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THE CELESTINE PROPHECY - AN ADVENTURE : JAMES REDFIELD
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The Celestine Prophecy describes a real, spiritual experience. Published over 20 years ago, it remains popular and relevant, and has been a source of great inspiration for so many. When you focus on these experiences of spirituality, instead of abstract questions like whether to “believe” or not, you become awakened to a higher state of consciousness. The Celestine Prophecy narrates this occurrence and shows us how we suddenly feel that our existence is so much more than we have known before. When centered within our synchronistic life journey, we become wise and clear about past events and how they have prepared us to break through into a new life purpose. In this state, we feel enlarged and knowing, as though our minds suddenly download a higher intelligence from within. Many readers of this book experience a break through moment of this kind, and begin moving towards living a life, where that feeling cannot be lost.
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This heightened awareness is the ticket to your greater self and most inspired life. The challenging part is to remain in this consciousness and to make it central to your everyday existence. Millions of people have tasted this life enrichment, yet, we continue to struggle to build a world around conscious enlightenment. Now, to make changes in our world, we have to stay in this uplifted state ourselves, and this is not easy to do, but we are beginning to understand how to accelerate this process. It cannot happen from the top down, like a new scientific theory. Theories are intellectual processes, and what is written about here is a movement toward a new “level of experience.” We must first grasp this from within ourselves. Each person then spreads it to other people, one by one. What makes this sharing possible is that spiritual consciousness is truly contagious to the people around you. We appear to be wired to jump in, just merely by being around another person who’s acquired and living an enlightened life. In a sense, it’s prevalent because a higher awareness will always replace lower functioning behaviors. And so, the odds remained stacked in our favour. In this novel, James Redfield presents spiritual consciousness as an experience that could be entered through a series of steps or insights so we could learn to live by example. He says "We’re now at a point in time where together, we can learn to hang on to this new consciousness, and then spread it to other people. We’re making it real by understanding the “experiential” steps one can use to enter such a state of mind, and if we lose it, how to get it back again."
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A VISIONARY LIFE - CONVERSATIONS ON PERSONAL AND PLANETARY EVOLUTION
MARC ALLEN
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This book was very important to me during the time when I was building both the commitment and the capacity to live my own unique visionary life. I love its simplicity, its structure, its down-to-earth style. In this inspiring parable, a companion to the author´s groundbreaking book Visionary Business, Marc Allen once again meets his enigmatic mentor, Bernie, who reveals that the principles of visionary business extend to the conscious creation of a visionary life. He shows us how the key to this is the courage to create. Knowing this, we can transform ourselves and the world. This engaging story tells of Allen's conversations and adventures with his sage who has become his mentor and with whom he pieces together 10 principles - and practices - of a visionary life. This is a very accessible, magical tale about following our dreams and seeing the eternal truths at the heart of visionary living. Highly recommended.
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CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION - AWAKENING THE POWER OF OUR SOCIAL POTENTIAL
BARBARA MARX HUBBARD
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Historically speaking, new worldviews have been responsible for causing major social transformations, says futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard. It occurred in the Renaissance when the idea of progress through knowledge was born. It happened in the United States when the principles of democracy and freedom became institutions. "Now once again a new world view is arising," writes Hubbard. "This idea is the culmination of all human history. It holds the promise of fulfilling the great aspirations of the past and heralds the advent of the next phase of our evolution. It is the idea of conscious evolution."
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Human beings have now gained the ability to shape their own evolution, explains Hubbard, and therefore the next world task is to become conscious of this power and guide the earth and all its inhabitants into survival and fulfillment of our potential. Born out of the new spirituality, which began as a path toward self-awareness, but has quickly spread into a "social potential movement," Hubbard predicts that the ideology of "conscious evolution" will be seen as a pivotal turning point in human history, leading us into an era of heightened creativity, environmental accountability, and spiritual development.
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Her message is steeped in intelligent writing and persuasive research. But most enticing, she writes as an optimist as well as a visionary. Rather than buy into the "old story" of imminent self-destruction, Hubbard sees the potential for humanity to create a "new story" that melds all our advances - spiritual, scientific, and social - into a glorious vision for the future. Conscious Evolution could be classified as a millennium book. As Hubbard describes, "It sets forth a vision of the vast transformational enterprise of the next millennium, and it seeks to discover the design of evolution inherent in all nature with which we can consciously cooperate to guide our actions." She describes how we can make a conscious transition from high technology, pollution and overpopulation to a system that fulfills our potential. In precise detail she reports where we've been, where we are, and where we're going. It's a positive book - one about doing - and I also found this book extremely enlightening on my own path. There's a chapter on what we can do now and how to accomplish it. The last portion of the book has names, addresses and descriptions of resources to implement that action. The writing is simple and coherent and even with all the myriad pieces from government to spiritual, she brings it together in one seamless fit.
