In Michael Fischman’s book, Stumbling Into Infinity: An Ordinary Man in the Sphere of Enlightenment, it becomes apparent that Fischman is neither ordinary nor stumbling. While he emphasizes that this is his personal story, he has adeptly written a debut nonfiction work that is multiple books at once, layered one beneath the other and bound together by everyman’s search for the answer to the question ‘Why am I here?’ Nearly all of us ask this question more than once in our lives, but Fischman is a man driven more intensely than most to find the answer. His passionate quest makes for an extraordinary memoir.
In the first chapter Fischman writes that his parents, perhaps to protect his innocence, had kept his grandfather’s death a secret from him. He recalls, “One night, when I was about three-years-old, while my parents and sister were asleep…I awoke before dawn and saw Grandpa. Transparent as a mist of smoke he stood still in our bedroom doorway… I didn’t know why he was there.” The author continues, “And it was many years before I realized that Grandpa’s death had coincided with the time of his mysterious visit. At age eight, alone in his Grandma’s hospital room, he saw her take her last breath. “I knew she was gone. I stood shaking, as though I’d been dipped in ice water. I’d seen death.”
Perhaps his early childhood experience with death, and physical abuse by his father, explains the author’s ever present concern with the meaning of life and living a better life. Or perhaps, as he speculates, you could blame it on growing up in the sixties and seventies. Whatever the reasons, Fischman remembers from his college experiences that “I was more interested in attaining a state of Nirvana and enlightenment that studying for my chemistry finals and graduating from college.” But like most Westerners, Fischman believed then that one should be independent minded and find their own way in spiritual matters. This first layer of the memoir continues to follow Fischman’s quest, ultimately leading the reader to his close friendship with one of the Eastern world’s great spiritual gurus and the assumption of the leadership of his U.S. organization.
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