GOAL IN PROGRESS

Nyanadhammika recounts his journey through a wide variety of religious traditions in this memoir.

The author opens his account with his own personal spiritual awakening: in the autumn of 1974, he and a friend were taking in their beautiful view of the Catskills; he was watching the colors turn as his perceptions were “enhanced” by a hit of mescaline he’d taken 30 minutes earlier. “The drug prompted me to have an inkling of a transcendent mode of being – one that was not dependent on the drug itself,” he reports. “Mescaline was merely the catalyst.” That moment led Nyanadhammika on a quest that would take him from Buddhism to Christianity to Judaism and back to Buddhism again, with many detours along the way. He details all the exotic places his journey has taken him, including the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya, a place of significance in the life of the Buddha. “I successfully blocked out the noise and activity all around me and for a few moments, with my eyes closed, I just sensed the Tree,” he writes, “dismissing my acknowledgment of the fact that it was not the same tree the Buddha had sat under on the night of his enlightenment.” The author’s narrative presence is warm and very human; he writes about his various spiritual adventures with an unflagging energy and specificity. Sometimes that specificity can clog up the larger narrative; readers will encounter passages like “Soon after Labor Day, I made preparations to sell my apartment and began to divest myself of the more than 1500 books I had in my studio apartment” a bit too often. But the earnest nature of Nyanadhammika’s spiritual walkabout will make this an involving read for all of his fellow seekers.

A vividly personal story of a spiritual odyssey across faiths.