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by Jim Garrison
Paraview Press, 2000
ISBN: 1-931044-00-7
History, 414 pp
Trade Paperback: $19.95
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ABOUT THE BOOK
This visionary new book takes readers on a stimulating journey
through history, and examines the spiritual, cultural, and
evolutionary changes that brought humanity to its current
predicament--namely its critical imbalance with Mother
Earth.
REVIEWS:
"Jim Garrison's CIVILIZATION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF
POWER is the most interesting book that I have read in ages.
It is a call to awakening, to sanity: the way of wisdom. History
is voiced as it relates to potential. Garrison challenges the
imagination and will to venture into new domains of
consciousness. He teaches the relationship between antinomies
which shocks one into a new awareness of Reality. Liberation
seems to be the successful harmony of masculine and feminine as
knowledge and wisdom lived in the nirvana of mind. Garrison has
captured history and placed it in a web of intriguing
composition. What a wonderful opera his story would make set to
the music of a Verdi/Wagner talent! One can hear the melodies of
a Verdi brought into harmony with the thunder of Wagner
connecting with the Cosmic Consciousness."
- Ken Wallace
"Civilization and the Transformation of Power is an absorbing,
provocative, scintillating account of the 'interiors' of western
history-that is, the psychological and spiritual forces that
historians often ignore in favor of reporting merely the exterior
historical 'facts.' Jim Garrison is one of the great visionaries
of our time, and his account not only traces the rise of western
culture, it points beyond it to a more integral, gracious,
compassionate world, drawing on the best of both East and West,
feminine and masculine, to paint a picture of a more caring
tomorrow."
- Ken Wilber, author of A Brief History of Everything
"Here is paradox played out on the high stage of history. Here
are the mythic underpinnings of civilization in its contents and
discontents. Here is the tragic and transformative dialectic
between Mother Mind and Father Force. And here too is the sacred
psychology of God rising to be known in the unfolding of psyche
in time. Within the compass of this remarkable book Garrison has
garnered an understanding of emergent consciousness, the drama of
the World Soul and the redemption of the higher dream."
- Jean Houston, author of Jump Time
"Jim Garrison has created a work that could not have been
written until the very end of the millennium, because it is in
fact a comprehensive summary of the historical movements that
have brought us to our present world situation. But in
Civilization and the Transformation of Power he does something
that has been done by no culture historian nor philosopher before
him: To analyze both the transformations of human culture, and
the invisible presence we call "God," from the viewpoint of the
"antinomial reality"--the presence of opposites, of paradoxes in
everything we do and say. He adds to this a trenchant analysis of
gender politics inflected through mythology that is absolutely
brilliant, and shows how the suppression of the archetypal
feminine has led us to the brink of world catastrophe.
"Civilization and the Transformation of Power is an education in
itself. The fifteen years Garrison says he has taken is entirely
believable in both the scope and the detail of his treatment.
Familiar terrain to the historian and the mythologist are
visited--but with new eyes. From the epic of Gilgamesh, which he
rightly interprets as the beginning of the masculine hegemony in
world religion, Garrison shows how, again and again cognitive
fundamentalisms that assign categories such as "good" and "evil"
cause their own catastrophes, and prevent us from being a more
tolerant and paradoxically wise species. this is a book to take
on a long retreat--and study closely.
"If those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, it
seems to me that the best introduction to the serious seeker who
wishes for the New Age would be to read Jim Garrison's book. It
is both a broadly sweeping historical treatment, and a minute
analysis of the pivotal cultural trends that have brought us to
our current world impasse. I could easily see it as required
reading for the possible human of the new millennium. It provides
an education not only in culture history, psychology and
theology. It trains the mind in the art of paradoxical
thinking--and our own inevitable mythmaking tendency.
"Like his inspirational mentor, Blaise Pascal, Jim Garrison
offers us an alternative to the deadly Cartesianism that seems to
have paralyzed our age: A revival of the "logique du cour"--the
"wisdom of the heart," that can lead us out of the impasses our
heads are always getting into. The addition of Sophia, feminine
wisdom, and the integration of the archetypal gender perspectives
makes this a truly wise and balanced book. Rather than quailing
before our accumulated history as "a nightmare from which we
struggle to awaken" (Joyce), Jim Garrison has given us some
useful tools for analyzing the dream and learning its
psychological meaning. Highly recommended; an education in
itself."
- Stephen Larsen, Ph.D. is the author of The Shaman's
Doorway, The Mythic Imagination, and with his wife Robin,
A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell. The
Larsens have just finished a new book on gender politics and
spiritual partnership: The Fashioning of Angels: Partnership
as Spiritual Practice.
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JIM GARRISION was born of
Baptist missionary parents in Szechuan Province, China, in 1951.
From 1953-1965, he lived with his family in Taiwan. His early
experiences set the stage for a life of engagement in
international issues and social activism. By the time he began
university, he had traveled in over forty countries worldwide and
was active in the anti-Vietnam war and environmental movements.
As a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University (1975-1982), Dr.
Garrison became engaged in the citizen diplomacy movement to
reduce the nuclear tensions between the United States and the
Soviet Union, founding two organizations dealing with the nuclear
power issues, and publishing two books
on the topic.
Throughout the 1980s, Dr. Garrison refined his skills at
facilitating private discussions among leaders across national
boundaries and disciplines, directing programs that engaged in
private sector diplomacy with Soviet counterparts in a variety of
sectors. In 1991, he founded the International Foreign Policy
Association in collaboration with Georgian President Edward
Shevardnadze and former Secretary of State George Schultz,
focusing on providing humanitarian relief for children in the
former Soviet republics. In 1992, at the behest of Mikhail
Gorbachev, Dr. Garrison founded and became the President of the
Gorbachev Foundation/USA.
These two organizations set the stage for the establishment, in
1995, of the State of the World Forum, a San Francisco based
non-profit institution created to establish a global network of
leaders, citizens and institutions dedicated to discerning and
implementing those principles, values and actions necessary to
guide humanity toward a more sustainable global civilization. The
Forum has convened roughly 4,000 people from over 100 countries
to its annual sessions, which have launched and directed a number
of action oriented strategic initiatives across a spectrum of
areas.
Garrison’s degrees include: B.A. World History, University
of Santa Clara;M.T.S., History of Religion, Harvard University;
and Ph.D., Philosophical Theology, Cambridge University. He has
written six books concerning the historical and theological
implications of the advent of the nuclear age.
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