Have you ever sensed that your life has a deeper, more meaningful purpose, but you don't know what it is? If so, you're not alone. To help you and the millions like you, psychic Ainslie MacLeod's spirit guides have given him a systematic approach to uncovering who you really are and the life your soul has planned for. They call it The Instruction. Now, for the first time, this unique teaching is offered as a step-by-step program for realizing personal fulfillment. The Instruction will take you through 10 doorways to unveil the life plan your soul created before you were even born, including:

• Your Soul Age Determining how it shapes your beliefs and behaviors
• Your Soul Type Are you a Hunter? Thinker? Creator? What your Soul Type reveals about your true self
• Your Powers Connecting fully and permanently with your spirit guides to create your destiny
• Your Talents Using your past lives to enhance the present

By taking you on a journey beyond this plane, Ainslie MacLeod uses a groundbreaking system to help you unlock the secrets of your soul's purpose, and illuminate the path of your life with The Instruction."

Exploring what does and what does not constitute pilgrimage, Redefining Pilgrimage draws together a wide variety of disciplines including politics, anthropology, history, religion and sociology. Leading contributors offer a broad range of case studies from a wide geographical area, exploring new ways of approaching pilgrimage beyond the classical religious model. Re-thinking the global phenomenon of pilgrimages in the 21st century, this book offers new perspectives to redefine pilgrimage.

Heal the emotional scars of the past and develop profound spiritual awareness with innovative, past-life hypnotic regression practices. Deep within you resides a great spirit-a place of profound wisdom, creativity, power, and love. But layers of hurt from early life, and from the defenses you've created to avoid further hurt, have accumulated and diminished that spirit over time-lifetimes, really-obscuring what is magnificent about you-your authentic self. This transformational and healing guide will help you awaken to the wisdom within yourself, break through the layers of emotional protection you've placed around your heart, and heal the scars of trauma that hold you back from happiness and fulfillment. During this process, you'll discover the source of your pain-whether that lies in your body, your mind, in your personal and family history, or in your soul-so you can finally release it. In the end, you'll find the strength needed to navigate all the challenges of life. If you're ready to reveal the true you-the one that lies beneath the scars of trauma-this book provides essential healing to guide you.

This book is a study of contemporary spirituality as it is practiced in the world today, characterized by its secular and inclusive nature, and applied to art and art education. It identifies the issues facing a formal introduction of contemporary spiritual concepts into a secular and multicultural arts educational environment. Lander begins by separating the notion of "the spiritual" from the study of organized religions. She uses examples of art from different cultures in contemporary spiritual systems, making the study a reference book for contemporary spirituality and spirituality in art education, with usable definitions and practical examples suitable for scholars in art and visual studies, art education, and contemporary spirituality.

This title was first published in 2001. This work presents a sociological theory of religion. Richard K. Fenn demonstrates that the shape of the sacred depends on what aspects of the psyche and of the environment seem to be beyond the pale of the human and the social, that is, the primitive. Whatever is anti-social or subhuman, and whatever subverts the reign of convention, or whatever defies notions of reason, represents the primitive. Indeed, the primitive represents the range of possibilities that excluded us from any society or social system. That is why hell is so often populated by those who are partly bestial, or crooked and corrupting. If there is to be a renewal of Christian thinking and aspiration in our time, it has to come from a rediscovery of the dream: not only in the metaphorical sense of a vision, perhaps of racial equality, but in the quite literal sense of the individual's own reservoir of suppressed and unconscious memories and yearnings, magical thinking and wounded or grandiose self-imagery.

In Mystical Theology and Contemporary Spiritual Practice several leading scholars explore key themes within the Christian mystical tradition, contemporary and historical. The overall aim of the book is to demonstrate the relevance of mystical theology to contemporary spiritual practice. Attention is given to the works of Baron von Hugel, Vladimir Lossky, Margery Kempe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Merton, and Francisco de Osuna, as well as to a wide range of spiritual practices, including pilgrimage, spiritual direction, contemplative prayer and the quotidian spirituality of the New Monasticism. Christian mystical theology is shown to be a living tradition, which has vibrant and creative new expressions in contemporary spiritual practice. It is argued that mystical theology affirms something both ordinary and extraordinary which is fundamental to the Christian experience of prayer.

The Vijayanagara Empire flourished in South India between 1336 and 1565. Conveying the depth and creativity of Hindu religious and literary expression during that time, Vijayanagara Voices explores some of the contributions made by poets, singer-saints, and philosophers. Through translations and discussions of their lives and times, Jackson presents the voices of these cultural figures and reflects on the concerns of their era, looking especially into the vivid images in their works and their legends. He examines how these images convey both spiritual insights and physical experiences with memorable candour. The studies also raise intriguing questions about the empire's origins and its response to Muslim invaders, its 'Hinduness', and reasons for its ultimate decline. Vijayanagara Voices is a book about patterns in history, literature and life in South India. By examining the culture's archetypal displays, by understanding the culture in its own terms, and by comparing associated images and ideas from other cultures, this book offers unique insights into a rich and influential period in Indian history.

