Our first new library addition this month is an article by Kerrie Hide, “Insights from the Revelations of Divine Love and the Contemplation to Attain Love”, on religious “conversion” (metanoia) as an “other-worldly falling in love” and “one-ing”, where ultimately God’s love for us and ours for God includes all things, the totality of the self, every element of God’s world.

Prayer ones the soul to God in the sense of bringing together and joining us with what we already are. Prayer brings about the experience of oneing, of being knit in this knot and oned in this oneing, and made holy in this holiness.

• Rodney Blackhirst introduces us to “The Mythological & Ritualistic Background of Plato’s Timaeus”, meeting point between ancient Greek and Oriental traditions of wisdom, and wellspring for centuries of scientific and mystical cosmological studies.

The Timaeus behaves very much as a sacred text in the fullest sense—having a microcosmic completeness and adequacy—which indeed it is, but to a religion that is now defunct… the text’s array of symbols is so primordial and fundamental that it has remained an unsurpassed account of traditional cosmological doctrines.

• In the article “Hasidism and Prayer”, Rabbi Louis Jacobs describes the way of prayer of the tsaddikim towards “that high place in which comprehension is impossible, except in the manner that one smells something fragrant.”

The Hasid should never be ashamed to perform violent movements and to shout aloud during his prayers any more than a man in danger of drowning in a swiftly flowing river is ashamed to call for help and wave his arms about in order to save himself.