On Awakening, Non-duality, and Our Birthright of Joy
The path is fraught. And full of paradoxes and contradictions.
I’ve been passionately interested in awakening for many years.
Some people call it enlightenment, but that word feels particularly loaded. Others call it self-realization or realizing one’s true nature.
To me, it means waking up to the ultimate nature of reality and thereby setting oneself free of suffering and all the accumulated baggage of the small, limited sense of self and world.
It means living in a state of Oneness with All of Life, deeply alive and attentive to each moment, living fully in our natural birthright of freedom, wholeness, peace, joy, and love.
I know this is our birthright. It’s who we innately are. I aim to help others have more of these qualities in their lives through everything I teach and share.
So, why is it so difficult to reach this state in a permanent way?
There’s a line on a CD I have that says “Awaken fully in this lifetime for the benefit of all sentient beings.” That has long felt to me like the most important and valuable thing to do with this life.
And yet, how to bring it about?
Yes, there’s meditation, and letting go, and a whole host of spiritual practices, but do they lead to true awakening? For most people, it appears that those practices help us live better, happier, more peaceful lives, and to navigate the inevitable storms of life with more grace and ease, but not to awaken fully.
Discovering a Path to Freedom
Like many people, I’ve had plenty of awakening experiences—profound experiences of oneness, beauty, joy, peace, Divine, and of seeing radiant Truth. In 2002, I spent three weeks in such an exalted state and received all sorts of remarkable transmissions.
But then, like seemingly everything, these experiences fade, and I’m back to my suffering, ego-bound self, irritated by little things, easily discouraged, frightened, and so on.
At some point, I kind of gave up, not really believing I could ever wake up in this way.
Then, this past summer, having come through the fires of hell during a year-long journey with advanced stage cancer, and having miraculously healed, I began to feel the longed-for peace, joy, and ease.
During that time, I listened to Rhonda Byrne on a podcast and could immediately tell she was dwelling in this state of awareness, that she was for real.
I bought her book The Greatest Secret, in which she talks about how this awareness is what we are and that is available to all of us. It doesn’t require years of meditation or lifetimes of spiritual practice. It’s who we already are. And more and more people are waking up to this with greater ease than ever before. There seems to be a wave of consciousness rising among us.
She quotes many wonderful teachers of this truth in the book.
I was thrilled when I read this. I immediately began to seek out teachers and teachings that might help me wake up.
I followed the breadcrumb trail that Rhonda had followed and looked into the teachers in The Greatest Secret that I most resonated with. Below, I’ll share some of my favorite resources I’ve found so far.
At first, I felt so enlivened and excited. Awakening felt so near. Then, I hit a wall.
Dark Nights of the Soul
The veil between me and my true nature thickened into what felt like a steel door. I was depressed, frustrated, strugglingly mightily with both bodily afflictions and mental ones.
There’s a paradox around all this. That what we are trying to attain is what we already are, and any efforts to attain it tend to perpetuate the illusion that it’s not already here, keeping our experience of it at bay.
This can be enormously painful, as I found out.
And yet, the teachers also say that a sincere desire to awaken is an important quality to have. So, how do we hold that desire without efforting?
I scheduled a conversation with David Bingham, one of the teachers that has helped many people realize their true natures. I had watched many of his YouTube conversations with others and was so excited to have him “enlighten” me in this way. I couldn’t wait.
In our conversation, David said he could tell that I had already realized my true nature and that I just needed to choose in each moment whether to fall for the illusions of the dualistic realm (what most of us think of as reality) or rest as Effortless Awareness. At first, that felt lovely to hear.
But then, why was I still suffering so much? I entered a kind of mini dark night of the soul. I reached out to David for another conversation, which helped create more clarity, but also didn’t change my day-to-day experience of life that much.
On the Hazards of Non-Duality
The teachers in The Greatest Secret and others I’ve been following since are pointing to something that is called non-duality.
Non-duality means that there is no separate self, there is no me that is separate from the rest of reality. There is no self and other, no subject and object.
The self we believe ourselves to be is an illusion. I am not my body, not my mind, not my emotions, not my sensations, not my history, personality, identity. I am not a separate me at all but simply part of the vast ocean of Being.
There is only this one Being/Awareness. Everything else is illusion, a Divine play that we can choose to play in with freedom and joy, once we see through the illusion.
You might be able to guess that the ego doesn’t take kindly to this news. It is profoundly confronting and confounding to the mind.
