Bazerashvili
After “No Boundary”, Ken Wilber once again amazed me with his holistic, big-picture and integral understanding and approaches of spirituality and psychology. In this book, he talks about an Integral framework that he calls the AQAL (All Quadrants All Levels) framework, which, basically describes all of life if one thinks about it.
Understanding all quadrants and all levels is required if we want to have a map of human development. This framework integrates individual and collective parts of life, with it's inner and outer zones. There are very important illustrations here, which help us zoom out a little and look at one of the most comprehensive maps clearly, where we can see that intentional, behavioral, social and cultural phenomena are just parts of a whole. They are just a perspective or one aspect of our being in each moment of our lives.
But again, this is just a map, not the territory, and because of that, Ken suggests us the Integral Life Practice (ILP), which unites the practices to train 8 major zones from 4 quadrants. Those are the life-changing stuff if put in practice.
He also talks about structuralism and various models of human psychological and cultural development, including Graves' Spiral Dynamics, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, etc. and asks a very important question, how can we define Enlightenment? and is the Enlightenment from 2000 or 10,000 years ago the same as it is today? He suggests that it isn't, because we not only have to take into account the various mystical states that people can experience in each ages of history, but also the stages, that are being developed as history and evolution unfolds reality. So, some of the stages that are available today, was not available hundreds or thousands of years ago.
We are talking about the stages that Graves defined as different colors: red, blue, orange, green, yellow, turquoise, etc. According to Wilber, Enlightenment means becoming one with all the states and stages that are currently available in the memory of Kosmos today.
Also, he mentions very important issues, like “pre/post fallacy” and “the myth of the given”. Those are crucial to consider if we want to understand issues such as religion vs science, science vs spirituality, why science will never answer the question of the ultimate concern, and why failing to do so creates much more evil in the world. Also, it's important to think about a whole new paradigm that comes with post-metaphysics, as Wilber call it, according to which, there is no given reality waiting for us to be discovered, and there are no pre-created structures of the human psyche that the mankind hasn't tapped into yet. No, those are all co-created and have been co-created since the beginning of the universe.
That is supposed to be the reason why only meditation won't solve your problems because there are things that just can't be seen while sitting on your cushion. Also, shadow work is worth mentioning, which Ken talks about too, and considers crucial for becoming a whole human being.
In short, this was a very interesting read. Anyone interested in holistic understanding of spirituality must read this book (and other works of Ken Wilber)
After his trilogy, Jed has written a shorter and more insightful book about what he calls the Theory of Everything in which he tries to convey his enlightened perspective on life and tries to answer some of the most frequently asked questions by humans.
One of the most important things that reader can understand after reading this book is that there seems to be a whole different paradigm out there, and people who seem to be inhabiting this paradigm. Jed is one of them, who tries to explain an awakened perspective, which sounds impossible from my point of view. But we must understand that our close-mindedness can only take us so far.
Jed's Theory of Everything is based on an experience, not on a belief. Nobody is required to believe anything. Besides, believing this stuff might backfire, because investigation must happen from scratch.
Most importantly, as Jed says, BYOFT - Be Your Own Fucking Teacher. Kill the Buddha. Take ownership of your life and don't be depended on anyone, especially when it comes to finding out what's true.
This is a great compilation of brief passages from Ken's most popular writings. After reading it, you get a pretty good sense of the things that he is trying to convey in dozens of other books that he has written so far.
Having read a couple of Ken's books before, I'm still amazed by the ideas presented in these passages, and I'm very glad that I stumbled upon Ken during my research. I think he is truly the most comprehensive philosophical thinker of our times because he is one of the few who integrated western and eastern thinking in a very beautiful manner. His Integral Framework can change the world for the better if implemented correctly.
This book is also great for a high-level overview of the books Ken has written. At the end of it, there is a list of all of them with brief descriptions and it's very useful if you plan to read most of Ken's work.
So, if you are interested in topics like levels of consciousness, mystical experience, integral spirituality, meditation practice, death, the perennial philosophy, integrating matter, body, soul, and spirit, and so many more, delve deeper into his work.
This is an amazing book about an amazing phenomenon.
What I like about the idea of becoming lucid in your dreams is its huge potential in exploring your subconscious mind and potentially healing yourself.
This book is written in a very easy-to-read way. It starts by explaining the history of using dreams for all sorts of reasons. It turns out that ancient people knew about the positive effects that becoming lucid in their dreams could have on their lives.
Then, we learn about DILD (Dream Induced Lucid Dreaming), which is the most common way of becoming lucid in your dreams. There is a detailed step by step instruction on how to do it.
Towards the end, we also learn about a more effective technique called WILD (Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming), which is a bit more advanced but a very promising one. If you master this one technique, you would be able to enter dreams directly from waking state. This is supposed to be a very interesting experience on its own.
I have had a couple of lucid dreams before and I constantly write dreams in my dream journal upon waking up. This has helped me to better remember my dreams, lucid or not. Authors talk about this in the book too, along with the importance of reality checks that you should be performing a couple of times a day.
The things that I think and intuit that are possible via lucid dreaming excite me very much. Becoming conscious of your unconscious mind is the key to solving many of your life's problems. Dreams seem to be a great medium to look straight into the eyes of the hidden aspects of your psyche. Shadow work is essential if you want to return to your state of wholeness, and exploring dreams lucidly seems to be an exciting and a very fun way to do it.
Also, authors make correlations between lucid dreaming and what mystics have been saying for thousands of years, that we are all connected, and that life is a big dream that we can awaken from, just like a lucid dream. As you become more aware inside your dreams, you clearly see the interconnectedness of everything in it and you easily recognize that all of that is just your mind and you are the creator of everything in it and the only thing left is to just explore the infinite potential of it.
