Authors: Stephan Bodian
Everything you can hear, see, smell, taste, touch, feel, and think—that is, everything with qualities or characteristics—is an experience, an object of your observation, and therefore can’t possibly be the you who experiences or observes. The question is, who or what is this you, this me? Even the me you’ve taken yourself to be, the self-image, the personality, is just a collection of characteristics and can’t be the one who experiences. Spiritual awakening means waking up to the experiencer, the witness, pure being itself, the one who is eternally aware.
Words can’t possibly encompass the vastness of being or pin down its mystery, but they can be used as convenient pointers, like fingers that point to the moon but have
nothing to do with the moon itself. The terms and phrases used throughout this book, such as
impersonal witness, ultimate subject, timeless presence
, are not intended as concepts to add to your spiritual encyclopedia. Instead, their purpose is to short-circuit your conceptual mind and point beyond it to the place inside you that already knows what I’m talking about and can recognize and resonate with the truth of these words. If the words do their job, you’ll put down this book knowing less than when you picked it up but being closer to true, nonconceptual understanding.
As powerful as waking up to pure being or the impersonal witness may be, it’s just the beginning of an often prolonged journey of spiritual unfolding. Like an earthquake in consciousness, awakening moves the tectonic plates of your psyche and sends shock waves to every corner of your life, initiating a profound transformation at the core of your being. Over time, the awakening will deepen and expand as you become progressively clearer about who you really are. Along with greater clarity, you’ll feel a natural movement to live in alignment with your realization. Eventually, the truth you’ve awakened to will become the predominant perspective and force in your life, supplanting the old beliefs and stories that have informed your activities in the past.
For some people, this process of transformation happens slowly and almost imperceptibly, like gradually getting wet while walking through fog. Others may experience it as a tsunami roaring across the landscape of their lives and leaving nothing undisturbed in its wake. Whether you’re just
ambling along on your journey or feeling as though your world is falling apart, you can benefit from having a guide who outlines the stages of the pathless path and reassures you that you’re actually right on track and doing just fine.
Based on my own experience and the experiences of students and clients over the years, I’ve broken down the awakening process into five overlapping stages: seeking, awakening, deepening and clarifying, embodying, and living the awakened life. These stages, which are explored at great length in this book and echo traditional categories from Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, are meant to be only loosely sequential, and most people skip around from one to another in the course of their journey. Indeed, every person’s spiritual trajectory is unique, and no map can hope to chart the terrain accurately for everyone. Ultimately, you are the path—the path begins and ends with you. Maps are just intended to quiet the mind so it can relax and allow the process to unfold. Don’t take them too seriously—in fact, don’t take anything in this book too seriously. If you find some insight helpful in reassuring or orienting you, hold it lightly; if it causes you to doubt yourself or fear the possibilities, forget about it—you can pick it up later if it appeals to you again.
Here is a brief overview of the stages I’ll be describing:
•
Seeking (
Chapters 1
through
5
).
Motivated by suffering, devotion, or mere curiosity, you stumble on the possibility of awakening and begin to search for it using a variety of means to glimpse it for yourself. In this stage, you may learn to sit quietly, practice self-inquiry, and closely
examine the various spiritual beliefs you’ve accumulated over the years that may obscure your inherent wakefulness. Even after your initial awakening, you may continue seeking if you feel that your awakening is not quite clear or complete.
•
Awakening (
Chapter 6
).
In the aftermath of authentic, direct, nonconceptual awakening, seeking comes to an end. You’ve found what you’ve been looking for, know who you are, recognize your original face, and have discovered the priceless jewel of true nature.
•
Deepening and clarifying (
Chapter 7
).
In most cases, awakening continues to unfold and clarify, just as you may recognize a familiar face from afar but only gradually begin to flesh out the important details as you get closer. In particular, the recognition that you are the light of consciousness, pure awareness, the impersonal witness, gradually deepens as you realize that the witness and what is witnessed, observer and observed, subject and object, you and the objects of your experience, are inseparable. To take this even further, they are both manifestations of some deeper reality or mystery that enlivens, encompasses, and gives rise to everything.
•
Embodiment (
Chapters 8
and
9
).
Although you may know who you are with unshakable certainty, this realization may still have to filter down from your mind and heart into your lower energy centers. As a result, you may experience your oneness with all things and enjoy the bliss of timeless presence when you sit quietly by yourself, but you may not equally embody your essential nature at work,
in your intimate relationships, or with family and friends. In other words, you may not walk your talk. The more you embody what you know yourself to be, the more your every action becomes a radiant expression of truth.
•
Living the awakened life (
Chapter 10
).
Once your awakening has deepened and clarified and has come to inform every moment of your life, you naturally and spontaneously act in alignment with your deepest truth. Seeing the inherent emptiness of self and the essential inseparability of self and other, you no longer feel moved to act out of narrow self-interest but instead follow the flow of life itself, acting in attunement with the movement of the whole, the Tao.
If these stages don’t make much sense to you right now, don’t worry—I’ve telescoped a lifetime of insight and realization into a few short pages, and we’ll spend the rest of this book exploring, elaborating, and deepening the same fundamental principles. In fact, I’ll be repeating the same truths again and again so they can gradually bypass your mind and awaken your own inner knowing, the deeper dimension inside you that already knows who you are.
For the purpose of supporting these teachings in their work of awakening, you might experiment with a new way of reading and listening to them—that is, not with your mind, but with your whole being. Just as you listen to a beautiful piece of music—whether it’s a sonata by Mozart or a song by Madonna—by opening your ears and allowing the music
to move and affect you at a visceral level, you can read this book with the same attitude. Don’t try to figure it out, compare it with other books you’ve read, or filter it through a collection of preconceived ideas. Just relax your body, set aside your judgments, and let the words act on you. They carry the energy and music of their source—let them resonate inside you.
