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Overview
Prayer is practical, Williamson tells us. "To look to God is to look to the realm of consciousness that can deliver us from the pain of living." Illuminata brings prayer into our daily lives, with prayers on topics from releasing anger to finding forgiveness, from finding great love to achieving intimacy. There are prayers for couples, for parents, and for children; prayers to mend broken relationships and prayers to overcome obsessive and compulsive love. There are prayers to heal the soul, prayers to heal the body, and prayers for work and creativity.
Williamson also gives us prayers for the healing of America, including two prayers that have had powerful effects on audiences at her lectures: a prayer of amends on behalf of European Americans to African-Americans and one to Native Americans. How, Williamson asks, can we expect anyone to forgive when we have made no formal apology?
Another section includes rites of passage, ceremonies of light for the signal events in our lives: blessing of the newborn, coming of age, marriage, and death. There is also a ceremony of the elder, for moving into midlife, and a ceremony of divorce, in which a gentle transition is provided for both the couple and their children.
"Read my prayers or someone else's," Williamson says. "By all means, create your own." Illuminata is a way to bring prayer into practical use, creating a sweeter, more abundant life for yourself and the people you care for. "No conventional therapy," she says, "can release us from a deep and abiding psychic pain. Through prayer we find what we cannot find elsewhere: a peace that is not of this world."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307833259 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/30/2013 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 1,054,600 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
• 1 •
Renaissance
There is a spiritual renaissance sweeping the world. Most people feel it, some deride it, many embrace it and no one can stop it. It is a revolution in the way we think.
Its torchbearers are a motley mix. Some are religious in a traditional sense, while some are not. Some are successful in the world, while some are not. Some of us genuinely like one another, while some of us do not. Some are politically liberal, while some of us are conservative. Some seek Truth in fellowship and some seek Truth alone. Some of us are old and some of us are young.
We are an assorted group, an unlabeled group, but together in spirit, we are affecting the world in significant ways. We are turning away from a purely worldly orientation. We seek an ancient God and a modern God. We feel a current of change, a cosmic electricity running through our veins now. However disparate our personalities and interests, we all agree on one very important point: Mankind has come to a major crossroads, at which the spirit alone can lead us toward human survival.
We wage, in our way, a revolution based on love. We seek to replace an old, oppressive order, not so much politically or socially, but within our minds where it lives and works. We try to hate no one, for we recognize that hatred itself is the enemy. We hope to change the world into a place of grace and love.
The first shots have rung out in this revolution, but they were not shots. They were bursts of light, streaming silently yet dramatically through the hearts and minds of millions. This historic unfoldment has already begun, and it is playing out on inner planes.
The question on most people’s minds, whether conscious or unconscious, is this: What will happen now? From channeled entities claiming to hail from the Pleiades to fundamentalist Christians, from the prophecies of Nostradamus to visions of the Virgin Mary, from angels who whisper to a backwoods carpenter to scientific think tanks, come predictions of global shift, perhaps cataclysm, in the years ahead. Our own inner sense corroborates the evidence: It doesn’t seem as though the future is going to be much like the past. It feels as though something is up, as though something significant and big is about to occur.
It feels, for one thing, as though something is fundamentally wrong. It isn’t just the environment, just the wars, just the gangs or the violence or the drugs. It isn’t just the lack of values or integrity or love. Something lurks. In Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” he describes a time in which the center cannot hold. Our center isn’t holding. The center isn’t there.
And yet, the deeper the despair that seems to creep around the edges of things, the brighter the light that seems to beckon from the center. It turns out that the center only seemed not to be there; it has merely been ignored. To those who look inward, it is bright indeed. Now, in growing intensity and yearning, the mind of humanity is seeking its Source.
The antidote to what is fundamentally wrong is the cultivation of what is fundamentally right. Should we choose to expand who we are on a fundamental level, new structures will replace the casualties of premillennial disintegration, and the next twenty years will usher in an age of light more dazzling than the world has known. The next twenty years will be the deciding factor. We need all our attention and all our focus to turn the species in the direction of survival.
Ultimately, the choice to love each other is the only choice for a survivable future. The meek shall inherit the earth because everyone else will have died on their swords. Every time we open our hearts, we create the space for a global alternative.
