![Shift into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness by [Kelly, Loch]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41S-8hqXD6L._SY346_.jpg)
I'm a fan of Loch Kelly's work. I've been to a couple of his seminars. Good guy, good stuff, sincere.
His problem - mentioned in many of the non-5-star reviews - is that he gets caught in verbal thickets. Kelly has a knack for expressing elegantly simple truths with painful complexity. Worse, he has a slew of awkward go-to catch-phrases he repeats again and again. They appear to be highly meaningful for him, so he's enamored of them, but you'll need to learn Loch-speak before you can easily swallow this material.
An assertive editor might have helped keep things clear and readable, but, alas, this reads like a transcription of Kelly at his extemporaneous driest. Here's a representative paragraph, chosen at random:
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Awake awareness is invisible, contentless, formless, boundless, and timeless, but it is the ground of our being. When you shift out of your conventional sense of self, there is a gap of not-knowing. Awake awareness is who we are prior to the personal conditioning we usually turn to for our identity. Rather than looking to our thoughts, memories, personality, or roles to identify ourselves, we learn to know awake awareness as the primary dimension of who we are, the ground of Being. Then, with unconditioned awake awareness as the foundation of identity, we can include our conditioned thoughts, emotions, and sensations as waves of the ocean of our life.
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If you're able to bushwhack through academic-style writing, and willing to do some of Kelly's work for him by distilling wordy explanation into the simple points he's straining to make (which, fwiw, I am, myself!), you'll find this material four star good (I've deducted another star for the tortured expression). And while I'm sure this isn't his intention, a case could be made that it's actually better this way. When simple spiritual truths glide down like butter, without forcing the reader to do much work, they might not be as well-digested.
I'd suggest downloading a Kindle sample, or web search (book title + "excerpt") for examples of Kelly's writing. If you find it digestible, go ahead and buy. The Dzogchen material feels fresh, so this will be a fine addition to your book collection. But if you're a fan of, say, Adyashanti's plain-language simplicity, understand that this is pretty much the antithesis of that.
- File Size: 2977 KB
- Print Length: 288 pages
- Publisher: Sounds True (September 1, 2015)
- Publication Date: September 1, 2015
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B013RLHMW2
- Text-to-Speech:
Enabled
- Word Wise: Not Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#71,277 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #49 in Occult Spiritualism
- #62 in Meditation (Kindle Store)
- #108 in Buddhism (Kindle Store)
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