I occasionally receive books on spiritual topics in the mail, with nice cover letters from publishers or marketing people, because I apparently was added to some mysterious mailing list, perhaps of “bloggers who write about spiritual topics.” I (rarely) review books or films on this blog, as I don’t have much time to read them, being engaged in an intensely focused study and practice of biodynamics (a bridge between meditation and healing, as I’ve come to think of it).

I asked members of my long-time spiritual book group if they wanted to read and review some books I’d received, and Harry Lundell chose this book.

Here is Harry’s review:

Rupert Spira’s newest book, The Nature of Consciousness: Essays on the Unity of Mind and Matter, represents an expansion and a summarization of his earlier efforts in spreading the philosophy of non-dualism (consciousness-only) to the Western world.  This little volume is a must-read for anyone interested in spiritual growth and the expansion of consciousness sought by increasing numbers of people everywhere. As a practicing psychotherapist  for over twenty-five years and a rehabilitation counselor for fourteen years before that, this reviewer had only a passing familiarity with Mr. Spira’s work when asked to provide a review of his newest work — an oversight that has since been happily addressed.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the text from this reviewer’s perspective is how it has had a definite and beneficial effect upon the lives of my patients. Combining the reading of this text with therapeutic protocols has gone a long way toward releasing selected patients from fear and anxiety, the inevitable downstream effects of what Mr. Spira calls the “soft materialism” of reductionism that has permeated the practice of psychotherapy — the belief that our noblest emotions and spiritual aspirations are just the epiphenomenal “side-effects” of molecules bumping into one another in our brains.

Spira points out that we, as a world culture, have completely bought into the belief that the only thing we have ever experienced — the awareness of our experience — is derived from the only thing we have never experienced — the existence of matter independent of our awareness of it! Spira believes that Western science in particular has gotten it completely backwards with the belief that mind is derived from matter.  Apparently Albert Einstein agreed with the author’s perspective when he said that “all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.” The author goes on to demonstrate, given the prevailing mindset, that it is small wonder the West is experiencing a tsunami of mental illness.

Mr. Spira’s new book goes on to articulate how this fundamental error of thought and belief has negatively impacted the warp and weft of our entire culture, and that the remedy has always been close by, hidden in awareness of our own experience.

This reviewer can suggest nothing less than a five-star rating for this slender masterpiece of clarity.

Thank you so much, Harry. Although I have not had a chance to read it yet, I do know that Harry plans to propose that our book group read it when we finish our current book, In Search of the Miraculous by P.D. Ouspensky — who happens to be one of Mr. Spira’s influences. Harry is quite taken with Mr. Spira’s clarity of thought, and I am looking forward to reading and discussing it in our book group.

This book, with a foreword by Deepak Chopra, will be published on June 1, 2017, and is  available for pre-order on Amazon.com, where it should probably not be classified in the category “Christian living.”