Quest Magazine

Sake & Satori: Asian Journals-Japan

By Joseph Campbell
Novato, CA: New World Library, 2002. Hardback, xvi + 350 pages.

During the mid-fifties, the great American mythologist Joseph Campbell took an extended trip to Asia-his first--while on leave from Sarah Lawrence College. An assiduous journal keeper, Campbell kept detailed notes of his experiences and impressions. Sake and Satori, the second of two volumes and recently released by the Joseph Campbell Foundation, is primarily concerned with his time in Japan. (The first, Baksheesh & Brahman: Asian Journals-India, chronicles his sojourn on the subcontinent.) This book conveys about as well as a book can a sense of being there, and it can be read, on one level, as a guide on how to travel well.

Campbell is an enthusiastic and highly energetic travel companion: observant, insightful, and sometimes a bit petulant. He doesn't just sightsee, he absorbs the culture he experiences. Spending five months in Japan, mainly in Tokyo and Kyoto, Campbell immerses himself in the study of Japanese, conversations with people from all walks of life, and as much of the culture as possible. He visits shrines, temples, colleges, and museums; attends a multitude of theater productions and folk and religious ceremonies; and also finds time for a few randy adventures in some Tokyo strip clubs and geisha houses. Ever the able synthesizer, he makes good use of these experiences, and it's his ideas, seen in various stages of development, that provide the meat of this work. His ruminations focus mainly on Japanese religion and mythology but include healthy doses of philosophy, sociology, geopolitics, East/West cross-cultural comparisons, and the boorish ways of some Americans abroad.

There are surprising, paradoxical revelations as well. At one point, Campbell observes, despite his obvious love for Japan and the rich spiritual traditions of the East, that "Asia has not contributed and cannot contribute a single helpful technological or political thought to the contemporary world." And, his relentless diatribes against the poverty, squalor, anti-Western sentiment, and what he considered to be spiritual arrogance that he found in India border on the obsessive.

Indeed, in a moment of self-awareness, Campbell remarks "as a contemporary Occidental faced with Occidental and contemporary psychological problems, I am to admit and even celebrate (in Spengler's manner) the relativity of my historical view to my own neurosis (Rorschach formula)."

His neuroses notwithstanding, any Joseph Campbell book is an intellectual feast. This book, though rough around. the edges as any journal would be, does not disappoint.

-PAUL WINE

March/April 2004

Rumi: Gazing at the Beloved

Rumi: Gazing at the Beloved

By Will Johnson
Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003. Hardcover, 216 pages.

Inspired by the spiritual practice of the Sufi poet and mystic Jallaludin Rumi and his teacher Shams-i-Tabriz, this little book considers the art of seeing.

All spiritual traditions teach that to encounter God we must "come face to face with the energies of the divine" and surrender to whatever emerges in us as a result of the at meeting. Creating eye contact is essential, and Johnson suggests that this practice of looking deeply can be done by holding one's attention and gaze on the eyes of an icon or image of a god or goddess, a spiritual teacher, or beloved friend.

Like Coleman Barks who says that the depths of the heart can only be experienced “in the mysterious osmosis of presence with presence,” Johnson observes that real love is the ground of communication between two people. To hold and soften one's gaze into their partner's eyes until each begins to feel that they are an embodiment of the divine is natural. This experience enables us to feel truly seen for who we truly are.

As children we did this, and the prolonged eye contact generated energies that triggered a burst of laughter and two smiling faces. According to Johnson, in our fear-based culture only new lovers and parents of newborns are allowed to gaze deeply. For others, such behavior is considered taboo.

Many contemporary teachers are beginning to incorporate the practice of gazing in their work with their students Johnson cites specific instructions and descriptions of the practice found in the poetry and discourses of Rumi who was inspired after being transformed by the spiritual mysteries he encountered with Shams and the innate consciousness of the divine they shared.

This book presents insights gleaned from personal practice and professional instruction, bringing previously esoteric understanding to a wider audience. The poetic beauty of Johnson's prose embraces and dances with the abundant selection of Rumi's work.

"The practice of gazing at the beloved is like a float trip that takes you down the river of your soul and ends at the ocean of union." Accordingly, Johnson guides readers through the trips four stages. He provides a reassuring and unintrusive "map" to prepare us for the "territory" of our own experiences of transformation.

Of course, spiritual practice is not an end but a means to living with presence and connection in the world. The gazing practice can enable us to take the feeling of union with us into our daily lives so we can experience what the Koran asserts, "Wherever you turn, there is the face of God." As we see with new eyes, we can merge with everything in nature and have a felt understanding of being one with the universe.

In light of Andre Malraux's observation that the twenty-first century would be mystical or not at all, Johnson's perspective on the mystery of mysticism has an encouraging timely relevance.

-DAVID BISHOP

March/April 2004

The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West

Edited and Introduced by Jay Kinney
New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004. Paperback, x + 324 pages

.Many readers of Quest are sure to remember Gnosis magazine, he journal of arcane Western spirituality that was published from 1985 to 1999. Gnosis was a leader in its field; its demise was a great loss for both scholars and the general public. Happily, The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West edited by the magazine's founder and editor in chief, Jay Kinney, reprises a wide-ranging and richly detailed array of articles from its pages.

