The Theory of Celestial Influence: Man, the Universe, and Cosmic Mystery (Arkana S.)

Rating:
Summary: If by chance you wish to awaken
Review: If you wish to bring clarity and meaning to your search then sit and read this thought as well as emotion provoking book. Connects your existence with the universe in a way which creates wonder, awe, meaning, and if you are lucky, purpose. Definitely a tool which enables one to get a different sense of one's self as it did for me. If you also had the same experience, I would love to hear from you. Be advised though, the book and it's content is "not for everybody".

Rating:
Summary: If by chance you wish to awaken
Review: If you wish to bring clarity and meaning to your search then sit and read this thought as well as emotion provoking book. Connects your existence with the universe in a way which creates wonder, awe, meaning, and if you are lucky, purpose. Definitely a tool which enables one to get a different sense of one's self as it did for me. If you also had the same experience, I would love to hear from you. Be advised though, the book and it's content is "not for everybody".

Rating:
Summary: "Concepts without percepts are empty..."
Review: The author, a long-time student of occult master Ouspensky, states: "despite its scientific appearance, it [this book] has no importance whatsoever as a compendium of scientific facts or even as a new way of presenting these facts...[but] in its being derived from the actual perception of higher consciousness and in its indicating a path by which such consciousness may be again approached [xxi]." Thus its value lies not in the sight, but in the seeing. But that is just the problem. This book is neither a guide to higher consciousness nor a work on fringe/occult science. Instead, it presents a decidedly scientific "New View" of the universe, and never mind about either facts or practices. It's not that this is pseudoscience (science is, after all, a metaphysical research program). And it does include some tantalizing glimpses of a new worldview. But it is weak in content and failed to generate either productive research or spiritual discipline. An example: "We have reason to believe that our sun does circle about Sirius" [15] in a 800,000 year period. Why? Precessional differences in the annual rising of Sirius relative to its starry background are consistent with the Sun's movement around a circle centered on Sirius. So it *could* be true. And it would certainly be fascinating. And it might explain "Nemesis: the Death Star" thought to periodically attract comets (like the one the killed off the dinosaurs) toward Earth. But nobody every bothered to find out. As it turns out, Ouspensky himself "abandoned the system" at the end of his life, telling his students that they must start over [xx-xxi]. This recalls St. Thomas Aquinas who, at the end of his life, received a vision of the Divine Mother (described in his "Aurora Consurgens") and, in a Zen-like fit of satori, rejected his own earlier intellectual Aristotelian system of theology. Unfortunately, almost nobody knows this; instead the West was stuck with the Thomistic debris of the Catholic Church, rather than elevated by the beatitude of Thomas' final vision of alchemical gnosis and the Divine Mother. So, if you enjoy extended "as above, so below" analogies lacking both empirical content and spiritual interiority , this book is for you. If you had hoped to find a work on spiritual/occult science here (a la Grossinger's "The Night Sky," Gauquelin's "Cosmic Clocks," Seymour's "Astrology: The Evidence of Science,") your disappointment may reach cosmic proportions.