Quest Magazine

The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah: Recovering the Key to Hebraic Sacred Science

By Leonora Leet
Rochester VT: Inner Traditions, 1999. Paperback, xiv + 459 pages.

This is the second volume of a projected four-volume set attempting to reveal the esoteric foundation of Kabbalah in sacred geometry, Pythagorean thought, and Gematria. Leer explains that the secret "doctrine of the son" is the central salvific belief of Jewish esoteric ism: "the central mystery of the son, as of the cosmic process, has ever had hut one meaning, that  ultimate unification of the human and divine that could effect both the personalization of the divine and complementary divinization of perfected humans." She also claims to have come up with a kabbalistically derived geomentric matrix of all known subatomic particles that makes a major contribution to quantum physics. Leer relates her work to everything from Om to the Big Bang. Whether or not you are convinced by her arguments, you cannot but: he impressed by her intellect.

How Like an Angel Came I Down: Conversations with Children on the Gospels By A. Bronson Alcott, introduced and edited by Alice O. Howell; Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, NY, 1991; paperback.

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 Eight Gates of Zen: Spiritual Training in an American Zen Monastery

by John Daido Loori
Dharma Communications: Mt. Tremper, New York, 1992; paperback.

If you still don't know what Zen is, it's your own fault. Library shelves are stuffed with books a bout Zen, and we probably don't need more of the kind that describe what Zen is. But a new kind of book has made its appearance in recent years and it is of equal or greater interest. That is the kind of book that reflects the actual experience of the first generation of Western Buddhist teachers. Such books are display cases for Zen students who have practiced for several decades, achieved some degree of spiritual realization, and have received Dharma transmission and permission to teach from their teachers. These books are valuable for not only the teaching we read but also for their tacit witness to the fact that spiritual attainment is still a reality.

John Loori has been a student of Taizan Maezumi Roshi of the Zen Center of Los Angeles for many years. He is now the teacher and abbot of his own monastery at Mount Tremper, in the Cat skill Mountains in southern New York. The Eight Gates of Zen is not a “this-is-what-Zen-is” kind of book but rat her is ostensibly a description of what spiritual t raining involves at a no-nonsense monastery run by a teacher who knows that Zen is a religious path and not a hobby. His monastery is hard to get into and the life there is challenging once one is accepted. For those who are accepted and who settle in for long-term practice, the monastery offers eight “gates,” or entrances into the spiritual life of Zen. These are Zen meditation (zazen), individual study with the teacher, liturgy, ethical and moral self-education, art practice, body practice, academic study of Buddhism, and work as spiritual practice. These approaches to, and expressions of, Zen are followed over ten stages, which Loori likens to the ten stages of the well-known “Ten Ox-herding Pictures.” The structure of the eight gates and ten stages, which includes the elaborate and rigorous koan study that is part of this form of Buddhism, leaves no doubt as to the rigor of practice at Mount Tremper.

But The Eight Gates of Zen is more than a mere description of the course of practice at one American Buddhist community, as interesting as that may be for students of religion , sociologists, and the like. Loori uses the structure of the eight gates as a device for exploring and commenting on the importance and relevance of each of the eight gates from the perspective of his own under-standing. To mention just three of the gates, I find that he speaks convincingly of the necessity of liturgical practice, academic study of Buddhism, and moral and ethical grounding. This is particularly important because Americans (and perhaps Europeans) who follow Buddhism are, as a group, abysmally ignorant of the teachings of Buddhism, and don't see the relevance of bowing, chanting, and other practices. They do not practice Buddhism as a spiritual path and often lack authoritative guidelines for conduct. It is little wonder that fundamentalist Christian preachers see Zen as cultlike and a refuge for hippies.

Another area of discussion that will interest members of the Buddhist community is that of the nature of monk and nun practice and its relationship to lay practice. Loori insists on making a sharp distinction between the two forms of practice, observing correctly that in our culture we don't really know what a Buddhist monk or nun is, with the result that in many communities, “monks” have families, work in the secular world part or full time, accumulate property, and so on, so that beyond the robes that they wear, they are indistinguishable from lay students. Loori makes the distinct ion and discusses the importance of both kinds of practice and their interdependence.

Still, Loori's permitting couples to live together or at least have a physical relationship as long as the couple does not have children, leads me to question whether he has completely settled the question of what a monastic is as opposed to a lay person. Should renunciation of worldly cares and attractions be extended to the greatest of all distraction s and attract ions? Is sex incompatible with a true commitment to a spiritual way? (Ancient Buddhism thought so.) Is the traditional Buddhist negative attitude towards sex simply outmoded and irrelevant today? And if it is all right to have a satisfying sex life, why can't one also own a Mercedes? Eventually the American Buddhist community needs to settle this issue.

Loori 's book will be of interest to American Buddhists and to scholars and professionals who are interested in American religion. The book is well written and produced, thanks both to the literacy of the author and the excellent editorial work by Bonnie Myotai Treace and Conrad Ryushin Marchaj.

-FRANCIS DOJUN COOK

Autumn 1993

A Secret History of Consciousness

By Gary Lachman
Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books. Paperback, xxxv + 314 pages.

Gary Lachman, whom many readers of The Quest will recognize as a contributor to this magazine, is at once a highly successful popular musician, a much published writer, and a serious student of psychology and philosophy. It is in the last capacity that he has produced this ambitious and wide-ranging work. A Secret History of Consciousness is both a history of consciousness and a history of ideas about the history of consciousness.

The history of consciousness takes us back to the Paleolithic emergence of a distinctive human mode of awareness. The history of the history of consciousness presented here offers an admirable mix of philosophers usually considered mainstream, including Kant, Hegel, James, and Bergson, together with others, such as Steiner, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, and Blavatsky, often put into a special "esoteric'' category. Lachman's way of enabling representative's of the two sets to dialogue with each other is one of the great strengths of this work; we do not understand consciousness so well that we can afford to neglect any significant perspective on it.

Theosophists will be particularly happy to see that this study is highly appreciative of Helena Blavatsky's importance in that conversation, presenting her work as the first major post-Darwinian response to nineteenth-century scientific materialism. Her picture, often mythopoeic, of convergent physical and spiritual or "consciousness" evolution, showed how the sterile impasse of religious and scientific dogmatism could be transcended through reference to an ancient wisdom in which mind and matter coexist and evolve together.

It is jean Gebser (1905-1973), however, who is the culminating figure in this book and clearly the scholar with whom Lachman feels the deepest affinity. In Gebser's view of the history of consciousness, archaic magical and mythical ways of thinking "mutated" into a "mental-rational" structure and finally are reaching an "integral" stage. We are now transiting into integralism, in which all previous modes of consciousness will be brought together more perfectly than before. Amid the tension of change, however, there is always the danger of “atavistic" relapse into modes of consciousness whose time is past, which is what Gebser saw happen around him as perverted forms of magic and myth returned in Europe in the form of fascism and other antirational ideologies. In passing, it may be noted that Gebser was highly regarded by Theosophical intellectuals such as Fritz Kunz well before he became the widely recognized thinker he now is.

A Secret History of Consciousness is highly recommended to all serious readers of philosophy and intellectual history.

-ROBERT ELLWOOD

March/April 2004