The Damnedest Thing

If there is one author that parachuting, wisefooling, free-floating and American homegrown spiritual guru Jed McKenna is indebted to it has to be Friedrich Nietzsche. No other author since the long dead German wept over a horse, has been able to match his style. It has been said that Nietzsche makes sense only if read while hiking through the Alps. Only then do the emotionally charged highs and lows of his philosophy meld with the terrain. It follows the natural unraveling of the mountain range—elevation for the peaks; soul harrowing for the valleys.

This is the same instrument that McKenna has learned to play like a virtuoso. In his book “Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing,” he outlines his journey from eyes closed juvenile to freshly emerged enlightened being and finally the wisefool leader of an American ashram in the heart of Iowa. Part American gun-slinging cowboy, part detached Chinese sage, part Japanese Ronin, he journeys from student to student putting out spiritual fires.

Of course, none of this happened and the story is clearly fabricated to expound on spiritual truths that the author holds valid. In terms of authorship controversies, you are looking at the Shakespeare of spirituality. We have no Marlowe, we have no Bacon, and everyone wants to know who he is and nobody seems able to find out. Was it a collection of authors? Was it the hottest new guru on the spiritual marketplace? And if you are tempted to run off and say all these people don't have anything better to do then I have a juicy tidbit for you. A Canadian Ponzi scheme creator named Ken McMordie claimed to be McKenna and ran his own ashram in Cambodia with his own students. No one from the McKenna group came forward to debunk him. Anyone can claim his mantle without repercussions. Life imitates art.

But what is all the fuss about this man? It’s his style. Revelatory writing that forces the reader to come to terms with their beliefs and assumptions. Then you are lulled by his easygoing nature and just when you are finding the world pretty he hits you with another one of his Zen sticks. All facets are included in this book. Monstrous nihilism in which ideas of the meaning of life are thrown away for the dogged pursuit of truth and weepy eyed gratitude for what has been given. McKenna gives a parallel to a student about Krishna and God in the Mahabharata which also serves as a perfect allegory for his writing.

Krishna cheats, lies, murders, and is cowardly at various times throughout the great epic , and that’s something that anyone coming from a God’s-a-jolly good fellow mindset might have trouble processing. Krishna, however, is not a god of love and light; he represents the whole thing, so in him all the qualities must be found. A god of love and goodness would be merely a single aspect of a god who is defined as absolute. Krishna is the personification of the absolute, so if you leave child molester or genocidal maniac or puppy kicker out of him due to your own delicate sensibilities, then you’ve redefined him as something finite and we must come up with a new name for the absolute.”

The book is a trip. And the conductor of the ride is a man who has drunk deeply from the stories told by religions and philosophies across the world. The enthusiastic blurb from the cover of his third book says it best. “A masterpiece! Very disturbing.”