Reviews for Easy Death

The average rating for Easy Death based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-08-16 00:00:00 Anthony Beck The first edition contains the writings and talks of a very wise scholar of Eastern none duality. It is no exaggeration to say that this scholar will become the best writer on Eastern ideas in the English language. Even as the Avatar, he got better at describing and writing, cliche free. The second edition of the fantastic musings from the 1970's, imaginatively titled titled, Easy Death. The second edition would not be an improvement but for a few selections from the man's Dawn Horse Testament which are worth the few pence purchase. Adi Da is easily the best spiritual writer in the English language, as attested in the Dawn Horse. Sadly the scholarly writing by those outside the cult had fled the building at the time of the second edition. The third edition is pure cultish to the extreme! Was he a Divine being? More likely he a genius scholar, in fact a psychological genius who new the foibles of the human condition more than Wilber, Watts and the rest of the spiritually thirsty scholars. The trouble with the East is that the enlightened person becomes all knowing, and he speaks from his 'direct experience' rather than from scripture. But all it takes then is for a brainy conman to memorize the scripture and pretend to be talking from direct experience. Who can tell the difference? Even Alan Watts could not. Alan Watts and many other scholars proclaimed this scholar not to be one, but an adept or an enlightened being! Watts read the first edition of Knee of Listening and proclaimed the author to be enlightened. What what was the evidence? Merely writing up what is in Scripture but in a brilliant English. Ken Wilber also believed the scholar to not a mere scholar, but in fact an 'adept'. The Yoga scholar, Georg Feuerstein also had the same craving like Wilber and Watts. The craving is reading about enlightened people and wanting to come across a real one, right now! Osho makes the same point about Westerners travelling to India in search of an enlightened person. Osho says there is an obvious craving in these people which will dampen their critical mind and there are Baba's on the other side waiting to scoop up these Westerners with there spiritual hooks. But hallelujah, says Watts, we now have an enlightened being born in the West!! So Feuerstein writes an article on the grace of foot touching. The article is still online. Feuerstein sold himself as a devotee to the scholar who he thought was an adept, in fact, one who knows death and who can explain the process better than Jesus or the Buddha because he is here now, a real adept, a realizer, deserves his feet to be touched a thousand times! You too can enjoy this sort of praise from Feuerstein in the first edition of Easy Death. The first edition of Easy Death has much writing from Feuerstein. In his very early books, Da Free John allowed others to share in his writings. And so the first edition of Easy Death has an intro by Kenneth Ring, the famous near death experience researcher. I also own the second edition of Easy Death. That second edition was still written for an audience. So one picks up the book, and reads. This third edition seems to be written strictly for his devotees. So there is a little chapter on his Divine Emergence blah blah, and a photo of the Avatar! One new to all this business will be baffled. But if you are used to his later hyperbolic writings, which are enjoyable, then the book is still readable. Surprisingly the printing and paper feels very cheap and the cover is terrible. I imagined no publisher will have a bad cover if they were confident that inside will be very well printed. But no. The publishers of the third edition seem to be so confident that this is the book of books that they printed it as cheaply as possible. This is a shame. The plus points are chapters from his later books which are fantastic. But the best parts I feel are in the first edition. There you can also read Feuerstein along with Adi Da. Overall the message is that we think this fleshy body is real and divinity is false. Adi Da Samraj points out that the body isn't real and the Divine Condition is who we are and so there is no death. However, this is a very Eastern idea and can seem nihilistic to the mind. Also, it is not original but, like I said, Adi Da Samraj was re-writing the East. The talk titled Paradox of Reincarnation is great and is worth the purchase. Also the chapters on the Cosmic Mandala are breathtaking. But others have pointed out that Adi Da is not original. He is merely repeating what the Tibetans, the Buddhists and the Advaitins have been doing but in original and better language. So you have to have faith in he East. Like I said, he writes gloriously but most of what he writes is 'Me', 'Me', 'Me'!! So overall we shouldn't trust this guy, or even trust the East. How about the Near Death Experience? All Adi Da can say is that it is a hallucination or the ego dying to live. This is typical Richard Dawkins closed mindedness. Sadly even Nisargadatta and Ramana Maharshi is say the same thing. I have some across many Buddhists and advaitins who completely dismiss NDE's and, say, the psychedelic experience, with the same atheistic hubris like they know something you don't. But we only take the East seriously because it is trendy to do so. A good counterweight to the East is Emanuel Swedenborg. There are some great video's online. Swedenborg is far from nihilistic and his system is just as clever as any Eastern system. I wish you well in your search.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-08-03 00:00:00 Jean Lapointe My boyfriend's grandmother in Australia died a month before we were due back to see his family. I wasn't sure how he'd take it, since death can bring about so many different emotions, but at the end of each chapter, he wanted me to keep going and said, "No, this is good." I found it really educational about death, our ideas fears and misconceptions about it. In some ways the most valuable things i read were what the living can do to serve the dying through the transition that occurs during the death process. If it can be said, this book helped to make sense out of death and at the same time teaches about life.