Spirituality governs what is right and wrong in a man’s life. The spirituality of man defines the way a man lives his or her life.
Man, the social animal, is also a religious or spiritual being. Religion is a primary concern of man as it is the earliest and one of the most intense interests of human beings. Religion is man’s universal, permanent, pervasive, and perennial interest. Man not only has biological, economic, and social needs but also what is known as a spiritual need. Human beings have a religious quest that makes them restless even beyond the satisfaction of their basic physical needs. Hence the Biblical saying, Man cannot live by bread alone. It is also said that man from the earliest times has been incurably religious.
The book offers a deeper meaning of spirituality.
The ABBA Tradition is the spiritual and mystical tradition that lies deep within and behind western religions and modern cultures. This book helps Christians discover the profound Jewish tradition that Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught, and also highlights one of the most excellent Jews of all time: Joshua be Miriam of Nazareth, who first brought the Gentile nations to the holy one of Israel.
The author, Michael Hattwick, has written around the mystical and spiritual practices within western religions and cultures; the book aims to guide its readers to actualize who they’re meant to be. Hattwick came up with his book by combining the Hebrew names: Aziluth, Beriah, Barakah, and Assiah – the four worlds which stand for the physical, psychological, transpersonal, and transcendent realities of life. According to his book and the Abba Vision he conjured with it, life is best experienced by seeing and living through these realities, each contributing meaning to people’s lives in different perspectives- physical reality, psychological reality, transpersonal reality, and transcendent reality.
Michael Hattwick, who is behind this intricate ideology, is someone other than someone you’d be expecting to write about such a deep discussion. Despite being a physician and involved in organizations built around science, Michael Hattwick has been studying and teaching spiritual tradition for years. With his years of spiritual experience, he published a book about tackling life through the lens of religion. His journey to materializing this book was challenging. He sacrificed a lot of his time and poured a lot of effort into teaching himself Greek and Hebrew to read the New and Old Testaments to gain knowledge in support of his book.
Author’s Bio
Michael Hattwick is a practicing primary care physician in the Washington, DC, area. He was born in Illinois, raised in Houston, Texas, and educated at Harvard, Georgetown, and the University of London. He has been a student and teacher of the Western Spiritual Tradition for many years. A member of the David Reisman freshman Seminars, majored in Chemistry and Physics and studied western civilization with Paul Tillich for two years. In 1962, he was a member of a seminar taught by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (aka later Ram Dass), and Ralph Metzner. He went with them to their summer school in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and then traveled to Europe, where he met his wife. In 1963, he returned to Harvard and graduated Cum Laude. He earned an MD from Baylor College of Medicine and continued his medical training at Georgetown University in DC General Hospital.
From 1970 to 1977, he was in the Public Health Service Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program at the Centers for Disease Control. At the CDC, he was responsible for Viral Diseases, where he treated and published the first reported case of recovery from Rabies and ran the National Influenza Immunization Program (Swine Flu) in 1977. Since 1978, Dr. Hattwick has been a practicing primary care physician and health care consultant in the Washington area.
Following his Harvard experiences, Dr. Hattwick began exploring Christianity’s philosophical (Tillich) and mystical (Leary) traditions. In 1995, Dr. Hattwick presented a paper titled “The ABBA Tradition” at the First International Kabbalah Society meeting in Toledo, Spain. That paper grew into the book “The ABBA Tradition,” published in 2010.
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