The Ecstatic Journey


Book Description

In this rich and deeply personal book, Sophy Burnham uses her own momentous journey into mystical awareness to show readers a contemporary path for experiencing divine energy, guidance, and inspiration. Historically, mystical experiences have been available to only a select few. But just as Sophy Burnham made angels accessible to contemporary readers, she now demystifies mysticism and shows the many different paths readers can follow in their everyday lives for powerful spiritual encounters. Threaded through her own story, Burnham gives us scores of firsthand accounts of mystical encounters as recorded by ordinary people today, as well as by saints, seers, ecstatics, and holy men and women of every faith. Burnham insightfully and comfortingly shows how their journeys--and ours--are similar, sharing a subtle, unnamed longing; passing through various stages of prayer, introspection, and spiritual awareness; and opening into a single transformative moment of clarity and connection. In addition, Burnham delves into the physical side of mystical awareness, describes the age-old practices that invite mystical awareness, and points out the landmarks that one passes on this extraordinary spiritual journey.




Ecstatic Healing


Book Description

Understanding ecstatic spirit possession for physical and spiritual healing • Details the author’s direct experiences working with Brazilian miracle healer John of God (João de Deus) and African high shaman Credo Mutwa • Includes stories of psychic surgery, spirit possession, and shamanic healing rituals • Explains how each of us is capable of miraculous healing Margaret De Wys first became aware of ecstatic trance healing when she was a young girl fascinated by the rapture of the Holy Rollers. However, it would be decades before she would be called to explore that early fascination. At a gathering in Upstate New York thirty years later she was spontaneously possessed by a sacred Zulu necklace--a gift from one of the most powerful shamans in Africa, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa. Frightening yet exhilarating, the experience set her on a search to understand the depths of ecstatic healing. Margaret journeys to Brazil to work with famous healer John of God (João de Deus), where she witnesses hundreds of miraculous healings through psychic surgery. During her years of spiritual service at John’s Casa, she experiences ecstatic visions, which increase her hunger for more knowledge. She begins to attend possession rituals held by Pai Lazaro, an Umbanda priest, and finds she is a natural medium to the African gods. Called through her dreams to work with Credo Mutwa, she travels to Credo’s Healing Village in Africa, where she discovers her gift as an ecstatic healer and the meaning of true faith. In sharing her journey to reach a profound understanding of ecstatic states and shamanic healing, Margaret De Wys not only gives the reader a direct experience of holiness but also reveals the potential each of us has for miraculous healing.




Mast - The Ecstatic


Book Description

Karl Marx spoke about the have and the have nots. A third kind always existed in Bharat (ancient India) since time immemorial and continues to this day - those who could have anything but wanted nothing. The Məsts. Remaining always in inner ecstasy and living in complete freedom and abandon, they walk the earth to remind you of your lost glory. To go within. To be in ecstasy within yourself. To be You. To be a Məst. Learn about these amazing Məsts and the grand Tradition that they represent, through the fascinating life of Atmananda Chaitanya. Atmananda is not just a person. He is a wake-up call. This book may awaken people from the illusions of activities into the lap of beingness, totality and completion. This is the story of a possible journey of an ordinary man from a unit to the Universe. He is everybody. He is everything. He is YOU.




Where the Spirits Ride the Wind


Book Description

“Dr. Goodman has pioneered in the study of bodily postures and altered states of consciousness.” —Stanley Krippner, professor of personal mythology and parapsychology “And suddenly the understanding of my own vision washed over me like a mighty wave . . . For life or for death, I was committed to that mighty realm of which I was shown a brief reminder, the world where all was forever motion and emergence, that realm where the spirits ride the wind.” —from the Prologue Anthropologist and spiritual explorer Felicitas Goodman reexamines our notions of the nature of reality by studying the ritual postures of native art assumed by her subjects during trance states. For readers desiring to discover this world of ancient myths, she has included a practical guide on how to achieve such ecstatic experiences. “The book is clearly written for the general reader and includes many descriptions of trance experiences. It may serve as a good introduction to the nature and appeal of the shamanic revival in modern Western cultures.” —Theological Book Review “A case study in experiential anthropology that offers a unique mix of autobiography, mythology, experiential research, and archaeological data to support a challenging thesis—that certain body postures may help induce specific trance states.” —Shaman’s Drum “This is a spellbinding and exceptionally readable book by an extraordinary woman.” —Yoga Journal




Ecstatic Trance


Book Description

Ecstatic Trance contains in-depth information on 60 ritual body postures and describes them in precise, accurate detail, with clear illustrations. The first complete manual on this subject, presented here are age-old postures (one dates back 32,000 years and was inspired by a cave painting) along with newly-researched postures, published here for the first time. Learn these postures and access, energize, and integrate your creative potential. Practicing these postures also leads to new insights into healing, inner development, and rebirth. And combined with appropriate rhythmic stimulation--music and dance, for example--the postures can engender a profound change in consciousness, leading the participant to experience altered states of reality including visions and ecstatic trance states. The postures themselves do not promote any one belief system or dogma but are elements in an overall shamanic worldview.







