SHAPES OF TRUTH

Although Allen flatly says that his work is about God, he quickly clarifies this assertion. “I don’t care what your religion is, and I don’t care if you’re an atheist,” he writes. “None of that has any bearing on what I’ll cover in this book.” Oddly, he then immediately moves on to claiming that there exists, hidden in the body of every human, a set of 35 “embodied concepts that describe qualities of God.” According to the author, these qualities include things like strength, nourishment, vulnerability, identity, space, gratitude, and an array of different kinds of love: personal love, passionate love, universal love, “merging” love, and so on. Each of these, Allen explains, is “a way of seeing the divine in everyday life” and setting about answering so-called big questions like “Who am I? What’s God? What will it be like to die?” The author sees these embodied concepts as essentially physical manifestations. Imagine, he asks his readers, that you’re in the presence of somebody who’s suffering, and instead of feeling your response as “compassion,” you find “a soft brick sitting inside your upper chest cavity, glowing emerald green, tender to the touch and bringing tears to your eyes.” In his ambitious guide, Allen describes each of these “thirty-five issues and their corresponding divine body-forms” in ways that readers of spiritualist/New Age literature will find comforting, inspiring, and predictable. In addition, his narrative style is easy and readable throughout the earnest work. But those not already onboard may become perplexed, and the confusion will start virtually on Page 1, with Allen’s contention that his intensely religion-saturated book doesn’t care whether or not a reader is, for instance, an atheist. They may also question his contention that all of his 35 concepts are actually real, scientifically verifiable, physical components, including gratitude.