Now I See …

2012-0519

The Secret History of the World as Laid Down by the Secret Societies

4 Comments[Author: karens Category: History, Reviews ]

By Mark Booth

2008 Peter Mayer Publishers, Overlook Press, Woodstock, NY. The Kindle edition Click to Buy this Book!

Synthesizing all the esoteric thinking since the dawn of time is not a task most of us would undertake. Even if we could. Decoding the mysticism lurking in literature, art, music, religion, alchemy, history and philosophy in order to present a coherent and readable overview of what we humans have been confronting for eons … who, in their right mind would even attempt that?

Mark Booth, as it turns out.

He’s a publisher-author-avid reader. This is a compilation of at least twenty years of reading the books listed in the extensive bibliography (reason enough to buy this book) as well as actually commissioning and publishing many of them. Booth’s knowledge makes The Secret History of the World extremely fascinating and enlightening reading.

After centuries of mystery schools and initiations, Booth summarizes at the end, we now know it’s really quite simple. Imagination is the key to realizing our soul-force. Materialistic science, on the other hand, would say imagination is just illusion and fantasy.

Plato once said, “It all starts with wonder.” Wonder, Booth claims, is transformed feeling that is aware of the spiritual workings of the cosmos. We’re intimately engaged in a four-fold process involving our vegetable, mineral, animal and human bodies which eventually become angelic. We all sprout wings! And when we change our human physiology we become seeds of transformation for the entire universe, for we are, indeed, intimately connected to all that is.

The Apostle Paul had the right idea in I Corinthians. It all comes down to faith, hope and love — the greatest of these being love. What we’ve learned — at least up to now — is that if some of us are unhappy, we’re all going to be unhappy. And if we’re not careful, evil will harden us into only our animal passions.

Change throughout history, Booth notes, comes, not from generals and politicians, but through artists and thinkers. Through writers and musicians and oral traditions. And through all those people, known and unknown, who have kept the traditions alive. More »

Tags: book review, Goethe, history, Mark Booth, Plato, Secret, Secret Societies, World

2012-0509

Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot

1 Comment[Author: mkeltz Category: Paranormal, Reviews ]

By Bruce and Andrea Leininger, with Ken Gross.

Grand Central Publishing, New York, 2009 Click to Buy this book!

During the Second World War, unprecedented, incomprehensible numbers of victims died tragically and violently, with untold deaths occurring among children and youth. In the 2000 book Crimes Against Humanity, the British barrister and author Geoffrey Robinson gave the estimated number of deaths in the twentieth century as 160 million, the result of wrong or outdated forms of government and the subsequent wars, famines, imprisonments, diseases, genocides, and slayings. In light of the spiritual teachings regarding the laws of karma and reincarnation that were included in the evolutionary advance of Christianity at the beginning of the twentieth century, through countless individuals and avenues, and most notably within Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science, great numbers of souls who died between 1933 and 1945 might be expected to quickly re-appear in our time, many expressing unusual abilities and talents in the first seven years of life, the years of the rapid development of the physical body. Unusual children who seem to have healing capacities have become evident to the public due to the mediums of television, the internet, book and magazine publishing, etc. Even in this regard, the story of James Leininger is outstanding. Were it not for advances in computer science and the rapid expansion of the internet, this story probably could not have been written and published as early as 2009, for James’s parents, Bruce and Andrea Leininger, utilized twenty-first century resources to locate and contact individuals and organizations who were eventually able to confirm as fact the past-life memories of their son. Soul Survivor is not only about their son, it is also the story of their long, difficult sojourn toward higher truths, particularly Bruce Leininger’s gradual acceptance of belief in reincarnation, while still mingled with some skepticism, as compatible with his Evangelical Christian beliefs.

Soul Survivor was written and published as a commercial enterprise with the assistance of Ken Gross, a professional novelist and nonfiction writer from Brooklyn, New York. The decision to take James’s story along a commercial path, including appearances on television talk-shows, has made this important case for the reality of reincarnation well-known. This path also seems to have involved factors of destiny, as Bruce Leininger had worked both as a human resources executive for various corporations and as a consultant, and Andrea had been a professional ballet dancer. At first, prior to the taping for an ABC Primetime presentation in 2003, the couple wanted no reference to the family name or to the town where they lived. However, they were persuaded to change their minds, and as Ken Gross writes: “That is how it works in television, the salesmanship is sophisticated and builds on small steps of trust.” Unfortunately, most contemporary American nonfiction writing of this nature tends to be highly personal, almost to the point of being offensive. (Bruce wrote on a 2009 blog, “… this book has moved our lives into a fishbowl.”) But overall Soul Survivor is very well-written, holds the reader’s attention, and may become a classic in the literature of reincarnation, especially if the enormous number of reviews, articles and blogs online about it are any indication, from Buddhists, Edgar Cayce devotees, down-home folks, and, unfortunately, careless writers (one had a very important fact wrong — for the record, James Huston was killed while flying a Wildcat, not a Corsair), as well as the epitome of bad taste: a person claiming to know the past lives of Bruce, Andrea and James — Scottish royalty — “according to the akashic records.” More »

Tags: book review, Fighter Pilot, Leininger, Reincarnation, Soul Survivor, World War II

2012-0429

Adam, Eve, and the Serpent

2 Comments[Author: ftsmith Category: Religion, Reviews ]

By Elaine Pagels

Published by Vintage Books ed edition (September 19, 1989) Click to Buy this Book!

