Awakening the Wisdom and Compassion to Change Your World is the latest book by Robert Sachs. It is the sequel to Robert's groundbreaking interviews with some of the world's foremost Buddhist leaders in The Wisdom of The Buddhist Masters: Common and Uncommon Sense.

In the fall of 2006, Duncan Baird editor-in-chief, Michael Mann asked Robert if he could interview current world Buddhist masters asking pithy questions about today's challenges and what they saw in humanity's future on planet Earth. Such masters are usually approached to answer the more philosophical and existential questions of life. But, as a student of Tibetan Buddhism since 1974, Robert often heard them make "off the record" comments demonstrating their social, historical, and political astuteness. The Wisdom of The Buddhist Masters documents those interviews.

These interviews had a profound effect on Robert and led him to discuss with Michael at Duncan Baird an expanded and updated version of one of his most popular books, The Buddha at War: Peaceful Heart, Courageous Action in Troubled Times. Becoming Buddha not only lays out a step-by-step path to becoming a "conscious, engaged activist" or spiritual warrior, working in all spheres of human activity to create a possible and sustainable future, as outlined in The Buddha at War. In what he sees as a more inclusive book that will touch the hearts and inspire the minds of readers regardless of their religious, political, or philosophical persuasion, Robert adds the critical social and moral Buddhist principle of the Four Guests. Briefly, the Four Guests include divine or transcendent beings, elemental forces, our human family and the world of life we all share, and those in the greatest suffering we see in our world. In keeping with teachers of past and present, Robert asserts that in properly addressing these Four Guests, we can create a society that becomes more fulfilling and sustainable for us here and now.  It also casts an eye down the road and suggests that for us to have a conscious, engaged civilization for generations to come, we need to consider, appreciate, and pass on to future generations the wisdom and compassion to maintain healthy relationships to all of these Four Guests. To demonstrate his own commitment to this, there is an Appendix which illustrates the kind of provoking editorial writing Robert does to inspire social and political change.

Thus, Becoming Buddha will not only help to train each and every one of us to become "all that we can be" - awakened incarnations living conscious, engaged lives.  It also offers an encompassing vision of how we can build a conscious, sustainable civilization to inform, inspire, and serve generations to come.