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THE
SECRET LIFE OF GENIUS
How 24
Great Men and Women Were
Touched by Spiritual Worlds
by
John Chambers
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ISBN-13: 978-1-59477-272-6 / ISBN-10: 1-59477-272-X. Quality
Paperback. June 25, 2009. 6’x 9’. 336 pp. 24 b&w illustrations.
Imprint: Destiny Books. Inner Traditions/Bear & Co., P.O. Box 388,
Rochester, VT 05767. 1-800-246-8648 / (802) 767-3174,
Fax: (802) 767-3726, <http://www.innertraditions.com>,
$18.95.
"Rare and penetrating
glimpses into the paranormal
dimension of the creative
lives of 24 famous artists,
scientists, and politicians.
From Benvenuto Cellini to
Churchill and Carl Jung,
this book offers fresh
perspectives on the
achievements of greatness.
Written with grace, wit, and
quiet erudition—heartily
recommended." -
Michael
Grosso, Ph.D, author,
Soulmaker, The
Millennium Myth.
"John Chambers has
penetrated to the core of
human genius, and found it
has less to do with raw
intelligence than we
previously assumed. The
two dozen, extraordinary
individuals he examines—despite their radical
diversity—all share
something in common; namely,
the application of spiritual
experience to life. Chambers
thereby unveils the most
empowering secret available
to every man and woman."
-
Frank Joseph,
editor-in-chief, Ancient
American magazine, author,
Survivors of Atlantis,
Discovering the Mysteries
of Ancient America.
"John Chambers is a gifted
writer, and his writings are
always topnotch,
educational, and
entertaining reading. He
researches his material and
knows about what he writes!
In this book, Chambers looks
at how twenty-four
remarkable men and women
were touched by spiritual
worlds and what it did to
and for each of them. This
book is about relationships
between humans, God, nature,
and the realm of
spirituality from the era of
the 16th century to the 20th
century.
Occult influences
are covered.
Paranormal experiences and
other intriguing factors are
involved in the book,
detailed, analyzed, and
shared with the reader. This
reviewer found the following
sections of special
interest, and thinks the
reader will also: Michel de
Nostradamus, William Blake,
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,
Honoré
de Balzac, Madame Helena
Blavatsky, William Butler
Yeats, Carl G. Jung, Sri
Yashoda Ma, Doris Lessing,
and Norman Mailer.
The book
as a whole does a fine and
excellent job at presenting
its subjects in honest,
straight-forward analysis,
and it is a book that should
be on readers' reading lists
as a well-written and
memorable book concerning
the intricate topic of
spirituality and its effect
on people.
For a book that is
well-researched,
well-written, and
well-explained, John
Chambers deserves a round of
applause and a wide reading
audience. This is an
entertaining reading
experience.
The Secret Life of Genius
is a heady, intimate reading
journey! The subjects come
alive! Highly recommended."
-
Review
by Lee Prosser -
leep@ghostvillage.com, Ghostvillage.com
<http://www.ghostvillage.com>, June 3, 2009.
"Chambers has opened our eyes wide into the incredible spiritualist life of many
fascinating people known and not so well known. Each chapter featuring another
genius can be read independently of the others. His exhaustive research looks
deep into a life unfamiliar to most of us. Highly recommended for book group
discussion." - A. MacKay Betts, AMAZON.COM, May 16, 2013.
"The Secret Life of Genius is itself a work of genius--of a type. One
would have to go back to the best critics of earlier generations to find
a match for the barrage of insights that saturate the pages of this
wonderful entertaining book--to authors like J. B. Priestley, John Cowper
Powys, Colin Wilson, Prichett, Frances Yates, G. Wilson Knight, Northrop
Frye, Harold Bloom. To read The Secret Life of Genius is the equivalent
of a gourmet dinner topped off with two double expressos.
