"Lazy Man's guide to entertainment " by Thaddeus Golas

Reading " metamorphosis " e-zine in my indiatimes email. They referred to this book , this author whose book has rave reviews in amazon.com. About love and ' hippie spirituality'.

" Lazy Man's guide to enlightenment ' by Thaddeus Golas.

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Book Description$10.95 cloth hardcover 1-58685-190-X 5 x 7 in, 112 pp, Rights: W, Self-Help Originally published by the author in 1972, the underground classic Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment teaches how to improve the quality of life, to feel good, and to determine what's real. Golas leads the reader down the path toward enlightenment with simple steps, like memorizing key phrases and incorporating them into daily life and thought. Think of how much better your life might be if you reminded yourself to "love as much as you can from wherever you are" or "love it the way it is." This classic book is full of useful tips on how to live a more conscious life and to be an engaged and aware member of the universal community. "While we have humility and pride enough to act on the knowledge that we exist in an infinite harmony, that we are neither greater nor lesser than any others, we can enjoy exquisite spiritual wealth and pleasures. When you love yourself, you are in truth expanding in love into many other things. And the more loving you are, the more loving the beings within and around you. On all levels we are mutually dependent vibrations. Play a happy tune and happy dancers will join your trip." - From The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment After serving in World War II, author Thaddeus Golas graduated from Columbia College in New York. He later moved to San Francisco, where he became involved in the activism and spiritual quests of the 1960s. He was an editor of Redbook magazine and a book representative for publisher Harper and Row. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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FIRST REVIEW
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The lazy person's Dhammapada, December 31, 2002
By
John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Silver Lake, OH) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment (Hardcover) 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).