Awakening doesn’t happen through effort or will, but by being what my teacher Jean Klein used to call
disponible
, a French word meaning “available, or receptive,” to truth. The less you do, the better; no need to make sense of what I say on a conceptual level. Over time, the teachings will keep returning to you unbidden at unexpected moments in your everyday life, perhaps to bring light to a particular circumstance or challenge, or merely to illuminate another aspect of truth. The fact is, the awakening process, once begun, develops its own momentum without effort on your part, and the truth naturally yearns to awaken to itself through you. Eventually, after repeated listening, the truth will spontaneously spring to life inside you, and you’ll recognize that it has always belonged to you, has always been the essential truth of your being; it’s just been hidden from view.
As an invitation for you to be receptive and available to truth, I’ve included several guided meditations in each chapter. The “Breathe and Reflect” exercises, which appear intermittently, provide an opportunity to pause, let your analytical mind relax for a few moments, and reflect on the truth of what you’re reading. The “Wake-Up Calls” at the end of each chapter are prolonged meditations intended to
bypass the mind and allow you to glimpse the deeper truth behind the words. Use these exercises not as repetitive daily practices or more items on your interminable to-do list, but as sporadic forays into uncharted terrain, laboratory experiments with the potential to reveal some new and enlightening insights. Do them as you feel inclined. Just follow the instructions with beginner’s mind, and notice how the exercise affects you.
Ultimately, nothing I say in this book is true in any lasting way—it’s just an expedient means, a pointer, to turn your attention inward to the source of all teachings. Because truth is essentially nondual and includes everything without exception, anything I assert about it is both true and false—and neither true nor false. For example, if I say that the truth of your being is profound silence, I may awaken this silence inside you but ignore the fact that truth ultimately includes noise as well. If I call it “stillness,” I neglect the dynamic flow of truth in manifestation, the rush and urgency of life in all its fullness. If I say “joy,” I leave out the sorrow of the human condition. If I call it a “precious jewel,” I ignore the heap of refuse by the side of the road that shines with the radiance of being. For this reason, the teachings throughout this book are filled with paradoxes—indeed, paradox is the only way to approach truth with the respect it deserves. Again, don’t try to resolve these paradoxes or figure them out—let them bypass your mind and act on your whole being. As the American sage and poet Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Truly, is anything missing right now?
Nirvana is right here, before your eyes.
This very place is the Lotus Land,
This very body is the body of the Buddha.
—Zen Master Hakuin, “The Song of Zazen”
Several months before I turned sixteen, my mother died suddenly in an automobile accident. As I struggled to come to terms with this heart-wrenching loss, I found myself losing something equally precious as well—my faith in the benevolent, omniscient God who had guided and cared for me since childhood. My whole world of belonging and meaning collapsed within a few weeks. Grief-stricken and bereft, I didn’t have the support necessary to help me process my feelings. So I turned to the world of philosophy to help me deal with my pain.
In the American transcendentalists, I discovered intimations of a more mysterious, impersonal divinity that infused, animated, and yet transcended all things. From Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, I made my way to German idealists like Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, who challenged my conventional way of knowing reality and pointed to a fundamental principle prior to thought. Learning that these philosophers had been influenced by the wisdom of Asia, I soon found myself on the doorstep of Buddhism and Zen.
In those days, books on Buddhism were scarce and often difficult to decipher. But in the few Zen books I could lay my hands on, I found images of masters who sat unperturbed as earthquakes rumbled around them and samurai swordsmen threatened to cut off their heads. Troubled by the pain of a difficult childhood and a longing for the mother-love I had recently lost, I desperately desired to transcend my suffering and awaken to the unshakable tranquillity and equanimity these men and women had apparently achieved. After several years of reading, including college courses in Asian philosophy and experimentation with mind-altering drugs, I finally looked up
Zen
in the phone book and began weekly trips to a little Zen center in midtown Manhattan for an evening of meditation and spiritual talk.
On one particularly warm summer evening, as the pungent smell of Japanese incense filled the meditation hall, one of the roshi’s senior students, a woman my mother’s age, gave a talk that ignited a fire deep inside me and set me off on the pathless path. “Zazen [Zen meditation],” she said softly, “is the way to bring you to your long-lost home.” As a college
student with no home to return to and no sense of a stable center or home within, I was profoundly touched by these words. I yearned to discover my true home, the one I knew could never be lost.
In that moment more than thirty years ago, I came face-to-face for the first time with the core paradox at the heart of the spiritual journey. According to the books I read and the teachings I received, the home I so fervently sought existed right here and now, inside me. Being home, after all, it wasn’t some exotic and unfamiliar Garden of Eden, but the place I inherently belonged, my birthright, my natural state, the awakened nature that already shone forth from inside me. I was being told that Zen meditation was the way to go there, even though there was apparently nowhere to go. My mind simply couldn’t wrap itself around this paradox, so I took the easy way out and shifted my focus from discovering home to counting my breaths.
Many years later, when I finally did come home once and for all, I realized that I had never been apart from it even for an instant. As one of my teachers liked to say, it’s your nearest, your home ground, the silent presence gazing through these eyes, giving rise to these thoughts, animating these arms and legs. Not the me you take yourself to be, but the one you really are—the mysterious, ungraspable subject of all objects, the “I am” prior to all characteristics. Yet somehow my true home, apparently as near as breath itself, had remained completely invisible to me, even though my teachers kept pointing toward it (as I’m doing now). As a result, I ended up searching for more than twenty years, sitting long
hours in meditation, listening to countless teachings, reading innumerable books, before I found myself where I had always been.