Adyashanti: A True Guru?

July 27, 2016

Hardly. As I see it, this uber-popular Advaita “guru” is on the same (grossly overrated) spiritual level as Eckhart Tolle and Mooji. It’s more likely that Miley Cyrus is chaste, Hillary Clinton is honest, and OJ is innocent than Adyashanti is Enlightened.

Because I’ve reviewed a number of Adyashanti’s books at Amazon.com that make clear my POV on him, rather than write an article on the subject, I’ll just post a few of the reviews. The first one (A Blind Man Leading the Blind) is my two-star review of “The End of Your World,” the second (The Way of a Muddled Mystic) is my two-star review of “The Way of Liberation,” and the third (Falling into Dis-Grace) is my just-posted at Amazon one-star review of “Falling into Grace.”

A Blind Man Leading the Blind

In the interview at the end of this book, Adyashanti implicitly makes it clear that he has no business writing books on spiritual awakening, or anything else for that matter.… Read the full article

Cracking the Cosmic Code, Part 3

May 16, 2016
[Note: Part 1 of this series is available in the July 2015 archives, and Part 2 in the October 2015 archives.]

In Part One of this “Cracking the Cosmic Code” philosophical series, I focused on metaphysics, in Part Two I considered epistemology, and in this Part I will turn my attention to ethics, an essential branch of the “philosophy tree.”

Ethics is the branch of philosophy that considers morality: right conduct versus wrong conduct.

In my opinion, the libertarian ethos – self-ownership and non-initiation of force (against others) – represents the ideal moral philosophy. It honors individual rights (including property rights), but with an essential caveat: that one’s rights do not include the right to violate the rights of others. In other words, one should not be able to restrict others from engaging in victimless, so-called immoral activity (such as gambling, prostitution, and drugs), nor be allowed to steal or violate an- other’s property.

The libertarian ethos is in perfect alignment with the U.S. Constitution, but the U.S Government is not. The current U.S… Read the full article

Meher Baba, A Tower of Baba Babble

April 25, 2016
[This is my just-posted at Amazon one-star review of "God Speaks" by Meher Baba.]

The title of this book is a gross misnomer. Meher Baba wasn’t God, and he wasn't an Avatar; he was a fogged-out mystic who couldn’t articulate a clear and comprehensive spiritual Dharma. While his convoluted and Byzantine Sufi mysticism will bedazzle the esoterically challenged, the cognoscenti will dismiss his labyrinthine ramblings and schematic scaffolding as a “Tower of Baba Babble.”

This book is so bad, I could literally compose a 1,000-page tome deconstructing it sentence by sentence. And if a Baba believer or basher wants to offer me, say, a 100 grand, I’ll gladly drop my multiple other projects and focus my literary efforts on elaborating the problems with “God” Meher Baba’s spiritual Dharma. But since I’ve yet to receive even a sniff of such an offer, and this is necessarily a delimited review, I’ll just pick out some of Baba’s babble, and point out the errors.

Meher Baba writes, “Most souls have gross impressions; some souls have subtle impressions; a few souls have mental impressions; and a few souls have no impressions at all.”… Read the full article

The Sad State of Spiritual Literature, Part 2 (Franz Bardon, Dion Fortune, Paul Foster Case, Sammy Aun Weor, Et Al.)

March 31, 2016
In Part 1 of this series, posted here February 2016, I lamented the sad (meaning disappointing) current (or modern) state of spiritual literature – and, by implication, I included dead authors (meaning those deceased in the 20th or 21st century) in my “indictment.”

In this article, I will focus on 20th to 21st century Hermetic Western Mystery Tradition writings, exemplified by the works of occult luminaries such as Franz Bardon, Dion Fortune, Paul Foster Case, Samael Aun Weor, Paul Foster Case, Aleister Crowley, and Manly P. Hall. I’ve written Amazon reviews of books by each of these authors, except for Crowley, whom I’ve read but wasn’t motivated to review.

The bottom line is that none of these authors (nor any of their Western Mystery Tradition contemporaries I’ve encountered) “cracked the cosmic code.” Their writings may impress the non-cognoscenti, but not the cognoscenti. Some of these authors are teeming with occult knowledge, but most of it is historical and cosmological – and their cosmology, for the most part, is flawed. When it comes to real spiritual insight and hermeneutics, they all are lacking.… Read the full article

The Sad State of Spiritual Literature, Part 1

February 20, 2016
I doubt that there is a better-read mystic than yours truly. Moreover, I doubt that there is a living mystic with my overall knowledge and understanding of mysticism and spiritual philosophy. As I read book after book, it is apparent to me that I have no peers in the field of spiritual exegesis and elaboration.

I wish this weren’t the case. I wish that I could point people to living spiritual masters and great spiritual writers, but all I see is a vast wasteland of mediocrity (and less-than-mediocrity). There are some high-integrity spiritual teachers, and a few teachers who are true experts in a specific tradition – but no one, other than me, seems capable of putting it all together, in forging a deep and wide esoteric perennial philosophy.

In the forthcoming weeks, I will, for both fun and educational purposes, be commenting on some of these teacher-writers (as well as some dead ones, too). Dale Carnegie is probably turning over in his grave right now, wondering why I would “stir up a hornet’s nest” by “digging into the Dharmas” of these teachers. But unlike me, Dale Carnegie didn’t have Scorpio rising and five planets in the eighth house.… Read the full article

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