Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment by Thaddeus Golas
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Book Reviews of Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment
Book Review: The lazy person's Dhammapada
Summary: 5 Stars
I've never been interested in having a guru, and Thaddeus Golas was never interested in being one. He wasn't looking for converts, followers, or even agreement, and I've always felt free to disagree with the way he makes this or that point. So this book has long been perfectly suited to me and my somewhat iconoclastic/refractory temperament.This little book is one of a very small handful that I regard as the absolute cream of "hippie spirituality". Stephen Gaskin's _This Season's People_ is that literature's Diamond Sutra and Paul Williams's _Das Energi_ is its Tao Te Ching. Golas's slim volume comes very close to Gaskin's in its adamantine wisdom and so ranks as a close second in diamond-sutrahood, but I think of it as something like the Dhammapada.
Its message is so easy to put across that, technically, you already know everything it says. The heart of the matter is: relax; just love as much as you can from wherever you are. When you come right down to it, you're already "enlightened" and you don't have anything to prove.
But somehow, the _way_ Golas puts this message (and the bit about "love as much as you can" is a direct quotation) has some major mojo in it, enough to knock your mind loose from your brain.
Golas knew it, too. He died in 1997, but a couple of years before that, he wrote a nice long introduction to this book so that it could be republished in hardcover. It was, and this is that edition. There are also some photos of Golas, ranging from childhood to middle age. (That's good for potential buyers to know, because the full text of the original book is available online and there wouldn't be much point in getting this one if it didn't contain anything new.)
In the introduction, Golas provides some interesting autobiography and also expresses more than a little wonderment at the effect this little book has had. He even notes that there are some things in it that he's even come to believe are incorrect, and yet he won't change a word of it because it seems to have the power to _do_ something to its readers, something compared to which his "corrected" views seem flat and tame. This is quite true. So beware; in its way this text is every bit as potent as all of Anthony de Mello's books.
A longtime "underground" spiritual classic, this little book belongs on your shelf next to Douglas Harding's _On Having No Head_ (which takes a very different but every bit as "simple" approach to the non-problem of enlightenment).
Book Review: This book is a lesson on unconditional love
Summary: 5 Stars
The recent reprint of this book has an addition of a short biography with photographs of the author. Included is a letter for readers that he wrote in his last years about how the book came to be and a few added thoughts that he came to in latter years. What I have learned from this book is that no resistence is the way to love people with charity, with full unconditional love. If you can look at someone for what they are, with all of their strengths and weaknesses and love them regardless of what is right or wrong, in fact, love them for what is wrong as well as right, then you have discovered what many call the Christ love and are no longer imprisoned by what you might deny.
From reading this book it has become very clear to me that we become what we hate. The very thing that we fight against is what we become. The same with our government fighting against terrorism, it has become a federal terrorist. The terrorist fighting against unjust governments have become unjust. Self appointed Bodhisattiva's fighting against what they perceive as protecting the innocent have become the guilty.
It always works that way.... no resistence is the only answer, love that which you would hate and you will not become that. It appears that the universe is built to teach us compassion. Hate something enough and you are drawn to it like iron to a magnet, offering your soul to the very thing which you sought to deny and in the end becoming a perfect image of that which you tried to destroy.
The big joke is that because none of us see everything the same way many of the pretty or ugly colors that you might see upon others in the world uniquely exist in your own mind alone because you have colored them that way. When you see injustice, cruelty, ignorance and stupidity most of what you see does not exist exactly the way you see it, sometimes far from the truth. When you fight the image upon the mirror of your mind it's the most dangerous enemy you can possibly have because the internal oscillations of hate and dislike reflecting off of the surfaces of your own judgments take on a life as your own personal phantoms capable of haunting you to the ends of your days, never vanishing until accepted and loved for what they are, for what you have created.
Fighting against another is like offering your soul to the devil. You will be consumed by and become the very thing you sought to perish. In the end trading one for the other, you stand in its place.
Book Review: its as if he were speaking to me personally from across time
Summary: 5 Stars
Over twenty years ago a woman i worked with handed me this book and said here i think this will speak to you. strangely, wonderfully, Barbara became a best friend. she is someone i feel like i've known forever. and this gift of a book she gave me has served me unlike any other book ever, because it excludes no one, anywhere, ever. it is all inclusive in love. about 15 years ago i was feeling really awful and sat in my bathtub and read this book aloud into a tape recorder so that i could listen to it in my car (which i seemed to always be in). later i found it on tape read by the author which i still have and cherish listening to. i reread this book yearly it seems, because it makes me smile, and i pass it on to those i feel will get some relief from it. i've given so many copies away over the years. i searched bookstores used and new for copies. i finally had only one left. i'm so happy to have found this book in print again and am ordering many copies to give to people i love. thank you thaddeus. you speak to me of love and expansion and inclusion forever. you remind me to expand and love when i'm contracted and dense. i love you.Book Review: A small book with a big message
Summary: 5 Stars
As the author of The Lazy Person's Guide to Success: How to Get What You Want without Killing Yourself for It, I can say that The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment was an inspiration to me for many years. I have the original copy I purchased long ago and even purchased an extra copy just in case I lost the first copy. Many friends have asked to purchase my extra copy, but I have turned them down because the original copy is falling apart from the many times I have read the book. This small book continues to be a great read for inspiration and the quest for enlightenment - if it ever can be attained. Although The Lazy Person's Guide to Success is different in approach and content, I must admit that The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment gave me the idea for writing my book. In short, the book The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment has been an inspirtation in many ways. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes reading small books that are big in content.The essential message of the book is that you don't have to do anything to experience enlightenment aside from realizing that deep-down you are already enlightened.
Book Review: This is based on the author's use of LSD
Summary: 5 Stars
I put that title in because one reviewer felt ripped off after buying the book only later to discover that the book is at least in part, written as a guide to get you out of a bad lsd trip. The author clearly states in the book that psychedelics are ONE way to follow a path towards enlightenment.
Of course many Buddhists and religious types would disagree. But as Golas says "Enlightenment doesn't care how you get there" or something to that effect.
I bought this book, indeed, while I was experimenting with lds in the 70's and it did indeed set me on the path towards spiritual enlightenment. I have since read many books on enlightenment and of all of them, this is the simplest and most basic, while also being "right".
(I also am a big fan of Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now".)
This is a classic and it is a shame it's out of print.
Get a used copy. Even if you have to pay $20-30, it's worth it, especially if you plan to blaze a trail down the well-traveled but full-of-surprises and pitfalls path of psychedelic exploration.