Offering resources and initiatives on religious and spiritual diversity in higher education, this book describes the conceptual foundations for teaching religious literacy and provides a sample curriculum with a facilitator's guide and assessment tools needed to evaluate its development among students. With a clear understanding of the diversity of religious and spiritual experiences found on college and university campuses, Ennis offers a much-needed framework for facilitating conversations about religion and spirituality in colleges and universities. By working from a comprehensive overview of NYU's award-winning Faith Zone training program, this book breaks down the methodology and tools required to create religious literacy training curricula at campuses around the world.

This book rediscovers a spiritual way of preparing the actor towards experiencing that ineffable artistic creativity defined by Konstantin Stanislavski as the creative state. Filtered through the lens of his unaddressed Christian Orthodox background, as well as his yogic or Hindu interest, the practical work followed the odyssey of the artist, from being oneself towards becoming the character, being structured in three major horizontal stages and developed on another three vertical, interconnected levels. Throughout the book, Gabriela Curpan aims to question both the cartesian approach to acting and the realist-psychological line, generally viewed as the only features of Stanislavski's work. This book will be of great interest to theatre and performance academics as well as practitioners in the fields of acting and directing.

The Hindu-derived meditation movement, The Art of Living (AOL), founded in 1981 by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in Bangalore, has grown into a global organization which claims presence in more than 150 countries. Stephen Jacobs presents the first comprehensive study of AOL as an important transnational movement and an alternative global spirituality. Exploring the nature and characteristics of spirituality in the contemporary global context, Jacobs considers whether alternative spiritualities are primarily concerned with individual wellbeing and can simply be regarded as another consumer product. The book concludes that involvement in movements such as AOL is not necessarily narcissistic but can foster a sense of community and inspire altruistic activity.

This book rediscovers a spiritual way of preparing the actor towards experiencing that ineffable artistic creativity defined by Konstantin Stanislavski as the creative state. Filtered through the lens of his unaddressed Christian Orthodox background, as well as his yogic or Hindu interest, the practical work followed the odyssey of the artist, from being oneself towards becoming the character, being structured in three major horizontal stages and developed on another three vertical, interconnected levels. Throughout the book, Gabriela Curpan aims to question both the cartesian approach to acting and the realist-psychological line, generally viewed as the only features of Stanislavski's work. This book will be of great interest to theatre and performance academics as well as practitioners in the fields of acting and directing.

Divination is any ritual and its associated tradition performed in order to ask a more-than-human intelligence for guidance. A universal human practice, it has received surprisingly little academic attention. This interdisciplinary collection by leading scholars in the field is dedicated to fascinating new insights into divination and oracles arising from recent work in anthropology, religious studies, history and classical studies. Central importance is given to the practical and theoretical perspectives of diviners as well as scholars of divination; several contributors are both. This book explores philosophical issues such as the nature of divinatory intelligence, the relationship between divinatory and metaphorical truth, the primacy of ontology over epistemology, the importance of reflexivity in scholarly studies of divination, and astrology as the principal Western form of divination. The ethnographic and historical examples range from contemporary Nigeria, urban Cuba, Mayan Guatemala and the shamanic cultures of the circumpolar Arctic to classical Greece and ancient Judea.

This book explores the Pentecostal and charismatic movements, tracing their development and their variety. Hocken shows how these movements of the Holy Spirit, both outside the mainline churches and as renewal currents within the churches, can be understood as mutually challenging and as complementary. The similarities and the differences are significant. The Messianic Jewish movement possesses elements of both the new and the old. Addressing the issues of modernity and globalization, this book explores major phenomena in contemporary Christianity including the relationship between the new churches and entrepreneurial capitalism.

Wisdom is an integratal part of all philosophical and religious traditions in the world. Focusing on the concept of wisdom, this book examines the difficulties and problems facing comparative studies of the early Confucian and Israelite traditions by exploring the cosmological and ethical implications of wisdom in the older layers of Christian and Confucian texts. Presenting a detailed discussion of how wisdom was understood in philosophical, religious and social contexts by the writers of the so-called early Confucian and Israelite wisdom texts, this book offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the significance of wisdom in the East and West, and to our knowledge of different and yet related ways of life as understood in their literature.

