Well, I'm on Day 2 of an approximately year-long journey on what meditation teacher Henry Shukman calls The Way.
Pleasingly, I don't have to journey to India or Tibet, nor go on lengthy meditation retreats. All I needed to do was install an app on my iPhone and pay $89.99 for a year's worth of daily talks and guided meditations that comprise The Way.
One thing that I like about Shukman's approach is that The Way is unique, to my knowledge, among online meditation instruction with its "no choice" format. I've tried quite a few meditation apps. They all have offered a large array of material -- guided meditations, interviews with spiritual teachers, talks on various subjects, videos, and such.
By contrast, with The Way, you start at the beginning and proceed step by step along a single path. Nice and simple. I ordered Shukman's most recent book, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. I started reading the book today.
It's well written and has an appealing message, based on the first 20 introductory pages. I usually shy away from spiritual writings that talk about love as being the most important thing. Not that love isn't important. It is. I just don't enjoy lofty paeans to love that aren't grounded in practicality.
From what I can tell, Shukman views love in much the same way as I look upon oneness. It's an evident fact, not an abstraction or emotion. The basis of love is connection, which is facilitated by a recognition that what we normally consider to be our self actually doesn't exist. His first paragraphs are:
This is a work of unabashed advocacy. It seeks to persuade you that a radical reversal in our ordinary understanding of self and world is available. And that it matters because it not only brings us closer to reality, but also has far-reaching benefits, both for an individual and for society at large.
This book is about the best subject. It's about the single most astounding fact you will ever come to know. It's about you.
You yourself are the most astonishing reality in the whole universe. You -- right where you are, right now, whether you are reading these words while standing at an airport newsstand, slouching in a subway car rattling under the streets of a great city, sagging behind the wheel on a gridlocked freeway, or sitting at a lamp-lit desk at night scrolling down the Amazon home page -- are not what you have taken yourself to be.
Yes, you are the person with the history, hopes, relationships, physiology, aptitudes, and fallibilities that help to define who you think you are. But you are also both much more, and much less. When we get right down to it, our sense of self is an illusion, like a mirage over a hot road, no more substantial than a reflection on the surface of a lake. To "awaken" is to realize this, and this book is a guide to catching glimpses of what that means.
If this book succeeds even a little, it will open a crack in your sense of self -- a chink in the armor of your certainty, of your confidence in the basic assumptions we all make about life -- that will allow a revelation to begin to unfold in your life, as well as in the lives of those around you, and ultimately, perhaps, in the whole human family, and through it, in the great family of all animate beings.
This book is about joining wholeheartedly in the play of this cosmos, which bursts forth in a spectacular array of life on this planet. Here, the bare mineral desert of the galaxy, in its vast, austere beauty, explodes in the wild play of life. This is the universe's garden. This right here is the treasured hothouse. Right here is where the cosmos blooms.
And among the many forms in which it blooms, here is the creature -- you -- that has enough consciousness to be cognizant of its situation, to know how it evolved to be what it is, and to be aware of its own awareness. And to discover in its very bones that it is part of the whole of creation. The universe is blooming right now as you.
So it appears that Shukman looks upon reality much as I do. That we live in a highly interconnected cosmos, bound by universal laws of nature. Any feeling of being separate from reality, of being a stranger in a strange land, a soul tossed out of some supernatural paradise who needs to find its real heavenly home -- that is an illusion fostered by our sense of being a distinct self.
Less self, more connection with everything else. We are a wave, or a ripple, tossed up by the ocean of the universe. It is possible to relax back into that ocean through meditation and other approaches that lessen our sense of being separate and distinct from all that surrounds us. Pain and pleasure, hate and love, war and peace -- whatever we experience emerges from the whole called the universe.
Shukman writes:
The proposition of this book -- and of the deep meditation traditions from which it draws -- is that it is possible to see through our sense of ourselves as separate entities, and to break an enchantment we didn't know we had been caught in.
Far from this risking a dissociative tumble into a vortex of nihilism, breaking the spell that separates us from the universe can be the single most healing, positively life-transforming event that can happen to us, with massive beneficial impacts on our priorities, orienting us away from self-protection and self-promotion and toward concern for the well-being of others, arising from a deep sense of connection.
And the reason awakening can accomplish all this is that it opens up a boundless love -- the "original love" of this book's title.
Today I got this email message from Shukman about meditation. I like his style.
They say the only bad session is the one you didn’t do. A good reminder to try and keep a consistent practice.
But there is a deeper truth here. We often think that a sit where we had a calm mind we did ‘right’, and a sit where we got distracted by thoughts we did ‘wrong’.
But there is no performance here. There really is no good or bad meditation session. There is simply our experience in the moment – each moment has its own intrinsic value just as it is. And the key thing is being still and quiet, knowing there is nothing to live up to, no special condition we have to find.
In the next session on The Way we explore arriving in the present moment, to observe our experience just as it is. No expectations, no preconceived notions of good and bad – just you being you. If you'd like to experience this, click the button below from your mobile phone to start your next session.
Hi Brian, I don’t buy so many books these days, just mostly ones that discuss findings on psychology or neuroscience and so on, such as some of those you have reviewed by Garfield (Loosing Ourselves), Anil Seth (Being You) etc. I also lately enjoyed Lisa Fieldman Barrett (How Emotions are Made) etc. and Helen Czerski (The Blue Machine). As for books on meditation, Zen, and so on, if I buy any nowadays, it’s mainly about seeing how different authors express ‘This’.
