A successful beginner’s guide to spiritual growth and enlightenment.
A guide that lays out universal principals and ideas about spirituality.
Debut author Ferro begins by offering a road map for a personal spiritual journey, beginning with the idea that people have purposes that are deeper and more complex than they may understand. The author urges the reader to distinguish between their outer and inner selves; the latter, she says, encompasses one’s connection with a greater force, or Absolute Being. One’s body, she emphasizes, is only a vehicle for the soul. Along the way, she discusses the Seven Major Rays of Creation; each of us, according to the author, is born “under” a particular ray (such as “Will and Power” or “Active Intelligence and Adaptability”), which doesn’t full develop its energy until one is born again, under a different ray. Thus, one’s spiritual life is a constant process of growth and search to refine one’s connection with the Absolute Being, and all that’s connected to it. In a concise, conversational manner, she defines what each ray means. The second ray, for instance, “Love and Wisdom,” emphasizes a life focused on nurturing, caring, and passivity; the fifth ray (“Concrete Knowledge and Science”), by contrast, is the ray of the scientist, who “brings the light of understanding to the soul.” Ferro also provides a vivid description of the chakras of Indian religions, which she explains as being “centres of light in our bodies.” Overall, this book is thorough and descriptive, but it won’t overwhelm novice readers. One engaging chapter on “Group Soul Recognition,” for instance, discusses the universal, relatable experience of connecting immediately with some people while instantly disliking others; the author goes on to explore the possibility that those we connect with have crossed our paths in previous lives.
A successful beginner’s guide to spiritual growth and enlightenment.Pub Date: April 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-7868-0
Page Count: 138
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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