Book Reviews

IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE: Making Worlds of Myth and Science

by William Irwin Thompson
St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1989; hardcover.

“To construct an imaginary lost cosmology from a mere six pages of Grimm…”

Every now and then there is a book that witnesses to the sheer joy of journeying in the real of mythic imagination. In Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science, William Irwin Thompson provides as a point of departure, a brilliant reconstruction of Grimm’s Rapunzel. We are taken on an analytic journey deep into the imagery of this Marchen and discover it describes the experience of our psycho/social transformation of human evolution through historic time. We are invited to travel along on this Bateson-inspired quest to find “the pattern that connects.” Perhaps in the journeying, we might just be fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of a future born of observations and imaginings as bravely new and all-encompassing as the once novel notion of a round Earth. In Thompson’s words, the tale holds the very

…setting up of an order that is not simply familial or societal, but planetary; that in fact, the story is one of the setting up of a new world system with its relationships between the sexes, its new societal organizations, and it’s new arrangements of the planets in the solar system.

In touring Rapunzel’s mythic landscape, Thompson articulates for us a cultural history shaped of the stunning empirical correspondences in our myths, and the hidden mythic images in the very stuff of our sciences. We are led through Rapunzel only to find that our fairy tales

…have their roots in prehistoric darkness, and the hidden geometry that survives in them is not simply the obvious stuff of phallic symbols and devouring maws, but a lost cosmology of correspondences that connect the flowers to the stars. It requires an act of the imagination to bring it forth, much in the same way it required an act of the imagination to look in a new war at the dripping of a faucet.

Literally, Thompson asks for a revisioning of the very geography of what we view in out mind’s eye. It is no less than an excursion to the most compelling of new paradigm horizons.

As companions on this journey, lest we be unconvinced of the potential vistas, Thompson invites four friends to join us- Ralph Abraham, Jim Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and Francisco Varela. All are pioneers in their respective fields, and witness by their work to radically different modes of looking. Through personal anecdote and empirical explication, Thompson provides passage to the very center of the correspondences between these independent thinkers.

Thompson constructs an opportunity to view through their eyes a reality literally laid down in the shaping.” We are provided an intriguing glimpse of a possible perspective, a Thompsonian cosmology that has the carrying capacity worthy of these thinkers’ paradigm-challenging research. In a vital and imaginal conversation between cognitive biology and geo-physiology, as well as non-linear Gaian and chaos dynamics, we are treated to an intimate viewing of the fullness of possibilities that outdistance the individual horizons of each of the disciplines. The most spectacular view is at the composite vista point.

Thompson divides his synthesis of this possible view into five great cosmological emergences, providing an analysis of each according to its prevailing mode of consciousness and technology, its constellated cultural identity, the concomitant cultural complex, and the resultant societal victim. He considers these evolutional realities as polities, that is, five different mental landscapes that externalize themselves in these five great emergences.

Scanning the period from the remotest Paleolithic to the present time indicated as the period of Planetization, Thompson concludes that our present emergence has as its prevailing mode of consciousness the press for participation or “attunement.” To arrive at this point, Thompson leans upon the empirical historical evidence of our contemporary experiences. To help us envisage the future, he draws upon the cosmological implication sin the research of his four friends, demonstrating that it is possible for the multi-dimensionality and “inter-relatedness of all sentient beings” to inhabit the new imaginal landscapes shaped of transformed and transforming participation.

Dealing as it does with the future, Imaginary Landscape is perhaps the most personally revealing and intimate of Thompson’s books. Here he reveals his own passions, exuberances, and cautions for the razor-edged path participatively emerging before us. This is for Thompson the “middle way of the Mind” that

…lies between the angelic height of the macrocosm and the Gaian atmosphere and the elemental depths of the microcosm of the material earth.

Here imagination is the passport, and in tribute, Thompson concludes the book with four poems, one dedicated to each of his four traveling companions. As epilogue to the text, they provide a proper container for the late-night conversations and encouragements among friends. They serve to inspire, for in the end what matters is that we, too, must cultivate together the imaginal possibilities for our brave new land.

–GABRIELE UHLEIN

Spring 1991

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 Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that have Shaped Our World View

by Richard Tarnas
Harmony Books, New York, 1991; hardcover.

Where are we, Daddy? How did we get here? What are we to do?- our first profound questions, and, for most of us with interests in the transpersonal, questions we still earnestly ask. Richard Tarnas seeks answers to all of these and more in The Passion of the Western Mind, and, more often than not, succeeds spectacularly in providing a response that is at least provocative and hopeful if not an outright guide to salvation.

The "where we are," as Tarnas describes it, is in troubled postmodern times, caught in a cosmic double-bind between the inner craving for a life of meaning and the relentless attrition of existence in a cosmos that our rational scientific world view has assured us is empty, dead, devoid of all purpose. "How we got here" forms the body of Tarnas' work: a concise yet comprehensive account of the entire span of Western thought, from Plato and before, through early Christianity and the many permutations of the Christian-Hellenic synthesis of the Middle Ages, to the birth and transformation of the modern era through the world- shattering projects of Copernicus, Galilee, and Descartes, and, finally, to the postmodern apocalypse culminating in the systematic stripping away of certainty, soul, and sanity. This part of the book, which could have been as dry and debilitating as a sophomore seminar, is instead an exciting read, a page-burner of a mythic novel. Our history is, after all, the story of the Hero's Quest, with all that high drama – and with the inevitable Hero's tragic flaw. How that flaw is part of the solution as well as part of the problem is resolved in the exciting conclusion of Tarnas' story.

