Quest Magazine

The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness

Richard Smoley
New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2015. 164 pp., hardcover,
$16.95

With The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness, Quest editor Richard Smoley has created what most writers dream about: an accessible book that will make a difference for a long time to come. If you’re a spiritual writer, you might even go as far as thinking, “Why didn’t I write this book?”

Forgiveness may seem simple, but the hurts, resentments, and grievances we hold on to and the complex psychological, emotional, and social reasons behind them are anything but simple. Smoley assures us that there is something each and every one of us can do
about it if we are willing to forgive and be more forgiving. He tells us forgiving will make our lives freer, better, and more creative, and we in turn will also be forgiven. Smoley shows how often we identify with our hurts and grudges, believing that holding on to them is of value to us, or protects us in some way. But, he stresses, it is in our own best interest to forgive. Only in this awareness
can we become more fully present in our lives and useful to ourselves and humanity.

With his literate and fluent discourse, Smoley may even be creating a new language of compassion, awareness, love, and peaceful coexistence. Smoley does not ignore or minimize the horrors and sufferings of the world. Time and again he examines and writes with originality and depth about difficult subjects and illuminates them through his clarity of thought. As he navigates through difficult waters touching on deep historical grievances, he shows us how such grievances can be used to manipulate groups and nations.

During the twentieth century, many lives were shattered by two major wars, racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and displacement. As I have learned from my own experience of working with Holocaust survivors and their testimonies, the events of the last century have left permanent scars on many psyches. In the aftermath, how individuals have dealt with forgiveness—in the many forms forgiveness can take—has been partly responsible for how they lived the rest of their lives. Consequently it has also affected the lives of their children and grandchildren.

More recently, as Smoley points out, after the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, the South African government explored a new model of justice. With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission the world was able to hear the grievances and testimonies of victims, as well as requests for amnesty by some of the perpetrators of atrocities. The terrible bloodbath that was predicted by many did not happen. Smoley discusses this and other historical examples “because they illustrate on a large scale what forgiveness may accomplish.”

On the spiritual dimensions of forgiveness, Smoley observes, “We as humans can forgive sins or debts that are owed to us personally. But it seems to be true that we can only receive total forgiveness from a higher level of consciousness and being than we are used to in daily life. We often identify this higher level with God.” Whether that is a more personal form of God, as it is for some, or impersonal, as it is for others, is left up to the individual to determine. Smoley, who is no stranger either to the Eastern or to the Judeo-Christian traditions, believes “that forgiveness can be offered and received in a much wider range of contexts than many religions teach.” He opens the door of forgiveness for people of all faiths and also for those who are atheist or agnostic.

The Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah speaks of Hesed, or “mercy,” and Gevurah, or “severity,” and says they need to be kept in balance. It’s important to be generous, giving, and even indulgent, but there comes a time to exercise boundaries and draw the line. As Smoley writes, “Keeping these in balance is crucial to any mature and decent life.” We often make the mistake of thinking that forgiving something means condoning it, and therefore we are not willing to forgive. But a refusal to forgive does not bring about justice, and forgiveness on a personal level doesn’t mean letting people trample on you, nor does it even necessarily mean forgive and forget. You may remember, but you can still be free of the anger and resentment that initially came with the hurt.

The author of The Deal offers a way of life that is more empowering and freer of grievances over our own mistakes and shortcomings as well as the trespasses of others. In my opinion, one of the best arguments this rare book makes is that “your actions today will have consequences far beyond those you may have expected, and they will benefit and heal, not only yourself and the people you have thought of, but many others you do not know and may never even meet.”

In today’s commercial culture, in which almost everybody is caught up in the frenzy of getting a great deal, forgiveness could, as Smoley claims, be the best deal of your life.

Adelle Chabelski

The reviewer is a translator and human rights advocate. She was historical adviser and interviewer for two award-winning
documentaries, one on the former Soviet Union and the other, produced by Steven Spielberg, entitled Survivors of the Holocaust.

