Excerpts from "Soul Awakening Practice"

By James O’Dea

This brand new book of prayer and contemplation (order it here) is for evolutionaries and activists, for deep ecologists, for spiritual seekers engaged in passionate renewal, and for all those thirsty for a spiritually coherent worldview. Prayer and contemplation can access the deepest aspect of our will to radically change our lives and transform the world — the deeper the contemplation the more profoundly we can be stirred to meaningful action. Each set of poetic reflections concludes with a short essay by outstanding spiritual leaders and thinkers: Barbara Marx Hubbard on soul awakening; Anodea Judith on heart opening; Ervin Laszlo on light shining; Michael Singer on wounds dissolving and Hopi elder Mona Polacca on peace radiating.

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As your soul awakens, it begins to permeate your psyche with wholeness, your heart with love’s subtle harmony and your mind with visionary insight and a vibrant moral conscience. You are on your way to becoming a new creation. But the world will still manufacture its own meanness, crudity and calculated self-interest to try to subvert your progress, so that it can bind you to the false security of the status quo.

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Intellect can envision and explore new worlds, but it is awakened soul that synchronizes body, heart, mind and spirit. Soul brings universal truth into visionary embodiment and manifests as evolutionary creativity in action.

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Mind gets lost in fantasies, whereas Soul feeds pure imagination, which contains all the codes needed for us to manifest planetary healing and deep social renewal. Perfection emerges out of pure imagination and the awakened courage to embody Soul’s beckoning. Evolution’s great game is to lift each of us up to play creatively in God’s imagination.

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As your soul awakens, you are given your true spiritual work. Your whole being begins to shift its axis to revolve around being an authentic and fearless ambassador of universal truth and unconditional love. You will be asked to shred any remaining boundaries of narrow self-interest. True heroism is necessary to live a spiritual life, since such a life inevitably challenges the sanctimonious righteousness of religious and social conformity.

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The heart’s opening slowly defies the gravitational pull of buried wounds. Faith is now alive and vividly experienced, not just a set of ideas you have been told to believe. It has the power to lift you out of the ashes of crisis and despair, and can even enable you to soar toward complete liberation. Heart opening propels you into new life like no other force.

James O’Dea is author of The Conscious Activist, Cultivating Peace, Soul Awakening Practice, and other acclaimed works. James is a former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Washington office director of Amnesty International, and CEO of the Seva Foundation. He worked with the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut during a time of war and massacre and lived in Turkey for five years during civil upheaval and coup d’etat.

He has taught peacebuilding to over a thousand students in 30 countries. He has also conducted frontline social healing dialogues around the world. He is a member of The Evolutionary Leaders group and on the Advisory Board of The Peace Alliance and Kosmos Journal. James also mentors emerging leaders. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Laszlo New Paradigm Institute. James is both an activist and mystic.