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THE NEW PARADIGM IN CONSCIOUSNESS,HEALING & SPIRITUALITY
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BOOKS BY PIERRE FRED WALTER
The New Paradigm in Business, Career, Success & Prosperity
(Book Reviews)
!
The New Paradigm in Science and Systems Theory
(Book & Media Reviews)
!
The New Paradigm in Consciousness, Healing & Spirituality
(Book & Media Reviews)
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THE NEWPARADIGM
In Consciousness, Healing & Spirituality40 Book & Media Reviews by Pierre Fred Walter
Jeremiah Abrams (Ed.) • Victor H. Anderson • Joseph Campbell
Deepak Chopra • Russell DiCarlo (Ed.) • Donna Eden • Mircea Eliade
Walter Y. Evens-Wentz • Jonathan Goldman • Stanislav Grof • J. Krishnamurti
Charles W. Leadbeater • Timothy Leary • Alexander Lowen • Terence McKenna
Ralph Metzner • Thomas Moore • Jeremy Narby • Michel Odent
Otto Carl Simonton • Hal & Sidra Stone • Dora van Gelder • Alberto Villoldo
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Published by Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC
113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA
©2014 Pierre Fred Walter. Some rights reserved.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This publication may be distributed, used for an adaptation or for derivative works,
also for commercial purposes, as long as the rights of the author are attributed. Theattribution must be given to the best of the user’s ability with the information avail-
able. Third party licenses or copyright of quoted resources are untouched by this li-
cense and remain under their own license.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Set in Palatino
Designed by Pierre Fred Walter
Free Scribd Edition
ISBN 978-1-933137-40-7
ipublica is an imprint created by the author
http://ipublica.com
Author Contact Information
About Pierre Fred Walter
http://pierrefwalter.com
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About the Author
Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzerland andthe United States, Pierre focused upon fine art, cookery, astrology,musical performance, social sciences and humanities. He startedwriting essays as an adolescent and received a high school awardfor creative writing and editorial work for the school magazine.
Upon finalizing his international law doctorate, he privately stud-ied psychology and psychoanalysis and started writing both fictionand nonfiction works.
After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal coach,Pierre retired as a full-time writer, entrepreneur and consultant. Hisnonfiction books emphasize a systemic, holistic, cross-cultural andinterdisciplinary perspective, while his fiction works and short sto-ries focus upon education, philosophy, perennial wisdom, and thepoetic formulation of an integrative worldview.
Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and writes Eng-lish as his 4th language after German, Latin and French. He alsoreads source literature for his research works in Spanish, Italian,Portuguese, and Dutch.
All of Pierre’s books are hand-crafted and self-published, designed by the author.
About Quoting
Quotes are followed by a forward slash (/) and a page number.They always refer to the author and the book that is being re-viewed, and the page number of the edition that was reviewed. It
may not in every case be the newest edition of the book.
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To Nelson
The author’s profits from this book are being donated to charity.
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Introduction
These book reviews were written between 2005 and 2014, the
result of an effort for making a contribution not only to academia,
but more so, to college students around the world who wish to be
informed about books that cover the exciting adventure of the
present paradigm changes in consciousness research, healing and
spirituality that we are currently living through.
The present volume belongs to a reviews trilogy that are in-
tended to be a coherent whole. The two other volumes are entitled
The New Paradigm in Business, Career, Success & Prosperity and The
New Paradigm in Science and Systems Theory.
This journey, undertaken with the intention to share knowl-
edge that I believe is useful to many people, was a great challenge
and adventure for me; it opened me new pathways that were con-
firming my research on the perennial holistic wisdom of ancient
civilizations who were thriving before patriarchy was putting na-
ture upside-down about five thousand years ago.
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Currently, with the advent of the networked global society,
and systems theory as its scientific paradigm , we are virtually look-
ing into a different world, with a rise of ‘horizontal’, ‘networked’
and ‘sustainable’ structures both in our business culture, and in
science, and last not least on the important areas of psychology,
medicine, alternative healing, and spirituality.
—A paradigm, from Greek ‘paradeigma’, is a pattern of things, a configura-
tion of ideas, a set of dominant beliefs, a certain way of looking at the world, a set
of assumptions, a frame of reference or lens, and even an entire worldview.
While most of this new and yet old path has yet to be trotted,
we cannot deny the changes that happen all around us every day.
Invariably, as students, scientists, doctors, consultants, lawyers,
business executives or government officials, we face problems to-
day that are so complex, entangled and novel that they cannotpossibly be solved on the basis of our old paradigm, and our old
way of thinking. As Albert Einstein said, we cannot solve a prob-
lem on the same level of thought that created it in the first place—
hence the need for changing our view of looking at things, the
world, and our personal and collective predicaments.
What still about half a decade ago seemed unlikely is happen-ing now all around us: we are rediscovering more and more frag-
ments of an integrative and holistic wisdom that represented the
cultural and scientific treasure of many ancient tribes and king-
doms that were based upon a perennial tradition which held that
all in our universe is interconnected, and that humans are set in
the world to consciously live in unison with the infinite wisdominherent in creation as a major task for driving evolution forward!
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It happens in science, since the advent of quantum physics
and string theory, it happens in neuroscience and systems theory,
it happens in biology, in ecology, and as a result, and because sci-
ence is a major motor in society, it happens now with increasing
speed in the industrial and the business world, and in the way
people earn their lives and manifest their talents through their
professional engagement.
More and more people begin to realize that we cannot hon-estly continue to destroy our globe by disregarding the natural
law of self-regulation, both outside, by polluting air and water,
and inside, by tolerating our emotions to be in a state of repression
and turmoil. Self-regulation is built into the life function and it can
be found as a consistent pattern in the lifestyle of natives peoples
around the world.It is similar with our immense intuitive and imaginal faculties
that were downplayed in centuries of darkness and fragmenta-
tion, and that now emerge anew as major key stones in a world-
view that puts the whole human at the frontline, a human who uses
their whole brain, and who knows to balance their emotions and
natural passions so as to arrive at a state of inner peace and syner-getic relationships with others that bring mutual benefit instead of
one-sided egotistic satisfaction.
For a real change to happen, we need to change the thinker, as
Krishnamurti used to say, which means we need to undergo a
transformation that puts our higher self in charge as the caretaker
of our lives, releasing our conditioned ego from this task.
Hence the need to really look over the fence and get beyond
social, cultural and racial conditioning for adopting an integrative
INTRODUCTION
9
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and holistic worldview that is focused on a higher plane than the
level of mere problem-solving.
What all these books convey is that it’s not too late, be it for
our planet and for us humans, our careers, our science, our collec-
tive spiritual advancement, and our scientific understanding of
nature, and that we can thrive in a world that is surely more dif-
ferent in ten years from now that it was one hundred years in the
past compared to now.We are free to continue to feel like victims in this new reality,
and wait for being taken care of by the state, or we may accept the
state, and society, as human creations that will never be perfect,
and venture into creating our lives and careers in accordance with
our true mission, and based upon our real gifts and talents.
I haven’t given ratings in my reviews, and for good reason. I
find rating content a misguided popular institution that puts the
consumer in the role of the ‘king’ to judge all and everything from
a naturally limited personal perspective. As mindful humans we
should be careful with judgment, with judging others, or judging
what others have achieved and produced in terms of intellectual
or artistic content.
This being said, the very fact that a book was included in my
three review volumes is proof enough of the fact that the book is
highly worthwhile reading, and the review serves to elucidate the
why and how of that. Besides, there was no need to give any spe-
cific ‘star’ ratings.
I hope that any book you may be interested in that is included
here can help you to lead a better life, have a higher understand-
ing of your own path of life, help you to have better relationships,
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a more harmonious emotional life, and a tighter grasp of scientific
research and ultimately—a success boost in your personal path of
life.
On the other hand, if any particular book you want to see re-
viewed is not included here, you may write to me using the email
address published in the very first page of this book. I will surely
consider your request for the next edition of this review sampler.
—Pierre Fred Walter
INTRODUCTION
11
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Contents
Jeremiah Abrams 15• Reclaiming the Inner Child 15
Victor H. Anderson 25• Etheric Anatomy
25
Joseph Campbell 32• The Hero With a Thousand Faces 35
• Occidental Mythology 40
• Oriental Mythology 45
• The Power of Myth 50
Deepak Chopra
61• Life After Death 61
Russell DiCarlo (Ed.)
64• A New Worldview 64
Donna Eden 128• Energy Medicine 130
• The Energy Medicine Kit
136
Mircea Eliade
140• Shamanism 140
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Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz
149• The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries 152
Jonathan Goldman
156• Healing Sounds 158
• Healing Sounds DVD 173
• Tantra of Sound 176
Stanislav Grof 182• Beyond the Brain 187
• The Holotropic Mind
189• The Cosmic Game 193
J. Krishnamurti 196• Education and the Significance of Life 204
Charles Webster Leadbeater 228• Astral Plane 231
• Dreams 254
• The Inner Life
262
Timothy Leary
276• Your Brain is God 276
Alexander Lowen
286• Pleasure 289
• The Language of the Body 305
Terence McKenna
312• The Archaic Revival 315
• Food of the Gods 329
• The Invisible Landscape 339
Ralph Metzner (Ed.) 344• Ayahuasca 344
Thomas Moore 362• Care of the Soul 362
CONTENTS
13
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Jeremy Narby
372• The Cosmic Serpent 372
Michael Newton
380• Life Between Lives 380
Michel Odent 387• The Functions of the Orgasms
387
Otto Carl Simonton 402
• Getting Well Again
402
Hal and Sidra Stone 415• Embracing Our Selves 415
Dora van Gelder 421• The Real World of Fairies 421
Alberto Villoldo
434• Healing States
437
• Shaman, Healer, Sage 443
• Healing the Luminous Body 450
• The Four Insights 454
Bibliography
459
Personal Notes 464
CONTENTS
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Embracing Our Selves , the present book was an important inspira-
tion for drafting my own approach on healing the inner child. This
reader is well edited and presented; each contribution is essential
and brings a new insight and perspective for awakening the inner
child. Jeremiah Abrams wrote once in a presentation of the book
that inner child recovery is a religious quest. I can fully subscribe to
this statement, as it’s in accordance with the oldest of traditions. In
fact, the Hermetic Tradition was teaching the dialogue with our
inner selves as a path to self-knowledge, and unfortunately this is
today forgotten in our rushy and outwardly prosperous culture.
Inwardly, most of us are impoverished on the level of soul which
is why we have such a high level of depression and resulting emo-
tional disorders in our modern international culture.
Let me tell you upfront that this book is not about psychiatry.You do not need any psychological knowledge for reading it, and
applying its wisdom in your own life. Most contributions, and to
mention here especially those of Jeremiah Abrams, Gaston Bachelard,
Joseph Campbell and John Loudon expand on the poetic and mytho-
logical dimension of a healed and functional inner child. But even
those other contributions, written from the pulpit of psychiatricprofessionals, to mention only John Bradshaw, Nathaniel Branden,
James Hillman, Robert M. Stein or Hal and Sidra Stone , do not pre-
sent inner child healing as a discipline that is strictly speaking to
be placed within the closed space of psychiatric hospitals or the
coach of the psychoanalyst. Also these contributions are very well
readable for the novice and non-professional reader, and they em-phasize the poetic, creative and artistic role of the inner child,
while they also show what good a functional inner child can do
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within a healthy and well-composed psyche. To make this book
review not too extensive, I have chosen to publish a few quotes
from the contribution of each author to the reader.
Jeremiah Abrams
If we are to stop abusive family patterns and not transmit
them to the next generation, then the internalized parental
image also must be recognized as wounded. Such compas-
sionate awareness is a developing phenomenon in the livesof those courageous adults who are overcoming their shame
and pain in order to acknowledge and heal the wounded
child within./168
Gaston Bachelard
He is stuffed with sociability. He is prepared for his life as a
man along the lines of the ideal of stabilized men. He is alsoinstructed in the history of his family. He is taught most of
the memories of early childhood, a whole history which the
child will always be able to recount. Childhood—that
dough!—is pushed into the die so that the child will follow
closely in the path of the lives of others./45
The child dreamer is alone, very much alone. He lives in theworld of his reverie. His solitude is less social, less pitted
against society, than the solitude of men. The child knows a
natural reverie of solitude, a reverie which must not be con-
fused with that of the sulking child. In his happy solitudes,
the dreaming child knows the cosmic reverie which unites
us to the world./45
JEREMIAH ABRAMS
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John Bradshaw
Our source relationships were bathed in poor modeling and
abandonment. This created our shame-based identity. Be-
cause we had no authentic self, we clung to our caregivers in
a fantasy bond or built walls around us where no one could
hurt us. These earliest imprints colored all our subsequent
relationships./225
The emotionally shut-down person literally is filled with
will, i.e., becomes will-full. Willfulness is characterized by
grandiosity and unbridled attempts to control, and is the
ultimate disaster caused by toxic shame./227
Nathaniel Branden
In effect, the child we once were can be experienced as a
source of pain, rage, fear, embarrassment, or humiliation, to
be repressed, disowned, repudiated, forgotten. We reject that
child just as, perhaps, others once did—and our cruelty to
that child can continue daily and indefinitely through our
lifetime, in the theater of our own psyche where the child
continues to exist as a subpersonality, a child-self./243
When related to unconsciously and/or negatively, a child-self is left in a kind of alienated oblivion. In the latter case,
when the child-self is left unconscious, or is disowned and
repudiated, we are fragmented; we do not feel whole; in
some measure we feel self-alienated; and self-esteem is
wounded./244
Left unrecognized, not understood, or rejected and aban-doned, a child-self can turn into a ‘troublemaker’ that ob-
structs our evolution as well as our enjoyment of existence.
The external expression of this phenomenon is that we will
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at times exhibit harmfully childish behavior, or fall into pat-
terns of inappropriate dependency, or become narcissistic, or
experience the world as belonging to ‘the grown-ups.’/244
On the other hand, recognized, accepted, embraced, and
thereby integrated, a child-self can be a magnificent resource
that enriches our lives, with its potential for spontaneity,
playfulness, and imaginativeness./244
Joseph Campbell
How might we as individuals get in touch with the child
that lives within us? By killing the dragon ‘Thou shalt’. By
choosing not to live by other people’s rules? Right. Respect-
ing them, but not living by them./260
James Hillman
Jungian therapy, at least how I practice it, brings about an
awareness that fantasy is a creative activity which is con-
tinually telling a person into now this story, now that one. …
Soulmaking goes hand in hand with deliteralizing con-
sciousness and restoring its connection to mythic and meta-
phorical thought patterns. Rather than interpret the stories
into concepts and rational explanations, we prefer to seeconceptual explanations as secondary elaborations upon ba-
sic stories which are containers and givers of vitality./278
Whenever we are caught in a literal view, a literal belief, a
literal statement, we have lost the imaginative metaphorical
perspective to ourselves and our world./278
The main body of biblical and classical tales directs fantasy
into organized, deeply life-giving psychological patterns;
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these stories present the archetypal modes of experiencing.
/279
John Loudon
There is a sense then in which the self is a lifelong project, as
long as we remember that it is a project that requires as
much passivity as activity (to use Teilhard’s terms)—both
receptivity and taking hold, yin and yang./237
The child has the glory of simply being, like a flower or an
animal, without the necessity of doing anything, becoming
anything in order to be fully what it is./238
In later childhood, one is socialized into conventional values
and meanings. While this is necessary for an adequate sense
of self-worth and basic orientation and for social order, all
too many of us can become arrested at this stage of devel-
opment and lead what Paul Tillich calls ‘heteronymous’
lives, in which something external sets our priorities, estab-
lishes what is meaningful and worthwhile./239
But if we give ourselves to the process of growth, if we take
up the search for wholeness, the quest for understanding
(rather than the vain longing for certainty), we are set on a
path that leads not back to the childhood we may nostalgi-
cally idealize but forward toward an authentic fullness and
integration./239
Maturity, then, is an achievement of synthesis. It is not sim-
ply a chronological stage of life./240
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Alice Miller
The true self has been in ‘a state of noncommunication’ as
Winnicott said, because it had to be protected. The patient
never needs to hide anything else so thoroughly, so deeply,
and for so long a time as he has hidden this true self./136
Where there had only been fearful emptiness or equally
frightening grandiose fantasies, there now is unfolding an
unexpected wealth of vitality./137
Jeffrey Satinover
I would say that the puer may result from a parental milieu
which, in a roughly eighteen-month to a two-year-old child,
habitually disrupts any sign of assertiveness, of action or
fantasies that carry not the hallmark of masculinity, but of
specialness and grandeur./146
Thus, an internal vicious circle is established; each constella-
tion of the Self, bringing with it a tide of grandiose fantasies,
is followed by a tide of self-criticism and re-fragmentation.
/147
By reflecting back to the child his specialness and grandeur,the parent helps to sustain a kind of necessary inflation. This
inflation will motivate the child to move into an ever-
expanding world where, by suffering tolerable defeats, the
inflation will be modified and personal identity sustained
more and more by the capacities of the ego./153
Robert M. SteinCreative psychological development, individuation, is de-
pendent on spiritual freedom. When we say, for example, a
man has a free spirit, do we mean that he freely or necessar-
JEREMIAH ABRAMS
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ily transgresses the imposed manners, mores and taboos of
his culture? I think not. But it does mean the freedom to do
anything or go any place he desires in the imaginal realm.
He is a man who has clearly distinguished the sacral, time-
less world from the secular, historical world. He knows he
can move with unashamed dignity among the gods and de-
mons which belong to the mundane world. Such freedom
cannot occur with a primitive form of consciousness in
which inner and outer reality are governed by the same laws
and values. In this sense, our Judeo-Christian tradition is
primitive in that our thoughts and desires are subject to the
same dogma, the same regulation, as our deeds. Spiritual
freedom requires a break with biblical tradition and the de-
velopment of a new form of consciousness—a consciousness
which promotes the cultivation of imaginal freedom./265
If one has experienced an authentic rebirth, one is ready to
enter into a new life where kinship of spirit becomes a
stronger bond than kinship of blood./269
The lack of firmly rooted kinship connections is perhaps
more responsible for our sense of isolation and alienation
today than any other single factor. Frequent renewal through
kinship connection is basic nourishment for our spiritual
and physical well-being./270
There is a great need nowadays for new forms in marriage,
friendship and community which will promote the devel-
opment of erós and feelings of kinship connection./270
The exchange of soul-substance which occurs when two
souls meet and touch is essential for the life and health of the
body and spirit. Inner wholeness soon becomes cold, rigid
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and life-killing if the soul is not continually re-humanized
and renewed through the human connection. Still, it is just
because soul-connections are so rare and difficult to have in
our culture that the internal healing of the mind/body split
and internal wholeness is so essential. This is another para-
dox which we cannot avoid./270
The need to keep one’s soul carefully hidden and protected
disappears when one is no longer dependent on the connec-
tion to another for completion. There is no longer the fear of
experiencing and expressing one’s feelings, one’s reactions
to another, simply because the integrity and wholeness of
one’s being are not dependent on a particular relationship.
This increases the possibility of having close human connec-
tions, and it decreases the demands and expectations which
we are all prone to make upon those we care for. In addition,
the revealed soul generally evokes the emotion of love, espe-
cially when it demands nothing from the other. Thus, inner
wholeness opens the door to many more possibilities for
soul-connection, in spite of the lack of erós promoting ves-
sels in our culture./271
Hal and Sidra Stone
What is this child like? The most striking quality is its ability
to be deeply intimate with another person. The facilitator
can feel a physical warmth and a fullness radiating from this
child. It is as though the space between the two people is
alive and vibrating./177
The vulnerable child is tuned in energetically—it is aware ofeverything that is happening. Words will not fool it for a
moment. As you speak, the child will know if there is any
change whatsoever in your energetic connection to it./177
JEREMIAH ABRAMS
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Caring for this inner child through an aware ego gives a feel-
ing of real strength. It represents real empowerment./184
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Victor H. Anderson
Etheric Anatomy
The Three Selves and Astral Travel
With Cora Anderson
New York: Penguin Arkana, 1993Albany, CA: Acorn Guild Press, 2004
Etheric Anatomy is a small booklet that really surprised me! It’s an account bypeople situated far from the mainstream. The book is precious for anybody who
is researching the human aura, lucid dreaming, astral projection, or general pa-
gan knowledge about the vital energy.
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soul and spirit body is made up of three definite parts or
entities. Each of these three entities has its own individual
and collective existence in the soul and personality, just as
surely as the three atoms in a molecule of water./8
The authors have a unique manner of describing phenomena
known from psychology, psychoanalysis, parapsychology and
quantum physics, as they use the terminology of the natives, and
not the language of modern science. But for this very reason, theiraccount actually gains vivacity and authenticity. Some observa-
tions are strikingly original, such as the idea—which I found in
other clairvoyant literature—that the human body emits a specific
sound, a sound that is different from one individual to the other, a
frequency that identifies the individual:
Another interesting property of the vital body, although dif-
ficult to detect, is a faint buzzing sound, somewhat like that
of a bumblebee. This signals the gathering in and arrange-
ment of atoms and molecules to maintain the structure of the
dense body./12
The subatomic world, known as the specific focus of quantumphysics, is in the language of the natives the world of the spirits. I
have found this indeed confirmed in the overwhelming part of
shamanic literature. The author states on the same lines:
What we call the ‘spirit world’ is composed largely of parti-
cles and frequencies of a subatomic nature. We of the Craft
say that these planes or worlds are / below the atom. Weknow the vital body to be made up of what we call bio-
plasma. Besides the other finer particles and frequencies of
which it is composed, there is a small amount of plasmic hy-
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drogen, i.e., electrons and protons. In substance, it actually
resembles the more tenuous parts of the sun itself! The term
‘astral body’ may be vindicated after all./12-13
A particularly interesting field of study has become aura re-
search, and even aura healing, the healing of the luminous body.
What years ago was still relegated to ‘esoteric traditions’ is now
beginning to be effectively integrated into the official body of
medical science and psychology.
The author clearly states that contrary to common belief, the
aura is not limited to living beings, but is an energy-related phe-
nomenon that is to be found with all objects, be they inanimate.
He writes:
Every object with which we deal in everyday life is sur-rounded by a kind of shadowy counterpart that varies in
color, density and dimensions, depending on the kind of
matter. A steel ball an inch in diameter will have a pale,
violent-blue replica of itself extending one sixteenth of an
inch from it on all sides. If we examine a bit of rock, we will
find that it too has an extension that varies in color and di-
mension depending on its composition. Pieces of wood andother more organic objects have wider and sometimes more
colorful ‘surrounds’, as psychic children call them. When we
break a rock in two, the etheric part follows the outline of the
break./13
It has been said that only living things have auras. This is
not the case. Every material object of appreciable size is sur-rounded and penetrated by some of the etheric matter and
frequencies from the various planes of existence. Even a
statue has an aura. The auras of what we call inanimate ob-
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jects are static and homogenous in appearance unless acted
upon by mana from ourselves or the mana and presence of
spirits, saints or the Gods./17
What has been seen by the use of Kirlian Photography is de-
scribed by the authors here in a beautiful passage. The phenome-
non has been demonstrated also by energy healers such as Donna
Eden who heal recurring pain in phantom limbs by impacting en-
ergetically upon the aura of the missing or amputated limb.
If we keep cutting the leaf up, a point is reached at which the
vital body of the leaf will dissipate into the ether. If a part of
the leaf is torn off and slowly pulled away, the bioplasma
will stretch out a half centimeter or so, and then break off
and rejoin the severed parts./14
Further research is needed in order to determine when the
fetus becomes an individual human being, that is, ensouled.
Based on my personal observations, I would estimate the
time as forty-two to forty-five days./36
There is a striking congruence with what Dr. Rick Strassman
writes in his book DMT—The Spirit Molecule (2001) , where he says
that in his observation ‘a pineal DMT release at forty-nine days
after conception marks the entrance of the spirit into the fetus.’
Now, let me comment on Part Two of the booklet, written by
Cora Anderson and entitled The Three Souls and Out-of-Body Travel.
Cora Anderson distinguishes between the alpha spirit, the beta
spirit and the delta spirit, and writes with regard to the ‘vital body’
and that other authors call the ‘etheric body’:
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The alpha spirit is usually the first to feel sex attraction and
fall in love. It does not separate sex from love. In some
primitive cultures, it is called the bush or animal spirit. The
word animal does not put a low meaning to it, but means
‘anima, life soul or spirit’. In the ignorant and undeveloped
human being, the alpha spirit becomes so full of complexes,
it can no longer use its form of natural instinctive mentation.
/44
There are several important ingredients in this statement. First
of all, I am thankful for her clarifying that ‘animal spirit’ in the
terminology and scientific worldview of the Kahunas is not to be
connoted with ‘lowness’ of any kind. What Cora Anderson calls
the alpha spirit, the Kahunas call the low self or unihipili.
The Unihipili will release the mana to the Aumakua as se-men is released in sex, or water sprouts from a garden hose.
You will feel a tingling up and down your spine and in your
genitals. If you feel a sudden surge of sexual feeling, do not
repress it. This signals a most perfect and intimate union
with the God within you, your Aumakua. Always remember
you are a trinity in the divine image; otherwise, this prayer
will not work./49
The secret about the huna prayers is that it’s the low self that
sends the mana , and the quest for help or advice, to the high self or
Aumakua , and not the middle self or rational mind. This is why the
prayers of mechanistic minds remain unfulfilled! This is logically
so because it’s simply not the middle self—our reasoning mind—that sends the vital force to the high self, but the low self. This is a
brilliant example for the fact that religion, understood intelli-
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gently, has much in common with science, as it is inquisitive, and
not based upon dogma.
I leave it here with my review, expressing my thankfulness to
the authors and to my own higher self for having guided me to
find this precious resource of wisdom.
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Joseph Campbell was an important discovery for me. I found
his books back in 1998, through a reference in the book The Great
Mother , by Erich Neumann. His work assumes for me the same
importance as, for example, the work of Carl Jung. His books give
us insights about the development of the collective unconscious,
just as Jung’s—but from a mythological , not psychological, perspec-
tive. However, his books contain a common thread, a basic mes-
sage, and this message is that patriarchy is a form of life-denial, a
collective neurosis—not a lifestyle, not a philosophy, not a Weltan-
schauung , but rather a twist given to life and that distorts our very
nature. And ultimately, therefore, it’s a refusal of true humanity.
Campbell develops the theme further with Bill Moyers in The
Power of Myth (1988) , by alluding to the Star Wars plot.
Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He’s arobot. He’s a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in
terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives
that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out
and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to
make use of the system to the attainment of human pur-
poses? How do you relate to the system so that you are not
compulsively serving it?/54
Patriarchy, with its craving for obedience to the father, is a sort
of compulsion neurosis. Not only are individuals flattened out by
systems that are eternal replacements of real fathers—those who
typically abandoned their roles as true caretakers, but authority-
craving individuals also have flattened out their better halves,their right brains, so as to serve the system even more diligently.
In this sense, as a sentinel for attention to the signals pointing to a
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possible coming of Orwellian times, Campbell’s oeuvre cannot be
underestimated. It should be read in all schools, also because it’s
essential to train the right brain capacities of associative, symbolic
thinking from early age. In fact, these capacities were highly devel-
oped in the great scholar, next to his poetic understanding and
word magic, which is why his books are great reading, and not
dry scholarly pamphlets. And then we might finally ask the perti-
nent question: ‘How has patriarchy come about—and what was
before?’ It all started with a murder. The murder of the Goddess.
And it became the foundation of what is called a culture. It be-
came the foundation of what is called a religion.
In biblical times, when the Hebrews came in, they really
wiped out the Goddess. The term for the Canaanite goddess
that's used in the Old Testament is the Abomination. Appar-ently, throughout the period represented in the Book of
Kings, for example, there was a back and forth between the
two cults. Many of the Hebrew kings were condemned in
the Old Testament for having worshiped on the mountain-
tops. Those mountains were symbols of the Goddess. And
there was a very strong accent against the Goddess in the
Hebrew, which you do not find the Indo-European mytholo-gies. Here you have Zeus marrying the Goddess, and then
the two play together. So it's an extreme case that we have in
the Bible, and our own Western subjugation of the female is
a function of biblical thinking./215-216
It seems that when man began to preach high morality and
confessed to strife for goodness, he began to really becomediabolic. Campbell remarks that the vandalism involved in
the destruction of the pagan temples of antiquity is hardly
matched in world history./248
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The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Princeton: Princeton University PressBollingen Series, XVII, 1973
The Hero with a Thousand Faces is one of Joseph Campbell’s best books. It contains
much of the other books, but when it comes to presenting the material, this book
really is well-edited. The headers are comprehensive and the book in its overall
makeup addresses not only scholars but also a young and always-young audi-
ence as it has a significant contact with present-day reality.
We are now once again in the midst of a Hero Cult , and Camp-
bell has to be credited with the merit to have shown the negative
sides of this patriarchy-related phenomenon and its many unde-
sirable consequences. Contrary to the proponents of the cult of
hero modeling, Campbell makes it all clear that, by following this
idea, you miss your soul entirely. In the meantime, he is not the
only one who is saying that. We are going to see further down in
the review of Care of the Soul (1994) by Thomas Moore, that there
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are more authors now being alert to warn us about the dangers of
hero modeling, and perfectionism, as these are symptoms of both
individual and cultural narcissism.
Campbell can be said to be in contradiction with the hero cult,
while this may sound like a paradox. Well, the paradox finds its
solution in the simple fact that Campbell, in accordance with the
oldest of traditions, defines the hero in a different manner than
current popular culture. While this may not be obvious on firstsight, this and my other reviews of Campbell’s books will peel this
truth out for everybody to see.
The answer is probably that to be a hero in today’s hero cul-
ture, you have to abnegate self , so as to bring about private victory
and eventually public victory , to use popular terms. However, it
has to be seen that the creator of these terms, Stephen R. Covey,was not advocating modeling. Other leadership trainers however
do. In Covey’s definition of a leader, soul has certainly a firm and
well-deserved place.
—See Pierre Fred Walter, The New Paradigm in Business, Career, Success &
Prosperity, Book Reviews, 2014
A responsible coach and leadership trainer cannot overlook
the immense quantity of junk productions, especially popular
video games, where the hero is depicted as an abusive type of to-
tally masculine—and often equally totally brainless—type of per-
secutor, and ruthless killer. The film title ‘The Terminator’ also is
an indicative for this kind of redefinition of the hero. But this kind
of hero is the ‘false hero’ not the true hero as the old sagas and
fairy tales have featured him. Joseph Campbell steps into that old
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tradition and explains and describes it with all his rich and mature
vocabulary, and his vivid imagination.
In this book, he takes an archetype-based approach for pre-
senting a wealth of material from mythology and the folk lore of
olden times and of all times, a lore that defines the hero as a basic
novelty , a unique brew of characteristics and a specific energy that
brings forth its mark upon the world, whatever stands in the way,
and thereby produces and changes culture. The archetypal jour-ney of the hero is laid out in the chapter headings, Departure (I-1),
Initiation (I-2), Return (I-3), Keys (I-4), Emanations (II-1), Virgin
Birth (II-2), Transformations (II-3), Dissolutions (II-4).
Campbell defines the hero as a being in transformation , and thus
open for change, flexibly intelligent, and ready to leave behind the
old serpent skins. But what really distinguishes the hero from theordinary man is that he follows but his star , to paraphrase Dante,
and that he models only his or her own self, yet by doing so, and
here is the other paradox, sets the personal mission on the public
stage and makes out of it what the Romans called res publica.
Thus, the hero is defined by the fact of overcoming not only
personal limitations but also selfish orientation, having set the
stage for a transpersonal outcome of his or her particular mission.
To bring about transpersonal realization, not abnegation of self is
needed, but affirmation of self , not ‘victory’ over selfish needs, but
listening to these needs through a constant focus inside and an open
ear for our inner child, the main creative energy in us.
Campbell puts the rebirth of the hero in our focus, which oth-
ers call second birth and which aligns us with our spiritual family,
and often alienates us from the blood family, the pedigree, the il-
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lusion of ‘home sweet home’, and the eternal co-dependence of
the nuclear family that smashes the child’s striving for autonomy
and self-reliance by manipulating children’s emotional life in the
name of ‘the child’s own best.’ Campbell writes:
The hero … is the man or woman who has been able to battle
past his personal and local historical limitations to the gen-
erally valid, normally human forms. … The hero has died as
a modern man; but as eternal man—perfected, unspecific,
universal man—he has been reborn./19-20
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces , Campbell puts a particular
stress on using introversion and introspection as tools for gaining
self-knowledge and strength, the unique force that animates the
hero, his creative energy:
Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements
of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate de-
vice. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates
the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypical
images./64
Campbell sees the uniqueness and the power of the hero not
only in specific talents, personal strength, or a certain alignment
with universal laws, but also in the release of a specific energy
that, using cross-cultural insights and comparisons, he identifies
as the cosmic life force that animates all sentient beings. The hu-
man paradox is that the specific realization of spiritual energy is
brought about not by abnegation of self and focus on ideals, but in
the contrary through a deliberate and long-term focus on one’s
own unique energy. This energy, again paradoxically, strongest is
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visible not in our good deeds, but in our bad ones, which are those
attributed to our shadow. It is our shadow, our inner daimon as Soc-
rates called it, that most originally expresses the essence of our be-
ing, and it’s by dialoguing with this instance, and not by repress-
ing it, that we realize our full spiritual nature. And saying this, I
am in alignment with the writings of Hermes Trismegistos and the
Eleusinian mysteries.
Campbell’s message is important for understanding what thetrue hero is and what the false hero is, and as a consequence to
eventually see that what is thriving today in popular culture is not
heroism, but false heroism. It is not by striving to be superhuman
but by accepting to being only human that we become fully human.
Thus, it’s by accepting our simple yet so wonderfully colorful
humanity that we realize the spiritual man and woman in us. Forthis to happen, we have to focus on our inner world, not on outer
sense-givers. And most importantly we have to avoid those who
come with instant concepts for self-realization and their endless
quick fixes. The soul abhors quick fixes, and instant solutions, and
it prefers the convoluted and slow liberation from our inner maze.
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Occidental Mythology
Princeton: Princeton University PressBollingen Series, XVII, 1973
Occidental Mythology, to say it coarsely, renders the murder culture eventually
comprehensive. It is Joseph Campbell’s merit to have unveiled Isis a second time,
after her first veil was torn down by Helena Blavatsky …
It all started with a murder, the Murder of the Goddess , and it
became the mold of all the murders perpetrated thereafter. And
he, the scholar, politely talks about ambivalence and inversion for
explaining that the basic symbols of the Bible address a pictorial
message to the heart that exactly reverses the verbal message ad-
dressed to the brain, and that this nervous discord inhabits both
Christianity and Islam as well as Judaism, since they too share in
the legacy of the Old Testament. We do have a constant rhetoric in
the Bible that uses the word ‘love’ like a strange kind of balm for
the wounds torn by violence and the patriarchal fear of the female.
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For it is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of
the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-
herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat-herders
from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world,
there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic,
vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life
that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for
whom not the patient toil of earth but the battle spear and its
plunder were the source of both wealth and joy./21
The ‘fury of fire and sword’, as Riane Eisler called it in The
Chalice and the Blade (2005) , was in Campbell’s opinion a moralistic
neurosis as the point of departure of patriarchy.
—See my review of Riane Eisler’s Books in Pierre Fred Walter, The New
Paradigm in Science and Systems Theory (Book and Media Reviews)
He speaks about an infantile thinking in opposites that typi-
cally is marked by an almost total absence of holistic intuition, as-
sociation and synthesis. It is a stiff and inflexible, and neurotic left-
brain concept, called the ‘solar worldview.’
If this worldview would be a historical artifact, we could rele-
gate it to the history department. But we are not yet beyond thesolar worldview, as it has become rather popular again, with relig-
ious and political fundamentalism, and a widespread moralistic
attitude pervading public discussions. And one may ask why hu-
manity has developed a solar worldview in the first place? Camp-
bell explains:
As the mother of all living, Eve herself, then, must be recog-
nized as the missing anthropomorphic aspect of the mother-
goddess. And Adam, therefore, must have been her son as
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uncircumcised, that were to follow. (...) And the observation
must finally be added that all references to sexual life, all
phallic symbols, such as abound and are so aggressive in /
numerous religions—including the historic religion of
Greece—are in Minoan art completely missing./62-63
After the peaceful, emotionally intelligent, wistful and abun-
dantly joyful Minoan Civilization was ravaged and burnt to ashes,
an upside-down movement set in that Campbell well describes asa rewriting of mythology, that resulted in attributing to most dei-
ties the exact opposite values they have had before; it was a forum
of cultural brainwashing. All cultural values were turned to their
opposite. As a result, something like a new morality came up at that
time of early patriarchy that is based upon the demonization of
the autonomous, wistful and knowledgeable female:
The Babylonian epic of Creation is a forthright patriarchal
document, where the female principle is devaluated, to-
gether with its point of view, and, as always happens when a
power of nature and the psyche is excluded from its place, it
has turned into its negative, as a demoness, dangerous and
fierce./86
And here we see why the serpent became a demon, and a se-
ducer, and why native cultures, with their natural integrative atti-
tude toward nature and the female, have been largely decimated
over the course of patriarchy.
Studying the research undertaken by Joseph Campbell gives
us the opportunity to be informed and enlightened about the in-
famous cultural betrayal that is part of our past as a civilization,
with all the consequences this entails. One of them namely is our
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problem with controlling violence and abuse. Fact is that patriar-
chy has made of abuse an automatism. It has built abuse right in
its cultural and social setting. It has made abuse inevitable, and
this is logically so, as this cultural paradigm came about through
murder and abuse, and the ravaging of ‘the children of the en-
emy’, when the strong-and-righteous were taking over the non-
believers. And we can even go as far as saying that patriarchy is per
se a form of ritual abuse of nature. And that is why we have to
overcome the cultural betrayal of patriarchy and not for any other
less important, reason!
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Oriental Mythology
New York: Penguin Arkana, 1991Originally published in 1962
When we want to learn what the difference is between our culture and its patri-
archal roots, so well described by Campbell in Occidental Mythology, then we are
on a path of synthesis, and of unification.
Campbell expresses it in Oriental Mythology in the terms ‘The
Indian point of view is metaphysical, poetical; the biblical, ethical
and historical.’ We could also say that the Oriental mind is better
able to tolerate opposites instead of being trapped by them, and as
a result can assume the simultaneous existence and non-existence
of reality, god or truth. Or, to use modern terminology, the Orient
did not need quantum physics for understanding that life is essen-
tially patterned and nonlinear, not hierarchical and linear. This is
what Campbell calls the still point of eternity, as the spiritual field
beyond the dual nature of physical appearances. And from this
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wistful point of departure of non-dualism, the Oriental mind fos-
ters not opposition to nature, but acceptance of all nature, includ-
ing human nature. The social outflow of this worldview is the ac-
ceptance of the fact that humans are not individuals only, but also
part of group life, endowed with social and cultural responsibility.
Oriental culture is pervaded by the idea that we are all inhabit-
ing not only visible reality, but also a greater scheme of intelli-
gence than the intellectual mind, and the divine is seen as inhabit-ing non-human and inorganic life as well. From this insight, a cul-
ture has been created that teaches the dialogue with self not only
as a personal hygiene and religious quest, but also as a cultural
imperative. While in the West, religion was ritual and dogma, in
the East it was inquiry in the nature of reality, a dialogue with self
and the universe, and attention to the answers given by the uni-verse to our individual quest for truth. Campbell puts this process
in very eloquent terms:
One has but to alter one’s psychological orientation and rec-
ognize (re-cognize) what is within. Deprived of this recogni-
tion, we are removed from our own reality by a cerebral
shortsightedness which is called in Sanskrit maya delusion(from the verbal root ma, ‘to measure, measure out, to form,
to build’, denoting, in the first place, the power of a god or
demon to produce illusory effects, to change form, and to
appear under deceiving masks; in the second place, ‘magic’,
the production of illusions and, in warfare, camouflage, de-
ceptive tactics; and finally, in philosophical discourse, the
illusion superimposed upon reality as an effect of ignorance.Instead of the biblical exile from a geographically, histori-
cally conceived garden wherein God walked in the cool of
the day, we have in India, therefore, already c. 700 B.C.
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(some three hundred years before the putting together of the
Pentateuch), a psychological reading of the great theme./13
And as a result, and not surprisingly so, Oriental culture long
ago came up with a set of techniques that help to bring about this
inner unity which is alignment, peace, and inner growth; and
called it yoga. And the inquiry process itself, the observation of
inner processes, and the reflection pattern, was called meditation.
The analogy is given of the surface of a pond blown by a
wind. The images reflected on such a surface are broken,
fragmentary, and continually flickering. But if the wind
should cease and the surface become still—nirvana: ‘beyond
or without (nir-) the wind (vana)’—we should behold, not
broken images, but the perfectly formed reflection of the
whole sky, the trees along the shore, the quiet depths of thepond itself, its lovely sandy bottom, and the fish. We should
then see that all the broken images, formerly only fleetingly
perceived, were actually but fragments of these true and
steady forms, now clearly and steadily beheld. And we
should have at our command thereafter both the possibility
of stilling the pond, to enjoy the fundamental form, and that
of letting the winds blow and waters ripple, for the enjoy-ment of the play (lila) of the transformations. One is no
longer afraid when this comes and that goes; not even when
the form that seems to be oneself disappears. For the One
that is all, forever remains: transcendent—beyond all; yet
also immanent—within all./28
As for the oldest religion of humanity, Taoism, this book con-tains invaluable source references from age-old scriptures and po-
etic works, such as the works of Chuang Tzu.
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In the following passage, Campbell cites Chuang Tzu, Book
VI, Part I, Section VI. 2-3:
The True Men of old knew nothing either of the love of life
or the hatred of death. Entrance into life occasioned them no
joy; the exist from it awakened no resistance. Composedly
they went and came. They did not forget what their begin-
ning had been, and they did not inquire into what their end
would be. They accepted their life and rejoiced in it; they
forgot all fear of death and returned to their state before life.
Thus there was in them what is called the want of any mindto resist the Tao, and of all attempts by means of the Human
to assist the Heavenly. Such were they who are called True
Men. Being such, their minds were free from all thought;
their demeanor was still and unmoved; their foreheads
beamed simplicity. Whatever coldness came from them was
like that of autumn; whatever warmth came from them was
like that of spring. Their joy and anger assimilated to whatwe see in the four seasons. They did in regard to all things
what was suitable, and no one could know how far their ac-
tion would go./28
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I haven’t found a better description of the integral worldview
of the old Taoist sages and their unifying and non-harming, re-
spectful attitude toward life and living—and their true integration
of nature in all its forms and expressions. And what few have been
able to elucidate, the difference between the Indian and the Chi-
nese mind, Campbell has ventured into and he came up with a
quite elaborate distinction. Even more eloquent and daring, when
comparing Indian and Japanese religious customs and spiritual
traditions, Campbell writes:
These, then, are the signatures of the two major provinces of
the Orient, and although, as we shall see, India has had its
days of joy in the ripple of the waves and the Far East has
cocked its ear to the song of the depth beyond depths, never-
theless in the main, the two views have been, respectively,
‘All is illusion: let it go’, and ‘All is in order: let it com’'; in
India, enlightenment (samadhi) with the eyes closed; in Ja-
pan, enlightenment (satori) / with the eyes open./29-30
And then again comparing the religions of the Far East with
our Middle Eastern religious tradition, Campbell wistfully con-
cludes:
Whereas in the greater Orient of India and the Far East, such
a conflict of man and God, as though the two were separate
from / each other, would be thought simply absurd./32-33
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Now, the person who isn’t a specialist, but a generalist like
myself, sees something over here that he has learned from
one specialist, something over there that he has learned from
another specialist—and neither of them has considered the
problem of why this occurs here and also there./11
Campbell illustrates a variety of material he presented in Occi-
dental Mythology , perhaps because the content is more controver-
sial, and also because it bears a direct link to our own culture. Heexpresses some deep truths that form part of his mythological vi-
sion in a more convincing manner than in the former book, for ex-
ample as to the Christian ideal of brotherhood, and how it was
applied in practice:
Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is confined
to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggres-
sion is projected outward. For example, the ten command-
ments say, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Then the next chapter says,
‘Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it’. That is a bounded
field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the
in-group, the the out-group is totally other. This is the sense
of the world ‘gentile’—the person is not of the same
order./28
Campbell leaves no doubt that this myth indeed tells us an
important story about present times, and that it has forged some
of our controversial values. They were essentially forged through
that in-group versus out-group thinking that goes back to our Bibli-
cal past:
The Hebrews were absolutely ruthless with respect to their
neighbors. (...) That is to say, love and compassion are re-
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served for the in-group, and aggression and abuse are pro-
jected outward on others. Compassion is to be reserved for
members of your own group. The out-group is to be treated
in a way described there in Deuteronomy. Of course, in bib-
lical times, when the Hebrews came in, they really wiped out
the Goddess. The term for the Canaanite goddess that’s used
in the Old Testament is ‘the Abomination’. Apparently,
throughout the period represented in the Book of Kings, for
example, there was a back and forth between the two cults.
Many of the Hebrew kings were condemned in the Old Tes-
tament for having worshiped on the mountaintops. Those
mountains were symbols of the Goddess. And there was a
very strong accent against the Goddess in the Hebrew, which
you do not find the Indo-European mythologies. Here you
have Zeus marrying the Goddess, and then the two play to-
gether. So it’s an extreme case that we have in the Bible, and
our own Western subjugation of the female is a function of
biblical thinking./215, 216
It seems that since those early times of patriarchy, humanity is
entangled in one tight knot of violence, and it is our major trinity
of religions that have helped this knot to be so tight. It is not one
of these religions, but all three of them, Judaism, Christianity andIslam that are sworn into this kind of thinking. By contract, East-
ern culture and religion offer a counterpoint here, and Campbell
puts it eloquently when he says:
Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within
us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in
the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the
worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and
dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of
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the lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come
together. He is the primary god, actually, in the Garden of
Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the cool of the
evening, is just a visitor./54
Campbell’s answer is in alignment with the oldest of tradi-
tions, that all affirm the serpent to be the god of the gods, the ul-
timate spiritual force of the universe. This is also the teaching of
the old Chinese sages and of most of the native peoples around
the world. But to depict Yahweh as a visitor is an idea I have not
found elsewhere. Campbell implicitly says that what Eisler called
the ‘truncation of civilization’ through the reversal of the symbol-
ism after the cultural turndown of matriarchy, has not really taken
place, at least not on the level of the unconscious, and in mythol-
ogy. Campbell suggests that what he called the counterplayer to
patriarchy, the Serpent-Goddess, is still active on the level of the
unconscious, and probably also on the level of the collective un-
conscious, relegating the ‘New God’ to the status of a visitor. But
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ing their own authentic vision to the emotional addictions of their
parents. Campbell’s message is encouraging for all of us because
it’s positive, and because it’s human in a time where inhumanity
seems to get the overhand, and he shows us that we have to find
our strength inside because we all have extraordinary gifts and re-
sources:
I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal.
Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experi-ence of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate
it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when
people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met
an ordinary man, woman, or child./205
When Campbell voiced his opinion that he found the idea of
God as Absolute Order ‘simply ridiculous’, the discussion took avery interesting turn. Moyers asks if the courage to love, in the
troubadour tradition of the Middle Ages, became the courage to
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affirm one’s own experience against tradition and why that was
important for evolution of Western thought? Truly, an intelligent
question. Campbell replies:
It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the
individual, that one should have faith in his experience and
not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It
stresses the validity of the individual’s experience of what
humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the mono-
lithic system. The monolithic system is the machine system:
every machine works like every other machine that's come
out of the same shop./234
I think here we have got to an angular point in our tradition in
that it is not a monolithic system , because love, human love and de-
sire, is a transformational lever not only for individual growth, but also for society at large. Campbell affirms:
The best part of the Western tradition has included a recog-
nition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The
function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not
the function of the individual to support society./239
The idea is paramount in the history of Western individualism
and here we encounter what the wisdom tradition has called The
Holy Grail. What is that about? Campbell explains:
The Grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that is lived
in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse sys-
tem, that carries itself between the pairs of opposites of goodand evil, light and dark./245
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The individual love quest is always a manifestation of the
larger desire to become an individual, to gain true autonomy, to be
self-reliant and powerful, and this quest can never be respectable ,
to paraphrase Krishnamurti. Campbell notes:
Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in
terms of the socially approved manners of life. That’s why it
is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order./254
When we recognize that love is on a different level than social
order, we can realize our love, and will realize it not on the lines of
social order and majoritarian approval, but based upon our own
soul values.
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Deepak Chopra
Life After Death
The Book of Answers
London: Rider, 2006
Life After Death is one of Chopra’s best. I am talking about this specific edition
that he published with Rider in London, not about the later version entitled Life
after Death: The Burden of Proof, that he published in the USA.
What makes the strength of the present edition is that design-
ers and the publisher really worked well to bring over Chopra’s
poetic content to the distinguished reader. For this book is not just
scientific in the modern sense of the word; it is scientific within the
oldest traditions of the world, and among them the tradition Chopra
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himself originates from, the wistful Vedic tradition of India. In this
sense, the book is an artful composition of poetic teaching tales
and scientific text interwoven in a fantastic poetic tale.
I do not presently know an author who could do such a fusion
without losing his style, and get into popular science jargon.
Chopra is beyond these categories, which is why he can afford
to put his whole heart and soul in a book where others, afraid of
public opinion in a matter that is still highly controversial, wouldprobably stay with the hard facts. That is truly admirable. I would
like to laud the designers and the publisher, Rider-Randomhouse
in London, for this wonderful rendition of Chopra’s thoughts. The
choice of the cover, the font, the layout and design, all is the work
of skilled craft-makers, and it shows so much care taken! This is
how it should.
This book was for me a journey, and I read it parallel with
Charles W. Leadbeater’s Inner Life (1911)—which I am equally re-
viewing in this present volume—and that was truly a good mix.
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Russell DiCarlo (Ed.)
A New Worldview
Conversations at the Leading Edge
Erie, PA: Epic Publishing, 1996
A New Worldview, edited and published by Russell E. DiCarlo, is somehow a
radical book in that it really holds its promise: it presents a new worldview, and
all its contributors are leading-edge scientists and paranormal healers of the
highest caliber and with the highest credentials.
This is the most electrifying science book I have read so far,
and each contribution is a major one. I go as far as saying that this
book will really contribute changing your regard on life forever,
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therapist, Brennan has spent the last 15 years studying the
human energy field and working as a healer. Hands of Light
goes beyond conventional, objective knowledge while re-
taining scientific clarity. It details a study of the human en-
ergy field and how it is intimately connected to a person's
health and well being and contains essential information for
anyone involved in healing and conscious health care, in-
cluding people seeking to heal themselves. Science and spiri-
tuality may currently be at odds, but fortunately there will
always be scientists who are spiritual seekers, and it is in the
mingling of the two worlds where wisdom is born.
—Jodie Buller
Barbara Brennan
I have a scientific background, and from a scientific perspec-
tive, there aren’t any adequate experiments to tell you what
the field really is. So I am going to have to speak solely from
my experience as a healer who is able to perceive the field
and work with it. From this perspective, the human energy
field—which can be perceived by anyone with practice—is
the matrix structure upon which the cells of the physical
body grow. It is the template of the physical body./146-156,
at 146
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Based upon my experience as a healer conducting private
sessions with clients spanning a fifteen year period, and as a
teacher for as many, I can tell you that anything that happens
in the physical body will happen in the pattern of the energy
field first./146-156, at 146
In between the structured layers of the field is a bioplasma
like energy that simply flows along the lines of the struc-
tured field pattern. It’s the energy that flows along the lines
of the structured field pattern that changes very fast with
thoughts and emotions, not the structured pattern itself. For
example, if you stop yourself from feeling something, it will
stop the flow of energy in the field. And if you experience
the feeling, the energy will be released. There is a direct cor-
relation. There are even correlations between the energy field
and the part of the brain you are thinking with. As you
change your thought patterns, the patterning of the field
changes./146-156, at 147
When you forgive yourself, wonderful things happen. There
is a certain tension and stagnated energy that is held in the
field whenever there is anything that you won’t accept
within yourself. It’s kind of like a mucous that you get when
you have a cold. So you actually create distortions in your
own energy pattern that have to do with unforgiveness to-
wards yourself. These distortions will eventually lead to
illness./146-156, at 148
Life is associated with constant movement in the personal
energy field, so any attitude of non-forgiveness within the
self will create blockage. When you have a non-forgiving
attitude towards an individual, there will be a definite pat-
tern in your field. The outer edge of your field will become
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rigid and brittle when interacting with that person. There
will be additional ways that you will not let your life energy
flow out towards that person. There are great bands of en-
ergy or bioplasmic streamers that normally flow between
people when they interact. There’s an exchange of life en-
ergy that normally goes on between all living things. It’s not
just human beings: there’s a flow between humans and ani-
mals, humans and plants. But if there is a sense of unfor-
giveness, all that will be stopped./146-156, at 149
If you look at the energy field, there are three major aspects:
reason, will and emotion. All are associated with psychologi-
cal phenomena. When you judge another, you stop the flow
of your emotions towards that person which would be on
the front of your body, and you would be pushing your en-
ergy to the back of the body, into the will, and then running
it up into the mind. So you ‘will not’ accept that person, and
then the energy moves up your body to the head region and
you rationalize it in the mental sensors./146-156, at 149
When a person allows love into their field, the field becomes
very soft, very flowing, resilient. The whole field blows up
sort of like a balloon. It becomes very energized and the en-
ergy flows out of the field in a very healthy way./146-156, at
149
To feel grateful is one of the most important experiences we
need as humans. When we feel it, there is an acceptance of
everything in our life and a surrender to basic values in life.
