One of the most accessible introductions to Tibetan Buddhism ever published.

Jan Willis provides a wealth of information about six mahamudra masters from the Geluk school of Tibetan Buddhism and how they studied, practiced, meditated, and became enlightened beings in their lifetimes.

Jan Willis is not Baptist or Buddhist. She is simply both. Dreaming Me is the story of her life, as a child growing up in the Jim Crow South, dealing with racism in an Ivy League college, and becoming involved with the Black Panther Party. But it wasn't until meeting Lama Yeshe, a Tibetan Buddhist monk living in the mountains of Nepal, that she realized who the real Jan Willis was, and how to make the most of the life she was living.

Free Spirit speaks as freedom, which is our Consciousness, the sweet essence of our lives. The freedom spoken here is an inner knowing. We cannot realize this liberation by catering to our bodies, emotions or minds. No, this freedom is spiritual; an altitude of perception that only arises when we are lighter than our surroundings. We can realize this lightness of being if we are willing to abide as Awareness and let go of the ego, the one who suffers mind. For this enlightenment to happen, a quiet mind is all we need. Why do anything for this, when only our stillness will suffice. Be silent, be still, be free. Within this book you will find answered and unanswered questions, humor, poetic prose, experimentation with consciousness and passages that illuminate the sense that we are more than our thoughts, emotions, senses, body and energy. Every word is sourced by the power of silent Truth. Without contradicting this source, the writing inspires our active participation in the realization of Spirit, as only our direct experience is of value to this awakening. For those of us who desire to be free, the author takes us by the hand and walks with us through the entire landscape of the egoic mind, until we reach its outer boundary. Here, we are invited to take a leap of Self-faith into simply being who we are right now... Free Spirit,

Surveys "the rise of Western (mostly American) teachers who fill the role of guru or master ... [and] explains who the masters are, who influenced them, what they teach, what their personalities and personal lives are like, and the strange adventures that many of them have experienced."--Back cover.

Why did the Founding Fathers fail to include blacks and Indians in their cherished proposition that "all men are created equal"? The usual answer is racism, but the reality is more complex and unsettling. In Bind Us Apart, historian Nicholas Guyatt argues that, from the Revolution through the Civil War, most white liberals believed in the unity of all human beings. But their philosophy faltered when it came to the practical work of forging a color-blind society. Unable to convince others-and themselves-that racial mixing was viable, white reformers began instead to claim that people of color could only thrive in separate republics: in Native states in the American West or in the West African colony of Liberia. Herein lie the origins of "separate but equal." Decades before Reconstruction, America's liberal elite was unable to imagine how people of color could become citizens of the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, Native Americans were pushed farther and farther westward, while four million slaves freed after the Civil War found themselves among a white population that had spent decades imagining that they would live somewhere else. Essential reading for anyone disturbed by America's ongoing failure to achieve true racial integration, Bind Us Apart shows conclusively that "separate but equal" represented far more than a southern backlash against emancipation-it was a founding principle of our nation.