The world needs to know. Trailblazing. Life-enhancing. A Radical Awakening is one of those books you will want to keep on your nightstand.’ Oprah Winfrey during ‘Oprah’s Your Life in Focus’

At first, our true self fights for survival. It protests loudly, so much so that we feel nauseated. As we continue to ignore it, the protesting fades until it’s a mere whimper. As the years erase all memory of its existence, the plaintive cries recede altogether. SJ: Now there’s a very pertinent remark! At the heart of the embryo of mental health that reveals to our self the unreality of its personal productions-and which thus prevents you from taking the mental image of your wife for your wife-there’s a delirium of interpretation that’s more or less serious.So great is our thirst to be seen and validated by our parents and our culture that we succumb to the ego’s powerful and instinctive lure, slowly burying our authentic nature in the process. The result is a false identity, which we now present to the world. We think it’s who we are, but it’s really only a facade we wear to ward off the fear that we are unworthy and unlovable. In the Fog GF: Among the people supposed to have attained the awakening or approached it, history and tradition present us, on the one hand, examples of very refined, intelligent, cultivated beings and, on the other, with examples of uneducated monks sweeping the cloister-humble characters living that which the literate and the wise men speak of without having had the experience. If our parents admonished us for being too emotional or too this or too that, many of us immediately reacted to their injunctions in some rapid-fire way, adjusting our temperaments to match their standards. As happened with Trista, the ego becomes our armor, our protector, helping us adjust to a misaligned childhood. Cultural oppression and subjugation are the masters of our psyche, and fear is the curriculum they mete out on a daily basis. We are graded on how silent and subservient we are. The more quiet, the higher the grade. These are the legacies of a patriarchal culture that has everyone messed up, including men. Such is the nature of a toxic system. It doesn’t spare anyone from its clutches. the wrong duality from the right one. The psychological being annihilated in the fire of the awakening is reborn, covered with the dew of the dawn of creation. Fundamentally, as I already said, absolutely nothing has happened. I became me. Nothing changed, everything changed.

There is an abundance of radical ideology in here, explained thoroughly and dissected for easier understanding. Definitely an Eastern philosophy vibe, with an emphasis on less patriarchal power, without emasculating males and masculinity. I can't wrap my head around everything in here, yet, but I'll read and re-read and keep trying. While I believe this book can radically improve society, I can't control that. But I can control improving myself through what I learn, and that's what I'll be working on. There isn’t a person I know who has escaped the replacement of their authentic self with a persona, the mask behind which their true self lies largely dormant. This happens more so with little girls because of the overarching patriarchy we live under, where boys are allowed to just be boys. Our young girls, on the other hand, are trained to fit a rigid prescription early in life.But that’s not it! John remains entirely himself, the tree remains the tree, and yet there is union. It is in this coexistence of fusion and maintenance of the intrinsic identities of both parties where the miracle resides. If an annihilated A fuses with an annihilated B, there’s really not much to fuss about. The extraordinary thing is that two completely different things can be truly joined while each, at the same time, maintains its original nature. SJ: In any case, it can’t do any harm. Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not saying it’s absolutely essential to read these authors-and there are others-nor even that it’s indispensable in itself to be interested in literature. Yet the terrain must be prepared, the garden cultivated, the sensibility refined . . . One cannot misinterpret the importance of culture in the profoundest sense of the word. Of course, literature, Rimbaud, Proust, and all the others also participate in hallucination and sleep, but it’s a good way to dream. And it’s hard to wake up when you’ve dreamed badly. In my humble opinion-which is,to be sure, highly pretentious-for a Westerner, reading Rimbaud is more practical than reading I don’t know which “Sri Whatshisname.” I know I’m not alone on this quest for my true self. I’ve talked with thousands of women who want to get out of the fog and live more awakened lives. So oblivious are we that we are living from a false sense of ourselves—fear-ridden and suppressed—that it often requires multiple awakenings for us to face up to the fact.