A mystical foray into our ancestral shadows—not for nonspiritually inclined readers.
Spiritual counselor and psychic O’Sullivan and journalist Graydon provide guidance toward connecting with the gallery of heroes, villains and everyday folks who comprise our physical, psychological and emotional heritage (and baggage).
As the authors endeavor to help readers find their place in and path through their particular family tree, they give advice on how to tap into the flow of the past to the present, primarily through meditation and prayer and perhaps in association with a healer or other member of the spiritual community. Although O’Sullivan and Graydon suggest readers remain open to intuition and incorporeal voices, to “allow ourselves to cross the bridge between our day-to-day awareness and higher consciousness,” they also have much to say to the spiritually clueless among us. Curiosity about your forebears is certainly a near-universal condition. There are many quotidian avenues to explore genealogy, and neither O’Sullivan nor Graydon disavow them. Still, feeling the potency of a familial landscape, for instance, isn’t a great surprise, and it affords us an opportunity to keep an open mind and pay attention to premonitions, dreams and sudden empathies. The authors present dozens of stories about people visiting in one form or another with deceased family members, which will appeal to a limited audience of readers. Although a certain passivity occasionally interrupts the proceedings—“The secrets of our inheritance...lie in our genes. They contain the memory of all that we are and all who have gone before us”—it is more likely that O’Sullivan and Graydon espouse active engagement, to seek and interpret your past to both fill yourself out and to disentangle yourself from any ruinous family script.
A mystical foray into our ancestral shadows—not for nonspiritually inclined readers.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7454-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
If Charles Reich is your bag, then this may be your book. If you want your neuroscience qua science, then head over to where...
A head-spinning guide to supercharged meditation.
If life is like a box of chocolates, to quote the philosopher Forrest Gump, then, to quote Siegel (Clinical Psychiatry/UCLA; Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human, 2016, etc.), “consciousness is like a container of water”—undrinkable if a tablespoon of salt is put into an espresso cup but just fine if the container is a bathtub. And why is it like a container of water? That’s never quite explained, except to say that cultivating the mind to maximize awareness makes our experience of things different. That heightened experience can be a deeply positive thing, for, as the author points out, neural integration makes problem solving easier, and “open awareness” boosts the immune system. Siegel delivers a “Wheel of Awareness” to visualize the process, with attention as the spoke, knowing or awareness as the hub, and “knowns” on the rim. But those knowns can be awareness-inhibiting prejudices as well as hard-won knowledge of how the world works. Siegel favors a murky, circular style: “When we open awareness to sensation, such as that of the breath, we become a conduit directing the flow of something into our awareness.” Well, yes, that’s how breath works, but Siegel means something different—“enabling the sensation of the breath at the nostrils to flow into consciousness.” Further along, the author complicates the picture: “And so both focal attention involving consciousness and nonfocal attention without consciousness involve an evaluative process that places meaning and significance on energy patterns and their informational value as they arise moment by moment.” Can there be meaning without consciousness? That’s a question for Heidegger, but suffice it to say that it’s a clear if empty statement relative to the main, which is laden with jargon, neologisms (“plane-dominant sweep”; “SOCK: sensation, observation, conceptualization, and knowing”), and lots of New Age cheerleading.
If Charles Reich is your bag, then this may be your book. If you want your neuroscience qua science, then head over to where Damasio and Dennett are shelved.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-99304-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
A moving account by renowned English medium Altea of her life, her preternatural gifts, and the meaning that she sees in these for herself and others. From earliest childhood, Altea heard strange voices and saw terrifying faces at night. Lonely and rejected by her unhappily married parents, who often beat her, she was haunted by the fear that she was mad. She grew up in poor health with the one desire to pass as a normal person. Even this was finally denied her when, toward the end of her own disastrous marriage, she came into contact with Spiritualists in 1980 and learned to develop rather than resist her psychic powers. The turning point came in her first encounter with Grey Eagle, her Apache spirit guide. Altea recounts many fascinating stories of contact with the dead that seem to defy ordinary understanding. She explains that in a trance the medium vacates her body so that it can be used by a spiritual entity. The purpose is not only to console the living but also to help the departed, who somehow need to communicate and, in extreme cases, to relive and accept their actual death experience, as in the case of a woman who had been buried alive. Although Altea reproduces many of the stock themes of Spiritualist literature and sometimes lapses into moralizing, her true contribution here is the heroic story of her own ``blossoming'' into life and establishing centers where people can receive spiritual and psychic healings. The author's simplicity and patent sincerity will warm the hearts of readers who reserve judgment on Spiritualist phenomena. (Book-of-the-Month Club featured alternate; Quality Paperback Book Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: May 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-446-51969-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
