An informative, if often familiar, manual of spiritual development.
A spiritual guidebook accompanies readers on a journey of self-discovery with a meditative focus on the constancy of the inner self.
The first chapter of this manual of enlightenment posits, “Our lives have both a dynamic quality and a static quality to them.” This notion that human existence is composed of ever changing experience swirling around an unmoving core is present in a number of religious traditions. Biotechnology executive Krenitsky calls this core the “Still Point,” but he points out that it’s also been called “Awareness, Consciousness, Knowing, Being, Holy Spirit, Presence, Tao, and so forth.” Around this Still Point, the author notes, humans experience a number of unhelpful thoughts and emotions that he summarizes as “the insane conditioning of the ego, which has brought you nothing but fear, worry, and conflict.” Chapters such as “The Seduction of Thought,” “The Absolute Need To See the Ego Self as False,” and “The Illusion of Control” expand on the idea that happiness requires one to tune out a cacophony of feelings, desires, and ideas in order to become aware of one’s “true, unchanging nature.” After this, the seeker’s next step, the author asserts, is to expand this moment of consciousness into an “ever-present awareness”—which, in turn, can lead to personal as well as social change. Much of the book is presented in a question-and-answer format, and Krenitsky presents it all in the style of a good teacher; the overall tone is direct and respectful, without pretention or condescension. His evocation of the Silent Point, that thing “you have called ‘I’ when referring to yourself your entire life,” is likely to feel relevant and compelling even to those who are unfamiliar with practices of meditation and self-realization. At the same time, there’s not much new here for longtime practitioners of New Age or Eastern spiritual traditions, but instructions such as “Be the Actor and not the Character in the Movie of Life” may provide seekers with helpful ways to approach enlightenment.
An informative, if often familiar, manual of spiritual development.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-954968-82-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Waterside Productions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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