I have just finished reading two books – I tend to read books in tandem, depending on my mood – it’s my mutable side!
The first is “A Secret History of the World” by Jonathan Black. This is a brick sized tome that is dense and irritatingly written. The author has his reader up and down rabbit holes and round and round labyrinths of confusion. However, if you hang in there, you will find some extraordinary ideas that have been taught throughout history to members of the various Secret Societies of the Western Tradition as the true face of reality.
Many of the ideas are not new – we live in a culture where we can easily find out about Theosophy, the secrets of the Greeks and Romans, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, for example – all we have to do is Google for the information. However, the beauty of this book is that Black takes us beyond the flat information we are usually fed that certain societies believed this or that nonsense – or alchemy was simply the forerunner of modern chemistry. He takes us into the mystery itself – and offers us a view of the world largely hidden from us by our materialist world view.
And, for Law of Attraction students, look no further than this book to gain a real understanding of how it all functions. That and a whole lot more!
The second book is “Eat, Pray, Love” by Elizabeth Gilbert. This is a delightful story of a young woman’s search for meaning in a New York kind of way. Her marriage ends, she suffers a New York Divorce, then follows a childhood dream and goes off to Rome to learn Italian and eat Italian food.
After she’s done that part, she’s off to Pray at her Guru’s Ashram in India – where she works hard and meditates a lot. She does have some genuine spiritual insights and it is this part that lifts the book out of the usual chick lit bracket into something else. It was my favourite part of the book, to be honest. Gilbert writes well and accessibly about the Ashram tradition and what it can mean for Westerners – and what it means for her in particular.
Then, she’s off to Love – in Bali, where she meets and explores the ways of the traditional healing culture there and happens, quite by ‘accident’, upon a lover.
Sounds like a romantic novel? Well, it is in a way, except it’s autobiographical – and it’s more than that – it has wisdom, sadness and a huge dollop of heart. An easy read. Highly recommended.
You can buy these two books from Amazon by pressing on the pictures.
