Shumei International Press, 2007,

ISBN: 978-4903930008

Reviewed by Sandra White

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American writer and photographer Lisa Hamilton had been investigating global food production for many years when in 2003 she was invited by Shumei, a Japanese spiritual organisation (shumei.org), to interrogate their approach to farming, Natural Agriculture. For three years, mostly in Japan, she visited individual farmers and the people who distribute and eat their produce and one of the attractive aspects of this book is her immediate openness about how her Western mind wrestled with their Eastern approach.

As the title suggests, there is more to Natural Agriculture than simply producing food. Combining aspects of Buddhism and Shinto, it aspires to shape a wholesome society which upholds the complexity of nature and shares her fruits with other creatures as well as fellow human beings.

After an introduction to Natural Agriculture’s principles and a history of Japan’s relationship with food, Hamilton profiles the people she met, under four themes:  Grow:  Natural Agriculture as a Farming System; Connect: Natural Agriculture as a Food Culture; Cultivate: Natural Agriculture as an Experience; and Live: Natural Agriculture as a Way of Life. Then she offers Afterword: Embracing Possibility, where she addresses her own scepticism.

Through distilled prose, short engaging chapters and unusual photographs, she builds a complex picture which, in my view, does justice to Shumei’s ambition to move the world away from contemporary farming practices which are so destructive to the soil. She describes farming in harmony with larger nature, communities of committed purchasers, transformations in physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing among farmers and eaters alike and, finally, the rippling out of these transformations into individual attitudes and behaviours which could cultivate world peace.

A bold claim – but this is not an idealised portrait. Some of the profiles hint at inner personal dynamics which, without transformation, play out on the world stage and produce war, inequality, poverty and famine. She makes struggles transparent and acknowledges the structures and power inherent in a spiritual organisation like Shumei, whose influence over its members is something our secular society might envy.

Natural Agriculture is quite controversial, even within organic circles. No pesticide or fertiliser of any kind is applied, seeds are saved and, whenever possible, there is no rotation. All this, within an active attitude of love, respect and gratitude, supports the soil’s innate capacity to partner crops suited to its local characteristics, strengthening the life force of the plants to withstand attacks from pests, diseases and adverse weather conditions. At Shumei’s small vegetable initiative in Wiltshire, (shumei.eu/yatesbury/), the yield was only 10% reduced by our awful weather this year, (its third), in comparison to other organic farmers reporting shortfalls of 15 – 50%.

Hamilton showcases powerfully how this approach could feed people, change attitudes and nourish peace.

O Books, 2011, 222pp
ISBN 978–1–84694–567–0

Reviewed by Ian Mowll

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You must read this book. If you are interested in political philosophy you will find it fascinating. If you are not interested in political philosophy you soon will be. This is a book written as books should be written. Jean combines her usual clarity with an engaging use of poems and quotations. You get to know first hand the characters who shaped our theories of politics, often by engaging with their own words; and you get the feeling for what they were about through Jean’s judicious choice of poems to illuminate and elucidate each chapter.

Despite the unquestionable scholarship and wide–ranging sources, the book has the feel of a set of stories or vignettes which help the reader to explore and roam around the ideas and get to know the people who developed them. It allows the reader really to reflect on what politics is about: what is it for, who is it for, what is included and what tends to be left out.

In the first part of the book, Jean introduces us to a number of political philosophers who she feels are key to the development of political thinking. These vignettes are light and straightforward and yet authoritative and engaging. They make me want to find out more. Jean also includes in this political patchwork one very unusual name, that of Charles Darwin. I wholeheartedly concur that Darwin changed the face of many disciplines; his ideas of indeterminacy – the fact that the future cannot be predicted – and the importance of variation and diversity influenced physics and biology and philosophy, psychology and economics as well as politics. One can argue that Darwin has had more influence on intellectual discourse than anyone since Isaac Newton. Some of that influence has been to the good, in that he emphasised the importance of collaboration as much as the role of competition and the importance of diversity rather than of standardisation;  equally, some of his ideas were distorted as a way to support eugenics and the primacy of competition. It is a great choice to include Darwin amongst the political philosophers.

Jean makes it clear that a central theme that drives politics is how you view ‘The Nature of Man’. Rousseau thought Man is largely Good and so a political system needs to give room for this goodness to flourish. Machiavelli thought Man is largely Bad and thus needs controlling by the state, or, as Jean (p26) puts it, “the Government exists to restrain the imperfections springing from this negative characteristic”.

Whilst Jean does a wonderful job of considering the impact of differing assumptions regarding the Nature of Man, she could perhaps have given more prominence to the differing assumptions about the way the world works, about theories of society. She does mention the idea of society as a series of market relations and the need for political society to maintain orderly relationships (p33). But perhaps she could have taken this further? So, I would have been interested in her views as to how Newton’s ideas (translated into French by the Marquise de Chatelet, who was the mathematical brains behind the better–known Voltaire, her lover) influenced the philosophy of the French Enlightenment. Newton’s laws offered a vision of the world as a place of predictability, rationality, objectivity and control that was very beguiling; Voltaire introduced these ideas to France, in Elements of the Philosophy of Newton written in 1736. What underpinned the French Enlightenment was this doctrine of determinism and the belief that society could be designed as from a blank sheet of paper and a belief that society would then operate as designed. So the ways in which this image – of society as a machine which political and economic systems could control – has influenced subsequent political thought might be a theme to explore in more depth in a later edition of this wonderful book.

Incidentally, Hayek (1958), a 20^th century economist and philosopher who Jean was moved to include, contrasts this Newtonian machine view with the view of the Scottish tradition of the Enlightenment – led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. Hayek explains that they described their theory as one “which showed how… complex and orderly and, in a very definite sense, purposive structures might grow up which owed little or nothing to design, which were not invented by a contriving mind but arose from the separate actions of many men who did not know what they were doing”. This tension between laissez-faire and design and control which still underpins political and economic thought, emerged from this Enlightenment period. And indeed, whether laissez-faire leads to the greatest good for the greatest number, or, in practice leads to the increasing domination of the powerful, remains a moot point.

The second part of the book, which draws on a quite marvellous breadth of literature, focuses on themes that politics tends to ignore. This includes women, feminine qualities, the Earth, the unconscious, the spiritual, native wisdom. So it invites us both to stray away from traditional and mainstream sources of wisdom and ways of thinking as well as exhorting us to reconsider what politics is for – in the sense that political systems surely need to protect the weak, create economic equity, work to sustain the planet and uphold human rights. Jean calls on a lifetime’s exploration of psychology, feminism, spirituality, as well as politics, to provide new angles and provocations and unsettle us from the idea that politics is what it is because that is how things are. These same interconnected themes, this holistic view of social life, are relevant to any social enterprise and hence the inclusion of this eclectic and riveting range of perspectives is itself a political act, as it gets us, in the most interesting and engaging way, to review our worldview, challenge ourselves to see things differently – whether we are designing political systems or bringing up children or running a charity, or running a bank – or, indeed, just going shopping.

And where else would you, on the one hand, get to know, through pithy original quotes, how seventeenth century parents were exhorted to discipline children, seen as born evil, due to their original sin (p148); and on the other hand see how children’s intrinsic badness legitimated institutional obedience in the political climate of the times? Where else would you find a poem by Thomas Hardy which captures the way he felt Man was a threat to the natural world (p119) in the same book as a question set in a 1907 examination at the London School of Economics (p106) “give facts illustrating the savage’s personality, and consider how far this differs from the fully developed  concept”. Jean uses her extremely wide breadth of sources to provide an almost visceral sense of earlier attitudes and reflections, thus minimising the need for long explanations or justifications. She leaves it to the reader to be moved by the material and yet the approach lacks nothing in clarity. Jean is clear about her arguments, follows through on themes and uses illustrative material in a most effective and affecting way.

One additional source of material that Jean could maybe explore for a second edition of the book is greater focus on the overlap of politics with economics and ecology. In the same way that political systems often seek to benefit those already with power, the same criticism is often aimed at economic systems; and what economic theories governments choose is itself a political act.

For example, the Radical Economics movement in America in the late 1960s asked (Tiago Mata, 2006): “How frequent are articles which deal with the economics of racism, poverty in the American economy, international imperialism, or the real economics of defence?”

Mata goes on to say: “Radicals called for empathy with society and its ills. Radicals corresponded objectivity with the objectification of subjects which benefited the interests of the status quo by constructing and maintaining a ‘machine-like’ social system.”

There may also be some useful material to explore in the green economics movement (Cato, 2009), the theories of evolutionary economics and ecological economics and the whole movement of limits to growth (Meadows, 2004 and Daly, 2007). Jean mentions capitalism and its interplay with individual freedom (p36) and I would have liked to have understood this better from her perspective.

But these are small suggestions. This book does not seek to be comprehensive; it seeks to entice, provoke, send us off in new directions, integrate themes and weave new connections. This book is about Jean’s life and her own political and intellectual journey as much as it is about political philosophy and I was very moved by her dedication of this book to her father and her discussion about her own experiences and influences. Read this book. Dip into it; read it backwards; buy it for your friends; emulate its style; read its references; learn its poems. You will not be disappointed.

References

Cato, Green Economics,Earthscan, 2009.
Daly, HE, Ecological Economics and Sustainable Development, Edward Elgar Publishing 2007.
Hayek, Freedom, Reason, and Tradition Ethics, 68 (4): 229–245, 1958.
Mata, Tiago, Self-defining dissent:Radical Economics in America,1968–1975, Contingency and Dissent in Science Seminar, Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics and Political Science,23 May 2006.
Meadows, D et al, Limits to Growth;the 30-year Update,Chelsea Green 2004.

O Books, 2011, 238 pp
ISBN 978-1-84694-619-6

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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In the summer of 2010, Caroline Brazier co-led a week-long eco-therapy group in her Buddhist community’s retreat centre in the French countryside. At the conclusion of the week, she began to write down her thoughts and reflections. In her words, “This book is the result. An account of a group and of a summer, interwoven with the ideas and therapeutic theory which framed our work, it is an invitation to share, to join the exploration and to experience the process of engagement in a healing relationship with nature.”

Expertly structured and beautifully written, her book brings us close enough to that summer’s experience to see and feel, along with the group, the shapes and textures of the piece of land she so lovingly describes, to study its creatures, especially the ants, to smell its air, hear its sounds and feel its showers and breezes against our skin. And as we move with her through the landscape, with senses wide open, she speaks to us also of the connections between inner and outer and the metaphors and teachings—free gifts from the environment—that bring clarity to her mind and resolution to her own dilemmas.

There is something for everyone in this little gem of a book. But I especially hope it will find its way into the hands of everyone, whether eco-therapist, ecopsychologist, group leader or parent, who has occasion to lead others into closer communion with the surrounding Earth.

Fons Vitae, 2005, 170 pp
ISBN 1887752706 

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Reviewed by Jean Hardy 

The story of this book is miraculous in itself. The fable and the message it so clearly contains date from over a thousand years ago. The origins of the story were Indian, but it was actually written down for the first time in the tenth century C.E. in Arabic by a Sufi order. It has since circulated through most of the Eastern religions; this edition is the first one in English. I found out about it through Isabel Carlisle, who converted it into play form and has used it in schools over the last few years.

The story is that there once was a place on Earth, an island called Tsagone, where the animals lived happily and free from persecution by human beings; the Isle was ruled over by Bersaf, King of the Spirits. But a ship carrying passengers was wrecked near its shores and a large group of people clambered onto the island. Quite soon, perhaps inevitably, the people began to use the animals and birds for food and labour, and in fact enslaved them: so for the animals, “eyes that were once filled with trust began to be drowned in stormy oceans of fear.” Eventually the animals, in desperation, met and agreed to ask the King of Spirits for help. He decided to summon the humans to court to answer the charges which were beginning to be specified by the animals.

The humans were strongly divided. Hochmah (Wisdom), the female sage, was in favour of the animals’ case. Zadone (Malice) however was the spokesperson for the humans and led their case in their representation to the King. He argued, in relation to species other than human: “We say they are our slaves and we shall seize those whom we wish and treat them just as we would  treat any other possession. Those who submit to us accept the notion that the Creator set us to rule over them—but those who break our yoke and flee—they are rebelling against God’s word…the consequences are theirs.” The humans also maintained that they were the only creatures who had souls, consciences and understanding and that they had the most perfect bodies in all Creation.

The King of Spirits, after wise advice, ordered a full investigation based on evidence and asked both humans and animals to bring together their evidence. The animals sent six emissaries to the different groups of animals to ask them to send a representative. The Horse went to the Lions, the predatory animals: the Ox went to the Phoenix, ruler of the non-predatory birds: the Sheep went to the Osprey, ruler of birds of prey: the Donkey went to the Bee, ruler of the winged swarming things: the Pig went to the Sea Dragon, ruler of water creatures: and the Mule went to the Snake, ruler of the creeping things. The account of these gatherings is fascinating, as all the animals and birds spoke according to their own nature. Emerging as representatives of all animals, judged best able to present their case to the King, were the Dragon, the Nightingale, Parrot, Queen Bee, Frog, and Cricket.

The Court was convened. The arguments are amazingly modern. The Nightingale argued that,  “…even the swarming and creeping creatures have knowledge and understanding and unique skills. We all do. Therefore, since we all have a portion of the Creator’s gifts, how can humans glorify themselves over us and claim they are our lords and masters?” She argued that all animals share one soul and are unified, that humans have individual souls and are in constant dispute between themselves and the rest of the world.”

Humans and animals both gave their evidence at some length and with great eloquence. At the end, the King gave his verdict. “By the grace of God, I find myself in favour of the animals, for they have been sorely tested and abused.”

He accepted that humans were beginning to realise the harm they are doing, and must begin to treat all creatures with loving kindness. “Should you err, the animals will begin to disappear, one by one, forever, from the face of the earth; and the air in your settlements and fortresses will become dangerous to breathe…the seasons will be reversed and your climates turned on end…the animals you eat will bring sickness and death upon you…and you will no longer rule the earth.” This can be reversed, but  humans have to realise the extent of their cruelty.

The story ends with an exhortation to all humans to realise what they need to do and how they need to live. It comes with great force over a thousand years, to us who can see the catastrophes approaching because humans have through these thousand years largely ignored these warnings, and indeed things are often so much worse for animals in our industrialised and human-centred societies.

I found in this book a message that speaks so clearly to me and to us all. It is remarkable it has survived, and has been published by a small press, the Fons Vitae (fountain of life) in Kentucky USA. It is beautifully illustrated on the cover and throughout by Kelsum Begum, and presented with great love. Further information about it, including a large section of the text with accompanying pictures, can be found on the Internet by clicking here.

W. W. Norton & Co., 1995
ISBN 978-0-39332-947-6

Reviewed by Joan Angus

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I enjoyed this delightful collection of studies, anecdotes and observations, using the subject as a vehicle for musing on the facts of life. Logan converts that which seems ordinary into something mystical, taking us with the stardust created in the ‘big bang’, through the ages, to join the other components of earth, dirt, soil, muck, loam, humus, compost, or whatever you choose to call the skin of the Earth.

We travel with him through wind and rain, up mountains and plunging deep into the oceans around the globe, through millennia from the time the earth was formed, picking up samples on the way, and analysing their chemical constituents. Not a speck of dust is missed. He brings the dirt alive with its inhabitants and its fertility; the humus dances in mineral exchanges with plants and their roots. There is a surprise round every corner, the Earth becomes a many faceted diamond, and pieces of information pop up like jewels: Did you know, for instance, that rodents grow enamel on the front of their teeth only, thus maintaining a sharp edge as they wear it down by gnawing?

This book is very readable, and has something for most people, but will be especially interesting to gardeners, farmers and gravediggers. There are references from the work of a divers company of scientists, philosophers, writers and poets, including Cato, Virgil, Dante and Ghandi, Francis Bacon and Sir Isaac Newton, Walt Whitman and John Wesley, Meister Eckhart and Thomas Aquinas, Darwin and William Cobbett, as well as myths and legends to illustrate his point. This man is certainly well read. He discusses the relationship between the human race and the Earth, often leaving a thought provoking statement or question at the end of his meditations: ‘We spend our lives hurrying away from the real, as though it were deadly to us. “It must be somewhere up there on the horizon,” we think. And all the time it is in the soil, right beneath our feet.’ (p. 97)

William Bryant Logan is an American living in New York. He is an arborist and writer, having won the ‘Quill and Trowel’ award! He did much of his research in his homeland, and most of the scientific data is American in origin. The farming practises of the two first American Presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams are discussed, and the work of George Perkins Marsh, who founded American Ecology in 1864, is mentioned frequently. We also meet his friend and guru Hans Jenny, ‘one of the greatest soil scientists of this era.’ It was while reading the last section, and Logan’s tribute to the work of Hans Jenny, that I was struck with an overwhelming sense of the vastness and power of the evolving ecosystems of the Earth, over millennia, and the comparative tickling on the surface: the interference of the human species. How can we have the arrogance to imagine that our activities will have the slightest effect on the processes of Gaia? As part of the evolutionary process we are undoubtedly capable of destroying ourselves, but the Life of the Earth will proceed well beyond the human era. Logan doesn’t leave us hanging there. He neatly rounds off his message by reminding us that we are, after all, made of stardust, and who knows where, in the cosmos, may the dust travel next?

