Deeksha: The Fire from Heaven

Imparting spiritual advice and spreading the message of a new worldwide movement, Deeksha: The Fire from Heaven offers readers a lot of information. In the first third of the book author Kiara Windrider takes readers on the journey of his personal enlightenment. He describes in great detail what brought him back to his native India, where he studied with the Avatar’s Bhagavan and Amma at the newly founded Oneness University.

The first part of the book reads like a no-frills memoir and ends when Windrider finishes explaining his new path in life. The book continues with shorter stories of other student’s experiences at Oneness University, explanatory passages covering everything from brain chemistry to the Mayan Calendar, and an interview with the Avatar Bhagavan himself.

The book title, Deeksha, refers to person-to-person transfers of energy that according to Windrider and the Deeksha Movement create a neurocircuitry change in the brain. This change allows ego and the sense of a separate self to take the back burner and eventually leave completely. Think of Deekshas as Reiki’s more powerful cousin. This change in the brain allows people to fully realize oneness, the idea that there is no separate self and that we are a part of everything in the universe. This, says Windrider, is what elusive enlightenment is all about.

So does enlightenment mean constant happiness for the rest of your life? Not at all, Windrider concludes. Happiness comes and goes just like all emotions and enlightenment is about not being attached to any of them. I picked up Deeksha: The Fire from Heaven hoping to learn more about the nature of happiness and was awed when the book ended up breaking down many assumptions I had about the emotion itself.

This book challenges the way most of the world looks at everything from religion to global climate chaos. It exposes readers to an important spiritual movement in India that has only just begun to spread westward. While you may not be moved to take the capital “I” out of your writing, this book will give you some tasty thought morsels to ruminate on for months to come. And who knows, maybe they will one day help you to be, in laylady’s terms, More Happy.

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