Thaddeus Golas

Summary

Thaddeus Golas is known for having written The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment (ISBN: 0879056983) , a classic book on human consciousness, which was first published in 1972 by J.E. Casey of San Francisco.

The Guide, as it is affectionately called by those who have read it, is thought by many to be one of the very best descriptions of, as well as a trigger for, the transcendental experience. It has been described many times as: "The last book you’ll ever need to read on Spirituality".

Biography & Philosophy of Thaddeus Golas

Thaddeus Golas was born on June 15th 1924 in Paterson, New Jersey. He was the youngest of five children. Both his parents were of Polish descent and met in the United States. His father died when Thaddeus was four, and his mother remarried when he was ten, but the stepfather also died -- of Tuberculosis.

Thaddeus studied at New York’s Columbia University (Class of ’48), and eventually served in WWII; where he was stationed in France. He returned to the United States and became an editor for Redbook Magazine and later worked at Harper & Row as a book representative. He held several publishing related jobs in the Midwest, and finally wound up in San Francisco, where he self published his famous The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment.

This book is the only part of his writing that was ever published and he never lectured about it, nor “exploited his readers in any way”.

He was not fond of the New Age movement nor the propensity of its parishioners for wanting to attain control of physical reality; Thaddeus Golas’ chief interest was in mapping the mechanisms of Energy, Space, and Matter, and how they relate to the human experience of consciousness, through a process of expansion to energy to space, then from space back through energy to contraction into mass.

"Space pushes away Energy", he said. "Space Consciousness has no interest in controlling mass interactions".

He coined the notion that: Space propels energy, and energy compels matter – this process which we call the forces of gravity also relates, according to Golas, to the mechanism by which consciousness becomes entangled in the physical realm.

Golas saw Enlightenment not as a benign form of therapy, but merely the way out of this reality.

He married three times, lived in San Francisco, Hollywood, and Sarasota Florida – his last stop.

Thaddeus Golas spoke of prolonging consciousness as the only action that could result in a change for the better. When we attain consciousness, he said, we merely wake up where we have been sleeping.

"It isn’t as though our movement in this life is horizontal through time, since in Space, the time is always now".
Though many wish to remember catch phrases such as: “Love it the way it is”, or
“What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens”,
Thaddeus Golas favored one notion above all else:

“No matter what happens, I am conscious all the time”

External links

Factoids

Thaddeus Golas is often confused with Thaddeus Golas, the movie actor by the same name.
The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment was in print for 30 years and translated into seven languages but Golas felt it was only really written for the English language.
He had no religious affiliation, and reckoned that if he had, he would never have had the open mindedness to conceive of the concepts presented in the Guide.

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