Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #749360 in Books
• Published on: 1997-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 323 pages

Customer Reviews

One Woman's Spiritual Journey Into Selfhood
Written almost as a diary of her spiritual questioning, Sophy Burnham outlines the various written records of faiths to describe illumination for those who have never felt it. This is an outward teaching to give context for an inner awakening. It gave her the courage to end her marriage in a loving way and find a new way of being. From a wife, a mother and a daughter, she grew to be a successful writer by relying on her spiritual insight, to become an award-winning author of 10 books including two New York Times best sellers -- The Art Crowd and A Book of Angels. This book can inspire hope for those wishing to change their lives. The illumination, the direction, will have to come from within.

Highly useful for mystics (& others) in the everyday world.
I just finished Sophy Burnham's "The Ecstatic Journey," and highly recommend it. So many people are having mystical experiences now, and those of us who have been having them for a while could really have benefited from Burnham's book back when we began.

A practitioner of Vipassana Buddhism herself, Burnham synthesizes nuggets of gold from Buddhism and several other traditions into a highly readable account of how a mystic lives in the "real" world. This book also includes a useful bibliography and list of suggested reading. Perhaps most the valuable parts of this book, though, are the two appendices. One is a handy summation of how to meditate in a Christian context, a process that is not as widely known as in other traditions. The other is a word about how to tell a healthy spiritual organization from a cult, how to know if a teacher is ethical, and what to do if (all too common nowadays) you find out your teacher has feet of clay. Burnham has also included hints throughout on how not to freak out if one day you find yourself face to face with a spiritual visitation and you know you're not crazy.

If you are a closet mystic, this is a valuable point of connection. If you've never had the Divine grab you by the front of your shirt and reorder your life via an intense mystical experience but are curious what it can be like and what effects it can have, this is a good book to read. It's lucidly written, and not "weird." A definite thumbs up.