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Most of Sam Keen's writings could be called quests. This autobiographical work is at once a personal history, a cultural meditation, and a poetic brief on the dynamics of rebirth. It is a sequel to To A Dancing God wherein Keen described the beginnings of a new religious consciousness following his divorce and departure from a career in teaching. Some no doubt will be perplexed by the author's psychological strip-tease show within these pages. Others might be taken aback by his refusal to be identified with those human potential movements promising a heaven on earth via self-transformation.
Beginnings Without End charts a tur
Most of Sam Keen's writings could be called quests. This autobiographical work is at once a personal history, a cultural meditation, and a poetic brief on the dynamics of rebirth. It is a sequel to To A Dancing God wherein Keen described the beginnings of a new religious consciousness following his divorce and departure from a career in teaching. Some no doubt will be perplexed by the author's psychological strip-tease show within these pages. Others might be taken aback by his refusal to be identified with those human potential movements promising a heaven on earth via self-transformation.
Beginnings Without End charts a turning point in Sam Keen's life — an emotional, spiritual, and physical reversal of his being. He uses the cycles of the seasons as a poetic way of reflecting upon that psychic death and the renewals that followed: "The key to understanding everything is: There is no key to understanding everything." Only intimations of grace and meaning through the drama of one's days. Only several trips through fear and trembling, pain and anger, loneliness and solitude, madness and alienation. Only a coming to terms with fater and mother.
We thought we had Sam Keen's theology all figured out. Now he puts himself and us in the dark with statements on how he does not believe in getting it all together, living without attachments, being totally open, experiencing instant cures or achieving reincarnation. Keen believes in what he calls "an Easter sandwich-life (death) life." Goodbye Gnostic dreams and utopian schemes. "Only flesh can break the captivation of abstraction."
A chapter entitled "A New Self Borning: Incarnation — The Thoughtful Body and the Carnal Mind" is a crucial account of Keen's homecoming to his own flesh: "As I identify with my body, I see the insignificance of all those substitute monuments to immortality — hoarded wealth, opulent machines, political empires, youthful facades — that we death-defying American Prometheans create." The body brings a new sense of human limitation and imperfection — plus a revitalized appreciation of grace within the actual confines of experience. One cannot speak of ecology, politics, aging, or hope apart from the body. Keen loops these subjects together but refuses to tie everything nicely together with a ribbon.
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Manufacturer: HarperCollins
Release date: 3 October 1977
ISBN-10 : 0060642653 |
ISBN-13: 9780060642655
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