The Simple Road: A Handbook for the Contemporary Seeker - Softcover

Harris, Obadiah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0399176306 ISBN 13: 9780399176302

Verlag: TarcherPerigee, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

This elegant, concise guide by the founder of the University of Philosophical Research distills a lifetime of spiritual seeking into one beautiful, unforgettable blueprint for inner growth. 

"When you grow exhausted with all of today’s spiritual programs, axioms, seminars, and techniques; when you feel fatigued from searching and cannot find a way forward; when it seems that years of seeking have netted so little – throw yourself upon the essential truths in this book…It can be lifesaving." --Mitch Horowitz, from the introduction

For more than a half-century, Obadiah Harris has studied the spiritual path, holding ministerial pulpits in traditions ranging from Pentecostalism to New Thought, and directing programs in continuing education, community-outreach, and distance-learning at major universities.

He has worked with the ideas and legacies of spiritual icons ranging from Manly P. Hall, author of the landmark The Secret Teachings of All Ages, to Ernest Holmes, founder of the Science of Mind movement, America's most successful and intellectually rigorous New Thought congregation. When he was growing up in rural Oklahoma, Harris's family provided the first pulpit to internationally known televangelist Oral Roberts.

As a scholar and seeker, Harris has traversed and helped shape broad swaths of our modern spiritual landscape. Now, he distills the insights he has found -- all of them potent, powerful, and, above all, useful -- in The Simple Road.

The Simple Road is more than a book. This concise statement is a spiritual GPS that guides the earnest seeker past dead-ends and switchbacks to locate the path that most intimately and directly connect us with the Source of all life. The methods and ideas in this book can help rescue you from a crisis and provide a daily source of practice. 

This brave work addresses head-on topics that are often shunned or ignored in works of "proper" theology, including the question of physical healing by spiritual means -- a topic treated with deepest seriousness -- and with the existence of hostile forces that test us on the spiritual path. 

The Simple Road is balm for parched souls. Whatever tradition you belong to, or if you belong to no one tradition, The Simple Road helps you locate the thread of universality that runs through all faiths, and leads you to practices, prayers, methods, and parables that lift your daily journey to a higher, better place.

This brief, powerful book can bring you literally life-saving solace when facing life's entanglements.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Obadiah Harris is the founder and president of the University of Philosophical Research (www.UPRS.edu), an accredited distance-learning college that grants graduate and undergraduate degrees in consciousness studies, transformational psychology, and liberal arts. The school is built upon the intellectual traditions of independent scholar of religion Manly P. Hall (1901-1990), who founded its landmark Los Angeles campus, the Philosophical Research Society.  Also president of the Philosophical Research Society, Harris has a long and storied career in both mainstream academia and the American metaphysical culture.  He holds a Ph.D. in education administration and supervision from the University of Michigan and an MA in education from Arizona State University, where he was an associate professor of education and director of community education. For almost two decades at Arizona State he designed programs in community outreach and in adult and continuing education. Harris has held numerous ministerial pulpits and collaborated with figures of major influence in contemporary spirituality, including Ernest Holmes (1887-1960). Born in northeastern Oklahoma, he lives in Los Angeles.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harris, Obadiah Silas.

The simple road : a handbook for the contemporary seeker / Obadiah Harris.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-698-40806-7

1. Spirituality. 2. Spiritual life. I. Title.

BL624.H3325 2015 2015011719

204'.4—dc23

Cover design by Nita Ybarra

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction The Road Before You by Mitch Horowitz

THE ART OF SELF-HEALING

Chapter I Sincerity, Receptivity & Retention

Chapter II Creating a Body Open to Healing

Chapter III The Physical Descent of Divine Consciousness

Chapter IV The Mastery of Divine Consciousness

Chapter V Cultivating Inner & Outer Strength

Chapter VI Transformation of the Inner Self: Breaking the Habit of Frustration & Anxiety

OVERCOMING HOSTILE FORCES

Chapter VII Facing Obstacles to Spiritual Growth

Chapter VIII The Divine Life on Earth

Chapter IX A Life Beyond Stress & Suffering

Chapter X Upending the Hostile Forces

Chapter XI Strengthening Weaknesses

Chapter XII The Vanguard of Advancing Spiritual Consciousness

Chapter XIII Defeating the Hostile Forces

THE MYSTERY OF WORK

Chapter XIV The Lilies of the Field

Chapter XV The Invisible Art of Inner Work

Chapter XVI Releasing Oneself to Divine Will

THE PROBLEM OF FREE WILL

Chapter XVII A Reconciliation of Contraries

Chapter XVIII The Partisan Mind

Chapter XIX Egoistic Free Will

Chapter XX Psychic Free Will

SACRIFICE

Chapter XXI The Self-Conscious Being of Man

Chapter XXII The Transformative Sacrifice of Inner Purification

Chapter XXIII Rejection of the Ego & Prioritization of the Soul

LIBERATION FROM GUILT

Chapter XXIV What Is Guilt?

