The Gateway to Insight, Wisdom, and Spiritual Truth

About the Book

The booksellers´ shelves are divided into three primary categories regarding humanity´s quest to better understand self. These essential divisions are psychology, philosophy and spirituality/religion. And what is the epitome of each such realm of inquiry? Insight is the goal of psychology, wisdom is the aim of philosophy and spiritual truth, personally revealed, is the aspiration of the spiritual seeker. These three cornerstones of self-affirmation are only thinly tethered and bound by most expositors of these respective fields of study, seldom free of historical narrative, elusive terminology or the therapeutic objectivity that has failed to engage the seeker directly with truth - his own living truth. The Gateway to Insight, Wisdom and Spiritual Truth will help you lay the groundwork to discovering the enlightenment that has always been in you, and is awaiting your invitation to know and strengthen the truths within you.

In my twenty-five years of medical and mental health patient care - as a head trauma intensive care nurse, psychiatric staff supervisor, nationally certified hospice nurse, substance abuse counselor, cancer treatment nurse, group co-therapist and independent lecturer - I have taken the study of insight, wisdom and spiritual truth to heart. My patients are living the struggles of attaining insight, wisdom and spiritual truth, but free of any concept of doing so. Through my lecture company, InQuest, I have given seminars to healthcare professionals and others on how to see, know and be what awakens enlightenment in the western-minded individual in one´s daily struggles for purpose and meaning. The Gateway to Insight, Wisdom and Spiritual Truth is the written culmination of those twenty-five years of studying, feeling and being part of my patients´, and my own, experiences in realizing insight, wisdom and spiritual truth - in sum, enlightenment. The blossoms to what we seek in psychological inquiry, philosophical perspectives and spiritual manifestation are seeded in a process of arrival I call Spiritual Zero. You will see that you have already walked through its doors many times over - you only needed someone to aid in seeing the insights, wisdom and truths that were rightfully your own.

Having grown up in a violent and shattered family, I explain how my own traumatic childhood experiences were disguised lightening-rods for harnessing the truths which our very being evolves around - courage, doubt, ethics, the pain of understanding life´s impersonal order, and so on. The Gateway shows that our anguishes in daily living possess the complementary gems of enlightenment itself - in me, in you, in the seeker, now and always.

Divided into five sections, The Gateway´s structure and order models after the Pythagorean protreptic, moving the reader from the subjective self, through mind and thought, then progressively upward into the literal heavens. Through discourse, autobiography with analysis, anecdote and metaphor, I intend to keep you, the reader, subjectively engaged in this journey to your own Soul awakening.

Section One, "Subjective Truths," sorts out subjective truth from social fiction, from childhood through adulthood. "The Problem of Self Stability" initiates the reader into a study of the thinking habits that have blocked our ability to gain access to the very riches we claim to want - to experience enlightenment directly. The premise: we as children confirm possessing truth and wisdom directly through experience. We know their awesome powers. We also have a keen awareness of the familial and social repercussions for revealing such knowledge to intolerant or fearful participants. Through the event of my own sexual molestation as a child, I show the psychological and truth-knowing realities of even a six-year-old. "The Slice" defines how parents and other adults (Big People) are profoundly ignorant of a child´s truly wise inner univers

About the Author

Terry Lee Bivona finds the examined life worth living. The Gateway to Insight, Wisdom and Spiritual Truth is his proof and map to follow. Through his twenty-five years working in the mental health field, trauma intensive care nursing, hospice, cancer treatment and lecturing, Bivona has developed a view of living that integrates psychology, philosophy and tangible spirituality into a “grand unified reality.” He calls the gateway to it “Spiritual Zero.” His thousands of patients, over the years, have demonstrated the principles presented here. Bivona shows, autobiographically, how these ideas are grounded in his life, and yours, too. If you want to know the insight, wisdom and spiritual truth within your past and future but need a guidepost, The Gateway is it. Whether a novice seeker, psychologist, philosopher or spiritual practitioner, the glimpses offered here to your true Self will leave you awakened and enlightened like no other.