From Amazon.com
Dante's Path: A Practical Approach to Achieving Inner Wisdom is primarily a self-help book. However, it is a self-help book with a difference. Authors Bonney Gulino Schaub and Richard Schaub use their perceptive, though simple reading of Dante's
Divine Comedy to guide their readers through a process that allows them to access their internal wisdom, or "wisdom mind," to achieve liberation from their fears and to realize their deeper potential. Psychotherapists for over 30 years, the Schaubs practice
psychosynthesis, a holistic method developed by Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, that recognizes "the importance of integrating spirituality into the paradigm for seeking mental and emotional health." The book provides practical techniques, based on the world's meditative traditions, to assist readers to free themselves from their fear-based patterns and to move closer to their "higher" selves.
Taking the lead from their mentor Assagioli, the authors recognize that the spiritual path traveled by the poet in Dante's masterpiece provides the perfect road map for achieving internal wisdom and peace. Like Dante's poet, the readers are urged to move through their "hellish" impulses (such as envy, addiction, and rage) by "Learning to Witness" and to proceed to self-transformation (Purgatory) by becoming "Lord of Yourself" and ultimately to achieve enlightenment (Paradise) by "developing a relationship with your wisdom mind." In addition to their primary focus on The Divine Comedy as a metaphor for the psychoanalytic process, the authors explore connections to other spiritual world traditions. Thus, they reveal the broader implications of self-healing and discovery. They tell us if we can learn how to deal with our fears and reduce the negative actions that are generated by them, we could increase the amount of peace in our lives and subsequently, the amount of peace in the world. --Silvana Tropea
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
