The Bhutanese Guide to Happiness
Sub title: 365 Proverbs from the World’s Happiest Nation
What we can learn from a country where Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product
In clear, simple prose, and with poetic turns of phrase, this inspirational collection of quotations—apart from being funny and quirky—reflects the values of the unique country of Bhutan, and its universal embrace of compassion, understanding and kindness. This remarkable little kingdom in the Eastern Himalayas may just hold the secret to lifelong happiness.
The Bhutanese grounding in Buddhist ideals suggests that material and spiritual development should occur side by side—something we can forget too often. So dive into this inspiring collection of wisdom, proverbs and general sage advice to help you along your own road to happiness—or at least put a smile on your face.
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Zen
Sub title: Dang Dang Doko Dang
Learn how to free your mind
In these lectures on Zen, Osho shows the way to self-realization without believing in any God. He argues that the mind is increasingly our barrier to happiness and truth and that Zen teaches you how to detach yourself from it. By doing so, you have the chance to truly experience yourself and to connect with your own being. This is the heart of Zen thought and Osho calls it the religion of the future—a vision that goes beyond organized religion to an individual ‘religiousness’.
Lucid and profound, and told with great simplicity, Zen: Dang Dang Doko Dang is an utterly inspiring book from one of our great spiritual masters. It will transform the way you live and perceive the world.
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In Search of Oneness
Sub title: The Bhagavd Gita and Koran Through Sufi Eyes
If man were to come out of the self-limiting veil that covers his eyes, what glorious revelations he will see in every faith. —Ghalib
This free-flowing narrative illuminates the journey of the author, a devout Muslim, through sacred books and holy men of all religions—starting with his own—in search of a personal god and faith, and his coming upon the Bhagavad Gita. Examining commentaries on this text, from Sankara to Abdur Rahman Chishti, alongside some renderings of the Quran here, Moosa Raza finds many common threads: summoning God through sadhana or dhikr; reaching God through daan or giving and the service of the destitute; and seeking ecstasy through self-mastery, detachment and surrender.
These original observations are complemented by his encounters with people practising these values, like his ailing school teacher who felt God was always beside him or his friend, a senior civil servant, who, trusting in Allah’s providence, kept an open home for the poor and the homeless. Through these experiences and his own striving, Raza celebrates the oneness and power of faith and spirituality, showing a path for other seekers.
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The Alchemy of Well-Being
Reach your inherent potential, by attuning yourself to you
Each one of us wants to achieve excellence in whatever we do, but the first resistance we face may come from within ourselves. We prevent ourselves from doing our best, reaching our intrinsic worth and feeling truly well within. The key to lasting well-being is finding our ‘accordance with self’, i.e, removing our internal resistance and acting in harmony with ourselves. But how?
Only our ‘original solution’ (originating from within us) can provide this accordance.
This practical guide, based upon nine years of research, with more than four thousand client visits, shows:
• why accordance with self is a must for lasting well-being,
• why only your original solution provides this accordance for you,
• and how you build your original solution easily, from inside out.
Others did this with grace; their results endure. You can do it too.
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Flight of the Alone to the Alone
Sub title: Talks on the Kaivalya Upanishad
The ancient Kaivalya Upanishad is a search for ultimate freedom. It begins with a prayer to strengthen the senses. It takes great individual effort to become free, says Osho, but before making that effort, a greater, existential power has to be invoked: 'the first effort'. Embracing the senses is not a sign of weakness or indiscipline. The senses are, on the contrary, the door to experiencing the divine, a means to freedom. Often people misunderstand this, calling that which comes within the grasp of our sense organs 'the world' and that which doesn't, 'the divine'. According to this Upanishad and to Osho, both are divine. That is why Osho continually emphasizes the importance of love, celebration, creativity and humour on the path of awareness. Flight of the Alone to the Alone brings together a series of talks given by Osho on the Kaivalya Upanishad. It explores the nature of existence and tackles some of life's most fundamental challenges: achievement, loneliness, the eternal quest for happiness, and freedom.
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A Step Away From Paradise
Sub title: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality
"A Step Away from Paradise tells the story of Tibet’s Tulshuk Lingpa, a visionary lama who in 1962 launched an expedition to what he and his followers believed to be the land of immortality described in twelfth-century Tibetan tradition. With over 300 disciples, he ventured up a remote Himalayan mountain at the Nepal-Sikkim border in order to ‘open the way’ to a hidden land of plenty found on no map. Fifty years later, Thomas K. Shor tracks down the surviving members of this visionary expedition and entwines their remarkable stories of faith and adventure with his own quest to discover the reality of this land known as Beyul. What emerges is a breathtaking story alive with possibility, bringing the reader as close to the Hidden Land as a book possibly can. As the astounding account unfolds, the reader is sure to repeat the question constantly raised by the author in his interviews: And then what happened? The story recalls and evokes one of humanity's oldest aspirations—that of finding a stairway to paradise "
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Pilgrim's India
Sub title: An Anthology
"More people have embarked on a quest for the sacred in India than anywhere else. An exceptionally rich religious tradition and an abundance of minor and major pilgrim sites have given seekers ample motivation to pack their bags and go on a search. Pilgrim’s India is about all journeys impelled by the idea of the sacred. It brings together essays and poems--from the Katha Upanishad, Fa-Hien, Basavanna and Kabir to Paul Brunton, Richard Lannoy, Amit Chaudhuri, Arun Kolatkar and others--about various aspects of trips undertaken in the name of God. Readers will encounter the watchful reserve of a British journalist in southern India, the vigorous prose of a contemporary Sikh pilgrim, a French author-adventurer’s appraisal of the Ellora caves, a modern-day Zoroastrian’s reflections on Udvada and a woman’s impression of what it means to be Muslim in India. Mystics, witnesses and wanderers write about the Supreme Being, about journeys and destinations, false starts, bottlenecks and blind alleys, about humour, rage and revelation--all of which make this anthology a deeply absorbing and idiosyncratic take on pilgrims and pilgrim trails in India."
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