Within these pages, independent researcher Burniston has crafted a unique discussion of the psychologically and philosophically relevant journeys of C.G. Jung contained in fourteen thematic chapters and three appendices. The text is divided into two parts and three sections: Opus, Prima Materia, and Theoria. Scholarly in presentation and not aimed at a general readership, this is still a compelling read with much in the heady mix of essays that is accessible for anyone familiar with the basics of Jung's work.

With his own unique spiritual and philosophical viewpoints and his big-picture ability to juggle disparate ideas, Burniston engages in connecting, comparing, and contrasting Jung's ideas with a variety of other philosophers' and thinkers' theories, including Ibn' Arabi, Erich Neumann, Mircea Eliade, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Corbin, and Rene Gueron. The author has probed the threads running through centuries of spiritual and intellectual inquiry to reveal insights that reconcile and synthesize disparate viewpoints into a coherent union, challenging the reader to embrace the disunity much as Jung promoted the idea that "wholeness is not perfection because it must necessarily include imperfection. Light and shadow paradoxically coexist in the wholeness of man and cannot be split apart."

This conversation is an apt analogy for the modern era in which the secular and the spiritual are sometimes engaged in a death grip for a battle to ascendancy when there is much about this disunity of opposite ends of the spectrum that could be brought into equanimity by approaching the middle regions, where there is no perfection but instead, a balancing point. There are many previously known but untraveled bridges in this commentary, and Burniston is the guide who brings the reader to both intuit and physically journey across these via the luminous perceptions of his intellectual and spiritual inquiries.

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