The Common Experience – Signposts on the Path to Enlightenment
By J.M. Cohen and J-F. Phipps.
281 Pages |First Quest Edition 1992 | Softcover | Quest Books, U.S.A. | ISBN: 0835606791.
'The mystical path is not mysterious. It is not the private path of monks and yogins', so begins this anthology of the spiritual experience of ordinary men and women as well as those of monks, philosophers, and spiritual teachers such as Lao Tzu, Krishnamurti, Aldous Huxley, William Blake, Plato and Paramahansa Yogananda. These selections on the ways to Enlightenment, drawn from both East and West, are grouped to illuminate such topics as meditation, compassion, time and eternity, mystical powers and death and rebirth. Although the writings and the authors' commentary on them are variously colored by their separate traditions, their effect as a whole is to reveal 'the white light, that combines the rainbow hues of the different mystical traditions', which are essentially one 'common experience'.
From Chapter 4 - 'Enlightenment' (p. 109):
" Q. How is it possible to become selfless, while leading a life of worldly activity?
A. There is no conflict between work and wisdom.
Q. Do you mean that one can continue all the old activities, in one's profession, for instance, and at the same time get enlightenment?
A. Why not? But in that case one will not think that it is the old personality, which is doing the work, because one's consciousness will gradually become transformed until it enters in That which is beyond the little self . . . "
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