EHE Process/Spiritual Path ,Spirituality Record Type: Review   ID: 658
The American Emergency: A Search for Spiritual Renewal in an Age of Materialism Briggs, Robert
Briggs, who is a former bookseller and now is a publisher, examines the status of personal spirituality in the America of the 1980s. The book is autobiographical in approach, and it reads much like a journal, but without dates. He feels that the scientific paradigm founded in the uncertainty of quantum mechanics has led to "a growing mistrust of authority and [has] led countless people to seek something more, something other" (p. xi). Because individual circumstances are so varied and so complex, general rules are not applicable to everyone. He proposes that "each human being must reassess current values and wisely rearrange ways and means by which whole new worlds can be experienced. Eventually, to transcend ordinary levels of awareness, it becomes necessary to identify considerations of the mind, body, spirit, and environment and translate these considerations into concerns with conduct, health, faith, and ecology; then through direct action—exercise, diet, meditation, and the alteration of lifestyle—unify all four in order to produce true change" (pp. xii-xiii). In a sense, this book recounts his efforts to follow this recipe as he tries to outline a "framework in which the current confusion over awareness and consciousness might be more carefully examined and understood" (p. xiv). Instead of "New Age," he proposes that we are in the midst of an "Open Age."
Publisher Information:	Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1989. 207p. Bibl: 183-190; Ind: 191-207

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