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•REVIEWS•
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After 15 years of consistent reprints A Revised Second Edition |
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| By Peter A. Campbell, Ph.D. & Edwin M. McMahon, Ph.D. Table of Contents with Excerpts—Foreword (vii) |
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| This book grew from searching, searching for a practical way to enter ordinary living so the meaning of being human and being uniquely oneself might lead each of us forward into the mystery of some Larger Awareness. These pages will attempt to describe the ingredients of a lived spirituality that actually facilitates change. We are not concerned with change in the realm of religious ideas . Rather, we look toward a transformation that will support human wholeness as this can unfold within a greater organismic evolution—a growing cosmic congruence. This is not, therefore, a collection of denominational religious teachings or truths. We describe, instead, a quality of human consciousness, a lifestyle wherein an awareness potential of the body is absolutely indispensable for spiritual knowing. We call this capacity for more integral presence BioSpirituality . |
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| ...human transformation depends upon far more than information. The critical factor for change is not understanding but an experience of give, shift, or movement, in the bodily awareness of a problem or life situation. This is not seeing new things; it’s a new way of seeing! It is an experience of inner release! This is what counts and makes real change in awareness possible. | ||||||||
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| Following the directions for Focusing is much like paddling a canoe from some protected inlet out into the middle of a river. Once there, several things can happen. Sometimes you paddle deliberately into a current. Sometimes, the flow of the river catches you unaware, bearing you along in its grasp. Sometimes you just paddle around and go nowhere. Nothing happens. Following the instructions can only get you out into the middle of your own inner stream. Once there, you soon discover that the stream has a life and movement of its own. It does not bend to your paddling any more than your canoe can change the course of the river ’s flow. All you can do is go with it in case it should catch you and carry you along. | ||||||||
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| There are two critical issues in spiritual development as far as we are concerned. The first is to discover a more embodied approach for letting go of the mind’s omnipotent control as a prelude to allowing some broader wisdom within the entire human organism to speak. The second is to allow the unique next step that is me to emerge as an integral, harmonious expression of some Larger Process. | ||||||||
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| There is a comfortable predictability about reason. Maybe that’s why it has never been thought of as the royal road of spiritual advancement. Reason can never comprehend the miraculous, the unpredictable, the larger pattern. In the narrowed world of control there is little room for playfulness and surprise. Indeed, surprise is the enemy! Yet availability for surprise is a necessary disposition for growth in the spiritual life. | ||||||||
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| Have you ever experienced moments of quiet in which you suddenly realized your life has become little more than a series of reactions to one crisis after another? As each of us grows older, we long to live more of each remaining day not like a cork bobbing up and down on the waves of other people’s events. Rather, we feel a compelling need to discover unfolding directions from within. My life. My reason for being. My unique story. | ||||||||
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| Did you know that a honey bee colony functions as an individual living organism? All those thousands of darting forms are, in fact, a unified, integrated expression of one single, vibrating life! It’s difficult to grasp this because our perception is attuned to particularity. We sense organisms, not The Organism. Our ability to perceive broader unities is, as yet, still undeveloped. But there are tantalizing clues. Dr. Eugene Gendlin writes: Your physically-felt body is in fact part of a gigantic system of here and other places, now and other times, you and other people—in fact, the whole universe. This sense of being bodily alive in a vast system is the body as it is felt from inside. | ||||||||
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| The fear of death can be resolved in our bodies, not solved with our minds. There is no answer to the dreadful specter of total annihilation. No solution that soothes the mind’s shattered logic. But there is response within the body. A felt naturalness, perhaps even rightness, about the experience, as though some inward organismic knowing recognizes death as a vital transition. Something is born in every dying! A believing is born of change. Focusing can begin to transform one’s perception, not through an explanation of death, but by providing a different place to stand within ourselves. This shift in perspective may itself be the answer that so many people seek. |
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| The rediscovery of the body in our age and culture has opened a critical threshold in spiritual awareness. A dialogue, hopefully, will soon begin between an ancient faith struggling to find its voice in this age of perpetual transition and the ring of a fresh new humanism that reaches for faithfulness to its own deepest yearnings. In union with one another they must find some way to grow beyond the overriding need for control as well as that hardening core of fear, mistrust, and self-hatred that permeates so many lives today and threatens the specter of a nuclear nightmare. Abraham Maslow echoed much the same sentiment. A whole school of psychologists now believe that “spiritual values” are in the organism, so much a part of the well- functioning organism as to be sine qua non “defining characteristics” of it...If this development is a secularizing of all religion, it is also a religionizing of all that is secular. |
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Appendix 2 Process-Skipping: A block to the body-life of Spirit (177) |
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| Process-skipping structures are not just obvious things like drugs, alcohol, sex, work, or pleasing other people. Prayer, meditation, volunteer work, anything that can be substituted for a congruent owning of what is real inside me contains the negative potential for contributing to a process-skipping pattern of addiction. Any religious exercise, any form of meditation, any “growth” practice that takes me away from the truth of myself as this is carried in my body and substitutes, instead, some more acceptable feeling or attitude in place of what is real—that practice or exercise or prayer, if engaged in for some time, will inevitably become addictive. |
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Appendix 4 Ten Learnings from BioSpirituality that draw us into a global spirituality (203) Notes (207) The Institute for BioSpiritual Research (211) |
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3441 North Ashland Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60657 Tel: 1-800-621-1008 ISBN: 0-8294-0937-8 $10.95 |
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