Wednesday, March 09, 2016

More Madero: Interviews by Jeffrey Mishlove and a Review by Michael Tymn

It's sometimes curious the way books wend their way to their readers. When I started out writing under the name C.M. Mayo more than (ayy) two decades ago, like most young writers, I hyper-focussed on short-term goals such as getting an agent, getting published, winning prizes, and selling oh-so-many copies. I still relish getting published, winning prizes, and selling copies, when that happens to happen, but my view of the value and meaning of this peculiar endeavor we call "writing books" has since expanded into more esoteric realms, and in more ways than one. 

As those of you who have been following this blog well know, back in 2014 I brought out Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual, which includes my translation of Manual espírita, by "Bhima," that is, the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico from 1911-1913. In other words, I wrote a book about and translated a book of transcendental importance to the 1910 Revolution itself, among other things, to which, for more than a century, only a handful of specialists in Mexican history had paid more than a whit of attention. (And why not? Two words: cognitive dissonance.)


The thing is, a book is both a commodity, as anyone who works with a major New York publishing house or, say, a rare books dealer, can aver, and a mystical package, that is, a complex amalgam of thought-forms that, so encapsulated, code on paper, can travel forward across even vast realms of time and space to unleash its contents into the imaginal realm of a human mind. 
When that happens to happen.


Right now, as I am working on a book about Far West Texas, I have on my desk a mystical package that is 474 years old. Specifically: a paperback edition of the English translation by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz of the Relación or report of 1547 by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca to the King of Spain-- a story that is an odyssey if there ever was one.

To the newsI am very honored to announce that just this week Michael Tymn reviewed Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution on his blog over at White Crow Books. 

Among many other works, Tymn is the author of Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife. 




And I am also honored to announce that Jeffrey Mishlove conducted a three part interview with me about Spiritism in the Mexican Revolution for his program "New Thinking Allowed." As of this week, the first two of three segments All three segments are now on-line.














Mishlove is the author of The PK Man, a book that took him 20 years to publish, is now 15 years old, and is yet finding ever more readers. It may have gotten a slow start but I believe that Mishlove's The PK Man will stand as one of the landmark works of the 20th century. I explain in my forthcoming review of Jeffrey Kripal and Whitley Strieber's Super Natural.













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