By Michael Ortiz Hill and Mandaza Augustine Kandemwa, Afterword by Deena Metzger.

220 Pages | First Quest Edition 20o7 | Softcover | Quest Books, U.S.A. | ISBN: 9780835608527.

A gift to a world divided by race, this book is the memoir of two contemporary shamans born in divergent cultures and drawn together by destiny. Both became sacred healers, or ngangas, in traditional Bantu African medicine and came to see themselves as spiritual twins. Their meeting began an elegant process of mutual initiation so that they might lead their entire lives in the service of Spirit.

One ’twin’ among the poor in Africa, the other in an American hospital, together they explore the borderland between Western medicine and shamanic practice. Ultimately, theirs is a powerful statement about peacemaking, as it requires stripping to the elemental truth of oneself to meet ’the other’ as friend and teacher.

From Chapter 39 – ‘I AM HERE’ (p. 181):

” MANDAZA: You cannot separate the Ancestors from God. You can’t. These are the faces of God. I agree with the Jewish scripture that says ‘no graven images’, because what people do is create an image and then worship that image, and it becomes a God. You cannot make a God. God is not an object. If you want to see the faces of God, look at a mountain. You will really see the power of the Creator. Look at another person; you will see God. But I don’t pray to that person. I pray to the power that made that person and that mountain.

Nobody is perfect. Nobody is righteous. We are all young babies. We stand up, and we fall. We stand up, and we fall. I am not a perfect Mandaza. I am not righteous. I am just being told to say things to God’s people, to God’s animals. This is my message. Over and over again I repeat, ‘I am here’. It is all that I have to say. “

By John L. Hill.

240 Pages | A Quest Original 1987 | Softcover | Quest Books, U.S.A. | ISBN: 0835606155.

Whatever is our world coming to? The prophets of boom herald an age of plenty. The prophets of doom, a world in despair. Are these our only choices? There is also an enlightenment, suggests Hill, who writes about man as he is, and about man as he could, should and will be. The author believes that nature has an inherent propensity to evolve and flourish, and man, as a part of nature, is participating in the process. Thus, not only is the individual getting better, but so is society. The end result could be an enlightened society, one that has become integrated, non-judgemental, and compassionate. One that considers the world-at-large to be a sacred phenomenon.

Importantly – this is not merely a book of educated conjecture. Although the author’s contention that society will become enlightened makes good theoretical sense, Hill decided to strenghten his position with a personal experiment. Thus in his Chapter ‘A New Image of Humankind’ he relates the story of his own spiritual revitalization as he undertook a regimen of regular meditation.

From Chapter 9 – ‘A New Image of Humankind: A Personal Account’ (p. 9):

” To this point, this book has been theoretically oriented with an emphasis on outlining an underlying metaphysical and psychological theory of evolution. If one has had the impression that all this talk of self-transformation was only abstract ‘stuff and nonsense’ – a metaphysic without a reality, a rarefied world view to replace one or another previous paradigm, equally inefficient in winning genuine moral and existential conviction, I hope now to dispel that suspicion. I consider the last seven years of my life something of an objective, if not ‘scientific’ experiment. I believe, as a result of this experiment, that evolution is a process that may be augmented, encouraged along the lines that await us. We may take a part in our own evolution. Life should be – and can be – a process of always getting better. Everything we should do add up to making each of us more wise, compassionate, humane and, yes, happy as individuals. Life should be a process of accumulation , but it is Wisdom and love that should be accumulated. What follows is a very personal, idiosyncratic, and sometimes embarrassing account of my own experience with meditation and the effects it had on my life. ”