Now, elsewhere in Dr. Bruteau's 1979 book, she also briefly quotes McLuhan. Let's look at each of those in turn.
On page 108, in Dr. Bruteau's Chapter 5: "The Conviction Community" (pp. 92-114), she says, "Marshall McLuhan [1964, p. 92] comments wryly 'that self-consciousness of the causes and limits of one's own culture seems to threaten the ego structure [of Dr. Bruteau's psychic grid] and is, therefore, avoided.'" McLuhan's wry comment is characteristic of his Menippean style.
On page 122, in Dr. Bruteau's Chapter 6: "Alternative States of Consciousness" (pp. 115-143), she says, "Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media [1964, p. 163], tells of seeing an anthropological film of a Melanesian carver cutting out a decorated drum 'with such skill, coordination, and ease as to provoke applause.' But when the anthropologist asked the tribe to build crates to ship these carvings in, 'they struggled unsuccessfully for three days to make two planks intersect at a 90[-degree] angle, then gave up in frustration.' Items that appear obviously linked in our grid - all types of woodworking - are not linked in other grids."
On page 192, in Dr. Bruteau's Chapter 8: "Feedback Loops" (pp. 181-205), she says, "Marshall McLuhan [1964, p. 70] remarks on 'the endless power of men to hypnotize themselves into unawareness in the presence of challenge,' and comments that we need the will to be aware as well as the intelligence to perceive situations adequately."
In summary, Dr. Beatrice Bruteau's account of Marshall McLuhan's 1964 book in her 1979 book strikes me as admirably lucid and of enduring value.
Conclusion
As we noted above, in the 2016 book honoring Dr. Beatrice Bruteau, the Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault says that "The Psychic Grid [was] by her own estimation her 'breakthrough book' and personal favorite" (p. 12). From the above highlights of her 1979 book centering on Marshall McLuhan's thought in his 1964 book Understanding Media, we may now turn our attention to speculating a bit about why Dr. Bruteau's 1979 book was her personal favorite and why she characterized it as her "breakthrough book" after she had already published two significant books earlier, Worthy Is the World: The Hindu Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo (1972) and Evolution toward Divinity: Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu Traditions (1974).
We may take a hint from the name of the book series in which her 2001 essay collection The Grand Option: Personal Transformation and a New Creation was published: Gethsemani Studies in Psychological and Religious Anthropology. In effect, Dr. Bruteau's 1979 book The Psychic Grid: How We Create the World We Know enabled her to articulate for herself and for her readers a detailed and nuanced philosophical, psychological, and religious anthropology. That is, as she operationally defines and explains her conceptualization of the psychic grid, it is a philosophical, psychological, and religious anthropology - and it is also compatible with what Ong tends to refer to as philosophical personalism.
Indeed, much of Ong's work shows that he was also grappling in his own ways and to the best of his abilities with formulating and articulating a philosophical, psychological, and religious anthropology.
I hasten to add that the selections gathered together in Marshall McLuhan's 1999 book The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion may be interpreted as showing that he was also grappling in his own ways and to the best of his abilities with formulating and articulating a philosophical, psychological, and religious anthropology. We may even credit McLuhan's thought in his 1964 book with being a significant source of Dr. Bruteau's thought about the psychic grid in her 1979 book.
The Franciscan friar Daniel P. Horan's 2019 book Catholicity and Emerging Personhood: A Contemporary Theological Anthropology shows that the need to formulate and articulate a philosophical, psychological, and religious anthropology an ongoing task.
By using Ong, McLuhan, and Horan here to establish a frame of reference, I hope to show why Dr. Beatrice Bruteau set herself the task of explicitly formulating and articulating a philosophical, psychological, and religious anthropology in her 1979 book. The figurative term that she coined, the psychic grid, was her handy way of referring to what C. G. Jung and his followers (such as Erich Neumann) refer to as ego-consciousness. For Dr. Bruteau, the conceptualization of the psychic grid, as she discusses it in her 1979 book, enabled her to discuss mystic experience.
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