Mystic Approaches

De: John Butler

Narrado por: John Butler

How can I best serve the world I love? The answer led him deeply into prayer.

Complementing his first book, Wonders of Spiritual Unfoldment, John goes back to the roots of his mystical experience in farming where, seeking to do his best but humbled by experience, he came to realise that the only impediment to universal good is self-willed ego “me”. This, as we know, is not easy to control.

Keeping his farmer’s feet firmly on the ground and writing entirely from simple, first-hand experience, he tells of many ways in which he sought and found, beyond his personal horizons, the ever widening freedom and providence of Spirit.

©2012 John George Butler (P)2024 John George Butler

Incredible read

I couldn't recommend this book enough. The author and narrator has filled this book with wisdom and peaceful words. Perfect for resting and thinking of the most important things in life. This book is a gift and I wish all could share and learn from it.

A Real Gem

If you seen his videos, then you know the depths of John’s knowledge and wisdom. This book gives you the background and the history of the man he became. It’s a wonderful insight told to you by the person you want to hear it from. Thank you, John, for taking time to share this gem from the treasure of your life.

What is so great about civilization?

Im so honoured to get a copy of this book and in audio format, hearing you John retelling your own story to us with so much love.
You took my hand and reintroduce me back on a road home. Your love for nature brought back my love for nature, which in return brought me back to God. God was always here He never left🥹. John you made me aware how i have complicated everything myself, the ego me. I started to practice meditation 20min a day for now. John i can hardly be present for 1min🤣🤣 As you said, practice and practice some more.
You have awaken a longing to a normal and less complicated life. My grandparents were farm workers and we use to visit them as kids. All i long for now, is a life away from civilization and a dear wish of mine to save my little children away from this abnormal life i grew up in.

I can listen to the audio while going about my day. There is so much life and richness in just a 1min audio clip of a chapter, you have to pause and reflect. I can sometimes listen to only 1 Chapter for a few days. Your words are like precious treasures John. You have spoiled me. I can no longer read another book or listen to another youtube channel 🤣. The scriptures and your books are all i need❤️❤️❤️
God Bless you. Hugs and kisses, Brenda❤️❤️❤️

Spirituality at its purest

I will never find words to express my gratitude towards John. After decades of my spiritual search, I was descending towards atheism, since the decadence of official religions and immature "spiritual teachers" had left me without any reliable spiritual reference point. The "God" that they preached was not persuasive to me. I had almost lost my hope in the existence of a God that would give meaning to life.
In John's videos and books (including this one) I found a spiritually pure man who spoke from experience and was free from ideological boundaries. A truly free, humble and loving soul that points us to the truly free, humble and loving God that he experiences though his prayer.

To listen is to be healed….

After a long week of being assailed by the ways of the world, I realized I needed something—some music, a book, some silence to clear the flailing head space. I was, in many respects, a drowning man.

A lifelong of reading entirely from actual bound books usually did the trick, but recently I had taken a pleasant dive into the world of Audiobooks, namely with John Butler’s reading of his own book Mystic Approaches. I had purchased the book nearly two months ago and enjoyed his very fine introduction, but had set it aside, perhaps even then refreshed to take on the dragons that then awaited me on the other side of the book.

Today, the dragon twitched a bit and both of us came to an understanding. In Mystic Approaches we might find a respite from the fatigue of battle from the wearying struggle along with the maddening onslaught of the daily news.

So I fastened the earbuds into their nest and “turned on the book.”

For the next several hours, this listener was transported within a true-life story of one man’s journey of the soul . . . in an awakening to love. John’s recollections of his early life in Derbyshire, living on the farm and discovering the people and creatures that inhabited the countryside allow the reader to drink in his dawning discoveries alongside of him.

The events in the book can at times be as poignant and dear as gazing into the eyes of the farm creatures, making a kinship with them as he tends to their needs. They can just as well be heartrending when those same animals are made to suffer or must undergo that sad trek to market.

For whatever reason, the reading of the book by John began to work a kind of enchanting magic in me. By the end of whichever chapter I happened to be in when I finally set it aside, I had experienced what I can only describe as an opening. This cannot be only the result of word-magic, although John’s truly Wordsworthian craft as a writer certainly enters into play. Safe to say that those Romantic poets would have greatly enjoyed sipping from the same spring that is more than trickling through the author’s genial heart and equally genial voice that allow him to impart the transmission of the simplest moments into angelic epiphanies.

The sense of nostalgia is warm without the narrative becoming overly sentimental: some of the experiences John describes can be downright wince-worthy in their suddenness and rawness. All delivered in the name of truth. I think John is helping us to remember that sometimes the soul must bear some necessary wounds in order to see its way homeward. For example, his reflection upon the inadvertent blinding of a lamb, a moment of such searing personal torment that the reader feels John’s sense of shame, pity for the creature, and the realization that these are among life’s most difficult yet everlasting of lessons. They open us up and lead us up that spiral staircase that brings us to the threshold of the unfathomable. Each step along the way as we listen, we are drawn closer to that part of us that can gradually, day by day, be made lambful by patient insight and the embrace of Presence.

Readers will also certainly come to appreciate the ways John describes the agrarian life in Derbyshire that were really not so long ago or far away. He was among the first of the organic farmers before the 60s counterculture movement urged us to get back to nature. For John, from the time he was born, this became his discovered way of life. And if we listen more deeply into his message, we will see any striving that we may have—to recover what is lost—is really just right outside our door . . . in the renewal of our connection to the land, the land that is right there where it’s always been: rising up beneath us, simple and pure, to kiss our very own feet.

A loving approach indeed.