Quest Magazine

 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

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

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.

-DAVID BISHOP

September/October 2005

Keeping the Link Unbroken: Theosophical Studies Presented to Ted, G, Davy on His Seventy-fifth BirthdayEd. Michael Gomes

N.P: TRM [Theosophical Research Monographs], 2004, [vi]+xxxii + 197 pages.

Ted Davy is one of the central figures of Theosophy in Canada, perhaps most widely known for his thirty years of editing the Canadian Theosophist, which was one of the foremost Theosophical journals in the world under his editorship. The present volume is a Festschrift (a "festival writing") by some of his friends to mark three quarters of a century in his life.

The front matter includes a personal reminiscence by his wife, Doris, and a bibliography of his writings, two charming and useful introductions to the twelve pieces that follow. The body of the volume is eleven essays, which consist of five essays on Theosophical subject matter, six biographical essays, and a jeu d'esprit acrostic consisting of lines from the index to The Secret Doctrine, whose first letters spell out "Doris & Ted Davy."

In the first of the initial five essays, John Patrick Deveney asks why Theosophical historians do Theosophical history. His answer, apart from the inevitable Mt. Everest one, is an esoteric intuition that the isolated fragments of historical detail "will allow us to strip away the mask and allow us to see the truth beyond the history." Robert Hütwohl examines accounts of previous Buddhas, Henk J. Spierenburg looks at the secret doctrine of the Rabbis, and Leslie Price reconsiders Esoteric Christianity. David Reigle considers in patient detail "The First Fundamental Proposition of the Secret Doctrine" in a clear, well organized, and perceptive reading of what is arguably the most basic Theosophical statement ever written. His essay is a model of close reading and lucid explication, which should be studied by every serious Theosophical student.

The biographical essays, all of great historical interest, are treatments of Albert Smyth and Henry Newlin Stokes by James Santucci, of B. P. Wadia by Dallas TenBroeck, of Victor Endersby by Jerry Hejka-Ekins, of Henry Erie Russell and the trust he established in his mother's name by Ernest Pelletier, and of a number of early Theosophists by Joan Sutcliffe. Michael Gomes's essay on "Anagarika Dharmapala at the World's Parliament of Religions" is actually far broader than its title would suggest. It treats much in the life of this early Theosophist who became a champion of the Buddhist revival, in which Henry Steel Olcott also played a seminal role. The scope and detailed documentation in this concise treatment of an internationally and historically significant figure makes this essay an especially significant contribution.

This volume is a worthy tribute to an honored Theosophical scholar and gentleman. That final compound epithet is a cliché, but in this case its use is apposite and literal. One can only add one's best wishes ad multos annos!

-JOHN ALGEO

September/October 2005