The Spiritual Tourist: A Personal Odyssey Through the Outer Reaches of Belief

by Mick Brown

Book Overview

On a pilgrimage to see the Dalai Lama in the foothills of the Himalayas; blissed out in Germany with a beautiful Indian girl, believed to be "the Divine Mother"; witnessing miracles in the ashram of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1582340013
• ISBN13: 9781582340012
• Release Date: August 1998
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A great read

There are two perspectives from which spiritual questing might be approached, from the side of the seeker and from the side of the provider. In other words, there are two stories to be told, and Mick Brown's book does a good job at both. He is very forthright about his own relentless seeking after spiritual truth, meaning, and faith, and he is equally so when it comes to describing the myriad individuals and enterprises that are out to fulfill that demand. A lot of interesting adventures occur where those two things intersect, to say the very least. I did not know that Ram Das began as Richard Alpert, a psych prof and LSD compatriot of Timothy Leary at Harvard. I didn't know that books by Rajneesh, the disgraced Bhagwan, are still being sold with the author's name changed to Osho. I didn't know that Krishnamurti began by being picked off a beach as a lice-infested kid, by a prominent Theosophist with a penchant for young boys. And lots more. Brown's travels through this world are a source of enlightenment, if not always of the sort one is hoping to find. But this is not a hatchet job -- if anything, Brown is overly generous in giving many of these rather questionable spiritual practitioners and their operations the benefit of the doubt. He is serious in his quest, remains almost always hopeful regardless of disappointment and disillusionment, and his thoughts about what he is looking for, and why, are sophisticated and moving. The position he finally arrives at seems to be something like this: It is possible that none of these religions and systems are true in any scientific, empirical sense, but they do all seem to end up with a pretty similar understanding of what human happiness requires. If you can find one that you are able to commmit to and practice, you will live a better and more fulfilling life, and no justification beyond that is necessary. This could be a valuable book for anyone embarking on such a search, because it contains a lot of information about the dead ends to avoid. At the end of the book, the author seems finally to have found his spiritual home in a Tibetan Buddhist enclave in Scotland. That was about ten years ago; it would be most interesting to know where he is today.

Great Book about an outer/inner journey

I happened upon The Spiritual Tourist at a used bookstore. I was impressed by the writing and the content. I have never met Mick Brown but I like him and I appreciate his objectivity and at the same time his receptivity to the possibility that there is more to life than what we may see or think. I was especially pleased with the chapter on Krishnamurti and the theosophical society. Having read several of Krishnamurti's works, I still find him the "wisest" for lack of a better word spiritual teacher I have ever encountered.

A down to earth approach for linking sceptics to mystics.

When a "spiritual tourist" wanders along your path and you are open to spiritual discovery, you wander along with him for a while. Mick Brown takes what is human in all of us, question, and uses it a as tool to understanding. Too many books on the subject of spiritual discovery are 'preachy' and tend to distance the novice spiritualist. Mick's book is descriptive, informative, and laced with sceptical humor. This book is truely a journey, and I doubt that a man with so much background knowledge into so many spiritual leaders, is just a tourist. This book is written by an insightful, spirtual human being.

This is high work, that is also a great read.

This is high work, that is also a great read. Mick Brown takes us from suburban London to arcane areas of India, with side-trips to the USA, Germany and Scotland as he attempts to come to terms with his own shifting, gradually growing, spiritual perspectives. What is especially refreshing is Brown's air of uncertainty in a world populated by wide-eyed, gullible cosmic spivs who you would cross the Ganges to avoid. As well as being rather profound, The Spiritual Tourist is a very funny book.

An inquirer with a singular sense of fairness

Brown has achieved an extraordinary feat here. If you doubt it, ask yourself how many first-person accounts of spirituality you have read that are neither reverent nor debunking. Brown is a deeply interested inquirer who is yet disinterested, in the better sense of that word. He clearly holds no stock in the gurus, movements and mystifying phenomena he investigates on three continents, but at the same time he is entirely open to being affected and changed by them - provided they pass the laugh test and his discerning inner assay of authenticity. He is not shy about his own hunger for a spiritual bread that will sustain. In this respect, he is an eloquent surrogate for thousands of potential readers, whether they be believers or skeptics. If only he had been better served by his publisher. The book's title conveys nothing of the seriousness of the work; the garish cover art is ludicrously off the mark; the copyediting betrays a wholly misplaced devotion to the comma; and poor Buddha gets his name Gautama misspelled over and over again. Fortunately, these are no more than surface blemishes on an offering of genuine substance.