Imagine crossing the film Shadowlands with the perennial philosophy, and you'll have a pretty good feel for the power of this book. The author of such landmark books as The Spectrum of Consciousness takes his wide-ranging philosophic thought and brings it home, literally. This ain't no armchair philosophy. Rather, it's the story of the five years Wilber spent with his wife Treya, who was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer shortly after their marriage.

Sure, you could read Grace and Grit as just a love story—Wilber even tells you which "heavy philosophy" chapters to skip, if that's your interest. You could read it as just another story about a heroic battle with cancer. But you'd be missing out if you did. Because it's the intertwining of the philosophy, the deep spiritual yearnings of Ken and Treya, and the horror of cancer that makes this a compelling story. The beauty and the terror of life are so close together that the Truth can't help but shine through. Here's a brief sample:

 

Friends and family often wondered, is she being unrealistic—shouldn't she be worrying? fretting? unhappy? But the fact is, by living in the present, by refusing to live in the future, she began exactly to live consciously with death. Think about it: death, if anything, is the condition of having no future. By living in the present, as if she had no future, she was not ignoring death, she was living it. And I was trying to do the same. I thought of that beautiful quote from Emerson:

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

And that is exactly what Treya was doing. If and when death came, she would deal with it then, not now. There's a great Zen koan on this. A student comes to a Zen Master and asks, 'What happens to us after death?' And the Zen Master says, 'I don't know.' The student is aghast. 'You don't know?! You're a Zen Master!' 'Yes, but not a dead one."

Ken and Treya are spiritual seekers who "live the life" as we say in SKS, for they've got everything on the line. And they are transformed by their courage to live honestly to the very end. If you aren't moved by the end of this journey through hell and back, you might as well hang up your spiritual track shoes.