A Teacher
Thaddeus Golas
Enlightenment is total self-acceptance: love as much as you can from wherever you are, with no resistance.
The transmission
Thaddeus Golas (1924-1997) was an American writer and former book editor who, in the psychedelic ferment of late-1960s San Francisco, self-published a slim 1972 handbook that became an underground classic: The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment.
No guru, no lineage, no robes - a self-described ‘lazy man’ who refused to believe that awakening required effort, discipline, diet, or virtue, he wrote the book, he said, ‘to save myself the trouble of talking about it.’ Encouraged by figures like Alan Watts and Timothy Leary, he offered a picture of the cosmos plain enough to survive the most extreme freak-out.
His model imagines the universe as a single kind of living entity whose basic activity is expanding and contracting: expanded beings are permeative and experienced as space and awareness, contracted beings as dense mass, with energy and matter arrayed between.
From this he draws one operative attitude - love as much as you can from wherever you are - and a demand for no resistance, no denial of any concept or condition. Within the Atlas, Golas is the anti-guru nondualist: where other teachers prescribe practice and ascent, he insists there is nothing you need do first, that you must start where you are, and that a little bit of love goes a long way.
What they gave
Total self-acceptance: Reframes enlightenment as loving the way you are now - ‘you will not be able to rise above your present vibration level to stay until you love the way you are now.’
- No resistance: Makes non-resistance the whole method - being fully aware means ‘no resistance, no denial of any concept or relationship,’ transcending rather than fighting what arises.
- The expanding/contracting spectrum: Models all beings on a single axis from expanded (space, awareness) to contracted (dense mass), with energy and matter between - a plain cosmology in place of doctrine.
- Enlightenment demystified: Strips awakening of effort, discipline, and virtue for the ordinary person - ‘there is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened.’
In their words
Love as much as you can from wherever you are.
Love it the way it is.
There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened.
You will not be able to rise above your present vibration level to stay until you love the way you are now.
We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other.
A little bit of love goes a long way.
The line they stand in
Golas is a product of the 1960s-70s West Coast counterculture and its psychedelic milieu, writing for readers opening up ‘with or without psychedelic help’ and circulating among Haight-Ashbury figures such as Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, and Allen Ginsberg.
His teaching shares the family resemblance of nondual acceptance traditions - a single underlying reality, non-resistance, love as the ground of being - but arrives at them through plain first-person reflection rather than any received school.
Kept in print for close to three decades and passed hand to hand, the book has endured as a quietly influential underground guide to acceptance-based awakening.
Essential Works
- The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment1972
- Love and Pain2008
- The Cosmic Airdrome2010