The Direct Way: Thirty Practices to Evoke Awakening

You may feel hesitant about this, or fearful. You’ll encounter different emotions each time, so let them arise; open your heart to those too. Open your heart to your fear, open your heart to your anxiety, open your heart to old thought patterns that insist you have to protect your heart at all times. This is important, because being in a state wher

What we ultimately are in our Ground of Being is beyond description, so all I can do here is suggest what it might be. The final answer to the question “Who am I?” is found by waking up to the totality of our true nature by whatever name we give it. From the awakened view, only this awakened view is the final resolution to the question of who and w

Awakened awareness practices focus on dis-identifying with the conceptual mind, specifically the false self or ego that we imagine ourselves to be. To call the ego a “false self” is not to disparage it or even judge it. It is to name it as what it is: a psychological process with which we have become overly accustomed to identifying. The false self

The key to awakening as the formless being of awareness is to let go of grasping at it with your mind and relax into the simple, quiet, and open intuitive sense of awareness itself.

Enlightenment is a way of viewing and experiencing life. These practices are meant to be one part—although a powerful and important part—of a comprehensive devotion to truth, love, and wisdom grounded in a moral and ethical landscape of selfless commitment to the welfare of all beings and undertaken in a spirit of appreciation for the great mystery

This plunge into the dazzling dark of our unimaginable Being requires an intuitive leap of love. Yes, love. For it is love—love of truth, love of God, love for our fellow creatures—that compels us to leap into the abyss of unknowingness at our core that is beyond description. We leap into this abyss because we care. We care for our own well-being,

With heartfelt devotion and focus, yet without referring to a thought, image, or idea to tell you who you are, rest in the always and already existing silent and dark void—the mystery of Being.

In the Ground of Being, all self-descriptions must be left behind, otherwise we cannot enter fully. We must be as spiritually naked and empty of self-orientation as possible.

Your focus should be on direct experience and natural awareness rather than on trying to make something happen or to philosophically ponder.