The Awakening Guide: A Companion for the Inward Journey (Companions for the Inward Journey Book 2)

by Bonnie Greenwell

  Stopping too Soon

  When you experience a dramatic spiritual or energetic experience and believe that is the end of the journey, you can be led quickly into a spiritual cul-de-sac.

  In my own experience, I had many mystical and energy experiences for nearly 25 years, but still questioned if this was all there was. Adyashanti once said that after profound awakening experiences, he spent five years with an inner voice that continually told him, “This is not the end…keep going,” and he returned to his meditation practice again and again.

  The fulfillment of the journey to enlightenment is not about a continual overpowering mystical experience, nor is it falling permanently out of the body into some other-worldly state. It is the settling of all division, the peace that comes with knowing all is well, exactly as it is. Awakening ends the drive to have more, be more, or do better, and brings the deepest relaxation imaginable. It is as if every movement of the personal me has burned itself out, and one is no longer tempted to rehash the past or accomplish the future, and has the inclination to settle in this very moment. Clarity, wisdom and compassion arise in this settling, and the direction of life becomes more natural. Movement flows more like a river or a breeze, and there is no attachment to the results.

  If you stop short of this condition of beingness, you may become a spiritualized personality, knowing how to acquire mystical experiences, but still feeling unfinished and unsettled. You may become caught in the, “I had it and now I’ve lost it” syndrome, or you may spend most of your life withdrawing into meditation and avoiding the living of your experiences. Don’t stop until you are free of yourself. On the other hand, once you know that you know the Truth, don’t drag every last personal piece of conditioning into the light of day. Relax the struggle and let the process bring forth what is needed, and simply meet it wherever you are.

  Enchantment With Ecstasy

  Enchantment with some of the by-products of the spiritual search – new abilities, capacities, devotion, bliss, altered states, or self-aggrandizing can also block the completion of a spiritual awakening process. It is beautiful to enjoy the gifts that come along, and explore their depth and expression, but remember that what is essential is to know who is having the experiences. When this is known with full clarity, then all experiences are acceptable, even the ones that are not blissful, powerful and spacious. You become just the being, the experiencing, and the One who has no tendency of grasping or rejecting any element of life. So instead of becoming addicted to one aspect of life experience and being enchanted by that, you find appreciation and pleasure in many experiences, and acceptance in the areas that are not comfortable.

  One way that you can be undermined by your own experiences is allowing yourself to feel special. It is a simple movement of ego that allows the arrogance to arise following a profound spiritual opening. If the mind is extremely creative it may briefly lead one down the path of “saving the world”, or seeking out followers, in the innocent belief that you have seen the truth and are ready to lead the masses. It may allow you to silently feel better than others, and negate the understanding that you are no different than them as a human, completely conditioned and vulnerable to misinterpretations.

  It is usually not possible to overcome these thoughts by crushing them. Instead we have to accept our vulnerability to arrogance, specialness and whatever other movements of the old self arise, and choose not to act upon them. It is through compassionate acceptance of our shadow characteristics that we gain the freedom from being manipulated by them unconsciously, and we gather insight into the limitations of being human.

  Doubts

  Doubts may arise about the possibility of becoming free or even the existence of freedom. Our culture does not encourage inner work or support the dissolution of personal egoic tendencies. All around us we see those who are fascinated with wealth, fame, power, sexuality, and even violence. To live a life that simply goes with the flow of things and is not concerned with personal acquisition seems unnatural to us. When we start to realize the cost of knowing the Truth is the releasing of our conceptual frameworks, personal drives, and old patterns, we may feel this is completely unrealistic, not worth the effort, not likely to gain us anything. And we do not even know if when we let go of our attachments there will be anything valuable to take their place. Freedom may lose its appeal when it no longer seems to be about having everything your own way, but is seen to be more about responding in line with some vague intuitive and unknown Truth.

  If we do not let doubt drive us away from the process, we can find this arising of doubt to be useful. It can trigger great questions and challenges that open us to a deeper understanding of who we are. When our behavior falters, or we find ourselves in an old unsettling pattern, we may begin to doubt our own worthiness. This is an opportunity to uncover hidden and unawake patterns of identity that need to be brought into consciousness, questioned and released. Are these thoughts actually true, or are they simply old assumptions based on conditioning?

  Discouragement

  Discouragement often comes as a by-product of the spiritual search – the feeling you no longer fit in, you can’t function the way you used to, or you are facing difficult or shattering physical or emotional experiences. Depression, anxiety, rage, sorrow, and all the other emotions might arise for some time after an awakening, and a few people will be carried into such despair that they give up the journey. During these dark night experiences there can be a sense of failure, inadequacy, disillusionment and resistance, and you may lose the spirit for the interior work that is being asked of you for completion. This is an important time not to give up hope and to find new depths within your self.

