Dante’s Path

Dante's Path guides you along the steps of the classic Western spiritual journey. Oprah's "O Magazine" called the first edition (2003) of Dante's Path "divine therapy," and letters came in from clergy, counselors, nurses, executives, teachers, soldiers, and seekers of many backgrounds telling how Dante's Path helped them to increase their conscious contact with their innate spiritual nature. This new second edition is filled with specific steps, methods, detailed explanations and images so that you can go on the classic spiritual journey for yourself. First described by the Florentine mystical poet Dante in 1307 in the masterpiece "The Divine Comedy," this path has been studied for centuries by people around the globe. The most famous part of "The Divine Comedy" is the Inferno (the worst aspect of human nature), but Dante's true intention was to teach about the practices of freeing ourselves from suffering (purgatory) and experiencing illuminations and higher consciousness (paradise). Six hundred years later, the visionary Florentine psychiatrist, Roberto Assagioli, MD, integrated Dante's insights into a school of self development, psychosynthesis, so that people could make these important discoveries for themselves. Looking for a psychology that respected spirituality, the authors studied Assagioli, which led to their own immersion into Dante and the city of Florence itself. The authors call the discoveries along Dante's Path "transpersonal" (meaning "beyond the personality") and advocate that each person without exception can develop their natural transpersonal intelligence. They have gone on to teach Assagioli's work and transpersonal intelligence internationally for over 35 years and now train health professionals to be transpersonal teachers for their patients, clients, and students. Dante's Path is for any seeker who wants a realistic, pragmatic approach to increasing peace and wisdom in their daily life.

  The authors are practitioners of a form of holistic psychology called "psychosynthesis," which was founded by Roberto Assagioli when he, along with Carl Jung, began developing the field of transpersonal psychology as a way to bring spirituality into the psychoanalytic movement. But you don't have to be a proponent of psychosynthesis to enjoy this book, because it is less a guidebook and more an interpretive reading of Dante's epic poem The Divine Comedy as Assagioli saw it, as a metaphor for his psychoanalytic approach that stressed the process of first dealing with one's fears of mortality (Hell), then developing a sense of the power of one's spirituality (Purgatory), and finally experiencing the "loving force" of the spiritual or "universal energy" in one's daily life through access to one's higher self or "wisdom mind." Throughout, the authors offer helpful sidebars detailing mental exercises, especially forms of applied meditation and imagery, to help people access their higher self-"a creative process in which, through a series of discoveries, your experience of who you are is gradually expanded." The book's real success is in providing a fascinating interpretation of Dante's masterpiece-and the movement of Dante from the "dark wood" to the beatific image of his beloved Beatrice-in a way that is sensitive to the work itself and doesn't use The Divine Comedy merely as an advertisement for the authors' psychoanalytic approach.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.