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The spiritual books "Lost Horizon" and "Stranger in a Strange
Land", Have fascinating stories behind them.
They are both fiction,
yet the first, was actually based on our monastery in Tibet, although with much
information left out, or added. The second, is more significant to me. As I
mentioned, during my early to mid-teens, I studied alternative religions and
"paths". But it was more intense than that. I was obsessed. I
literally spent day after day, all day, reading all the spiritual books I could.
And out of all of that, I only found "bits" of truth, here and there,
amongst dogma, unnecessary ritual, etc., until I found my path, and what in my
opinion, and my intuition told me was the "real thing", and 100% truth
with NO dogma.
Anyway, after all that studying, when I was finally 16 or 17, I started
reading stranger in a strange land on breaks during a graveyard shift job
I had. I floored me. It changed my life. While it was nonfiction spiritual
book, it had more of what I considered real truths and spirituality than the
thousands of things I read during my search. It was what clarified to me, what I
was looking for, and changed my course to searching for a community, with the
philosophy and lifestyle described in it.
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