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Her website is here: https://www.barbaramarxhubbard.com
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IQ84 - MURAKAMI HARUKI
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The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. In this world, the fates of two people, Tengo and Aomame, are closely intertwined. They are each, in their own way, doing something very dangerous. And in this world, there seems no way to save them both. Something extraordinary is starting.
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This book is considered Murakami´s most achieved novel, an epic in which form and content are neatly aligned. Eerie, suspenseful and packed full of gorgeous ordinary details and provocative extraordinary events, Murakami takes weighty themes and delivers a compulsive tale that is funny, fresh and intensely surreal. It´s a book that makes you marvel, reading it, at all the strange folds a single brain can hold, and the author is an absolute master of texture. Murakami is one of the most admired novelists in the world today, a brilliant practitioner of serious, yet irresistibly engaging, literary fantasy.
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It´s not considered "spiritual" (whatever that really means) but I highly recommend IQ84, and, indeed, most of Murakami´s books for those who are evolving a new perspective on the nature of reality.
TAO TE CHING - LAO TZU - AN ILLUSTRATED JOURNEY
TRANSLATED BY STEPHEN MITCHELL
This translation and commentary on the Tao Te Ching is one of great clarity and lucidity. He brings to this classic of Taoism a spiritual sensibility and a fondness for the many mysteries of life. In the foreword, Mitchell gives us a glimpse of his perspective: "People usually think of Lao-tzu as a hermit, a dropout from society, dwelling serenely in some mountain hut, unvisited except by the occasional traveler arriving from a '60s joke to ask, 'What is the meaning of life?' But it's clear from his teachings that he deeply cared about society, if society means the welfare of one's fellow human beings; his book is, among other things, a treatise on the art of government, whether of a country or of a child. The misperception may arise from his insistence on wei wu wei, literally, 'doing not-doing,' which has been seen as passivity. Nothing could be further from the truth."
Mitchell states that the preparation for this translation was his 14 years of Zen training which introduced him to Lao-tzu and his true disciples and heirs, the early Chinese Zen Masters. He salutes the moral dimension of The Tao Te Ching and points out that the Master is a man or woman (he uses both he and she in the text) "whose life is in perfect harmony with the way things are." Mitchell concludes by offering this confession about his approach: "If I haven't always translated Lao-tzu's words, my intention has always been to translate his mind."
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Here is a sample passage:
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"Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.
I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world."
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I just love to introduce people to this beautiful work.
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BIRDS AS INDIVIDUALS - LEN HOWARD
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What can I say about this? I love birds and I love individuation. This is just fabulous.
Gwendolen Howard (1894 - 1973) was a British naturalist and musician. She is known for the unique amateur bird studies that were published in various periodicals and two books under her pseudonym, Len Howard. I'm guessing that she used the name Len to avoid being discriminated against as a kind of 'mad cat woman' - you know the story. But I'm not absolutely sure about that.
Born in the town of Wallington, Howard lived with her family in various homes throughout England and Wales before beginning a music career in London, where she gave music lessons, organized concerts for children of the poor, and played viola in an orchestra. In 1938, Howard purchased a plot of land outside the village of Ditchling and arranged for construction of the home she later called "Bird Cottage."
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Once resident in Bird Cottage, Howard developed an intimate, co-habitational relationship with the wild birds in the area, providing food (including her own war rations), chasing away predators, tending to damaged nests, and allowing the birds to fly and roost throughout her home. Around 1949, Howard began publishing her field notes and "bird biographies" in British natural history periodicals, and in 1950 her first book was published. Howard continued to write and publish about her birds until at least 1957. Believing that fear is the primary motivating factor in much of avian behaviour as observed by humans, and wanting to combat the scientific conclusions that had been drawn from such observations, Howard strove to effect great control over her and her birds' environment so as to maximize her birds' sense of security, and to encourage an uninhibited relationship with them. To this end, Howard was reclusive and gave strict instructions to those who ventured to visit her or contact her at Bird Cottage. Howard also undertook a public campaign in 1960 to prevent development on the land surrounding her property.
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In her writings, Howard argued that individual intelligence, and not mere instinct, is a factor in much of bird behaviour. Howard paid especial attention to great tits in her studies, although she also wrote about other tits, robins, sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, and finches, among others, and singled out particularly striking individuals for her biographies. Howard's musical training gave her unique insight into birdsong, and the final section of her first book is devoted to an in-depth analysis of this topic.
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Gwendolen Howard died on 5 January 1973, at Bird Cottage, at the age of 79.
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In 2016 a novel based on Len Howard's life and work, 'Het Vogelhuis', written by the Dutch author Eva Meijer, was published in the Netherlands, where it became a best-seller. It has subsequently been translated into several languages. The English translation by Antoinette Fawcett, 'Bird Cottage', was published world-wide by the Pushkin Press on 30 August 2018. Eva Meijer was interviewed about the book by Jenni Murray on the BBC Radio Four programme 'Woman's Hour' at 10.32, and by Sean Rafferty on the BBC Radio Three programme 'In Tune' at 17.23, on Friday 31 August 2018.
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