Wake Up Now
Authors: Stephan Bodian
Praise for
Wake Up Now
“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, author of
The Impact of
Awakening
and
Emptiness Dancing
“Many books talk about spiritual awakening, but
Wake Up Now
breaks new ground by providing a detailed road map to the complete awakening process. Profound yet accessible, precise yet jargon-free, this wise book leads you step-by-step on the direct path home to your radiant natural state, your innermost true self.”
—Lama Surya Das, author of
Awakening
the Buddha Within
“Communicating nondual wisdom is a high art—requiring a precise and evocative use of language, as well as a profound understanding of paradox. In
Wake Up Now
, Stephan Bodian more than manages both of these challenges and provides the fortunate reader with a doorway into the real but ineffable possibilities inherent in this very moment.”
—Stephen Cope, director of the Kripalu Institute
for Extraordinary Living and author of
Yoga and the Quest for the True Self
“Read Stephan Bodian’s
Wake Up Now
to do just that. It cuts through everything!”
—David Chadwick, author of
Crooked Cucumber:
The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki
“Stephan Bodian masterfully presents enlightenment not as a state to be achieved, but as our underlying condition that is already present, only awaiting recognition. This is a must read for all who sincerely desire a direct pointer to absolute truth and to living the awakened life.”
—Richard Miller, Ph.D., cofounder of the International
Association of Yoga Therapy and author of
Yoga Nidra: The Meditative Heart of Yoga
“Stephan gently takes you by the hand and guides you home through the spiritual maze to your innate awakened essence, awareness itself.
Wake Up Now
is an extraordinarily userfriendly, radiant gem.”
—Leonard Laskow, M.D., author of
Healing with Love
“
Wake Up Now
is a timely book. Not only does it invite the reader to step out of the mind into our natural state, but it also paints the possibility of fully embodying that awakening in day-to-day life. Stephan Bodian is one of a growing breed of ‘translucent’ writers and teachers who point us to a new vision of the possibilities of being human.”
—Arjuna Ardagh, author of
The Translucent Revolution
WAKE UP NOW
A
GUIDE
to the
JOURNEY
of
SPIRITUAL AWAKENING
STEPHAN BODIAN
Copyright © 2008 by Stephan Bodian. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-07-174236-8
MHID: 0-07-174236-0
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To Consciousness,
the silent source and essence of all.
And to you, dear reader:
May this book illuminate your journey of awakening.
5 Who Is Experiencing This Moment Right Now?
9 Freeing the Dark Inside the Light
Needless to say, a book of this kind is the fruition of countless insights and experiences, many of them precipitated or inspired by the kind support and compassionate presence of others. As the words poured forth and appeared on the page, it was clear that this person here is merely an instrument of a more universal movement of truth.
First, I offer heartfelt thanks to my many friends and colleagues, for the love and wisdom we’ve shared over the years; to my students and clients, who kept asking questions and eliciting clarification; and to my friend and Dharma brother John Prendergast, who read the manuscript carefully and offered invaluable suggestions and feedback.
Thanks also to the folks who made possible the publication of this book: my agent, Bill Gladstone, who believed in the proposal and found it a good home; and my editors at McGraw-Hill, Doug Corcoran and Sarah Pelz, for their enthusiastic support at every stage of the process.
Finally, I offer deep bows of appreciation to my teachers, without whose dedication and compassion this book would never have been written: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi; Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi; Taizan Maezumi Roshi; Tsoknyi Rinpoche; and, especially, Jean Klein and Adyashanti. My gratitude for their generosity and their commitment to truth knows no bounds.
Like numerous other authors of spiritual guides, I was motivated to write this book by the complexities and confusion I experienced on my own spiritual journey. Despite all the guidance I received through many years of study and practice in several established traditions, I often found myself wandering alone in uncharted terrain as I navigated my way among the various openings, glimpses, obstacles, and challenges I encountered.
In the Zen tradition, where I practiced as a monk for more than a decade, awakening to true self, or “Buddha nature,” was the elusive goal of the spiritual path, the reason we sat for long, arduous hours facing a wall and following our breath or wrestling with one of the hundreds of koans, or riddles, in the Zen canon. But the nature of this awakening, or
kensho
, was rarely explained or described in detail. Indeed, such descriptions were scrupulously avoided to prevent us from fabricating some false, imitation awakening based on what we had heard. We were encouraged to read stories depicting the enlightenment experiences of the great masters of the past. But inevitably the awakening—which was generally precipitated by an unexpected event, like a pebble striking bamboo or a sudden blow from the teacher’s
staff—was instantaneous and apparently complete, and its substance, the realization the practitioner awakened to, was described in deliberately elliptical and poetic language to prevent any neophyte from prematurely deciphering the code. As a result, I was left to stumble my way toward enlightenment on my own, with frequent visits to the roshi to assess my progress and validate any authentic insights.
After ten years of this regime, I left the monastery and put aside my robes because I concluded that I wasn’t getting any closer to the realization I so earnestly sought; the advice of my teachers—essentially to meditate longer and “sit harder”—no longer resonated and proved fruitless in practice. Sure, I had had a few fleeting glimpses of a profound stillness and silence beneath the activity and clamor of life—brief moments, once while riding my motorcycle, another while sitting by a mountain stream, when time seemed to stand still in the luminosity of the eternal Now. After one of these experiences, a lifetime of anxiety lifted and did not return for several weeks. But I knew that I hadn’t reached the summit of the mountain, and my appraisal was echoed by my Zen teacher, who would approve my presentations of the koans, then periodically pause, peer at me over his reading glasses, and say with some affection, “Not quite clear.”
For the next few years, I dabbled in other forms of Buddhist practice, including Vipassana and Tibetan Vajrayana, before happening inadvertently on a master of the Indian tradition known as Advaita (“nondual”) Vedanta. Instead of encouraging his students to meditate in order to achieve enlightenment, as I had been accustomed to do, he taught
that our always already awakened true nature was our birthright, our inherent condition, our natural state, which we merely needed to recognize, without effort or striving, in a moment out of time. After so many years of just such effort and striving, I found his words to be a tremendous relief—and actually quite familiar, since they echoed the teachings of the early Zen masters who were so revered (though not so often followed in practice) in the Buddhist tradition.