We can see the positive in everything and also feel thankful
for it. That’s essential because it allows a connection to take
place between the personality self and the deeper regions of
the human being, the core essence or the divinity within. The
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The field of anyone who hasn’t done a lot of personal devel-
opment work and transformed themselves will be quite brit-
tle. It will be laden with blocks, stagnated energies, and
probably tears, disruptions and imbalances./146-156, at 153
One major thing about the human energy field: energy and
consciousness cannot be divided. So whenever the energy
moves, you also experience it. You become consciously
aware of it. Transformation is about becoming consciously
aware of everything. In other words, awakening./146-156, at
153
From the broader spiritual perspective we are all connected
in concentric spheres. Those who are closer around us are
more involved in the creation of our personal reality than
those who are outside of that sphere. You can expand that
out concentrically. We not only create as individuals, we cre-
ate as groups, as communities, as nations, and as the whole
of humanity./146-156, at 155
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CAROLINEMYSS PH.D.
Caroline Myss Ph.D. is an international lecturer in the field of
human consciousness and is widely recognized for her pioneering
work with Dr. C. Norman Shealy, former president of the Ameri-
can Holistic Medicine Association, in the area of the intuitive di-
agnosis of illness. Together they have written the book, The Crea-
tion of Health. According to Myss, the root cause of disease is not to
be found at the level of the physical body, but rather at emotional,
mental and spiritual levels.
Editorial Book Reviews
Who can help asking ‘Why?’ when they develop a disease?According to theologian and ‘medical intuitive’ Caroline
Myss, Ph.D., and co-worker C. Norman Shealy, M.D., who is
a physician, neurosurgeon, and expert on pain and stress
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management, the answer goes further than a medical expla-
nation. The Creation of Health explores the emotional,
physical, and spiritual patterns that form health and the
stresses that can cause disease.
Joan Price
Myss identifies eight dysfunctional patterns that lead to ill-
ness. Being aware that ‘negative attitudes create negative
responses within the physical body’ allows you to make
changes toward health after identifying your emotional,
psychological, and spiritual stresses. The most interesting
chapters discuss specific diseases in terms of lifestyle factors,
stress, and psychological patterns and energy factors, with
case studies. A heart attack, for example, is ‘an explosion of
energy attempting to break down an emotional barrier ...
caused by warehousing fears and anger’, says Myss. The
authors alternate, rather than co-write, chapters and topics,
so you know whose perspective you’re reading. The theo-
retical sections are not easy reading, but the insights you can
apply to your own health make the work immensely
worthwhile.
Christiane Northrup
The pioneering work of Dr. Shealy and Caroline Myss is the
best way I know to learn the dynamics of the human energy
system. Applying the principles ... outlined in this book in
your own life may be the most important thing you do for
your health this decade.
—Christiane Northrup M.D. is the author of Women’s Bod-
ies, Women’s Wisdom.
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sponses form patterns that influence your electromagnetic
circuitry. This dictates a quality control signal that influences
the creation and quality of cell tissue./136-145, at 137
This means you would be taught to take responsibility for
your attitudes and for the thoughts that you generate be-
cause you would be taught that from that moment on, every
thought you have has a consequence in the physical world.
It is irrelevant to me that you can't see it. You’re going to live
your life by that fact./136-145, at 137
Energy is intelligent. It is alive. It is information—energy is
information. It is one and the same thing./136-145, at 137
Nobody ever goes to heaven sane. You have to go quite in-
sane before you get enlightened./136-145, at 138
I cluster the 1st , 2nd and 3rd chakras under what I would call
the tribal or the group mind. But instead of looking at each
of the chakras individually, I cluster them. So the 1st , 2nd and
3rd are one unit, 4th , 5th , 6th and 7th are another. Then there’s
the 8th , which is symbolic. (…) At some point, every one of
us, somewhere along the line—this life, next life—is destined
to break free of the tribal mind and develop the upper 4th ,
5th , 6th and 7th chakras. It is inevitable. This is the stage of
individuation. The 4th thru the 7th chakras have nothing to
do with time and space./136-145, at 139
So, in looking at the top level, when you start the journey of
individuation—being an individual by pulling away fromthe tribal mind—you begin the journey of becoming congru-
ent, of getting all the seven chakras lined up with a more
mature will. That’s when you have to go into conflict with
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the tribal mind, because you are now purging yourself of
what you want to believe versus you have been pro-
grammed to believe./136-145, at 143
If people could stay in present time for two days, their whole
life would change, because the consequence of having that
much energy would activate synchronicities—coincidences
in their lives of being in the right place at the right time and
that would change everything./136-145, at 145
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GARYZUKAV
Gary Zukav is the author of the book The Dancing Wu Li Mas-
ters , which won the 1979 American Book Award in Science, and
helped to establish him as one of the foremost interpreters of the
new physics. A graduate of Harvard University, he has also
authored the book The Seat of the Soul , which describes the evolu-
tionary journey of humanity from external power based upon the
perception of the five senses, to authentic power based upon the
perceptions and values of the soul.
Amazon Editorial Review
At an Esalen Institute meeting in 1976, tai chi master Al
Huang said that the Chinese word for physics is Wu Li, ‘pat-
terns of organic energy.’ Journalist Gary Zukav and the oth-
ers present developed the idea of physics as the dance of the
Wu Li Masters—the teachers of physical essence, Zukav ex-plains.
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Mary Ellen Curtin
The 'new physics’ of Zukav’s 1979 book comprises quantum
theory, particle physics, and relativity. Even as these theories
age they haven’t percolated all that far into the collective
consciousness; they’re too far removed from mundane hu-
man experience not to need introduction. The Dancing Wu
Li Masters remains an engaging, accessible way to meet the
most profound and mind-altering insights of 20th-century
science.
David Bohm
This book is an extremely clear and easily understandable
account of the latest developments in physics …
Gary Zukav
The evolutionary transition that humanity is now in has no
precedent. There is nothing in our past from which we can
extrapolate our future. (...) This evolutionary transition is
one from a five sensory species that is evolving through the
exploration of physical reality with the five senses to a spe-
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walk. As you begin to move in the direction that your soul
wants you to move, you begin to get a sense of meaning.
When your life is alive with meaning, when you are excited
every day about what you are doing, when you want to get
up, when you want to be with people, when you have no
fear, when you have forgotten to worry, when you are fully
engaged with your life, you are moving in alignment with
your soul. That is authentic power./317-330, at 322
Decision-making today is primarily an intellectual function.
We use logic and understanding that originates in the mind.
This / logic and understanding is linear and exclusionary.
That is, you cannot think of one thing without excluding
others. You cannot understand something one way and un-
derstand it in other ways simultaneously. We are now devel-
oping a higher order of logic and understanding that origi-
nates in the heart. The heart is inclusive. It accepts. The intel-
lect judges. The higher order of logic and understanding that
originates in the heart comprehends nonlinear realities and
simultaneous realms of truth./317-330, at 323, 324
Quantum physics is the pinnacle development of science. It
leads us to the intellectual realization that consciousness is
an aspect of physical reality, that the two can’t be separated.
/317-330, at 327
Human history has been the sequential recording of one bru-
tality after another. You will know in yourself that you are
striving for authentic empowerment when a part of you de-
cides that it will not participate any longer in this brutality,
that your life will contribute something else to this human
experience, and you find a way to do that in your day-to-day
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interactions. These will cumulatively form the course of your
life./317-330, at 329
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JACQUELYNSMALL, MSS
Jacquelyn Small is the the author of Becoming Naturally Thera-
peutic , Awakening in Time or The Sacred Purpose of Being Human.
Another of her books, the Transformers has become a classic.
Small is the former Director of Training for the Texas Commission on
Alcoholism and Drug Abuse; and she served on the external degreefaculty of the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Menlo Park,
California, for four years.
She currently sits on the Advisory Board for the National Council
on Codependence. Her company, Eupsychia, Inc., is a healing and
training center dedicated to bridging traditional and transforma-
tional psychologies.
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Editorial Review
Noted psychologist Jacquelyn Small helps us break the cycle
of addictive behavior, destructive relationships and self-
harm by teaching that we are not human beings learning to
be spiritual, we are spiritual beings learning to be human.
Jacquelyn Smalls 12 Principles of Wholeness, developed in
her 30-year clinical practice, provide a one-year process of
psychospiritual inner work. Blending ancient wisdom and
modern science, this process has led client after client to the
personal transformation of addictive living that precedes
spiritual awakening. The readings, exercises and guided im-
ageries in this book will help you access blocked emotions
and modify the basic patterns buried within you that are
holding unwanted behaviors in place. You will learn how to:
Release stuck emotions through ‘inner work’ designed to
heal your past. Identify pseudo-personalities that masquer-
ade as your true self. Create the inner space required for a
spiritual awakening to occur naturally.
Jacquelyn Small
Western psychology is based upon ego psychology. Unfor-
tunately, even though the word psychology comes from the
word ‘psyche’, which means ‘soul’, Western psychologists
really have not been very knowledgeable of the fact. They
have focused their attention upon the ego, which is like
studying the shell of an egg and not looking inside to dis-cover the essence of the chick./331-358, at 332
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If you bring in a little Eastern thought about the energy cen-
ters called ‘chakras’, you will realize that each of us has
seven different levels of consciousness that we are capable of
experiencing while we, as consciousness, are in human form.
Historically, ego psychology in the United States has studied
the first three levels of consciousness—the physical body,
emotions, and workings of the mind, which has been nar-
rowed unfortunately to the intellect. What many psycholo-
gists don’t realize is that beyond body, emotions and mind
we have yet another level of consciousness which you might
think of as the heart./331-358, at 332
The seventh level of consciousness is where you begin to live
your deepest truth and embrace your spiritual will. When
people come into that stage of consciousness, they become
‘transformers.’ If they walk into a room full of other people,
their very presence begins to cause energy shifts to occur.
/331-358, at 332
The transformer is flowing through life, allowing you to be,
and they don’t ever view you through judgmental eyes, as
needing to be changed. The reformer is always trying to
change you because they have already got a preconceived
notion of what’s right. If you don’t live up to their ideal, they
have a way to either punishing you, making you feel wrong,
or pulling away from you. A transformer just doesn’t view
you that way at all. They simply meet you in the moment
and because they see you from the ‘Bigger Picture’, they
know that you are a spirit in human form and that you’ve
gotten caught in a condition, trapped in something that is
scaring you, beating you up, or taking your energy./331-358,
at 333
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I see addiction as a way of being stuck in the past through
repetitive, self-destructive behavior./331-358, at 334
There are so many addictions—some are just more subtle
than others. The chemical addictions are the easiest ones to
spot. People even get addicted to their ideas and beliefs and
become extremely unwilling to change their rigid and dys-
functional point of view. Sometimes I think those are the
worst addictions of all because they block growth./331-358,
at 335
Our intrinsic nature is spiritual. We are made of light parti-
cles. We have the ability, just as physics is showing us now,
to manifest as both the particle, localized in time and space
as the personality that we / know so well, and also as the
wave function, which is our spiritual nature. The law of
complimentarity rules us. I am an ego in concretized, physi-
cal form, but I also can evaporate and be spirit. But spirit is
not a belief or dogma. It’s not religion. Spirit is an internal
force that moves you toward the realization of your ideal.
When we relax our ego-driven controls, we flow naturally
toward what inspires us./331-358, at 335, 336
To be healthy individuals we just learn to honor our human
nature and also honor the fact that we are spiritual beings
and not try to be either/or. If I fall down in my conscious-
ness and think I am just an ego, I get stuck in the muck.
Every condition that I butt up against will start defining
me— ‘I am a neurotic. I am a divorced woman. I am a basket
case. I can't get it right.’ All those things we say and do when
we are in a lower state of consciousness./331-358, at 336
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I am sure you have met people like that. They are always
pretending to be positive. Everything is just so full of love
and light all the time, but you don’t feel as though you have
touched a real person. And you have a little secret knowl-
edge that if you ever did punch one of their buttons an over-
heated ‘shadow self’ would come out. And in fact, you can
bet it does behind closed doors./331-358, at 336
Most of us are from dysfunctional families which means
we’ve got some very core issues to deal with—with mom,
with dad, with life, with self-image. / So our little earthy self
is made up of an ego nature that takes on a ‘persona’ which
means ‘mask’ in Greek. It tries to live according to society’s
standards so that it won’t get in trouble. It is a very basic
structure called ‘personality.’ When I call it ‘lower self’ I
don’t really mean that it is ‘less than’ the Higher Self. It’s just
closer to the earth, very susceptible to destruction. It’s con-
crete. /331-358, at 336, 337
We have seen what people are like who have no egos. They
are in back wards of state hospitals. They can’t function in
the world. The ego is living the earth life and it knows the
ways of the outer world./331-358, at 337
We can operate in the world through the laws of material-
ism, of limitation, of separation, of sensation and of survival.
We can live our lives locked into a sense of separateness and
isolation, of only looking out for ourselves. We have that
power. Unfortunately, some people do that without even
knowing it./331-358, at 337
Once you have developed a strong ego and personality
structure and have become identified with it, then you’ve
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got a foundation and the strength to go through the trans-
formational process and experience more of your spiritual
nature. And that transformational process is going to be cha-
otic at times because it’s a ‘death/rebirth’ process. If you
don’t have a strong ego, you will not be able to make it. Peo-
ple can shatter into fragments and become mentally ill. /331-
358, at 338
The soul wants to play, to dance, to experience life. It just is
what it is. The soul lives totally in the moment. When it
picks up a piece of paper, it starts to feel the texture of the
paper and begins to get really into it. It gazes into a sunset,
captivated by its beauty. It is totally caught up in whatever it
is doing at the moment. And if you think about it, that’s the
way we love to be in life more than anything else—totally
and intensely involved. And when we are in that state of
consciousness there is no sense of time. You might think you
have been sitting somewhere ten minutes and it’s really been
an hour./331-358, at 338
The intellect is in between, and it serves as a bridge between
our conscious and unconscious mind. It serves as a gate-
keeper. The intellect will only let in so much soul power at
once because the soul is light and it’s terrifying to an ego
that’s not able to handle it. So our intellect serves as a filter
and it will restrict our awareness to as much of reality as we
can handle at any one time. The intellect is like a computer,
very mechanical and always being programmed with infor-
mation from what is already the past./331-358, at 339
The intellect is always drawing its knowledge from the past.
It’s like a little researcher and it makes a lot of mistakes be-
cause it is using that person’s perception which is going to
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be distorted if there is a lot of unfinished psychological busi-
ness going on all the time./331-358, at 339
On the other hand the Higher Self mind, which operates
from a very expanded state of consciousness, sees whole pat-
terns. It thinks in terms of the whole, not the part. It might
move in and dissect something for a minute, but it won’t get
lost in it. It can pull back out and see the whole picture, put-
ting all things in their proper perspective. In Eastern
thought, it’s called ‘Big Mind’./331-358, at 340
When I was twenty-nine I had a clinical near-death experi-
ence. I was out of my body for a while, looking down upon
it from above the hospital bed saying calmly to myself, ‘You
don’t want to go back into that body, do you? That body has
had it.’ But when my thoughts turned to my son who was
eight years old at the time, I felt compelled to return. He
didn’t know how to take care of himself. It was my compas-
sion for my son that brought me back. Through this experi-
ence I had a wonderful opportunity to know that there is no
such thing as the death of the individual. There are only
shifts of consciousness to other states of being. In that next
state beyond where I am now, my body dissipates and I just
become space. Using the language of the new physics, I am
dissolving my particle nature and I am moving into a wave
function. I can dialogue with myself and with others, even
when I am out of my body./331-358, at 341
We have to continuously be stepping out of our old skin,
‘making dying our profession,’ if we are to grow. And right
now, as one Humanity we’re stepping out of one big, huge,
human soul skin and we are moving into a new dimension
of consciousness./331-358, at 341
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If you allow the law of attraction to draw you, if you allow
yourself to be pulled by your bliss rather than deciding from
the intellect whom you should mate with, you will find that
you are exactly with the partner you need to be with at the
time. It may not need to be a marriage. It may just be a love
affair. Or it may be a real close friendship or a business part-
nership. Sometimes we have to go through the trials of a re-
lationship to find out what is our right relationship. Some-
times the role or label we put on a relationship misidentifies
it./331-358, at 342
Your desire nature is always moving you towards fulfillment
of your ideals. (...) But if your desires are distorted and begin
moving you towards self-destructive, addictive and self-
defeating behaviors and activities, then you’re going to mess
up your energy for awhile which will really slow you down
in your growth. Sometimes I think we deliberately choose
something dysfunctional to slow us down or send us off
course because we start moving too fast. Or because, for
some reason, we need the lesson this dysfunction will pro-
vide. /331-358, at 342
If you make decisions based on greed, or want too much
luxury, or put yourself into debt financially just so you can
have a lot of goodies, then you are letting the lords of mate-
rialism become your god and rule you. That kind of life al-
ways leads to misery./331-358, at 343
I think it is very important to be in our bodies, and to be
fully involved with life. To really be willing to commit to
being here. (…) Attachment involves getting hooked on out-
comes and expectations. It’s an ego thing. It is not a Higher
Self state. If I have become attached—let’s say to my mate—
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in a jealous, possessive way and I feel as though I own him,
look how I am going to behave. I am going to act in a way
that is going to make me less than proud of my reactions. So
attachment is the exact opposite of love. It’s paradoxical be-
cause we tend to think of attachment as meaning you are
really close and intimate with someone. But attachment
blocks intimacy. It blocks true intimacy./331-358, at 344
To use an analogy, the Higher Self is really more an artist
than a scientist. It really doesn’t care if it is validated empiri-
cally. It just wants to express. It is full of life, full of creativity,
full of joy. It is loving whatever is happening in the moment.
Even if it is something ‘negative’, it can honor the fact that
both positive and negative are part of life./331-358, at 344
The Higher Self, coming from our pattern of wholeness,
tends to live from the ‘bigger picture.’ It possesses a creative
imagination—meaning that its thoughts are creative—and it
knows it. It takes responsibility for how it thinks. (…) It’s
light, it’s energy, it’s vibration. It’s experienced through
sound, color, music, movement, flow—those are all words
that pertain to the Higher Self. The Higher Self is not ‘in-
formed’, meaning it’s not in form. It’s energy. It is an energy
matrix, or scaffold, that formulates matter into an individual.
It is an archetype./331-358, at 345
I can literally start becoming a living representative of that
Higher Power in my life. Then people start calling you
teacher, or they say, ‘you are representing an archetype.’ You
have to be careful. As you begin to attract people to you,
which happens when you begin to express your Higher Self
a lot, you have to know the responsibility that’s involved.
You are more influential than you perhaps realize, so you
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have to be careful about the words you use and the things
you do and be willing to take complete responsibility. /331-
358, at 346
The minute that I start realizing that I am a soul in human
form, everything changes and my soul consciousness comes
alive in me. It always has been, but I just didn’t notice it be-
fore. Now I have noticed it; it is a conscious aspect of my
experience. I begin to learn about the soul’s qualities—the
soul just is quality actually. That’s the definition of the soul,
it’s qualities such as inspiration, imagination, joy, celebra-
tion, light, play, spontaneity, deep compassion, hope, and
faith. The soul is really not a thing, it is our essence, our ‘fla-
vor.’ The soul desires to manifest here on the earth through
our physical forms. Our souls are wanting to spiritualize
matter. What that means in ordinary language, is that we are
learning how to bring the good, the true and the beautiful
through in all our relations and in all our activities./331-358,
at 347
I think we are shifting away from fear consciousness to con-
sciousness of love and compassion. We are shifting from
separatism to more of a unified wholeness. I think we are
realizing now that we are not individual countries, that we
are all living on one globe. Television and the media have
helped us to realize that we just can’t separate off from each
other as we’ve done in the past. And yet because we are both
an ego and a soul, we also have a right to have a personal
life. We have a right to our privacy. We have a right to make
our own decisions and choices and to honor each others in-
dividual nature while at the same time recognizing our right
relationships with each other as soul brothers and sisters.
Ultimately, we’re all here for one reason and that is to bring
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journey and you become the bridge. And you realize the
journey is your home./331-358, at 358
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LARRYDOSSEY, M.D.
Dr. Larry Dossey is the author of Space, Time and Medicine , Re-
covering the Soul and Healing Words which explores remissions of
illness that are unexplained by the traditional paradigm of medi-
cine. A physician of internal medicine, he served as battalion sur-
geon in Vietnam and was former Chief of Staff of Humana Medical
City Dallas Hospital.
He lectures internationally and in 1988 was invited to deliver
the annual Mahatma Gandhi Lecture in New Delhi, the only phy-
sician ever invited to do so.
Dr. Dossey is co-chair of the Panel on Mind/Body Interven-tions, National Institute of Health in Washington, D.C.
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Dr. Larry Dossey
Now, there is overwhelming evidence that if you take prayer
into the laboratory and subject it to testing, you can show
that it works. So, that’s the big news. This information has
been marginalized and it is practically unknown, even to
physicians. It is not taught in medical schools. But it’s out
there./124-135, at 127
My primary interest is not the practical applications of
prayer to make diseases go away. It’s really the larger mes-
sage about who we are, and what our origins and destiny
may be. How consciousness manifests in the world. Those
are the real issues that go far beyond whether you can use
prayer to bail yourself out of a difficult situation or illness.
/124-135, at 127
The prevailing notion that prayer is asking for something—
basically talking out loud to a cosmic male parent figure who
prefers English—either for yourself or somebody else is woe-
fully incomplete. I want to get away from that common wayof looking at prayer. Prayer for me is any psychological act
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which brings us closer to the transcendent. It’s not the terri-
tory of any specific religion./124-135, at 127
Love is a felt quality that can change the state of the physical
world. We are beyond metaphor and poetry here. We are
talking about something that literally can make a difference
in outcomes in the world./124-135, at 128
The materialists cannot account for non-local events. There is
currently nothing within the field of biological science that
can explain distant, non-local, consciousness-related events.
/124-135, at 128
The problem is, the skeptics and the materialists won’t look
at non-local data at the level of biology and psychology.
They will grant you that non-local phenomena occur at the
quantum level—the level of the very small, such as atoms
and subatomic particles. That has been proven beyond a rea-
sonable doubt. But the notion that these things can happen
at the level of the psyche and at the level of biology is just
not being entertained./124-135, at 128
These non-local manifestations of consciousness—among
which prayer is one type—display characteristics that are
not displayed by any known form of energy. For example,
prayer, transpersonal imagery effects, and so on, are not a
function of the amount of distance a person is from their tar-
get. These activities are just as effective when done on the
other side of the earth as when they are done close up. /124-
135, at 128
The reason that many of the dedicated materialistic scientists
are so infuriated over the mere discussion of prayer and dis-
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tant healing, is that it really begins to call into question their
world view. It calls into question the adequacy of materialis-
tic science, upon which these people have staked their ca-
reers, self-identity and self-esteem. And when you begin to
question somebody’s world view, that’s more inflammatory
than making derogatory comments about their mother. It
generates tremendous animosity and really draws a line in
the sand. If the data is right, then the materialist’s model of
the universe is inadequate. It’s down to that. That’s why you
see people libeling and slandering other people over these
issues in the scientific journals./124-135, at 129
Right after I began to attract the attention of cynics, material-
ists and skeptics in medicine, I pulled a book off my shelf
called Garrison’s History of Medicine, written in 1929. It’s
one of my favorite books. I went back and looked at the way
the great medical authorities of the day treated Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes, who was among the first to suggest hand-
washing. He was vilified for proposing the silly idea that
washing your hands could cut down on the incidence of in-
fections and death following childbirth, in spite of the fact
that there was supportive scientific data which had been col-
lected from the hospital. It showed that the practice of physi-
cian hand-washing tremendously lowered the death rate
following childbirth. The data was in, yet in spite of that, this
man was unbelievably hounded by other leading orthodox
obstetricians./124-135, at 130
Physicist Max Planck, commenting about the controversy
surrounding quantum physics around the turn of the cen-
tury said that, science changes funeral by funeral. That’s a
clever way of stating that some people are never going to
change their mind./124-135, at 131
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PETERRUSSELL
Peter Russell graduated with first class honors in theoretical
physics and experimental psychology at the University of Cam-
bridge (England).
He has been a business consultant for fifteen years to interna-
tional corporations such as Apple Computers, Shell, BASF, Ameri-
can Express and BP. He produced a series on meditation for BBC
Radio 4, and is the author of seven books, including The Global
Brain Awakens , which explores the psychological dimensions of the
global crisis and The White Hole In Time.
Editorial Review
At this unprecedented moment in history, when escalating
crises threaten all life on earth, internationally renowned
physicist-futurist Peter Russell weaves together the physical
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and social sciences, modern technology and ancient mysti-
cism to demonstrate that the possibility of global illumina-
tion is now as real-and as imminent-as the threat of mass
annihilation.
In this updated edition of The Global Brain Awakens, Russell
details an extraordinary new vision of humanity’s potential
as a fully conscious super organism in an awakening uni-
verse. Presenting evidence that the earth itself is a living be-
ing and every person upon it a cell in the planetary nervous
system, Russell describes how breakthroughs in telecommu-
nications and computer networks are rapidly linking the
human species into an embryonic global brain.
At the same time, the human potential movement is growing
faster than any other segment of society, and influencing
every aspect of the culture-including business, politics and
medicine. Russell shows how the convergence of these pow-
erful trends is creating the required conditions for an evolu-
tionary shift in consciousness from egocentrism to geo-
centrism.
First published in 1983 as The Global Brain and translated
into ten languages, Russell’s seminal work won acclaim from
forward thinkers all over the world. Regarded by many as
years ahead of its time, its original predictions about the im-
pact of computer networks and changing social values were
quickly fulfilled.
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Peter Russell
Consciousness is used in many different ways. You can talk
about consciousness in the context of whether you’re awake
or asleep, or in terms of social consciousness, which involves
one’s value system. (…) I tend to look at the current timesfrom a different perspective. As human beings, we are expe-
riencing the most significant era of change in this planet’s
history—not just in human history but probably in the his-
tory of this planet. Never before has a species arisen which
has so much creativity and so much intelligence but also so
much destructive capability, which has shown itself through
such / things as the environmental crisis. In my view, we arereally being pushed to work inwardly and to go through an
evolutionary process. If we don’t, I doubt we’ll survive
much longer. We’ve come to this point in history where we
have to learn how to use our powers of creativity and our
intelligence in ways that do not threaten our own future, nor
the future of the rest of this planet. I think many people are
looking at the ecological crisis as signaling the need for peo-
ple to change their thinking and to change their values.
/359-373, at 359, 360
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If you look at what’s happening in the world, you will find
that now, we’re all becoming interconnected. The linking
together of humanity, which began when the emergence of
language allowed us to share information with each other,
has now reached a global level. We are sharing information
through television, through print, through video, through
computer networks. We are beginning to function as a single
information system./359-373, at 364
Science fiction writers of thirty or forty years ago had no
idea of what was going to happen to computers and infor-
mation processing. Most science fiction writers were talking
about huge computers. They didn’t see the advent of the
small, portable personal computer, the lap-top computer
which could be networked with other computers. In the
same way, very few people can foresee the incredible speed
of change and awakening that is possible on the level of con-
sciousness, once things start taking off./359-373, at 364
If a system is sent into a chaotic, disordered state, it can—
though not every time—reorganize itself into a higher state
of organization and capability. On the global level we are
going through chaos. We are seeing breakdowns of economic
systems, and the turning around of some of the political sys-
tems in Eastern Europe. It appears to be the breaking down,
but it’s also a field in which new levels of organization could
emerge. They haven't emerged yet, but the time is ripe for
something new to happen./359-373, at 365
One thousand years ago, you could probably predict the
next hundred years. One hundred years ago, we could
probably predict the following twenty to thirty years. Today,
we really can’t predict more than a few months ahead in
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many areas. What I call the ‘prediction horizon’ is getting
closer and closer and closer, so we are certainly moving into
a much more unpredictable world. But within that unpre-
dictability, there is so much potential for change. I think
we’re in the most exciting time in human history. In our own
lifetimes we are going to see as much development, and as
much evolution, as perhaps the whole of humanity has wit-
nessed over the last 5000 years./359-373, at 365
We now have—interestingly enough—about the same num-
ber of people living on the planet as there are nerve cells in
the human brain. We are now entering this process of con-
nectivity. We aren’t yet as interconnected as the nerve cells in
the brain and we only communicate with one or two people
at a time, but I think the way our technology is going, over
the next ten, twenty or thirty years, that connectivity will
probably rival that of the human brain. When that happens, I
think we are in for a major transformation on a global level.
/359-373, at 366
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The word ‘synergy’ comes from the Greek—syn and ergos—
literally meaning to ‘act together.’ In a high synergy system,
the individual units—whether they be people in a society or
nerve cells in a brain—while acting in their own interest, are
also acting for the good of the whole system. It’s an align-
ment between individual interests and group interests. /359-
373, at 366
Many of us compromise our individuality. We don’t really
express ourselves. We don’t live our own truths. We tend to
live the truths that the media tell us. We live the truths that
the fashion houses tell us. So we wear the latest fashions, do
the right things, go to the ‘in’ places. Not because, ‘that’s
who I am’ but because we want to belong to the right group.
We want to be seen to be part of the system. As we begin to
wake up, we also become more open to other people—more
compassionate, more loving towards other people, more able
to interconnect with other people. At the same time that’s
happening, we also gain a greater inner strength to actually
be ourselves, to express our own truths./359-373, at 368
The change in world view that I think needs to come, is a
shift in values of what we consider to be important. That
comes back to a fundamental belief about how we find the
peace that we’re looking for in the world. It could come from
reading books, but I think they would be books of a more
spiritual nature. If one goes back and reads some of the old
classic spiritual teachings, one finds the same basic message
about letting go of attachments, letting go of our beliefs
about how to find happiness and beginning to recognize that
whether or not we’re at peace is not a question of what we
have or do, but is a question of how we see things./359-373,
at 369
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The critical decision rests upon how we perceive the world.
In each of our lives, in every single moment, and regardless
of whatever is happening to us, we have the opportunity to
either see this as a threat or as an opportunity: an opportu-
nity to learn more about ourselves, an opportunity to de-
velop our consciousness in some way or other, an opportu-
nity to grow. Part of the shift entails putting this into practice
in our own lives so that at every moment of the day we be-
gin to make that choice. Instead of seeing things through the
eyes of fear, the eyes of anxiety, the eyes of separation, we
begin to see that we are actually in control of our lives. We
are in control of how we see things and we begin to exercise
that control and learn to use what is happening in the world
for our own inner growth and development./359-373, at 370
Consciousness is something completely nonmaterial and
totally indefinable by modern science and yet it is something
common to all of us./359-373, at 370
The meta-paradigm of Western society suggests that the ma-
terial world is real, and that consciousness and mind are
somehow offshoots of material reality. (…) I think the new
meta-paradigm that is beginning to emerge is saying that
consciousness is primary to the universe. In some sense,
matter is created in our consciousness, we are the creators of
our experience of reality./359-373, at 371
It was my meditation experience in India that made me real-
ize that consciousness is primary, and matter is something
we create in our awareness. That’s not to say matter doesn’t
exist out there somewhere, but every time I experience it I
am re-creating a version of it for me in my mind./359-373, at
372
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I think on a more global level, the shift is going to happen as
the anomalies build up, as we begin to realize that con-
sciousness cannot be excluded from our understanding of
the world as has been suggested by modern physics. As we
begin to realize the world doesn’t work without including
consciousness, that consciousness is primary. Then I think
the shift in world views will happen./359-373, at 372
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PETER SENGE
Peter Senge is Director of the Systems Thinking and Organiza-
tional Learning Program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management , and
a founding partner of Innovation Associates in Framingham, Mas-
sachusetts. He has introduced thousands of managers at Ford,
Digital, Apple and other major corporations to the disciplines of
the learning organization through seminars. He is the author of
the book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning
Organization.
Editorial Review
Peter Senge, founder of the Center for Organizational Learn-
ing at MIT's Sloan School of Management, experienced an
epiphany while meditating one morning back in the fall of
1987. That was the day he first saw the possibilities of a
‘learning organization’ that used ‘systems thinking’ as the
primary tenet of a revolutionary management philosophy.
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He advanced the concept into this primer, originally released
in 1990, written for those interested in integrating his phi-
losophy into their corporate culture.
The Fifth Discipline has turned many readers into true be-
lievers; it remains the ideal introduction to Senge’s carefully
integrated corporate framework, which is structured around
‘personal mastery’, ‘mental models’, ‘shared vision’, and
‘team learning.’ Using ideas that originate in fields from sci-
ence to spirituality, Senge explains why the learning organi-
zation matters, provides an unvarnished summary of his
management principals, offers some basic tools for practic-
ing it, and shows what it’s like to operate under this system.
The book’s concepts remain stimulating and relevant as ever.
—Howard Rothman
Peter Senge
The difference between a child at the age of one, two, or
three, learning to walk, learning to read, learning all the in-
credible stuff that kids learn, and that same person at the age
of ten or twelve learning grammar because they have to, is
the basic difference between aspiration and fear./206-219, at
207
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The first principle of real learning is that learners learn what
the learner wants to learn./206-219, at 208
This whole idea of tapping the capacity of human beings in
an organization to learn because they really want to, not be-
cause they have to, is the key for two reasons. Reason one: if
people were really learning what they wanted to learn, they
would be enthused and excited about what they were doing.
The other reason is the key from an organizational stand-
point. Learning based on desperation or fear is always going
to be episodic in nature. In other words, people will learn as
long as they have to, as long as there is a threat that they
have to respond to. As soon as that threat goes away, the
learning will stop. So you will get episodes of learning and
change./206-219, at 208
The Japanese are very, very good at continual learning. It’s
part of their culture; part of the very way they manage. For
most Westerners, learning is what happened to us in school
and when we grow up, we work. We’re not learning any-
more. So with that kind of mind-set, we tend to only learn
when there is a crisis that compels us to learn. That’s a very
important, practical difference between learning that’s based
on aspiration versus desperation./206-219, at 208
The second core capability of a learning organization would
be the ability to have reflective conversation in organiza-
tions. (…) Much important work gets done through conver-
sation. Decisions are made through conversations; decisions
are implemented through conversations—people talking to
one another. Most conversations are marginally productive;
often they are counterproductive. People come in with dif-
ferent views and they end up polarizing and having a debate
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rather than a conversation. It’s usually not even a very good
debate. What people really have in mind remains unsaid.
They’re afraid that if they expressed their true thoughts,
things would get worse, not better./206-219, at 208, 209
In productive conversations people become more aware of
the assumptions they hold, the very basis of why one sees
things the way they do. It’s important to realize how relative
these assumptions are. Nobody carries God’s truth in their
head. We carry views, opinions, interpretations—things that
are a product of our life experience. They’re very idiosyn-
cratic to us; they’re not absolute. Yet we treat them as if they
are absolute./206-219, at 209
One of the reason that shared visions don’t exist and why we
can’t tap collective aspiration is because we don’t know how
to manage the communication process whereby individual
visions can be articulated and can interact so that, over time,
people can truly start to feel a part of something larger than
their own individual vision, a part of a really shared vision.
/206-219, at 209
By the time many managers rise to any kind of a position of
authority, they are usually extremely good at advocating
their views and getting others to ‘buy in.’ In fact, what’s
really needed is not just the advocacy of my views but an
inquiry into my views and the views of the other people.
There needs to be a balance of advocacy and inquiry. It’s al-
most completely absent in most large organizations. /206-
219, at 209
We have no idea of the process of going from A to B. We tend
to see problems as isolated from one another. If I’m in manu-
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facturing, I see a manufacturing problem. If I’m in research, I
see a research problem. If I’m in product development, I see
a problem development problem. I treat these separately
when, in fact, often they are highly interdependent./206-219,
at 210
If you’re building an automobile, you have 12 or 13 major
engineering sub-specialties. Each of those specialists is off
solving their own isolated problems, but in fact they have to
produce one car. The success of the car actually doesn’t de-
pend on having the best transmission system and the best
drive train and the best steering. You can put all the best
parts together and you won’t necessarily get the best car.
What makes the best car is the way all the parts fit together.
/206-219, at 210
So, life is integrative. Whenever we’re trying to produce
something, we’re producing something that has to work as a
whole, but our patterns of thought and our ways of identify-
ing and solving problems are highly fragmented. In our cul-
ture, being an ‘expert’ literally means knowing a lot about a
little. So the whole notion of expertise is very counterpro-
ductive to being effective in organizations because organiza-
tions have to produce something that is integrated./206-219,
at 210
Customers have real needs and real problems—they don’t
care about 13 different features that you have, each of which
is world class. They really care about how it all comes to-
gether into an integrated product or integrated service. /206-
219, at 210
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So the third capability has to do with the ability to deal with
complexity, to deal with high degrees of interrelatedness and
processes which are far from static. They are dynamic,
changing over time. It involves systems thinking./206-219,
at 211
In the West, we tend to think of knowledge as something
that we have in our heads. We actually don’t make any rig-
orous distinction between knowledge and information. We
treat knowledge as a little more important than information.
/206-219, at 211
You know something about human relationships when you
have some capacity to produce meaningful relationships. It’s
not something you’ve read about in a book. You have some
capacity to work with other people, particularly those whose
ideas, emotions, backgrounds and previous experiences
might be very different than yours./206-219, at 211
Real learning is learner directed; it involves self-assessment.
In school, we learn that what’s most important is what the
teacher says, not what we say about how well we are doing.
It’s ironic: for the rest of our lives, we’re / not going to have
a teacher around to tell us how we’re doing. Yet most kids
do not develop any capability for objective self-assessment,
which is absolutely critical for lifelong learning. And so we
have a lot of very strange and I would say, counterproduc-
tive, notions about learning in the West./206-219, at 211, 212
In Eastern cultures, it’s typical for people to think of learning
as something that’s actually in the body, not just in the head.
When you say, ‘I know’, in most Eastern languages such as
Chinese and Japanese, you literally are saying it from the
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center of your body—‘I know it; it’s in me’. In the West, we
tend to think of it as in our heads. This is a part of the dualis-
tic Western philosophy that makes its presence felt in so
many different areas. There is a real disconnect in our think-
ing about learning between the head and the hand, between
our intellectual knowledge and our capacity for action. It
actually is deeply rooted culturally./206-219, at 212
In many traditional European cultures, there was a very rig-
orous, rigid cultural distinction between the people who
worked with their hands and the people who did not have to
work with their hands. It’s always sobering to remember
that Michelangelo could not have dinner with his patrons
because the artisans occupied a different social class because
they worked with their hands. That fragmentation is very
deeply imbedded in Western culture and it’s very relevant to
these questions of learning and what we mean by knowl-
edge. We have a lot of executives sitting around in corporate
suites who really think that, ‘We come up with the big ideas
here, right?’, ‘We create strategy’. Think about the parallel to
this: ‘We create the strategy—you guys have to implement
it!’ And, of course, what’s one of the biggest problems facing
domestic organizations! They can’t implement strategy. The
reason they can’t implement strategy is because their entire
way of thinking about it is so deeply fragmented. Our notion
is that the top of the organization thinks and that the people
at the local level, in the guts of the organization so to speak,
take action./206-219, at 212
The Japanese think of strategy as something that emerges
throughout the whole organization. A lot of the best strategic
ideas come from the front lines, and conversely, the people at
the top should be spending their life involved at all levels of
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the organization. If you go to Honda’s corporate headquar-
ters, you will never find any executives there./206-219, at
212
So, you see, this whole separation of head and hand, of intel-
lect and action, of corporate management and local actors, is
really a Western product. It’s very much a product of our
culture and our heritage, and it represents a huge problem
when it comes to learning because real learning, is by its na-
ture, integrative. Real learning integrates new ideas, new
insights and new actions. If there is no change in behavior,
there’s no learning. But also, if there’s no change in under-
standing, there’s no learning either. There has to be
both./206-219, at 213
There’s a famous library in Oxford, England, that has an an-
cient, circular courtyard with 12 or 13 different doorways
leading in. Over each doorway is printed ‘Geology’, ‘Phys-
ics’, ‘Biology’, ‘Literature’, etc. It is a wonderful symbol of
our theory of knowledge in the West. You enter through each
of those doors and you leave the knowledge contained be-
hind the other doors. So, the whole notion that knowledge
could be a more integrated activity is really lost in the West.
It’s a profound problem and so is this deep, cultural ten-
dency towards fragmentation—the breaking up of wholes
into pieces./206-219, at 214
There is a profound need to develop integrative disciplines
in the sciences. What we have today is an enormous ten-
dency towards educating people in very narrow ways. Occa-
sionally, someone comes along who, just by the sake of their
own brilliance, is integrative—they cut across different dis-
ciplines and we consider those people real geniuses. Well, I
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don’t know if they’re real geniuses or they’re just real con-
trarians. They somehow manage to resist the temptation to
fragment knowledge./206-219, at 214
We tend to think of ourselves as things isolated from one
another. If you take seriously the notion of the primacy of
wholes, then you arrive at an entirely different view. You
seen an individual as the reflection of a community; a strand
in a web of interrelationships. /206-219, at 215
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STANGROF
Dr. Stanislav Grof , M.D., Ph.D. is a psychiatrist with over
thirty-seven years of research experience in non-ordinary states of
consciousness.
Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Dr. Grof, along with Abra-ham Maslow is considered a primary founder and theoretician of
transpersonal psychology.
He’s the author of Psychology of the Future , Spiritual Emergency ,
LSD Psychotherapy , Realms of the Human Unconscious , Beyond the
Brain , Human Survival and Consciousness Evolution and co-author,
with his wife Christina, of The Stormy Search for The Self .
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From the Back Cover
This accessible and comprehensive overview of the work of
Stanislav Grof, one of the founders of transpersonal psy-
chology, was specifically written to acquaint newcomers
with his work. Serving as a summation of his career and
previous works, this entirely new book is the source to in-
troduce Grof’s enormous contributions to the fields of psy-
chiatry and psychology, especially his central concept of
holotropic experience, where holotropic signifies ‘moving
toward wholeness’.
Grof maintains that the current basic assumptions and con-
cepts of psychology and psychiatry require a radical revision
based on the intensive and systematic research of holotropic
experience. He suggests that a radical inner transformation
of humanity and a rise to a higher level of consciousness
might be humankind’s only real hope for the future.
This book is by a pioneering genius in consciousness re-
search. It presents the full spectrum of Grof’s ideas, from his
earliest mappings of using LSD psychotherapy, to his clinical
work with people facing death, to his more recent work with
holotropic breathing, to his latest thoughts about the cosmo-
logical implications of consciousness research and the pros-
pects for dealing with an emerging planetary crisis.
Grof has always been one of the most original thinkers in the
transpersonal field, and his creativity has kept pace with the
maturity of his overall vision.
—Michael Washburn
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Stan Grof
Non-ordinary states of consciousness are certainly a unique
source of profound insights into the deepest recesses of the
human psyche. In my opinion their potential significance for
psychiatry is comparable to the importance of the micro-
scope for medicine or the telescope for astronomy. It is hard
to believe that this area has been largely ignored by tradi-
tional psychiatrists and psychologists./98-109, at 98
The attitude of Western psychiatry that sees mental health as
simply the absence of symptoms certainly has to be radically
revised. (...) In the alternative system of medicine known as
homeopathy, the symptoms are seen as expressions of heal-
ing, not the disease. Therapy in homeopathy consists of a
temporary intensification of the symptoms to achieve
wholeness. This approach results in profound healing and
positive personality transformation rather than the impover-
ishment of vitality and functioning that accompanies the
suppression of symptoms through the use of prescribed
drugs. The emphasis on constructive working with symp-
toms instead of their routine suppression is the first major
difference between the strategies based on modern con-sciousness research and those used in mainstream psychia-
try. /98-109, at 99
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Mainstream psychiatry is based upon the Cartesian-
Newtonian materialistic world view which maintains that
the history of the universe is basically the history of develop-
ing matter. The only thing that really exists is matter and life;
consciousness, and intelligence are its accidental and insig-
nificant side-products. In this kind of world view, there is no
place for spirituality. To be spiritual means to be uneducated,
unacquainted with modern scientific discoveries about the
nature of the Universe. It means to be involved in supersti-
tion, in primitive, or magical thinking. Traditional psycho-
analysis explains spirituality as a regression, as a fixation on
the infantile stage—a step backwards in development rather
than a step forward. In this context, the concept of God is
interpreted as the projection of your infantile image of your
father in the sky. Interest in religious ritual is seen as analo-
gous to obsessive-compulsive behavior of a neurotic and
explained as a regression to the anal stage of libidinal devel-
opment. /98-109, at 100
And here lies the fundamental difference between traditional
psychiatry and transpersonal psychology which considers
spirituality to be an intrinsic dimension of the human psyche
and a critical factor in the universal scheme of things. This
conclusion is not some kind of irrational belief or a specula-
tive metaphysical assumption. It is based on systematic
study of non-ordinary states of consciousness in which we
can have direct experiences of the spiritual dimensions.
These experiences fall into two distinct categories. In the first
one are experiences of the Immanent Divine; they involve
direct perception of unity underlying the world of separa-
tion and a realization that what we experience as material
reality is actually the manifestation of creative cosmic en-
ergy. The second category includes experiences of the Tran-
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In other words, the insights that people get into the nature of
the cosmos in non-ordinary states are in fundamental con-
flict with the old, Cartesian-Newtonian world view, but are
very similar in nature to descriptions that we find in
quantum-relativistic physics and other avenues of the new
paradigm./98-109, at 103
In non-ordinary states, the material world is experienced as
a dynamic process where there are no solid structures and
everything is a flow of energy. Everything is perceived as
patterns of energy and behind patterns of energy there are
patterns of experience. Reality appears to be the result of an
incredibly precise orchestration of experiences and the ob-
server plays a very important role in the creation of the
universe./98-109, at 104
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There exists substantial evidence that consciousness is not a
by-product of matter, an epiphenomenon of the neuro-
physiological processes in our brain, but a primary attribute
of existence./98-109, at 104
In the course of this century, quantum-relativistic physics
has seriously undermined the belief in the tangible and un-
ambiguous nature of our material reality. It has thrown a
new light on the ancient Buddhist idea that form is empti-
ness and emptiness is form. In the subatomic analysis, mat-
ter in the usual sense of the word, disappears and what re-
mains is pattern, relation, mathematical order—elements
which we would certainly associate with consciousness
rather than matter./98-109, at 105
Traditional science claims in a very authoritarian way that
the material universe which we experience through our five
senses, is the only existing reality. And if we experience
other realities, such as historical or archetypal elements of
the collective unconscious, these are seen as illusory experi-
ences derived from the perceptions and memories of this
world. In other words, transpersonal experiences are fanta-
sies or hallucinations. This position is presented as an evi-
dent scientific fact that has been proven beyond any reason-
able doubt, but a closer examination clearly shows that it is
an unfounded metaphysical assumption. Modern con-
sciousness research actually has brought ample evidence
that there are other experiential dimensions of reality with
specific and demonstrable characteristics. To borrow an
analogy from electronics, material reality is just one ‘holo-
graphic cosmic channel’. There are other ‘channels’ that are
equally real or unreal as this one./98-109, at 105
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Robert Monroe has developed some very effective means of
inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness, with special
emphasis on those that are conducive to out-of-body experi-
ences. In non-ordinary states, the sharp difference between
what is ‘real’ and what is ‘unreal’ tends to disappear. Our
ordinary material world appears less real and the world of
the archetypal beings and other aspects of the transpersonal
world become very convincing and believable. Careful study
reveals that they are more than fantasies or hallucinations.
Once we realize that in both instances we are dealing with
‘virtual realities,’ the distinction between what is ‘real’ and
what is derived becomes rather arbitrary./98-109, at 105
The traditional point of view of Western materialistic science
is that we are Newtonian objects, made up of atoms, mole-
cules, cells, tissues and organs, that we are highly developed
animals and biological thinking machines. If we seriously
consider all the data amassed in the last few decades by
modern consciousness research, we discover that this point
of view is incorrect, or at least incomplete. It is just one par-
tial aspect of a much more complex picture. It can be main-
tained only when we suppress all the evidence from para-
psychology and the study of non-ordinary states of con-
sciousness, such as mystical, psychedelic, and near-death
experiences, or trance phenomena and meditation. In all
these situations, we can also function as fields of conscious-
ness which can transcend space, time, and linear causality.
/98-109, at 106
Quantum-relativistic physicists have a definition of suba-
tomic matter and also of light that combines in a paradoxical
fashion two seemingly incompatible aspects of these phe-
nomena. This is the wave-particle paradox described by
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Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity. To understand
the nature of subatomic matter or light, you have to accept
that they are phenomena which can have characteristics of
both particles and waves. These are two complementary as-
pects of the same phenomena and each of them manifests
under different circumstances. We are now discovering that
something similar applies to human beings. We are Newto-
nian objects, highly developed biological thinking machines,
but we are also infinite fields of consciousness that transcend
time, space, and linear causality. These are two complemen-
tary aspects of who we are and each of them manifest under
different circumstances, the first in the ordinary state of con-
sciousness, the other when we enter a non-ordinary state of
consciousness./98-109, at 106
The most important thing to realize that traditional psychol-
ogy and psychiatry do not make a distinction between a
mystical experience and a psychotic experience. From a tra-
ditional point of view, all forms of non-ordinary states of
consciousness—with the exception of dreams where there is
a certain tolerance—would be interpreted as pathological
phenomena. Strictly speaking, Western psychiatry has pa-
thologized the entire history of spirituality. /98-109, at 106
We actually have many psychiatric articles and books that
discuss which psychiatric diagnosis would be most appro-
priate for the founders of various religions, their prophets,
and saints. Franz Alexander, a famous psychoanalyst and
founder of psychosomatic medicine, even wrote a paper en-
titled Buddhist Meditation as an Artificial Catatonia, putting
spiritual practice into a pathological context. Similarly, an-
thropologists argue whether shamans should be viewed as
hysterics, epileptics, schizophrenics, or maybe ambulant
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psychotics. Many people who have transpersonal experi-
ences are automatically treated as psychotics, people suffer-
ing from a mental disease, because psychiatrists do not make
a distinction between a mystical experience and a psychotic
experience./98-109, at 107
The concept of spiritual emergency suggests that many epi-
sodes of / non-ordinary states of consciousness that are cur-
rently diagnosed as psychoses and treated by suppressive
medication are actually crises of transformation and spiritual
opening. Instead of routine suppression through drugs, we
should give these people support and guidance to help them
through these experiences. When properly understood and
properly guided, these states can result in emotional and
psychosomatic healing and positive personality transforma-
tion. /98-109, at 108
If you look back at human history, you will find that many
people have invested enormous amounts of energy in the
spiritual quest. They have also made tremendous sacrifices
for this purpose—the sacrifice of material possessions, pro-
fessional careers, as well as of personal and sexual life. In
transpersonal psychology, the impulse toward spirituality is
viewed as a very natural and very powerful drive in human
beings. In Western culture, we have lost all socially sanc-
tioned contexts in which people can experience non-
ordinary states of consciousness and have spiritual experi-
ences. Our attitude toward spirituality is certainly peculiar.
There is a bible in every motel room and even leading politi-
cians pay lip service to God; but if a person would have a
powerful spiritual experience in the church, an average min-
ister would send them to a psychiatrist./98-109, at 108
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Experiential contact with the archetypal domain in and of
itself is not necessarily beneficial. It is possible to get inflated
by identifying with an archetype, and it can leave you in a
state of grandiosity. For example, some people who experi-
ence identification with Jesus Christ, which is a very com-
mon experience in non-ordinary states, can end up believing
that they are actually the historical Jesus. Another common
pitfall is to experience one’s own divinity (in the sense of the
Tat tvam asi of the Upanishads) and attaching this insight to
one’s body ego (I am God and that makes me special). /98-
109, at 109
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Donna Eden
Books Reviewed
Energy Medicine (1999)
The Energy Medicine Kit (1999)
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Donna Eden has treated over ten thousand individual clients
and has taught hundreds of classes, speaking to standing-room-
only audiences throughout the United States, Europe, Australia,
New Zealand, and South America. Able from childhood to per-
ceive the body’s subtle energies, she works with those energies to
heal others and to teach others how to work with them.
—From: The Energy Medicine Kit (Back Cover)
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Energy Medicine
With David FeinsteinNew York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1999
Energy Medicine is a quest book, the final outcome of a quest of the authors, a real
voyage, and realization of a dream, with all the obstacles that this implies.
