In the following article, the author shares an account of his journey toward spiritual awakening and his relationship with an Advaita master. You might find it enlightening on more than one level.
Journey of Freedom
by Jim Dreaver
The goal of the spiritual journey--in my view--is to see through the illusion of separateness and wake up to our true, enlightened nature. The realization of truth brings freedom from self-doubt, conflict, guilt, fear, loneliness, unhappiness, and all other forms of psychological and emotional suffering. It brings an inner peace and joy that sustains us through even the most difficult times.
This, in brief, is the story of my journey. I'm sharing it for one reason: that it might trigger an insight, and maybe even a shift within those of you who are still seeking, still living with the questions "Who am I?" and "What is the meaning and purpose of my life?"
I was born in New Zealand and raised in a family where there was a lot of conflict between my parents--not an uncommon childhood situation. Because of the lack of harmony and stability in the family dynamic, my quest for inner peace began early. When I was young I formed a close personal relationship with God--that kindly old man in the sky who ran the whole show, and took care of me.
As I got older, went into the army, became an artillery officer, served in the Vietnam war, then left the military to work in sales, "God" seemed less and less relevant. In my twenty-sixth year I came to the U.S. to attend chiropractic school. I wanted to be a writer, and chiropractic
seemed like a career that would provide satisfying work and give me the freedom to write.
In my final year at school I was up late one night studying for examinations when I began getting severe tightness and palpitations in my chest. I thought I was dying of a heart attack. This began a process where for months I was afraid to go to sleep for fear I would die. It turned out
that it was just stress, extreme anxiety. I was very uptight. I lived in my head, and was always pursuing some elusive goal in the future. This crisis marked the beginning of my healing journey.
As a would-be novelist I was reading a biography of Aldous Huxley, a writer I had always admired. He spoke of his friendship with J. Krishnamurti, the great spiritual teacher. I was inspired to send away for Krishnamurti's books, the Commentaries on Living. Those books changed my life. "There is something extraordinary in life, if you can come upon it," he said. I was hooked. "Thinking is the problem, the only problem," I heard him say. I began to experiment with letting go of thoughts as they arose, and just being open in the present. The magic that I had felt in life and in nature as a child began to return. I began to conceive of "God" in a whole new way--not as an entity, but as this marvelous energy and mystery that Krishnamurti spoke of. An exciting new journey began!
I took a course in T.M. I began doing yoga. I started reading books on Zen. I loved Zen, and soon dropped the T.M. form to sit twice a day in the Zen style. After a while I dropped all styles and just sat for twenty or thirty minutes. I especially loved the morning sittings--and still do. Not to "get" anywhere, anymore, because there is nowhere to get. But just for the joy of sitting.
Two years after the health crisis, about six months before my thirty-first birthday, I had an enlightenment experience. I woke up one summer's morning and noticed a shaft of sunlight coming through a chink in the venetian blinds. The dust motes dancing in the light caught my gaze. I was transfixed. Suddenly, everything in my mind just fell away. I lay there, in bed, in awe. I was absolutely one with the present. Indeed, there was no "me" having the experience. There was just a profound awareness of the unity, beauty, and sacredness of life. I realized then that there was nothing to seek, that it was all right here. Life, in its essence, was--and is--utterly perfect. We need do nothing but relax, be still, and open up to this.
I crept out of bed slowly so as not to disturb this magical state of awareness. Later, of course, it faded, but something in me had shifted. Now I knew. A hole had been punctured in my conditioned consciousness, and I'd been shown the true nature of reality. Now I knew what I was looking for. I wanted to live with that expansiveness, that radiant awareness. All the time.
Everything I did for the next eighteen years was a conscious act of seeking and exploring, designed to bring me permanently to that awakened state of consciousness: workshops, lectures, spiritual books, teachers, meditation retreats, psychedelics, psychotherapy, bodywork, emotional
therapy, travel to Bali, Nepal, India.
In 1984, I met Jean Klein, a master of Advaita (nondual awareness), and a former physician. The master is the one who can point you back Home, and give you the exact directions needed to find your true Self--the master within. Jean became that Master for me. I learned four things main things from him:
1) How to expand my awareness of body/mind/self in a way that produced a genuine feeling of ease and well-being--the "secret" that I talk about at the beginning of chapter one in The Way of Harmony.
2) The need for letting go attachment to states of bliss, peace, because it is clinging to ideas about such "states" that prevents us from experiencing them.
3) That I was totally okay as I was, and that there was nothing to seek.
4) That the ultimate understanding of Advaita, and Jean’s own insight into it, is that there is no independent entity. The "me," with its history, doesn't exist, except as an idea, a story, between our ears. (The Buddha said exactly the same thing: he called it anatta, "no-self").
