True Self/False Self : Unmasking the Spirit Within

Rating:
Summary: Another Excellent Book
Review: This book contains the best explaination that I have read on the idea of the True Self and False Self...ideas that are crucial for understanding many of the writings in mystical spirituality and ourselves. I have read the book four times and every time I re-read it I find something more in it.

Fr. Pennington's ability to make accessible for the layman the often specialized vocabulary and ideas of the mystic is truly outstanding.

Rating:
Summary: Way Off Base
Review: This book has such a promising title, and Pennington would have done well to have stuck with the topic it suggests. However, Pennington cannot seem to resist inserting his own political views and revealing his own religious bias in ways that seem totally out of place in a book that promises to "uncover the direct route to happiness and peace our age so desperately seeks." Perhaps Pennington is trying to demonstrate how intrusion of the "false self" can pollute an otherwise promising discussion?

The first intrusion appears in chapter four when Pennington interrupts his otherwise valuable discussion of the "evolution of human consciousness" to criticize former President Ronald Reagan for his funding of the failed star wars project, money that "could have funded a raised standard of living for every person on this planet." While I find this criticism valid (although a jarring turn in the tone of the discussion), it is completely overturned in the next chapter when in the midst of a very negative description of modern childhood, Pennington wonders "if the anti-child atmosphere of our age of birth control and abortion might not invade the womb and infect the developing child." It is odd that an author so concerned with the standard of living for the world's population would support a belief system that has done so much damage to the world's economic health and quest for physical survival. What is the cost of feeding, clothing, and educating a population out of control? Certainly Reagan's sins pale by comparison, and Pennington's criticisms become shamelessly hypocritical. Of course, he is feeding us the typical party line of the Catholic Church, a view that is anti-woman, anti-environment, and anti-humanity. But what can you expect from a world view that not only views women as unable to assume leadership positions within the church, but also unable to govern their own bodies?

Pennington also takes the time to criticize modern Biblical scholarship, referring to attempts to approach the Bible without religious bias as "ridiculous and arrogant humanistic and anthropocentric dissections of the Sacred Text." Pennington would do well to read William Johnston's newest book (which I did just prior to my unfortunate encounter with this one)in which Johnston finds value in such studies once they have been reintegrated into a religious context. Pennington instead offers this profound advice: "We need not waste any time giving any attention to these..."

There is some valuable discussion in this book when Pennington sticks to his subject, but there are too many tares growing among this wheat. I could only recommend this book to the patient and mature reader who is able to recognize chaff when he or she sees it.