From her book and writing style, Donna Eden appears to be a
very strong character, and she probably needed to have exactly
that quality in her wisdom quest as when she started, more than a
decade ago, modern medicine was really hostile toward the idea
of integrating any of the many perennial healing concepts that it
discarded as vitalistic. The authors introduce their book in very
comprehensive terms:
The return of energy medicine is one of the most significant
cultural / developments of the day, for the return of energy
medicine is a return to personal authority for health care, a
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return to the legacy of our ancestors in harmonizing with the
forces of nature, and a return to practices that are natural,
friendly, and familiar to body, mind and soul./2-3
It also seems that Donna Eden’s collaboration with David
Feinstein led to a wholesome mix of energies. The authors have
done ground-breaking research on the ubiquitous quality of the
energy concept and have laid the theoretical groundwork of the
Donna Eden Energy Healing Practice. This is truly a good thing tohappen, as there are today many healers who learn from hearsay
and practice methods they don’t really understand. Not so for
Donna Eden. She has complemented her strong intuitive knowl-
edge, or what she directly perceives through her extraordinary
energy sensitivity, by a thorough base of theoretical and cross-
cultural knowledge, and this makes the strength of both her heal-ing practice and her books. The authors write on the cultural
background of energy medicine:
Numerous cultures describe a matrix of subtle energies that
support, shape, and animate the physical body, called qi or
chi in China, prana in the yoga tradition of India and Tibet,
yesod in the Jewish cabalistic tradition, ki in Japan, baraka
by the Sufis, wakan by the Lakotas, orenda by the Iroquois,
megbe by the Ituri Pygmies, and the Holy Spirit in Christian
tradition. It is hardly a new idea to suggest that subtle ener-
gies operate in tandem with the denser, 'congealed' energies
of the material body./16
To add to this list that the Japanese call this energy hado , not ki,
so far as water is concerned, as Masaru Emoto explains in his
books.
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not implied in the concept per se. So for knowing the difference
between atman and soul you have to get into Hinduism and
Christianity, and it’s not guaranteed that you will find the answer.
In fact, you don’t need to know the exact difference, for if you look
at both notions from an energy point of view, for you will very
quickly understand that both notions are dynamic, that both no-
tions are considered as containers of vital energy. So if this serves
you as a commonality, you don’t need to do that extended philo-
sophical and religious research. It seems to me that the authors
have taken the latter approach, as they are talking about soul:
The soul is the source of the most subtle energies of your
being. Yet this subtle energy gives form to everything else
about you, from your cells to your sense of self. If spirit, as it
is often defined, is the all-pervasive, intelligent energy ofcreation, soul is the manifestation at the personal level./20
Now, let’s look at another fundamental principle of energy
medicine: balance. What does balance mean? I have found it ex-
pressed in Chinese medicine as harmony. In Chinese medicine,
harmony means health. It’s as simple as that. The ancient Chinese
physicians discovered that when an organism is healthy, it is natu-
rally harmonious , and there are no extremes. All is in a state of
harmonious balance. The same is true the other way around:
when an organism is found to be in harmony, the physician could
conclude that the organism is in good health.
This was ignored over centuries in Western medicine, and en-
ergy medicine now brings this perennial notion of harmony or
balance into our own medical paradigm. The authors write:
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Balance is a pivotal concept within energy medicine, just as
homeostasis is a pivotal concept within biology. All systems
move toward an energetic balance, a state of internal stabil-
ity and harmony with other energies. At the same time,
every expenditure of effort and every interaction with the
environment upsets this balance. You are always moving
toward balance and always disturbing that balance in living
and growing./22
However, the book goes far beyond the theory. The theory is
kind of underlying, and the book really is a practical guide for
healing, and you can apply it on a daily basis. The knowledge is
transmitted in good little chunks, and with clear and comprehen-
sive language.
There are many different ways to work on your vital energy,
and how to balance it if you have abused of yourself too much,
through stress, smoking, fatigue, drug intake or through destruc-
tive relationships. For most common ailments the book gives prac-
tical advice how to treat not just the symptom, but the underlying
energy misbalance, so as to reestablish health by opening the en-
ergy flow, as a first step, and by balancing the energies, as a sec-
ond step. The authors explain that many health problems, at their
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early stage can be healed simply by opening the energy blockage.
How does the energy flow get blocked? In most cases by mishan-
dling our emotions, by repressing certain emotions, or by trying to
overadapt to certain situations, disregarding feelings of anger or
frustration over long periods of time. This is how the vital energy
can become obstructed.
Energy medicine is really useful in informing the reader about
the possibility to heal disease by simple methods of energy rebal-ancing, by enhancing the energy flow, also by giving the necessary
practical advice so that the reader can administer the methods by
himself or herself, without needing to consult an energy practitio-
ner.
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The Energy Medicine Kit
With David FeinsteinNew York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1999
The Energy Medicine Kit is really an ingenuous product. I was very pleased when I
received it and opened that promising yellow box. And how well all is put to-
gether! This would make a wonderful present, to be true!
I congratulate the authors and the publisher to have come up
with this brilliant idea, that I have seen nowhere before! I have
myself started my journey through this Kit by watching the DVD,
seeing Donna Eden in her healing seminars. It was a good idea to
combine the literary content with multimedia clips. Now, after
discovering the DVD, I saw that I had much more in this precious
thunder box. There is a crystal, and I wondered what to do with it.
So I looked first in the Guidebook to find some instructions,
and found them on page 21: ‘How to Use The Energy MedicineKit’, with reference to page 23: ‘Using a Crystal As Your Training
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Wheels.’ I would like to quote here from this guide as this is really
useful to know before-hand:
While I am a hands-on kind of healer, some people find it
easier to begin to experiment with energy methods if they
use a device such as a crystal. Like everything else, crystals
carry a vibrational rate that can influence other energies in
their proximity. Crystals also reflect light, perhaps the most
primary vibration of the universe. Spinning the crystal over
an electromagnetically sensitive point on the skin has a sub-
tle but immediate effect on the energies involved with that
point. When practiced with consistency, working with a
crystal can begin to bring about beneficial changes in your
energies and in your life./23
Then I saw that the first of the 43 cards contains specific in-
formation about ‘How to Spin a Crystal’, and I tried out the exer-
cise described on Card 2 ‘Spinning a Crystal over Your Chakras’
and made a surprising discovery. As the two-year old baby of my
friend had a headache that day, I taught the girl to hold the crystal
in front of her third eye and spin it first in clock-wise and then in
counter clock-wise direction. The girl, very attentive to this heal-
ing technique that she surely had never seen before, and smart
enough in holding and spinning the crystal, did it for about one
minute. Then they left my office. Half an hour later the mother
came back to me with the girl, smiling, and told me the baby’s
headache had disappeared completely.
Well, I don’t know of course if this was a coincidence as thiswas not a repeated experience, but there is a possibility that the
healing was effected by the crystal. I know that usually when the
DONNA EDEN
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girl has a headache it’s for hours in a row and the mother brings
her to the doctor; however, this was that time obviously not neces-
sary.
As I am myself in perfect health in the moment, I have not
tried out the crystal or any other of the techniques taught in the
Kit on myself, but I will surely do so in case of sickness.
If you need more information for building trust in energy
medicine, you should perhaps do what I did before I ordered thisKit, i.e. read about the theoretical and cross-cultural research the
author has done relating to her energy healing practice, by order-
ing her book Energy Medicine that she co-authored with David
Feinstein.
The present Kit is a practical guide for self-healing, while the
book offers you insights, information and research about energy
healing, and practical guidance for self-healing.
Last not least, let me mention the 21 exercises on the CD audio
that is equally provided with this Kit. Now, I found it a little diffi-
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cult to exactly take the body positions the author describes on the
CD for the various exercises, and it would have greatly facilitated
the understanding if the author would have included some addi-
tional cards for the exercises on the CD that demonstrate visually
the positions to take. But this is surely the only negative point I
could find in this overall very beautiful Kit.
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Mircea Eliade
Shamanism
Ancient Techniques of Ecstasy
New York: Penguin Arkana, 1989
First published by Pantheon Books, 1964
Shamanism by Mircea Eliade is considered to be the classic on shamanism, and it
remains a reference book. However, the book is not an easy read. Especiallywhen compared with Terence McKenna’s books, and those by Richard Schultes,
Michael Harner or Ralph Metzner, Eliade’s book takes the appearance of a rather
dry scholarly work, reference manual, or standard academia. But this is its value!
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The book contains so many details that one single lecture will
generally not leave very deep traces, except you dispose of a pho-
tographic memory. The eminent advantage of the book or gener-
ally of Eliade’s approach to shamanism is that his research did not
take its origin in the Amazon, but in Siberia. True shamanism, the
most original and untouched ritual of shamanism originates from
Siberia, not from the Amazon, while today’s media suggest the
very contrary. It is important at the very start of studying shaman-
ism to learn that it is not a religion. As Eliade observes:
For all that shamanism dominates the religious life of Cen-
tral and North Asia, it is nevertheless not the religion of that
vast region. Only convenience or confusion has made it pos-
sible for some investigators to consider the religion of the
Arctic or Turko-Tatar peoples to be shamanism./7
This is probably why Eliade sub-titled the book Ancient Tech-
niques of Ecstasy , for it’s that, a technique, a ritual, something eso-
teric and not what the religion normally does; shamanism could in
fact be called the higher octave of religion, like the Mystery Schools
in Antiquity added something essential to Greek religion, without
representing that religion. As a result, the shaman, while highly
respected, and even venerated and encountered with awe, is an
outcast!
On the other hand, while a certain mental alienation may pre-
cede the initiation of the shaman, Eliade’s early stance on shaman-
ism helped to repel the standard misnomer, for the most part
brought up by ignorant missionaries, that shamans were mentally
ill, schizophrenic or hysterical people. The contrary is true. The
shaman typically is in his set and setting the only person of a
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really sane mind. But for developing that sanity of mind, mental
alienation is often brought about by the inner self, as a temporary
condition, for the sole purpose of deconditioning the candidate
and purifying his inner world, and his perception of reality. Eliade
observes:
Psychopaths or not, the future shamans are expected to pass
through certain initiatory ordeals and to receive an educa-
tion that is sometimes highly complex. It is only this twofoldinitiation—ecstatic and didactic—that transforms the candi-
date from a possible neurotic into a shaman recognized by
his particular society./14
Like the sick man, the religious man is projected onto a vital
plane that shows him the fundamental data of human exis-
tence, that is, solitude, danger, hostility of the surroundingworld. But the primitive magician, the medicine man, or the
shaman is not only a sick man; he is, above all, a sick man
who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.
/27
Disease often has to worsen before it can be cured—that’s
known since times immemorial. By the same token, those who
rank high in society often go through a difficult childhood or had
their trials in their first years of professional engagement. Eliade
observes that many a shaman had a predisposition to shamanism
since their childhood, which typically manifests in ‘being differ-
ent’, having visions and precognitive dreams, but also suffering
from strange fears, or even epileptic seizures:
But the future shaman exhibits exceptional traits from ado-
lescence; he very early becomes nervous and is sometimes
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even subject to epileptic seizures, which are interpreted as
meetings with the gods./15
Thus, shamanic power often is the result of overcoming a dif-
ficult condition, be it a mental illness or a physical trauma; this
overcoming is the result of a major effort from the side of the indi-
vidual, something like a personal victory, but one that was in
some way aided by spiritual forces, not by ego-driven action:
There is always a cure, a control, an equilibrium brought
about by the actual practice of shamanism. It is not to the
fact that he is subject to epileptic attacks that the Eskimo or
Indonesian shaman, for example, owes his power and pres-
tige; it is to the fact that he can control his epilepsy./29
When we consider the extraordinary power of a shaman, forhealing himself and others, and for communicating with spirits so
as to alter fate, for example prevent a tribal war between neighbor
tribes, we might wonder what personal qualities or characteristics
such a person must develop? Are they innate, or can they be ac-
quired? Opinions here vary from culture to culture, and it seems
that communication abilities are primed in this process:
As for the Sudanese tribes studied by Nadel: ‘No shaman is,
in everyday life, an abnormal individual, a neurotic, or a
paranoiac; if he were, he would be classed as a lunatic, not
respected as a priest.’ Nor finally can shamanism be corre-
lated with incipient or latent abnormality; I recorded no case
of a shaman whose professional hysteria deteriorated intoserious mental disorders. In Australia matters are even
clearer: medicine men are expected to be, and usually are,
perfectly healthy and normal./31
MIRCEA ELIADE
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For the Yakut, the perfect shaman ‘must be serious, possess
tact, be able to convince his neighbors; above all, he must not
be presumptuous, proud, ill-tempered.’ One must feel an
inner force in him that does not offend yet is conscious of its
power.’/29
Finally there seems to be some agreement that the shaman,
while he may appear an unusual figure, is a person not of ordi-
nary, but of superior intelligence:
According to the testimony of Belyavsky and others, col-
lected by Karjalainen, the Vogul shaman displays keen intel-
ligence, a perfectly supple body, and an energy that appears
unbounded. His very preparation of his future work leads
the neophyte to strengthen his body and perfect his intellec-
tual qualities./29
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In general, the Siberian and North Asian shaman shows no
sign of mental disintegration. His memory and his power of
self-control are distinctly above the average./30
Shamanism is distinct from religion also by its redefinition or
alternative definition of what is sacred. Contrary to the common
definition of sacredness primarily being defined by religious tradi-
tion, in shamanism sacredness has an immediate quality about it,
and is often related to mystic appearances, or a direct perception ofthe divine. Eliade observes:
It is important to bring out this notion of peculiarity con-
ferred by an unusual or abnormal experience. For, properly
considered, singularization as such depends upon the very
dialectic of the sacred. The most elementary hierophanies,
that is, are nothing but a radical ontological separation ofsome object from the surrounding cosmic zone; some tree,
some stone, some place, by the mere fact that it reveals that it
is sacred, that it has been, as it were, chosen as a receptacle
for a manifestation of the sacred, is thereby ontologically
separated from the other stones, trees, places, and occupies a
different, a supernatural plane./32
In this sense, for the truly religious mind, the detail becomes
the major thing in life, and nothing will be really insignificant.
Such an attitude, that in major religions only is seen as awe in
front of the divine, greatly enhances our faculties of perception. As
the attitude it not projected onto a divine figure but is general, na-
ture as such is embraced and integrated into a greater spiritual
whole, and that makes that shamanism is so successful in healing
the human body. For it brings along alignment , an alignment that
MIRCEA ELIADE
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most tribal peoples indeed possess, which makes for their peace-
ful and non-harmful living, and their silent dialogue with nature.
The other fundamental question that Eliade asked and tried to
answer in his book was what is the intrinsic quality of the sha-
manic cure, and how does it come about? Eliade writes:
The shaman’s ecstatic journey is generally indispensable,
even if the illness is not due to the theft of the soul by de-
mons or ghosts. The shamanic trance forms part of the cure;whatever interpretation the shaman puts on it, it is always
by his ecstasy that he finds the exact cause of the illness and
learns the best treatment./328
In fact, the astonishing difference between the way shamans
cure is that the shaman takes the medicine, while in our culture
it’s the patient. The shaman, through the trance, enters the vibra-
tional field of the patient, and can thus detect the real problem of their
illness, by screening their luminous body. This is all the secret, or
the most part of it. No medicine is needed when you can alter vi-
brations within the aura, an insight that today has been made use-
ful for medicine again, and that is at the basis of what we call vi-
brational medicine. Eliade observes further:
The morphology of shamanic cure is the same almost
throughout South America. It includes fumigations with to-
bacco, songs, massage of the affected area of the body, iden-
tification of the cause of the illness by the aid of the helping
spirits (at this point comes the shaman’s trance, during
which the audience sometimes ask him questions not di-
rectly connected with the illness), and, finally, extraction of
the pathogenic object by suction./329
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A particularity that can be found in many tribal nations is that
illness is attributed to the interference of the spirit world. Modern
medicine hardly ever asks how the patient may have contributed
to bringing about their disease; the spiritogenic etiology, used by
shamanic cultures, would by most doctors probably be qualified
as schizophrenic. Not so in tribal cultures. Rule and exception can
be seen as reversed in the sense that in most native cultures, ill-
ness is primarily seen as a form of superimposition of malignant
spirit power, and only in second instance as a possible result of an
individual’s condition, weakness, or fragility, or corruption to
have let it happen. Eliade describes a healing ritual:
Throughout Melanesia treatment of a disorder begins with
sacrifices and prayers addressed to the dead person respon-
sible, so that he will remove the sickness. But if this ap-proach, which is made my members of the family, fails, a
mane kisu, ‘doctor’, is summoned. By magical means the
latter discovers the particular dead man responsible for the
sickness and begs him to remove the cause of the trouble.
/364
The most important for understanding shamanism is the sha-man’s frequent use of entheogens , plants that contain psychoactive
compounds, which, when taken at appropriate doses, produce a
consciousness-altering effect upon our psyche and perception.
There are various names for such plants, and the name that is
given reflects the state of mind of the researcher. Eliade says in his
book that a shamanic culture was at its decline or caught in deca-dence when their people take hallucinogenic compounds for ef-
fecting the shamanic trance. Today, this opinion is clearly contra-
MIRCEA ELIADE
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dicted by the large majority of modern researchers, such as, for
example, Metzner, Harner, Schultes, or McKenna who consider
Eliade’s bias as a myopic view and a basic misconception about
shamanism.
For example, contrasting with this view, Terence McKenna
writes in his book The Archaic Revival (1992), p. 15:
While Eliade asserts that the use of narcotic substances as an
aid to ecstasy invariably indicates a decadence or vulgariza-tion of the shamanic tradition, there is reason to doubt this.
I will come to an end of my book review at this point, because
this book contains so many details, and there are so many differ-
ences in ritual from tribe to tribe, and so many different forms of
shamanism, that to advance more details here out of contextwould be rather confusing.
As a serious shamanism researcher, you simply can’t do with-
out this reference work written by one of the finest scholars on the
subject.
But on the other hand, it’s equally true that you can’t just limit
yourself to this study because the author has many a peculiar per-
spective or point of view that other, more recent, researchers
openly contradict or even invalidate. So care is needed here, and
discretion, because after all, it’s not easy to form rational views
and thorough understanding of something that is so remote, ex-
otic and outlandish as shamanism, when you see it from the per-
spective of our own culture and tradition.
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Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz
Books Reviewed
The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911)
Pixies, elves, dwarfs, leprechauns, and the other enchanted
little people: where do they come from? Folklorists consider them
the byproducts of ancient religious beliefs, occultists term them
nature spirits, and the peasantry call them fallen angels—creatures
neither good enough for redemption nor bad enough to be forever
lost.
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This collection of reports of elfin creatures in Wales, Ireland,
Scotland, and Brittany ranks among the most scholarly works ever
published on the subject.
The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries begins with the author’s
collection of firsthand testimony from living sources, classified by
individual country and introduced by leading authorities on an-
thropology and folklore.
The next section concerns the recorded traditions of Celtic lit-erature and mythology, followed by an examination of a variety of
theories and their religious aspects. The book concludes with a
remarkably rational case for the reality of fairy life.
Narrated with an engaging sense of wonder by W.Y. Evans-
Wentz, the first American ever to receive the degree of Doctor of
Science in Comparative Religion from Oxford, this volume offers a
valuable resource for students of anthropology and Celtic lore, as
well as hours of delightful reading for fairy enthusiasts.
—From: Back Cover
What the note on the book cover unfortunately forgot to relateis that the book is not only a fantastic, unprecedented and pre-
cious resource for anthropologists and lay persons, but also, and I
would say primarily for:
• Parapsychologists
• Energy Healers
• Dream Researchers
• Bioenergy Researchers
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• Theologians
• Theosophists
• Shamans
• Poets
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The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries
London: Frowde, 1911Minneola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2002
The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries is the final account of an immensely complex
and long-standing research on fairy faith in Britain and Brittany, the French Bre-
tagne. The research Dr. Evans-Wentz conducted on fairies was meticulous and
scientific. There was obviously an effort from the part of the researcher to some-
how classify and objectivize the fairy world, and this was perhaps necessary at a
time when holistic science was not yet born in the West and scientists had to give
an appearance of ‘pedantic detachment.’
On the other hand, this old-fashioned pedantic, meticulous
and detailed research approach is perhaps a good counterpoint to
the hairy stories this book abounds of.
But are we not outgrown from the times where as good as eve-
rybody was to dismiss all this as folk lore and superstition? Are
we not somewhat more mature today to have a compassionate
and participatory regard on these intriguing phenomena?
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Well, I believe we are, and that therefore this study appears
like the first volume of a greater vision—and the second volume
still needs to be written! Unfortunately this book was written at a
time when the overwhelming majority of people in our culture
were dismissing fairies as pure superstition and folk belief.
It is sometimes good to see the context in which a particular
book was written. I had a similar impression with Shamanism by
Mircea Eliade, and I think both researchers share some personalitytraits. Both books are considered as reference books, which also
implies that you may want to skip some passages or even chap-
ters, as the author’s dry academic style gets a bit annoying over a
longer sitting. But on the other hand, this detached style somehow
contrasts well the sometimes really unbelievable stories that are
counted in the book.Indeed, what Evans-Wentz did was to collect and catalogue
stories about fairies, in a very orderly fashion, with all pertinent
information like tags put on needled ants, much like Béla Bartók
catalogued most of Hungary’s folk melodies and made a fantastic
music from that scurrilous repertoire of century-old musical lines.
And this adds on to the credibility of the author. Because some
of the stories are so hair-rising, bold and unheard-of that surely
without this enhanced credibility of the author, I would not have
considered this book as a source of research in parapsychology.
An Irish mystic, and seer of great power, with whom I have
often discussed the Fairy-Faith in its details, regards fairy
paths or fairy passes as actual magnetic arteries, so to speak,
through which circulates the earth’s magnetism./33, note 1
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Perhaps the study would have benefited from a comparative
perspective as to other paranormal phenomena than fairies?
I could imagine that the comprehension of the intrinsic fairy
phenomenon could have been more amply illustrated and eluci-
dated. Evans-Wentz correctly evaluates the fairy faith as being a
part of a tradition of world-wide animism, and he does his best to
convey to the reader that this is a good thing, and not something
to dismiss as pseudoscience.The theory of worldwide animism was also held in the face of
one of the greatest holistic scientists, Johann Wolfgang von Go-
ethe, and yet today we know that his color theory is a valid alter-
native scientific approach in its intent to contradicting Newtonian
science. Evans-Wentz writes:
The modern belief in fairies, with which until now we have
been specifically concerned, is Celtic only in so far as it re-
flects Celtic traditions and customs, Celtic myths and relig-
ion, and Celtic social and environmental conditions. Other-
wise, as will be shown throughout this and succeeding chap-
ters, it is in essence a part of a world-wide animism, which
forms the background of all religions in whatever stage of
culture religions exist or to which they have attained by evo-
lution, from the barbarism of the Congo black man to the
civilization of the Archbishop of Canterbury; and as far back
as we can go into human origins there is some correspond-
ing belief in a fairy or spirit realm, as there is to-day among
contemporary civilized and uncivilized races of all countries.
/226
You can travel the world and ‘collect beliefs,’ for cataloguing
them. And you can also trust human intelligence and travel the
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Jonathan Goldman
Books Reviewed
Healing Sounds (2002)
Healing Sounds DVD (2004)
Tantra of Sound (2005)
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Jonathan Goldman, M.A., is an internationally renowned
writer, musician, and teacher. He is an authority on sound healing
and a pioneer in the field of harmonics. Jonathan is the author of
Healing Sounds, Shifting Frequencies , and The Lost Chord.
He has studied with masters of sound from both the scientific
and spiritual traditions, incorporating this knowledge and energy
into his teachings and healing music. His award-winning record-ings include Chakra Chants and The Lost Chord. Jonathan is director
of the Sound Healers Association in Boulder, Colorado, and CEO of
Spirit Music. He teaches all over the world.
Andi Goldman, M.A., L.P.C. is a licensed psychotherapist,
specializing in holistic counseling and sound therapy. She holds
an M.A. in counseling psychology from Boulder Graduate School
and is Codirector of the Sound Healers Association and Director of
the Healing Sound Seminars. Andi is the developer of Tele-Counsel,
the nation’s first telephone counseling service specifically offering
home-bound clients structured counseling. She has been an educa-
tor at international schools in Japan, Germany, and Indonesia and
has lived and traveled extensively throughout the world. She is a
musician, teacher, sound healer, and the wife and partner of Jona-
than Goldman. Together, Jonathan and Andi have dedicated their
lives to the path of service, helping awaken and empower others
with the ability of sound to heal and transform. They lecture and
give workshops worldwide.
—From: Tantra of Sound
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Healing Sounds
The Power of HarmonicsRochester: Healing Arts Press, 2002
Originally published in 1992
Healing Sounds was really a discovery for me! It was through the DVD that I dis-
covered Jonathan Goldman’s erudite approach to sound healing. The DVD trig-
gered my interest to order Goldman’s two major books, to know more about the
theory, while I had seen the practice on the DVD.
Let me be down-to-earth in this review and instead of talking
generalities, I would prefer to comment some of the quotes I have
taken from the book.
Before I do this, I would like to say that this book is very read-
able because the author understands to explain quite uncommon
things in a clear and easy-to-read diction that initiates the readerin a matter that has been blinded out from our consciousness since
centuries. The author skillfully weaves personal anecdotes in the
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narration, which makes the matter more lively and interesting to
the novice reader—for let us not be delusional on the matter itself:
it’s a highly dry and mathematical subject!
I have in fact studied sound theory during my musical studies
at university that I had engaged parallel to my law studies, and I
remember to have read a thick book written by the German com-
poser Paul Hindemith about harmonics. And I remember that every
time when I was reading a few pages of the book, I was beginningto fall asleep!
Not so with Goldman’s book. He manages to provide the ut-
most necessary of technical information by imbedding it in a
larger context of information so that the read never really gets te-
dious and boring. To begin with, why should you study sound,
harmonics and sound healing? If you are not a healer, and if it’snot specifically for self-healing, there is a reason that the author
gives, and that I find important. He states:
Sound plays a key role in these times, for sound is helping
us adjust to the frequency shifts that are occurring on so
many levels./viii
Presently, the huge revolutionary shifts in human conscious-
ness are indeed reflected by a raising energy vibration on the cel-
lular level, as it has been affirmed by many esoteric and scientific
authors. This is why it is a good idea to learn more about sound
and vibration, in general. The author notes:
Everything is in a state of vibration. Everything is frequency.
Sound can change molecular structure. It can create form.
We realize the potential of sonic energy; we understand that
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virtually anything can be accomplished through vibration.
Then, the miraculous seems possible./viii
What are harmonics? They are mathematical extrapolations of
vibration projected in sound, but sound that most of the time we
do not consciously ‘hear’ but perceive as timbre. For example, the
special timbre of a trumpet is created by the harmonics of the
sound coming out of the trumpet. The same tone played on a pi-
ano sounds like ‘piano’ because it has got different overtones than
those created by the trumpet. The author explains:
The first harmonic which occurs vibrates twice as fast as that
first note, the second harmonic vibrates three times as fast,
the fourth harmonic vibrates four times as fast and so on./16
Different instruments will all sound overtones, but specific
overtones are most prominent in different instruments.
These most prominent overtones are called formants. They
are the area of the sound spectrum where the sound energy
is most highly concentrated./25
The striking characteristic of harmonics is that they are affect-
ing all vibrations that are in the immediate environment, and they
affect most the ones that are mathematically closest related to the
one that is the triggering vibration—and therefore are called ‘har-
monics’ of it. The author explains:
These notes are not the same and yet they are interrelated. If
you were to strike that lowest C on the piano, you wouldalso set into resonance all the other Cs on the piano. They are
harmonics of each other./16
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Anything that vibrates creates harmonics. Since the universe
is composed of nothing but vibrations, everything creates
fundamental tones and harmonics, ranging from electrons
orbiting around atoms to the planets orbiting around the
sun./31
But the author, in accordance with ancient knowledge on the
power of correct proportions, sees and evaluates harmonics not
only as an important ingredient of musical science, but also of na-ture in general. He wistfully explains what must baffle the uniniti-
ated reader, but lets the sage nod in agreement:
The entire length of the body can be viewed as adhering to
the Golden Section if we first divide the length of the body
into the proportions of the Golden Section at the navel.
These proportions are then found at the nipple dividing theentire width of the human body if the arms are stretched out.
The loin divides the distance from the ground to the nipples
in the proportions of the Golden Section. These proportions
are found in many other aspects of the body: when the knee
divides the entire leg; when the eyebrows divide the head;
when the elbow joint divides the entire arm. These propor-
tions of the major sixth (3:5) and minor sixth (5:8) can befound in other bodies, such as those found in the plant, in-
sect and animal kingdoms./35
Now, for the modern reader it is probably not self-evident why
sound can be used for healing, even when knowing the theory of
harmonics. The author imbeds his explanations within a larger
historical and cultural context:
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In India, where the art of music has been developed to the
point of being a science, there are thousands of scales, called
ragas, which are designed to have particular effects on the
emotions. The scale which arises from the harmonic series of
the first four octaves is known as Raga Saraswati. It is named
after Saraswati, the Indian Goddess of both music and sci-
ence. /29
In different cultures, science and music have not been sepa-
rated as in the West. The ancient mystery schools of Greece,
India, Tibet and Egypt had a vast understanding of the rela-
tionship between music and healing, based upon vibration
as the basic creative force in the Universe./29
It is important to know that once science and sound were not
separated as it is today but sound theory was part of the perennial
science traditions, as for example the Hermetic tradition.
In Antiquity, the sage was mathematician in just the same way
as he was musician and musical theorist, writer, poet, philosopher
and teacher of the youth, and also political theorist, orator, gov-
ernment consultant, astrologer, fortune teller, life consultant and
coach—all in one single person! Goldman studied one example ofthis ancient archetype of the scholar and found it embodied in the
Greek mathematician Pythagoras:
Pythagoras believed that the universe was an immense
monochord, an instrument with a single string that stretched
between the heavens and the earth. The upper end of the
string was attached to absolute spirit, while the lower endwas connected to absolute matter. Through study of music
as an exact science, one could become familiar with the as-
pects of nature. He applied his law of harmonic intervals to
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all the phenomena of nature, demonstrating the harmonic
relationship within the elements, the planets, and the con-
stellations. /30
To Pythagoras and his students, the Music of the Spheres was
more than a metaphor. The Greek master was said to have
actually been able to hear the sounds of the planets as they
vibrated in the heavens. The relationship between this
movement of the heavenly bodies and sound has been hy-
pothesized by scientists for centuries. Recently, scientists
using advanced mathematical principles based upon the or- bital velocities of the planets have equated different sounds
with different planets. Amazingly, they seem to be harmoni-
cally related. Perhaps this ancient master had hearing which
could perceive these astronomical movements as sound./30
Pythagoras had a school on the island of Crotona where he
taught his understandings of the mysteries of the universe.This ancient mystery school operated at three levels of initia-
tion. The first level, the acoustici, learned to recognize and
then apply the various musical proportions demonstrated to
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them through the use of the monochord. The second level,
the mathematici, dealt more specifically with knowledge of
numbers, as well as individual purification and mental self-
control. Before going on to the next level, it was necessary
that the disciple be as clear in mind and body as possible for
the responsibilities of the sacred information then received.
The third and highest level of initiation, the electi, were
taught the secret processes of psychic transmutation and of
healing with sound and music./31
Goldman’s merit in this book is that he does not only refer to
his own admittedly broad experience with sound healing, as a
professional sound healer, but that he also quotes important scien-
tific research done on healing with sound, and in general on the
effects of sound on the human psyche and on emotions. This en-
ables the reader to follow up from the notes and research the mat-
ter more deeply.
For example, he quotes the German scientist Hans Kayser
who, in the 1920s, developed a theory of world harmonics. Gold-
man elaborates:
He believed that through understanding the connection be-tween music and mathematics, it would be possible to create
an understanding of the relationship between tone and
numbers. Thus qualities (tonal sensations) could be derived
from quantities (numbers) and quantities could be derived
through qualities./33
According to Kayser, the whole number ratios of musicalharmonics corresponds to an underlying framework existing
in chemistry, physics, crystallography, astronomy, architec-
ture, spectroanalysis, botany and the study of other natural
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sciences. The relationship expressed in the periodic table of
elements, an understanding of the formation of matter, re-
sembles the overtone structure in music./33
Another example of this excellent reference work of the
author, which actually broadens and backs up his own theoretical
foundation, is Cymatics and its founder, the Swiss scientist Hans
Jenny.
Cymatics is the name which Dr. Jenny gave to his work. The
name comes from the Greek kyma, a word which means
wave. Cymatics is the study of wave-form phenomena. It is
proof positive that sound has the ability of creating form.
Once they are exposed to sound waves, the inanimate blobs
of liquid, pastes, and other materials in Dr. Jenny’s experi-
ments begin to undulate and move. Slowly as the sound con-tinues to affect them, they begin to take form. No longer
shapeless blobs, these forms pulse and vibrate with the
sounds that course through them, looking for all the world
like living breathing creating. They are, however, not alive,
but merely assume the features of life through the extraordi-
nary power of sound. Once the sound is stopped, these
shapes cease and the inorganic creations resume their shapeas formless blobs./36
Jonathan Goldman also explains that harmonics is not just an
intellectual or New Age fancy but has its roots in human evolu-
tion, and most probably, from the information we gain from the
old myths and sagas, preceded verbal language:
There are legends that before there was a spoken language of
words, there was a harmonic language. This language al-
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lowed humankind to communicate with all the creations of
nature. It utilized the concept of information being encoded
on the pure tone frequencies of harmonics. It was different
from telepathy in that it used sound but it was similar to te-
lepathy for the thoughts and information were sent on the
sound wave and were received by the listener. This may be
one of the ways by which dolphins communicate with each
other, transmitting three-dimensional holographic thought-
forms of sound. /53
And looking in the future, we can speculate that we may en-
able time-travel through manipulating sound and frequencies,
probably through the use of huge powerful quartz crystals that act
as energy transducers. The author states:
It is possible that harmonics can actually create an openingor a gateway between different realms of existence./59
Another important body of knowledge on sound and vibra-
tion is native wisdom and the author has merit to mention the
most basic facts in this context:
The Aboriginal people utilize a form of harmonics in theirsacred ceremonies that is not created from the voice but from
an instrument. The didjeridu is a hollowed-out tree limb
which is blown into to produce a very low fundamental tone
as well as very distinct overtones. The sound is very similar
to the One Voice Chord of the Tibetan monks./60
The Aborigines believe that before the first Aboriginal peo-ple came to this planet, there was a race of supernatural be-
ings called the Wandjina. They were a Dreamtime race and
responsible for the creation of the various creatures and
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forms on the Earth. When the Aboriginal people were cre-
ated, it was time for the Wandjina to depart. They left these
people the didjeridu as a gift. When the didjeridu sounded,
it created a sonic field, a sort of interdimensional window,
through which the Wandjina could travel to the Aborigines
and vice-versa./60
Another important branch of research done by the author is
the famous one-voice overtone chanting of Tibetan monks and
Mongolian shamans. The author relates his various meetings with
overtone-singing Tibetan monks both in the USA and Tibet and
references musicological and other research on this important sub-
ject that is still considered highly ‘esoteric’ in our own culture. The
Gyuto and other monks from Tibet namely chant a bass voice that
is entirely unknown to any, even professional, singer in the West.
Scientists formerly stated that it was impossible to produce a
sound of less than 150 Hz with the human voice. But these monks
prove the contrary. The author relates:
Musicologists later determined that the bass note which the
Gyuto monks chant is two octaves below middle C, vibrat-
ing at an astounding 75.5 cycles per second. The deepestrange of an opera singer is closer to 150 cycles per second,
nearly twice as high as the extraordinary bass of these
monks./67
In Tibetan tantric chanting the goal of the chanting is to in-
voke and then unite with a particular deity or being. The
monks literally become the gods and goddesses to whom
they are praying. It may be that the overtones which are
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pronounced by the different Tantric Colleges are specific in-
vocations to particular entities./67
The major difference between the Tibetan chanting style and
Mongolian / overtone singing is that the Tibetans incorpo-
rate the use of sacred text in their chanting while the Mongo-
lians create wordless melodies with their harmonics./68-69
Before Buddhism became the religion of Tibet, the religion of
the country was an animistic shamanic practice known as
Bon (a Tibetan word meaning to chant). Little information
exists about the exact nature of the Bon chanting techniques,
but there are indications that it was similar to chanting styles
used by Mongolian shamans in which open vowels were
used to create harmonics./69
Tibetan chanting employs mantric formulas which make up
their sacred texts. These are mantras which are fundamental
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to their spiritual practices. Each sacred scripture is an invo-
cation to a specific deity or a collection of deities. The chant-
ers visualize these deities while creating a mandala, a circu-
lar cosmological painting which they inwardly visualize in
archetypal symbols. These mandalas may involve over 150
deities and entities, all in specific placement. This combina-
tion of vocalization and visualization allows the monks to
become the embodiment of the energies they are invoking.
/70
Next, the author expands on the research of French doctor Al-
fred Tomatis who was already twenty years ago an authority on
sound research and healing with sound. The author relates:
Dr. Alfred Tomatis, an otolaryngologist from France who has
studied chanting throughout the world, believes that due to
the high altitude of Tibet it was necessary to chant in the ex-
tremely deep voice in order to create higher overtones./67
Alfred Tomatis … has been working with understanding the
functions of the human ear and the importance of listening
for forty-five years. He explains the three main functions of
the ear: (1) to assume balance (equilibrium, body tone and
integration of motor and sensory information); (2) to analyze
/ and decode movements from outside the body (cochlea)
and inside the body (vestibular) so that auditory-vocal con-
trol is established; and (3) to charge the brain. Tomatis be-
lieves that there are two kinds of sound: (1) sounds which
tire and fatigue the listeners, and (2) sounds which charge
the listener. In particular, Tomatis found that sounds whichcontain high frequency harmonics, such as those found in
Gregorian chants, are extremely beneficial. It is these high
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frequencies (around 8000 Hz) which are capable of charging
the central nervous system and the cortex of the brain./75
Dr Tomatis believes that one of the basic functions of the ear
is to pro-vide, through sound, both a charging of the cortex
of the brain and 90-95 per cent of the body’s total charge.
The chants of the Gregorians, according to Tomatis, contain
all the frequencies of the voice spectrum, roughly 70 cycles
per second up to 9000 cycles per second’. These are also the
frequencies found in the One Voice Chord of the Tibetan
monks, as well as in many of the hoomi or vocal harmonic
techniques discussed in this book./76
Tomatis himself manages with a small amount of sleep, less
than four hours a night. He attributes this to his listening to
sounds which are rich in high harmonics./76
The Tomatis Effect states that the voice can only create and
duplicate those sounds which the ear is able to hear. This
means that until you are able to hear various overtones, you
will not be able to create them in your voice. Further, as you
begin to hear the various aspects of the sound spectrum, not
only does your hearing change, but your voice as well.
Therefore, as we begin to listen actively and open our ears
up to harmonics, we are not only charging the cortex of the
brain and energizing ourselves, but we are also able to actu-
ally change the quality of our voice./77
According to Dr Alfred Tomatis, nearly all the cranial nerves
lead to the ear. In particular, the ear is understood to be neu-
rologically involved with the optic and the oculomotor
nerves, and therefore is interrelated with the process of vi-
sion and movement. The ear is also related to the vagus, or
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tenth cranial nerve. This nerve affects the larynx, the bron-
chi, the heart and the gastro-intestinal tract and thus our
voice, our breathing, our heart rate and our digestion are
affected by the ear. Is it any wonder then that on a purely
physiological level listening to the soothing music created by
the sacred sounds of vocal harmonics can and will help cre-
ate states of deep relaxation and meditation?/79
Goldman also teaches conflict resolution effected through em-
pathic listening that is completely immersed in sound, and distin-
guishes it from mere hearing. He points out that the activity of
active listening leads to deep understanding:
Listening is an active activity, as opposed to hearing which
may be understood as a passive activity. Listening involves
really using our ears as an organ of consciousness. Listeninginvolves really using our ears as an organ of consciousness.
When we hear, we do not discriminate between the sounds
around us. We may be unaware of them. This is why sitting
in silence / allows us to empower listening. There are many
levels of listening. The first level involves this enormous step
of going above the passiveness of hearing into the activeness
of actually listening and becoming aware of the multitude ofsounds that surround us. Through listening we can begin to
open up to sound. /81-82
That all life is coded in sound, we know from ancient times,
but it has been completely disregarded in modern science until
very recently. Now, based on this ancient understanding of the
human body as a resonance emitter and receiver, we can indeed
develop from this insight a genuine healing approach that Gold-
man traces out as a mapping of frequencies:
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Every organ, bone, tissue and other part of the body has a
healthy resonant frequency. When that frequency alters, that
part of the body vibrates out of harmony and this is what is
termed disease. If it were possible to determine the correct
resonant frequency for a healthy organ and then project it
into that part which is diseased, the organ should return to
its normal frequency and a healing should occur./90
In this understanding of the human body as a creator of sound
and light, the pineal gland plays a very important role as it has
been seen by various researchers, such as Manly P. Hall:
Research by scientists such as Robert Beck suggest that the
pineal is an organic device which is tuned towards magnetic
north to give both humans and animals their sense of direc-
tion. Other scientists believe that the pineal is a biolumines-
cent organ which has the ability to create light./106
I highly recommend the present book especially for neophytes
in sound theory and sound healing, as the author understands to
carefully introduce in the matter, always alternating theory and
practical advice or personal experience so as to make the reading
lively and interesting.
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Healing Sounds DVD
Principles of Sound HealingDVD, 90 min.
Sacred Mysteries, 2004
It was through the Healing Sounds DVD that I heard about Jonathan Goldman.
Only afterwards I ordered his books Healing Sounds and Tantra of Sound. From
the start of watching this DVD I was captivated.
Goldman understands to present a highly complex and rather
mathematical matter in an easy style, without losing depth. And
he artfully has interwoven practice and theory, as this DVD is not
just a lecture but spends about half of the time in pure practicaladvice. This production is good for everyone who wants to learn
the basics and even advanced techniques of sound healing. It is
also an excellent awareness-builder. Here is how the DVD is built
and what it contains over the one hour and a half of its really gen-
erous playing time. Part I gives a general introductory lecture
about the principles and the healing properties of sound. HereGoldman speaks to a small audience in an elegant, intimate set-
ting.
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Part II is an interesting interlude about Cymatics and the expe-
riences of Dr. Hans Jenny in the 1970s that Goldman further refer-
ences in his book Healing Sounds. Goldman shows how with
Cymatics it was proved that sound creates patterns, very specific
and beautiful patterns, and that the form and size of the patterns
depends on the frequency of the sound.
Part III is an experiment with creating a sound that matches
the group oversoul of the audience. Jonathan Goldman creates an
overtone sound, using overtone singing, a technique used, inter
alia, by Tibetan monks, in order to project light into the luminous bodies of all people present in the audience, and the house where
he gave his presentation.
Part IV is a practical demonstration of Jonathan Goldman ap-
plying a healing treatment to a person by using vocal intonations
and sound created by a Tibetan bowl.
Part V is an overview of recordings by Jonathan Goldman that
he has realized using his expertise in overtone singing and project-
ing intent into sound for various purposes.
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I highly recommend this DVD for everyone, professionals or
lay people, interested in sound healing, not only as a practitioner,
but also for personal awareness building on the importance and
omnipresence of sound in our life.
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Tantra of Sound
How to Enhance IntimacyWith Andi Goldman
Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2005
Tantra of Sound was really a discovery for me! On first sight, and compared to
Goldman’s earlier book Healing Sounds , this present book appears to be edited in
a more professional way, and in fact, it’s from a different publisher. The choice of
headers and font, all is perfect in the present publication, and I did not find one
single typo, while in Healing Sounds , I found several.
And this present volume has one big advantage: it comes withan Audio CD that contains 20 tracks over 60.34 minutes of playing
time, the first and last being Introduction and Conclusion and all the
others being vocal intonations. In addition, it is noteworthy that
this volume has been authored by both Jonathan Goldman and his
wife Andi Goldman, and this for good reason.
The book’s main intent to to apply sound to relationship, and
even to love and sexual union, in order to stimulate and broaden
the pleasure and joy of love within the couple—really an extraor-
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dinary gift item after all. I can whole-heartedly recommend this
book. But not only for this purpose. In fact, I am myself in the
moment without a partner, and this fact did not reduce my inter-
est in the book. As the authors state themselves:
It is not necessary to have a partner in order to experience
tantra. In Tibetan Buddhism, tantra is normally practiced
alone, uniting the divine forces as one within you. Tradition-
ally, a tantric practitioner’s meditations incorporate the visu-
alizations of male and female deities./9
To begin with, what is of high interest in this present book is
the research that the authors have done on Tantra, a research that
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pretty much unveiled most of what is written on the Internet
about Tantra as folklore and imagination. Let me go into more de-
tail here, because it’s an important matter, and let the authors
speak for they have put the right words on the right things. In a
few short statements, they basically say it all, and this gives you
the framework of what this book is about, and what it is not about:
Tantra is Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Hindu tradi-
tion. As in other sacred languages such as Hebrew or Ti- betan, there is frequently no one single meaning that can be
applied in translation. Thus tantra is often translated as ‘con-
tinuum’ or ‘unbroken stream’ and indicates a flow of con-
sciousness from ignorance to enlightenment. The word also
translates as ‘web’ or ‘warp’ and encompasses all that is. /4
Tantra represents the interconnecting energies between allthings in this and other planes of existence. Other words
used to describe tantra are: leading principle, essential part,
model, system, framework, doctrine, rule, theory, scientific
work, order, chief part, rule, authority, science, mystic works,
magical formulas, means, expedient, stratagem, and medi-
cine. /Id.
The etymology of tantra points to the combination of two
words, tattva and mantra. Tattva is the science of cosmic
principles, while mantra refers to the science of mystic
sound and vibrations. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, tan-
tra is sometimes referred to as Secret Mantra. This may be to
distinguish it from Western concepts. A definition of Secret
Mantra from the Tibetan Buddhist standpoint is as follows:
‘Secret’ indicates that these methods should be practiced
privately; ‘mantra’ means ‘protection for the mind’ and often
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utilizes sacred sound to provide this. Thus the function of
Secret Mantra is to enable us through the use of sound to
progress swiftly through the stages of the spiritual path by
protecting our mind against ordinary conceptions./5
Indeed, one of the highest levels of tantric practice involves
resonating and harmonizing oneself with the sound. This is
done in order to enhance and energize our physical, mental,
emotional, and spiritual essences. Hindu and Tibetan Bud-
dhist tantra both stress the power of sound. Sound, in fact is
the basis of much tantra – through working with advanced
sound techniques, tantric practitioners are able to harmonize
themselves in body, mind, and spirit./Id.
The model we present in Tantra of Sound is one that is bal-
anced and aligned with the harmonious integration of the
masculine and feminine energies within each person. When
these energies are embodied, they create an egalitarian rela-
tionship with the self and others. This relationship is not
controlling nor is it in competition with the participants in-
volved. It is cooperative and compassionate. It is balanced
and harmonious./6
So, to summarize, if you want to buy this book for strictly en-
hancing your sex life, and expect it to contain explicit sexual ad-
vice, you better buy any other book on the matter.
This book does not contain sexual advice. On the other hand,
the exercises are varied enough and thorough enough to impact, if
you do them correctly, on your emotional body, and that of yourpartner, and by so doing, you may experience a stronger fusion
and perhaps also a stronger sexual response. I would say that
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chances are higher for this to happen than not to happen. But the
book is not written with an intent that focuses on the sexual un-
ion, but is much broader in perspective and rather speaks of love,
instead of speaking of sex. And I personally think that this is the
right approach, as it is holistic. The authors explain and frame
their approach very well:
It is from the Hindu tradition that sex as a physical activity
has come into our awareness as being synonymous with tan-tra. Yet, in actuality, many true Hindu tantric practitioners
are celibate, focusing, like their Tibetan Buddhist counter-
parts, on the symbolic union of male/female energy. This
union of the male/female energy—the Shiva-Shakti current
—is metaphoric ritualistic, and meditational. It is only a spe-
cific variation of Hindu tantra that actually works with
physical sex between partners. This is the left-hand path oftantra, known as Vamacara, which has become the focus of
much Western awareness of tantra./9
I will not discuss the holy mantras that the authors very thor-
oughly present both in verbal explanation and as vocal intona-
tions because this may be considered by the authors as core mate-
rial and therefore might be considered as more tightly restricted
by copyright. I will thus not quote from these chapters that cover
20 pages of the book, so much the more as this information was
secret for hundreds of years.
Suffices thus to mention that the book elaborates in its Chapter
6 the ‘Sacred Vowels’ and in its Chapter 7 the ‘Bija Mantras’ andthat the CD contains vocal intonations of these mantras, which
may be very powerful. For what reason other than for that have
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they been kept secret for so long? It’s because they are powerful
and therefore should be used responsibly. For the couple, Chapter
10 is of particular interest as it discusses and explains ‘Sounding
the Bijas with a Partner.’
Now, with this voluntary restriction, let me shortly mention
here what I myself found particularly useful in the book, while it
may be a byproduct of the author’s research. Indeed, I myself
found the authors’ explanation of the chakras, and of the brainwaves particularly useful. They write regarding the subtle bodies:
Knowledge of these subtle bodies first manifested thousands
of years ago in the ancient mystery schools of India, Egypt,
China, and Tibet. The understanding of our bodies as being
composed of different, interfacing energetic fields is one of
the core concepts of the / esoteric traditions found through-out the world. These energy bodies make up what is called
the ‘aura’, a word meaning atmosphere or light. It is a word
usually defined as a multidimensional energy field made up
of the emanations of each of the subtle bodies./22-23
In my research on the human energy field I found a stringent
incongruence of terminology in this respect; in fact, I found thatmost authors, when they speak about the aura only want to men-
tion the etheric body, and thus only one of the seven bodies we
possess as humans, and I find the authors’ very encompassing no-
tion of aura comprehensive and elucidating.
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Stanislav Grof
Books Reviewed
Beyond the Brain (1985)
The Holotropic Mind (1993)
The Cosmic Game (1998)
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Stanislav Grof was formerly Chief of Psychiatric Research at
the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and Assistant Professor of
Psychiatry at John Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is cur-
rently Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Cali-
fornia.
He is the author of Realms of the Human Unconscious , LSD Psy-
chotherapy , and Beyond Death (with Christina Grof). His edited
volume Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science is also published bySUNY Press.
—From: Beyond the Brain (Back Cover)
When I started reading Beyond the Brain, I was deeply touched
by the drawings of LSD subjects, and their remembrance of the
trauma of birth; further was I amazed about the parallels between
these drawings and sadistic violence.
Grof explains sadism, cruelty and violence as consequences of
the birth trauma. He argues that while birth is a natural process, it
is in most cases a terrible trauma that leaves deep scars in the hu-
man psyche and emotions and that is responsible for most of the
violence that mankind is suffering from. The book was written in
1985 and it goes back on 30 years of research.
Grof first successfully experimented with LSD therapy. When
LSD was forbidden, Grof and his wife developed holotropic breath-
ing. I looked up all I could find about it, but was surprised to learn
that it is simply hyperventilation. Their claim it can bring you back
into fetal memories is almost unbelievable. Generally, until I find
convincing proof, I do not believe in Grof’s theory that birth is the
culprit of all and everything, as he writes over hundreds of pages
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in Beyond the Brain. First of all, I cannot believe that something
created by nature, such as birth, should be traumatic per se. What
Grof sees in his research, in my opinion, is cultural distortion of
nature, but he generalizes and not with one word does he see his
cultural bias. The counter-proof would be the Cesarean cases, and
here he should have really insisted to bring forth his arguments.
That would have been logically and systemically sound. That
thousands of LSD subjects had such terrible birth trauma memo-ries proves only that our culture is a madhouse and that our birth
methods are wrong. But this, Frederick Leboyer, Michel Odent
and others have said since long and there are changes on the way.
Our birthing methods are wrong, the way mothers consider birth
is wrong, the preparation of mothers for birth is wrong, the impli-
cations of the father in birthing, namely his total absence, is wrong—all is wrong.
In his discussion of The World of Psychotherapy that together
with paradigmatic reasoning fills the first 197 pages of the book,
Grof writes that LSD subjects have basically proven both the
Freudian and Jungian theories as correct:
The psychosexual dynamics and the fundamental conflicts of
the human psyche as described by Freud are manifested
with unusual clarity and vividness even in sessions of naïve
subjects who have never been analyzed, have not read psy-
choanalytic books, and have not been exposed to any other
forms of explicit or implicit indoctrination. Under the influ-
ence of LSD, such subjects experience regression to child-hood and even early infancy, relive various psychosexual
traumas and complex sensations related to infantile sexual-
ity, and are confronted with conflicts involving activities in
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various libidinal zones. They have to face and work through
the basic psychological problems described by psychoanaly-
sis, such as the Oedipus or Electra complex, the trauma of
weaning, castration anxiety, penis envy, and conflicts around
toilet training./154
The observations from LSD psychotherapy have repeatedly
confirmed most of Jung’s brilliant insights./190
As it’s notorious that Freud’s and Jung’s theories basically op-
pose one another, this observation seems to be of little value for
supporting the thesis that LSD research by and large confirms
psychoanalysis.
