From my new book, END YOUR STORY, BEGIN YOUR LIFE

Our true nature cannot be expressed in words. However, consciousness, awareness, beingness, and presence are some words that come closest to defining what we are, here, right now. We always start from this moment now, from the present.

So, what can be said to be real right now is you are alive, present, and reading this book. What is real now is your existence. You are conscious of existing, of being alive. Your true nature is consciousness itself. It is the one thing always present, whether you are asleep or awake, and whether you are aware of it or not.

What you are in your essence is the lucid, unchanging consciousness giving birth to everything in the world of the senses, including all your thoughts, stories, memories, and to your body, mind, and this unique personality called “you.” To understand this is to grasp the literal meaning of the words attributed to St. Francis: “What we are looking for is what is looking.” You become aware of yourself, your true nature, as consciousness, awareness, or presence itself....

The goal of spiritual or transformational work is to wake up from the dream. It is to break free of the internal dialogue. It is to see through the mind-created illusion of “me, myself, and my story,” the imaginary world you have created between your ears, making you feel separate and apart from others.

These stories, memories, and experiences have shaped your personality but they are still only your stories. They may have been real once, but are definitely not real now. They are an imaginary world existing inside your head, in the form of fleeting thoughts, beliefs, pictures, and ideas of “self,” with corresponding feelings and emotions in your body. And they are always changing, always coming and going, yet you, as the awareness which sees them, experiences them, are always here.

Every time you see the truth of this, your head clears, your body relaxes, your heart opens, and you experience a release from inner conflict, stress, and suffering. You become, in a word, present...

Awakening itself is realizing you are not your stories, not your thoughts, but you are the consciousness in which stories and thoughts—in which all existence—arises. You are not an object, a human being in space and time who has only intermittent glimpses of consciousness, the source of creation. You are not a wave, occasionally remembering your connection to the ocean. Rather, you are consciousness itself, viewing all of creation through the eyes of this human being called “you.” You are the ocean itself, manifesting in this individual human wave form.

As this realization occurs, you find yourself connected to an inexhaustible source of wisdom, love, and inner joy. Instead of living out of some myth or story about who you are and what life means, you live in awareness in the present. Meaning and identity no longer depend on beliefs, stories, or circumstances, but flow directly out of the beauty and dynamism of the life force itself. They arise from the sense of oneness, of the intimacy you feel with life—from the fullness and fragrance of being itself. You live in a state of openness, of welcoming everything that comes into your awareness.

With this awakening to the truth of being, the incessant chatter of the mind no longer dominates your consciousness. Your inner state becomes one of clarity and ease—at times, radiantly so. You become aware of a deep, vast silence, a universal spaciousness without center and without borders. You feel yourself to be one with that silence....

Awakening, as will become clear, means freedom from conflict and suffering. This is the promise of the inner quest. It doesn’t matter what your circumstances are, or where in this world you live—inner freedom can be yours, simply because it is your true nature.

The feeling-tone associated with being established in pure consciousness is one of relaxed ease, harmony, and presence, of openness and welcoming, of gratitude and appreciation. It is one of feeling the energy of aliveness in your body. Thoughts may or may not be present, but you are not identified with them. There is no “you” in the way. There is just the flow of beingness, what in Zen is called the “suchness” of life, and you are one with the suchness. Everything then happens out of oneness.

Truly, to know yourself as consciousness, and then to embody the knowing, is the greatest blessing.

(from Chapter One, End Your Story, Begin Your Life)

The Fear of Being Nobody

The greatest fear spiritual “seekers” experience is this: who will I be without my story? The fear of being nobody came up for me a lot before I woke up and definitely most intensely during a “bad” psychedelic trip. I describe it in my new eBook, Before And After Awakening:

“In 1982 I ate a big, fat magic mushroom on a hilltop with friends, and it turned out the mushroom ate me. It took me on the most frightening inner trip of my life. It felt as if I was being sucked down Dante’s inferno. It lasted for several hours. As I clung desperately to the rim of the volcano with my finger nails, the fire down below threatening to engulf me, I heard my mother’s voice crying to me faintly: “Jimmy, what have you done to yourself?” I finally began to come down when Barb, my girlfriend, who had been at work, joined me, saw what was happening, and lay down and made eye-contact with me, and guided me back to safe ground. I will always be grateful to her for that.”

With hindsight, it is easy to say that if I had just surrendered to what was so, which would mean accepting the reality of the inner fire raging up my spine, my trip might have smoothed out, but the fact is that, at the time, I was terrified! I was terrified of losing this “me” that I thought I was, this “me” that I had built my whole identity around—as a Kiwi, as a former army officer who had served in Vietnam, as a rugby-player, as a chiropractor, and as a seeker of truth.

But when we really look at it in the clear light of day (not under the influence of a powerful drug like psilocybin!), the fear of being nobody is actually a paper tiger. When we peer inwardly—into our own psyche, our own consciousness—we can’t find this “I,” this “me” anywhere. Yet we, as the awareness which looks, are very much here!

