Quest Magazine

When Oracles Speak: Understanding the Signs and Symbols All around Us

By Dianne Skafte
Wheaton. IL: Theosophical Publishing House, Quest Books, 2000. Paperback, viii + 279 pages.

We tend to believe what we believe. But when we suspend belief and disbelief and become open-minded, then we may hear when oracles speak. Dianne Skafte invites us, in her beautifully written book When Oracles Speak, to rediscover some of the myriad gifts of open-mindedness, some ancient and archetypal, others intimate, affirming, guiding, and inspiring. Being open-minded, we are openhearted. Being openhearted we become more vulnerable, yet also more empathic, caring, and therefore wise.

When our hearts and minds are open to the world, we become present in our being to all beings. This is when we can hear the oracles. As Skafte writes, "Oracles are more awesome than everyday events but far less awesome than mystical raptures. Perhaps they form a contact point between heaven and earth."

She goes on to show how we can make this connection between heaven and earth through the oracles, for our own good and for the good of all. But if the good of others does not eventually become foremost in our lives, we will mistake the voice of the oracles for our own.

This is a providential book in these chaotic and troubling times, giving comfort and security to many and guidance toward spiritual affirmation and rediscovery of the gifts of life that are transformative of us as individuals and as a species.

For over 90 percent of human existence, we were gatherer-hunters, intimately connected with the powers of the phenomenal, natural world. This included the kingdoms of mineral, plant, and animal, as well as other kingdoms that shaped our psyches as we evolved. We are all disoriented in an increasingly dysfunctional society that severing our sacred connections with these Powers, and destroying the natural world-our ground of being and becoming.

This book is an antidote to the extinction of much of what has made us human and what it means to be human. To Western rational materialists, this book will be incomprehensible nonsense rather than a well-researched psycho-historical cross-cultural treatise on the subject of oracular communication, divination, and communion.

A book like this, that advances our development and evolution by facilitating our "understanding the signs and symbols all around us," is one antidote that I would prescribe for all.

-MICHAEL W. FOX

January/February 2002

Ed. Wendy Doniger
Springfield. MA: Merriam-Webster, 1999. Hardback, xviii + 1181 pages.

One-volume encyclopedias of religion appear to be a new growth industry. This addition to the field is of a quality associated with the distinguished Merriam-Webster imprint. It has a list of 37 scholarly advisors and authors. It is extensively illustrated with black-and-white pictures, two-color maps, and inserts of full-color plates. It consists of two kinds of articles. Approximately 3500 basic articles vary in length from a few lines to a few pages each; 30 major articles on principal religious traditions and themes run from four to thirty pages. Variant names, spellings, and pronunciations are given, including both those favored by scholars and popular Anglicized ones when they exist.

The entries are readable, informative, clear, engaging, and impartial, although inevitably not always thorough. An instance is the article on "Theosophy." It surveys Western theosophical traditions from Pythagoras to the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and Eastern ones from the Vedas to Sufism, giving an accurate overview of some of the characteristics those traditions have in common.

The article's description of the early days of the modern Theosophical Society is fair but has a major lacuna at the time of the .Judge split. Its account of the Society in America thereafter deals solely with the Judge branch, overlooking the reestablishment of Adyar lodges throughout the United States and thus failing to give an adequate picture of American Theosophy after 1895.

The article gives, however, an accurate assessment of the influence of Theosophy on religious thought, which has been far greater than is often recognized, although it overlooks Theosophy's effect on literature, art, and music. It begins by saying that the Theosophical philosophy "has been of catalytic significance in religious thought in the 19th and 20th centuries" and concludes:

The influence of the Theosophical Society has been significant, despite its small following. The movement has been a catalytic force in the 20th-century Asian revival of Buddhism and Hinduism and a pioneering agency in the promotion of greater Western acquaintance with Eastern thought. In the United States it has influenced a whole series of religious movements.

This encyclopedia is a good one-volume source for information about general religious topics and compares favorably with its chief competitors: The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (1995), The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (1997), and The Perennial Dictionary of World Religions (originally Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions, 1981).

