Awakening Through Love:  Unveiling your Deepest Goodness, John Makransky, 2007 

This is a very important book and it comes at a time when I have committed myself to addressing others with love and acceptance which is the book’s central theme.  It’s not an easy book, overly long, detailed, and full of the Buddhist philosophy of an infinite consciousness and goodness and love and compassion for all, but it has lots of wisdom and practical suggestions.  The key is to move from the egoic self, grasping for identity, security, and objectiveness which has no objective reality to a concept of the mind with its limitless openness, cognizance, and awareness.  That enables one to then meditate based on our own benefectors as a starting point for the radiance that we can extend to all others moving past the reductive labels of friend, enemy, and stranger that limits our view and feeling towards them.  The book finishes with the six perfections of Buddhism—generosity, moral discipline, patience, perseverance, meditative concentration and wisdom.  Very dense, very challenging, but very important.