Quest Magazine

Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness

By Robert K. C. Forman
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999. Paperback, x + 214 pages.

We are told not to judge a book by its cover, but what about its title? This title has everything. The author, Robert Forman, is an associate professor of religion at Hunter College and editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Thus he is no novice on the subject. In this volume he has combined published papers, lectures, and some original material to make an interesting but sometimes uneven read. Considering the difficulty of writing about mysticism, mind, or consciousness, perhaps asking for evenness is too much.

Recently books of this type attempt to quantify the mystical experience and then discuss it as if it were a subliminal science experiment. Even worse, quantum mechanics seems to be introduced so the mystical experience will sound up-to-dare. Being a scientist by profession, I find this to be a stretch in the wrong direction. Thankfully, Forman has simply given us a forthright approach. He not only covers the expected medieval mystics, but demonstrates his knowledge of ancient India and China. From his academic knowledge and personal experience, we get a well-balanced discussion of various schools of thought on the subject.

Forman argues that mysticism may not necessarily he formed by culture, language, and background knowledge. Instead, he indicates that mystical experiences are a direct encounter with our very conscious core. He reviews the well-known experiences that are commonly referred to as a "pure consciousness event." However, he favors a new type referred to as a "dualistic mystical state."

The preface says that "this book is the product of a lifetime." That is an interesting opening, but it is also literally the truth. Forman has been practicing a neo-Advaitan form of meditation twice daily since November 1969. Also, on extended retreats, he meditates six to eight hours a day. In doing so, he experienced what he calls the dualistic mystical state (DMS), defined as "an unchanging interior silence that is maintained concurrently with intentional experience in a long-term or permanent way." I interpret this to mean "in the world, but not of the world."

The DMS suggests Krishnamurti's experience. The biographies by Mary Lutyens again and again refer to what appears to be a DMS; for example, Krishnamurti: The Years of Fulfillment (68) speaks of his "going off' during "the process." Simply put, an elemental tended to his physical body while his higher self was elsewhere.

As mentioned above, there is some unevenness in the book. It is mainly editorial, but is distracting since it shows a lack of attention to details. An example is Forman's interview with Diado Sensei Loori, head of the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, New York, which is an interesting and relevant story in the text (21-22) but is repeated in the notes at the end of the text (89). Another instance, although trivial, is surprising, given the book's copyright date of 1999: Forman uses a Compaq 386 computer as an example (16), but almost all of my current students known nothing other than Pentium computers. This example makes the book seem a little out-of-date.

-RALPH H. HANNON

May/June 2000

The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

By Daniel J. Boorstin
New York: Random House, 1999. Paperback, xiv+ 351 pages.

Everyone is a philosopher at heart-a lover of wisdom. One way to arrive at this self-knowledge is to be wisely companioned on the journey to truth. Surely one such sage is the eminent scholar and former Librarian of Congress, Daniel J. Boorstin. His book is not only an insightful clarification of the significant points of development in western consciousness, but also the story of seekers whose quest for meaning invites each of us on our own search for truth.

On this journey, Boorstin offers his perspective on what he sees as the "three grand epochs of seeking." During the first epoch, the ancient seer's influence was based on an ability to predict the future. Prophets, such as Moses and Isaiah, eventually surpassed them with the ability to proclaim God's word with God's own authority. Their divine teachings became a source of sacred wisdom, a mythology that reflected a profound metaphysical reality beyond scientific facts.

Western thought developed as Thales and other pre-Socratic philosophers shifted their questioning from mythology to the nature of the cosmos and as Socrates sought wisdom by questioning human nature. Plato then widened the focus to include a theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and questions of community citizenship and practical morality; next Aristotle rekindled the search for what the world is made of and how it works.

The communal search of the second epoch included the seekers of early Christianity who experimented with styles of living. Hermits, for example, lived separately, withdrawn from society, while cenobites lived together in community. Out of this grew the monastic way of life whose monks invaluably helped western culture survive and advance. Medieval Christianity developed the communal experience of Western education with the seven liberal arts in the cathedral schools, and later with theology, law, and medicine in the universities.

