LOVER OF WISDOM | MYSTIC | DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGIST | AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR | ROUND THE WORLD VOYAGER | NATURE WALKER |
Robert Atkinson
ROBERT ATKINSON, PHD, award-winning author, educator, and developmental psychologist, is a 2020 Gold Nautilus Book Award winner as co-editor of Our Moment of Choice: Evolutionary Visions and Hope for the Future, a 2023 Silver Nautilus Book Award winner for A New Story of Wholeness: An Experiential Guide for Connecting the Human Family, and a 2017 Silver Nautilus Book Award winner for The Story of Our Time: From Duality to Interconnectedness to Oneness. He is also the author or co-editor of nine other books including, The Way of Unity: Essential Principles and Preconditions for Peace (2025), Year of Living Deeply: A Memoir of 1969 (2019), Mystic Journey: Getting to the Heart of Your Soul’s Story (2012), The Life Story Interview (1998), The Gift of Stories (1995), and Songs of the Open Road: The Poetry of Folk-Rock and the Journey of the Hero (1974).
His PhD is in cross-cultural human development from the University of Pennsylvania, with a postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Chicago. He is professor emeritus at the University of Southern Maine, an internationally recognized authority on life story interviewing, a pioneer in the techniques of personal myth-making and soul-making, director of StoryCommons, founder of One Planet Peace Forum, and a member of the Evolutionary Leaders Circle with a Lifetime Achievement Award as a Visionary Leader from the Visioneers International Network.
http://www.robertatkinson.net
My 10 Best
(In no particular order)
Leaves of Grass
This is the only book I remember as a high school kid, without fully realizing it at the time, that had a life-changing impact on me. Growing up on eastern Long Island, I was doubly drawn to the visionary, wholistic poetry of Walt Whitman, who was born not too far down the road from where I was just beginning to think about a sense of place, belonging, and becoming. He not only highlighted the many contradictions of life but also, just as smoothly, brought them into balance and harmony, leaving me with a sense that everything is in its rightful place. The poet of Paumanok, the bard of egalitarian democracy, juxtaposed opposing forces to illustrate something greater than the parts. He focused not on a temporal, ever-changing realm but on the one that does not waver, even with the blowing winds of time. He recognized permanency beyond change, as the reconciler of opposites. He taught me of the wholeness of the creation beyond its parts, of the continuity across and between the realms of creation, and that his, mine, and everyone’s inner world is connected to everyone else’s. He gave me the courage to look past the ambiguity of the moment.
Walden
If there ever was anyone who knew how to live deeply in the moment, wherever he was, it was the tenant of Walden Pond. Thoreau inspired me to not only seek the solace of the natural settings around me, but also to draw out as much understanding as possible from their organic renewal processes. Within their unfolding patterns were hidden lessons, in the swaying trees, the flowing stream, and the changing seasons. I discovered that I wanted to learn what nature had to teach as much as he did. I wanted to know the laws of the universe in their simplest, most direct form, to gaze into the sky at night and see who created them, and for what purpose. He helped me see the inherent harmony and balance in the universe around me.
The Prophet
This was another dual-purpose book for me that snuck up at just the right time. This book changed my whole approach to writing before I knew I was reading it for that reason. I wasn’t fully aware at the time that I was an aspiring writer, but reading Gibran inspired me beyond its deep and insightful understanding of relationships to teach me in a subtle way that it was just as important to choose my words, for whatever purpose, not just for their meaning, or for the wisdom they contained, but also for their power and beauty.
