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Title: Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing by Jed McKenna ISBN: 0-9714352-3-5 Publisher: Wisefool Press Pub. Date: December, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.41 (27 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Enlightenment 101
Comment: I'll admit, Jed McKenna's book is an unexpected source of lessons about enlightenment, coming as it does from someone who sounds pretty ordinary and claims to live in a farmhouse in rural Iowa. We don't learn anything about Jed's actual background or how he pays the bills at the farmhouse, but we get lots of dialog between Jed and would-be disciples who want to "wake up" and be enlightened like Jed, who gather at his house hoping to get on a track to enlightenment. Jed has no spiritual goodies to dispense, no feel-good peak experiences to lead us to, he just hammers home that enlightenment is a state of being which, once achieved, does not go away. Enlightened persons cannot go back. They exist in a condition of "nonduality" that means they are no longer stuck in a role like the rest of us. They have discarded the character they used to be.
I found his use of the expression "awake" (enlightened persons are "awake" and the rest of us are "asleep") interesting since it is the same expression used by Gurdjieff and expounded in the works based on his teachings by P.D. Ouspensky. I read Ouspensky's book In Search of the Miraculous and was quickly lost in a maze of obscure concepts. But I was intrigued by the idea that most of us go through life "asleep" and that there are ways to "wake up." I once found a copy of Ouspenky's The Fourth Way at a used book sale and brought it home thinking I'd persevere through it and get some illumination on how to wake up. A short time with the book revealed it to be even more obscure than my first attempt at understanding Gurdjieff. So the book went into the bin to be resold on Amazon. Someone else bought it and is probably now scratching their head at the difficult ideas within.
But you won't find any difficult ideas in Jed's book. At least not in the same way as with Gurdjieff. Jed lays it all out in a series of conversations, many involving analogies that you can follow quite easily. The hard part is actually becoming enlightened and Jed is not encouraging about the prospects for success. Getting there is painful, as we see as one of Jed's seekers gets to the First Step at the end of the book. By showing us a cast of characters trying to learn from him, Jed leads us gently through what enlightenment is not and guides those who want to go there to what it is. After reading this book, I'm not sure I want to go there, even though I'd like to "wake up." Jed's explanations are simple, but what he expects you to do to achieve enlightenment is not.
Rating: 4
Summary: Half-baked enlightenment
Comment: First, I loved reading Spiritual Enlightenment. In fact, I've read it twice as I don't have much on my summer reading list. And it is a wonderful teaching book, as far as it goes, bringing the reader to the realization of the emptiness and meaningless of all ideas, concepts and beliefs about life, self, religion, metaphysics, etc. Mountains are no longer mountains, rivers no longer rivers. Jed says,"The black cloud is infinitely big and infinitely black...the black cloud is reality so deal with it." Yes, so it seems. And the black cloud is only half way home. Jed also says, "I don't do heart." I agree, we don't do heart. For those of us who are lucky, heart happens through us. This is the final actualization of jnana, of zen. The universe, reality, truth is using some human beings to manifest real consciousness and love and caring on this plane of existence. It's just happening and it's a fact, not a belief, concept or theory or even a stand one takes. When some of us body/mind mechanisms become empty flutes, love flows through. So to Jed, who I feel is my spiritual brother, I say, further: when the false self dies, something else becomes fully alive within us and as us. Some teachers say the universe is not human hearted. It is. It is usuing us to be so. And I know it's all an illusion. And yet it's not. Go figure. Hotei has returned to the village.
Rating: 5
Summary: For Real
Comment: I have read Spiritual Enlightenment The Damndest Thing.
The reading and the book I give five stars at least.
Jed is quite extraordinary. His grasp and breadth outstanding.
However I have a query and a suspicion.
Does he really exist as a person outside the book?
Is this a work of fiction?
Does such a man exist in Iowa?
Can one contact him?
If so, how?
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Title: Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment by Jed McKenna ISBN: 0971435251 Publisher: Wisefool Press Pub. Date: February, 2004 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: Invitation to Awaken: Embracing Our Natural State of Presence by Tony Parsons ISBN: 187801921X Publisher: InnerDirections Publishing Pub. Date: January, 2004 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Nobody Home: From Belief to Clarity by Jan Kersschot, Tony Parsons ISBN: 1842930621 Publisher: Watkins Publishing Ltd Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: As It Is: The Open Secret to Living an Awakened Life by Tony Parsons ISBN: 1878019104 Publisher: Inner Directions Pub. Date: September, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Ask the Awakened: the Negative Way by Wei Wu Wei ISBN: 0971078645 Publisher: Sentient Publications Pub. Date: 01 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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