Far from being a Pelagian handbook, Eknath Easwaran’s volume on living in freedom or Conquest of Mind is his very successful effort to present the art of training the mind to respond to life’s challenges and discover the True Self in the process—not just a transformation but transfiguration whereby one is love. Drawing as he does on saints and mystics of many other religious traditions, the author very capably and consistently sets before his readers a dynamic discipline which he calls meditation designed to assist us to our “native state.” Eknath insists that discovering the divine core in our human personality is the real goal of our lives. Convinced that “no one teaches more clearly than Buddha that the mastery of life depends on mastering the mind,” the author uses basic teachings of the Enlightened One to offer skills for watching, slowing down and changing conditioned thinking. “Meditation,” he says, “is bringing your attention back to quality thoughts—a warm-up exercise for the mind,” though every moment is “an opportunity for mind training.” There is a good section on ill-will and how it devastates us until we choose to let our minds be tamed. The same capacity for habitual obsession, he says, if it can be won over, becomes a splendid capacity for continual contemplation. The book is an interreligious gift to all.

Monastics, especially encouraged to have the “mind of Christ” within them, ought to be indebted to Eknath for the manual of deprogramming or untraining the mind, a phrase once used by Thomas Merton. “Dive deep, O Mind, dive deep,” he quotes Ramakrishna, “in the ocean of God’s beauty. If you descend to the uttermost depths, there you will find the gem of Love. . . . ”