One could go a long way with the metaphor of the song of the whales. It is said that whales actually sing melodies and that these melodies communicate messages to all the schools of whales around the world.  The songs are long and slow, but gradually, as the messages get around, they change everywhere in the world of whales; their changing comes to be assimilated in the sonic history of the tribes, and the new songs nurture songs yet to be clucked and hummed and chanted by future generations of these mammals who take refuge in the deep. Longer than a song, here we are engaged in a drama among progressed apes who delight in the play of the nine dramatic moods of classical Indian theater, the rasas:  love, vanity, laughter, anger, sorrow, disgust, pity, astonishment, and peace.

This book is a small sign that the message of a religious dialogue among the people of South Asia, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere (among others) is beginning to hear some themes and variations from the experience of a tiny minority of "divers into the deep" that are now beginning to change the way people communicate about spirituality all over the world.   What a small and intrepid group of individuals was able to accomplish over the past two centuries (one thinks of Csoma de Koros; of Giuseppe Tucci; of Evans-Wentz; of Lama Govinda; of Swami Abhishiktananda and Jules Monchanin) has now entered the "mainstream" of fashionable western culture, for better or worse.
In particular, the small army of translators that has emerged over the past 200 years has made available to readers in nearly all the languages of the world the closely guarded secrets of Tibetan Buddhism, of Kashmiri Shaivism, of Tantra, of Shamanism, of yoga.
In these following pages a descendent of Italian Guelf warriors, settled in the hill towns of Campania for eight centuries to become expert in farming, stuccoing and woodworking, begins to pick up a clucked and chanted melody unfamiliar to the ear, but in some strange mode already articulated in the heart. We hill dwellers have much in common, and there is little that does not escape the penetrating glance of those who have to keep their attention on both the distant horizon and the flinty trail underfoot.