Universal Knowledge Now Revealed

Robert Merrett was Professor of English at the University of Alberta.

This book on psychic religion is so bad that this reviewer seriously considered declining to review it. It is so poorly written, so totally lacking in syntactic and stylistic efficiency, and so blighted with typographical errors and an absence of editorial intelligence that it is difficult to imagine anyone being able to read it through. The writer’s lack of discipline particularly exposes itself in the shapelessness of the 15 chapters, the primitive dialogue form, the miscellaneous subjects, and the frequently absurd topical transitions. Perhaps the crowning absurdity is that the book takes its title absolutely seriously. However, the book cannot be so easily dismissed since it is as dangerous as it is inept, especially in its cultic pretensions. The writer offers herself as a privileged instrument whose function is to transcribe automatically her conversations with the spirit world. There is nothing inherently implausible about listening to spiritual voices as long as the listening is done sensitively and the questions posed are genuinely spiritual. But here neither condition is met. At one moment, the instrument asks gossipy questions about kin and movie stars and, at the next, raises opaque issues involving mathematical ratios and gnostic mysteries. The dangerous pretensions of the book are most evident in the way the writer claims to utter universal truths through the perspective of reincarnation. Such important topics as abortion, divorce, and homosexuality are addressed from this perspective, but the usual result is confusion and moral ambiguity. Granted, reincarnation does provide an interesting rhetorical posture against racial prejudice. But, when we are told in so many words that handicapped people do not want to be treated as normal people because they have chosen to be incarnated in handicapped bodies, we see that psychic solutions are no more than methods for escaping from moral conflict and social policy. It is important, then, to understand that the cultic pretensions of this book, as well as being anti-institutional, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish, are anarchic and hostile to communal life. In a sense, this book cannot be simply dismissed since its many grammatical, stylistic, and expository errors are tokens of moral anarchy. When it tells us, for instance, that guilt is only “a feeling, a neglect type feeling ... a doubting wonderment feeling” (p. 47), we must recognize the grim harmony of jargon and thoughtlessness and try to eclipse such nonsense by comprehending it, as Alexander Pope so brilliantly does in his poem The Dunciad.