Thirty-three Meditations on the Paradox of the Self

Poet Michael Hedley Burton has written a series of poems that attempt to grasp that illusive experience of selfhood. In the book's foreword he writes that there are two different kinds of self accessible to us, one built up from our earthly experience and the other overshadowing this as a kind of "higher self". The drama of who we are is founded very much on the kind of relationship existing within us between these two selves. The "Thirty-three Meditations" is a deeply Christian study - but not Christian in the sense of allegiance to any fixed form of religion. Here the emphasis is on one's own personal relationship to the divine within. In the final section we are taken into images that Burton received from a study of "The Fifth Gospel" - lectures given in 1913 by Rudolf Steiner. In looking for the essence of selfhood he found himself confronting the one known as Jesus of Nazareth whose destiny it was to sacrifice his earthly ego to become the bearer of the Christ. These are poems that will appeal to anyone who thinks deeply about life and who wants a book that can be kept by the bedside and studied over a period of time, always giving further thoughts. One reader, a psychologist, called it "33 forms of healing medicine for the human ego".