Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Jorge Ferrer, PhD, is former chair of the department of east-west psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is currently a core faculty member there. He is author of Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, and Participation and the Mystery: Transpersonal Essays in Psychology, Education, and Religion. He is the coeditor of an anthology titled, The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, and Religious Studies. He is...

“I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience,” Kazuo Ishiguro says of The Remains of the Day in his Paris Review interview (“The Art of Fiction,” No. 196). “One of the ways I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internationally – in this case, the English butler.” “Jeeves was a big influence.” This is a necessary genuflection. No literary butler...

In the autumn of 1956, Japan’s most renowned literary critic, the 54-year-old Hideo Kobayashi, engaged in taidan ( a “conversation” to be published in a magazine) with 31-year-old rising literary star Yukio Mishima. Early that year Mishima’s novel, “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion,” had been published to widespread acclaim, following a series of best-selling novels such as “The Sound of Waves,” that had already been turned into films. In the course...

ADAM PHILLIPS’S recent biography Becoming Freud recounts a brief anecdote, one that conceals a meta-commentary, a key to how the book will want to frame its subject and his audacious project. In 1936, Freud is approached by a writer wishing to become his official biographer. In reply, the great theorist unloads, in rapid succession, some half-dozen reasons why he won’t consent: To be a biographer you must tie yourself up in lies,...