical traditions both Eastern and Western. It is the Theosophy re-presented by H. P. Blavatsky later in the nineteenth century, and re-presented again by Aldous Huxley in The Perennial Philosophy. It comes to us in many garbs, in many times and places, but its core element remains always the same.

As Alcott wrote, this is 

... a spiritual religion based on a firm belief in absolute and eternal values as the most real things in the universe –a confidence that these values are knowable by man– a belief that they can nevertheless be known only by wholehearted consecration of the intellect, will, and affect ions to the great quest –an entirely open mind towards the discoveries of science– a reverent and receptive attitude to the beauty , sublimity and wisdom of the creation, as a revelation of the mind and character of the Creator –a complete indifference to the current valuations of the worldling.

Alice O. Howell, an analytical astrologer and counselor who has taught Jungian analysts, has provided a splendid introduction to this book.

The free-ranging conversations in Alcott's class were not scripted; he said on the first day of his class that he did not know what he would say, nor the children what they would say, but that something wonderful, wise, new, and fresh may come up. And many wonderful, wise, new, and fresh things did indeed come up. The depth of these children’s responses to their reading of the life of Christ is a marvel, evoked by Alcott's genuine interest in the children and his willingness not to impose an understanding on their reading of the life of Jesus and the values by which we seek to live our lives in response to that exemplary life.

The Alcott book is a wonderful companion to Robert Coles' The Spiritual Life of Children. Coles, too, recounts his own conversations with children on spiritual matters, revealing a depth of insight by young people of which adults today are largely unaware. More than a century and a half after Alcott, Coles has, like Alcott, made himself a real friend of children, someone to whom they can truly express themselves, revealing the feelings and thoughts at the very center of their experience of life.

-WILLIAM METZGER

Autumn 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

Unconditional Life: Mastering the Forces that Shape Personal Reality

by Deepak Chopra,
M.D.; Bantam, 1991.

Deepak Chopra, described in a recent issue of Publishers Weekly as one of the most popular practitioners and authors in the “wholeness school of health,” assumes in Unconditional Life a positive attitude that does not discredit other approaches to the treatment of disease processes and patients' various health complaints.

Chopra's fields of medical practice are alternative medicine and endocrinology. He maintains that complete healing depends upon the individual's ability to “stop struggling.” This is exemplified throughout the book, which in essence is a collection of narrative passages taken from case histories of his own patients and some of his colleagues' patients. One anecdote flows casually into another, frequently with dialogues on the mind-body approach which Chopra applies to his cancer patients, patients with so-called incurable diseases or injuries, and others suffering from personality problems.

Aside from his medical training, Chopra is a highly perceptive and not ably sensitive practitioner who feels the pain of his patient s and empathizes with their reactions to their own suffering. The reader gets the feeling that Chopra suffers along with his patients, yet exhibits control over each conference-room interaction. His writing is lightened and enhanced by frequent quotations from great literary figures of the past such as Tagore, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Tennyson, Frost, and Yeats.

Having grown up in New Delhi and having been educated in both India and the United States, Chopra is able to apply both Eastern and Western modes of healing and of interrelating the healing of the emotions and the spirit with the restoration of physical well-being or improvement of status.

Chopra recommends meditation to his patients, and he himself practices Transcendental Meditation. He states that in English the “classic description” of meditation is in the writings of William Wordsworth in poems such as “Tintern Abbey.” He attributes the healing of many patients to their having engaged in meditation over a period of years. He finds that in addition the showering of “loving attention” on a wound, even for muscle regeneration, can bring astonishingly favorable results.

Chopra devotes sufficient space to the Bhagavad-Gita to introduce the central dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna to Westerners unfamiliar with this classic, and to define significant Sanskrit terms. He devotes a passage to yoga as one means to search for the knower and to become liberated from pain and suffering. Chopra is cognizant of the problems that people in the Western world have in accepting such ideas as that there is life in everything. His own explanation is that the same stream of life once flowed through every thing. Thus, we should not be skeptical about mysterious forces functioning in healing.

Always, to Chopra, the patient is capable of making a choice. Through exercises, patients can learn to control their thoughts of fear and anxiety, so that they concentrate on the space between thoughts and seeing past their problems. Early in his practice, Chopra began to observe in his office patients in whom physical and mental states had become severely “disjointed.” This fragmented state, says Chopra, seems to be best alleviated through the use of meditation. He continually accepts pain and suffering as real, stating that many of his patients have been to other doctors before being referred to him and have been subjected to negative approaches to health care.

