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This book is my favorite for any beginner in meditation. It was also the book I read before I sat down on the mat for the first time.
To begin with Ram Dass is a great teacher. He's a westerner to which I can relate much easier than an Indian guru.
The book describes various meditation techniques and what you can expect following this path.
But the best part are the quotes. Ram Dass took a deliberate effort to pick great inspirational quotes which will create your 'must read' list.

This book is great. Ram Dass helped me get a better understanding of what meditation really is and how not to take myself too seriously.

I'm doing a form of meditation called brain entrainment called Holosync through Centerpointe. I wanted to know about meditation: what to expect and perhaps some tips on how to get the most out of it. This book provided all of that and more.

Ram Dass is the best!

I've been a big Ram Dass fan for over twenty years now. I "knew" him when he was just Richard Alpert and worked closely with fellow doctor, Timothy Leary. But like all of us, he wondered, "What's next?" And so he went to India on a Spiritual Journey and had an awakening and came back to the states as Ram Dass which means "servant of God". Since that time he has devoted his life to writing and teaching about spirituality and how we can wake up to the Truth that God is not external to our being, but is our being.

I read this when I was taking my foundation course work to being a Practitioner at my church. I ate it up like a kid eating candy. I was always classified as the "weird" one of the family and learning to meditate would firmly cement the title in place. My stressed out dad would complain to my equally frazzled, recovering fundamentalist sister, "He's crazy, I tell ya...why would anyone wanna learn to meditate..."

Mmmmm...I wonder...

One never really "learns" to meditate...we remember how to meditate. Don't tell me that you don't know how because you do. You just forgot. You still think of yourself as a human doing and not as a human being and it is our nature...our True Nature to simply be and when we allow ourselves to have periods of just being who we are, that which is unlike this beingness falls away.

This book goes through various ways to experience this beingness. Meditation can range from sitting in the lotus position and chanting "Om" to taking a slow and gentle walk being mindful of every step.

Meditation is not something one "gets" and then that's it. To me, daily meditation is a gift I give to myself to remind me of the Truth that the Living Spirit is within me and I am within the Living Spirit and that just as God can never be completely known- because God is Infinite, I can never fully and completely know my mind because my mind is God's Mind. I can, however, "touch the hem of the garment"...in other words, have glimpses of Truth and in these glimpses be encouraged to continue on with my practice. It's never about "getting it"...it's always about "being it" and when I am in that place of Pure Being, I know I am It but I also know that you are It and they are It and We are It and I know that It is us, as well. In Truth, there is only It.

So, I'm still the weird one of the family even though my dad and sister both practice meditation now. I guess I need to have some kind of identification that's tied in with the world. Heaven knows I don't want to "shine" too much.

Yeah, okay, dad...

Shine on, children of Light...shine on...

Peace & Blessings.

john, "the Light Coach"

If you are a point in your life where you've had more than a fleeting thought regarding "there being something more", this book is certainly a fantastic place for beginning your journey to self-discovery (and/or awakening).

I have never been inspired enough to write a review about a book but this book deserves my most profound endorsement.

Best of luck in your journey.

This is a fantastic book, though it's more of a global history lesson than a lesson in entrepreneurship. Monique Maddy covers the history of Liberia in depth and in less depth the history of several other African countries. She talks about economic development and the failures of the UN, IFC and World Bank. She is clearly an advocate for economic development via private investment. Her perspective is shaped by growing up in an exemplary company town. It was part of a mining project in Liberia sponsored by a joint venture named LAMCO. The project had a social development component that both supported the mining company by developing employees, and supported the citizens by developing them. The book is significantly a biography of Maddy herself and how she came to start her venture. That core of the book is surrounded by chapters that describe her efforts to start a pan-African telecommunications company- Adesemi - and its ultimate demise.

Maddy writes a warm, but penitrating review of the life of her family, as well as the nation of Liberia.

She gives great insight into the exploitation of Africa by the west. She makes recommendations that companies and individuals should heed as they work in this great continent.

Her writing style is easy to read, and very to the point.

REVIEW BY IAN MOUNT
www.ghanaweb.com: Business News of Monday, 1 October 2001

The Last Place to Start a Company
Monique Maddy tried and failed to launch a telephone service in Africa. She's moving on. Africa isn't.

Three short years ago, Monique Maddy was boasting that her company was going to "change people's lives" and "revolutionize things." Adesemi, the wireless pay-phone company she founded in 1993, had raised $37 million dollars, built a network in Tanzania, and moved into Ghana, and was planning to expand its service to the Ivory Coast. Maddy was the new face of African business. A Wall Street Journal article in September 1998 even proclaimed, "If the disenfranchised of Africa ever join the global economy, it won't be diplomats, politicians, or church people leading the way. It will be entrepreneurs like Monique Maddy."

