By Mark Pelgrin. 159 Pages | First Re-Quest Edition 1962 | Softcover | Quest Books, U.S.A. | ISBN: 0835603059.

ed. by Sheila Moon and Elizabeth B. Howes

When a man stands alone . . . 

Every man is born and every man dies. None is born conscious of the significance of this birth in time, and most are unaware of the significance of this death. Some do have an intimation of the meaning of dying, and a few achieve an intensified relationship to the purpose behind the final life experience. Even fewer have ever chronicled the ways by which they came to that place, where death seemed the ultimate step in self-fulfilment. This book is therefore a rare account, coming from a man, who died at the age of 47 of cancer, but who gave the last year of his life to a heightening and hastening of his search for all the seasons of God – a man who came, at the end, to where he could say yes to both sides of the paradoxes of Ecclesiastes.

From the beginning of the book:

” For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. “

• Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.

By Elizabeth Boyden Howes and Sheila Moon.

221 Pages | First Quest Edition 1977, second Quest printing 1987 | Softcover | Quest Books, U.S.A. | ISBN: 0835604926.

Each of the above participate in this stunningly sensitive exam-ination of man’s sacred responsibility to make choices. For man needs to constantly choose a course of action if he wishes to survive, declare the psychotherapist authors. Take your choice, they say, between ‘the sin of holy uselessness‘ and ‘the path of holy intercourse with all existence’.

It is vital to our well-being, they believe, crucial to the future of the entire world, that we do not abdicate this God-given privilege; that we recognise that man is by his very nature a choicemaker, and that this is the basis difference between him and ‘unthinking’ creatures. The authors support their unique thesis with documented dream evidence, fresh interpretations of Biblical stories, our human propensity for myth-making, and the basic conclusions found in Jungian depth-psychology.

From Chapter VI – Into the Mirror of the Waters (p. 79):

” The Self is perhaps the most significant archetype and/or complex in terms of man’s full development as individual. This is true, because it is both the totality of and the religious center of personality. And insofar as the individual ego is working for wholeness, for individuation, it is working in the service of the Self, which in turn relflects the larger transpersonal Purpose. Although we have already discussed the Self in previous chapters, here a new facet appears. The Self is an archetype and yet with a difference that makes it, so to speak, the most vital of the psychic ‘organs’, the heart that keeps the vital processes moving in a forward direction. It is not only the center of the total personality, but it magnetizes all the opposites into a pattern that evolves in each individual toward wholeness. “