Wheatmark, 2009, 228 pp
ISBN 978-1-60494-0909

Reviewed by Sky McCain

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The overall theme and objective of this book is to illustrate that Jesus of Nazareth was green. Grabill shows, from a study of biblical translations direct from the Aramaic and quotations from texts long ago eliminated from the bible by church politicians, that Jesus would probably be at the forefront of  the green movement were he alive and teaching today.

The author has utilized his professional historian skills coupled with seven trips to the Holy Land to pull together facts and examples showing the profound earthiness revealed in the life of Jesus. After all, Jesus lived a simple, very small footprint lifestyle with frequent isolated periods spent in the wilderness in prayer and meditation. There is considerable evidence to support claims that he loved Nature. In the first section of the book, Grabill holds an imaginary interview with Jesus as a way of describing his early life in Judea and his relationship with Mary Magdalene. I would like to have heard more about Mary Magdalene since there are various texts that confirm her importance in the life of Jesus and she most likely would have been chosen over Peter had she not been female.

I was very pleasantly surprised with many aspects of the book. It is extremely easy to read, plainly written, with an especially flowing style.  There are humorous anecdotes gleaned from children’s impressions of the bible such as (quoted from Hample and Marshall’s Children’s Letters to God): “Our Father who does art in heaven. Harold is his name.”

Grabill weaves into the text his own impressions of the natural world from his home along the southern shores of Lake Superior. Yet he never strays far from the main objective of his writing, which is to demonstrate the green consciousness of Jesus.

The book is quite solidly structured yet avoids rigidity and repetitiveness.  Each of eleven chapters follows a similar path with an introductory statement about how Jesus expressed sustainable living. For example, in the first chapter we find: ‘Would Jesus drive a Hummer?’ Then an aspect of sustainability is discussed.  Following that is a principle or green theme. The next few paragraphs focus on practice and here we find interesting ways that people have found to downsize and to re-evaluate their environmental footprint.  In this part of each chapter I was repeatedly surprised by the amazing things some people are doing to honour Gaia. Each chapter ends with a discussion about how our attitudes and feelings toward the environment sometimes get in the way of our efforts to be greener.

The book’s supplementary material is extremely extensive and helpful. There are summaries of quotes from the sayings of Jesus, citing their origin, and summaries of green principles and practices. There is an Aramaic glossary, with a collection of phrases, and a well developed guide for conducting group discussions.

No matter how much you already know about the life of Jesus, I think you’ll find much of interest in Green Kingdom Come!

O Books, 2011, 176 pp
ISBN 978-1-84694-401-7

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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The old mechanistic paradigm under which most of us grew up has trained our thought habits so thoroughly that those of us struggling to express an ecocentric worldview often find ourselves literally at a loss for words. For example, we hear ourselves using phrases like ‘walking outside in Nature,’ even though we know that Nature includes us also, whether outdoors or in. We talk about ‘caring for the planet’ as though it were a thing and separate from ourselves. And if finding a vocabulary for ecocentrism is hard,  how much harder is it to live it?

Stephanie Sorrell’s new book, Nature as Mirror is a great step in that direction. As she points out, “Natural cycles and processes profoundly shape and transform our lives just like the currents shape the rock at the bottom of the river.” By reminding us, page after page, of how our inner and outer worlds are mirrors of each other, Sorrell invites us into a deep, cellular awareness of who we really are.

I am reminded of Christ’s words as reported in the Gospel of Thomas: “When you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below…then shall you enter the Kingdom.”

O Books, 2010, 162 pp
ISBN 978-1-84694-438-3

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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Like most people in the Western world, I’d had little or no exposure to Shinto, the ancient, traditional spirituality of Japan. It was never included in my mental list of wisdom traditions and, I am now ashamed to say, if I thought about it at all I’d dismissed it as merely a set of rituals that Japanese people traditionally observed out of habit rather than conviction. How wrong I was.

The author traces the history of this ancient tradition (whose origins date back  and astounding 16,000 years) and introduces its key concepts of Kami (creative energy), Kannagara (going with the flow) and Musubi (organic, sustainable growth). But Shinto cannot be reduced to simplistic terms. When you try to put these concepts into rational boxes, as I was doing at first, they jump out again, switch boxes. Eventually I realised they can only be understood properly at an intuitive, ‘aha!’ level. It occurs to me that Shinto is a lot like water. You can drink it, bathe in it and use it for a hundred and one different purposes but you can never actually grasp it. Just when you think you’ve understood it, it shape-shifts again, trickling out through your clutching fingers. And that’s because, like life itself, it never stops growing, moving changing, adapting…which is why it is still alive and well after so many millennia.

I had just finished reading this book when the devastating  earthquake and tsunami struck Japan. People here were marvelling at the way the Japanese people handled this tragedy. Was it stoicism? Far from it. It was Shinto in action: flowing with what happens: staying grounded: staying deeply tuned to Nature, tempestuous aspects and all. Like a rooted tree, bending in the wind. Saying ‘yes’ to life.

As Rankin says, “Shinto is a life-affirming faith that embraces tradition and innovation equally and helps us to reconnect with nature. It is a spiritual pathway for our time.”

O Books, 2011, 216pp.
ISBN 978-1-84694-674-5

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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At the beginning of his book, Forman points out that: “the thought that you can be utterly ego-less , that you can remember to attend to your thought processes often enough to change them, that your guru is utterly egoless, that your everyday life is or will be complete and entirely easy and that these are or should be our goals, has been a damaging fantasy, at best, and counter-productive at worst…it is high time that we turned around and looked squarely in the maw of our own daydreams.”

So when our daydreams about the attainment of some spiritual nirvana are smashed, what then? There is a well-known Sufi tale about a man who searched far and wide for treasure only to discover, after eventually giving up what he had decided was a hopeless search and returning home, that the gold was in fact buried under his own hearth. Why do you suppose this tale has endured for centuries, in many forms? Probably for the same reason that the most famous and oft-quoted  lines in all of T.S. Eliot’s  poetry are those ones about returning, at last, to the place from which you began but knowing it for the first time. This resonates deeply with all of us because our souls know that the story is true.

However, there are no short cuts. Like Ulysses, we must all make the journey in some form or other before we can fully return to ourselves. Only by undertaking the search shall we ever find the gold. Only when we have searched for spirit in all the exotic places do we discover that true enlightenment, like the treasure beneath the hearth, is hidden in plain sight. For what we shall eventually discover, as this author has, is that the most profoundly spiritual life of all is lived right here, where we are. And the most profound spiritual questions are those posed to us all through that life by experiencing what he calls, “the sweaty ambiguity that soaks the fabric of everyday life.” By living deeply into every moment of the wood-chopping, water-carrying life of ordinariness, with all its puzzles and challenges, we learn the lessons we are here to learn. Our significant others become our most significant teachers, our everyday dilemmas our hardest homework. The enlightenment we thought we were after is – as this book’s whimsical title informs us – ‘not what it’s cracked up to be.’ True enlightenment turns out to be something else entirely.

Forman’s story traces his own search, from his first taste of Transcendental Meditation in 1969 and his rigorous training with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi 1971, through his exploration of many other spiritual pathways to his contemporary experiencing of what he calls ‘soul jazz.’ It also includes a vivid account of his own internal changes, including physical ones such as the bizarre ‘unzipping’ sensation he felt as more and more areas of his bodymind exchanged chatter for a peaceful silence. These gradual changes, although they seemed to happen unexpectedly, would almost certainly not have taken place had it not been for those years of training and the ongoing practice of meditation. For as one of my own favourite spiritual teachers is wont to say: “Enlightenment is an accident, but practice makes you accident prone.” Forman has not only had 40 years of personal practice but also vast experience as a teacher of others and a skilled therapist. I love his quirky writing style, his gentle, disarming manner and his vivid language. I admire the fearless, open honesty he displays and his willingness to embrace paradox and stay with the ‘sweaty ambiguity.’ I thank him for sharing his story in such a simple and fascinating way. The book is simple and its teachings are profound. It is a gem and I highly recommend it.

O Books, 2009 240pp.

ISBN 978-1-84694-238-9

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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BBC presenter Peter Owen-Jones puts his finger right on the spot when he describes Mark Townsend as “a priest on the edge.” As he reminds us, edges are always the places in the biosphere where we find the most diversity and the greatest creativity. In the noösphere, the same applies. The edge is where one finds people bold enough to move out of comfort and familiarity, to seek, to question and to birth new ideas.

Like David Abram, who charmed so many of us at the GreenSpirit Leicester conference in 2004, Mark Townsend is not only a deep thinker but a professional, sleight-of-hand magician. He is also a writer, a priest and a seeker of wisdom. His questing mind, his magician’s fascination with the numinous, his love of the Earth and the inner whispering of his soul all joined forces to propel him out
of his comfortable life as an Anglican vicar and into the woods.

The Path of the Blue Raven is his personal account of this transition, along with the stories of other folk on similar flight paths from traditional religion to green spirituality.

From where he is now, poised, in a sense, between the two worlds of Christianity and Druidry, Mark admits that he is still on a journey and has no idea how the story will end. But the story thus far is a fascinating one and very well told.

Findhorn Press, 2009

ISBN 978-1844091621

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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Sally Andrew is a sublime storyteller. Her brand of delightful whimsicality is so captivating that I predict she is headed for literary fame in the coming years—and not only in her homeland of South Africa, either. Meanwhile, right now, her energy and passion are channelled into raising awareness about climate change and the need for urgent action to avoid eco-catastrophe. It all began with a strange dream.

“I was in a rural African community. Not the prospering village of my romantic fantasies, in which children eat sweet jungle mangoes in front of beautiful mud huts. These people were dust—poor and their red-brick houses were patterned with cracks and crumbles. They had to coax their scratchy vegetable gardens into giving them food. … The women in this village were organized and had a powerful voice. In consultation with a giant sacred rock, they decided and acted on the needs of the community. These women decided what my job was to be, and came to inform me. ‘We need you,’ they said, ‘to read stories to dogs.’”

Intrigued, Sally tried reading some stories to Riska, her Ridgeback, but Riska was not impressed. Some years later, still not understanding the dream but still feeling it to be important, she spoke of it to a friend, who explained that they had just entered what, in Chinese astrology, was the year of the Fire Dog.

The dog, she discovered, symbolizes those who look after the collective interests of the community. They are the watchdogs and guardians of the Earth who bark to draw attention to injustices. While others sleep, they prowl the night, guarding the grounds.

That was when she realized what her task was. To read stories to the ‘dogs’ whose task it is to guard against climate chaos and re-green the Earth. “To open their hearts. Stories that help them to feel and understand so that they can think and act, bark and run together in wild places, bare their teeth and, if necessary, bite.  Stories for those fighting, and those licking their wounds.  Stories for those who are dog-tired, and want to go for a walk in the fresh air and wag their tails.”

The result is a clever and unusual blend of stories and well-researched ‘facts sheets’ with which Sally aims to inspire us into action and cheer us on in our efforts rather than to shock or scare us. It is a good formula and one that I believe really works. I recommend that you buy multiple copies of this little book and spread them
around.

Findhorn Press, 2002

ISBN: 978-1899171293

Reviewed by Jean Hardy

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What I like most about this book is that it genuinely celebrates the late afternoon and evening of our lives. Most biographies draw the human life as though it were a hump – starting small, growing towards the prime, and then downhill all the way, leading to death often in depression and failed faculties.

But Marian Van Eyk McCain’s Elderwoman is an energetic, wise, purposeful person, garnering her life’s wisdom and with much to offer those around her. As the sub-title says, “Reap the wisdom … feel the power … embrace the joy.” I also like her idea of what normality is: “the steady beating of our hearts, the rhythm of our breath, the movement of the seasons, rain on the roof, moss on stones … the cyclic progression of all living things …”

The book is divided into the four sections of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Earth is about the ground on which we live; the relationship we may have to our home and sense of place, and to the other creatures around us. And how we can, often after an alienated early life, find a sense of being “at home on the Earth” as we grow older. The themes of simplicity and lightness pervade the chapters on air, and McCain has a strong appreciation of silence, and the depth of experience that needs space. Fire is about energy of several kinds – political awareness and action, sexuality, a sense of proportion and spirit beyond and within oneself, a continued willingness to live with risk. And finally water is about saying “yes” to what she calls a radical aliveness, in spite of being – or perhaps because of being – less sprightly, indeed maybe positively creaky, in body.

What I had most difficulty with was her acceptance of the traditional division of a woman’s life into three parts – maiden, mother and grandmother. McCain is certainly very careful to indicate that, for instance, the mothering may be not only about having children but also about creating organisations, books, work of many kinds, communities. But her division does not describe my life or the life of many women I know. I was never a ‘maiden’ in the sense of wanting ringlets, or comparable adornments. I’ve never had, or wanted, children of my own, and I’m therefore not a grandmother and don’t really feel like an elderwoman, though I am the right age. As an alternative, I could readily accept as a model the Hindu division of life into youth, householder and contemplative, though the last two, for me, are not easily divided into two stages. But would these descriptive stages suit everyone either? I’m sure they wouldn’t.

The lives of both women and men are now very diverse in Western society, so that we perhaps need to re-examine traditional taken-for-granted stories about their shape. Books on ageing and its implications by Theodor Roszak, Ram Dass and James Hillman, all of which McCain quotes, tend to examine the common experience of men and women in coming to terms with the opposites within which we live – male and female, material and spiritual. These three accounts, however, tend to emphasise the male experience of later life to different degrees. I believe McCain’s book is intending to do something similar for women; but I wish she’d gone a few steps further in countering gender and life-patterning stereotypes.

O Books, 2008

ISBN 978-1-84694-121-4

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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A main thrust of GreenSpirit is the ‘re-membering’ of ourselves in Nature, the awakening of our sense of belonging to Earth and the deep connection with the more-than-human world that our ancestors probably had and which we, in our fool’s paradise of modern, consumer society, have largely lost.

We can learn much from looking back and noting what has slipped away from us, as GreenSpirit member Barry Cottrell does in the first part of this book. Paradoxically, however, the way to reverse the alienation process is to move forward – forward through our scientific discoveries, our sharpened intellect and our deepened understanding of the Universe. This comes through strongly in Cottrell’s unusual and stimulating discussion of shamanism, past, present and future.  As he points out:

“A ritual, and the level of consciousness which it expresses, is very much married to a time and a place, and to the needs of the people in that culture. But life and consciousness are always evolving.” (p.89)

In other words, study the past, learn from it, and then by deconstructing it, use its raw materials to create a new future. Which is what he does, here,  with shamanism.

The book is in three parts.  First, Cottrell takes a new look at pre-history, presenting some interesting ideas about the nature of early humans and their modes of awareness.

It bothers me whenever, in his enthusiastic depiction of the Neanderthal people as differing in consciousness from homo sapiens, he strays dangerously close to presenting speculation as fact – a hazard which anyone seeking credibility for non-mainstream theories needs scrupulously to avoid.

But I find his Part Two excellent. First describing the role and training of the traditional tribal shaman, he goes on to examine the surge of interest in shamanism recently apparent in our own culture. Myself a once-avid reader of Castaneda (1970s) and graduate of Harner’s shamanic training (1980s) I particularly appreciated his clear, thoughtful differentiation of these two approaches and their applicability – or otherwise – to current ecological dilemmas.

Cottrell then shows us, in Part Three, how shamanism’s deconstructed elements can be re-shaped into tools for assisting the birth of that new consciousness that we now know is essential if we are to avert global ecological catastrophe.

The ‘way beyond the shaman’ is found not by attempting to graft on to our culture the totems and rituals of other peoples and other times. Not by seeking power, either, or by feeding romantic mysticism to our greedy egos. But by turning towards our own pain, our own vulnerability, our own dark, inner chaos and, in true shamanic fashion, finding the path there. And above all by immersing ourselves, as shamans have ever done, in relationship with the Earth. For as Cottrell so eloquently says:

‘When you truly regain your sense of belonging to Earth, this elemental awareness automatically brings with it a gentleness and humility towards all other expressions of life. When this sense of belonging is fully experienced, there can be none of the arrogance that characterizes the Western mind still today, the arrogance of the superiority of intellect. And while this may be a book about shamanism, it simply cannot teach more than a minute fraction of what can be experienced, learned, and understood through that greater openness towards the messages in the sky, in the clouds, in the whispering of the winds, in every utterance coming from each manifestation of life around you. When you allow your eyes to see and your ears to hear, you will wonder how you could have relied so much and for so long on the words written in books……’ (p.107)

O Books, 2009

ISBN 978-1-84694-199-3

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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Is it a novel? Is it a screenplay? What on earth (or in heaven) is it? Vincent Tilsley’s Holy Night is unlike anything else I have ever read. It also stirred up more excitement in me than any book I have read in a long time and stretched my mind to its furthest limits.

