211208: maybe not five because it becomes repetitive. when he is on, he is great. i might prefer [book:Freedom from the Known|143877] as it is concise and covers similar ideas, but this collection of talks and q&a sessions gives sense of being together with other curious searchers, and k insists he is not 'leading' the talks but everyone is participating together. it is his name that goes on the book. one signal assertion is that k refuses to believe anyone, not himself even, can share this 'awakening' of intelligence and communicate some 'mechanical' process to achieve 'enlightenment' (word he does not like)...
an outgrowth of this belief is that the past, our past as culture, religion etc, and our past as individuals, cannot necessarily help us live tomorrow. that we have all been searching for security and so we apply 'thought' to create everything from fast cars, big houses, God (Brahama) to reincarnation and so on. we are afraid of tomorrow. k is not afraid of slamming 'eastern' thought for its errors (such as zen meditation being 'self hypnosis') as well as 'western' permissive society (drugs)....
for k the answer to our fragmented, confused, violent world is the 'awakening' of intelligence, an awareness he contrasts with 'mechanical' thought, which, while having achieved great things, is trapped within its own conceptual loop of dualities, valuations, and is not our living world. this answer is an awareness, not intellectual, that k connects primarily to love. it is not learned through concentration, meditation, but in the act of 'seeing' or being 'aware'...
this is indic philosophy, thus no firm line between philosophy and religion, and i compare it to the book on husserl just read [book:Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations|403013], for an interesting effect: this takes for granted that the important aspect of the world is human thought, it does not argue for it, also, rather than socratic give-take dialog the guru (or anti-guru) presents longer arguments to 'go into sir', to be assessed, argued, asserted...
to be there at these talks must have been engaging...