Product Description

Author, teacher and spiritual master Jed McKenna tells it like it's never been told before. A true American original, Jed succeeds where countless others have failed by reducing this highest of attainments—spiritual enlightenment — to the simplest of terms.

Effectively demystifying the mystical, Jed astonishes the reader not by adding to the world's collected spiritual wisdom, but by taking the spirituality out of spiritual enlightenment. Never before has this elusive topic been treated in so engaging and accessible a manner.

A masterpiece of illuminative writing, Spiritual Enlightenment is mandatory reading for anyone following a spiritual path. Part exposé and part how-to manual, this is the first book to explain why failure seems to be the rule in the search for enlightenment — and how the rule can be broken.

This is not just another New Age guru trying to put a fresh spin on tired New Age platitudes. Jed McKenna takes us to a whole new level where he challenges us to simply open our eyes — to see for ourselves. Sound simple? Buckle up, you're in for quite a ride. Every page in this paradigm-busting book brings fresh challenges and rewards.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #139939 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 296 pages

Review
"Absolutely marvelous, splendid, perfect book!" -- Acharyaji Anatole, Abhidhyan Yoga Institute

"I loved it. Insightful, bullying, delightful, and just fun. A magic book without the sleight of hand." -- John Kremer, author,

"McKenna is an American original, and his delightful Spiritual Enlightenment is just what's needed to wake us up from slumber." -- Lama Surya Das, author, “Awakening the Buddha Within”

"McKenna's description of enlightenment is so good, 99.9% of his readers might not understand how truly profound it really is." -- Satyam Nadeen, author, “From Onions to Pearls

"Starkly provocative and uniquely insightful. This book cuts like a knife through many detours along the spiritual journey." -- Alan Cohen, author, “I Had It All the Time”

Customer Reviews

"A billy-clubbing by a Jed-I warrior" (the cover says so)
Gaaaaaaaaaah. Not only the back cover but the _first ten pages_ of this book are filled with glowing reviews by the representatives of today's Illuminatus Industry, praising Jed McKenna to the skies, carrying on about how marvellously enlightened he is, and crowing about how this book is Just What The World Needs Today. Man, by the time you get done reading those, you'll be ready to toss (a) the book in the trash and (b) your cookies.

Well, don't. In spite of all of the sell-it-to-the-seekers tub-thumping, it's actually a pretty good book. (And you have to wonder why so many of these folks have so heartily endorsed a book that heaps so much well-deserved scorn on the spiritual-fashion industry. Maybe they don't think he meant _them_.)

On the plus side, there's the total absence of crap on the subject of enlightenment itself. This McKenna distinguishes carefully from both religiosity and mystical experience. Neither of these, he says, has squat to do with enlightenment, which is nothing more or less than abiding nondual awareness (a.k.a. "no-self"). His no-nonsense advice on how to get there comes down to this: just keep asking yourself what's true until you know. But it's not for everybody, getting to it is pretty painful, and the cottage industry that has grown up around it is actually selling something else.

Well, that's nice, and his lack of bull-puckey on the subject is refreshing. Heck, enlightenment aside, he's fun to read just to enjoy a little healthy irreverence toward vegetarianism, the practice of mindfulness, and umpteen other brands of Fashion Spirituality.

McKenna also seems to be a pretty decent and interesting guy in his meatspace persona. Much of the narrative really just conveys the flavor of his own life and character, so it's a good thing he turns out to be reasonably pleasant company -- astringent, curmudgeonly, genially cynical, and often funny as hell.

On the minus side, there's the presence of a certain amount of crap on lots of _other_ subjects. For my taste, the hard-boiled lookie-what-an-illusion-busting-realist-I-am tone gets old after about the first ten or twenty pages. The Zen masters of legend are usually content to give somebody a single sharp blow with a stick; this guy goes at you with a meat axe, over and over and over and over. Readers of _Radical Honesty_ (whose author Brad Blanton provides one of the cover endorsements) may enjoy this sort of thing; I don't, and I don't find it either especially radical or especially honest.

And -- much more seriously -- there's _way_ too much chatter about how unreal everybody else looks to somebody in that there state of abiding nondual awareness. McKenna is constantly pointing out that from his view-from-nowhere vantage point, everybody in the world is just a fictional character in a sort of cosmic soap opera. This would be annoying enough even if it were true just as it stands, and it isn't. Sure, there's something to it, and Ramana Maharshi got some good mileage out of the truth underlying this overstatement. But to hear McKenna tell it in his Holden-Caulfield-among-the-illuminati patter, somebody with nondual awareness would be mighty hard to tell from a straight-up sociopath.

Don't let that stop you from reading it; just watch for the stuff that sounds out of balance. Besides, that dramatic-rhetorical stuff (which is all it is) may be just what readers of some temperaments need. Just bear in mind that real nondualism doesn't dismiss actual people as unreal or fictional; this is as much an untruth as the contrary statement that we're simply "real" just as we seem to ourselves. In Hindu terms, folks, maya is Brahma too.

By the way, I'm not altogether sure whether the narrative portions of the book are strictly nonfiction or even whether "Jed McKenna" is a real person (in the usual sense of the words); it's entirely possible that the whole thing is as fictional as its author says all the rest of us are anyway. It doesn't much matter, though.

Brilliant!
It reads much like a novel which makes it a gripping read. Jed McKenna has boldly gone where few spiritual teachers have dared to go before. He clears out the erroneous beliefs surrounding enlightenment and clarifies what it really is. He is funny at times and portrays himself as an average man who happened to become enlightened. He's honest about the subject and there is no airs and graces. This book combined with another witty and powerful book by Keith Loy Finding Reality 'Awakening to Spiritual Freedom' will provide all of the clarity you will ever need on this subject.

Straight talk regarding Awakening unfolded in fiction: Delightful
"My interest in self inquiry was sudden and unexpected: during an extreme "dark night of the soul" experience, I had a massive, catastrophic collapse which left me spent and speechless.

This collapse was sudden, left me completely empty, with not even one ounce of resistance left, with no more answers of any sort, in a sort of cathartic and limp state.

While I sat in this darkened, private library in the middle of the night, mentally and spiritually exhausted, in final dispair, with absolutely no clue on what to do with my next breath, much less the rest of my life, a most peculiar phenomena occured: sitting in absolute silence, I noticed.... thoughts.... arising to me.

Mind you: these were no longer 'my thoughts".

For some peculiar reason, in this stillness, it was spectacularly clear to me, that these thoughts, which were arising in the stillness of 'me', were not me at all, or, more specifically, that what I was had to be something quite separate from these thoughts.

This was a profoundly unsettling awareness; in fact, it completely shattered my world. The only thing I was certain about was that I was uncertain about everything.

Thus began this journey"

Written under an assumed pen name, this book would be easy to ignore if it was not so damned entertaining while being so frightfully honest.

'Jed McKenna' is one of the few remaining Westerners I would enjoy meeting."