  It is shocking to discover this aspect of the spiritual process as it is so foreign to expectations. Sometimes it seems the heart is forced to break, and often there is a sense of carrying the load of the world. We grieve all the wars. We feel all the rage of those displaced. We feel the neediness of the world. But when we can let this move through us, and release it from our energy field, we will find stillness underneath, and the ability to move on in our spiritual journey..

  I have seen this discouragement especially when a student has been disillusioned by the behavior of a spiritual teacher or leader, possibly one they trusted and served for many years. Many spiritual seekers become attached to an ashram or monastery or a teacher, and give up their lives in service to what they naively perceive as the perfection of that individual or system. In doing so they may ignore obvious signs of inauthenticity, distortions of truth and even abuse. When a person becomes disillusioned and leaves a spiritual community it may feel as if their entire world has collapsed and all they ever believed was false. It can take years to recover.

  But if one can see this collapse as an essential part of the personal spiritual process, grieve the losses, create a personal version of a balanced life, and develop trust in his or her own heart wisdom this trauma can actually become a portal to freedom. One does not need to lose the wisdom and joy once known in spiritual practice, but simply strip it from the projections on the teacher and community. This is not an easy path, but it can break apart the spiritual identity and open the heart to know freedom. True awakening happens within us, and no one else can give it or carry it for someone else. Worshipping or serving another person’s drives and desires does not earn it.

  Distractions

  Many people become distracted and fall out of their intention for awakening or freedom, drawn by love affairs, exciting new work, family problems and issues, illness, the need to make money, and many other events that arise in an ordinary life. This is why it was often a requirement to give up the world and live in a monastery, retreat setting or ashram while pursuing spiritual practices. In some traditions people still retreat for up to three years, unable even to leave the setting when there is a family crisis, in order to give undistracted attention to spiritual practice. Discipline and established habits in practice are a foundation in most serious spiritual
systems. But I consider many of these distractions to be just the unraveling of old samscaras (inherent conditions) that still need to be played out in a lifetime. When longing for truth is sincere, it will return and redirect us toward further development when the timing is right.

  Distraction followed by a return to spiritual focus years later was my personal experience. I responded to an initial awakening in my late 20’s by going back to school and throwing myself into professional work while I raised my family. I had felt an opening in meditation that was so overwhelmingly joyful that I felt I would never do anything with my life if I stayed so happy just washing dishes. The mind quickly made other plans. I was given a great gift, and then locked it away while I was pulled in the direction of earning college degrees and building a career. Yet the longing for Truth and enlightenment returned powerfully a few years later, making spiritual practice and energy work an integral part of both my personal and professional life, and now I don’t see that any time was really wasted. Rather everything was unfolding in a very beautiful way, outside of my understanding of it.

  Fear of Letting Go

  Most people find occasional moments of extreme fear when they are moving through a spiritual awakening process. There may be a glimpse of emptiness, of the sense that “I” do not exist, or simply a physical sensation as if one is going to fall out of the body. There can be a sense that life is falling apart.

  Usually by the time this fear arises it is too late to go back. As Kennett Roshi, a Buddhist abbot, once said to a class I was in, “Be careful what you ask for, because you are likely to get it.” We enter our spiritual work very innocently, thinking we are going to gain something precious and sweet. When we get close to this precious freedom, we begin to see clearly that we cannot take anything with us into this new territory. It is not that everything is ultimately lost, but rather that who we are and what we have accomplished loses its charm and its value to us. Many things fall away and we do not know as we enter through the eye of the needle what will return and what will forever be lost to us. We can put off the completion of the journey to enlightenment for many years by coming up to the gate, and then refusing to walk through it because we realize we have no control over who we will be on the other side.

  Fear of the Empty Mind

  Eckhart Tolle was a houseguest of ours once, during the time he was first promoting his book “The Power of Now”. His presence was warm and quiet, and I found sitting with him was a bit like sitting by a toasty fire, watching the flames flicker, and falling into trance. My husband tried to start conversations with him about the news, or sports, or other general topics. Finally Eckhart smiled and said, “You know Bill, sometimes I go for hours without a thought.” This is the myth and a source of anxiety about awakening for many, the delusion “I will no longer be able to think.”

  Eckhart could hardly be said to be incapable of thought. He had just published a brilliant bestseller and another would soon be on its way. He did not imply he could not think, only that thoughts did not arise at random, or that thinking arose from something other than the random firings of mind. He is a man who lives comfortably with an empty mind.

  Eckhart and I sat on a bench by the ocean for a while, silently entering the space of ocean, the rhythmic eternal movement of stillness before us. I realized with Eckhart that now and the awakened state are one and the same, and being in the moment without thought is being awake. Awakening is Being. Emptiness is Being.