Henry Shukman seems to communicate this well, in fact, I’ll probably buy this book seeing as though he talks clearly on many issues that I have always been interested in. For example: - the true meaning of awakening: how we have evolved to be aware of our own awareness: the interconnectedness of the cosmos and: seeing through our illusory sense of self and of being separate entities.
Many people talk of love and compassion believing it is something you acquire whereas Shukman, I’m sure, will point out that love and compassion only truly arise when our sense of being separate from the world, from others (and ourselves) along with the illusion of being a separate self drops away.
Posted by: Ron E. | January 16, 2025 at 03:20 AM
Sounds like an interesting book.
"You are the person with the history, hopes, relationships, physiology, aptitudes, and fallibilities that help to define who you think you are. But you are also both much more, and much less. When we get right down to it, our sense of self is an illusion, like a mirage over a hot road, no more substantial than a reflection on the surface of a lake. To "awaken" is to realize this, and this book is a guide to catching glimpses of what that means."
our sense of self is an illusion. There is no separate self, only the appearance. However, just to say this, it becomes a theory, a teaching. To REALIZE it - it becomes your truth, absolutely without any doubt. A theory, an understanding, a belief, a teaching, a dogma, these are not realization. They can be questioned, doubted, because they arise within the mind.
Realization is not a mind construct.
If it IS a mind construct, then it is not realization, it is the stage that happens BEFORE realization, and which some people can easily mistaken for realization. I call it the booby prize. It is when you (a) understand and (b) accept as true the "idea" of oneness. It now becomes your belief, you FEEL different, hence it's easy to think you have attained something. This is the early stage, when it feels real and you will CLAIM enlightenment. You claim it because something profound has happened to YOU. It is an experience. It is a mind construct. The separate self is claiming it. It is the enlightened ego. ONENESS is only an idea.
Actual realization is not something that you can create, manage, encourage, or do anything to make it happen.
It is not even a happening. It is not an event.
It doesn't happen to an individual.
something that was always the case now is seen to be the truth.
but there is no "seer" nobody to experience the oneness.
the moment this is expressed in language, it has to appear nonsense, because all that can really be said is "IT IS"
"If this book succeeds even a little, it will open a crack in your sense of self -- a chink in the armor of your certainty, of your confidence in the basic assumptions we all make about life -- that will allow a revelation to begin to unfold in your life, as well as in the lives of those around you, and ultimately, perhaps, in the whole human family, and through it, in the great family of all animate beings."
This is exactly what the author is talking about. The book, the meditation is an attempt to "open a crack"
to question the basic assumptions we all make about life.
only then does the possibility open up.
that is the same as the dialogue between a master and disciple.
A crack open up, a possibility arises....
A non-disciple cannot see it - he is closed, so the real dialogue cannot happen, because it is not of the mind.
this meditation is designed to take you beyond the prison of logic, the prison of the mind
Posted by: Osho Robbins | January 16, 2025 at 05:16 AM
Ah, the usual double-down. Pay a thousand dollars every year for guru books and subscriptions to spiritual phone apps. The rest of us know sitting is all.
Posted by: sant64 | January 16, 2025 at 08:52 AM
@ Osho R
Maybe I should not address myself to you or even write the following ....
Suppose you have toiled and studied to prepare yourself for a position in society and the very moment you are ready that position is no longer needed in society.
Or remember the transformation of the feudal China to the modern China under the Cimmunist regime as shown in the movie the "last emperor"
What I am pointing at or try to do is that we cannot revive a religions of ancient times and we should not.
We have arrived in a time that many worldviews that were still valid say 100 years ago have come to lose their value and meaning and nothing ne is at the horizon.
I hardly dear to write it down, but I do feel that whatever spiritual path that was available having its roots in long bygone, regional societies and cultures are ALL in their end days ..be they dual or non-dual
They no longer serve humanity
Not only these spiritual traditions but many other social and cultural tools humanity has lived by for hundreds and hundreds of years. ..holding on to them will destroy whatever remains of nature
Posted by: um | January 16, 2025 at 08:52 AM
And OshoR.
In the past religion served the common man as still can be seen in India where people with the millions gather for a religious event. THAT receptivity is no longer available elsewhere in the world.
Religion, and its "scholars" so to say the mystics, those that have time to spend in a religious practice instead of earning their bread. Scholars as they too are payed indirectly by the common people.
Science and religion have both driven far away from the general public and most lay people can hardly grasp what these scientific and spiritual scholars are talking about, nor do they have the need ..whatever they want to know they can easily find themselves on tiktok ..the new church with the new clergymen the influences
Do you think, that if Israel manage to get the complete control over Jerusalem, that most inhabitants are waiting for the reconstruction of the temple of Solomon in its original glory and use it as it was practiced more than 2000 years ago??
What you are discussing here is voor a paricular intelectual elite ..that is allright but that is an small circel. irrelevant for what the masses have in mind.
Posted by: um | January 16, 2025 at 11:54 AM
I'm loving watching the complete collapse of the Democrat party.
This is the greatest thing to happen in my lifetime.
It's like waking from a nightmare.
This must be how the patriots felt when the British troops were sent packing back to England.
This must be how Americans felt on VJ day.
Posted by: sant64 | January 17, 2025 at 07:42 AM