Quest Magazine

A Mythic Life, by Jean Houston; HarperCollins, New York, 1996; hardcover, 340 pages.

Peripheral Visions, by Mary Catherine Bateson; HarperCollins, New York, 1994; hardcover, 243pages.

The Way of the Explorer: Art Apollo Astronaut's Journey through the Material and Mystical Worlds, by Dr. Edgar Mitchell, with Dwight Williams; G. P. Putnam: Sons, New York, 1996; hardcover, 230 pages.

All three of these books present what could surely be called mythic lives. All three authors have ranged in their lives across expanses of experience decidedly uncommon in one life.

Jean Houston's career has ranged over psychology, philosophy, anthropology, the new physics, and embodied all of these interests in explorations of human potential. But she is perhaps best known as an extraordinary storyteller in workshops and mystery schools aimed at transforming participants' lives.

Mary Catherine Bateson is a professor of anthropology and English and a prolific author, another profound storyteller who writes movingly of the effort to "construe continuity" in a life that may appear extraordinarily diffuse and scattered in its explorations.

Former astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell's life, beginning on a Texas ranch during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, included training at MIT, walking on the moon, and then exploring the outer dimensions of human consciousness.

Mythic lives, all.

Mitch ell begins his tale this way: "In January of 1971 I boarded a spacecraft and traveled to an airless world of brilliant clarity. The soil there is barren and gray, and the horizon always further than it appears. It is a static world that has only known silence. Upon its landscape human perspective is altered."

By the end of the first page he makes the key point of his book: "What I experienced during that three-day trip home [from the moon] was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of universal connectedness."

A visionary moonwalker, he went on to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which under the direct ion of Willis Harman has become the leading institution in the exploration of consciousness. Mitchell's book is an adventure across space and deep into inner space culminating in his declaration that the gods of the mystic and the theologian have been too small. "They fill the universe. And to the scientist, all I can say is that the gods do exist. They are the eternal, connected, and aware Self experienced by all intelligent beings."

Mary Catherine Bateson's stories draw on experiences living in many cultures Israel, the Philippines, Iran, America. She promotes the idea of lifelong learning and, in a delightful chapter called "Construing Continuity," speaks of how in looking back over a life of seeming discontinuity one can discern or at least "construe continuity."

She writes that:

Often those who have made multiple fresh starts or who have chosen lives with multiple discontinuities are forced by the standard ideas of the shape of a successful career to regard their own lives as unsuccessful. I have had to retool so often I estimate I have had five careers. This does not produce the kind of resume that we regard as reflecting a successful life, but it is true of more and more people, starting from the beginning again and again. Zigzag people. Learning to transfer experience from one cycle to the next, we only progress like a sailboat tacking into the wind. (p.82)

We can, she says, write the story of our lives as continuity or discontinuity. One version of the truth, she says, is that "Everything I have ever done has been heading me for where I am today," and the other version is "It is only after many surprises and choices, interruptions and disappointments, that I have arrived somewhere I could never have anticipated."

Those who have participated at one time or another in one of Jean Houston's workshops will already have heard some of the stories in her book. But all of them bear "rehearing" in this summation of her life to date. Perhaps we should say" lives to date," for Houston's life is characteristic of Bateson's description of the wide-ranging life. From the Hollywood of the forties, where Houston's father Jack was a writer for many of the great comedians, to travels to many countries, to the Parliament of Religions, to the United Nat ions, Jean Houston's life is rich with stories

. All three of these authors, by taking readers on their own mythic journeys, show how to draw out the mythic strands in our own lives.

-WILLIAM METZGER

Autumn 1996

The Ultimate Maze Book

by David Anson Russo
Simon &Schuster, New York, 1991; paper.

Labyrinths are big things these days. A number of recent books have treated walking labyrinthine patterns as a spiritual exercise or have considered the patterns as symbols of our experience of and in the world.

Labyrinths, also called mazes, are of two basic sorts: unicursal, in which a single, undeviating path without options leads through the intricate windings of the pattern; and multicursal, in which a number of paths branch off from each other, offering sets of alternatives, not all of which may lead to the desired end. The term "labyrinth" is sometimes restricted to the unicursal variety, although that may also and less ambiguously be termed a "meander." Multicursal labyrinths are also called "mazes."

The Ultimate Maze Book is about multicursal labyrinths, which are often used as puzzles-frustrating or entertaining, depending on their complexity and the solver's ingenuity, Mazes are of several types, depending on how they are made: turf mazes, hedge mazes, toy mazes (games in which one rolls a little ball through the passages in a glass-topped box), and paper mazes, This book consists of 39 full-page colored maze diagrams on paper that the reader can try to solve. Even the simplest are fiendishly difficult for the tyro. Working mazes is like solving crossword puzzles: it takes talent, experience, and an obsession to finish the task.

The mazes in this book can also be regarded as works of art, for most could be hung on the wall as decorations. Or alternatively they could be used as objects of contemplation, like yantras. Spiritual exercises need not be very far from art and entertainment, for the world, as the Hindu sages tell us, is a game, a divine lila.

There are significant differences between the unicursal meander and the multicursal maze. One may be a gender link, with women preferring the meander, and men the maze. Or they may correspond with different psychological types: the meander with security-seeking introverts and the maze with chance-taking extraverts. Or perhaps they symbolize two spiritual experiences: the meander the certainty of our higher selves, and the maze the confusion of the personalities.

