I'm so biased that I held off on writing this review for a long time, but seeing no one else yet commenting I must say this book is really great and deserves to be discovered by more people! Sooner or later it will be I trust, and a factor for its slow discovery has just been the expensive university press that makes this not an easy candidate for store promotions or book group reading lists. And sure enough I'm biased too, because on one level it's largely about me and my extended circle of friends in Cambridge Massachusetts. We're mystics, spiritual misfits, and radical visionaries, and hey, how often do you get a Columbia sociologist to go native with your esoteric subculture, taking notes while making friends, hinting that it might become a book someday, until there it is years later! We were incredibly validated and respected by Courtney, who interestingly didn't tell us when our lives finally got published, feeling a bit sensitive for how we might react and figuring that if we really were tuned into the universe we'd find out for ourselves. Well sure enough, I did! Summer 2010 I was getting a big intuitive tap on the shoulder to integrate and share my past life discoveries more, thinking that I needed to be in print somewhere. Then googling I find wait, who is this guy Eric saying things I said, do I have a rival doppelganger?! Oh wait, that's me, Courtney picked a pseudonym and I'm already published! Talk about instant manifestation... and I always liked the name Eric!
But that's just the human interest level, which is handled candidly, cheerfully, and without a lot of ego or belief requirement. This book is satisfying and fun and fair to everyone in the genre of spiritual pop culture sharing, and still it goes far deeper to earn real academic merit. Courtney places our stories in the fullness of social context, for the evolution of New Thought and New Age values in America going back to classic roots in William James "Varieties of Religious Experience" and beyond. Our mystical experiences discussion group met at the Swedenborg Chapel in Harvard square in the shadow of Harvard's William James hall, so she recognized a beautiful conjunction of timeless influences in our existence and wrote intelligently from that place. In fact, few of my friends had ever heard of the complexity of antecedents for our subculture which this book examines, but I had because I'm a fan of such history and have long since extolled the virtues of America's long fascination with and development of progressive spirituality. The 19th century in greater New England was every bit as mind-blowing as what's going on today anywhere, from James' father Henry joining Ralph Waldo Emerson to import the teachings of the 18th century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, to Andrew Jackson Davis saying the spirit of Swedenborg was along with Galen guiding him to become the godfather of Spiritualism and move from the Catskills to Cambridge, and the rise of movements as diverse as Theosophy, Christian Science, and Mormonism straining everyone's imagination. The US has been a hotbed of radical consciousness more than most people know for longer than they know, and yet it permeates our culture. When self-proclaimed rational types decry the surveyed majorities in this country that profess beliefs in angels or miracles or God, they have no concept of the stunning breadth and depth of philosophical movements that they are dismissing behind those simple surface statistics.
I'm not even a deep student of all this history either, being an intuitive appreciator who prizes books like Courtney's to educate me. "The New Metaphysicals" is right up there for me with great windows on the astounding under-appreciated contributions of the United States to the evolution of consciousness, like Eugene Taylor's "Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America" and Mitch Horowitz's "Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped our Nation". That's why I'm saying this book is a must-read for a variety of audiences, from spiritual explorers to trend followers and setters to progressive sociologists and psychologists, and not just because I'm in it and my ego got tickled.
(Incidentally, my friends and I have come a long way since Courtney's interviews were done around 2002, and in no small part thanks to her respect at a key point in our lives. Our truths have only become more true, things we may have talked about tentatively in the book have become more solid and defined, and the diversity of spiritual evolution marches on. Courtney changed names and altered some details to take the focus off of us, but for example the past life I talked about has expanded into full confidence as I work now with reincarnation researcher Walter Semkiw. In short, things are cooking in your neighborhoods to envision a peaceful enlightened global society far beyond the usual headlines that may depress you for making humanity look stupid and violent, and a lot of our movements can be found on meetup.com these days, a grassroots networking website that has grown enormously since its humble roots in bringing together post-9/11 healing support groups.)
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