The Perfection of Nothing: Reflections on Spiritual Practice

This book is the most practical talk about actually walking the path of a spiritual practitioner that I have ever seen. Lewis writes vividly about the importance of how we are being in our everyday life. The insight and clarity he has on spiritual issues is rare and wonderful. Reading this book is like gathering around a table in an inn to listen to a seasoned traveler talk about the rarely walked road ahead.The book is written in four main sections in a `journal entry' style. The first section was a little hard to get through but it was worth it because as I continued reading the journal entries became more vivid and practical. There is definitely some great writing in this book, although that's not the point. I believe sincere practitioners of any discipline will be able to use this book like no other.

....this readable book offers thoughts and insights on the daily awareness required for "living in the world as though not of it."Dotted with humility and humor (e.g., the term "driveway improvement plan" used to describe what most people seek in their "spiritual" strivings--namely, a shorter route to inner glory), this four-part collection of observations, rooted in the author's endeavors toward authentic wholeness, smacks of Zen, Watts, Krishnamurti, even Taoism; and yet its clarity lends it a remarkable availability to those not familiar with the spiritual traditions.I particularly enjoyed the critique of common workshopy/self-help offerings as "not-good-enough-ism." Whether perfectionism shows up in the bank account, the office to-do list, expectations about one's mate, or supposedly spiritual activities, the real object of worship is still perfectionism, the shaming, controlling, super-organized constriction of naked suchness.To write such a book involves a struggle to reach as wide an audience as possible while doing justice to one's felt sense of the divine Other. A question for me was whether the numen and the mainstream really have much to do with one another, and if so, how. As a man who has practiced psychotherapy from a depth perspective, I couldn't subscribe to the metaphor of our psychological makeup as a pitted driveway down which we make our gradual way Home--the idea being neither to speed up the drive (yes, I can see that) nor to focus so much on the bumps (hm...). It seems to me that when we substitute attentiveness for wallowing or victim-thinking, we find in those inconvenient and efficiency-impairing bumps what we banish from our ego-dominated daily consciousness. As Jung pointed out, gods and goddesses--marginalized meanings and secret magic--dwell in our wounds and weaknesses. While there's much to be said for mental and spiritual health, I'm no more a fan of the "work through and transcend forever" paradigm (which one sees far more often in theory than in life) than I am of the rather Freudian and Americanized Far Eastern view of the unconscious as a dusty warehouse to vacuum out and purify, whether through meditation or psychoanalysis. Nor does such a paradigm offer anything to the homeless person, the victim of violent crime, the pregnant teen who can't read, the patient suffering from a severe personality disorder. They must get their fulfillment elsewhere, and very often more heroically, if less consistently. Such people tend not to be taken into account in those developmental schemes of spiritual evolution which become popular and lucrative; and it's to the author's credit that he gives some space to gently explaining some of their rather arrogant shortcomings.Fragmented, distressed, or relatively intact, we are always somewhere within complex and image, psyche and stress; the beauty is in how we come to terms with that and even draw on it in our yearning to host the Sacred shining through it. "You can make

Comparable in many ways to other more popular spiritual practice books such as Pema Chodron's WHEN THINGS FALL APART (1997) and Jack Kornfield's AFTER THE ECSTASY THE LAUNDRY (2000), Rick Lewis's small-press book could be missed quite easily by many readers interested, as I am, in this genre. This is unfortunate. Although I have given it a four-star rating, Lewis's book shines with many five-star moments. He offers an honest account of his spiritual struggle with the heaven and hell inside him, a struggle to surrender to "what is." "The whole path," he writes, "is the perfection of nothing" (p. 82), and this summarizes the whole point of Lewis's book.Lewis's collection of reflections might be read as the journal entries of a man struggling with his spiritual practice. His writing here is insightful, often challenging, at time humorous, and rich with fresh metaphors and analogies. The book is organized into four sections, "The Context of Transformation" (pp. 1-56), "The Nature of Mind" (pp. 57-86), "The Way of Body" (pp. 87-136) and "The Truth of the Heart" (pp. 137-161). "The essence of any real spiritual work or path," Lewis writes, is to travel from our unexamined assumptions about the way life should be to "how life is, accepting it as it is" (p. 10). Escaping "the kind of madness one can see any day of the week on the street, on a television, in a newspaper, at the mall" (p. 83), and then "to see and admit who we are--is 99.9 percent of the spiritual quest, the .1 percent of the work that's left to do after this is the most important, significant, and mind-blowing part, and this, fortunately gets done by God" (p. 13). While "so much of modern day spirituality is nothing more than the activity of denial, the attempt to avoid what is Real based on the conditioning to reject parts of our psychophysical makeup . . . this is never and cannot be God" (p. 45). Through his own practice, Lewis encourages us to "get as close as you can to life, and you will become undefeatable" (p. 17).Meditation, Lewis observes, "can anchor a fully awakened, fully integrated awareness that lives, breathes, and acts in the world (p. 86). It is "persistence and consistency that counts" in spiritual practice, "time after time, hour after hour, day after day" (p. 122). "We must pay attention," Lewis writes. "But the degree to which we must pay attention to enter the kingdom of God is not one for which we have a reference. When it is said that we must pay attention, most people think the level of attention required to keep a car on the road while driving, or to avoid harming ourselves while using a sharp knife. The amount of attention that must be paid is all our attention. This comes by completely and totall re-owning, re-assuming, and recollecting all the attention that we normally disburse to various manifestations throughout the universe through the activity of the mind, which is responsible for interpreting, judging, commenting on, assigning meaning

Down Lewis down! This book confronts me. I open it's pages and it is like looking in the mirror. Everything I can see is there, I cannot hide from what I don't want to see. I command and march my ideas into the text only to have them obliterated and sucked into a black hole. The book costs all of your ideas-literally. However, once you hand 'em over, your in for one heck of a rebate. Paradoxically, you will have no more options, only to inherit everything as is, after which, there is no refund. This book is honest and rare-I like it better than anything I have seen in a long time. For all the brilliant philosophy we have in the world, I don't know how many can actually stand up to exposure to the scorching rays of this honesty. This entire book reads like a question and a bomb. A mind bomb that explodes illusions so that by the end of the reading, you will know what time it is.