Be warned – this is not a simple book by any means. It will entertain you and intrigue you but it will also make you think. Although in one sense it reads like a ‘ripping yarn’ and its sci-fi elements are worthy of Star Wars, it also stretches the intellect in rather the same way that Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance did. (I would love to see Holy Night become a cult classic as that one did. It certainly deserves to).

You need to pay close attention to the story, for everything changes, second by second and time does strange things. In fact, there are several stories happening at once as though you were watching a bank of screens all tuned to different channels. You’ll find the characters, too, watching multiple screens and following several stories.

It would be a challenge to any writer to create a book in this format. But Tilsley manages it, and does so superbly. This is where the skills he honed in his 20 years as a TV scriptwriter must have come in handy. Though Holy Night is, I must say, a very long way from ‘Prisoner’ and ‘Dr Finlay’s Casebook’!

It is a hard book to describe, since it is so unlike anything else. Basically, it is a story about good and evil, emotion and intellect, mind and spirit. It tells the tale of a relationship between an impulsive, emotional, creator and his perfectionistic, high-tech counterpart – a relationship of love and loathing, fear and longing, denial and intimate, eternal, inescapable connection.

Holy Night is funny, irreverent, shocking, witty … and utterly profound. You will either ‘get it’ or you won’t. I fear a lot of people may not. But for those who do, it may leave you, as it left me, with a sense of speechless delight in the privilege of being a bumbling, struggling yet awesomely creative ordinary human being, reinventing the world in every moment. If you really do ‘get it’, then for a while, after you close the cover, everything sparkles.

Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011

ISBN 978-1-84905-004-3

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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From my experience of a career in the so-called ‘helping professions,’ I think I can safely claim that in these industries geared to health, healing and helping, scant attention is ever paid to people’s spirituality. We train our medical, paramedical and mental health workers in the mechanical workings of the body and the mind, but speak rarely of the heart and never of the soul. In case conferences, grand rounds and college classrooms where the talk is all about the physical or mental repair of damaged or dysfunctional individuals and families, how often do you hear mention of soul or spirit? And how holistic is supposedly holistic health care if it leaves out this all-important dimension of human existence?

Culliford’s book is a brave attempt to put spirituality on the agenda, where it should always have been. It is a calm, balanced, thoughtful work, specifically written for people in the helping professions. There is probably little in it that any spiritually aware reader doesn’t already know. But if there is anyone of your acquaintance who works in the health or welfare field and whom you think needs a gentle nudge towards understanding his or her patients/clients as spiritual beings, buy them a copy, please. It would be a great start.

Hay House 2011

ISBN: 978-1848503359

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain*

(*This review was originally written for the Cygnus edition, 2005)

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We’ve all been taught – whether by high school biology teachers, college lecturers or the journalists and TV documentary-makers of popular culture – that it is the DNA in our cells which determines who we are. Nurture is important but it is our genes that confer upon us our individual identity.

This identity, which we spend a lifetime maintaining and defending, walks around, gloriously ‘inner-directed’, in something we call ‘the environment’, something that is, by definition, not us. We exchange information with it, use it for our own ends and often we admire it or even love it, but it remains an ‘it’ and I remain an I, an egg in an egg-cup of non-egg otherness.

We might talk glibly about being at one with Gaia or the Universe, but do we really feel that, deep in our bones, deep down wherever we keep our unconscious beliefs? Or is it just a pretty idea?

Bruce Lipton’s brilliant Biology of Belief gives us, at last, the scientific nuts and bolts with which we can rebuild our high school, Newtonian biology into an Einsteinian model worthy of our spiritual rhetoric about oneness.

For me it has been one of those life-changing works that come along only occasionally. Lipton is an impeccably-credentialled biologist who, like Rupert Sheldrake, has followed his research interests so well and so passionately that they have eventually taken him to a place far beyond the comfort – and  approval – zone of his conventional colleagues. (A familiar story in science, as we know).

The DNA in a cell, he has discovered, is not its most significant, regulatory mechanism after all. It is the cell membrane that runs the show. (He calls it the ‘mem-brain’)

Moreover, the cell membrane is governed to a huge extent by information coming from without. Like a TV set, the programs it plays are received, not self-generated. We truly are continuous with our environment. And the cells of our bodies not only take many of their orders from beyond our skin, at times they also translate those into standing orders, transmissable to our descendants. Yes, Lamarck was right all along; some acquired characteristics can indeed be handed on.

Many of us are aware, despite the apparent solidity of our bodies and surroundings, that all matter is reducable to nothing more than energy patterns. We live in a quantum world. Yet we go about our lives as though Einstein had never been born. Lipton breaks through all that. Taking us on a guided tour around the incredible, sub-molecular world of living cells and using clever visuals, an engaging manner and delightfully accessible language, he helps us finally to dismantle the Newtonian-based, limited beliefs we have about the way our bodies work. Some of these beliefs can, as he points out, make us ill by turning us into unquestioning pawns of the pharmaceutical industry whose magic blunderbuss bullets can play havoc with the delicate mechanisms of our cells. Others can keep us ill by not letting us believe our illnesses are curable.

We already know that ‘mind’ can control ‘matter’, but how does that actually work? Only by understanding what goes on deep within a cell can we answer that – and  for the first time truly get it that there is no actual distinction between the two. The homework he sets us is to continue disinterring our basic beliefs – most of which were planted deeply in us during childhood – and updating them in the light of this new knowledge.

Lipton’s work is far-reaching in its implications, not just for our own bodies and our physical and mental health but for the birthing and raising of our children. And also for our spiritual lives. I highly recommend it.

Capall Bann Publishing, 2003

ISBN 978-1861631695

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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Patterson’s book was obviously written for a Pagan/Wiccan audience, sprinkled as it is with references to ‘magick’ and spells. I found that a bit alienating, since I’m not part of that subculture. I also had problems with his tendency towards vagueness. His ideas are great but they often bog down in wording so unspecific as to be meaningless. And I wish he hadn’t included so much of what appears to be raw data from his personal journal, formatted to look like poetry. To me as a writer, poetry intended for public consumption needs to be well-worked and refined. But that’s a personal bias.

Nevertheless, I liked his book for three reasons. Firstly, it teaches a slow, careful and highly conscious way of interacting with – and appreciating – place.

Secondly, in sharing some of his own experiences the author reminds us that whenever we’re able to move into a state of heightened awareness, especially alone and in the wild, we soon rediscover our native, intuitive powers and start to trust in a much deeper way than is our wont. Whenever we do this, the experience renews in us our understanding and belief that we are an intrinsic part of the whole. I think it’s important to keep reminding each other about this.

Thirdly, this is the first bookof its kind I’ve read that blends a mystical appreciation for Nature and the spirit world with a thoroughly down-to-earth attitude to ecological responsibility. You want to do something nice to honour the spirit guardians of this lovely little patch of woodland you have found? Well never mind the incense and the incantations – how about picking up all the plastic bags and beer cans and polystyrene take-away containers? The devas will thank you and you may save a few little insect lives too.

O Books, 2008

ISBN 978-1846941474

Reviewed by Ian Mowll

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This book is brilliant! I read it twice and both times I was unable to put it down and read it from cover to cover.

Healing, at least in part, can come through making sense of suffering and learning from it. So, for those who have suffered from mental ill-health or those who meet people who do, this book is particularly helpful.

The basic premise of the book is that our minds are made up of two sub-systems, the ‘propositional’ and the ‘relational.’ The propositional is the logical, conscious part of one’s mind and deals with either/or logic. The relational has all of the rest and deals with both/and ‘logic’. A connection is made between the relational and what is called ‘the transliminal’ which is similar to (but not the same as) the subconscious.

We can ‘know’ the propositional either/or logic. But we can only experience the relational part of our minds. This distinction shows how some writers unhelpfully try to apply either/or logic to this relational area, which is inappropriate.

So there is the basic model. What the book does so well is to apply this model to many areas of life: creativity, the psychiatric system, spirituality, religion, science, psychology, why we give our power away and more. There are lots of useful insights.

The book draws from history, people’s personal experiences and current scientific understanding (both neurological and psychological) so it feels very grounded and current. The author is also careful to explain where currently accepted scientific theories end and where her speculation begins.

For GreenSpirit readers in particular, there is a touching part in the book about the protestors at Twyford Down, how this affected the author, and how the experience relates to the ideas put forward in the book.

Thoroughly recommended.

SUNY, 2008

ISBN 978-0-7914-7452-5

Reviewed by Jean Hardy

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“Our most dangerous characteristic is our propensity to develop and rely on our conscious purposes…until we see the world as a network of relating, as a vast interrelated process of which we are dependent members, we will not be fit to survive in it.” (p.29).

All the elements of the universe, as vast as the  Milky Way or as small as the working of, say, an eye, are in this view essentially systems of mind, conscious or unconscious.  Gregory Bateson maintains that Mind—some would say spirit—moves  through all of living creation. We humans can only perceive a sliver of the whole through trying to understand the world through the framework of  scientific rationality, and this leads to the blind alleys humans constantly enter, and to dangerous hubris.

Noel Charlton has done a great service in this devoted study of Bateson’s work. Gregory Bateson’s search began earlier than the present burgeoning of insight springing from complexity and chaos theory: he was born in 1904 and died in 1980. He became increasingly concerned through his wide experience and reading in many disciplines—in anthropology, psychology, systems thinking, the study of human and other animal consciousness, and ecology—that we as the human race are going the wrong way. From the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we have relied disastrously on rationality and Western science to promote a worldview which is about attempting human control of the forces of Nature, trying to defeat uncertainty, and ignoring such qualities as beauty, wonder, love and awe. Bateson believed that the human conscious mind is only of a limited quality—and the failure to recognise and acknowledge this has led many thinkers and cultures to consider that consciousness is  a purely human phenomenon experienced only by individuals. Such a view is dangerous and is not true.

Like Jung, Bateson saw the collective unconscious mind as greater and wiser than consciousness; unconscious natural flow is the context of consciousness. He maintained that the linking of the beautiful with the ecologically healthy is the key to a true perspective of the world: “…nothing can ever be understood in isolation from its context, and the context must be seen as depending on patterning” (p.43). There is a sacred order in the world. The individual person has to touch into this unconscious order to see beyond the limited mindset of modern Western understanding. The Western world needs the ‘yin’, the perceptions of poets, artists, and musicians, those willing to experience the mystery of the natural world to be enabled to come closer to a truer nature of things.

Gregory Bateson was born into an intellectual family living in Grantchester, near Cambridge. His father was the geneticist William Bateson, and Gregory was called after Gregor Mendel. His parents were part of an academic and largely scientific circle containing such well known families as the Whiteheads  and Huxleys. The children of the family were trained to be  atheistic naturalists. William Bateson, however, questioned  theories of evolution as developed by Darwin, particularly in relation to the actual process by which characteristics were transmitted through generations, and this questioning remained lifelong with his son. William also had a fascination with form and  pattern in Nature and this too was shared by Gregory throughout his life.

Gregory left England in the 1920s, after graduating with a first class degree in the Natural Sciences from Cambridge. He went on to study social anthropology, working in New Guinea, married Margaret Mead in 1935, and collaborated with her in writing the book Balinese Character. His interest in human—and eventually animal—psychology flourished, and one of his early academic posts was as Lecturer in Medical Anthropology with the Psychology Department at the University of California Medical School in the late 1940s. He moved beyond science into art and a more systematic appreciation of beauty, and then in the later part of his life, more specifically into ecology. He came to see the deepest problem of the human race as a question of our worldview, of our blinkered conscious vision. And he perceived, beyond and within all the mind systems, a sacred element which his birth family had denied.

Noel has a deep love of Gregory Bateson’s work, and this study is both a doctoral thesis and a now thankfully a published book. It has the great advantage of this combination in that it is careful, very well researched with a massive bibliography and is takes pains to differentiate Bateson’s views from those of the writers who influenced his subject. My only caveat is that it led to, say, Chapter Five, which is a synopsis of separate pieces of writing not really incorporated into the whole. I feel Noel could have written this chapter with more panache.

Reading Noel Charlton’s study has made me dig out the only Bateson book I presently have, which is Mind and Nature and made me resolve to buy Steps to an Ecology of Mind. I feel that what Noel has done here is to acknowledge the pioneering and searching path of a person he deeply admires, and with this book he has brought Bateson once more into the forefront of modern ecological thought.

Rider (Random House) 2005

ISBN: 978-1-84413-297-3

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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In Peace is the Way, Deepak Chopra speaks of the choice that contemporary people face concerning religion. Not religion per se, but religion in the ossified, tradition-encrusted form in which it appears to so many people today.

The religious impulse in all of us remains alive and well. But it is becoming increasingly clear that if religion is to have any meaning for us in this twenty-first century we are going to have to re-shape it into something more relevant and more compatible with today’s science. We have to a large extent outgrown the old forms. New forms are slowly emerging, even as those with a vested interest in maintaining the old forms struggle to defend them.

So, says Deepak, we can either:  “1. Keep on defending traditional religion to the last ditch, no matter how much it contradicts reason, or 2. Urge religion to evolve so that it gains the kind of relevance that science cannot defeat.”

Deepak writes: “Although it may seem that religious people have chosen the first alternative in overwhelming numbers, I think appearances are deceiving. People of spiritual intent have been finding new ways to think about God; they have looked to quantum physics to explain reality in such a way that miracles and the existence of the soul are even more credible than they were in traditional religion. Spirit has returned, not as blind obedience to a canon, but as a personal exploration of consciousness. ….. God is con¬sciousness. If your mind feels conflicted, or guilty, or schizoid, there is no other way to view God than through those lenses. If your mind is organized, coherent, and clear, there is no other way to view God than through those lenses. You cannot escape one basic fact: at any given stage of personal evolution, you are seeing reality as yourself. The biblical story of how God created man in his own image isn’t complete until we realize that man returned the favor by creating God in his image, too……

As evolution proceeds, God changes. The level of consciousness that makes God a sup¬porter of war and a source of fear shifts, to be replaced by a peaceful and loving God. That God is only sustainable, however, if your awareness has shifted to support it. This is one of the laws that govern spirituality. As you evolve, so will the divine. The way of peace depends on bringing that truth to life, step by step.”

As always, some very sound spiritual advice from the indefatigable Deepak.

O Books, 2005

978-1-90381-697-4

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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GreenSpirit member Adrian Smith sees the journey away from unquestioned tradition as forking into two slightly different paths.

One group of people, says Adrian:
“.. is moving from an intellectual basis of beliefs and Church practice to search for an experiential religion, inviting into their spiritual lives an emotional dimension. They would describe themselves as Charismatics. Their key word would be religious ‘experience,’ describing both the evident presence of the holy Spirit in their lives and their enjoyment of its community dimension.”

The other group has become disillusioned.
“The realities of today’s world, its science, its increasing human control over nature, its evolutionary theories of our origins, its ever-changing ethical values, all these cause them to regard their previous religious beliefs, traditionally expressed, as no longer tenable and their religious practices as hollow. They gave comfort and made sense to a previous generation – and to themselves in their own childhood – but contribute little to explain the world as they experience it today. Some of this group respond by opting out of Church membership, regarding it as a contemporary irrelevance. Others, whom we name here ‘Tomorrow’s Christians,’ struggle to bring together in a meaningful way, traditional Christianity on the one hand and, on the other, a contemporary, nourishing understanding and expression of it.”

The profound shift in consciousness which is already taking place is, as Adrian says, beyond the awareness of most people.
“The Big Picture is so big that it encompasses a new perception of the supreme mystery, which we name ‘God.’ It calls for a review of our relationship to our fellow human beings with all their differences of faith, color, culture, and a new relationship to the planet we inhabit. The way we live as Christians, our attitudes, our practices, the way we understand Christian doctrine, our prayer life – all these are affected by the great consciousness shift taking place……….. All that till now has underpinned our western culture is in the melting pot. These are not comfortable times.”

To aid his readers in exploring these questions for themselves, Adrian closes each of his chapters with a set of questions. Which makes his book into a really useful workbook for anyone attempting to rework the Christian religion for the Ecozoic Era

Hodder & Stoughton  2004

ISBN: 978-0340830239

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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Neale Douglas Walsch has probably done more than anyone in this last couple of decades to assist people in outgrowing their infantile images of ‘God’ as some old, judgmental, sky-dwelling patriarch in a nightie, and replace them with something closer to the Perennial Philosophy. His Conversations with God series of books and tapes has been remarkably popular, not least because his main tool is humour and he uses it so well.

Walsch’s series started gently, tactfully, trying not to scare his readers with the strangeness of this new ‘take’ on things. But Tomorrow’s God brings us light years away from the old guy in the nightie. This God says things like:  “Most human beings think that objects in the universe such as the earth, the sun and the solar system are ‘dead.’…This is an illusion and when you live within this illusion you have no reason to act in any way in relationship to those ‘dead’ things except to exploit as many of the m as you can, so that you can ‘live better.’ Yet when you envision and experience the objects in the universe as part of a living system, which is the reality, your idea about your Self in relation to that System changes.”

“Right now, you know that you, yourself, are living, but once you perceive everything else as being alive also, you experience yourself as one part of a Larger Whole, one energy package within a larger energy package, one Life Form within a larger Life Form.”

