Right, as promised, I started reading "Quest - Journey to the Centre of your Soul".
Then I stopped. Sorry, but I just couldn't take it any more. It's the usual New Age logic gap. Yes, there is probably great personal benefit from spending a day in silence, or camping out in nature on your own, or sitting in an empty room without distractions for a period of time. But you can see that benefit without linking it to Native American rituals, or attaching some kind of cosmic significance.
Time alone = time to think = time to reflect = a chance to make decisions and come to answers. It's as simple as that. But it gets surrounded by this self-important, meaningless "spiritual" bollocks.
Take room purifying, for instance. I will just about accept that the aroma created by burning sage may have some relaxing or calming properties. But I won't accept that it will "cleanse the energy", because energy is a complicated scientific concept and not something you can spray with Dettol, and neither will I accept that it is necessary to use a feather to waft the smoke around. Why not anything else? What difference does it make? If I wafted it around with a copy of Mein Kampf, and then invited her into the room to examine "the energy", would she be able to tell?
Furthermore, why do they always pick the acceptable parts of tribal rituals? She talks about how young adolescents from Native American tribes go on a Quest to reach adulthood, and prescribes it for her own children. But then, the coming of age rituals of boys in the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea would involve inserting sharpened sticks into their nostrils until blood gushed out, and encouraging them to fellate as many bachelors in the tribe as possible, and swallow as much semen as possible, over a period of 5 days. Perhaps Ms Linn would like to include this "Quest" in her next book?
Anyway, I feel a bit guilty for not getting through it all, so I'm going to listen to an album of Happy Hardcore to make a start on part 4.
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