Wake Up Now: A Guide to the Journey of Spiritual Awakening - Softcover

Bodian, Stephan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0071742220 ISBN 13: 9780071742221

Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Live a life of peace, love, and happiness through spiritual awakening

In Wake Up Now, author Stephan Bodian--nationally recognized expert on meditation and spirituality and former editor-in-chief of Yoga Journal--reveals that spiritual awakening is not some faraway dream, or overly complicated to achieve, but an ever-present reality that is always available here and now.

Based on his own experience and over 30 years of teaching the direct approach to spiritual awakening, Bodian has broken down the awakening process into five overlapping, loosely sequential stages: seeking, awakening, deepening and clarifying, embodying, and living the awakened life. Wake Up Now guides you through every stage of the journey, from the process of seeking through the often prolonged and challenging process of integrating the awakening into everyday life.

"This book is one of the most concise guides to spiritual awakening I have read. Both profound and practical, it guides the reader through the intricacies of awakening as only someone who has walked the walk themselves can do. The clarity and compassion this book offers the sincere spiritual seeker is both rare and welcome."
--Adyashanti, renowned spiritual teacher and author of The Impact of Awakening and Emptiness Dancing

Topics include:
Entering the Gateless Gate; Seeking without a Seeker; Freedom from the Known; The Practice of Presence; Who is Experiencing this Moment Right now; Spontaneous Awakening; In the Wake of Awakening; Embodying the Light; Freeing the Dark Inside the Light; The Awakened Life

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stephan Bodian is the former editor-in-chief of Yoga Journal and the author of the bestselling guidebook Meditation For Dummies. Founder and director of the eight-month School for Awakening, he has studied with some of the great spiritual masters of our age, and has been teaching the direct approach to spiritual awakening for more than 30 years. A licensed psychotherapist as well as a Zen master, Stephan has been a pioneer in the integration of Eastern spiritual wisdom and Western psychology. His work has been featured in Reader's Digest, Shape, Women's Health, and the San Francisco Chronicle and his articles appear regularly in Fitness, Cooking Light, Alternative Medicine, Tricycle, and Yoga Journal.

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"Both profound and practical, "Wake Up Now" guides the reader through the intricacies of awakening as only someone who has walked the walk themselves can do. The clarity and compassion it offers are both rare and welcome."
--Adyashanti, author of "The Impact of Awakening" and "Emptiness Dancing"

By simply picking up this book, you've stumbled onto a path that's been hidden from you--until now. It's the path to enlightenment, and it has been traveled by countless individuals through the ages. But this path is a pathless one, a road that keeps changing as your own journey endlessly unfolds. "Wake Up Now" is your guide for this incredible journey. It won't tell you how many miles you must travel or whether the path will fork left or right, but it will offer you direct pointers that invite you to awaken now and navigate the obstacles, whether external or internal, that might block your path.

Whether you're new to the path of awakening or an accomplished seeker in search of further guidance, this book will show you that enlightenment is always available, right here and right now--just open your eyes.

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WAKE UP NOW

A GUIDE to the JOURNEY of SPIRITUAL AWAKENING

By STEPHAN BODIAN

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2008 Stephan Bodian
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-174222-1

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Entering the Gateless Gate
2 Seeking Without a Seeker
3 Freedom from the Known
4 The Practice of Presence
5 Who Is Experiencing This Moment Right Now?
6 Spontaneous Awakening
7 In the Wake of Awakening
8 Embodying the Light
9 Freeing the Dark Inside the Light
10 The Awakened Life
Other Books You Might Enjoy
Index

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

ENTERING THE GATELESS GATE

    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 automobileaccident. As I struggled to come to terms with this heart-wrenching loss, Ifound myself losing something equally precious as well—my faith in thebenevolent, omniscient God who had guided and cared for me since childhood. Mywhole world of belonging and meaning collapsed within a few weeks. Grief-strickenand bereft, I didn't have the support necessary to help me process myfeelings. So I turned to the world of philosophy to help me deal with my pain.