-EDITOR

January/February 2002

By Rudolf Steiner
Intro. Robert Sardello. Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophical Press, 2001. Paperback. 141 pages.

In five lectures, delivered between 1912 and 1921, Steiner takes on the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, first through a reworking of some of their famous case studies and second through a remodeling of this material in terms d his own spiritual psychology. He critiques Freud for his focus on the sexual etiology of psychic illness and critiques both Freud and Jung for stressing the hothouse experience of "transference" as the touchstone of the analytic process. The problem with transference, with its intense activation of childhood Oedipal material that gets projected onto the analyst, is that it allows the analyst to enter psychically into and thus alter the karma of the analysand. Transference is thus an alien power.

Steiner proposes instead a procedure that allows us to distinguish between unconscious (pathological) projections and genuine clairvoyant visions by using the individual will to see if the particular vision or symptom can be dissolved by a concerted mental action. If it cannot be expunged, then it is not a symptom or projection, but objective and a product of higher dimensions of reality than those admitted by psychoanalysis.

Steiner's anthroposophic framework reverses the psychoanalytic understanding of the causal relation of external wound to internal symptom by arguing that we are self-causal before an external symptom is manifest. Only clairvoyant consciousness, not free association combined with libidinal cathexis, can open out the driving forces of the unconscious and liberate them for growth. To accomplish this opening and liberation, we are asked to envision an internal "artificial human being" who stands for the deeper causality behind our triumphs and failures. Once we see that this higher being has actually directed our lives, we can grasp the roles of karma and self-causality, which this artificial human being represents, in making us well and ill. That is, things do not just happen to us; we have directed (caused) them.

Steiner gives a fairly good account of the post-life realms of kamaloka and devachan. The former realm is the first that the soul encounters after the loss of the physical shell and is actually an externalization of our unprocessed internal projections, which are seen in kamaloka (the desire realm) as having objective reality. The subsequent realm of heaven (devachan) allows us to shed our projections and become immersed in the deeper reality beyond projection. In our clairvoyant consciousness, we can allow aspects of these realms into our psyche in the physical realm and thereby gain a more objective understanding of our current, past, and even future lives.

In a deeper and more genuine dialogue between spiritual psychology and psychoanalysis, we must go far beyond Steiner's caricatures of the founders and find room for phenomena he seems to he afraid of, namely, denial, negative transference (like his toward Leadbeater and Krishnamurti}, sexual stasis, and even esoteric projection. His lectures represent a one-sided approach that refuses to engage in the often distasteful work of probing into the shadow and the other non-self-caused aspects of the almost infinite unconscious. In this book, Steiner is as much a polemicist as a genuine explorer. I wish he had been fairer to his honored interlocutors, yet this is a beginning, and one that should be acknowledged for what it has accomplished.

-ROBERT S. CORRINGTON

January/February 2002

The Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism: The Gem Ornament of Manifold Oral Instructions Which Benefits Each and Everyone Accordingly

By H. E. Kalu Rinpoche
Ithaca. NY; Snow Lion, 1987, c1999. Paperback. xlv + 193 pages.

Kalu Rinpoche, born in 1905, after many years teaching in Tibet became senior lama of the Karma Kagyu lineage. In 1955 he was sent to India and Bhutan to prepare for the anticipated exodus of Tibetan refugees. In 1971, he began visiting the West to teach. The teachings in this book were delivered at a meditation retreat in Marcola, Oregon, in 1982, and present an overview of Tibetan Buddhism.

The author explains the three ways of Buddhism--Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana--and the ordinary preliminary practices of contemplating the "four thoughts that turn the mind." These are appreciation of the precious opportunity human birth provides; the fact of impermanence and change; the karmic causality between actions and experience; and an awareness of suffering. He gives an explanation of taking refuge in the Dharma (teachings), Sangha (Buddhist community, especially enlightened bodhisattvas), and Buddha, and of the difference between lay vows, the Bodhisattva vow, and the Vajrayana commitment.

The book provides a "big picture" view of Tibetan Buddhism accessible to those with only passing familiarity with the subject. A helpful glossary ends the book.

-MIKE WILSON

January/February 2002