This communal search for truth, however, was not without difficulties. Seekers in the Christian community were challenged by a powerful Roman Church to be analytic and creative within its dogmas and traditions. Copernicus and Galileo struggled to be both true to their intellectual convictions and faithful to their Catholic beliefs. The constraints on scientific evidence, thoughtful scholarship, and freedom of expression caused other seekers to leave or be forced out of the institution. Thus, Martin Luther and John Calvin became instrumental in the Protestant Reformation of theology and church organization, which prepared the way for modern western democracy and representative government and the later work of such seekers as Locke, Jefferson, and Hegel.

Boorstin offers a wonderful discussion of Francis Bacon's "idols of the mind," those experiences, ideas, and attitudes which give a person the illusion of knowledge. He then trumps this treatment with reflections on Descartes, who believed that "truths are more likely to have been discovered by one man than by a nation ... because no one can so well understand a thing and make it his own when learnt from another as when it is discovered himself."

Lastly, Boorstin presents a panorama of development in the third epoch. Key themes in this age of the social sciences include the differentiation of the science of history from cultural history and political science, the laws of social change, and the stages and influence of human progress on history. Not surprisingly, the scientific dogmas of destiny were challenged by seekers who believed in consciousness, autonomy and human freedom, and the impact that great individuals (St. Francis, Gandhi) have on history.

In "a literature of bewilderment without precedent in our history," some twentieth century seekers have spoken of the absurdity of living life without a moral compass in a universe from which humanity is alienated. Observing that others have found "meaning in the seeking," Boorstin concludes eloquently and hopefully with reflections on Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein.

Bergson liberated seekers by shifting the focus from the codes of laws and customs derived by intelligence and expressed by science, to the aspirations of heroes and mystics, derived by intuition and expressed by freedom and creativity in works of every kind of art.

Einstein, who saw the atom and the cosmos as a single, unified puzzle, never stopped seeking for a unified field theory. He worked to bridge the gap between the old and new physics and to reveal a newly significant unity. "He had the patience, 'the holy spirit of inquiry,’ the sense of humor, and the faith that he was treading an endless path."

A reflective reading of this book will help readers renew their own quest to understand their world by treading the endless path with some of the western world's most significant seekers.

-DAVID R. BISHOP

May/June 2000

H.P.B.: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the Founder of the Modem Theosophical Movement

By Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams
Santa Barbara, CA: Path Publishing House, 1998. Paperback, xxiv + 660 pages.

It is a pleasure to welcome back into print this third and revised edition of the best biography of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ever written. This new edition corrects errors, which are inescapable in a book of this length and complexity, and adds some new material. It includes notably one appendix with Vernon Harrison's opinion about the 1885 Hodgson Report to the Society for Psychical Research concerning the authorship of the Mahatma Letters and another listing contemporary editions of Blavatsky's writings and selected additional resources.

This book is a sympathetic biography, which takes at face value certain of HPB's statements about herself, rather than a critical one that impartially evaluates the often conflicting reports of her life that have been made by herself, her followers, and her critics. It is, however, a carefully documented and reliable work.

As such, it is a welcome antidote to the journalistic exposes and psychologizing biographies of HPB that are too often mistaken for scholarship. It is a relief to have a serious and level-headed alternative to the sensationalized and speculative treatments that have too often been the old lady's fare. An especially useful feature of the book is part 7 (pages 421-554), examining the influence of HPB on modern thought and the parallel developments that mushroomed in the century following her death. Few either outside or inside her Society realize what a force HPB was on twentieth century thought, as revealed in these pages. Ultimately what is important is not her biography, with its mysteries and marvels, but the powerful effect she had on the world.

One of her teachers wrote of Blavatsky: "But, imperfect as may be our visible agent- and often most unsatisfactory and imperfect she is-yet she is the best available at present." That is a realistic but also an appreciative and affectionate assessment of HPB. It is also applicable to this biography-and is no small praise of either person or book.

-JOHN ALGEO

May/June 2000

The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell

Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell
By Robert Ellwood. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Paperback, xiv + 207pages.

The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: "The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." The three great scholars and popularizers of mythology, C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, seem to have been confronted powerfully with the predicament implied in that: saying. Living in an era of two World Wars and bloody totalitarian tyrannies, they often faced the choice between agreeing with the majority or remaining morally and clinically sane. The agonies of their choices, along with their triumphs and failures have now been eloquently chronicled by Robert Ellwood.

