This book about one man’s experience of enlightenment and his life teaching others about it at a small Iowa ashram is a fantastic exercise in critical thinking.  Well-written and entertaining to read, it offers a valuable perspective on the difference between the kind of yummy, mystical unity experience that most people assume is enlightenment, and what McKenna refers to as actual truth realization, the rather less comfortable process of losing complete identification with your sense of self.  

The book is so enjoyable to read, it took me a while to notice the numerous contradictions within it. The author spends a lot of time making absolute statements based in the authority of his self-proclaimed enlightenment, while at the same time warning readers to be wary of listening to people like him.  In addition, I couldn’t quite shake questions about whether or not the book is the true memoir it presents itself to be, or if it is instead the creative product of some Iowa Writer’s Workshop student who got waylaid in Fairfield for a time.  While many of his insights feel spot on, I could find no other information on this teacher or his supposed Iowa ashram anywhere.  I find it hard to believe that a teacher so skilled could remain completely under the radar if, he is, in fact a real person.  Some may feel that the information within it is so valuable that it doesn’t matter, but I find the idea that a book that claims to be about essential truth might in fact be based on a fundamental falsehood more than a little ironic.

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One of the reasons I found myself so engrossed in this memoir of a woman’s year of travel through Italy, India and Indonesia is because Liz Gilbert is a very funny person. Though she is writing about a deeply personal and often internal journey, she does so with enough intelligence and self-depreciating wit that the book is a true pleasure to read. Within just a few pages, I found myself so engaged by her vivacious personality I wished I knew her personally.

I had mixed feelings about the middle section of the book, in which she spends four months at the ashram of her Indian guru. Being painfully aware of the hazards of guru relationships, reading about someone who is very into a guru can be difficult for me. To her credit, when she describes her spiritual explorations and the time she spent at the ashram, she remains focused more on her own process of growth and the people she meets in the ashram than on the guru herself. Ms. Gilbert has the capacity to find powerful stories to tell no matter where she is, so this book is always interesting. I just hope that at some point she decides to go back to India and write about all the other fascinating things she didn’t get to see by staying at the ashram the whole time.

Sartor’s memoir is composed of actual entries from the diaries she kept between the ages of twelve and seventeen.  On the surface, this glimpse into the psyche of a struggling teenager is at times funny and heartbreaking. But it is also a fabulous book for meditators. I walked away from it with a profound understanding of not only the universality of human experience (or at least, the teenage American female human experience) but also a visceral understanding of the highly transient nature of our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. 

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