This is when the real awakening begins, when you realize that no thought, concept, or story between your ears is real because they come and go. You cannot even find the “I” thought in your consciousness. It, too, is illusory. And yet, again, you—the seer, the watcher, the experiencer—are always here!

As you awaken to the freedom that is your natural state, your realize more and more clearly that what you were afraid of—“Oh my God, I can’t handle the thought of being nobody”—was an illusion, a story that you “believed.” However, the fear itself, when it was happening, was very real—which further reinforces the story of “Oh my God…”

This is why, in the nondual approach, we focus again and again on seeing that the thought or story is not real—rather than dealing with the emotional reaction which is real for as long as it lasts, but ultimately is fueled by the story.

When you undo the story by exposing it for the illusion it is any emotional reaction created in your body by the story, including the fear of being “nobody,” dissolves, and you relax. You relax into your true nature, and your overall experience becomes one of ease, harmony, and flow.

Let me conclude with a final quote from my new eBook:

“At the same time, it is vitally important to realize that thoughts are very powerful. Thought has created everything in the human-made world, beginning with the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the transport we move around in. When you understand this from the perspective of freedom, of being fully conscious—i.e. realizing you are not your thoughts—you have the key to transforming your own life for the better and to changing your world.

“Freed from its psychological and emotional aspects—the worrying, fretting “I” or “me”—thought becomes a powerful tool for communication, problem solving, creating, and expressing your true purpose in the world. It is the most powerful tool available to us, in fact.”

©Jim Dreaver, 2011

Before and After Awakening

I have just completed my new book, titled Before and After Awakening: An Old Meditation Journal and My Experience Now.

In 1983 I was living in a four-bedroom house I owned in Santa Rosa. It had an in-ground swimming pool in a lovely backyard setting. I drove a brand-new BMW. I had a successful chiropractic practice. But, I wasn’t happy. Why?

I’d had a profound taste of enlightenment in 1977, which I write about in End Your Story, Begin Your Life, and the experience had been so pure, so mind-blowing that after that, it was the only thing I wanted. I wanted to live in the ‘enlightened’ state all the time. I had always been a good chiropractor, but chiropractic was never ‘it’ for me. I wanted to become enlightened so that I could share it, teach it, and write about it. (I know, it may sound arrogant to some, but my intention was always pure!)

So, some time earlier, I’d resolved to sell my practice, sell my BMW, rent the house out, and travel to India and Southeast Asia to find enlightenment. (Ah, such naiveté, such an illusion to even think it was somewhere outside myself! But I am reminded of the lines from T. S. Eliot: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.’)

So, in the spring of 1983 I sold my practice and was preparing to embark, with my girlfriend, on what would be a nine-month journey to China, Bali, Nepal, India, Australia, and New Zealand. In that spring, while I was getting the house ready for the new tenants, and preparing for our travels, I kept a journal during my regular morning meditations. I would scribble notes on a yellow legal pad, describing my various states of consciousness, which alternated between time of great peace, clarity, and equanimity, and periods of extreme uncertainty, anxiety, and insecurity. After all, my identity was still very much tied to what I did and what I had and I was giving all that up!

I would type the notes at night (personal computers were only just coming on the market then), and I still have the 110 page manuscript. It is funny too, because I always knew that meditation journal of mine would find its way into a book, and now, almost thirty years later, it has!

Yesterday I finished in-putting the entire manuscript into my laptop, and at various intervals along the way, in I write up my experience now: what I see or know now that I didn’t see or know then. I think it is a book that will help a lot of people. It is certainly the kind of book I would have wished I had back then.

And what do I see now that I didn’t see then? Back then, I still believed that my stories, and my sense of “self” was real, and that “I” had to find enlightenment, presumably, I thought at the time, through the practice of meditation.

Now I see that nothing between my ears is real—no thought, no story, not even this “I” and “me” I take myself to be. Why? Because thoughts and stories come and go, but we—as these aware, conscious beings we are—are always here.

Stories may be true, or they may be false, but none of them is real. What is real always here, always exists. We exist. We are real, independent of our ever-changing thoughts, stories, feelings, emotions, events, and circumstances.

To know that, to embody the knowing, is to be free. It is to be one with the natural ease, harmony, and flow of life.

The Real Meaning of 9/11

To commemorate the 9/11 attacks in New York ten years ago, I offer an excerpt from my new novel, The Unexpected Goddess. It appears after the first chapter, and speaks to what I consider the real meaning of the attacks:

David, who is fifty-five, is a reasonably happily married with three kids, a successful stockbroker, a Republican, and, since his marriage, had become an ever-increasingly devout Jew. Now though, in part because of my influence, my brother is beginning to question his beliefs. We speak on the phone about once a month and during our last conversation, he announced that he had just finished reading You Are Not Your Story, and that it was, in his words, “a mind-blowing book.”

Then he asked me what my intention was in writing it, saying: “Are you trying to turn the whole world upside down, Steve? I mean, Judaism’s been around for over 5,000 years and you are trying to say that it, and all the traditions and practices handed down to us by the great rabbis, is just, essentially, a story? My God, do you realize the implications of what you are teaching?”

