The Myth of the Great Secret:

...They go through the motions of religion without becoming any more significantly related to God or his world...

...He rejects the church as old-fashioned, outmoded, and over-institutionalized...

...So instead of becoming detached from the false self, the grasping, craving ego, we become banefully detached from real persons, places, and things, leaving them behind in our quest for the newest model...

...Why, since I am so tired of such accounts and so skeptical, did I read this particular book...

...Because the publishers reminded me that the author and I had met...

...our search grows out of a personal need for a person whose mercy and tenderness extends to the weakest and farthest depths of creation...

...To think of oneself and others as nothing leads to feckless folly or despair...

...In fact, I read it twice Why...

...It is bound to break through one's crusty old ways of thinking, one's inordinate attachment to words, images, and ideas however sacred, one's fear of the emptiness that lies just below the exciting surface of things, and provide a guiding light, an opening way toward Reality...

...If his life story is so far a miracle of grace the miracle consists in this: that despite the roaring cataract of nonsense, the Secret has not escaped him...

...He is on to something and evokes wonder: his chief guides along his questionable way are Joseph Campbell, Buddha, Nagarjuna, and Carl Jung...

...And indeed we had, over twenty years ago, when Toby (the author) was a Servite novice...

...In the silent and solitary residue of these events and meetings a way into the present and the future opens up for us...

...It is my conviction that if you are going to review a book you should really review it...

...As usual, the journey is from West to East...

...Our sense of nothingness is so trenchant that our need for the Absolute is absolute...

...Here we have another nearly typical inward journey (a far-out trip, man...

...Those individual myths manifest the myth of the Great Secret...

...When, as he says, he realized there were no specific truths, he found himself one day turning away from the crucifix and then - "My eye was caught by the poster on the wall opposite: George Harrison, in orange and green highlights, a blazing psychedelic vision, his eyes upturned and his hand, marked with a glyph of the all-seeing eye, raised in benediction, the mudra 'Fear not...

...It is easy, even fashionable, to turn to the East...

...And that is why so many people are turning to the East...

...What the world needs above all else is a divinely empowered, Christ-centered, worldwide revolution and that is precisely what mystical Christianity is...

...Something of incalculable value, of supreme importance is lost...

...And its corrupted versions can end up supporting what they were meant to undermine: the isolated, empirical, competitive ego...

...The funny thing about the Christian Myth is that God could not keep the secret...

...And then, although his insights are deeper and broader than most "journeymen," his story becomes hackneyed...

...So Edwin Johnson and I are indissoluble touchstones of reality...

...And so, as the subtitle of the book indicates, it is a soulful "search for spiritual meaning in the face of emptiness...

...It seems to me that what is needed today is not theological systems or linguistic analyses on a plethora of "experiences," but "an opening way...

...Their religion is monkey business: keeping the rules, repeating the ritual with no religious experience, or more accurately, no mystical experience...

...But it was the meeting that seduced me...

...So beingful will these contemplatives become that they will overflow into the "fearful symmetry" of art or the creative and fruitful industry of work...

...That meeting was important because something supremely important happened between us...

...And there's the rub...

...That is the problem: Western religion is not mystical enough...

...And so Christ said: I am the Way rist said: I am the Way...

...and that's where it's atman...

...It is much healthier and holier, and far more realistic, to live acutely and wittily in the creative tension between "thou art that" and "thou art not that...

...And what the wisdom of the Orient has recently begun to do is to stimulate in the West a new appreciation for its own Judaic-Christian heritage, its own mystical life Thousands of religiously active - feverishly active - Westerners are starving to death spiritually...

...we are next to nothing...

...That is why I admire Edwin Clark Johnson...

...Our existence is fragile, contingent...

...Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity, a French Carmelite mystic, goes so far as to define mystical prayer as "the meeting of Him who is with her who is not...

...But I also know lots of people who, in turning East, lost their balance and ended up unworldly indeed, but with deracinated minds and deciduous hearts...

...So the flesh was always sacred and sacramental in the West...

...If you believe in nothing but the sum total of consciousness, or in other Jungian words, the "collective unconscious," the "objective psyche," you become not a mystic but the abominable no-man...

...It is, however, almost impossible for Americans to import Oriental spirituality pure and undefiled...

...but neither is there any "touch" independent of contact with an otherness that transcends my own subjectivity even when I respond to it from the subjective ground of my being, and know it only in my contact with it Events and meetings that are mindful and contemplative enough constitute the world of spirituality, and matrix of mysticism...

...Much of the teaching of the East and some of the apophatic theology of the West exaggerates the negative dimension...

...To be haunted by a mystical sense of nothingness leads to holiness...

...Oriental spirituality is one of the longest and deepest traditions in the world Countless holy men and women have grown out of its religious disciplines...