On the other hand, Grof lucidly analyzes how sexuality has
become ‘contaminated’ by non-sexual concerns in our culture.
Another important insight involves the fact that our present
definition of normal sex does not exclude even severe con-
tamination of the sexual situation by preoccupation with
dominance versus submission, use of sex for a variety of
nonsexual goals, and maneuvers that have more relevance
for self-esteem than for sexual gratification. In our culture
individuals of both sexes commonly use military concepts
and terminology in referring to sexual activities. They inter-
pret the sexual situation in terms of victory or defeat; con-
quering or penetrating the partner, and, conversely, being
defeated and violated; and proving oneself or failure. Con-
cerns about who seduced whom and who won, in this situa-
tion, can all but overshadow the question of sexual gratifica-
tion. Similarly, material gains, or pursuit of a career, status,
fame, or power can completely override more genuine erotic
motives. When sex is subordinated to self-esteem, sexual
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interest in the partner may entirely disappear once the ‘con-
quest’ has been accomplished or the number of partners se-
duced becomes more important than the quality of interac-
tion. Moreover, the fact that the partner is not approachable
or is deeply committed to another person can become a deci-
sive element of sexual attraction. /207
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Beyond the Brain
Birth, Death and Transcendence in PsychotherapyNew York: State University of New York, 1985
Beyond the Brain seriously challenges the existing neurophysiological models of
the brain. After three decades of extensive research on non-ordinary states of
consciousness induced by psychedelic drugs and by other means, Grof concludes
that our present scientific worldview is as inadequate as many of its historical
predecessors.
In this pioneering work, Stanislav Grof proposes a new model
of the human psyche that takes account of his findings. Grof in-
cludes in his model the recollective level, or the reliving of emo-
tionally relevant memories, a level at which the Freudian frame-
work can be useful.
Beyond that is the perinatal level in which the human uncon-scious may be activated to a reliving of biological birth and con-
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frontation with death. Beyond this level, again, is the transpersonal
level.
How birth experience influences an individual’s later devel-
opment is a central focus of the book. The most serious challenge
to contemporary psychoanalytic theory comes from a delineation
of the transpersonal level, or the expansion of consciousness be-
yond the boundaries of time and space. Grof makes a bold argu-
ment that understanding of the perinatal and transpersonal levelschanges much of how we view both mental illness and mental
health.
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The Holotropic Mind
The Three Levels of Human ConsciousnessWith Hal Zina Bennett
New York: HarperCollins, 1993
In The Holotropic Mind Stanislav Grof exposes his vision of a holographic uni-
verse, and he summons convincing amounts of data and evidence for his view.
Grof’s contribution is important especially right now as the holographic view of
the universe is one of several ‘theories of everything’ or integrative visions that
actually link back to ancient holistic science traditions.
Grof further references current research, thus blending ancient
and new cutting-edge science into something like a total synthesis.
With good reason and convincing arguments, he refers to David
Bohm’s theory of a constantly unfolding universe as one of the
first holistic science concepts in modern times:
For Bohm, holographic theory illustrates his idea that en-
ergy, light, and matter are composed of interference patterns
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that carry information about all of the other waves of light,
energy, and matter that they have directly or indirectly con-
tacted. Thus, each part of energy and matter represents a
microcosm that enfolds the whole./10
Bohm reminds us that even the process of abstraction, by
which we create our illusions of separation from the whole,
are themselves expressions of the holomovement. We ulti-
mately come to the realization that all perceptions and
knowledge—including scientific work—are not objective
reconstructions of reality; instead, they are creative activities
comparable to artistic expressions. We cannot measure true
reality; in fact, the very essence of reality is its immeasurabil-
ity. /10
One of the most daring thinking habits to overcome, that are
connected with mechanistic science, is the illusion of separateness.
Grof writes:
The holographic model offers revolutionary possibilities for
a new understanding of the relationship between the parts
and the whole. No longer confined to the limited logic of
traditional thought, the part ceases to be just a fragment of
the whole but, under certain circumstances, reflects and con-
tains the whole. As individual human beings we are not iso-
lated and insignificant Newtonian entities; rather, as integral
fields of the holomovement each of us is also a microcosm
that reflects and contains the macrocosm./10
But apart from systems theory, in which he knows to excel,Grof is really the specialist for LSD-based psychiatry, and his two
decades of experience together with sound judgment of his many
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observations have led to something like an integrated concept of
LSD-based psychiatry.
While all this research had been stopped because of the fact
that LSD, together with number of natural plant psychedelics, has
been forbidden by our administrative oversoul, the insights and
miracles remain an ecstatic outlook in a possible future of psychia-
try. Grof writes:
In sessions of LSD-assisted psychotherapy, we witnessed a
rather peculiar pattern. With low to medium dosages, sub-
jects usually limited their experiences to reliving scenes from
infancy and childhood. However, when the doses were in-
creased or the sessions were repeated, each client sooner or
later moved far beyond the realms described by Freud. /16
Many of the experiences reported were remarkably like
those described in ancient spiritual texts from Eastern tradi-
tions. I found this particularly interesting because most peo-
ple reporting these experiences had no previous knowledge
of the / Eastern spiritual philosophies, and I certainly had
not anticipated that such extraordinary experiential domains
would become accessible in this way. (...) When the process
moved beyond the biographical material from infancy and
childhood and the experiences began to reveal the greater
depths of the human psyche, with all its mystical overtones,
the therapeutic results exceeded anything I had previously
known. Symptoms that had resisted months or even years of
other treatment often vanished after patients had experi-
ences such as psychological death and rebirth, feelings of
cosmic unity, archetypal visions, and sequences of what cli-
ents described as past-life memories./16-17
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Contrary to Freudian psychoanalysis, Grof, following a tradi-
tion created by Otto Rank, includes perinatal experiences in his
psychoanalytic exploration.
Exploration in non-ordinary states of consciousness has pro-
vided convincing evidence that we do store memories of
perinatal experiences in our psyches, often at a deep cellular
level. People with no intellectual knowledge of their births
have been able to relive, with extraordinary detail, facts /
concerning their births, such as the use of forceps, breech
delivery, and the mother’s earliest responses to the infant.
Time and time again, details such as these have been objec-
tively confirmed by questioning hospital records or adults
who were present at the delivery./28-29
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The Cosmic Game
Explorations of the Frontiers of Human ConsciousnessNew York: New York State University Press, 1998
The Cosmic Game is perhaps Grof’s best book. It is written in fluent style, summa-
rizes the most important of his LSD research and his research with holotropic
states, and is not grappling with conceptual issues as the ones reviewed before.
It is a book that every intelligent person can read, written in
normal and descriptive language; it is clearly the book of an ex-
pert, a man who also has a clear literary talent and an incredible
knowledge of mythology, besides his sharp scientific perception
and reasoning that is always empirical first and conceptual sec-
ond.
The book is clearly structured and an overview of the contents
shows that it’s not a ‘research report’ of experiments but a subli-
mation of any such research, a retrospective that is contemplative
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and basically spiritual. I would even use the word ‘religious’ in
the sense that the book talks about our true ‘religio’, the link with
our source, our inner divinity.
1. Introduction
2. Cosmos, Consciousness, and Spirit
3. The Cosmic Creative Principle
4. The Process of Creation
5. The Ways to Reunion with the Cosmic Source
6. The Problem of Good and Evil
7. Birth, Sex and Death: The Cosmic Connection
8. The Mystery of Karma and Reincarnation
9. The Taboo against Knowing Who You Are
10. Playing the Cosmic Game
11. The Sacred and the Profane
Space allows me to only review parts of the book and sprinkle
in some quotations. In the Introduction, Grof explains that holo-
tropic states are not ‘delirant conditions’ (which are those in which
perception is grossly impaired), but an interference with a realm
that is outside of ordinary consciousness, a parallel reality.
Grof also writes that the content of holotropic states of con-
sciousness is often philosophical and mystical, often focused on
the ‘ground states’ of becoming and unbecoming, death, rebirth
and feelings of oneness with all-that-is. In the 2nd Chapter, Grof
makes some interesting remarks regarding Carl Jung’s theory of
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the Universal Archetypes. He writes that these images do not have
to be limited to our own racial and cultural heritage but are rather
of a universal nature. He writes:
Particularly frequent in my work have been encounters or
even identification with various deities from different cul-
tures who were killed by others or sacrificed themselves and
later came back to life. These figures representing death and
resurrection tend to emerge spontaneously when the process
of inner self-exploration reaches the perinatal level and takes
the form of psychospiritual rebirth. (…) However, we have
also seen many powerful experiences of identification with
Jesus during our holotropic breathwork seminars in Japan
and India. They occurred in individuals whose background
was Buddhist, Shinto, or Hindu. Conversely, many Anglo-
Saxons, Slavs, and Jews identified during their psychedelic
or holotropic breathwork sessions with Shiva or Buddha, the
Egyptian resurrected god Osiris, the Sumerian goddess
Inanna, or the Greek deities Persephone, Dionysus, Attis,
and Adonis./23
Mistaking a specific archetypal image for the ultimate source
of creation leads to idolatry, a divisive and dangerous mis-
take widespread in the histories of religions and cultures. It
might unite the people who share the same belief, but sets
this group against others who have chosen a different repre-
sentation of the divine. They might then try to convert others
or conquer and eliminate them. By contrast, genuine religion
is universal, all-inclusive, and all-encompassing./24
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J. Krishnamurti
Books Reviewed
Education and the Significance of Life (1978)
Krishnamurti was born on 11 May 1985, at Madanapalle, a
small hill town between Madras and Bangalore. His father, Jiddu
Narianiah, had married a cousin, Sanjeevamma, who bore him tenchildren, of whom Krishna was the eighth. This Telugu-speaking,
strictly vegetarian Brahmin family were not badly off by Indian
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standards, Narianiah being an official in the Revenue Department
of the British administration, rising before his retirement to the
position of District Magistrate. Narianiah was a Theosophist and
Sanjeevamma a worshipper of Sri Krishna, himself an eighth child
after whom she called her own eighth child.
Mary Lutyens
Sanjeevamma had a premonition that this eighth child was
to be remarkable in some way and insisted, in spite of her
husband's protests, that it should be born in the puja room.A Brahmin writer has pointed out that this prayer room
could normally only be entered after a ritual bath and the
putting-on of clean clothes: ‘Birth, death and the menstrual
cycle were the focus of ritual pollution … that a child should
be born in this room was unthinkable.’ And yet it was so.
Unlike Sanjeevamma’s other confinements, it was an easy
birth. The next morning the baby’s horoscope was cast by awell-known astrologer who assured Narianiah that his son
was to be a very great man. For years it seemed unlikely that
his prediction would be fulfilled. Whenever the astrologer
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saw Narianiah he would ask ‘What of the boy Krishna? …
Wait. I have told you the truth; he will be someone very
wonderful and great.’
At the age of two Krishna almost died of malaria. Thereaf-
ter, for several years, he suffered from bouts of malaria and
severe nose bleeds which kept him away from school and
closer to his mother than any of her other children. He loved
to go with her to the temple. He was such a vague and
dreamy child, and so bad at school work, which he hated
that he appeared to his teachers to be mentally retarded.
Nevertheless he was extremely observant, as he was to be all
his life. He would stand for long stretches at a time, watch-
ing trees and clouds, or squat to gaze at flowers and insects.
He also had a most generous nature, another characteristic
which he retained throughout his life. He would often return
from school without pencil, slate or books, having given
them to some poorer child, and when beggars came to the
house in the mornings to receive the customary gift of un-
boiled rice and his mother sent him out to distribute the
food, he would return for more, having poured all the rice
into the first man’s bag.
—Mary Lutyens, The Life and Death of Krishnamurti, Chennai: Krishna-
murti Foundation India, 1990, pp. 3-4.
Rohit Mehta
When there is total attention to yesterday’s psychological
memory, than that memory comes to an end; the brain cells
and the mind then are free.’ Krishnamurti here speaks of a
total attention to yesterday’s psychological memory in order
to end it. If it ends, then there is no projection of an image onthat which is sought to be perceived. In the ending of the
psychological memory of yesterday there comes into being
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naturally and effortlessly a state of / attention in which pure
perception of what is becomes possible. It has to be remem-
bered that in Krishnamurti’s Approach, total attention
means non-verbalized observation; it is perception without
naming. He says that in order to end the psychological
memory of yesterday, one must totally attend to it. Now, yes-
terday’s psychological memory exists neither as an object
nor as an event. It exists only as an image. It represents not
what is, but what was. It is this image which causes all the
projections of the mind; it is this which distracts from what
is.
—Rohit Mehta, J. Krishnamurti and the Nameless Experience: A Compre-
hensive Discussion of J. Krishnamurti’s Approach to Life, Delhi: Motilal Banarsi-
dass Publishers, 2002, pp. 328-329
In 1929, after years of questioning himself and the destiny im-
posed upon him, Krishnamurti disbanded the Order of the Star , the
theosophical organization he was elected to be the head and
chairman, turning away all followers.
Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any
path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, beinglimitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path what-
soever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be
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formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular spiri-
tual path.
From that time until his death in February 1986 at the age of
ninety, he traveled around the world speaking as a private person,
teaching and giving talks and having discussions. His aim was to
set people psychologically free so that they might be in harmony
with themselves, with nature and with others. K taught that hu-
manity has created the environment in which we live and that
nothing can ever put a stop to the violence and suffering that has
been going on for thousands of years except a total transformation
in the human psyche.
If only a dozen people are transformed, it would change the
world. Krishnamurti maintained that there is no path to this trans-
formation, no method for achieving it, no gurus or spiritual
authorities who can help.
He pointed to the need for an ever-deepening and acute
awareness in which the limitations of the mind could drop away.
K always was a universal and cosmopolitan mind. Although
born of Indian parentage, he stated repeatedly that he had no na-
tionality and belonged to no particular culture of group. What he
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hoped his audience would learn, he was the living example for it,
which is in my view the only way a guru can legitimize himself as
a spiritual leader. Only what is brought over as ‘incarnated’ can be
shared, not what is merely preached or lectured, as true as it may
be.
Education has always been one of Krishnamurti’s chief con-
cerns. If a young person could learn to see their conditioning of
race, nationality, religion, dogma, tradition, opinion, etc., which
inevitably leads to conflict, then he might become a fully intelli-
gent human being able to live in a way that respects other beingsand nature as a whole.
During his lifetime K established several schools in different
parts of the world where young people and adults could come
together and explore the possibility of right relationships in actual
daily living. Krishnamurti said of his schools that they were places
where students and teachers can flower inwardly and become un-fragmented and whole humans. He wanted the schools to be real
centers of understanding, of real comprehension of life.
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Krishnamurti’s teaching had a strong impact upon my own
philosophical thinking, and in fact, when I first encountered it in
1985, as a member of a Krishnamurti study circle in Switzerland,
Shortly before I left Switzerland for my journey to the United
States in 1985, I met Raffaella Ida Sangiorgi, Princess of Liechten-
stein, the wife of Prince Alfred of Liechtenstein, a long-term mem-
ber of the group.
I was presented to her one afternoon, during a study session inthe splendid villa of entrepreneur Friedrich Grohe in Morges at
the Lake Geneva, where we met twice per month for our ex-
changes on K’s unique teaching. There was a spontaneous sympa-
thy and even enchantment on both sides and we separated from
the group soon and had some intimate discussions in another
room where we were undisturbed.
I was highly intrigued by the fact that the Princess and her
husband had known K for long years and hosted him often times
in their premises. And instead of talking about him as a venerated
saint and guru, she spoke about K affectionately, and told me little
anecdotes about his life. For example, she told me that once she
discovered that one of her precious diamonds had stopped to
shine, and had become dull. And K suggested in his habitual sim-
ple style she should leave the diamond ring with him for a few
days and then see the result. K put the ring and returned it after
three days, she explained, and the diamond had become so bril-
liant and was glowing with such tremendous luminosity that it
seemed to be a higher grade of stone than it actually was.
Yet the Princess, who spoke a very pure German, counted this
little anecdote in rather factual terms and without the glare that
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Education and the Significance of Life
London: Victor Gollancz, 1978
Krishnamurti’s book Education and the Significance of Life is one of the most impor-
tant books on education. I will produce and discuss some quotes here that show
that K really had a radical and honest attitude toward child rearing.
His main argument regarding education was that it should not
condition the child, but build awareness of our inevitable condi-
tioning by society and social values. Here are some key quotes:
We are turning out, as if through a mould, a type of human
being whose chief interest is to find security, to become
somebody important, or to have a good time with as little
thought as possible./9
Conventional education makes independent thinking ex-
tremely difficult. Conformity leads to mediocrity. To be dif-
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ferent from the group or to resist environment is not easy
and is often risky as long as we worship success./9
This fear of life, this fear of struggle and of new experience,
kills in us the spirit of adventure; our whole upbringing and
education have made us afraid to be different from our
neighbour, afraid to think contrary to the established pattern
of society, falsely respectful of authority and tradition./10
It is only when we face experience as it comes and do not
avoid disturbance that we keep intelligence highly awak-
ened; and intelligence highly awakened is intuition, which is
the only true guide in life./11
Though there is a higher and wider significance to life, of
what value is our education if we never discover it? We may
be highly educated, but if we are without deep integration of
thought and feeling, our lives are incomplete, contradictory
and torn with many fears; and as long as education does not
cultivate an integrated outlook on life, it has very little sig-
nificance. /11
The individual is made up of different entities, but to em-
phasize the differences and to encourage the development of
a definite type leads to many complexities and contradic-
tions. Education should bring about the integration of these
separate entities—for without integration, life becomes a
series of conflicts and sorrows./12
What K next stresses in education is self-knowledge. And rightlyso. Without self-knowledge we become automatons and ruthless
executioners in lifeless systems.
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We cannot understand existence abstractly or theoretically.
To understand life is to understand ourselves and that is
both the beginning and the end of education./14
When there is no self-knowledge, self-expression becomes
self-assertion, with all its aggressive and ambitious conflicts.
Education should awaken the capacity to be self-aware and
not merely indulge in gratifying self-expression./15
Systems, whether educational or political, are not changed
mysteriously; they are transformed when there is a funda-
mental change in ourselves. The individual is of first impor-
tance, not the system; and as long as the individual does not
understand the total process of himself, no system, whether
of the left or of the right, can bring order and peace to the
world./16
One of the main points of critique of current education by al-
ternative educational methods is the fact that modern-day educa-tion is mechanical and technology-based, and disregards the soul
and soul values. K writes:
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Present-day education is a complete failure because it has
over-emphasized technique. In over-emphasizing technique
we destroy man. To cultivate capacity and efficiency without
understanding life, without having a comprehensive percep-
tion of the ways of thought and desire, will only make us
increasingly ruthless, which is to engender wars and jeop-
ardize our physical security. The exclusive cultivation of
technique has produced scientists, mathematicians, bridge
builders, space conquerors; but do they understand the total
process of life? Can any specialist experience life as a whole?
Only when he ceases to be a specialist./18
The man who knows how to split the atom but has no love
in his heart becomes a monster./19
Thus, K stresses the need for an integrated approach to educa-
tion, which necessarily also would be an approach that wisely is
drafted to activate and stimulate both brain hemispheres, and the
characteristics associated with them. K points out:
The right kind of education, while encouraging the learning
of a technique, should accomplish something which is of far
greater importance; it should help man to experience theintegrated process of life. It is this experiencing that will put
capacity and technique in their right place./21
An important, and often misunderstood problem in education
are ideals, heroes, and generally any kind of people worship. The
conditioning of children after national or social, or other heroes,
and the idealism connected with that quest in traditional patriar-
chal education cannot be overlooked. Krishnamurti never left a
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doubt that ideas are highly destructive for building intelligent
humans, and he boldly states:
Ideals have no place in education for they prevent the com-
prehension of the present./22
The right kind of education is not concerned with any ideol-
ogy, however much it may promise a future Utopia: it is not
based on any system, however carefully thought out; nor is
it a means of conditioning the individual in some special
manner. Education in the true sense is helping the individual
to be mature and free, to flower greatly in love and good-
ness. That is what we should be interested in, and not in
shaping the child according to some idealistic pattern./23
Now, we often hesitate to talk about love, and it’s almost a
commonplace today, or even has a strange subversive note about
it to say that one must love children if one wants to be a good
teacher. K had the authority to say what had to be said, and it was
received positively because there was no doubt in his integrity:
Only love can bring about the understanding of another.
Where there is love there is instantaneous communion withthe other, on the same level and at the same time. It is be-
cause we ourselves are so dry, empty and without love that
we have allowed governments and systems to take over the
education of our children and the direction of our lives; but
governments want efficient technicians, not human beings,
because human beings become dangerous to governments—
and to organized religions as well. That is why governmentsand religious organizations seek to control education./24
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And we are again confronted with the notion of conformity
that goes through the book like an Ariadne thread; in fact, ideal-
ism and conformity go hand in hand, and are sugared up by sen-
timentality.
Life cannot be made to conform to a system, it cannot be
forced into a framework, however nobly conceived and a
mind that has merely been trained in factual knowledge is
incapable of meeting life with its variety, its subtlety, its
depths and great heights. When we train our children ac-
cording to a system of thought or a particular discipline,
when we teach them to think within departmental divisions,
we prevent them from growing into integrated men and
women, and therefore they are incapable of thinking intelli-
gently, which is to meet life as a whole./24
K saw the difficult and challenging role of the dedicated edu-
cator, and he was very outspoken that such an individual cannot
reasonably be a conformist, but must be a person who is an inde-
pendent thinker, and mentally and emotionally sane:
Education is intimately related to the present world crisis,
and the educator who sees the causes of this universal chaosshould ask himself how to awaken intelligence in the stu-
dent, thus helping the coming generation not to bring about
further conflict and disaster. He must give all his thought, all
his care and affection to the creation of right environment
and to the development of understanding, so that when the
child grows into maturity he will be capable of dealing intel-
ligently with the human problems that confront him. But inorder to do this, the educator must understand himself in-
stead of relying on ideologies, systems and beliefs./25
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The right kind of education consists in understanding the
child as he is without imposing upon him an ideal of what
we think he should be. To enclose him in the framework of
an ideal is to encourage him to conform, which breeds fear
and produces in him a constant conflict between what he is
and what he should be; and all inward conflicts have their
outward manifestations in society. Ideals are an actual hin-
drance to our understanding of the child and to the child's
understanding of himself./26
Ideals are a convenient escape, and the teacher who follows
them is incapable of understanding his students and dealing
with them intelligently; for him, the future ideal, the what
should be, is far more important than the present child. The
pursuit of an ideal excludes love, and without love no hu-
man problem can be solved./27
The right kind of educator, aware of the mind's tendency to
reaction, helps the student to alter present values, not out of
reaction against them, but through understanding the total
process of life. (...) Without really inquiring into this whole
question, we assert than human nature cannot be changed,
we accept things as they are and encourage the child to fit
into the present society; we condition him to our present
ways of life, and hope for the best. But can such conformity
to present values, which lead to war and starvation, be con-
sidered education?/30
The next important point in the value discussion is discipline.
What place should discipline and self-discipline be given in theeducational framework of a non-repressive and consciousness-
based institution? K is very clear-cut in this respect. He is against
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discipline, and stresses the need to educate children sensitively by
raising their self-respect and respect for one another, and for life as
a whole:
For political and industrial reasons, discipline has become an
important factor in the present social structure, and it is be-
cause of our desire to be psychologically secure that we ac-
cept and practise various forms of discipline. (…) Discipline
then becomes a substitute for love, and it is because our
hearts are empty that we cling to discipline./31
Sensitivity can never be awakened through compulsion. One
may compel a child to be outwardly quiet, but one has not
come face to face with that child which is making him obsti-
nate, impudent, and so on. Compulsion breeds antagonism
and fear. Reward and punishment in any form only make
the mind subservient and dull; and if this is what we desire,
then education through compulsion is an excellent way to
proceed./32
Implicit in right education is the cultivation of freedom and
intelligence, which is not possible if there is any form of
compulsion, with its fears. After all, the concern of the edu-
cator is to help the student to understand the complexities of
his whole being. To require him to suppress one part of his
nature for the benefit of some other part is to create in him
an endless conflict which results in social antagonisms. It is
intelligence that brings order, not discipline./33
The problem of discipline, K analyzes very succinctly, is that itcreates fear. And fear is not conducive to intelligence, and renders
people emotionally highly unstable. K observes:
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Fear perverts intelligence and is one of the causes of self-
centered action./34-35
The right kind of education must take into consideration this
question of fear, because fear warps our whole outlook on
life. To be without fear is the beginning of wisdom, and only
the right kind of education can bring about the freedom
from fear in which alone there is deep and creative
intelligence./35
And what place should religion have in education? Some find
it necessary that children receive a religious education, others find
that in a modern state the school system should refrain from con-
ditioning children spiritually. France has a special position here because of the French Revolution and the fact that in the French
Constitution, an explicit secularism is anchored that all schools
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must respect. The most recent debate has been over whether any
religious apparel, such as the Hijab, the Sikh turban, large Crosses
or Stars of David should be banned from public schools? After
much political debate a law has been voted in France to ban all
those personal religious symbols in schools. K expresses himself
against any form of organized religion or ritual:
What we call religion is merely organized belief, with its
dogmas, rituals, mysteries and superstitions. Each religionhas its own sacred book, its mediator, its priests and its ways
of threatening and holding people. Most of us have been
conditioned to all this, which is considered religious educa-
tion; but this conditioning sets man against man, it creates
antagonism, not only among the believers, but also against
those of other beliefs. Though all religions assert that they
worship God and say that we must love one another, theyinstill fear through their doctrines of reward and punish-
ment, and through their competitive dogmas they perpetu-
ate suspicion and antagonism./38
Organized religion is the frozen thought of man, out of
which he builds temples and churches; it has become a sol-
ace for the fearful, and opiate for those who are in sorrow./40
The next important point in a sensitive education is how to han-
dle the child as an individual, while participating in a group?
How should the educator relate to the single child, and how to
react to children’s curiosity, and their often disturbing inquisitive-ness? How to handle their discontent in phases of adaptation they
invariable go through, and that leave traces of hurt through the
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inevitable restriction of freedom? Krishnamurti gives very clear
answers here.
Most children are curious, they want to know; but their ea-
ger inquiry is dulled by our pontifical assertions, our supe-
rior impatience and our casual brushing aside of their curi-
osity. We do not encourage their inquiry, for we are rather
apprehensive of what may be asked of us; we do not foster
their discontent, for we ourselves have ceased to
question./41
The young, if they are at all alive, are full of hope and dis-
content; they must be, otherwise they are already old and
dead./42
Discontent is the means to freedom: but in order to inquire
without bias, there must be none of the emotional dissipa-
tion which often takes the form of political gatherings, the
shouting of slogans, the search for a guru or spiritual
teacher, and religious orgies of different kinds./43
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A very intriguing point is K’s position on success. While
striving for success is something really natural for human beings,
Krishnamurti teaches that the very striving for success per se cre-
ates fear and is therefore not an ideal motivational factor:
As long as success is our goal we cannot be rid of fear, for
the desire to succeed inevitably breeds the fear of failure./44
To apply this approach means to let children see that the striv-ing for success, without being based on other values can be poi-
soned by greed and selfish gain. The art is not to suffocate the
child’s energy for progress, which requires from the teacher a bal-
anced attitude, sensitivity and tact. K says it in more general terms
that can be interpreted in many ways:
The school should help its young people to discover their
vocations and responsibilities, and not merely cram their
minds with facts and technical knowledge; it should be the
soil in which they can grow without fear, happily and
integrally./45
Another important value in any spiritual educational concept
is simplicity. K was a simple man all through his life. He was di-
rect and simple in his approach to people, and to children. He was
not afraid of direct exchanges, and he did not foster hierarchy
thinking. He was relating to a beggar and a king in basically the
same way, empathically and fearlessly. This is not the way of our
modern society, so how can we help children to develop simplicity
without however neglecting our duty to help them understand
the complexity of life? This obvious paradox requires to get deep
inside and see the metarational relationship between complexity
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and simplicity. Only a spiritually developed teacher can appear as
a simple human while fully understanding the complexity of life,
and of relationships. K. explains:
From innumerable complexities we must grow to simplicity;
we must become simple in our inward life and in our out-
ward needs./45
Krishnamurti schools had from the start a rather peculiar ap-
proach to teaching skills.
For example in a painting class, the teacher would only intro-
duce in the subject and then the main educational work would be
done by participation. There would simply be a painter around,
who would paint, around the children, for them to grow into it by
seeing it every day.
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This philosophy is based upon the insight that no child can be
trained in anything that their soul is not ready to receive. So if you
‘teach’ art or music to a child whose soul has no affinity with art
or music, you not only confuse the child, but you also waste time,
and in some cases you even create a lifelong rebellion in the child
against what they felt was ‘imposed’ on them. This is why partici-
patory education solves many problems in that children who are
naturally gifted for art or music or literature or anything else will
pick that up when it’s around. That means, of course, that the
school really must be a cultural place, and not just an academy for
indoctrination. K explains:
Teaching should not become a specialist's profession. When
it does, as is so often the case, love fades away; and love is
essential to the process of integration. To be integrated theremust be freedom from fear. Fearlessness brings independ-
ence without ruthlessness, without contempt for another,
and this is the most essential factor in life./47
The integrated human being will come to technique through
experiencing, for the creative impulse makes its own tech-
nique - and that is the greatest art. When a / child has thecreative impulse to paint, he paints, he does not bother about
technique. Likewise people who are experiencing, and there-
fore teaching, are the only real teachers, and they too will
create their own technique./48
Many of us seem to think that by teaching every human be-
ing to read and write, he shall solve our human problems; but this idea has proved to be false. The so-called educated
are not peace-loving, integrated people, and they too are re-
sponsible for the confusion and misery in the world./52
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their ways of life are not conducive to tranquillity. They are
both responsible for the confusion and misery of the
world./63
Intelligence is not separate from love./64
There is a distinction between intellect and intelligence. In-
tellect is thought functioning independently of emotion,
whereas intelligence is the capacity to feel as well as reason;
and until we approach life with intelligence, instead of intel-
lect alone, or with emotion alone, no political or educational
system in the world can save us from the toils of chaos and
destruction./65
Wisdom comes with the abnegation of the self. To have an
open mind is more important than learning; and we can
have an open mind, not by cramming it full of information
but by being aware of our own thoughts and feelings, by
carefully observing ourselves and the influences about us, by
listening to others, by watching the rich and the poor, and
powerful and the lowly./65
Intelligence is much greater than intellect, for it is the inte-
gration of reason and love; but there can be intelligence only
when there is self-knowledge, the deep understanding of the
total process of oneself./67
As Krishnamurti has pointed out in his his book Beyond Vio-
lence (1973) , for overcoming violence we do not need to put up
ideals of peace, nor do we need tighter laws, but a better education,and better relationships. To get there, we need to understand our-
selves and at the same time, we need to learn relating, both to our-
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selves and others. This helps us to dissolve artificial boundaries
between humans that our ideologies, traditions and national pride
have created. K explains:
The problem of man’s antagonism to man can be solved, not
by pursuing the ideal of peace, but by understanding the
causes of war which lie in our attitude towards life, towards
our fellow-beings; and this understanding can come about
only through the right kind of education./68
If we avoid the responsibility of acting individually and wait
for some new system to establish peace, we shall merely be-come the slaves of that system./70
The constantly repeated assertion that we belong to a certain
political or religious group, that we are of this nation or of
that, flatters our little egos, puffs them out like sails, until we
are ready to kill or be killed for our country, race or ideology.
It is all so stupid and unnatural. Surely, human beings aremore important than national and ideological boundaries.
/71
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Nationalism, the patriotic spirit, class and race conscious-
ness, are all ways of the self, and therefore separative. After
all, what is a nation but a group of individuals living to-
gether for economic and self-protective reasons? Out of fear
and acquisitive self-defence arises the idea of my country,
with its boundaries and tariff walls, rendering brotherhood
and the unity of man impossible./72
Our present social institutions cannot evolve into a world
federation, for their very foundations are unsound. Parlia-
ments and systems of education which uphold national sov-
ereignty and emphasize the importance of the group will
never bring war to an end./73
An important insight in this respect is that children are not per
se thinking in terms of nations, religions, races or any other dis-
tinctions that our fragmented and conditioned thinking comes up
with. Children are universal thinkers.
The child is neither class nor race conscious; it is the home or
school environment, or both, which makes him feel separa-
tive. /75
If life is meant to be lived happily, with thought, with care,
with affection, then it is very important to understand our-
selves; and if we wish to build a truly enlightened society,
we must have educators who understand the ways of inte-
gration and who are therefore capable of imparting that un-
derstanding to the child. Such educators would be a danger
to the present structure of society. But we do not really wantto build an enlightened society; and any teacher who, per-
ceiving the full implications of peace, began to point out the
true significance of nationalism and the stupidity of war,
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would soon lose his position. Knowing this, most teachers
compromise, and thereby help to maintain the present sys-
tem of exploitation and violence./79
As I pointed out above, a responsible attitude toward educa-
tion requires us to put the cards on the table, and we do live in a
world of violence, chaos, murder, hunger for many, but also in-
credible abundance, and unrivaled comfort for a few.
What is our relationship with all of this? Do we think that war
is outside only, or do we recognize that every war we bring to
birth was already there inside of us before we ever lifted our arm
to take a gun?
I have emphasized in my own writings that every act of vio-
lence done in outward life is a reflection of violence we have done to
ourselves, on an inward level, long before that particular event. By
the same token, every murder committed is preceded by a murder
that was committed inside of the murderer long before he mur-
dered. As long as we continue to murder so-called ‘perverse’ de-
sires, longings and fantasies, so long shall we have murder in this
world. Once we learn to embrace ourselves, and our selves, and
stop disowning parts of our inner whole that we disintegrate be-
cause of the schizoid split that all morality brings about, we learn
to handle our emotions. K says:
War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday
living. We precipitate war out of our daily lives; and without
a transformation in ourselves, there are bound to be nationaland racial antagonisms, the childish quarreling over ideolo-
gies, the multiplication of soldiers, the saluting of flags, and
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all the many brutalities that to go create organized
murder./79
Finally, what is this psychological revolution that K. talks
about? What does it require? K explains:
True revolution is not the violent sort; it comes about
through cultivating the integration and intelligence of hu-
man beings who, by their very life, will gradually create
changes in society./89
For education to adopt a higher quality, instead of being fo-
cused upon quantity in the sense of educating masses of people, it
logically needs to focus on every single child rather than seeing
children as a quantifiable factor to be addressed:
The right kind of education is not possible en masse. To
study each child requires patience, alertness and intelligence.To observe the child’s tendencies, his aptitudes, his tem-
perament, to understand his difficulties, to take into account
his heredity and parental influence and not merely regard
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him as belonging to a certain category—all this calls for a
swift and pliable mind, untrammeled by any system or
prejudice. It calls for skill, intense interest and, above all, a
sense of affection; and to produce educators endowed with
these qualities is one of our major problems to-day./94
The following quotes are among the most revolutionary and
challenging sentences Krishnamurti produced in this book:
If parents really cared for their children, they would build a
new society; but fundamentally most parents do not care,
and so they have no time for this most urgent problem. They
have time for making money, for amusements, for rituals
and worship, but no time to consider what is the right kind
of education for their children./97
We say so easily that we love our children; but is there love
in our hearts when we accept the existing social conditions,
when we do not want to bring about a fundamental trans-
formation in this destructive society? And as long as we look
to the specialists to educate our children, this confusion and
misery will continue, for the specialists, being concerned
with the part and not with the whole, are themselves uninte-
grated. /98
The suffering of parents for their children is a form of pos-
sessive self-pity which exists only when there is no love./103
To be the right kind of educator, a teacher must constantly be
freeing himself from books and laboratories; he must ever be
watchful to see that the students do not make of him an ex-
ample, an ideal, an authority./110
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For the true teacher, teaching is not a technique, it is a way of
life; like a great artist, he would rather starve than give up
his creative work./111
Creativity has many forms and expresses itself in many ways.
K. has repeatedly said in his talks that modern education suffo-
cates creativity, and I have seen this confirmed in my work in
schools and kindergartens in several countries. So what is creativ-
ity, and how do we nourish the creative flame inside of us?
Krishnamurti gives a quite original answer:
The intellect, the mind as such, can only repeat, recollect, it is
constantly spinning new words and rearranges old ones; and
as most of us feel and experience only through the brain, we
live exclusively on words and mechanical repetitions. This is
obviously not creation; and since we are uncreative, the only
means of creativeness left to us is sex. Sex is of the mind, and
that which is of the mind must fulfill itself or there is frustra-
tion. Our thoughts, our lives are narrow, arid, hollow, empty;
emotionally we are starved, religiously and intellectually we
are repetitive, dull; socially, politically and economically we
are regimented, controlled. We are not happy people, we are
not vital, joyous; at home, in business, at church, at school,
we never experience a creative state of being, there is no
deep release in our daily thought and action. Caught and
held from all sides, naturally sex becomes our only outlet, an
experience to be sought again and again because it momen-
tarily offers that state of happiness which comes when there
is absence of self. It is not sex that constitutes a problem, but
the desire to recapture the state of happiness, to gain and
maintain pleasure, whether sexual or any other./118
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Unless we investigate and understand the hindrances that
prevent creative living, which is freedom from self, we shall
not understand the problem of sex./119
I will come to an end now with this extensive review in the
hope that this overview over the topics of this book raises yourthirst to read it.
It is a difference to read some quotes from a book or to read
the integral book. Also, I am very clear about it, I have not hidden
my own bias, my own necessarily subjective participation in this
book, and in the subjects that go beyond it, such as education,
world peace, or spirituality.
I have my own philosophy and solutions to offer in my writ-
ings, and I cannot avoid that my way of seeing the world goes into
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these book reviews. But this must be so, or I would be dishonest.
After all, what is of interest for you is your own relationship with
this book and its author, and not how it impacted upon my mind,
and my emotions! In this sense, I can only reflect it with my mir-
ror, not with yours.
But let me affirm that without any doubt, this book was one of
the most important I have read in my entire life. I have read it first
about twenty years ago and since then have re-read it severaltimes.
Krishnamurti is a thinker, a sage, a philosopher that you can-
not ‘store away’ in a library and forget, like we do it with so many
others! He and his teaching is alive, as alive as ever before.
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Charles Webster Leadbeater
Books Reviewed
Astral Plane: Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena (1894/1997)Dreams: What they are and How they are Caused (1903)
The Inner Life (1911/1942)
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During an eclipse of the moon, he saw a shadow that was no-
ticeable before the eclipse fairly started, and wrote some paper as
to this, and it was found to be, in all probability, the shadow cast
by the Andes. At one point of time, Charles Leadbeater used to go
to a good few spiritualistic séances in London and met William
Eglinton, a famous spiritualistic medium and reported some of his
experiences with this medium. He also organized meetings in his
own cottage.
It is through Spiritualism and psychic phenomena that Lead-
beater came to discover Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the Theo-
sophical Society after reading the book The Occult World by A. P.
Sinnett. He joined the Theosophical Society on November 21, 1883
at the same time as Prof. William Crookes, an eminent scientist,
and his wife.—From: Biographical Notes , by Maurice H. Warnon
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clairvoyance, by meticulously and systematically exploring its phe-
nomena, building a scientific framework for explaining them in a
verifiable manner.
Today’s intelligent elite surely has less of a problem to accept
paranormal abilities than this was the case a hundred years ago,
and a person such as Leadbeater would probably not come over in
the same suspicious manner in the press than this was the case in
a time when these phenomena were to be seen only in circuses, but were seldom subjected to serious scientific investigation.
This being said, I will try, in this book review, to cast some
light on a number of quotes taken from this erudite booklet, so as
to show that it is a highly important item for the library of any
even moderately spiritual-minded scientist and any curious indi-
vidual open enough to look over the fence of ‘school wisdom’ toexplore a realm of existence that he or she will inevitably join one
day, after passing over, and for a certain time of transition: the as-
tral world. The author introduces in the topic in his concise, bril-
liant and lucid diction:
No one can get a clear conception of the teachings of the
Wisdom-Religion until he has at any rate an intellectual
grasp of the fact that in our solar system there exist perfectly
definite planes, each with its own matter of different degrees
of density, and that some of these planes can be visited and
observed by persons who have qualified themselves for the
/ work, exactly as a foreign country might be visited and
observed; and that, by comparison of the observations of
those who are constantly working on these planes, evidence
can be obtained of their existence and nature at least as satis-
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factory as that which most of us have for the existence of
Greenland or Spitsbergen. /2-3
Very early in his book, Leadbeater comes up with the idea of
planes; he argues that the world consists of a set of layers that are
superimposed on each other, and that he calls planes—a very in-
teresting idea indeed! He develops some kind of theory that these
layers are all connected and behave interactively, and that our ex-
perience of them is not sequential, but simultaneous. Actually, the
idea of a sequential order of experiencing the present world and
the afterworld seems to be a myth given that we travel every night
into the afterworld or astral world, using the same astral energy
body that we use when we pass over to this realm of existence. So
it would be highly unscientific to speak about a sequential behav-
ior of these worlds or dimensions of existence.
There is now a huge body of evidence that shows that time
travel is possible both forward and backward in time, and this
would be impossible if the planes were sequential. The astound-
ing characteristic of our universe is that, while it is multi-layered
like an onion, it is interconnected and interacts simultaneously on
all levels at once. In addition, on the astral plane objects are not
definite but shapeshift constantly. Leadbeater explains:
The astral region which I am to attempt to describe is the
second of these great planes of nature—the next above or
within that physical world with which we are all familiar. It
has often been called the realm of illusion—not that it is it-
self any more illusory than the physical world, but because
of the extreme unreliability of the impressions brought back
from it by the untrained seer. This is to be accounted for
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mainly by two remarkable characteristics of the astral world
—first, that many of its inhabitants have a marvellous power
of changing their forms with Protean rapidity, and also of
casting practically unlimited glamour over those with whom
they choose to sport; and secondly, that sight on that plane is
a faculty very different from and much more extended than
physical vision. An object is seen, as it were, from all sides at
once, the inside of a solid being as plainly open to / the view
as the outside; it is therefore obvious than an inexperienced
visitor to this new world may well find considerable diffi-
culty in understanding what he really does see, and still
more in translating his vision into the very inadequate lan-
guage of ordinary speech./3-4
First of all, then, it must be understood that the astral plane
has seven subdivisions, each of which has its corresponding
degree of materiality and its corresponding condition of
matter. Now numbering these from the highest und least
material downwards, we find that they naturally fall into
three classes, divisions 1, 2 and 3 forming one such class, and
4, 5 and 6 another, while the seventh and lowest of all stands
alone./8
Now, there are certain laws of geometry, for example the law
of perspective, that are valid in our dimension, but that do not ap-
ply in the astral region, and yet we can say that the view of matter
on the astral plane is less of an illusion:
Looked at from the astral plane, for example, the sides of a
glass cube would all appear equal, as they really are, whileon the physical plane we see the further side in perspective –
that is, it appears smaller than the nearer side, which is, of
course, a mere illusion./9
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magnifying power is enormously greater than that of any
microscope ever made or ever likely to be made./13-14
On the other hand, while the astral point of observation, ac-
cording to the author, offers a very minutely detailed view of ob-
jects, this view is limited to that very plane and a look ‘over the
fence’ seems to be excluded:
It must also be remembered that the regular inhabitant of the
astral plane, whether he be human or elemental, is under
ordinary circumstances conscious only of the objects of that
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plane, physical matter being to him as entirely invisible as is
astral matter to the majority of mankind./15
That our ‘real’ existence here on earth is not a very high level
of evolution in our present cosmos can be seen in the fact that vi-
brationally or energetically it is related to the lowest of the seven
subdivisions of the astral plane. Leadbeater points out:
For the seventh and lowest subdivision of the astral plane
also this physical world of ours may be said to be the back-
ground, though what is seen is only a distorted and partial
view of it, since all that is light and good and beautiful
seems invisible. It was thus described four thousand years
ago in the Egyptian papyrus of the Scribe Ani: ‘What manner
of place is this unto which I have come? It hath no water, it
hath no air; it is deep, unfathomable; it is black as the black-est night, and men wander helplessly about therein; in it a
man may not live in quietness of heart’./16
The following explanation of the Akashic Records is uncanny
and unfortunately it is left open what the Akâsha is.
Fortunately we have arrived, as a culture, despite our initial
ignorance, at a point of bifurcation. Ervin Laszlo’s amazing ‘the-
ory of everything’ stands exemplarily for this fact and what me
miss out in Leadbeater we can look up, at least in principle, in
Laszlo’s book Science and the Akashic Field (2005) that I have re-
viewed in The New Paradigm in Science and Systems Theory (2014).
So far, Leadbeater states the principle:
An account of the scenery of the astral plane would be in-
complete without mention of what are commonly called the
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Records of the Astral Light, the photographic representation
of all that has ever happened. These records are really and
permanently impressed upon that higher medium called the
Akâsha and are only reflected in a more or less spasmodic
manner in the astral light, so that one whose power of vision
does not rise above this plane will be likely to obtain only
occasional and disconnected pictures of the past instead of a
coherent narrative. But nevertheless pictures of all kinds of
past events are constantly being reproduced on the astral
plane, and form an important part of the surroundings of the
investigator here./18
The book now expands in various smaller entities that treat
the astral life of specific kinds of people, as in principle Leadbeater
stated that the astral body significantly differs according to the
spiritual development of the person. For the ordinary human, theauthor notes:
[The Ordinary Person] These extruded astral / bodies are
almost shapeless and very indefinite in outline in the case of
the more backward races and individuals, but as the man
develops in intellect and spirituality his floating astral be-
comes better defined and more closely resembles his physi-cal encasement. Since the psychical faculties of mankind are
in course of evolution, and individuals are at all stage of
their development, this class naturally melts by impercepti-
ble gradations into the former one./21-22
For clarification purposes, it is useful to see our recent ad-
vances in holistic research confirmed and preceded by more than
hundred years: death is not what it appears to be in popular cul-
ture. The author remarks:
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To begin with, of course this very word ‘dead’ is an absurd
misnomer, as most of the entities classified under this head-
ing are as fully alive as we are ourselves; the term must be
understood as meaning those who are for the time unat-
tached to a physical body./23
Another fact that is hardly known is that emotions, and emo-
tional memories, and also our emotional scars are not stripped off
at death, but transported in their vibrational essence into the as-
tral, and here they can cause distress. And in this sense, death is
not the leveler it has been looked at by many poets. To summarize:
we are not born equal, and we don’t die equal either. Leadbeater
writes:
The average man has by no means freed himself from thelower desires before death, and it takes a long period of
more or less conscious life on the astral plane to allow the
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forces he has generated to work themselves out, and thus
release the higher Ego./26
The poetic idea of death as the universal leveler is a mere
absurdity born of ignorance, for, as a matter of fact, in the /
vast majority of cases the loss of the physical body makes no
difference whatever in the character or intellect of the per-
son, and there are therefore as many different varieties of
intelligence among those whom we usually call the dead as
among the living./27-28
A very important rectification theosophy has brought forward
concerns the so-called heavenly punishment of ‘bad deeds’ that is
notoriously a constant theme in Catholic dogma—and that was
unveiled for the first time in religious history as a complete mis-
nomer, and even a blasphemy:
The horrible doctrine of eternal punishment, too, is respon-
sible for a vast amount of most pitiable and entirely ground-
less terror among those newly arrived in Kâmaloka, who in
many cases spend long periods of acute mental suffering
before they can free themselves from the fatal influence of
that hideous blasphemy, and realize that the world is gov-erned not according to the caprice of some demon who
gloats over human anguish, but according to a benevolent
and wonderfully patient law of evolution./28
Grief over departed family members and friends is not only
unwise but is to their detriment, a fact that is stressed now fre-
quently by channeled messages, and begins to be known in mod-
ern society. Leadbeater explains:
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Apart altogether from any question of development through
a medium, there is another and much more frequently exer-
cised influence which may seriously retard a disembodied
entity on his way to Devachan, and that is the intense and
uncontrolled grief of his surviving friends or relatives. It is
one among many melancholy results of the terribly inaccu-
rate and even irreligious view that we in the West have for
centuries been taking of death, that we not only cause our-
selves an immense amount of wholly unnecessary pain over
this temporary parting from our loved ones, but we often
also do serious injury to those for whom we bear so deep an
affection by means of this very regret which we feel so
acutely./30
Not that occult teaching counsels forgetfulness of the dead -
far from it; but it does suggest that a man's affectionate re-
membrance of his departed friend is a force which, of for his
progress towards Devachan and his quiet passage through
Kâmaloka, might be of real value to him, whereas when
wasted in mourning for him and longing to have him back
again it is not only useless but harmful./31
Another important insight from astral knowledge is suicide.
There are in the West many people who suicide themselves for the
mere reason of ongoing depression, and most of them have not
the faintest idea what they are doing to their astral vehicle. Suicide
is the single most unintelligent act one can commit in one’s life. It
is clearly a form of harm to self, and thereby on the same level
karmically than harm done to others. But the reasons for this fact
have nothing to do with morality; they are scientific.
