An inspired, technical work for daring seekers of the sacred and sublime.
A divine dissertation for zealous spiritual devotees.
Impassioned author and sage-in-the-making Gandhi doesn’t just talk the talk and walk the walk, he has become the path. Dilettantes beware, as Spiritual Man is not for the weak-muscled, shallow-minded or faint-hearted–readers must get real, get a guru and get God. This is the hard-work, soul-first way of the disciple–meditation, detachment from worldly illusion and sloughing and scrubbing one’s inner being until it’s squeaky clean. Through devotion and dedication, the author writes that followers will be “completely drunk with the unbroken experience of the nectar of Bliss.” In true relationship with Self, the author writes, one recognizes that fruitless action begins with a negative thought. An essential transformative practice is Pratipksha Bhavana, which involves suppression, substitution and sublimation–through willpower, one contains the negative thought, replaces it with that which is positive and by continued practice observes the diminishing of all negativity. Occasionally, one of Gandhi’s sentences echoes the work of Tolle, such as, “Remain as the Self of the thinker, and there is an end of thoughts.” Elsewhere, stirring passages herald the ecstasy of the enlightened man–“He may become simple and innocent like a dove, dynamic like a hawk, elevated and detached like a swan.” Nowhere does the author state his credentials, suggesting less an error of omission than an act of genuine humility. Though the book’s terminology is exhaustive, readers can easily refresh their memories by using the glossary. Spiritual novices will quiver in the depths of Gandhi’s teachings, and serious students may shiver at the absence of chaff. It is sometimes unclear whether certain information is the author’s or teachings of ascended masters, such as Sri Ananda Mayee Ma and Bhagavan Ramana Maharshi. Still, it’s worthy of being repeated.
An inspired, technical work for daring seekers of the sacred and sublime.Pub Date: May 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4363-0308-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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