The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment

The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment
The Guide, First and Second Editions (1971,1972)

The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment, is a philosophical essay by New Jersey born American author Thaddeus Golas (1924-1997.)
The book began as a mimeographed pamphlet which Golas handed out on the streets of San Francisco in 1971. It was officially published in 1971 by the son of an East Coast businessman, Joe E. Casey, but was quickly taken over by Palo Alto’s Seed Center in 1972, after a dispute between Golas and Casey.

The book sold briskly through many printings and in 1979, wound up at Bantam Books, where it blossomed and eventually reached the end of its run in 1993. In 1995, Gibbs-Smith Publishing of Utah, a publisher known mostly for interior decorating books, issued a limited hardcover edition of The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment.

The Book

The 80 page book is an original conception, unlike any other in the area of Spirituality and Philosophy, and has often been described as "the last book you'll ever need to read on Spirituality." It contains many constructive warnings to readers about typical pitfalls associated with Spiritual Questing, and offers remedies for many forms of confusion often found in the field.
It immediately was heralded as major philosophical work by Richard (Ram Dass) Halpert, and Alan Watts, who read passages of the pamphlet edition out-loud to their flocks.
Though the Guide inspired many to write spiritual books, it was a unique phenomenon for its time; Golas purposely avoided discussing themes which had been covered by other spiritual authors, and focussed instead on exposing his own ideas. Thaddeus Golas said he initially wrote The Lazy Man' s Guide to Enlightenment as a sort of a life-raft for hippies who were drowning in the rough seas of the psychedelic era, but was soon stunned to discover that "the general public got off on it".

Font, Typography, and Cover Art

The font originally used by the author for the text was "Baskerville." Thaddeus Golas, a former typesetter and proofreader, and production editor in publishing, felt strongly about a clean and classic serif font, since "pretty" typefaces lost their delicate serifs when printed on cheap paper. DeRay Norton, his publisher at the Seed Center in Palo Alto, opted to have the typeface reset without telling Golas, in 1975 after being convinced by a printer to spend more money on a new font. To his chagrin, Golas watched the subsequent editions of the Guide at Bantam Books, who printed on cheap paper, and who shot their plates from the "Seed Center" edition, prove his fears to be founded. The Cover art of the Lazy Man' s Guide to Enlightenment, a curvilinear design comprised of circles, is an original creation by architect Klaus Rothe, commissioned in the style of a classic Russian folk mandala. The intersecting and overlapping circles evoke the permeability of space, energy and matter. The font chosen by Golas on the cover of his book is a now defunct variant of a Caslon Old Face whose closest relative is presently Caslon Antique, or Casablanca Antique.

Title and Meaning

The title of the book refers to the fact that the author, a self-described “lazy man,” refuted the notion that a spiritual quest should demand “effort, non-smoking, strict diet, hard work, or other evidences of virtue.” Quoting Zen, Golas asks “If you can’t find it where you’re standing, where do you hope to run in search of it”?

In fact, Thaddeus Golas, in The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment, explains how in his view, even the effort of seeing the world as “needing to be purified” or people “as needing to be enlightened,” can easily lead one to erect a wall that can prevent a genuine gain from occurring in the opening perceptions that lead to a state of Enlightenment, or help maintaining it.

Concepts and Cautionary advice

Thaddeus Golas, in The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment, also cautions against buying into the Spiritual Status system so typical of philosophical ideologues: “This can produce unloving snobbery towards your brothers,” he says, and reminds the reader that “what we see and describe is always ourselves.” He adds “Many of our feelings about the world are based on erroneous perceptions about the status of others.” Thaddeus Golas goes on to say that it is “pointless to worry about better or worse spiritual conditions beyond our own,” since “keeping our attention focused on the low vibrations of others fastens us to our own level.”

Survival of Structures and push-pull tensions

Another concept central to The Lazy man’s Guide To Enlightenment is the study of structures.
Thaddeus Golas felt his most important chapter within the book was entitled "Self-Improvement." The segment discusses the survival of all structures, including the self, in relation to Spiritual questing.
“A structure,” Golas says, “is any relation between entities that avoids dissolving.” He goes on to point out that “the self that we know is a structure...”
“An odd thing about structures is that they will dissolve both from success and failure, too much pleasure or too much pain, so the problem, if you want a structure, is to maintain a tension somewhere between the two.”

Golas explains that the nature of all structures in our universe requires positive/negative or push/pull tension in order to avoid dissolution.
He argues that in terms of spiritual questing, “the Ego feels better when it has to contend with the tension of threats to its survival.” Hence the warning about seeking Spiritual Enlightenment through conventional methods:

“Negative emphasis results in an intensified structure and a stronger ego. Even though some of these activities, like self-denial, are carried on under the banner of spiritual search, the result is the same. On a subtle level we know that most spiritual endeavors will not succeed, but we go on maintaining the fantasy that they are admirable. Many of us have no intention of really succeeding in dissolving our attachment to structure and going to another plane of existence.”

