The Great Sweetening: Life After Thought

Jan Frazier

Description

Jan Frazier experienced a radical transformation of consciousness at age fifty, in 2003. Her teachings are drawn from direct experience, relying on no particular tradition or set of beliefs. "The Great Sweetening: Life After Thought" invites the spiritual seeker to ask "What am I?" Am I what my ego and mind tell me I am? Or am I consciousness itself? This collection of essays explores how the sense of self is created by thought patterns, memory, and beliefs. Frazier gently shows how the ego uses the mind to keep this self seeming real and worthy of the enormous attention it receives. She offers helpful guidance about how to relate to mental activity so that painful thoughts no longer imprison. The compelling reality of the self thus begins to soften, making it possible to sense the larger reality within every person.

The profound peace that is universally longed for is innate to our humanity. It's only because the mind-made self seems to be what we are that this sense of well-being is not realized, not experienced in moment-to-moment life.

Frazier's first book, "When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening" (Weiser Books, 2007), is an account of her awakening, as it unfolded over the first eighteen months. "The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is" (Weiser Books, 2012) offers guidance toward the reduction of suffering and the prospect of radical freedom. Both books are available in paperback and eBook. "Opening the Door: Jan Frazier Teachings on Awakening" is an eBook collection of essays on the nature of spiritual awakening. The book opens the reader's awareness to the possibility of a richly human life, beyond what appears possible to the ego and the mind. The teachings point to unresisting present-moment attention, where the truth of existence is known.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Spirituality
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 04 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456626266
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Great Sweetening
 
Life After Thought
 
 
By
 
Jan Frazier
 
JanFrazierTeachings.com
 
 
Author of
 
When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening (Weiser Books, 2007)
 
The Freedom of Being: At Ease with What Is (Weiser Books, 2012)
 
Opening the Door: Jan Frazier Teachings on Awakening (eBookIt, 2012)

Copyright 2016 Jan Frazier,
All rights reserved.
 
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2626-6
 
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Table of Contents
eBook Cover
Title Page
Front Matter
Being a Smart Animal
The Truest, Realest You
Radically Transient
The Three-Sided Structure We Live In
When Everything Changed
The Past Is a Sheer Cliff Just Back of Your Heels
A Child Again
Homesickness
Plummeting and the Terror of Peace
In Rumi's Field
Resting from Mind-Caused Suffering
The Really Real You
A Locked Door
Being Conscious
Really Alive
Paying Attention
Joy in the Face of Suffering
The Best Thing You Can Do for Yourself
What Life Is Actually Like
What Am I?
What Happens at Awakening?
You Are Not Precious
The Day Time Dies
Do You Love Yourself?
No More Big Sighs: The End of the Search for Security
Life on the Tongue
The Endless List of Things to Do
Anger as a Pointer
All That's Happening
Just Here
It's Not About Liking It
You Are Not Your Problems
The Uselessness of Trying to Rise Above
Meditating All Day Long
You Don't Need to Change
What You Can Do to Wake Up: Not This
Watch What Really Happens
Suffering: That Extra Something
Living Without Mental Management
Outside the Box
The Ultimate Betrayal
The End of the Story
Getting It in Your Head Versus Getting It in Your Bones
An Encyclopedia of a Peach
The Power of Attention
What Awakeness Feels Like
Pausing the River
Human Being as Lint
Transformative Suffering
Preparing the Ground for Resistance
What You Are (After You Disappear)
The Moment the Lord Has Made
What Doesn't Change
Talking to God
The Line Dividing Fear From Love
What I Wish for You
 
