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Review - Grassroots SpiritualityWhat It Is, Why It Is Here, Where It Is Going by Robert Forman Imprint Academic, 2004 Review by Naomi Gold, Ph.D. Apr 18th 2005 (Volume 9, Issue 16)
In an article titled
"Renaissance Man: The Life of Leonardo," which, among other things,
scrutinizes historical inaccuracies in The DaVinci Code, writer Adam Gopnik
comments, "A cultural anthropologist, a hundred years from now, will
doubtless find, in the unprecedented success of The DaVinci Code during
the time of a supposed religious revival, some clear sign that, in the Elvis
mode, what a lot of Americans mean by spirituality is simply an immense
openness to occult superstitions of all kinds" (The New Yorker January
17, 2005, 86). In using this statement to open a review of Robert Forman's Grassroots
Spirituality: What It Is and Where It is Going, I may appear to be
offhandedly dismissive of the current groundswell of interest in all things
spiritual, metaphysical, and mystical. But the panegyric quality of Grassroots
Spirituality provides a case in point for what I regard as an urgent need
for the application of a critical perspective on the products of this very
free, very vigorous, very fertile spiritual marketplace.
Accepting the premise
that human beings have an inherent spiritual impulse that moves many, though
not all, to search for life's meaning in the intangible realms of spiritual
idea-making, it must be said that giving oneself over to spiritual impulses and
to the copious varieties of spiritual expression that are now, more than ever,
available to individuals largely freed from the familial and cultural moorings
that used to dictate religious affiliation, is no more prudent or sound than
unreservedly indulging any other impulse. And while Forman declares the need
for an antidote to "…strictly rationalistic world views and life
goals" (4), and extols spiritual practices as "…perfect answers to
the desire for something besides the controlling manipulative linearity of
science and rational accounting principles," I think there is ample
evidence to support the assertion that the need for a rational assessment of
spiritual ideas and practices is as necessary now as it has ever been. The
implication of Forman's presentation in Grassroots Spirituality is that
the non-mainstream, ostensibly non-dogmatic practices that constitute the
grassroots spirituality movement are by their very nature progressive,
equitable, and humane. But there is ample evidence to suggest that no human
enterprise is more plagued by eruptions of self-deception and duplicity than is
religion and spirituality. This statement does not emerge out of an
anti-spiritual or anti-religious perspective, but from an unmistakable and
pervasive discrepancy between explicitly professed values on the one hand, and
patterns of tangible conduct on the other. This incongruity between values and
conduct is evident whether one is examining mainstream religious institutions
or alternative/eastern/new age teachers, groups, and practices. We must, many
of us, explore the meaning of our lives in something other than a
non-rationalistic way. But the claims, and more significantly, the activities
of teachers and of individual groups must constantly be submitted to precisely
those rational processes that seem so limiting and stifling.
That there is great
interest in and commerce with all things spiritual and metaphysical is
undeniable. While there is much preoccupation, especially in academic and
other largely liberal circles, with what is perceived as a growing, if not
already predominant conservative tendency in patterns of American religious
sentiment, only a stubbornly partial perspective could fail to recognize the
enormous number of Americans involved in a wide range of spiritual ideas and
practices: "New Thought" (e.g. Unity and Religious Science), a vast
assortment of meditation techniques, esoteric religious systems, and mind-body
healing techniques that are poles apart from fundamentalist religion and
evangelical Christianity. (Even this observation must be tempered with some
reservation. I direct interested readers to the volume The Guru Papers:
Masks of Authoritarian Power by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad [Berkeley, CA: Frog, Ltd., 1993],
which makes a persuasive case for the authoritarian dynamics present in almost
all spheres of human interaction. This includes spiritual and religious
traditions that we don't usually associate with coercive practices, such as
Buddhism, which advocates a morality of self-sacrifice and
"selflessness." Buddhism is not singled out. Covert
authoritarianism is present in any group focused on the person of a charismatic
teacher or guru, in many self-help groups, and in the concepts of unconditional
love, self-surrender, and egolessness that form the basis for most religious
and spiritual traditions, according to the authors.) Alongside the growth of
the "big box" evangelical churches and an apparently increasing
growth of conservative religious values in the public sphere is the almost
ubiquitous presence of crystals, prayer beads, yoga, qigong and tai chi,
acupuncture, the chanting of mantras, healing prayer, shamanism, the Divine
Feminine principle, getting in touch with our inner child, our shadow side, our
higher self. These ideas and practices have become practically mainstream, and
have become part of our common cultural and linguistic currency. While many
people retain a passing acquaintance with such ideas, many more, exercising a
level of free choice that was far rarer even a generation ago, have become
unbound and restless spiritual seekers and consumers, discontent with
mainstream religions, moving away from the traditions into which they were
born, and eager to experiment with ideas and practices that seem to offer the
potential for personal meaning, existential satisfaction, peace of mind, and
physical healing. Many others, especially in the nineteen sixties and
seventies, became the exclusive devotees of individual movements, or, more
precisely, of individual teachers: TM and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Hare
Krishna movement and Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada,
Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), Guru Maharaj Ji's Divine Light Mission, Bhagwhan Shree
Rajneesh. While such movements were well populated, not to mention profitable,
seekers have more commonly experimented with a variety of teachers and
techniques, piecing together a personalized, non-specific array of beliefs and
practices from whichever sources they have found meaningful and congenial.
