There’s Room for Everyone!

Even those with no time to read (let alone meditate):

Originally published by the author in 1972, the underground classic Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment teaches how to improve the quality of life, to feel good, and to determine what’s real. Golas leads the reader down the path toward enlightenment with simple steps, like memorizing key phrases and incorporating them into daily life and thought. This classic book is full of useful tips on how to live a more conscious life and to be an engaged and aware member of the universal community.

In 1988 an audio version of The Guide was recorded. The audiobook was abridged and contained only two-thirds of the content of the printed edition.

In 2005 I obtained a copy of the audiobook on ebay. I did not realize until it was in my possession that the reader was Thaddeus Golas. Although the first five minutes of the tape had been overdubbed the rest of the recording was clean. Golas changed some of the content and it is interesting to listen to the tape and follow the words in the printed book. In the audiobook most mentions of LSD and sex were excluded from the recording.

The audiobook is out of print and the company that created it has closed. On this page are mp3 files made from the audiobook so that users of The Guide may share in the experience of hearing Golas’s words in his own voice.

I’m thinking that the printed book plus these mp3’s would be the ticket….

Another Bittersweet Goodbye

R.I.P., you modern-day Socrates.

I already miss your watery eyes, your cigarette curls and your linguistic sword slashes.

The world can hardly afford your absence… but lucky for us, you left plenty of grist for our collective mill.

Stealing from a wonderful Poputonian post at Hullaboo, here’s a final salute from A Man Without a Country:

I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any “Good Old Days,” there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, “Don’t look at me, I just got here.”

There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity — the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, “Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end.”

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, “You’re a man now.” So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can’t be a man unless he’d gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Goodbye, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Huna Kapua

Secrets divulged!

Huna is a Hawaiian word meaning “secret,” but it also refers to the esoteric wisdom of Polynesia. Kupua is another Hawaiian word and it refers to a specialized healer who works with the powers of the mind and the forces of nature. In that respect it is very similar to the Siberian Tungusic word “shaman.”

The understanding of Huna described here comes from the kupua tradition of the Kahili family from the island of Kauai, through Serge Kahili King, who was adopted as the grandson of Joseph Kahili and trained in his tradition.

Click the link only if you’ve been given Top Secret security clearance…!