Hello and Welcome.
After a long sojourn in the wilderness I started this blog as a way of connecting with people who are interested in considering my newest and most adventurous work, The Soul’s Perilous Journey. While awaiting a suitable publisher I am posting edited excerpts of each of this book’s twelve chapters along with other material of related interest.
Some visitors may already be aware of my previous books, which include Living With Schizophrenia; Healing Schizophrenia: Using Medication Wisely; Hearing Voices: A Common Human Experience; and Unshrinking Psychosis: Understanding and Healing the Wounded Soul. While these are comprehensive and meticulously researched, since they were intended to promote a more holistic understanding of conditions like psychosis and schizophrenia their scope and subject matter was necessarily relatively narrow and specific.
After many years dedicated to them as a mental health counsellor and educator I gradually realised focusing intensively on a fairly small subsection of the human population had inadvertently caused me to neglect issues of utmost importance to all people. While certain life journeys are undoubtedly far more perilous than others, emphasising difference tends to overshadow the many things we have in common. The Soul’s Perilous Journey attends to human beings in general rather than any particular group or subdivision. It is about us – you and me – rather than someone else. And, finally, it is about mental health and well-being in their truest, deepest, and surest sense.
Widening my horizons I saw I was actually continuing a life-long search far bigger and deeper than I appreciated. I began fully expecting all that was required was to venture a little more broadly and dig a little more deeply than before and I would surely find the answers I sought. It soon became clear this quest would take me much further than anticipated and involve delving into a multitude of previously unexplored areas as well as revisiting some already familiar but seeing them with new eyes. In time I came to see the validity of Bruno Schulz’s sage observation: “When we pursue an inquiry beyond a certain depth we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life.” These beguiling mysteries led me on: never content for long with mere belief, I wanted to know.
Searching for answers, I came to understand spirituality is paradoxically both the beginning and end of a timeless quest whose goal truly is “beyond belief” – as the book’s subtitle intimates – since what we discover far transcends everything we think we know or are even able to imagine when we first set out. One of the most important lessons I learned is that it is ultimately an inner journey to which we are called. During the years of working on The Soul’s Perilous Journey I often wondered if I would ever reach the end. Now I am sure I won’t because, as Tolkien recognized in his wisdom, “the Road goes ever on and on”.
The Soul’s Perilous Journey offers the kind of guidance I often yearned for during my many long years of troubled searching. I hope reading it will be as rewarding for you as researching and writing it has been for me. Engaging sincerely with the issues it addresses might even prove life-changing. While not claiming to provide conclusive answers to eternal human questions, open-minded readers are sure to find in this book much food for thought, and hopefully insight and inspiration, as it draws from the deepest wellsprings of human wisdom, ancient and modern.