Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing [Paperback]

Jed McKenna (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2002

Book One of Jed McKenna's Enlightenment Trilogy: From a spiritual master unlike any, a spiritual masterpiece like no other. AUTHOR, TEACHER AND SPIRITUAL MASTER Jed McKenna tells it like it's never been told before. A true American original, Jed succeeds where countless others have failed by reducing this highest of attainments - Spiritual Enlightenment - to the simplest of terms. Never before has this elusive topic been treated in so engaging and accessible a manner. A masterpiece of illuminative writing, Spiritual Enlightenment is mandatory reading for anyone following a spiritual path.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Absolutely marvelous, splendid, perfect book!" -- Acharyaji Anatole, Abhidhyan Yoga Institute

"I loved it. Insightful, bullying, delightful, and just fun. A magic book without the sleight of hand." -- John Kremer, author,

"McKenna is an American original, and his delightful Spiritual Enlightenment is just what's needed to wake us up from slumber." -- Lama Surya Das, author, “Awakening the Buddha Within”

"McKenna's description of enlightenment is so good, 99.9% of his readers might not understand how truly profound it really is." -- Satyam Nadeen, author, “From Onions to Pearls

"Starkly provocative and uniquely insightful. This book cuts like a knife through many detours along the spiritual journey." -- Alan Cohen, author, “I Had It All the Time”

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Wisefool Press (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971435235
• ISBN-13: 978-0971435230
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (73 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #514,453 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

189 of 206 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A billy-clubbing by a Jed-I warrior" (the cover says so), February 15, 2003

By 

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

This review is from: Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing (Paperback)

Gaaaaaaaaaah. Not only the back cover but the _first ten pages_ of this book are filled with glowing reviews by the representatives of today's Illuminatus Industry, praising Jed McKenna to the skies, carrying on about how marvellously enlightened he is, and crowing about how this book is Just What The World Needs Today. Man, by the time you get done reading those, you'll be ready to toss (a) the book in the trash and (b) your cookies.

Well, don't. In spite of all of the sell-it-to-the-seekers tub-thumping, it's actually a pretty good book. (And you have to wonder why so many of these folks have so heartily endorsed a book that heaps so much well-deserved scorn on the spiritual-fashion industry. Maybe they don't think he meant _them_.)

On the plus side, there's the total absence of crap on the subject of enlightenment itself. This McKenna distinguishes carefully from both religiosity and mystical experience. Neither of these, he says, has squat to do with enlightenment, which is nothing more or less than abiding nondual awareness (a.k.a. "no-self"). His no-nonsense advice on how to get there comes down to this: just keep asking yourself what's true until you know. But it's not for everybody, getting to it is pretty painful, and the cottage industry that has grown up around it is actually selling something else.

Well, that's nice, and his lack of bull-puckey on the subject is refreshing. Heck, enlightenment aside, he's fun to read just to enjoy a little healthy irreverence toward vegetarianism, the practice of mindfulness, and umpteen other brands of Fashion Spirituality.

McKenna also seems to be a pretty decent and interesting guy in his meatspace persona. Much of the narrative really just conveys the flavor of his own life and character, so it's a good thing he turns out to be reasonably pleasant company -- astringent, curmudgeonly, genially cynical, and often funny as hell.

On the minus side, there's the presence of a certain amount of crap on lots of _other_ subjects. For my taste, the hard-boiled lookie-what-an-illusion-busting-realist-I-am tone gets old after about the first ten or twenty pages. The Zen masters of legend are usually content to give somebody a single sharp blow with a stick; this guy goes at you with a meat axe, over and over and over and over. Readers of _Radical Honesty_ (whose author Brad Blanton provides one of the cover endorsements) may enjoy this sort of thing; I don't, and I don't find it either especially radical or especially honest.

