Rarely does a book come along that offers a new window through which we can view, with enhanced perception, the panorama of life. Rarely does an author create a compelling inversion of conventional thought that serves up lost grief and new hope in equal portions. Seldom does one find a book so laden with paradox, humor, love and wisdom as Daniel Deardorff’s The Other Within. Therefore, we have all the more reason to treasure it, read it twice and use its insights to realign our lives.

So what is this book, anyway? It is classified as psychology and myth, but it also partakes of philosophy, literature, storytelling and poetry. It is a book that finds the common threads running through all of these, weaving a new synthesis of thought that lays bare the essential paradoxes of life itself. And chief among those paradoxes is that of “the gift within the wound.” As we learn to see this, we begin to understand “the genius of deformity.” Deardorff begins with these words:

Every human being, in the infinite variety of body and soul, comes into this world so unique and so alike, with so much promise—each one prepared and appointed for the best... It’s not going to happen.

The promise of life will break—early or late, far and away from the life that might have been—we fall, and thus we are betrayed. Crushed and broken, this anomalous, aberrant, unimaginable shape of life, strange to the eyes of the pack, if not concealed, means a life of exile.

Thus, our wounds and betrayals are what separate us from others; they are the seeds of our uniqueness and the initiators of deeper perception. Nothing so clarifies consciousness as the shock of what Deardorff calls the Thunderbolt. He continues:

‘Wisdom’—the vision of doom or being doomed to vision—begins in the unforeseen catastrophe which strips away life’s promise, reduces hope to ashes, and leaves one castaway in the original darkness. Consciousness stripped down to nothing. What remains is what we are. What remains is the ‘hierophany of betrayal;’ here is the violent strike of a Thunderbolt—the irrevocable summons to a deeper life—and for a few, the hard-won discovery that the very instrument of betrayal, the Thunderbolt which afflicts them, is also the soul’s invincible core.

What follows this challenging opening is an initiatory journey which leads the reader outside the walls of “respectable civilization” and into the weird realms of trickster wisdom, (where the important thing is to make all the right mistakes), and the leaping consciousness (through which seemingly unconnected areas of thought and experience are seen, in flashes of insight, to be aspects of a single intelligent whole). All of this engenders the understanding that a shift of perception can reveal an unseen intelligence which seems to have chosen for us the perfect misfortunes to bring forth our most exceptional gifts—if we accept the gifts and do the work. Such ideas can free us from the deadening role of victimhood, a habit as boring as it is popular.

Deardorff’s ideas are so many and so challenging to consensus reality that all a book review can do is bait the hook. Yet I promise that those who dive into these waters will emerge transformed, stronger and more alive—and the greatest rewards will go to those most willing to risk their own clichés.

In his introduction to the book, the poet Robert Bly has written: “Deardorff is a true inheritor of Joseph Campbell. He is persistent about the intelligence inside the myth. And he gives weight to the wounded emotional body which people on the road of descent possess. He notices that the man or woman who is crippled or fiercely outcast or deformed has an honorary place in the house of mysteries.”

All of us are wounded. The wounds of some are more visible, or more severe, than others. Yet we are all split off from the Divine One which is our true self. To find that one, we must take the downward road into the wound, for here is the connection. And in so doing, one may find that fear and dread turn at times to wonder, and even healing and a kind of union. It may be possible, we discover, to retrieve and value, even love the lost parts of ourselves. We may actually find in the end, that those lost parts are ourselves.

The Other Within sets up, through its simultaneously held contradictory points of view, a kind of living tension that runs like taut strings through the heart, potentially transforming us at last into fitting instruments for the soul’s music, which we were born to play.