Facing West from California's Shores:

...He passes his experience through the fire of thought and tradition...

...Reading Toolan, one is impressed again with theology's need for good conversational partners...

...Toolan draws on anthropologist Victor Turner's notion of "liminality" to explain the movement's search for new patterns of experience...

...While avoiding a naive collapse of high-energy physics into mysticism, Toolan marks out a view of nature which, grasped as metaphor for quickening Eros, enables us to experience ourselves as poised at the unstable threshold of a vast cosmic process - in which we make a difference...

...That new cosmology promises to overcome the cultural schizophrenia imaged in C. P. Snow's "two cultures," and could form the basis of a new polis, a new political order founded upon a genuinely global outlook...

...Viewed culturally, the consciousness movement's florescence on the margins of mainstream religious institutions signaled the inadequacies of the latter...

...which they beckon...

...He knows that a literalistic return to a spirituality of pre-literate culture offers no cure for the West...

...By introducing the cultural relevance of the mystical element of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Toolan re-centers the discussion and makes a distinction between a prepersonal loss of selfhood and the possibility of genuinely transpersonal experience...

...Once recovered, that story enables him to discern in the consciousness movement the struggle for an inclusive vision of reality which has been increasingly absent in the secular West since the modern mind began its encapsulation in the heroics of self-realization...

...For Toolan's odyssey charts his recovery of the central plot line of the Western story...

...But in Toolan's reading, Lasch fundamentally misunderstands the movement's jeremiads against false subjectivity when he interpretes them as expressions of a passive and narcissistic mentality...

...Contemporary physics has begun to reveal a universe in which wer no longer alien freaks of cosmic process, are the ineluctable expressions of the difference time can make...

...As autobiography, it is the religious odyssey of an American Jesuit as he moves from his Western religious and cultural origins through the consciousness movement of the sixties and a pilgrimage to India, and finally back as a contemporary Christian changed by his journey East and attentive to the continuing developments of the consciousness movement...

...Thus we have a passage back through the elaborate differentiations of self nurtured by literacy, and back to the sacred numinosity of an oral world that predates the rootless desiccation of the autonomous Western self...

...The author's trip to India is more than a personal pilgrimage...

...Toolan takes on both directions...

...It can be read at several levels...

...Thus his story, at another level, can be read as a form of searching theology - a sustained conversation between Christian faith and a host of contemporary voices that clamor at the rapidly moving edge of an emerging postmodern culture...

...Having discovered the primordial ranges of consciousness more readily at play in the East, Toolan regained the startling power of the Western spiritual classics...

...But Toolan's story, while personal, is not merely idiosyncratic...

...His discussion of Christopher Lasch's critique is instructive in this regard...

...In doing so, Toolan forges a bridge between the American consciousness movement, largely cut off from any explicit relationship to Western religion, and the deeper voices in the Judeo-Christian tradition...

...If in the former paradigm matter is dead and history has no purchase, in the latter a stochastic universe braids itself in energy-dissipating, organ-like structures in irreversible time...

...In contemporary physics, the long-established hegemony of a closed, steady-state, time reversible paradigm has begun to yield to a radically new view of reality, one understood to be open, unstable, and irreversible...

...If the consciousness movement opened for Toolan a path to spirituality and opportunities for appropriating a postmodern Catholicism, Toolan, in turn, offers the movement a unique interpretation of its possible significance to the Western tradition...

...The book proves Toolan an alert Western traveler...

...Toolan acknowledges that the consciousness movement has provided refuge for the "minimal selves" which, Lasch argues, offer only an inverted image of the modern, Promethean self...

...Moderns may thirst for an organic connection with creation and a sense of the sacred, but they are not simply ready to exchange these for the hard-won achievements of selfhood and conscious freedom...

...It seeks to recover the "uncarved block" out of which the modern Western self and its world have been sculpted...

...The first was a "her-meneutics of restoration," a retrieval - albeit often a non-academic one - of ancient spiritual wisdom characteristic of pre-modern, traditional societies...

...Toolan artfully describes the refigura-tion of nature taking place at the edges of current science...

...In Toolan's reading, the crucial issue that the consciousness movement posed to both the East and the West is the development of a free mode of participation in time that both preserves the emergence of selfhood and reconnects it with the depths of reality...

...It probed, Toolan argues, in two directions...

...He sees this search as a collective "rite of passage," a modern form of pilgrimage that presages a collective cultural shift toward a new cosmology...

...Toolan's search, read culturally, calls us to a collective expansion of our imaginations and to the possibilities for religious transformation which they beckon...

...The trip East proved to be a path toward home...

...William F. Vendley David Toolan's Facing West from California's Shores is a bold book...

...Theological conversation opens a search...

...The consciousness movement's search for this outlook sought to go beyond our schizoid culture, on the one hand beyond detached rationalists, and on the other beyond those seeking to find order in a self divorced from the wider environment...

...Of particular value is Toolan's ability to entertain helpful but inadequate criticisms of the consciousness movement...

...And the second probe, more revisionist in character, aimed to explore the new scientific paradigms emerging on the fringes of modern physics...

...It serves as a form of anamnesis, the recollection of a primordial sense of time...

...Toolan's conversation between Catholicism and the voices in the consciousness movement is impressive...

...The book chronicles the genesis of the so-called consciousness movement, its many feverish mutations, and the restless searching that inspired it...