Readers who enjoy books with body-mind-spirit topics can find extensive selections in bookstores or on bookseller websites. Many best selling authors, like Caroline Myss, Dr. Andrew Weil, Wayne Dyer, Joan Borysenko, Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra are well-known and dependable writers with effective publicity for their books. What is exciting, however, is to come upon a largely unknown author and to discover that his book is exceptionally fine and worthwhile.

That is the case for our topic in Book Talk this month, a superb new work: The Translucent Revolution: How People Just Like You Are Waking Up and Changing the World by Arjuna Ardagh (New World Library, 2005) with a “Foreword” by noted philosopher, Ken Wilbur. This is a brilliant, informative, insightful and enlightening book, worthy of a permanent spot on everyone’s bookshelf. It’s the best book I’ve read since Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (New World Library, 1999). In fact, its content is so richly worthwhile, we will spread our discussion of it over two Book Talks. See next month for the second part.

The author, Arjuna Ardagh, unknown to me until I read this book, was educated in England, earning a master’s degree in literature at Cambridge University. This, I’m sure, is a major contributing factor to the author’s clear prose that makes this book so readable. We learn, moreover, that “he has had a passionate interest in spiritual awakening“ since the age of 14, at which time he began to “practice meditation and yoga.” Later he “studied and lived with a number of great spiritual teachers both in Asia and in the United States.” He has traveled extensively, teaching and facilitating “a profound shift in awareness with thousands of people throughout the United States and Europe.”

Ardagh’s preparatory work to create this book is impressive. He began with a perspective that teachings about enlightenment and the realization of oneness were highly available, but that the challenge was “in living it.” He says, “As helpful as (the guidance) maps and concepts can be, many of us have found that they simply do not fit the actuality of our reality, as it is.” Hence, he “began to seek out the leading authorities on spiritual life in our time – people like Eckhart Tolle, Ram Dass, Byron Katie and Jean Houston – to take a fresh look at our condition together.”

Ultimately Ardagh interviewed 100 or so active spiritual teachers, writers, lecturers and activists in multiple arenas of society, filling “almost 250 cassette tapes” with 170 dialogues. Through these dialogue-interviews, he also tapped into the personal experience of the interviewees as well as what those individuals had learned from their workshops, conferences, friends, students and readers. Moreover, he studied “numerous polls and bodies of research that suggest a radical change in collective consciousness.” The Translucent Revolution is the result, “based on three thousand pages of transcripts from the interviews.”

Readers of this book benefit mightily as a result. Not only do we benefit from the author’s insights, but we also find a rich treasure of the philosophies and experiences of all those remarkable people that Ardagh interviewed. A special benefit of this book is the section at the end of the book, called “Who’s Who,” where the author provides 30-plus pages of mini-biographies and resumes for 92 of his contributing interviewees, including contact mailing addresses, websites and e-mail addresses. These pages alone excite my imagination and optimism for the world because they demonstrate how so many people and organizations are actively living, teaching and applying what the author terms “translucent” awakening.

In his introduction the author explains his motives for writing this book, emphasizing how we particularly need help to put spiritual insights into practical applications. In this book Ardagh presents “what has emerged as the prevailing translucent view, “ based on all interviews he conducted. Excerpts from those interviews turn up throughout the text. Most importantly, however, “this book offers practical tools to help you honestly address how fully you are incorporating translucence into the mundane procession of daily duty.”

Ardagh uses terms throughout the book that readers need to understand. I really like the author’s word choice of translucent to describe his concepts. When most authors write about consciousness raising or spiritual evolution, they most commonly use the word enlightenment. That word, however, has a finality or “fixed point” to it that just doesn’t match everyday reality. Even if individuals have an “enlightened” experience, perhaps gaining some enlightenment from life or a book, those moments tend to be highly transitory. So what word could best explain an evolving consciousness? Translucent seems perfect, since it means “letting light pass through.” The author says “translucent people also appear to glow from the inside.” It is also an on-going process, not something already attained. Whereas “enlightenment has generally been used as an absolute word... translucence is subtler; it is relative. One can always become more translucent (or) may waver in the degree of translucence,” notes the author.

Another term the author uses is “radical awakening” to indicate a shift in awareness or consciousness during which an individual knows herself “to be limitless, much bigger than, yet containing the body, beyond birth and death, eternally.” This “radical awakening” is the opposite of what the author calls “the trance of separation,” otherwise noted as “a preoccupation with I, me, mine.” The author claims that “all over the world, from every imaginable background and system of belief, people report the trance of separation being broken. For the majority this radical awakening has occurred within the last 15 years.”