"The
chapter on Balzac is extremely insightful and provocative. The chapter
on Blake is sublime and stunning; the author demonstrates an
understanding of Blake's Gnosticism as well as his connection to the
Lurianic Cabala and its concept of the Primal Adam that existed before
the Creation and the Fall. In many ways Blake's poetry and paintings are
vastly superior to any attempt at a poetic epic on the part of Hugo
whose supreme achievement is found in his fiction. The prose epic Les
Miserables is the greatest single work in French literature before A la
Recherche du Temps Perdu. In this work Hugo was more successful than
Blake or Balzac in fusing the echoes and foreshadowings of a
Swedenborgian parallel world with the political and social world of the
Restoration with all its grief and injustice. Blake achieved this type
of unity only in his lyrics and Balzac was a great novelist only when he
allowed himself to leave the Occult in the background. All the great
French nineteenth century novelists are Balzacian spin offs. [The awesome, heartbreaking,
beautiful 22-page segment on Yukio Mishima is the climax of the whole book and probably the best
account of this matchless author ever penned. . . . (It) goes deeply into the (reincarnational) beauty of alayavijnana.]" - Steven Sittenreich, AMAZON.COM, Jan. 17, 2014.
"This
is such a fantastic book! I read it about a year ago, and now my mate
is reading it. I think I may have to read it again. This book is
fascinating in so many ways. As many of us read great literature
we intuit meaning that isn't logically present. We call this 'reading
between the lines.' If you have been reading between the lines of great
literature realizing something spiritual was responsible, then this book
helps make sense of why. It will also help you make sense of patterns
and synchronicities you experience while engaging in spiritual/creative
life." - Kristina's Review, GOODREADS.
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January
2008, Inner Traditions/Bear & Company <http://www.InnerTraditions.com>,
of Rochester, Vermont, published a completely revised and expanded
edition of Conversations with Eternity: The
Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor Hugo
(New Paradigm Books, 1998) under the title
 VICTOR HUGO'S CONVERSATIONS
WITH THE SPIRIT WORLD
A Literary Genius's
Hidden Life
By
John Chambers
Imprint: Destiny Books. ISBN-13: 978-1-59477-182-8. ISBN-10:
1-59477-182. 0. $18.95. Paper. 384 pages. 6 x 9. Three illustrations.
"Things to do on Jersey when
you're dead...This intriguing corner of the
great novelist's life is
exceptionally well documented in
Victor Hugo's Conversations with the
Spirit World, by John
Chambers. Chambers, the first person
to translate the séance transcripts
into English (in an
earlier edition of this book),
does a fine job of evoking the
atmosphere of the exiles' home away
from home, their bitter homesickness
and burgeoning fascination with the
occult. His book is unusually well
written for a study of this kind,
laced with keen character sketches
and absorbing sidelights on William
Blake,
James Merrill, and Kabbalah. He
presents the facts without undue
speculation and lets his readers
draw their own conclusions....Victor
Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit
World is a superb contribution
to literary history and to the study
of the paranormal. I recommend it
highly." - Michael Prescott,
April 28, 2008. For full text,
click on <http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2008/04/things-to-do-on.html>
"Focuses on Victor Hugo's
exile on the island of
Jersey, where he and his
friends escaped the reign of
Napoleon III and where he
transcribed hundreds of
channeled conversations with
various incarnate energies
from beyond. New age
collections will find it an
intriguing addition."
-
Midwest Book
Review,
April 3, 2008 (Oregon, WI).
"...Hugo comes across as a
complex man - as one would
expect - egotistical and
selfish, overbearing towards
his family, yet sensitive
and passionate on occasion.
He was also capable of
surprising insights, musing
on time running backwards,
or prefiguring David Bohm's
holographic universe. While
not convinced that the
séances were "the
greatest... adventure into
the supernatural that has
ever been recorded", I would
agree that this is a
fascinating story, and it is
told in an engaging way." -
Tom Ruffles, NTHPOSITION
Online Magazine, March 2008.
For full text, click here:
<http://www.nthposition.com/victorhugosconversations.php>
"I assure you you will
be entertained, amused and
will find yourself pondering
the conversations included
in this book. It is a
fascinating volume."
- ZODIAC BISTRO.
"I picked up this book
as a lark, but to my
surprise it turned out to be
a fascinating read full of
forgotten little tidbits of
history." - SME, Bookworm
Collective, Jan. 25, 2009.
"Chambers’s
writing is somewhat
redolent of the
style of some French
popular biographers
of the 1950s, such
as André Maurois.
This is not a
criticism by any
means. Quite the
opposite, in fact:
the novelistic way
in which he presents
a certain number of
scenes – all
conscientiously
documented, one
should add – makes
for very pleasant
reading and helps to
better grasp the
ambiance of the time."
- Dr. Vittorio Frigerio,
Head, Department of French,
Dalhousie University,
Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada, Dalhousie French
Studies, No. 86, Spring
2009.