And -- much more seriously -- there's _way_ too much chatter about how unreal everybody else looks to somebody in that there state of abiding nondual awareness. McKenna is constantly pointing out that from his view-from-nowhere vantage point, everybody in the world is just a fictional character in a sort of cosmic soap opera. This would be annoying enough even if it were true just as it stands, and it isn't. Sure, there's something to it, and Ramana Maharshi got some good mileage out of the truth underlying this overstatement. But to hear McKenna tell it in his Holden-Caulfield-among-the-illuminati patter, somebody with nondual awareness would be mighty hard to tell from a straight-up sociopath.

Don't let that stop you from reading it; just watch for the stuff that sounds out of balance. Besides, that dramatic-rhetorical stuff (which is all it is) may be just what readers of some temperaments need. Just bear in mind that real nondualism doesn't dismiss actual people as unreal or fictional; this is as much an untruth as the contrary statement that we're simply "real" just as we seem to ourselves. In Hindu terms, folks, maya is Brahma too.

By the way, I'm not altogether sure whether the narrative portions of the book are strictly nonfiction or even whether "Jed McKenna" is a real person (in the usual sense of the words); it's entirely possible that the whole thing is as fictional as its author says all the rest of us are anyway. It doesn't much matter, though.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Undoing..., August 8, 2009

By 

Matthew Mossbarger "woodhouse publishing" (Ogden, UT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing (Paperback)

I read reviews of this book, and they are as paradoxical as the book itself seems to be... at first read.

Jed McKenna, fictional or non-fictional, creator of a work or simply a process that seems to be writing a book, is himself an enigma of epic proportions. If one stops at this layer with the book, the whole point is that there is no point except getting a good dose of irreverent and fun blasting of all the world's religions, new age thought, and science as an alternate religion.

The book, however, defies its surface. Just as U.G. Krishnamurti defies explanation, the author and the book defy the layers of BS in which we shroud true spirituality. What is spirituality other than humankind's search for meaning and purpose in a seemingly purposeless and meaningless world? What is spirituality other than a search for Truth?

For someone who had wandered through being raised fundamentalist Christian and subsequently converting to Hinduism, reading extensively in Chaos mathematics and Quantum Physics, searching through quasi-metaphysical works, and studying everything from Kabbalism, Gnosticism, numerology, and astrology to the Bible, Darwinism, and Relativity, this book served one purpose. That purpose... toss it on the fire (it provides valuable fuel) and keep going.

After reading this book, I felt like someone had given me a golden key which unlocked all the goo and rephrased all my study into a brand new context. All of it and none of it points to the Truth of existence. I felt like Arjuna being stunned with the reality of my situation. To paraphrase, I too felt like I was just 'having a bad day at the office when the Universe flashed me.'

Truth burns, and that is what makes this book so valuable. There is only one message in it, "Ask yourself who you are until you know." That is the whole of the book said succinctly and perfectly. Begin this process and never be the same. Blow off the layers of who you think you are until you know what you really are. The complete message of the book only serves to help the reader do one thing, look inward and ask hard questions. Done honestly with great intent, the questioning serves only to remove all the layers of cultural, social, and religious dogma, and what lies underneath is the greatest journey of discovery that one can ever make.

If you truly want to know what the h**l is going on, this book is highly recommended.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Flawed But Worthwhile Challenge for the Discriminating Reader, October 12, 2009

By 

T. Gallaher "T. Gallaher" (san francisco) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing (Paperback)

This review is for all three of the spiritual books by "Jed Mckenna", because what I have to say here applies to all three of them.

First, I must get a few of the flaws out of the way. As other reviewers have noted, you have to wonder why someone who has so much scorn for the spiritual industry would go so over-the-top in printing glowing reviews from so many teachers from that same industry for several pages in the beginning of his first book. Perhaps selling books isn't so far from the top of Mr. McKenna's list of values and motivations for writing? Don't know.

Which brings up the other up-front flaw: There is little or no evidence that there is a spiritual teacher by the name of Jed Mckenna. He may be a guy who has achieved notable realization and just wants his privacy. But as a disembodied writer with no apparent connection to a flesh and blood human, it becomes difficult to gauge the sincerity of what he has to say, especially because it can be pretty challenging to most spiritual seekers. After all, you can say incredibly inflammatory and deceitful things with ease if you never are held accountable for them, except through emails, letters and book reviews which you can easily dismiss or ignore. Realization is a state of being, and without knowing that being in an in-person, flesh-and-blood manner, one is just left with words. And as a result, those words must be taken with a grain of salt. The same is true for the words in the bible or any other holy book, but one would hope that a contemporary spiritual treatise would come with the benefit of more than just words.

