good books

[Found Goat]

Three books that have had a profound impact in my own life, as far as what it means to be spiritual is concerned, and which continue to help keep me anchored to the earthplane, are Joy, Love & Orgasm, and Narcissism: Denial Of The True Self -- all of which were authored by the late 'Bioenergetics' founder, Alexander Lowen, who was a student of the great Wilhelm Reich.

Not that I've ever needed anyone to impress upon me the importance of bodywork and an appreciation of the spirit-infused human experience. Even prior to my discovering the works of Lowen I'd come to recognize on my own not only the practical health benefits of physical movement but the positive effects even simple exercises like touching one's toes from an upright position can have on one's mood and psychology, or as far back as a kid learning first-hand the drug-free euphoria obtained from an autoerotic fantasy.

As to this latter discovery, my puritan parents took a dim view of my then masturbatory activities, telling me how sinful it was in God's eyes, but even as a youngster I was unable to reconcile how something so pleasurable and innocuous could be wicked as opposed to divine. I remember wondering even as a juvenile: Did I really want to live forever in an asexual and thus nominal paradise? Only just a young boy and I was thinking: What if the Apostle Paul (he who taught the flesh was evil) was the greatest of ideological perverts?

Then in my late teens I was introduced to alternative spirituality, and had wondered even then why it was so many practitioners within this camp enjoyed, as with their religious counterparts, deadening the body as well, if not by physical inaction (e.g. perpetual navel-gazing) then by thought process (as with the longing in such ones to be ultimately 'liberated' from their bodies).

It seemed every where I looked, whether it was organized religion or in the alternative spirituality community, I saw people who devalued both the world of matter and our spiritual tabernacles that are our physical bodies.

Never have I wanted to be raptured into a non-physical body, to leave the sensual world of culinary delights and blissful climax behind, nor do I understand those non-religious mortifiers either who long to escape their corporeal natures, whether temporarily via the lotus position, or with their sights set on a permanently disembodied afterlife with ultimate 'enlightenment' as the endpoint.

Enter a fellow Canadian in Jeff Brown who has written an excellent book, titled Grounded Spirituality (2019); a man who was also highly influenced by the commonsense teachings, or rather reminders, of one Alexander Lowen -- specifically, that spirituality is directly related to, if not indistinguishable from, our physicality. To think otherwise is folly if not downright delusional.

Brown's story is an interesting one. The greater part of the first half of Grounded Spirituality has the author recounting the years he spent foolishly following gurus and, indeed, there's an entire chapter later on in the book that Brown devotes to criticizing New Age philosophy, with its overemphasis on temporal do-nothingness and its almost dogmatic romanticizing of 'love and light,' this done often as as excuse to ignore earthly concerns deserving of a spiritual human being's whole-souled attention. On this, I couldn't agree more with Brown. (After all, what is a truly loving light-being but one unafraid of the metaphysical darkness so as to expose it; but one desiring to make this world of ours a better place to live in?)

Although I recommend Brown's book in general, this is not to say I'm in agreement with every last word contained within its pages. Admittedly, a little suspicious I am of Brown whenever he speaks of 'the Divine Feminine' as if in a gender-superior manner. Yes, Jeff, the feminine is divine, but let us not forget that so is the masculine. In my opinion, we need both in the world working in harmony with each other, and an extreme of either one, whether on a collective level or individually, only leads to an antagonistic imbalance, or a split-self, if you will.

But as to the major crux of Brown's book, overall Grounded Spirituality is spot-on, and so it is that I regard it as a must-read.

Alexander Lowen's primary message was that the human being is inherently spiritual in the bodily state -- by spiritual, he meant neither perfect nor godlike (he stressed humility and our need to understand and appreciate human limitations), nor in some mystical meaning did he talk of spirituality (he in fact loathed mysticism) but in the sense that corporality is in fact synonymous with spirituality, if and when one's humanness is positively embraced, as opposed to belittled, degraded, or outright rejected. Various belief systems that teach our world and our selves to be illusory would therefore be diametrically at odds with a spirituality grounded on Earth and in the wholeness of the unfragmented individual.