ROCK
STAR POWER PROPELS HUGO’S
CONVERSATIONS
(June 17, 2008) A mention of
Victor Hugo’s
Conversations with the
Spirit World by rising
28-year-old Brit rock star
Natasha Khan in an interview
in the Manchester
Guardian for Monday,
June 16, sent sales of the
book soaring on
AMAZON.COM.UK (and
probably in bookstores).
MORE...
"While
this book is not a biography it does limn the relevant elements
of this gargantuan writer's gargantuan life. . . . [It] is well written
and based on Hugo's own accounts and those of his contemporaries and it
reads like a novel with asides for exposition." - Michael
W. Jackson, Professor of Government and Public Administration,
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. Aug. 28, 2015. <http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/theoryandpractice/2015/08/>
STRANGER THAN FICTION.
"A fascinating insight into a unique period in the life of a most
unusual man. Full of original texts but also highly readable." - Rosemary Allix. AMAZON.COM.UK. 4 out of 5 stars. Jan. 13, 2016.
Click on <http://www.newpara.com/johnchambers.htm>
for details, including
reviews.
_________________________________________________
John is currently completing work on a companion volume to Secret Life of Genius tentatively entitled From
Pythagoras to Solzhenitsyn: Encounters of Eminent Persons with Other
Worlds. Table of Contents is as follows:
I.
Pythagoras (circa 570-485 BCE);
II. Lalibela, King of Ethiopia
(circa 1150-1225);
III. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274);
IV. Liu Ji, the Chinese Nostradamus
(1311-1375);
V. Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France (1769-1821);
VI. Victor Hugo
(1802-1885);
VII. Alan Kardec (1804-1869);
VIII. Elizabeth Barrett
Browning (1806-1861);
IX. Robert Schumann (1810-1856);
X. Harriet
Beecher Stowe (1811-1896);
XI. Charles Dickens (1812-1870);
XII. Queen Victoria, ruler of Great Britain (1819-1901);
XIII.
Jules Verne (1828-1905);
XIV. Mark Twain (1835-1910);
XV. Henry James (1843-1916);
XVI.
Thomas Edison (1847-1931) & William Butler Yeats (1865-1939);
XVII. Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925);
XVIII. W. L. Mackenzie King, Prime
Minister of Canada (1874-1950);
XIX. Upton Sinclair (1878-1968);
XX. Eileen Garrett (1893-1970);
XXI. Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) &
Carl G. Jung (1875-1961);
XXII. Paramahansa Muktananda (1908-1982);
XXIII.
Simone Weil (1909–1943);
XXIV. Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008).
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In 2017, Inner Traditions will publish John Chambers's latest book,
ISAAC NEWTON:
RESCUING THE SOUL OF MAN
Table of Contents
I. A History of the Corruption of the Soul of Man
II. The Newton Code
III. Newton's God
IV. Murder in the Fourth Century A.D.:
(1) Bloodbath in a Boghouse
V. Murder in the Fourth Century A.D.:
(2) The Severed Hand
VI. The Temptation of Saint Anthony
VII. The Great Apostasy
VIII. Apocalypse 2060?
IX. The Conversion of the Jews
X. With Noah on the Mountaintop
XI. In the Days of the Comet
XII. Deconstructing Time
XIII. Chiron and the Argonauts
XIV. A Glitter of Atlantis
XV. The Secret of Life
XVI. Masters of the Prisca Sapientia
(1) Aristarchus, Anaxagoras, Numa
XVII. Masters of the Prisca Sapientia
(2) Philolaus, Pythagoras, Moses, Pauli
XVIII. Son of Archimedes
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"Since the eighteenth century, the problem has existed of
understanding how one and the same person, the greatest genius of his
age, could have written such brilliant mathematics and physics and
still have dabbled in multiple arcane and occult fields.
"This kind of simplistic, 'two-Newton'
interpretation, one a young, brilliant scientist, the second a
senile religious nut case, went by the boards when Newton's
non-scientific writings—five million words including
exhaustive and groundbreaking studies in alchemy, chronology,
polytheistic mythologies, early Christian Church history, the
interpretation of Biblical prophecies, and many more—were auctioned
at Sotheby's in London in 1936. These manuscripts showed that Newton
was working on these 'unscientific' topics throughout his adult
life and was, in fact, working on them at the very times that he did
his greatest scientific writings.