Which brings me to what I like about the books. They are simple, direct, well-written and low on BS. By reducing his teaching to a very clear and uncomplicated directive (truth-seeking), he cuts through the myriad layers of guru-worship, dogma, self-deception, delusion, manipulation and lies that clutter so much of the cultural dialog and accumulated beliefs regarding spirituality and enlightenment. He calls a spade a spade, and I find this incredibly refreshing. Unfortunately, this type of thinking is still taboo and iconoclastic today, especially regarding spirituality. And by encouraging the seeker to be his or her own authority in the search for truth, McKenna undermines hundreds of years of programming that has suggested that the truth is "out there" - in priests, ascended masters, divine avatars and charismatic teachers - rather than being closer to us than our own breath. Even though this isn't a new idea, the commercialization of it (as he discusses in his criticism of most modern Zen) has totally neutered the power of the plain wisdom of this perspective.

So if you are bright and have a low tolerance for BS and want a simple, direct understanding of spirituality, this is well worth your time. Be prepared to perhaps have several cherished and loved ideas regarding spirituality challenged. And if you don't like those types of challenges, then these books aren't for you. But if you want to get to the truth bad enough and are willing to burn up anything that gets in your way, these are your friends. Besides, the third book has the best exploration of a higher perspective on manifestation and it's relation to the awakened state that this well-read reviewer has ever come across.

However, there is one major flaw in these books. I am glad it is there though. If you want books to give you the answer or the truth on a platter, you will always be deceived and led astray. But if you want books to stimulate your own thinking so you can better grapple with the questions of life and have a vital, personal inquiry, then the flaws of one seeker can actually help you better understand your own journey, like the grain of sand that transforms from an irritant into a pearl.

Throughout the books, the author repeatedly states that enlightenment is an abiding state of non-dual awareness. Simple enough. Yet throughout all three books, and especially in the last two, he makes it clear that the unawakened state is a scummy, miserable, toxic state to be stuck in and that the awakened or adult state is what we should all be aspiring to, if not achieving. He likens the predominant state of humanity to a sewer that one should try to escape from at all costs. In other words state A (the adult or the awakened state of non-duality) is far far superior to state B (the sleeping, dualistic state that most of humanity is in). This premise is the core of the flaw in Mr. McKenna's teachings because it is duplicitous; this perspective is steeped in duality. To say that anything is superior to something else firmly establishes a dual perspective. And not only does Mr. McKenna set this perspective up firmly throughout all three books, but at times he gets quite nasty about it when dealing with those he deems as asleep (like the book discussion group in book 2). With so much emotional charge around the issue of how unconscious the majority of humanity is and so much rejection of their dualistic and somnolent state, he continues to ingrain the dual perspective both in himself and in his undiscriminating readers. One also has to wonder if the guy has a lot of unresolved emotional issues and is just spiritually bypassing to get to his "enlightened" state. If Mr. McKenna's non-dual realization was as solid as he claims, why would he be so riled up about how most of humanity is asleep? It seems to me that true non-dualism sees the beauty and perfection in everything just the way it is, awake or asleep. This doesn't mean that if one wants to awaken that one shouldn't head in that direction. But to do so out of rejection (or downright scorn) for the unawakened state is just to further mire oneself in duality and sleep. Perhaps Mr. McKenna's state of non-dual awareness is not as abiding as he would like himself and others to believe. And this makes sense since his method is largely intellectual and thus it may not seep deep enough down into one's being, as another reviewer noted in quoting Osho.

I'm not judging him. I'm just pointing out a major flaw in his teaching. But again, I'm glad it's there because contemplation of his teaching has led me to this discrimination and has greatly helped me in my own search. That's what good books do. And by that measure, these books were pretty good for me!