SELF-RESCUE

At least this one's reasonably literate, but it's the same old how-to-save-yourself-from-yourself stuff This time, it's distilled Christian dogma, with a smattering of eastern philosophy and a surprising injection of politics--all meant to keep you from jumping off that bridge. ""What few understand is that if there is a natural 'law' called the 'Relativity of Perceptions' to which all men are subject in their qualitative judgments about their experience, there is no law which governs the particular relativistic system that men choose. While the glancing of men is natural, where that glance is directed is, for most men, a matter of fashion. . . . In our times, more and more humans find themselves under the stage direction of Marx. Large numbers of the Hindu, Islamic, and Buddhist traditions do not (yet?) walk in that stage. . . . If there is relative social calm in Cairo, Dacca, and Damascus, it is because the relativity system taught by the Prophet is still in force."" Back to the man on the bridge: he must ask himself, says the author, ""is it the real me who is urging a jump . . . rather than some chance intruder? . . . Our would-be suicide needs to perceive the doctrinal heart of all true religion, that all being is one."" With an introduction by William F. Buckley, whose presence here reminds us only that all the pages turn to the right.