Sacred Pathways

Sacred Pathways reveals nine distinct spiritual temperaments--and their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies--to help you improve your spiritual life and deepen your personal walk with God. It's time to strip away the frustration of a one-size-fits-all spirituality and discover a path of worship that frees you to be you. Experienced spiritual directors, pastors, and church leaders recognize that all of us engage with God differently, and it's about time we do too. In this updated and expanded edition of Sacred Pathways, Gary Thomas details nine spiritual temperaments and--like the Enneagram and other tools do with personality--encourages you to investigate the ways you most naturally express yourself in your relationship with God. He encourages you to dig into the traits, strengths, and pitfalls in your devotional approach so you can eliminate the barriers that keep you locked into rigid methods of worship and praise. Plus, as you begin to identify and understand your own temperament, you'll soon learn about the temperaments that aren't necessarily "you" but that may help you understand the spiritual tendencies of friends, family, and others around you. Whatever temperament or blend of temperaments best describes you, rest assured it's not by accident. It's by the design of a Creator who knew what he was doing when he made you according to his own unique intentions. If your spiritual walk is not what you'd like it to be, you can change that, starting here. Sacred Pathways will show you the route you were made to travel, marked by growth and filled with the riches of a close walk with God. A Sacred Pathways video Bible study is also available for group or individual use, sold separately.

Sacred Pathways reveals nine distinct spiritual temperaments--and their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies--to help you improve your spiritual life and deepen your personal walk with God. It's time to strip away the frustration of a one-size-fits-all spirituality and discover a path of worship that frees you to be you. Experienced spiritual directors, pastors, and church leaders recognize that all of us engage with God differently, and it's about time we do too. In this updated and expanded edition of Sacred Pathways, Gary Thomas details nine spiritual temperaments and--like the Enneagram and other tools do with personality--encourages you to investigate the ways you most naturally express yourself in your relationship with God. He encourages you to dig into the traits, strengths, and pitfalls in your devotional approach so you can eliminate the barriers that keep you locked into rigid methods of worship and praise. Plus, as you begin to identify and understand your own temperament, you'll soon learn about the temperaments that aren’t necessarily "you" but that may help you understand the spiritual tendencies of friends, family, and others around you. Whatever temperament or blend of temperaments best describes you, rest assured it's not by accident. It's by the design of a Creator who knew what he was doing when he made you according to his own unique intentions. If your spiritual walk is not what you'd like it to be, you can change that, starting here. Sacred Pathways will show you the route you were made to travel, marked by growth and filled with the riches of a close walk with God.

Discover new ways of connecting with God by understanding how he uniquely created you to worship him. The Sacred Pathways video study will help you learn: How you naturally express yourself in your relationship with God How to develop new ways of drawing near to him Key biblical figures who share your spiritual temperament How to understand others who connect with the Creator differently As believers in Christ, many of us today fall into the trap of thinking we have to approach God in a certain way. But our Creator made us all unique, and he designed us to connect with him in our own ways. For some, this might look like quiet contemplation. Others express praise through caregiving or theological discussions. It's important to discover the particular pathway that will best help you to experience God's presence. Bestselling author and speaker Gary Thomas reveals nine distinct spiritual temperaments to give you insight into how you naturally worship and how your personal walk with God might look different from those around you. Unlike the Enneagram and other personality assessment tools, Sacred Pathways gives you tools to investigate how you naturally relate to God. You will discover the strengths and impulses in your devotional approach so that you can eliminate the barriers that keep you locked into scripted methods of worship and praise. There is one thing that each of us as Christians can do that nobody else can--give our personal love and affection to God. This Study Guide includes: Discussion questions, reflection questions, and a personal assessment test to discover your pathway Personal Bible study for between sessions A guide with best practices for leading groups Sessions include: The Journey of the Soul – Introduction to the Pathways Pathways of Wonder – the Naturalist, Sensate, and Traditionalist Pathways of Contemplation – the Intellectual, Ascetic, and Contemplative Pathways of Action – the Caregiver, Activist, and Enthusiast Tending the Garden of the Soul – How the Pathways Apply to Your Life Designed for use with the Sacred Pathways Video Study available on DVD or streaming video, sold separately.