The opening of the heart is an awesome personal politic, providing us with an internal strength greater than any worldly power. As we receive God’s love and impart it to others, we are given the power to repair the world. As we give up our collective enslavement to the dictates of Western materialism, we relinquish the increasingly primitive belief that the world outside remains unaffected by our thoughts. We have begun to recognize that our individual minds create our collective realities, and we are ready to take responsibility for the world by taking more seriously our individual contributions to it. Personal transformation can and does have global effects. As we go, so goes the world, for the world is us. The revolution that will save the world is ultimately a personal one.
Some people think that things are no worse now than they have ever been, that all this talk of some millennial shift is nonsense, even dangerous. Perhaps this book is not for them. I am not trying to convince anyone of the reality of a global crisis; I am concerned, as are millions of others, with increasing consensus and hope among those who already believe that there is one.
This is the drama of our times: the climax of our historical epoch as we reach the conclusion of the twentieth century. Our planet, our species, our generation is shifting. And they are all the same shift. This is not a personal story, though everyone’s personal life is affected and everyone’s life affects the story. Like strands of DNA, all of us are coded with the history and possibilities of the species. Ours is a collective, generational drama, for our dramas at their core are all the same story. We all came from the angels and we have all fallen far. Now we are poised on the edge of a cliff. As a group, we will fall, or as a group we will fly.
The 1990s are a power point in time, an opening in a revolving door that last passed this way in the 1960s. Now, as then, we have a limited time in which to jump in. The decade of the sixties was a societal peak experience, a red-letter era in our evolutionary journey. It was a premystical phase, which foreshadowed current history. An entire generation of souls was marked for a lifetime by having experienced that period. Like Cinderella, who retained one glass slipper even after the spell broke, which then gave her entrance back into the magic, we have retained our cultural talismans and waited three decades for reentrance to a state of collective hope. We had a glimpse of an expanded reality, however drug-based that glimpse might have been at the time. Much as we receive the mark of a rubber stamp on our hands when we enter a place of entertainment, indicating that we don’t have to reenter but we can, an entire generation now looks at that stamp on our hands and wonders if maybe we had it figured out right back then after all. We were marked, chemically altered by those days, and however far we might have run from them, they have never stopped haunting us. We are beckoned by the music, the philosophies, the pictures. No one who was not there then can imagine the way our souls were branded. And they were branded for a reason: Now that we have begun to awaken from the sleep of two ultramaterialistic decades, the branding on our souls, our hands, sparks our memory. We are staring into space. We are jarred by what we know.
And we are not the only generation waking. Everyone on earth at this time is permeated with the vibrations of a closing chapter in a historical cycle. Small electrical shocks pulse through our nervous systems. We are coded with the knowledge that at this point we must change our course. Memories come from the future as well as the past. The twentysomething generation has a complementary metaphysics to that of the baby boomers, harking as we did to sounds the world can’t hear. Generations are like keys on a piano; baby boomers and twentysomethings are a musical perfect third.
We are a ragamuffin group in many ways, but great revolutions have begun with less.
There is a feeling in the air now, a sense, however faint, of renewed magic. The nineties seem to be revving up for something. We have arrived full circle at the point where we began this journey in the sixties, but this time, those who carry the torch are sober. We began, in those days, a collective quest for an enlightened perspective, and now, perhaps, we might actually find it. Our sobriety is more total than mere recovery from addiction to drugs and alcohol. A genuinely sober life is one in which moderation is embraced as a higher good, for the valuable part it plays in the creation and right use of energy. We’re letting go our addictions to many things: to people, to sex, to worldly illusions. Those who are not sober today risk missing the train of history. Sobriety itself is today’s high, for it is ultimately in the most centered consciousness that we find our power to transcend the world.
We are looking not so much for more ground to conquer, but for a truer ground of being on which to stand inside ourselves. The most positive breakthroughs of our times are internal. The drama of personal actualization is rarely reported in the mainstream press, except in irreverent, often ignorant tones. What is the story, after all? The story is an inner drama, in a world beneath the surface of things. When the eyes are closed, light isn’t seen. But still it works its miraculous transformations. Both men and women are becoming more authentic and powerful, as the light within us accelerates and intensifies. We are beginning to see ourselves in a new perspective, to generations before and after us, to the earth, to each other, to God. We are beginning to recognize simultaneously our many human weaknesses and our many divine strengths.