Other Worlds, Other Beings: A Personal Essay on Habitual Thought
By Lathel F. Duffield, with Camilla Lynn Duffield
New York: Vantage, 1998, Paperback, xxii + 90 pages.
The ways we perceive and think about the world around us and the "other worlds" that are the object of religious concern depend crucially on the assumptions with which we view them. Many of our assumptions arc modeled by the language we speak (a proposition advanced most notably by the Theosophist Benjamin Lee Whorf and therefore known as the "Whorf hypothesis"). In the West, the dominant set of assumptions are "mechanistic," but the author proposes that another set of assumptions is also available, based on the concept of "numen," a spiritual power inherent in things, and calls for an integration of these assumptions.
-J.A.
March/April 2001