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[The Suicide, or victim of sudden death] It will be readily
understood that a man who is torn from physical life hur-
riedly while in full health and strength, whether by accident
or suicide, finds himself upon the astral plane under condi-
tions differing considerably from those which surround one
who dies either from old age or from disease. In the latter
case the hold of earthly desires upon the entity is more or
less weakened, and probably the very grossest particles are
already got rid of, that the Kâmarûpa will most likely form
itself on the sixth or fifth subdivision of / the Kâmaloka, or
perhaps even higher; the principles have been gradually
prepared for separation, and the shock is therefore not so
great. In the case of the accidental death or suicide none of
these preparations have taken place, and the withdrawal of
the principles from their physical encasement has been very
aptly compared to the tearing of the stone out of an unripe
fruit; a great deal of the grossest kind of astral matter still
clings around the personality, which is consequently held in
the seventh or lowest subdivision of the Kâmaloka./39
The position of the suicide is further complicated by the fact
that his rash act has enormously diminished the power of
the higher Ego to withdraw its lower portion into itself, and
therefore has exposed him to manifold and great additional
dangers: but it must be remembered that the guilt of suicide
differs considerably according to its circumstances, from the
morally blameless act of Seneca or Socrates / through all
degrees down to the heinous crime of wretch who takes his
own life in order to escape from the entanglements into
which his villainy has brought him, and of course the posi-
tion after death varies accordingly. It should be noted that
this class, as well as the shades and the vitalized shells, are
all what may be called minor vampires; that is to say, when-
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ever they have the opportunity they prolong their existence
by draining away the vitality from human beings whom
they find themselves able to influence./41
Leadbeater firmly contests folk wisdom in stating that it is
very difficult for even any villain to be villain enough to deprive
himself or herself of spiritual support in the afterlife. In fact, his
observations brought him to be convinced that human beings are
basically good, as the human nature is quite flexible, and very dif-ficult to be forced in one single direction. In so far, moral teachings
that attempt to divide humanity in ‘good souls’ and ‘bad souls’
are all basically flawed. Leadbeater points out:
All readers of Theosophical literature are familiar with the
idea that it is possible for a man to live a life so absolutely
degraded and selfish, so utterly wicked and brutal, that the
whole of his lower Manas may become entirely immeshed in
Kâma, and finally separated from its spiritual source in the
higher Ego. Some students even seem to think that such an
occurrence is quite a common one, and that we may meet
scores of such 'soulless men' as they have been called, in the
street every day of our lives, but this, happily, is untrue. To
attain the appalling pre-eminence in evil which thus in-
volves the entire loss of a personality and the weakening of
the developing individuality behind, a man must stifle every
gleam of unselfishness or spirituality, and must have abso-
lutely no redeeming point whatever; and when we remem-
ber how often, even in the worst of villains, there is to be
found something not wholly bad, we shall realize that the
abandoned personalities must always be a very small
minority./42
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Now, as Ervin Laszlo attempts to describe in Science and the
Akashic Field , the ether, zero-point-field , ch’i , orgone, prana, mana or
however you want to call it, is very difficult to grasp for the ob-
server. Not so for the clairvoyant for he can sense the fluctuant,
vibrational, flowing nature of this field. In fact, the field is so un-
predictable that the only prediction that can be made about it is
that it will change, and change again. Leadbeater gives a few de-
tails:
In spite of these manifold subdivisions, there are certain
properties which are possessed in common by all varieties of
this strange living essence; but even these are so entirely dif-
ferent from any with which we are familiar on the physical
plane that it is exceedingly difficult to explain them to those
who cannot themselves see it in action. Let it be premised,
then, that when any portion of this essence remains for a few
moments entirely unaffected by any outside influence (acondition, by the way, which is hardly ever realized) it is
absolutely without any definite form of its own, though even
then its motion is rapid and ceaseless; but on the slightest
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disturbance, set up perhaps by some passing thought-
current, it flashes into a bewildering confusion of restless,
ever-changing shapes, which form, rush about, and disap-
pear with the rapidity of the bubbles on the surface of boil-
ing water./52
Another important matter that has been discussed by count-
less philosophers over the course of human history is the question
‘what is thought’?Leadbeater clearly states that we do not own our thoughts and
that we do not often think our own thoughts, as we pick up
thoughts from the quantum field that links us all together:
A question naturally arises in the mind here as to what intel-
ligence it is that is exerted in the selection of an appropriate
shape or its distortion when selected. We are not dealing
with the more powerful and longer-lived artificial elemental
created by a strong definite thought, but simply with the
result produced by the stream of half-conscious, involuntary
thoughts which the majority of mankind allow to flow idly
through their brains, so that the intelligence is obviously not
derived from the mind of the thinker; and we certainly can-
not credit the elemental essence itself, which belongs to a
kingdom further from individualization even than the min-
eral, with any sort of awakening of the mânasic quality. (…)
When we read of a good or evil elemental, it must always be
either an artificial entity or one of the many varieties of
nature-spirits that is meant for the elemental kingdoms
proper do not admit of any such conception as good and
evil, though there is undoubtedly a sort of bias or tendency
permeating nearly all their subdivisions which operates to
render them rather hostile than friendly towards man, as
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every neophyte knows, for in most cases his very first im-
pression of the astral plane is of the presence all around him
of vast hosts of Protean specters who advance upon him in
threatening guise, but always retire or dissipate harmlessly if
boldly faced. It is to this curious tendency that the distorted
or unpleasant aspect above mentioned must be referred, and
mediaeval writers tell us that man has only himself to thank
for its existence. In the golden age before this Kaliyuga men
were on the whole less selfish and more spiritual, and then
the ‘elementals’ were friendly, though now they are no
longer so because of man’s indifference to, and want of
sympathy with, other living beings./53
On the same line of reasoning, Leadbeater stresses that we
should not judge a human being by their acts only; in fact, as
thoughts are much more important as an influence upon theworld than most of us know, when we go to laud somebody for
his achievements and judge him or her ‘a good person’, we may
be wrong, because that person may have exerted a ravaging influ-
ence on others and the world by his or her self-talk, by their way
of thinking about others, and by their way of judging others
harshly over years and years, in their mind. What this creates areelementals or thought-forms and these thought forms are more or
less permanent, and gain permanence over time and also depend-
ing on the emotional energy invested in those thoughts. I think it’s a
good thing that Leadbeater addresses this point so clearly here
because most people in our culture are ignorant about the impact
of thought on the world, on others and their own karma:
The fact that we are so readily able to influence the elemental
kingdoms at once shows us that we have a responsibility
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towards them for the manner in which we use that influence;
indeed, when we consider the conditions under which they
exist, it is obvious that the effect produced upon them by the
thoughts and desires of all intelligent creatures inhabiting
the same world with them must have been calculated upon
in the scheme of our system as a factor in their evolution. In
spite of the consistent teaching of all the great religions, the
mass of mankind is still utterly regardless of its responsibil-
ity on the thought-plane; if a man can flatter himself that his
words and deeds have been harmless to others, he believes
that he has done all that can be required of him, quite oblivi-
ous of the fact that he may / for years have been exercising a
narrowing and debasing influence on the minds of those
about him, and filling surrounding space with the unlovely
creations of a sordid mind./54-55
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Now, regarding the elementals that are created through thought
and intent, and the gestation that is brought about by the repeated
fostering of a well-defined thought pattern, Leadbeater explains
that elementals are not autonomous in the sense that they can be-
gin to act on their own and trigger changes; they must be pushed
to do so:
But the ‘elemental’ must never be thought of as itself a prime
mover; it is simply a latent force, which needs an externalpower to set it in motion. It may be noted that although all
classes of the essence have the power of reflecting images
from the astral light as described above, there are varieties
which receive certain impressions much more readily than
others—which have, as it were, favourite forms of their own
into which upon disturbance they would naturally flow un-
less absolutely forced into / some other, and such shapestend to be a trifle less evanescent than usual./55-56
The spirits of nature, shunned so much by religious funda-
mentalism and reborn now in the course of the new age, and the
revival of the folk lore of fairies, as it was, for example, rediscov-
ered by Dr. Evans-Wentz in his remarkable study The Fairy Faith inCeltic Countries (1911/2002) , and observed by clairvoyant Dora van
Gelder in her book The Real World of Fairies (1977/1999) , have cer-
tain well-defined characteristics and they are quite distinct of hu-
man beings. Leadbeater explains:
We might almost look upon the nature-spirits as a kind of
astral humanity, but for the fact that none of them—not eventhe highest—possess a permanent reincarnating individual-
ity. Apparently therefore, one point in which their line of
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evolution differs from ours is that a much greater proportion
of intelligence is developed before permanent individualiza-
tion takes places; but of the stages through which they have
passed, and those through which they have yet to pass, we
can know little. The life-periods of the different subdivisions
vary greatly, some being quite short, others much longer
than our human lifetime. We stand so entirely outside such a
life as theirs that it is impossible for us to understand much
about its conditions; but it appears on / the whole to be a
simply, joyous, irresponsible kind of existence, much such as
a party of happy children might lead among exceptionally
favourable physical surroundings. Though tricky and mis-
chievous, they are rarely malicious unless provoked by some
unwarrantable intrusion or annoyance; but as a body they
also partake to some extent of the universal feeling of dis-
trust for man, and they generally seem inclined to resent
somewhat the first appearances of a neophyte on the astral
plane, so that he usually makes their freaks, they soon accept
him as a necessary evil and take no further notice of him,
while some among them may even after a time become
friendly and manifest pleasure on meeting him./61
The Adept knows how to make use of the services of the
nature-spirits when he requires them, but the ordinary ma-
gician can obtain their assistance only by processes either of
invocation or evocation—that is, either by attracting their
attention as a suppliant and making some kind of bargain
with them, or by endeavouring to set in motion influences
which would compel their obedience. Both methods are ex-
tremely undesirable, and the latter is also excessively dan-
gerous, as the operator would arouse a determined hostility
/ which might prove fatal to him. Needless to say, no one
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First, there are great etheric currents constantly sweeping
over the surface of the earth from pole to pole in volume
which makes their power as irresistible as that of the rising
tide, and there are methods by which this stupendous force
may be safely utilized, though unskilful attempts to control
it would be fraught with frightful danger. Secondly, there is
what can best be described as an etheric pressure, somewhat
corresponding to, / though immensely greater than, the at-
mospheric pressure. In ordinary life we are as little conscious
of one of these pressures as we are of the other, but neverthe-
less they both exist, and if science were able to exhaust the
ether from a given space, as it can exhaust the air, the one
could be proved as readily as the other. The difficulty of do-
ing that lies in the fact that matter in the etheric condition
freely interpenetrates matter in all states below it, so that
there is as yet no means within the knowledge of our physi-
cists by which any given body of ether can be isolated from
the rest. Practical occultism, however, teaches how this can
be done, and thus the tremendous force of etheric pressure
can be brought into play. Thirdly, there is a vast store of po-
tential energy which has become dormant in matter during
the involution of the subtle into the gross, and by changing
the condition of the matter [so that] some of this may be lib-
erated and utilized, somewhat as latent energy in the form of
heat may be liberated by a change in the condition of visible
matter. Fourthly, many striking results, both great and small,
may be produced by an extension of a principle which may
be described as that of sympathetic vibration. Illustrations
taken from the physical plane seem generally to misrepre-
sent rather than elucidate astral phenomena, because they
can never be more than partially applicable; but the recollec-
tion of two simple facts of ordinary life may help to make
this important branch of our subject clearer, if we are careful
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not to push the analogy further than it will hold good. It is
well-known that if one of the wires of a harp be made to vi-
brate vigorously, its movement will call forth sympathetic
vibrations in the corresponding string of any number of
harps placed round it if they are tuned to exactly the same
pitch. It is also well known that when a large body of sol-
diers crosses a suspension bridge it is / necessary for them
to break step, since the perfect regularity of their ordinary
march would set up a vibration in the bridge which would
be intensified by every step they took, until the point of re-
sistance of the iron was passed, when the whole structure
would fly to pieces. With these two analogies in our minds
(never forgetting that they are only partial ones) it may seem
more comprehensible that one who knows exactly at what
rate to start his vibrations—knows, so to speak, the keynote
of the class of matter he wishes to affect—should be able by
sounding that keynote to call forth an immense number of
sympathetic vibrations. When this is done on the physical
plane no additional energy is developed; but on the astral
there is this difference, that the matter with which we are
dealing is far less inert, and so when called into action by
these sympathetic vibrations it adds its own living force to
the original impulse, which may thus be multiplied many-
fold; and then by further rhythmic repetition of the original
impulse, as in the case of the soldiers marching over the
bridge, the vibrations may be so intensified that the result is
out of all apparent proportion to the cause. Indeed it may be
said that there is scarcely any limit to the conceivable
achievements of this force in the hands of the Adept Who
fully comprehends its possibilities; for the very building of
the Universe itself was but the result of the vibrations set up
by the Spoken Word./89-91
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In the last, most interesting part of the book, Leadbeater ex-
plains phenomena such as disintegration, materialization, spirit
photographs, reduplication, precipitation, slate-writing, levitation,
spirit lights, handling fire, transmutation or repercussion. I shall
end my review here and let you order and fully read and under-
stand this uncanny book. The book is not an easy read, but a great
treasure for scientific minds.
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Dreams
What they Are and How they are CausedLondon: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1903
Kessinger Publishing Reprint Facsimile Edition
(Quoted Edition)
Dreams: What they Are and How they are Caused is a highly useful booklet that ex-
plains why we dream and what the spiritual reasons are for dreaming.
Now, at a time when science was far from admitting anything
beyond the five senses and when it was firmly believed that allsensations and emotions were processed in the brain, and when
the luminous body was strictly denied in science, Leadbeater pro-
vided clairvoyant scientific explanations that today we know are
true, but that at his time were considered as pure esoterism. Lead-
beater first introduces in the aura, or the etheric body, explaining
of what it consists and what its function is:
Now this etheric double has often been called the vehicle of
the human life-ether or vital force (called in Sanskrit prâna),
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and anyone who has developed the psychic faculties can see
exactly how this is so. He will see the solar life-principle al-
most colorless, though intensely luminous and active, which
is constantly poured into earth’s atmosphere by the sun: he
will see how the etheric part of his spleen in the exercise of
its wonderful function absorbs this universal life, and spe-
cializes it into prana, so that it may be more readily as-
similable by his body; how it then courses all over that body,
running along every nerve-thread in tiny globules of lovely
rosy light, causing the glow of life and health and activity to
penetrate every atom of the etheric double; and how, when
the rose-colored particles have been absorbed, the superflu-
ous life-ether finally radiates from the body in every direc-
tion as bluish-white light./11
Leadbeater’s assumption that it’s the spleen that collects and
refines the human energy field is in accordance with the teaching
of numerous tribal peoples, and it’s also in alignment with ancient
Hermetic Tradition. The author has a funny way to explain how
the transmission of energy for healing works. Here, we have to
bear in mind that at his time what we today call the quantum field
was still called magnetism or life-ether:
When a finger becomes entirely numbed with cold, it is in-
capable of feeling; and the same phenomenon of insensibility
may readily be produced at will by a mesmerizer, who by a
few passes over the arm of his subject will bring it into a
condition in which it may be pricked with a needle or burnt
by a flame of a candle without the slightest sensation of pain
being experienced. Now why does the subject feel nothing in
either of these two cases? The nerve-threads are still there,
and though in the first case it might be contended that their
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action was paralyzed by cold and by the absence of blood
from the vessels, this certainly cannot be the reason in the
second case, where the arm retains its normal temperature
and the blood circulates as usual./12
Explaining the mechanisms, without having even tackled the
subject of dreams, the author explains the astral body, or desire-
body, which is well different from the etheric body that he dis-
cussed above. The astral body serves us as a vehicle for the astralplane, the plane we are going in between lives. But usually we do
not stay very long in the astral plane, and move on to higher
planes. For the astral plane, we need the astral body, because it’s
the vibrational shell for this density of energies:
The astral vehicle is even more sensitive to external impres-
sions than the gross and etheric bodies, for it is itself the seat
of all desires and emotions—the connecting link through
which alone the ego can collect experiences from physical
life. It is peculiarly susceptible to the influence of passing
thought-currents, and when the mind is not actively control-
ling it, it is perpetually receiving these stimuli from without,
and eagerly responding to them./16
It becomes obvious why Leadbeater explained all of this, while
it was really the subject of his book The Inner Life , to be reviewed
below. For those who are not adepts of theosophy and who have
not read that other book, he did well to introduce these concepts,
because otherwise his explanations about dreams could not really
be understood. The first important fact about dreams that Lead-
beater reports is that they are not just ‘imagination’ as psychology
continues to believe, but another level of consciousness, another
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power to judge either of their sequence or their lack of that
quality./26-27
It is anathema for mechanistic science to consider thought being
anything but ‘pictures in your mind’; and that is why it under-
stands little of the mechanism of mind. The first thing to learn in
holistic science is that thought is a movement of subtle energy that
triggers immediate effects, both for self and others. The fact is only
that most people have a low energy level in their thought process;
this results in little or no effects. But take a master, a yogi, a saint,
and you will see their thought triggers phenomenal effects, either
for good or for bad! This is what magic is all about, after all. A real
master only needs to focus their thought and can trigger any de-
sired effect. With saints and yogis, it has been reported that their
thoughts can do miracles, such as producing matter instantly,
shapeshift their bodies, levitate the person in the air, or heal others
virtually as quickly as they think of it. Leadbeater explains:
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Students of occultism are well aware that it is indeed true
that thoughts are things, for every thought impresses itself
upon the plastic elemental essence, and generates a tempo-
rary living entity, the duration of whose life depends on the
energy of the thought-impulse given to it. We are therefore
living in the midst of an ocean of other men’s thoughts, and
whether we are awake or asleep, these are constantly pre-
senting themselves to the etheric part of our brain./30
Another daring hypothesis that Leadbeater presents in this
book is that we do not own our thoughts and that actually many
thoughts we have are really not our own because they are picked
up from other people, without our being conscious of this fact:
The vast majority of people, if they will watch what they are
in the habit of calling their thoughts closely, will find thatthey are very largely made up of a casual stream of this sort
—that in truth they are not their thoughts at all, but simply
the cast-off fragments of other people’s./31
Another interesting theme that Leadbeater expands about in
this uncanny booklet is the notion of time in dreams. In fact, time in
dreams is totally different from time in wake consciousness. In a
dream minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and even dec-
ades can have passed, while the subject was dreaming just one
second.
Unfortunately Leadbeater does not attempt to explain why
this is so. The reason may be that we are basically beyond relativ-
ity theory when we are in the astral, as relativity theory only is
valid for matter, not for energy-waves, and thought is wave-like
energy and moves with a speed that is approximately the speed of
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the light – which is why events are dilated in time, just as it would
be the case when astronauts fly in space with a spaceship that can
fly close to, or identical with, the speed of the light. Another sub-
ject that Leadbeater treats is the faculty of prevision in dreams.
Precognition has always given rise to questions of cosmic deter-
minism versus free will, and Leadbeater voices a clear credo for
human free will, but he adds an important precaution:
Man, however, undoubtedly does possess free-will; andtherefore … prevision is possible only to a certain extent. In
the affairs of the average man it is probably possible to a
very large extent, since he has developed no will of his own
worth speaking of, and is consequently very largely the crea-
ture of circumstances; his karma places him amid certain
surroundings, and their action upon him is so much the
most important factor in his history that his future coursemay be foreseen with almost mathematical certainty./43
Now, let’s compare this with what Leadbeater says about pre-
cognition in the life of a highly developed individual:
But when we come to deal with a developed individual—a
man with knowledge and will—then prophecy fails us, for
he is no longer the creature of circumstances, but to a great
extent their master. True, the main events of his life are ar-
ranged before-hand by his past karma; but the way in which
he will allow them to affect him, the method of which he will
deal with them, and perhaps triumph over them—these are
his own, and they cannot be foreseen except as probabilities.
Such actions of his in their turn become causes, and thus
chains of effects are produced in his life which were not provided
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for by the original arrangement, and therefore, could not have
been foretold with any exactitude./44
The booklet ends already with page 69, and there are 34 eso-
teric illustration annexed, one on each page (Kessinger Edition).
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The Inner Life
Theosophical Talks at Adyar, Vol. IIChicago: The Rajput Press, 1911
Kessinger Publishing Reprint Facsimile Edition, 1942
(Quoted Edition)
The Inner Life is a door-opener to all worlds beyond the visible and the physical.
It’s a book that talks about things you perhaps won’t think can be true if you
have not done research about the author.
In fact, the insights of a clairvoyant into the reality of our uni-
verse are so strikingly different from what mainstream science and
school wisdom tells you that you may doubt this book is written
in a scientific intention? But when you read the first ten pages you
will perhaps arrest your hurried judgment because of the truly
scientific style of the author, a style that is so dry and unpreten-
tious that it’s not easy to read for non-academic readers. This book
has very little to do with the trials of theosophy. It’s the meticu-
lously honest account of a psychic who looks beyond the fence of
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ordinary reality and who didn’t really care about being promoted
to ‘popular status.’ Much to the contrary, Leadbeater fostered a
rather elitist philosophy that I found very healthy by and large,
for not all truth is for all people:
To be psychic means to be able to bring through into the
physical consciousness something of the wider life; it is
therefore / in the condition of the physical vehicle that there
is an inequality between the psychic and the ordinary per-
son, but when the physical is dropped that inequality no
longer exists./4-5
There are many observations in the book that can neither be
verified nor falsified, except you are yourself a clairvoyant, and
not just a clairvoyant but one of the highest initiation.
Leadbeater was on level five which means a direct perception
of the aura, of the after-life through trance, and visions of the fu-
ture without needing to dream, but in the trance-state or in wake
consciousness. It is this level of perception that for example the
seer Nostradamus was gifted with. The trance state is superior to
dreaming because it can be brought about voluntarily by the sub-
ject, and it can be directed.
I think it’s important that you know this before reading the
book, because if you have never done studies in theosophy or in
esoteric religious teaching (such as Sufism, or the Cabbala, for ex-
ample), you may come to think that this man was an impostor or
that he had paranoid delusions. No, he didn’t have a deficient ego
nor was he insane. This is widely recognized by biographical re-
search, and I have studied several biographies of him, and also the
beneficial role he played in the life of the young Krishnamurti.
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As copyright has expired because of time reasons, I will be
able to publish all my quotes from the book here without further
commenting on them.
To be psychic means to be able to bring through into the
physical consciousness something of the wider life; it is
therefore / in the condition of the physical vehicle that there
is an inequality between the psychic and the ordinary per-
son, but when the physical is dropped that inequality no
longer exists./4-5
All the matter of the astral body is constantly in rapid mo-
tion from one part of it to another, so that it is quite impossi-
ble for any astral particles to be specialized in the same way
as certain nerve-ends are specialized in the physical body.
The senses of the astral body act not through special organs,
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but through every particle of the body, so that with astral
sight a man can see equally well with any part of his body,
and can see all around him simultaneously, instead of only
in front of him. (…) It is, however, perfectly possible for him
to materialize a hand which, though invisible, can be felt just
as the ordinary physical hand can be, as may often be ob-
served at séances./6
If it is complained that … the departed does not see the
physical world exactly as it really is, we must answer that
neither the departed nor we on this plane every see the
physical world as it really is at all, for we (or most of us) see
only the solid and liquid portions thereof, and are altogether
blind to the far vaster gaseous and etheric parts; while the
departed does not see the physical matter at all, nor even the
whole astral counterpart of it, but only the portion of the
latter which belongs to the particular sub-plane upon which
he is at the time. The only man who gets anything like a
comprehensive view of affairs is he who has developed eth-
eric and astral sight while still alive in the physical body./8
The length of a man’s stay upon any sub-plane depends …
on the amount of matter belonging to that sub-plane he has
built into himself during earth-life./10
The length of a man’s astral life after he has put off his
physical body depends mainly upon two factors – the nature
of his past physical life, and his attitude of mind after what
we call death. During his earth-life he is constantly influenc-
ing the building of matter into his astral body. He affects it
directly by the passions, emotions and desires which he al-
lows to hold sway over him; he affects it indirectly by the
action upon it of his thoughts from above, and of all the de-
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tails of his physical life (his continence or his debauchery, his
cleanliness or his uncleanliness, his food and his drink) from
below. If, by persistence in perversity along any of these
lines, he is so stupid as / to build for himself a coarse and
gross astral vehicle, habituated to responding only to the
lower vibrations of the plane, he will find himself after death
bound to that plane during the long and slow process of that
body’s disintegration. On the other hand, if, by decent and
careful living, he gives himself a vehicle mainly composed of
finer material, he will have very much less post-mortem
trouble and discomfort, and his evolution will proceed much
more rapidly and easily./13-14
The ordinary man has little will-power or initiative, and is
very much the creature of the surroundings which he has
made for himself, on the astral plane as on the physical; but
a determined man can always make the best of his condi-
tions and live his own life in spite of them. What has, after
all, been caused by his will can gradually be changed by his
will, if time permits. A man does not rid himself of evil ten-
dencies in the astral world any more than he would in this
life, unless he definitely works to that end./17
In the summer-land men surround themselves with land-
scapes of their own construction, thought some avoid that
trouble by accepting ready-made the landscapes which have
already been constructed by others. Men living in the sixth
sub-plane, upon the surface of the earth, find themselves
surrounded by the astral counterparts of physically existing
mountains, trees and lakes, and consequently are not under
the necessity to manufacturing scenery for themselves; but
men upon the higher subplanes, who float at some distance
above the surface of the earth, usually provide themselves
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with whatever scenery they desire, by the method that I
have described. The commonest example of this is that they
construct for themselves the weird scenes described in their
various scriptures, and therefore in those regions we con-
stantly find ourselves in presence of clumsy and unimagina-
tive attempts to reproduce such ideas as jewels growing
upon trees, and seas of glass mingled with fire, and creatures
which are full of eyes within, and deities with a hundred
heads and arms to correspond. In this way, as a consequence
of ignorance and prejudice during their physical life, many
men do a great deal of valueless work when they might be
employing their time in the helping of their fellows./19
The dead man is the only absolutely free man, free to do
whatever he wills and to spend his time as he chooses, free
therefore to devote the whole of his energies to helping his
fellows./20
When a man dies, the etheric part of his physical body is
withdrawn from the denser part, and shortly afterwards
(usually within a few hours) the astral breaks away from the
etheric, and the man’s life on the astral plane is begun./23
The etheric body is only a part of the physical, and is not in
itself a vehicle of consciousness—not a body in which a man
can live and function./24
Here therefore is a possibility of making karma, and of mak-
ing it on a scale which is entirely out of his reach on these
lower planes, for every thought on those higher mental lev-
els has a force quite out of proportion to that of our limited
thought during physical life./46
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There is perfect continuity in the astral life. That life is in
many ways much more real than this, or at least much
nearer to reality, and this physical existence is only a series of
breaks in it during which our activity is greatly limited and
our consciousness but partially operative./58
The astral life is much more vivid and its emotions are far
stronger than any that we know down here./58
We must try to understand that as soon as we leave the
physical body at night we stand side by side with a departed
friend, exactly as we did when he was with us on the physi-
cal plane. One great thing to remember is the necessity of
curbing all sorrow for the so-called dead, because it cannot
but react upon them./60
The main object of the helper is to calm and encourage the
sufferer, to induce him to realize that death is a perfectly
natural and usually an easy process, and in no case a formi-
dable or terrible leap into an unknown abyss./62
In the mental world one formulates a thought and without
any expression in the form of words. Therefore on that plane
language does not matter in the least; but helpers working in
the astral world, who have not yet the power to use the men-
tal vehicle, must depend on the facilities offered by the astral
plane itself. These lie as it were half way between the
thought-transference of the mental world and the concrete
speech of the physical, but it is still necessary to formulate
the thought in words./67
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When a man functions in the mental vehicle he leaves the
astral body behind him in a condition of suspended anima-
tion, along with the physical./68
There is a special class of devas who respond to music and
express themselves through it, and sometimes they are will-
ing to teach people to whom music is the first and only thing
in life./69
The Theosophist will not allow this rearrangement, because
he intends to work, and therefore he must be free to move
through all the sub-planes. We cannot get rid of elemental
essence, but we can subdue the desire-elemental, draw in the
finer types of matter, and make the ego strong keep the up-
per / hand. The essence wants violent emotion, so as to
evolve downwards—which, it must be remembered, is its
proper and legitimate course of evolution. If it knew of our
existence, we should appear to it to be evil beings and
tempters, trying to prevent the evolution which it knows to
be right for it. If we steadfastly refuse to allow our astral
body to vibrate at the rate peculiar to the coarser matter, that
coarser matter will gradually be discharged from the body,
which will become finer in texture, and the desire-elemental
will be of a less active kind./69-70
At present there is a moment of unconsciousness between
sleeping and waking, and this acts as a veil. It is caused by
the closely-woven web of atomic matter through which the
vibrations have to pass./78
The joy of life on the astral plane is so great that physical life
in comparison with it seems no life at all./78
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Astral pleasures are much greater than those of the physical
world, and there is danger of people being turned aside by
them from the path of progress. It is quite impossible to real-
ize while one is confined in the physical body the great at-
tractiveness of these pleasures. But even the delights of the
astral life do not present a serious danger to those who have
realised a little of something higher. After death one should
try to pass through the astral levels as speedily as possible,
consistently with usefulness, and not yield to its refined
pleasures any more than to the physical. One must not only
overcome physical desire by knowledge of the astral or the
heaven-life, but also go beyond even them, and this not
merely for the sake of the joy of the spiritual life, but in order
to replace the fleeting by the everlasting./79
If there are seven dimensions at all, there are seven dimen-
sions always and everywhere, and it makes no difference to
that fundamental fact in nature whether the consciousness of
any individual happens to be acting through his physical
body, his astral body or his nirvanic vehicle./80
Degrees in the feeling which prompts thought are expressed
by brilliance of colour. In devotional feeling, for example, we
may have the three stages of respect, reverence and worship;
in affection we may have the stages of good-will, friendship
and love. The stronger the thought the larger is the vibration;
the more spiritual and unselfish the thought the higher is the
vibration. The first produces brilliancy, the second delicacy
of colour./90
A thought shows itself as a vibration in the mental body of
man; that vibration is communicated to external matter, and
an effect is produced. Thought therefore is itself a real and
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definite power; and the point of vivid interest about it is that
everyone of us possesses this power./98
If a man allows himself to begin to think evil of others, it
soon becomes easy to think more evil of them and difficult to
think any good of them. Hence arises a ridiculous prejudice
which absolutely blinds the man to the good points in his
neighbours, and enormously magnifies the evil in them. /
Then the thoughts begin to stir up his emotions; because he
sees only the evil in others he begins to hate them./98-99
We must not excuse ourselves, as so many do, by saying that
undesirable feelings are natural under certain conditions; we
must assert our prerogative as rulers of this kingdom of our
mind and emotions./99
We can accustom ourselves to look for the desirable rather
than the undesirable qualities in the people whom we meet;
and it will surprise us to find how numerous and how im-
portant those desirable qualities are. Thus we shall come to
like these people instead of disliking them, and there will be
at least a possibility that we may do them something ap-
proaching to justice in our estimate of them./100
A grumbling and fault-finding attitude towards others is
unfortunately sadly common at the present day, and those
who adopt it never seem to realise the harm that they are
doing. If we study its result scientifically we shall see that
the prevalent habit of malicious gossip is nothing short of
wicked. It does not matter whether there is or is not any
foundation for scandal; in either case it cannot but cause
harm. Here we have a number of people fixing their minds
upon some supposed evil quality in another, and drawing to
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Make it a practice to set apart a little time each day which
shall be devoted to formulating good thoughts about other
people, and sending them to them. It is capital practice for
you, and it will unquestionably do good to your patients
also./104
There mere impulse has its birth in the astral body, while the
true intuition comes directly from the higher mental plane,
or sometimes even from the buddhic./106
Any sudden idea or vision which comes to you may be sim-
ply the thought-form of some person who is keenly inter-
ested in the subject in hand./107
It is easy to see that when one thinks of something a little
difficult, one may attract the thought of another person who
has studied the same subject, and even the person himself if
he be on the astral plane./108
The etheric double is the vehicle of vitality, the life-principle,
which is perpetually circulating through our bodies; and
when any part of our etheric double is withdrawn that life-
circulation is checked and its current broken. A terrible drain
on vitality is then set up, and that is why the medium is so
often in a state of collapse after a séance, and also why so
many mediums in the long run become drunkards, having
first taken to stimulants in order to satisfy the dreadful crav-
ing for support which is caused by this sudden loss of
strength./120
In cases of materialisation, dense physical matter, probably
chiefly in the form of gases or liquids, is frequently bor-
rowed from the body of the medium, who actually decreases
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temporarily in size and weight; and when it takes place,
naturally that is a further source of serious disturbance to all
the functions./121
No one connected with any school of white magic would
think it right to interfere with the etheric double of any man
in order to produce a materialisation, nor would he disturb
his own if she wished to make himself visible at a distance.
He would simply condense, and build into and around his
astral body a sufficient quantity of the surrounding ether to
materialise it, and hold it in that form by an effort of will as
long as he needed it./121
There is no harm in using will-power to cure diseases, so
long as no money or other consideration is taken for what is
done. There are several methods; the simplest is the pouring
in of vitality. Nature will cure most diseases if the man can
be strengthened and supported while she is left to do her
work. This is especially true of the various nervous diseases
which are so painfully common at the present day. The rest-
cure which is often advised for them, is quite the best thing
that can be suggested, but recovery might often be greatly
hastened if vitality were poured into the patient in addition.
Any man who has surplus vitality may direct it by his will to
a particular person; when he is not doing that, it simply ra-
diates from him in all directions, flowing out principally
through the hands. If a man is depleted of strength so that
his spleen does not do its work properly, the pouring in of
specialised vitality is often of the greatest help to him in
keeping the machinery of the body going until he is able to
manufacture it for himself./122
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One should take care not to be caught or entangled on the
astral plane, as a man easily may be, and that through his
virtues as well as his vices, if he be not exceedingly cautious.
For example, it is possible to affect others by thought, and
thus obtain whatever is wanted from them, and the tempta-
tion of his power to an ordinary man would be overwhelm-
ing. /123
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Timothy Leary
Your Brain is God
Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing, 2001
Author Copyright, 1988
Your Brain is God by Timothy Leary is an unusual book. When pondering how to
characterize it, it came spontaneously to mind to call it a Manifesto. I can’t think
of another expression for describe the frantic speed of Leary’s diction, his highlyaffirmative style, his wit and colorful insights, but first of all the communication
of his unique worldview and philosophy.
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The book was for years in my bookshelf—untouched. It fell in
my hands just last night, when I wanted to close this manuscript
for publishing. By a chance event I saw a documentary on You-
tube that showed Timothy Leary in prison, in California, a radiant
Leary, not as you would find inmates ordinarily, as I found them
myself in my years of prisoner care, as part of my work as a law-
yer. To keep one’s mind in high spirits in such circumstances is an
extraordinary, if not heroic, effort, and it shows the true innocence
of the man, psychologist and philosopher whom Ronald Reagan
notoriously had called ‘The Most Dangerous Man in America.’
The book is written in the spirit of the 1960s, while it was ac-
tually written in the much more repressive 80s, but the author had
not lost a bit of his lofty spirited style that distinguished him all
his life through from the common populace of ‘adapted’ citizens.The book, which I grabbed right away from my bookshelf, and
went through just this morning—it’s just 105 pages with a quite
large book font—, reminds me of my own youth, and the year
1968, the year of the student revolt. I was thirteen by then, and it
was a time of excitement for all of us. I will never forget that dur-
ing that year an issue of BRAVO, a youth magazine in Germany,published a joyful essay entitled ‘Jugend und Sex ’68’ (Youth and
Sex ’68) which retraced the ‘student liberation’ in quite open terms
including photos of nude teenager couples. And we were wearing
our jeans even in school only after lengthy ‘operations’, unique
kind of meditations during which we cut slices in our jeans and
shirts, or cut out the knees—some did it even with parts of their jeans’ bottom … which when the boy was rather ugly ended up in
a rather tragicomical outfit, reminding of something in between a
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street peddler and Hamlet. Yet, despite this kind of freedom, our
teachers were stressing old-fashioned principles of discipline, an
attitude that even more accentuated the tension between the gen-
erations that was so much felt during these times of revolt versus
restoration.
All this would of course be outright impossible these days. Yet
I believe that despite a ‘straighter’ attitude in society today, a man
like Leary would be considered as harmless compared to the ‘newsocial enemies’ such as Julian Assange or Bradley Manning.
To begin with, the description of the book on Amazon reads as
follows:
This collection of essays, written by the poster boy of 1960s
counterculture, describes the psychological journey Timothy
Leary made in the years following his dismissal from Har-
vard, as his psychedelic research moved from the scientific
to the religious arena. He discusses the nature of religious
experience and eight crafts of God, including God as he-
donic artist. Leary also examines the Tibetan, Buddhist, and
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Taoist experiences. In the final chapters, he explores man as
god and LSD as sacrament.
As the book can be ‘looked inside’ on Amazon I spare to reit-
erate the titles of the 20 chapters. These are actually 8 Questions,
which the author introduces with these very well written lines:
Religion, being personal and private, cannot produce an-
swers to the eight basic questions. The philosopher’s role is
to ignite the wonder, raise the burning issues, inspire the
pursuit of answers. It is science that produces the ever-
changing, improving answers to the haunting questions that
religious wonder poses. There are eight questions which any
fair survey of our philosophic history would agree are most
fundamental to our existential condition. /13
Here are the 8 Crafts (Eight Fundamental Questions):
1) Origins
How, when, where did life come from? How has it evolved?
2) Politics
Why do humans fight and compete destructively? What arethe territorial laws that explain conflict? How can humans
live in relative peace and harmony? How, when, where, and
why do humans differ (among each other and from other
mammalian species) in aggression, control, cooperation, af-
filiation?
3) EpistemologyHow, when, where, and why does the mind emerge (in the
individual and species)? And how, when, where, and why
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do humans differ in their ability to process information,
learn, communicate, think, plan, and manufacture?
4) Ethics
How, when, where, and why do humans differ in their moral
beliefs and rituals? Who decides what is good and right?
5) Esthetics
How, when, where, and why do human devote their ener-
gies to decoration, hedonism, art, music, entertainment? And
how, where, when, and why do they differ in modes of
pleasure?
6) Ontology
How, when, where, and why do humans differ in the reali-
ties they construct and inhabit? How are realities formedand changed?
7) Teleology
What are the stages and mechanisms of evolution? Where,
when, how, and why has evolution occurred? Chance? Natu-
ral selection? Natural election? Creation? If life is created
and evolution blueprinted, who did it? Where is life going?
8) Cosmology
How, when, where, and why was matter-energy formed?
What are the basic units and patterns of matter/energy?
What are the basic forces, energies, and plans that hold the
universe together (or don’t) and determine its evolution.
Where are we going?
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This list of inquiry is highly interesting and unique. It reminds
of the beginning of a Socratic discourse. In fact, we know from IQ
research that the highest evolved thinkers stand out not by the in-
telligent answers they give, but by the intelligent questions they
ask. And here we have such a smart question catalogue, that in my
view would be an ideal way to start a philosophy class for college
students. When you ponder these questions a bit, you will see that
they really cover all the essential questions man has been asking
over the course of human history, again and again. And while the
answers constantly changed, and change, the questions remain. Is
it, then, not true that questions are actually more important an-
swers given that all answers are temporary while questions, most
of them, remain valid over time?
It was really in the spirit of Zen, with its Dharmic rule to fulfill
any task ‘With a Beginner’s Mind’ that Leary wrote out this list. It
reminds me a bit of my own questions as a child and adolescent.
In this sense, these questions are ‘seeds’ and are full of potentialfor each and everyone of us could and would answer them differ-
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ently, yet despite these differences, there would be something like
a consensus at the end.
This being said, I am not attempting to paraphrase any of the
content of this highly condensed book that is written in a perfectly
witty style that would contrast with my simple academia style as
a non-native English speaker and writer.
Despite many of the esoteric ideas of the author, the book is
highly readable, and for many a reader can possibly help dispelfears and doubts in the task of self-expression, because the bold-
ness of Leary’s approach to life is really refreshing and uplifting!
I will not comment a few quotes I have taken from the book:
Our political experiences at Harvard also pushed us in the
direction of the religious metaphor. When it became known
on campus that a group of psychologists was producing
revelatory brain-change, we expected that astronomers and
biologists would come flocking around to learn how to use
this new tool for expanding awareness. But the scientists,
committed to external manipulations, were uninterested.
Instead we were flooded by inquiries from the Divinity
School. /3
I find this highly uncanny. Leary, after long hesitation, and
with encouragement by his friend Ram Dass, approached religion
with a scientific mindset—which is, as we know today, not a bad
approach at all. What he calls ‘Do-It-Yourself Theology’ is today
embraced by authors like Thomas Moore who in his latest book A
Religion of One's Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a
Secular World (2014) advocates an approach to religion that is to-
tally personal and individual, in the sense that religion is a ques-
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tion of the soul, and doesn’t need organization or dogma to unfold
for us, individually. This is so much the more compelling as Tho-
mas Moore spend twelve years in a monastery with all that this
implies.
—See my review of Thomas Moore’s previous book Care of the Soul (1994)
further down in this volume
Many of the observations Leary makes, for example as to our
origin as living cells, have in the meantime been corroborated byand large by systems research.
Sometimes it seems to me that Leary deliberately exaggerates
or rather amplifies his message, as for example when he depicts
the Mediterranean—which is after all the cradle of European cul-
ture and philosophy— as ‘a bunch of semi-illiterate Bronze-Age
Greeks, Italian and Semites.’ /24
His ‘Psychedelic Prayers’ are very highly original meditations
that are worth reading. Here is the first:
Sheathing the Self
The play of energy endures beyond striving
The play of energy endures beyond body
The play of energy endures beyond life
Out here float timeless beyond striving.
Finally, his famous motto Turn On—Tune In—Drop Out ex-
plained in chapter 18 which is entitled: ‘You are A God, Act Like
One.’ Turn On means to realize that we are not isolated, separate
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social egos, but rather transient energy processes ‘hooked up with
the energy dance’ around us. Tune In means to shape our envi-
ronment according to our level of consciousness, in order ‘to har-
ness your internal energy to the flow around you.’ And Drop Out
means to ‘reflect the grandeur and glory of your vision’:
But this process must be harmonious and graceful. No
abrupt, destructive, rebellious actions, please start ‘tuning in’
through your body movements. Walk, talk, eat, drink like a joyous forest-dwelling god. /87
Despite the exuberant mindset of the author and his literary
skills, the book is not an easy read for its diction is rather dense.
Sometimes Leary says more in one sentence than other authors
convey on an entire page. Here is an example from the how-to-do
Tune In:
Let us consider a sad illumination. The Manhattan office
worker moves through the clutter of factory-made, anony-
mous furniture to a plastic, impersonal kitchen, to breakfast
on canned, packaged anonymous food-fuel; dresses hirself
in the anonymous-city-dweller costume, travels through
dark tunnels of sooty metal and gray concrete to a dark
metal room, foul with polluted air. All day s/he deals with
symbols that have no relevance to hir divine possibilities.
This person is surrounded by the dreary, impersonal,
assembly-line, mass-produced, anonymous environment of
an automated robot, which perfectly mirrors hir ‘turned-off’
awareness. /86-87
How to better describe, in one single paragraph, the misery of
a society that has lost its soul?! (By the way, s/he or hir are spell-
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ings made up by Leary to convey he’s not willing to use sexist
language, thus forming a mix between ‘he and she’ and between
‘his and her.’
Reading this book in 2014, which was written in the spirit of
an epoch almost 60 years away is a refreshing experience. It shows
that the spirit of social rebel of grand style has not lost a bit of its
originality, not a bit of its juicy wit, not a bit of its large and intui-
tive wisdom. I leave this review with the motto printed in big and bold letters on the last page of the book:
Grow
With
the
Flow
—Timothy Leary
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Alexander Lowen
Books Reviewed
Pleasure: A Creative Approach to Life (1970/2004)
The Language of the Body (1958/2003)
Alexander Lowen, M.D. (1910–2008) practiced psychotherapy
for more than five decades. He published twelve books on bio-
energetic healing, including Love and Orgasm (1965), The Language
of the Body (2006), Depression and the Body (1992), Love, Sex, and Your
Heart (2004), and Narcissism: Denial of the True Self (1983).
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the reminders today for us that the social policies in place, with
their negativistic view of the human being, their tendency to de-
clare more and more of natural behavior ‘a crime’ and to sharply
control human behavior, together with the prohibition of psyche-
delic substances mark a turn in the wrong direction, away from
nature and toward more and more structural violence and state
control.
The media do a large part of the social brainwashing of theconsumer into believing governments and corporations were
more important than the human body; they make believe the citi-
zen that total consumption without reflection is the ‘ideal way of
life’—while about everywhere in the world there is conflict, pov-
erty and misery, virtually around the globe.
Wilhelm Reich’s social predictions were harmless against whatis really going on today, as the rise of fascism is clearly to be noted
everywhere. At the same time, the denial of the body, the body’s
needs, the denial of pleasure, the denial of intergenerational love,
the denial of border-expanding psychic experiences and a growing
general fear-complex that Lowen called ‘fear of life’ make that peo-
ple, especially in the modern world, have become rudely judg-mental overall when only certain forms of love are concerned or
mind opening and deconditioning drugs, and the like. The truth is
that paranoid leaders can only see a paranoid world, for they are
wearing paranoid glasses!
Lowen shows in the present book and actually in all his books
that the pleasure principle really is fundamental for human sanity
and at the same time, for world peace. In all our modern policy-
making, there is a strong turndown of pleasure to be seen and felt
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throughout and all about. Pleasure is condemned when it is not
linked to consuming products; this is of course much more an im-
pact of the corporate world than it is the will or policy of any of
our political leaders.
The corporate world has obviously little interest in consumers
being self-contained and having their natural pleasures. People,
adults or children, who are content and satisfied with their sen-
sual and sexual lives are bad consumers! This is the reason why
multinational corporations always agree when governments apply
‘get tough’ policies, raise state control over the citizen, raise pun-
ishments and criminal fines and instill in the consumer populace
still more fear of life, so that people stop thinking because of the
fear barrier—which is, while it is mass hysteria, the ideal soil for
implementing total consumption without reflection!
When you read this book, you really feel it is written in an-
other epoch, a time when there was relatively more freedom for the
individual for experimenting with the limits and the borderlines, to
look over the fence using psychedelics, to think about parallel in-stitutions to the traditional family and to care for the body and its
beauty and health. All this is today relegated to a few ‘naturalist’
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fanatics who hold tight against the monition that we are sooner or
later going to end up with total and global fascism. It is for that
reason a very important book, a must-read for an intellectual to-
day, and for anybody who wants to have a real look at our social
problems and who asks, what’s going wrong and why is it going
wrong? It is an important book for any citizen who dares to ask
the question:
—Why, tell me, do our governments seem to suspect us beingcriminal virtually from birth? Why do they criminalize more and
more behaviors that over the whole course of human evolution
were considered as social and natural? Why are they building
every year larger prisons and even prison camps that can hold
millions of people?
The etiology of fascism was well analyzed by Wilhelm Reich.
The present book is more positive in nature. It is well-known that
Lowen, when he was asked why he thought Wilhelm Reich had
such a bad fate, used to reply:—Wilhelm Reich had many personal problems …
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Hence, he was critical as to Reich’s assumption that only be-
cause he had been a maverick researcher, he was persecuted, slan-
dered and finally ended up in jail and died there.
Indeed, Lowen continued Reich’s research very diligently and
never faced any problems of the kind Reich was facing. Lowen
was a different character, he was a really positive person and the
present book is written in this positive and happy tone, and for
that reason, if it was only for that reason, it is easy to read. It isalso well structured and reasoned through. Lowen and Reich have
that in common that both were not only great scientists and doc-
tors but also good writers. Lowen’s diction is easy to read; he
doesn’t bombard the reader with medical vocabulary of any kind,
but writes in a tone that every intelligent reader can understand,
and even for those who may never have heard of bioenergetics.This being said, I would like to first just list the titles of the 11
chapters of the book for this gives already an excellent insight into
what can be expected from this masterpiece written by a bioener-
getic healer and also a great master of his personal life, that was,
as he said shortly before he died a centenary, a happy life through-
out.
• Chapter 1: The Psychology of Pleasure
• Chapter 2: The Pleasure of Being Fully Alive
• Chapter 3: The Biology of Pleasure
• Chapter 4: Power Versus Pleasure
• Chapter 5: The Ego: Self-Expression Versus Egotism
• Chapter 6: Truth, Beauty and Grace
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• Chapter 7: Self-Awareness and Self-Assertion
• Chapter 8: The Emotional Responses
• Chapter 9: Guilt, Shame and Depression
• Chapter 10: The Roots of Pleasure
• Chapter 11: A Creative Approach to Life
The notion of power is flawed in our society, and for the dead
simple reason that power is so much abused. Every sexual abuseis a form of power abuse; all abuse is but power abuse, but who
are those big ‘perpetrators’ who most abuse of their powers? We
all know the answer.
In truth, what has been called ‘worldly power’ is indeed often
abusive, but the truly moral person knows that it is but decadence
and corruption, the betrayal of the citizen that brings about such
power. Genuine morality is linked to pleasure, not to the prohibi-
tions of pleasure; it is a morality that is non-compulsive and natu-
ral. This morality is not rooted in the personal ego, but in a space
beyond the ego.
In other words, the real power is the life force that streams
through our bodies and minds, and it is foremost in pleasure. In-
deed, this abusive power mechanism is defeated through pleasure
and shared pleasure. As long as pleasure is really shared, there
cannot be a power problem, it’s as simple as that. Lowen writes:
We must realize that we are all, like Dr. Faust, ready to ac-
cept the devil’s inducements. The devil is in each one of usin the form of an ego that promises the fulfillment of desire
on condition that we become subservient to its striving to
dominate. The domination of the personality by the ego is a
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diabolical perversion of the nature of man. The ego was
never intended to be the master of the body, but its loyal and
obedient servant. The body, as opposed to the ego, desires
pleasure, not power. / Bodily pleasure is the source from
which all our good feelings and good thinking stems. If the
bodily pleasure of an individual is destroyed, he becomes an
angry, frustrated and hateful person. His thinking becomes
distorted, and his creative potential is lost. He develops self-
destructive attitudes. Pleasure is the creative force in life. It is
the only force strong enough to oppose the potential destruc-
tiveness of power. Many people believe that this role belongs
to love. But if love is to be more than a word, it must rest on
the experience of pleasure. /2-3
The truth is that our leaders consciously lead us astray so as to
easily control us. Body-conscious people are no good followers,
they are not blindly obedient, they do not believe in conspiracies,
and they are not filling the cash registers of gadget stores because
they have their satisfaction from body pleasure, not ersatz pleasure.
Hence Lowen’s idea that honoring the body is the beginning of
real wisdom is true, for it is shielding us from the corruption and
betrayal we are facing daily in our neofascist world of global con-sumerism that feeds at maximum one billion of the seven billion
people now on the globe, letting the others starve in misery and
die in poverty.
The patriarchal worldview with its credo to ‘control life’, ‘con-
trol relationships’, ‘control human behavior’ fails at all ends. This
is why we are worldwide in this mess today because controllinglife doesn’t bring about peaceful togetherness nor is it in any way
intelligent behavior. Nature has instituted self-regulation if only
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humans were ready to follow nature, that is, to follow the intelli-
gence of their bodies and their emotions. If we did this, collec-
tively, the world would quickly become a better place. But for this
to happen, we need to rebuild the lost trust with nature, as we, as
a civilization, have lost that continuum, that basic trust in nature.
Lowen refers to children and their play as a striking example
how the creative impulse works in the human being. I had to think
of Pablo Picasso when reading this as he was certainly one of the
most creative persons who ever lived, but also a peaceful man, a
lover.
It is widely recognized that in their games and play children
manifest the creative impulse at work in the human person-
ality. Often a high degree of imagination is involved in these
activities. The ease with which a child can pretend or make
believe indicates that his world is largely an inner one con-
taining a rich store of feelings upon which he can draw. Be-
cause he is relatively free from responsibilities and pressures,
his imagination can transform his surroundings into a fairy
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world that offers unlimited opportunities for creative self-
expression and pleasure./6
Indeed, most children’s inner reality is intact, their fantasy is
unbroken and it is from this inner life that true happiness results.
However, our culture has by and large replaced inner life with
outer consumption; it starves us through all the millions of images
it projects in our media, as when one’s mind is full of images that
are not coming from one’s inner reality, one has lost that inner life.
Lowen states:
The denial of inner reality is a form of mental illness./7
When we understand that, we see that we are collectively mad
in a consumer society; this may bring us back to focus inside again
and on our own body and its needs, as the point of departure for
developing our intrinsic creativeness.
Pleasure and creativity are dialectically related. Without
pleasure, there can be no creativity. Without a creative atti-
tude to life, there will be no pleasure. This dialectic stems
from the fact that both are positive aspects of life. An aliveperson is sensitive and creative. /19
When I talk about the ‘schizoid split’, I mean the split between
the mind and the body, or the left and right brain hemispheres, or
in other words, the splitting off of deductive and inductive logic.
While most adults think deductively, that is, from the mind to-
ward the body, the child thinks inductively, from the body toward
the mind. Lowen writes:
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Another simple truth that should be self-evident is that an
individual’s personality is expressed through his body as
much as through his mind. A person cannot be divided into
a mind and a body. Despite this truth, all studies of personal-
ity have concentrated on the mind to the relative neglect of
the body. /21
And here is the problem. As long as humans are split apart in
‘minds’ and ‘bodies’ and have lost their wholeness, their feeling
level doesn’t work, they are then living with a starved body and
starved emotions, and their emotional balance is out of order. This
is why then, these people become more and more violent. Here is
how this can be explained in bioenergetic terms:
The two functions that are most important in this regard are
breathing and movement. Both of these functions are disturbedin every person who has an emotional conflict by chronic
muscular tensions that are the physical counterpart of the
psychological conflicts. Through these muscular tensions
conflicts become structured in the body. When this happens,
they cannot be resolved until the tensions are released. To
release these muscular tensions one must feel them as a limi-
tation of self-expression. It is not enough to be aware of theirpain. And most people are not even aware of that. When a
muscular tension becomes chronic, it is removed from con-
sciousness, and one loses an awareness of the tension. /22
Feeling is determined by breathing and movement. An or-
ganism feels only that which moves within the body. For
example, when an arm is immobilized for a time, it becomes
numb and without feeling. To recapture the feeling its motil-
ity must be restored. The motility of the whole body is re-
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duced when breathing is restricted. Thus, holding the breath
is the most effective way of cutting feeling. This principle
works in reverse, too. Just as strong emotions stimulate and
deepen one’s breathing, the stimulation and deepening of
respiration can evoke strong emotions. /22
Breathing cannot be dissociated from sexuality. Indirectly it
provides the energy for a sexual discharge. The heat of pas-
sion is one aspect of the metabolic fires, of which oxygen is
an important element. Since the metabolic processes provide
the energy for all living functions, the strength of the sexual
drive is ultimately determined by these processes. The depth
of respiration directly determines the quality of the sexual
discharge. Unitary or total breathing, a respiration that in-
volves the whole body, leads to an orgasm that includes the
whole body. /28
Hence, when the emotional flow is disturbed because the body
is armored and stiff, unable to fully breathe, both psychosomatic
disease and psychopathological behavior will set in.
This is why the contact with the body and natural pleasure is
so important, for it literally prevents violence as a ‘negative pleas-
ure function.’ Now, let me continue my reasoning on the patriar-
chal quest of ‘controlling life.’ Control brings about fear, and fear
restricts all bodily movements, it restricts freedom, free thinking,
and emotional vibrancy. The natural state is described by Lowen
in these terms:
A healthy personality is a vibrant personality. A healthy body is a pulsating and vibrant body. In the state of health
the body’s vibrations are relatively fine and steady, like the
hum of a smooth running automobile. When the motor in an
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automobile goes dead, we sense it by the absence of vibra-
tion. In a similar way, it can be said that individuals whose
bodies do not vibrate are emotionally dead. /34
It may seem surprising that spontaneity and self-control are,
despite their seeming contradiction, both facets of natural
motility. Self-control implies self-possession, which is the
attribute of a person who is in touch with his feelings and in
command of his movements. He has self-control because he
can choose how to express himself, since his motility is not
limited or constricted by chronic muscular tensions. He dif-
fers thereby from the controlled individual, the compulsive
personality, whose behavior is dictated by his tensions, and
from the impulsive individual, whose behavior is a reaction
to his tensions. It is a common experience in bioenergetic
therapy that the freer a person becomes in his movements,
the more self-control he gains. /40
Hence, inherent in nature is self-control; when we follow na-
ture, we do not need outside control, we do not need compulsive
morality and endless ‘sex laws’ to behave socially, without harm-
ing others. This is how building trust in life enhances this natural
self-control and restores pleasure and happiness.
