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Books and Essays by LightAbout eight years ago while in a bookstore, by chance I happened to pick up “Active Meditation: The Western Tradition”, by Robert R. Leichtman, M.D., and Carl Japikse. I thought that meditation might be a good way to relax. The book was definitely not what I expected and it was not about relaxing. It is a mechanism for exploring and understanding consciousness. There are probably thousands of books about meditation. My first impression of Active Meditation was that the basic principle made sense. It says that each person has the potential to contact a true source of intelligence, guidance, and wisdom. One of the things that never made sense to me, but some religious leaders would have us believe, is that God only chose a few individuals throughout history to reveal wisdom to and that everyone else must rely on that testimony (usually someone else's interpretation of it) in order to know the truth. Even though the premise of Active Meditation made sense to me, I still found myself being skeptical. This illustrated to me the power of the subconscious mind. The warnings about seeking insights outside of "official doctrines" were engrained—“beware of false profits.” Fortunately, I was able to get over this, largely because the skill, intelligence and common sense of the authors. In no way do they encourage anyone to blindly accept the ideas they present—they encourage people to learn to think for themselves and to prove the ideas by applying them. In researching the background of the authors I found their website. They founded Light in 1980 and they have extensive backgrounds in writing and teaching in the areas of personal and spiritual growth. Shortly after reading Active Meditation, I sent a few questions to an email address on their website. Since the email program was set up to use my work address, the message included my company name. A few hours later, I received a phone call from a fellow employee who lives about 10 minutes from my home in New Jersey. He told me that Carl Japikse, who lives in Atlanta, teaches classes at his home. Carl saw that we had the same email addresses and told him to let me know about his next class. Since we worked for a company with locations throughout the continental United States, I wondered how Carl seemed to know that we lived near each other. He must be psychic. Over the past eight years, I’ve studied many of their other books and essays, including “The Life of Spirit” and “The Art of Living”. I have links to the books that I’ve read on my Recommended page. I consider their works to be among the best available on these topics. The ideas were not invented by the authors—any more than electricity was invented by mankind. These ideas have been discovered long ago. Just like it took the skill of brilliant scientists like Nikola Tesla and James Clerk Maxwell to help us understand the principles of electricity, the skill of people like Leichtman and Japikse provide extremely valuable insights into the workings of divine laws and principles. I’ve found that the ideas they present are not in conflict with any religion. In fact, they represent the principles that inspire all religions. I’d also like to mention the forum on the Light website. Now that my children are a little older, I was looking for a good book specifically to teach younger children about God. I posted this question on their forum. Carl did some research on this, and not being satisfied with what he found, he wrote “The Story of God” in response. Now that’s a useful web forum! I encourage anyone with specific questions on these topics to post them. The following short quote gives us two important clues about life. First, those with the "eyes to see" will find divine qualities and lessons in all aspects of life. Second, the purpose of life is not to simply "believe" in the Light, but to discover it, learn about it, and put it to creative use in everything that we do.
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