Continuum - Böcker

These three journeys take theater critic Margaret Croyden to a Polish forest retreat devised by experimental theater director Jerzy Grotowski, through intensive sessions at a Catskills ashram with Hindu guru Baba Muktananda, and, finally, to a spiritual teacher in an Israel divided by both the metaphor and the reality of war. Each experience, powerfully evoked, arouses memories of Croyden's past - her long forgotten childhood with her Jewish family in Brooklyn, her youthful dreams and aspirations, and her adult search for fulfillment and spiritual transendence. Each experience brings her closer to her identity as a woman, a Jew, and a writer. Croyden's quest turns up no easy answers, no doctrinaire catharses. The struggle for self-knowledge is slow and painful, requiring both a remembering and a forgetting. Croyden's perceptions may sometimes shock - especially those of the relationship between sexuality and religious ecstasy and of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This memoir - moving, thought-provoking, and daringly honest - tells a brave tale of a modern woman's discovery of her authentic self.

A volume of the work known as the "Zohar" ("Splendour") which is the key text of the Kabbalah. The Zohar is a commentary on the Torah and although it is sometimes ascribed to a 2nd-century rabbi from Simon Bar-Yochai, the form in which it is most widely known originates with Moses of Leon, a native of Grenada, who died in 1305. The kabbalists believe that the undefinable origin of all things is Ein Sof - the causes of causes, the infinite, that which underlies everything. The universe emanates from the divine in successive layers called "sefirot". Everything exists in God but God extends infinitely beyond existence. According to "The Book of Concealed Mystery", the light of God must be concealed in order to be revealed to creation. Even though the kabbalists believe that ultimately Ein Sof is beyond expression or understanding, the contemplation of God's presence in all things causes our thoughts to be purified.