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.
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