Wake Up Now (15 page)

For Segal, this sudden shift in identity came not as a blissful spiritual realization, but as a shocking loss of something comfortable and familiar, which she spent years trying to recapture. Only after she met a spiritual teacher who confirmed her discomforting experience as a genuine spiritual awakening was she able to relax and allow it to flower into the full recognition that she was not only nothing, but everything.

As a child growing up in New York City, Robert Adams found that he had a magical power—he could get whatever he wished for by repeating God’s name three times. One day, at the age of fourteen, he sat down to take a math test and applied his technique as usual to provide himself with
the correct answers. Instead, he had a powerful, spiritual illumination in which the world lost its substantiality, and everywhere he looked he could see only the unchanging Self, the all-penetrating, all-prevailing source of existence. “There was no time, there was no space, there was just the ‘I am,’” he recalls in
Silence of the Heart
. “Everything was the ‘I.’ The word ‘I’ encompassed the whole universe, and a limitless, indescribable love permeated everything.”

Needless to say, the young Adams was irrevocably transformed by what he had so unexpectedly experienced and immediately lost interest in his usual studies, hobbies, and friends. After several years spent searching for someone to help him understand what had happened, he eventually found his way to India, where he studied for three years with the great sage Ramana Maharshi. “It was with Ramana that my eyes were opened to the meaning of my experience,” Adams says.

My own initial awakening, which occurred while I was driving on a California freeway, was not as dramatic or as unanticipated as Adams’s or Segal’s, but it still had the power to turn my accustomed way of seeing myself inside out in an instant. Instead of being centered in the body-mind, where I had thought I resided, I suddenly realized that I was actually this global luminosity, this awake, aware space in which the body-mind and everything else appeared—and this “globality,” this “one bright pearl” (as Zen Master Hsuan-sha called it), was the only reality, timeless and ever-present. The words “There’s no going away from it” kept running through my head as waves of bliss coursed through my body.

These revealing stories, not of Indian sages or Zen monastics but of ordinary Westerners, demonstrate the often spontaneous, disconcerting, and life-transforming nature of genuine spiritual awakening. In a moment out of time, your accustomed identity crumbles, and you see beyond the veil of conventional reality to the deeper spiritual ground or undercurrent of existence, of which the material world is merely a manifestation. As a consequence, you can never again view your life in quite the same way, as if it were ultimately real, permanent, or substantial.

The term
awakening
is so appropriate and so often used because most people actually do have the sense of waking up from the dream they previously took to be reality—of being a solid, separate someone in a world of other solid someones—and realizing that this seeming reality is merely a translucent, evanescent appearance floating on the surface of a deeper reality, like a bubble on a pond or a wave on the ocean.

Of course, you may have preliminary glimpses of your true nature in which the sense of a separate experiencer drops away momentarily but quickly returns and reestablishes its control, or brief moments of groundlessness in which you enter the mysterious current of life but quickly resurface as a separate self. Authentic awakening, however, generally involves a powerful figure-ground shift in identity that radically and permanently transforms your experience of reality. Once you awaken, you can never completely go back to sleep, though you may doze off from time to time; once you know who you are, you can never completely forget, though the knowing may seem to disappear or elude you.

Every genuine awakening has its unique particulars, as the stories told here show. Some take place as a gentle homecoming, a final recognition of what you’ve always known yourself to be. Some, like Suzanne Segal’s, occur as a sudden, forceful stripping of the veil that separates you from some vaster reality. Others, like Tony Parsons’s, penetrate through the illusion of a separate self in an instant, like a sharp sword cutting through layers of encrusted beliefs, revealing the living truth at the core. Still others resemble a gradual dissolution, like ice melting into water and merging with the sea. Some awakenings are dramatic and filled with powerful imagery or energetic experiences; others are almost entirely uneventful, like slipping quietly down a rabbit hole—or perhaps a birth canal—into a completely new world.

Breathe and Reflect

Spend some time noting the ideas and preconceptions you have about spiritual awakening. Where did these ideas originate? How do they influence your attitude toward spirituality? Once you’ve identified these ideas, set them aside, and open yourself to the possibility of genuine awakening.

Whatever the particulars, spiritual awakening occurs at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of being. As Westerners, we move through life almost exclusively on the horizontal plane of time and space, carrying the baggage of our beliefs and our personal history, working diligently to achieve certain goals while being fearful of
failure, loneliness, and death. Like everyone else we know, we take ourselves to be separate individuals bound to the roller-coaster ride of pleasure and pain, fulfillment and suffering, health and sickness, which eventually ends in old age and death.

But each moment offers us an opportunity to awaken to another dimension in which time and space no longer apply and everything radiates unconditional presence and the timeless divinity of being. Sometimes called the eternal Now, this vertical dimension is always infusing and informing the horizontal and inviting us to awaken to our spiritual nature. Indeed, every moment is already the intersection of the time-bound and the timeless, form and the formless, the horizontal and the vertical. Like Jesus, whose cross symbolizes this intersection, you are both a human being and God simultaneously—you just need to recognize this truth. Though meditation and self-inquiry may invite this recognition, it occurs just as often without preparation, spontaneously and unexpectedly, as an inexplicable gift.

Despite the differences among awakening experiences, there appears to be a commonly applicable movement or unfolding to the awakening process. In the initial awakening, you generally find that the locus of your identity is dislodged from your usual sense of self and shifted, either gently or forcefully, to the uninvolved witness who is always aware but never a part of what it witnesses. You may experience this witness as a vast spaciousness, a profound silence
or stillness, a deeper ground underlying all things, or (as in Suzanne Segal’s case) a disembodied reference point that eventually dissolves and never reappears. More than a mental insight or epiphany, this shift is an energetic, whole-body change in the location and content of who you take yourself to be. Rather than localizing yourself in the brain, where most Westerners believe the “I” exists, you now recognize that thoughts, images, feelings, and memories actually arise in a timeless, boundaryless space—and this space is your true identity, the “I” you genuinely are. (In Zen this limitless spaciousness and nonlocatability is known as emptiness, or the absolute.)