This paradox and its remedies are central to The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment.

Love and Pain

Wanting to revise The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment, Golas, in his later years, explored the idea that " too much pleasure or too much pain" would cause all structures to vanish.
He wrote extensively on the nature of consciousness from the idea expressed in this maxim. He saw all interactions as oscillating between Pleasure and Pain in a search of the "Pleasure of Agreement."
He concluded that "perfect functional agreement" is impossible in our energy dimension, because "energy never rests, and never stops changing" thus, "our World was a constant rearrangement of the same variables..."
"Good manners may be our best hope," he said, "but we cannot fix the chaos."
This thinking aligned him with several mystical traditions, including the Buddhist concept of dukkha which views the world as an endlessly delusional dream from which the soul would do well to escape, but placed him at odds with the New Age movement, which typically sees the world as a sort of Divine Playground whose apotheosis promises to deliver happiness and bliss.
Such resistance from the New Age industry kept his writing from being published. His manuscript on Love and Pain, which explores these ideas, will be published, now posthumously
by Even Lazier Publishing of California.

Space, Energy and Mass

In his “looking-glass” vision of Spirituality, the author brings the reader to the principal tenets of essential navigation through awakening to the transcendent nature within man. He navigates around common mistakes associated with many schools of spiritual dogma. At the core of The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment lies an idea discovered by Golas in 1950: “Space is to Energy as Energy is to Mass.”

This idea was inspired by reading a popular adaptation of Einstein’s General Relativity concepts. Thaddeus Golas begins The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment with a proposition:

We are equal beings and the Universe is our relations with each other.

Each being is alive.

Each being determines the course of its own existence.

He goes on to suggest that “the function of each being is to expand and to contract.”
Thaddeus Golas equated Space with Consciousness:"Basic entities are conscious space when expanded,
unconscious mass when contracted, and alternating between these states as energy," he noted.

He described: "There are two states of being: expanded and contracted. (It might be more precise to say standing momentum outward, and standing momentum inward, but those are awkward phrases to repeat often.) An entity must be in one state or the other at any given instant.
It may sustain either state at will. Expanding consciousness is not a process of expanding like a balloon, it is a process of PROLONGING your conscious state.
You must be either conscious or unconscious in any given instant".

Energy and Spirit

The role of Energy is central to Thaddeus Golas' philosophy. In his later revisions of The Lazy man' s Guide to Enlightenment and in much of his subsequent writing, Thaddeus Golas emphasized the importance of understanding the role played by the "seduction" of Energy in our interactions on the material plane...The very "glue" which holds matter together is also seen as the chief culprit in the delusion experienced by consciousness when it is bound in Spacetime, according to Golas. "Energy is the rapid alternation between space and mass", Golas explained, "the devil, the delinquent, the messenger who delivers only half the message, the marker of time."
He coined the notion that: “Space propels energy, and energy compels matter – the propulsion is uniform; it is what we now call the force of gravity”.

The book essentially discusses our lives from that viewpoint.

Crediting Lysergic Acid Diethylamide

Thaddeus Golas used LSD during the late sixties and early seventies.
He continued to write enthusiastically about its properties, long after he ceased taking the drug itself in 1971.
He credited LSD for helping him crystallize his ideas on the physics of metaphysics, but disliked the notion which many proposed, that The Lazy Man’s Guide To Enlightenment was in some way channeled, or resulted from automatic writing spell in an altered state of consciousness.
Of that, he said: "I resented being seen as some sort of typist for higher consciousness." Golas enjoyed discusing his tangible and down-to-earth reasons for bringing forth his book as he did, and spoke of having his first satori experience almost a decade before he ever used psychedelics; he often said his ideas evolved over a 30 year period. He was proud of his intrinsic qualities as a writer, and appreciated being recognized for his earthbound human skills, and his clarity of thinking. He often said that throughout his life, he was denied simple credit for his ideas, on many occasions...

Updates and Revisions to the Lazy Man' s Guide to Enlightenment

Thaddeus Golas made many yet unpublished revisions to the original text of the Lazy Man' s Guide to Enlightenment throughout the 1980' s and 90' s. Such revisions were intended to help the text survive the extinction of the 1960' s jargon. He also clarified many concepts and emphasized the idea that consciousness, more so than love, is the key to Enlightenment.

External links

• Seed Center Publishing: preserving the writings and essays by Thaddeus Golas
• Gibbs-Smith Publishing: Most Recent Publisher of The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment
• The Audio CD Edition of The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, read by Thaddeus Golas, complete with a new handbook written by the author
• Thaddeus Golas' later texts, and forthcoming posthumous writings
• The Official website about author Thaddeus Golas, his biography, and beliefs
• The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment - A copyrighted transcript of the pamphlet edition, for review purposes