The description I have
provided thus far is based on observation of phenomena whose prevalence seems
to require no corroboration. But there is additional persuasive evidence for
the demise of traditional forms of belief and practice and the concurrent
escalation of alternative, non-mainstream spiritual activities. Among the sources
offering demographic and statistical information about the state of religious
membership, belief, and observance in the U.S. and Canada is the American Religious Identification Survey
(ARIS), which operates under the auspices of the Graduate Center, City University of New York. It provides
"the most extensive survey of religious identification in later half of 20th
century America" (American Religious
Identification Survey The Graduate Center, The City University of New York,
http://www.gc.cuny.edu/studies/aris_index.htm).
Polling data from the 2001 ARIS study indicated that 14.1% of Americans do not
adhere to any organized religion, double the number of 8% in 1990. According
to the website religioustolerance.org, "There are more Americans who say
they are not affiliated with any organized religion than there are
Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans taken together" ("Religious
Identification in the U.S.: Christianity Sinking;
'None of the Above' Rising," Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance
website, http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prac2.htm).
And a USA Today/Gallup Poll taken in 2003 revealed that almost half of American
adults "...appear to be alienated from organized religion. If current
trends continue, most adults will not call themselves religious within a few
years." Incidentally, the fastest growing religion in terms of
percentages was found to be the neopagan religion Wicca.
Critical perspectives on
this eclectic "do-it-yourself" form of spiritual seeking have ranged
from cultural commentators to religious leaders, who have, for different
reasons, denounced it as shallow, self-centered, and superficial. This
evaluation, especially on the part of religious leaders, is probably a little
self-serving, and fails to recognize that such seeking is made possible by an
environment that encourages autonomous thought and that allows for a radical
freedom of conscience, choice, and self-determination. In this sense,
"grassroots spirituality" represents everything that dogmatic
religion is not. That being said, the need for critical thought and assessment
about the teachers and practices of the new spirituality has never been more
necessary.
It has been said that if
you can get people to ask the right questions, the answers you provide don't
much matter. So I think it is important here to start out by asking questions
that submit to scrutiny proposals regarding the value and the qualities of
spiritual ideas, and that take as their starting point the radical discrepancy
between religious and spiritual ideals and tangible behavior, which is a
feature of religious and spiritual communities of every type. Such a line of
inquiry demands an examination of the ways in which our motivations are often
unconscious, ambivalent, and outside our conscious control. This line of
inquiry must also acknowledge that liberal, esoteric, eastern, non-mainstream
practices that are the source material for "grassroots spirituality"
are not immune from the kind of authoritarianism, rigidity, and abuses of power
that have dogged so many churches and religious organizations. The most
important question to explore, therefore, is not "what does it mean to be
religious or spiritual in the 21st century?," but "How can
human behavior really be transformed and elevated? By what means can the
tendency toward self-deception, hypocrisy, and evasion be overcome?" This
is not merely an academic question. The new age, esoteric, eastern, liberal
practices valorized in this book with a kind of utopian spin are not the
inevitable conveyers of peace, balance, interpersonal harmony, and the capacity
for self-observation. There is ample evidence for this, as I will
demonstrate. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Grassroots
Spirituality is a constituted by a decentralized collection of spiritual
teachers, movements, ideas, practices, and organizations that have developed
independently of one another, and that, nevertheless, seem to have many
parallel, converging principles. "We call it 'grassroots,'" says
Robert Forman, "to indicate that it has developed in a spontaneous and
disorganized way among many everyday, ordinary people. Nobody has planned this
growth. It is not coming from some religious authority or a Pope. No one is
running the show" (26). This movement, which Forman calls possibly
"the biggest movement to come onto the religious/spiritual scene since the
reformation" (11), is the product of "…a huge, far-reaching yet
largely disconnected body of ordinary people all over the world, and especially
in North America…" Participants and contributors are largely urban,
educated, middle or upper middle class, educated, and financially comfortable
(104). The various ideas and practices that make up this movement hinge on
individual experience, experimentation, and the pursuit of an encounter with
transcendent reality. The individuals motivated to seek in this way are
motivated by "…[dissatisfaction] with narrow dogmatic religious views and
[frustration] with strictly rationalistic world views and life goals"
(4).
