Product Description
Today apocalyptic predictions and images dominate popular culture and social media. Yet for most of our history, human consciousness focused on the mystery of beginnings, not endings. Our ancestors felt that the most powerful energy and clearest vision for the future could be found at our inception. They meditated on stories of the Great Beginning as the way to go forward.
Original Meditation is two books in one. First it investigates the ancient tradition of creation mysticism and shows how Western culture became sidetracked into an increasingly narrow, apocalyptic world view. Second, it shows how we can begin to recover an authentic meditation on our shared beginnings, a meditation that can bring us into a more embodied and compassionate present. To help us on our way, Neil Douglas-Klotz offers us a living anthology of voices, from a mystical view of the first chapters of Genesis, to the Aramaic words of Jesus, to translations of mystical voices like Jelaluddin Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart and the Jewish Kabbalists.
Uniting the native spirituality of the Middle East with Western creation spirituality, we catch a glimpse of the life-affirming energy of “beginning-time” and experience what it means to be fully human in today’s world.
Neil Douglas-Klotz, Ph.D., is an internationally known teacher of meditation and the author of Prayers of the Cosmos, The Hidden Gospel, Desert Wisdom and The Sufi Book of Life.