“The Old Spirituality insists that Yesterday’s God created the heavens and the earth, while the New Spirituality says that Tomorrow’s God IS the heavens and the earth.”

Here at last is a genderless, deconstructed, post-modern God who hands the responsibility for our screwed-up planet right back to us. ‘Tomorrow’s God’ is the grown up God of spiritually grown-up people.

Nicholas Brealey  2005/06

ISBN: 978-1-85788-355-8

Reviewed by Karen Eberhardt Shelton

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I’ve always wondered what manner of ‘profound change’ it would take to alter how individuals think and act.  Individuals make up society; if enough of them did change, that would mean society itself would undergo some kind of transformation.  Thus it was with great curiosity and anticipation that I waded in and began absorbing the discerning logic and experiential wisdom the four experts had woven in and out of all kinds of background qualifications and assembled into one gigantic platter of prescriptions for how to make sense of who we are, how society functions, the consequences of our interactions and the kinds of scenarios that result because of the choices we make, both personal and public, at all levels of human conduct.

One of the reasons this book has such appeal is because it was about collaboration; four individuals working on it together, pooling their unique ideas and experience.  It is the richer for that.  My sense was that one person alone couldn’t have possibly accumulated so much useful knowledge about how to repair broken concepts in a way that would restore them to health.

Presence is also equivalent to a heart transplant in the broken societies of today’s world because it offers new blood and a richer, better way of pumping that blood around the cavities of a slowly dying body, and in the process pulling all living things into its affirmative flow.

Presence is not pretentious or scholarly; it’s down-to-earth and entirely accessible .  It’s like walking through a newly harvested field of hay at the end of a warm summer’s afternoon and breathing in fragrant textures of scent and continuity.  Slowly reading through (and underlining, underlining) this book filled me with a sort of painful contentment and realisation that yes, this is how it is, this is what we need to turn to, this is how we must learn to think if we are ever to experience earthly fulfillment and sense of global harmony in the years to come.

Without that awakening to the quality of the presence of life around us, the way in which humans have torn the planet apart will reverse and tear us apart and we will be left as a mass of squabbling factions struggling to survive.

How does Presence advise us to avert disaster, what realisations does it offer?  For starters, it’s about “deep listening, about being open beyond one’s preconceptions and historical ways of making sense, about making choices that serve the evolution of life.”  Perhaps one of its biggest probes lies in wondering “Shouldn’t we come together to answer one fundamental question: why don’t we change?” and leads on to reminding us that “Seeing freshly starts with stopping our habitual ways of thinking and perceiving. . .SEEING OUR SEEING IS JUST THE BEGINNING.  It’s about learning to look from ‘inside’, starting to see reality freshly, seeing our connections to reality more clearly. . . .The best approach is being able to understand that the whole is to be found in the parts. . .When we encounter the authentic Whole, we encounter life at work and are transformed from passive observers to active participants in ways that intellectual understanding can never achieve.”

I particularly embraced the concept of problems arising out a lack of human relationship, ‘not just with each other but with all of nature.”  How can you harm or destroy that which you have entered into a reciprocal relationship with?  Our global  awareness is based on alienation and separation.  “We have to change that relationship to one of co-creation.  You and the other are two forms of the same life.  We are stuck in a story of who we are on this earth as human beings. . .We have no idea of the cost we pay for living this story of separation.”

Essentially, we fall into three categories: OSTRICH, those who avoid facing problems.  LAME DUCK, where the power to act is crippled, and FLAMINGO.  Flamingos take off very slowly and take off together, thus making their ‘scenario’ the only viable way forward and allowing for ‘seeing with the heart collectively’.  They are not even thinking: they are ONE with the situation.

There are chapters about types of learning, becoming a force of nature, crystallising our intent, opening up a dialogue with the universe, meeting our future, and a wonderful epilogue titled: “With Man Gone, Will There Be Hope For Gorilla?”  There are vastly useful and softly brought-together guidelines for how to open the eyes of industry, the medical practice, education, science. . .The four authors met over a long period of time on a regular (more or less monthly) basis to discuss and compare their progress in various disciplines and interactions with multiple facets of society.  Thus the collective guidance and insight they offer adds up to more than the sum of its parts.  There are countless spoonfuls of good medicine for elevating the tricky business of being human to a level that enhances and supports all life.  It is not the Status Quo that needs preserving, it is the call to assert our highest potential for good that needs to be heard.

As Presence states so beautifully, “The longest road you will ever walk is the sacred journey from your head to your heart.”  Reading this worthy book will inevitably heighten your perception and knowledge of what is required of us if we are willing to act from our highest future selves.  It will make your heart and your head tingle in unison.  And then you will be moved to act–as though you were a flamingo relishing the art of synchronised flying.

New World Library, 2009

ISBN 978-1577316756

Reviewed by Ian Mowll

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Over the past decades feminism has taken up much of the debate around gender roles. Whilst this has been good in addressing the pressing need for equality, it could be said that men have been finding it difficult to redefine their roles through such change. It could be argued that, in very broad terms, women find it easier to adapt to new social situations than men. And as Matthew Fox points out, the suicide rate amongst young men is higher than for young women. If there is a crisis, he asserts, it’s with the men.

Added to this is the lack of debate in spiritual circles around aggression and male sexuality. And so this book is a breath of fresh air – adding a great deal of thoughtful insight into male spirituality in the 21st century.

On p.44 Matthew writes: “To be a human is to be a hunter-gatherer. To be a man is to serve the tribe and the survival of the community through the skills of hunting and gathering. This has been the case for about 90,000 years of the 100,000 years of our most recent ancestors – and for millions of years before that.” He explains the need and place for aggression in a holistic spirituality. For instance, on p.70, he shows how healthy competition in sport can be an important and natural part of our development.

Matthew Fox goes on to describe ten archetypes of authentic masculinity. One of the most useful I found was his chapter on the Greek Myth of Icarus and Daedalus. In this myth Icarus had wings – he must not fly too near the sun or his wings would melt and he would fall. He must not fly too near the sea or his wings would become wet and he would also fall and drown. The meaning of the myth is that we must not live too much in the world of ideas and imagination (too near the sun) – otherwise our spirit will die. Just as living too much in the everyday (too near the sea) without inspiration is unhealthy. Our spiritual symbols (ideals) need to connect with the everyday and hold these two areas of our lives in creative tension.

Another archetype he describes is the Green Man – which he says is becoming ever more present. This archetype has many layers of meaning and is present in many cultures around the world. On p.27 he writes: “The Green Man may be recurring today, then, not just because our relationship with Nature is off balance but also because our relationship with maleness is off balance. The Green Man calls men to wake up and smell the coffee. He calls men to reconnect sexuality with nature, culture with cosmos, and economics with stewardship and moral responsibility.”

I sometimes think that in our wider western culture, spirituality is portrayed as a kind of aloof, peaceful kindness. This is fine for some. But it does not hold the grit and grime of the everyday, the passionate response, the fool starting out on his journey and all of the other symbols that make up a holistic spirituality. If, at the start of my spiritual quest, I could have read this book it would have helped me a great deal.

Finally, I suggest that this book is for women just as much as for men. Partly because, as Matthew Fox rightly says, we all have our inner masculine and inner feminine to honour. And also because the more understanding and dialogue there is between the sexes, the more chance there is for a sacred union between these two polarities.

This book is warmly recommended.

Medlar Press, 2011 (Revised Edn)

ISBN: 978-1-907110-28-3

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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Sheila is a long-time member of GreenSpirit. She and her colleague Rosemary Ward (no relation) run workshops for midlife women at The Grange, in Shropshire, England.

Sheila’s book, Towards Wisdom, is in part autobiographical, exploring the author’s own journey of personal and spiritual growth through the membership of various groups and circles in which she has taken part over the years. It details the techniques and practices used in each of these and how they might be used by other groups or individuals, particularly groups of women entering — or already in — the second half of their lives.

In doing so, it provides a wealth of useful material for any woman who is either seeking new ways to pursue her own inner journey or who is in some way facilitating the journeys of others, particularly by means of circles. For as we all know, sitting in circle and telling our stories is the time-honoured way in which women of all cultures transmit their wisdom to each other and to younger generations. We need to acknowledge this important tradition and reinstate it as a vital part of our own culture, and elderwomen may often be the ones best suited to take the lead in this.

Another interesting component of Sheila’s book is her exploration into the many meanings of the word ‘love’. It has become such a catch-all term that most of us do not even stop to think about its many layers and shades of meaning. We may dimly remember that the Greek philosophers classified love into several forms but most of us would be hard pressed to explain the classifications. Sheila’s classifications feel intuitively right to me, particularly her discovery and exploration of something she calls ‘Inspirational Love.’ This, she explains, is “a love which inspires and energises but has no physical component.”

This type of love is non-erotic, in the sense that no sexual feelings are involved. Neither is it the same as the kind of love one has for a child, a parent, a friend, a companion animal etc. It is not to be confused with what the Greeks called agape – the impersonal, selfless love that the Christian is urged to foster for his or her fellow-human. Inspirational love is, according to Sheila, in a class apart.
” I am sure that many people experience this,” she says, “but I have never found it identified and if others can confirm my experience (which some have already done) then it seems to me vital that it should be more generally recognised. What is needed now is the affirmation of countless other women who can, in circles, explore their experience of different varieties of love and what it means. It is only in the confidentiality and trust of such circles that women can speak openly of such experience…it may bring to light many other sorts of love which will enable a much greater understanding and maturity The process of self-revelation with a deep level vulnerability creates a special kind of love between the circle members which in itself may be worth exploring, (and may also give strength to some of the more lonely women in our society). But more importantly if such Circles were manifest on a large enough scale it could begin to change the emotional and spiritual climate of our culture as well as having a deeply evolutionary significance.”

Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc, 2009

ISBN 978-1-57675-969-1

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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How many of us, staring up into the unfathomable reaches of the Milky Way on a clear, moonless night, have felt a shiver run through us? Who could not feel a shiver of awe – perhaps even of terror – in contemplating his or her puny insignificance against a background of stars? Compared to the immensity of even this visible fragment of the mysterious universe, we are mere specks of dust. And yet… perhaps we are less puny and less separate than we think.

For many people, the idea that human beings – along with earthworms and beech trees and anchovies and millions of other life forms – are simply cells in the living body of our planet  would probably be difficult to comprehend. How much harder, then, might it be to know ourselves as minuscule fragments of a living, pulsating, aware universe so vast that it has no known limits?

Yet it makes perfect, logical sense. If it is true that the Earth itself is a living organism, as Lovelock’s theory indicates, then why would our planet, in its turn, not be part of a living universe? Those of us who have learned a little about quantum physics are by now familiar with the holarchic nature of the material universe: the giant set of Russian dolls that goes from electrons to atoms to molecules, to organs to organisms to ecosystems to the planet to the solar system to the galaxy. All are simultaneously parts and wholes, from the greatest to the smallest. And we know that electrons are not the end point of smallness and neither is the Milky Way the end point of largeness. Why should we assume that life is confined to just one segment of this seemingly endless holarchy? Maybe everything is alive. Maybe everything has consciousness.

As to our position on the chain, perhaps we are not as puny as we thought. In this excellent and stimulating book, Elgin points out one of the stunning discoveries of modern science. Which is that: “there is more smallness within us than there is bigness beyond us…The universe reaches into unimaginably minute realms within us. We think of the realm of atoms as small but there is a vast distance from the size of atoms to the truly infinitesimal realms at the foundations of our existence.” The universe, it appears, dissolves at both ends into mystery. With us somewhere in the middle, yearning to understand.

There is mystery in the middle as well; all over, in fact, since a staggering 96% of everything is totally invisible to us. In which case, Elgin says, “..how much of ourselves is invisible and not detectable by material technologies? How far do we extend into the deep ecology of the invisible universe? Because we are an integral part of the universe, a large part of ourselves may well be connected with and operating in these invisible realms. The roots of our being reach deep.”

So where are we? What are we? Who are we? For me, Elgin’s thesis – that the universe itself is alive and aware and evolving – rings true at a visceral as well as an intellectual level. It makes sense to me that those currents of energy I feel in my body are the very same energy out of which everything is formed. I find this concept strangely comforting. It reassures me that far from being a tiny speck in an ocean of mystery I am, in fact, an expression of it, just as an eddy in flowing water is an expression of the river.

One chapter of the book explains how the concept of a living universe can be found at the core of the world’s main wisdom traditions and this, I am sure, will give it extra validity for many. But for me, the most exciting part is the author’s description of three stages in the awakening of consciousness: reflective (self-awareness), oceanic (connectedness) and flow (co-creation).

I am always a little worried by claims that human beings have some special role to play in the great scheme of things because our historical assumption of specialness has led to the worst kind of hubris and to the dreadful damage we have inflicted on our planet. But I cling to the hope that books like this one might be instrumental in bringing about the change in consciousness that will enable us to start mending what we have broken. And this time, maybe, if we do indeed have a special role to play, we shall play it with humility. So may it be.

Highly recommended.

Hay House, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-8485-0305-2

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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The thesis of Bruce and Steve’s brilliant new book, in a very small nutshell, is that there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that science has moved on but we haven’t. And we need to—fast! The good news is that we can do it because all the tools we need are right here, under our noses (inside our noses too, as a matter of fact).

Whilst our leading edge 21st century scientists are rapidly learning to move—even to dance—in a quantum universe, 999 out of every 1,000 humans are still stumbling around with 19th century maps of the world firmly imprinted in their minds, lurching further and further into crisis.

Yet if we could just open our minds a little, the blueprints for survival are not only all around us, they are within us. As the book’s blurb explains: “…the struggle before us is not against some external enemy but rather against culturally distorted misperceptions of human nature and human potential. These myths, programmed into our collective subconscious, are directly responsible for today’s global crises. Fortunately, the blueprint for our sustainable, life-affirming future is already inside us, encoded in each of the trillion cells comprising our body.”

Anyone who has been involved in psychotherapy knows that an essential first step in understanding yourself is to bring to light the programming—from family, school and culture—that still shapes your perceptions of the world and governs your responses to it. Once you understand behaviour it becomes possible to change it. The aim of this book is to reveal the programming that shapes us collectively and thus shapes our society as a whole. For in understanding—and then consciously changing—that programming lies our best hope for survival.

It has often been said that we have made such a mess of our planet that our species is doomed to extinction—along with many others—without a rapid change in human consciousness. We must evolve to a higher level of functioning if we are to survive and to build a sustainable life for ourselves and all the other life forms on Planet Earth.

These authors maintain that the key to this evolutionary step is to clear our minds of the clutter of old programs and challenge what they call the primary ‘myth-conceptions’ we have all grown up with so that we can replace them with something closer to the truth. Like, for example, re-examining the 19th century concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ and replacing it with a much more scientifically accurate and up-to-date version they call ‘thrival of the fittingest,’ which is how Nature actually works. It is how our bodies work, how cells work, how ecosystems work and how we should make everything work. Just as in Permaculture, all we have to do is to study Nature’s own operating instructions and follow them in all that we do.

Bruce Lipton is a biologist with an extraordinary ability to make his subject interesting and accessible to any intelligent lay person—as anyone who has read and enjoyed his first book The Biology of Belief will attest. This new book recapitulates on some of that earlier work and then takes it to a whole new level. This time he is joined by political philosopher Steve Bhaerman, better known to most people through his alter ego Swami Beyondananda, the Cosmic Comic. Steve brings to the book his wealth of knowledge, his deep wisdom and his irrepressible wit, making it not only a fascinating read but also a highly enjoyable one.

To me, this is one of the most significant, exciting and hopeful books of our times and I urge everyone to buy it, to read it and to recommend it widely.

 O-books, 2011

ISBN: 978-1846944437

Reviewed  by Chris Clarke

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As can be verified from Google, it has often been said that “what we do to the planet we do to ourselves.” An even more chilling thought, however, is that what we humans do to ourselves we may also do to the planet. A significant proportion of us have, today and  throughout our history, routinely inflicted the most horrifying suffering on each other, on scales from the individual to genocide, despite widely spread contrary teachings from the major religions and despite – or maybe because of – the power and sophistication of our mind. So what is it about Homo sapiens that makes us the scourge both of other species and of our own?

According to Malcolm Hollick and Christine Connelly, the answer is, trauma: by which they mean emotionally shocking or painful experiences that have lasting mental and physical effects.  What makes trauma so malignant is that, as they quote from the therapist Peter Levine, “Trauma can be self perpetuating. Trauma begets trauma and will continue to do so eventually crossing generations in families, communities and countries …” Their book argues that trauma, usually repressed or dissociated, is ubiquitous in human society, twisting the behaviour of many people and distorting our social structure.

For me the most impressive and convincing part of the book was the central section which described in some detail, drawing on many sources, how this self perpetuating cycle of trauma arose between about 4000 BCE and 2500 BCE. It began with an abrupt climate change and widespread drought, the resulting trauma leading to a succession of adverse changes in human culture which perpetuated a trauma-inducing society. The cultural history of this period unfolds with the remorselessness of a Greek tragedy, an episode that Steve Taylor called ‘The Fall.’  We are living still today trapped in the ‘dominator culture’ which then emerged, a culture that encourages violence and feeds on violence. Others have described this process in terms of gender roles or of economics (both of which are also referred to by Hollick and Connelly). Placing trauma at the centre of the picture, however, both clarifies the problem and also opens up routes for doing something about it.

