Cheng could easily have become sad and bad, but good and happy is her path. These lifeways were her ticket to the high road.
Motivational speaker and poet Cheng offers a heartfelt guide to building the foundations for a good life.
Cheng has had her share of miseries: A crippling case of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which was not only excruciatingly painful but kept her from school and almost sent her into foster care, was followed by the loss of her vision at the age of 17. So if she chooses to live in happiness, then her tools to achieve that state certainly have fashioned one shining example. Cheng is a forceful believer in God Almighty: “God is everything. He is all virtues…He is infinite, total, and all-encompassing.” Well, perhaps not all the time–“He is absent during your every fall”–and she is not the first to appreciate that “He works under mysterious plans.” But readers need not be believers to find the everyday wisdom in her life purposes: to be a good person with good intentions and to enjoy life to its last sensuous, joyous morsel. Her advice is to live moment to moment, guided by a foundation of values and virtues. Writing with verve and conviction, and ever cutting to the chase, she covers the ingredients of the foundation: faith (in God, perhaps, or maybe simply the allegiance to a cause), finding gratitude (or at least an education) in all things, discovering your core value (hers is goodness), loving life and yourself and others, and having hope that things will go right. Who’s to argue with that? As you wend your way to being good, Cheng is adamant about putting your needs first (only when you have cared for yourself can you fruitfully care for others) and being yourself, finding what is important to you, learning to say no, giving yourself a break, kicking back and taking risks. Then she provides working examples of how to handle the negativities that enter life–deaths, physical ailments–moving beyond simply tendering good words.
Cheng could easily have become sad and bad, but good and happy is her path. These lifeways were her ticket to the high road.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-6151-5522-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A useful text for readers curious about New Age spirituality.
An intense exploration of the mystical concept of “ageless wisdom,” which Seifer and Vieweg describe as a body of ideas, laws and truths that have guided seekers throughout time in finding and reveling in the world’s spirituality.
This second edition of the text, following closely on the heels of the first, opens with a well-written and thought-provoking introduction that quickly lays out the authors’ hypothesis–mankind is now, more than ever, ready and willing to embark upon a spiritual quest. The authors point to tragedies such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina as catalysts for this movement. Seifer and Vieweg support this theory with a series of 10 dense chapters, each of which opens with a thought-provoking quotation from a saint, poet, writer or prophet that logically guides the chapter. Although the book provides ample coverage of the history of ageless wisdom, the authors also focus on illuminating its role in the world’s current state, and make predictions about its future. Seifer and Vieweg thoroughly cover reincarnation, the qualities and existence of the human soul, the experience of spiritual awakening and the history of ageless wisdom. Woven throughout the text is a fine balance of description of and quotations from spiritual leaders from around the world and across time–this provides this text with a global and timeless perspective. Each chapter concludes with end-notes which provide additional information, much of which is historical in nature and provides opportunity for future exploration. The book also includes a short glossary of terms, enabling readers to better understand some of the more complicated spiritual concepts, such as Etheric Vision (“the power to see the subtler grades of matter with the strictly physical eye”). Though abstract and wordy, the book is appropriate for seekers wanting to understand the roots of ageless wisdom.
A useful text for readers curious about New Age spirituality.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9820047-0-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Rigorous yet readable notes, sketches, and articles that round out a four-volume panorama of the philosophical pantheon. The eminent existential philosopher Jaspers (18831969) died before he could complete this work. Editors Ermarth and Ehrlich have, however, been able to stitch together a coherent book that, in accordance with Jaspers's plan, primarily covers the philosophers whom he termed ``the disturbers'': thinkers for whom doubt and despair loomed large. Jaspers opens with a discussion of Descartes. A disturber in the probing style of his thought, he stands apart, however, insofar as he compartmentalized issues of faith and philosophy. The other disturbers Jaspers characterizes as ``great awakeners.'' Working the boundaries between philosophy and theology, they sought to think man back to some sense of completeness. These include Pascal, whose famous wager for the existence of God Jaspers critiques at some length; Kierkegaard, the great philosopher of faith, over whom Jaspers lingers longest; and Nietzsche, discussed briefly in part as a counterpoint to Kierkegaard. Interestingly, Jaspers includes a chapter on the 18th- century theoretician and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, declaring his work to be exemplary for its critical discernment. In a short section on ``philosophers in other realms,'' such as the sciences, Jaspers discusses the philosophical import and the (in his view) severe limits of Einstein's thought. Max Weber, in contrast, elicits unstinting praise. The book closes with an appreciation of Marx that subsumes a harsh critique of the Marxist style of disputation. Jaspers makes information about philosophers' lives and the dissemination of their works integral to his accounts of their ideas. Thus a sense of history and of human contingency pervade these pieces. Twenty-five years after its author's death, this is by no means a cutting-edge work—but this great thinker's ruminations on his predecessors have a timeless quality to them.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-136943-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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