Journey to The Cave of The Heart: Midlife & Unfolding the Self

“Journey to the Cave of the Heart: Midlife & the Unfolding of the Self”

Not everyone has a mid-life crisis where, with Dante, one is apt to find oneself “in a dark wood, where the right road was wholly lost and gone.” But for most thinking people life is a journey, an odyssey, which includes an ongoing learning process. James Joyce made use of Homer in Ulysses and Carl Jung and his expositor, Murray Stein, form the background for Meath Conlan’s Journey to the Cave of the Heart. Here the author offers an interpretation of his own odyssey, using the image of Hermes, the Edge-man, as a symbol of the deep awakened unconscious. Hermes stands for what Conlan calls “liminality,” that moment in the process of self-discovery when the soul “awakens to a level that endures beyond the ego’s defeat and death.”

The death of the ego does not imply regression to a more infantile or primitive state but a re-appropriation of the roots of our being. The first half of life is the process of strengthening the ego; the second half of letting it go. This “letting go” is an important element in self-discovery. With the guidance of Bede Griffiths in India, Meath Conlan learned how to become what he already was at a deep level. The inner journey is in a sense a return to the source, something that Bede spoke of in another context, as getting in touch with the other half of one’s soul.

With the use of dream analysis under the guidance of Dom Bede, Conlan was able during the years of his periodic stays with his “Acharya” to enter the second half of his life with a sense of purpose and spiritual maturity.

This is an important book for men and women, but especially men, who reach mid-life with a number of meaningful achievements behind them. But then one has to come to terms with the gnawing question: What to do with the second half of one’s life? How to grow, and not stagnate? Conlan’s inner quest can be of help to readers of all ages. This is an honest and very personal account of a spiritually oriented and prayerful man, coming to terms with life’s most precious years, the years that unfold after the forties and fifties.

From the Foreword by James M. Somerville, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus: Department of Philosophy, Xavier University.

Co-Founder of the International Philosophical Quarterly.

Currently Editor: Schola Contemplationis.

Author of: The Mystical Sense of the Gospels (1997).

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Note: This book will be available generally in 2010