In Handbook for the Spirit, an extraordinary group of thinkers and teachers, including Andrew Harvey, Sue Bender, Rev. Michael Beckwith, Barbara De Angelis, and Marianne Williamson, celebrate their personal experiences of the divine. Previously published as For the Love of God, the book features the Dalai Lama on the central importance of kindness; Sue Bender on the small miracles of everyday life; Brooke Medicine Eagle on the Great Spirit; and Joseph Goldstein on the Dharma. Included are Rabbi Harold Kushner on how God appears in relationships, Brother David Steindl-Rast on perceiving the divine through the senses, and 19 other contributors. Each author shares what it is like to have a personal relationship with a higher spirit, how this relationship developed, and how it manifests in his or her life, relationships, and career. Most significantly, the authors offer insight into how readers can enhance their connections with a higher source. Handbook for the Spirit offers both hope and purpose in a world deeply in need of both.
From the Foreword by Marianne Williamson:
Our relationship with God is our relationship with ourselves because the divine in us is who we essentially are. The idea that we are separate from God is merely an illusion of consciousness.
But that illusion is powerful indeed, and we are lost within it. The human condition is one in which we have a gnawing sense we come from somewhere else, somewhere other that this world. Yet we can’t quite remember where.
Books such as this one are maps back home. They bridge us back to the essential self. They remind us who we are, and grant us the peace of remembering at last.
Without a conscious connection to love, life is beset with fear. This book is a book about loving God, and the casting out of fear that occurs when we embrace Him. As we read the words of fellow pilgrims, particularly those who are further down the road, then our own path back home becomes illumined. We realize the part of us that says, “there is more to life than this” is not just a trick of the mind. We begin to trust we are on the right road. The work “God” itself is a talisman, a power point, an awesome gift. To devote ourselves to its meaning—as the pure and all-powerful love that rules the universe and lies within us all—is to merge with a divine beloved and experience a larger self. That is the goal of the spiritual seeker, and the only hope for the salvation of the world.
We are living at a time of tremendous transformation, fro a species arrogant enough to think it’s on its own, to a species that remembers where it comes from. When a critical mass remembers, allowing the love of the Father-Mother God to heal us of our painful illusions of separation, we will be redeemed and our children will be secure. What a task lies before us, what a gift is offered. This book is one of the many ways the spirit of love has arrived to speak with us to beckon us and guide us home. Let us give thanks, and let us listen.
–Marianne Williamson