We have it from Frithjof Schuon (The Transcendent Unity of Religions) and many others that the Vedanta appears among explicit doctrines as one of the most direct formulations possible of what makes the very essence of our spiritual reality. The work in hand can be read as a book-length unpacking of that accurate description. Reliable from beginning to end, it is distincitve among the innumerable renditiois of the Vedanta in two ways. First, because its author is an accomplished wordsmith, he makes the Vedanta's profundities-which delve as deep as those of any philosophical theology-read like...

"Is it possible to hold the crisis of the modern world in the palm of one's hand, rotating it thoughtfully to view it from all angles? This, in effect, is what Marty Glass does in The Sandstone Papers. Through the eyes of alter-egos, he analyzes our dilemma from the six leading, rival, philosophical perspectives that are jostling for acceptance - all to the (unspoken) end of forcing the reader to ask what he or she takes to be the fundamental problem/opportunity of our time. It is a sensitive and deeply reflective book." - HustonSmith, author of The World's Religions, etc.

We have here a collection of what the author called "affirmations." I am satisfied that that they could only have emerged from direct experience, and this also is the authors claim. What is this "direct experience"? The term is widely employed in the Eastern traditions and refers to an unmediated experience of the divine reality, a vision of that reality in which the world and the meditator are transfigured, revealed for what they truly are and were all along, attained, or "received," as a gift of grace, in that higher state of consciousness, in the Hindu tradition called turiya, or "the...