Buddhism Is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom Beyond Beliefs

Buddhism Is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom Beyond Beliefs

By Steve Hagen
New York: HarperCollins, 2003, Hardback, 252 pages.

Buddhism is not what you think. It is about being awake to reality. And you cannot be awake to reality if you insist on thinking about it. Reality cannot be described or explained, for that would be to conceptualize. "Reality," Steve Hagen tells us in Buddhism Is Not What You Think: Finding Freedom Beyond Beliefs, "is what is immediately experienced."

In this deceptively simple book, Hagen offers simple but profound statements about many things: good and evil, mind, dualism, consciousness, space/time, freedom, and rebirth, to name a few. The first and longest of the three sections that make up the book is titled "Muddy Waters," and it takes up the many stumbling blocks we mistakenly erect in our search for truth or enlightenment. Zen teaches "no dualism," for example. If we conceptualize, we have dualism-you and me, good and bad, subject and object. The mistake we make is in calling that reality. So how do we apprehend reality? Hagen repeatedly offers the simple advice, "just see."

Another stumbling block has to do with rebirth, and this is one of the more challenging points he makes. He says that what Buddha taught was rebirth, not reincarnation, for nothing endures. Reincarnation cannot occur because there is nothing to reincarnate. Nagarjuna in the second century pointed out that nothing persists from moment to moment. "Nothing endures ... to be impermanent. He [Nagarjuna] calls this Emptiness. This is the true meaning of impermanence." This moment is born again and again. Seeing this, and not the "recycling of souls," is "the liberation the Buddha pointed to." The point is reinforced when Hagen speaks of enlightenment: "A teacher who is awake realizes that there's no particular person who's awake."

Buddha taught that everything is made of mind. A pure mind is one that sees but does not grasp, we learn in section two, which is titled "Pure Mind." In it and in the third section, titled "Purely Mind," Hagen repeats the same refrain running through the book: You are right here and right now, and there is no separateness; all you have to do is just see.

It is in the latter short section that he considers the subject of consciousness, which, he acknowledges, we don't know a great deal about although we are all intimately familiar with it. Matter, he contends, is abstract. When we get down to the subatomic level, for example, we can find either an electron's location or its momentum, but not both. "In other words, an electron doesn't seem to have properties that are separate from our awareness of those properties." This points to the conclusion that “physical reality cannot be fully accounted for apart from consciousness. "

It is difficult to write about this book without extensive quoting, for Hagen's felicitous style is spare, direct, and lucid. That is one of the book's pleasures, in fact, for the subject matter, profound as it is, could have been weighed down by verbosity in the hands of someone with less wisdom and understanding. Although the reader may want to explore further the rebirth/reincarnation conundrum, Hagen has presented here a clear view of Buddhism as he sees it. This book could be extremely useful, for not only does he demonstrate pitfalls the beginner encounters, he illuminates what it is to be awake.

-JOSEPHINE WOLLEN

September/October 2005

The Gospel of Thomas: A Guidebook for Spiritual Practice

The Gospel of Thomas: A Guidebook for Spiritual Practice

By Ron Miller
Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2004, 130 pages.

Those in search of the historical side of Jesus have come to see him in many different ways. Indeed, President George W. Bush is not the only person to consider Jesus Christ a philosopher. Some seekers compare Jesus to the Cynics, contemporaries of Socrates and Plato, who also lived simple lives and used wise sayings and questions to challenge their listeners to look at things more deeply.

The Gospel of Thomas is one of thirteen books discovered in northern Egypt in 1945 that make up the Nag Hammadi Gnostic Library. Followers of these texts were called Gnostics-from the Check gnosis for "knowledge"- by their critics because they claimed to have a higher knowledge than other philosophical schools or religious groups.

The Gospe1 of Thomas: A Guidebook for Spiritual Practice, and the statements attributed to Jesus, resonate with the growing number of people who are exploring the difference between their strict religious programming as youngsters and their personal spiritual experiences as adults.

For Ron Miller, the Gospel of Thomas is a powerful book "that could actually change our way of thinking." His goal of the translation of these sayings put into daily practice is "to become Jesus' twin ... by manifesting in our lives the same Christ consciousness revealed in the person we know as Jesus of Nazareth." This path to open to everyone and does not lead not to membership in any group, but to the kingdom that is within and without.

These 114 gnomic statements beg for patient, reflective tending in order to bear their nourishing fruit. Consider saying 5, Jesus said, "Know what is in front of your face, what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed." Perhaps Jesus is challenging us to recognize that the entire spiritual realm is hidden in the physical realm in front of us, waiting to be revealed when we are ready to receive its revelation. Furthermore, even our most concealed thoughts and beliefs will manifest in some form in our daily lives.

Or saying 105, "Whoever knows the Father and the Mother will be called the child of a whore," Like a Zen slap, this saying startles us in order to take us closer to the truth hidden at the heart of the Gospel of Thomas. The first step is to realize that, like Jesus, our twin, we are not an offspring of our human parents. These sayings help us know our true identity, while meditation enables us to become who we truly are.

Miller gathers the sayings topically and thematically into chapters and connects them with sinews of pleasing narrative. The teachings and techniques of several traditions are included in his suggestions for meditation. He ends each chapter with a short list of questions to encourage reflection and facilitate insight into our personal life. The Gospel of Thomas: A Guidebook for Spiritual Practice is a helpful source to begin meditation on the Gospel of Thomas.