Breaking Through
Subtitle: A Narrative of the Great Work
By: André VandenBroeck.
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: 1996
Place of publication: San Francisco, USA
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 374
ISBN-13: 9780872863194
Subjects: Prehistoric peoples -- Fiction.; Paleolithic period -- Fiction.; Cinematographers -- Fiction.; Spain -- Fiction.
Description: "Our stone is made the way the world is made," the old alchemists used to say of their great work, which they called an imitation of nature in her mode of operation. But what is nature? As Rumi put it: First I appeared in the mineral realm; then, I entered the vegetable kingdom. I lived there a long time, forgetting what I had been. Then, I took the path to animal existence, remembering nothing of my plant life. Finally, I became human, forgetting everything.".

Breaking Through depicts one man's experience of this ancient imagery. Piero Tallini, a cinematographer, is irresistibly drawn to the Paleolithic culture of southern Spain. While exploring the rugged hills in search of a suitable location for the film he wants to make, he finds himself establishing contact with the first human beings to know the world through interiority and language.

Guided by powerful presences, he enters the primordial orbit of cave-consciousness and experiences what the cave ancestors experienced. But this is only the beginning of an initiation so profound it must take place within the earth where his journey into the past becomes an adventure in the present as he undergoes the phases of transformation. Regenerated through the realms of nature, Tallini recognizes that consciousness is genesis and perceives himself as Earth-Human becoming cosmos.

Ever since Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for claiming that all things exist in consciousness, science has torn mankind from its cosmic home. Alienated from itself, the objective, heliocentric mind has ravaged Earth's soul.

In his passage to the center, Tallini learns to seek the source and purpose of life not in some Big Bang still resonating in the farthest reaches of space, or in bones analyzed by paleoanthropologists, but here and now through participation in the interplay of sensation, perception, attention, thought, and language. Breaking Through is a philosophical novel that bears witness to the drama of reality in a way that transcends both philosophy and fiction.