The Way Back to Paradise: Restoring the Balance between Magic and Reason
by Joseph M. Felser
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Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company 2005 225 pp 16 pp Refs. $14.95.
Joseph Felser is a wise teacher of philosophy who does not buy into the rigid modern pursuit of reasoned examinations of our place in the universe, particularly when it comes to questions of religion. He connects with nature to know his place in the universe, observing that we all know how to do this -- though many in our culture have neglected this connection for so long that we have forgotten we are ourselves a part of nature. He calls this a state of "metaphysical malnutrition" (p. 50) and observed that earlier in his life, when he could not even identify the source of his inner hunger, he tended to satisfy himself with more familiar junk foods.
Reason is no more a mere adding machine or a logical scalpel than a gardener is her shovel or rake. These are only (some) tools used by reason, and not reason as such. To think otherwise, I suggest is a fatal mistake. [...] "Reason," said Joseph Campbell, "has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring order of the universe." In other words, as I assume in this book, reason is the faculty of asking ultimate questions, of seeing things as a whole, of making real--not, as Hume thought, spurious--connections. (xxv)
It is through being in the flow of beingness that we connect with our spirituality.
Paradise is not the garden of bliss, but rather, the bliss of gardening.... Paradise, I contend, is the harmonizing of magic and reason. (xxii)
... traditional religions and even many esoteric spiritual systems seek to cloud our perception of the invisible dimension with distorting fears, illusions, and superstitions. They do this in order to stage-manage and control not only the magic itself, but also the questing intelligence to which our innate psychic sensitivity gives birth. They condemn the psychic as demonic or, at best, as a distraction from "true" spirituality...
As for science, it, along with its offspring technology, continues to pretend that our reason is utterly self-generating and self-supporting, like a tree growing out of thin air rather than from a seed buried in the rich earth. This idea would truly be magical if the image weren't so laughably absurd. We can repress our sympathy with nature, but we cannot destroy it. Repressed, it exacts its revenge, threatening us with our own doom. (xxviii)
Suggesting that he is a canary stuck in a mine -- along with you and me -- he announces that he is singing out a warning about our insensitivity to the degradation of the world around us "If I can do it, so can you. Paradise is only a pain away." (xxxi)
Felser advocates for spiritual awareness that is alive and questioning, for it is through the questing and inquiry that one comes into real, personal awareness of the transcendent.
Felser has a wonderful gift for presenting complex concepts through simple imagery and metaphors, helping the reader experience some of the delight in nature and in the transpersonal that he himself obviously has developed.
But what if, as the Sioux philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. says (from the perspective of that older, outlawed animist point of view), "the world is constantly creating itself because everything is alive and making choices that determine the future" ? Then creation (or evolution) is not something essentially over and dones with; it's happening right now, all the time, in ways we can neither predict nor control, nor perhaps even comprehend. Everything, in other words, is conscious, alive, and free. Creation itself is "heretical"! " (p. 74-75)
This book is a thoughtful and enjoyable read, with stimulating quotes that open doors into further reading.
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