Beyond Mindfulness: The Direct Approach to Lasting Peace, Happiness, and Love

STEPHAN BODIAN
San Bernardino, Calif.: Waterfront Digital Books, 2014.
136 pp., paper, $9.99.

We live in a world of benefits. With everything we do, we want to know: what will I gain from it? But spiritual practice does not talk about benefits. The Bhagavad Gita says, take action but do not expect any fruits. My revered Thai Buddhist teacher told me, “Your job is to only practice.” My Zen teacher threatened to hit me thirty times if I asked once more about benefits.

So I am a little leery when spiritual approaches are compared in terms of their benefits. Dilution of spirituality scares me. Mindfulness practice is getting more attention than any other meditative approach today. The popular show “Sixty Minutes” aired a segment on a three-day mindfulness retreat attended by the television anchor Anderson Cooper. California’s Spirit Rock Meditation Center offers on-line courses on the subject. Companies like Google hold conferences on it that are attended by thousands of employees. Of course, this could not happen if people did not feel some benefits in their day-to-day lives.

Mindfulness practice is a continued attention to the arising and passing away of experiences at all levels of sensation and feeling. It is said to lead to a penetrating insight into the impermanent nature of the material world. Mindfulness retreats allow one to delve deeply into the “sure heart’s release” from suffering. Seeing things as they are from moment to moment, and not as we want them to be, is the key. In addition to reducing stress, offering relief from depression and anxiety, and creating more harmonious relationships, mindfulness practice has been shown to change the brain in significant and positive ways. The therapeutic benefits for chronically ill patients have been proved by research papers. 

Stephan Bodian, author of Meditation for Dummies and former editor-inchief of Yoga Journal, is a well-known meditation teacher. In this book he points out that mindfulness practice has its pitfalls. The practice can become laborious and stagnant, and one may start to look for more spontaneous ways to be present. The practice of deliberate attention may introduce a new type of ego identity as a detached observer, giving one a sense of separateness. One may also use mindfulness to avoid or suppress uncomfortable emotions, so that it turns into a kind of escape from life’s challenges. Instead of using penetrating insight towards a deeper understanding, the practice turns into a sort of addiction (not a bad one to have, but an addiction nonetheless!). Bodian argues that these obstacles can stop you from experiencing abiding peace, spontaneity, freedom, and authenticity. 

The next natural step after mindfulness, Bodian says, is “awakened awareness.” In the Buddhist tradition, it is called “True Self” or “Big Mind” or “Clear Light.” Here is the big difference, as Bodian sees it: awakened awareness is not a state of mind, because states of mind come and go. Awakened awareness abides all the time.

The author uses two terms in this regard: “ground of awareness” and “awakened awareness.” The ground of awareness is the openness in which everything arises (somewhat like your computer screen). Awakened awareness
dawns when you realize that this ground awareness is your natural state. That is what you truly are. This is your background of everyday living, unchanging and self-sustaining. 

The key attributes of living with awakened awareness, as Bodian describes them, are: no sense of center, periphery, or self; no sense of separation between self and others; an awareness that everything is perfect and meaningful just as it is; the absence of effort; responding only to the situation at hand; and, finally, an experience of mystery beyond description.

There is a paradox here. How can you become what you already are? If awakened awareness is your natural
state, then why do you need to approach it? The answer is that you continue to suffer because you do not consciously recognize that you are this awareness. Awareness has to awaken to itself.

Basically the author makes this distinction: mindfulness emphasizes objects of awareness; the “direct approach,” as he calls it, emphasizes the ultimate subject, awakened awareness itself. The book includes a chapter devoted to practicing awakened awareness in everyday life. Suggestions include spending time each day sitting quietly; enjoying your time with loved ones; spending time away from digital devices; and finding time away from e-mail and social networks to be still. These guidelines brought a smile to my face as I wondered what the ancient teachers would have thought of them.