What if the waking world is just like that, and a solidity of it is just an illusion. Well, that's what all those mystics and cutting edge quantum physicists have been telling us. It seems that lucid dreaming can help us realize all that and more.
So, read this book if you want to get excited about mastering lucid dreaming, like me.
Sweet dreams.
This book is about an idea that you have to concentrate on one thing to achieve the extraordinary results in any domain of your life. The author says that things don't matter equally and we have to choose what we'll do every day very carefully and not get distracted by all the other things that we could be doing instead.
This is a wide-spread idea, which one can read in many other self-help books. Gary Keller talks about the mastery mindset, Ericsson's research about 10,000 hours, the couple of success myths and much more. Therefore, it's nice to hear about those ideas once again, even though some of the stuff that he mentions are quite obvious.
I think that one of the main takeaways of this book is the following question:
What's the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?
It's a simple but powerful question. If one figures out the ONE thing that he or she will do in different areas of one's life with concentrated time blocks, according to Gary's clever metaphor, it can become the first domino in the stack of hundreds, which illustrates the baby steps that snowballs into the extraordinary results in the future.
I think that Jed's work is a great introduction to this enlightenment thing. With his personal anecdotes and stories, he makes this book fun to read, along with all the great insights that this book is full of.
I, personally, try to understand what awakening is not, and Jed helps the reader to see that more clearly. The fact that just a typical guy, who likes to ride a bike to mountains and skydive dozens of times a year is at the same time awakened to his true nature, breaks the guru stereotype for me.
He also stresses the point that all the spiritual teachings can be boiled down to one sentence: sit down, shut up and find out what's true about something. That's it. For me, teaching without all the cultural nonsense is the most beneficial and that's exactly what you'll find in Jed's books.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who is tired of all the nonsense on the modern spiritual marketplace and is interested in the most straightforward and paradigm shifting information from someone who clearly understands what he is talking about.
I've just finished this book and have lots to say, but when I tried to begin writing a review, resistance kicked in. What is resistance? Well, Steven dedicated this book to explaining what that force is, and how to conquer it.
He explains that resistance is the force which doesn't let us become our greatest selves. The good news is, that it's entirely in us. It IS us, or the part of our psyche that he calls the ego.
Every one of us experiences resistance towards our creative pursuits. This point needs to be emphasized more. EVERY one of us. Even the ones you think as geniuses. Yes, they are geniuses, but not because they were born with some extraordinary capacities or some superhuman brains. No, one of the things that they did was that they learned how to deal with resistance. If they didn't, we wouldn't have the 5th Symphony, The Great Pyramids, The Mona Lisa, etc.
It's in our capabilities to slay this dragon, which keeps us from getting that holy grail which is at the end of our journey. And as Joseph Campbell said, we are the hero of this journey, and it's our responsibility to do so.
Pressfield also differentiates the two approaches of doing your art: hierarchical and territorial. The difference is that hierarchical approach doesn't work, because it's focused on how your art affects your hierarchical level in society, whereas with the territorial approach you are solely interested in doing your craft, for its own sake, and not for the approval of any kind.
In short, this is a must-read for anyone who creates something.
This book is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to build a compelling career for oneself.
Newport presents convincing cases for why the passion is not something that you start with, but rather something that you end up with after going through the mastery process.
The theme of the book is this idea of mastery, which he calls the craftsman mindset, according to which you have to hone your skills to such a degree that people can't ignore you.
After reading this book, you will understand what it takes to create a career that you'll love. You'll know what direction you should go in order to create a purpose, or as Cal calls it, the mission for your career. But for that to happen, you need to have a career capital, which is also his theory that you acquire a career capital after working in an industry and having gone the mastery process (that famous 10,000-hour rule that everyone talks about).
I'm really convinced that if I want to have a passionate career, I must stop dabbling and commit to mastering a field that I'm working in. All the good stuff will unfold, as it did for the people that Newport studied and talked about in this amazing book.
This is a fascinating autobiography of a woman who experienced the disappearance of a personal identity while getting on a bus. Only after a decade, she discovered what had really happened.
She tells us her story, full of struggle and confusion, that had lasted for more than a decade, a period that was full of terror, misunderstanding, and searching for the answers everywhere she could. But apparently, no one was able to give her the proper context of what was happening to her, until nearly a decade had passed.
At the bus station in Paris, she became enlightened. She achieved something that people are struggling to achieve for decades through intense meditation or any other means. Suzanne had some spiritual background. She became a TM teacher in her early twenties and had spent many hours in meditation, but the sudden realization was not anything that she was prepared for, or even heard of as possible. She thought that she had gone mad.
After numerous therapists, she nearly concluded that what had happened to her was a depersonalization disorder or insanity. But after hearing the conclusions of those therapists and psychologists, who clearly didn't understand what she was experiencing, decided to turn into spirituality again and find her answers there, which she did.
Her descriptions of what she calls the Vastness are very interesting to me, as I draw parallels and connect the dots with other teachers' descriptions, though she didn't think of herself as a teacher. Also, her point of view of living without a self, makes me wonder how the hell is that even possible.
The one thing I kind of disagree is the importance of a spiritual practice. She says that it's not as important as people like to think, because there is not a person inside a body who works towards enlightenment and does those practices. But if you ask me, that's misleading, because, if people think that they are already awoken, they will die without experiencing their true nature, because most of us are not lucky to have a sudden awakening at a bus station, like Suzanne had.