Book review of Easy Death, by Adi Da Samraj (Da Free John)
As a longtime hospice worker I’ve made a habit of reading everything I can find about death and dying. The psychologically-oriented books on bereavement and mourning are interesting and even helpful, but most of them presume that death is just annihilation. The religiously oriented books are more hopeful but, to put it bluntly, most of them are filled with nonsensical dogma.
I know for a fact that death isn’t annihilation because even after people die you can feel their spirit in the room. In little, out-of-the-way spiritual bookstores I’ve found several small, pretty marginal books that acknowledge this fact and attempt to describe what happens to a person AFTER they die. But none of them really speak with the authority of the two best books on the entire subject of death and dying, Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Adi Da Samraj’s Easy Death. The good Rinpoche’s book is very good indeed and I got a lot of out of it. But Adi Da Samraj’s book is of another order entirely.
Adi Da is an American spiritual master who literally accompanies his own devotees through the death process (the book contains some amazing stories about this). Most importantly, he addresses every important aspect of the death and dying in a language that we ordinary mortals can understand, offering us clear, absolutely usable advice that I’ve never seen anywhere else.
You really can and should know what happens after death, and this book will tell you. I’ve been employing Adi Da Samraj’s wisdom in my hospice work for a few years now and it’s just totally changed the outcome for those who have died right in front of me—as well as for their families, and even for me. It turns out that what you need to know about death is exactly what you should know about life as well. I don’t know who this man is or where he came from but they ought to give him a medal for this book.
—Will Knoblock, Hospice Worker