The Art of Losing Control


Book Description

Humans have always sought ecstatic experiences - moments where they go beyond their ordinary self and feel connected to something greater than them. Such moments are fundamental to human flourishing, but they can also be dangerous. Beginning around the Enlightenment, western intellectual culture has written off ecstasy as ignorance or delusion. But philosopher Jules Evans argues that this diminishes our reality and denies us the healing, connection and meaning that ecstasy can bring. He sets out to discover how people find ecstasy in a post-religious culture, how it can be good for us, and also harmful. Along the way, he explores the growing science of ecstasy, to help the reader - and himself - learn the art of losing control. Jules' exploration of ecstasy is an intellectual and emotional odyssey balancing personal experience, interviews and readings from ancient and modern philosophers that will change the way you think about how you feel. From Aristotle and Plato, via the Bishop of London and Sister Bliss, radical jihadis and Silicon Valley transhumanists, The Art of Losing Control is a funny and life-enhancing journey through under-explored terrain.




The Power of Ecstatic Trance


Book Description

A guide to ecstatic trance for spiritual and emotional development, spirit journeying, and connection to the collective unconscious • Describes more than 20 ecstatic trance postures for healing, divination, spirit journeys, shape-shifting, past-life recovery, and connecting to the Akashic field • Explores the physiology and psychology of ecstatic trance journeying • Provides guidance for those with little or no experience as well as methods to deepen practice Over the millennia shamanic trance journeying has been used as a way of healing, of providing answers to questions, and of offering solutions to individual, family, and community problems. Though traditionally it was the shaman of the community who went on such journeys, the revolutionary work of the late anthropologist Felicitas Goodman shows that we all have these shamanic powers. Her research on the body postures found in ancient primitive art and in the practices of contemporary shamans offers each of us the ability to experience ecstatic trance journeys firsthand. A student of Felicitas Goodman and Belinda Gore, psychologist Nicholas Brink examines more than 20 traditional trance postures for divination, decision making, letting go of guilt and grief, healing of illness and emotional pain, spirit journeys, shape-shifting, interacting with animal spirits and the dead, and discovering past lives. Exploring the physiology and psychology of ecstatic journeying, he offers guidance for those with little or no experience as well as methods for longtime practitioners to deepen their practice and reclaim the extrasensory power of our ancient ancestors. Offering solid theories of how ecstatic trance triggers healing and spiritual development, Brink explains how trance journeying allows us to tap in to the collective unconscious, or Universal Mind, and access the information matrix of the Akashic field.




Ecstatic Witchcraft


Book Description

Journey down a shamanic path that embraces the ecstatic, the wild, the gnostic, the transformative, and the visionary. Expanding on principles touched on in his book By Land, Sky & Sea: Three Realms of Shamanic Witchcraft, Gede Parma walks you through an apprenticeship designed to ground and orient you on the path of the Shamanic Craft. Discover the meaning of ecstasy. Encounter the three realms. Learn shamanic techniques and rituals that will give you a more primal, authentic experience of Witchcraft, including: Drawing Down the Gods Working with Spirit Allies Trance and Moving Between the Worlds Ecstatic Spellcraft Healing and Soul Retrieval Seership and Divination Praise: "Smart, thought-provoking and useful...A worthy contribution to the continuing growth and evolution of shamanic Wicca by a passionate and poetic member of the next generation."—Phyllis W. Curott, author of Witch Crafting: A Spiritual Guide to Making Magic




The Ecstatic, Or, Homunculus


Book Description

Something is wrong with Anthony, and it's getting worse. Schizophrenia runs in his family's blood, picking off an uncle here, a mother there, and has now found a home in Anthony's mind. The women in his life -- his mother, sister, and grandmother -- bring him home to Queens and try to fix him, but his presence slowly turns their home into a semi-suburban asylum.Anthony narrates the skewed story of his family's surreal adventures in an exploitative world, from black-market employers and neighborhood loansharks to bogus beauty pageants and bootleg medical clinics. In the tradition of misfit picaresques from The World According to Garp to Confederacy of Dunces, this is the story of a family trying to save themselves from the ravenous world and their own unraveling minds.