If you'd rather place an order by talking to one of our cheerful order desk clerks, please call 1-888-232-4444 (USA and Canada only) or 250-383-6864. From Europe, ring our UK order desk clerk at local rate number 0845 230 9601 (UK only) or 44 (0)1865 722 113.

A Spiritual Journey

by Graeme Hughes

88 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #00-0101; ISBN 1-55212-436-3; US$15.00, C$17.00, EUR12.50, £8.50

This book describes the author's spiritual searching through psychology and comparitive religion. It concludes with a description of his own spiritual growth-experiences.

Read more!

about the book      about the author      sample excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book This little book charts the pilgrimage of the author from "sense to soul." It is a mystical path as the author discovers the limits of thinking. The book condenses a wealth of information on psychology and comparitive religion before demonstrating that mystical growth can not be taught or described in word and concept. The author concludes with an account of his own experience.

About the Author Graeme Hughes came to Canada in 1968 after practicing law in Australia. He has received senior degrees from York University in Toronto and from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in California, U.S.A. and he has also attended Canada's National Defense College in Kingston, Ontario. In Canada he undertook a business career, but in order to continue and deepen his life-long interest in spiritual theory and practice, he retired early. He continues to travel extensively and finds his love of classical music and sculpture (he sculpts in stone) supports his spiritual practice.

A Review of A Spiritual Journey

This jewel of a book is gentle balm for any seeker who has ever broken his/her heart on the sharp spikes of the harsh, demanding intellect. Graeme Hughes has written the story of his journey from existential questioning to the utter limits of the egoic mind and its ability to understand. There, with tremendous courage, and at some considerable peril to his sanity and health, he discovers something beyond thought and reason.

On his way to this new place of tenderness, trust and compassion, Hughes is hurtled into a maelstrom of intellectual quandries and assumptions. It is his gift and his cross to confront these spiritual dilemmas squarely through reading, contemplation and tough thinking.

He takes on the New Ages's sacred cows he meets along he road, not with malice but with curiosity and diligence. For example, psychic powers - "...If you have the gift of (psychic powers) use it rarely and circumspectly and never let it distract you from the real goal." (pg. 51) And again, that a state of oceanic bliss is desirable or helpful on the spiritual path. Hughes investigates this phenomenon and concludes, bravely, I think, that this is a regressive state, characterized by an infantile with to forgo the necessary hardships on the road to true transcendence. He seems to be finding his way to the Zen paradox, "First there is a mountain, then no mountain, then mountain again." You have to have a self, then lose it, to find the Self. It is quite "other" than a trip back to undifferentiated oneness. There are others: meditation, exoteric ritual and esoteric knowing, to name two more.

There is so much in this short book that I will only mention some of the terrain he has covered by listing some of the authors, teachers and spiritual systems he contemplates: Carl Jung's individuation archetype and psychological types, Joseph Campbell and the Hero's journey, Aldous Huxley and the Perennial Philosophy, Ken Wilber, Vedanta, the Tao, modern Christianity, Ramara Maharshi, Bahkti, Gnana, and Karma Yoga and the list goes on. Really, it is extraordinary what he as packed into this book.

Finally, nearly broken many times in body and mind, (and by the mind, as well) he finds his path, his particular practice: trust. This is the solution that renders irrelevant the mind's insane drive to own, know and separate. It is a stunning step for a man with a mind so powerful it almost dropped him in his tracks. Gently and transparently he describes his personal battles and breakthroughs and the applications he has come to from all he has (un)learned. It is here that the book takes on its benediction for those of us whose path it is to do battle with the intellect.

Keep this book close by. It is one you will read more than once and graze through often for that special inspiration.

Lavida Bond, Therapist

Sample Excerpt

Prelude

We are all on a " Journey " -- transiting space and time with a self - consciousness that tries to make sense of it all. We each make different stops and have different terrains to cover. We start and finish the same way -- alone. How do we make sense of this life journey? Especially as we grow old, this question can become insistent and infuriating because "doing" starts to lose its distracting grip. The easy answers don't really fit any more. It first comes upon us as a feeling -- a shadowy, questioning, dissatisfied, uncertainty -- and only with great effort can we translate it into a question. Even then, we sense that something has been left out. We ask, " Why am I here?" ( We might even ask, " who or what is this ' I', and what is ' here ' "? ) Perhaps our religion quickly replies, " You exist for the greater glory of God." We want to say, " What's so glorious about it?" or, " Who said so?" No longer are we satisfied by any one else's dogma or experience. At that point we might get a momentary flash when it all just seems insane. The flash disappears into the ordinariness of our experience, we put these inchoate feelings away ( again ), but we are left with a suspicion... or a fear... We want to know why do we even have the imagination to feel this way or think it all might be an insane game?

