Free Wake Up Now by Stephan Bodian Page A

nothing has changed. Perhaps you’ve used spiritual concepts in the same way.
    The spiritual marketplace is filled with well-intentioned folks who collect teachings the way some people collect antiques and take comfort and pride in admiring them. The first time I met my teacher Jean Klein, I described the teachings I had studied and the books I’d read, and he smiled lovingly and said softly, “Put down your baggage.” Jean called such concepts “sweets for the ego” because they give the mind a false sense of power and control over what simply cannot be controlled or known, a feeling of solid ground where no ground exists. Such concepts interfere with your ability to awaken because they give you the mistaken impression that you already know.
    Of course, religions develop in the same way, beginning with a genuine, vital spiritual revelation that gets passed from generation to generation and gradually loses its juice as fewer and fewer disciples experience the simple, radiant truth behind the words. Over time, the religion degenerates from living communion to rigid dogma, from the sayingsof the masters infused with the power of their source to a collection of dead words that are enshrined in holy books and scriptures, defended against apostates and nonbelievers, and worshipped from afar as the sacred and irrefutable pronouncements of the enlightened or divinely inspired ones of old.
RADICAL SPIRITUALITY
    Radical spirituality takes an entirely different approach. Instead of offering more beliefs for your collection, it slashes away at your most cherished assumptions to reveal the root, the living source, from which all concepts spring. “Throw it away!” says Nisargadatta Maharaj. “Whatever you understand is not the truth and is to be thrown overboard.” Indeed, radical spirituality teaches that your ideas and stories are the only things that separate you from the truth of your essential nature. Once you stop taking them as reality and see them for what they are, mere thoughts, you have an opportunity to fall back into the vast, spacious, luminous, thought-free presence that is always already who you really are—the living reality that no thought can possibly touch. “Realization is not the acquisition of anything new or a new faculty,” says Ramana Maharshi. “It is only the removal of all camouflage.”
    Buddhist masters and Indian sages aren’t the only ones to emphasize letting go of conceptual baggage, as the story of the Baal Shem Tov makes clear. Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross expounded what later came to be known as the
via negativa
(the wayof negation), which teaches that nothing you can say about God is true, because God is a vast emptiness beyond all conceptual knowing. “God the ineffable one has no name,” wrote Eckhart, adding that “the highest and loftiest thing that you can let go of is to let go of God for the sake of God”—that is, the concept God for the living God. Yet according to the masters of the via negativa, you can know God directly and indisputably, beyond the mind.
    Jesus himself said, “It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Although he was primarily talking about an attachment to material wealth, he was also referring metaphorically to the wealth of beliefs by which many people in his day (and ours) identified themselves: Pharisee, Sadducee, liberal, conservative, Muslim, Jew. “You must become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount—meaning you must be innocent, open, receptive, with childlike faith unencumbered by dogma. The path that Jesus taught emphasized spiritual poverty and humility, stripping yourself bare of the old in order to be baptized and reborn in the newness of the Now.
THE LURE OF FUNDAMENTALISM
    Spiritual dogma can be extremely seductive, despite the admonitions from the various