Opening the Door: Jan Frazier Teachings On Awakening

By Jan Frazier

Jan Frazier experienced a radical transformation of consciousness at age fifty, in 2003. Her 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. Jan Frazier's teachings are drawn from direct experience, relying on no particular tradition or set of beliefs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456610999

Book preview

sky.

Tuning Fork

Just a door to open, a quiet invitation. Suspect there is more to you. Suspect the kingdom of God is here. You are it.

In the 1960s there was a shaving cream ad on TV in which a woman with a sultry voice said, Take it off. Take it all off. What is naked? What is that, to remove the apparent?

Here, come play in the silence, where the wind is. Did you imagine the wind blew someplace besides the inside of your body? Look on your own works, on the stars, the dew. Feel how life plays inside your vast body. Notice how you cannot find death, however hard you look.

You weren’t prepared for this. You cannot prepare. It comes, it lays out its banquet. You open your mouth: maybe sing, maybe cry out.

What is passion? What is the passion? What is it to be naked? What is it to realize nothing has been left out? To feel the arms of the beloved grabbing you up in rejoicing, and to realize they are your own?

We must be done with misery. It has spent itself down, wrung itself out. It is finished, useless now. Someone said, The world was meant to be free in.

Can’t you sense it? The option of it? That there is option being exercised?

But here, now, here comes the silence, to remind. How partial is the usefulness of words. The truth knows itself from within. The bones know. The ticking heart knows. The connective tissue hums with it.

The earth hums. Do you feel it? Oh, tuning fork — do you feel it?

Do you suspect there is option at play? Do you suspect grandeur in your very self? Let suspicion shock you awake, a bucket of cold water. Shake yourself like a dog. Look around, refreshed. Did you know all along? Notice the absence of surprise. See how familiar you feel to yourself, how it was all known. All home. See how at home you feel. How drained you are of opinion, ambition. How rinsed you are of grudge, regret. Of wishing.

Did you think you were something besides that loon? that fog lying on the distant hill? Are you surprised? What do you think Whitman was talking about in his rapture over the grass?

Where do you stop, and where does the rest of the world begin? There is no rest of the world. Do you have a suspicion of this? Did you think there was error?

God is a patient god. Lucky for us. No clock ticks there. It has been going on forever. It will go on another forever. We play in it, recklessly. Reckless of our majesty.

Fear is food. Eat it, shit it out, be done with it. It never did have anything to do with you. It is bored of our interest in it. It is going away now. One day, they will hear stories about the old world, how it used to be. Before we remembered what we are made of. We are here: this is that old world, where death is dreaded, where war is our idea of a good time. They will tell stories about us, how bit by bit, we shrugged ourselves awake. How we opened our eyes, looked around, and saw for the first time the miraculous world.

Shut Door, Open Door

In ordinary awareness, most moments of life seem to be like this. I am (anyone is) a certain person, having a particular identity, separate from all around me. I am here, now, and something is occurring. Maybe I’m doing something, or observing something, or something is happening to me. Maybe something noticeable is going on inside, in mind or body or emotions. There’s a physical setting and I’m located in it. Things appear to be in motion. I am somehow engaged with the surrounding experience. I am experiencing, processing, reacting. My inner response to what’s happening in the immediate scene has a landscape and an energy of its own.

Whatever the primary focus of attention, whether the immediate outer condition or an absorbing inner reality, there’s an ongoing sense that I am a physically contained awareness moving through space, moving through time, and subject to experience. That I am separate, a subject taking in an object.

Now forget all of that.

In a moment of presence, in which the solid sense of self is felt to briefly dissolve, what happens? For some reason (a thing we are not in charge of), a door has opened. In floods awareness. This is not a mental experience. It is not a spiritual experience. (Forget all of that too.) This is a human experience. It’s about feeling. Presence is the enlivening of intelligent awareness that is felt throughout the body.

Something has caused awareness to sense itself. People often will say they recall vividly the first time this happened. Probably it was in youth.

What opens the door? The gathering of electrified attention. The quieting of thought. An encounter with astonishing beauty can do it. Being stunned by radically unanticipated circumstances. Extreme physical effort. Rhythmic, repetitive, mindless activity. Creative endeavor. Breathtaking emotional or physical pain. (I experienced it at the height of labor contractions.) But even just the plain, quiet gathering of attention will open the door.

You are in utter stillness. Briefly, the familiar sense of person-having-experience has melted into diffuse awareness. There is sensation. Deep peace. Likely, you feel something. Alive, alive, you are alive. The mind is still. The apparent separateness of a self — so familiar — has softened. You are the moment. You are the space in which all is taking place. What’s happening around you is on the same plane of reality, in the same space, as whatever’s going on inside your apparent self (thoughts, feelings, sensations). It’s all one thing. (This is what is meant by being one with all that is.)

