Title: Spirituality for Badasses: How to Find Inner Peace and Happiness Without Losing Your Cool
Author: J. Stewart Dixon
Publisher: PIE Publishing / Awakening Resource Center, LLC
Pages: 329
ISBN: 978-0985857905
Genre: Spirituality / Self-Help / Humor
Reviewed by: David Allen
Pacific Book Review
Spirituality for Badasses: How to Find Inner Peace and Happiness Without Losing Your Cool is exactly that: an expansive sometimes manic tour de force through thousands of years of received wisdom and spiritual teaching. The author gifts the reader with his encyclopedic knowledge of self-help books and spiritual traditions, in the process serving up his own very contemporary style of the pursuit of enlightenment.
Self-help books and podcasts and videos are bestsellers, clearly topping market share among reading audiences. Ever since the 1960s, titles like If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him have been startling and amusing and teaching rapt audiences. The pursuit of wisdom and knowledge, in the form of blind obedience to self-professed spiritual leaders, in the form of consciousness-altering drugs and meditation retreats and binges and radical life styles, have been constant components of the cultural zeitgeist. Spirituality for Badasses takes a very modern swipe at previous efforts and offers its own unique brand of self-knowledge and attainment.
The lesson plan is as follows. The omniscient author, like an updated Don Juan (The Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Carlos Castaneda), serves as Zen master and teacher for the reader in a series of irreverent often amusing encounters. J. Stewart Dixon, the author, self-discloses, exhorts, and guides his reader/student through a series of meaningful encounters with self, consciousness, and the fabric of what we loosely refer to as ‘reality.’ Dixon always keeps it real and fresh with plentiful allusions to pop culture, to television and movies and consumer brands that serve to keep the reader in this very moment of history and awareness. The author’s use of pop culture and often obscene colloquialism is in the service of keeping his spiritual smorgasbord timely and relevant.
Dixon’s hortatory efforts are never wide of the mark. He rightfully focuses on the primacy of consciousness and awareness. He has clearly done his spiritual homework and he succeeds at distilling the effective and life-changing ingredients of contemplation and initiation. His relationship to his student/reader is like a shaman drill sergeant cajoling and nudging and ultimately getting his team over the hurdle.
The identification of ego as a diluent and obstacle to enlightenment is right on as well. The narrative voice in Spirituality for Badasses is always well intentioned. Sometimes the mentor has to be cruel to be kind! The obvious parallel here is the necessary focused discipline anyone interested in pursuing the stratosphere must enforce in training his or her own consciousness. Spirituality for Badasses is a very contemporary spin on the pursuit of self-knowledge, and serves its lessons up in easily accessible portions. You can read it one byte at a time, or at any greater length.