Readers should find this book fascinating and will gain new insight into disease manifestations and the alleviation of pain and suffering. It is rare to find a book on the subject of disease written in lay person terms throughout that is also compelling from beginning to end.

-MARY JANE NEWCOMB

Winter 1992

The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentary on the Therigatha

by Susan Murcott
Parallax Press, Berkeley, CA, 1991; paperback.

Susan Murcott turned to Buddhism in adulthood because, she says, the Christian tradition in which she had been raised did not affirm that women could attain the highest religious truth, nor did it give women equal opportunity to serve as priests and teachers. When Murcott came across a 1909 English translation of the Therigatha by Caroline Rhys Davids in the library at the University of Melbourne, she realized that she had found a feminist spiritual treasure. The Therigatha is a collection of seventy-three enlightenment poems written by Buddhist nuns of the sixth century 8.C.E., contemporaries of the historical Buddha. It demonstrates, Murcott says, “that women have the capacity to realize and understand the highest religious goals of their faith in the same roles and to the same degrees as men.”

Murcott's translation from Pali into contemporary English and her commentary on the Therigatha were clearly both, as she says, “a labor of love” and a powerful feminist statement. In Buddhism, Murcott notes, women have the right to form celibate communities, teach, be ordained and ordain, preach, and gather disciples. In the opening chapter, Murcott recounts that Ananda had to ask the Buddha three times to permit women to join the sangha. However, in granting them permission, Buddha affirmed that women as well as men can “realize perfection.” or attain supreme enlightenment. Thus from the beginning, Murcott says, the Buddhist tradition acknowledged that women and men were “spiritual equals.”

Murcott's study of the poems is not simply a translation of text from one language to another. Rather it is a transference -an attempt to communicate to Western readers the sense and the spirit of the poems. Unlike the original manuscript, in which the poems were arranged according to the number of stanzas (Murcott says this arrangement was probably a mnemonic aid when the poems were part of the oral tradition), the poems are grouped into chapters based on the roles and relationships of the women. Murcott surrounds the poems with biographies and stories about the women to whom the poems are attributed, drawn from a fifth-century commentary to the Therigatha.

In the chapter “Friends and Sisters,” for example, Murcott tells the story of Vijaya, a woman from a humble back ~ground who became a nun because her dear friend Khema had become one. In the poem attributed to her, Vijaya recounts a night during which she left her cell “four or five times,” unable to achieve “control over mind.” Finally she sought the help of another nun, who taught her “the faculties, the powers, the seven qualities of enlightenment and the eightfold way.” Following her sister-nun's advice, Vijaya returns to her meditation, until she achieves at last the “peace of mind” she had been seeking:

In the first watch of the night,
I remembered I had been born before.
In the middle watch of the night,
the eye of heaven became clear.
In the last watch of the night
I to re apart
the great dark.

Vijaya's poem is thus a testimony to both a woman's capacity to achieve enlightenment and to the importance of other women as teachers and helpers on the spiritual path.

Perhaps the most dramatic and arresting poems in the book are contained in the chapter “Prostitutes, Courtesans, & Beautiful Women.” In her introduction to the chapter, Murcott recalls the long tradition of tension between male celibate monks and beautiful, sensual women. Early Buddhist art, Murcott says, contains many images of women as temptresses, who represent the world of sexuality, birth, and rebirth, through which a renunciate monk must pass before reaching enlightenment. However, the poems collected in this chapter stand this cliché on its head. Here the beautiful women speak for themselves and recount their own struggles to transcend the realm of samsara and reach ultimate spiritual development.

One of the most powerful poems expressing this theme is attributed to a prostitute named Vimala. In it, she recounts her transformation from a stance of egoism and anger to one of renunciation and true freedom:

Young
intoxicated by my own
lovely skin…
I despised other women.
Dressed to kill…
I was a hunter
and spread my snare for fools…
Today'
head shaved,
robed,
alms-wanderer,
I, my same self,
sit at the tree's foot;
no thought.

Murcott's book will be appreciated by Buddhist women and, indeed, by all people on a spiritual path. The emotional clarity and intensity of these songs of enlightenment is truly timeless. Reading them is to feel an overwhelming sense of kinship and sister hood with women seekers who have gone before.

-BRENDA ROSEN

Autumn 1992