Needless to say, such a sudden shift may be disconcerting, as Suzanne Segal’s story attests. Sometimes it’s accompanied by powerful energetic releases or by deep feelings of wonder, gratitude, love, or relief. In my own case, waves of ecstatic energy flowed up my spine and out the top of my head like a fountain for hours. Just as often, especially if you’re not spiritually inclined or schooled in the phenomenon of awakening, it may prove frightening or overwhelming. For years after her initial awakening, Segal would feel a rush of panic whenever she looked in the mirror and couldn’t identify the face she saw there, and my own bliss soon began alternating with fear as my mind struggled to regain control from an energy that seemed to be threatening to overwhelm and destroy it. Eventually, however, most people get used to their new, expanded identity and glean from the detachment it brings a peace and equanimity that are not so easily disturbed by the ups and downs of life.

As transformative as it may be, the shift in identity from the personal, psychological self, which is composed of thoughts and feelings and localized in the head, to the formless, nonlocatable emptiness that contains and pervades everything is only the first stage in the full flowering of awakening. Although the realization that everything, including the separate self, is empty of abiding, substantial existence brings tranquillity, it can also make you passive, detached, and disengaged from life and lead to a kind of nihilistic view: “Everything is empty; nothing really matters. So why bother?”

The next step is to recognize that everything without exception has ultimate value and meaning because the rocks, the clouds, the cars, the buildings, the homeless person on the street are not separate from who you are—indeed, they’re your very own essential self. Empty of substance and permanent existence, they’re simultaneously filled with divinity—with radiance or presence—and therefore precious beyond price.

In Zen, this “empty fullness” finds expression in the famous words of the Heart Sutra: “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” In other words, the world we see and hear is empty of substance, like a bubble or a dream. Yet this emptiness, this deeper ground, is never separate or apart but spontaneously expresses itself as the multidimensional play of the manifest world. If you overemphasize emptiness, you risk becoming detached, distant, and uncaring. If you overemphasize form, you risk becoming embroiled in the
dream once again. Form and emptiness are inextricable, flip sides of the same coin, two faces of one seamless reality, like foreground and background, content and context, objects and space. In Zen, this nondual nature of reality is called “suchness,” or “just this.” In the words of a famous Zen saying, “Mountains are mountains again and rivers are rivers,” but now the most ordinary experiences are glowing with spiritual significance.

Although the distinctions I’m making here may seem extremely subtle or abstract to you right now, they’re actually crucial to an understanding of awakening. Until you recognize that form is not only emptiness, but emptiness is also form, you wander in what Suzanne Segal called the “wintertime” of the experience, when emptiness predominates, before the heart blossoms in the warmth and fullness of form. “When I look within and see that I am nothing, that is wisdom,” says the Indian sage Nisargadatta Maharaj. But this insight must be joined by its complement. “When I look without and see that I am everything, that is love. Between these two,” he concludes, “my life flows.”

Some rare individuals open all at once to the complete realization that form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. For example, Robert Adams realized, in the time it took his fellow students to complete a math test, not only that he was pure awareness, the luminous void, the absolute “I am,” but also that he was everything without exception: “I was the flower. I was the sky. I was the people. . . . The word ‘I’ encompassed the whole universe.” Others may awaken first to their oneness with all things before they realize the
emptiness of self, in which case they may become attached to this oneness as if it actually belonged to a me. But most of us first awaken to form is emptiness, and gradually, in fits and starts, realize the full nondual nature of reality.

Based on my own experience and my conversations with students and friends, I would suggest that most genuine spiritual awakenings contain encoded within them the full nondual realization that form is emptiness and emptiness is form—the world of kids, dogs, dishes, and work is nothing other than the lofty spiritual reality we’re searching for, yet this spiritual reality doesn’t exist in some distant, abstract dimension, but inevitably and spontaneously expresses itself as kids, dogs, dishes, and work.

For some reason, however, most people are unable to digest and assimilate the complete realization and instead end up with only one piece—generally, form is emptiness. They may have the felt sense that their realization contains more depth and substance than they’ve managed to comprehend, but they can’t quite articulate or grasp it. Just as a zip file on a computer may contain many complex documents in a condensed format that can subsequently be decoded, people who awaken often download an enormous amount of insight in a single instant and then spend years unpacking and clarifying what they’ve received.

For example, one of my students suddenly recognized that she was the silence and stillness beneath all the noise
and activity, and only gradually, in a series of further awakenings, did the silence and stillness reveal itself to be the source and substance of everything. In my own case, the luminous sphere that awakened through me felt like a hologram containing the fullness of being, but it took me years to realize this fullness and completeness, which could be most accurately expressed by the simple words “This is it!”

Even the most powerful and seemingly complete awakening may take years to unfold and reveal its riches, and further awakenings and insights are often just the deepening clarification and stabilization of what has already been received. In a sense, you could say that you may know who you are after the initial awakening, but you don’t completely know what you know; you only come to realize and actualize it fully over time.

Distinct from the dramatic images, emotions, and sensations that may accompany spiritual awakening, the actual awakening itself is generally experienced as a subtle shift in the localization of your identity—the standpoint from which you encounter reality. My teacher Jean Klein occasionally advised his students to “find yourself behind,” in the back of the head, rather than in the “thought factory” of the neocortex, located in the forehead. By this, he meant to shift your identity from the thinking mind, the self-image, the personality, to the awake, aware space behind you, the one who gazes out through every pair of eyes.