Inscendence/Embodiment EEs/EHEs Record Type: Review   ID: 166
The Dancing Animal Woman: A Celebration of Life Hillman, Anne
This is the most important book, as measured by its ability to open up my thinking, since I read Tom Berry’s Dream of the Earth. It is no coincidence, for the following reason. Ann Hillman was an organizational development consultant for 20 years for U.S. hospitals, businesses, schools, etc. She helped work groups and individuals to initiate their own growth and development in times of rapid change. However, in 1978 she made a turn to studying the internal (subjective) aspects of social change. She explored beyond the bounds of traditional institutional approaches. She studied with Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry and then, moved by what in effect were her EHEs, she began to emphasize the degree of interior human development required to support their work. She also has worked with Matthew Fox and Richard Moss. Thus, this book also can be viewed as her EHE autobiography. She has had several most unusual experiences involving a sense of connectedness, interior exploration, striking synchronicities involving deer, and major creative insights of what Berry has called inscendence. I have been consciously trying to inscend since 1990 or so but I had no map, no way to judge any progress. Hillman’s experiences showed her the way, which includes a diagram of progress in which the experiencer goes from our ordinary conscious involvement with language and images down, back, and in to emotions (feelings, sensings); instinct; the shamanic/dreams; intuition; the unfolding story of the cosmos, to the Mystery—the Creative—the Void. I plan to write a book review article in which I map EHEs onto the figure she presents of how identity expands outward as one inscends inward. I will attempt to show how her own EHEs revealed the path she took, often not knowing what she was doing until she had done it. As one continues on the path of inscendence, one increasingly senses new connections to and even union with other levels of self, other people and eventually, the entire human species; other life forms; Earth itself; the cosmos; and finally, the endless creativeness of the Mystery. I have outlined this route from my study of EHEs. Suzanne Brown and I call it the EHE process. In the article I hope to write, I will show how Hillman’s path of inscendence and the EHE process overlap and inform each other.
Publisher Information:	Norwalk, CT: Bramble, 1994. Pp. xxiv + 226. Chapnotes: 221-225; 2 figs

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