Moments of Mastery
Jim Dreaver

"What you are looking for is what is looking." – St. Francis

To accomplish anything worthwhile in life, you must have a goal. You must set an intention. You must start out with the end in mind, so you know where you are going. Then you must put the goal at the back of your mind, so to speak, and focus on the journey. The learning, the discovery, and the joy is in the journey, in the step you are taking right now. The destination, remember, is always the bonus. It’s the icing on the cake.

On the spiritual journey, the goal is freedom, enlightenment, mastery. It is awakening to your true Self. It is to experience union with the divine, oneness with God, or however you like to define it. Once you are clear about the goal, clear that freedom is, indeed, what you seek, then you can put the goal aside, and focus on the here and now.

As I will emphasize throughout this book, the most important tool or practice you will take with you on this journey is your capacity to be very aware and alert in the present. The master lives from awareness, and uses thinking as a tool, whereas the unawakened person lives from habitual patterns of mental and emotional reactivity, and has only occasional glimpses of clear, present-time awareness.

If you are not here, fully awake and attentive in this very moment now, then where are you? You are in your head, in thoughts of the past, or of the future, or else you are lost in some reverie, day-dream, fantasy, or story of some kind. But you are not here. So the ongoing work as you enter or travel deeper on the way of transformation is to always, always, come back to the present. Come back to this moment now. Right here, right now, is where truth, freedom, and love are to be found.

Above all, start becoming aware of awareness itself. Shankara, one of the great enlightened masters of India who lived around eight hundred A.D., said "The realization of truth is brought about by perception, and not in the least by ten millions of acts."

What he meant by this is that all the spiritual techniques and practices, and all the good works in the world, will not set you free. They may make you feel good, they may benefit others, they may help you get freer of ego and self-centeredness, but they cannot, in and of themselves, bring about liberation. So long as you are attached to any idea or image of "self" – even if the "self" that you take yourself to be is doing important and valuable work in the world – you are not free. You will still be subject to internal conflict, and the emotional highs and lows that characterize the unawakened mind.

What is required for freedom is a shift in perception, a shift in the way you see and experience reality. And the essence of this shift is this: instead of being caught up in your thoughts, and perceiving life from the idea of "I" or "me" – specifically, of "me, myself, and my story" – come back to awareness itself, the awareness that precedes thinking. Come back to the awareness that observes thoughts as they arise. This is the power of presence in action.

After all, if you can observe a thought, you cannot be the thought, right? You are what is observing. And what is that? You cannot name it or conceptualize it. The moment you do, you are back in thought again. So, each time you come up with a new story about who you are – "I am an expression of universal intelligence," "I am a child of the divine," or even, "I am a random event in a meaningless cosmos" – step back, so to speak, behind that thought, that story. Keep coming back to the awareness which gives rise to all thoughts, including all thoughts and images of self.

The more you practice the power of presence, the more you realize that what you actually are is pure awareness, or consciousness, expressing through this unique instrument, this individual body/mind/self called "you." You are the timeless, unchanging awareness which notices, and responds to, the endlessly changing drama that is life. You are the consciousness that gives birth to the entire world between your ears, the world which you have always thought of as "you." The deeper the realization of this fact, the closer you draw to enlightenment, or freedom.

Eventually, the realization become complete, and you no longer have to "work" at being aware anymore. You have seen that the world between your ears is a self-generated fiction, a story of your own making, and just through the seeing of it, it begins to fall away. You don’t even have to actively "drop" it. Once you see that it is not real, you will lose interest in it.

You will see the pointlessness, the futility of basing your entire existence on an illusion. You will see how most human conflict arises precisely because people fervently "believe" that they are their particular political, cultura l, religious, or personal story. They define themselves by their opinions, positions, points of view. They do everything they can to defend and justify their own view of reality, while seeking to invalidate, even attack, contradictory beliefs and perspectives. Meanwhile, they miss the underlying unity, the timeless beauty and harmony of existence that gives birth to all the different forms, the different stories.

As you go deeper on the path of presence, you discover that consciousness itself – even more than words or deeds – is the most powerful transforming agent in the universe. When you shine the light of consciousness, of pure awareness, on a thought – any thought – it disappears, and there is just light, openness, presence. Your head clears, your body, relaxes, your heart opens. Your mind now no longer controls you. Instead you, as consciousness, are now fully in control of it. You still have thoughts, but you know you are not your thoughts. You still have a story, but you now know you are not your story.

This is what I call the core insight, the understanding that sets you free. This is the knowledge that was given to me by my guide, a teacher of self-realization named Jean Klein, and that I am sharing – in my words – with you. Awareness, or presence, is the central practice on the path of mastery. Understanding that you are not your story, not your thoughts, not the person you once took yourself to be, is the teaching on this path.

As the practice and the teaching become more real for you, less and less do you take yourself to be a separate "person," an isolated wave in a lonely, competitive, often hostile sea of humanity. Instead, you start to know yourself as the ocean, expressing as a wave. You are a uniquely individual manifestation of the One underlying reality, or universal consciousness. To know this, to know who and what you really are, is the essence of enlightenment.

As you become more established in the knowing, the teaching, then the work is to embody it, to live it. This is where the teaching and the practice start to become one, where they merge to create a new "you." After you awaken to the realization that you are not your story, and that freedom is your true nature – once you really get this – there is no going back. You don’t get hooked into the illusion again. But embodying your understanding, and the freedom it has brought you, is a life-long journey.

The good news, though, is that with awakening, then even if the external conditions of your life happen to be difficult or unfavorable, as they can be at times, they no longer trouble you in the old way. Outer events lose their power to disturb your inner clarity and equanimity. At times the winds of change or upset may briefly ruffle you on the surface, but like the still waters of a deep lake, inwardly you will remain relaxed and at peace, serenely content. Much of the time, this inner acceptance is all that is needed to bring about a more favorable change in circumstances.

When you stop resisting and fighting life, life has its own surprising way of coming into balance and harmony. Indeed, this is how miracles occur. And it all happens not in some promised future, or some imagined after-life, but right now. Here, in this moment now, is where enlightenment is to be found. So, rather than obsessing over what it takes to become fully realized, or why you still suffer, why you are not yet free, let go of the attachment to all your ideas and stories about enlightenment and suffering, and just focus on being fully alert, aware, and present now.

Then your moments of mastery will become more and more frequent, and the times of conflict and suffering will be fewer, and much shorter in duration. Eventually, as your internal gaze penetrates more deeply through the illusion that is the world between your ears, the world you have for so long been referring to as "me, myself, and my story," the liberation you have been seeking will be yours.

Then a profound feeling of love and gratitude for the gift that is life will be your constant companion. The work you are here to do, the contribution you want to make, will become clear. You will connect with your true creative power, and the results you seek will manifest much more effortlessly.

Never again will you feel that there is not enough time. You will live in the timeless zone, the now, and you will be rich beyond measure, deeply nourished from within. Eighty percent of the problems in your life will solve themselves, and the other twenty percent you will be able to live with, manage, until the right solutions present themselves. Living itself will be endlessly abundant in meaning, purpose, and adventure.

Such is the power of presence.

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