When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening [Paperback]

 

 

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This is a first person account in journal format with dated entries of a permanent spontaneous spiritual opening. The author is a fine writer, sort of an Annie Dillard of the inner realm.
What is an awakening? Readers from Buddhist, Hindu or mystical traditions will understand immediately with terms like kensho, nirvana, or happy dream. But Westerners at large will be fresh beneficiaries of this astute and carefully crafted chronology of events. This book might be looked on as an expanded and enhanced presentation of the daily life of a realized Western woman. It will be particularly valuable for metaphysical students of authors like Eckhart Tolle, ACIM, Joel Goldsmith, and Krishnamurti.
The writing is plainspoken yet eloquent in the same breath, both accessible and deep because it builds gradually and assumes no special background or knowledge--truly for a general audience.
Authors like Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie have described in a fairly brief way their own spontaneous awakenings. This work offers a gigantic leap in the level of detail provided and the practical consequences seen day-to-day.
MOST OF ALL this book is an inspiration, a reassurance, a touchstone, a reckoning of how the minutia of a troubled, fearful life can fall away into oblivion literally overnight and never return.
An unsophisticated reader of this book may first view it as a fiction, a fantasy, an unbelievable concoction--practitioners will see the truth in it at once. It develops at a slow matter-of-fact pace. By the time you are done following the author for two years of tumultuous personal growth you will cultivate in yourself an intimate understanding of the awakened state.
These descriptions and reflections are not doctrinal or cosmological but strictly experiential. What is it like to live the ineffable life? She says "Isn't it the case that the moments in a lifetime most worth saving, most worth saying, are not accessible to the reaching fingers of words.... As soon as you look at a thing enough to collect words for it, it has ceased to be." Nevertheless the author is a writing instructor and words are her tools, she "cannot help wanting to use them : they are there, sharp, solid, ready for use" and that she does as a true artisan. "I so dearly love the rich interior that I want to convey what it feels like. Using language well is a way of paying homage to this consciousness, a way of showing my gratitude for what has come. If the words could come out right...it might make a place for others...to feel their own lives change." The words did come out right--full of fresh pixelations to titillate your imagination.

She makes it clear that she has a new and better life--more loving, confident, happy, alert, creative, substantial and stress-free. "During the first year or so it was like being intoxicated" "My mind is generally quiet unless there is a need for it to become engaged and then it works wonderfully well-better than before this change" Problems are not solved by thinking about them and mentally rehearsing but by a kind of interior looking from which knowing emerges. She now has a much deeper happiness far beyond the situational joys of vanity appeasement.

Her message crosses denomination boundaries and can be a gift that will unleash the self-inflicted bondage of the egoic mind both for the devotee and the lay person.
The normally humble tone of the book changes with a more declarative warning as the Epilogue launches:
"What do you know?"
"I know what I know. The knowledge is 24 karat. It is elemental, every atom of it like every other. It is cut with nothing, diluted with nothing. It is seen not through any lens. There is nothing in me that is not knowing. I am not separate from knowing. There is not a knower and a known.
I do not know anything that you do not also know. Here is the difference: Everything that used to obscure the knowing has gone from me. All I used to believe myself to be has fallen away like overcooked meat from a bone.
There are many kinds of knowledge, only one of them worth everything, only one of them not subject to opinion or degree or damage. If you come to that, you will know what I mean. If you don't, listen to someone who has. There are people in the world who have this ultimate knowledge. They know what they are talking about. If you object or disagree with what they say, take the difficult route: assume it is because you do not understand. Assume you need to open your eyes wider, open your heart more, quiet the noise in your head. Assume it is you, not them. The longer you insist it is them, the further and harder you are pushing yourself from your own knowing.
Forget about time. It is an invention, a child's drawing. It is a lie, a little game."
There is nothing the presence cannot accomplish, it is above all the limitations of time, space, distance, fear, opinion and pain. It can solve all problems with unmistakable certainty and clarity.
"Most people go to their graves believing suffering is unavoidable. How sad that is. If you turn from the possibility that it could be otherwise, you will suffer until the day you die." "The liberated state is a real thing."
Highly recommended.

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