Book Reviews

Earth’s Hidden Reality: Discover It, Explore It, Embrace It

Mark Hunter Brooks
Charlotte, N.C.: Spark Publications, 2022. 179 pp., paper, $24.95.

Mark Hunter Brooks boldly proposes a new and complex worldview that unites current science and Theosophical metaphysics. The maxim “Fools Go Where Angels Fear to Tread,” which serves as the title for chapter 10, hovers over the entire book. Is Brooks the fool who dares tread unwittingly among the angels of Western science? Or is Brooks the angel who treads on the fools of Western science, which ignored the principles of metaphysics?

Brooks humbly states that he does not know for sure, and he suggests directions for scientific research in quest of the answers that will determine if his grand proposal is valid. If so, it will be a major accomplishment, which will repair the deep rift between science and spirituality. If it isn’t valid, it was a courageous attempt for which he deserves credit, having led both scientists and Theosophists to think deeply outside of the box.

Brooks obviously worked long and hard in his craft as an author to make physics succinctly understandable to a broad readership. The book delves into contemporary physics in the same depth that you would expect from an article in Scientific American magazine. Many readers, though, will not grasp his explanations of physical concepts fully and will have to take him at his word in places. This shortcoming is a consequence of his decision to present a complex worldview in an abbreviated, well-illustrated book. If he chose to write a more detailed book, his readership would drop precipitously, although it might attract a larger academic audience. We are the beneficiaries of his production of a popular book rather than a longer treatise.

Brooks is a profound thinker who is not constrained by the paradigms of Western science. He is well versed in Christian and Jewish thought but not beholden to doctrinaire theology or creeds. He is a member of the Theosophical Society and steeped in the writings of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, including their work in occult chemistry. He prominently credits Theosophy as his primary source of metaphysical knowledge. He has experienced personal visitations by spiritual beings.

Earth’s Hidden Reality is based on wave theory rather than particle physics. This decision may cause heartburn for many physicists who cling to particle theory. However, wave theory resolves paradoxes that particle theory may not. For this reason, we applaud Brooks’ reliance on wave theory to explain the origin of matter and energy and to account for reincarnation and other mysteries on a scientific basis. His grasp of wave theory is commendable. He argues compellingly that wave theory is complementary to basic concepts of metaphysics. These include what Theosophy calls planes of existence and the anu or ultimate physical atom as described by Besant and Leadbeater.

For Theosophists who want more background on physics but not a textbook, we recommend Schrödinger’s Universe by Milo Wolff and the Fields of Color by Rodney A. Brooks. These two popular books approach quantum theory from the perspectives of the wave structure of matter and field theory respectively. The wave-based theory was originally proposed by Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger and William Clifford, while field theory was mainly fleshed out by Julian Schwinger, also a Nobel laureate.

Bold new ideas like the ones in this book cannot be digested overnight. What Brooks has proposed is thorough, well thought out, and convincing. We hope that experimental physicists will follow his metaphysical clues to focus their research towards answering the basic questions of existence with a wave-based perspective. In the meantime, this stimulating read deserves our careful attention.

We are not convinced, though, that the wave theory of physics can directly answer the basic questions of Theosophy that Brooks tries to explain. Theosophical answers may have to wait until we have a better understanding of consciousness and its relationship with wave theory. Rodney A. Brooks has identified consciousness as the “grand-daddy of all mysteries.” We agree.

Andre Juliao and Andre Clewell

Both reviewers are members of the Tallahassee Study Group. Andre Juliao is a PhD student in physics at the National High Field Magnetic Laboratory of Florida State University.

Seven Games of Life and How to Play

By Richard Smoley 
New York: G&D Media, 2023. 221 pp., paper, $17.95.

When I was growing up, I was a big fan of the Milton Bradley board game “The Game of Life.” Its rainbow-colored spinner produced a delightful clicking sound, and the hills and valleys of the game path, set out in molded plastic relief, were aesthetically pleasing.

A generation later, my twin sons were introduced to the game and were appalled by it. Their attention was drawn not to the colors of the spinner but the heteronormatively gendered blue and pink playing pieces, and the game’s emphasis on procreation. Victory was defined as acquiring $1 million and then quietly dying. Anything else was failure.

Perhaps I did not notice these things because I came of age in the 1980s, when greed was good and gays were closeted. Or perhaps my sons were just more enlightened at age tern than I was. But our contrasting experiences show how the meaning of “winning” at “the game of life” has shifted over time.

The pursuit of money for its own sake is not one of the septet of games that Richard Smoley details in Seven Games of Life and How To Play, though money is certainly one way of keeping score in some of them, and a means toward achieving success in some others. Smoley presents six “games”—survival, love, power, pleasure, creativity, and courage—in a rough hierarchy from the profane to the sacred, with complexity and subtlety increasing as the player climbs the ladder. A seventh game, the Master Game, is atop the list as a sort of boss-level challenge to be unlocked by the most accomplished players.