"We can today see the possibility that one man, a product
of many intellectual and religious currents in the seventeenth
century, could write great scientific works, great works in church
history, in Biblical interpretation, and so on, as part of one great
enterprise, that of understanding man and his place in the grand
scheme of God’s creation." - Newton scholar James E. Force
"We may soon be able to substantiate a
hypothesis I offered in 1987, that perhaps Newton was a great
seventeenth-century alchemist and theologian, who dabbled a little
bit in the physical sciences, and that his main concerns deserve our
serious attention if we are to understand the full Newtonian
Revolution." - Newton scholar Richard H. Popkin
_______________________________________
On
February 5, 2014, Edizioni Crisalide, Via Campodivivo, 43 - 04020
Spigno Saturnia (LT), Italy, Tel.: +39 0771.64463 - Fax +39
0771.639121 <crisalide@crisalide.com>,
<http://www.crisalide.com> published the Italian edition of
THE SECRET LIFE OF GENIUS: HOW 24 GREAT MEN AND WOMEN WERE TOUCHED BY SPIRITUAL WORLDS by John Chambers, under the title
LA VITA SEGRETA DEL GENIO: L'IRRUZIONE DELLO SPIRITO NELLA VITA DI VENTIQUATTRO PERSONAGGI FAMOSI
Contenuto:
Isaac Newton, Wolfgang Goethe, Tommaso d’Aquino, Benvenuto
Cellini: questi sono alcuni dei ventiquattro personaggi famosi la cui
biografia spirituale è presentata nel libro.L’autore mostra come le loro
opere siano state il risultato non solo del loro infaticabile impegno
ad eccellere nel loro campo, ma anche dell’irruzione del mondo dello
spirito nella loro vita.
Lettore tipo:
Sia i lettori dediti alla ricerca spirituale, che quelli che si interessano
di storia, filosofia e letteratura.
Argomenti di vendita:
Si tratta di un testo assolutamente originale, che esamina la vita dei
personaggi trattati non tanto dal punto di vista della loro vita esteriore,
quanto da quello della loro capacità di entrare in contatto con
il mondo spirituale.
In
the Italian edition, chapters on Ben Jonson, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells,
Doris Lessing and Yukio Mishima have been replaced by chapters on
Thomas Acquinas, Napoleon Bonaparte, Robert Schumann, Rudolph Steiner
and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
NEW PARADIGM BOOKS ceased publication Summer 2008
NEW AGE BOOKS ABROAD
ceased publication Spring 2009
In the period since New
Paradigm Books was closed, rights to four of its titles have
been transferred to other publishers. Conversations with Eternity: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor Hugo, by John Chambers, has been reissued in revised and expanded form as VIctor Hugo's Conversations with the Spirit World: A Literary Genius's Hidden Life <http://www.innertraditions.com> (see this page).
The Sovereign Soul by Philip Gowins and In Search of the Unitive Vision by Seymour B. Ginsberg have been republished by Quest Books <http://www.questbooks.net/> as, respectively, Practical Sufism and The Masters Speak.
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John Chambers has a
Master of Arts in English from the University of Toronto and spent
three years at the University of Paris. His translations from French
include “Phase One: C. E. Q. Manifesto,” in Quebec: Only the
Beginning. He has been a full-time English instructor at Dawson
College, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and assistant editor at
McGraw-Hill Publishing and managing editor at International Thomson
Publishing, both in New York, NY. In 1988 he received a New York
Business Press Editors' Award for excellence in journalism. He has
published three hundred articles, on subjects ranging from ocean
shipping to mall sprawl to alien abductions, and is the author of
Conversations with Eternity: The Forgotten Masterpiece of Victor
Hugo (New Paradigm Books, 1998), translated into
seven languages.
Seven of his articles appeared in Forbidden
Religion: Suppressed Heresies of the West (Inner Traditions,
2006). From October 1997 to March 2008 he was director of New
Paradigm Books, Boca Raton, Florida. He has published two books with
Inner Traditions/Destiny: Victor Hugo's Conversations with the
Spirit World: A Literary Genius's Hidden Life (January 2008) and
The Secret Life of Genius: How 24 Great Men and Women Were Touched
by Spiritual Worlds (June 2009). His upcoming book, Isaac Newton: Rescuing the Soul of Man, will be published by
Inner Traditions in 2017. He currently lives in Redding,
California, with his wife Judy.
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