The “Hope” of the title lies in the fact that trauma can be healed. The latter part of the book is devoted to this. Here the authors, in my opinion rightly, focus on human development from infancy to adolescence and provide a useful, though necessarily highly compressed account of the role of trauma in the phases of development, how it can be avoided and how it can subsequently be released. While a wide range of approaches are described there is an emphasis on body-based dynamical approaches to individual healing. This is coupled with a theoretical framework for the nature of trauma in the first part of the book, based on a metaphorical concept of ‘energy,’ which I found less convincing.

The climax of the book, for me, was the last main chapter which set out the key features of the power structure of our present ‘dominator culture,’ and placed against it a new social agenda, drawing on the work of Riane Eisler, for an emerging ‘partnership culture’ based on release from trauma. This new agenda begins with “Children First”, then proceeding through community building, equality,  economics and finally myths, beliefs and stories.

In a field as vast as this each reader will find his or her own points to praise and points to question. I would have liked more contemporary psychology and more analysis of processes, such as  “truth and reconciliation”, for healing the pain held within societies, as much as individuals, as a result of internal conflict. But through this book we can see more clearly how we might live peaceably in the world rather than dragging the whole planet down into our own misery. The authors have given us the great gift of seeing the (human) wood for the trees.

Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2006

ISBN:978-1856230506

Reviewed by Don Hills

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“Ever felt stuck?” asks the publisher of this highly accessible book. “Here is an approach”, they claim, “..that helps us overcome obstacles, improve our relationships, supports our values, and moves us towards our goals.” For once, I’m pleased to say, the publisher’s blurb has not overstated its case.

Chris Johnstone is a highly-respected, medically-trained specialist in the psychology of change. He also works as an addictions specialist, and gives talks and workshops on finding your power. He is careful to point out in the Introduction that he is talking about personal power which he defines as ‘the ability to move in the direction you want to go’. It is nothing to do with gaining power over others.

I attended the launch of this book and was struck by Chris’ ability to convey concisely, enthusiastically and yet with charming modesty, his message about the real possibility of finding the courage and confidence to live our beliefs. The good news is that his tips are based on seventeen years of experience and detailed research into ‘what works’ with a variety of clients in both clinical and workshop settings.

The book is laid out in a very clear, logical and accessible fashion, with short, pithy sections leading to ‘power points’ – a concise summary of the main action points – at the end of each chapter. Lots of helpful diagrams, bullet points and practical suggestions, with a short but well-planned Notes (mostly references) on the contents at the end of the book. Normally I am a stickler for having an index, but I have to say that this book is so well constructed and easy to cross-reference, that it doesn’t need one. A good thing, because it hasn’t got one!

As to the content it looks, at first blush, like one of your run of the mill self-help books – three parts, each with a punchy title: the power to begin, the power to move through blocks, and the power to keep yourself going. As you start and then get into it, however, Chris’s guidance is anything but run of the mill. From the outset, he advises his readers to think carefully about the way they read the book. His three tips for reading it in a ‘powerful’ manner are – first, make use of the ‘try this’ boxes that accompany each chapter: second, use two ‘memory pegs’ after finishing each chapter (is there anything I can start using now? what bits do I still want to remember in six month’s time?): and third, have good reasons for wanting to read at a deeper level.

He’s quite happy for us to ‘dip and skim’ and only dive down when the text is hitting the heart strings of purpose and motivation. How do we find these? That’s what part one is all about! Part two is absolutely key to us lazy types who have clear goals but so often fall down after the first or second hurdle. But perhaps the third part will be of most interest to us GreenSpiriters. Its title – how to keep yourself going – is deceptively simple-sounding. Train hard? Get fit? Nose to the grind-stone? No, none of this. Chris launches into a wonderfully lucid account of the ‘keep-on-keeping-on’ kind of technique, so beloved of so many spiritual traditions. Yet nowhere does he use the word ‘spiritual’. Instead we get a chapter on ‘the connected vision’, and another on ‘believing mirrors’. He is leading his readers into some of the depths and breadth of very practical, walk-your-talk spirituality. We find out how important relationships and the bigger picture are in giving us the inner nourishment to help us find sufficient purpose and delight to keep us on the path. He is leading us to find the power and enjoyment of our Deeper Purpose – that mysterious, but very real entity which is different for every one of us. “When you act for something larger” he says, “it can act through you.”

As Chris took us through the background and birth of his book at the launch, he stopped here and there to enchant us with his playing of the hammered dulcimer. But, in the spirit of his seventeen-year journey in producing Find your Power, it felt like the dulcimer was playing its own tribute to the book. How appropriate then, that at the end of the meeting, Chris pushed the book away from himself and joined us in applauding it.

New Page Books,US; First Edition edition, Aug 2004

ISBN: 978-1564147295

Reviewed by Sky McCain

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Jesse Wolf Hardin’s  book bears an accurately descriptive title. Gaia, the living, conscious, inspirited Earth, and eros, the love of the Earth.  Gaia Eros – Earth love. Its thirty-eight small chapters felt to me more like a collection of love poems than a series of essays. Unconnected by a logical, progressive unfolding of ideas, each is complete in itself like musical variations on a theme – the theme of Earthly love.

In much the same vein as John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, Annie Dillard and Henry David Thoreau, Wolf writes and talks from out of his personal experience, revealing his love affair with the larger domain of himself.  Love for others, and for all of Nature, must be grounded in love of self. Not so much the egoic, personal self, but more the larger Self fully embodied in the sacred skin of the living Earth.  ‘Earthen Spirituality’ or ‘New Nature Spirituality’ is what Wolf likes to call it.

All his chapters – or  poetic vignettes – are like expressions of the lover speaking from a heart saturated with over twenty-five years spent in the sensual, erotic bower  of his beloved canyon. It is a place of cool breezes and laughing waters, thick and luxuriant with a backdrop of forest and stately cliffs rising to lofty crags and pinnacles.  Cool boulders of bold design dotted with hardy cacti lie among fallen limbs in and among sand washed down with Autumn thundershowers.  “I’m excited,” says Wolf. And having walked the sacred canyon myself, I understand and share that excitement.

Of course, the American Southwest has no monopoly on beauty.  Equally, there may be the loveliness of a potted plant, hedgerows of campions interspersed with the withering bluebell blossoms past their prime and forming seed. The joyfully sounding song of the robin shortly before his summer silence or the melodious notes of the blackbird taking a short break from the relentless task of feeding her young; all are equal parts of Gaia.  As Wolf puts it, “the interpenetration and interrelationship of all her sacred parts.”

Interwoven with the affirmations of joyful communion with Gaia are several invigorating themes. I’ll just touch on a few.  Earthen Spirituality promises no transcendent answer or creed.  Where is it that we think we might go?  The Tao is within, not out there somewhere.  There is no need to look further than our Earthly home for sustenance.  In my own words: let us wholly immerse ourselves in the love and beauty of Gaia and let Gaia, who is better equipped, deal with cosmic consciousness.  Our connection to the cosmos must come through Gaia.  We, as earthling animals, simply don’t have the sensors to deal directly with galactic spirit. And why should we be concerned?  Can we not be satisfied with being Earthlings?

Wolf says, “Earth is a spirit-embodied being, sexually charged and reproductive, but also sensitive and vulnerable. In this way our playmate, partner, and lover.”

In Chapter 11, there is a fairly detailed ‘Anatomy of a Quest’ as guided by the residents of the Earthen Spirituality Project in the magical Gila Mountains of New Mexico, USA, once the abode of the Mogollon (‘Sweet Medicine’) people.

A major part of the New Nature Spirituality involves “recreating a practice that is true to our mixed heritage and found homes, true to the current needs of self and earth in these contemporary times.”  Avoiding ‘cultural appropriation’, we need authentic rituals that reflect our new understanding of Gaia,  (what I call ‘rituals of uncertainty’).  These must be pulled from the heart and shared.  Early on, in Chapter 2, there is a ‘sweet medicine query,’ a preparatory rite of passage into the book.  This mental preparation seems to parallel the two mile walk into the canyon, where the visitor must cross the usually calf deep river seven times.

Some other charming chapters feature such things as ‘Mulberry Truths’ – a collection of affirmations and truths from Nature’s storehouse,  and ‘Lessons of the Furry Buddhas’ – things the author has learned from bobcats, such as: “Anytime you’re not actively being pursued, don’t bother being afraid“. Then there is Wolf’s ‘Ode to Wilderness’, an impassioned testimony rather than reasoned argument.  In Gaia Eros one also finds a detailed example of restoring and resacramenting land, beautiful suggestions for reclaiming the ever present ‘now’ and several interviews which help the reader to be come better acquainted with the author.  These and others are all illustrated with Wolf’s art.

In a culture that is currently threatening to bring about “the end of Nature”, Gaia Eros is a Song of Songs, an inspirited beacon piercing through the darkness.

Illustrated by Jeila Gueramian

Brotman Marsh-Field Curriculums, Biddeford, ME (USA)

ISBN 978-0976256809

Reviewed by Angie Burke

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“You are part of a wonderful web of life.”

The Kids’ Book of Awesome Stuff is filled with information, ideas, and activities to develop awareness in children that they are “…part of a wonderful web of life.” Grounded in scientific facts – including explanations of the Big Bang, nuclear fusion, evolution, photosynthesis – the book is engaging and inspiring and should leave any receptive young reader enthralled and sparkling with enthusiasm. Charlene Brotman’s accessible style and creative use of activity-based, interactive learning techniques combine with Jelia Gueramian’s friendly illustrations to make this book a treasure for children and adults alike.

The book consists of six chapters: Star Stuff (exploding stars, chemical elements and recycled matter); Saved by Something Green (how trees breathe, what would happen if every plant disappeared); Poop and Pee and Dead Stuff that Rots (sure to be a favorite!); If There Were No Bugs (Did you know millions of years ago dung beetles cleaned up after dinosaurs?); Ancestors (why your hand has five fingers, evolution and invisible bacteria); Spinning Spiral (the galaxy and our place within it).

Each chapter delves into the subject with a mixture of facts and cartoons providing quirky questions and commentary – a picture of a dandelion leaf with a speech bubble “I’m just a dandelion leaf, but I can split water!” to illustrate how plants convert water into hydrogen and oxygen, or the “How fish are saved from poisoning themselves” fishy conversation about the toxic qualities of fish poo and the bacteria that save them!

There are star journals to keep, word puzzles, leaf hunts, mirror messages, and even yoga. My personal favorite being ‘The Dizzy Rounds’ where you make your body spin around and circle at the same time as if you were the earth circling the sun. Guaranteed to make you dizzy. Your friend, the sun, stands in the centre, now tilt your head (the earth is tilted), turn like a top (that’s the earth rotating), and move in a circle around your friend – tilting, rotating and revolving as you go! Certainly one for younger children to enjoy and perhaps a new party game?

The book encourages children to engage with the natural environment with suggestions for simple, readily achievable activities (you don’t have to live in the countryside for any of them). “Try this some nice day…Breathing with trees: Lie on the ground under a tree. Look up at the leaves. Breathe in deep breaths…The air you breathe in is breathed out by the tree. The air you breathe out is breathed in by the tree. From the tree to you, from you to the tree…Over and over…the Breath of Life.” An initiation ceremony for future eco-warriors?

The book contains gems of wisdom from the Desiderata You are a child of the Universe: Lakota Native American sayings Mitakuye O Yasin – We are all related: Thich Nhat Hanh In the garbage I see a rose. In the rose, I see the garbage. Without one the other cannot be: and Rabindranath Tagore.

There is an account of Rachel Carson’s life and pioneering work to raise awareness about the dangers of chemical use in farming to ourselves and to the Earth, aptly called No Peace in Keeping Silent, and A Strange Tale of what happened in Borneo when the WHO sprayed the island with DDT.

Charlene Brotman envisioned The Kids Book of Awesome Stuff (in collaboration with Ann Fields and Barbara Marshman – neither of whom lived to develop the book) as a tool for teaching the seventh principle in the Unitarian Universalist faith: ‘Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part’. The book was written and designed for children aged nine to eleven to nurture a sense of wonder through science-based puzzles, activities and stories. There are also blank pages at the end for children to use for their own drawings, poems, thoughts and wonderings.

As a workbook for home or school-based environmental education, this book is a valuable resource for developing children’s ‘knowledge and understanding of the world’ (that’s National Curriculum speak!) and may well prove to be more ‘successful’ (certainly more relevant, thorough and fun) than the current strictly subject-based approach in many of our schools.

Rather than testing children on their ‘knowledge and understanding of the world’, perhaps schools should ask parents to participate with their children in some ‘Star travel’ on a clear and starry night – “It’s easy! Bring blankets or sleeping bags, so that all of you can lie on your backs and look up at the splendor above.” Share stories and ideas and think about what you would have called the Milky Way had you discovered it!

As well as providing a holistic basis for learning, this book gently guides children to develop an awareness and appreciation of the sacred. It ends with the words “I pledge to take care of Planet Earth.”

If children can develop a connection with the natural world, as adults they will surely embrace Chief Seattle’s words and perhaps be entrusted to take more care of the Earth than we have.

“People did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”  – attributed to Chief Seattle, 1854

O Books, 2008

ISBN 978-1-84694-096-5

Reviewed by Sandra White

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At the core of this book is a profound understanding of the state that Jocelyn Chaplin sets out to evoke, being in “the flow”, which lies within us all but which in the West is hard to make contact with and live from.   Rooted in her childhood spent in the Sudan and Ghana, and her adult years as a political activist, scholar, artist and psychotherapist, her writing succeeds in synthesising all these strands of her life.

She describes the central challenge for those of us living in hierarchical systems: how to separate ourselves enough from them to allow the to and fro rhythm of life, the interplay between the opposites and the spiralling energy at the heart of the cosmos into our lives so that we can be truer expressions of them.  But she goes further than description by placing herself, her personal and professional ‘lives’, at the centre of the narrative and this brings her exploration alive.  With portrayals of rituals that she has taken part in and conducted which heal places and honour seasons, of collective rituals like carnivals and raves, of intimate moments with partners and of moving transitions that some of her therapy clients have made, she gives us picture after picture – in words and in her own artwork – of what is flow, continually strengthening our connection with it.  Constant, equalising flow is intrinsic to the book itself, as she moves steadily and lightly, back and forth, between extensive references to ancient cultures and modern physics, personal stories and professional accounts.  She also usefully unpacks a behaviour like necessary political rebellion, exploring the value of an underpinning state of mind she calls “loving rebellion”, rooted in deep equality, rather than more reactive rebellion, which is effectively still an expression of hierarchy.  I loved her image of “new wine in old bottles”, questioning some of the modern spiritual propositions which succeed in evoking flow and rhythm while still claiming superiority over other spiritual schools.   At the end of each chapter are exercises we as individuals can experiment with to bring us closer to our inner “deep intuition”, our own hearts of flow and rhythm.

A powerful example of “be[ing] the change”, I found this book a delightful read; nourishing, enabling, provocative and inspiring.

Hodder & Stoughton, 2008

ISBN: 978-0340935927

Reviewed by Grace Blindell

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This book opens with words from the Tao Te Ching “He who knows he has enough is rich” … and then continues … “We have some evolving to do. And quickly. We need to develop a sense of ‘enoughness.’”

This is a great book. John Naish has an enjoyable sense of humour, and of the ridiculous, thus transforming a book which could be a gloomy criticism of the idiocy of the human race, into one which engenders hoots of mirth, and gentle chuckles.

For this reason too, it is also a book that the converted can both enjoy and learn from, as well as recommending to the unconverted, without feeling too self-righteously ‘holier than thou’!

The chapters: Enough … Information, Food, Stuff, Work, Options, Happiness, Growth, and Never Enough, are well investigated and researched.

Very definitely a GreenSpirit book.

O Books, 2008

ISBN 978-1-84694-094-1

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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Emma is head of the international Druid Network and the author of ten books. She teaches courses worldwide, and lectures at universities and conferences on Druidry, environmentalism, healing, and women’s spirituality.

With a knowledgeable and authoritative voice, Emma speaks from both heart and well-schooled mind about her Pagan tradition, its history and practices, and how its ethics and attitudes fit into the context of Western philosophical thought.

This book’s blurb describes it as “… a comprehensive guide to moral living from a Pagan perspective” and that it certainly is. It might just as easily have been a guide to living out of exactly the kind of ecocentric worldview that all the members of our GreenSpirit organization share, along with many other spiritually aware, green-minded people who have not thought of themselves specifically as Pagans.

A counsel of perfection it may be, but it is a beautifully articulated one and worth a place on any ‘green’ person’s bookshelf, whether a practising Pagan or not.

