THE DESTINY AND SIGNS OF GOD

A psychiatrist offers an overview of humanity’s place in the physical and spiritual universe.

Rotaru begins his ambitious nonfiction debut with a series of elemental questions that have plagued humans for centuries: Who are we? Where do we come from, and where do we go? “How can the paths we choose determine the destiny of our lives?” In the long and comprehensive book that follows, the author seeks to provide his readers with the means to answer those questions through a deeper understanding of the relationship between God and what Rotaru conceives as God’s “wife,” the physical matter of the universe. Fusing generous autobiographical elements from his own life with a kind of popular version of Eastern philosophy (“negative energies” corresponding to chakras and other such ideas), the author lays out a vision of what he sees as humanity’s potential—and the obstacles to realizing that potential. “Our lust for money and wealth and physical satisfaction,” he writes at one point, “is clouding our thinking and hinders our vision of our true destiny.” There are aspects of Rotaru’s own vision that will likely rankle some 21st-century readers. His view of the universe is blandly heterosexual, for example. “Just as God-matter and soul-body couples cannot separate from one another,” he writes when forbidding married couples from separating, “so men and women in the period of spiritual evolution cannot divorce.” Those same readers may question the author’s conviction that the voices he hears in his dreams are messages from God or his rather controversial belief that “every time a stranger comes to you to confess his problems and idiosyncrasies, he is carrying a message from God.” But the author’s enthusiasm and conviction carry a charm of their own, and his many ideas are thought-provoking.

An elaborate and intriguing—if overly detailed—spiritual cosmology.