{"product_id":"2940154537992","title":"Embracing the Lotus: A Long Journey to a Reluctant Enlightenment; A Poetic Allegory","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis book is a fictional, poetic, first person narrative by a successful man in his 50s that begins with a flashback to when he was an ambitious mining engineer of 27, married, with 2 children, and living a normal, unconscious, materialistic, ego-driven life that satisfies him until he goes through a series of mystical experiences that shatter his worldview and his conception of himself.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese experiences open him up to an unfamiliar spiritual reality, to a deeper aspect of his own being, and compel him to write inspired, mystical and philosophical poetry. While living his mundane life, he spends many nights in a deep trance scribbling out reams of inspired poetry, quickly discovering that these inspirations are the result of an intimate communion with a powerful, spiritual entity—a Muse. This communion is a transforming, mystical experience.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA major promotion at work puts demands on him that yank him away from that poetry, end his magical communion with the Muse, and quickly causes the mystical, transformative world he'd been entering, to vanish. This temporarily concerns him, but the ego-enhancement provided by his promotion induces him to dive back into his former worldview, former ego-defined sense of self, and former ego-driven life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOver the next 27 years, he finds purpose and meaning milking from the cow of that normal, materialistic, ego-driven life, every drop of success it has in its udder, eventually fulfilling his ambition to become a mine manager. However, like so many achievement-driven and successful men, he reaches the point where the cream of meaning in that cow runs dry. Since he already has a masculinity-affirming sports car and a beautiful wife he still loves, he cannot not solve his mid-life, existential despair through the buying of a sports car or the acquiring a trophy wife, so he gives into a burgeoning compulsion to reconnect with those meaningful mystical experiences that he'd abandoned 27 years earlier.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe quickly discovers that buying a sports car or acquiring a trophy wife would be easier than reconnecting with those long-betrayed mystical states. However spontaneously they manifested in him when he was 27, they were now playing a serious game of hide-and-seek, and none of the intelligence, knowledge, drive, discipline and willpower that made him a successful mine manager, can help him reconnect with them. On realizing this, he sinks into a deep depression.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is in the nature of depression that it either destroys or transforms the person suffering in it, and he chooses the transformational path, forcing himself to spend long, dark, painful hours thinking about life and his life, about reason and mysticism, about materialism and spirituality, and about modern society's ego-dominant and materialistic values.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe discovers that by going back to, and reworking, the mystical poetry he had written all those years before, he can establish a weak connection with that lost mystical world.\u003cbr\u003eWhile working on that poetry, he partially reconnects with that mystical world that he'd betrayed and lost. In doing this, he realizes that in having possessed and thrown away that spiritual world, and then in struggling so hard to reconnect with it, he now understands it at a much deeper level. He also more deeply understands the stark nature and dangerous deficiencies of the spiritual wasteland that is the \"normal,\" rational, materialistic, ego-dominated and materialist science-ruled world—and worldview— that had swallowed him up for those intervening 27 years.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFinally, he reaches a point in his quest to reconnect with that mystical world where it again mysteriously manifests and embraces him as it once had, and he gains from it a deeper, more spiritual understanding of himself and life. His capacity to write new, Muse-inspired, mystical and philosophical poetry returns, and this poem is the first manifestation of that return.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gregory","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47076437721328,"sku":"2940154537992","price":3.33,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940154537992_p0.jpg?v=1764070118","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940154537992","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}