RECOVERING THE SOUL: A Scientific and Spiritual Search
Larry Dossey, M.D. New York: Bantam 1989 $9.95

Larry Dossey is an American doctor practicing internal medicine, well known from his books, Space, Time And Medicine and Beyond Illness. He is president of the Isthmus Institute of Dallas, which focuses on convergences of religious thought and science.

In Recovering The Soul Dossey develops the hypothesis of non-local mind, drawing from studies of the mind and body, prayer and healing, modern physics and more.

This book is a delightful read, both in the style and content. Dossey points out our society's spiritual agoraphobia, our sense of time which is prisoner to language designed to describe space, and the unlimited awareness to which we can open ourselves. He spices his exposition with a marvellous variety of quotes and observations, as in the following:

    The spirit of man communes with Heaven; the omnipotence of Heaven resides in man. Is the distance between Heaven and man very great?
    --Chao Tze-chiang, 'Discourses on Vegetable Roots' from 'A Chinese Garden of Serenity' (Ming Dynasty)

    ...biologists, who once postulated a privileged role for the human mind in nature's hierarchy, have been moving relentlessly toward the hard-core materialism that characterized nineteenth-century physics. At the same time, physicists, faced with compelling experimental evidence, have been moving away from strictly mechanical models of the universe to a view that sees the mind as playing an integral role in all physical events. It is as if the two disciplines were on fast-moving trains, going in opposite directions and not noticing what is happening across the tracks.    --Paul Davies, 'God and the New Physics'.

Dossey is particularly clear and succinct in explaining the dangers of ignoring our dark, or 'shadow'sides.

    Because the Universal Mind, in which our individual minds participate, is a... complex of opposites...the light and shadow exist together as rightful parts of a whole. If we hold to the light and deny the shadow, we will not understand the whole when we experience it, and we will be assailed with the overwhelming force of tragedy, disease and death. Only through the conscious recognition of the complexity of the whole can we escape being devastated when bad things happen.

    ...God and the Universal Mind are a Whole, from which nothing is excluded - even disease and tragedy.

    There is, then, a dark and terrible side to the Universal Mind that is seldom acknowledged... But to recognize this - to know it as deeply as we can - is curiously to be free from the tyranny of the dark side and the periodic buffeting it causes...

I warmly recommend this book, and hope it may soon be available in a UK edition.

                                              -- Dr. Daniel Benor

FIRE IN THE HEART: Healers, sages and mystics
Kyriacos C. Markides, London: Arkana/Penguin 1991 $6.99

This remarkable book is about Spyros Sathi, an extraordinary Cypriot healer who is called Daskalos (Greek for 'master' or 'teacher') by his followers. He is a retired civil servant who enjoys painting. Behind his modest circumstances and humble manners lie a depth of understanding of the human condition and abilities to heal which are astounding. People from all over the world flock to him for help with illnesses for which they find inadequate help from their doctors.

Kyriacos Markides is a sociologist at the University of Maine, a native of Cyprus, who has documented Daskalos' work in this (and two previous books)(1). In the earlier works he describes more of the effects of the healings. These include apparent improvements in paralyses and straightening of bony deformities, among many other dramatic cures. In Fire In The Heart he details many of the cosmologies and teachings of Daskalos and of Kosta, one of his foremost disciples.

Reincarnation is a vital aspect of diagnosis with Daskalos. He explains that the soul enters 

    ...the gross material level to acquire experience of the lower worlds, the worlds of polarity, of good and evil, of life and death...

    ...at the moment of the first incarnation, a present personality will be constructed, which...is made up of a noetic body, a psychic body, and a gross material body.

    ...Spirit is radiant and...the present personality is the dark side. The aim of existence is to join the two points and form one brilliant circle...Through awakening of the lower self to its divine origin...

    We are gods in exile...who suffer from self-inflicted amnesia. Our ultimate and overarching purpose is to recover our memory...

Awakening our awareness may occur through experience over many reincarnations, as well as through deliberate study and self development 'through contemplation, meditation, self-observation and service.

Daskalos and Kosta describe experiences in their personal inner consciousness and in doing and teaching healing which led them to their understanding of karma and ways in which people awaken to greater awareness.

This book is a light which may guide one to greater understanding of the meanings of life and of the contributions which spiritual healing may make along the way.

-- Dr. Daniel Benor

FOOTNOTES
1. The Magus of Strovolos; Homage to the Sun

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