Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76123 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Synopsis
A revised edition of this book in which Dass shares his understanding and explores the many paths of meditation, from mantra, prayer, singing and visualisation, and suggests how the reader can find a suitable method for themselves.

Customer Reviews

Funny, helpfull and positive!
Ram Dass helped me get a better understanding of what meditation really is and how not to take myself too seriously.

One of those books....
There are some books which, as soon as you pick them up, just speak to you. For me, this is one of them. From the first page the tone, the style, the content are just wonderfully understated and full of wisdom that makes me hunger for more of the life that he describes.

As a UK purchaser, the second half of the book with its directory of North American meditation centres is not that useful, but the first half is so good that this is a small quibble.

Buy, read, digest, enjoy.

Not quite good enough
This book is in two halves. The first part is a description of the core problem and the utility of meditation in solving it. The second half is a directory of organisations that are associated with the practices.

The long intro is very good, as is much of what follows in the first half of the book BUT what I found missing was good-enough descriptions of the effects of meditation.

I did a form of meditation (actually concentration) some years ago and actually stopped doing it *because* of the effects. These were psychic phenomena and their occurence blew apart my old world view. The problem was that the old world view was replaced with nothing and that, my friends, is very frightening.

In addition, unless you are part of a group, (that's what the second half of the book is for) you are isolated because nobody believes you. Even the witnesses usually refuse to take it on board because they are as scared as you are to let go of the reality they thought they knew. They ask in some considerable frustration "*HOW* did you know that?" and you have to say "I don't know, I just suddenly knew". It's unsatisfactory my friends and VERY confusing for everyone involved. You may find yourself wrestling with an insoluble problem and losing friends because they (have to) doubt you. That happened tome and, at the time, I could not find a source to explain what was going on.

So what I am saying is that the book is good as far as it goes but it's the map and the "what to do ifs" that are missing. Read it by all means and then read more too or you may find stuff happens that leaves you looking for the path back to ordinary reality. That path is there if you need it sure enough, so don't worry, but the book doesn't tell you much about these things.

If you want to know about the effects of meditiation and moreover *WHY* these things happen then read Horoshi Motoyama's "Toward a Superconciousness; Meditational Theory and Practice". It was long out of print and I had to buy mine second hand but it may be available again now from the California Institute for Human Science ( I don't think Amazon has it). If you get scared and you want to tread the path back it's simple; throw away all your occult books, eat fatty foods including meat, drink alcohol, throw yourself into a social life with straight-forward happy people and fix engines or some other such matter-of-fact, mundane thing in your spare time until you come down. It doesn't take long, hopefully you won't need to.

Do well, and if you hold it together as you cross over let me know.

Regards

Adrian