What holds the door shut? (For this, the shut door, is the primary ongoing human experience.) Resistance. Pushing away the spontaneous feeling that comes in response to a moment of life. Mentally managing a feeling. Making up a story about what’s happened, erecting a barrier to protect yourself. Believing your thoughts, mistaking them for reality itself. Paying attention to something inside your head instead of paying attention to what’s here and now.

Fear holds the door shut. It is all about fear — of the unknown, of the uncontrollable, of pain.

When the door opens, you allow yourself to feel what’s happening. You are an aware intelligent animal — sensory, heartfelt, fearless. What’s happening around you is happening within you. You are the present. This is what presence is.

This is what religion and spirituality have invented words and concepts for (God being one). But when you are flooded with presence, you aren’t thinking God. Just like a fish doesn’t think water. There isn’t anything but.

The thinking about it, the name for it, comes only after, during the in-between times. The useless times.

Spiritual Liberation: Top of the List

Spiritual awakening can be seen as something gained, or as something coming to an end. What’s gained is a deep, unwavering sense of well-being. What falls apart is the machinery for suffering. While most people live their whole lives without seeking liberation, or even thinking much about it, a few get a hunger for it. (There are some who wake up without having ever tried to, who never thought about it once. These people can be infuriating to the hungering ones.)

The longing can be great but stay in a perpetual stall.

Liberation tends to be seen as the final victory, the triumphant conclusion of lesser bits of progress. A kind of last frontier. It’s seen as the ultimate goal. But really, it’s the undoing of all goals.

Even if a person longs for liberation, there’s usually a bit of a list of other longed-for things. I want to be free . . . and I also want to be loved by somebody, and respected by my children and peers, and I want to be healthy and have a great job.

If spiritual freedom is the thing most longed for, that means it’s at the top of a list. The list is a problem. Being free means being free of the list. The other things have to be held lightly, so lightly they just may blow away. (It’s not that they wouldn’t be preferred, among other possibilities; but that the attachment to them would be less ferocious.)

But don’t I want my children to be happy? My children will be what they will be. (If they are happy, I won’t be made happier, and if they are unhappy, I won’t be made unhappy.) Don’t I want there to be world peace? The world cannot (right now) be any way other than the way it is.

A person probably can’t decide to stop wanting something, to turn off the attachment to (say) making enough money to pay the bills. But just noticing the force of wanting can have a softening effect on it. While you can’t talk yourself out of it (it’s a waste of time to try), you can look in the face of desire, the felt need to have a certain something. You can really look at the awful force of it. Feel it. Feel the pain it can’t help but cause. How it keeps the machinery of suffering going on and on.

Maybe you’ll be surprised. The desire might just turn and go then, all on its own. Maybe the thing you’ve been looking for will come in through the back door, looking for you. No more longing. No more suffering. No more list.

Conditioning

When I first was drawn to the spiritual practice I did for many years, one of the things that most appealed about it was the recommended practice of noticing what was going on in my head as I moved through my day. Not like an aggressive gardener bent on rooting out weeds, but gently, curiously. Just observing. Seeing how I reacted, on the inside, to things that happened on the outside. My young children squabbling: how that generated heat in my body, which generated yelling (and sometimes grabbing). My husband calling late in the afternoon to say he’d be delayed getting home: how that made the remaining minutes of being a single parent seem to elongate, multiply. Receiving a real letter from the editor of a literary journal, instead of the usual small rejection slip: how that swelled my heart, gave me a sense of being a real writer.

Until I encountered this idea of noticing my interior as its own world, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was a separation between that reality and the one out there — the things that happened, the situations surrounding me. To me it was all a big integrated blob, the inner and the outer woven together in a way that made them a single thing. A unified reality. As far as I had always understood it, there was a causal, inevitable relationship between what happened and how it affected me. As my mother often used to say of her own behavior and attitudes, I couldn’t help it.

When I was growing up, I hated that she would say that, especially when it had to do with things about herself that I saw as signs of bigotry. The colored laborer working in the lot beside our white-neighborhood house, in the early 1960s, who asked for a drink of water and was handed a peanut butter jar to drink out of. I chided her for that. When she said she couldn’t help it, she really meant that. She truly couldn’t help thinking the man had cooties, and that ever after, our drinking glass would not be able to be sufficiently cleaned. She thought she couldn’t help her feelings, and so truly — in