I had a major awakening with Jean at a retreat at Mt. Madonna Center, in the Santa Cruz mountains of California, in 1988. I was strolling down to the afternoon dialogue, contemplating the notion that I was not the "person" I'd taken myself to be, when my "I," my ego--with its whole story-line--suddenly jumped out into my awareness. In that moment, I saw the game I'd been playing all these years. I saw my attachment to the identity of myself as a spiritual "seeker." I felt a great sadness. I sensed I would never be able to quite buy into my own "story" again.
I told Jean what happened. He said, "You have, in a certain way, understood that the existence of the person is an illusion, a fabrication from memory, looking constantly for security. So the moment you become free from the person you no longer deal with this reflex. You'll live completely in the absence of yourself, and you'll become a happy man."
But it took seven more years for the seeing to really take hold. As clear as I was becoming, as free as I felt inwardly, there was still a "me" holding onto something. I'd still have periods of dissatisfaction, yearning, of something missing. I still hadn't quite "got" it. I fluctuated between feeling on top of things, and feeling like a victim. I was still holding onto an image of myself. And I had, at times, an arrogance about me, the hubris of one who "thinks" he knows something.
Then, in the spring of 1995, during a time when I was going through some major financial and other challenges, I woke up one morning and felt depressed. My normal pattern would have been to get out of bed feeling somewhat bummed-out, and then go sit on my meditation cushion and just breathe, center myself, tune-in to spirit, and wait for the negative energy to clear.
But this morning I was evidently ready for something different. (I can see now that while it is true that there is nothing to "do" to get enlightened, there is a shift in attention that is needed--a very subtle kind of "doing"). I lay in bed and faced myself in a way I never quite had before. I said to myself, "Okay, Jim, you say you’re depressed. So, just who is depressed?" Then I looked deep into the interior of my own consciousness to find this "me" who insisted he felt depressed.
Of course, I couldn't find it. "I" and "me" don't exist, except as concepts, appearances, in the mind. As my awareness opened and expanded, the three thought-forms--"I-feel-depressed"--dissolved, and "I" (as awareness, as consciousness) felt perfectly okay. The same thing happened the next two mornings in a row. I woke, felt depressed, and lay there with the same deep inquiry into "who" was depressed. Each time, the self-concept of "I" or "me" dissolved, the energy in my body and mind reintegrated itself, and "I" felt fine.
In the months following that third morning, it became evident that something had shifted. I was no longer able to take my personal sense of "self" seriously. The experience of inner clarity, freedom, and joy without cause became stable. That is, whenever I stopped to notice how I felt, that clarity and peace was always there. I could still, on occasion, get upset about things (about once a month during the first year or so) but then I, as the awareness expressing through this body/mind/self, would quickly pose the question, "So, who's worried?" or "Who's afraid?" The
sense of being a contracted, fearful "me" would dissolve, to be replaced by a feeling of ease and well-being.
About a year after I "woke up" I wrote in my journal, "I've found the way Home, now I'm learning to find my way in the world." Once we have seen that we are not the "person," the psychological/emotional entity we used to think we were, all seeking falls away (who is there to seek?) and there is no going back. Once you know there's no Santa Claus, you're free of that illusion.
No matter how awake we are, however, we're still human, and there will be moments when we forget our true nature--especially when dealing with stressful or challenging circumstances. In my case, four years later at the time of writing this, it seems that about every four or five months something happens which triggers a residue of an old worry or fear (usually to do with money, although once it was a relationship problem). When such a residue occurs now, it is like a disturbing ruffling of the smooth surface of a deep and calm lake. I notice it, and remind myself
that the challenging problem or difficult circumstance is not who I am. Calmness and tranquillity then quickly return.
It was Jean who introduced me to the term 'residues" as a way of describing the old ego patterns. He said that no matter how long one had been established in one’s true nature, they could still come up. Jean himself went through some difficult moments toward the end of his life (he passed away in 1998) when his body was really failing him.
History records that the Buddha was still subject at times to temptation, long after his enlightenment. Ramana Maharshi said that self-realization is like the unplugging of an electric fan, and that the fan will keep spinning for some time after. He was referring to the fact that the body/mind has its own karma, its own ingrained psychological and emotional conditioning to work out. A person can be completely awake, and yet the past memories are still in the body’s cells, and it may take a life-time for them to completely release--or not.
Copyright© July 1999
Jim Dreaver
All Rights Reserved
Reprinted with permission
For More Information
You can learn more about Advaita and the teachings of Jim Dreaver through his books:
The Way of Harmony - Walking the Inner Path to Balance, Happiness, and Success (Avon, 1999).
The Ultimate Cure - The Healing Energy Within You (Llewellyn, 1995).
Somatic Technique - A Simplified Method of Releasing Chronically Tight Muscles and Enhancing Mind/Body Awareness.
For more information and to order the books, visit Jim Dreaver's Way of Harmony.
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