Spiritual Warfare (eBook)

Jed McKenna (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
476 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
9780980184808 (ISBN)

Infos

Guns and bombs are children's toys,
A true war wages, and you're invited.

It's an invitation you may not be able to accept if you want to, or decline if you don't. It's an invitation to fight in a war like no other; a war where loss is counted as gain, surrender as victory, and where the enemy you must face, an enemy of unimaginable superiority, is yourself.

  Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

    -Nietzsche

Spiritual Warfare is a book for those who do want to know; people who want to escape from their dark asylum and experience a direct and authentic spirituality; people for whom it's time to look, to think, to know, and, at long last, to put away childish things.

'Jed McKenna is an American original.' -Lama Surya Das

'Absolutely marvelous, splendid, perfect book!' -Shri Acharya

'These books have profoundly changed my life.' -C. Jensen

'These books are precious gifts to humanity.' -E. De Vries

'Thank you for the books. I've been waiting all my life for them.' -C. Vankeith

'I can think of no other author I'd recommend more highly.' -M.R. Fleming

'Jed McKenna's books are so compelling I can hardly put them down!' -Ray Napolitano, Inner Directions Foundation

'Jed's books have turned my entire understanding of life, enlightenment, spirituality and everything upside down.' -M. Bhagat

'Jed McKenna's description of life after enlightenment is so good that 99.9% of his readers might not understand how truly profound it really is.' -Satyam Nadeen, From Onions To Pearls

'In this book lies the truth of the world.'
Richard Ritsudo Morrissey, Zen Buddhist Priest

'I say an eternal thank you for the trilogy. Nothing compares to this writing.' -JH, MN

Visit Wisefool Press to learn more.

Textauszug

Timeless Time & Spaceless Space

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or even register.

Eugène Ionesco

THE REST OF THE EVENING and early morning were anticlimactic but not unpleasant. No one seemed to harbor any ill-will toward me and no one treated me like the reckless dipshit you might suppose. The sergeant wasn’t pleased, mainly because he had to get the city attorney out of bed so they could figure out something to charge me with. The tricky part was that, to everyone’s surprise, I hadn’t done anything illegal. That didn’t matter; there was no way they were letting me go without charging me with something. I saw that they were having a hard time thinking up a charge, so I assured them that I was leaving the area soon and wouldn’t be returning for a court date. That seemed to relax them a bit.

Still, I ended up spending four hours in the cop shop while they put it together. It was all pretty informal; cuffs off, a light pat-down, taking some information. No fingerprinting or photographing. I didn’t have my wallet so I couldn’t prove who I was, which they weren’t too thrilled about.

“Drive me to my house and I’ll grab my wallet,” I suggested. “You’re probably gonna wanna set a fine, so I’ll need my credit cards anyway.”

“We don’t take credit cards,” grumbled the sergeant.

“Then you’ll have to run me by the ATM over on Lakeview, too,” I said. Then, to make sure they didn’t overtax my munificence, I added: “But my daily limit is a hundred bucks. If it’s more than that I guess I’ll be your guest for awhile.”

That little fib worked and the fine would eventually turn out to be a hundred bucks. Go figure.

“Don’t you have some one-size-fits-all charge to suit every occasion?” I asked. “Disturbing the peace, interfering with official acts, disorderly conduct, something like that?”

That just caused more grumbling. Whatever the charge ended up being, we all knew it was just a formality; they had to charge something and I had to pay something, and it had to be done in such a way that I was set loose that night and that would be the end of it; no court appearance, no lawyers, no scrutiny.

Fine with me. I was getting snoozy.

They told a big young cop named Ben to take me to my house, to the cash machine and back. I rode in the front seat, no restraint. He waited while I ran in for my wallet. He was a polite kid, a former highschool linebacker type, who was eager to do a play-by-play reenactment of the evening’s chase.

“I almost had you there by the sled-run,” he said proudly, meaning the toboggan slide.

“Oh, that was you? Yep, that was darn close. What was it you yelled? I couldn’t make it out.”

“Yeah,” he laughs good-naturedly. “I started to yell ‘Freeze!’, but that seemed like TV stuff so I changed it to ‘Stop!’ in the middle but didn’t get it all out. I think I yelled ‘Free-stab!’”

“Yeah,” I agree, “that’s what it sounded like. Free stab.”

“Where’d you get off to? I thought I was right behind you.”

Time to lie. Everyone in the police station had been doing this sort of excited retelling of the chase and their own role in it. In a town like this, tonight would be talked about and recounted for years to come; guns had been drawn, county was involved, dogs and helicopters were almost called in, deadly words had been spoken in earnest. It turned out that the runner wasn’t a real criminal, but no one knew that when it was happening. Coulda been a real desperado.

