In the Bible passage of Exodus 23:28 we read: And I will send the hornet before thee. I have taken this biblical verse to heart and have even helped the Lord God fulfill this “threatening” prophecy with my newest spiritual book Swedenborg & Gurdjieff: The Missing Links (Anti-intuitive Essays For Personal Transformation).
The cover on this short book features mean-looking hornets emerginging from their nest and seemingly posing a threat to the reader. In my introduction to the book I even warn potential readers that I will be poking a stick into a hornets’ nest throughout the following pages.
Why publish a book that might scare buyers away? (Especially since I had a long career in advertizing and promotion where I learned in “Marketing 101” that you always offer positive support for people’s expectations of improving their lives.)
Well, I do this for everyone’s eternal good. But this approach is admittedly “anti-intuitive” because we most often attempt to improve the quality of our lives without serious self-examination. It is an uphill battle trying to convince people that self-improvement is not an “add-on.”
You see, the hornets in my new book are special psycho-spiritual hornets, which symbolize thoughts and feelings that inflict harm on our spiritual well being. (It is these types of hornets that the biblical passage above alludes to.) We all harbor such hurtful feelings and thoughts deep within are hearts and minds but we go through life mostly unaware of these ignoble personal traits—they fly under our radar. So we all participate in a great conspiracy and cover-up by sustaining this diminished level of consciousness.
Worse yet, you cannot protect yourself from these pesky personal flaws with a can of insect spray.
My new book simply lets the reader discover how these tiny pests have built their nest within the innermost fabric of our lives. Unfortunately, this process of self-discovery comes with “stinging” revelations. It hurts to find something unflattering within one’s inner makeup. But since it is our inner reality (quality of our hearts and minds) that survives the death of our physical bodies, mere outward acts of kindness are left behind as well. Unfortunately, our psycho-spiritual hornets travel with us into our spiritual abode where they can continue to inflict harm to our souls—unless we do something about it.
These spiritual pests can only be removed if we notice them as flaws of character and humbly ask for God’s help in removing them from our lives. Even if you are an atheist and don’t believe in an afterlife, you can certainly embrace the idea that the problems facing the human race and society can all be traced to harmful “hornets” buzzing around people’s hearts and minds!
(My wife of 36 years has written the foreword to this new book because she knows—and can attest to—my personal flaws better than anyone else. Ouch!)
