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—DH
Book
One man’s memoir of blindness and light; a simple but moving account of the power of consciousness. Lusseyran went blind at the age of eight, but quickly developed an inner sight, which served him for the rest of his life. This memoir covers his experiences as a young man, through his role as a leader in the French resistance, and finally his capture and internment in Buchenwald. —DH
Music
This movement, with its restrained use of harp and strings, speaks of grief and grieving, and of acceptance, while its pathos, repose and genuine sadness transports us to another realm. It is a long goodbye—to those we have loved, to the world itself—and a meditation on the fragile, precious, fleeting nature of life. —MB
Book
Where There Is No Doctor has been translated into more than eighty languages, and has been followed by Helping Health Workers Learn, A Book for Midwives, Disabled Village Children, and most recently, Where Women Have No Doctor. These books are written for peasants, and in addition to modern medical treatments talk about home remedies, first aid, nutrition, village hygiene, and family planning. In my opinion the Hesperian Foundation has done more for the world's health than any other single group. The Hesperian Foundation, PO Box 11577, Berkeley, CA 94712-2577 —DH
Multimedia CD-ROM
This CD is based on research by the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. It looks specifically at the last thirty years in America, and covers fifteen traditions such as the Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, Sikh, and Taoist. Diana Eck, the founder of the project, came to Harvard as a student of the culture and religions of India. She notes that in the 1990s we are seeing an “emergence in America of a new cultural and religious reality,” due in large part to the influx of Asians following the 1965 Immigration Act. —DH
Book
In this book, Wallace elegantly sets forth a non-dual perspective, which is neither materialism nor idealism, as an alternative to current attempts to integrate mind and matter. Presenting a clear understanding of the limitations of present-day science, Wallace develops the beginnings of what Sri Aurobindo might have called a gnostic science, a way of knowing which honors the contemplative vision of the world without rejecting the gains of modern science. While not academic in the sense of having a dry scholarly style, this is a book which requires deep and sustained reflection. I was fortunate to take part in a workshop given by Alan Wallace in the fall of 1996 on contemplative science. He has a childlike enthusiasm, and it is wonderful to see the joy he conveys both in person and in writing regarding the synthesis of science and spirituality . —Don Salmon
Film
Contact. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey, and Tom Skerritt. Warner Brothers, 1997. Contact begins with a visual flight away from the earth, into the far reaches of space, where the universe collapses into blackness…whereupon this void condenses itself into the pupil of a young girl's eye. She is seated at a shortwave radio, searching for someone to talk to. She is the consciousness of the universe seeking to meet itself. Solitary vastness and solitary consciousness. This searching is the heart of the movie, and a central movement of spiritual practice. Contact may well be the forerunner of a new generation of science fiction film, one as far from the current crop of laser-blasting space operas as it is from the fifties' bug-eyed latex aliens. Instead of special effects, Contact relies upon a sense of awe, a grounding in current science, and intelligent, mature characters. The movie, and Carl Sagan's 1986 novel of the same name, is based on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, otherwise known as SETI. A project with this name was funded for some years until the early 1990's at a radio telescope facility in New Mexico called the Argus Array, and perhaps the most dramatic event in the movie occurs when Jodie Foster, playing Ellie Arroway, a single-minded astronomer intent on the search, first gets an indication that there may be a message from another civilization. She skids along dusty roads in her convertible, punching commands into a laptop computer, as gargantuan telescope dishes wheel slowly above her in response. Here we feel more than in any other scene the relationship between human life and technology. The philosophical dialogue moves back and forth between Arroway and Palmer Joss, a young theologian who declares at one point "I'm not against technology, I'm against the men who deify it at the expense of human truth." Joss is the voice of all those who do not believe that science holds answers to ultimate questions, but who are not willing to condemn it either. He stands in stark contrast to the irrationality of wild-eyed religious fundamentalists. Science and religion both loomed large in Sagan's mind, as seen by the fierce arguments he raised in another recent book, The Demon-Haunted World. One of the strange paradoxes of our time, he points out, is that science—which permeates daily life, which has given us wonders to strain the imagination, and which