Furthermore, Lowen explains that there is also a relationship
between pleasure and growth, which explains why youth is closer
to pleasure than old age; it’s because young people have a greater
capacity of excitement. He explains:
The secret of pleasure is hidden in the phenomenon of exci-tation. A living organism has the inherent capacity to hold
and increase its level of excitation; it does not change from
inertness to responsiveness, like a machine when its motor is
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started or the current is turned on. There is a continuous
excitation in the living organism which increases or de-
creases in response to stimuli proceeding from the environ-
ment. Broadly speaking, an increase of excitation leads to
pleasure, a decrease to boredom and depression. /50
Lumination is also an aspect of excitation in living organ-
isms. We light up with pleasure, shine with joy, and glow
with ecstasy. /Id.
The lumination of the human body is surrounded by a ‘force
field’ which has been described as an aura or atmosphere. It
has been observed and commented on by many writers, in-
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cluding Paracelsus, Mesmer, Kilner, and Reich. My associate,
Dr. John C. Pierrakos, has made a special study of this phe-
nomenon for the past fifteen years. This field or aura can be
seen by the naked eye under certain conditions. It is shown
in early Renaissance paintings as a glow about the heads of
saints. /51
The field also pulsates, that is, it appears and disappears at
an average rate of fifteen to twenty-five times per minute
under normal conditions. The rate of pulsation, like the color
of the field, is related to the degree of excitation in the body.
When the body goes into involuntary vibratory movements
as a result of deeper respiration and more feeling, the rate of
pulsation may reach forty or fifty per minute: at the same
time, the width of the field extends farther, and its color be-
comes brighter. /51
Hence, the freedom of emotional flow is a bioenergetic fact as it
can be explained by a greater motility and vibrancy of the lumi-
nous energy field. Hence, when we follow nature and honor our
body and our desires, our luminous energy field will be strong
and vibrant, which means we are in a state of good health and our
body provides excellent immunitary response. But as our society
tries to direct us away from our bodies, we live in our egos and
are focused upon satisfying the needs of those blown-up egos,
through domestication and acquisitiveness, through ‘settling down’
in and switching, as it were, from dialogue to monologue—with
the result that our vibrancy declines.
Since the values of a mass society are success and power, the
person who accepts them becomes a mass individual and
loses his true individuality. He no longer thinks of himself as
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a person apart from the crowd, since his primary interest is
to rise above the crowd. At the same time it is very impor-
tant to be accepted by the crowd. He abandons the discrimi-
nating attitude of the true individual in favor of conformity.
His behavior is oriented away from pleasure and toward
prestige; he becomes a status-seeker and a social climber.
What is worse is that these values infiltrate his home life.
They become the criteria by which he judges his children,
who must measure up by being both acceptable and out-
standing. /73
Power is antithetical to pleasure. It bears the same relation-
ship to pleasure that the ego does to the body. Pleasure stems
from the free flow of feeling or energy within the body and
between the body and the environment. Power develops
through the damming and control of energy. This describes
the basic distinction between the pleasure individual and the
power individual. Power develops from control and oper-
ates through control. It has no other mode of operation. /82
Parents use power to control their children because they
were similarly controlled when they were young. Having
been the objects of power, they are now determined to exer-
cise power even over their children, which is the easiest way
to exercise power. The exercise of power seems to restore, in
their minds the idea that they are individuals who have a
right to make demands and express them. /84
I haven’t discussed the whole of the book here as that would
go beyond the limits of a review. One thing is certain, without thebioenergetic way of thinking, which is the way nature itself ‘thinks’,
we wouldn’t be able to look behind the veil of our cultural distor-
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tions and we wouldn’t understand why we as a society are hyper-
violent and become more violent with each and every year. It is
that we turn down pleasure that we bring about violence, and for
no other reason.
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The Language of the Body
Physical Dynamics and Character StructureHow the Body Reveals Personality
Alachua, Fl: Bioenergetic Press 1958/2003
It is noteworthy to see that Lowen wrote The Language of the Body before Pleasure:
A Creative Approach to Life , the book I discussed earlier. This present book is way
more theoretical. I admit it is also much more difficult to read. However, for
those who are interested in learning the mechanics of bioenergetic thinking, this
early work of a master healer is a must-read.
As Harris Friedman, PhD, writes in the Introduction:
For anyone wanting an in-depth exposure to the theoretical
underpinnings of bioenergetic analysis as a whole system,
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this is the book that I would unwaveringly recommend as a
starting place.
I have admittedly read Reich’s ‘Character Analysis’ already
back in the 1970s. Yet there is a difference between reading Reich’s
first attempts to build a characterological analysis, and this work
of one of his best disciples who has worked that early draft out
into a mature methodology. Here, as in my former review, I will as
well shortly outline the content headers of the chapters, for they
let us very clearly see the broad scope and the very systematic ap-
proach of the author to the topic.
! PART ONE
• Development of Analytic Techniques
• Somatic Aspect of Ego Psychology
! The Pleasure Principle
! The Reality Principle
! The Bioenergetic Concept of the Instincts
! Bioenergetic Principles in Analytic Therapy
! Character Analysis
! Character Formation and Structure
! PART TWO
• The Oral Character
• The Masochistic Character – 1
• The Masochistic Character – 2
• The Hysterical Character – 1
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• The Hysterical Character – 2
• The Phallic-Narcissistic Character
• The Passive-Feminine Character
• The Schizophrenic Character
• The Schizoid Character
It may go without saying that I will not be able to discuss the
present book in the same depth as the former, because this would
be quite impossible to achieve, not only because I am not myself a
trained psychiatrist, but because most lay readers couldn’t see thelinking points between the different quotes, because of the concep-
tual barrier. It is for this reason that I have chosen to discuss here
only PART ONE, Point 5, ‘The Bioenergetic Concept of the In-
stincts’. This is of particular interest as Lowen draws a line to
Freudian psychoanalysis that is very important to observe. To be-
gin with, Lowen explains:
The impulse itself is an energy movement from the center of
the organism to the surface where it affects the relationships
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of the organism to the external world. This movement of
energy from center to periphery has two purposes or ends.
One is related to the function of charge, such as taking in
food, respiration, sexual excitement, etc. The other is related
to the function of energy discharge, the foremost expression
of which is the sexual discharge and reproduction. All activi-
ties can be classified according to this simple criterion; that
is, whether they fulfill the function of energy charge or
discharge./62
Hence, what Freud and early psychoanalysis called ‘the in-
stincts’ must not be confounded with the zoological definition of the
‘instinct’ in animals. It is a fallacy that Freud used the notion of
‘instinct’, while he defined it differently.
But only bioenergetic thinking made it possible that what
Freud wanted to express really became cognizable.
We are here confronting a simple dualism that marks all life
functions, it is charge and discharge , an energy metabolism in the
cell plasma. This is how we can cognize the energy nature of our
emotions and find ways to regulate them sanely, without blocking
them or replacing one emotion by another because we find the
latter ‘more acceptable’ than the former.
This metabolism also conveys that life is essentially a vibration
or oscillation where the constant balance of charge and discharge
creates a slightly waving ‘band’ on an oscillator. Now, to come
back at how Freud saw the ‘instincts’ and how he related the sex
drive to them, is controversial. Lowen bluntly states:
In … eros, Freud recognized the libido of the sexual instincts.
Originally the concept of libido was restricted to the energy
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Our culture is very much influenced by Freud’s pseudoscien-
tific or outright mythical teaching, not by the real insights of bio-
energetics.
This is one of many reasons why the scientific achievements of
bioenergy research have not penetrated so far into our mass media
and remain a kind of hermetic professional knowledge. Lowen’s
books tear down the veil for those who want to know, how few
they may be …
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Terence McKenna
Books Reviewed
The Archaic Revival (1992)
Food of the Gods (1993)
The Invisible Landscape (1993)
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Terence McKenna (1946-2000) spent twenty-five years in ex-
ploring ‘the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation’ and
is as a specialist in the ethnomedicine of the Amazon basin. He is
coauthor, with his brother Dennis, of The Invisible Landscape: Mind,
Hallucinogens, and the I Ching , and author of the forthcoming Food
of the Gods.
—From: The Archaic Revival (Back Cover)
Reviews of The Archaic Revival
Scholar, theoretician, explorer, dreamer, pioneer, fanatic, and
spellbinder, as well as ontological tailor, McKenna combines
an erudite, if somewhat original, overview of history with a
genuinely visionary approach to the millennium. The result
is a cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost
any brain out of its cognitive Kansas.
—Tom Robbins, from the Foreword
As wordsmith and logos laser [McKenna] stews his concep-
tional imagination in language so potent that doors open
into evolutionary destiny and possible worlds. A radically
innovative natural philosophy is offered here, one that in-
spires a new ecology of inner and outer space.
—Jean Houston, PhD, Director, Foundation for Mind Research ,
author of The Possible Human and The Search for the Beloved
[McKenna's] ideas are rare jewels discovered during expedi-
tions to the heights and depths of inner space. (…) The Ar-
chaic Revival is flammable to the drybrush and deadwood of
the intellect. In the twilight of human history, McKenna’s
prescription for salvation is just so crazy it might work.
—Alex Grey, artist, author of Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art
of Alex Grey
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The three McKenna books I have chosen to review are jewels
both in their quality as literary oeuvres and their value as testimo-
nies of one of the greatest mind explorers of our times.
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The Archaic Revival
Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFO’s,Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess and the End of History
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992
In The Archaic Revival, McKenna lays the groundwork for something like a psy-
chedelic culture, a society based on new values.
In the etiology of the group alienation that is so typical for our
culture, the author detects a basic denial of ecstasy.
McKenna’s views are deliberately political in the sense that he
claims nobody can develop a sane mind within an insane culture,
without rejecting that culture in the first place:
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In addition to choosing to repress the strange abilities of the
shaman and the psychic potential of contact with the Other,
Western tradition has a built-in bias against self experimen-
tation with hallucinogens. One of the consequences of this is
that not enough has been written about the phenomenology
of personal experiences with the visionary hallucinogens./3
I am a political activist, but I think that the first duty of a
political activist is to become psychedelic. Otherwise you’re
not making your moves cognizant of the entire field of
action./13
There is a parallel here with Krishnamurti who had a similar
position with the difference only that he did not endorse psyche-
delics. But K is quoted to have said that ‘it is not a proof of mental
health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.’ McKennasees no way around the citizen’s perversity than by ‘civilizing’
him or her psychedelically, while Krishnamurti sees the way out
through total attention:
So the issue finally comes down to the citizen versus the self.
The citizen is an extremely limited definition of human po-
tential. The self is a definition of human potential so broad
that it threatens the obligations of the citizen./12
When we give a primacy to the self, the individual, and hence
see society or the group as secondary, we still can build group
values from such a starting point, and we can build them with ec-
stasy as a primary value in place. This is exactly the outcome ofmy own shamanism research, and I have found no other author
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who saw this with an even remotely similar lucidity as Terence
McKenna. He writes:
Shamanism is use of the archaic techniques of ecstasy that
were developed independent of any religious philosophy—
the empirically validated, experientially operable techniques
that produce ecstasy. Ecstasy is the contemplation of whole-
ness. That’s why when you experience ecstasy—when you
contemplate wholeness—you come down remade in terms
of the political and social arena because you have seen the
larger picture./13
When we ask what shamanism is we need to focus our re-
search on the shaman as the central figure. The shaman is a mind-
alterer, a reality-shifter, a magician, and at the same time, a healer.
But he’s an outcast nonetheless, and this is his crux:
So it is the form of the mind that the shaman works with: he
has a larger view because he is not really in his culture. (…)
The shaman may appear a member of the culture, but he’s
broader, deeper, higher, and wider than the culture that cre-
ated him./14
As a culture-founder and ‘psychedelic’ politician, McKenna
asked who or what is going to be supportive of his quest? He de-
cided that shamanism was part of this special branch of popular
culture he became the spokesman of. Then, he discussed why he
did not embrace Buddhism as a religion, and his answer is conclu-
sive and makes sense:
I think of Mahayana Buddhism, the multileveled, many-
inhabited, demon-haunted, Buddha-haunted realms of peace
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and joy. The insistence of Mahayana Buddhism that there is
really no center, that everything is a construct of time and
space, is the most sophisticated psychology. But I’m not will-
ing to climb aboard the Buddhist ethic because Buddhism
says suffering is inevitable. That’s not a psychedelic point of
view./17
I always thought that the Buddha was judging life instead of em-
bracing life, and this is pretty much a cultural bias in the whole of
Indian philosophy. The ‘psychedelic’ sage, and there is wide
agreement here, is definitely not somebody who judges life, but
who embraces life. But McKenna’s critical stance on religion is
more general than that:
Unfortunately, religion for the past five hundred years has
been a hierarchical pyramid at whose top were theologiansinterpreting dogma. This interpretation was handed down
through a hierarchy to the faithful. I think religious hierar-
chies are very unsettled by the idea of direct revelation.
Nevertheless, this phenomenon is certainly thriving in pre-
literate cultures all over the world. We discovered in dealing
with this that the only people you could talk to about it or
who seemed to have familiarity with it were shamans./28
Now, we got shamanism and the spirits of nature in our cul-
tural soup, and we got no religion besides nature’s religions, and
direct perception as our awareness paradigm. But what is miss-
ing? McKenna puts a unique stress on language, and the evolution
of language through psychedelics, as an essential characteristic ofhis new, and yet perennial, cultural paradigm.
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And this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about:
they force the evolution of language. And no culture, so far
as I am aware, has ever consciously tried to evolve its lan-
guage with the awareness that evolving language was evolv-
ing reality. (…) The social consequence of the psychedelic
experience is clear thinking—which trickles down as clear
speech. Empowered speech./21
McKenna’s detractors cunningly argue that his highly refined
use of language was not the result of psychedelics but of his Irish
tradition, and that he was using his obvious literary talent for mak-
ing up a cultural pretension, as a matter of show, and for establish-
ing his particular niche in popular culture.
It is true that McKenna had the ability to render complex and
convoluted speeches with a crystal-clear ‘premeditated’ logic, that,
as his voice is rather monotonous, suggests someone reading from
an invisible book in front of his eyes. I haven’t seen or heard any-
thing comparable in my life. This being said, it seems obvious that
McKenna, when molding his cultural Pygmalion cannot rely on
proven theories, but proceeds by drafting hypotheses, such as the
following one, that bears however some anthropological backup:
Anthropologists have commented on the absence of serious
mental disease in many preliterate cultures. I believe that the
mediation of the shaman and through him the contact to the
centering Logos, this source of information or gnosis, is
probably the cause of this ability to heal or minimize psycho-
logical disorders./29
The open question is if this ability of the shaman to seize the
‘Centering Logos’ for healing purposes requires a culture to be
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preliterate? The question hits home because in my unique experi-
ence with Ayahuasca in 2004, the plant intelligence communicated
to me that I was more or less unable to perceiving reality directly,
and that this atrophy had come about through the strong language
training I had received, so that language had become in my life an
obstacle to the real understanding of nature, and nature’s wisdom.
Thus, my psychedelic experience seems to confirm McKenna’s
view that language is in the way of understanding nature whenit’s not transformed, modulated ‘psychedelically’, and rendered a
philosopher’s stone through the unique alchemy of entheogens
impacting, over long periods of time, on our mindbody chemistry.
And this, in turn, is exactly what McKenna has summarized as
the essential in the Archaic Revival. It is his mind-boggling assump-
tion that only through psychedelics humankind was able to build
civilization, and that originally entheogens were really laid in our
cultural cradle, and have served over millennia their good pur-
pose, until exactly the moment when in the 20th century, our para-
noid leaders put them on the index of ‘forbidden plants.’ In his
book Food of the Gods , McKenna lucidly comments on this prohibi-
tion with the words that ‘the notion of illegal plants is obnoxious
and ridiculous in the first place.’ And he points to the degree of
barbarous misinformation and anti-cultural propaganda that this
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this cultural denial has brought us, with the result that civiliza-
tion, from that moment, was in a backward trend:
Psilocybin, in the minds of the uninformed public and in the
eyes of the law, is lumped together with LSD and mescaline,
when in fact each of these compounds is a phenomenologi-
cally defined universe unto itself. Psilocybin and DMT in-
voke the Logos, although DMT is more intense and more
brief in its action. This means that they work directly on the
language centers, so that an important aspect of the experi-
ence is the interior dialogue./36
Interestingly enough, McKenna shows a parallel of this 20th
century anti-psychedelic paranoia with the former worldview un-
der Christianity that regarded any wisdom from nature as diabolic
and abject, and that destroyed much of the direct knowledge thatancient civilizations possessed about life:
The Stropharia cubensis mushroom, if one can believe what
it says in one of its moods, is a symbiote, and it desires ever
deeper symbiosis with the human species. It achieved sym-
biosis with human society early by associating itself with
domesticated cattle and through them human nomads. Likethe plants men and women grew and the animals they hus-
banded, the mushroom was able to inculcate itself into the
human family, so that where human genes went these other
genes would be carried. But the classic mushroom cults of
Mexico were destroyed by the coming of the Spanish con-
quest. The Franciscans assumed they had an absolute mo-
nopoly on theophagy, the eating of God; yet in the NewWorld they came upon people calling a mushroom teo-
nanacatl, the flesh of the gods; yet in the New World they
came upon people calling a mushroom teonanacatl, the flesh
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of the gods. They set to work, and the Inquisition was able to
push the old religion into the mountains of Oaxaca so that it
only survived in a few villages when Valentina and Gordon
Wasson found it there in the 1950s./40
Our symbiosis with the Other , that unique intelligence which
speaks through psychedelic mushrooms, and that is accessible
through their ritualistic ingestion, McKenna argues, was cut, as
through still another cultural circumcision we were subjected to,on the basis of spiritual dominance taken as religion, and as a mat-
ter of power abuse and tyranny.
Ignorance burned the libraries of the Hellenistic world at an
earlier period and dispersed the ancient knowledge, shatter-
ing the stellar and astronomical machinery that had been the
work of centuries. By ignorance I mean the Hellenistic-Christian-Judaic tradition. The inheritors of this tradition
built a triumph of mechanism. It was they who later realized
the alchemical dreams of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuri-
es—and the twentieth century—with the transformation of
elements and the discovery of gene transplants. But then,
having conquered the New World and driven its people into
cultural fragmentation and diaspora, they came unexpect-edly upon the body of Osiris—the condensed body of Eros—
in the mountains of / Mexico where Eros has retreated at the
coming of the Christos. And by finding the mushroom, they
unleashed it./40-41
I have forwarded the point of view, and I am not the only one,
that psychoanalysis was meant to be, from the start, more than a
medical technique, but had, especially in its Freudian vintage, a
strong underlying idea of shamanism to it. The importance of the
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shaman as an integrative and sacred figure in a highly technologi-
cally alienated culture such as ours is obvious. McKenna writes:
The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no
shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily techniques, not
ritual. It is a set of techniques that have been worked out
over millennia that make it possible, though perhaps not for
everyone, to explore these areas. People of predilection are
noticed and encouraged. In archaic societies where shaman-
ism is a thriving institution, the signs are fairly easy to rec-
ognize: oddness and uniqueness in an individual. /45
Among aspiring shamans there must be some sign of inner
strength or a hypersensitivity to trance states. In traveling
around the world and dealing with shamans, I find the dis-
tinguishing characteristic is an extraordinary centeredness.
Usually the shaman is an intellectual and is alienated from
society. A good shaman sees exactly who you are and says,
Ah, here’s somebody to have a conversation with. The an-
thropological literature always presents shamans as embed-
ded in a tradition, but once one gets to know them they are
always very sophisticated about what they are doing. They
are the true phenomenologists of this world; they know
plant chemistry, yet they call these energy fields spirits./Id.
The integrative philosophy that McKenna’s Archaic Revival repre-
sents and that we are the inheritors of, after the passing away of
its creator requires us to build relationships between phenomena
we don’t usually think of as related.
McKenna teaches that this synthetic view of the universe is
immensely facilitated through what he calls the ‘mediation’ of the
plant teachers:
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A voice that gave guidance and revelation to Western civili-
zation has been silent for about seventeen hundred years.
This is the Logos and all ancient philosophers strove to in-
voke it. For Hellenistic / philosophy it was a voice that told
self-evident truth. With the passing of the Aeon and the
death of the pagan gods, awareness of this phenomenon
faded. However, it is still available through the mediation of
the plant teachers. If we could intelligently examine dimen-
sions that the psychedelic plants make available, we could
contact the Oversoul and leave behind this era where domi-
nance hierarchies must be disciplined by UFOs and messi-
ahs, and where progress is halted for millennia because cul-
ture cannot advance ethics at the same rate as technology.
/61-62
In fact, contrary to many who claim their Ayahuasca experi-
ence was but a spectacle of colorful visions, I can testify as a direct
witness of what McKenna writes about the Logos coming through
as an intelligence or plant teacher, manifesting in the psychedelic
state as an immediately present telepathic voice and response-giver that
teaches a wisdom not from this earth. And it has taught me a wis-
dom, not general, but very much tailored to my own needs, telling
me through direct insight that I needed to give love instead of
waiting to receive love from others, and that by doing so without
wavering in my attitude, I could overcome the pitfall of percep-
tion that my overindulgence of language-related thinking has
brought about. From 2004 to 2007, and thus within three consecu-
tive years, I have fundamentally changed not only concepts and
relationships, but also my daily life and habits, and there are no
more depressions, no more outbursts of hate and violence, no
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more sad remembrances of my terrible childhood, and I have sim-
ply become wiser in all I think and do.
McKenna’s vision of the Archaic Revival targets at the creation
of nothing less but a psychedelic science, while he localized him-
self to be an avatar in the creation of that science, in similar ways
as our technological explorers some centuries back on the road of
technological progress, only that this progress will not be frag-
mented, but holistic:
The early approach with psychedelics was the correct one.
This is the notion that intelligent, thoughtful people should
take psychedelics and try and understand what’s going on.
Not groups of prisoners, not graduate students, but mature,
intelligent people need to share their experiences. It’s too
early for a science. What we need now are the diaries of ex-
plorers. We need many diaries of many explorers so we can
begin to get a feeling for the territory./69
And as a parallel movement with the creation of that psyche-
delic science that McKenna envisions, he predicts the ultimate en-
counter with the Other, whenever on a timeline of events this may
occur:
Eventually this contact will occur. We are now in the pubes-
cent stage of yearning, of forming an image of the thing de-
sired. This image of the thing desired will eventually cause
that thing come into being. In other words, our cultural di-
rection is being touched by the notion of / alien love, and it
comes to us through the rebirth of the use of plant hallu-cinogens. The shamanic vision plants seem to be the carriers
of this pervasive entelechy that speaks and that can present
itself to us in this particular way. (…) The appetite for this
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fusion is what is propelling global culture toward an apoca-
lyptic transformation. (…) But it could also slip away. We
could harden; there are dominator, hypertechnological fu-
tures that we could sail toward and realize. That would
eliminate this possibility of opening to the Other./73-74
While McKenna seems to see this encounter with the Other a
bit in the way of science fiction novels, as a spectacular one-time
event, described by some as the proverbial ‘UFO landing on theground of the White House’, he acknowledges, what can be called
a consensus now, that this Presence, this Other does not need to
come here, because the eternal present aligns all dimensions as
superpositions, and not in horizontal space. But what is the bar-
rier, then, between them and us? According to McKenna, it is lan-
guage, and it’s by the evolution of language that we are going toget over the fence and face the Other:
As human history goes forward, we develop the linguistic
discrimination to be able to recognize the extraterrestrials
that are already insinuated into the planetary environment
around us, some of which may have been here millions and
millions of years. In other words, space is not an imperme-able barrier to life; there is slow drift. There is genetic mate-
rial that is transferred through space and time over vast
distances./80
Let me come to the end of this rather extended book review
with a brief discussion of Novelty Theory, and what McKenna says
about it in this book. Timewave Zero or Novelty Theory is a graph-
based mathematical construct that depicts novelty in the universe
as an inherent property of time. The idea was initiated by Terence
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McKenna in the 1970s and was worked out mathematically by the
Swiss mathematician Peter Meyer. It is a wild and unconfirmed
assumption when Wikipedia assumes that ‘the theory lacks any
credible basis in peer-reviewed science and is generally dismissed
as pseudoscience’. In personal correspondence with Meyer, I was
informed that the theory basically is to be explained with the frac-
tal nature of time; when novelty is graphed over time, a fractal
waveform known as Timewave Zero results. The graph shows at
what times novelty is increasing or decreasing. Now, this is what
McKenna comments on the theory in the present book:
What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty to-
ward what Whitehead called concrescence, a tightening
gyre. Everything is flowing together. The autopoietic lapis,
the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when eve-rything flows together. When the laws of physics are obvi-
ated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly
bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself,
rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its re-
flection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and
apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change
is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predictthat concrescence will occur soon—around 2012 A.D. It will
be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will ap-
pear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the re-
lease of the mind into the imagination./101
Novelty, then, is put forward as a primary term necessary to
a description of any temporal system much in the way thatspin, velocity, and angular momentum are primary terms
necessary to the description of any physical system. Syno-
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nyms for novelty are degree of connectedness or complexity.
/109
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Food of the Gods
The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge:A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution
Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishers, 1993
Food of the Gods of perhaps the best book Terence McKenna has written, and I
have read it with an enthusiastic participation that I have rarely experienced in
my literary life. It was as if I was co-authoring the book while reading it.
And this book is much more coherent than The Archaic Revival,
and much less esoteric than The Invisible Landscape—the book I
shall review next. In fact, it treats a very important subject that israther obfuscated in modern times: food. When I say obfuscated I
really mean that most modern city dwellers have developed no
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consciousness of what they ingest on a daily basis; they are just
gnawing away their very juice of life, with all the toxics that mod-
ern processed food contains. While in ancient times food was medi-
cine. You still have this philosophy in the Chinese food tradition
where there are many dishes, for example a whole array of mush-
room dishes, that originally were concocted for medical purposes
but that today we eat just for enriching our daily diet. There is one
rather esoteric dish among them, that is called the ‘black chicken.’
The interesting thing about this dish is that while you can buy
these small black chickens in any supermarket in Asia, the other
ingredients you best don’t buy there, but in a Chinese medical
pharmacy. They will open a number of little drawers for you and
put on a sheet of paper a curious composition of mushrooms,
herbs, spices and dried plums that you take home for a few cents.Now, you brew this with water, and just put some salt. You
cannot imagine what this dish can do! It cures any cold, influenza
or cough—guaranteed! The taste is exotic, it really tastes like
medicine, and the red meat of this little black chicken really has a
good taste. This is the way to enjoy life as the ancients did: you eat
what you like, but you eat medicine at the same time.
McKenna’s mind was incredibly lucid for unveiling the machi-
nations of our negative oversoul, and I wonder if any of his predic-
tions are understood by a larger number of people, other than the
eternal adolescent-minded and hopelessly narcissistic baby boom-
ers that surrounded him like a plague all through his life, and that
surely will not have the necessary strength to assume his heritage.
He writes:
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Our culture, self-toxified by the poisonous by-products of
technology and egocentric ideology, is the unhappy inheritor
of the dominator attitude that alteration of consciousness by
the use of plants or substances is somehow wrong, onanistic,
and perversely antisocial. I will argue that suppression of
shamanic gnosis, with its reliance and insistence on ecstatic
dissolution of the ego, has robbed us of life’s meaning and
made us enemies of the planet, of ourselves, and our grand-
children. We are killing the planet in order to keep intact the
wrongheaded assumptions of the ego-dominator cultural
style. It is time for change./xxi
Food and mind do interact: this is the essential message of this
book. And there is one more link to it. Food acts on sexuality, and
sexuality acts in turn on the mind. This is not an insight unique to
McKenna’s food research but many studies have shown that alco-hol abuse has a particular effect on sexuality in that it renders the
sexual appetite more violent, more sadistic, or else leads to impo-
tence. McKenna speaks of an ‘alcohol culture’ and a little later he
also speaks of a ‘coffee culture’ so as to characterize, in terms of
food, our patriarchal tradition:
Dominator style hatred of women, general sexual ambiva-
lence and anxiety, and alcohol culture conspired to create the
peculiarly neurotic approach to sexuality that characterizes
European civilization. Gone are the boundary-dissolving
hallucinogenic orgies that diminished the ego of the indi-
vidual and reasserted the values of the extended family and
the tribe./148
On the other hand, the current demonization of the harmless
hallucinogenic Cannabis will in the author’s opinion cause us a
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particularly heavy price to pay for the surrender to dominator
values in that it will bring about the deterioration of the individ-
ual self, and selfhood:
Of all the pandemic plant intoxicants inhabiting the earth,
cannabis is second only to mushrooms in its promotion ofthe social values and sensory ratios that typified the original
partnership societies. How else are we to explain the unre-
lenting persecution of cannabis use in the face of over-
whelming evidence that, of all the intoxicants ever used,
cannabis is among the most benign. Its social consequences
are negligible compared with those of alcohol. Cannabis is
anathema to the dominator culture because it deconditionsor decouples users from accepted values. Because of its sub-
liminally psychedelic effect, cannabis, when pursued as a
lifestyle, places a person in intuitive contact with less goal-
oriented and less competitive behavior patterns. For these
reasons marijuana is unwelcome in the modern office envi-
ronment, while a drug such as coffee, which reinforces the
values of industrial culture, is both welcomed and encour-aged. Cannabis use is correctly sensed as heretical and
deeply disloyal to the values of male dominance and strati-
fied hierarchy. Legalization of marijuana is thus a complex
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Sugar is culturally defined by us as a food. This definition
denies that sugar can act as a highly addictive drug, yet the
evidence is all around us. Many children and compulsive
eaters live in a motivational environment primarily ruled by
mood swings resulting from cravings for sugar./180
Then, eventually, we talk about tobacco and the myth of its
cancerogenous nature that not only McKenna has unveiled in the
meantime, but also a number of other researchers:
The tobacco of the Classical Maya was Nicotiana rustica,
which is still in use among aboriginal populations in South
America today. This species is much more potent, chemically
complex, and potentially hallucinogenic than the commercial
grades of Nicotiana tabacum available today. The difference
between this tobacco and cigarette tobacco is profound. This
wild tobacco was cured and rolled into cigars which were
smoked. The / trancelike state that followed, partially syn-
ergized by the presence of compounds that included MAO
inhibitors, was central to the shamanism of the Maya. Re-
cently introduced antidepressants of the MAO inhibitor type
are distant synthetic relatives to these natural compounds.
/196-197
Opium addiction was once the price paid for the prohibition of
tobacco, as addiction to gasoline has been seen to be one of the
consequences of alcohol prohibitions both in 1930s America and in
Iran under the reign of Ayatollah Khomeini. As a general rule, you
can observe in life that every denial brings about worse a condition
compared to the original desire that was denied to manifest. Only
that our decision-makers have so far not fully understood this law
of the psyche. McKenna writes:
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It was the prohibition of tobacco smoking in China by the
last emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1628-1644) that led frus-
trated tobacco addicts to experiment with smoking opium.
Before that time the smoking of opium was not known. Thus
it is that the suppression of one drug seems inevitably to
lead to involvement with another. /201
So much depends on how we define food, or not define it as
food! Psychedelics were originally defined as food, and no one
had a problem with them. And the suppression of culture and the
suppression of food go hand in hand, as McKenna lucidly demon-
strates:
Psychedelic plants and experience were first suppressed by
European civilization, then ignored and forgotten. The
fourth century witnessed the suppression of the mysteryreligions—the cults of Bacchus and Diana, of Attis and Cy-
bele. The rich syncretism that was typical of the Hellenistic
world had become a thing of the past. Christianity tri-
umphed over the Gnostic sects—Valentinians, Marcionites,
and others—which were the last bastions of paganism. These
repressive episodes in the evolution of Western thought ef-
fectively close the door on communication with the Gaianmind./223
I would like to close this book review with a reproduction of
McKenna’s unique law draft, which he entitled ‘A Modest Pro-
posal’, and hope that the publisher will allow me to share this in-
formation here, which is surely not destined to preclude any book
sales, and in the contrary encourage the reader to buy the book:
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A drug policy of democratic values would aim to educate
people to make informed choices based on their own needs
and ideals. Such a simple prescription is necessary and sadly
overdue. / A master plan for seriously seeking to come to
terms with America’s drug problems might explore a num-
ber of options, including the following.
1. A 200 percent federal tax should be imposed on tobacco
and alcohol. All government subsidies for tobacco produc-tion should be ended. Warnings on packaging should be
strengthened. A 20 percent federal sales tax should be levied
on sugar and sugar substitutes, and all supports for sugar
production should be ended. Sugar packages should also
carry warnings, and sugar should be a mandatory topic in
school nutrition curricula.
2. All forms of cannabis should be legalized and a 200 per-
cent federal sales tax imposed on cannabis products. Infor-
mation as to the THC content of the product and current
conclusions regarding its impact on health should be printed
on the packaging.
3. International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending
should be withdrawn from countries that produce hard
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drugs. Only international inspection and certification that a
country is in compliance would restore loan eligibility.
4. Strict gun control must apply to both manufacture and
possession. It is the unrestricted availability of firearms that
has made violent crime and the drug abuse problem so inter-
twined.
5. The legality of nature must be recognized, so that all
plants are legal to grow and possess.
6. Psychedelic therapy should be made legal and insurance
coverage extended to include it.
7. Currency and banking regulations need to be strength-
ened. Presently bank collusion with criminal cartels allows
large-scale money laundering to take place.
8. There is an immediate need for massive support for scien-
tific research into all aspects of substance use and abuse and
an equally massive commitment to public education.
9. One year after implementation of the above, all drugs still
illegal in the United States should be decriminalized. The
middleman is eliminated, the government can sell drugs at
cost plus 200 percent, and those monies can be placed in a
special fund to pay the social, medical, and educational costs
of the legalization program. Money from taxes on alcohol,
tobacco, sugar, and cannabis can also be placed in this fund.
TERENCE MCKENNA
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10. Also following this one-year period, pardons should be
given to all offenders in drug cases that did not involve fire-
arms or felonious assault./269-270
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The Invisible Landscape
Mind Hallucinogens and the I ChingNew York: HarperCollins, 1993
The Invisible Landscape is the most esoteric of the three McKenna books reviewed
here. Many of the topics he treats in his other books, he treats here as well, but he
presents them under a slightly different light, or in more subtle language.
His standard theme psychedelics, for example, assumes a new
dimension, together with his regard upon science:
Psychedelic drugs have always been and remain the most
useful molecular probes available to science for exploringthe relationship between the subjective experience of mind
and neurobiological processes./Preface XIX
TERENCE MCKENNA
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Despite its pretensions to objectivity, science, like any other
human institution, places a certain vested interest in its own
self-preservation; thus it is likely to be less than enthusiastic,
if not openly hostile, toward any investigative strategy that
could potentially call its most basic assumptions in question.
/Id.
I have pointed out in my review of McKenna’s Archaic Revival
that he envisioned a future ‘psychedelic’ science which I believe
will be a holistic science that uses the psychedelic experience for
the progress and true spiritual evolution of the human. Presently,
he adds on another element to this broad vision, which is exactly
what I call the holistic direction this science will be going to take:
It may be that the psychedelic experience cannot be under-
stood using only the reductionist models of science, and thatonly by a conscious unification of the reductionist, analytical
methods of science with the holistic, nonanalytical approach
of the shaman can we hope to understand, appreciate, and
apply the lessons learned from such experiences./Id.
The next element in McKenna’s vision would be the applica-
tion of psychedelics to healing. The idea of psychoanalysis being a
potential adaptation of shamanism to modern society is not new,
and it does not originate from McKenna. It has been voiced by
Freud rather early in its creational process of psychoanalysis, and
by other psychoanalysts of the closer Freudian circle.
But McKenna smartly fits the idea into his holistic vision of an
‘enlightenment’ of modern culture through shamanism, at some
point in the future. He points out:
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physics concerns the smaller processes, which are likewise
organisms, in that they experience a reference to things past,
immediate, and future. For the primary organisms, we ob-
serve this relation as a factor in its external aspects; for our-
selves, we observe it as an element of our psychological field
of awareness. But if we experience, in experiencing ourselves
as process, our essential relatedness to other processes in
other times and places, are we justified in denying this expe-
rience to other, primary organisms?/39-40
To stay with the subject of science philosophy, McKenna has
given in this book an important contribution to the present discus-
sion of what has been called the Holographic Universe (Talbot), the
Conscious Universe (Radin) or the Unfolding Universe (Bohm).
The holographic theory is only one of many ‘puzzles’ that are
concisely presented and commented by Ervin Laszlo in his study
Science and the Akashic Field (2005) which I have reviewed in The
New Paradigm in Science and Systems Theory (2014). I myself think
that there are many natural phenomena that are best explained
when we grasp the notion of hologram-like coding in nature.
The unformed archetypes of the collective unconscious may be the holographic substrate of the species’ mind. Each indi-
vidual and mind-brain is then like a fragment of the total
hologram; but, in accordance with holographic principles,
each fragment contains the whole. It will be remembered
that each part of a hologram can reconstruct an entire image,
but that the details of the image will deteriorate in propor-
tion to its fragmentation, while the overstructure will re-main. Out of this feature of holography arises the quality of
individual point of view and, in fact, individuality itself. If
each mind is a holographic medium, then each is contiguous
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with every other, because of the ubiquitous distribution of
information in a hologram. Each individual mind would
thus be a representation of the ‘essence’ of reality, but the
details could not be resolved until the fragments of the col-
lective hologram were joined./51
Confronted with certain holographic qualities as a feature of
both mind and brain, it seems reasonable to ask whether
holographic principles are found on other levels of organiza-
tion. We can find this most apparently in the organismic
realm, in the fact of the ubiquity and redundancy of DNA.
We refer to the fact that DNA seems to store information
holographically, in that the nucleotide sequence of the mole-
cule is identical in every cell of a given organism. The DNA
from one cell theoretically contains all the information nec-
essary to regenerate the entire organism./52
TERENCE MCKENNA
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Ralph Metzner (Ed.)
Ayahuasca
Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature
New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999
Ayahuasca is a fascinating reader presenting personal experiences with the sacred
Ayahuasca brew, and it’s a most valuable resource for both researchers and those
interested in a spiritual voyage.
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In addition to this invaluable source material, the introduction
and comments by the editor of the book, Ralph Metzner, a widely
acclaimed authority on shamanism and entheogens, are precious
and well-written. The book throughout is very readable; there is
no ethnobotanic gibberish, and the editor has mastered the task to
unite different energies into a powerful laser.
I had an immense interest and pleasure reading this book, and
it captivated me page after page. It is an absolute must-have in apersonal growth library, in a spiritual library, in a library about
tribal peoples, in an ethnobotanic library, and in a specialized li-
brary about shamanism. Ralph Metzner writes in the introduction:
Ayahuasca is widely recognized by anthropologists as being
probably the most powerful and most widespread shamanic
hallucinogen. In the tribal societies where these plants andplant preparations are used, they are regarded as embodi-
ments of conscious intelligent beings that only become visi-
ble in special states of consciousness, and who can function
as spiritual teachers and sources of healing power and
knowledge (...) The plants are referred to as medicines, a
term that means more than a drug: something like a healing
power or energy that can be associated with a plant, a per-son, an animal, even a place. They are also referred to as
plant teachers and there are still extant traditions of many-
years-long initiations and trainings in the use of these
medicines./3
Some people, and among them many skeptics, ask why one
who is not part of such a culture and who is not an ethnobotanist
should have an interest in engaging in a plant-induced spiritual
quest? Ralph Metzner gives a clear answer:
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A powerful resurgence of respectful and reverential attitudes
toward the living Earth and all its creatures seems to be a
natural consequence of explorations with visionary plant
teachers./4
Terence McKenna emphasized in all his books another impor-
tant aspect of psychedelics: their boundary-dissolving nature. Pa-
triarchy is unique in human history in its obsessional and neurotic
striving for setting boundaries, putting up limits, erecting fences,dividing naturally grown landscapes, dissecting bodies for ‘vivi-
section’, splitting the atom, dividing life and nature into ‘white-
god’ and ‘black-devil’, and so on and so forth. We won’t get rid of
our patriarchal tradition by a magic stroke of destiny nor by rebel-
lion. The way to go is to overcome the boundaries and gain access
to the whole.With erecting a divider between man and nature, our culture
has developed a schizoid and delusional fantasy of man being
‘superior’ in creation, having ‘dominion’ over nature, obviously
forgetting that we own our very existence to this nature that we
tend to condemn as low and unspiritual. In the run of patriarchy,
and thus since the last five thousand years, the really destructive
and life-denying ideology was not coming from Sumer, Babylon
or Rome, but from the suffocating ethics of puritanical fundamen-
talism. This cultural perversion lasted a few hundred years, and
perhaps we are now at a turning point? Metzner notes:
Over the past two millennia Western civilization has increas-ingly developed patterns of domination based on the as-
sumption of human superiority. The dominator pattern has
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involved the gradual desacralization, objectification and ex-
ploitation of all nonhuman nature./5
And by doing so, to paraphrase Thomas Moore’s Care of the
Soul (1994)—which I am going to review next, we have created a
cultural narcissism without equal in human history. For the scien-
tist and explorer of consciousness, there are other values con-
nected with the quest of getting back in touch with the spirits of
nature. Metzner notes:
As a result of the conflict between the Christian church and
the new experimental science of Newton, Galileo, Descartes,
and others, a dualistic worldview was created. On the one
hand was science, which confined itself to material objects
and measurable forces. Anything having to do with purpose,
value, morality, subjectivity, psyche, or spirit, was the do-main of religion, and science stayed out of it. Inner experi-
ences, subtle perceptions and spiritual values were not con-
sidered amenable to scientific study and came therefore to be
regarded as inferior forms of reality—merely subjective as
we say. This encouraged a purely mechanistic and myopi-
cally detached attitude towards the natural world. Percep-
tion of and communication with the spiritual essences andintelligences inherent in nature have regularly been regarded
with suspicion, or ridiculed as misguided enthusiasm or
mysticism./6
Now, as to the question of how plant-derived psychedelics
work and what they do to human consciousness, Ralph Metzner
summarizes some of the current theories or metaphors:
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Two analogies or metaphors for the drug experience have
been repeatedly used by writers both in the psycholytic and
psychedelic paradigms. One is the amplifier analogy, accord-
ing to which the drug functions as a nonspecific amplifier of
psychic contents. The amplification may occur in part as a
result of a lowering of sensory thresholds, an opening of the
doors of perception, and may in part be due to as yet not
understood central processes involving one or more neuro-
transmitters. The other analogy is the microscope metaphor:
it has repeatedly been said that psychedelics could play the
same role in psychology as the microscope does in biology—
opening up realms and processes of the human mind to di-
rect, repeatable, verifiable observation that have hitherto
been largely hidden or inaccessible. Both amplifier and mi-
croscope are technological metaphors for expanded percep-
tion and divination—the ability to see and hear more vividly,
to see into other, normally invisible worlds or dimensions,
and to obtain otherwise hidden knowledge./24-25
One aspect that ethnology may have overlooked in shamanic
cultures is their real—and not just fantasmatic—knowledge about
healing with plants, a knowledge so vast, and so deep that, with-
out having any technological instruments of inquiry at their dis-position, seemed a sheer impossibility to many researchers.
As a result, many of them brushed this knowledge off as non-
sense, exaggeration or myth. Now, modern research has shown
that all is real, but at the same time researchers became even more
strongly aware of the impossibility of it. The only hypothesis that
could explain it was the one actually forwarded by the natives
themselves: that they receive their knowledge directly from the
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plant teachers, without using any further instruments or tools,
while being in psychedelic trance. Metzner notes:
Some of the indigenous healers and herbalists are veritable
walking encyclopedias of medicinal botanical knowledge.
They may have direct personal knowledge of hundreds,
even thousands of plants, and what illnesses or conditions
they can be used to cure; this knowledge was not acquired
by literate means, but by direct experience./29
For all their demonstrated knowledge of herbs and medi-
cine, the ayahuasqueros are unanimous in their assertion
that the knowledge is given to them by the spirits of the
plants, the forest, or the animals. Likewise, the healing is
done, not so much by the plant drug, but by the spirit or es-
sence invoked by the healer, via the use of the plant teacher,
and expressed in the songs. With this belief, which is com-
pletely at variance with the accepted medical model focused
on isolating and purifying the molecular compound, they
would agree with Samuel Hahnemann, the great eighteenth-
century German physician who founded homeopathy. In
this medical system, the plant drug extracts are repeatedly
diluted to such a degree that often not a single molecule of
the original substance is left. In addition they are shaken or
vibrated, a process referred to as succussion. Hahnemann
said that through the repeated dilutions and succussions the
spirit or essence of the plant was entirely released, or liber-
ated, from the plant substance, and was thus able to act on
the spiritual or essence of the patient. In this recognition of
the spiritual essences inherent in plant medicines and their
healing virtue, the homeopaths and the shamanic healers are
in accord. It is also, I would add, the underlying assumption
and understanding that I and my colleagues and collabora-
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tors have come to and that is represented, explicitly or im-
plicitly, in the accounts in this book./32
I will come to an end with my review and refer the reader to a
few quotes from the contributions to the reader that I publish be-
low. I hope that this review and the further quotes will convince
you of the usefulness of this well-edited book and make it a part
of your library.
Contributions
Adamson, Raoul
C., Stefan
D., Raimundo
G., Eugenia
Callaway, J.C.
GaneshaGrob, Charles S.
H., Wahtola
L., Abraham
Lovetree, I.M.
McKenna, Dennis J.
Metzner, Ralph
S., Kate
S., Renata
T., Oregon
Raoul Adamson
Initiation into an Ancient Lineage of Visionary Healers, in:
Ayahuasca, Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 46-57
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I become aware of a morphic resonance between serpent and
intestines: the form of the snake is more or less a long intes-
tinal tract, with a head and a tail end; and conversely, our
gut is serpentine, with its twists and turns and its peristaltic
movement. So the serpent, winding its way through my in-
testinal tract was ‘teaching’ my intestines how to be more
powerful and effective—certainly a gut-level experience!/48
The visionary warrior is not just passively taking in the vi-
sions, as we do when watching a film or television, or during
most dreaming. The warrior is actively looking at them, ob-
serving the details, searching for the meaning behind the
appearances. (…) Painful or traumatic experiences are often
incomplete, sometimes because they are powerful prohibi-
tions on the third phase of communicating. Healing or re-
covery from trauma involves telling the story, so that it is
shared, believed and recognized./52
I had known that songs could heal before, but what was new
to my understanding here was that they could also function
in a protective manner against toxic emotional negativity./54
Stefan C.
Having So Recently Experienced My Death, It felt Miracu-
lous To Be Alive, in: Ayahuasca, Human Consciousness and the
Spirits of Nature , New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999,
pp. 64-70
As a physician, I commonly use and prescribe medication.
Until this experience of ayahuasca, I had never experiencedwhat a true medicine might be. It is a terrible shame that we
are unable to share the secrets and powers of this medicine
with the suffering people who come to us for help. I would
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like to believe, however, that a strategy could be imple-
mented for the future which could facilitate such interven-
tion. If our society is unable to incorporate such a change,
however, it will be sad world indeed./68
Conveying that the collective Gaia-nature of this planet can-
not much longer sustain its health and vitality in the face of
escalating environmental destruction perpetrated by a world
culture dominated by greed and aggression, the essence of
this ayahuasca inspired communication was to wake up be-
fore it is too late and mobilize what forces are necessary to
prevent the annihilation of nature and the obliteration of the
life forces it nurtures./69
Knowledge and information, contained in the core of the
experience, has swept through me. I have been catapulted to
a domain of being other than my self, more akin to the True
Self. I have stood humbled in the face of its immense other-
worldly power, and have dissolved in the embrace of life-
affirming ecstasy. These encounters have provided a learn-
ing experience of extraordinary depth and profundity. /70
Raimundo D.
The Great Serpentine Dance of Life, in: Ayahuasca, Human
Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New York: Thunder’s
Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 129-131
The plumed serpent is masculine, involves outer impression
and show of power; the unplumbed serpent is feminine, in-
volving inner expression and statement of strength. (…) Iexperienced my entire body being reprogrammed and rear-
ranged, even reconstituted at the deep cellular level. This
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resulted in an incredible feeling of openness, solidity, whole-
ness and openness./130
Eugenia G.
The Plant Spirits Help Me to Heal Myself and Others, in:
Ayahuasca, Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 124-128
I left conventional pharmacy, and the plant kingdom pro-
vided me with a new profession as an herbalist-educator of
botanical medicines. (…) Besides being rich with verdant
fecundity and colorful wildlife, the rain forest holds secrets
that could change the course of medicine as we know it./127
Ayahuasca has allowed my everyday life to come more alive
—my skin became electric, and light was everywhere; lucid
dreams, messengers, birds, talking animals, and plant spirits
continue to teach me./128
J.C. Callaway, Ph.D.
Phytochemistry and Neuropharmacology of Ayahuasca, in:
Ayahuasca, Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 250-275
DMT fits rather well into certain subsets of serotonin recep-
tor sites within the brain (Callaway and McKenna 1998),
where it is believed to modify the flow of neuronal informa-
tion. (…) Although a function for its presence in the brain
has not been demonstrated, the production of visions in
dream sleep has been suggested as a role for endogenousDMT (Callaway 1998)./262
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Ganesha
A Vision of Sekhmet, in: Ayahuasca, Human Consciousness and
the Spirits of Nature , New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999,
pp. 76-85
Throughout this part of the session, I felt the balancing of
male and female energies, the dance of consciousness and
substance./81
As I read about Sekhmet and assimilated my experience
with her, the understanding that formed in my conscious-
ness was that Sekhmet is a Great Mother Goddess, one that
spans all time. With the sun disk at her head and the snake
around it, she symbolizes the serpent power of the root
chakra having risen to the crown. Thus, she encompasses
both heaven and Earth, and demonstrates the way to unite
the heaven and Earth of our own nature, Spirit and Form,
through the awakening of the kundalini power in the mulad-
hara chakra and its arising to the sahasrara chakra./83
Charles S. Grob, M.D.
The Psychology of Ayahuasca, in: Ayahuasca, Human Con-
sciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New York: Thunder’sMouth Press, 1999, pp. 214-249
The field of ayahuasca studies poses a challenge to main-
stream psychiatry and psychology. Long neglected by Euro-
American science, this Amazonian plant hallucinogen con-
coction known in native Quechua as the 'vine of the dead' or
'vine of the soul', has recently begun to attract increasingdegrees of interest. (…) The fields of psychiatry and psy-
chology have never had an appreciable comfort level with
the mind states of aboriginal peoples. Native peoples have
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often been disparaged and the technologies designed to in-
duce ritual trance states either pathologized or ignored.
Years past, during a time of psychoanalytic preeminence, the
medicine men, or healers, of these aboriginal peoples were
judged to be mentally ill (Devereux 1958), their behaviors
variably attributed to diagnoses ranging from schizophrenia
to hysteria and epilepsy. The primitive medicine man, or
shaman, was often identified as a deranged aboriginal tyrant
and the wellspring of that psychopathology inflicting the
entire tribal group, preventing their elevation into civilized
society. Until quite recently the prevailing perception of the
aboriginal has been one of the ignorant, deluded and dan-
gerous savage, whose only salvation lay in abandoning the
traditions of his ancestors for the customs and beliefs of
modern culture. The proposition of taking seriously the
plant technologies underlying the collective belief system
found in native shamanism was given little credence by
mainstream science and medicine./214-215
Ethnobotanical explorations in diverse geographic regions
have yielded a surprising plethora of psychoactive plants,
some with no prior history of cultural identification. Knowl-
edge of potent psychochemical recipes have begun to dis-
seminate, often with the aid of the Internet. Use of plant hal-
lucinogens, in both underground and formal settings, is
growing. It is time for post-modern medical science to re-
awaken and be attentive to this rapidly emerging phenome-
non. Beyond the need to assess safety parameters, the full
implications to paradigms of healing and reality need to be
grappled with./215
The occupying Spaniards and Portuguese, possessors of now
of most of the New World’s rain forests, brutally persecuted
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and exploited native cultures (Taussig 1987). Observing the
utilization of sacred plants to induce an ecstatic intoxication,
and identifying the central role they played in aboriginal
religion and ritual, these new European overlords harshly
condemned their use. Hernando Ruiz de Alarcon, an early
Spanish chronicler of native customs, described how the
plants ‘when drunk deprive of the senses, because it is very
powerful, and by this means they communicate with the
devil, because he talks to them when they are deprived of
judgement with the said drink, and deceive them with dif-
ferent hallucinations, and they attribute it to a god they say
is inside the seed’ (Guerra 1971). Condemned by the Holy
Inquisition in 1616, the ceremonial use of the plant hallu-
cinogens by aboriginal peoples of the New World survived
only by going deeply underground, remaining hidden from
the hostile and rapacious European-imposed dominant
culture./219
Wahtola H.
