Jed McKenna, the Howard Roark of Spiritual Enlightenment

I was just listening to the voice reading McKenna, Don’t care much for the inflection..liked your analysis…thanks, Moodle

Moodle,

I know what you mean about the narrator’s voice. As the story progresses, for whatever it’s worth, I found myself liking it more and more.

I never got out of it what I get from listening to the voice of Eckhart Tolle or Adyashanti, but after the opening chapters I did come to enjoy the narrator’s performance on its own terms.

Joshua

Homespun American enlightenment. Rings very true as experience that can’t be fictionalized by someone who has not been there, that is, enlightenment. Not warm and fuzzy but Jed emerges as an engaging personality who belies his own claims to detachment by he passion of his voice.

If this book were a true memoir, I might have been very impressed by it. But I realized halfway through that it IS a novel–a fantasy about metaphysics–and I dropped it in disgust, and an anger that I came so close to being suckered. There is too much here that doesn’t ring true.

So rather than bring me any sort of enlightenment (in the common sense of the word), or open my mind, it only served to crank up my skepticism to new highs. Good job, author.

Marc,

A few thoughts in response to your comment:

It is actually not a fantasy about metaphysics. The metaphysical aspects of awakening that McKenna describes are corroborated by other spiritual teachers (e.g., Adyashanti and Eckhart Tolle) who’ve gone on the public record about their own awakening experiences.

In general, one of the biggest problems with spiritual growth is that students tend to identify personally with the teacher and rely too much on the teacher’s authority, rather than accepting personal responsibility for the truth of their own path.

In this regard, McKenna does students a great service: He is like the messenger who shows up on your door, hands you a lengthy scroll of sacred scripture, and then commits seppuku right there on your doorstep. You are left with nothing but the discerning judgment of your own mind, with which to evaluate the truth of the teaching.

That said, I’ve also heard that Adyashanti (who has more credibility with me than any other teacher of enlightenment) finds McKenna to be one of the few contemporary writers whose descriptions of enlightenment he enjoys reading.

So with that in mind, I do hope you will finish the book. Some of the descriptions toward the end of the book are particularly revealing and instructive.

Perhaps when the time is right…

Joshua

Fictional character or autobiography, I find McKenna’s words ring consistently true for me. Often, if I am reading a spiritual / metaphysical book I find myself altering words or phrases that, to me, reflect cultural conditioning or socially accepted premises rather than having actual meaning. I read McKenna’s trilogy with no mental red pen at all. However, I have not succeeded (yet!) in persuing the path he laid out. I have spent years, on and off, in various variations on the theme of eliminating beliefs, so I figured I had a good head start. After 3 or 4 months of work, I am still stuck in dual non-awareness, and not sure what falsehoods are still holding me here. What I loved about Jed’s writing, as opposed to say Eckhart Tolle or others, is that he is more interested in telling you how to get there than just describing the scenery. Who else is trying to make the trip, and how are you doing?

I gotta say I fucking loved the title of the article, i.e. bringing up Howard Roark.