Apprentice to the Dawn: A Spiritual Memoir (Hard Cover)
Apprentice to the Dawn is both an intimate spiritual memoir and a broad exploration of the expansion of consciousness in our society. This book exemplifies the availability of visionary experiences to all of humanity and is a call to contact the original wisdom that lies within each of us. Following a mysterious spiritual awakening, James Ingebretsen, successful lawyer and businessman, struggled to reconcile the seemingly disparate existences of father, husband, executive and newly-initiated spiritual seeker. With Gerald Heard as a guide, he came to see his experience as a call to invest his activities and relationships with greater significance and awareness. Over the next 44 years, Ingebretsen sought to facilitate spiritual growth in individuals and society by founding a retreat center, investigating mythology, meditation and ritual and assisting inspiring teachers in spiritual, psychological and cultural disciplines. He sought out and formed close relationships with writers and thinkers as diverse as J. Krishnamurti, Ira Progoff, Joseph Campbell, Dane Rudhyar, and Alan Watts. Along the way he participated in early experiments with LSD, published the first book in English on tai chi ch'uan by Wen-Shan Huang , and incorporated the Sufi Order in the U.S. with Pir Zade Vilayat Inayat Khan. He shares his personal experiences and practices to remind readers that each life is a unique, creative expression and to encourage them to find their way of giving themselves more fully to life. As he says in this book, “I am engaged in self-unfoldment, that is the process of becoming conscious of and connected to Divinity. My story is the tale of how self-unfoldment has taken place in the life of one man, how one man has been an “apprentice to the dawn”. "It is my wish that you will finish this book with an increased sense that your life is a unique expression of greater forces. I wish that you will always find the will to be present, attentive, and responsive to all the possibilities of the universe as, day by day, together and alone, we unfold our strange destinies." - James C. Ingebretsen.