AuthorHouse, 2011

ISBN 978-1-4520-8290-5

Reviewed by Sky McCain

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From GreenSpirit member Chris Philpott comes a book, many years in the making, that is a compendium of attitudes and sources of wisdom about the spiritual basis of what it is to be green. In an inspiring Foreword, the author, scientist and activist Vandana Shiva suggests that this book could help us to rediscover what she calls a ‘spiritual sheet anchor.’

In his Introduction, the author asserts that all of the major spiritual traditions warn us about the perils of not losing sight of the sacredness of our home planet. He states that we must recognise and rid ourselves of our ‘illusion.’ It wasn’t clear to me exactly what the illusion is but I suggest that it is the illusion that we and Gaia are separate; or perhaps that the whole sacred/mundane dichotomy is an illusion.

The purpose of Part 1 appears to be to identify and document the wisdom and respect for Nature found within twelve spiritual traditions, suggesting that each has wisdom that can help us  “…raise our standards of care for our planet.” Each of the twelve chapters contains an introduction to one of the traditions and outlines its history, doctrine and customs, festivals and practice, ending with a description of its green aspects and a list of websites for further study.

Within the Christianity chapter is an assertion that social justice is a green principle.  My search for the definition of social justice revealed that the common thread woven into all the various definitions is justice for people. To my mind, green spirituality is also about ecological justice or justice for all life forms, human and otherwise, and for our living planet itself. But presumably this is implicit in Philpott’s definition.

Part 2 is headed ‘Global Environmental Problems and World Poverty.’ Its seven chapters take us on a journey of spiritual insights around water, food, air, climate, species extermination, waste and the poverty we create. The author has gathered and revealed the spiritual direction offered by the twelve spiritual movements concerning our ecological crisis.

The last chapter has a most interesting title: ‘You Are the Emergency Services.’  Here, we are introduced to various sustainable communities who are paving the pathway towards truly sustainable, practical living. Certainly a hopeful note on which to end this solid, well-researched and informative book.

Profile Books, 2009

ISBN 978-1-86197-818-9

Reviewed by Michael Colebrook

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It is very appropriate that this book should have appeared in Darwin’s year (2009) and I started to write this review on the 150th anniversary day of the publication of The Origin of Species.

The author is a biochemist and he deals with aspects of the evolutionary story at the molecular level that were quite unknown in Darwin’s day. It does present a problem for the reader in that some knowledge of chemistry and basic biology is an asset in following the stories he tells. But he also tells his stories very well, with the minimum of technical language and no formulae!

The book opens with a necessarily speculative but very convincing argument that life started in one of the forms of submarine hydrothermal vents. These are known as alkaline vents in contrast to the better know acidic ‘black smokers’. Both the physical structure and the chemical environment of these vents provide definite possibilities for the emergence of living organisms.

There is a problem in the field of molecular evolution in that there can be no direct fossil record of biochemical systems. Everything has to be based on inference from what is going on in organisms that are alive today. Nevertheless, it is clear that, at the biochemical level, many of the processes and systems found in organisms living today had their origin in the very earliest phases of the evolutionary story. We are given a glimpse of what had to be happening during the long, long period of evolutionary history, of about three thousand million years, when the only living creatures were the bacteria and the single celled eukaryotes.

A good example is the Krebs cycle. This is a remarkably complicated system involved in the production of the energy needed for the functioning of just about every cell of just about every organism that has ever existed (see box). As the author states: “There is a marvellous unity to the world of the cell, which gives a deep sense of connection and fellowship with the world around.” Another example is that the two main proteins, myosin and actin, which are involved in the muscle systems of just about all the multi-cellular animals from jelly fish to insects to humans, are also found in the intracellular systems of all eukaryote organisms.

The chapter on sex includes a refreshing emphasis on the role of recombination—as opposed to the more common stress on mutation—in the emergence of genetic variation and its role in evolution by natural selection. Recombination involves a rearrangement of the sets of existing genes located in specific chromosomes. The result being that offspring inherit an essentially random mix of the genes of their parents. A lot can go on even without mutation.

The author goes on to describe a number of systems at the biochemical level but he avoids the obvious trap of reductionism. We come away with a feeling of the great antiquity of the origins of the systems. Altogether an illuminating and valuable contribution to the evolutionary story.

O-Books, 2006

ISBN 978-1905047710

Reviewed by Chris Clarke

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Readers of GreenSpirit will be profoundly aware of the ecological stress now facing our planet as a result of human action, and of the call which many of us feel, to respond by embracing the earth more closely, connecting with it more intimately, so that we can know in our bones what is happening and respond more with our whole being. Many of us also feel that the underlying cause of what is happening is the progressive loss of any meaningful worldview within our society. The only stories that can be clearly heard within Western society as a whole are stories of wealth and status, domination and control; or the materialistic story of classical science, of the universe as a machine. This outworn scientific story of a meaningless universe is the only story that reaches to every country of our globalised planet.

Since the 1980s the Creation Centred Spirituality movement has been telling a ‘New Universe Story’  (pioneered by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry) of a world filled with constant creativity; and in GreenSpirit (Spring 04) Isabel Clarke linked into this the ‘New Human Story’ which explained the place of our own species and the paradoxical nature of our relationship with the world. Both these new stories are rooted in science, and so we are starting to see how the universality of science might be combined with the meaningfulness of our physical, intimately felt relationships, to restore to humanity a meaningful story by which to live within Gaia. But something has been missing. Science and the humanities, while sustaining many mutual resonances, still seem different worlds. Creation Centred Spirituality is still largely ignored or viewed with suspicion by the major faith traditions, and is itself sometimes reluctant to engage with the faith traditions. We still lack a truly unified story that encompasses the social realities of science, arts/humanities and spirituality. It is this that Malcolm Hollick seeks to build.

Amongst an ever-increasing flood of books building bridges between science and spirituality, his book stands out through its fundamentally different approach.. Malcolm Hollick does not rest with science and spirituality as already given and fixed. Instead, he proceeds to construct a new worldview that is rooted in an inner conviction of the oneness of the world, working with both scientific and spiritual material but treating both in the spirit of science – of a quest for truth marked by openness and humility within a public dialogue. In this way he progressively extends the boundaries of understanding beyond science to achieve, in the words of his title, ‘a science of oneness’ rather than a conjunction of science and spirituality as they are now.

In common with Creation Centred Spirituality, he extends science by recognising that its current bounds are set by its use of one particular way of knowing – the rational and analytical – and that its extension requires a different, relational or intuitive way of knowing. He then leads the reader into those branches of science which take us closest to the boundary where we can see how an intuitive knowing can continue the story. This results in a survey of enormous scope. He sets out in considerable breadth successive sections on systems theory, relativity, quantum physics, cosmology, mind, life and consciousness studies. What emerges is a detailed account of a holarchical cosmos, based on Koestler’s concept of a holon as a system that is defined by its own internal integrity, by the larger holons of which it is a part, and by the subsidiary holons from which it is built. The dynamics of the evolution of increasingly complex holons echoes Thomas Berry’s dynamic of “individuation, subjectivity and communion”.

Most importantly, his method of constructing the book itself illustrates his philosophy of the use of different ways of knowing. He goes well beyond conventional intellectual  exposition by including in each section inspirational readings and seeds for meditations that enable readers to develop their own intuitive understanding of our world. This, and the use of a consistently accessible non-technical of language, gives the book an impressive pedagogic strength.

The process of the extension of science and the development of readers’ own understanding culminates in the final section: an exposition of the spiritual territory that his method has reclaimed. Rational and intuitive knowing combine in affirming the diversity of a universe which (echoing Brian Swimme) is in constant and unpredictable evolution, “..a truly creative process, with no predetermined path or goal.” He argues for a view in which the variety of spiritual traditions are seen as mutually enriching “..participatory experiments in which humanity is exploring alternative approaches to our relationship with Spirit and material existence.” At the end he finds a vision of a cosmos that has at its heart “..the Mystery of Spirit, a creative potential that shattered the primal One, bringing matter and consciousness into being.” Moreover, he affirms that “Even as the unity shattered, its fragments were being reintegrated into a complex, connected whole that is infinitely richer and more beautiful than the Void from which it sprang.” Within this vision he concludes by inspiringly focuses on his readers’ understanding of their own place in the world. He supports the insight of many spiritual traditions that “..our real ‘self’ is not an isolated individual, but a person-within-society-and-environment.” This enables us to come to terms with the reality of death (an essential step in freeing society from many of its pathologies) and to find our own meaning in our self-giving to the whole in love.

Malcolm Hollick has a background of academic ecological work in Australia and practical ecology in the Findhorn Foundation, and so his exposition is well interlaced with an ecological sensibility; though because of the breadth of his canvas this is often more implicit than explicit. He writes at a non-specialised level to convey a feeling and a general understanding of a holistic worldview. Inevitably this leaves some sections presented rather impressionistically – for example, in his treatment of physics, psychology or consciousness studies. At these points I missed the detail which might have been given of the current status of work in these areas, which is already making exciting headway in underpinning the general approach.

This book is not a simple extension of existing schools of thought, but – in its methodology as much as in its detailed content – it is the beginning of something new to which, I think, GreenSpirit can comfortably relate. With its extension to the fundamental insights of spiritual traditions and its unity of approach, we are moving from Universe and Human stories to the start of a Cosmic story.

Findhorn Press, 2004

ISBN:978-1844090372

Reviewed by Lis Bertolla

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This is not the first book I have read on the subject of simple living, but it is as yet, the only one which tackles the psychological implications of making life changes in as much depth as the practicalities. We all have some resistance to change, especially when the outcome runs counter to the attitudes and values prevalent in our materialistic society. To summon the energy and willingness to do this requires both awareness and effort (qualities which the author has aplenty). So, if you are willing this book could be a useful companion.

We read on the fly-leaf that Marian Van Eyk McCain worked as a transpersonal psychotherapist and was a workshop leader and  health educator and that she also writes poetry and short fiction. All  of these skills are evidenced in the book, which has an unusual structure (for a text-book, that is,) which alternates between passages  of practical exposition and lyrical descriptions of the author’s much loved garden. It is in these latter that much of the wisdom of the  book is encapsulated however, and indeed it is the frogs and their life  on the eponymous lily-pad that lead us through the thesis of the book.

Marian describes our high-tech, frenetic society with a colourful simile: ‘we are’ she says ‘rushing around like grasshoppers on amphetamines.’ Her seven steps to simplicity form the main body of  the book, with a chapter devoted to each. It is impressive that she understands so very well how we, as humans, contrive to sabotage our own good intentions with endless mind-games and hang-ups At the same time she acknowledges that our motives are not always conscious ones. We are often prevented from achieving change by  our deep-seated, but unrecognised needs. I found her concept of ‘need-holes’ (see Chapter2) most enlightening. Simply put, our unsatisfied needs from childhood – for unconditional love and recognition – will continue to trip us up throughout adulthood.  At times of stress or vulnerability we can fall down a need-hole and struggle to reappear (my interpretation, not the author’s). Such  areas of unresolved need cannot be filled, we cannot go back to being  the children we once were: ‘the problem is, whilst you can fill a  hole in the ground, you cannot fill a hole that only exists in memory – a historical hole. Trying to fill a historical hole is like trying to fill a leaking bucket.’

We may attempt to fill up our empty spaces with material consumption: retail therapy and, in some cases, addiction to drugs and alcohol, but we are inevitably left with an emptiness inside. Recognition of this dilemma, whilst not effecting a cure, can at least offer us the chance to manage our compulsions and, perhaps, to make more rational decisions whilst pursuing our intentions.

So the usual strictures I have learned to expect in books on the simple life—such as, eat vegetarian food, clear the clutter in your home and use your car less, whilst given a mention are not seen as being as crucial as the assault on the detritus of the mind: ‘Simplicity is not and never should be a hair shirt. It is merely the embrace of a new kind of joy’. This writer is more interested in our inner processes and posits that, without such inner change all our outward attempts may come to nought.

I mentioned earlier that Marian chronicles throughout the book the life of her garden and the lily pond with its teeming wildlife. I particularly enjoyed reading of her night-time excursions, crouching by the pond with a torch and observing the nocturnal activities of its inhabitants. It is an image that will cheer my winter nights for many a year. And I should also mention at this point the many sensitive and witty illustrations by Iris Hill who captures the pond with its layer of dark green duckweed and the frog whose life-cycle is spent there. She also provides us with miniature jumping frogs at each turn of page.

These excursions into the author’s inner world are a welcome, but not irrelevant digression from the more didactic content of the book. They give us a window through which we can peer at the simple life as it is lived They bring us closer to the author on the long journey she has made to get where she now is. They act like a meditation  that both slows our pace and increases our enjoyment. This is a woman who writes, as she doubtless lives, truthfully and with understanding.

I will end where the writer begins with the following passage:  ‘It is becoming increasingly obvious that if human beings – particularly those in affluent, Western industrialised countries who are mainly responsible for the twin problems of over-consumption and pollution – do not learn new ways of being and start adopting them now, most forms of life on earth will come to an end.’

Within the covers of this relatively slim book, the crucial steps of the journey are simply described. Here is someone who not only  practises what she preaches, but who seems to garner enjoyment  from every moment.

Brunner-Routledge, 2004

ISBN: 978-1583918746

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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When I was a child, everyone went to church (or chapel) on Sundays, or so it seemed. Spirituality and religion appeared synonymous. That is so no longer. The winds of change have blown hard in my lifetime, and you and I now live in a predominantly secular society – one of many in the Western world. But there is another strong weather pattern coming up against the wind. Religion may be in decline, but spirituality has never been so much in evidence. In a culture that now worships at the shopping mall yet comes away empty-hearted, there is a swell of yearning for a deeper connection – or a  reconnection – with the sacred. This yearning manifests in the proliferation of ‘New Age’ therapies, gurus and products, it powers the popular search for ancestral roots and ancient wisdom, and it is possibly what brought many of us to GreenSpirit. It also shows itself in the numbers of people taking refuge in religious fundamentalism, which purports to offer the security of certainties and prescriptions in an insecure, uncertain and chaotic world.

“The spiritual revolution,” says David Tacey, “..is a spontaneous movement in society, a new interest in the reality of spirit and its healing effects on life, health, community and well-being. It is our secular society realising that it has been running on empty, and has to restore itself at a deep primal source, a source which is beyond humanity and yet paradoxically at the very core of our experience.”

The irony is that, as he points out, this movement has people heading in completely opposite directions in search of the same thing. “Spirituality seeks a sensitive, contemplative, transformative relationship with the sacred, and is able to sustain levels of uncertainty in its quest because respect for mystery is paramount. Fundamentalism seeks certainty, fixed answers and absolutism, as a fearful response to the complexity of the world and to our vulnerability as creatures in a mysterious universe.”

There are traps in both directions. Fundamentalism’s certainties are a dangerous mirage and  the ‘New Age’ is by now a huge, commercial enterprise, abounding in false prophets.

Tacey, a Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, set up the only non-religious course in spirituality in Australia after he noticed how many signs of spiritual searching were evident in his students’ work and discussions in other classes such as literature and Jungian psychology. The new course was eagerly taken up. Numbers grew each year as Tacey and each fresh crop of students embarked on their mutual exploration of what spirituality might mean in the 21st Century and, unlike the traditional religion of most churches, how green (and therefore how political) this new spirituality is and must be. He was awed and excited by the depth of awareness he found in these young people, the fervour of their arguments and their enthusiasm for the topic, and he includes in his writing many extracts from his students’ essays and discussions. I think these are what gives the book its unique flavour.

Much space is taken up by his lamenting, as we have so often done in our GreenSpirit gatherings and online discussions, the inability of most of our religious institutions to recognise the spirituality revolution and to come out and engage with it. Instead they feel threatened, and huddle in their closets of dogma, ever-fearful of losing their power even though that very fear is causing them to lose it all the faster.

But of course, there is nothing new in that. For as Tacey reminds us:
“The ruling tradition in any era does not grasp the fact that if God is alive and active in the world, then God will be creative in the world, beckoning us to new transformations. The old tradition may in some ways prefer God to be ‘dead’, because then the sacred body of God can be laid out, dissected by systematic theologians and pedants. and pinned down in precise and scientific ways. But if God is alive, our experience of the sacred is going to be uncertain, creative. imprecise and full of surprise and astonishment. If God is alive, God will always be revealed as mysterious, unknowable and unable to be contained and captured.”

As a practising Christian, however, Tacey sees part of his work as holding up a mirror to the churches and challenging them to drop their fears and be part of the revolution. After all, their founder was a revolutionary par excellence.

My only criticism of this book is that the discussion of the churches’ attitudes seems somewhat repetitive and long-winded whereas only a few pages are given to the strongly eco-spiritual aspects of this ‘revolution’, and the Universe Story, to my great surprise, does not rate a mention.Nonetheless I found it an interesting and enjoyable book, refreshingly non-academic in its language and probably worth a place on your GreenSpirit shelf.

Permanent Publications, 2009

ISBN: 978-1856230490

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain
(review first published in Permaculture Magazine)

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Our Western culture does have a few standard rituals for marking significant events in our lives but we all experience other events and other special moments and decisions for which no prescribed form of ritual exists. Yet we are often dimly aware of the impulse to mark these moments in some meaningful, symbolic way, particularly when they concern something as emotionally laden as procreation.