The book serves as a
kind of companion piece to the grassroots spirituality of an organization
called The Forge Institute, of which Forman is the Director. The Institute
describes itself as "…an association of people from diverse traditions who both
sense such a mystery and recognize that the there are many valid paths to
it." Its activities include "…a suite of trainings, community
gatherings and informal connections." Forman asserts that the grassroots
spirituality movement flourishes "…mostly on the margins of the
mainstream, popular culture and traditional church hierarchies" (4). And
while it is certainly outside formal church hierarchies, it is not quite
accurate to claim that it resides outside popular culture. It has, to the
contrary (and as I have already mentioned), been absorbed by popular culture,
and may in fact be almost indistinguishable from that large and multi-faceted
phenomenon often referred to as "new age" spirituality. (The
parallels and links between "grassroots spirituality" and the
"new age" phenomenon is a discussion I will leave for another time.)
Many of grassroots spirituality's ideas and practices, moreover--healing
prayer, meditation, working with spiritual energies--have moved into the
mainstream, even gaining acceptance in some psychotherapeutic and healthcare
circles, as well as occupying a significant amount of space in bookstores, and
forming the basis for countless formal and informal meeting-groups, healing
centers, and individual practitioners.
The participants in this
"grassroots spirituality," in all their variety and working
independently, seem to have generated very similar approaches to life's most
pressing questions. What is this convergence of belief that has emerged? In
large part, it is constituted by a belief in "…a vaguely panentheistic
ultimate that is indwelling…as the deepest self and accessed through
not-strictly-rational means of self-transformation…" (51). (Note that
"panentheism" is distinct from "pantheism," as noted on
page 52.) Access to this "indwelling ultimate" may be attained
through practices such as Tai Chi and meditation that assist the individual to
transcend "…the controlling manipulative linearity of science and rational
accounting principles." Another tenet of grassroots spirituality, indeed,
its "sine qua non," is a view of God as
"non-personal" (8). In a rather unfortunate bit of prose, Forman
describes the resulting spiritual fusion as the "…tossing together [of a]
salad of religions and beliefs out of our worldwide religious smorgasbord"
(124). In a better analogy, Forman uses the development of English out of the
languages spoken by Frisians, Saxons, Angles and Jutes to illustrate the way in
which multiple spiritual streams are merging into a more unified, coherent
whole: "As we spoke with our representatives from the array of religio-spiritual
'languages,' we began to hear something like a single new religio-spiritual
'language' being spoken. It has taken bits and pieces from the mother
traditions that preceded it, but it is not just warmed-over
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Feminism, or nineteenth century New Thought. It
has its own rules, ritual patterns and attitudes…Grassroots Spirituality has
become its own thing" (91).
