In many spiritual traditions, paradise names an otherworldly realm overflowing with lush greenery, luscious fruits, honeyed scents and cascading waterfalls. In others, paradise could be attained on this world, even within the midst of the clattering cacophony surrounding us. Bestselling journey author Pico Iyer shares his personal seek for paradise in The Half Identified Life, traversing the world’s vibrant spiritual traditions to uncover paradise’s contours, its purported areas and the position it performs in earthly conflicts.
With vivid imagery and sterling prose, Iyer paperwork his wanderings from city to temple. In Tehran, Iran, for instance, he discovered that Rumi recommended readers to discover a heaven inside themselves as a result of paradise isn’t some idyllic place that transcends this world. Rumi’s poetry created a “paradise of phrases,” Iyer discovered, amid the unceasing strife of the nation’s varied Islamic branches. Within the Kashmir area of India, which some declare was the placement of the Backyard of Eden, Iyer embraced a paradisiacal second as he floated in a houseboat in the midst of a lake. In Sri Lanka, he visited Adam’s Peak, a forest outcropping that Buddhists, Christians and Hindus all declare as sacred floor. In Jerusalem, Israel, he questioned the place a “nonaffiliated soul” might discover sanctuary and “make peace amongst all of the competing chants.” He tried his luck on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, “a riot of views of paradise overlapping at crooked angles until one was left with the sorrow of six completely different Christian orders sharing the identical area, and lashing out at each other with brooms.” On the finish of his quest, Iyer woke to a “thick pall of mist” in Varanasi, India. It was so tough to see via that it “made each determine look much more like a customer from one other world.” Observing them, he writes, “it was simple to imagine we had been all caught up in the identical spell, creatures in some celestial dream, ferried silently throughout the river and again once more.”
Half travelogue, half theological meditation and half memoir, The Half Identified Life shimmers with knowledge gleaned from exploring the nooks and crannies of the human soul and the world’s city and rural, secular and spiritual, landscapes.
