THE SPIRIT OF SPINOZA

Book excerpt: BENEDICT SPINOZA was a 17th-century philosopher and spiritual psychotherapist. This intellectual self-help book provides important insights from Spinoza’s system of thought in a format accessible to the general reader, as well as to those already familiar with his philosophy. By applying his method to our personal lives, we may free ourselves from bondage to our lower emotions and habitual behaviors and thus begin to enjoy the “continuous, supreme, and unending happiness” promised by Spinoza. “Those of us who came of age in the twentieth century were taught that we must adopt a crazy-making strategy of compartmentalizing our lives, putting our rational, scientific side into one corner and our psychological/spiritual side in another. The precarious state of our world is evidence enough that this approach to life is a destructive dead end. You are holding an effective alternative in your hand. The Spirit of Spinoza is a brilliant treatise that has been field-tested by Professor Neal Grossman in his own life and that of his students over decades. This book is a master stroke by a master teacher about a master philosopher. It is also delightfully dangerous, for it has the power to shift one’s life onto a new axis, where it becomes possible to blend knowledge and wisdom into an experience that can best be described, quite simply, as waking up.” —Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters