The Marriage of Spirit — Enlightened Living in Today's World
By Leslie Temple-Thurston with Brad Laughlin

In 1971 a young artist, the wife of a South African physician, engaged in an afterdinner discussion with her husband and their guests on the merits of art versus science. In a flash of insight, she recognized that there was no intrinsic difference between the two, that they sprang from the same source, expressed the same essence. She also saw that the diverse opinions arose from several polarized struggles: male-female, intuition-logic, right-wrong, set in a country torn apart by racial divisions.

The next morning, while painting in her studio, Leslie Temple-Thurston had “the clear realization that my knowings of the previous evening were the truth….I was in what I now know to be a state of unity consciousness, a state for which I had no reference point at the time.” As she wrote down her impressions, “the innate unity which underlies all of the dualities that we know in this world became clearer and clearer.” Three weeks later, while still struggling with theses concepts, she discovered that she was pregnant with her first child and focused on more immediate matters.

However, on the strength of that experience, Temple-Thurston says, “I became available to inner change, and the spiritual seeker in me was born.” When the family moved to Los Angeles, she began to focus on her inner spiritual journey.

Reading the pioneers of the new spiritual psychology from Carl Jung to Fritz Perls and Erich Fromm, while also working with two spiritual teachers, Leslie Temple-Thurston was able to place her experience of unity consciousness into the context of ancient yogic and modern spiritual traditions.

Fittingly it was in Los Angeles, one of the modern world’s most complex and polarized cities, that she entered, in the tradition of the Indian and Tibetan yogis, her reclusive “cave experience” in a quest to reclaim her experience of unity consciousness as a permanent state of being. After two years she emerged, having experienced the complete dissolution of her old identity and a profound spiritual awakening. Her understanding from 1971 had become a way of life for her now: “If we integrate the dualistic and polarized schisms in our personality, we can know directly and palpably the unity which we truly are, beyond the limited personality.”

In 1988 Leslie Temple-Thurston gave her first seminar, which encompassed the set of principles and “processing” techniques she had used in the years prior to and during her cave experience. Their roots are based in the ancient teachings of the reconciliation and unification of opposites. This can be seen in the Chinese Taoist’s yin-yang symbol, Tantra yoga’s union of Shiva and Shakti, Buddhism’s tenet of the middle way, and even in The Gospel According to Saint Thomas in which Jesus says, “When you make the two one, when you make the inner as the outer…when you make the male and the female into a single one…then shall you enter [the Kingdom].”

However, the techniques of The Marriage of Spirit, filtered through modern psychological thought and the author’s own life experiences, emerge in an original, fast and simple form designed especially for the contemporary spiritual seeker. Their aim is to recreate balance and harmony in the midst of ordinary, everyday living. As the author says, “We have arrived at a new and different time; we are here to enlighten the physical plane, the body, and the personality while living and working in the world.”

Leslie Temple-Thurston is a modern-day mystic whose book, The Marriage of Spirit, presents techniques that help us accelerate the path of spiritual awakening and live a truer expression of our own inherent divine nature. In a world torn apart by polarization, it offers hope for a third way, the way of unity amidst diversity.

THE MARRIAGE OF SPIRIT: Enlightened Living in Today’s World

By Leslie Temple-Thurston with Brad Laughlin
CoreLight Publishing
hardcover, 7 5/8” by 9 ½”, 288 pages, $22.88
ISBN 0-9660182-0-6
Publication date: September 1, 2000
Distributor: CoreLight Publishing