  Our lives are graced with many possibilities for entering realization. It is, after all, only our own Truth, the place within us that is as eternal and whole and full as the ocean. The non-dual sages would say that enlightenment is like being a drop of water and merging into the ocean, recognizing “I am this”. But our mental image of this Oneness is that it means the dissolution of “me”, a loss of boundaries, a dangerous regression to the mindlessness of infancy or dementia. This is our western image of living without thought, thus our fear of feeling empty.

  Every night we willingly surrender thought for sleep, fearless about letting go of ourselves and even aggravated when sleep eludes us. We recognize we need this emptiness in order to function the next day. The stillness of mind and freedom from thought that characterizes some awakened people is like the restfulness of sleep, enhanced by the clarity of presence. It is “knowing” without knowing you know, responding from stillness, appreciating each moment. It is being undivided, being One, freedom from creating a cloud of words to define oneself or connect with others.

  Not everyone who wakes up lives in the quiet the way Eckhart does, and he is clearly a person who has always inclined toward introversion. The sage Ramana Maharshi was another man who lived in stillness, even more so than Eckhart, and it appears that he rarely had anything to say. But one who is awake sometimes emanates the radiant stillness of no thought, and spiritual seekers often resonate with this, feeling it as love or bliss when in its presence, even falling into samadhi states.

  Another silent yogi I have known is Baba Hari Das at Mt. Madonna Center in California. He is over 90 now, but he took a vow of silence as a young man and through more than 50 years has been the heart of a community, stimulating and inspiring a group of yogis who have created a beautiful and peaceful retreat center, built and operate elementary through high schools on their land, founded an orphanage in India, established a community center in Santa Cruz, and provided Ayurveda training and many other programs for those who value the path of Ashtanga yoga. He often directed work crews who built beautiful sacred temples, walkways and gardens on the site, as well as impressive buildings to house students and activities there. His love of children is a joy to witness, and his wisdom related to scripture is beautifully conveyed through simple phrases written on a chalkboard. Silence is not passive! It is rich with possibility and creativity.

  Adyashanti, who wrote a book of poetry called My Secret is Silence, is not always a silent man. An introvert plunged unexpectedly into a teaching role for thousands, he has told students that someday he may just sit without speaking, and in the meditation hall his presence in stillness will gradually bring a deep stillness to hundreds at a time. One night in the early days of his teaching I sat with him in a Tibetan meditation hall during a silent retreat and looked into his opened eyes. I saw only a boundless space like the sky and it felt as if my consciousness dissolved within it. This was not something Adya did deliberately, and apparently he did not even know he did it. Such moments are rare gifts of a moment that can help us understand and value the world of no-thought. If our intention is to live an awakened life we need to embrace emptiness, to fall into it with abandon, and realize its full potential.

  The Value of a Mentor

  There are many advantages in finding the right teacher or mentor for you. An awakened teacher can demonstrate that it is possible to live freely and contentedly, even joyfully, without all the attachments and demands of a personality. He or she can nudge you, urge you, inspire you, and shake you up.

  There is a story about the Indian non-dual guru Papaji that he once announced to the students who had come to his room in Lucknow, India that enlightenment was available right now to whomever would come up and talk to him, but not a single person came up to talk. And these were not casual students, but seekers who had traveled all the way to India to see him. In the end, when the possibility of dropping everything else and awakening now arises, most of us freeze. But if you are willing and open, the teacher can tempt you through the gate, console you when the going is rough, and keep you moving on the straight path and out of the cul-de-sacs.

  Breaking Free of Concepts

  What all of these obstacles boil down to is the power of the conceptual world we live in. Our belief in thoughts and feelings create the sense of an “I “ who is someone important or worthless, useful or limited, spiritual or profane, on a journey or hopelessly mired in the world. All these aspects of the conceptual mind hold us together as separate individuals. This becomes are story, to which w
e become attached. All of these barriers to enlightenment only exist in thought.

  Enlightenment is what remains when the conceptual mind lets go and the natural Self remembers its true source. In Vedanta this is called an experience of Self. In Buddhism it may be described as an experience of no-self, or emptiness, because these words are more free of mental concept. These terms express how it feels to discover the “me” is not a separate identity and realize that when it is out of the way, something else indefinable remains.

  When this realization happens for an instant, in a deep meditation or perhaps in a moment of crisis, or an awesome recognition of beauty, it can be called a glimpse. Sometimes a glimpse completely reorganizes a person’s worldview. When it is a permanent condition from which the life is lived consciously, without the trappings of personal history, it can be called enlightenment. No one is actually enlightened. The attachment to a separate me is simply discarded.

  The conceptual world is called maya. Once maya is seen through, personal identity becomes unstable. If you were a house we might say as each wall is removed, the space inside is more related to the space outside. The true essence of the house, which is the space where you live, becomes One with the skies and the world around you. This crumbling reveals the true relationship of the space inside the house with the space outside.