The two forms of the labyrinth certainly differ in their philosophical implications. For the meander proclaims that we will all reach the goal, not all at the same time, but all with the same assuredness. The maze offers no such guaranty. You enter it at your own risk and take your chances.

This book offers many hours of play and contemplation with chance-taking confusion, but no danger if you hit a dead end.

-JOHN ALGEO

Summer 1996

God Talks With Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita. Royal Science of God-Realization

by Parahmahansa Yogananda
Self Realization Fellowship, Los Angeles, 1996; Two·volume slipcased hardcover, 1,224 pages.

This monumental translation and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, by one of India's illustrious saints, breaks new ground as a revelation of its deepest spiritual, psychological, and metaphysical truths.

One of the most beloved of India's sacred texts, the Gita is considered to embody the essence of the four Vedas, 108 Upanishads, and six systems of Hindu philosophy. A pivotal episode of the great Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, the Gita takes place on the eve of a cataclysmic war in ancient India. Allegorically depicting the moral and spiritual struggle that leads to God-realization, it presents a dialogue in which the Lord Krishna, symbolizing the omnipresent Spirit, imparts counsel to the warrior-prince Arjuna, the soul.

In an illuminating commentary, Yogananda explores the science of yoga encrypted in the Gita, its time-honored tradition of meditation, and the way this ancient discipline makes possible the direct experience of God. In simple but eloquent language, he sets forth a sweeping chronicle tracing the soul's journey to enlightenment. He considers issues of great interest today, including the origin, evolution, and nature of the cosmos; karma and reincarnation; the phenomenon of death and life after death; and the eternal laws of righteousness. Extensive footnotes show striking correlations between the Vedic view of reality and the discoveries of modern science, as well as parallels between the teachings of the Gita and those of the Bible.

Born in northern India, Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952) lived and taught in the United States for more than thirty years, after coming here in 1920 as India's delegate to an international congress of religious leaders. His landmark Autobiography of a Yogi, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, is widely regarded as a spiritual classic.

A preliminary serialization of his translation and commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita first began appearing in 1932 in Self-Realization Fellowship's magazine. Toward the end of his life, Yogananda devoted considerable time to revising and expanding this work, and gave instructions to two close disciples regarding editing and annotation for eventual publication in book form. His complete translation and commentaries are now available for the first time in this elegantly designed and illustrated edition, which includes a 37-page index and twelve original color paintings by contemporary Indian artists.

-JUDITH CORNELL

Summer 1996

A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science

by Michael S. Schneider
HarperCollins. New York, 1994; xxxii +352pages; hardcover.

Number symbolism and mysticism are pervasive in the world's cultural traditions. In the West, the Pythagoreans and the Kabbalists have provided two major approaches to the meaning of numbers; while the East has its own numerological traditions. The symbolism of numbers is also a major concern of Freemasonry and of modern Theosophy. From H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, with its preoccupation with number symbols in the Stanzas of Dzyan and explications of them, to the writings of later Theosophists like Claude Bragdon, who integrated art, architecture, and mathematics, Theosophical literature has treated numbers as emblems of the timeless wisdom.

A Beginner's Guide is an eclectic survey of the symbolism of numbers one through ten as (according to the blurb on the dust jacket) "a wisdom neither ancient nor New Age but timeless." Its author, Michael Schneider, is a mathematics teacher who "designed the geometry harmonizing the statues at the entrance to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City." He writes in the grand tradition of mathematicians who have perceived their calling as all art of order and a yoga of understanding.

In his introduction to the book, the author distinguishes between secular mathematics (which is what is taught in schools and used in ordinary applications), symbolic or philosophical mathematics (which is the main subject of this book-a view of numbers as an expression of the order of creation), and sacred mathematics (the use of numbers to raise consciousness from mayavic to the Real, from the phenomenal to the noumenal, from the typical to the archetypal). It is the possibility of the last that is the real fascination of the study of numbers.

The body of this well-illustrated and clearly written book is divided into ten chapters, one for each of the first ten numbers, 1 to 10. One misses a chapter on zero, mystically or sacredly speaking the most important of the numbers and one of considerable value even in secular mathematics (try multiplying or dividing LClX by XXXlI to see how important 0 is). However, the chapter on I includes the circle, which overlaps the symbolism of zero.

The book includes a wealth of topics related more or less closely to numbers: mandalas, the ouraboros, the geometer's tools, Mobius strips, checkerboards, the vesica piscis, the principle of the arch, primary colors of pigments and light, labyrinths, the Orphic Egg, the Platonic solids, the Golden Mean (also rectangle, triangle, and spiral), the Fibonacci Series, Escher illusions, the Zodiac, Stonehenge, the musical scale, the electromagnetic spectrum, chakras, the Rainbow Bridge to Valhalla, ziggurats, the caduceus, mitosis, the I Ching, the DNA molecule, lunar phases, the enneagram, the Otz Chiim, the tetraktys, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Here indeed is God the Geometer's plenty.

It is said that the gods created the universe by numbers. And if each of us is a creator in training, then the title of this attractive, entertaining, and informative volume suggests it is a handbook for future Dhyan Chohans, or universe-creators. Studying the book mayor may not prepare readers to construct a universe. It will, however, tell them much about the inner side of numbers and open their eyes to the rich symbolism of mathematics and geometry.

-JOHN ALGEO

Summer 1996