(Currently sale priced) "... illuminating ..." - The Dalai Lama.Sacred Pathways explains how the brain areas that support Near-Death Experiences are also the basis for mystic experience during our lives. It's a 21st century synthesis of science and spirituality by brain scientist Todd Murphy, in which spiritual, religious, and mystic events are explained with neuroscience.Edited and re-edited to make the science easy to understand, it's a readable introduction to the science of the spiritual.Murphy uses Darwin's theory of evolution to understand the human death-process, and proposes that reincarnation is an evolutionary adaptation which contributed to the survival of our species. The book explores the ideas that the self is actually a hallucination, God is a manifestation of a part of ourselves, and enlightenment comes from a blast of neural activity in specific parts of the brain. It also looks at prayer, spontaneous mystic experiences, romantic love, and psychic skills. The author also believes that spirituality is a very positive force, both in the world and in our lives. Spirituality, he argues, is an adaptive force that's crucial to our survival as a species, making it an integral part of human nature. An atheist who openly encourages prayer, Murphy goes past the debates between skeptics and believers and shows how religion helps us, without regard for the truth or falsehood of anyone's beliefs. Sacred Pathways is a fascinating example of no-nonsense 'new science' at its best.This extensively referenced tour-de-force work explains the brain's role in religious and mystic experiences including, enlightenment, prayer, near-death experiences, and even psychic perception. It also explains reincarnation, out-of-body experiences and the spiritual nature of romantic love.It includes a chapter that summarizes Murphy's concept of reincarnation; the first to be published by a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It also has an in-depth discussion of the famous God Helmet, and explains how psychic skills work, based on lab experiments with telepathy and remote viewing.Sacred Pathways is a major advance in neurotheology, a synthesis of science and religion that discusses spirituality only in the language of science. Most people in this field confine themselves to looking at what the brain is doing when people have otherworldly experiences, epiphanies, and peak experiences. Murphy goes further than that, seeing these things in the context of anthropology, sociology, and human evolution as well as in the human brain.Todd Murphy has published in several scientific journals, including the Journal for Near-Death Studies, Psychology Reports, NeuroQuantology, and Activitas Nervosa Superior.This fascinating, accessible, and thought provoking book will change the way you see spirituality.Sacred Pathways is "...the principia (principle work) of the scientific investigation of spiritual experiences" (From the forward by Dr. Michael Persinger, inventor of the God Helmet).

Roar Rule Laugh Create Destroy Love ...And lay claim to your true masculine nature and spiritual heritage. According to Dagonet Dewr, a writer and activist in the men's pagan spirituality movement: "We have forgotten how to cry, to scream, to hunt, to love, to honor, to teach, to initiate." Hip, funny, and direct, this pagan belief guide explores twelve powerful male archetypes and their relevance for men today: Divine Child, Lover, Warrior, Trickster, Green Man, Guide, Craftsman, Magician, Destroyer, King, Healer, and Sacrificed One. Stories of characters from mythology, fantasy, and pop culture illustrate different expressions of masculine energy. With pagan rituals and magickal workings, this pagan book offers a visceral, hands-on way to connect with archetypal energies and honor male rites of passage such as coming of age, seeking a partner in love, or becoming a father.

This text combines study of the dynamic historical development of each religious tradition with a comparative thematic structure. Students are encouraged to discover and explore the nature of religious experience by comparing basic themes and issues common to all religions, finding connections with their own personal experiences. By sensitively introducing descriptive material within a comparative thematic structure, this text helps students to understand how each religion provides, for its adherents, patterns and meanings that make up a full way of life.

For 250 years the Turkic Muslims of Tibet, who call themselves Uyghurs today, have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s national narrative. The roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, Rian Thum says, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage along the Silk Road dominated understandings of the past.

Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education is an exploration into some of the shared cross-cultural themes that inform and shape Indigenous thought and Indigenous educational philosophy.