“The awakened mind is free flowing, natural and well rounded. It’s like Teflon — nothing sticks. On the other hand, the unawakened, ordinary mind is rigid, limited, and sticky like flypaper; the ordinary mind has corners and sharp jagged edges on which ideas get caught, hanging us up. Dualistic thinking is like Velcro; it takes two to tangle. Unitary vision is more like a crystal through which all forms of light can pass unimpeded.”
— Awakening the Buddha Within
“The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.”
I finished the novel Muhammad yesterday and have been pondering what to say about it. I found the story interesting and well-told. I’ve read a number of other books by Deepak Chopra and like the way he writes.
I think I’ll let smarter, more knowledgable folks review the book. No shortage there. So, what can I say about the novel?
If you were a kid, or have a kid, or you’ve been to a kid’s party, you’ve seen those guys that make balloon animals. Before blowing up those long skinny balloons they twist and shape into giraffes and stuff, they usually stretch the balloon. And as they inflate the balloon, they sometimes bend and turn it.
That’s what much of my reading has been like in the last few years. My thinking gets stetched and expanded, often to the breaking point.
One guy makes a hat, the next a horse. I enjoy them all and try to remember it’s all the same air inside the different colored balloons.
I knew almost nothing about the Prophet Muhammad. Now I know more. And maybe a little about the people who follow his teachings.
I fear many of those who would discuss this with me a) haven’t read the book and b) would be intent on explaining why Islam is wrong. (In their world, there is only one balloon and it’s blue and round.)
For that reason, I’ll limit comments to those who have read the book. So be prepared with a specific page reference.
Last week I read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman. I’ve been sorting out my thoughts about the book but I’m not there yet. I think it’s going to take a while. But I want to get something down here while the story (and my impressions) are still fresh in my mind. So, this will be one of those stream-of-consciousness posts (not a real review of the book).
GMJ&TSC is fiction. It is the story (a story) about the life and death of Jesus and his twin brother Christ (hardly a spoiler since it’s the title).
I found the style of the book very different from Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The book read very quickly. The chapters are very short with little or no character development.
To me it felt as though Pullman was trying to condense the stories most Christians grew up with to the bare “facts” (The Childhood of Jesus, Jesus Scandalises the Scribes, The Death of John, etc). Now that I think about it, each chapter read like a Cliffs Note.
Here’s how Pullman describes the book on the back of the dust cover:
“The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”
TRUTH and HISTORY –and the relationship between the two– is a common theme throughout GMJ&TSC:
“If the way to the Kingdom of God is to be opened, we who know must be prepared to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was.” (pg 99)
Deeply “religious” people are often offended when someone takes liberties with their story. (Jesus Christ Superstar, the Dutch cartoonist’s depiction of Mohammed, etc) And if you happen to believe that every word of the King James Bible is literally true and an exact account of the life and death of Jesus, you probably won’t find this book a good read.
If on the other hand, you aren’t ready to stop thinking about such things, you might. I know that I did. Here are some questions it raised for me: