Self-Transformation and the Oracular offers a model for authentic self-change based upon the wisdom traditions of the East and the West. While supported and sustained by serious scholarship, it is neither abstract in its manner nor academic in its mode. It presents a genuinely dramatic challenge to the reader: to examine and to test oneself by consulting the preeminent oracles of the East and the West -- the I Ching (the first of the Chinese Classics) and the Tarot (a deck of seventy-eight iconic image cards).
This book offers an approach to the life of self-inquiry from the spiritual or genuinely trans-personal perspective. To date, our culture has not encouraged self-inquiry outside those avenues provided by the psychological and religious establishments and presided over by practicing psychologists and clergy. This book provides the serious reader with a thoroughly intelligent and practical framework for self-study through discovering how one may come to live in accord with Ultimacy and fulfill his or her own destiny.
Unique to Self-Transformation and the Oracular is Professor Anderson’s application of the distinction between spirituality and psychology. In keeping with the Asian regard for human nature as fundamentally good, he identifies selfishness as the dysfunctional stance that unavoidably yields the unnatural condition of anxious worry as its result. The longstanding Western accounts of anxiety as either essential to our humanity (psychology) or as a congenital defect of our nature as a result of inherited sin (Christian Theology) are here rejected as mistaken and misleading. The ultimate aim of all self-cultivation is discoverable only in the individual’s transcendence of such self-misunderstandings. The ending of captivity by the false is the precondition for the disclosure of the true. Thus escape from any negative entanglements rests wholly on the individual’s coming to participate in an increasingly aware and attuned relation to Ultimacy. This unique possibility for human existence is one that psychology either denies or ignores and theological intellectualism only obscures.
Throughout this book, Professor Anderson attempts to awaken in his reader a deeper appreciation of Western spirituality through investigation of the genius of the Asian tradition. Thus his emphasis never rests with the merely informative or theoretical, but consistently encourages us to risk the practice of self-inquiry and to encounter the genuine possibility of self-transformation that only authentic spiritual activity can provide.
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ISBN13 (TP) 978-1-4415-1749-4
ISBN13 (HB) 978-1-4415-1750-0