And sometimes there is the expression in someone’s eyes,
or in the voice, or in the letters on the screen,
that says something is happening there.
Something radical.
The great sweetening is taking over.
Being a Smart Animal
Once upon a time there was a creature endowed with a fine mind, and also with sense receptors that were sweetly attuned to the surrounding world and to its own delightful body. This intelligent and feeling creature could pick up sense impressions and savor them, without seeking to understand or to name or categorize any of what was smelled or heard or seen or touched or tasted. Life was a bounty.
Sometimes the excellent mind would become engaged, processing impressions in a way that was handy. The mind was a curious processor, taking a particular kind of non-physical delight in drawing connections and conclusions. This was one of the pleasures of being a smart animal. The mind would notice similarity between one tall growing thing and another, and pronounce them trees. The sensation in the mouth was pleasing, the tongue and lips and saliva cooperating to produce a new thing, a word. Thus it became possible for one of the creatures to say to another, “Tree,” in the absence of the growing thing itself, and for the two of them to form in their minds a picture in common. This picture felt almost as real as an actual tree, notwithstanding the absence of the feel under the touching fingers, the distance traveled up with the eyes, the sound of the leaves in the wind, the smell of the fallen leaves decomposing at the feet of the tree.
It came to pass that the name for a thing, which lived only in the mind and the mouth, took on the appearance of reality itself (which continued to be discernible by the senses only). The word good came into being, and also bad, and they too seemed to name something real (even though what they named existed in the mind, not in the world).
Increasingly attuned to the mind’s version of reality, the intelligent animals created a self , to go with each of their bodies. No one noticed that each evolving self had no independent existence, outside of a mind thinking it into being. No self was discernible by the senses (unless you counted the person’s body, which everybody knew was a very minor portion of a self).
This self appeared to need maintenance and protection. It seemed to have a continuity across experiences, which made time seem like a real thing. The past seemed real because of the mind’s ability to revisit something that had happened, and the future seemed real because of the mind’s ability to fantasize and to worry about something that had not happened.
More and more, the mind’s picture of things was mistaken for reality itself. The mind-made self learned to invent problems to fret over, having usually to do with wishing life were other than it was. The self and the problems were so compelling that the intelligent creatures came to live not in the real world but in their heads.
The problems spread over the earth, taking up much more room than the trees and the rocks, the continents, and even the buildings and cars. Then the smart animals, sinking under the weight of their mind-made problems, used those same minds to try to fix the problems.
Alas, they were unable to see the only real problem. Which was this: if the mind has created the problem, it cannot hope to fix it.
Then somebody said – Why don’t we just stop making the problems? Why don’t we stop living in our heads? And so they did, all on a single day. Profoundly relieved, with bounteous energy freed up, they turned their creativity and love to caring for one another and their dear planet. And they all lived peacefully ever after.
The Truest, Realest You
I found a door I hadn’t known was there. It was like entering into another dimension, only this wasn’t science fiction, or a dream, or delusion. It was just plain true. There had been a door all along, in the room in which life-so-far had taken place, fifty years of it. Suddenly I turned and looked in a direction I’d never looked before, and a door I’d never seen was slowly opening, waiting for me to step through. I stepped.
It was like that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the monolith that was buried millennia ago is now, newly uncovered, about to be touched for the first thrilling time by the rays of the sun, which will set in motion something revolutionary. The dramatic opening notes of Also Sprach Zarathustra will play, lest you miss the significance of the moment. The monolith shape is reminiscent of a door, a tall shiny black door, standing free of any walls.
But this – this door that opened in my awareness – is not science fiction, or a movie. It’s a plain-old life, my ordinary human life. Anybody’s life. Only stepping into the newfound space causes life-ever-after to have nothing plain-old about it.
The thing is (and I have yet to get over this), what I saw vividly was that the door had been there all along. How could I have missed it? How could we all – humankind, that is – miss noticing the ever-present door? How is that possible? For years now I’ve been scratching my head about this.
We think that our ideas about life, about ourselves, are reality itself. This is the cause of our suffering. Our mental pictures have us so convinced of their objectivity, their legitimacy, that it doesn’t occur to us to consider another possibility.
We live all our lives contained in a room of our own making. Reality is what it is: mentally unfiltered life occurring, moment by moment, one day followed by another. We are there for it. But what we live in is our interpretations of things. Our elaborate and pain-inducing stories. Meanwhile, uninterpreted life goes on, at a great distance from our consciousness. Trapped in our minds, we miss life itself – the real thing.
When the door is noticed, it’s an invitation to step outside the mind-made room into actual life: immediate, sensory, unprocessed, unresisted life. What encounters this life is plain consciousness. Not the stories, the beliefs, the history that we bundle together into a self that needs asserting and defending. When consciousness encounters life, all is profoundly well. Maybe even fun. At the very least, peaceful.
Yes, even when life dishes up a big challenge. There is unending peace and well-being. Because there is no resisting, no mental processing.
It’s a stunner.
Why don’t people see this door? Why didn’t I? To step through its opening is to leave behind many cherished things: grudges, wounds, ambitions. Identity. Dignity, self-esteem, familial pride. Anger and hope. Defenses. So many things that we hold to ourselves, like comforting clothing. The irony is terrible, as all of this is what causes us to suffer. To miss the real thing!
Meanwhile, we point to life and declare it the cause of our misery. So why bother noticing the door, when we can’t bear to consider the idea that we ourselves (not life) are the makers of our torment? Anyhow, it’s impossible to imagine that it could be otherwise.
This must be science fiction, you may be thinking – that it could truly be otherwise. That’s what I would have thought, had someone proposed such a thing to me. Anyhow, I don’t recall really noticing there was a door there. I seem to have fallen through the opening. I looked around and saw the familiar world . . . only vastly changed. Well, it was the same world, the same life. But I was utterly different inside.
* * * * *
It seems to have to do with perspective. Stumbling through the door separating our usual way from the alternate one is abo