Two weeks ago, my audio/visual receiver (AVR) stopped working. My immediate reaction was, "Thank you, God!!"
I've been trying to cut back on my increasing hours of TV watching after work, and I felt like my prayers had been answered. Still, being the addict that I was, I tried the AVR a couple of times later in the week to see if it would spontaneously work again. Thankfully, no. It remained dead.
Initially, I replaced TV with YouTube, wasting more time than usual on Stephen Colbert's monologues. But even that quieted down over the week.
Finally, I began to read books. I started with Claude Swanson's latest creation: Science of the Soul, the Afterlife, and the Shift. I've collected all of his books (several copies), but I've never actually read them. They decorate my bookshelves very nicely though. His latest book is over 700 pages long. I liked it, but after getting one third of the way through, my interest began to falter (I'll explain why later), and I found myself reading another book.
This next book was called, Learning From the Light: Pre-death Experiences, Prophecies, and Angelic Messages of Hope, by John Lerma, MD. The book is filled with stories about spiritual experiences patients had in hospice care before they died. I found the stories inspiring and aligned with my own spiritual beliefs.
My third book was called, Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist and researcher. I liked the book and was reading along at a fast clip when I came across several chapters where I disagreed with the writer's opinions and perspectives. My reading came to a screeching halt, and I found myself moving on to another book.
I began my most recent book two days ago, after I heard a live online talk by Ingrid Honkala, who shared her many spiritual experiences. She was two years old when she drowned and had a near-death experience. I fell asleep through a part of her engaging presentation, probably because it was late, and I had just finished dinner. But, my curiosity was aroused, so I bought her book: A Brightly Guided Life: How a Scientist Learned to Hear Her Inner Wisdom. I'm still reading it, but it's a very interesting memoir of her life journey and full of useful lessons about living in alignment with our spiritual beliefs.
Read on for my opinions on each book, including what I liked and didn't like about them. Enjoy!
A Quick Skip Through Four Books on Consciousness and the Soul
What I learned from half-read books
Because my parents were too poor to buy books for me when I was a child, I always read books borrowed from the public library. And, because they were borrowed, I developed the habit of reading them from cover to cover before I returned them. I was what you would call a voracious reader, a real bookworm, an embarrassing bookaholic.
Well, that was how I read until I went to medical school. After that, I barely read anything for fun at all. Even when I did read something, my attention would flag halfway through, and I would move on to another book. Those medical school textbooks killed my interest in reading.
Thanks to my dead AVR, I am getting back to my reading roots, and I wanted to share some of my reflections on the following books:
1) Science of the Soul, the Afterlife, and the Shift by Claude Swanson, Ph.D.: I love this book and will continue to gnaw at it over time. I'm especially interested in the "shift" that is supposedly happening right now to our entire solar system, which is exaggerating the effects of global warming and he suggests, may result in extraterrestrials having to rescue the human race from ultimate doom. Yes! About time! The one distracting aspect of his book is that he repeats data all over the place and there are a lot of typos and editorial oversights. *Sigh*
2) Learning From the Light: Pre-death Experiences, Prophecies, and Angelic Messages of Hope by John Lerma, MD: This book is filled with story after story of people's spiritual experiences before they die. There are feathers that fall from the ceiling and balls of light coming out of the deceased body. Dr. Lerma clearly believes in the spiritual and mystical causes behind the miraculous events he shares, but he'll pose his clear biases as questions to the reader, like, could the light have been some kind of anomaly explained by some other environmental factor? And, of course, the reader thinks, "Hardly."
3) Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: I was really enjoying this book until Dr. Csikszentmihalyi began to rail against mediums and people who do past life regressions. He declared that it was impossible for such things to happen. Also, his book is all about how joy in life comes from focused productivity. I'm not sure that is what I consider to be a state of joy. I think it's a state of concentration, which all too often I find myself in during a session with my patients. Flow, to me, isn't so much a state of joy as it is a state of work. So, I'm not convinced that his definition of Flow is where I always want to be.
4) A Brightly Guided Life: How a Scientist Learned to Hear Her Inner Wisdom by Ingrid Honkala: In this memoir, there are so many amazing miracles that happen all the time to the writer. I get quite envious of her ability to hear angelic advice, see people's auras, and even disappear from danger. What puzzles me is how none of these gifts mattered at some points in her life. She rejected her gifts when she felt undeserving, too ashamed, or simply too preoccupied. There are layers of learning from her tale: the spiritual aspects, her human journey filled with mistakes, and the hardships from external social forces. So far, what I've appreciated most from her memoir is her vulnerability and honesty. I learned that even if you had angels you can talk to 24/7, life can still be a struggle.
I hope you'll try out these books, even if you don't finish them. Let me know what you think of them!