Hubo una vez un fuego : El despertar a la consciencia cósmica

Once upon a time, there was a fire. Not outside, but within. Today, it's an ember, almost extinguished, almost forgotten, yet still burning beneath the layers of our identity, our ideas, our fears… This book is an invitation to approach that ember, to blow upon it, to rekindle the fire. However, it is also a map —lucid, free, profoundly human— of the spiritual journey: a path that traverses the different levels of reality, of the ego, of desire, of suffering, of death, of love, and of the possibility of awakening. A path without shortcuts where the mind ceases to be master, ceases to command, and learns to place itself at the service of something vaster. Immeasurable. Thus, throughout these pages, Ram Dass displays his mastery and experience with Theravada Buddhism and Zen, Bhakti devotion and Advaita Vedanta, Western psychology and Taoist texts, without any tradition overshadowing the others, because what interests him is not the form, but the fire that burns beneath them all. But Ram Dass is not your typical teacher. A brilliant professor at Harvard University, he was expelled for experimenting with psychedelic substances in an attempt to understand what we call "consciousness." His quest led him to the East, where he was a devoted disciple of his Indian master and, at the same time, a critical, provocative, and iconoclastic thinker. A man who could speak of God with rigor and humor, of enlightenment and failure, of devotion and LSD, of surrender and identity, of asceticism and bisexuality, without shying away from any contradiction. This volume blends the precision of a psychologist, the wisdom of Eastern traditions, and a radically contemporary voice that doesn't seek to convince us, but rather to point us toward a possible path. It's a book for those of us who feel that something isn't quite right. For those willing to look inward and, perhaps, let the fire do its work.