Having achieved considerable fame in their lifetimes (Campbell having done so posthumously by his televised interviews with Bill Moyer), all three men have been subject often to vicious criticism when dead and unable to respond to their detractors. Characteristically, these criticisms were not so much directed against their work as against their alleged political sympathies. Indeed one cannot escape the thought that the critics wished to find ways to make a case against the three mythologists that would evoke an instant and intense adverse emotional response from as many people as possible. The uniform charge leveled at lung, Eliade, and Campbell is that of fascist and related sympathies, an accusation that unaccountably seems to be more seriously damaging in many eyes than its opposite, i.e., the charge of communist sympathies that can be justly made against a good many intellectuals of the West.

Robert Ellwood addresses himself to the lives, careers, and beliefs of his three subjects individually. In Jung's case he correctly notes that for a brief period he showed some mild sympathy towards aspects of the Nazi cause, which he replaced with a violent aversion not only against German National Socialism but against all totalitarian government. In connection with Campbell, Ellwood notes that no public statements, written or verbal, have ever emanated from him that could be construed as anti-Semitic or racist. All accusations of such a nature have been made after Campbell's death by persons who claimed to have overheard such statements in private. Obviously the proof of such innuendo rests with the accusers, and they can offer none.

Ellwood's best efforts are reserved for Mircea Eliade, whose student Ellwood was at the University of Chicago. With an insight usually absent in observers outside the East-Central European matrix, the author analyses the complex political and philosophical currents in Eliade's native Romania in the early and mid-19.30s. He describes the messianic nationalism rampant in Romania at that time and tells of some of its charismatic exponents, such as the visionary Corneliu Codreanu and the philosopher Nae Ionescu. The book reveals that Eliade was never a member of the controversial Legion of the Archangel Michael (nicknamed the Iron Guard) but that for a brief time he sympathized with its aims and consequently was briefly imprisoned in 1938-9.

Perhaps the greatest merit of this book is the ability of its author to put the political sympathies of his subjects in. the context of the intellectual milieu of the precise times when those sympathies existed. As one who was present in Europe at that period, this reviewer can attest to the veracity of Ellwood's intimations concerning the peculiar circumstances and perplexing choices faced by such figures as Jung and Eliade in the 1930s. There were plenty of good people who, during those difficult years of depression and war, saw at least a short term diminishment of democracy as a necessary evil; they found a certain allure in a vision of an authoritarian nation-state which they hoped would overcome the shortcomings of the weak and pusillanimous regimes that replaced the old, stable order of pre- World War Europe.

In the first and last chapters of his book, Ellwood touches on some issues of singular and abiding import. He indicates that all three of his subjects were inspired by a gnosis that resonated with the insights of the Gnostics and Hermeticists of old. Their view of reality was based in a vision sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of eternity), which of necessity tends to relative such modern (and postmodern] preoccupations as multiculturalism, feminism, and the populist welfare state. Jung, Eliade, and Campbell all valued a certain individualism and spiritually based libertarianism above the fads and enthusiasms of their time or of any other time. Their contention that ancient myths interpreted in the light of patterns of spiritual transformation may serve as important resources to people impoverished by our materialistic, secular culture is not invalidated by anything we have learned about them.

With all of its outstanding virtues, Ellwood's book is likely to be found somewhat as wanting by both those who wish to condemn and those who desire to admire uncritically his three subjects. For his own part, the present reviewer would have welcomed the sort of spirited defense that can be found in an appreciation of Mircea Eliade by William W. Quinn (former editor of the Quest's predecessor journal): "Those with an irrepressible proclivity to see fascist conspiracies everywhere have occasionally sought to lump Eliade into this world view. This is poor history and worse analysis" (Novo Religio 3.1 [Oct. 1999]: 153). Neither can this reviewer agree with Ellwood that it is somehow incorrect or even reprehensible "to view the world as hopeless for any kind of salvation but individual" (178). What other salvation is there, or has there ever been, but an individual one? And where did most of the politico-ideological wrong-headedness of the last 250 years originate if not in the chimera of collective as against individual salvation?

Such considerations, however, are a matter of personal conviction rather than of objective merit. Robert Ellwood's work possesses an abundance of accurate data, inspired insight, and informed sympathy for his subjects. It is a book to be commended and recommended as well as admired by all who hold myth and its champions in high regard.

-STEPHAN A. HOELLER

March/April 2000