In the American transcendentalists, I discovered intimations of a moremysterious, impersonal divinity that infused, animated, and yet transcended allthings. From Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, I made my way toGerman idealists like Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, who challenged myconventional way of knowing reality and pointed to a fundamental principle priorto thought. Learning that these philosophers had been influenced by the wisdomof 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 whosat unperturbed as earthquakes rumbled around them and samurai swordsmenthreatened to cut off their heads. Troubled by the pain of a difficult childhoodand a longing for the mother-love I had recently lost, I desperately desired totranscend my suffering and awaken to the unshakable tranquillity and equanimitythese men and women had apparently achieved. After several years of reading,including college courses in Asian philosophy and experimentation with mind-alteringdrugs, I finally looked up Zen in the phone book and began weekly tripsto a little Zen center in midtown Manhattan for an evening of meditation andspiritual talk.

COMING HOME

On one particularly warm summer evening, as the pungent smell of Japaneseincense filled the meditation hall, one of the roshi's senior students, a womanmy mother's age, gave a talk that ignited a fire deep inside me and set me offon the pathless path. "Zazen [Zen meditation]," she said softly, "is the way tobring you to your long-lost home." As a college student with no home to returnto and no sense of a stable center or home within, I was profoundly touched bythese words. I yearned to discover my true home, the one I knew could never belost.

In that moment more than thirty years ago, I came face-to-face for the firsttime with the core paradox at the heart of the spiritual journey. According tothe books I read and the teachings I received, the home I so fervently soughtexisted right here and now, inside me. Being home, after all, it wasn't someexotic and unfamiliar Garden of Eden, but the place I inherently belonged, mybirthright, my natural state, the awakened nature that already shone forth frominside me. I was being told that Zen meditation was the way to go there, eventhough there was apparently nowhere to go. My mind simply couldn't wrap itselfaround this paradox, so I took the easy way out and shifted my focus fromdiscovering home to counting my breaths.

Many years later, when I finally did come home once and for all, I realized thatI had never been apart from it even for an instant. As one of my teachers likedto say, it's your nearest, your home ground, the silent presence gazing throughthese eyes, giving rise to these thoughts, animating these arms and legs. Notthe 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. Yetsomehow my true home, apparently as near as breath itself, had remainedcompletely invisible to me, even though my teachers kept pointing toward it (asI'm doing now). As a result, I ended up searching for more than twenty years,sitting long hours in meditation, listening to countless teachings, readinginnumerable books, before I found myself where I had always been.

In our heart of hearts, don't we all yearn to return home, not to the family ofour childhood, but to the place where we feel completely free to beourselves—a place of total contentment, relaxation, and ease? You maynever have experienced such a home on this earthly plane, yet you may haveglimpsed the possibility from time to time. Perhaps you've had such intimationswalking on the beach, listening to music, or lying entwined in the arms of abeloved—a fleeting few moments of indescribable peace and love, when timeseemed to stop, space opened up, and you encountered something indescribablysacred and profound. But such experiences inevitably come and go, and you mayhave been left believing that you could never experience such peace consistentlyfrom moment to moment. Or you may have been so enthralled by the encounter thatyou spent years trying to re-create it through spiritual teachings andpractices.

This paradox of the home we've never left but must somehow rediscover isexpressed throughout the world's spiritual traditions by the universal parableof the prodigal son. Wandering off from his father's home in search of somedistant treasure, the prodigal forgets who he is and inadvertently stumbles homeyears later, where he is found by his father, welcomed back, and offered hisoriginal inheritance and birthright. In one version of the story, he finds atreasure map that leads him back home to the jewel buried beneath his ownhearth. In another, the prodigal, who has been reduced to poverty, discovers aprecious diamond that was hidden in his pocket all along.

These versions of the parable acknowledge the mystery of the spiritual journey:there's no place to go but here, yet the going is often inevitable because itwears us out, humbles us, and prepares us to receive the treasure with agratitude and appreciation we might not otherwise have experienced. By lookingto externals for answers and coming up empty again and again, we discovereverything we're not—pleasurable experiences, material possessions,spiritual accomplishments, blissful mind-states, anything that comes andgoes—and become more open to recognizing what we really are, theindestructible jewel of true nature, which as Jesus said is beyond rust anddecay.

ENCOUNTERING THE...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071742220
• ISBN 13: 9780071742221
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: McGraw-Hill Education; https://www.mheducation.co.in/; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien