The Path

This book by Christine Gross-Loh and Michaell Puett is an unacademic, but unflinching in its acerbic accuracy of phrasal gutpunching to the Western mind; short introduction to the range and content of (an initially-seeming-somewhat-disingenuous but explored with real nuance) ancient Chinese philosophies.

   As readers of this blog will know, while my life is still in Christ Jesus the Tao has helped me walk with God through His crazy-at-times world - and there is a notable lack of talk of God, especially in the kind of personal terms monotheists often attribute to They Who Transcend All Thought - which is to say, this can be safely read by any agnostic on any fence and it will probably help you out in some form or other. We're walked through the as-if ritualization practices of Confucian living; the staunch disciplines and Chuang Zhi and the raw spontaneous whimsy of Lao Tzu clashing in midair as arguments around the Tao fail eternally to Pin it Down; Mencius helps us simplify anxiety-causing choices we have to make in the modern world; while Xunzi keeps the pattern of ethical humanity very much at the core of everyday living. There is a lot in here that a lot of people would find extremely salubrious to their mental health if they drank it in and tried to get it, not by striving to fully understand; but by submitting in ignorance to the mysterious nature of Nature and Humanity itself as we shamble about beneath the Heavens - and obeying. It is not idolatry to comply with ancient wisdoms about how our own bodies and minds work. And if it is, then that might be a jealously too far for whatever that god is - because the God I believe in made Everything for a Reason, and the Tao wouldn't be floating about in the real-spacetime arcane umbra without some kind of purpose.

   The book's subtitle; a new way to think about everything - one could, being generously cynical, argue is the case for pretty much any book assuming it has contents that would seriously affect the contents of the heads of its readers. For me it has not fundamentally altered my worldview - only helped flesh out the carpet a bit better, and vaguely try to grab snatched memories of whatever the wallpaper in Purgatory looked like.

A Wizard of Earthsea

This book is a fantasy novel by the inimitable Ursula K. Le Guin; about a goatherd called Ged who discovers he has the gift of interacting with reality magically, and goes off to train to be a wizard. He then spends the rest of the book on a range of island-hopping adventures, eventually chasing his own shadow to the very edge of the known world, and I won't tell you what happens there or why this post is so lacking in its usual ruminant quality because I loved this book and am going to read its sequels very soon. Worth mentioning also that Harry Potter can shove his wand up Ollivander's cavities because this is, by far - the best realized quasi-soft actually-hard Magic System I think I've ever encountered in fiction.

the Corpus Hermeticum

This book, for which I'm not going to provide a link because the whole point of alchemy is to send unexpecting overcurious readers down their own rabbit-holes and where would the fun of that be if I just gave you it that easily?* is probably the foundational text, or at least one of the key foundational texts, for the Western Hermetic tradition by which a true alchemical practice is derived. It takes the shape of a conversation between Hermes and Thoth, on a range of matters - but dealing in considerable depth the natures of Cosmos, Mind, Being, God and Goodness; the language is potently symbolic but not such that it, I don't think anyway, obscures the underlying metaphysical things it is trying to talk about - though the very nature of alchemy means that what I have derived from the text might not necessarily be what any other reader might clearly be able to infer from the words alone; as such, I would not recommend this text with much gusto - despite feeling personally that it has an abundance of Truth contained therein - because for that truth to shine through in a proper way to the Imaginations of its readers they must have been prepared through the cosmic trip of their own life-inner-journeys - but if you have, as I was, been led to the discovery of this text through your own questings, then read it with generous discernment - as I sense this far down the rabbit-hole things do start getting strange, and those who read out of an intellectual voracity and a desire to Fully Comprehend risk dragging their minds and souls into the truly abstract and/or occult which are less than life-giving; but if you have been led here out of a humble expectancy, spiritual curiousity and openness - it may very likely have much of merit to say, but let me say here - nothing which has not been said elsewhere, in many forms and occasions, as the true & proper ground of any alchemical "fact" can only be known exactly as and where it is - which may well be just about everywhere, and if you do not already see that then reading a text like this might not necessarily help you do so, instead just furnishing the strangeness of your mind-soul's quest-loot with an additional bunglage to its burden, which will only be shed when you properly grasp what it's about. God is not gnosis. Nor is gnosis necessary for salvation: only Christ - but the Gnosis spoken about in this text, that is the gnosis of, and in, for and through such things as the mind-soul's Life in Jesus-God; is a real thing impossible to lose when it is found, for it is the truest surest ground of a mind-soul that can be known, felt or said to exist - all of which is to say, be honest in your self-examinations, and quest carefully.

* That said, you do have my assurance that PDFs of it are available online, or it in book form. I read the translation by G.R.S. Mead, if you're interested.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

This book by Dave Eggers truly lives up to its title: that's all that needs saying of it in a post like this.

witness

This book is the second poetry collection by Jonathan Kinsman [this being the first], who's a personal inspiration to me and an all-round fantastic bean. The fourteen* poems herein exploratively reimagine the personalities of Jesus of Nazareth[who!?]'s disciples, with all of their quirks, flaws and background-complications - as 21st-century persons.
   I'd read or at least heard many of them before but upon receiving my copy of the book in the post I took the opportunity to read it all out again, aloud, in the park, as it was a nice day, though on reflection I'll think twice about doing something like that again as I had to interact with a gaggle of strangers who were looking for a lost football in a bush while I was fully teared-up from the sheer emotive power of some of the poems in this volume. This is a righteous angry book, of radical love and hope, of seeing depths of injustice and hypocrisy latent in the world and knowing that if Christ came again today we would crucify him again; and his followers, for all their pain and self-tormented inner conflict, would probably let the authorities do so. I think most "orthodox" Christian readers would find elements of these poems grating, because they are challenging - they ask the hard questions, remind us of the fundamentals of Jesus's mission, redraw familiar boundaries into stories that feel so strangely familiar and eerily echoant of contemporary reality - I'm rambling.
   This book is excellent and I'd recommend it to all discerning poetry-lovers with the knowing caveats that if you're a Christian it will make you think some uncomfortable things but lead you deeper into Christ - and if you're not - well, it could be an even more dangerous book.

* The twelve originals, plus Mary Magdelene, and Matthias - who in Acts is chosen by lot to replace Judas.

the Improbable Interplanetary Revolutions of Naomi Moss

This book is one I have written myself - though it has not yet found publication. As such, I hope you don't mind there not being a link to where you can get a copy of it yet - nor will I talk much about what I think about it, as it's kind of the point of a piece of art to speak of itself for itself. Watch this space.