Chapter XXV The Immorality of Theological Guilt

Chapter XXVI Removing Theological Guilt

Chapter XXVII Removing Personal Guilt: From Ignorance to Knowledge

FORGIVENESS

Chapter XXVIII Understanding Forgiveness

Chapter XXIX Forgiveness from the Heart

Chapter XXX The Dangers of Ignorance

Chapter XXXI Becoming a Vessel for Divine Truth

Chapter XXXII The Strong Forgiver Is Thus Purified

LOVE

Chapter XXXIII The Perfect & the Imperfect

Chapter XXXIV Psychic Love

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Introduction

THE ROAD BEFORE YOU

by Mitch Horowitz

The book you are about to read could save your life. That is not some maudlin claim. I know it as fact—because it helped save mine.

Its author, Obadiah Harris, a university administrator, scholar of religion, and lifelong seeker, says little about himself. He makes hardly a personal reference throughout this book. So, before getting into what you will discover in this work—and defending the claim I make above—I will say something about the man behind it. Understanding the author and his background will illuminate how he reached his conclusions, and what they may hold for you.

Obadiah Harris was born on January 6, 1930, to an ardently Bible-reading family in Wynona, Oklahoma, a small town in the northeastern part of the state. His father was the pastor of a local Pentecostal church and his mother taught him to read using Scripture. They completed the entire Bible before Obadiah’s first day of public school.

The Pentecostal faith was at the foundation of his household. Americans have long misunderstood Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on speaking in tongues and spiritual healing. The denomination is often viewed as belonging to the lower rungs of emotional religious life among the Southern poor; or, worse yet, critics see Pentecostals as a congregation of sheep who are exploited by slick televangelists and tent-revival faith healers.

In actuality, the Pentecostalism that animated Obadiah’s childhood arose from a hunger among American Protestants to move beyond the formality and cold professionalism that had settled over much of mainline Christianity by the early twentieth century. Pentecostalism was not a call to flee the modern age but rather to revive a form of religion that intimately mattered in the life of the individual; a religion in which miracles, struggles against evil, and the peace brought by redemption were palpable forces. This was the faith in which Obadiah grew up: one of wonder, mystery, and commitment. Biblical figures were as real to his childhood as sports heroes and presidents.

When Obadiah was eight, a young Oral Roberts—then a freshly minted, twenty-year-old Pentecostal minister decades away from fame as a televangelist—conducted his first revival service at the elder Harris’s church in Oil Center, Oklahoma. In person, Roberts was humble and gentle—but in the pulpit he burned with the conviction that religious healings and the ecstasies of the Holy Spirit had to be part of Christian faith if it was to remain relevant to modern people. Roberts’s passions outstripped his experience: when he ran short of sermons, Obadiah’s father gave him outlines for new ones.

As a teen, Obadiah followed his father on a circuit trail of churches, singing and accompanying himself on guitar. He became ordained as a Pentecostal minister, but yearned for greater freedom and opportunities. In particular, he wanted to broaden his religious perspective. The Judeo-Christian Bible was not, to his mind, the sole repository of religious truth. The notion that other, non-Christian faiths possessed Divine truth was intolerable within most Pentecostal circles—and the young minister was determined to move beyond them.

He began studying some of the new metaphysics that had gained popularity in America in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly the idea that the mind can serve as a channel of Divine creativity, and that thoughts possess causative properties. This outlook, generally called New Thought, went under the congregational banner of movements such as Science of Mind, Divine Science, and Unity. The philosophy’s most articulate purveyors included Ernest Holmes, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, and Neville Goddard—all of whom held, in their own way and with their own distinct emphases, that mental experience and spiritual experience were part of the same continuum, and that our feeling states and thoughts, and our capacity to direct these expressions along productive, generative lines, could manifest reality.

One day in early 1958, Obadiah was delivering a talk as a guest speaker at the Apostolic Christian Temple, a liberal evangelical congregation in Phoenix, Arizona. A slight bustle arose at the rear of the congregation when in walked a group of well-dressed, urbane-looking visitors. At the center of the group was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: TarcherPerigee
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0399176306
• ISBN 13: 9780399176302
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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