Why the Chicken Crossed the Road: & Other Hidden Enlightenment Teachings from the Buddha to Bebop to Mother Goose - Softcover

Sluyter, Dean

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0874779057 ISBN 13: 9780874779059

Publisher: Tarcher, 1998

Synopsis

In thirty-three short, illustrated chapters, a humorous and revealing collection illuminates the insights into spirituality and the nature of the universe latent in popular songs, jingles, jokes, sayings, and nursery rhymes. Original. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

BACKCOVER [NOTE: THIS REPLACES ALL TEXT CURRENTLY DISPLAYED UNDER EDITORIAL REVIEWS, BOOK DESCRIPTION, AND SYNOPSIS.]

Sluyter’s fresh, enticing manifesto of found wisdom from the scrap heap of popular culture highlights the right stuff. It nourishes both heart and mind, and tickles the funny bone too. – Lama Surya Das, author of AWAKENING THE BUDDHA WITHIN

The great spiritual truths are right under your nose — in the songs, jokes, proverbs, and nursery rhymes you’ve known all your life.

Join in the seriously playful adventure of "digging the cosmic ordinary" — exploring our cultural backyard to discover the profound enlightenment teachings hidden there in plain sight. In thirty-three illustrated mini-chapters, Dean Sluyter reveals the startling, sometimes hilarious connections between the highest revelations and the lowliest jingles, jokes, and cliches:

o "Knock-Knock, Who's There?" teaches the same process of radical self-inquiry advocated by meditation masters.

o "Mary Had a Little Lamb" expounds the way of love and devotion as eloquently as the Gospels or Psalms.

o "Home on the Range" celebrates the anarchic freedom of enlightenment.

o "Easy Does It," a principle as precise as E=mc2, describes both the workings of the universe and the mechanics of meditation.

Christ and the Buddha, Sluyter shows us, bring the same good news of cosmic liberation — and so do the Monkees and the Rolling Stones, Bugs Bunny and Alfred E. Neuman. Along the way, Sluyter tells lively stories that incorporate basketball and Sufi dancing, cowboy movies and Sabbath mysticism, bebop saxophone practice and Tibetan compassion practice. And through powerfully transformative spiritual exercises — some traditional, some home-brewed — he shows how to apply these enlightenment teachings in our own lives.

About the Author:

Dean Sluyter has taught nonsectarian meditation for more than thirty years. He is an award-winning former film critic and, as the developer of the Literature of Enlightenment program, a leading innovator in the use of meditative techniques in education. He is also the author of THE ZEN COMMANDMENTS: TEN SUGGESTIONS FOR A LIFE OF INNER FREEDOM.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tarcher
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0874779057
• ISBN 13: 9780874779059
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272