'The title All is One Love certainly attracted me, but what in heaven’s name is ‘transpersonal psychology’?' Photo: Book cover of All is One Love: Reflections upon the transpersonal psychology of time and eternity
All is One Love by Stephen Sayers
Author: Stephen Sayers. Review by Daniel Clarke Flynn
All is One Love: Reflections upon the transpersonal psychology of time and eternity
The title All is One Love certainly attracted me, but what in heaven’s name is ‘transpersonal psychology’? Stephen Sayers, with his decades of experience, defines it as ‘setting out to develop the rich synergistic opportunities promised by the fusion of the concepts and methods of modern psychology and spiritual wisdom’. Fair enough, and by the end of the book I came to see ‘transpersonal psychology’ as another solid stepping stone in humanity’s search for meaning.
Dispersed throughout the text are fresh new perspectives of seeing, connecting and expressing that only an open-minded, adventurous multidisciplinary learner like Sayers can offer. For example, here he is explaining eternity: ‘Eternity is a mystery. Writers struggle to find the right words to say what it is. I will too, but let me try. Eternity is the source of all things. It is there before time, and it remains there after time. Eternity is absolute presence. It is absolute stillness.’
Here he tries to answer the question ‘What is eternal life?’: ‘If temporal life is our becoming what we are, then eternal life is our being who we are.’
There is power in these statements for me because I have come to believe that we are all with eternity today in the here and now. We just don’t know it.
Sayers talks about how ‘whispers’ from the future (pre-cognitive experience) may impact our present condition. I had a stark pre-cognitive experience at ten years of age when my last thought going to sleep one night was that, despite having seen so many people killed in movies, I had never seen a real dead person. The first person I saw the next morning was my beloved father in a bed across from me. He had died of a heart attack during the night.
In ‘The Secret of the Rowan Cross’, Sayers describes the expression, ‘happening across’. A rowan cross can only be ‘happened across’, he says, not searched for. ‘A commitment to happening across something produces a different consciousness to that produced by a deliberate seeking. Looking for something suggests a predisposition to take what is required. Happening across something suggests a predisposition to receive what is given.’ What is a rowan cross? The book has a beautiful illustration by Stephen’s wife, Swea Sayers.
The author seeks to overcome our perceived dualistic separation from the divine and accepts Jesus as a spiritual guide. He practices his belief that our spiritual awareness ‘can arise just as readily from non-religious as from religious sources’. Hence the dedication of the book to his late friend, Mike Peters is graced by beautiful words from Jungian scholar, James Oppenheim: ‘Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.’
Sayers supplements the main text with two appendixes on transpersonal psychology and the Quaker way. Both are worth reading. I am not a book collector, but this is one I will read again. Give it a try. You might find it full of inspiring signposts for your own life journey. n
Daniel is from Belgium & Luxemburg Yearly Meeting.
