LORD HAVE MURPHY

LORD HAVE MURPHY

A work of spiritual humor, this book is the paperback edition of LORD HAVE MURPHY: Awakening in the Spiritual Marketplace “When will Buddha bring the ice cream? I’d like the Instant Enlightenment Sundae, please, with no nuts. And could I have it to go?” —Murphy We hear a lot these days about mindfulness. “Weapons of mass instruction are proliferating.” How to clear the air? To trust what’s in us and that we’re finding our way to it. With unrelenting humor, Murphy gives it a try, only to discover in himself an extraordinary truth: that contact with the finer energy animating us awakens us to a completely different level of being alive. With over 40 wonderful drawings by Bruce M. Sherman, and Murphy’s satirical comments that make us laugh out loud, the book appeals to both of our natures, the everyday and the higher. For Murphy the daily ups and downs become the necessary reminders to awaken, and “we don’t have to be a certain way to wake up.” All that we need is already in us, hidden from our usual mind. “Nothing about me needs to change except where the attention is.” Is being self-aware the same as being awake? Can we behave our way to a higher level? Surely “transformation” must mean more than “transitory information about how to cope as a cheerier me.” Is there an Intelligence in me that bypasses thought? Along with these questions, Murphy explores, with great fun: travels in the state of Identification; everything in self-help but The Self?; the four levels of spiritual writing (“From,” “About,” “Spinach,” and “Criminal”); the Leaky Boat School of Self-Perfecting; beliefs (“the Big Addiction”) and ownership (“the Big Trap”). Here is “a look beneath the golden robes of the spiritually well-endowed.” In the face of it all, whatever the hitch, Murphy always says, “But I can work with that”—an endearing attitude—and for him, Attention is the teacher. Sensitivity to the subtle energy can take us from self-awareness across the threshold to awakening. Is it possible now to embody the higher energy and let it come into life on earth? Fran Shaw, Ph.D. is a longtime practitioner in a spiritual discipline. She is a university professor emerita and an award-winning author whose books include The Next Attention, Writing My Yoga: Poems for Presence, 50 Ways to Help You Write , and Being Attention . REVIEW: "Exquisitely conceived and executed, with marvelous drawings by Bruce M. Sherman. There is almost nothing more difficult than to open doors in the sleeping soul with humor, but Fran Shaw is a genuine master, and does it with grace. Every page contains a small shock, pleasurable, surprising and joyous. God laughs and plays , said Meister Eckhart. To wake up into this singing, exuberant world, the first step is to laugh. Lord Have Murphy is a funny, punny, brilliantly attentive doorway into the incredible richness of real connection with higher self and the immense world around us, of which we normally see so little. This book is very special. It has a gentle, deeply spiritual touch that you reach through its humor and beauty. I have really never seen anything quite like it. An extraordinary door into attention." —Whitley Strieber Goodreads