The Seat of the Soul
by Gary Zukav
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gary ZukavEdition: Paperback
Published: 1990-01-15
ISBN: 067169507X
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Book Reviews of The Seat of the Soul
Book Review: Maybe for you, but definitely not for me.
Summary: 2 Stars
Our spiritual paths are wrought and forged from the crucibles of our lives; however, the wonderful thing is that there are also more innocuous reformations for that as well-books, movies, music, people, etc. Everything in life we experience is a rendering for our soul and our spiritual path. As we become conscious of this it is more congruously applicable. For the reason why I have decided to sojourn with that topic is due to the devastating feedback this book has received. It is not that the book should receive five stars or one, the issue is that if you feel that this book is resonant with your soul do not allow the reviews to obviate you from that position. Spirituality is the individual pursuit for one to understand the essences of life, it is not like religion, there is no solidarity.
For me this book was extremely thought provoking, I have thirty pages of notes subsequent to my reading. While I disagree with Zukav on about seventy percent of the book, merely reading it caused me to scribe my own interpretations of the topics that of which I disagreed. Unfortunately, my cerebral spam filter did not allow much of the book to be applied to my base program. I often times found myself pondering, in opposition, more than reading. I drifted off far more than I have with any other book and was "literaturally" placed in a comatose state much of the time. It was indeed, at times, strenuous to overcome the extreme disparity of ideologies between Zukav and me.
Now, I will delve into my severe disagreements:
- I disagreed emphatically with his interpretations of karma and reincarnation, and at times they were quite odious to me. His rendering of how a new life will pay the karmic ancestral debt of its previous life is not something I can fathom. For I feel that we "reap what we sow" in life whether we realize it or not. This may sound repugnant to the previous sentence, but I personally do not believe in karma.
- There was reference that a drunk driver being judged and sentenced is acceptable, but individuals who beat you nearly to death and are not prosecuted is non-judgmental good karma. If that makes any sense at all please further elaborate or correct me if I am wrong.
- I thought his coin of marriage as a "spiritual partnership" was a derivative of spiritual ingenuity and I now refer to it as that, but I found myself disgusted by some of his perceptions of what constitutes that. Specifically, I will refer to the last paragraph on page 125 and its culmination on page 126. To sum up his ignorant ramblings there, he basically says that it is ok for those two individuals to get a divorce, separate after six months or twenty years because the soul knows what it needs and that is acceptable. To me this is a New Age advocacy for promiscuity (which is a sad misrepresentation for the rest of us that are of New Age Spirituality), a dissolution of the concept of marriage and morally disingenuous and insolvent. Personally, if your love cannot bound you with your spiritual partner for longer than six months or twenty years then you have chosen the wrong individual.
- Should psychologist stop working? Zukav believes so, he says the issues that the psychologist work with are merely karmic debts and issues of an individual's past life. Should we not try to help them with the issues that they have? Are we not here to help, aid and guide each other?
- I also disagree with his theories that we escalate through species as we reincarnate and his perceptions of the elements of the soul vs. personality.
In closing on my disagreements I will say that I have found throughout the book that it has been proliferate on any given topic that what I agree with is contiguous to what I disagree with. Whether it be neighboring sentences, paragraphs or even chapters. This book was the first that I have ever experienced this very confusing paradigm. Overall, the vast disparity has given me the opportunity to further define my opinions and ideology on subjects that I had not yet given much thought to.
While I have found much of the book devoid of any possibility of resonance with my soul I have found a few things:
- The chapters of "Intention I" and "Relationships" were, for the most part, applicable to the way I feel and at times stimulated a state of spiritual euphoria.
- Inverting the pyramid to represent the calibration of life down to the soul elicited much enlightenment for me. Especially, being a conspiracy theory reader, seeing the pyramid used to represent the Caste System and the hierarchy of Earth so often. If this is a coin manifested by Zukav I do not know, but it was the first time that I have come across this representation.
- There was one quote extracted from the book that I was attuned to: "So powerful is the energy of the soul....In the creation of the personality, the soul calibrates itself, to take on the human experience."
In the end, the best books on spirituality that I have read are the ones written by the lesser known writers. Is it that the National Best Seller writers have just become avaricious and negate that very diagnoses? At times the unknown writers have a view that is not tainted by gold, and, at least by my perception, their writings are not commensurate to the National Best Seller writers-in a good way.
Summary of The Seat of the Soul
Gary Zukav's American Book Award-winning The Dancing Wu Li Masters masterfully introduces the layman to quantum and particle physics, as well as Einstein's relativity theories. With a similar dose of amiable, easy-to-understand prose, Zukav guides readers into the spiritual realm in his bestselling The Seat of the Soul.Zukav questions the Western model of the soul, alleging that the human species is in the midst of a great transformation, evolving from a species that pursues power based upon the perceptions of the five senses--"external power"--to one that pursues power based upon perceptions of the soul--"authentic power." He believes that humans are immortal souls first, physical beings second, and that once we become conscious of this transformation--once we align our personalities with our soul--we will stimulate our spiritual growth and become better people in the process. This insightful, lucid synthesis of modern psychology and new-age principles has been described as the "physics of the soul." Who better to explain such heady concepts than Gary Zukav?
Ready to attain a higher level of understanding? Author Gary Zukav can help you evolve into a multisensory being, one who "values love more than the physical world." As shown in The Dancing Wu Li Masters, his bestselling exploration of physics, Zukav has a gift for presenting complex, even mind-boggling concepts in clearly worded and reasoned logic. In Seat of the Soul, he leads you on an inspirational and potentially life-changing journey into the seemingly intangible realm of the spirit. Reading in a calm, soothing voice he explains why increased sensory perception will mark the next phase of human evolution, how the power of choice can change your existence, and what you can do to infuse your life with more compassion, trust, and understanding. (Running time: 3 hours, 2 cassettes) --George Laney
With the same extraordinary skill that he used to demystify scientific abstraction and the new physics, Gary Zukay, the award-winning author of The Dancing Wu Li Masters, here takes us on a brilliant and penetrating exploration of the new phase of evolution we have now entered.
With lucidity and elegance, Zukav explains that we are evolving from a species that pursues power based upon the perceptions of the five senses -- external power -- into a species that pursues authentic power -- power that is based upon the perceptions and values of the spirit. He shows how the pursuit of external power has produced our survival-of-the-fittest understanding of evolution, generated conflict between lovers, communities, and superpowers, and brought us to the edge of destruction.
Using his scientist's eye and philosopher's heart, Zukav shows how infusing the activities of life with reverence, compassion, and trust makes them come alive with meaning and purpose. He illustrates how the emerging values of the spirit are changing marriages into spiritual partnerships, psychology into spiritual psychology, and transforming our everyday lives. The Seat of the Soul describes the remarkable journey to the spirit that each of us is on.
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