Naked Through The Gate A Spiritual Autobiography Second Edition

In this dramatic and engaging spiritual autobiography, Joel Morwood candidly shares the struggles and insights of his remarkable journey to spiritual Awakening. Joel Morwood is also the author of The Way of Selflessness: A Practical Guide to Enlightenment Based on the Teachings of the World's Great Mystics and Through Death's Gate: A Guide to Selfless Dying. Since 1987, Joel has served as spiritual director of the Center for Sacred Sciences, a non-profit organization based in Eugene, Oregon. The Center for Sacred Sciences is dedicated to helping individual seekers on their spiritual paths, as well as fostering the creation of a new worldview, founded on the mystical teachings of The Great Tradition, but presented in terms appropriate to our present scientific age.

This book is designed to help committed spiritual seekers prepare for death. It summarizes the basic teachings found in the major spiritual traditions of the world on how to pass through death as selflessly and effortlessly as possible. In particular, it contains three fundamental spiritual practices to help you transform your own death from a terrifying ordeal into what the Sufi poet Rumi called our "wedding with eternity."

He can function as a priest no longer. Perhaps the burden of a priestly vocation is too heavy. Or perhaps he's lost faith in the Church's ability to lead people to God. He doesn't know. After resigning his position, he leaves his parish and heads for the relative solitude of a rural town in South-West England. His only close companion is his dog, and it's through the dog that he meets an enigmatic character who will challenge his Christian persona and his belief structures in a catastrophic and, ultimately life-giving, way. This is an autobiographical account of one man's mystical journey, taken through The Dark Night of the Soul. On this journey that will teach him the true meaning of spiritual poverty, he is stripped of his religious persona and plunged deep into the abyss of a purifying process that seems to him to be a place from which there is no escape. But in his guide's ruthless hands, he discovers a new way of relating to his faith and the scriptures that define it; a level of freedom and contentment for which he has been longing. And he realizes that God has been staring him in the face all along. James RQ Clark is a former teacher and Anglican priest. Born of a French-Mauritian mother and an English father who spent his working life roaming through Africa, the Middle and Far-East, James attended a Catholic boarding school in the UK. After a life-changing encounter with God in the early 80s and a stint in a British Charismatic Evangelical House Church, he re-connected with his Catholic roots and studied for his Theology degree at a Catholic college of the University of Surrey. A journey through teaching and school chaplaincy led to his ordination in the Anglican Church of New Zealand in 2012. These days he is settled in an old house, in an old town in Dorset, South-West England. He walks his dogs, swims in the rivers, thinks, writes, and occasionally sees people for transpersonal counselling and spiritual direction. "The Naked Mystic is not for the faint of heart, but it is for those of us looking for guidance through this labyrinth we call life. A beautiful story of a man's journey into, and out of, the darkest corners of his mental struggle to know God. For anyone who believes the bible is the beginning and the end of spiritual understanding - this book is for you. For anyone who questions the role of institutions in the world of God - this book is for you. For anyone who struggles with loneliness and fear - this book is for you. A story about the end of stories. While intimate and particular to one man's struggle, it remains extraordinarily relatable and helpful - Woven in such a way that helps us understand the bible in a way that helps us understand our Self. In these times of widespread fearmongering and quarantine, The Naked Mystic offers us a guide to being okay with being alone. No doubt, The Naked Mystic is a spiritual autobiography worthy of the name." B.R.

Presents an account, first published in 1622, of the Pilgrim's journey to the new world.