Navigating the Inner Path to Peace.

Beauty As A State of Being: Mastering Mind and the Spiritual Path, is a book whose message will remain with me for some time – hopefully always.

Written by Dr. Solomon Katz, a Harvard educated clinical psychologist, and lifelong practitioner of meditation, this book is one of those rare gems of spiritual enlightenment that addresses the mental pathologies of the human psyche. More significantly, he offers readers numerous tools and insights to circumvent them, ultimately allowing one to rest in a state of inner peace, harmony, and the bliss of pure being.

And how does one get there?

Not easy in the rapid-fire, digital world of information overload in which we all live on a daily basis. From Helicopter moms and over-scheduled school kids to struggling college undergrads and stressed-out executives, we are incessantly lost in our internal dramas and dilemmas. And the more we fuel them, the more real and convincing they appear.

But they’re not.

And that’s what Dr. Solomon Katz masterfully demonstrates in this book. Drawing from years of teaching, clinical practice, and monastic living in the East, he is a master in his own right of the spiritual path to self-mastery and inner calm.

If I had to capture the essence of Katz’s book in verse, I would use the following Haiku poem by 19c Japanese monk/writer, Ryokan:

The flower invites the butterfly with no-mind;The butterfly visits the flower with no-mind. The flower opens, the butterfly comes; The butterfly comes, the flower opens. I don’t know others, Others don’t know me. But by not knowing, we follow nature’s course.

Beauty As A State of Being, reminds me of the timeless, eternal mystery of my existence – an existence that is pregnant with infinite possibilities – here and now in the sacrament of the present moment. A great read: I highly recommend it.

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