AT HELL'S GATE

A Soldier's Journey from War to Peace

by Claude Anshin Thomas

(Shambhala Publications, 2004, hardcover $19.95)

In At Hell's Gate, Claude Anshin Thomas tells the story of his courageous transformation from trained killer to holy drifter. During the Vietnam War, under the relentless pressures of training, Thomas decided to be what the Army wanted: a good soldier. After boot camp, assigned as a door gunner on an assault helicopter, his job was to fire until the enemy was destroyed. He made no distinctions—men, women, children, animals—he didn't stop until nothing moved. After only a few months of combat, Thomas was already responsible for hundreds of deaths.

Decades later, struggling to overcome the fear, addiction, and anguish that had shattered his life, he reluctantly attended a retreat with Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh at the urging of a counselor. Thomas was so terrified of Vietnamese people and so plagued by attacks of panic at the prospect of being unarmed in the midst of “the enemy” that he insisted on doing a full perimeter check of the area before entering the retreat center. But when the gentle monk walked in to begin the retreat, Thomas broke down. The presence of this beautiful man so deeply conflicted with his own inhuman attitude toward the Vietnamese, it triggered a cascade of horrifying memories, suppressed since his time in combat.

Later, Hanh invited Thomas to spend time at Plum Village, his community in France, but instructed him to live among the Vietnamese students rather than with the Westerners. By forcing Thomas to confront his deepest horrors, Thich Nhat Hanh helped him learn how the choices he had made and the suffering he had inflicted in the past affected his life in the present.

Today, Thomas is a wandering Buddhist monk in the lineage of Roshi Bernie Glassman. He roams across continents teaching Oneness, mindfulness, and nonviolence, helping veterans and nonveterans alike realize that the demons within us that we refuse to face are the real source of violence and hatred in this world. And what gives his perspective so much weight is that it carries the rare and undeniable authority of one who has seen firsthand the extremes of both good and evil that lie in the human soul.

Jeff Carreira

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS

Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations

by James Surowiecki

(Doubleday, 2004, hardcover $24.95)

In 1906, eight hundred people at a country fair placed wagers on the weight of the meat on a living ox. Their diverse guesses averaged 1,197 pounds. The poor ox, cut up, weighed 1,198. This is only the first of dozens of remarkable stories pulled together by James Surowiecki to demonstrate that many people making independent judgments can generate a surprising level of collective intelligence. In fact, under the right conditions, the aggregate wisdom of groups consistently outperforms that of their individual members—even experts.

Surowiecki, a financial columnist for The New Yorker, explores the economic implications of group wisdom in some detail, and he touches briefly on its implications for democracy. Unfortunately, however, he does not explore the role of consciousness—collective fields, higher-order intelligence, ESP, the power of focused attention—as factors in group wisdom. Instead, he believes that most collective wisdom derives from the aggregation of diverse, independent, free individuals making rational, self-interested choices. And he also tries to understand cooperation, duty, and people's sense of fairness as mere expressions of self-interest. But might communion actually be a natural state of affairs, from which many things—including collective wisdom—can arise?

Yet his pioneering work is vital to anyone intending to further the conscious evolution of civilization. He helps us understand our uncanny collective ability to accurately estimate present-time realities and future possibilities, to successfully coordinate our collective affairs without direction, to generate wisdom in small groups, and to cocreate collaborative systems that evoke trust and fairness. And he helps us see why we so often fail to do these things. Indeed, this fascinating, story-filled book just might inspire our innate self-interest and our drive for self-transcendence to find new ways to dance powerfully together into collective transformation.

Tom Atlee

MESSAGES FROM AMMA

In the Language of the Heart

Edited by Janine Canan

(Celestial Arts, 2004, hardcover $14.95)

Messages from Amma is a beautiful collection of quotations taken from the talks and writings of Mata Amritanandamayi, or Amma, best known as the God-intoxicated hugging saint who travels unrelentingly throughout the world to embrace countless thousands of people in a seemingly endless outpouring of compassion. No one alive today more fully embodies the ideal of what many would call unconditional love, and although much of the book explores this aspect of her remarkable being, there are many passages that reveal Amma to be much more than a fountain of tenderness. Indeed, she is also a fierce guru who never denies that God's love comes at a heavy price.

According to Amma, you can only feel love by expressing it. And ego—which means pride and selfishness—stands in the way. “Ego . . . is the only offering God asks,” the divine mother tells us, going on to state that if you are not willing to give up your ego once God has asked for it, then it will be taken from you.

Emphatically and unapologetically, Amma insists that a real guru is essential for awakening to occur, because seekers simply cannot dislodge subtle negative tendencies by themselves. “The ego must be removed,” she insists. “This painful process is only possible through surrender to the teacher. The teacher breaks the ego's shell.” Spiritual practice is the other component of a seeker's life that Amma considers vital for any real advancement to occur: “The person who constantly studies without doing spiritual practices is like the fool who tries to live in the blueprint of a house.”

Amma's recipe for living a spiritual life is profoundly simple and absolutely demanding—give selflessly to others always, die to your prideful ego, engage earnestly in spiritual practice, and surrender to the wisdom of a true guru—instructions that are not likely to gain her nearly the same popularity as her unconditionally loving public image.

Jeff Carreira