raises fundamental questions of human nature—is practically unknown. We live in a mythological world populated not by unicorns and river sprites but by microwaves, distributed computing, and recombinant DNA. The average American, who can talk for an hour about prayer in school, would be hard pressed to explain the basic principles underlying a telephone. Three centuries after Newton, knowledge of the natural world seems to be shrinking, not growing, in the public mind. The reasons for this are complex, but one sure factor is our desire for instant results, and our unwillingness to commit to substantial goals. Knowledge, whether mental or spiritual, is a skill which takes hard work, experiment, and experience. It depends upon lengthy preparation; one doesn't exhaust the intricacies of quantum mechanics or Integral Yoga in an week, or even a year. Dedication and perseverance are required. Jodie Foster is the soul of Contact, and her integrity permeates the film; role and person become one. The force of a person's consciousness manifests itself in all that she does and says, for actresses as well as yogis, and watching such a person becomes a meditation on excellence. Ellie Arroway spends years watching and listening to the stars, in an attempt to find what she has lost, the touch of soul to soul. Radio astronomy may seem an unlikely route to achieve unity with the cosmos, but who is to say what ultimate purpose our actions serve? Adult careers may begin with shadowy childhood events, or unfathomable psychic forces. Does this imply a contradiction of the objectivity of science? Not really. Science, along with every other human activity, is a conjunction of the personal and the universal, and the particulars of an individual life play themselves out in harmony with eternal forces. Similarly, for those of us who pursue a spiritual path, the accidents of our beginning and the specifics of our practice do not encompass the whole that is the path. Neither do these outward details explain our revelations. Spiritual realization is not caused by indigestion, any more than Einstein's relativity is explained by the nursery rhymes he listened to as a boy. In our time technology is rushing ahead at breakneck speed. The dreams of mid-century—lasers, space travel, talking machines—are old hat, and even those of a few years ago—holographic memory, cloning—are fast becoming realities. The pace of change in digital computers has far outstripped anything that the average human can keep up with, even as that very technology regales us with sparkling visions of the future-present. And if such wonders seemingly await us only a few years down the road, when CPU's run at a speed of gigahertz and information storage is measured in petabytes, then what would happen if we were to meet beings from a civilization a thousand or a million years more technically advanced? Would they not have found the answers to every question, solved every problem of behavior, politics, disease? To put it differently, what would happen if a being were to step out of the Supramental world tomorrow, its every cell in complete integration with the universal, having solved every problem of integration of body, mind and spirit? Is not even the possibility worth dedicating one's life to the pursuit? Doesn't every other purpose pale with insignificance compared to the attempt to bring about a new world? The climax of Contact is an astronomical vision on a scale of the million eyes and mouths of Vishnu, and Jodie Foster aptly shows the heart-stopping awe, the open-eyed wonder at being granted such a vision. "No words...they should have sent a poet," she whispers. Unfortunately the difference between fantasies and visions, for the untutored awareness, may be slight. When virtual scenes can be produced by any teenager with a fifty-dollar multimedia program, discrimination becomes all the more important, especially if we are striving for an spiritual synthesis that includes science. Contact leaves us with a surprising ambivalence. In answer to a child's
question if there are aliens, we are told "The most important thing is
that you all keep on searching for your own answers." These answers must
be worked out in each of us, made real to our perceptions, fleshed out
in our force of consciousness; we can't accept a glib response, much less
pick them up with the latest CD or download them from the Internet. Olaf
Stapledon in his novel Starmaker imagines a half-spiritual, half-scientific
journey in which a man merges consciousness with larger and larger wholes,
until, after passing through entire civilizations, he reaches the level
of the entire cosmos. We need to widen our horizons to the entire human
race, and beyond. "All it requires," says Ellie, "is a sense of adventure."
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does grief—gut-wrenching, sobbing, maddening grief—affect the human spirit?
And how might a spirit respond? In this touching film, Stevenson plays
a woman who can't get her recently deceased husband out of her mind or
emotions, and Rickman is the husband who returns from death in answer to
her profound need. There are no special effects, just an introspective
look at love and grief, life and death.