The Nuwaubian Nation takes the reader on a journey into an African-American spiritual movement. The United Nuwaubian Nation has changed shape since its inceptions in the 1970s, transforming from a Black Hebrew mystery school into a Muslim utopian community in Brooklyn, N.Y.; from an Egyptian theme park into an Amerindian reserve in rural Georgia. This book follows the extraordinary career of Dwight York, who in his teens started out in a New York street gang, but converted to Islam in prison. Emerging as a Black messiah, York proceeded to break the Paleman's spell of Kingu and to guide his people through a series of racial/religious identities that demanded dramatic changes in costume, gender roles and lifestyle. Dr. York's Blackosophy is analyzed as a new expression of that ancient mystical worldview, Gnosticism. Referring to theories in the sociology of deviance and media studies, the author tracks the escalating hostilities against the group that climaxed in a Waco-style FBI raid on the Nuwaubian compound in 2002. In the ensuing legal process we witness Dr. York's dramatic reversals of fortune; he is now serving a 135-year sentence as his Black Panther lawyer prepares to take his case to the Supreme Court. This book presents fresh and important insights into racialist spirituality and the social control of unconventional religions in America.

Despite the forces of secularization in Europe, old pilgrimage routes are attracting huge numbers of people and given new meanings in the process. In pilgrimage, religious or spiritual meanings are interwoven with social, cultural and politico-strategic concerns. This book explores three such concerns under intense debate in Europe: gender and sexual emancipation, (trans)national identities in the context of migration, and European unification and religious identifications in a changing religious landscape. The interdisciplinary contributions to this book explore a range of such controversies and issues including: Africans renewing family ties at Lourdes, Swedish women at midlife or young English men testing their strength on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, New Age pilgrims and sexuality, Saints' festivals in Spain and Brittany, conservative Catholics challenging Europe's liberal policies on abortion, Polish migrants and French Algerians reconfiguring their transnational identity by transporting their familiar Madonna to their new home, new sacred spaces created such as the shrine of Our Lady of Santa Cruz, traditional Christian saints such as Mary Magdalene given new meanings as new age goddess, and foundation legends of shrines revived by new visionaries. Pilgrimage sites function as nodes in intersecting networks of religious discourses, geographical routes and political preoccupations, which become stages for playing out the boundaries between home and abroad, Muslims and Christians, pilgrimage and tourism, Europe and the world. This book shows how the old routes of Europe are offering inspirational opportunities for making new journeys.

Grappling with theological issues raised by abuse, this book argues that the Church should be challenged, and ministered to, by survivors. Paying careful attention to her interviews with Christian women survivors, Shooter finds that through painful experiences of transformation they have surprisingly become potential agents of transformation for others. Shooter brings the survivors' narratives into dialogue with the story of Job and with medieval mystic Marguerite Porete's spirituality of 'annihilation'. Culminating in an engagement with contemporary feminist theology concerning power and powerlessness, there emerges a set of principles for authentic community spirituality which crosses boundaries with God, supports appropriate human boundaries and, crucially, listens attentively. Appealing to Church leaders, students, practitioners and practical theologians, this book offers a creative and ethical theological enquiry as well as some spiritual anchor points for survivors.

We're all spiritual beings with a spiritual support system on the Other Side that oversees and helps guide our lives from the moment we're born to the moment we leave our physical bodies and return to Spirit. Not knowing this fact is a severe handicap, as the Universe is designed to care for and nurture all its creatures and help make our life's journey easier and more successful. When we learn how to connect with our angelic guides, our lives naturally fall into a pattern of ease and flow during which we grow our souls, fulfill our life's purpose, and make our time on Earth endlessly entertaining. This fascinating and inspirational book by Sonia Choquette provides all the information you need to help you connect with your spirit guides so that you can enjoy all the love, abundance, and joy you're entitled to.

This book explores the role of altered states of consciousness in the communication of social and emotional energies, both on a societal level and between individual persons. Drawing from an original reading of Durkheimian social theorists (including Mauss, Hertz, and Hubert) and Jungian psychology, Louise Child applies this analysis to tantric Buddhist ritual and biographical material. She suggests ways in which dreams and visionary experiences (including those related to the 'subtle body') play an important and previously under-explored role in tantric understandings of the consort relationship.

The Little Book of Spiritualism is your spiritual guide. This mini manual provides the perfect introduction to spiritualism and the spirit world, full of techniques, thoughts, terminology and quotes to guide you in your own spiritual journey. From spirit guides to mediums and angels to affirmations, this little book is a fascinating insight into spirituality and how it can transform your life. The Ranks of the Angels In total, there are said to be nine levels of angels, and this is a brief summary and hierarchy of the angels, from highest to lowest. Seraphim Seraphim are the highest order of the hierarchy of angels. These angelic beings spend their time worshipping and praising God. Cherubim Cherubim are the second highest order. They are depicted on the Ark of the Covenant as its guardians. God sent them to guard Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve.