The Upanishads taught this perennial truth: I am That (aham brahmasmi). The Vedantic teachings concern the
ultimate identity of the individual soul with the Supreme Soul. Vedanta is intended to enable the seeker to have
the direct experience of his or her true nature, and it holds that each and every one of us is qualified to have that highest illumination, if we are willing to put forth sincere and intense effort. J. Krishnamurti spoke about “choiceless
awareness.” Is this any different from what Bodian is talking about? I ask the question under the eternal threat of
thirty hits from my Zen teacher.

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for the past forty-five years. He is a regular contributor to the Indian periodical Lokmat.

Taking the Adventure: Faith and Our Kinship with Animals

GRACIA FAY ELLWOOD
Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2014. 236 pp.,
paper, $21.60.

In 1906, with the publication of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, the American public was appalled to learn that its meat industry was a filthy and cruel enterprise. Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent Eating Animals shows that little has changed since then. Other books, such as Diet for a Small Planet and The China Study, present compelling evidence that a carnivorous diet is unhealthy for both us and the planet. Yet we continue to consume everincreasing
amounts of animal flesh, approximately 125 pounds per person annually in the United States.

In Genesis 1:28 we read the cultural mandate familiar to many: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (King James Version). Does this mean that mankind has the God-given right to enslave, torture, and slaughter all nonhuman beings of the earth as it sees fit? Or does it mean that we are to cherish, love, and respect all of God’s creatures?

Through a deft interweaving of thirty short essays, author and educator Gracia Fay Ellwood strongly asserts
the latter interpretation. 

Calling upon diverse sources from literature, philosophy, behavioral science, and religion, Ellwood argues that there is no one single answer to the question of why we continue to eat more and more animal flesh, but that there are several psychological, cultural, religious, and economic factors that must be taken into consideration. One is the psychological gap that separates humans from animals. In chapter 2, “The Great Wall,” she likens contemporary society to a medieval walled fortress, with humans on the inside and animals on the outside:

What, after all is it that makes us human beings think ourselves to be the sole bearers of intrinsic value, distinguished as the only proper inhabitants of the charmed circle? . . . Animals have central nervous systems; they show signs that they dream; they communicate by sounds and gestures; they suffer; they enjoy. When we perceive that the wall was not created by God or Natural Law, but by human beings, it follows that to confine, harm, or destroy the bodies of creatures that have these capacities—that have their own point of view—is real violence against them. From their point of view it is slavery and murder. They have opinions which deserve to be heard and weighed.

The reader is then introduced to another key player in the game: the unquenchable greed of the corporate farming industry and its necessary by-product, forced ignorance on the part of the consumer. Brand names like "Sunny Farms" and "Orchard Gardens" and terms such as "cage-free" lead us to believe that we are purchasing cruelty-free, earth-friendly products, when in fact these labels are as misleading as the signs above several of the Nazi concentration camps that read "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work makes free"). We are led to believe, by slogan and by cutesy drawings, that by spending a few pennies more we are contributing to a sustainable, compassionate world, when in fact these designations are as chimerical as their names are fanciful. In chapter 10, "The Foul Stable," we read:

Many readers will already be aware of how much worse the situation is in present-day animal-slave operations:crowded reeking mega-sheds virtually never cleaned out, imprisoning thousands or hundreds of thousands of wretched, immobilized chickens and pigs and calves with ammonia-burned lungs, never free of pain and never seeing sunshine until they are dragged out to be killed.

Ellwood’s Taking the Adventure: Faith and Our Kinship with Animals draws heavily upon parables of ancient and modern worlds to illustrate her invitation to veganism. From the Bible and the writings of Lucretius to The Hobbit, A Christmas Carol, and The Chronicles of Narnia, among many others, the author invites the reader upon a great adventure. Not merely the adventure of giving up meat in our daily diets, but to the greater adventure of realizing that all beings, both animal and human, are imbued with the Divine Breath of God. As Annie Besant wrote: “O hidden light, shining in every creature. . . . ”

It is an adventure well worth taking.

Paul Topping 
The reviewer is a linguist and language researcher residing in New York City, where he leads the local TOS Animal Healing Circle. He is vegan.