It hasn't turned out that way. Maddy walked away from her company in disgust in the fall of '99. Her story is a familiar one, full of the government corruption that has become an African clichi, but the 39-year-old Maddy doesn't blame her company's demise on the bribery requests or Kafkaesque red tape. For the Liberian native, who's writing a book about third-world entrepreneurship to be published by HarperCollins next year, the real reason for Adesemi's failure and Africa's continental mire can be traced to the international development agencies that are designed to help the region. "Africa is worse off today -- in many countries -- than it was at independence, even though billions and billions have been spent," says Maddy, who herself served for five years as a United Nations Development Program officer. "As long as you have these kinds of institutions, you won't have any change."

Take Maddy's experience getting a pay-phone license. In mid-1995, a year after the Tanzanian national phone company granted Adesemi the license (and Adesemi had spent $1.5 million on its network), the phone company president said that it was no good because Adesemi's pay phones were wireless. Only after an acquaintance at the Harvard Business School, her alma mater, put her in touch with World Bank president James Wolfensohn did the matter get settled. The World Bank pushed the government just so far, however. The phone company insisted on charging Adesemi inflated rates to use its infrastructure. "When we asked the World Bank to do something about the rates, they said they couldn't tell the government what to do -- but they could lend them millions of dollars," says Maddy, referring to a $75 million interest-free loan the World Bank made to the national phone company. "They had a conflict of interest," she says.

Still, Adesemi kept at it, eventually building its network up to 600 pay phones and a pager service with 5,000 customers. The sell was easy, Maddy says, because Adesemi's phones actually functioned (the street nickname for the system was "the phones that work," she says).

When an Adesemi backer, CDC Capital Partners, refused to invest more money for the company's expansion into what Maddy argued were more profitable markets -- it wanted to see profitability in Tanzania first, despite the stacked odds -- she finally gave up. Maddy, who now lives in Boston, hasn't been to Tanzania since; her investors are selling off the network.

Not surprisingly, Maddy says her book will call for a radical departure from a system based on an international aid bureaucracy. "You basically have bureaucrats trying to develop countries," she says. "How many bureaucrats started Microsoft?"
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Source: Ian Mount

As I read this book I couldn't help but notice how similar Monique's tale is to the story of Africa. She weaves us through a maze of emotions as we feel her joy, hope, determination only to be suddenly brought to earth with frustration, anger, desparation.

For anyone ever been to Africa rarely has a book come along that so perfectly captures the daily difficulties of survival in Africa. Though tongue-in-cheek Monique certainly understands clearly the difficulties facing that part of the world and I would hazard we'll be hearing more from her on this subject.

Oh by the way did I mention that she became a World Class marathon runner in her spare time?

As someone who grew up overseas much like Monique, i deeply admire how she chose to use her acquired skills and network to give back to a continent in dire need of what rare individuals like her have to offer.

The book is enjoyable to read and deeply inspiring to anyone interested in contributing to third world development.

Published in 1959, Level 7 is presented as the diary of a military man who is permanently stationed thousands of feet underground in a self-sufficient bunker. His job is to sit in a roon awaiting the command to push a button to fire nuclear weapons at an enemy country. When the command arrives and the button is pushed, he is forced to deal with the consequences of a nuclear holocaust that wipes out life on earth as he knows it, and is left with nothing to do but await the fallout that must inevitably reach the bunker and slowly kill the few humans remaining on a dying planet.

Level 7 is bleak and terrifying, but it's just far-fetched and cold-war enough that it doesn't depress you too much. Read it and reflect on the self-destructive nature mankind can show, and the priority revenge and victory can take at the expense of quality of life.

What makes sci-fi and fantasy fun is the ideas. What makes great sci fi are those works that are still meaningful after decades of technical and social change.

Level 7 is one of those books. I read it for the first time 30+ years ago, and it's still scary. Nuclear winter may be less on our minds these days, but this tale will stick with you.

I have the the original hard back edition, but it's available in paperback now.

I have read this book during my schooldays, some 15 years ago, and it remained in my mind ever since. Im really happy that I finally found it at amazon and that i can wonder again into its fascinating and inspirational pages. Definitately the best story I ever read about the end of the world. And the ending.... ah the ending... i was with tears in my eyes...

Powerful. If only because its related in such a simple matter-of-fact way up until the buttons are pushed. And then the mounting sense of ?? as you realise level by level that all humanity will die when level 7 dies.

Maybe I read too much into it, but the 7th level in Dante's inferno is populated by the violent, the assasins (Push Button Technicians who will release the bombs?) . The 7th level is also overwhelmed by a powerful stench (X127 thought he could smell the dried waste that took up space beside the dried 'food'.) Dante's 7th level had woods of stunted gnarled trees (the emotionally stunted inhabitants of level 7 unable to make real emotional connections to others? Willing suicides of the 7th level are perhaps equivalent to level 7's willingness to be dead to the outside world?)

Level 5's politicians and important men that fall into civil disorder (killing those believed responsible for the End) before their own end is reminiscent of Dante's level of wrath where they tear at each other with their teeth.

Except, no levels 8 & 9 in Roshwald's Hell.

Afterthought:
Once the people had gotten down to level 7, the level was permanently cut off from the rest of the levels and the surface. My question? How were they going to get back up to the surface after the 500 years and food ran out? And was ther no way to override this mechanism after the damaged reactor was discovered? Move up to level 6 or 5 (presuming it *was* just the water that was contaminated) and remain there until the reactor was fixed?