Forman's book is an
enthusiastic endorsement for what he regards as a turning point in the world of
spiritual seeking. This has been made necessary, or perhaps inevitable, by widespread
dissatisfaction with dogmatic religion of all types, but as much or more than
that, by disillusion with a "…modern worldview [and] an arrogant but
possibly naïve faith in the power of human reason and the experimental
attitude" (127). It is always a little troubling to hear spiritual
writers disparage reason and experiment. We may assert with some certainty
that human reason may not be capable of discovering the answers to life's most
persistent and elusive questions, and it is without a doubt capable of being
misused in the service of sophistry and double-speak. But an absence of the
structure and discipline imposed by a rational methodology--observation, hypothesis testing, confirmation and
falsification, replication, controlled, empirical study--would render us
helpless, with a kind of mental immune deficiency against every fear and
superstition, every encounter with the unknown. Reliance on the ability of
reason and experiment to solve humanity's problems may produce a certain kind
of arrogance in some individuals, but religions that have claimed a reliance on
God have likewise produced, and continue to produce, individuals demonstrating
arrogance of immense and deadly proportions. The fault is not with reason, but
with human nature.
Forman, however, implies
that the qualitative differences between traditional, dogmatic religion and the
practices that constitute grassroots spirituality make it is safe to "let
go of rationalistic thinking," as though these ideas and practices are by their
very nature benign, liberal, humanistic, egoless. Yet abuses of every kind
among teachers and groups cited by Forman (88-89) as contributing to the
grassroots spirituality movement--ISKON (the Hare Krishna movement), Siddha
Yoga, Rajneesh, EST, Zen Buddhism, Alan Watts, TM, and Buddhist teacher Baker Roshi--have
been widely reported and well-documented. The irony here is that the humane
and open values Forman espouses were often sorely compromised by some of these
very teachers and organizations. The fact that they were eastern and
non-mainstream does not of necessity render them morally superior to western,
mainstream religious traditions. This statement is not meant to serve as an
apologetic for mainstream religion, but rather to assert that an uncritical embrace
of "alternative" spiritualities is as naïve as the uncritical embrace
of fundamentalist religion.
Why am I so insistent
about the need to cultivate a critical and self-possessed approach to emerging
"grassroots" spiritualities? The reasons are as numerous as the
abuses and scandals that have emerged over the past two decades. In the
December 1990 Yoga Journal magazine, author Katherine Webster wrote
about a long history of sexual harassment, outright sexual assault, financial
exploitation, psychological manipulation, and a host of coercive practices on
the part of Swami Rama, the founder of the Himalayan Institute, which taught
and continues to teach, meditation, yoga, spirituality, and holistic health in
the ayurvedic tradition. (Webster's article is available online at http://www.rickross.com/reference/swami_rama/swami_rama2.html.)
The Himalayan Institute was, in its time, well-known in seekers' circles, and
Swami Rama was recognized as a spiritual adept even in some secular circles on
account of his astonishing physical powers, said to be derived from deep yogic
practices. These were demonstrated for, among others, researches at the Menninger
Institute in Topeka in 1970. In 1997,
however, jurors determined that the Himalayan Institute in Honesdale, N.Y. should pay $1.875
million in damages to a woman who was sexually assaulted on 30 separate
occasions by Swami Rama. Webster's article reveals that this woman was only
one of many assaulted by the Swami, although most cases were not litigated.
She chronicles a long history of behavior unbecoming to a spiritual renunciate,
who abused in every way the authority, admiration, and devotion of students who
regarded him as a father, and whose unquestioning compliance was cultivated by
institutionalized guru-veneration that was and is common to many groups with
Hindu and Buddhist roots. Also in 1990, writer Kathy Butler published the
article, "Encountering the Shadow in Buddhist America" in the journal
Common Ground (May/June 1990). There, she described the sexual
misconduct of well-known Buddhist teachers, including Osel Tendzin, the leader of the
largest branch of Tibetan Buddhism in the United States, who carried on numerous sexual affairs with
students--over one hundred by his own admission--despite having been infected
with the AIDS virus since 1985. It was reported that Tendzin
(born Thomas Rich) believed he had been endowed with magical powers through his
lineage initiation, which he believed would prevent transmission of the virus.
(Tendzin was permitted to marry according to the regulations of his sect, and
had a wife and children during the years he was sexually active with others.)
Individuals in positions of authority within Tendzin's particular spiritual
lineage knew of the situation, and worked to suppress the reporting of it.
