by Jordan McGill
Staff Writer

The other night I arrived home, checked my mailbox and found to my delight Mortimer Ostow’s culminating life’s work, “Spirit, Mind and Brain,” in hardback, which I had ordered off of ABEbooks.com about a week and a half before.

Mortimer Ostow was a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and neuroscientist who died in 2006. I discovered his work while using Google to search of hypotheses on human violence. (Specifically, whether or not the tendency is innate within each one of us.)

The first hit procured the desired effect. “Ostow, M. M.D., Theory of Aggression.” Unfortunately, it was only an abstract and on one of those sites where you have to be a member to access the exposes. Since I wasn’t about to pay $49.95, I decided to jump on over to www.shoreline.edu where I clicked “Current Students,” then “Library,” and finally “Articles and other info.” I scrolled down to JSTORE, logged in and typed “Mortimer Ostow” into the search parameter box.

The JSTORE online scholarly journal research database holds an amazing amount of interesting information. The first paper of Ostow’s that popped up was titled, “The Nature of Religious Controls,” an essay examining the relationships between religion and mental health.

I printed the piece of writing and returned to the Google results page. This time I clicked on a review for his most recently published endeavor, “Spirit, Mind and Brain.”

After a hasty read through of the evaluation, I found that the book addressed a family of interrelated issues: spirituality, religiosity and mysticism. Ostow rejects the conventional view that religion and psychological health are incompatible. He views these two impulses as not only interdependent but even indispensable for the shaping of a mature identity.

The book was deemed “required reading for all who are concerned with the place of the spirit in the tumult of modernity.” Who can argue with that?

I promptly placed my order and when I finally got a hold of the book, I finished all 203 pages in less than four hours. That’s 50 pages an hour. Honestly, I didn’t stop. Upon entering my unit, I opened the manila package, unearthed the book from its brown paper packaging and plopped onto the dirty linoleum floor of my kitchen.

My eyes and mind began to swallow and digest sentence after sentence after paragraph after chapter. Time meant nothing to me—neither did the page numbers. I was on a vision quest to reap what insight I could from a man who claimed to have a, “smattering of ignorance…and expertise.”

Life itself never changes—only The Self does. I was raised by a mother who took me to church every Sunday until eighth grade, when I decided to stop going. Since then, I’ve wrestled with personal testimonials from others and have questioned my own beliefs about faith, religion and whether or not a higher power, “God,” even exists.

At 1 a.m. I finished the book, hungry for some cream cheese to smear on a toasted bagel. I also knew that I needed to buy some soap. Mentally lightened, I drove to three different supermarkets (all of which said, “Open 24 Hours”) before I found one whose doors were not welded shut.

Entering the deserted store I did what I always do; followed my gut and read the signs. Maneuvering through the aisles, I grabbed the holy trinity of Philadelphia Cream Cheese, Irish Spring and some grapefruit juice in one fell swoop. It’s amazing what can happen when spirituality becomes something less to do with “God” and more with binding reality into a semi-coherent occurrence.

As I drove home on the deserted street passing beneath green lights at 60 miles an hour, I thought to myself, “Bill Hicks was right: Life is a ride experienced by the collaborative intellectual consciousness of one species’ individuals having subjective moments. You can change it anytime you want. The best part is that it’s all up to you.”