I, too, have had these promptings. Nothing unusual in that, I suppose. I have come to suspect that for all of us life is a learning experience -- but not in some general, philosophical sense. I have come to suspect that this learning is really focused on only one, quite specific and basic thing -- and if my own experience is any guide, it is not what we might have first thought. It will be so basic it will be easy to overlook. It is different for each of us. I believe it will be about something that entirely permeates our consciousness so that it constitutes our attitude to life and, in effect, becomes the unconscious reflex conditioning our behaviour. Yet I do not believe it can be understood primarily in psychological terms. It is a lifetime learning -- at least it seems to be for me. In my own case I was perhaps half way through my life before the frequency of meeting the same issue became a " two by four " hitting me over my head to attract my attention. It is this: I must learn to stop the conscientious struggle, to cease the egoic effort, however well intentioned, to improve performance; in learning " to hold things lightly " I come to understand that the willing and doing is God's. For some people, this attitude is fairly easy to adopt. And so this is not their life - lesson. But it surely is for me! This will become clearer as you read on, and it is really the subtext of chapter 7.

This little book partially describes how I have responded to this learning experience. Partially, only because I don't have the wit or the pen to make my response fully conscious to you or even to myself. And this, it seems to me, is perhaps the ultimate point of it all -- the expansion of consciousness... the getting of wisdom ... not simply knowledge of fact or theory, or the achieving of power or status.

In Part 1 of this book I describe how I have been literally beset by certain questions which had to be answered before I could continue on my journey. The threshold question was, why should I worry about these questions? Why not just settle into some religious belief and coast along? Well, that was the whole point; my journey didn't and wouldn't go that way. The mind -- or at least my mind -- has a veto power! Until it is satisfied, it prevents me from moving forward. I don't mean to suggest that the mind is the most important part of me or anyone else. I recognize and try to use all of my faculties of consciousness such as intuition, feeling and sensing as well as thinking. But I quickly found that my intellect had the power to stop me until its questions were answered satisfactorily.

Eventually, after a lot of slogging, I came to the point where my questing, arrogant but courageous little mind could say: " Ah, now I see -- that I can't see." But that was eventual. I write about this in Part 2.

The book is not, however, a spiritual biography -- although I will speak of some of my " plateau and peak" experiences -- nor is it based on a comprehensive, academic review of the appropriate literature. This is for scholars. It is simply a telling of my own journey. Fortunately for you ( and me ), there are now hundreds and hundreds of books dealing with the issues I raise. Some of them are excellent but many, I think, mistake genuine spirituality. Although I say more about this in the Postlude, let me say something about it now.

Bookshelves are groaning under the weight of self - improvement books, pop psychology books, alternative therapy books and " spirituality made easy " books. I hope my book doesn't fit these categories. (The only justification for it is my hope that readers will be helped by the fundamental questions I try to answer.) The New Age seems to have spawned many well - intentioned authors who in my opinion do little more than massage the ego and give it new playthings to distract or to increase its skill. Probably no harm in this, unless of course those involved mistake the exercise for genuine spiritual transformation. I think that's what spirituality is all about -- transformation brought about by an expansion of consciousness; not intellectual knowledge, not psychological adjustment, not psychic skill or experience, but transformation of the egoic self into a consciousness of the divine -- and more.

I guess we each have a notion of what is " spirituality," and I will refer to important attempts to define it. I use the term to mean the highest levels of consciousness leading up to and including what is called " unitive " consciousness. I believe spirituality can be received, but not taught, simply because it is not primarily the stuff of thinking. But perhaps some of the pre - conditions can be usefully examined. If you are like me you are not specifically trained in the " ologies" -- psychology, mythology, theology -- yet forced by the inquiry to obtain a superficial understanding of them all. The deeper I read the more I appreciated my own lack of scholarship -- but what was to be done? Well, eventually I came to realize that scholarship, and even thinking, had its limits. And still the Journey continues.

I, for one, find this Journey tough and terrible at times although shot through with flashes of ecstasy. And it's a long way from over. The space in which I am now living? My poem says it best:

Catalogue Information