The Seventh Shrine: Meditations on the African Spiritual Journey: From the Middle Passage to the Mountaintop

Orland Bishop weaves together the story of his personal development and initiation with a unique, compelling, and necessary perspective about slavery and the Middle Passage. I would heartily welcome a "Volume 2" in any form. One of the most compelling views about the forced migration of Africans, this book is a must read for students of black history, esoteric history, and evolution of consciousness. Thank you Orland!

This is the kind of thoughtfulness, of wholeness that we miss because we have not been taught to see. Orland is a spiritual guide, a mystic in the tradition of Howard Thurman, Simone Weil, and a line of mystics that have been sent again and again through time to redirect the path of the good toward the aim of the indivisible and indomitable great Spirit that made and guides the universe. This work is healing, reconciling and almost frighteningly true and challenging. Only read it if you are ready to change your life to fulfill your destiny.

I am not even all the way through this book and already I feel an embedded sense of protection/isolation loosen its grip. Orland's journey is an opening to the promise of initiation through *living* our relatedness to others across species, gender, race and class.

Rare and essential wisdom from an Indigenous and Western teacher /healer who tells the stories, as his lineages train him to do, so that we are deeply sustained and transformed by reading this profound book. Orland Bishop is a sacred physician for the soul.

Orland Bishop is an inspiration.

Though provoking and very relevant to the struggles we are facing today.

Game changer

I recommend very highly.....deep thought and food the soul.

It was a Universal Satnav moment to be introduced to ‘The Seventh Shrine: Meditations on the African Journey’ by Orland Bishop at the beginning of the COVID-19 global epidemic (or hoax?) and before the (socially engineered?) ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests.The author was born in Linden, Guyana in 1966, one of the first countries in the Americas to be established as a slave trade colony. Like a genuine prophet, he lives and shares his fulfillment of the spiritual quest for meaning to a human life, the longing to connect to the highest truth: revealed to him through an African ancestral path of initiation - resulting in psychological and spiritual regeneration of the capacity to right relationship to one’s purpose in life.Orland describes how the Africans of the slave trade had the task to stand against the social difficulties of their time. Their task was to communicate to others what they were inwardly aware of – that freedom is a shared reality. Someone must choose to be free to support the other to be free. The message of freedom for all beings is the spiritual destiny for Africans to fulfill in America (and the world).This decision to act out of freedom beyond self-interest or gain, supports the cultivation of a faculty that guides us towards insight to certain spiritual truths: Earth and humanity are one, as humanity is one. There is no such thing as a single human being. We are part of the unity of all things .It is this understanding that is needed now as the freedom of all people in the world is under threat.As Orland Bishop describes: …the door remained open for me and I’m sure for others who asked – not why this has happened – but now that it has happened, what must I do…?What is awakening in the human being in a time of difficulty is the predisposition to make contact with the spiritual world, the invisible guidance within one’s destiny. It is now our turn to stand against the social difficulties of our time. Our task to communicate to others what they are inwardly aware of – that freedom is a shared reality.We are made free to increase our capacity to carry what we do carry - in light of the times we live. We are hosting the future so that it may enter the world through us.What is lived in the moral and mental space of the human creative process is now made manifest for the benefit of the world. It becomes not my will but thy will, a service beyond something beyond the self. Love unites the discontinuities into a space of mutual expression of the same unity. Love is an agreement that re-establishes contact with the source – the source of Life itself.When people seek mentorship, writes Orland Bishop, they are looking for a conversation and relationship to correct a process of being isolated (separated) from the source of unity of a shared reality. Having been lost, abandoned, mistreated, or forgotten, our path leads us home through our inner meaning, giving free will to participate in the communal expressions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.What we find in the world is directly proportional in ourselves.Understanding reveals and illuminates the human consciousness to itself. Understanding is light and as we are lighted, we become a light to others.What we should support is the distribution of the incentive for people to participate in communications that reflect back to them the predisposition of the human being. THIS IS THE MESSAGE FOR 2020!