Jamie › Likes

again. . . "well, DUUUUUUUUHHHH!!" any old-school holy man could have said that. . .Nazarite, Sufi, Zen, Taoist, Hopi, whatever. . .shutting God up in a box on schedule isn't religion. it's ritual. before he died, Lenny Bruce remarked that "more and more people are leaving the church and returning to God." 'bout time it started happening again. . .it'd make people feel a lot better. unless they like someone else to do their thinking for them. - Okami

"Though raised Catholic, in the early 1950s Jack Kerouac became fascinated with Buddhism, an interest that would have a profound impact on his ideas of spirituality and their expression in his writing from Mexico City Blues to The Dharma Bums. Published for the first time in book form, 'Wake Up' is Kerouac’s retelling of the story of Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who as a young man abandoned his wealthy family and comfortable home for a lifelong search for Enlightenment. As a compendium of the teachings of the Buddha, Wake Up is a profound meditation on the nature of life, desire, wisdom, and suffering. Distilled from a wide variety of canonical scriptures, Wake Up serves as both a concise primer on the concepts of Buddhism and as an insightful and deeply personal document of Kerouac’s evolving beliefs. It is the work of a devoted spiritual follower of the Buddha who also happened to be one of the twentieth century’s most influential novelists." - Vincent X

It was released about a month ago... I'd been hearing about this unreleased material of his for a while now (in Kerouac bios I read over the years), but just found out that they finally made a book out of it. - Vincent X