In this delicately and lovingly crafted book, Jackie Singer raises our awareness of the importance, the usefulness and the wonder of rituals for marking our special moments. Then she goes on to look at all types and sizes of ritual around childbirth, from those tiny, private ones that we use, sometimes spontaneously,  to honour our own special moments, to the large, public ceremonies like baby naming and funerals. (Yes, funerals. Not all pregnancies go to term. Not all babies survive birth.)

She describes the shape of a ritual—its beginning, middle and end—and looks at the aspects of time and place, rhythm and sacred space, words, music, objects altars … nothing is left out of this comprehensive guidebook. She reminds us that the planning of a ceremony is just as much a part of the whole as the performance of it, for the creation of a ceremony and the intention behind it, have their inner and outer components also.

‘Devising a ceremony,’ Jackie says, is ‘one part divine inspiration to five parts earthly practicality,’ and she provides a checklist of questions to help the planner focus.

As well as its usefulness to anyone interested in the power of ritual, what makes this book really special is its amazing and thoughtful inclusiveness. Jackie has devised rituals for everything to do with birth. Infertility, IVF treatment, adoption, termination planned or unplanned, even the conscious decision to remain childless, all these life events and situations find their rightful place here.

For any young parents or soon-to-be parents or hoping-to-be parents, this book would be a wonderful gift. It is also good reading for anyone interested in the form and nature of rituals, their importance to our lives and the important part they play in our emotional health, our personal growth and our spiritual life.

Shambala, 2009

ISBN 978-1-59030-705-2

Reviewed by Stephen Wollaston (Santoshan)

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Within eco-spiritual literature there are few titles that satisfactorily relate Hindu Yogic teachings with contemporary green issues, or do little more than simply acknowledge a basic relationship between the two. Michael Stone’s Yoga for a World out of Balance beautifully highlights how the five yamas (traditionally translated as non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, chastity, and greedlessness and non-grasping) are essentially interwoven with global and social responsibility and Earth-centred practices . The yamas themselves are invariably recommended within various Yogic traditions as an important first stage of an essential eightfold path that was outlined in the influential Patanjali Yoga Sutra.

The author of this new book is a cofounder of a Sangha in Toronto, consisting of both Yogic and Buddhist practitioners exploring relationships between practice and social and ecological action. The misguided concept often held in the west about Yoga being merely about physical exercises is clearly tackled by Michael. He also writes to those engaged in meditation and Hatha Yoga posture work to take their practices and teachings beyond their exercise mats and overcome any polarised split between personal practice, everyday life and their relationship with the natural world.

The book’s Foreword is written by the renowned Yoga master, B.K.S. Iyengar, who clearly agrees with Michael’s emphasis on the yamas. Interestingly, Iyengar points out how he prefers to interpret the word yama as ‘self-culture’, which he sees as a universal ethical principle, whereas Michael translates it as ‘external restraint’ (a more standard interpretation). There are points about the date of the Yoga Sutra – which Michael places as early as the 2nd century BCE – whether Pantanjali was actually trying to create a synthesis of different teachings and if it implied seeing life in a holistic, non-dualistic way, as Michael suggests. It is generally thought that Patanjali’s final stage of enlightenment is a stage of isolation or aloneness (see Georg Feuerstein’s The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali), though similar to Michael, the scholar Ian Whicher also put forward an excellent case for the Patanjali Sutra being about an integration of all parts. It is also interesting to see Michael translate the fourth yama (brahmacary) as, “wise use of energy, including sexual energy,” as it is often interpreted to simply mean ‘chastity’.

But the central message and importance of Michael’s superb book need not be side-tracked by these points. For if ancient wisdom is going to be of any worth for our current age it will need to be evaluated for its relevance to contemporary life and issues, and it is this which I feel Michael succinctly achieves. Patanjali himself was merely summarising what had gone before and popular at the time, which implies the teachings are much older than any dating of the Sutra. Other teachers who have implemented the eight-limbs have arrived at different understandings about enlightenment and have seen it, as Michael does, as more holistic and integral. For Michael, “Though the yamas may appear to be a path to Samadhi [a stage of enlightenment], they are also a creative expression of Samadhi.”

The sacredness of life has always been there within the Hindu Yogic traditions and the propagation of the yamas and their ethical implications certainly implies taking responsibility for our actions and engaging healthily with life. Michael points out how Yoga practice is not a disengagement with postmodern living, or about mastery over the body, language or mind but, “a returning that returns us to the wild ecology that is our true home.” For Michael, this implies a “reattunement to the complex interdependence of the air and earth and mind and heart so that we can return our animated ecological mind and reactivate this wisdom in contemporary times because these are our times, and without increased wisdom and attentiveness, they’ll pass us by.”

In all, this is an excellent book, which I hope will be the one of many more that revaluates the central wisdom of Yoga and its applications for contemporary ecological issues.

 

Park Street Press, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-59477-340-2

Reviewed (the 2002 edition) by John Clarke

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The American philosopher W.V.O. Quine once remarked that “Consciousness is to me a mystery, not one to be dismissed. We know what it is like to be conscious, but not how to put it into satisfactory scientific terms” (Quidities pp. 132-3). So consciousness, along with the whole subjective nature of our inner mental and spiritual life, gets left out of the scientific world picture. Thus, the orthodox account of evolution tells us that living beings emerged and developed as ever-more complex physical entities, but nowhere in this story is there a place for the subjective phenomena of consciousness. These seem to be of a different order of being entirely, and the only way of accounting for them is to imagine a kind of miracle whereby at some point in the evolutionary process complex physical systems produced a wholly different kind of reality, namely consciousness.

Christian de Quincey, who is professor of philosophy and consciousness studies at John F. Kennedy University in the USA, offers us a radically alternative paradigm. What if, he asks, consciousness did not appear like a genie out of a lamp at some arbitrary point in biological evolution, but rather has been present within, and a component of, the very stuff of the universe, an essential complement to its material constitution? Perhaps, to adapt a famed remark quoted by William James, it’s not ‘turtles all the way down’ but ‘consciousness all the way down’.

de Quincey starts out from two basic problems in his exploration of this hypothesis. The first is the unsatisfactory nature of our contemporary paradigm from a purely theoretical point of view. This paradigm has been shaped since Descartes’ time by the assumption that there is a profound split in the nature of things, an absolute division between mental and physical realities. From a purely philosophical point of view this presents us with some intractable problems, particularly the question of how the mental world can possibly interact with the physical. From a scientific point of view, it strikes at the heart of science’s attempt to give a coherent and comprehensive account of reality. It is forced to be content with the seemingly miraculous birth of consciousness which eludes its allencompassing grasp. It is inconceivable, he argues, that “sentience, subjectivity, or consciousness could ever evolve or emerge from wholly insentient, objective, non-conscious matterenergy” (p.263). Of course, many scientists simply ignore the fact of consciousness, and are content to view organisms simply as physical machines. But as de Quincey argues, this runs in the face of the facts of experience, namely our immediate awareness of the presence and efficacy of our own consciousness in the world.

The second problem with our contemporary paradigm is of a more practical nature. Its image of the basic stuff of the universe is one which is totally devoid of meaning or purpose, or any of those spiritual qualities that give value to life. This is not only an issue that concerns our personal lives and our individual sense of purpose and meaning, but has wider implications for the way in which we run our social and political affairs, and the way in which we engage with our natural environment. In the shadow of this paradigm, our world has “become a giant machine, without any intrinsic feeling”, its only value being its potential for exploitation, a world which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be profoundly ‘pathological’ (p.5). What we need, he argues, is a new cosmological story, “an ecological account of the world in which we humans find our fit, our place, our home. We need a new story because the current dominant cosmology, based on modernist science, has left us alienated in the universe” and we need “a way to heal the split between knower and known, and to develop a worldview that includes the storyteller” (pp.19 & 83).

The story which fits this requirement is, according to the author, panpsychism. This theory maintains firstly that all physical things have an interior dimension of experience or feeling, and are in some respects both material and psychic and secondly, that this feature of the universe is essential to it and has therefore been intrinsic to nature right from the start. Such a story not only enables us to avoid imagining some kind of miraculous birth of consciousness seemingly out of nothing, but also embeds us in a universe of unfolding meaning.

The outline I have given is inevitably sketchy, and gives only a hint of the wide-ranging scholarship and sophisticated argument that the author brings to bear over nearly 300 closely argued pages. The book not only traces the development of panpsychism in the context the historical debates about consciousness and the nature of mind, psyche and soul, but also draws on recent arguments of process philosophers such as Whitehead and Griffin whose speculations are closely interwoven with de Quincey’s own.

One of the key arguments of the book revolves round one of panpyschism’s most plausible competitors, namely the theory of ‘emergence’, the view that entirely new beings emerge in biological history. de Quincey devotes much attention to refuting this rival theory. In my own opinion, however, emergentism fits somewhat better with contemporary thinking than panpsychism. This new thinking has moved decisively away from mechanism and reductionism, views which are certainly hostile to the idea of consciousness, and is moving towards a conception of reality as radically creative, as constantly producing new forms, right from its beginnings in the Big Bang up to the emergence of intelligent life. This idea is captured in the concept of ‘autopoiesis’, coined by Maturana and Verela who see self-generation as a key characteristic of life. It has also been espoused by the biologist Brian Goodwin who identifies creative emergence as the central characteristic of the evolutionary process, and by Stuart Kaufmann of the Santa Fe Institute with his speculations concerning new types of order that can emerge spontaneously in complex systems. According to de Quincey, however, emergentism is profoundly mistaken in that it involves the creation of something out of nothing which is “not only unscientific, it is logically absurd” (p.207). This is questionable. It seems to me there is nothing logically contradictory about this notion, and it is only ‘unscientific’ in terms which ignore recent theories in biology concerning the spontaneous emergence of new order, and developments in physics and cosmology where the spontaneous creation of elementary particles from nothing is almost commonplace, and the universe itself is seen as emerging from the quantum vacuum. Moreover the emergence of consciousness, though unpredictable, and not merely a reshuffling of existing material, is open to explanation in Darwinian terms, and hence not an entirely inexplicable miracle.

Arguably, the possession of consciousness has a survival advantage over its non-possession, and so, while its intrinsic nature cannot be explained in terms of its preceding conditions, its functional properties may well be. This consideration might be linked with recent developments in our understanding of consciousness in relation to the brain whereby consciousness is seen, not as some kind of freakish excrescence, but as an integral component of the whole cognitive process, linked intimately with the evolutionary emergence of increasingly complex living structures. There seems to me to be no pressing need to extend this model backwards into non-living matter where similarly complex structures are absent. Is a universe impregnated from top to bottom with some form of consciousness even conceivable? de Quincey vehemently rejects the ‘lazy’ objection that, according to panpsychism, everything from tables and telephones to atoms and bacteria would have thoughts and perceptions. He insists that panpsychism does not imply that every particle of matter, right from the Big Bang, has been endowed with an interior dimension of consciousness that resembles our own. Rather, all matter contains an elemental quality of feeling, a primitive form of consciousness of which our own is (probably) the most sophisticated development.

It is not clear to me, however, what possible role consciousness, even in a most primitive form, could play at a pre-biotic level. We certainly need consciousness to explain human, and some animal, behaviour, but I cannot see what it adds to a purely physico-chemical explanation of processes prior to the emergence of living beings. Is a world pervaded with consciousness more meaningful than one which views it as a latecomer? Is it one in which we can feel more at home? I can see the attraction of such a view which links us to the universe in a kind of family relationship. But personally, however, I feel no desire to link my own sense of meaning and spiritual purpose with some grand cosmic scheme, or with an infinite multitude of conscious beings. The vestigial conscious properties of matter do not seem to add anything to what I know or care about my own and human life in general. I do not need to feel that mountains, oceans and forests, or the very atoms they are made from, have a conscious dimension in order to experience and admire their sublime beauty, or to treat them with reverence; as far as I am concerned they are not ‘dead’, a term which de Quincey frequently uses to characterise the ‘merely’ material. Gaia does not have to be mindful for me to experience and treat it in mindful ways. In any case, much about human consciousness is not at all admirable or worthy of reverence, and its products at the human level are often worse than meaningless – they are positively evil.

It is anthropocentrism of the worst kind to assume that consciousness is somehow what is of supreme value about the world; as Kierkegaard suggested, it might even be viewed as a disease. So, while admiring de Quincey’s bold and sophisticated defence of panpsychism, in the end I still prefer emergentism; apart from any philosophical reasons, I simply feel more at home in that kind of universe. Like Walt Whitman, “I know nothing else but miracles”. For me, it’s miracles all the way down.

State University of New York Press, 2003.

ISBN: 978-0-7914-5808-2

Reviewed by Christine Avery

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‘All things are interconnected.’ I am always surprised that this highly abstract, therefore potentially dry statement can set off a tidal wave of joyful emotion in the depths of the psyche. For Freya Mathews it expresses a basic intuition, the essential starting point for a careful philosophical analysis which leads to Panpsychism, in a modern form of this ancient idea. She is clear that “One is likely to become a panpsychist only as a result of direct experience of a responsive world” and her ample and engaging examples of such experience include her own and other people’s. On an ordinary, daily car journey: “With all the objects around me finely and blackly etched against the orange light, the differences between trees and telegraph poles, birds and distant airplanes, no longer registered. I was filled with a sense of one of those semi–ineffables: that every instance of matter is not merely manifest and visible, but actually there, present to itself…there is an innerness to its reality as well as an outerness.”

From here we need to follow her through some subtle and often difficult philosophical argument which can only be appreciated by reading the book. The hard thinking is essential because “Reason is the grave guardian of our fullest humanity and we rebuke and disown it at our peril.” Equally unavoidable is the hypothetical, exploratory nature of her thinking which can at times thin down to a gauzy tenuousness. (I was interested to notice that her next book will be about the place of Reason.) With some temerity, I will attempt to sum up a few of the ideas which were most interesting to me, drawing on her earlier book The Ecological Self as well as the present one.

According to Newtonian ‘substance pluralism’ the universe consists of many different things which are logically independent of each other – the nature of each is within itself, without reference to any other thing. By contrast, for modern physics, the nature or identity of everything is implicated in the nature or identity of everything else, and this is ‘substance monism’. As now perceived, the universe is not just a bag of different things accidentally banging into each other, but a structured whole. This structure or pattern invents itself − varying, complexifying, serving its own ends and containing its own justification for being, unlike a machine which only serves ends outside of itself. Hence, as a whole, it has the qualities normally attributed to life and to mind. The universe is “a gigantic act of self- affirmation,” and it is “a psychophysical unity.” Freya Mathews uses the medieval term ‘conatus’ as a shorthand for this self-perpetuation and self-realization. It is the wholeness of the universe “within the eddies and currents of whose dynamics we and other finite creatures stake out our relative identities.” Individual beings are small reflections of the whole cosmos and ‘The conatus of the individual, by helping to shape the wider system, helps to sustain the conatus of that system…” Self-love is natural and right, and it leads to love of nature and love of the cosmos.

At this point those with a tragic view of existence will probably get off the bus, declaring that this landscape is far too sunny and that individual self-love does not lead straight to love of Everything. Personally, I stay on the bus, as a fundamental act of faith. All you need is wholeness – integration. (Please note irony which is all part of the ecstatic richness of things.)

As a side note, however, I would want to say that Freya Mathews’ ideas could easily be misinterpreted by people who are minimally self-aware and that history is full of examples of people with power catastrophically misinterpreting even the best ideas. Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ which, he claimed, shaped the common good out of individual greed is also inconveniently haunting me. Is it an answer to these problems to say that the ideas in For Love of Matter demand both depth of attention and a precision of expression which fight against misunderstanding? There is an affinity with the relatively better known ideas of Joseph Campbell and his maxim ‘Follow your joy’ where the expression (one hopes) contains its own safeguards. In Freya Matthew’s own highly qualified terms: ‘The self need only follow its appetitive promptings, adapted in the light of panpsychist awareness, to give its desire fullest expression, and incidentally to achieve maximal self-realization. In reaching out to the world…and seeking to participate as deeply as possible in it, the self will necessarily seek to connect not merely with the materiality of things but with their subjectivity.” (p. 60)

This is the rationale for the One and the Many. Freya Mathews compares two stories which offer contrasting explanations of this relationship. The first is the Fall myth in Genesis which registers the human person’s discovery that she/he is an individual centre of consciousness and as such is aware of, and terrifyingly vulnerable to, pain and destruction. According to the Genesis myth-maker, this discovery is a forbidden one and leads to retribution from an affronted, hierarchical God. In answer to this, the story of Jesus has potentially panpsychist meaning since the One suffers with and for the Many. But it is seen as falling short because it demands that ‘God’ is seen as logically distinct from ‘Creation’ and therefore the ‘guilt’ of separation remains unless the sinner is ‘redeemed’ by absorption into the perfect, transcendent Creator. This negates the plurality of the whole enterprise in which individuals become separate in order to meet and communicate: “The impact of collision, the fizz and crackle of contact, is what charges our being and renews our sense of being alive.” And this applies to the whole realm of living things, and beyond that to the ‘inanimate’: everything exists for relationship.