Following upon that 1990 article, another article titled "Buddhist
Teachers and Sexual Misconduct" appeared in Turning Wheel: Journal
of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (Spring and Summer, 1991). But even prior
to 1990, the prestigious San Francisco Zen Center experienced a crisis of
shattering proportions when it was discovered in the early 1980's that the
Center's abbot since 1971, Zentatsu Baker-roshi (Richard
Baker), had engaged in multiple sexual relationships with female students,
while simultaneously disciplining students for flirtatious and other
"inappropriate" behaviors. In the volume Jewish Women Speak
about Jewish Matters (Detroit: Targum/Feldhiem, 2000), a collection of
short essays by and about the experiences of Jewish women, one contributor
wrote about her years of involvement in Eastern spiritual groups and the long
series of sexual scandals that eventually, and with increasing frequency, were
made public about supposedly celibate gurus, bringing them down "…one
after another like a game of dominos." This woman wrote: "Hardly a
month went by without hearing of a new scandal involving, in the end, almost
every Hindu, Buddhist and Jain teacher in America."
Writer Jack Kornfield, in "Sex Lives of the Gurus," published in the Yoga
Journal of July/August 1985, came to a similar conclusion. In this
article, Kornfield reported the results of a survey he had conducted among 54
spiritual teachers. Of these, 34 were found to have engaged in sexual
relations with students.
For some
gurus, the rapaciousness and corruption were very evident. The cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
attracted thousands of educated, mostly middle- and upper-middle-class
devotees. With money supplied by devotees, the organization purchased a ranch
in Oregon in the early 1980's,
but his ostentatious
display of wealth, drug use, promotion of sexual promiscuity, and eventual
investigation for multiple felonies including arson, attempted murder, drug
smuggling, and voter fraud in the nearby town of Antelope resulted in his deportation from the U.S. in 1985. While
Rajneesh has since died, he has been re-branded as "Osho." His
teaching still retains a following, and books of his writings are widely
available. Nor
is this tendency toward radical abuse of power limited to eastern teachers.
The leader of a dynamic Jewish revival movement, Shlomo Carlebach, was known by
many women during his lifetime to be rapacious and predatory in his sexual
behavior. This long and painful history, accompanied by an equally long
history of denial and rationalization, are described in "A Paradoxical
Legacy: Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach's Shadow Side," by Sarah Blustain (Lilith
Magazine Vol 23 No. 1 Spring 1998, available online at http://www.rickross.com/reference/lubavitch/lubavitch12.html).
Carlebach, who was descended from a prestigious orthodox lineage and who was
educated in orthodox institutions, was famous for abolishing many of the
barriers between men and women that exist in orthodox Judaism, in particular
the barriers to women's full participation in Jewish ritual life. Many of
these barriers focus on prohibitions on physical contact, and while former
followers acknowledge many life-affirming results from increased involvement by
women in traditional Jewish practices, "Reb Shlomo" also became
famous for, among other things, prolonged, emotionally charged hugs that could
last for many minutes. His activities did not stop with hugs, however. His
sexual involvement with women followers, which involved uninvited touching,
groping, and worse, and constituting what we now understand to be assault, went
on with girls as young as 12. One of the most poignant instances of a
spiritual community whose behavior diverged radically from its stated
principles involves the many case of physical, sexual and emotional abuse that
occurred in the late sixties, the seventies, and into the early eighties in
boarding schools run by the Hare Krishna movement (ISKON). The children of
devotees were often placed in these ISKON-run schools, called gurukulas,
to allow their parents freedom to work for the organization. Many of the
children of devotees placed in these schools were often subjected to treatment
that can only be described as torture at the hands of sadistic
teachers--teachers who were were, moreover, strict vegetarians and
practitioners of the many rounds of mantra recitation that is a central part of
ISKON observance. Children were beaten, deprived of food, locked in dark
rooms, exploited for cheap labor, and routinely sexually assaulted. The
litigation resulting from these events continues to drag on in the courts, in a
way that mirrors the litigation surrounding the sexual abuse perpetrated by
hundreds of Roman Catholic priests and brothers.
Forman does acknowledge,
"many leaders of spiritual groups…have been accused of sexual and
financial abuses" (14). But in his eagerness to privilege spiritual
activities and interests, and make a case for what he sees as pervasive
discrimination against individuals who identify as spiritual seekers, he
sidesteps this very persistent feature of spiritual leaders and communities.
