Spiritwalk Books
Selections of the Month
June 1999
- by John Tarrant
About The Light Inside the Dark by John Tarrant
- Try smiling at the morning birds while in the grip of profound grief. The effort of just
- turning up the corners of your lips is enough to send you back to the oblivion of sleep.
- Escape, John Tarrant tells us, is not the answer; neither is just getting over it. In a
- lyrical fusion of Jungian psychology and Zen Buddhism, Zen teacher Tarrant narrates
- the human descent into darkness and, through meditative living, the subsequent ascent
- to the light. Like a nonfiction version of Dante's Divine Comedy, Tarrant acts as our guide
- on a journey through myths and stories, crushing experience, and heroic drama, into the
- maws of despair and out again into the light of compassionate living. Coming face to face
- with our interior troubles is the catalyst, Tarrant says, for liberating ourselves into the
- moment. But Tarrant is no glib optimist. The ascent can be as treacherous as the fall and
- demands constant attention. Second to none in modern Zen literature, Tarrant will bring
- you smiling into the light, even if it takes a trip through hell to do it.
~ Brian Bruya
About the Author, John Tarrant
- John Tarrant is a psychotherapist and director of Zen training. Born in Tasmania, his
- first spiritual interests were eclectic, shaped by English literature, the Latin mass, a
- nd Australian Aboriginal culture. A student of Buddhism who has trained in several major
- traditions, Tarrant is a lineage holder in Zen and teaches extensively in both the United
- States and Australia. In addition, he holds a Ph.D. in psychology and practices
- psychotherapy with a special interest in healing and the arts. He is a member of the
- faculty of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona at Tucson
- and teaches meditation to physicians. He lives in Santa Rosa,
California.
What People are saying about The Light Inside the Dark by John Tarrant
- Publishers Weekly
"To accept Tarrant's invitation to search for 'the light inside the dark' is to become - swept up in a torrent of evocative and lyrical images which move seamlessly from
- the mythology of ancient Greece through the humorous asceticism of Zen masters to
- the passionate pain of modern psychotherapeutic patients."
Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United States
"John Tarrant's subject is the unbearable lightness of being but also its inconsolable - heaviness, and his thinking about the relation between these two poles of spirit and
- soul is extraordinarily rich. He inoculates one against the wish for a quick fix in the
- spiritual or imaginative life. His work is useful to poets in the way Bachelard's Poetics
- of Space or Hyde's The Gift is useful."
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., author of Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal
"Simply the best book that I have read in the past ten years. The Light Inside the Dark - cuts through the many contemporary illusions about the journey which is a life and offers
- a compass that can guide us to our true home. I want to give it to everyone I know."
- Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart
"An exquisite book which carries your deepest longings and loves with the lyrical voice - of a nightingale. This is one of the best guides yet to the breaking open of the human
- heart, to vulnerability, eternal spirit, and the mountains
dancing."
MOMENTS OF HELPLESSNESS
"The journey into a life of awareness begins for most of us in a moment
of helplessness. When our lives are going well, we do not feel any need
to change them, or ourselves. We are content to go on as we are,
coasting, serene as planets in their orbits, or caribou on seasonal
migration. Our habits of mind are sufficient to sustain us through the
days. We are unperturbed, and half asleep.
"Then a crisis arrives: a child falls ill, a lover disappoints, or some
vast, neutral power of the earth, such as a hurricane or a fire, strips
us of everything we have relied upon to stay the same. We will have
other descents in life but this first one has a terrifying vividness.
Change is sure, and change brings suffering, which is an inner as well
as outer event. Under the impact of a crisis, images we have worshipped,
beliefs we have cherished, also break and fall away. We lose not only
houses, photo albums, and people dear to us, but our idea of what life
is. We find ourselves plunging unprepared, a weakness in every limb.
"Yet this unexpected fall is also a gift, not to be refused ~ an
initiation ordeal preparing us for new life. The enveloping dark strips
us of our sleepyheadedness, our assumption that who we now are and the
life we now know will be enough. The night is not interested in our
achievements. Pitching headlong into this first descent of the journey,
we struggle, we suffer untellable grief, but we also wake up ~ we begin
to see ourselves and our lives for what they are. We cannot return to
the way it used to be, even yesterday. We realize that we have no
choice: before we can rise up, we must go down and through."
From The Light Inside the Dark by John Tarrant
- Listen to Lux Viviens at Broadcast.com
- (Requires RealAudio)
- (You may want to fast forward through the introductory advert)
- (and the first 2 minutes of this selection)
Make Your Purchase at Amazon.com
Order The Light Inside the Dark by John Tarrant
Order Lux Viviens (Living Light): The Music of Hildegard von Bingen
Check out our earlier recommendations
April 98 July 1998 August 98 February 99 March 99 April 99 May 99 June 99
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