Teaching the Body Its Relationship to the Spirit, in: Ayahua-
sca, Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 148-152
My lower centers, my thighs, pelvis, and abdomen became
the focus for the waves of fluid-like power that pulsed
through my spaces. This fluid power was metabolizing and
restructuring the consciousness of my body in relationship
to the power and awareness available to it. As the intensifi-
cation occurred, the purge was stimulated, without the deep
significance of the first time with ayahuasca./150
The guide gave clues that helped me greatly in re-
establishing a center of focus when the flooding effects of the
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medicine would space out in directions that I didn’t want to
go. One set of instructions related to the four things useful to
remember on a journey, inner or outer: one is your intention
of purpose, two is your ancestors, three is your light or
awareness, and four is the Earth./Id.
Abraham L.
The Long, Multi-Faceted Journey of Jewish Experience, in:
Ayahuasca, Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 142-147
I saw and felt these masses of Jews clinging to something in
their hearts. Clinging to grief, like an addiction. Holding
onto it as though it was something precious, something that
made them special or closer to God./146
This feeling of being attacked reinforces the defensive walls
that surround the heart. In truth, there is an inner battle that
Jews need to wage in order to become free of their present
conflict. Perhaps, like with me, there is a need to fight to lib-
erate the inner feminine./147
I.M. Lovetree
Liquid Plum’r for the Soul, in: Ayahuasca, Human Conscious-
ness and the Spirits of Nature , New York: Thunder’s Mouth
Press, 1999, pp. 116-123
After the ayahuasca sessions, I feel cleansed within,
throughout and all about. I have a sense of having been
healed at all levels, especially the physical. The ayahuascamedicine seems to have a special affinity for the gastrointes-
tinal system: it snakes its way through the body, seeking out
and eliminating obstructions to life energy flow. I sometimes
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think of it as a form of kundalini, a Liquid Plum’r for the
soul. For cleansing and healing, for reconnecting with the
vegetable kingdom, ayahuasca is definitely my medicine of
choice./123
Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D.
Ayahuasca: An Ethnopharmacologic History, in: Ayahuasca,
Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 187-207
Ayahuasca is a symbiotic ally of the human species; its asso-
ciation with our species can be traced at least as far back as
New World prehistory. The lessons we have acquired from
it, in the course of millennia of coevolution, may have pro-
found implications for what it is to be human, and to be an
intelligent, questioning species within the biospheric com-
munity of species. Although we have no certain answers, the
question of the nature and meaning of the relationship be-
tween humanity and this visionary vine, and by extension
with the entire universe of plant teachers, persistently trou-
bles us. Why should plants contain alkaloids that are close
analogs of our own neurotransmitters, and that enable them
to ‘talk’ to us? What ‘message’ are they trying to convey, if
any? Was it purely happenstance, purely accident, that led
some early, experiment-minded shaman to combine the aya-
huasca vine and the chacruna leaf, to make the tea that
raised the curtain on the ‘invisible landscape’ for the first
time?/207
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Introduction
by Ralph Metzner, in: Ayahuasca, Human Consciousness and
the Spirits of Nature , New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999,
pp. 1-45
They have been called psychotomimetic ('madness mimick-
ing'), psycholytic ('psyche loosening'), psychedelic ('mind
manifesting'), hallucinogenic ('vision inducing') and entheo-
genic ('connecting with the sacred within'). The different
terms reflect the widely differing attitudes and intentions,
the varying set and setting with which these substances have
been approached./2
Ayahuasca is widely recognized by anthropologists as being
probably the most powerful and most widespread shamanic
hallucinogen. In the tribal societies where these plants and
plant preparations are used, they are regarded as embodi-
ments of conscious intelligent beings that only become visi-
ble in special states of consciousness, and who can function
as spiritual teachers and sources of healing power and
knowledge./3
The plants are referred to as ‘medicines,’ a term that means
more than a drug: something like a healing power or energy
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that can be associated with a plant, a person, an animal, even
a place. They are also referred to as 'plant teachers' and there
are still extant traditions of many-years-long initiations and
trainings in the use of these medicines./Id.
Kate S.
Breaking from the Bondage of the Mind, in: Ayahuasca, Hu-
man Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New York: Thun-
der’s Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 71-75
I had the thought that the reason certain cultural or ethnic
art forms appear is because of the planetary energy in the
location of the origin of that form, and that the music and
the art were intricately connected and reflective of the en-
ergy of the planetary location of their origin and the energies
which exist there./72
Renata S.
A most palpably Buddhist-like experience, in: Ayahuasca,
Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature , New York:
Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 132-134
My experience with the ayahuasca (as was true of my expe-rience with LSD) put me in touch with an understanding of
these ideas experientially. It was as if my body accepted
ideas of oneness, duality, paradox, etc. on a cellular level.
/133
I understood the sad and frightening visions to be every bit
as wonderful as the most beautiful visions. The marvel wasthat I felt totally alive, open, responsive, and fearless! Ac-
cepting the fleeting nature of all, it was so simple to be fully
present for every moment. Perhaps for the first time ever, I
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felt an implicit trust in my capacity to guide myself through
the incredible labyrinth of dark and light./Id.
I felt the medicine to be much like a snake, traveling from
my brain downwards, finally lodging in my groin. As I came
to the end of my experience, I felt rooted in some tangled,
steamy jungle, rich with the scent of death and rebirth,
slowly becoming one with the vines and the very earth
itself./Id.
Oregon T.
Knowledge Was Graciously Invoked in Me by the Plant
Teacher, in: Ayahuasca, Human Consciousness and the Spirits of
Nature , New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999, pp. 92-97
I saw the machinations of the ego-personality and its subtle
deceit of the Self, of the true Monad./95
The ayahuasca plant teacher, much like the entheogens
probably employed in the Eleusinian and other ancient mys-
tery religions, assists in the sought-after remembrance, what
Plato referred to as anamnesis./97
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Thomas Moore
Care of the Soul
Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature
New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999
Care of the Soul is one of the most important books of our times. It really had a
bandwagon effect in that it pulled after it a whole train with similar productions.However, what all those who think they can write such a book from scratch over-
look is that soul is not built from scratch, but in an often painful and lengthy
process of birth or ascension.
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Without the author having lived more than a decade of his life
in the monastic environment, this book would not have been born.
And without his lifelong studies of Renaissance art and literature,
the depth of the book would not have been reached.
The book is the ultimate no in the face of the positivist mania
of ‘getting everything fixed’ if only you buy the right book from
the right coach.
From my perspective, this book proves that ‘quick-fix’ coach-ing doesn’t work, because you can’t help somebody by bypassing
the soul, simply because there is no growth without soul growth.
And here the words ‘personal coaching’ and ‘personal power’ are
misleading insofar as personal, looking at the etymological root of
the word, means ‘related to the mask.’ It’s polish.
The recipe is clone a successful person, by modeling, as those
hero-coaches express themselves, and you more or less become
that person—which means for most people to become the wallet
of that person. This means in practice you become alienated from
your true self, and ultimately fail to realize your life’s mission. So
what is soul, and what are soul values? There is no better book as
this to find the answers. Thomas Moore writes:
Renaissance philosophers often said that it is the soul that
makes us human. We can turn that idea round and note that
it is when we are most human that we have greatest access
to soul. (...) By trying to avoid human mistakes and failures,
we move beyond the reach of soul./9
It seems obvious that without love there can be no cure, be-
cause love itself is healing. If this truth was known and the nature
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of love understood in our culture, we would not have the high
amount of depression and schizophrenia that strongly marks our
society and shows that most people have a vacuum in their hearts,
there namely where they should have love. Moore writes:
The ultimate cure, as many ancient and modern psycholo-
gies of depth have asserted, comes from love and not from
logic. (…) Often care of the soul means not taking sides
when there is a conflict at a deep level. It may be necessary
to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace contradiction
and paradox./14
This is exactly what real coaching is about, showing options,
in order to help the person out of an either-or dilemma brought
about by judging and condemning. Fact is that millions of people
are trapped by either-or choices in life because the tertium is not
given (tertium non datur), and this is the abysmal and fatal conse-
quence of Aristotelian logic that has subsisted over the ages, like a
virus, until today. And it truly is a virus for it has perverted natu-
rally integrated humans into schizoid angel-demons who act from
a personal base paradigm of compulsion, and not from a sane and
integrated mind. Moore shows with striking clarity the pitfalls of
moralism:
Moralism is one of the most effective shields against the
soul, protecting us from its intricacy. (…) I would go even
further. As we get to know the soul and fearlessly consider
its oddities and the many different ways it shows itself
among individuals, we may develop a taste for the perverse.
We may come to appreciate its quirks and deviances. Indeed,
we may eventually come to realize that individuality is born
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in the eccentricities and unexpected shadow tendencies of
the soul, more so than in normality and conformity./17
I would go as far as saying that moralism not only bypasses
the soul, it also bypasses life. It is the reaction of emotionally crip-
pled people, people who have from childhood been starved with
love and who have learnt only one thing: killing. They have learnt
to ‘kill perversity’ in themselves, thereby killing life in themselves,
and thereby creating the soil for abysmal violence within and with-
out. This is exactly how the hero culture works: it teaches people
to kill, by teaching them to kill off their emotions when they are
still in the cradle. Moore says that from the perspective of the soul,
perversity is meaningful, and has to be embraced instead of being
discarded out and wiped under the carpet:
Care of the soul is interested in the not-so-normal, the way
that soul makes itself felt most clearly in the unusual expres-
sions of a life, even and maybe especially in the problematic
ones. (...) Sometimes deviation from the usual is a special
revelation of truth. In alchemy this was referred to as the
opus contra naturam, an effect contrary to nature. We might
see the same kind of artful unnatural expression within ourown lives. When normality explodes or breaks out into cra-
ziness or shadow, we might look closely, before running for
cover and before attempting to restore familiar order, at the
potential meaningfulness of the event. If we are going to be
curious about the soul, we may need to explore its devia-
tions, its perverse tendency to contradict expectations. And
as a corollary, we might be suspicious of normality. A facadeor normality can hide a wealth of deviance, and besides, it is
fairly easy to recognize soullessness in the standardizing of
experience./18
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Embracing perversity is one leg of the integrated human, em-
bracing suffering, or pain, or discomfort, is the other. Moore ex-
plains:
If you attend the soul closely enough, with an educated andsteadfast imagination, changes take place without your be-
ing aware of them until they are all over and well in place.
Care of the soul observes the paradox whereby a muscled,
strong-willed pursuit of change can actually stand in the
way of substantive transformation. (…) Renaissance doctors
said that the essence of each person originates as a star in the
heavens. (…) Care of the soul, looking back with special re-gard to ancient psychologies for insight and guidance, goes
beyond the secular mythology of the self and recovers a
sense of the sacredness of each individual life. This sacred
quality is not just value – all lives are important. It is the un-
fathomable that is the very seed and heart of each individ-
ual. Shallow therapeutic manipulations aimed at restoring
normality or tuning a life according to standards reduces—shrinks—the profound mystery to the pale dimensions of a
social common denominator referred to as the adjusted per-
sonality. Care of the soul sees another reality altogether. It
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appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not
offer the illusion of a problem-free life. It sees every fall into
ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that
the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an an-
gel. The uniqueness of a person is made up of the insane and
the twisted as much as it is of the rational and the normal. To
approach this paradoxical point of tension where adjustment
and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of
our mystery-filled, star-born nature./19-20
In order to become whole inwardly and in our lives, we need
to embrace simplicity, and imperfection. Living in robotic culture,
we can resist becoming robots by embracing the ultimate truth that
we are always imperfect. Moore has found a tremendously wistful
tradition with the Renaissance saints and healers that warned,
more than five hundred years ago, of the pitfalls of perfectionism,
which has become, in the meantime, a real cultural disease in our
high-tech nations. More reminds Nicholas of Cusa:
Nicholas of Cusa, the great fifteenth-century theologian who
wrote a book about the importance of educated ignorance
says we have to find ways to unlearn those things that
screen us from the perception of profound truth. We have to
achieve the child’s unknowing because we have been made
so smart. Zen also recommends not losing the beginner’s
mind, so important for immediacy in experience./52
The two major problems young people experience in our
modern robot-society is narcissism and boomeritis. The first con-dition is marked by an almost total absence of soul, the second is
the inability to digest knowledge in a way that it becomes a part of
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self, instead of building layers around the person. Moore shows
that there is more to narcissism, that modern culture is profoundly
narcissistic in its very setup as a ‘scientific’ society:
Narcissism has no soul. In narcissism we take away the
soul’s substance, its weight and importance, and reduce it to
an echo of our own thoughts. There is no such thing as the
soul. We say. It is only the brain going through its electrical
and chemical changes. Or it is only behavior. Or it is only
memory and conditioning. In our social narcissism, we also
dismiss the soul as irrelevant. We can prepare a city or na-
tional budget, but leave the needs of the soul untended. Nar-
cissism will not give its power to anything as nymphlike as
the soul./58-59
What the narcissist does not understand is that the self-
acceptance he craves can’t be forced or manufactured. It has
to be discovered, in a place more introverted than the usual
haunts of the narcissist. There has to be some inner question-
ing, and maybe even confusion./60-61
I suspect that this is a very concrete part of curing narcissism
—talking to the trees. By engaging the so-called ‘inanimate’
world in dialogue, we are acknowledging its soul. Not all
consciousness is human. That in itself is a narcissistic belief.
/61
Before reading this book, it was indeed my habit to talk to
trees that got me to be interested in shamanism. That was the trig-
ger of my spiritual quest to ingest the traditional sacred Ayahua-sca brew. I left this initiation completely transformed, regained the
whole range of magical beliefs I once fostered as a child, and be-
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came whole again. This wholeness was precisely the cure of my
narcissistic fixation. Now, Thomas Moore, has put a particular
stress in this book on the danger of collective narcissism and he in-
vestigates the culture of the United States of America, to identify it
as a narcissistic culture par excellence. Moore writes:
Nations, as well as individuals, can go through this initia-
tion. America has a great longing to be the New World of
opportunity and a moral beacon for the world. It longs tofulfill these narcissistic images of itself. At the same time it is
painful to realize the distance between the reality and that
image. America’s narcissism is strong. It is paraded before
the world. If we were to put the nation on the couch, we
might discover that narcissism is its most obvious symptom.
And yet that narcissism holds the promise that this all-
important myth can find its way into life. In other words,America’s narcissism is its refined puer spirit of genuine
new vision. The trick is to find a way to that water of trans-
formation where hard self-absorption turns into loving dia-
logue with the world./62
Narcissus becomes able to love himself only when he learns
to love that self as an object. He now has a view of himself assomeone else. This is not ego loving ego; this is ego loving
the soul, loving a face the soul presents. We might say that
the cure for narcissism is to move from love of self, which
always has a hint of narcissism in it, to love of one’s deep
soul. Or, to put it another way, narcissism breaking up in-
vites us to expand the boundaries of who we think we
are./63
A neurotic narcissism won’t allow the time needed to stop,
reflect, and see the many emotions, memories, wishes, fanta-
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sies, desires, and fears that make up the materials of the soul.
As a result, the narcissistic person becomes fixed on a single
idea of who he is, and other possibilities are automatically
rejected'./67
Peter Pan resisted to grow up. And astonishingly so, Thomas
Moore writes that growing-up is not a cure for narcissism, in the
contrary:
But the solution of narcissism is not growing up. On the con-
trary, the solution to narcissism is to give the myth as much
realization as possible, to the point where a tiny bud appears
indicating the flowering of personality through its narcis-
sism. (…) Narcissism is a condition in which a person does
not love himself. This failure in love comes through as its
opposite because the person tries so hard to find self-
acceptance. The complex reveals itself in the all-too-obvious
effort and exaggeration. It’s clear to all around that narcis-
sism’s love is shallow. We know instinctively that someone
who talks about himself all the time must not have a very
strong sense of self. To the individual caught up in this
myth, the failure to find self-love is felt as a kind of maso-
chism, and, whenever masochism comes into play, a sadistic
element is not far behind. The two attitudes are polar ele-
ments in a split power archetype./71
Anyway, from the soul perspective, and leaving political reali-
ties untouched, Thomas Moore writes:
The secret of healing narcissism is not to heal it at all, but tolisten to it. (…) I am stuff. I am made up of things and quali-
ties, and in loving these things I love myself./73
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This is in accordance with a general soul-based healing ap-
proach that was the prevalent approach to healing during the
Middle-Ages and the Renaissance.
Robert Burton in his massive self-help book of the seven-
teenth century The Anatomy of Melancholy, says there is
only one cure for the melancholic sickness of love: enter into
it with abandon. Some authors today argue that romantic
love is such an illusion that we need to distrust it and keep
our wits about us so that we are not led astray. But warnings
like this betray a distrust of the soul./81
Interestingly enough, Krishnamurti’s approach to fear, pain,
humiliation and suffering is very similar. He often said in his talks
that we should not escape from pain or what we consider as nega-
tive, hurtful or humiliating in life, because if we do, there will bescars, while when we stay fully aware and do not escape the expe-
rience, there will be no scars.
I believe that the quotes suffice to give a taste of this unique
production of a real author-artist who walks his talk. I recommend
this book without hesitation and I recommend it also to young
people and elders. There is much spiritual water to draw from it,
for all members of our culture.
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Jeremy Narby
The Cosmic Serpent
DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
2nd Printing (Originally published in 1998)
New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2003
The Cosmic Serpent is an extraordinary and refreshing book. Written from the per-spective of an anthropologist, the book unveils many myths in that science when
it goes out ‘to meet the other’, and return to declare the peoples it met as schizo-
phrenic, retarded or ‘possessed by the devil.’
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But the author also reports how ethnology changed over time
and become more objective in its look on cultures that are mark-
edly different from our own.
Anthropologists discovered that their gaze was a tool of
domination and that their discipline was not only a child of
colonialism, it also served the colonial cause through its own
practices. The unbiased and supra-cultural language of the
observer was actually a colonial discourse and a form of
domination./14
From the early twentieth century onward, anthropologists
progressively extended the use of this Siberian term and
found shamans in Indonesia, Uganda, the Arctic, and Ama-
zonia. Some played drums, others drank plant decoctions
and sang; some claimed to cure, others cast spells. They were
unanimously considered neurotic, epileptic, psychotic, hys-
terical or schizophrenic./15
The change came abruptly. In 1949, Claude Lévi-Strauss
stated in a key essay that the shaman, far from being men-
tally ill, was in fact a kind of psychotherapist—the difference
being that the psychoanalyst listens, whereas the shaman
speaks. For Lévi-Strauss, the shaman is first of all a creator of
order, who cures people by transforming their incoherent
and arbitrary pains into an ordered and intelligible form./15
In this context of a critical review of Western science meeting
tribal cultures, Narby reveals a very important secret about tobacco,
and unveils the myths behind the current worldwide propagandaagainst tobacco, with its alleged cancerogenous effects.
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Narby, who has done research on tobacco over several years,
has published in this book a good part of the research results, and
gives further references in the footnotes. His research indicates
that it’s not tobacco that causes cancer, but additives and preserva-
tives that are put in cigarettes in the process of industrial fabrica-
tion. He writes:
There are fundamental differences between the shamanic use
of tobacco and the consumption of industrial cigarettes. The botanical variety used in the Amazon contains up to eight-
een times more nicotine than the plants used in Virginia-type
cigarettes. Amazonian tobacco is grown without chemical
fertilizers or pesticides and contains none of the ingredients
added to cigarettes, such as aluminum oxide, potassium ni-
trate, ammonium phosphate, polyvinyl acetate, and a hun-
dred or so others, which make up approximately 10 percentof the smokable matter. During combustion, a cigarette emits
some 4000 substances, most of which are toxic. Some of these
substances are even radioactive, making cigarettes the larg-
est single source of radiation in the daily life of an average
smoker. According to one study, the average smoker absorbs
the equivalent of the radiation dosages from 250 chest X-rays
per year. Cigarette smoke is directly implicated in more than24 serious illnesses, including 17 forms of cancer. In the
Amazon, on the other hand, tobacco is considered a remedy.
The Ashaninca word for healer or shaman is sheripiári—lit-
erally, the person who uses tobacco. The oldest Ashaninca
men I knew were all sheripiári. They were so old that they
did not know their own age, which only their deeply wrin-
kled skin suggested, and they were remarkably alert andhealthy. Intrigued by these disparities, I looked through the
data banks for comparative studies between the toxicity of
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the Amazonian variety (Nicotinia rustica) and the variety
used by the manufacturers of cigarettes, cigars, rolling to-
bacco, and pipe tobacco (Nicotinia tabacum). I found noth-
ing. The question, it seemed, had not been / asked. I also
looked for studies on the cancer rate among shamans who
use massive and regular doses of nicotine: again, nothing. So
I decided to write to the main authority on the matter, Jo-
hannes Wilbert, author of the book Tobacco and Shamanism in
South America , to put my questions to him. He replied: There
is certainly evidence that Western tobacco products contain
many different harmful agents which are probably not pre-
sent in organically grown plants. I have not heard of sha-
mans developing cancers but that may, of course, be a func-
tion of several things like lack of Western diagnosis, natural
life span of indigenous people, magico-religious restriction
of tobacco used in tribal societies. It seems clear that nicotine
does not cause cancer, given that it is active in the brain and
that cigarettes do not cause cancer in the brain, but in the
lungs, esophagus, stomach, pancreas, rectum, kidneys, and
bladder, the organs reached by the carcinogenic tars, which
are also swallowed. /120-121
But this general outline of shamanism and how the modern
world came to discover it is only a by-product of the book, so to
speak. The real topic is a very specific problem that Narby had
well defined in advance. He wanted to prove his hypothesis that
the visions and encounters psychedelic substances trigger are ac-
tually visions of the DNA, or the photons that irradiate from it. He
defines his research topic, first negatively, by demonstrating why
this link between entheogenic substances and the DNA could not
be discovered before by modern science:
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It seemed that no one had noticed the possible links between
the myths of primitive peoples and molecular biology. No
one had seen that the double helix had symbolized the life
principle for thousands of years around the world. On the
contrary, everything was upside down. It was said that hal-
lucinations could in no way constitute a source of knowl-
edge, that Indians had found their useful molecules by
chance experimentation, and that their myths were precisely
myths, bearing no relationship to the real knowledge discov-
ered in laboratories./71
This meant that the gaze of the Western specialist was too
narrow to see the two pieces that fit together to resolve the
puzzle. The distance between molecular biology and
shamanism/mythology was an optical illusion produced by
the rational gaze that separates things ahead of time, and as
objectivism fails to objectify its objectifying relationship, it
also finds it difficult to consider its presuppositions./78-79
The outline of Narby’s research is the most daring I have en-
countered in my shamanism research so far, and despite his well-
written book, it seems that his theory was not picked up by the
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scientific community so far. Narby had previously noted a de-
crease of interest in the subject, but his vision about a paradigm
change in science is hopeful in case that his hypothesis can be
confirmed by more in-depth research in the future:
From the middle of the 1970s onward, the connection be-
tween DNA and hallucinogens disappears from the scientific
literature. It would no doubt be interesting to reconsider it in
the light of the new knowledge established by molecular
biology./125
If my hypothesis is correct, and if ayahuasqueros perceive
DNA-emitted photons in their visions, it ought to be possi-
ble to find a link between these photons and consciousness. I
started looking for it in the biophoton literature. Researchers
working in this new field mainly consider biophoton emis-sion as a cellular language or a form of nonsubstantial bio-
communication between cells and organisms. Over the last
fifteen years, they have conducted enough reproducible ex-
periments to believe that cells use these waves to direct their
own internal reactions as well as to communicate among
themselves and even between organisms. For instance, pho-
ton emission provides a communication mechanism thatcould explain how billions of individual plankton organisms
cooperative in swarms, behaving like super-organisms.
/127-128
In addition, Narby made the discovery that quartz played a
decisive role in the biophoton research he went through for prov-
ing his hypothesis:
One thing had struck me as I went over the biophoton litera-
ture. Almost all of the experiments conducted to measure
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biophotons involved the use of quartz. As early as 1923, Al-
exander Gurvich noticed that cells separated by a quartz
screen mutually / influenced each other’s multiplication
processes, which was not the case with a metal screen. He
deducted that cells emit electromagnetic waves with which
they communicate. It took more than half a century to de-
velop a photomultiplier capable of measuring this ultra-
weak radiation: the container of this device is also made of
quartz. Quartz is a crystal, which means it has an extremely
regular arrangement of atoms that vibrate at a very stable
frequency. These characteristics make it an excellent receptor
and emitter of electromagnetic waves, which is why quartz
is abundantly used in radios, watches, and most electronic
technologies./128-129
Now, succinctly speaking, what Narby wants to show is that
what the shamans perceive as ‘spirits’ are in reality biophotons
emitted by the cells of the human body:
What if these spirits were none other than the biophotons
emitted by all the cells of the world and were picked up,
amplified, and transmitted by shamans’ quartz crystals,
Gurvich’s quartz screens, and the quartz containers of bio-
photon researchers? This would mean that spirits are beings
of pure light—as has always been claimed. /129
I will leave it here with my review and let you discover this
exciting book that is often quoted in shamanism literature. How-
ever, I have not yet found an author who either corroborated the
theory, or else falsified it. So much the more the book should be
read and its daring hypothesis shared with as many minds as pos-
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sible, so that a scientific agreement can be found to either corrobo-
rate or falsify this very interesting theory or hypothesis.
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Michael Newton
Life Between Lives
DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
2nd Printing (Originally published in 1998)
New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2003
Dr. Michael Newton is a counseling psychologist, master hypnotherapist, and
teacher. He has been on the faculty of higher educational institutions and has
served as a group therapy director for community mental health centers andspiritual renewal organizations in cooperation with hospitals and social service
agencies. Now retired after forty years of private practice, he is considered a pio-
neer in uncovering the mysteries of our life between lives through the develop-
ment of his own hypnosis techniques.
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Michael Newton is the author of the best-selling books Journey
of Souls and Destiny of Souls (winner of the most outstanding
metaphysical book award of the year at the annual Book Exposi-
tion of America in 2001), which have been translated into over
twenty-five languages. Dr. Newton received the annual award of
the most unique contribution by a hypnotherapist from the Na-
tional Association of Transpersonal Hypnotherapists. He has been con-
ferred as a Chevalier of Honor by the Order of Constantine for in-
ternational education. Dr. Newton is the founder of the Society for
Spiritual Regression (now called the Newton Institute for LBL Hypno-
therapy), which is an international organization designed for the
purpose of training experienced hypnotherapists in the techniques
of life between lives regression.
—Source: Life Between Lives (About the Author)
Life Between Lives is a fascinating door-opener not only for pro-
fessional hypnotherapists that it is actually written for, but also for
lay persons who wish to know more about the power of hypno-
therapy in its spiritual dimension, as life-between-lives regression
therapy.
In my review of this book I will however address the profes-
sional reader, simply because the quotes I shall provide from the
book are addressed to this target group. For the uninitiated, let me
put a precaution first.
As regression therapy seems to be very popular today, and as
there are today thousands of different regression therapies, let me
point out why LBL is not a regression therapy in the popular sense
of the word. Traditional regression therapy regresses the client
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into a former life, or a series of former lives, but does not touch the
realm in-between lives. Dr. Newton explains:
The fact is that most past life regressionists merely jump
their subjects from one former life to the next. Some still be-
lieve the time between lives is a grayish limbo of no conse-
quence. This notion is changing and I have wondered if it
didn’t originate with the ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead,
where people read that ‘the time between reincarnations in
the Bardo is a maximum of seven weeks.’/14
What is this realm of existence, and what is its vibrational na-
ture? Call it the Bardo with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or call it
the ‘astral plane’ with Charles Webster Leadbeater, the word is not
the thing.
What is important here is to see that Dr. Newton has created a
totally new, daring and absolutely unthinkable way of hypnotic
regression that fills the gap between the already fashionable past-
life regression and standard hypnotherapy, which typically re-
gresses back to childhood and the realm between conception and
birth.
Dr. Newton is a twofold pioneer, he is a pioneer both regard-
ing the professional conduct of a hypnotherapist (who was for-
merly simply not supposed to engage in this kind of regression),
and he is a spiritual pioneer because he opened a new channel for
truly religious experiences.
To begin with, I was dumbfounded that Dr. Newton confirmedin at least one instance my research that concludes as to the exis-
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tence of every human emanating a specific energy vibration that I
came to call Emotional Identity Code. Dr. Newton writes:
No two sessions are exactly the same because each soul has a
specific energy pattern for recovering stored immortal
memories and their own unique history of existence./4
I shall now provide and discuss a few pointed quotes so as to
demonstrate how Newton addresses the professional LBL hypno-
therapist and what advice he gives for the still quite esoteric prac-
tice of LBL hypnotherapy. Admittedly my quotes are rather lim-
ited, but this is due to the simple fact that this book addresses a
professional audience that will need much less guidance for pur-
chasing a book that might be of interest for them.
For Dr. Newton, the existence of the cosmic energy field that Iwas trying to conceptualize in my own research vocabulary is not
a matter of doubt, but a simple fact of life. He writes:
Your understanding and positive healing energy is vital as
you work to expose the client’s inner vision of their soul life.
In this way you also facilitate alignment of the subject’s vi-
brational soul energy to the rhythms of their human brains./6
And Dr. Newton confirms the perennial wisdom tradition that
may have inspired him when elaborating hypnotic regression to a
realm of life which was overlooked so far by almost all regression
therapists:
I have great respect for Taoist philosophy. The Taoists believe
that inspiration occurs when one’s conscious mind gets out
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of the way of their natural unconscious energy. In a sense,
our cosmic chi (energy) is what brings harmony and clarity
to the body. Having a keen internal focus also makes you a
better therapist./11
Newton also affirms the existence of soul values by affirming
the higher reality of a soul-based continuum and karma that re-
veals itself during LBL hypnotic regression. His advice to practi-
tioners is to help the client find their own personal identity by get-ting the complete (lost) picture of their soul reality. Dr. Newton
explains:
Current truths are succeeded by a higher and acute aware-
ness of ourselves that is at the core of expressing our per-
sonal identity. As spiritual regressionists utilizing the power
of hypnosis, we are now blessed with a new medium of
therapeutic intervention. If you are able to assist people inseeing the light of divinity within themselves and foster self-
discovery, then you will have made a real contribution to-
ward the ultimate enlightenment of our race./6
With this statement, Dr. Newton actually fully describes my
own mission, and I felt grateful for the encouragement I received
through his book. Also regarding the bioenergy, his book delivers
practical information that is barely to be found anywhere else.
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Please understand that prana is not the breath itself nor the
oxygen involved with breathing but the energy connected to
the breath. It is a connection to the energy of all living things
as a universal life force. I have worked to train myself to
seek energy pathways necessary to reach a particular client’s
mind while asking for help from my guide and my subject’s
guide. I begin by opening my mind and asking for guidance.
In this way I try to receive information and not send it. What
I do send to my clients are messages of confidence and reas-
surance. /12
In my research on sound and energy, I have learnt that the
human voice is a powerful musical instrument and vibrationally
very important, when used intently and ingenuously. Now, I was
wondering what the relationship was between sound and bio-
energy, and got some clues in Jonathan Goldman’s books HealingSounds (2002) and Tantra of Sound (2005) that I reviewed earlier in
this volume. Now, Dr. Newton writes on the subject of a hypno-
therapist modulating his or her voice, and thereby manipulating
vital energies:
I have mentioned how a subject’s own mental compass
within their higher spiritual self can assist them in reaching
the depth they require for specific soul memories. Also, that
one must always be aware of the two different magnetic en-
ergy fields which are activated between the minds of client
and facilitator working together. I bring this concept up
again to remind spiritual regressionists that the voice is an-
other means of reaching through the subject’s energy fieldand is useful in both removing emotional blocks and deep-
ening. /41
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Carefully pacing a session and using different voice inflec-
tions involving the application of sharp, soft, encouraging,
and calming techniques takes on greater hypnotic impor-
tance during a long mental journey./42
I work to pitch my vibrational voice tones to match both the
sound and type of responses coming from my LBL subject.
/Id.
Before the arrival of my clients, I take a few minutes to exer-
cise my voice range and sustain certain notes, especially in
the lower registers. Calibrating my voice with that of the
client from time to time fosters the merging of vibrational
energy./Id.
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Michel Odent
The Functions of the Orgasms
The Highway to Transcendence
London: Pinter & Martin, 2009
The Functions of the Orgasms is a cutting-edge study on the human pleasure func-
tion in its largest contextual framework, and with a special regard upon female
sexuality and the biological function of birthing and breastfeeding.
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Odent’s [book] is a stylish polemic that mixes endocrinology, comparative
anthropology, philology, anecdotes from the author's own medical practice.
—Steven Poole, The Guardian
‘Fetus ejection reflex’, ‘milk ejection reflex’, ‘sperm ejection reflex’, ‘orgas-
mogenic cocktail’ . . . These are examples of terms used by Michel Odent in his
study of the ecstatic/orgasmic states associated with different episodes of human
sexual life. This book about male and female orgasms is an opportunity to con-
vince anyone that humanity is at a turning point. Due to the improved technique
of medically assisted conceptions and cesareans, the advances in anesthesiology
and pharmacology, and the development of the food industry, women can now
conceive a baby, give birth and feed their infant without relying on the release of
‘cocktails of love hormones’. Human intelligence and ingenuity have made love
hormones redundant. Let us think long-term and let us raise questions in terms
of civilization. The future of humanity is at stake.
—Backcover
The study confirms and fully corroborates the earlier psycho-
logical, neurological and sociological research conducted by Wil-
helm Reich, Herbert James Campbell, James W. Prescott, Ashley
Montagu, and others. The title of the book is deliberately coined to
allude to Wilhelm Reich’s pioneering study The Function of the Or-
gasm (1942) as the author expressly notes, saying that his intention
for writing the book had been to ‘rewrite The Function of the Or-
gasm in a new scientific context.’
Before I review this book in detail, providing some quotes, I
may say this as an introduction. It is natural that one ventures out
from one’s own pleasure continuum. In other words, the under-
standing of the whole of life, and the way we perceive life, is con-
ditioned by how we experience pleasure. But it is also a limitative
view when one ventures to know only about one’s particular emo-
tional or sexual addiction.
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Michel Odent’s approach is comparatively larger. While the
focus in this book is primarily upon female sexuality and the sex-
ual nature of the process of birth, and breastfeeding, he is saying
that the experience of pleasure, in its ecstatic dimension, connects
us back with our source, and thus becomes an experience of tran-
scendence , an experience that is not just subjective and ‘personal’,
but essentially transpersonal. Odent links back to the oldest of
traditions, the times when women had freedom and power to live
the whole of their feminine erotic experience.
Odent’s main tenet in this book is that the female has been
disempowered to give birth autonomously, because there is a fetus
ejection reflex that is connected to the limbic system and the hypo-
thalamus, and that is overridden by the neocortex.
Hence, all kinds of procedures that ‘assist’ the mother in the birthing process are dysfunctional; all support, even midwifery, is
dysfunctional as it activates the neocortex in the laboring woman
and suppresses the fetus ejection reflex as a result.
The same is true for the orgasmic experience of breastfeeding
which was invaded by guilt and shame as a result of cultural con-
ditioning. Odent also reports that the rise in Cesarean birth led to
the fact that mothers do not want to breastfeed or only a short
time. He advances evidence for the fact that breastfeeding should
be a matter of years, not of months, with humans. He also reports
interesting details about certain apes and especially dolphins and
their non-reproductive sexual life, which is based, as with hu-
mans, exclusively upon pleasure and exchanging pleasure.
Besides, he speaks of a ‘cocktail of love hormones’ that is in-
volved in any kind of sexual experience and a special hormone
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called oxytocin that triggers in the laboring woman an altered
consciousness that leads to the mother ecstatically embracing the
newborn with all her soul, making for deep bonding between
mother and infant.
Needless to add that because of all our birth assistance and
tons of machinery, the flow of those hormones has been largely
blocked in our culture, which is the ultimate reason why women
came to dislike breastfeeding their infants, nor really bond with
them in the first moments after birth, which makes, as my own
research demonstrates, for our society’s enormous problems with
co-dependence.
One of the key factors in this etiology is lacking mother-infantsymbiosis during the first eighteen months of the newborn, in-
cluding a lack of breastfeeding and tactile care for the child from
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the part of the emotionally frigid mother. Generally speaking, it is
the inability of the mother to derive pleasure from the birthing ex-
perience. As a result of this blockage of the emotional flow, the
mother emotionally ‘clings’ to the child which is why she is un-
able to give to the baby a sufficient amount of autonomy to ex-
plore the world in freedom.
When one grasps the universality of pleasure in the higher
vertebrates and especially in the human, one’s personal addictionloses importance and one ventures into a larger realm of human
experience that is valid and experienced by many more people
than a tiny group. This then makes for a higher level of erotic in-
telligence and better overall judgment ability in matters of human
emosexual experiences and their cognitive, emotional and social
importance.To fully understand the similarities between orgasmic states
and other ecstatic states, we need to go far back in time, namely to
the Eastern Tantra , a culture that preceded the pleasure-hostile Ve-
danta by thousands of years.
While Vedanta is a relatively new religious paradigm in Hindu
culture, Tantra was much longer-lived, and for good reasons.
Odent also cites the ‘age of sacred prostitutes’ as being besides
Tantra one of the cultures that understood this hidden connection.
Generally, the author speaks about a distorted scientific world-
view in which the main paradigms were forged only by men:
It is as if there are female ways to evaluate the comparativeimportance of different perspectives in exploring human
nature. All scientific hypotheses are more or less based on
intuitive knowledge and intuitive knowledge is gender re-
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lated. Until recently the scientific world was highly domi-
nated by men. We are entering a new phase in the history of
sciences, with a more symmetrical input from each gender.
/4
Based upon this insight into cultural bias, which is intrinsically
a bias of perception, the author explains how the fetus ejection re-
flex could be overlooked for so long:
There are several reasons why we’ll first look at the fetus
ejection reflex. The first reason is that after thousands of
years of culturally controlled birth very few people—includ-
ing the natural childbirth advocates—can imagine what it is
about. Another reason is that, in the current / scientific con-
text, when the fetus ejection reflex is understood, it is easier
to look at the other orgasmic/ecstatic states. We must addthat this climax probably corresponds to the top of the high-
est possible ladder human beings may have the opportunity
to climb. /4-5
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In accordance with the oldest religious teachings of the world,
not only Tantra, but also Taoist doctrine and especially the teach-
ings of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu in China, Michel Odent advocates
the cultivation of sensuality and ‘orgasmic states’ as the ultimate
pathway to transcendence, and the realization of unity with all-
that-is. It is wonderful to see that a medical doctor, famous obste-
trician, scientist and author of our days has found this perennial
wisdom that I equally dug out of the cultural treasure of the an-
cient wisdom traditions.
And equally in accordance with these traditions, Odent warns
of the danger to overstimulate the neocortex through an exagger-
ated focus upon language, and concepts. In all natural processes
that require a let-go and an utmost of spontaneity, such as the sex-
ual embrace and particularly, as the author shows, the birthingexperience, the neocortex should be at rest, for otherwise it inter-
feres with the quite automatic processes that nature has set in
place for regulating and maintaining these processes.
An authentic fetus ejection reflex takes place when a human
baby is born after a short series of irresistible contractions, /
which leave no room for voluntary movements. In such cir-cumstances it is obvious that the neocortex (the part of the
brain related to intellectual activities) is at rest and no longer
in control of the archaic brain structures in charge of vital
functions such as giving birth. /9
Dr. Odent has summarized two decades of research done on
spontaneous birthing to demonstrate that in the case nature is re-
spected, there is neither excruciating pain involved in giving birth
to a child, nor any psychological symptoms that let birthing ap-
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pear like a disease. We don’t need to look back very far; still re-
cently birthing was done in hospitals in pretty much the same way
as operating a tumor, in antiseptic rooms, under strong lights,
with metallic instruments making sharp noise, and with cameras
installed for monitoring the ‘operation.’
I may be allowed to report here what I saw in a documentary
in my younger years. It was showing how women from a moun-
tain tribe in Caucasia give birth under extreme conditions.The film showed a strongly built woman walking naked into a
mountain lake, at about –20ºC. At the shore, a crowd of people
was waiting in silence, her extended family and friends. In walk-
ing ahead, she had to break the ice with her hands and feet, until
she reached a spot that she found suitable for giving birth.
She broke the ice in a circle around herself, and was then took
a position with her feet firmly on the ground, and her legs slightly
bent, as if riding a horse.
Then she seemed to enter a state of trance or meditation, as
she suddenly was completely silent and immobile.
A few moments later her pelvis exhibited strong contractions
or convulsions that appeared to push the baby out. It took no
more than three of those major spams and the baby was falling
out of her womb, in her hands, that she had held wide open, while
bowing down with the last contraction. She took the newborn up,
smiling, and bate through the umbilical cord. Then she slowly and
gracefully walked back to the shore where the crowd attended her
in silence.
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There are clear similarities between the immediate post or-
gasmic states following a fetus ejection reflex and an orgasm
of genital sexuality. During the hour following the birth,
when mother and newborn baby are in close skin-to-skin
contact and have not yet eliminated the hormones released
during the ejection reflex, each of these hormones has a spe-
cific role to play—natural morphine being a typical example.
Since all opiates have the properties necessary to create
states of dependency, it seems obvious that body-to-body
contact between two individuals who are under the effects of
endorphins can induce the beginning of a co-dependency, or
in other worlds of an attachment. /45
Finally, the author emphasizes the importance of extended
breastfeeding, which is not only a concern for bringing up infants
within a continuum of optimal tactile stimulation and nutrition, but also a concern of public sanity, for the turndown of breastfeed-
ing is one of the primary factors in the etiology of violence. The
author writes:
The duration of breastfeeding is undoubtedly influenced by
family structures. Since human societies organize mating
and create marriage rules, they also indirectly influence theduration of breastfeeding. Nobody knows exactly what the
physiological ideal for the duration of breastfeeding is
among humans. For any other mammal, the answer is sim-
ple—almost as simple as for the duration of pregnancy. For
example, after spending 230 days in the womb, the baby
chimpanzee is fed by its mother for two years; a bottle-nosed
dolphin is breastfed for 16 months. For human beings the
answer is much more imprecise, although a / physiological
ideal can be deduced as a reference point. Comparing hu-
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man beings with other mammals and taking into account the
duration of our life in the womb, our degree of maturity at
birth, our lifespan, the special nutritional needs of our big
brain, tooth development, and so forth, we might conclude
that breastfeeding among humans was originally maintained
for a matter of years rather than a few months. /66-67
The author also clarifies that before the ‘lifelong strict monog-
amy,’ most babies were breastfed for two to four years, which was
a practice that started in ancient Greece and went along all the
way up until the 19th century.
Michel Odent gives conclusive samples out of the life of thehigher apes and dolphins that demonstrate that these animals,
that are genetically most related to the human race, enjoy a sexual
life that is non-reproductive.
This research is important for it shows the invalidity of the
view forwarded by fundamentalist religions that sexuality, if used
properly, was exclusively procreative in the whole of the animalrealm, and that only humans had ‘transgressed’ this ‘natural law’
by being ‘pansexual’ to the utmost degree.
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Dolphins are known to have sex very frequently, in many
different ways, for reasons other than reproduction, and they
sometimes engage in acts of a homosexual nature. Copula-
tion takes place face-to-face and though many species of
dolphins engage in lengthy foreplay, the actual act is usually
only brief, but may be repeated several times within a short
time span. Various dolphin species have even been known to
engage in sexual behavior with other dolphin species. Occa-
sionally, dolphins will also show sexual behavior towards
other animals, including humans. /90
[Bonobos] often copulate face-to-face and the frontal orienta-
tion of the Bonobo vulva and clitoris both strongly suggest
that the female genitalia are adapted for this position. Dur-
ing sexual intercourse the females have been heard emitting
grunts and squeals that probably reflect orgasmic experi-
ences, which perhaps explains why sex, among bonobos, is
not just for reproduction—it is the key to their social life.
Bonobos become sexually aroused remarkably easily, and
they express this excitement in a / variety of mounting posi-
tions and forms of genital contact. Perhaps the bonobo’s
most typical sexual pattern is genito-genital rubbing be-
tween adult females. The two females rub their genital swel-
lings laterally together. Male bonobos, too, may engage in
pseudocopulation; they often perform a back to back varia-
tion, one male briefly rubbing his scrotum against the but-
tocks of another. These mammals also practice so-called pe-
nis fencing, in which two males hang face-to-face from a
branch, rubbing their erect penises together. /90-91
Michel Odent also emphasizes that humans have close genetic
relations with aquatic animals, a fact that has been overlooked by
scholars for thousands of years. It is significant in this context that
MICHEL ODENT
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human babies can stay erect and walk in water before they are
able to walk on dry land. The author then concludes that ‘all chap-
ters of human anatomy, physiology, behavior, pathology, and evo-
lutionary medicine must be rewritten in the light of this so-called
‘aquatic-ape theory.’
I sincerely wish that this important book finds a large audience
beyond the circles of academia. This is a vital and noble cause
when we think of reformulating basic social policies that regulatehuman behavior, and sexuality. We must grant this research a
prime agenda for it unveils most of the myths that cultural condi-
tioning has brought up about the nature of pleasure, thereby belit-
tling or outright turning down the importance of pleasure of the
human race, and generally, all of life.
We also should keep in mind that cutting-edge consciousnessresearch demonstrated that even particles possess consciousness
and actually choose where they wish to be and in which orbits
they wish to circulate around the nucleus. We have good reasons
to assume that the pleasure function is not restricted to human
beings alone, but that all of creation basically ‘runs on pleasure,‘
which means that positive sensations are the stimulus for evolu-tion. It is deplorable that over the last five thousand years, and
with the turn of Tantra into Vedanta, the pleasure function was
demonized in human evolutionary history.
This namely led to forging so-called sex laws, which are pun-
ishing life, and that are countering the positive evolution of hu-
manity.
There cannot be any evolution of the human race as long as we
demonize and prohibit pleasure, and regard human sexuality as
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basically dangerous and potentially aggressive. Our penal code
does not display much respect of the human nature; in fact our sex
laws seem to consider us to be an ‘impossible human’ instead of a
‘possible human’, which is why these laws need to be abolished.
For anyone who is engaged in law reform and reformulation
of our basic social policies, the scientific contribution Michel
Odent made in this book, and his other books, is substantial and
important. It is important because it shows that the natural pleas-ure function is in no way to be taken as a ‘potentially chaotic be-
havior’ but is regulated by nature so that no harm is done. When
harm is done, it is not the result of the natural pleasure function,
but exactly the denial of that function through the imposition of
compulsory sex morality.
MICHEL ODENT
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Dr. Otto Carl Simonton (1942-2009) and his wife Dr. Stephanie
Matthews-Simonton criticized the usual ways of treating cancer.
Their account of an alternative cancer cure which became suc-
cessful is written in an honest and lively manner, not theory-based
but sanely experience-based.
I think that the Simontons have greatly helped to establish al-
ternative cancer cure in our today’s diversified medical servicing,
and thereby have done a great job for all of us. And yet, I have metso many people, even in recent years, who never heard of its exis-
tence! It seems that the common man and the common woman get
their knowledge from the mass media, and there you see same old
soup, even today, with death-blow doctoral injunctions of the kind
‘Your life expectancy is maximum six months’, chemotherapy, and
all the rest of it. And of course, you can find the Simontons on theInternet. Here is the address of the place and the reference to their
well-done web site about the Simonton Cancer Center.
—Simonton Cancer Center, Malibu, CA 90264. http://simontoncenter.com
OTTO CARL SIMONTON
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That’s what conditioning is all about, and how the medical
system works—systematic disinformation about everything, life,
people, the world, resources, disease, hunger, war, death—while
health is never mentioned! And for good reason. It could disturb
worldwide medical business, for that’s what it is: a business, not
something even remotely concerned with healing. But the Simon-
ton approach is an approach to effective healing, and that’s why
this book is included in this volume and not in its sister volume
The New Paradigm in Science and Systems Theory (2014).
Fritjof Capra mentions in his book The Turning Point (1987)
that he was astonished to find out that the words healing and healer
have a pejorative meaning for most medical doctors. In fact, these
terms are associated with charlatanism and quackery. That is why,
among other things, the Simontons did not have an easy job. Their breakthrough were techniques today called ‘self-awareness tech-
niques’ that at the time when they started where called visualiza-
tion techniques or mental imaging. It was one of several approaches
they had tried out, but as these techniques were more successful
than others in helping their cancer patients, they stuck with them.
(By the way, there are many other alternative cancer cures; someare based on diet, some on bioenergetic treatment, some on ozone
inhalation, etc.).
The most important thing in the process of helping the patient
to collaborate in healing their cancer is to get them to learn that
they have a role to play in their healing. For they are conditioned by
traditional medicine to be mere injunction-receivers, and passivesufferers of a fate. The authors write:
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Most of our patients, who come to us from all over the coun-
try, have received a ‘medically incurable’ diagnosis from
their doctors. According to national cancer statistics, they
have an average life expectancy of one year. When these
people believe that only medical treatment can help them—
but their physicians have said that medicine is no longer of
much avail and that they probably have only a few months
to live—they feel doomed, trapped, helpless, and usually
fulfill the doctor’s expectations. But if patients mobilize their
own resources and actively participate in their recovery, they
may well exceed their life expectancy and significantly alter
the quality of life./4
One of the most daring ideas that doctors ever came up with
was to offer patients placebo drugs, suggesting they got drug XYZ,
famous and tested, and proven to be effective according to phar-maceutical publicity. In truth, what they received was a sugar pill.
Well, it’s hard to believe that this works better than normal medi-
cine because it has no side effects. But it has been shown over and
over that it cures as effectively as a real drug. The authors relate a
dramatic case that vividly illustrates the power of the placebo ef-
fect:
A most dramatic case of the placebo effect has been reported
by Dr. Bruno Klopfer, a researcher involved in the testing of
the drug Krebiozen. In 1950, Krebiozen had received sensa-
tional national publicity as a ‘cure’ for cancer and was being
tested by the American Medical Association and the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration. Once of Dr. Klopfer’s pa-tients had lymphosarcoma, a generalized, far-advanced ma-
lignancy involving the lymph nodes. The patient had huge
tumor masses throughout his body and was in such desper-
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ate physical condition that he frequently had to take oxygen
by mask, and fluid had to be / removed from his chest every
two days. When the patient discovered that Dr. Klopfer was
involved in research on Krebiozen, he begged to be given
Krebiozen treatments. Klopfer did so, and the patient’s re-
covery was startling. Within a short time the tumors had
shrunk dramatically, and the patient was able to resume a
normal life, including flying his private plane. Then as AMA
and FDA reports of the negative results of Krebiozen started
to be publicized, the patient took a dramatic turn for the
worse. Thinking the circumstances extreme enough to justify
unusual measures, Klopfer told his patient that he had ob-
tained a new, superrefined, double-strength Krebiozen that
would produce better results. Actually, the injections Klopfer
gave were simply sterile water. Yet the patient's recovery
was even more remarkable. Once again the tumor masses
melted, chest fluid vanished, and he became ambulatory and
even went back to flying. The patient remained symptom-
free for over two months. The patient's belief alone, inde-
pendent of the value of the medication, produced his recov-
ery. Then further stories of the AMA and FDA’s tests ap-
peared in the press: ‘Nationwide tests show Krebiozen to be
a worthless drug in the treatment of cancer.’ Within a few
days the patient was dead./26-27
Now regarding the much debated question what causes can-
cer, the authors review in the book the following etiologies: car-
cinogenic substances, genetic predisposition, radiation, diet and
the immune system.
Regarding carcinogenic substances, the authors note that there is
no simple cause--effect relationship between harmful substances,
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chemicals, chronic irritants, and cancer, and that the matter is
rather controversial in the literature.
Regarding genetic predisposition, the authors note that a human-
based research was not yet available, the research being available
having been conducted on mice. They concluded that this research
left considerable doubt on any ‘it’s genetics alone’ theory.
Regarding radiation, the authors note that background radia-
tion, also called cosmic radiation, is too universal a cause to possi- bly contribute to the cancer etiology.
With regard to another possibility being discussed, as to fluoro-
carbons released from aerosol cans that destroy the ozone layer of the
atmosphere, leading to an increased exposure to ultraviolet radia-
tion from the sun, the authors admit that although this could cer-
tainly lead to potential health problems, high levels of ultraviolet
rays were associated only with skin cancer.
Regarding x-rays and other radiation used in medical diagnosis
and treatment, the evidence was still unclear because many peo-
ple who have been exposed to high levels of x-rays and other ra-
diation do not contract cancer.
