Eli Jaxon-Bear - Sudden Awakening: Stop Your Mind, Open Your Heart, and Discover Your True Nature

I found it almost impossible to put down. I call it the real thing because there isn't even a moment of dogma or bias. Sudden Awakening went straight to my heart.

DR. MURRAY KORNGOLD
Founder of Los Angeles Society of Clinical Psychologists,
having studied with an associate of Karl Jung
and shared a practice with R.D. Laing in
Kingsley Hall, U.K. starting in 1964

Sudden Awakening carries the message so heartfully, it deeply touched me.

BARBARA MARX HUBBARD

Eli Jaxon Bear is a crucial messenger in our time... The integrity of his search, the living power of his realization, the courage of his life all merge seamlessly... The holy transmission of his teacher lives in him and seeks your heart.

RABBI MARC GAFNI
author of Your Unique Self,
The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment

Eli Jaxon-Bear's wonderful new book Sudden Awakening inspires us... It offers us both a map of consciousness and a vehicle of liberation.

RUSSELL TARG
research physicist with two awards from NASA
and author of The End of Suffering

Also by Eli Jaxon-Bear

Wake Up and Roar: Satsang with H. W. L. Poonja (1992)

From Fixation to Freedom: The Enneagram of Liberation (2000)

Lied der Freiheit (1998)

Cosmic Jokes and Teaching Stories (1990)

Healing the Heart of Suffering: Using the Enneagram for Spiritual Growth (1989)

This edition published in 2015 by

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

Charlottesville, VA 22906

Distributed by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 2001 by Eli Jaxon-Bear

Foreword copyright 2015 by Gangaji

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Hampton Roads Publishing, Inc. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

Previously published in 2012 by New Morning Books, Ashland OR, ISBN: 978-0-9856911-1-0.

Cover design by Jim Warner

Cover art is Sunflower, British Library, London, UK British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images.

ISBN: 978-1-57174-727-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: available upon request

Printed in the United States of America

MG

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To my beloved teacher, my sat-guru Papaji:
the dispeller of darkness,
the living embodiment of silence and freedom,
the one with the willingness to give everything at first meeting.

Deep thanks to Anita Tamboli and Jasmin Lace for all of their help in making this new edition possible. To my editor, Vesela Simic, and designer, Kari McCarthy, I am in your debt. To my dearest, beloved Gangaji, my partner of almost forty years, I am forever grateful. Nothing would have been possible without her undying love, support, and commitment to Truth.

Eli Jaxon-Bear is a master teacher, and this book is a clear reflection of his mastery. If you read it carefully, you will receive a transmission of the awakened mind. With care and exquisite timing Eli reveals the culmination of his spiritual search as irrefutable evidence of the possibility of freedom for all.

Like most of us I began my spiritual search as an extension of the primary search that started as a learning, growing infant. We all come into this world seeking identity. What better way to survive! We learn where our particular safety is and where the threats to that safety may be. We learn layer upon layer of the complexities of safety and threat in our world. As we develop we add to this complex of identity. Our world and our identities change as we grow and expand.

Circumstances are sorted to give believability to our most current sense of a particular self. Concepts of all kinds are accepted, fit into the structure of our identity, or thrown away within an hour, a phase, or a lifetime. We are mostly forever searching for enough identity to securely know who we are so that we can finally live freely.

There are moments however, if we are lucky, that reveal a free life regardless of identity and safety. Whether these moments appear in an instant of terror and true threat or in a moment of relaxed pleasure, they become the proof of a vastness that eludes our capacity to name, interpret, store or discard.

When I was teenager and busy throwing away my childish identities, Ilike most teenagersdiscovered these expanded, uninhibited moments with the aid of alcohol and risky behavior. And when I exchanged alcohol for the substances of the counter-culture of the 1970s, I was still seeking those free moments. When I exchanged mind-expanding substances for meditation and chanting, still my goal was to experience the pure pleasure and freedom of experience that transcended my known, constructed world.

Expansive moments did occur with meditation, as they had before with alcohol, sex, psychedelics, or even out of the blue with no known cause. But since I was continuing to form my identity, as we mostly do until death ends it all, these very moments of freedom became aspects of my bondage by forming who I thought I was.

I began to call myself a spiritual person. I thought of myself as someday reaching the final goal of becoming a fully realized spiritual person. This spiritual identity had different imagined personas. Mostly I imagined always resting in equanimity. Sometimes I imagined clairvoyant powers. Always an aspect of my idealizations was the hoped for future knowledge that I had reached the goal of completing my identity.

Certainly I recognized that the odds against my reaching this goal were huge. But I listened to many teachers. I vowed to use this lifetime to serve the fantasy of a future when I would finally know that the mountain had been climbed and the treasure secured.

I worked hard at becoming still and giving up my attachments. I tried to replace anger with peace. There were many beautiful experiences, but mostly I failed. My mind remained active, I was still attached to what I wanted, and now I wanted and was attached to non-attachment. I could name myself a spiritual person, think and look like a spiritual person, but I was still me. I was still searching for more me, better me, and now, enlightened me.

And I didn't get it. Except for those moments of grace when I did and laughed with mysterious joy at how truly absurd this search for identity was. I was unable to capture the freshness of freedom, but spurred on by the illusion of hope I continually returned to the search. I continually determined that with more work or practice or time, freedom would be mine.

After years of getting it and always then losing it, I knew there was something essential that I did not truly know. I prayed for a teacher who could show me what I was missing. By that time I feared that the enlightenment subculture was a fake. I suspected that the search for ultimate resolution was only another distraction to keep us away from the abyss of meaninglessness.

I wanted to know the truth whatever it was, and I knew I needed help.

Eli and I were partners then and we prayed together.

The answer to that prayer was extremely good news. Better than I could have imagined and infinitely more elegantly simple than I could have imagined.