Smoley is perhaps known to readers for his scholarly yet accessible books on occult and esoteric matters (and for his editorial stewardship of this magazine). Seven Games of Life is a different breed of book. It reads as a guidebook from a seasoned spiritual traveler produced for those at earlier stages in their journeys. It is not a self-help book in the conventional sense. Rather, it is in the tradition of manuals for living dating back to the Stoics that offer sound advice without being patronizing or simplistic.

The author draws on his erudition and vast areas of knowledge, but does so in easily comprehensible language that is never pedantic. There are references to pioneering psychologist Alfred Adler and political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but also to Downton Abbey and the National Lampoon. Smoley’s seven games are played by billions of people from all walks of life, and there is no snobbish intellectual gatekeeping here.

“The games themselves (perhaps excepting the Master Game) are of no absolute value,” Smoley writes. But “we have all bought the ticket to the amusement park that is life, and we may as well take the ride.” He does not intend to hand the reader yet another quick-fix self-help guide “with the usual array of instructions,” but rather to show that “although these games may be serious up to a point, it is ruinous to take them seriously in an absolute sense. They are best played with a lightness of spirit.”

While we all play the survival game—for failure to do so results in immediate nonexistence—and the games of love and power (here cast as primarily about interpersonal relationships and the dynamics within them) are required for anything beyond a feral state, Smoley presents the next three games as key to being a realized human. “You would not even know whether you were succeeding in the games of love, survival, or power without a sense of pleasure,” he argues. The things that bring us joys and pains are the broad outline of our personalities. They also fuel the impulse to do and make—to play the game of creativity. Anyone who toils at a boring job but delights in a hobby or avocation knows that creativity is a requirement for self-realization.

The game of courage insists that we do what we know to be right even when it is unpopular or dangerous and may put our success in the lower games at risk. Why stand up for justice when one’s livelihood and societal position could suffer for it? For some, Smoley writes, it is because an act of courage “points to values beyond life.”

That opens the door to the Master Game. It is the only game that is entirely optional, but it is also the one that makes the rest worthwhile. It is “concerned with another reality,” not beyond this life but hidden within it. Drawing on G.I. Gurdjieff, Smoley writes that the players of the first six games are in a state of “walking sleep,” carrying out the motions of existence like automata. This seventh game tasks us with waking up—easier said than done, but an aim to which all who seek to live deeply must aspire.

Peter Orvetti is a news analyst, freelance writer, and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C.

Julian of Norwich, The Showings: Uncovering the Face of the Feminine in Revelations of Divine Love

By Mirabai Starr reviewed by Peter Orvetti
Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads, 2022. 225 pp., paper, $19.

Little is truly known about the fourteenth-century Christian mystic Julian of Norwich—including her name. She is called “Julian” because she lived in permanent seclusion as an anchoress in a cell attached to St. Julian’s Church in the medieval city of Norwich. There are no details about her life before age thirty, and she did not sign her writings. And yet, more than 600 years later, the woman called “Mother Julian” by her devotees is still an influential proselytizer of the Divine Feminine.

As Mirabai Starr writes in her introduction to this book, Julian prayed in her youth to bear witness to the Passion of Christ and also “to endure an illness serious enough to carry her to the brink of death but not beyond.” Coming of age in the era of the Black Plague, the young Julian had seen a lot of death. She “was familiar with suffering,” Starr writes. But she also saw severe illness as a means of transcendence, as seekers today might turn to a sweat lodge or hallucinogens to gaze into the next world without permanently crossing over.

Julian took ill at age thirty, and writes that she “was still young enough to be sad about dying” even though she had prayed for the infirmity. After four nights, she was given the last rites, with all those around her expecting her imminent death. Instead, she lingered for two more days. She writes that on this sixth night, her senses began to fade. She was convinced she was about to die when “suddenly all pain vanished” in an “abrupt transformation” that “was the work of the Divine.”

Over the course of the next day—May 8, 1373—Julian witnessed sixteen “Showings” of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, the conquering of the Devil, the Virgin Mary, a “heavenly banquet,” the unity of the Divine in the Christian Trinity, and more. Upon her recovery, she quickly wrote down what she had experienced, in a text known as the Short Text. Over the next two decades, Julian, living in total monastic seclusion, analyzed and expanded on her notes in a radically optimistic work of theology known as the Long Text.

Julian’s work was influential even in her own time, but the religious wars that befell Britain in the years after her death prevented the publication of the Long Text until nearly three centuries later. Her works remained obscure until 1901, when a manuscript housed in the British Museum was transcribed and published. Julian’s writings are the earliest surviving English texts by a woman.

Julian’s God is a god of pure love, “incapable of wrath.” She rejected the notion of sin, writing that sin “has no substance” and “cannot be detected at all except by the pain it causes.” She called God “the Mother,” whose pure love is meant to inspire us to live righteous lives. “This beautiful word ‘mother’ is so sweet and kind in itself that it cannot be attributed to anyone but God,” writes the woman called Mother herself.

In Julian’s theology—a solid example of the once strong tradition of the Divine Mother in Catholicism, which has its remnants in the modern veneration of Mary—“God the Mother” was herself part of the Trinity, one in being with the Christ. “God chose to become our Mother in all ways,” she writes, performing the duty of service and sacrifice.

