This book is an account by a sociologist from the University of Maine of his visit to a monastery in Cyprus. Indirectly, it is concerned with the present paradigm in physics and the implications for this of the paranormal happenings associated with groups of monks on the island, who subject themselves to extreme measures in self-discipline.

The book opens with a wide-ranging discussion involving a mixed group of scientists, computer people, and medical practitioners in New York. The second half of the book follows a pilgrimage to Greece. The author spent 10 nights at the monastery on Mount Athos in Cyprus. The climax of the pilgrimage is a visit to the head of the monastery, Father Vasilios, who actually lives the life of a hermit in a hut apart from the monastary.

It takes 8 hours of mountain walking from the monastery — located in very isolated territory — to reach this monk, who has hidden himself in a hut. A number of miracles are attributed to him. The author finds the priest to be affable and rather lively, his age being judged to be "anywhere between 60 and 90." When the author returns to civilization, after the ten days' isolation with the celibate monks, he realizes he is not fit for the life of excruciating discipline to which the monks subject themselves. Before returning to Maine, he visits a seaside village on Cyprus for a few days to contemplate the implications of what he has learned. His conclusions fill the last chapter.

Chapter 1 exposes the author's main point, the rest of the book being a presentation of the evidence. His viewpoint is extremely radical in nature, and has great breadth in its implications. Scientism as a public philosophy is inconsistent with many experimental observations, some of which undermine the basis of the present physics. The apparent disarray among the world's religions fades once one looks beneath the surface to the spiritual experiences upon which they are all based. Then, suddenly, they present a common front, a kind of universal philosophy, variously called Buddhist, Christian, and Rosicrucian.

The contrast which the author presents is then a very sharp one. There is a common philosophy, several thousand years old, going back to the Upanishads. It does not need experiments to prove it. It arises in thoughts within us - so long as one disciplines oneself sufficiently, prays, and meditates. Then, one enters into altered states of consciousness, and the common realizations, to which the common philosophy gives rise, become conscious. The Yogis, the Sufis, and the Christian mystics all have the same things to say. The paranormal happenings present physics with a confrontation, brutal and direct, which it can no longer continue to ignore. Levitation, bilocation, and out of the body experiences are all phenomena experienced in the monasteries. In so far as they are accepted as real, they lead immediately to a collapse "by the people," i.e. in the popular world view. Physics, on the other hand, is the basis of the miracles of technology which have occurred since Bacon, Newton, and Leibniz.

The author is dramatic in his quiet way: he tells the reader to stop pretending, we have gone 400 years out on a limb, the wrong limb. Chapter 2 consists largely of discussions in New York with those eager to penetrate and escape the straitjacket of scientific materialism. Miraculous healing shows up here and there - in fact, it permeates many of the discussions used in the book to illustrate the marvelous and the impossible. He faces up to the "big questions" which we all discuss as sophomores. A soul? (Yes, but it is complex.) Reincarnation? (Sometimes.) God? (Um: very difficult. We experience "God" filtered through our own consciousness and the filter has small holes.)

Chapters 3 and 4 describe paranormal happenings in the USA. Among the many peculiar events described is one concerning a sophisticated Indian yogi whom the author met at a party. Markides describes the events observed in great detail and finally concludes that the Yogi was able to make one of the participants disappear for a few minutes.

