Michael A. Rodriguez - Boundless Awareness: A Loving Path to Spiritual Awakening and Freedom from Suffering

Michael is the living expression of his remarkable teachings. If you want to know him, read his book. If you want to experience the Truth as it has been revealed to him, step into these pages. You will be embraced by a humble and knowing heart. A timeless and expansive wisdom awaits you.

Bruce Joel Rubin, Academy Awardwinning screenwriter of Ghost, Jacobs Ladder, My Life, Deep Impact, Stuart Little 2, The Last Mimzy, and The Time Travelers Wife

Boundless Awareness is a delight to read, as it invites the reader to embody the loving awareness you are reading about with alive metaphors and heart-centered guided meditations. Michael addresses important topics such as boundless awareness versus the intimacy of experience, sudden versus gradual awakening, nothing to be done versus something to be done, no practice versus practice, and transpersonal versus personal in a way that is down-to-earth and a breath of fresh air.

Loch Kelly, author of Shift Into Freedom

Michael A. Rodriguez brings the words of a poet, the keen eye of a scholar, and the heart of a devotee of truth to this skillful evocation of non-dual realization. He covers the territory thoroughly, including the subtleties of embodying our inherent perfection in these imperfect human forms. An excellent resource for beginners and seasoned seekers alike.

Stephan Bodian, founder and teacher at the School for Awakening, and author of Wake UpNow and Beyond Mindfulness

In the growing field of non-dual literature, Boundless Awareness shines with an unusual clarity, warmth, creativity, and nuanced insight. Michael also breaks new ground with his discussion of post-awakening shadow integration, deftly including truths from both direct and progressive spiritual approaches. This is cutting-edge work: engaging, inspiring, and beautifully written. I highly recommend it!

John J. Prendergast, PhD, retired adjunct professor of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and author of In Touch

With incredible clarity and an unbounded heart, Michael masterfully guides you to step out of the prison of thought-created experience and into the freedom of an undivided view, in which the shining essence of reality reveals itself. A beautifully eloquent book that will undoubtedly serve to untangle many of the preconceptions about the awakened state and provide helpful pointers and practices to those willing to embark on the journey of direct realization.

Amoda Maa, author of Embodied Enlightenment

Michael delivers grounded, translucent teachings that penetrate and liberate both mind and heart. His book is a sublime manual for awakening, and it delivers much-needed clarity and precision on the liberating process of removing that which obscures our true nature. There is a clear and radiant transmission inherent within these pages. May it land and take root in your heart.

Susanne Marie, spiritual teacher, speaker, and group facilitator of Life Living Itself

I have read many spiritual books over the ten years I have been interviewing people for www.conscious.tv, but I found that Michaels book has an exceptional clarity that gave me a deeper understanding of who we really are.

Renate McNay, www.conscious.tv

As someone who quickly became a close friend, and in three appearances on Buddha at the Gas Pump, Ive found Michael to possess a rare blend of clarity, wisdom, and humanness. Those qualities come through clearly in this book.

Rick Archer, founder and host of Buddha at the Gas Pump

Skillfully drawing from both direct and progressive path practices, Michael has given us an integrative manual for awakening. His intellectual sensitivity and openhearted ease shine through in these pages. I sincerely hope that Boundless Awareness finds the wide readership it deservesit is one of the most lucid, helpful, and accomplished books that I have read on this subject in recent years.

Julian Noyce, founder of Non-Duality Press

Publishers Note

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright 2018 by Michael A. Rodriguez

Non-Duality Press

An imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

5674 Shattuck Avenue

Oakland, CA 94609

www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Amy Shoup

Edited by Gretel Hakanson

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

for my mother and father

What if you are not a separate person born into a universe made of dead matter? What if everything is vibrantly alive, all of it the expression of One Consciousness? What if you are that boundless awareness, unborn and indestructible, in which the whole universe appears and disappears? What if the awakening you are seeking is already fully present, simply unnoticed? If you really saw and felt the truth of these possibilities as your actual present reality, how would that change your life? Thats what this book is all about. Its a book that will be helpful to both beginners and to those who have been on the pathless path for many years.

Ive known Michael Rodriguez since he was a college student. We met through the work of Toni Packer, who was an important teacher for us both. In the beginning, Michael and I knew each other only through occasional email exchanges. In 2014, after he moved to the Bay Area, we finally met in person, and we quickly became close friends. In our dialogues in these last years, Michael has often been a teacher to me. In the last year, it has brought me great joy to watch him make the leap into being available as a teacher to the wider world.

Michael sees and writes with clarity and sensitivity. He brings both an open heart and an intellectual acuity to the table, but above all, he brings the fruits of his own direct inquiry, exploration, and discoverydissolving into and abiding as boundless awareness. It is that kind of direct exploration and abidance in the Heart that Michael encourages others to take up. He offers guided meditations and exercises throughout this bookvisceral somatic practices as he calls themthat allow you to directly experience what is being pointed out in the text so that your understanding never stops at the intellectual or cognitive level, but is always brought deeper into the aliveness and immediacy of non-conceptual presence and direct realization.

Michael offers an integrated approach to awakening that is, in his words, at once transcendent and imminent, awake and embodied, transpersonal and personal, divine and human. He recognizes and honors both the timeless absolute truth of what has never been absent and also the relative truth of the unending evolutionary journey of discovery and integration that occurs over time. His expression marries the path of negation (or detachment) and the path of inclusion (or love), illuminating both the emptiness and the fullness, the oneness and the uniqueness of everything. Michael uses language skillfully, but points beyond language to an emptying out where all concepts are left behind, even the subtlest and most sublime.