Dirty Enlightenment: The Inherent Perfection of Imperfection (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781484134849)

My "spiritual" life proper began in 1973, when at the age of 22 I had the extreme good fortune to receive "Transmission" from Pino Turolla. In the clarity I attained at that time I realized that my entire life had led up to that event, my character and obsessive nature regarding exploring Reality conspiring to the inevitability of the ongoing unfoldment that was quickened at that time, finally to bear fruit in more recent years. The pattern of Life is indeed astounding, a symphony of meaningfulness and profundity becoming more itself as it spirals out/inwards over the spiderweb of time... After that quickening I redoubled my spiritual explorations, driven to strive to make some sense of what had happened, was happening, to me, what this exceedingly strange circumstance of my experience was, in the context of both my own inspirations and various more traditional approaches to these matters, including Raja, Jnana, and Bhakti Yogas (and being dragged kicking, screaming, and bleeding through Karma Yoga), Quabalah, Western occultism, Tarot, Shamanism, Dzogchen, Taoism, Tantra, Buddhism, and Kashmir Shaivism, among other spiritual traditions; and the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, Bhagavan Nityananda, Nisargadatta, Longchen Rabjam, Lao Tzu, Hui Neng, Aliester Crowley, Jesus Christ, Neem Karoli Baba, and Austin Spare, among many others. Finally in a quiet moment in 1997, recovering from cancer at the time, on a sunny February afternoon, sitting alone in my living room, a tiny opening of realization gently flowed into appearance, the entire universe fractally crystalizing around it in instantaneous virtual ripples, eating all separation, all event, even all Being, into absolute indescribable Radiance, of me/it/everything/nothing laughing/crying/wonder, as it ever was and ever will be... The accumulation of perspectives that were acquired over the course of all that (unnecessary?) exploration of traditional philosophies enables me to correlate ideas from within those traditions, when useful, in the context of a more direct, pragmatic, non-jargon-laden presentation of the direct discovery of the mystery of what YOU are, that I have named the Yoga of Radiant Presence.