The Lost Spiritual World

The Lost Spiritual World series is a joyous celebration of the wisdom of the sages from all religious traditions. It is not a celebration of a specific theology or religion. Instead, it explores the spiritual truths common to each tradition, and how they fit into our evolving scientific worldview. It reveals God as an experience of the heart, and religion as a gateway to the Kingdom within.

The series begins with the Gospel of Mark because Mark is now regarded by scholars as “the first biography of Jesus ever written.” Alongside commentary from Christian mystics such as Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhardt, and Hildegaard von Bingen, you will learn how writers from different religious traditions experience Christianity, including the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, Rabbi Michael Lerner, and Yogananda Paramahansa. You will even gain insights from writers skeptical of religion, such as Nietzsche, Emerson, and Jung. Later volumes in the series explore the Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Sutras, Buddhist sayings, Sufi poetry, and the Torah – all from a multifaith perspective.

In the past generation, scholars have gained remarkable new insights into the Gospel of Mark. They have found ample evidence that Mark celebrates a very different Jesus from the one you find in traditional doctrines such as the Nicene Creed. To help you navigate this new scholarship, the Lost Spiritual World uses the Scholars Version, a landmark translation by many of the best Bible scholars from Harvard, Vassar, Notre Dame, Wesleyan and other major universities.

Most translations, especially the evangelical and fundamentalist ones, claim that Mark’s Gospel announces that Jesus was “the Son of God.” The Scholars Version dug into the ancient manuscripts and found that this was an insertion by later scribes and not a part of the original text. The Scholars Version also uses the word “trust” where most other translations use the word “believe.” This is because living in a scientific age, we understand something very different by the word “believe” than the original Christians. In the early years of the Church, the Latin word credo meant, “I lend my heart to,” rather than “I believe” in the modern scientific sense.

These are just two of hundreds of new discoveries that have only recently become available to the general public. The Lost Spiritual World explores the implifications of this recent scholarship through a bold and unprecedented use of typography. For example, the Lost Spiritual World often shrinks the word “sin” to an almost unreadable size, while the words “TRUST” and “LOVE” are often enlarged to ten times their normal size. It matters not if you agree with which words appear small, and which enlarged. Rather, what’s important is that you are engaged with the sacred texts in powerful new ways. The typography awakens you to messages and spiritual insights that are normally hidden from view in standard black and white text.

For many, the joy of experiencing the ancient traditions as a third millennium spiritual seeker is also the joy of being a trailblazer. You are free to mix and match the best from each tradition, and to create a new tradition within your heart. You are even free to stand up and declare, without a tinge of anger or rebelliousness, but with simple honesty and authenticity, “I cannot believe in Jesus, as the traditional doctrines present him. But I love Jesus. I love the Sermon on the Mount. I love his message of nonviolence. I love his peace and serenity, his extraordinary grace under pressure, his faith in the wake of extraordinary challenges. I love the Jesus who is inclusive, not exclusive. The Jesus who embraces the Samaritans, the people of other faiths."

If Christ taught us anything of lasting value, it is that there is no room in our hearts for anger, hatred or animosity. Here is where some critics tend to miss the point of religion, which is heart transformation, peace, love and forgiveness. As long as people write angry diatribes against religion, they can hardly claim the moral high ground. The fundamentalist persuades not by his doctrines, but by the love and peace in his heart. Likewise, if the atheist has nothing but love in his heart, he is living the Christian life, regardless of what he believes. Anger is a spiritual dead end, whether it comes from the left or the right. As Swami Rama, the great Himalayan master, once said, "Learn to love all and exclude none. That is the way to the Divine, and to peace."

The Lost Spiritual World invites you to experience books in an entirely new way, to see the page as the stage of a new kind of magic – visual magic. One reviewer wrote, “If ever there was a bleeding edge in book publishing, it is embodied in the Lost Spiritual World. It is a significant cultural artifact that could not have existed at any other time in human history.” Indeed, the Lost Spiritual World was impossible to produce even five years ago. Its unique wavy shape gives you a deeper experience of the subtle vibrations and resonant frequencies of our sages. Its twelve metallic inks open your heart to the cosmic stardust that is literally within you. Its blend of professional photography with hand-painted and computer-generated art gives you a new understanding of what it means to immerse yourself into the quantum field.

The series creator is a quiet and shy young mystic who agreed to publish one edition, but who refuses to do interviews. She identifies herself as "a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian and a skeptic" — all in one. Her name is Ruth Rimm. By day, she serves as a public school teacher in the South Bronx, in the poorest urban school district in the United States. By night, she is “a humble bee in a world of giants, buzzing from tradition to tradition, and transforming bits of pollen into spiritual honey.”

Ruth is also a dedicated practitioner and teacher of yoga. She is currently working on the next volume in the series, The Lost Spiritual World of Krishna. To learn more about Ruth and her vision for the future of "designer writing," click here.

Ruth Rimm