The Future That Brought Her Here.

[Dover]

New Book. I haven't read it yet, but it looks intriguing:



In a poetic memoir both personal and transpersonal, in our fearful post-911 era, Deborah DeNicola, among others, has predicted the world crisis we are now facing will initiate the global population into a new awareness of spiritual evolution.

In The Future That Brought Her Here, DeNicola undergoes three journeys which distill her private quest into esoteric knowledge.

A dynamic blend of history, science, psychology, dreams, and visions, Deborah DeNicola’s memoir is a compelling account of self-discovery that is provocative and humble. A poet, dream analyst, and college professor DeNicola writes about her struggle to live in the ordinary world of academia while honoring the competing call of the creative and the spiritual. DeNicola’s memoir shows her range of intellectual pursuits and spiritual experiences as she battles an inner war between depressive cynicism and faith and shares her lifelong search to heal the trauma of her father’s tragic death when she was a teenager. Struggles between cynicism and faith, depression and hope, independence and attachment, creativity and financial security in the midst of spiritual searching, motherhood, teaching and writing are inextricably woven into the fabric of her story. Sharing the process of her awakening and how dreams and visions guide her, DeNicola stirs readers to listen courageously to their own inner voices. Her visionary quest takes her to the American West, Israel, and Southern France. Along the way she weaves together references from the Bible and the Gnostic Gospels, the story of Mary Magdalene, medieval history, the Templar Knights, the Black Madonnas, String Theory and quantum physics to find the repeated linkage between divinity and humanity.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0892541482/


Excerpts from The Future That Brought Her Here


My dream placed me in an underground tunnel with mud walls. I began to see the outline of a woman covered in clay. With our eyes closed, the group followed me deeper into the cave. The feeling was overwhelmingly claustrophobic, but I crept along the mud floor until I knew instinctively a spot along the wall where I must begin digging. To my surprise, for this was long before my interest in the Black Madonnas, my active imagination uncovered a black African woman, very proud and strong. She was an object, yet she felt alive.. Though she seemed thoroughly other, my emotional attachment to her was immediate. I ended the session with the statement that I knew she had been walled in for a very, very long time.

*

I remembered Carl Jung's comments to Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Jung told him his problem was not psychological; it was spiritual. His thirst was for "spiritual fulfillment." I recalled that in the 19th century, alcoholic drinks were referred to as "spirits" and realized that the huge population of drug and alcohol abusers on the planet were not just suffering from what might be genetic tendencies, but also from a thirst for what the fast-paced, materialistic, superficial culture had practically eradicated, deep connections to spirit and soul. I too wanted to get out of my own skin, to get out of this world, to go outside my mind.

[ZombieHorde]

1. What is spiritual evolution?

What is esoteric knowledge?

[windoe]

2. Beautiful, the excerpt sounds like a shamanic journey.

I share the viewpoint that there is a hunger to transcend this world, for change must happen in dreams and imagination, psychologically and in beliefs, before it manifests in physical reality. This sounds like a profound book, thank you for sharing.

This thread may also find success in the Astrology group, since all things that mention spirituality get thrown into the woo woo section. :)

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. 'Spirits' in the 19th (and 20th and 21st) century, refer to alcohol's low boiling point

'Spirit' comes from the Latin stem for 'breath' (as do words like 'respire'). It's use with humans refers to 'the breath of life' - the vital principle of life (and may also inply it was 'breathed into' humans by a god) that people believe exists independently of a physical body.

Alcoholic spirits are those obtained by distillation - the captured 'breath' of the heated liquid that boils before the water does.

Connecting alcoholic drinks and spirituality is nothing more than a pun on the part of that writer.