The Hero of a Thousand Faces
In my mid 20s, not yet fully aware that I was undergoing my own mythic journey, I serendipitously found not only this book but also its author within an hour of each other. Living aways up the Hudson Valley, I decided to go into the city one random day. Wandering through Greenwich Village, a book in the window of the 8th Street Bookshop drew me in. I found the book and began to read it. A few minutes later, looking up at the bulletin board in front of me, I noticed a poster for a talk being given by Joseph Campbell, whose book I was reading. It was that night at Cooper Union, just a few blocks away, and I had just enough time to get there. Sitting down in the front rows, the huge hall filled up around me. As he began to speak, it felt as if I was the only one in the hall. He described in mythological and archetypal terms exactly what I was experiencing in my life at the time. I went up to meet him after the talk, he was open to talking more another time, and he became a mentor, sharing with me his insights from mythology that paralleled and explained the universal, timeless pattern I was living out in my life. This book, and his guidance, gave me the confidence that there is a purpose and pattern directing and guiding my life.
Cosmic Consciousness
This book shed further light not only on the universality of a pattern that was central to many ways of knowing, but also on the direction of the evolution of consciousness itself. Dr. Richard Bucke had interviewed many, including Walt Whitman, and studied many others, that all expressed a common pattern in arriving at what he called cosmic consciousness, or what might be now thought of as unitive consciousness, a consciousness that brings about and strives to maintain unity. Not only did the pattern reflect what Campbell had found in mythology, and what mysticism and rites of passage also mirror, but he had also hypothesized, since there were few cases in early times and that the number of cases had increased with time, that as part of an evolutionary process, over decades or centuries, there would be more and more instances of cosmic consciousness among the general population. My understanding of his theory is that there will come a time in the future when unitive consciousness will be the norm.
Mysticism
I was a mystic before I knew what that meant. Something had been guiding me toward wanting to know why the meaning of certain things were concealed, how it is that we become aware of the deepest reality, and what it is that brings about the unity that reveals and connects all things. The process, the pattern, and the stages for this multi-leveled understanding were all made clear to me in Evelyn Underhill’s classic study of mysticism, through the similarities in the hundreds of lives that she looked at to identify a universal, androgynous pattern she called “the mystic way.” This describes a process of spiritual transform consisting of awakening, purification, illumination, dark night of the soul, and finally union, which is the state of living in harmony with the whole.
The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys
This elegant, poetic mystic treatise, written in 1856, was a response to Sufi mystics familiar with The Conference of the Birds, a 12th century poem by Attar taking its title from the Qur’an and using the journey of the birds to their source as a metaphor for the individual and collective journey we undertake. The Seven Valleys develops this theme of an evolving consciousness to describe the conditions necessary for traversing a path beyond mystic union. The outcome of this journey, after the valley of unity, and through the valleys of contentment and wonderment, is becoming a pure channel for the expressions of divine attributes, which shifts the focus to understanding that the mystic way is as much about social action for the betterment of the world as it is for personal benefit.
The Promulgation of Universal Peace
This compilation of 140 talks given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in 1912 during his travels in North America offers in-depth explanations of all the principles of the Bahá’i Faith by showing how they are all interconnected components leading to the realization of the central organizing principle of the oneness of humanity. It is further made clear how they are all preconditions for achieving world peace.
Mystical Poems of Rumi
The mystery and magic of the poetry of Rumi is that it connects us to our soul, to that eternal part of us that knows we and all things are deeply connected. It is also heart-opening, in that it touches a part of us that is not only universal but also androgynous. It takes us to a place – where “there is a field…” – with no separation, where we can look through the lens of wholeness and see all things as they are, connected and in harmony. Rumi’s experience some eight centuries ago puts into eloquent words, an expression beyond what we may be capable of, a timeless, universal experience.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
As part of my ongoing studies of mythology, religion, and psychology, I had become quite familiar with many of the writings of C. G. Jung, so it’s a little hard to choose just one of his books in a top 10 list. This one, though, serves another dual function in my spiritual awakening and development. His autobiography is so rich in psychological insights into the universality of myth and religion while at the same time it is a rare model of autobiographical writing from primarily an inner perspective. He focuses on what was going on in his life on an inner plane in a unique way to illustrate how the collective is the individual and the individual is the collective (“Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity…”). This book provided another very important perspective on how the contradictions of life, as they are experienced in our own lives, can be resolved in their universality and in their necessity for leading us onward toward growth and transformation: “In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty.”