Instead of the Christian myth, Freya Matthews recommends the story of Eros and Psyche, which she argues has a much stronger philosophical and psychological truth. Her extensive analysis of this story is a sequence of revelations (despite occasional dips into the idiosyncratic and far-fetched). But this unfolding of meaning serves the affirmation that “The point is not to explain the world, but to sing it.” Story, poetry, song – and presumably all the arts, with their holistic modes of experience – bring us home to ourselves as part of the interconnected universe.

This is an exciting book. I felt that assent that comes when deep intuitions are affirmed and clarified, and a freeing up to participate (uniquely – as every being is unique) in the creative work going on at every point in the universe.

Nation Books, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-56858-683-0

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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When she was researching for her landmark book Diet for a Small Planet back in 1970, Frances Moore Lappé realized that it is we human beings ourselves who create the problems, such as scarcity, that we find so troubling. “While most of us think that ‘seeing is believing’… no, for human beings ‘believing is seeing.’ Our core ideas about how the world works determine, literally, what we can see and what we can’t.”

This new book is based around a list of problematical core ideas in our contemporary culture—ideas that stop us from dealing effectively with today’s environmental and social issues. These are ideas that are so firmly fixed in our minds and in our public discourse that they prevent us from seeing or seeking solutions that are right in front of our noses. She calls them ‘thought traps.’ She then takes these same ideas and reframes them in a way that an ‘eco-mind’—i.e. a mind that thinks in terms of connectedness and continuous change—might rethink them. In doing this, she creates what she calls ‘thought leaps’.

For me, the most impressive transformation from ‘thought trap’ to ‘thought leap’ was the one about growth. Like so many other ecologically aware people I too have preached the evils of a growth economy and the importance of replacing growth with sustainability. Lappé doesn’t believe in unbridled economic growth any more than I do. But she approaches the whole matter in a totally different way. As she points out, except when we are talking about cancer the word ‘growth’ has always had happy, green connotations. Children grow, gardens grow…

“I agree strongly that today’s economic ‘growth’ is not working,” she says, “ but to define what we’ve been doing as ‘growth’ risks blessing our current practices with a term that sounds positive to most ears. That’s a problem. Plus, ‘no-growth’ can look downright scary to the jobless, who understandably see economic growth as essential to putting bread on their tables.”  So by arguing against growth we are actually shooting ourselves in the foot. No wonder so many people are not listening to our dreary ‘no-growth’ arguments.

I have often used the word ‘sustainability’ as an antonym for growth. But I admit that it is really not a very sexy word. As this author says, “‘to sustain’ suggests ‘bearing up’ or ‘keeping on,’ and I want more. And I think most of us do too…’growth’ is a word I personally don’t want to give up. I want my tomatoes to grow, and my friendships.”

The point is that growth, in traditional economic terms, has always meant expansion. It is a quantitative measure. But we are drowning in stuff. And we are wasting stuff and destroying the planet with our waste products. Whether it is thrown-away food (at least a third of the world’s food is thrown away) or the 50% of all generated energy that is wasted as heat into the atmosphere, the scale of waste is absolutely staggering. Once we realize that what the economists have been describing as growth is actually not that at all but a highly inefficient economics of waste and destruction, we can move right out of the growth/no-growth debate and take the discourse to another level.

At this new level, growth becomes qualitative, not quantitative. It is re-defined as that which enhances and encourages ecological diversity, vitality, resiliency and so on. In these terms, to grow means to flourish. And that is the sort of growth we need. Like the growth and flourishing of renewable energy sources for instance. Or the growth in human connectedness that will enable local economies to flourish and communities to diversify and evolve into self-sufficiency.

Lappé enables her readers to re-frame each of the primary ‘thought-traps’ on her list, ending with the seventh one: the belief that ‘It’s Too Late.’ And I believe she is right. It is not too late to make the all-important change in our thinking and learn, as she describes it, to ‘think like an ecosystem.’

The amount of background information – facts, statistics, examples, anecdotes—that was collected for this book is really impressive and on a worldwide scale. One cannot help but think the author must have employed an army of researchers to amass this much material. And indeed she did, but not in the way you might assume. She turned to what has lately been termed ‘crowdsourcing’ and, as she explains in her Introduction, made the public—the readers of her books, the people who attended her talks and seminars etc—her ‘research team’. Thus the book became a massive work of collaboration: a truly co-operative venture, organized through the Small Planet Institute which she leads, along with her daughter Anna.

Written with her usual brisk thoroughness, her book sparkles with energy. Lappé is a positive thinker but she is no Pollyanna. She is all too aware of the perils facing our world at this time. But she is one of those people who, instead of sitting around and wringing their hands, roll up their sleeves and says “OK what needs doing?” It is an attitude that invigorates the reader and I challenge you to read Eco Mind and not feel much more inspired and empowered by the end of it than you were at the start.

Foreword by Dr. Ricardo Orozco, translated by Daniel Kai

Singing Dragon, 2011

ISBN: 978-1848190757

Reviewed by June Raymond

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This is a most welcome book as in my experience animals respond extraordinarily well to Flower Remedies and it will give confidence to many people who would like to use them on their pets.

The writer has an excellent understanding of the remedies and explains them well. He describes how each remedy can be useful for animals as well as for human beings. (In this context I found it interesting that Pine, for feelings of guilt, and Wild Oat, for the need to find direction, are the only two remedies that apparently have no useful application for animals).

In the book there are sections on common behavioural problems, two sections on case studies, one on ‘useful formulas’, additional notes on how to prepare and administer remedies for animals and a section suitable for animal shelters and another on neutering. Altogether it is a thorough and detailed study.

The author has clearly dealt with a great many traumatised animals in particular rescue animals; he shares some of his extensive experience and provides detailed case studies. While not every practitioner would necessarily come to exactly the same conclusions as he does most would feel confident using his recommendations. My only questions concern the preparation and dosage he uses. The traditional usage using the original formula would be to put no more than 4 drops of 5 or 6 remedies at the most into a prescription bottle and to give them give up to 4 times a day. Homedes puts as many as 7 essences into one remedy, keeping to the traditional 4 drops, but administering these 5 or 6 or even as many as 10 times a day.

He prefers to use what he calls the direct method of administration, namely putting drops directly into the animal’s mouth rather than putting them the water of a drinking bowl and using between 5 and 15 drops depending on the size of the bowl. In my own practice with animals, I put 2 to 4 drops in any bowl of water with completely satisfactory results. In my experience it makes no difference how much water you use since as the remedy is vibrational and not chemical.

Another area which I found interesting was in the use of creams. I have only used these on human patients and use methods closer to those described by Dietmar Kramer in his ‘New Bach Flower Body Maps’ and so I do not feel competent to comment on his work with animals although again I do not increase the number of drops according to the volume of cream.

The Bach Flower remedies are now made in various different ways and Nelsons who make the remedy with an official ‘Bach’ name now sell it in dosage strength rather than as the original concentrate. The remedies I use are made according to Dr Bach’s original method. It would be interesting to know which supplier Homedes uses, as he puts many more remedies in a prescription and expects them to be administered more times a day than would traditionally be normal. Also I would expect to see results sooner than those recorded in the book.

Despite these reservations I would have confidence in recommending this book.  I would make the proviso that a practitioner should use the quantities which work for them and not necessarily the ones in the book. I would add that in most cases animals respond excellently simply to rescue remedy. So for example I and several of my friends have found that dogs are completely cured of terror of fireworks or thunder storms with 4 drops of rescue remedy in their water. When the problem is deep seated, as it is in many of the case studies, we could need a more experienced voice and in this and other respects this book will be a valuable addition to the literature on Bach Flower remedies. 

Routledge, 2002

ISBN: 978-0415178785

Reviewed by Michael Colebrook

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The late Val Plumwood’s previous book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Routledge, 1993) is one of the foundational texts of eco-feminism. In Environmental Culture she has written a worthy successor.

It is not always an easy read but well worth the effort. She argues that in relation to the current environmental crises ‘it is clear that at the technological level we already have the means to accomplish the changes needed to live sustainably on and with the earth. So the problem is not primarily about more knowledge or technology: it is about developing an environmental culture that values and fully acknowledges the non-human sphere and our dependency on it.’

As in her previous book she locates the origins of the main obstacle to achieving this with the mind/body dualism inherent in Platonic idealism. Other dualisms derive from this primary one and inevitably lead to differential valuing of the components – mind over body, male over female, human over nature – leading in turn to the emergence of patterns of reasoning centred on the dominant element. Val Plumwood focuses particularly on the human/nature divide leading to an anthropocentric, human-centred culture. She claims that ‘As the human-centred culture of our modern form of rationalism grows steadily more remote and self-enclosed, it loses the capacity to imagine or detect its danger. But if this form of reason judges that nature is now inessential to its life, ecological catastrophe will deliver the verdict of a higher court, that reason has failed to recognise its ground in nature. Human-centred culture springs from an impoverished and inadequate conceptual and rational world; it is helping to create in its image a real world that is not only ecologically, biologically, and aesthetically damaged, but is also rationally damaged.’

Nearly three-quarters of the book is taken up with an extraordinarily wide ranging analysis of the problems of modern rationality in the fields of science, politics, economics, philosophy and ethics. In each field the problems of anthropocentrism and human self-enclosure, of narrow viewpoints and what she calls monological thinking are emphasised. The remainder of the book looks at ways of breaking out of the enclosed rationality of our anthropocentric culture. The two main chapter headings are enlightening. ‘Towards dialogical interspecies ethics’ and ‘Towards a materialist spirituality of place.’ Val Plumwood suggests that a key to a successful dialogue with Earth-others is to recognise their intentionality. ‘The intentional recognition stance allows us to re-animate nature both as agent in our joint undertakings and as potentially communicative other: we can join scientists like Humbolt in hearing basalt cones and pumice speak of their past to the well-versed observer who stops to listen.’

Singing Dragon, 2009

ISBN 978-1848190030

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain

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Many of the Westerners who take up Eastern  practices like Yoga and Tai Chi never really understand—or even take an interest in—the layers and layers of ancient, spiritual wisdom that underlie such practices.

Knowing this, many authors and teachers pay but scant attention to the theory and focus only on the physicality. In other words, both instructor and student concern themselves only with the tip of the iceberg.

Eternal Spring is very different and Michael Acton a very different sort of teacher. If only this book had been available years ago when I was struggling to master the form and just not getting the point. After reading the first few chapters, I stood in the middle of my living-room for five minutes with Acton’s words to guide me and suddenly, as I began actually to feel the subtle currents of energy move within me, I began, at long last, to understand what Qi Gong is really all about.

New World Library, 2004

ISBN:978-1577314943

Reviewed by June Raymond
(This review pertains to the 2001 edition with the subtitle The Mystery of Consciousness and the Meaning of Light)

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Many people are familiar with Peter Russell’s earlier book The Global Brain. I read this together with Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point in the eighties when I first came across Green and ‘New Age’ ideas. They both made a profound impression on me and so it was a wonderful surprise to discover Peter Russell’s most recent book about his theory of consciousness. I found it unputdownable and read it in a single sitting.

I am not a scientist and perhaps my response would be very different if I were. But I loved the fact that Russell explains everything with immense clarity and uses no equations, no algebra, no impossible mathematics! As for his theory, well you can take it or leave it, but I for one was convinced.

The book is written as a journey of discovery and Russell writes in the context of his own search to find a theory of consciousness. Apparently this is one of the major unsolved conundrums of psychology and even of quantum physics. It is possible to explain most human activities in terms of conventional science but how and why we should be conscious has still no satisfactory explanation.

Here Russell explores the subject of paradigm shifts and explains how as science develops in every age, there will emerge facts that simply don’t fit in with the current theories. At first they are dismissed as anomalies that will be accommodated as measurement and knowledge become more exact. However as knowledge increases their occurrence becomes more frequent and more difficult to explain rather than less. Then along come men of vision or genius, Copernicus, Galileo, and change the whole context of scientific research. The world is not the centre of the universe but itself goes round the sun, they declare, and in so doing change what Russell calls a metaparadigm. This, it goes without saying, is extremely unpopular and Galileo barely escaped with his life. So reluctant is the world to accept a shift in the paradigm of current scientific research that it may be centuries before it becomes general currency.

What Russell proposes is nothing less than a new metaparadigm shift to explain the problem of consciousness. He says consciousness is not an effect of wonderful and complicated nervous systems but actually the context within which they and all existence occur. He sees this as one with the phenomenon of light, which cannot be seen except by its effects. In a vacuum there would apparently be no light but when there is an object in the way light enables us to see. Light has another curious quality. No matter how fast you travel the speed of light is constant. Everything else is relative. So time and space are all relative and light, meaning the whole spectrum of light not just the tiny range of electro-magnetic vibrations that make up the visible colour spectrum, is the constant, outside time and space. This timeless dimension, Russell maintains, is consciousness itself.

The fact that we as human beings are uniquely aware of being conscious is because our neurological system is so evolved. But of itself our mind is only the mediator of our eternal, timeless, conscious intelligence. In short, the impression that your consciousness exists at a particular place in the world is an illusion. Everything we experience is a construct within consciousness. Our sense of being a unique self is merely another construct of the mind. Quite naturally we place our self-image at the centre of our picture of the world giving us the sense of being in the world. The truth is just the opposite. It is all within us. You have no location in space. Space is in you. So our consciousness is one with timeless consciousness behind and within all creation. It is itself uncreated and not subject to the separation and constant change within the time-space dimension of human existence.

Penguin, 2000

ISBN: 978-0140280555

Reviewed by Michal Colebrook
(This review, abridged from the original, was for the hardback edition, 1999)

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This is a very readable presentation of the life and tribulations of Galileo Galilei enlivened and enlightened by extensive extracts of letters, translated for the first time, written to him by his daughter. Born in Padua in 1601 and baptised Virginia, daughter of Madonna Marina Gamba and ‘of an unknown father’ [Galileo], she entered a convent of the Poor Claire’s at the age of 13 and took the name Maria Celeste.

We see, through her eyes, not simply Galileo the scientist, philosopher and martyr but also Galileo concerned about his son, his wine casks, his weak health, and his financial and other day to day affairs. We learn about the affairs of the convent and about the steady stream of medicines prepared by Maria Celeste—who was the apothecary to the convent—which she supplied to her much loved father.

The back drop of the letters adds a new and beautiful dimension to the story. In the history of Christianity, the book of Nature has been widely recognised, alongside the book of scripture, as a source of truth and enlightenment. The story of Galileo was not the first occasion of conflict between the two (Maria Celeste was born in the year that Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in Rome), nor was it the last; the conflict continues today.

The trial of Galileo is often viewed as the beginning of the split between science and religion, but Galileo’s main supporters as well as his opponents were within the church. It was very much an internal wrangle and Galileo himself never wavered in his faith in the basic doctrines of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the trial of Galileo has achieved the status of a pivotal event and about half of Dava Sobel’s account is about the writing and publication of Galileo’s controversial book, Dialogue, concerning the two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican.

Dava Sobel has written a beautiful book. The interplay of Galileo’s story with the letters from his daughter brings the period and the events to life in a way that I found fascinating. I couldn’t put it down.

Penguin, 2007

 ISBN 978-0-14-102662-6

Reviewed by Ian Mowll

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Out of the handful of books I have read about climate change, this is the best! George Monbiot researches the subject in depth, he cuts through preconceptions and gets to the root of the problem. A breath of oxygen rich fresh air. He shows how we can reduce carbon emissions by 90% by 2030 – this is the level he suggests we need to reach to avoid runaway global warming and the collapse of large eco-systems.

Monbiot acknowledges that the whole area is very complicated and that new discoveries are being made all of the time; on weather prediction, new technology and ways of addressing the problem. So we need to keep listening to the scientists and not, as he points out, the popular press which often provides distorted reports. And one of the most telling sentences in the book is this: “one of the discoveries I have made in writing this book is that my instincts are almost always wrong.”  Therefore, climate change is an area where we need a careful understanding of the issues and responses.

Real, practical solutions are put forward such as coaches (no cars) running up and down the motorways – which would reduce carbon emissions by a surprising amount. Other examples include carbon rationing and encouraging internet shopping.

One of the key conclusions I came away with is that changes need to be made on the macro level. We need to do our bit and to reduce our own emissions where possible. But to tackle the problem at its roots, we need society-wide solutions such as big wind farms (hopefully offshore), carbon rationing and legislation. This highlights for me, the need to continue to be involved in campaigns – to raise awareness and lobby where possible.

The big challenge comes from the time-lag of applying solutions to seeing the outcomes. If solutions applied today which are very restrictive on our way of life, will affect the planet in 10 years time or more, this is not an easy vote winner at a general election where people perceive other more immediate issues such as the economy, crime, schools and hospitals as more important. There is no easy answer to this dilemma, other than continuing to raise awareness and showing that action now will be far more effective than waiting till later. But the good news is that we have the technology and the means to radically reduce our carbon emissions. The challenge is purely one of politics and public will.

This book is a great read for those who want to be more informed about climate change and to know what we can do about it. Five stars, definitely.