An accessible and well-crafted introduction to the teachings of A Course in Miracles.
A psychiatrist and psychotherapist begins to unpack a monumental spiritualist work in this series opener.
Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles was first published in 1976. The book attempted, in Rosenthal’s (From Plagues to Miracles, 2018) view, to “clarify the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and to bring those teachings in line with their original meaning by cutting through centuries of distortion and misrepresentation.” The controversial and often difficult text has spawned many volumes of interpretation, to which Rosenthal submits this addition. “I hope to convey the Course’s core principles without relying too much on its specific language and terminology,” writes the author, “but rather to view it through the lenses of psychology, neurobiology, metaphor, and common-sense experience.” Rosenthal believes that people will not find happiness in the normal course of life; they must be guided to it through a deeper understanding of God and themselves. Using fablelike stories, personal anecdotes, and contemporary metaphors, the author attempts to communicate the major teachings of the Course (as he calls it) in a way that is helpful both to those familiar with the work and those who have not yet encountered it. These include Schucman’s idea of the two parts of the mind, which Rosenthal likens to computer-operating systems: the Ever-Mind (salvation) and the Never-Mind (the Ever-Mind’s truth-denying opposite). Rosenthal is a talented writer and elucidator, and his three decades of clinical experience as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist shine through his calming prose: “There is very little that medieval scholars and modern physicists agree upon, as you might expect. But there is one doctrine that both have endorsed: all things in this world of time and space must come to an end.” Frequently in these pages, he does not work directly from Schucman’s text, but rather describes her ideas on his own, which makes it easy for a novice to follow along. There is little talk of Jesus, and most of what Rosenthal discusses is applicable across religious (or secular) traditions. Even so, it’s difficult to imagine a general readership gravitating to this primer dedicated to a now-obscure New Thought text from the ’70s, no matter how pleasantly it is written.
An accessible and well-crafted introduction to the teachings of A Course in Miracles.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72251-009-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: G&D Media
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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