Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, The [Mass Market Paperback]

Thaddeus Golas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1983

$10.95 cloth hardcover 1-58685-190-X 5 x 7 in, 112 pp, Rights: W, Self-Help 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. Think of how much better your life might be if you reminded yourself to "love as much as you can from wherever you are" or "love it the way it is." 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. "While we have humility and pride enough to act on the knowledge that we exist in an infinite harmony, that we are neither greater nor lesser than any others, we can enjoy exquisite spiritual wealth and pleasures. When you love yourself, you are in truth expanding in love into many other things. And the more loving you are, the more loving the beings within and around you. On all levels we are mutually dependent vibrations. Play a happy tune and happy dancers will join your trip." - From The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment After serving in World War II, author Thaddeus Golas graduated from Columbia College in New York. He later moved to San Francisco, where he became involved in the activism and spiritual quests of the 1960s. He was an editor of Redbook magazine and a book representative for publisher Harper and Row.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Contents Introduction Author's Photographs Foreword Who Are We? Look, Ma, I'm Enlightened How to Feel Good Lifesavers How We Got Here Self-improvement Time and Vibrations Going Through Changes What is Real? How You Get There A Fable Even Lazier0 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

You don't have to work hard or suffer to be in paradise "I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidences of virture. There is a paradise in and around you right now, and to be there you don't even have to make a move. All potential experiences are within you already. You can open up to them at any time. There is an odd chance that this is what someone needs to read in order to feel better about himself. If you are a kind person and want to know what ot expect when elightenment strikes and why it comes to you, this is for you." "It's all right to have a good time. That's one of the most important messages from enlightenment." --From The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback
• Publisher: Bantam (July 1, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553263587
• ISBN-13: 978-0553263589
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #437,138 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in 1924 in Paterson, New Jersey, to Polish Catholic parents, Thaddeus Golas was a child of Einstein's Relativity but also of the Great Depression.

He served a long European tour of duty in WWII, and was in Patton's Third Army in Antwerp, but narrowly avoided combat at the Battle of the Bulge. The G.I. Bill helped him earn a BA in General Humanities from New York's Columbia University where he studied under Jacques Barzun, among notable others.

He went on to work as a proofreader for Betty Ballantine, as an editor for The Tatler in Paterson, NJ., a book editor for Redbook, and later, in Oklahoma, as a sales representative for Harper & Row. He saw the rise of the Beat Movement in Manhattan, with its onset of mind-altering substances.

His ideas on human consciousness had gathered over many years of pondering Eastern Mysticism and popular Quantum Science; when he moved to California in the '60s, he was encouraged by Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and former high school mate Allen Ginsberg to self-publish his Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment.

Thus, it was in the psychedelic maelstrom, in the midst of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury turmoil at the start of the Seventies, that Thaddeus Golas achieved recognition as a major philosopher. He stood on street corners with his third wife Nancy Monroe, come rain or come shine, selling copies to passersby to make ends meet. The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment caught-on like wild fire, and Golas, the reluctant guru, became a bit of a sensation.
His book remained in print for nearly 30 years.
Often shunned by members of the New Age community for his biting criticism of their manipulations, Thaddeus Golas remained a nomad and led a discreet life, declining to lecture or exploit his readers with seminars.

Twenty years after it was completed, Love and Pain, the second book by Thaddeus Golas, picks up where The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment leaves off. It is a deeper investigation of his metaphysical message; a more modern and more complete look at his metaphysical map -- by some accounts his "masterpiece" !

Similarly, The Cosmic Airdrome, his third book, is a great companion to the Guide.
The Lazy Man's Life is the Biography of Thaddeus Golas.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The lazy person's Dhammapada, December 31, 2002

By 

John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Cuyahoga Falls, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment (Hardcover)

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).

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book is a lesson on unconditional love, July 7, 2004

By 

Sphere "cch128" (Alaska) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment (Hardcover)

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.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An easy book to wear out., May 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment (Hardcover)

I am a lazy man too. I also like to laugh. I bought the book at a used book store before Amazon was even around. I thought it was a parody of the other arrogant "self help" books in fashion at the time.

This is the real thing. The truth in this book cuts through the jungle of spiritualism like a bolt of lightening. That was 10 years ago. I keep it by the bed on the nightstand--the ultimate anonymous, unpretentious keyhole to the way it is.