Ending the Search: From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness

Hunt (Leaves from Moon Mountain), spiritual director of Moon Mountain Sangha and founder of the San Francisco Center for Meditation and Psychotherapy, shares her broad spiritual wisdom in this unwieldy book on fighting the ego in order to live a fulfilling spiritual life. Writing for those who feel the “spiritual impulse” toward enlightenment—she calls this by many names, including “truth, love, God, Self, Buddha-nature, freedom”—Hunt begins with a Sufi fable of a stream wishing to cross a desert. The wind offers to transport the stream, but only if the stream agrees to an identity transformation. This circular evolution (stream to rain to stream) is a metaphor for a person’s spiritual journey: “We begin the search from the end and end the search where it begins.” To demonstrate her points, Hunt frenetically crisscrosses traditions and quotes liberally from spiritual teachers (particularly Ramana Maharshi and Ramesh Balsekar). “One has only to taste the words of the ancient Indian Rishis, the Taoist sage Lao-tzu, the Buddha, Jesus... to begin to resonate somewhere to that unspoken truth that touches the heart,” she writes. Although Hunt’s freewheeling text will disappoint readers looking for a more formalized method, the book effectively considers how different spiritual traditions confront negative, ego-driven attitudes. (Mar.)