Inprint - New Books of interest by Jeanne Spiro

Eckhart Tolle’s Findhorn Retreat: Stillness Amidst the World by Eckhart Tolle. (New World Library, $27.95, Hardcover with 2 DVD set.)

Eckhart Tolle recently led an extraordinary two-day retreat at Findhorn, the famous spiritual community in Scotland. The event was filmed and edited into a wonderful four hour video experience. In this presentation, Tolle gives us a profound message of hope and simple tools for transformation—the clear guidance needed to realize the magic of every moment and deepen our awareness of the sacredness of being. His words have the power to deeply affect our lives and reveal something new each time we listen.

The main theme of this retreat is stillness. He explains how compulsive thoughts become as we analyze, interpret, and label every conscious experience we have. In such a state we can no longer perceive the sacredness in ourselves and in the natural world around us. Our experience of life becomes nothing but a never ending reel of thoughts, opinions, and viewpoints. In a lighthearted but penetrating style, Tolle explains how we can free ourselves from our mind created sense of self by offering an in-depth explanation of stillness and how we can achieve it. His Findhorn Retreat offers a portal to serene sanity in a world that desperately needs it.

The book presents elegant nature photographs and captions. The images are interspersed with quotes from some of the peak moments from the retreat.

A Year to Enlightenment: 365 Steps to Enriching and Living Your Life by E. Raymond Rock. (New Page Books, $15.99, Paperback.)

A Year to Enlightenment is a complete meditation experience with a holistic approach. It is divided into 365 “days.” Each contains an insight, a reflection, and a meditation which will help awaken your intuition, insight, and inner knowledge to reach that state sought after by mystics and seekers throughout the ages: enlightenment.

Moving you gradually and comprehensively from simple relaxation into the deepest, most profound areas of meditation and spirituality, it encourages you to read only one page at a time, practicing a single technique until a personal insight arises. Only then do you turn the page and to on to the next “day.” By using this method, your own insights become your personal teacher.

A Year to Enlightenment presents Buddhist meditation principles, although it is nondenominational. People of all religions can apply the principles to awaken natural creativity and find meaning and significance in life. By becoming more loving, generous, and tolerant, stress and worry is reduced, and fear and uncertainty eliminated.

The Mysteries of Druidry by Brendan Cathbad Myers, Ph.D. (New Page Books, $15.99, Paperback.)

The ancient Celts embraced a spiritual relationship with an enlivened Earth. Their art, music, stories, and all of nature was sacred to them; a world filled with a mysterious energy that animated every tree, rock, animal, and even the weather. Their priests, the Druids, had a special knowledge and connection to these mysteries. Brenden Cathbad Myers traverses centuries-old Celtic pathways in order to rediscover the living spiritual mysteries over which the ancient Druids kept vigil.

Myers roamed the Irish countryside for four years, encountering the sacred places and collecting folklore first hand. He reconstructs Druidic history, tradition, and customs using historical documents and written accounts. The true key to understanding Celtic Mysticism, Says Myers, is the mythology. Celtic mythology reads like a biography of the Druids; their behavior, friends and family, travels, successes and failures. These Celtic mysteries, including the Sacred Truth, The Great Marriage, the Hero’s Journey, and the Otherworld are retold and made relevant to our world today.

The Mysteries of Druidry is also a contemporary guide for modern Celts and Druids. It provides guidance for developing a connection to the living physical environment, reconnecting to Earth, and experiencing the sacred. Myers illustrates how an ancient earth-based spirituality is not only appropriate for the 21st century, but is possibly crucial to healing the Earth.

Esoteric Christianity by Annie Besant. (Quest Books, $16.95, Paperback.)

Early Christianity held secrets equal to those of other great religions, says Annie Besant. Its first followers guarded them as priceless treasures. After an increasingly rigid hierarchy began to bury these truths in the early centuries A.D., they were known to only a few initiates, who communicated them privately, often in obscure language. In Esoteric Christianity, Besant’s aim is to restore the secret truths underlying Christian doctrine. As interest grows in the Gnostic Gospels and the mystical side of Christianity, Besant’s remarkable book, first published in 1901, is attracting new attention.

