I finished the book that my cousin lent me, Initiation.

There were aspects of the book I found astounding, and some aspects I found annoying and had me skipping whole sections, if not chapters.

My cousin also bought a copy for her husband, but he stopped reading it not far into it (he's an open-minded rationalistic agnostic, and tolerates many of my cousin's nutty out-there (even for me) ideas and wanderings. But not this book.). After I got further through the book, I recommended that he could start reading it again, but start at chapter 25, almost halfway into the book. That's when ideas start coming up that I found interesting, and thought he could appreciate in an intellectual way.

The book is supposedly autobiographical and vaguely outlines her spiritual journey in Europe in the early part of the 20th century, although context is never fully established. I didn't like her writing style and I didn't think she is a good storyteller. It felt very egotistical to me and aside from the astounding spiritual insights and ideas, I never got drawn in.

This (dead link) write up covers a lot of the book's faults and handles them more intelligently than I ever could (the book was intriguing enough for me to go looking things up about it). I think that website also helped me establish some context that made things make more sense, namely that she was in Germany during WWII, so when she talks about the "enemy", she means . . . us, the Allies, the winners, the people who weren't gassing Jews in death camps. And the post-war part, she is in what soon became East Germany, a-ha! It makes much more sense now!

Everything about geometrical shapes, astrology and "history" and races – Sons of Man and Sons of God – I thought was total, blood-boiling crap.

The bulk of the second half of the book is set in Egypt thousands of years ago, where ostensibly the author remembers in minute detail her previous life as the queen of a pharaoh and a spiritual "initiate". That's where a lot of the interesting stuff lies.

I think I might skim through the book again and pick out the bits that were particularly interesting. It may make a good summing up of my own thoughts and ideas.

But really, little of it was new to me. Most of the resonance was affirmation, rather than breakthrough. "Oh cool, she found that, too", "Well, duh!". Maybe if I read this 20 years ago, it may have made a much bigger impact. As it is, Richard Bach's Illusions, given to me by a woman named Darcy as a first year in college, was one of the first books that started opening doors for me, and I've given a copy of it to someone as late as this year.

There were a couple of new things that I got out of it, although different from how she experienced it.

I won't paraphrase her inspiration because it was completely different from what it inspired in me. But my idea was to visualize that it's not me that is breathing air that sustains my life, with an emphasis on me as the actor of living. But that I'm just a manifestation that formed out of the basic fabric of the universe, and that when I inhale, it's really the universe that is the actor that is exhaling a life force into me.

And the idea of just being a manifestation formed out of the basic fabric of the universe is analogized or symbolized by star formation or galaxy formation. The basic stuff of the universe is there, and when conditions are right, stars are formed. When enough stars are formed, conditions are right for them to interact to create a galaxy.

I don't know what the basic stuff is of what we are, but whatever that energy is, and no matter how it got married to physical forms, that's just the way it is, it is a part of the universe, whether in a manifested state or not. The physical form thing is just how the manifestation of the universe's energy occurred on this planet. It came from it, it goes back to it, and when the human species goes extinct, as the dinosaurs did, c'est la vie.

One last point of particular interest to me about the book was the chapter of the queen's actual initiation in ancient Egypt and how aspects of her description sounded to me very much like aspects of the death bardos as described in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I wonder if anyone has thought of that.

FRIDAY, JULY 16, 5:31 p.m.