Revolutionaries of the Soul: Reflections on Magicians, Philosophers, and Occultists

GARY LACHMAN
Wheaton: Quest, 2014. x + 214 pp., paper, $19.95.

Compilations of essays don’t always make for satisfying reading. Linked together in book form, the content can seem inconsistent, patchy, or repetitive. However, this book is a triumph, with a strong identity of its own, even though the essays were all individual articles, written for different publications over a period of fifteen years or so. Lachman brings them together in a coherent whole, creating a kind of portrait gallery for us, like a sequence of stained glass windows in a dignified old manor house. Each window tells a story, and Lachman makes sure that there is a story to tell, as he leads us from one luminary to another. The range is wide, within the esoteric field: Dion Fortune, P.D. Ouspensky, C.G. Jung, and Éliphas Lévi, to name some of the better-known figures, and Jean Gebser, Jan Potocki, and Owen Barfield as examples of those less well-known, but—as Lachman points out—deserving a more prominent place in history. Take the gallery tour; you’ll enjoy it.

Each chapter left me eager to start another encounter with these “revolutionaries of the soul.” It’s also a book that you can dip into, one that you can read in any order you want to, or enjoy making your way through steadily, from start to finish. On nights when I couldn’t sleep, it was my favorite reading—although I did avoid chapters involving black magic and suicides at those times!

Lachman’s great strength is that he gives us the person as well as his or her lofty or spiritual ideas. His aim is not to debunk when he reveals that Manly Palmer Hall was addicted to doughnuts and Ouspensky to alcohol, or that James Webb, author of The Occult Underground and other works, was arguably psychotic; he shows us that great teachers and thinkers struggle as we do with the pressures of life, and sometimes do remarkable things against the odds of their background, their constitution, or the difficulties that confront them. If we fail to accept that great teachers have foibles, we risk deifying them—and that can be very dangerous, for all concerned. I therefore appreciated the author’s way of describing his subjects with humor and affection, as well as paying tribute to their achievements. Sometimes his style is a little light or casual, but it is always engaging and genuine.

He also discerns the remarkable influence that some of these characters have had on mainstream culture, which is not always acknowledged. Ouspensky, he points out, directly helped to shape ideas in the poems of T.S. Eliot and the writings of J.B. Priestley. Manly P. Hall’s admirers included astronaut Edgar Mitchell and politician Harry S. Truman—along with Elvis Presley! I have a keen interest on how the esoteric meets the outside world, and influences the course of everyday life. (In my book Explore Alchemy, I have written about how alchemy influenced the composer Monteverdi, changing the course of music in the Western world.) Lachman helps to bring esoteric teaching out of the shadows, where it has often been considered unacceptable territory for academics to enter.

I can’t say for sure whether Lachman has included much new research. I had just finished reading Joyce Collin-
Smith’s autobiography, Call No Man Master, which talks in detail about James Webb, and I couldn’t find much additional material in Lachman’s essay “The Strange Death of James Webb.” I didn’t find that a problem, though, as he has the gift of bringing the person to life, and through his eyes I could see Webb more clearly. The only essay where he fails to do that, in my view, is the one on Julius Evola, a figure who comes across as more remote and less interesting. And, inevitably, some research will have moved on since Lachman wrote his original articles. “Colin Wilson and Faculty X” was published in 1995, and ideas on brain function and consciousness, as expounded by Wilson, surely need reevaluating in the light of current research.

But these are slight drawbacks, and the way in which Lachman includes his personal experiences (wryly describing a time when he considered Aleister Crowley “cool”) and face-to-face interviews (as with Owen Barfield) ensure that the studies are fresh and intriguing.

Lachman’s book is a welcome addition to my shelf, and one that I shall be dipping into for years to come, when I want a digestible approach to Swedenborg, an anecdote about Mme. Blavatsky, or a crystalline portrait of Rudolf Steiner. He has done a good job, benefiting all of us.

Cherry Gilchrist

Cherry Gilchrist is the author of a number of books including Explore Alchemy and The Tree of Life Oracle. Her article “The Open Secret of the Esoteric Orders” appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Quest.