Finally, another significant use of terminology, one that underlies the entire book is “the Iago factor,” often referred to as “the Iago trance.” This becomes a central metaphor for the author. In Shakespeare’s play Othello, Iago is the devious villain. Iago is Othello’s advisor and supposed friend, but he “plays one character against another, creating an atmosphere of separation and distrust.” The Iago factor operates on multiple layers in our lives. Ardagh emphasizes that Iago operates most effectively within our own minds, serving as “the voice of collective conditioning” – that is, all that we believe, that we have been taught and that we trust to be true.

Moreover, the Iago factor operates efficiently in our entire environment. The author says, “Iago is the dominant trance state of our planet,” influencing our relationships, parenting and attempts to relax and permeating “corporate business, international politics and our economic system.” All of our conditioning and environment tends to encourage us to “pin our fulfillment on external things,” and leaving us with the constant feeling that we have problems to solve, but little power to do so.

The author identifies eight major qualities of the “Iago trance.” A sense of lack keeps us striving for “more” because what we have or where we are is never enough. A sense of separation keeps us looking to externals for happiness or satisfaction. Addictions – to work, sex, food, drink, drugs, the internet or even spiritual highs, drive us to fill up our so-called “needs.” Fear prevails, usually unspecific fears – of aloneness, poverty, danger, whatever, all supported and exacerbated by current media blurbs that feed those fears. Suspicion becomes the result of our fears because we then trust no one. Strategic living then becomes a pattern as we feel a need to plan for the worst, thereby living in a “permanent state of alert.” That in turn creates great anxiety and stress and a constant state of worry. These feelings lead to hostile competition because “our success, even our survival, rests in (others) defeat.”

Is this really how we want to live? I don’t think so. Neither does Arjuna Ardagh, who gives readers many suggestions for getting past the Iago factor that so impacts our daily lives. An early suggestion involves “conscious inquiry.” This means simple, self-inquiry. He says, “It does not require you to do anything, change anything, think anything or understand anything. It only asks you to pay careful attention to what is true and real.” Ponder that for awhile. How often have I found myself hearing something from someone, a comment perhaps or reading an opinion piece in the paper or hearing some talking heads discussing an issue on cable news, only to find myself getting all riled up, anxious, angry or worried. How would it be if instead I just asked myself if I really knew the truth about it?

This point is important to the significance of this book. The author’s word choices, terms and suggestions, are presented in fresh new ways that create new insights for the reader. Ardagh provides new angles to consider and sheds light in new ways on old issues.

Let’s get back to the point of translucence. What does that really mean in regard to people? Ardagh identifies 10 characteristics of today’s translucents. Readers may find themselves identifying with some or perhaps all, of the characteristics. They will learn more about those qualities and themselves by reading the book. Here is what the author has learned about “translucents.” For the most part, they tend to live “outside the context of organized religion and hierarchy.” They tend to ignore “the dangling carrot” of future enlightenment (or reward) and live in the present moment. (See Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now). Translucents “speak of life as a ‘rivering,’ a process without end.” “Translucence is more a direction than a destination.”

Translucents recognize that “their own spiritual experience is only a tiny part of the larger context of collective awakening and evolution.” They are “always evolving,” although not in the sense of constant “fixing” themselves. Translucents honor the balance of both masculine and feminine principles and energies. Translucents don’t choose between spirit and the word, but rather embrace both. Translucents don’t “argue with reality” and resist what is, but rather allow reality to flow even when it is uncomfortable. Translucents seek out and honor group work, what the author sometimes calls “the sacred circle.”

Are you a translucent or on the way to becoming one? All of this is introduction to the two larger portions of The Translucent Revolution. Each of these major sections of around 170 pages each deals with applications of the concepts just introduced, first to individuals and then to groups. The section on individual translucence delineates how this can function in our own lives and how we can both understand and facilitate this growth in ourselves. The third section of the book gives many fascinating examples of how translucent growth can and does occur in business, medicine, education, the government, among others.

That is what we will discuss in next month’s Book Talk.

Gayl Woityra, a retired high school English and Humanities teacher, now resides in Arizona where she continues to pursue her eclectic metaphysical studies in consciousness, the Ageless Wisdom, astrology, flower essences, music, color and alternative medicine.