Title: YOU are THIS: Awakening to the Living Presence of Your Soul
Publisher: Mantra Books
Author: J.M. Harrison
Pages: 192 pp
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 9781785350986

The world is a fascinating place. It is a dimension of touch, sound, twi-(two)-lights and random visuals which we build up in our human pattern-making ability into a cosmos, a cultivated world, a made-up environment, a magic reality.

So, when someone seeks one out and offers a side-quest on the main path of one’s life-quest, it is very tempting to go down that sidebar, to investigate that road-less-travelled.

YOU are THIS came to me directly from the author, J.M. Harrison. It has a sub-title: Awakening to the Living Presence of Your Soul.

One of the problems of trying to explain the inexplicable or to describe the indescribable is — language itself. Every spiritual thinker has tried to come up with a word that encompasses the Source of the Sourceless. Mr Harrison goes some way towards mitigating this problem by inventing his own terms, playfully; subverting English words with Lewis Carroll’s portmanteau effect.

Thus we have the ‘mego’, which is the ego that one owns, and considers to be one’s own self, but instead is the mask or the veil that one uses to sublimate oneself from personality to personality as required by the various parts we have to play in our human cosmoses. ‘Mego’, of course, is a portmanteau of ‘me’ and ‘ego’. Other terms he has awakened are ‘soulution’, ‘Unividual’ and ‘Heart Stream of Conscious’ (a particularly lush metaphor of meaning).

Is this jargon, or is this useful nomenclature for navigating a new way of thinking (or, possibly, non-thinking)?

Only you, the reader, can answer that. Still, it is always useful to learn a new language. It keeps one’s brain supple and subtle. One can pick up a new word, as deceptively simple as ‘this’ and transform it into ‘THIS’. Re-wiring a word to hold new dimensions of meaning, is an enrichment exercise from which everyone may profit.

Seekers after truth will want to read this book. It is deceptively simple, but, like most still waters, it is very deep. There are Pranayama breathing exercises outlined at the end, as a means of stilling the busy-ness of the mego’s monkey-mind. All the great national spiritual leaders get a name-check, and Mr Harrison’s contention is that they have all journeyed up the ‘Mountain of Awareness’ and brought back the truth of that journey from the angle of their historical path.

Is it a book for beginners? Yes, provided the beginner is prepared to accept that reading this book merely once is not the objective. The objective is the sub-text, of learning to learn that the human soul is a bright spark swathed in matter. Duality, Non-Duality all figure in this spiritual quest. So be prepared to sharpen the sword of your spiritual will, and have at the forests of the night.

This reviewer will be returning to this book on a regular basis, as if approaching an ocean of wisdom. At some stage, one hope’s to discover one’s own swimming depth, and kick off from the groundlessness of one’s own ‘mego’.

J.M. Harrison’s blog can be found at http://nakedbeing.blogspot.co.uk/

[T J O’Hare is the author of Amnesiak: Blood Divinity (Spero Publishing).]