Matt Landing recounts the ups and downs as a Transcendental Meditation teacher. After a 1990 kundalini crisis, he thought he was enlightened, but he later painfully became aware that it was a grandiose delusion. Matt reflects on kundalini, mania, epileptic religiosity, psychedelic experience, and the experiences of people who claim enlightenment. Matt provides an entertaining account of his life with a look behind the scenes of the TM organization, advanced training courses, and the TM-Sidhis course. The book also contains a thought-provoking analysis of kundalini, enlightenment, celibacy, gurus, kriyas, speaking in tongues, Pure Awareness, super radiance, and reincarnation. Matt explains why the similarities between grandiose delusions, psychotic mania, and kundalini crises are more than a coincidence. He provides recommendations for those who are in the midst of a kundalini crisis. Matt explains how spiritual aspirants become ungrounded and offers suggestions on how to become grounded. He provides evidence against the existence of enlightenment. He looks at some of the unflattering characteristics of gurus and labels them as "guru maniacs". Beginning in 1972 while reading books in college, Matt acquired a desire to reach enlightenment. He then learned TM, went on numerous TM residence courses, practiced the TM-Sidhis program, ate a predominately raw food diet, fasted, detoxed his body, and used self muscle testing. His spiritual practice took 3 hours per day and included asanas, pranayama, and meditation. Matt delivers a powerful punch against enlightenment, gurus, spiritual movements, and religions. Matt strikes at the concepts of karma, kundalini, shaktipat, faith, support of nature, devotion to a guru, Pure Awareness, and right action. Version 2.00 of My Enlightenment Delusion is a 60,000-word book that was completed in December 2017 and contains the original material in Version 1.00 plus 7 additional chapters. Chapter 13 contains a comparison of epileptic religiosity with kundalini crises and mania. Chapter 21 juxtaposes spiritual experiences, psychedelic experiences, mania, near death experiences, and G-force induced loss of consciousness. Chapter 22 discusses Robert Forman's book Enlightenment Ain't All It's Cracked Up To Be and the unrealistic, rosy picture that enlightenment brings an end to all suffering. Chapter 23 is devoted to looking at the disquieting aspects in the lives of Suzanne Segal, Ramana Maharshi, and Gopi Krishna who are all departed but continue to inspire many spiritual seekers. Chapter 24 thoroughly describes the enlightenment experiences of 22 individuals and then offers a critique of their experience.

A MASTERPIECE of illuminative writing, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing 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. :: Book One of Jed McKenna's Enlightenment Trilogy. Contains Bonus Material.

From one of America’s most brilliant writers, a New York Times bestselling journey through psychology, philosophy, and lots of meditation to show how Buddhism holds the key to moral clarity and enduring happiness. At the heart of Buddhism is a simple claim: The reason we suffer—and the reason we make other people suffer—is that we don’t see the world clearly. At the heart of Buddhist meditative practice is a radical promise: We can learn to see the world, including ourselves, more clearly and so gain a deep and morally valid happiness. In this “sublime” (The New Yorker), pathbreaking book, Robert Wright shows how taking this promise seriously can change your life—how it can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and how it can deepen your appreciation of beauty and of other people. He also shows why this transformation works, drawing on the latest in neuroscience and psychology, and armed with an acute understanding of human evolution. This book is the culmination of a personal journey that began with Wright’s landmark book on evolutionary psychology, The Moral Animal, and deepened as he immersed himself in meditative practice and conversed with some of the world’s most skilled meditators. The result is a story that is “provocative, informative and...deeply rewarding” (The New York Times Book Review), and as entertaining as it is illuminating. Written with the wit, clarity, and grace for which Wright is famous, Why Buddhism Is True lays the foundation for a spiritual life in a secular age and shows how, in a time of technological distraction and social division, we can save ourselves from ourselves, both as individuals and as a species.

Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment Isn't One Kind of Enlightenment - It's the Only Kind THE MARK OF A TRUE MASTER is that he can express a subject of the utmost complexity with uncanny simplicity. Jed McKenna is such a master, and spiritual enlightenment is his subject. His first book, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing, was an instant classic and established him as a spiritual teacher of startling depth and clarity. Now, his second book, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, takes us on a fascinating tour of the enlightened state - what it is and what it's not, who's there and who's not, how to get there and how to get somewhere better. Delightful surprises abound, including the dramatic unveiling of perhaps the greatest spiritual masterpiece of all time - long hidden in plain view and well known to all. Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, Mark Twain and U.G. Krishnamurti all appear, and a student from the first book returns to share her Spiritual Autolysis journals. Also surprising are the author's gentle efforts to guide the reader away from enlightenment toward a more desirable and accessible state. Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged, Missing me one place, search another, I stop somewhere, waiting for you. - Walt Whitman Jed McKenna's books aren't for everyone. They're for people who are tired of the spiritual merry-go-round and ready to confront the unadorned reality of the awakening process. If you like your teachers with all the spiritual trimmings and trappings, Jed may not be right for you, but when you're ready to jump off the merry-go-round and begin your journey, Jed McKenna is the guy you want to see standing there, waiting for you.

What if you spent years of your life seeking spiritual enlightenment, but were looking in the wrong place over a long time? It’s happening right now to millions of seekers around the world. That’s why Dr. Robert Forman has written his revolutionary book. Told in often poetic prose, it offers new direction for people looking for a sane and healthy spiritual pathway in our increasingly confusing world. Traditional spiritual models are giving seekers a wrong and frustrating impression about spiritual enlightenment. By exploring his own 39 year experience of spiritual enlightenment, Dr. Forman offers a remedy to folks who are: Convinced they don’t have the right stuff to achieve enlightenment in this lifetime: Disillusioned by spiritual teachers who don’t live up to their lofty self-portraits: Worried that choosing a spiritual life means leaving their everyday life behind: Hungry for a different way to be, but unable to express it. Through metaphor, humor, vulnerability and achingly beautiful prose, Dr. Forman’s book offers newfound hope to spiritual seekers everywhere.

Celebrating 25 Years as a New York Times Bestseller — Over 16 Million Copies Sold It’s no wonder that The Power of Now has sold over 16 million copies worldwide and has been translated into over 30 foreign languages. Much more than simple principles and platitudes, the book takes readers on an inspiring spiritual journey to find their true and deepest self and reach the ultimate in personal growth and spirituality: the discovery of truth and light. In the first chapter, Tolle introduces readers to enlightenment and its natural enemy, the mind. He awakens readers to their role as a creator of pain and shows them how to have a pain-free identity by living fully in the present. The journey is thrilling, and along the way, the author shows how to connect to the indestructible essence of our Being, “the eternal, ever-present One Life beyond the myriad forms of life that are subject to birth and death.” Featuring a new preface by the author, this paperback shows that only after regaining awareness of Being, liberated from Mind and intensely in the Now, is there Enlightenment.

By the New York Times bestselling author: a provocative account of the attack on the humanities, the rise of intolerance, and the erosion of serious learning America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny. Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force. The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims. From #MeToo mania that blurs flirtations with criminal acts, to implicit bias and diversity compliance training that sees racism in every interaction, Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and that we are putting our competitive edge at risk. But there is hope in the works of authors, composers, and artists who have long inspired the best in us. Compiling the author’s decades of research and writing on the subject, The Diversity Delusion calls for a return to the classical liberal pursuits of open-minded inquiry and expression, by which everyone can discover a common humanity.