Letter to Jed McKenna

Preface to Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment

Dear Mr. McKenna,

I finished reading your book Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing and I’m so mad, I could chew nails. While you tout your book by its very title as a spiritual book, it is nothing about spirituality and was very disturbing to boot. I wish I’d never read it but believe me, if you write another book, I’ll not be buying it.

Do you realize that if people do as you suggest that their lives would be ruined? Maybe you never had anything to lose, but most people do. It’s like some fairy tale world you live in, where you think everyone is independently wealthy and are able to come and go without commitments to an employer, to say nothing of family, friends, and community. Like you think a mother can leave her children to go off on this spiritual pursuit or wild goose chase, I’d call it. Who would do that? What for? Who would want to? Not realistic, not happening at all.

I can’t imagine how or why you say such things. Just to sell books? Even if the things you say are true, who cares? What’s so great about Truth? I’d rather have my family and my life where I believe real spirituality is available to each and every one of us through kindness, good will, an open heart and mind. What would you know of that with your nihilism and your void? I think it’s rich that someone would write a book about spiritual enlightenment who admits they don’t even know what the word spiritual means.

So, maybe you will sell a lot of books. I don’t know why anyone would accept your version of spirituality. It’s the opposite of everything that’s good and beautiful about life. It is opposite of love and God and family and yet what’s it all for? There’s no point. Even you yourself say that there’s no point. Yet you advocate to your readership that they put all else aside to become, in essence, total failures. The damage I would do to other’s lives would be irrevocable, they would hate me and for what? Absolutely nothing.

Judging from all the rosy testimonials in the front of your book, there are people out there who believe you are a great spiritual master. I don’t think you have a spiritual bone in your body. I’ve had the wonderful privilege of being in the presence of individuals who were truly enlightened but you are nothing like them. Put that in the front of your next book so people like me won’t waste their time.

Reprinted by permission.
Name withheld by request.
Seattle, Washington