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REVIEW:
Awakening The Soul, Book 3: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature

By Bill Missett

ISBN 1-4033-4871-5 (electronic version)
ISBN 1-4033-4871-5 (paperback)

http://www.1stbooks.com/bookview/11585

Reviewed by Robert Yehling

Bill Missett is a man whose particular combination of characteristics might cross your path once in a lifetime. He's a retired newspaper editor, avid bodysurfer, connoisseur of music, and teacher of meditation and metaphysical principles whose wife is a human rights and political asylum attorney. Patrice and Bill Missett divide their time between a beachfront house in mainland Mexico and the Herald Square area of Manhattan. How's that for cultural diversity? These qualities enable Missett to be tough and soft, reflective and expressive, deep in heart and strong in mind. He's a living, deeply breathing example of how to take the inner sanctum of meditation and spirit, and turn it dynamically upon the worldãshaping your own reality in the process.

This combination of qualities serves as the spiritual pulsebeat for Awakening The Soul: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature, the third book (first to be published) in a series on which Missett has been working for most of the past decade. Or, if you want to draw back all the way, to the day in 1977 when a near-drowning experience led to his first profound look at the land beyond the veil of materialism—the spiritual realm. Awakening The Soul was intended to be a one-book magnum opus of the innate existence and fall of the spiritual kingdom, and our personal reclamation of it, but numerous agents and editors talked Missett into converting the book into a trilogy. Since Restoring Your Spiritual Nature was already finished, he came out with it first.

After reading a few pages of this book, it becomes clear that Awakening The Soul: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature is a book that will be read, re-read, underlined and dog-eared by every individual who sees it on a bookshelf and picks it up. Upon reading the entire book and its six mighty chapters, it's evident that this is an early 21st century masterwork of the relationship between spirit and the soul. It concerns itself with how we can lift ourselves out of the false hopes of the material world by going within ourselves—then conspire with the spiritual realm to change our external realities. The great stroke of mastery? This book has something for everybody. Missett took great care to make sure that the material was not only readable to long-time meditators and practitioners of metaphysical and alternative lifestyles, but to beginning seekers as well. As a writer, reviewer, Reiki practitioner and long-time teacher of meditation, I grow weary and frustrated when I see book after book that fails to make spiritual concepts comprehensible to the people who need them most—those just starting out. To me, it reflects a superiority complex on the part of the author. Isn't the point of the spiritual path to dissolve ego, not bolster it, and thus merge into one with the Infinite Source? From his wonderful "Awakening the Soul" exercise to his personal stories and cited studies, Missett observes Rule No. 1 of teaching: Meet your students wherever they are on the road, take their hands, and guide them further along. That is enlightenment. That is mastery of soul and mind. That is understanding that what counts is the reader, not the exhortations of the writer. Awakening The Soul: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature really pulls it off.

Awakening The Soul: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature covers all the bases of forming a relationship with the divine in a way that exudes humility, divinity, power to move mountains and—yes—achieve happiness and joy. The author sets up his sections with plenty of history, examples and sourced quotes, then guides us into our hearts and minds with exercises that are practical yet deep, simple to practice yet prone to open up deeper layers of experience. In one delicious segment of the book that evokes his bodysurfing background, he writes:

Every time you get upset about something, whether the emotion is anger, guilt, jealousy, impatience—whatever the cause— realize that there's a lesson to be learned in the emotion. You simply stop your old way of dealing with these emotionsã you stop sitting and stewing about what's happening, and you stop having emotional outbursts. You experience a new way of thinking through your Soul and realize "this is a lesson."

Think or meditate about what's causing the emotion. It may be impatience, or fear, or anger, and rather than blindly following your emotions into an outburst, see what lesson awaits you. Learn it, and you will rarely have to deal with it again. Ignore it, and it will keep coming back to you, upsetting your peace of mind. Awakening your Soul will provide the energy and intent to quickly learn such lessons, clearing your life path for positive, productive experiences.

You never stop learning or experiencing. It just gets better and better as you ascend. Your lessons become easier, your life less complicated. Life stops being frightening and starts making sense. You stop beating your head against the currents of reality and turn and ride the flow. Soon you will feel like a surfer who catches a perfect wave—that glorious moment when he or she is one with the wave and the spirit of Nature.

This book is a triumph of research and forbearance as much as a triumph of spirit. Missett cited numerous and divergent sources to support his narrative, then took the perspectives and material deep into his own heart and soul, where it connected and coalesced in the inner space of meditation. Sources such as futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, Indian yoga master Paramhansa Yogananda, "Seth" channel Jane Roberts, author/mystics John Randolph Price and Ken Carey, Esalen founder Michael Murphy and spiritual giants Rosemary Guilley, and Dr. Larry Dossey are among the more than 70 sources cited for this book. His primary sources are a pair of Middle Age-era mystics, Catholic saint Thomas Aquinas and German Meister Eckhart, and Matthew Fox. The material came out distilled, refined, and in harmony with the spirit of his personal narrative.

Awakening the Soul: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature is also necessary reading for these turbulent social, economic and global times. The fact that religious differences and the acts of extremists on both sides has started virtually every war in the history of humankind—and appears ready to do so again—is relevant to the subject material. This book shows how to rise above the misguided notions and outer practices of religions and burrow deeply into their core truths and precepts—where lasting peace, love and joy reside. Is there any piece of writing is more essential or relevant to the present time? As Missett writes in the introduction:

It is obvious that the universal spiritual power we call Allah, Brahman, Buddha, Creator, God, Great Spirit, Infinite Source, Infinite Mind, Jehovah, Prime Creator, Supreme Being, Yahweh, and other names, is communicating with us now, just as It did through ancient prophets preceding the birth of Jesus.

Millions are listening and are aware of what is happening. But there are far more who are oblivious to this increasingly obvious evolutionary event. This is not a religious movement. This is a spiritual renaissance that is occurring to millions of Earth's residents at the grassroots level, outside the rigid dogma of most organized religions. These "awakened souls" are aware of what is happening, and are participating in its coming, acting as midwives in the epochal event, assisting in its birth.

If there is a single hint of a suggestion to make about Awakening the Soul: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature, it would concern a fine point that is known to writers of literary memoir. The author cites and quotes numerous sources throughout the book, which gives us their words in deference to his own realized knowledge. In some cases, his own knowledge would've lent even more power to the passage. However, it is this reviewer's guess is that he deferred in order to fully honor the cited source. In so doing, he further exemplified the humility that makes the loud narrative voice of Awakening the Soul: Restoring Your Spiritual Nature so convincing and capable of changing the lives of every person who reads this book.

More Information:
• Review of Awakening The Soul – Book 2
• Excerpt of Awakening The Soul – Book 3
• Interview with Bill Missett
• Earlier Interview with Bill Missett