The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment

I got this for my friend Matt. He’s lazy and asked me how to meditate. So this is now on his book shelf.

This is a GREAT little book that I've had for years. So quick and easy to read or reference, and yet so power-packed with straight-forward gems about life, energy, and our place in it. I've rushed to retrieve this book from my bookshelf many times, just to remind myself where I want to be when things feel too weird. A few of my favorite lines from the book... "What am I doing on a level of consciousness where this is real?" "Love as much as you can from wherever you are." "No resistance." "All states of consciousness are available right now." The author's explanation of how people vibrate at different speeds/frequencies -- and how each one subconsciously tries to pull others to their frequency -- was pivotal in my understanding of the undercurrent in relations. But the biggest life-saver for me from this book was in learning and seeing how LOVING IT ALL can rebalance me in the midst of anything. (Now, if I can just remember that when some intoxicating drama has me whipped into a blind frenzy! That's why it's good for me to keep this book within reach. :-)

The recent reprint of this book has an addition of a short biography with photographs of the author. Included is a letter for readers that he wrote in his last years about how the book came to be and a few added thoughts he had towards the end of his life. What I have learned from this book is that no resistence is the way to love people with charity; with full unconditional love. If you can look at someone for what they are, with all of their strengths and weaknesses and love them regardless of what is right or wrong, in fact, love them for what they are, for what you see wrong in them too then you have discovered what many call the Christ love and are no longer drawn to and imprisoned by what you might deny.From reading this book it has become very clear to me that we become what we hate. The very thing that we fight against is what we become. The same with our government fighting against terrorism, it has become a federal terrorist. The terrorist fighting against unjust governments have become unjust. Self appointed protectors fighting against what they perceive as protecting the innocent have become the guilty.It always works that way.... no resistence is the only answer, love that which you would hate and you will not become that. It appears that the universe is built to teach us compassion. Hate something enough and you are drawn to it like iron to a magnet, offering your soul to the very thing which you sought to deny and in the end becoming a perfect image of that which you tried to destroy.The big joke is that because none of us see everything the same way many of the pretty or ugly colors that you might see upon others uniquely exist in your own mind alone because you have colored them that way. When you see injustice, cruelty, ignorance and stupidity most of what you see does not exist exactly the way you see it, sometimes far from the truth. When you fight the image upon the mirror of your mind it's the most dangerous enemy you can possibly have because the internal oscillations of hate and dislike reflecting off of the surfaces of your own judgments take on a life as your own personal phantoms capable of haunting you to the ends of your days, never vanishing until accepted and loved for what they are, for what you have created. Fighting against another with hate is like offering your soul to the devil. You will be consumed by and become the very thing you sought to perish. In the end trading one for the other, you stand in its place. Do as you wish to diminish the problems in this world, but do it without the resistence of hate, replace it with accepting love or you will become that which you fight against.

Over twenty years ago a woman i worked with handed me this book and said here i think this will speak to you. strangely, wonderfully, Barbara became a best friend. she is someone i feel like i've known forever. and this gift of a book she gave me has served me unlike any other book ever, because it excludes no one, anywhere, ever. it is all inclusive in love. about 15 years ago i was feeling really awful and sat in my bathtub and read this book aloud into a tape recorder so that i could listen to it in my car (which i seemed to always be in). later i found it on tape read by the author which i still have and cherish listening to. i reread this book yearly it seems, because it makes me smile, and i pass it on to those i feel will get some relief from it. i've given so many copies away over the years. i searched bookstores used and new for copies. i finally had only one left. i'm so happy to have found this book in print again and am ordering many copies to give to people i love. thank you thaddeus. you speak to me of love and expansion and inclusion forever. you remind me to expand and love when i'm contracted and dense. i love you.

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).

I read the "Lazyman" for the first time in 1987. Since then, I've read it, I've lost count...100 times, perhaps more. This book is transformative--everything I read before or after converges in the "Guide." A mere 80 pages of bliss and incomparable wisdom, it's responsible for rescuing me from many freak-out times. I've used the "Guide" as a course in my own life: I've studied it in times of peace; run to it in times of grief and despair; traveled with it and used it as an anchor--in case of emergencies. It's been a source of frustration and inspiration. I owe a lot to it's author, who by the way, I've tried to locate many times without success. I was successful one time in 1994. I wrote the publisher and they, very gracefully, forwarded my letter to him. He replied to me then and that was the last I heard. At the time Thaddeus Golas, who goes by Tad, was living in Florida, he was 74 years old and doing well. I'm still trying to find him--maybe he's gone home....I wanted to read the book he wrote with his earthly mind--"Love and Pain"--it's never been published, and he wrote to me that "it was no match for the "Guide," but still I'd like to read it. I wonder if anyone knows his whereabouts...Obviously,"Lazyman" is out of print, why? Now, as always, we need this guide. And, thank you brothers and sisters in bliss for letting my consciousness be in this place. Thank you, Tad, wherever you are.