The Initiation

by J. Vaughn Boone
64 Pages

reviewed by Christine Hall

“Big things come in small packages.” Like most clichés, we’ve heard this phrase so many times that it’s lost its impact, if not it’s meaning. Clichés are like that, which is why we’re supposed to avoid them when writing. We’re not supposed to write phrases like ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Both of these clichés, however, take on new meaning when perusing J. Vaughn Boone’s new book The Initiation. At a glance, this book doesn’t seem to amount to much. Weighing-in at a mere sixty-four pages, this is much more a booklet than a fully grown book, and the two staples along the spine might leave the impression that this was something that was put together at Kinkos.

In other words, if you were to see this volume on the shelves of your neighborhood book store (most likely, you won’t), you would probably be tempted to dismiss it out of hand. “Who could possibly say anything meaningful in such a few number of pages?” you might ask, before turning your attention to a six hundred page tome. This is a shame, for with The Initiation, Boone has crafted a succinct primer on spirituality that should be a welcome addition on the shelves on anyone interested in God, the Goddess or any aspect of the divine.

The author, Vaughn Boone, has been mentioned in our pages before. Although he’s eighty-five years old (born in 1916), he has the appearance of a healthy sixty year old and seems to have the energy of your average thirty something. Raised in a Methodist family in Greensboro, North Carolina, he took ministerial courses while attending a Methodist college. Like many a southerner before him, J. Vaughn Boone was called very early in life to become some sort of a preacher man. Or a doctor. At college he also took pre-med courses, with the intention to become a medical missionary.

Somewhere along the way, however, Vaughn made a left turn, for the spirituality he espouses today only barely resembles the orthodox Methodist faith of his youth. Although his spiritual bent is still decidedly Christian, his beliefs have become more like those of the early Christian mystics, before the conversion of Rome and the advent of theology, when Christianity was willing to borrow from other beliefs.

“I had just a small tinge of guilt for having some knowledge of the eastern religions where words such as ‘karma,’ ‘reincarnation,’ and ‘pranha’ were part of everyday language,” he explains in his book. “Yet, as I had spent a great deal of time studying comparative religions, I had come to realize that truth must be accepted from any source without prejudice, for all have truth, but none perhaps has total truth. Regardless of the source, denomination, or religion, it must meet a human need or it would simply have faded away.”

The Initiation tells the story of a vision had by Boone. In this vision, he’s taken by two beings, who turn-out to be aspects of his higher self, to stand before a board of exalted spiritual beings who question him about his knowledge of spiritual matters. The process has the atmosphere of an oral exam at a school like Cambridge, but without the smug, self-assured superiority of an Ivy League faculty.

While standing before this cosmic board, Boone answers their questions one by one. He tells them what he knows about happiness, understanding, karma, divine grace and more. When asked to explain his understanding of “treasures,” he begins by saying, “‘Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.’ This is the Master’s admonition that, while gentle, comes with a challenge, thunderous in impact. To catch the full impact, one must follow with the realization that ‘heaven is within.’ Thus, we paraphrase with, ‘Lay up for yourselves treasures within.’”

The book could be called “The Spiritual World According to J. Vaughn Boone,” and in the hands of the typical New Age guru it would be pretentious, self-serving and full of hidden agendas. But Boone is not a New Age huckster out to make a buck on people’s spiritual desires. He’s just a country boy from the Tarheel State, and his responses to the questions are always filled with a proper North Carolina bred humility. It seems that he’s always sure that his answers won’t be good enough.

Boone says that his job, as he sees it, is to point people toward the path that will take them up the mountain where they can come face-to-face with the divine. At the end of their journey, they might call this divine being God, Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or a thousand other names that humankind has used to call-out for spiritual guidance. Boone doesn’t care what name they use – only that they find this divine spark of love.

To order a copy of The Initiation from The Unicorn Shoppe (our online store), click here.