While acknowledging that it has become more acceptable since the 1990's to
speak openly of spiritual interests (14), Forman asserts that spiritual seekers
are marginalized by society, and suffer from "…the oppression that the
society has (unconsciously?) foisted against the spiritual [which] has tended
to make its 'members' lonely confused, and largely disenfranchised. Being
marginalized does this" (16). But spiritual seekers are not merely
marginalized, according to Forman. They are forced to live that part of their
lives covertly, fearing to speak openly about their spiritual activities and
interests for fear of stigmatization in their jobs and in other relationships:
"There's a word for fearing for your job because of your involvement in
your choice of spiritual or religious group. Discrimination. When you
cannot tell anyone [at work] of your interest in spiritual growth for fear of
being denied the next advancement, that is discrimination. When you can share
your books on new ways of growth only in secret…that is a quiet form of oppression…"
(13). This smacks of melodrama. There are many things that cannot or should
not be discussed in work situations, and this does not necessarily constitute
oppression, but rather, the kind of professional boundaries that are
appropriate in that context. Despite their marginalization, however, Forman
envisions an important mission for the decentralized grassroots spirituality
community: "If we don't' do our jobs well, we will have lost an incredible
opportunity to infuse our civilization with…more spiritual and open minded
values…we have the opportunity to sculpt and give birth to a new, holistic and
far more deeply humane way to think, see and live" (5).
Forman's book might have
been written as a descriptive exploration of a very evident and widespread
tendency toward spiritual eclecticism and experimentation. Instead, he claims
in a faintly high-handed way a kind of normativity for spiritual involvement
that glosses over the reality that many people are a-religious, not moved to
explore spiritual issues, or simply content to remain within the traditions
into which they were born. By contrast, Forman asserts, "We each
confront--for the first time in history--the world's smorgasbord of
religions, about which we all read, and from which we all must choose"
(122). Further, he says "…every educated American, indeed, every
Westerner, now faces a cacophony of religious options and choices. If they
have been relatively open-minded and diligent, they have probably explored
many" (123). Where does this leave non-seekers, those who have remained
within the religious traditions of their childhoods, or who feel no particular
need to engage in spiritual exploration?
Is the news all bad? Is
there nothing positive that can be said about the phenomenon described in Grassroots
Spirituality? Hardly. Given the fact that there will never be a way to
determine the precise truth-value of any spiritual system, a perspective that
accepts the value of many traditions is superior to those that insist on
exclusivity. The spiritual perspectives emerging from Forman's
"smorgasbord" are certainly more eclectic, more modest, and more
accepting of the idea that there is genuine value in a variety of sources, than
the totalizing claims present in traditional religious systems. Since human
beings are predisposed toward metaphysical speculation, it is preferable that
their speculations be generous and undogmatic. That being said, this would
have been a stronger book if it could have described the phenomenon in question
with less evangelical zeal, and without the implicit claim that all people must
of necessity be spiritual seekers of the experimental, grassroots variety. The
most honest thing that can be said about whatever spiritual realms may inhabit
our world is that we don't know anything about them. There is nothing
cumulative about spiritual ideas. There are no boundaries to govern spiritual
theories and imaginings, nothing to either corroborate or to invalidate. One
may accept that the River Ganges flowed from the head of Shiva, or that the
Divine Logos was embodied in the person we know as Jesus, or that sacred sounds
found in Hindu scripture can purify and free the mind from the physical
limitations of bodily existence. One may accept the existence of life force
energy, called "chi" in some traditions, which can be harnessed by
different varieties of prescribed physical movements. One may believe in the
power of focused, benevolent mental energy to heal, in protective spiritual entities,
or in the capacity of quiet mental focus on a sacred word to still and elevate
the mind. What there can be no doubt about is the fact that the very mundane,
day-to-day decisions we make about our behavior have a profound effect on the
quality of life of those around us. Spiritual practice is no substitute for
elementary decency. Questions surrounding the transcendent reality that may,
however elusive, be at the root of our existence is a ceaseless mystery. But
in the ranking of world mysteries, human nature is not far behind, and it is
conscientious human conduct on this material plane that is both the greatest
challenge and the most practicably attainable.
© 2005 Naomi Gold
Naomi Gold, Ph.D. holds
a Ph.D. in Theology from The University of St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and is currently
affiliated with the Centre for Wellness Research and Education at York University.
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