“You were right behind me,” I told him. In truth, I had ducked behind some hedges, watched him lumber by, and went back the way he had come. “I thought you had me easy, but I just ran flat out and hid in a kid’s treehouse till it was quiet.”

That pleased him. That was a tale he could tell.

*

“The sergeant aimed his gun at your head and threatened to shoot you if you moved?” asks Lisa, setting down the pages she’d just read. It’s a month after these events and we’re sitting at my poolside desk on a small estate in Mexico where we are both living.

“Yeah, why?” I look up from my laptop at the lake and mountains and rub my eyes. “Is that weird?”

“I don’t know,” she says, “it sounds a little theatrical.”

“He had to reach across himself and lift his stomach up with one hand so he could pull out his gun with the other. It wasn’t that theatrical.”

“Were you scared?”

“Of what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, uh, being shot in the head?”

I shrug.

“That’s about the least scary thing I can think of.”

“Jesus, you’re a strange man.”

I shrug again.

*

Over the course of the few quiet months I spent living in that resort town in New England, the idea began forming in my head that there might be a need for a third book; that there were still important things left unsaid and other things that had been said but not fully explored. When I finished the first book, Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing, it was a relief to have it out of my system and be done with it. But not for long. The second one, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, began making its presence known, so we got that one out. Again, I felt that I had it out of my system and no more writing would be necessary, meaning, in effect, that I was done with teaching, corresponding, writing, and all things spiritual. Then, over the few months before the thing with the cops, there it was again. I didn’t nurture it, but I understood from those earliest stirrings that it would survive and that a third book would need to be written. I didn’t do anything to encourage it. I just let it sit there in my head to live or die on its own.

The argument against doing a third book was that I was out of the teaching mode and spiritual mindset, and happily so. I was no longer communicating with anyone on these topics and they were no longer lively in my thoughts. They were out of my system and environment, and there was nothing to suggest that I would be re-entering the world of human spirituality. Where would a third book come from?

More than that, my own connection to the pre-awakened human experience was now so tenuous that I doubted a third book was even possible. The paradigm gap had grown too wide. I could no longer remember what life was like on the other side. My own experience was now so far removed from what most people called reality that there was practically no overlap. I see humans the way humans see chimps; from the same evolutionary remove. My memories of my own pre-awakened state were now as remote and impersonal as my memories of the second grade. I mentioned this gradual erosion of my dreamstate personhood in both books. I had been making an effort to maintain a connection, but after Incorrect I let it go, and now it was all but gone.

One of the arguments in favor of a third book was that it would provide a framework within which I could function; a context in which I could have something to do and a reason to do it. All context is artificial, of course, but what do I care? I like being alive, but it’s more fun when there’s a game to play. Writing with an audience in mind is one such game.

So I made the standard deal with the universe. If you want the book written, lay it out in front of me and I’ll write it. I’m not going to chase it, I’m not going to struggle to come up with stuff to write about. That would be artificial and egoic. I couldn’t do it and it wouldn’t work. I knew nothing like that was being asked of me, but I wanted a clear understanding between us: If you want a third book, I’ll do it, but the only way it’s going to happen is if you orchestrate it. Drop it in my lap.

Dealing with the universe this way is nothing new to me. We understand each other pretty well. I know how to speak and I know how to understand what I’m being told. Patterns, signs, subtle variations in rightness and not-rightness, flow and obstruction; this is how it works. I make it sound as if the universe and I were two separate things, but it’s actually the absence of that artificial distinction that I’m talking about. This is one of the things we’ll be taking a closer look at in this book. This is the thing that everyone wants to know about and tap into; effortless functioning, direct knowing, the manifestation of abundance, health, prosperity, happiness. Understand how the universe works, merge back into it, learn to operate in alignment with it, and you’ll blush to recall that you once thought that Albus and Obi-Wan had cool powers.

There are plenty of books about how to manifest our desires from within the segregated state of Human Childhood; to use prayer or wishcraft or affirmations or laws of attraction to get a better house, a faster car, the perfect mate, and so on. What we’ll be discussing in this book is making the transition to the integrated state of Human Adulthood and developing within it, so that prayer, wishcraft, affirmations, and laws of attraction become superfluous, the way cheating becomes superfluous when you know the answers.

Once that initial agreement with the universe...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.8.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Esoterik / Spiritualität
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Buddhismus
• ISBN-13: 9780980184808 / 9780980184808