I received a complementary copy of this book for review purposes. The opinions are completely my own based on my experience.
Do you need a spiritual tuneup? If so I highly recommend Patrick Paul Garlinger’s When Thought Turns to Light. The author gives helpful insights on a number of familiar topics for spiritual seekers, such as the value of meditation, forgiveness, gratitude, prayer, and more.
If you have read my past reviews you know I like books that affirm the unconditional love we receive from God/Spirit/The Universe or whatever your preferred label is for the Divine. When Thought Turns to Light emphasizes unconditional love on every page. “The Light—the energy of unconditional love—flows through all of us,” writes Garlinger. “We are always connected to the Light, and we are all capable of feeling and expressing unconditional love.” As I let those words sink in I wanted to read more.
Why don’t we always feel this unconditional love if love is our very nature? “We’re constantly thinking about the past, projecting onto the future, and completely missing the present based on things that happened to us that we misunderstood in the first place,” says Garlinger. These words reminded me of the teaching in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. Yet I found Garlinger’s approach to “living in the now” easier to understand than Tolle’s work.
Love is always working for our highest good according to the author. “The ways in which the Light heals are not always clear to us, nor do they unfold in the way we might expect,” the author feels. I liked how each chapter had questions to ponder at the end, such as “Can you think of examples where you thought something was terrible, and later quite fortunate? What changed?” Thus When Thought Turns to Light is a good book for group study, as questions like this are sure to lead people to share experiences from their own lives.
I also liked how the book took a realistic view of positive thinking. I value positive thinking, but there are limits to being positive all the time. “The problem is when (positive thinking) perpetuates a paradigm of materialism over spirituality, or worse still, creates a sense that the Divine is nothing more than a cosmic Amazon.com, ready to ship us what we want as soon as we ask for it with enough positivity,” Garlinger writes. The phrase “cosmic Amazon.com” made me laugh at first, before I realized some of the prosperity philosophy around these days teaches exactly that.
“When you have little practice at responding with love but a lot of practice at responding with fear, it is easy to fall prey to fear. For most of us, it will be the practice of a lifetime,” says Garlinger. When Thought Turns to Light encouraged me to look at the areas in my life where I respond with fear, and motivated me to continue to work on seeing all circumstances and people through the eyes of love.
