Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart Author: Ram Dass | Language: English | ISBN:
B00E6EFGM8 | Format: EPUB
Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart Description
NOTE: The ebook does not contain the spoken-word audio component included in the original printed edition.
Sometimes illumination occurs spontaneously or, as Ram Dass experienced, in a heart-wrenching moment of opening. More commonly, it happens when we polish the mirror of the heart with daily practice—and see beyond the illusion of our transient thoughts and emotions to the vast and luminous landscape of our true nature.
For five decades, Ram Dass has explored the depths of consciousness and love and brought them to life as service to others. With Polishing the Mirror, he gathers together his essential teachings for living in the eternal present, here and now.
Readers will find within these pages a rich combination of perennial wisdom, humor, teaching stories, and detailed guidance on Ram Dass' own spiritual practices, including:
- Bhakti Yoga—opening our hearts to unconditional love
- Practices for living, aging, dying, and embracing the natural flow of life
- Karma Yoga—how selfless service can profoundly transform us
- Working with fear and suffering as a path to grace and freedom
- Step-by-step guidance in devotional chant, meditation and mantra practice, and much more
For those new to Ram Dass' teachings, and for those to whom they are old friends, here is this vanguard spiritual explorer's complete guide to discovering who we are and why we are here, and how to become beacons of unconditional love.
- File Size: 352 KB
- Print Length: 196 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1604079673
- Publisher: Sounds True; 1 edition (August 1, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00E6EFGM8
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,150 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #5
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Exercise & Fitness > Yoga - #40
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Self-Help > Spiritual - #62
in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Exercise & Fitness > Yoga
- #5
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Exercise & Fitness > Yoga - #40
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Self-Help > Spiritual - #62
in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Exercise & Fitness > Yoga
Baby Boomers know Ram Dass as an American celebrity from the 1960s who came back from India in 1971 to publish a strange square-shaped book: Be Here Now. Some call that book "the Baby Boomers' Bible"--and there is a good argument behind such a claim. It wasn't until the era of Be Here Now that millions of Americans could immerse themselves in full-scale Asian spirituality and the rest of the world's spiritual diversity.
Since its debut, Be Here Now has racked up a stunning total of 2 million copies sold--and counting. Ram Dass has built on his original message in 11 additional books, a series of audio recordings, documentary films and short videos. Ram Dass also is famous for his 1978 establishment of the Seva Foundation, a highly respected charity that primarily focuses on curing illnesses of the eye in Asia, Africa and Native American communities.
Then, in 1997, Ram Dass made headlines once again for suffering a devastating stroke. As Baby Boomers, we were confronting our own looming mortality as we watched this perennially smiling genie of the `60s utterly humbled by his own body. As Ram Dass puts it himself: "I went from driving my sports car wherever I wanted to go--to being a passenger."
Now, flash forward 16 years to 2013 and in the opening pages of his newest book, Ram Dass briefly retells the dramatic story that many Baby Boomers know so well: As a rising star in the Harvard faculty, 30-something psychologist Dr. Richard Alpert teamed up with psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary. Ram Dass understates their titanic collision: "Meeting Tim was a major turning point in my life." No kidding!
Polishing the Mirror could've been called Polishing the Paradox, it's so wholeheartedly devoted to cherishing the impossible possibilities of life while fearlessly inviting the inscrutable potential of death, which to Ram Dass is simply "another moment." I think Ram Dass's platform - that of spiritually intrepid westerner transformed into eastern spiritual exemplar - remains, if no longer unique, then uniquely compelling. The authenticity of his personal transformation, his forty-odd years of devotion to loving everybody, serving everybody and remembering God, (the dharma bestowed upon him by his guru), his disarmingly ambitionless ambition, charming anecdotal humor, approachable scholarship and engaging, open-hearted personality, are to be beheld afresh in this elegant spiritual summary and approachable guidebook. I'm comforted and perplexed by his adventurous faith and spiritual courage, by the manner in which, like a child, he abides in and anticipates wonder, finding it - the unremote grace of it - in the pleasure perhaps of a big breakfast, a day at the beach and equally, in the incalculable mystery of suffering or in the "presence of Truth" he enjoys through his work with the dying. The book is invitingly wise, patient and compassionate, adeptly constructed upon Ram Dass's three-legged yogic foot stool of choice - a careful blending of the Bhakti, Jhana and Karma schools. It allays the suffering of our condition while never diminishing its imperative for self work.
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