The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. (December 2007)

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (March 2008)

Sections should be added to this article, to conform with Wikipedia's Manual of Style.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page.
This article has been tagged since March 2008.

The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment, is a philosophical book by New Jersey born American author Thaddeus Golas (1924-1997). The book began as a mimeographed pamphlet which Golas handed out on the streets of San Francisco in 1971. It was officially published in 1972 by the son of an East Coast businessman, Joe E. Casey, but was quickly taken over by Palo Alto’s Seed Center, after a dispute between Golas and Casey.

The book sold briskly through many printings and in 1979, wound up at Bantam Publishing, where it blossomed and eventually reached the end of its run in 1993. In 1995, Gibbs-Smith Publishing of Utah, a publisher known mostly for interior decorating books, agreed to publish a limited hardcover version of The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment.

The book is an original conception, unlike any other in the field of Spirituality and Philosophy, and has often been described as "the last book you'll ever need to read on Spirituality." It contains many constructive warnings to readers about typical pitfalls associated with Spiritual Questing, and offers remedies for many forms of confusion often found in the field.
The title of the book refers to the fact that the author, a self-described “lazy man,” refuted the notion that a spiritual quest should demand “effort, non-smoking, strict diet, hard work, or other evidences of virtue.” Quoting Zen, Golas asks “If you can’t find it where you’re standing, where do you hope to run in search of it”?

In fact, Thaddeus Golas, in The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment, explains how in his view, even the effort of seeing the world as “needing to be purified” or people “as needing to be enlightened,” can easily lead one to erect a wall that can prevent a genuine gain from occurring in the opening perceptions that lead to a state of Enlightenment, or help maintaining it.

Thaddeus Golas, in The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment, also cautions against buying into the Spiritual Status system so typical of philosophical ideologues: “This can produce unloving snobbery towards your brothers,” he says, and reminds the reader that “what we see and describe is always ourselves.” He adds “Many of our feelings about the world are based on erroneous perceptions about the status of others.” Thaddeus Golas goes on to say that it is “pointless to worry about better or worse spiritual conditions beyond our own,” since “keeping our attention focused on the low vibrations of others fastens us to our own level.”

Another concept fundamental to The Lazy man’s Guide To Enlightenment is the study of structures. “A structure,” Golas says, “is any relation between entities that avoids dissolving.” He goes on to point out that “the self that we know is a structure.” “An odd thing about structures is that they will dissolve both from success and failure, too much pleasure or too much pain, so the problem, if you want a structure, is to maintain a tension somewhere between the two.”

Golas explains that the nature of all structures in our universe requires positive/negative or push/pull tension in order to avoid dissolution.
He argues that in terms of spiritual questing, “the Ego feels better when it has to contend with the tension of threats to its survival.” Hence the warning about seeking Spiritual Enlightenment through conventional methods:

“Negative emphasis results in an intensified structure and a stronger ego. Even though some of these activities, like self-denial, are carried on under the banner of spiritual search, the result is the same. On a subtle level we know that most spiritual endeavors will not succeed, but we go on maintaining the fantasy that they are admirable. Many of us have no intention of really succeeding in dissolving our attachment to structure and going to another plane of existence.”

This paradox and its remedies are central to The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment.

In his “looking-glass” vision of Spirituality, the author brings the reader to the principal tenets of essential navigation through awakening to the transcendent nature within man. He navigates around common mistakes associated with many schools of spiritual dogma. At the core of The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment lies an idea discovered by Golas in 1950: “Space is to Energy as Energy is to Mass.”

This idea was inspired by reading a popular adaptation of Einstein’s General Relativity concepts. Thaddeus Golas begins The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment with a proposition:

We are equal beings and the Universe is our relations with each other.

Each being is alive.

Each being determines the course of its own existence.

He goes on to suggest that “the function of each being is to expand and to contract.”
Thaddeus Golas equated Space with Consciousness:"Basic entities are conscious space when expanded,
unconscious mass when contracted, and alternating between these states as energy," he noted.

He described: "There are two states of being: expanded and contracted. (It might be more precise to say standing momentum outward, and standing momentum inward, but those are awkward phrases to repeat often.) An entity must be in one state or the other at any given instant.
It may sustain either state at will. Expanding consciousness is not a process of expanding like a balloon, it is a process of PROLONGING your conscious state.
You must be either conscious or unconscious in any given instant". "Energy is the rapid alternation between space and mass", he explained, "the devil, the delinquent, the messenger who delivers only half the message, the marker of time."

He coined the notion that: “Space propels energy, and energy compels matter – the propulsion is uniform; it is what we now call the force of gravity”.