Book Review - searching for spiritual experience in today's world

Piers Moore Ede “All kinds of magic”, Bloomsbury, 2010, ISBN 978 1 4088 0962 4

Piers Moore Ede came to prominence with his first book, a travel guide searching the world for wild honey and this second work details a deeper inner search to fill his spiritual void. Piers has seen many glimpses of “the holy” in different cultures but never enough to have an life changing effect on him. This book is a detailed description of his exploration as he searches for deeper meaning to life through spiritual experience. Being English and having studied in the USA he rejects Christianity out of hand and like so many westerners before him sets off to India with a conviction that the subcontinent has a spirituality permeating all levels of society which has been lost in the west. Nothing though is as simple as it first seems as his meeting with a leading figure in India's secular society shows.

He is a very sensitive writer and having previously suffered from depression is both analytical and descriptive of all that he both thinks and experiences during this long journey of exploration. In this quest he meets holy men and women from Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic traditions and through their mystical insights he finds similarities in the experience of reality from the mystical vision and world view. He admits that this is frequently irrational and the book contains debates between his experiencing self and his critically analytic self as to what is really going on. He meets prophets, mediums, faith healers and oracles all of whom are both revered and feared in their societies yet all seem to fit in to the prevailing world view and what they do works for the people in their communities. He even examines the use of mind enhancing plant extracts (drugs) in religious traditions to raise awareness and bring enlightenment – which very reluctantly he decides to try.

The descriptions of all his experiences are meticulously recorded and written with great sensitivity. By the end of the book he recognises that he has been changed by the experiences and has become a different person.

It is interesting to note that not once does he look at religion or systems of belief per se – he is only interested in the experiential dimension; he wants to know and feel holiness and if he can accept the experience as real then he is prepared to be changed by it. But he is not prepared to take the word of others as to what he should do or feel and so he avoids the official religious castes.

He regards shamans as the most helpful assistants on his journey rather than priests. He discovers that these mystics often sit lightly to their religious tradition and are often regarded with suspicion by others in their faith groups (cf reactions of Muslims to Sufism)

His blind spot is that he totally ignores the western expressions of spirituality found in the various branches of Christianity, all of which have their spiritual, charismatic and mystical threads alongside the more orthodox. Perhaps his English upbringing has inoculated him from seeing Christianity as any more than a cultural shell leftover from centuries past. His analysis of all protestantism since the reformation sees it as dry, intellectual and wordy. He believes that the reformers squeezed all the holiness (or the magic) out of the religion.

This book is a good read. The descriptions of life in India took me back to my months there in the eighties. His sympathetic portraits of the characters he meets and the chance encounters that often made him take interesting detours in his journey give the whole story a lively sense of discovery and adventure. Ultimately I disagree with many of his conclusions, but he and I started and have ended up in very different places. But I thoroughly enjoyed sharing the journey with him.

(This book review first appeared in the journal of Spectrum)