A thorough, well-articulated study of spiritual awakening.
In this guide to spiritual awakening, debut author Knox combines the teachings of many notable masters to deliver a thorough exploration of the ways that inner perspectives drive external realities.
The author aptly titles this book a “crash course” in spirituality and holistic well-being. She dives into such complex topics as light and dark energy, cultural beliefs about death and dying, and metaphysics, skillfully conveying material from ancient teachings and modern texts. Drawing on 44 years of her own study, the author relates how modern culture pushes people to ignore their spiritual lives in favor of material, commercial concerns. However, Knox urges readers to look within themselves, and to that end, she fills her book with exercises to expand consciousness and mindfulness, including visualizations and conscious breathing. The book brims with information culled from numerous outside sources, including Bashar’s Five Laws of Creation from medium Darryl Anka and an in-depth exploration of the seven chakras and their importance to spiritual and physical health. Readers who are unfamiliar with ancient studies of energy fields, pyramids, and the human connection to the divine may find the book somewhat overwhelming, but others will relish the author’s tendency to dive straight into the nuances and specifics of each topic. Indeed, many of the principles expressed, such as the importance of applying positive meaning to all things, are easy to absorb and understand, even by readers who are just beginning to learn about spiritual practice. Toward the end of the book, the author explains “The Medicine Wheel,” a Native American concept represented by stone monuments, in New Age terms, relating how people may use it to integrate spiritual growth with physical health.
A thorough, well-articulated study of spiritual awakening.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8343-1
Page Count: 174
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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