Free Wake Up Now by Stephan Bodian

and unknowability of the Divine. Yet these teachings have not stopped the great religions from amassing countless volumes of conceptual elaboration on the most fundamental spiritual truths. Even Buddhism, which emphasizes the importance of direct spiritual experience, often comes replete with centuries of encrusted beliefs that burden the seeker with a clouded lens through which to interpretthe path. One of my students, for example, got involved with a Tibetan Buddhist sect that taught that enlightenment was possible if she devoted herself to her teacher and engaged in rigorous practices. The promise of awakening lured her on, but the more committed she became, the more she was exposed to other, more disturbing teachings that warned of the fires of painful hell realms if she in any way violated her vows to her guru. By the time she came to me, she was having nightmares about going to hell and was terrified she would end up there—simply because she had wanted to wake up to her essential nature.
NO SWEETS FOR THE EGO
    The Jewish tradition tells a wonderful story about the dangers of taking even the most exalted religious doctrines too seriously. One day, it seems, the founder of the Chassidim, Israel the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), was experiencing an elevation of his soul in the heavenly realms, as he was accustomed to do. There he met Satan, the angel responsible for bringing challenging situations to Earth, gesticulating and reading aloud from a book. From Satan’s words and gestures, the Baal Shem could tell that the book contained a version of his own Torah teachings.
    When he returned to his body, he called together his close disciples and asked who among them had written a book of the Baal Shem Tov’s Torah. Sure enough, one of the disciples sheepishly came forward, holding a small journal in which he had carefully recorded the teachings he had personally heard from the master’s lips. The Baal Shem Tovread the book, then handed it back to the student and said, “Not a single statement in this book is true.” By this, the Baal Shem did not mean that the concepts were inaccurate, but that the words no longer carried the wisdom of their source—they were dead, lifeless replicas, without the power to evoke the Divine.
    Too bad the Buddha can’t return like the Baal Shem to read the volumes of admonitions and theories that have been propounded in his name and declare them distorted, inaccurate, outdated, and inert. Every Buddhist sect and school makes different claims about what the Buddha really taught, but the truth is that the so-called words of the Buddha recorded in the Pali canon were written down more than five hundred years after the master’s death. Can you remember what you said last month, last week, or even yesterday? How, then, can the “words of the Buddha” be reliably transmitted for five centuries from one generation of monks to another without alteration? Who knows what the Buddha really taught? Yet millions of men and women revere these words as the gospel according to Buddhism and live their lives in alignment with them.
    In his wisdom, the Baal Shem realized that Satan, the tempter, could take words that were meant merely as pointers to divine revelation and fashion them into a golden calf, a false idol to be worshipped in place of the living truth that must arise anew in each individual heart. In the same way, the mind takes possession of even the highest spiritual teachings and pretends to know the truth of which theyspeak, whereas the mind is merely seeing reality through the cloudy lens of spiritual concepts.
    No doubt you know people who have read all the right spiritual books and imbibed the most refined spiritual concepts and can repeat them verbatim, but have no direct experience of the truth behind the words. These people identify with—and believe themselves to be sanctified by—the spiritual knowledge they’ve accumulated but still suffer and cause suffering as if