Wonder and Skepticism in the Middle Ages explores the response by medieval society to tales of marvels and the supernatural, which ranged from firm belief to outright rejection, and asks why the believers believed, and why the skeptical disbelieved. Despite living in a world whose structures more often than not supported belief, there were still a great many who disbelieved, most notably scholastic philosophers who began a polemical programme against belief in marvels. Keagan Brewer reevaluates the Middle Ages' reputation as an era of credulity by considering the evidence for incidences of marvels, miracles and the supernatural and demonstrating the reasons people did and did not believe in such things. Using an array of contemporary sources, he shows that medieval responders sought evidence in the commonality of a report, similarity of one event to another, theological explanations and from people with status to show that those who believed in marvels and miracles did so only because the wonders had passed evidentiary testing. In particular, he examines both emotional and rational reactions to wondrous phenomena, and why some were readily accepted and others rejected. This book is an important contribution to the history of emotions and belief in the Middle Ages.

Exploring the inner motivations of one of America's greatest religious thinkers, this book analyses the ways in which Jonathan Edwards' intense personal piety and deep experience of divine sovereignty drove an introverted intellectual along a course that would eventually develop into a mature and respected public intellectual. Throughout his life, the tension between his innately contemplative nature and the active demands of public office was a constant source of internal and public strife for Edwards. Approaching Jonathan Edwards offers a new theoretical approach to the study of Edwards, with an emphasis on his writing activity as the key strategy in shaping his legacy. Tracing Edwards' strategic self-fashioning of his persona through the many conflicts in which he was engaged, the critical turning points in his life, and his strategies for managing conflicts and crises, Carol Ball concludes that Edwards found his place as a superlative contemplative apologist and theorist of experiential spirituality.

Jung's psychology describes the origin of the Gods and their religions in terms of the impact of archetypal powers on consciousness. For Jung this impact is the basis of the numinous, the experience of the divine in nature and in human nature. His psychology, while possessed of a certain claim to science, is based on depths of subjective experience which transcends psychology and science as ordinarily understood. Jung and his Mystics: In the end it all comes to nothing examines the mythic nature of Jung's psychology and thought, and demonstrates the influence of mysticism and certain religious thinkers in formulating his own work. John P. Dourley explores the influence of Mechthild of Magdeburg and fellow mystics/Beguines, and traces the mystic impulse and its expression through Meister Eckhat and Jacob Boehme to Hegel in the nineteenth century. All of these mystics were of the apophatic school and understood the culmination of their experience to lie in an identity with divinity in a nothingness beyond all form, formal expression or immediate activity. Dourley shows how this is still of relevance in our lives today. The book concludes that Jung's understanding of mysticism could greatly alleviate the conflict between faiths, religious or political, by drawing attention to their common origin in the depths of the human. Jung and his Mystics: In the end it all comes to nothing is aimed at scholars and senior research students in Jungian Studies, including religionists, theologians and philosophers of religion, especially those with an interest in mysticism. It will also be essential reading for those interested in the connection between religious and psychological experience.

If music has ever given you 'a glimpse of something beyond the horizons of our materialism or our contemporary values' (James MacMillan), then you will find this book essential reading. Sacred Music in Secular Society is a new and challenging work asking why Christian sacred music is now appealing afresh to a wide and varied audience, both religious and secular. Jonathan Arnold offers unique insights as a professional singer of sacred music in liturgical and concert settings worldwide, as an ordained Anglican priest and as a senior research fellow. Blending scholarship, theological reflection and interviews with some of the greatest musicians and spiritual leaders of our day, including James MacMillan and Rowan Williams, Arnold suggests that the intrinsically theological and spiritual nature of sacred music remains an immense attraction particularly in secular society. Intended by the composer and inspired by religious intentions this theological and spiritual heart reflects our inherent need to express our humanity and search for the mystical or the transcendent. Offering a unique examination of the relationship between sacred music and secular society, this book will appeal to readers interested in contemporary spirituality, Christianity, music, worship, faith and society, whether believers or not, including theologians, musicians and sociologists.

If music has ever given you 'a glimpse of something beyond the horizons of our materialism or our contemporary values' (James MacMillan), then you will find this book essential reading. Sacred Music in Secular Society is a new and challenging work asking why Christian sacred music is now appealing afresh to a wide and varied audience, both religious and secular. Jonathan Arnold offers unique insights as a professional singer of sacred music in liturgical and concert settings worldwide, as an ordained Anglican priest and as a senior research fellow. Blending scholarship, theological reflection and interviews with some of the greatest musicians and spiritual leaders of our day, including James MacMillan and Rowan Williams, Arnold suggests that the intrinsically theological and spiritual nature of sacred music remains an immense attraction particularly in secular society. Intended by the composer and inspired by religious intentions this theological and spiritual heart reflects our inherent need to express our humanity and search for the mystical or the transcendent. Offering a unique examination of the relationship between sacred music and secular society, this book will appeal to readers interested in contemporary spirituality, Christianity, music, worship, faith and society, whether believers or not, including theologians, musicians and sociologists.