The word mystery, Besant says, is to be understood not as a puzzle, but as a window to a higher dimension. Jesus’ birth is a metaphor for the rebirth we must all undergo to find the kingdom within. She takes the same view in discussing the mythic Christ, the Atonement, the Resurrection and Ascension, the Trinity, Prayer, Forgiveness of Sins, the Sacraments, and Revelation. The introduction and notes by Richard Smoley make this classic work newly accessible for modern readers.

Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks 1960 - 1969 by Alan Watts. (New World Library, $15.95, Paperback.)

Alan Watts introduced millions of Western readers to Zen and other Eastern philosophies, but he is also recognized as a brilliant, celebrity philosopher who exemplified the ideas and lifestyle of the sixties. Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life is a compilation of lectures he delivered at American universities throughout that decade. In each of these presentations, he challenges us to reevaluate Western culture’s most hallowed constructs and to go beyond our usual mindsets.

In some of the lectures Watts is on familiar ground, interpreting Eastern philosophy for Western audiences. In others he treads new ground and explores the roots of the counterculture movement in ancient tribal and shamanic cultures. In the process, he addresses some of the era’s most important questions: What is the nature of reality? How does an individual’s relationship to society affect this reality?

In his talk “Not What Should Be, But What Is,” Watts contrasts classical Eastern and traditional Western mythologies and questions whether the image of divine patriarch is still intellectually plausible. In “Democracy in Heaven,” he asks if a monarchical religion still makes sense in a democratic society. And in “Religion and Sex,” he playfully suggests that organized religions are mostly sexual regulation societies. He goes on to discuss the social implications of the Church’s investment in moral issues.

Filled with Watt’s playful and provocative style, Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life shows the remarkable scope of a philosopher at his prime, exploring and defining the sixties counterculture as only he could.

Suddenly Psychic: A Skeptic’s Journey by Maureen Caudill. (Hampton roads, $16.95, Paperback.)

As Maureen Caudill bent a metal spoon with her mind she knew she was witnessing a total violation of the laws of physics and that her understanding of reality would never be the same. Letting go of the ultra-rational, skeptical perspective she had maintained over a twenty year scientific career, she joined the 50% of Americans who report having had psychic experiences and began a firsthand exploration of phenomena like clairvoyance, remote viewing, out of body experiences, channeling, and mediumship. In Suddenly Psychic she shares her conviction that psychic abilities are a normal part of human consciousness and anyone can access them, using her scientific background to validate and explain her experiences.

Caudill combines vivid descriptions of altered states of consciousness with an in-depth look at cutting edge scientific theories that are consistent with these phenomena. She offers us a solid, if sometimes speculative, scientific basis for understanding how these abilities might operate, based on current, cosmological and physics theories. Suddenly Psychic forges a link between two apparently opposite world views, the personal experience of a psychic and the clear, questioning mind of a scientist, and shows us that the two worlds are one and the same. Her message is simple: we are all psychic, these abilities are real, and current scientific theories are beginning to provide explanations for how and why they work.

Traveling With George: An Out-Of-This-World Experience by Betty Waldron Portenlanger. (Trafford Publishing, $19.95, Paperback.)

Losing your life’s partner in death is not something easy to undergo. The shock and the sorrow can be so intense that you may become numb to nearly everything else. Betty Waldron Portenlanger and her family suffered just such acute grief when she lost her husband, George, unexpectedly, literally instantaneously, after 33 years of marriage. But Betty did not accept George’s departure as a finality and began to look around for signs that his energy and their shared love were still in evidence. What she found fills the stories in Traveling With George.

This is a book for anyone who has lost a loved one through death, and who has wondered, “Is this really the end?” It is also an unforgettable portrait of George Portenlanger, the thoroughly charming husband whose 59 earthly years Betty found to be absurdly too few!