Earth's Call to Mankind...Love Essential 4
4 Fundamental Practices to End Pain and Suffering
Through her meditation practice over a four-year period, Zinah Stone’s spirit guides gave her a complex and inspiring blueprint called The Love Essential 4 (L.E.4), which led her to write Earth’s Call to Mankind. Intended as a gift to humanity, the book aims to provide the means toward personal and planetary transformation. The L.E.4 model is a series of charts, exercises, and meaningful insights that serve as guides to a place of deep connection with the earth, spirit world, and one’s higher self.
Stone’s sincerity is evident on every page, and the transformative potential of the L.E.4 is genuinely intriguing. Earth’s Call to Mankind begins with an opportunity for the reader to answer several profoundly personal questions about one’s life and passions. Following her initial self-reflection exercise, the author segues into a workbook format that includes multiple checklists and space to write about thoughts and feelings under specific headings corresponding to four color-coded quadrants. The colors (red, yellow, green, and blue) play a significant role in the L.E.4, as do the seasons, and how they connect to one’s birth month. The core of the model is a chart that assigns each person, based on the season of his or her birth, into a particular set of challenges and opportunities they will need to embrace and explore. Unfortunately, the chart uses the southern hemisphere seasons, though Stone instructs her readers in the north to adjust the model accordingly. This is easier said than done. In the southern hemisphere, for example, someone born in April would be an autumn, which may be confusing.
According to the L.E. 4 model, an autumn reader’s element is air and his or her sense is hearing, which shows a propensity for issues around listening. The animal, which signifies courage and strength, is the autumn’s kingdom (from the model’s four kingdoms of animal, mineral, plant, and human). And an autumn’s key words are “surrender” and “perception.”
While there is much to be gained from doing the complicated exercises and reflections associated with each quadrant, the overriding value of the teachings gets bogged down by the constant need to keep track of all the particulars of the model. The book’s many typographical errors, poor sentence structure, and redundancies are also off-putting.
Earth’s Call to Mankind works best when it focuses on the big picture: Why connecting with one’s higher self, universal wisdom, and the earth can radically improve one’s life. Stone’s suggestions about diet, environmental stewardship, self-reflection, and becoming open to grace all ring powerfully true, and they are immensely practical.
The book itself is attractively packaged and fairly well organized. It could find an audience in new-age bookstores, where some customers might feel drawn to it.
Reviewed by
Patty Sutherland
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