In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels described the finding of the Gnostic Gospels in a cave in Upper Egypt in December, 1945, and how these documents shed an entirely new light on early Christianity. She also told how the Gnostics, though far from united in their beliefs, practiced and preached a far more esoteric Christianity than that of the Church; and how the Church suppressed and destroyed the Gnostic writings. The documents found in Egypt had obviously been hidden there to preserve them from destruction.

In her later book (1989), reviewed here, Pagels takes up the story again, this time investigating how the traditional patterns of gender and sexual relationship arose in our society. In the process she saw that the sexual attitudes we associate with Christian tradition evolved during the first four centuries of the Common Era, when the Christian movement, which had begun as a defiant sect, transformed itself into the religion of the Roman Empire. Many Christians of the first four centuries took pride in their sexual restraint, eschewed polygamy and divorce, which Jewish tradition allowed — and they repudiated extramarital sexual practices commonly accepted by their pagan contemporaries, practices that included prostitution, abuse of slaves and homosexuality. Such views, although not completely original, soon became inseparable from Christian faith. Some even went so as to embrace celibacy, which they urged upon those capable of the “angelic life.” More »

Tags: Adam, book review, elaine pagels, Eve, religion, Serpent

2012-0419

In Search of Planet Vulcan: The Ghost in Newton’s Clockwork Universe

Comments Off[Author: mkeltz Category: Reviews, Science ]

In Search of the Planet Vulcan: The Ghost in Newton’s Clockwork Universe

By Richard Baum and William Sheehan.

Plenum Publishing Corporation, New York, 1997 Click to Buy this Book!

On the back flap of the jacket cover, the publisher summarizes this book as one that “will hold you spellbound from beginning to end. An irresistible tale of human eccentricity … destined to become a classic.” Authors Richard Baum, former Vice President of the British Astronomical Association, and Dr. William Sheehan, an amateur astronomer and a psychiatrist by profession, present a highly readable history of astronomy regarding the search for additional planets in the solar system, a search that intensified after William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781. Attempts to explain observations of Uranus’ “wayward movements” led, through applications of Newton’s laws or “celestial mechanics,” to the sensational discovery of a second new outer planet, later named Neptune. Neptune was discovered in 1846 by the great French mathematician and astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier (1811–1877), not from observations, but from calculations alone. The new planet was then observed in the exact position of Le Verrier’s calculations by Johann Gottfried Galle and his assistant on September 23, 1846.

The title of the book, the cover art, the photograph of the statue of U.J.J. Le Verrier across from the title page, the emphasis on the name Vulcan, and the publisher’s comments, above, are all somewhat slanted towards the entertainment value of the book (Richard Baum was involved in the Vulcan episode of the television documentary series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World). The authors, however, do offer clear, informative history, helpful clarifications of astronomical theory and calculus, interesting biographies, and many humorous touches, all leading up to and including the quest for an intra-mercurial planet to explain the “anomalous advance of the perihelion of Mercury.” Searches for trans-Neptunian planets (e.g., the discovery of Pluto) are also described, from the time of Herschel up until the late 20^th century. From the Epilogue: “Compared to the substantial gas giants sunwards of it, Pluto is a mere planetary soufflé, a creampuff planet … although it might be argued that Pluto does have a small moon — Charon, discovered only in 1978 — and an atmosphere.” More »

Tags: book review, Clockwork, Ghost, Newton, Planet, Richard Baum, science, Search, universe, Vulcan, William Sheehan

2012-0409

The Gnostic Gospels

8 Comments[Author: ftsmith Category: Religion, Reviews ]

by Elaine Pagels

Published by Vintage; 1st Vintage Books Edition, Sept. 1989 edition (September 19, 1989) Click to Buy this book!

In December 1945 an Arab peasant was digging around a massive boulder in Nag Hammadi, Upper Egypt looking for sabakh, a soil for fertilizing crops, when he found an large earthen jar almost a meter high. He hesitated to break it for fear an evil spirit might be inside, but the thought that it could contain gold overcame his fear and he smashed it. Inside were 13 papyrus books bound in leather. Disappointed, he brought them home and dumped them on the floor. His mother subsequently used much of t he material for fuel.

How the books came to be recognized is an interesting story in itself, how a local history teacher suspected their value and sent them on to a friend, how they were sold on the black market through antique dealers in Cairo, then confiscated by the Egyptian government, except for one codice, which was smuggled to the United States. Finally, thirty years after their discovery, they were deciphered and eventually published.

Mohammed Alí could not have imagined the enormous implications of his accidental find. If they had been found 1,000 years earlier, the Gnostic texts within would surely have been burned for their heresy. Bishop Irenæus of Lyon c. 180, wrote five volumes entitled, The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge. By the time of the Emperor Constantine’s conversion in the fourth century, possession of books denounced as heretical became a criminal offense. Copies of Gnostic books were confiscated and burned. But someone in Upper Egypt, possibly a monk from the nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years. Today we read them differently — as a powerful alternative to orthodox, organized Christianity. More »

Tags: christianity, coptic, elaine pagels, gnostic, god, gospels, jesus, monotheism, nag hammadi, religion, resurrection, virginal