In Six Stages on the Spiritual Path, we learn about spirituality and its stages as well as how spirituality helps to reduce our suffering and create more love. Writings from ancient to contemporary mystics across the world provide us with practical and spiritual wisdom that will make our lives happier and more loving. In the first stage on the mystic way, children experience awe and wonder, but they do not realize that this is a spiritual experience. While all indigenous people recognize awe as a mystical experience, only some adults and most artists do. When parents and religious leaders teach children about God, they cause their spiritual growth to flourish or to become stunted at an elementary school level. Awakening is an experience of the Divine that helps us realize that the Sacred Spirit is within us and loves us. Awakening produces love for our neighbors and ourselves. Then love nurtures more awakenings. Illumination and union are deeper mystical experiences that the Holy One is not only within all of us and all of creation, but also that we are within the ONE. Illumination creates more love for all people and all the universe.

Psychotherapists are increasingly expected to incorporate the spiritual as well as the psychological dimension in their professional work. Therapists also are increasingly required to utilize evidence-based practices and demonstrate the effectiveness of their practice. An ever-increasing number of spiritually-oriented psychotherapy books attest to its importance but, unlike these books that primarily focus on the therapist's spiritual awareness, the second edition of Spirituality in Clinical Practice addresses the actual practice of spiritually oriented psychotherapy from the beginning to end. Dr. Len Sperry, master therapist and researcher, emphasizes the therapeutic processes in spiritually oriented psychotherapy with individual chapters on: the therapeutic relationship assessment and case conceptualization intervention evaluation and termination and culturally and ethically sensitive interventions. The days of training therapists to be spiritually aware and sensitive to client needs are over; therapists are now expected to practice spiritually sensitive psychotherapy in a competent manner from the first session to termination. Dr. Sperry organizes his text around this central focus point and, as in the original edition, continues to provide a concise, theory-based framework for understanding the spiritual dimension. Readers can use this framework as the basis for competently integrating spirituality in an effective, evidence-based psychotherapy practice.

Islamic philosophy has often been treated as being largely of historical interest, belonging to the history of ideas rather than to philosophical study. This volume successfully overturns that view. Emphasizing the living nature and rich diversity of the subject, it examines the main thinkers and schools of thought, discusses the key concepts of Islamic philosophy and covers a vast geographical area. This indispensable reference tool includes a comprehensive bibliography and an extensive index.

This is a comprehensive introduction to a rapidly growing subject and provides key resources for thinking about key aspects of television studies. It begins with a critical evaluation of approaches that can be used to study television and introduces institutional, textual, cultural, economic, production and audience centred ways of researching and analysing television.

For five years, ending in 2005, Sheryl Karas worked as a Family Caregiving Consultant at the Alzheimer's Association and Del Mar Caregiver Resource Center helping families taking care of loved ones with incurable progressive memory loss and dementia. Trying to find services needed to provide basic care is what brought people in to see her first, but as the caregivers became more ensconced in their caregiving roles inevitably emotional and spiritual issues would become their primary concerns. Sheryl's role shifted to providing a combination of practical and spiritual care. During this period she wrote a caregiver newsletter every month and this book is the result.The author uses a very open, nondogmatic spiritual frame, appropriate for people of all religious backgrounds or none at all. Inspirational, comforting, and informative--highly recommended for anyone involved with long term care.

On the fourteenth day after His perfect enlightenment, Shakyamuni Buddha gave definitive teachings in nine assemblies. In these assemblies, He revealed to advanced Bodhisattvas the hindrance-free dharma realm of the one mind, and gave them the One Vehicle to Buddhahood through the six stages of the Bodhisattva Way. These teachings are contained in the Mahavaipulya Sutra of Buddha Adornment (Buddhavatamsaka-mahavaipulya-sutra), which is revered by Chinese Buddhists as the king of all sutras. Based on texts in the Chinese Buddhist Canon, this book, Rulus fifth, presents the English translations of the teachings in this sutra on the last two stages of the Bodhisattva Way, the Virtual Buddha Ground and the Buddha Ground. The translators introduction summarizes the teachings in this sutra and presents the five theses of the Huayan School of China, which explain that all things in the universe are interconnected and in complete unity. This book will benefit readers at all levels and can serve as a basis for scholarly research.

Richard Ferguson grew up a rough kid in a rough neighborhoodand yet he went on to become a Reiki master with a pilots license and two masters degrees. How did he rise above his early circumstances? It started with a godly epiphany high in the sky above the Paci?c Ocean. Since then, he has been a spiritual seeker, and, as the good book says, those who seek will ultimately ?nd. Follow his riotous path in A Real-Life Christian Spiritual Journey. Fergusons Christian transformation was not immediate. Once upon a time, he hated everything to do with religion. Part I uses Fergusons life journey as a template for the paths of all human life. We all go through stages, and each stage equates to who we ultimately will be and what we will believe in. Part II traces the unity of our stages in the earthly realm. Part III sets foot into the great beyond. Ferguson lost his wife to death, but he has come to realize that death is not an ending; it is a graduation to a higher, more joyful existence in eternity. With the guidance of psychologists Erik Erikson and James Fowler, as well as spiritual greats St. Paul and the Buddha, Ferguson looks back on a life well livedproving that when you seek ?rst a higher power, all knowledge will be given to you.

Almost all the books on the planet on the subject of ascension are written about planetary ascension. However, because of the extraordinary times in which we now live, in terms of Earth's history, there is a new opening and potentiality to also begin one's cosmic ascension process. This has never before been available. It must be understood, as Vywamus has said, that in completing our planetary ascension, we are no more than one-tenth of the way up a ten-inch ruler in terms of our cosmic ascension process. This includes most of the ascended masters. We on Earth who are working to complete our seven levels of initiation must remember that there are 352 levels of initiation to return to the godhead, or Father-Mother God, at the top of creation. Most of the Ascended Masters of the entire Spiritual Hierarchy are not beyond the 12th initiation. This is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. The question is, "What lies beyond the next nine-tenths of the ruler, and how do we achieve our cosmic ascension as well as our planetary ascension (which is no small feature in and of itself)?" Is it for the purpose that the author was guided to write his book.

Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism explores two influential intellectual and religious leaders in Christianity and Buddhism, Bonaventure (c. 1217–74) and Chinul (1158–1210), a Franciscan theologian and a Korean Zen master respectively, with respect to their lifelong endeavors to integrate the intellectual and spiritual life so as to achieve the religious aims of their respective religious traditions. It also investigates an associated tension between different modes of discourse relating to the divine or the ultimate—positive (cataphatic) discourse and negative (apophatic) discourse. Both of these modes of discourse are closely related to different ways of understanding the immanence and transcendence of the divine or the ultimate. Through close studies of Bonaventure and Chinul, the book presents a unique dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism and between West and East.

To question the idea of hell as a default destination is to question the entire fundamentalist evangelical worldview. This book does just that. Fundamentalist evangelicalism holds that the Bible is an infallible authority and that all are born in sin. Sinners go to hell, but Jesus, taking their place, died to save them from hell. How did this belief come to be? What were the effects on people brought up with a belief in the reality of hell? What has been the process of people leaving the fundamentalist evangelical movement? In Bad Girls and Boys Go To Hell (or not), Gloria Neufeld Redekop takes us on her own personal journey as she engages a movement in which she was raised, conducting a careful study of the history of fundamentalist evangelicalism, the attachment to a literal-factual interpretation of the Bible, and an analysis of the experience of those who have left the movement.