And I’ve come to discover it can also be quite dangerous. I’ve heard multiple tales of people committing suicide after attempting to follow this path.
You have to have a strong sense of self and a firm hold on reality before you can safely relinquish it. And even then, these teachings can lead to misunderstandings that cause everything to feel flat and meaningless. I’ve even read some teachers saying it is all meaningless, and there is no purpose to our lives. I consider that very dangerous teaching indeed and don’t agree with it at all.
The other danger, the one I fell into, is for the self to get caught in the torment of longing for this awakening, this bliss and freedom, and it feeling ever out of reach.
So, I want to caution you about this. Tread carefully if you choose to follow this path. Keep an eye on your well-being. And move always towards what feels best, what creates happiness, openness, love, and ease inside. Let that be your guide.
With that said, I’ll share some of the resources I have found most interesting, helpful, and inspiring.
Resources for Awakening
I recommend Rhonda Byrne’s The Greatest Secret for an excellent overview of the concepts and teachers of this perspective. She even shares practices and her own experience with awakening.
I followed Rhonda’s breadcrumb trail initially and also looked into the teachers I most resonated with from the book.
David Bingham—I love David’s incredibly clear, inspiring, helpful explanations of all this. His YouTube channel is a wealth of resources: https://www.youtube.com/@davidbinghamchannel You can watch and listen as he guides others to realize their true natures. I also particularly love the interviews he did on Conscious TV.
Jan Frazier—Jan’s memoir of her spontaneous awakening, When Fear Falls Away, is fascinating and well written, but it created a painful hunger in me to “have what she’s having,” and then butting up against the news that there’s nothing I can do to bring that about. Not easy. I did just order her book, The Freedom of Being, which is supposed to offer some practices or helpful perspectives. She’s also got some good resources on her website: https://janfrazierteachings.com/
This film on Awakening is fabulous. I found it on Jan’s site. Here it is on YouTube.
Sailor Bob & Kat Adamson. They host weekly Zoom meetings for free. Sailor Bob is the real deal and has helped many people realize their true natures. He’s gradually dying now but his wife, Kat, continues his work. https://www.sailorbobadamson.com/
John Wheeler—He no longer teaches, but this site is full of his excellent, super-clear teachings, or what he and other non-dual teachers call “pointers.” https://johnwheelernonduality.wordpress.com/
Hale Dwoskin and the Sedona Method—I’ve been using the Sedona Method and sharing it in my classes and coaching for over a decade. It’s been utterly life-changing for me and offers incredibly valuable tools for dealing with life’s challenges and finding much greater freedom within, while at the same time pointing to that ultimate reality that we are. As far as I’m concerned, you can’t go wrong with this: https://www.sedona.com/Home.asp
Letting Go and the Greatest Secret—Hale Dwoskin has a podcast on this topic, on which he interviews many fascinating teachers and also offers tools you can use to help you let go and experience greater freedom and well-being now.
Final Thoughts (For Now)
One thing I’ve discovered from my study of this is that everyone’s experience of Awakening is unique. Even though what is ultimately seen, the true nature of reality, is described in incredibly similar terms by everyone who has realized it, the path to get there is wildly varied.
Some people, like Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie, woke up spontaneously and completely in an instant out of states of intense suffering and never looked back. Many, like Rhonda Byrne, had a moment of clear seeing, followed by years of integration, letting go of old patterns of limitation, thought, and behavior.
Others had no singular moment at all, but rather a slow illumination and dropping away of the small self. Some insist that it’s simply a moment-to-moment choice and not a state of being at all, that there is no unwavering awareness or awakeness. Others disagree completely with that and say there’s a point from which you can never turn back.
Some found the process exquisitely delightful and freeing. For others, it was arduous and filled with alternations of deep pain and ecstasy. For some, the process has a significant physical component, as in kundalini awakenings. Others neglected their bodies because of becoming so dis-identified with them.
And we all know stories of gurus, who, having clearly attained some profound level of seeing and being, fell prey later to their egos in horrible ways.
So, it seems to me, the path is fraught. And full of paradoxes and contradictions. Each of us must find our own way.
And it’s also fine to not even bother to look into this topic and simply make the best life you can.
To me, what seems most important is to live a life that we love, that is filled with as much love, joy, wellness, peace, and inner freedom as we can. There are many roads to that.
The more I look into this, the less I know. I welcome you to share your thoughts, experiences, and favorite resources in the comments to this post. And I’ll continue to share with you what I discover as I go along.