Regarding diet as a possible cause of cancer, which is a relatively
recent etiology, the authors note the following quite remarkable
details:
For instance, Japan, where the diet is still predominantly
based on fish and rice and contains substantially less fat than
does the American or European diet, has both a lower / in-cidence of cancer and a substantially different profile in
types of cancers than the other industrialized countries.
Since the incidence of cancer goes up sharply among Japa-
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nese living in the United States ... some researchers have set-
tled on differences in diet as a likely explanation./38-39
The authors argue that for understanding cancer, we need to
find out why some people have a stronger immune system than
others?
A great deal of time, energy, and resource have been poured
into the search for the causes of cancer, but one important
fact is often overlooked: When exposed to known cancer-
producing substances, most people still remain healthy. It is
quite clear, for example, that the incidence of lung cancer
goes up sharply with heavy smoking. But if all it took to get
cancer was exposure to nicotine and tars, then all heavy
smokers would contract the disease. Yet most heavy smokers
do not get lung cancer./40
As problems with organ transplantation showed, the body’s
immune system normally is strong. For example, a cancer-affected
organ would not be accepted by the receiver, and if forced to do
so, as was shown by experiments, the receiver would indeed con-
tract the cancer, but as soon as the organ was again removed, the
cancer would quickly disappear. This research, as the authors con-
clude, has led to a broad medical acceptance of what is called the
‘surveillance theory’ of cancer development:
External agents, radiation, genetics, diet—all four factors
may play a role in the causation of the disease, but none of
them is a full explanation without considering why particu-lar individuals, at particular points in their lives, contract
cancer./44
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Now, the answer is of course, that the real causes of cancer are
related to emotional stress, in the sense that the suppression of
emotions, or certain emotions, clearly contributes to the causation
of cancer. Another factor is the inability noted in most cancer pa-
tients to express their emotions and thus release themselves at times
from pent-up emotional tension.
Dr. Simonton in discussion with Jeffrey Mishlove
For example in a research done by Dr. Thomas A. Holmes and
associates at the University of Washington School of Medicine, a
scale was designed that assigned numerical values (1-100) to cer-
tain stressful events: ‘Death of Spouse’, is rated 100, followed by
‘Divorce’, with 73 and ‘Marital Separation’ with 65. However,
even in Holmes’ study, 51 percent of the individuals with scores of
300 did not get sick during the period of the study, which let the
authors conclude that an event, even a stressful one, is construed
differently from person to person. A decisive study done in the
1920s by Dr. Hans Selye at the University of Prague gave conclu-
sive evidence for the stress-related etiology:
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This evidence clearly demonstrates the very real physical
effects of stress. But it is still another effect that is of greatest
importance to the cancer patient. Selye has discovered that
chronic stress suppresses the immune system which is re-
sponsible for engulfing and destroying cancerous cells or
alien microorganisms. The important point is this: The
physical conditions Selye describes as being produced by
stress are virtually identical to those under which an abnor-
mal cell could reproduce and spread into a dangerous can-
cer. Not surprisingly, cancer patients frequently have weak-
ened immune systems. /53
Selye’s findings were confirmed by other research and it was
found that, for example, lymphocyte function, a critical measure
of the potency of the body’s immune system, ‘was significantly
depressed in those who had lost a wife or husband.’ (53) Anotherstudy the authors report points to mental factors leading to the
suppression of the immune system where it was demonstrated
‘that the body’s immunity to tuberculosis can be profoundly af-
fected by hypnotic suggestion,’ which leads to the conclusion that
mental and emotional stress impacts on the body’s defenses. The
authors conclude that there are major themes of research in theetiology of cancer that crystallized out:
High levels of emotional stress increase susceptibility to ill-
ness. Chronic stress results in a suppression of the immune
system, which in turn creates increased susceptibility to ill-
ness—and especially to cancer. Emotional stress, which sup-
presses the immune system, also leads to hormonal imbal-ances. These / imbalances could increase the production of
abnormal cells at precisely the time the body is least capable
of destroying them./54-55
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But this is not yet the core of the book. The authors went fur-
ther in their research and found historical connections between
cancer and emotions, and that certain beliefs clearly trigger a pre-
disposition for cancer: it is not down the road that we got stress,
but how we cope with it what really is the subtle cause of cancer.
Most of the time, the ways in which we respond to the
stresses of life are habitual, dictated by our unconscious be-
liefs about who we are, who we ‘should’ be, and the way theworld and other people are and should be. These patterns of
behavior form a total orientation, or stance toward life./56
I always intuitively knew that compulsory morality is a strong
factor in the etiology of cancer, and the cancer patients I met in my
life have corroborated this insight. They were invariably people
who were thinking much more on the lines of ‘should be’ and
‘ought to behave’ than the average citizen who tends to think on
the lines of ‘Me first’. Quoting a researcher who published a book
in 1893 with the title Cancer and the Cancer-Process , and who stated
that ‘idiots and lunatics are remarkably exempt from cancer in
every shape’, the authors go on to examine an array of research
findings that corroborated their hypothesis of ‘emotional causa-
tion’. Among the factors that cause predisposition for cancer, the
authors examine the research of Dr. Lawrence LeShan, an experi-
mental psychologist who found evidence that co-dependence and
emotional abuse may contribute to the cancer etiology. He identi-
fied four recurring elements, something like a fatally coincidental
sequence, in the life stories of more than 500 cancer patients:
OTTO CARL SIMONTON
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After reviewing some of their patient’s life stories, the authors
inquire into the psychological process of illness and come to stress
certain factors they have seen in all the life stories they reviewed,
such as, for example:
Experiences in childhood result in decisions to be a certain
kind of person.
The individual is rocked by a cluster of stressful life events.
These stresses create a problem with which the individual
does not know how to deal.
The individual sees no way of changing the rules about how
he or she must act and so feels trapped and helpless to re-
solve the problem. /
The individual puts distance between himself or herself and
the problem, becoming static, unchanging, rigid./74-75
For each of these categories, the authors forward conclusive
evidence from the case histories, which I will not discuss here be-
cause of copyright. I can only say that this part of the book is per-
haps the most important as it provides very concise evidence as to
the real causes of cancer, which can be summarized as being emo-
tional, behavioral, and belief-related. But this is not all there is in the
etiology of cancer. The authors also provide conclusive evidence
for the fact that also the expectations a patient fosters about cancer
as a disease contribute to the etiology, and that there is evidence
for the fact that the stiff neurotic adherence to a life-denying ide-
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ology or religion or otherwise morality-imposing belief system
decidedly contributes to the causation of cancer.
After this first research part of the book, the authors present
their own approach in the second part, that starts at page 100, and
thus approximately after one-third of the book. I find that this was
a good balance to keep by the authors, and congratulate them, and
their publisher, for the good editing and composition of this book-
let, which comes with a 19-pages Bibliography and an Index.
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Hal and Sidra Stone
Embracing Our Selves
The Voice Dialogue Manual
Novato, CA: New World Library, 1989
The Voice Dialogue Manual was my companion in the two years I practiced dia-
loguing with my inner selves. Let us first clarify what voice dialogue actually is
all about? It’s a synonym for the inner dialogue with all our inner selves.
The Voice Dialogue Manual accompanied me with valuable ad-
vice over these years; I highly appreciated its clarity and depth
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that gives immediate credit to the authors’ immense expertise
with facilitating personal change and transformation. This is not
just a technical manual that teaches a method. It’s that also, but
much more. Here is how the authors introduce the book:
Voice Dialogue is not a school of psychotherapy, it is not a
substitute for psychotherapy, and it is not a profession in
and of itself. It is a technique for psychological exploration
and for the expansion of awareness. Although it can be a
highly effective tool for any psychotherapist it should be
clearly understood that it is not a complete and autonomous
therapeutic system./78
The authors appear to be beyond the mechanistic paradigm,
radiating a true and living spirituality. One of the objectives of
their unique and empathic approach to personal development andtransformational change is to help people develop their unique
vulnerability, their openness to the whole of life.
In my work, I have indeed become aware that vulnerability is
a sort of key word, and can be set as a destination in therapy. Vul-
nerability is our highest virtue, it’s the daringness, the courage,
the boldness to really embrace our destiny, to live fully and with-
out anxiety or fear of life.
Coping with this fear is a process, it cannot be brought about
through an instant, sudden insight but is the result of dissolving,
one by one, our shields, defenses, and projections.
Now, there is one pattern that is stronger than the others andwhich builds most of our character armor: it’s our inner controller.
The authors write:
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The protector/controller is the primary energy pattern be-
hind many other selves. For example, it will utilize the ener-
gies of the rational self and the responsible parent as a way
of maintaining control over our environment. When most
people use the word I, they are in fact referring to their
protector/controller. For the vast majority of us, protector/
controller energy is the directing agent of personality. It is
what many people think of as an ego./15
The authors express some things better than any of the famed
psychologists I have been reading, Freud and Jung. They speak of
our psychic fingerprint, which is an expression that beautifully
wraps around our inner clarity, and cosmic identity, when we are
in the state of total awareness, when there are no defenses, when
there is peace, when our inner lake is reflecting life without rip-
ples. And beyond the scope of this book, I believe that this cosmic
identity is related not to our mind, but to our emotional identity. It’s
coded as a vibrational code, and it’s related to the flow nature of
our emotional body, the human aura. The authors write:
The problem is, of course, that we gradually begin to lose
track of our psychic fingerprint. This is a sad state of affairs,for our whole system of relationships is affected by this loss.
If we are no longer in touch with those qualities that make
up our unique psychic fingerprint, then it is not our deepest
and most vulnerable self that is involved in relationships.
Instead, it is a group if subpersonalities, watched over by the
protector/controller, that determines our feelings and
behavior./15
Another expression I find helpful for understanding our inner
life is the notion of disowned selves. The authors write:
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We can be helpless victims to the multitude of relationships
in our lives that reflect our disowned selves, or we can ac-
cept the challenge of these relationships and ask: How is this
person, or this situation, my teacher? Asking this question in
itself represents a major shift in consciousness. A great deal
of the stress in our lives results from our tendency to attract
reflections of our disowned selves in our relationships, and
we continue to suffer as the same patterns are repeated in
our lives. Unfortunately, for most of us there is no support to
learn this lesson inherent in this process. Without this sup-
port the energy of our disowned selves grows stronger and
more twisted./32
Sigmund Freud was among the first psychologists who found
that the etiology of neurosis is primarily sexual, or with other
words, that when we repress sexual desire, we risk to become se-riously ill. Later, Wilhelm Reich found that not only neurosis, but
also psychosis, and especially schizophrenia are disturbances of
the vital energy flow that are the result of a distortion of body per-
ception. The same is true for the repression of ‘negative’ emotions
such as anger, hate or revengeful desires. What happens when we
are conditioned to repress our hot emotions is that they will bereplaced by depression. Thus, every time you would be angry at
somebody, you will ‘make’ a depression.
The depression will lead you back, through dreams and intui-
tion, to the original wound, which was inflicted upon you when
you were punished, as a child, for being angry. When you go deep
enough down the rabbit hole into your depression, you can trig-ger the therapeutic effect of remembrance! But what we do most
of the time when we are depressed is to seek distraction, else we
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take anti-depressants, thus avoiding the catharsis that the depres-
sion would naturally trigger. And on it goes. Every time you get
angry because somebody interferes with your boundaries or lacks
respect toward you, instead of using your anger as it should to put
that person ‘straight’, you escape into your next depression.
Hal and Sidra Stone speak in such a case about disowning the
anger energy, which is a good terminology that vividly describes
the effect of the unhealthy repression of desire, which is unfortu-nately an integral part of our patriarchal tradition.
When natural instinctual energies such as the need for sur-
vival, sexuality, and aggression are disowned over time, they
cycle back into the unconscious and go through a significant
change. Energy cannot be destroyed; thus, these disowned
energies begin to operate unconsciously and attract addi-tional energy to themselves. They soon lose their natural
qualities and become malevolent./32
Emotional flow is the natural positive flow of the bioenergy.
Demonic and destructive energies are the result of a negative po-
larization, which in turn is the consequence of the repression of
the original desire and its biogenic expression as ‘emotion’:
The disowning of the seven deadly sins results in a particu-
lar blend-up of instinctual energies in the unconscious that
we call demonic energies. They are among the major dis-
owned energy patterns, and as a society we pay a particu-
larly heavy price for their negation./33
The subpersonalities also protect themselves by revealing
themselves only to a facilitator who has access to a similar
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energy. Thus, the facilitator must be aware of and able to
locate the energy pattern within himself or herself that reso-
nates with the subject’s energy pattern./76
As an evaluation, this book clearly has merited the attribute
excellent , both in its addressing the intelligent lay reader and the
psychic health care professional. For both audiences, there is am-
ple information, which is not just theory, but practical and directly
applicable when actually doing the work of voice dialogue, withoneself or in a team, or else with a group, as a voice dialogue fa-
cilitator.
I may point you here to a more specific book by these authors
which is about handling the inner controller—which they call the
‘Inner Critic.’ You can find the book on Amazon.
—Hal & Sidra Stone, Embracing Your Inner Critic: Turning Self-Criticism
into a Creative Asset, New York: HarperOne, 1993
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Dora van Gelder
The Real World of Fairies
A First-Person Account
Wheaton: Quest Books (Theosophical Publishing House), 1999
The Real World of Fairies is one of a few really mind-opening books I found in my
life. When I say mind-opening, I do not just mean brilliant, excellent, daringly
novel or outstanding in terms of intellectual achievement. I mean nothing less
daring than my entire worldview suddenly shifting, widening, leading me up toa higher level of conscious awareness.
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There are not many studies about the fairy world. While nov-
els and short stories, especially the romantic sort, indulge in the
mystical theme, this would never have attracted my interest. Ac-
tually I did buy Irish fairy stories by William Butler Yeats, but that
is something entirely different. We are talking about a poetic real-
ity here, and about folklore. We also talk about good literature.
My interest in fairies, however, is scientific. Evans-Wentz’s fa-
mous study The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911/2003) left mecold compared to the present book. (See the review further up in
this volume). Why was it so? Because that study presents hearsay
evidence, to use a legal expression, it substantially consists of in-
terviews with all kinds of people from Brittany, Ireland, Scotland
and England who say they have heard of fairies, seen fairies or
fairy paths, or know about the existence of fairies, but the authorhimself resides in a distant intellectual chamber, as it were, to re-
port all this from an alien world he himself was seemingly never
in touch with. Our science perversely attributes more credit to the
‘disentangled’ researcher, who strictly speaking knows nothing
about the subject he researches about, compared to a clairvoyant
who actually saw the fairy world and actively communicated withfairies over the whole course of her life. Modern science, while it
knows that the observer is always entangled with the object of ob-
servation, argues that evidence is biased when a person reports
events from her own life that are not peer-reviewed and replicated
by other individuals. While quantum physics of course shows that
there is no science at all without entanglement between observerand object of observation, many scientists still discard more of life
than they actually embrace in their residue science paradigm.
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Generally speaking, I would go as far as saying that if you are
not entangled with the subject of your research, to a point to have
sleepless nights about it, one the one hand, and experience mo-
ments of euphoria on its account, on the other, you will not be a
brilliant researcher, and your publications will not really convince
others. It’s is a parallel observation you may accept or not, but fact
is that Dora van Gelder’s book about the existence of fairies is
more scientific, and provides more tangible evidence for the exis-
tence of the fairy world than all of Evans-Wentz’s epic and sophis-
ticated tales that make at best for a nice and elegant book cover in
your home library.
To begin with, Dora van Gelder implores the fact that our sci-
ence tends to overlook the underlying structures that are for the
most part invisible to the senses, yet absolutely substantial for liv-ing systems, and which consist of vibrations, and vibrational pat-
terns. It is the role of the clairvoyant to sensibilize her perception
apparatus to these vibrations:
The fact is that there is a real physical basis for clairvoyance,
and the faculty is not especially mysterious. The power cen-
ters in that tiny organ in the brain called the pituitary gland.The kind of vibrations involved are so subtle that no physi-
cal opening in the skin is needed to convey them to the pitui-
tary body, but there is a special spot of sensitiveness just be-
tween the eyes above the root of the nose which acts as the
external opening for the gland within./4
I found the book really starts with the second chapter entitled
A Typical Fairy, in which van Gelder meticulously describes as it
were a ‘standard’ fairy, an exemplary of a variety of varieties, so as
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to give the reader a taste of the high vibrational and etheric nature
of these creatures. She writes:
The material of his body is a loosely knit as the vapor from
the spout of a boiling teakettle and is somewhat of the na-
ture of a cloud of colored gas. In fact it is exactly that, only
the gas is finer than the lightest we know and is less readily
detected even than helium or hydrogen. But this does not
prevent it from being held together in / a form, for it is not a
chemical but a living substance which life saturates and
holds together. In truth, his power of this matter as a living
creature is shown by the fact that his body is composed of
two distinct densities of material. The body proper is a true
emerald green and fairly dense, considering the stuff of
which it is made; around this on all sides, both front and
back, is a much thinner cloud of the same matter in which he
is not so vividly alive. This thinner portion, which extends
from all sides of this body proper, is a lighter green./32-33
Van Gelder explains that fairies are essentially beings made of
energy. The material they are built of is feelings, vital matter, emo-
tions, streaks of energy which are modulated by their emotions,
their movements, and their desires.
The matter, then, they are made of is pure emotional streams,
not veins, muscles or nerves; when they feel an emotion, their
body directly responds and transforms itself according to the emo-
tion. They have a heart which is a glowing and pulsating center
and that emanates golden light and that the secret of fairy life is
rhythm. While we have sensations, she explains, fairies are sensa-
tion, all sensation, and they do not perceive life like we do,
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through special organs, but with their whole highly electric organ-
ism.
There are some very interesting and important details here be-
cause some of what van Gelder says confirms my research on
emotions and the vital energy.
The secret of the fairy life is rhythm. Each kind of fairy
(whether water, land, air, or fire) comes into the world with a
limited and definite range of rhythmic power, according tohis / species and his own personal nature. Within this range,
he controls the rhythm of vitality by his desires and feelings.
/34-35
As I said, they have a heart center like other fairies, but in
addition, the surface of their bodies is covered with scores of
luminous points that are subcenters connected with theheart. When the fairies move, a sort of suction is set up in
these spots of light; thus vitality is drawn into their bodies.
There are at least two kinds of energy involved, one from the
sunlight and the other from the water. The fairy’s heart cen-
ter is in the nature of a mixing place for these two sorts of
vital energy. Now, in the sea itself, at more or less fixed posi-
tions relative to one another, there are centers like vortices,probably magnetic, which are, of course, super-physical. At
times when the fairy has absorbed far more of this mixed
energy than he needs, he pours it out of his / surface centers,
and it is swept into the nearest of these vortices. There it is
swirled around and distributed from one vortex to another
by way of equalizing the charge. The fairies do this uncon-
sciously all day long, and in this way the sea is charged with
magnetism, thus helping all the creatures that live in it.
/130-131
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Another highly interesting detail in this context is the way fair-
ies establish relationships with other fairies, with plants and ani-
mals, and at times also with humans. There is a unique way they
do this, namely by adapting their vibration to the vibration of the
being they want to relate to. Van Gelder explains:
When he wants to respond to a plant, he makes his heart
beat at the same pulse rate as the plant. This synchrony
makes him unified./34
Apart from the form fairies present themselves in, which
greatly varies, and which they can deliberately alter, here is more
about how they handle and wistfully manipulate the energy they
are made of:
In this exchange of energies, those from the earth and thosefrom the sun, the fairy plays a definite part. He has power
over both these currents, especially the vitality from the sun.
He can retard them here and accelerate them there, and he
can add some extra vitality from himself at such points as he
desires./41
I am convinced that if humanity had not developed into patri-
archy about five thousand years ago, thus developing into evolu-
tionary retardation through moralism—which effectively prevents
love—, we would not be so different after all from fairies. We
would be on a higher level, the level two steps above fairies, as the
step immediate above them is the level of the angels. But humans
are made to be above angels. In this sense, we humans are fallen
angels, and this is how we need to understand the story of Gene-
sis in the Bible and the totally misunderstood idea of original sin.
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It is not technology that provides us with the evolutionary ad-
vantage over native peoples around the world. It can only be, if
ever, a true evolutionary advantage on the level of the total hu-
man.
Most native peoples around the world are able to see spirit
beings as their extrasensorial perception is more developed than
ours. They also, like van Gelder, see the fairy world. Last not least,
they also behave similarly, in their carefree joy, while it is of coursewistful behavior, and a functional attitude in the face of life’s con-
stant changes and its unpredictability.
The fairy has an immense power of mimicry and a sense of
drama. He is an emotional artist of rare ability, and a group
of them will put on a show for mutual entertainment. I must
explain again that a fairy has the power not only to changehis form but also to clothe himself in marvelous garments, a
process that is carried out by drawing the denser part of the
material about him by means of his will power or desire into
a thought garment. This requires effort and concentration
and takes a few minutes to achieve, especially if he desires to
change his form. The thought garment will last as long as he
sustains the effort at transformation. Most fairies are defi-cient in concentration, and thus they do not keep up the
show for any length of time./44
Between the human point of view and that of a fairy, or any
member of the angelic kingdom, one of the main differences
is that we live in a world of form, and they live in a world of
life. Our thoughts are primarily concerned with the formthings have, and we seldom go further than that. But fairies
are mainly concerned with the energy and life flowing
around and within the form—life that is everywhere. /47
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For example, if we look at a tree we respond to its size, its
shape, its color, its leaves, and fruit. These things combine to
create its beauty for us. But when one comes to think of it,
this is rather a limited way of seeing the world in which we
live. In contrast, the fairy first beholds the spirit of the tree
and responds to its vital energy. To a fairy, the tree is a living,
breathing personality which is expressing itself in the form
we see. There is then an exchange of feeling, a mutual re-
sponse, between the fairy and the tree./47
And in fact, natives do not possess that strict code of morality
that patriarchy has instituted with its monotheistic religions, and
compulsory morality. To prevent being misunderstood here, I do
not talk about genuine morality, but what I would call ‘fake mo-
rality’ which is the morality in our modern society, for it’s hypoc-
risy by and large. If we were having true morality, we wouldn’t
have crime, wars, civil wars, and genocide around the world; we
wouldn’t know the torture of humans and animals, and we would
eat healthy food, not processed food which is after all no food at
all, but corporate chemistry, and in order to watch television we
would develop true vision, true foresight—which is clairvoyance.
Van Gelder explains, in a similar spirit:
Humans have a system of morality, which embodies a very
serious attitude toward life—a moral code based upon rules
and involving fear of penal ties. Of course the fairies have
not the vaguest conception of what all that means. They are
the truest illustration of those lovely words of Jesus: Con-
sider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin.
Yet Solomon in all his glory / was not arrayed as one of
these. [Matthew 6:28-29]/52-53
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Our vision becomes thus limited, because our direct experi-
ence is bound to be small; and thus we age prematurely, and
life grows monotonous./79
Again, the energy-nature is emphasized in the author’s de-
scription of fairies and how they feed upon the sun, and as they
do not eat, this is their unique form of nourishment.
The fairies think of the sun as a tremendous life-giving globe
of light which is the source of all life, as they derive their
nourishment principally from the sun’s rays. They seem to
draw the rays of the sun through their bodies. This is the
nearest they come to eating. Apart from deriving energy for
the maintenance of their own bodies, they help to guide the
energy from the sun for the plants’ growth./87
Dora van Gelder’s classification of fairies is highly original as
she aligns them with the angelic realm, as a sub-realm actually, and
I think her observations are in alignment with theosophical teach-
ings. She reports that fairies are under the direct order and obser-
vation of angels, and the way she describes these angels is intrigu-
ing, and scientific. I haven’t found it in any other book thus far:
Over all, an angel is brooding—over the fairies, the trees, the
hills, and streams which are part of his life and are his trust.
He is a powerful personality, and the valley is just as much
part of his body as the trunk of a tree is the body of a tree
spirit, except that in this case, the angel has intelligence and
emotions as powerful as our own, and he is as much a being
as we are, if not more so. When he takes form he looks like a
beautiful human being, a clean-shaven youth with fine dark
hair and a powerful aquiline face, his body enveloped in a
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lovely apple green. His presence permeates the life of the
forest and valley./106
The most extraordinary chapter to be found in the book is the
last: how hurricanes are created by angels and what purpose they
serve. The author summarizes her very intriguing observations
with an ethical consideration:
Human beings will inevitably think that the water fairies,
sea angels, and especially the angel of the hurricane himself
are bad or evil, because for us they have been destroying life.
But this is not so. They have destroyed forms, but they have
not destroyed the life within the forms, for life cannot die.
Moreover, these beings have performed their function in ac-
cordance with natural law./167
I shall provide here the Roster of Fairies the author outlines at
the end of her book, because it is something like an extended table
of contents and refers to the various chapters of the book. It gives
you a concise overview over the contents of the book, and is in
itself very informative.
ROSTER OF FAIRIES
AIR FAIRIES are of three general types. First are those sylph-
like beings who inhabit the clouds and work with them.
These are the sculptors of the fairy world. Next are the air
fairies who are associated with the wind and storms. These
air fairies are generally some four or five feet high, very
shapely and beautiful. And last are the immense air spirits
who live at very high altitudes, who resemble great dragons
with huge heads, long bodies, and long tails. They are cen-
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ters of energy and power of some sort. All three of these
types are described in Chapter 11.
ANGELS OR DEVAS are radiant beings with great intelli-
gence who help to guide nature by their understanding of
the Divine Plan. They direct the energies of nature and over-
see the lesser fairies under their care, such as tree spirits and
those who might be in charge of wind or clouds.
EARTH FAIRIES consists of four main types, two of which
live on the surface of the earth and two underground. On the
surface, these fairies / range from the physically embodied
tree spirits to the small common garden or woods fairies.
Rock fairies, or gnomes, are one of the underground types.
More specific information is given in Chapter 5.
ELEMENTALS are, as their name indicates, spirits of the
elements. These creatures are evolved in the four kingdoms
of elements - air, earth, fire and water—according to Kabbal-
ists. They are called gnomes (of the earth), sylphs (of the air),
salamanders (of fire), and undines (of the water). H.P.
Blavatsky, in The Theosophical Glossary, explains that all the
lower invisible beings generated on the fifth, sixth, and sev-
enth planes of our terrestrial atmosphere are called elemen-
tals and include fairies, peris, devas, djins, sylvans, satyrs,
fauns, elves, leprechauns, dwarfs, trolls, kobolds, brownies,
nixies and pixies, goblins, moss people, manikins, and others
who belong to this classification.
FAIRIES are of four major divisions - air, earth, fire, and wa-
ter. Fairies range in size from the tiny butterfly-size, to
twelve-inch and two-foot ones, up to the great sylphs and
tree spirits.
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FAIRE FAIRIES are also called salamanders.
GARDEN FAIRIES are a common kind of earth fairy. /
GNOMES are another kind of earth fairy who inhabit rocks.
NATURE SPIRITS are those creatures of the devic kingdom
who care for the different categories in nature such as the air
and wind, the growing plants, the landscape features, the
water, and fire.
ROCK FAIRIES are sometimes called gnomes. Such fairies
are to be found both above and below ground. The great
rock fairies of the Grand Canyon are mentioned in Chapter
10 and elsewhere in the book.
SALAMANDERS are also known as fire fairies. Chapter 10
has information on one class of these who inhabit the under-
ground volcanic regions as well as those involved in light-
ning and fires above ground.
SYLPHS are a form of air fairy. They are large in size, though
not as evolved as those other great beings, devas. Cloud
sylphs are described in Chapter 11 and also mentioned in the
chapter on the hurricane, Chapter 12.
TREE SPIRITS, treated in Chapter 7, are larger than wood
fairies and have a more physical body.
UNDINES (a classical or Kabbalistic name) are also calledwater spirits or water fairies. /
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WATER BABIES are small, happy creatures who are found
near the seashore and in the surf. They are a type of water
fairy, but different from both those who live farther out in
the deep ocean and those who dwell near streams, lakes, or
ponds./178-180
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Alberto Villoldo
Books and Media Reviewed
Healing States (1984)
Shaman, Healer, Sage (2000)
The Luminous Body, DVD (2004)
The Four Insights (2006)
Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D., a psychologist and medical anthro-
pologist, has studied the healing practices of the Amazon and Inka
shamans for more than 25 years. While at San Francisco State Uni-
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versity, he founded the Biological Self-Regulation Laboratory to study
how the mind creates psychosomatic health and disease.
Villoldo directs the Four Winds Society, where he trains indi-
viduals throughout the world in the practice of energy medicine
and soul retrieval. He has training centers in New England, Cali-
fornia, the UK, Holland, and Park City, Utah. The author of the
best-seller Shaman, Healer, Sage, Villoldo now draws on his vast
knowledge to bring us a practical and revolutionary way to dis-cover the source of an original wound that may have occurred
during childhood or in a former lifetime, and that derailed our
destiny. He then shows us how to track forward along our time
lines to find our best and highest future.
—From: Inlay of Mending the Past and Healing the Future with Soul
Retrieval.—Website: www.thefourwinds.com
I should mention that I was attracted to these books through
the beautiful DVD entitled Healing the Luminous Body that was
produced by Sacred Mysteries , and which I am going to review fur-
ther down. Dr. Villoldo, besides the phenomenal cultural gap that
his teaching closes and the amazing perspectives for soul retrieval
in the future, stands out by his remarkable pedagogical talent; in
fact he is able to convey the complex matter in relatively simple
words and with many examples and excerpts from his personal
journal.
Besides, he writes a poetic style, and irradiates warmth, com-
passion and empathic understanding of human suffering; he also
stands out by his sometimes childlike inquisitiveness that led him
ALBERTO VILLOLDO
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win the sympathy and support of people and peoples who are, for
reasons that we all know, rather hostile toward our culture.
His popularity is growing presently. A documentary has been
released as his web presence informs and many interviews with
him can be found on Youtube. Besides, his ‘shamanic healing’
seminars are popular throughout the United States.
I am not surprised about his success given the void in our cul-
ture in the domain of genuine and personal spirituality, and theneed for non-mechanistic healing. Villoldo’s books are among the
most important books I have ever read in my life.
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Healing States
With Stanley KrippnerA Journey into the World of Spiritual Healing and Shamanism
New York: Simon & Schuster (Fireside), 1984
Healing States is a research volume that Alberto Villoldo co-authored with Stanley
Krippner, and it’s a glorious onset of his own career in spiritual healing. The re-
search presented in this book is highly thought-provoking if not mind-boggling,
and it’s well presented.
The point of departure of the author’s scientific journey was
his research on psychosomatic medicine. He was interested what ex-
actly makes the soma follow the psyche, or why the spirit imprints
itself on the soma, thus causing either health or disease. The
authors write:
A growing number of allopathic physicians believe that as
much as 80 percent of all illness may contain a psychoso-matic component. Allopathic medical science, which does
not publicly acknowledge the psychic realm, is still at a loss
to explain the origin and treatment of many of these psycho-
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somatic disorders, often merely referring to ‘unconscious
conflicts’ that can trigger disease./19
The phenomenon of contact with spirits is highly uncanny and
unusual for the modern mind. The authors, well aware of this cul-
tural bias or denial, have found that in fact, it may be a question of
terminology as psychotherapists talk about ‘complexes’ and ‘sub-
personalities’ when they refer to the same causal agents as for ex-
ample a medium refers to. In fact, in my own research on what
transactional analysis calls our inner selves , I have found that here
we encounter just another of those hidden key formulas that open
windows to other, wider, and deeper realms of insight.
—See Hal and Sidra Stone, The Voice Dialogue Manual (1989), reviewed
further up in this volume
My research on Huna, the ancient religion of the Kahuna na-
tives in Hawaii, brought to daylight and gave me evidence for the
assumption that inner selves are not just psychic modalities but
inner spirits, real entities that are part of our multidimensional psy-
che. And in my practice of the inner dialogue and spontaneous art,
I had at least in once instance, a real encounter with a spirit, and I became acutely aware of the fact that many of our thoughts and
ideas are not entirely our own but that we can, consciously or in-
voluntarily, benefit from the ideas sent to us by guiding spirits. Yet
for the authors, the idea of encountering spirits seemed novel and
daring and they write:
But as we prepared to leave São Paolo we were struck with
the thought that communications from the spirit world
could be happening all the time, and that we might simply
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not be aware of them. Is it possible that many of our intui-
tions and creative thoughts come from outside ourselves?
Although most scientists believe that contacts with spirits
are fantasies of the unconscious mind, a small but growing
number of investigators believe that the human brain may
behave like a complex transmitting and receiving apparatus,
which under certain conditions can pick up thoughts from
other minds, and even across space and time./18
The first landmark research described in the book regards The
Spiritual Psychiatry of Dr. Mendes , a Brazilian spiritual healer lo-
cated in the suburbs of São Paolo and specialized on healing epi-
lepsy, schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder. The inter-
views with this phenomenal natural healer revealed that it’s by
following the natural principle of self-regulation that healing states
are realized. The authors summarize their interviews with Dr.
Mendes as follows, fully quoting his reply to their questions:
You could say that we encourage the full expression of mad-
ness and of epilepsy. We then give them bioenergetic and
psychic exercises that correct their improper use of altered
awareness. After many years of observation, we have come
to the conclusion that epilepsy, schizophrenia, and multiple-
personality disorders can all result from inappropriate states
of consciousness. Therapeutic exercises help to organize the
guest/patients’ psychic energies and teach them to manage
their highly developed yet poorly trained mediumship and
trance abilities./41
On the same line of reasoning, the healing state is triggered
not by exerting control over the sickly condition, but by giving the
psychosomatic unity of the organism the opportunity to regulate
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its own healing, which in Dr. Mendes’ experience always leads to
the original wounding. It is by allowing this regression to take
place that full healing of the condition is achieved.
When we asked if learning to control the seizures constituted
the basis of the treatment, Mendes explained that control is
not the issue—as the basis of his therapy is hypnotic regres-
sion. This regression can take the patient back to childhood,or to a prenatal state when the person was still inside the
womb, or even to former lifetimes. Mendes believes that, to
cure themselves, most epileptics must discover and resolve
the highly charged emotional events that contribute to their
illnesses. But, unlike conventional psychotherapists, he feels
that these traumatic events may have happened in another
lifetime./43
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The healing would be accomplished by having one of the
clinic's mediums incorporate the former personality and
help her psychologically integrate and discharge that experi-
ence, just as if it had happened in this lifetime./44
Alberto Villoldo, long before he was famous as an alternative
spiritual healer, already had grasped the importance of bringing
self-regulation into healing; it was namely before he had departed
to the Andes that he was directing the Biological Self-RegulationLaboratory at San Francisco State University. One of the motiva-
tional triggers for this doctor’s extraordinary journey was his re-
search experience with Dr. Mendes.
Stanley Krippner reported that he was especially struck, in the
discussions with Dr. Mendes, by ‘the likelihood that the treatment
encourages a type of self-regulation.’ He explains:
All the various types of epilepsy involve dramatic alterations
of consciousness, some of them quite spectacular. An epilep-
tic may see auras before a seizure, may have a sense of déjà
vu, or may have sensory alterations which indicate that a
seizure is about to occur. Through biofeedback, some epilep-
tics have been able to exert some type of control over theepisode, thus minimizing its symptoms. Perhaps Mendes’
successful clients are doing something similar by shifting
their epileptic episode into a mediumistic experience./53
In The Shaman’s Journey , the authors come to an important con-
clusion about shamanism, which points to the important fact that
shamanism, at its very core, is basically non-judgmental and does
not steer toward any fixated position in terms of morality. It’s thus
free of the all-pervasive moralism that is part of the cultural bias
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inherent in all monotheistic religions and their respective cultural
incarnations (such as, mainly, Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
The authors conclude:
If we were to become polarized toward either the light or the
dark we would become trapped by that aspect of reality and
our spiritual development would be crippled./89
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Shaman, Healer, Sage
How to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine of the AmericasNew York: Harmony Books, 2000
Shaman, Healer, Sage is perhaps Villoldo’s best book. It was anyway the book thatmade him famous, a real bestseller. It has given me an ultimate peak of reading
enjoyment and illumination, and it has also emotionally touched me.
The author comes over in this book as a really honest, compe-
tent, emotionally mature, wistful and empathetic person who
went through a personal transformation that only few people in
these times can say to have accomplished. This book is not only
highly recommended lecture; it can perhaps be considered as one
of the best books so far in the century on the issues of shamanic
healing and the challenging task to render an outlandish practice
of Inka shamans comprehensive to the modern mind!
The literary abilities of the author, besides his expertise, are
out of question, and the book is an easy read despite the complex
and unusual subject. This might be due to the author’s penetra-
tion of the subject and his sense for vivifying theoretical content
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by practical and often uncanny experiences, and because of his
highly developed sense for poetic language and expression.
This being said, I would like to start the discussion of this
book with the term infinity. Dr. Villoldo explains that infinity is not
eternity and that it is not a stretching of time but as it were a realm
of ‘no time’, a sort of transliteration of another vibrational dimen-
sion, that is reigned by laws more majestic and more complex than
our own, and of which our space-time reality forms only a tinypart. One of the intentions of the author in this book was to render
comprehensive the fact that being in touch with shamanic healing
means to be in touch with infinity. This appears to be the key to
understanding the miraculous effectiveness of shamanic cures.
And the experience of infinity shatters the illusion of death,
disease, and old age. This is a not a psychological or spiritual
process only; every cell in our body is informed and re-
newed by it. Our immune system is unbridled, and / physi-
cal and emotional healing happen at an accelerated rate.
Miracles become ordinary, and spontaneous remissions,
those mysterious and baffling cures that confound medicine,
become commonplace. And a spiritual liberation or illumina-
tion takes place. In the presence of infinity we are able to
experience what we were before we were born and who we
will be after we die./22-23
And as he went through traditional medical training in the
United States at first, Dr. Villoldo then was going to look at that
medical science tradition he was coming from, and that he had leftwhen departing to the Andes in order to learn with the Inka sha-
mans. And he concludes:
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Many years later I understood that Western medicine, in an
effort to change the physical body, was merely moving the
iron filings around the glass. Surgery and medication often
brought about violent, traumatic change on the body. This
approach struck me as crude and invasive, like scattering the
iron filings with my hand, rather than moving them by
shifting/45
The other main purpose of the book is to explain to the inter-
ested reader what the Luminous Energy Field represents, what it
does in natural healing and how the shaman can access it for alter-
ing its energetic vibration in certain areas that contain so-called
imprints. The author explains:
We all possess a Luminous Energy Field that surrounds our
physical body and informs our body in the same way thatthe energy fields of a magnet organize iron filings on a piece
of glass. Our Luminous Energy Field has existed since before
the beginning of time. It was one with the unmanifest light
of Creation, and it will endure / throughout infinity. It
dwells outside of time but manifests in time by creating new
physical bodies lifetime after lifetime./42-43
This reservoir of vital force is a sea of living energy as indis-
pensable to our health as the oxygen and nutrients carried
by the bloodstream. They are the energies of the Luminous
Energy Field, the purest and most precious fuel for life./43
Indian or Tibetan mystics who documented the existence of
the Luminous Energy Field thousands of years ago de-scribed it as an aura or halo around the physical body. At
first it seemed odd to find the same concept of a human en-
ergy field among the jungle and mountain shamans in the
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Americas. Once I grasped the universality of the human en-
ergy field, however, I understood that every culture must
have discovered it. In the East, mandalas depict the Buddha
enveloped by blue and gold bands of fire. In the West, Christ
and the apostles are shown with luminous halos around
them. In the mystical literature, the Apostle Thomas is said
to have glowed with the same radiance as Christ. Native
American legends speak of persons who shimmered in the
night as if lit by an inner fire. The Andean storytellers recall
the ruler Pachacutek, considered to be a Child of the Sun,
who sparkled with the light of the dawn./43
In view of our cutting-edge science revelations over the last
two decades, and the insights we gained from quantum physics
about the quality of light, and of universal memory, the teaching
Dr. Villoldo received from the Laika shamans becomes compre-
hensive in a larger context, and is actually corroborated by newest
scientific insights. The author writes:
Every living thing on Earth is composed of light. Plants ab-
sorb light directly from the sun and turn it into life, andanimals eat green plants that feed on light, so that light is the
fundamental building block of life. We are light bound into
living matter./43
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In the light of Integral Theories of Everything, and especially
the revealing book by Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field
(2005) , what the author reports about the Akashic memory does
not sound so esoteric after all:
The Luminous Energy Field contains an archive of all of our
personal and ancestral memories, of all early-life trauma,
and even of painful wounds from former lifetimes. These
records or imprints are stored in full color and intensity of
emotions. Imprints are like dormant computer programs
that when activated compel us toward behaviors, relation-
ships, accidents, and illnesses that parody the initial wound-
ing. /46
What Dr. Villoldo writes about the earth’s magnetic field, and
how the luminous energy field connects us to the luminous matrixof the entire universe, reminds the extraordinary research by Dr.
Wilhelm Reich on what he called the orgone , which he described
equally both as a bioplasmatic energy and as cosmic orgone , being
responsible, inter alia, for the changes in weather.
—See also my reviews of Reich’s books in The New Paradigm in Science and
Systems Theory (2004). It must be seen that Reich was one of the first systemsresearchers in modern history, at a time when this kind of knowledge was not yet
embraced by science, which is why Reich had to suffer a lot of hardship through-
out his career as a medical doctor, psychoanalyst and bioenergetic healer
It is a well-known fact that Reich, on the basis of these discov-
eries, was able to bring about rain in desert regions and under
conditions of severe drought. Dr. Villoldo writes:
Although the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field drops off
very rapidly the farther it travels from the planet, it never
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actually reaches zero. It extends for hundreds of miles into
space before diminishing in strength, and travels at the
speed of light, at about 186.000 miles per second, to the edge
of the Universe. The human energy field appears to extend
only a few feet beyond the body since, like the magnetic field
of the Earth, it diminishes in strength very rapidly. Yet it also
travels at the speed of light, connecting us to the luminous
matrix of the entire Universe, known to the Inka as the tex-
emuyo or all-pervading web./49
Over the years I developed the ability to perceive the
streams of light that flow through the luminous body, and
read the imprints of health and disease. I believe that this is
an innate ability that we all possess but either do not de-
velop or lose after the age of seven or eight because we are
taught to believe that the material world is the only ‘real’
world. Shamans throughout the Americas rely on their abil-
ity to perceive the energetic realm./50
Now, what happens when for example we have been suffering
trauma in early childhood? Dr. Villoldo explains that in such a
case an imprint is formed in the luminous energy field.
Unresolved psychological and spiritual traumas become en-
graved like scratch marks in our luminous fields. Positive
experiences do not leave a mark in our luminous body./55
The blueprint that shaped and molded us since we were in-
side our mother’s womb contains the memories of all of our
former lifetimes—the way we suffered, the way we loved,how we were ill, and the way we died. In the East these im-
prints are known as karma, forces that sweep through our
life like a giant tide that we cannot swim free of. These im-
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prints contain instructions that predispose us to repeating
certain events from the past. We want to learn where these
energy imprints are located in the Luminous Energy Field
and how to erase them so that the body, mind, and spirit can
return to health./56
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Healing the Luminous Body
How to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine of the AmericasNew York: Harmony Books, 2000
Healing the Luminous Body was my first access to Dr. Villoldo’s unique healing
methods that he exposes in more detail in his books. This DVD is very well done,
a calm and peaceful introduction into the philosophy, the development and the
effectiveness of healing the luminous body..
Dr. Villoldo expresses himself fluently, and he is able to inform
about the unusual subject in a competent and poised manner. It
becomes clear that he speaks of experience, not of theory. The
video also retraces his professional way, how he got to the knowl-edge that today benefits so many people in the West, and how, at
the start, he was really a pioneer. In this sense, despite enlighten-
ing new openings presented to a greater public in the film ‘What
the Bleep Do We Know!?’ , people like Alberto Villoldo swim against
the stream. For the enlightenment, as in all times of turmoil and
change, does not seem to reach the small oligarchy that handle thelevers and push the buttons, and that use red telephones and se-
cret services. I say this to prevent you from falling in an unreal
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new age enthusiasm that deprives so many people today of their
feet and lets them float in the pure air of meditation, spirituality
and angels. Villoldo is not one of those lofty spirits! His teaching is
grounded, and therefore helps us connect with the not so lumi-
nous forces in us, our inner shadow, or all the shadows that are
the results of the imprints in our luminous body, which are for the
most part the consequences of early abuse suffered as children, or
that go back to former lifetimes.
Villoldo is not only a fabulous author, who is able to wrap his
teaching in a beautiful and wistful poetic style, but he’s also a
great orator, and his way of talking triggered in me pure hope,
love, and enthusiasm. I am thankful for this wonderful DVD as ithelps to introduce in his teaching which is not as easy to apply as
it seems on first sight. After all, it is taken from a culture almost
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opposite to ours, a culture that is psychologically and spiritually
much higher evolved than ours.
In this fascinating and informative video, Alberto Villoldo,
Ph.D., introduces viewers to the luminous energy field that
surrounds and informs our physical body like a blueprint of
life. Unveiling the secret of ancient shaman-healers, he
teaches us that many of our physical and psychological
problems stem from imprints within our luminous body. Dr.
Villoldo reveals the nature of this luminous field, how it acts
as a blueprint for our physical body and how by under-
standing its nature, we can actually heal ourselves and each
other. Once the luminous body is cleared, Dr. Villoldo ex-
plains, physical and emotional healing can begin.
Trained as a Medical Anthropologist, Dr. Villoldo left the
academic world behind twenty years ago to study among
the Inka shamans. It was in the Andes Mountains of South
America that he discovered the wisdom of the luminous
body from the indigenous shamans. This ancient knowledge
reveals the secret of true health and happiness.
To aid Dr. Villoldo explaining the luminous energy field, the
paintings of visionary artist Alex Grey are presented. No
other artist has depicted the luminous energy form in all of
its intricacies as clearly as Alex Grey. Dr. Villoldo's presenta-
tion, together with Alex Grey’s images help all of us under-
stand the nature of our spiritual and physical being.
Many of our illnesses, physical disorders, addictions and
failed relationships can be traced to faulty imprints in our
luminous body. In this video, Dr. Villoldo unveils how to
heal and recover from these destructive imprints and regain
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our physical, mental and spiritual well-being. Join us as we
travel to the Andes Mountains to learn the secret of the an-
cient shamans, a secret that can lead all of us to health, hap-
piness and beauty.
—From: DVD Back Cover
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The Four Insights
How to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine of the AmericasNew York: Harmony Books, 2000
The Four Insights chronologically is the last of the three books by Dr. Villoldo that
I review here, as it was the most recent at the time I drafted these reviews.
The book is structured very differently from the preceding
ones, in that it condenses the teaching into Four Insights.
Part One: Understanding the Energy of Perception
The Four Levels of Perception
Your Energetic Anatomy
Part Two: The Four Insights
Insight One – The Way of the Hero
The Practice of Nonjudgment
The Practice of Nonsuffering
The Practice of Nonattachment
The Practice of Beauty
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Insight Two – The Way of the Luminous Warrior
The Practice of Fearlessness
The Practice of Nondoing
The Practice of Certainty
The Practice of Nonengagement
Insight Three – The Way of the Seer
The Practice of Beginner’s Mind
The Practice of Living Consequently
The Practice of Transparency
The Practice of Integrity
Insight Four – The Way of the Sage
The Practice of Mastering Time
The Practice of Owning Your Projections
The Practice of No-mindThe Practice of Indigenous Alchemy
In a way, and perhaps logically so, this book is much more
condensed than any of the former books by the author. Every sen-
tence, and every word counts, and is full of meaning, and you are
not going to read this in the same speed as, for example, Shaman,
Healer, Sage. This indicates perhaps that this book is more concep-
tual than the earlier books, and that the author has in the mean-
time created a concise framework for his teaching. To give an ex-
ample of this density that reminds the highly focused content of
theosophical writings, the author writes in the Introduction:
The Earthkeepers teach that all of creation—the earth, hu-mans, whales, rocks, and even the stars—is made of vibra-
tion and light./x
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Thanks to the discoveries of quantum physics, we’ve come
to understand that all matter is densely packed light. But the
Laika have known about the luminous nature of reality for
millennia - they know that vibration and light can organize
themselves into a thousand shapes and forms./xiii
There is another elucidation forwarded by the author about
his teaching that I consider extremely important—and that he
should perhaps have provided in earlier publications. It’s the factthat the Laika tradition he was initiated in is not to be confounded
with mainstream Inka tradition.
All those who know about the Inka tradition are aware of the
fact that it was a Sun God cult, what Joseph Campbell came to call
a ‘solar culture’ that practiced ruthless slavery, the oppression of
the female, violent warfare, torture of prisoners of war, and hu-man sacrifice. The author explains:
As fortune or destiny would have it, I ended up meeting my
mentor, don Antonio. He was one of the last of the living
Laika, and he took me under his wing and trained me for
nearly 25 years. He was a man of many lives—during the
day, he was a university / professor; in the evenings, a mas-ter medicine man. He was born in a high mountain village
and worked with the tools and practices of the 15th century,
yet he was conversant in the way of the 21st. Although he
was a descendant of the Inka, he would tell me that the
Laika are much older than the Inka, whose culture was mas-
culine and militaristic. The Laika’s teachings were from that
earlier time, when the feminine aspect of the divine wasrecognized./xi-xii
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Over millennia, the Laika learned to access the biological
blueprint of light and assist Spirit in the unfolding of crea-
tion. They also learned how to heal disease and create ex-
traordinary states of health, as well as to craft and shape
their personal destinies, by changing the LEF [Luminous
Energy Field]./xiii
The powerful message of this teaching is that we can over-
come our negative individual and collective karma by rejoining
the original pattern, through overcoming and healing what the
Kahunas call complexes , and what Dr. Villoldo calls imprints in the
Luminous Energy Field (LEF).
We can think of the LEF as the software that gives instruc-
tions to DNA, which is the hardware that manufactures the
body. Mastery of the insights lets us access the latest versionof the software and allows each of us to create a new body
that ages, heals, and dies differently. Without the ability to
reprogram the LEF, we're trapped in the stories we inherited;
that is, we age, heal, live, and die the way our parents and
grandparents did, reliving their physical ills and emotional
ailments. The four insights contained in these pages allow us
to break free of the tyranny of our familial curses, the storiesthat haunted our ancestors./xiv
In becoming Homo luminous, we'll give up the ways of the
conquistador and discard the masculine theology that values
command, control, and dominion over nature, a theology
that justifies the exploitation of the earth's rivers and forests
because they're seen merely as resources for human con-sumption. Instead, we'll embrace an older mythology that
has become lost to most humans, a feminine theology of co-
operation and sustainability./xiv
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It is a daring perspective, and I can only admire the courage of
the author to forward his wonderful mission in a time of change
that perhaps really contains a vortex, an opening for the new to
emerge from the old.
The book contains much more than the little window that I
opened here in my book review, and perhaps contrary to my other
reviews, I restrain myself here. And for good reason. It’s a sym-
bolic act. Discover for yourself, and see what more you can learnfrom this extraordinary book! I feel unable to convey it.
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The Masks of GodOriental MythologyNew York: Penguin Arkana, 1992Originally published in 1962
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Simple Effective Techniques to Help You Boost Your VitalityBoulder, Co.: Sounds True Editions, 2004
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ShamanismArchaic Techniques of EcstasyNew York: Pantheon Books, 1964
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Healing SoundsThe Power of HarmoniesRochester: Healing Arts Press, 2002
Healing SoundsPrinciples of Sound HealingDVD, 90 min.Sacred Mysteries, 2004
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Tantra of SoundFrequencies of HealingCharlottesville: Hampton Roads, 2005
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Beyond the BrainBirth, Death and Transcendence in PsychotherapyNew York: State University of New York, 1985
The Holotropic MindThe Three Levels of Human ConsciousnessWith Hal Zina Bennett
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Education and the Significance of LifeLondon: Victor Gollancz, 1978
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DreamsWhat they Are and How they are Caused
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Your Brain is God
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The Archaic RevivalSan Francisco: Harper & Row, 1992
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Food of The GodsA Radical History of Plants, Drugs and Human EvolutionLondon: Rider, 1992
The Invisible LandscapeMind Hallucinogens and the I ChingNew York: HarperCollins, 1993(With Dennis McKenna)
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Care of the SoulA Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday LifeNew York: Harper & Collins, 1994
Murphy, Joseph
The Power of Your Subconscious MindWest Nyack, N.Y.: Parker, 1981, N.Y.: Bantam, 1982Originally published in 1962
The Miracle of Mind DynamicsNew York: Prentice Hall, 1964
Think Yourself RichUse the Power of Your Subconscious Mind to Find True WealthRevised by Ian D. McMahan, Ph.D.
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The Cosmic SerpentDNA and the Origins of KnowledgeNew York: J. P. Tarcher, 1999
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Life Between Lives
Hypnotherapy for Spiritual RegressionWoodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 2006
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Shaman, Healer, SageHow to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine of the AmericasNew York: Harmony, 2000
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Personal Notes
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