"What are we to do?" It is the great gift of this book that we are not left to sink in the postmodern morass, but are invited - indeed almost compelled by logical and visionary necessity-to recognize that there is an underlying pattern to all this, an archetypal pattern , and a method of archetypal analysis, synthesis, and above all experience, that points to the coming of a new world to which we are not alien but , rather, are fully inspired participants in its formation. Tarnas finds the clearest expression of this underlying archetypal world structure in the work of consciousness researcher Stanislav Grof, whose thirty years of investigation with psychedelics and other depth psychological techniques (i.e., holotropic breathwork) have revealed a four stage sequence of birth experience that has the most profound resonance on physical, psychological, religious, and physical levels. (In addition to his Harvard degree and Ph.D. in psychology, Tarnas was for ten years director of programs at Esalen Institute and Dr. Grof's next door neighbor, friend, and collaborator.) I will leave it to Rick's extended argument to prove to you the efficacy of the perinatal matrix as the "new paradigm" we have all been seeking. Convinced or not, you will surely add richness and complexity to your understanding of transpersonal issues.

Tarnas' conclusions will surely be criticized, misused - even abused. For example. they are subject to the lukewarm embrace of the reductivist: "Hmm, we all do go through a birth process; maybe he's right that coming through the birth canal preconditions human experience." or they may receive cavalier dismissal by scientific fundamentalists as "based on the ravings of the LSD-crazed." That the archetypal pattern revealed in the perinatal matrix underlies both mind and world, and thus unites them, requires an act of recognition that perhaps only the transpersonally experienced can accomplish with ease. However, on the whole Tarnas argues persuasively, and I urge you to encounter that argument. Particularly if you are somewhat new to these ideas, you must read this book to have any notion of what transpersonal psychology is truly about, and where it is destined to lead.

The Passion of the Western Mind is well placed to get a hearing in academic and professional circles as well as to become a hit with the educated public. It is a book that could truly make a difference. We in the transpersonal movement should , especially, take it to heart.

Note: I first heard the material that comprises the epilogue of The Passion of the Western Mind as a speech given at the 1990 "Cycles and Symbols" conference in San Francisco, where psychotherapists and professional astrologers gathered for the first time together to explore similarities in their disciplines and to jointly participate in presentations by Tarnas and Grof as well as other prominent astrologers and therapists. Tarnas brought the crowd roaring to its feet, both through the depth and breadth of his vision, and because he added to the written version an explicit encouragement to astrologers. (After all, if the "astrological premise"-that the movements of the heavens are correlated with human action-is verified, then the postmodern dilemma vanishes.) I for one am looking forward to further exciting developments from the Tarnas-Grof collaboration.

-BOB CRAFT

Summer 1992

Unconditional Life: Mastering the Forces that Shape Personal Reality

by Deepak Chopra,
M.D.; Bantam, 1991.

Deepak Chopra, described in a recent issue of Publishers Weekly as one of the most popular practitioners and authors in the “wholeness school of health,” assumes in Unconditional Life a positive attitude that does not discredit other approaches to the treatment of disease processes and patients' various health complaints.

Chopra's fields of medical practice are alternative medicine and endocrinology. He maintains that complete healing depends upon the individual's ability to “stop struggling.” This is exemplified throughout the book, which in essence is a collection of narrative passages taken from case histories of his own patients and some of his colleagues' patients. One anecdote flows casually into another, frequently with dialogues on the mind-body approach which Chopra applies to his cancer patients, patients with so-called incurable diseases or injuries, and others suffering from personality problems.

Aside from his medical training, Chopra is a highly perceptive and not ably sensitive practitioner who feels the pain of his patient s and empathizes with their reactions to their own suffering. The reader gets the feeling that Chopra suffers along with his patients, yet exhibits control over each conference-room interaction. His writing is lightened and enhanced by frequent quotations from great literary figures of the past such as Tagore, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Tennyson, Frost, and Yeats.

Having grown up in New Delhi and having been educated in both India and the United States, Chopra is able to apply both Eastern and Western modes of healing and of interrelating the healing of the emotions and the spirit with the restoration of physical well-being or improvement of status.

Chopra recommends meditation to his patients, and he himself practices Transcendental Meditation. He states that in English the “classic description” of meditation is in the writings of William Wordsworth in poems such as “Tintern Abbey.” He attributes the healing of many patients to their having engaged in meditation over a period of years. He finds that in addition the showering of “loving attention” on a wound, even for muscle regeneration, can bring astonishingly favorable results.

Chopra devotes sufficient space to the Bhagavad-Gita to introduce the central dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna to Westerners unfamiliar with this classic, and to define significant Sanskrit terms. He devotes a passage to yoga as one means to search for the knower and to become liberated from pain and suffering. Chopra is cognizant of the problems that people in the Western world have in accepting such ideas as that there is life in everything. His own explanation is that the same stream of life once flowed through every thing. Thus, we should not be skeptical about mysterious forces functioning in healing.

Always, to Chopra, the patient is capable of making a choice. Through exercises, patients can learn to control their thoughts of fear and anxiety, so that they concentrate on the space between thoughts and seeing past their problems. Early in his practice, Chopra began to observe in his office patients in whom physical and mental states had become severely “disjointed.” This fragmented state, says Chopra, seems to be best alleviated through the use of meditation. He continually accepts pain and suffering as real, stating that many of his patients have been to other doctors before being referred to him and have been subjected to negative approaches to health care.

Readers should find this book fascinating and will gain new insight into disease manifestations and the alleviation of pain and suffering. It is rare to find a book on the subject of disease written in lay person terms throughout that is also compelling from beginning to end.

-MARY JANE NEWCOMB

Winter 1992