...But ultimately there is one way, and it is not a doctrine or a teaching or a technique or a system of beliefs, but a personal, passionate exchange going on at the "still point of the turning world...

...It was the memory of that meeting (history) that induced me to overcome my antipathy toward "journey" books...

...Turning East can be either helpful or harmful...

...Johnson's way, however, needs to be critically assessed, for I do not believe, as he does, and as he thinks the famous fourteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart does, that all ways are equal...

...So I not only read this book twice, but meditated on it for weeks...

...They are "touchstones of reality...

...Turn to the East THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET Edwin Clark Johnson Morrow, $10, 228 pp William McNamara I AM weary, and wary too, of the glut of books on journeys - both inward and outward...

...We can import all the light we want from the East but we will not become enligthened until we become more human, or to put it negatively and more politically, until we give up our personal and national quest for economic supremacy and military invulnerability...

...The telling of it was the Word, and the Word became flesh...

...This is a far cry from the God of Jung and Johnson - a God swallowed up in the big, expanded Self...

...There are numerous myths, some truer than others...

...Yet to wizened Westerners who seem finished, fastened as they so often are to the fixtures of religion rather than to the ineffable Godhead, I highly recommend Johnson's Myth of the Great Secret...

...His book is full of sparkling, scintillating truths that contradict one another...

...This is the Secret: the sacrificial love that creates or (in our case) co-creates the inner (and outer) suchness of things...

...But to be open to the East requires a qualitative change, a radical conversion of mind and heart, a miracle of grace...

...For these residues, I claim what cannot be claimed for any objective metaphysics or subjective inspiration...

...There are countless touchstones, some better than others...

...Yet it was precisely in that historical moment at precisely that geographical location in California that two distinctly differentiated human beings who enjoyed a unique and indestructible human existence, confronted and encountered each other's implacable otherness in an act of holy communion...

...And as Johnson and the enormously popular breed of navel-gazers would have us believe, a good dose of Buddhism can eliminate that...

...by another precocious soul...

...If they sit there long enough, growing up into adulthood without losing their childhood, taking long, leisurely, loving looks at the real, i e , learning to contemplate, then meaning will erupt out of those everyday forms of Being, and their everyday minds (their body-minds, the attentive hearts) will be simply and wholly engaged...

...Edwin Johnson abandoned this way while he was still a Roman Catholic monk, a Servite...

...This, of course, is inevitable once you are convinced that there are no specific truths, just a vast vague consciousness "There is no self, no permanence, there is only suffering...

...How droll: this book is about the emptiness of everything, the nothingness of the other and therefore the vacuity of history...

...We are relatively nothing - nothing apart from God, nothing except insofar as we are known, loved, and sustained in being by God's creative act...

...His spiritual journey from West to East and his psycho-religious account of it is, indeed, a miracle of grace "Revealed in every aspect of the universe - on all levels of existence, from the simple material to the most advanced cosmolog-ical or most bizarre esoteric presentation of it - there is a secret...

...If God ceased to uphold us for one moment we would disintegrate...

...The Secret is Love, not emptiness, not meaninglessness, but a love so unbounded and limitless that it evokes from the imperfect, or, rather, unfinished lover an eerie sense of the void...

...So the superficial merging of Oriental and Occidental spiritualities does not produce a contemplative human being, but a competitive consumer of ideas, and a compulsive devourer of experiences...

...That exchange erupting at the core of every creaturely relationship is our best clue to Who God is - Love personified, sheer altruism, the Trinity...

...It has been immensely beneficial to people such as Thomas Merton, Bede Griffiths, Raymond Panikkar, David Steindl-Rast, William Irwin Thompson, Harvey Cox, Richard Al-pert, and Douglas Steere, among others...

...No reality (even God) is independent of touchstones...

...matter matters - except among those tainted and twisted by the dark clouds of Jansenism and gnosticism...

...Two things in particular spoil our Oriental imports: our consumer mentality and our psycho-idolatry Americanized and psychologized Buddhism becomes Buddyism: casual and careless relationships because "nothing matters," irresponsibility with a spiritual veneer, a metaphysical license to avoid serious, solemn commitments, a mystical permit to skip from one person, bed, cause, or program to another without ever taking the plunge...

...That's why so many of the journeys to the East make me sad...

...In the West some people - the live ones, the wise ones - sit down before facts, events, good and bad news, like a child...

...He calls himself a mystic, compares himself to Thomas Merton, practices psychotherapy, and glories in his myth of the great secret...

...And it can only be spoken of in myths...

...It is essential to distinguish mere nothingness from the mystical sense of nothingness...

...In the West the obedient ones (ob-audire means to listen) are overwhelmed by One Word, which in the beginning, though divine, became flesh...