Friday is Book Day on the blog, when we take a look at books – old and new — that I highly recommend you not miss. This week’s recommended reading: God on Your Own, Finding a Spiritual Path Outside Religion, by Joseph Dispenza.
This book is about opening to the direct experience of the Sacred, beyond the experience of mere Belief, as Dean Sluyter put it in his jacket endorsement. My lovely friend, the wonderful Barbara Marx Hubbard, says of this text: “Every now and then a book nourishes our deepest and often unstated need. For those of us stepping out from organized religion, learning to incarnate the divineand to discern the deeper meaning of all mystical revelation as sovereign persons, this is literally a God-send! We are taken on a journey to spiritual freedom and fulfillment as a personal revelation. It’s a remarkably good book.”
Says the book jacket liner notes: After spending eight years in a monastery, Joseph Dispenza walked away from his life as a monk and the religion of is used in search of a different kind of spiritual path. Outside the confines of organized religion, Dispenza was able to create a spiritual life that gives direction and meaning to all he does and all he is.
God on Your Own is written for anyone who has left (or is thinking of leaving) organized religion but wants to continue on the spiritual path. Throughout the book…
…Dispenza offers wise, compassionate guidance, speaking as one seeker to another. For anyone who is ready to take full responsibility for his or her spiritual life, this book will serve as a personal guide for the journey.
Typical of the kind of insight and commentary that will be found here is this passage:
“The strong message we get from the Lord’s Prayer is that we are fundamentally flawed but there is a creator, somewhere far away from us, who is withholding from us all the basic things we need for our fulfillment. No wonder we are all walking around on our own little personal cloud of guilt. We declare that we are worthless, and to make things worse we have no hope of ever becoming less worthless. That is, if we keep praying the way we have been.
“Let me make it clear that I am not suggesting the Lord’s Prayer be stricken from the books and erased from the mind of s of billions of people. I am pointing out the core spiriual beliefs running behind the world’s most well-known prayer. You can do the same with virtually any prayer or hymn you learned by rote as a child growing up within an organized religion or simply in our Christian-dominated culture. All have core beliefs behind them; all have spiritual secrets to reveal…
This may sound like an irreverent book that has no place of honor for God, but it is exactly the opposite. The book explores at a very deep level the journey taken by human beings who find themselves at odds with the teachings and doctrines of traditional theologies, but not at all at odds with the idea of a Divine Being or a Greater Reality that most of us call God or Allah or Yahweh or Jehovah or Bramin and or by whatever other name feels comfortable to us.
With great respect for the world’s great religions, and meaning no disparaging of them at all, I would recommend God on your own is a wonderful tool for persons who find themselves on a different path toward the Divine.
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