The book is full of challenging thoughts which turn up in the discussions. It was Freud who melted the glue of the western civilization. Was he sent by Lucifer to spoil God's plan? No, for without Freud, there would have been no Jung, who stimulated spiritual insight in modern times, an era in which the "educated classes" regarded all religion as superstition. Then, in Chapters 5 and 6, the author softens us up for what is to come. For example, he points out that Wilder Penfield, the great brain surgeon of Montreal, concluded from his experiments on exposed brains that there could be no interpretation of them within the present paradigm of physics and chemistry. The brain is a computer, but someone is writing its software, clicking its mouse. Randall Byrd has established that a prayed-for group of cardiac patients recovers quickly, while the corresponding unprayed-for control group recovers more slowly. The story of Arigo, the trade union leader who performed a stream of rapid and effective operations using rusty tools and neither antiseptics nor other anesthetics (and was frequently photographed doing so by western medical doctors) is given in detail. Here, one of the mysteries of our time is faced. Scientific and Western-style evidence for a number of "impossible" phenomena has been around for many years; in a few cases, for about 100 years. It is Galileo and the telescope all over again, but this time, it is not the priests who refuse to look — it is the scientists. Why has this situation been going on for so long?

By Chapter 10, we are in Cyprus and in the monastery on Mount Athos. The lion of Mount Athos - the origin of the title in the book - turns out to be the chief of the monastery. He is said to have many of the characteristics associated with Christian saints and Yogis. He can fall into an ecstasy (trance state). Several detailed accounts of radically "impossible" feats alleged to have been performed by Father Vasilios are given. Chapter 11 explains to a degree why all these amazing things can happen on Mount Athos, while they occur so rarely in New York. Thus, the paranormal happenings cannot be brought about easily, but only in the presence of those who have disciplined themselves for many years. Fasting, complete obedience to an elected abbot, praying and meditating for many hours per day, having little sleep, these are routines which the monks have found lead eventually (for some of them) to what the Yogis call "Siddhis." The goal of all the discipline, obedience, and fasting is to obliterate the Ego.

This is a tenet of the monastic life: if one pushes one's self down sufficiently, obstructions to the direct action of God, which in most of us are dense, fade gradually. A person who perseveres in the monastic life of deprivation begins to experience new states of consciousness. In time, he finds that happenings which are impossible within the confines of our understanding of physics may occur. "You see," says Father Maximos, "you have to reach a state where you don't have any personal desires. Then, God acts for you and things happen which are not possible in normal life."

Finally, the author ruminates on what he has witnessed in the ten days. He is back in civilization now. Can it be that the residuum of a medieval religion has a message for the 21st Century? Why are so many things being thrust upon us now which seem to tell us that we have it all wrong: the near death experiences, the UFO abductions, the successful experiments in psychokinesis? Kenneth Ring, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Connecticut, has had his say on this. He thinks that the shamanization of humanity is occurring. A "Great Transition" is under way. Have the last few hundred years been a time of bedazzlement? Have the inventions and machinery which flowed from Newton's 17th Century discoveries of gravity glued our eyes upon the outer world and closed our minds to other worlds? Is the sudden collapse of the only great world power that stretched the scientific paradigm to eliminate the spiritual "officially" actually a characteristic of the present change? Could it be that the monks on Mount Athos are not a fading remnant of an ancient faith, but the strongly beating hearts of the perennial world philosophy - the spiritual consciousness which is the common foundation of all religions?

These are great questions and this book poses them in a very calm and palatable way. The author reminds himself and us that he is a western scientist and a tenured professor at a U.S. university. The tone is even-paced and the text is never heavy or hard to read. For one thing, the author is generous in his descriptions of his surroundings where all these discussions occur, whether they be in Orono, Maine, or on the shores of Mount Athos. He shines his light and then lets his colleagues speak at length. They contradict; they discuss; they explain. The presentation is often persuasive, but always dispassionate. It is, above all, brave, for as the reviewer knows, to come out with evidence for truths inimical to the paradigm which flows through U.S. universities often gives rise to painful reactions from powerful colleagues. But the questions will not go away. Indeed, we may ask whether the astounding events said to have been witnessed by monks in monasteries on a Greek island are more amazing and more paradigm-shifting than results of some of the scientific experiments described in refereed papers in the Journal of Scientific Exploration.

J. O'M. Bockris
Dist. Prof. of Chemistry
Texas A&M University
4973 Afton Oaks
College Station, TX 77845

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