“Yes,” I said to him. “Judaism, like any other religion, is just a story… an ancient, beautiful, and complex story, with very practical teachings that work well in the world, but a story nonetheless. I’m teaching people to see that they have a story, but they are not their story. I’m showing them how to awaken to the reality of what is, to realize their true nature right here, now.”

I paused to allow the silence between us to be felt. We were speaking on the phone, he in New York, me in California, but we were sharing each other’s reality, as if in the same room.

“So that means Islam is just a story too?” he said after a minute or two. “And the 9/11 hijackers who flew those planes into the twin towers were driven solely by their anger towards America, as well as their fundamentalist Islamic views? They were totally caught up in their personal and religious story, in other words… And you’re saying that if they were free within, if they had done the practice you describe in your book, they would have lived in reality as it is here now, and would have felt some kind of brotherly love for mankind instead?”

My brother’s brokerage firm was within a mile of Ground Zero and he was at work when the attacks happened. Like most New Yorkers, like most Americans, he had been shocked by 9/11. He had lost friends, people he knew who were working in the buildings that morning. He had been traumatized for months after.

I was living at home in Sebastopol when 9/11 occurred. A friend called me and told me to turn on my TV. As I sat there and watched the planes striking the towers, my heart went out to the passengers aboard and the people in the towers, but I was not surprised by the event. After all, a radical Islamic group had a attempted to blow up the World Trade Towers before. I just thought—and I wasn’t alone in thinking this, of course—that they had finally figured out a diabolically ingenious method of doing it.

“Yes, David, that’s what I am saying. People who are awake and free within feel the oneness of all of life, and so they don’t hurt other people. That’s one of the key messages in my book. But the hijackers were fervent believers, victims of their Arab and Islamic culture. They were totally identified with the Islamic story between their ears. You could say that they were driven by an almost robotic behavior, and it led to disastrous consequences for America on the morning of 9/11.”

I paused briefly. “The same thing can be said of other fundamentalist religious groups, however, whether it’s Judaism, Christianity, or Hinduism. Clinging to a fundamentalist view creates robotic-like rituals and actions, no matter how sincere the actions of the believer.”

David was silent for a few moments, as if taking in what I said. Then we moved onto other subjects, and spoke briefly, as we occasionally did, about our parents, and especially our mother, and the anguish she still lived with.

Don’t Take Your Emotions Personally

What becomes clear on this path of awakening is the more you hold onto the need to have things be a certain way, the more you insist this isn’t right, or that should not be allowed, the more emotional charge you are storing up.

Then, when expectations are not met, there is pain and suffering. If your position is exposed as being hollow or false, you might experience sadness or embarrassment. If someone belittles you, puts you down in some way, or betrays you it may express as resentment or anger.

So the work is to welcome, or at least accept your suffering, and then look at what you are inwardly holding onto, the beliefs, expectations, pictures, and ideas. Look at the story you are telling yourself about who you are and what you need to be happy. Begin to see it is only a story, a story you are making up. It is a story entirely of your own creation.

Realize you are not the story, but the luminous ever-present consciousness which looks at the story, which creates the story, and you’ll have a genuine experience, a taste, of freedom.

After all, the story you tell yourself keeps the emotions in a volatile state of readiness. As I said, when you cling to any point of view or psychological position, you are generating an emotional charge.

Freedom comes as you see the story for what it is: a figment of your own creation. When you’re not holding onto any idea or image of yourself, there’s no build-up of emotional energy. You are simply open to life in the present. The secret is in emphasizing awareness itself, having all your senses alert, and not getting lost in thinking. Then your head will be clear, and you will feel the deeper energy, the deeper beauty and power of creation itself, and it will nourish you. Then your emotions will come into balance. They will arise spontaneously and authentically.

You will feel sadness at the loss of a loved one, or perhaps in a moment of being confronted with the tremendous suffering of so many innocent people in our world. Or you might feel anger whenever you are reminded of the terrible injustices still taking place, the brutality, the subjugation of one group of people by another.

But none of these feelings will be taken too personally. The “I” won’t jump in and make some new kind of story out of them, such as a victim story, as in, “Woe is me, the world is too awful and I am too sensitive to live in it.” People who really believe they are victims are always telling their tale of suffering to anyone who will listen, and this constant reinforcement of their story just keeps them stuck.

As you grasp this teaching and let go of the attachment to and identification with your own story, you begin to know yourself as awareness, the pure consciousness behind everything. You start to free yourself. Emotions still arise and pass, but now they happen more spontaneously. The paradox of awakening or enlightenment is that while you feel very deeply, you don’t take your feelings personally. Once you let go of the identification with your own story, you learn to let go of the attachment to other peoples’ stories as well.

Then, in the clarity of your true nature, you see what action, if any, needs to be taken. If something needs to be done about the situation triggering the emotional response, you’ll know what to do, and you’ll do it. But you won’t make a big drama out of it.

From End Your Story, Begin Your Life, Chapter 6, by Jim Dreaver