About Jim’s JourneyIt was during my last year in college that my spiritual journey started in earnest. I came to the United States, from New Zealand where I was born and raised, to Davenport, Iowa, to study chiropractic. This was during the late 1970's. During that last year I went through a health crisis where I would get tightness in my chest, and have difficulty breathing.
It got to the point where I was afraid to go to sleep at night, for fear that my heart would give out, or that I would stop breathing and die. I&rsquod finally fall asleep from exhaustion, and then would wake up the next morning just thankful that I was still alive. It was a very unsettling time, a time of great personal distress. I dealt with it by getting into yoga, and when I went for my morning run, I stopped timing myself to see how fast I was going. I made a conscious effort to appreciate nature more, to actually stop and notice things, like the blue jay squawking in the apple tree, or the bees buzzing around the honey suckle. I let go of trying to control my breath, and just started to trust more, to be more in the moment. I learned to meditate, After a few months, the anxiety began to fade and I started to sleep well again.
As part of my quest for understanding I read the books of Herman Hesse and Alan Watts, and especially J. Krishnamurti. As I dove into Krishnamurti's writings, I soon discarded the belief in God altogether. Krishnamurti was, in many ways, the ultimate spiritual iconoclast. He said that it was the prison of beliefs and concepts that kept us in bondage, and that caused all our suffering. Freedom, he said, lay in being free of the net of thoughts, of all concepts about God. Only then would we discover what was meant by the word "God." One of my favorite sayings of his was this: " Meditation is the ending of thought. It is only then that there is a different dimension, which is beyond time."
Through the practice of meditation, I learned to let go of thinking, and to become inwardly still and silent. It was from Krishnamurti that I learned what I was to later call the practice—the practice of being present, the practice of being very still, alert, and aware in the now moment.
In time, as the practice of inner silence became more natural, I did indeed discover that there was a power, a palpable and loving energy, or presence, that gave birth to all of existence. I felt it most readily out in nature, whenever I took a walk in the hills, but I could also feel it when I sat to meditate, if I got quiet and still enough.
Two years after the health crisis I had another life-changing event happen to me—my first awakening, my first real taste of enlightenment. It was summer, and what happened was that I woke up early one morning and noticed a shaft of sunlight coming through a chink in the venetian blinds. There were dust motes dancing in the sunlight, and my gaze was transfixed by them. Then I heard the soft, haunting call of a mourning dove, and suddenly everything in my mind fell away. Every thought, the residue of the night&rsquos dreams, it all just vanished and I lay there in the most extraordinary state of clarity, of stillness, of oneness with everything, that I had ever experienced. There wasn&rsquot even a sense of a "me" having the experience. There was just a feeling of magic, of timeless presence, and no tension or conflict whatsoever. I couldn&rsquot even put words to what was happening at first.
Then, after a while, a thought entered my mind: "So, this is what Krishnamurti and all these other teachers are talking about. There is nothing to seek. It is all right here. Life is beautiful and perfect as it is." After this realization, I got out of bed and crept slowly into my study to write about the experience in my journal.
As the day wore on, the feeling of oneness faded, of course, and I gradually reverted to my normal, cerebral, somewhat uptight self. But something had changed in me forever. It was as if a hole had been punctured in my ego-bound consciousness. I had tasted the Reality behind reality. I had glimpsed the divine perfection of creation, the beauty that is always here, underneath the surface noise, the tension in the mind.
Now I knew what I was looking for. I wanted to live with that clarity, that sense of ease and oneness with life, all the time. I was totally committed, and knew instinctively that I was going to do whatever it took, that I was willing to make whatever sacrifice was needed.
As a result of that inner commitment, I devoted the next eighteen years of my life to the pursuit of self-realization, to becoming fully established in the freedom that I knew now was my true nature. It was the central, driving theme of my existence, even as I outwardly lived a normal life: being married, getting divorced, running a successful practice, traveling, dating, going to the theater, skiing, getting married again, and eventually becoming a father.
Meeting The Master…
Then, in 1984 I met Jean Klein. Born in Europe, Jean had studied music in Vienna, had fought in the French resistance during the second World War, and had become a physician. But he had always had a passionate interest in truth, in a way of living that was free of the materialistic addiction that swept Europe after the war. As a result, he spent some years in India, studying with several spiritual masters.
In time, he became a master in his own right, a skilled exponent of Advaita Vedanta, an enlightenment tradition known as the "direct path," or the nondual path, because it points directly to consciousness, to the one energy that is our true nature. It points to awareness itself.
Over a period of about seven years—and as a result of carefully reading his books, attending workshops, going to his public talks and dialogues, and spending some private time with him—I finally "got" what he was saying. What Jean gave me was what I later came to call the teaching—the specific directions needed to orient the mind and point it in the direction of truth, where liberation is to be found.
From that very first meeting in Marin county, he passed on to me, through his words and through the clarity and power of his presence, the ultimate understanding of Advaita—and, indeed, of all authentic enlightenment teachings—which is that there is no independent entity. The "me," with all its history and drama, doesn't exist, except as an idea, a story, a fabrication between our ears. We have an ego, an "I" or "me" sense, but it is not who we really are. To actually see the truth of this—to "get" the teaching with the totality of one&rsquos being—is to undergo the perceptual shift that is the key element in awakening.
So, I would remember the teaching I had received from Jean: that I was not the "person" I imagined myself to be. I was not my thoughts, not my story. Then, eleven years after I had met Jean, something happened, and the seeing of truth finally took hold. (* For detailed description of Jim&rsquos awakening, read the last chapter. The section subtitled #2 ""Breaking Through" of The Way of Harmony).
In the more than nine years that have passed since that spring, the awareness of myself as being the awareness, the vastness, in which this life, right now, is happening, hasn&rsquot changed. Day or night, waking, sleeping, or dreaming, the experience of being the clear, calm, spacious consciousness in which life, with all its ups and downs, happens, is always here. The circumstances of my life, of course, have changed, and they continue to go through changes. But the awareness of myself as the awareness behind everything is constant. Whenever I stop to notice it, I feel a deep sense of gratitude for this discovery
Once we have awakened to our true nature, then the work is to embody it, to live our understanding. As Jean himself said in one of his talks: "In my teaching one points directly to consciousness, the natural state, becomes established in it and then moves down, so to speak, to the transforming of the relative nature."
This transforming of the relative nature, of bringing the consciousness that we are into every realm of daily life—health, relationships, work, the economic and social reality—is a process that goes on till the day we die. But the difference now is that we are always at peace. Our suffering truly has come an end. That&rsquos why enlightenment matters. And that's why I am passionate about teaching it.
Dealing with a crisis or a challenge