Though the impact would not have been nearly as tragic...

Level 7 represents the journal of Officer X-127, a member of an elite Armed Forces unit. X-127 has been ordered to the bottom-most layer (level 7) of a highly secure facility, where he is ordered to set off a massive nuclear attack. The facility is a city unto itself, four thousand feet underground and fully prepared to withstand a direct attack and the resulting radiation for many decades.

Chosen for their ability to follow orders and to withstand the confines of the facility, X-127 and his fellow officers must now come to grips with the fact that they may, in fact, never leave. The surface of the Earth has been transformed into a radiological wasteland, but those in the facility -- some of whom represent a "continuity of government" operation -- will be safe.

Or so it seems. Reports of radiation poisoning begin to filter in from the higher levels of the facility. With a gripping, impending sense of doom, Roshwald takes us into a journey into the true meaning of mutually assured destruction.

I first read this book upwards of 30 years ago. It has never left me. Was it because I was young? Impressionable? I don't know, but the book certainly left an indelible footprint in my mind that few, if any, other work can match. Whatever Roshwald constructed in Level 7 was utterly unique and memorable beyond description.

I am a student of Eastern philosophy and I looked at this book insofar as what it has to say from a Western, Jungian perspective. I was curious. At it's core Middle Passage explains Jungian theories of personality development and complexes that grow and change over time. The problem of the mid-life crisis, according to Hollis, is that we tend to hang on to ego-centric dynamics that worked in the past, perhaps out of necessity, but no longer work. The coping techniques run their course and rather than letting them go, growing, and accepting responsibility for our well-being and spiritual development, we cling to our former selves and projections on other. The book, however, tends to be abstract, more theoretical than practical. It explains more about HOW we get into mid-life in crisis and precious little about WHAT to do about it. But this is just the intersection with Buddhist teachings on essentially the same subject. Buddhism, in a sense, picks up where Jung leaves off. The Four Noble Truths, for instances, starts with the premise that human beings are prone to suffering for all the reasons Hollis gives in Jungian terms. It does not explain so much HOW we get into trouble with too much ego. Yet in 2,500 years of history, Buddhism and it followers have developed a rich set of tools centered around meditation for "staying awake" and living in the present as a practical anecdote for the ego -- namely, WHAT to do about it. In fact, toward the end of Middle Passage, meditation is one of the suggestions Hollis recommends for working through mid-life crisis. So I would say after reading this book take look at the writings of Pema Chodron, my favorite being Comfortable with Uncertainty. Get her seminar, How to Meditate, and see for yourself if this doesn't line up with Hollis and Middle Passage.

I had read all the reviews for this book before I purchased it but in the past that has not always been a guarantee. This was also the first Hollis book for me. Happy to say it won't be my last. I have a minimal amount of psychology studies (I minored in it) but am starting a master's program this summer. I picked it up mostly because I'm turning 50 this summer and felt the urges to put some "order" to the chaos I've been chasing the last decade or so in my life. It hasn't really been traumatic for me as much as it has been unsettling but I needed a name for it and Hollis names it well - the Middle Passage. I look back now and understand more clearly now why I seek out what I do and why I needed to reconcile what wounded me in the past. It gave me tremendous hope for the second half of my life and Hollis has a way of writing that is not intimidating. Too bad it's not a "must read" for every adult hitting 40 or 50. Marriages might have a better chance of staying stronger. People in general might not be wired so tight with superficial undertakings as they mature in life. I am grateful I found this author and intend on reading his other works.

This book was recommended by a friend who read it when she was going through her own mid-life passage. I found it extremely helpful and continue to use it as a reminder to myself when I am feeling like I 'm floating in outer space. James Hollis writes very succinctly, in Jungian terms, what takes place in the psyche of a person in the second half of life. I found it comforting, useful, and true for me. I highly reommend it to anyone who needs a light of hope and a map through the terrain of mid-life transformations.

I have had the priviledge of sitting through hours of James Hollis' lectures at Houston's Jung Center. His writing style is very compact but pacts a punch (Hemingway for Jungian Wanderers, if you will). He takes the notion of the "mid-life crisis" to the appropriate realm of "mid-life transformation" by illustrating the WHY of the formerly named "crisis". Taking his words (and always keeping in mind TS Eliot's "The Wasteland") will help any reader better understand why they feel "unfullfilled". His book will also give them tools to direct them back to that path of command/control of their own lives. Additionally arming them with the notion that there will be plenty more goofy (read unconscious) activities with which to deal in the future.

This book is a tool and a useful tool indeed.

An amazing number of people in Vancouver are reviewing midlife crisis books ... is that city going through it's own midlife crisis ?

This book is perhaps the best one out there. The reasons are many as others have pointed out, but in my estimation is this: Hollis does not jump into the mechanics of the midlife period, in fact this is not the main emphasis at all. He starts with an in-depth retrospective on childhood and does a thourough analysis of our early years, then guides us into our present state and our future.

Highly recommended, yes.