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GREAT SWAN

MEETINGS WITH RAMAKRISHNA

A remarkable portrait of a most remarkable spiritual teacher. Though little known in the West, Ramakrishna (1836-86) is generally revered in India as a direct incarnation of God, similar in some ways to Christ. Rather than write a standard biography of this Hindu mystic who embraced and, reportedly, embodied the essence of all major world religions—a biography like Richard Schiffman's Sri Ramakrishna (1989)—Hixon (Coming Home, 1978) here attempts a more daunting task: to re-create the experience of observing, over the course of years, a man who ``has attained the goal of spiritual evolution.'' To do this, the author draws on numerous eyewitness accounts of the sage, smoothly blending them into the voice of a disciple who observes his ``Master'' lecturing, conversing, playing, singing, dancing, and slipping into profound mystical ecstasies. There is no skepticism in this devotional telling but, rather, a pervasive sense of wonder and even rapture that Hixon makes concrete through tight physical detail, as in this deathbed scene: ``Ramakrishna's charming smile and the fresh white cloth around his waist shine in the flickering lamplight. His honey-colored skin, dulled by illness, seems to regain its extraordinary luster....The room is being filled with light....It is like a lightning flash, prolonged for several minutes. The pressure is unbearable....'' There is also much inspired exposition by Ramakrishna of religious principles and practices, making this account of great interest to those spiritually inclined but occasionally a tough go for those more interested in Ramakrishna's incandescent character than in his teachings. You don't have to share Hixon's conviction in order to appreciate his achievement in evoking—artfully and with considerable emotional power—what it might be like to encounter, as Ramakrishna put it, ``a human emanation of Divine Reality.''

Pub Date: May 30, 1992

ISBN: 0-87773-660-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

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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THE ART OF SOLITUDE

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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