THE DEAL

Richard Smoley’s THE DEAL, is a concise, deeply practical guide that shows you how to forgive anyone who has ever hurt you – and to receive a payback of enormous personal satisfaction and inner peace.

“What I am offering you in this book is the best deal you have ever gotten in your life, or ever will. Even though I know nothing about you, I’m willing to make this claim with complete certainty.”
“The Deal” is this: You agree to give up all your grievances and resentments and grudges for good. In exchange, you ask for – and receive – complete forgiveness for yourself.
The Deal is so remarkable because it explains how the virtue of forgiveness – rather than being a squishy, eat-your-vegetables truism – is actually the key, perhaps the sole key, to a happy life. This is because we live under the law of karma. Whatever one’s beliefs, we all hold to some concept of karma, the universal rule of cause and effect. There is no way out of karma. Except for one. It is forgiveness.

If you perform the one incredibly simple but vital forgiveness exercise in The Deal, you will forgive and be forgiven. You will be free. You will enter a new phase of life. Once the exercise in The Deal is completed – it can be done in less than an hour – Richard Smoley guides you how to stay with “The Deal” for life. And he counsels what to do in certain cases where forgiveness seems especially difficult, or where you may not want to forgive.
A widely respected spiritual writer and thinker, Smoley doesn’t hand you the standard promise that this book will change your life. When you finish it, he concludes: “It already has changed your life.”
This is the simple, radical truth of The Deal.

One of today’s most highly regarded writers on esoteric topics, Richard Smoley is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Oxford. He was a longtime editor of the venerated spiritual journal Gnosis. Smoley’s books include Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History (Tarcher 2013); Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition (Shambhala 2002); The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe (New World Library 2009); Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity (Jossey-Bass 2008); The Essential Nostradamus (Tarcher 2006); Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism (HarperOne 2007); and Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney) (Penguin Books 1999). Currently he is editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America and of Quest Books.