Starr, a former instructor in world religions at the University of New Mexico at Taos, does a great service with this simple but elegant new transcription of Julian’s words. The short entries can be read as a devotional or as a prompt to contemplation. They are also a useful guide to the lay seeker on the Christian mystic path.

Peter Orvetti

Peter Orvetti is a political writer and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C.

To Light the Flame of Reason: Clear Thinking for the Twenty-First Century

By Christer Sturmark reviewed by Peter A. Huff
Guilford, Conn.: Prometheus Books, 2022. 354 pp., paper, $29.95.

Pundits cannot agree on the twenty-first century. Is it the era of rampant secularism or the epoch of revenant superstition? For Swedish tech entrepreneur and publicist Christer Sturmark, ours is the secular age extraordinaire—but nowhere near secular enough. The legacy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, he contends, has enshrined the scientific method as mainstream society’s royal road to truth. The forces of posttruth, however, coupled with what he sees as disturbing reversions to outworn myth and mysticism, hinder full-scale appropriation of the Age of Reason’s ideals and cast aspersions on its first principles.

Hence Sturmark’s call for not only a reboot of the classical Enlightenment vision but an Enlightenment 2.0 calibrated for our time. Part polemic, part apologia, part primer, part manifesto, To Light the Flame of Reason has elicited endorsements from eminent apostles of secularity and New Atheist prophet Richard Dawkins. An homage to reason, it exposes both the aspirations at the heart of modernity and—unwittingly—the contradictions at the core of a one-dimensional view of human experience.

Sturmark’s ambitions are bold. The book’s fourteen chapters, divided into two parts, tackle a broad spectrum of topics, including strategies for critical thinking, warrants for a naturalist worldview, the failures and fallacies of religion, the principles of progressive education, and the prospects of morality without God. The first part attempts to lay the groundwork for techniques of clear thinking based on science, and the second sketches the pathway to a new Enlightenment in politics and society.

Overall the tone of the book is personal, informal, and supremely confident. Sturmark speaks securely in the first person but rarely engages in self-criticism and almost never exhibits empathy for competing points of view. He is strongest on themes close to his disciplines of mathematics and computer science but ineffective in his attempts to transform the sprawling fields of philosophy into a single, well-defined point. Romantic reactions to the Enlightenment in art, music, and poetry are ignored. Nietzsche, Freud, and other doctors of suspicion are barely mentioned, while Marx is completely overlooked, as are other critics of the Enlightenment’s contributions to economic oppression, imperialism, and colonialism. The darker sides of science—evident in theories of race, policies of eugenics, the disenchantment of nature, and the overreach of the infamous military-industrial complex—are conveniently dismissed under the label of pseudoscience.

Perhaps the low point of the book is Sturmark’s wholesale discounting of the medieval intellectual achievement. His assertions that the church “had a total stranglehold on philosophical teachings” and that Europe’s first universities devoted themselves “exclusively to the study of Christian theology” perpetuate the sort of unsubstantiated myth that he decries everywhere else in the book.

Sturmark is most troubled by the survival and successes of religion in the twenty-first century. From his vantage point, nothing reveals the impediments to a new Enlightenment more than the revival, creation, and spread of spiritual movements around the world. Long sections of the book are devoted to critiques of the moral and intellectual deficiencies of religious traditions, including the sins of priestcraft and patriarchal theocratic power—all well deserved and presumably well known to his audience. Defining religion primarily in terms of belief in supernaturalism, Sturmark betrays no familiarity with liberal, modernist, and feminist forms of religion or phenomena such as religious naturalism, religious humanism, and spiritually inclined atheisms. New Age movements, never precisely defined, are singled out for particular opprobrium, but again Sturmark demonstrates no special awareness of the thinkers and innovators associated with these trends, much less the significant role played by esoteric traditions in the formation of modern science. A lack of acquaintance with the sophisticated research on the origins, nature, and varieties of religion, produced by both believing and unbelieving scholars, limits his secular humanist verdict to a twenty-first-century reprise of the nineteenth-century village atheist rant.

Sturmark’s desire to compose a paean to reason is admirable. In an age notorious for its conspiracy theories, social media hoaxes, unbridled academic grade inflation, outright political lies, and mockery of evidentiary rhetoric, a defense of reason and rational and civil discourse is desperately needed and much appreciated. Nor can fundamentalist extremism be left to metastasize unchecked on the fringes of society or in its corridors of power.

A new Enlightenment with truly global scope, however, can be inaugurated only through an expansion of reason, not its contraction. Even if we deny, as does Sturmark, the immortal survival of the greatest minds of the early modern Enlightenment, their unforgettable words remind us that reason cannot properly fulfill its noble function without imagination, intuition, self-critical introspection, and what Pascal dubbed the reasons of the heart.

Marketed to a broad readership, To Light the Flame of Reason amounts to little more than a predictable sermon to the Western secular choir. Its arguments are derivative, its claims unnuanced, its conclusions simplistic, and its documentation far too scanty. A new Age of Reason requires more light and more heat.

Peter A. Huff is the author or editor of seven books, including Atheism and Agnosticism, selected for Library Journal’s “Best Reference Works of 2021.”