The Voice of the Thunder

Book excerpt: "From the beginning, Laurens van der Post has been aware of a dimension in life far larger and more significant than the outer eventfulness of everyday living. Whatever the demands on him during his long and distinguished career in many parts of the world, he has never lost his instinctive sense of life's preeminent role, its overriding purpose and awesome continuity, and the ultimate wisdom lodged in its keeping." "His perception of life's mysterious power began with the Bushmen, the first people of his native Africa. It grew in the universal imagery of dreams, the fertile legends and stories of ancient civilization, the intuitive teaching of prophets, poets, and other pioneers of human awareness, among them Carl Gustav Jung, explorer of mankind's "collective unconscious"." "In this book he has brought together two of his most deeply felt and far-reaching essays, reissued here as "The Little Memory" and "The Great Memory," in which he began to explore the concept of life's overall pattern. He has extended their message in a new chapter of great imaginative insight in which he traces the "Odyssean pattern" that exists in the unconscious of every human being - the potential in all men and women to acquire self-knowledge, to fulfill their individual destiny, and to live life according to its fundamental precepts." "The Voice of the Thunder is an urgent manifesto for renewal in the human spirit, a clarion call for recognition of life's great imperatives, and a stirring vision of hope for a world increasingly divided, blinkered, and adrift."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved