"I Don't Want to be Your Guru, but I Have Something to Say," by Joyce Shafer - Book Review

"I Don't Desire to be Your Guru, but I have got got Something to Say" is James Joyce Shafer's gift to me. This book, short and easy-to-read, do me recognize that other books, sharing wisdom that I have read, were merely building up to this book. The book could be read in one afternoon, but why would you desire to? I took my clip reading this book and intentionally did not tag in it, high spot or flag any portion of it. I desire to read it again before I really draw the lessons out of the text.

Through an easy departure conversation in a cafe, lessons about how we see ourselves and the human race around us are shared between two people. Each lesson is one which I desire to enjoy – like a delicious amuses-bouche. An amuses-bouche is bite-sized morsel served before the first course of study of a meal. And its purpose is to tantalize (or amuse) the oral cavity and indeed tease the diner with what the chef have prepared for the followers courses. "I Don't Desire to be Your Guru" functions up an array of amuses-bouche – each lesson teasing me with the possibility of how my life could be altered, bettered, lifted by integrating these lessons into it.

In "I Don't Desire to be Your Guru," the loose narrative which environments these lessons is a immature adult female named AJ (though I say it could be a man, but as I am a adult female I surmise Ms. Shafer intended me to see AJ as a woman) who is returning to the land site where she had this life-changing conversation with Old Bill. She is returning 10 old age after the conversation – and Iodine suspect that of everything she learned in her conversation with this "guru," it could take 10 old age to really incorporate and reflect on these lessons as portion of your mundane life. And I, for one, can't wait to acquire started!

The Power of Your Supermind: A Book Review

Vernon Howard authored an amazing number of books, booklets and other writings, all in that area of spirituality that goes by so many names, among them metaphysics, "the perennial philosophy," new thought and cosmic consciousness, just to name a few.

One of his best books is The Power of Your Supermind. It is second perhaps only to The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power as his clearest, most compelling work. In some ways, though, it outshines Cosmic Power, for example, in the wealth of practical exercises and suggestions it provides for getting in touch with (in Howard's words) "that ... remarkable part of you ... that is above and beyond conditioned human thought."

Howard has a special knack for stating timeless truths in fresh ways that hit the reader with sometimes startling newness. Often they are simply those things we knew all along -- or had encountered before in the pages of the world's great wisdom literature -- but that he is able to show to us in a new light.

I've always appreciated the insight from Lao-tse the Taoist that rules of morality arose from the loss of people's naturalness in the world, and are not really helpful at establishing goodness. Vernon Howard puts it this way: "Unawakened people are victims of their public virtues. I don't know anything more painful than trying to be 'good' people; they are so bad. ... But the self-unified man ... is good simply because it cannot occur to him to be anything else. Only an awakened man is truly moral."

Howard sums up the entire book nicely in the concluding chapter, "How to Have Everything Right through the Supermind." A person in a hurry could go directly to this chapter, make a committed effort to put into practice its suggestions, and find themselves achieving amazing progress on the spiritual/self-improvement path.

The Power of Your Supermind is published by Prentice Hall of Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; ISBN # 0-13-686718-9.