WHERE ON EARTH IS HEAVEN?

In this profound and reflective book, the author quotes Heisenberg to the effect that science represents an interplay between nature and ourselves – 'nature as exposed to our mode of questioning.' The question in the title – where on earth is heaven? - was put to the author by his seven-year-old son, and this book is his response, if you like, to life as exposed to his mode of questioning. In this sense, each of us is a question mark within the mystery of existence, this process of death and rebirth, disappearance and reappearance, the interplay between the visible and the invisible. Jonathan Stedall has had a long and distinguished career as an award-winning documentary maker, which has brought him into contact with a fascinating range of people, who help form the structure of the narrative, along with a huge variety of reading and quotations which enrich the text.

The sequence is autobiographical, with many evocative photos depicting the people involved in his films as fellow travellers on the quest, contemporary people to whom he put the same questions as he was exploring himself, or those like Gandhi, Jung and Tolstoy who explored this territory in their own time. The reader is drawn into and accompanies this quest for awakening as these same issues pose questions to one's own understanding along the way, and we emerge with an enriched understanding at the end. If we listen carefully, we gradually become more aware of who we are and what we should be doing. And yet, our identity is itself a deep mystery which cannot be fully grasped by the rational mind. Towards the end of his life, Jung wrote about his sense of kinship with all things, where the boundaries of identity become permeable as the sense of unity merges with that of individuality. It is not for nothing that the question 'who am I?' is a Zen koan. At a personal level, we sense that we are more than our bodies, and, as Sir John Betjeman put it, 'eternity is around us all the time.' We live in many dimensions.

Betjeman is just one of the significant people of our time whom Jonathan knew well. The reader is privy to conversations and exchanges with the likes of Sir Laurence van der Post, E.F.Schumacher, Cecil Collins, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ben Okri, Sir Mark Tully, Sir Bernard Lovell and many other pioneers who are less well known. A significant current running through the whole book is a work of the philosopher and mystic Rudolf Steiner, including descriptions of documentaries made about the Camphill communities for the disabled. He also spent a year studying at Emerson College. Jonathan uses Steiner as a point of departure for further reflection rather than a source of definitive revelation – an attitude that is always dangerous among the followers of such sages. He draws on his writings about reincarnation as well as the nature of the higher worlds and our capacity to perceive them. He quotes a profound passage where Steiner characterises love and light as the two components that permeate human existence, with 'love as the soul constituent of earthly being, light as the outer material constituent of earthly being.' This insight expresses the essence of mystical and near death experience, and perhaps of life itself, which Jonathan explores through other mystics like Tauler and Underhill.

Steiner was a pioneer of spiritual science as a means of penetrating more deeply into the nature of reality, following in the footsteps of Goethe. Jonathan calls for science to recognise a deeper intelligence in the universe than is apprehended by the militant atheists, who insist that life is simply a product of chance and necessity. They do not acknowledge the limits of science (a point made by Lovell) and the importance other ways of knowing, even if they have a sense of wonder. Teilhard de Chardin can serve as an awakener in this sense with his concept of the divine milieu in which we live and move and have our being. Another crucial question for science and philosophy is why there is something rather than nothing. Answers to this question will never be definitive as we ourselves are part of the question we are posing. So Jonathan does not propose anything definitive but rather shares his own quest.

Towards the end of the book, he quotes the Russian definition of a pessimist as a well-informed optimist. He remains optimistic because of the Cultural Creatives and the work described by Paul Hawken in his book Blessed Unrest. Death obliges us to ask the question about the meaning of life, and Steiner describes the field of mortality bringing to maturity the seeds of immortality within us. If we return to this sense of kinship to which I referred above and recognise the way in which is interwoven with the universal, then 'what we have achieved, whether good or bad, will affect and be incorporated in the whole of creation, better or worse.' This is our task and our responsibility. And this illuminating book serves as a series of signposts along the spiritual path, an encouragement to widen our horizons and deepen our understanding of who we are and where we might be going.