James Wood Teachings

Introduction

Excerpt from the Introduction to The Path of Awakening:

What is the Problem?

Humanity has a problem: Existence is agony.

Birth is painful, death is painful, and everything in between is painful: loss, failure, injury, disease, anger, loneliness, despair, heartache, ad infinitum. To exist is to be born, suffer, and die—a veritable danse macabre.

Of course, life has its moments of relief, respite, and pleasure—job promotions, island vacations, cocktail parties—but these experiences are temporary and incomplete. We are never completely fulfilled, or at least not permanently. No desire is ever fully satisfied, because within each satisfied desire is the seed of future craving. At the heart of life’s pain is a profound dissatisfaction, a sense of incompleteness or fundamental insufficiency—a sense of is this all there is? This can’t be it!—that persists despite everything we do.

Think about it. No matter what you do, nothing lasts. No matter how much money you make, it is eventually lost. No matter how much you eat, you get hungry again. No matter how much sex you have, you need more of it. Nothing of this world satisfies completely. Even if you are materially wealthy and surrounded by luxury, you get sick or have accidents. Even with the best doctors, you eventually die. No matter what you have, no matter who you are, no matter what you do—you lose it all at death.

This sounds like a bad nightmare, and it is.

To be free of it, you must awaken from it.

Spiritual awakening—not religion, not dogma, not words—but awakening itself, is the answer. Awakening is the end of all suffering, incompleteness, and dissatisfaction. Awakening ends your nightmare forever.

The Absolute: Truth

When your nightmare ends, what you awaken to is absolutely satisfying: your true nature. Your true nature is your spiritual essence. Complete, peaceful, and free, your true nature is beyond all comprehension and ultimately fulfilling. Because it is beyond all relative values, we can call it the Absolute. Awakening to the Absolute is everything you could ever want or need.

One way to look at the Absolute is that it is absolute truth. The Absolute is Truth* because it is what is revealed when you remove everything that is false. When you realize that you have been suffering from false ideas for as long as you can remember, it shocks you—and then you can begin to see what is actually there, what is primarily and ultimately true, the fundamental condition that you already are.

Truth is what you are.

Awakening is Truth-recognition. It is not an experience, state, or form of anything you can mentally know. The path of awakening involves finding false ideas, or lies, and seeing their falseness. When you see their falseness, you see truth. When you see nothing but Truth, you are awakened. This true seeing is awareness. Awareness is identical with your true nature.

To find Truth, you have to be a detective. You have to notice that things don’t add up, like a bad alibi. Then you have to find clues and follow them to their source, arriving at Truth no matter what, freeing you from your pain.

Freedom

To free yourself from pain, you must remove what keeps you bound to it. The absolute freedom of awakening in the average person is obscured by pain. You have to remove the cause of your pain to be free, just as a prisoner must break the chain of his leg-iron to escape. Eliminate what binds you, and Freedom is revealed. You don’t create Freedom, you are it, and you fall into it when you get rid of false ideas.

The unawakened condition is like a powerful state of hypnosis that you are convinced is true. For example, if you were hypnotized into thinking that you were a convict and your leg-chain were real and unbreakable, you would not be able to break it—because the chain is an idea in your mind, an impenetrable thought. You have to break the thought—the chain in your mind—by fundamentally recognizing that there is no leg-chain. That is what frees you—not the thought “there is no leg-chain,” but the actuality of it, the clear seeing that the leg-chain is just a thought, a hypnotic suggestion.

Because the Absolute cannot be grasped, it is difficult to try to attain it as a positive value. It is far more effective to get rid of what blocks it in your awareness. To do this, notice that you are dissatisfied, trace your dissatisfaction back to its origin, and eliminate its cause—a false belief—revealing the satisfaction that is already there. Otherwise, you will not likely find it. This approach is not for the faint of heart because you have to face your deepest fears. It may be challenging, but the ultimate satisfaction of awakening is beyond anything you could imagine: better than sex, better than drugs, better than success, incomprehensibly, ultimately, absolutely better than anything.

The True Teaching

Spontaneous awakening is rare, and the path that leads to it is long and arduous. This random, self-guided path is the way of most people. Waiting for awakening to occur in this way is like wandering aimlessly on a desert planet, expecting to stumble upon a hidden diamond by accident. It’s not likely to happen. For this reason, it is ill-advised to leave your spiritual progress up to random events. It is much easier to embrace the true Teaching, the active form of Truth in the world that is reaching out to you, even now.

The true Teaching doesn’t just materialize out of ether; it enters the world through awakened human beings. Because the awakened person embodies Truth completely, it is helpful to find an awakened person, a true Teacher, to help you. Awakened people are Teachers because that is their function. Although there is only one Truth, it has many relative forms. The Teaching is one; its forms are many. The outward form of the Teaching is a body of instruction whose purpose is to awaken all beings.

Most people think that a spiritual teacher is a person outside you. This is not necessarily the case. The ultimate Teacher is Truth, or who you are in your essence, so you already have a Teacher inside you. Everyone does. You are your own Teacher. But having an external, flesh-and-blood Teacher makes your work easier. It is easier to listen to a voice outside of you than it is to listen to a voice inside, especially when you are a beginner on the path. Having a Teacher is a great benefit, as if the internal voice of Truth had been conveniently externalized for you as a person.

A Teacher has been there, has taken the steps that you must take if you are to awaken. He* is the one who can pull you from the quagmire. To a person who wants to awaken without an external Teacher, I would say that although it is possible, it is not advisable. It is extremely difficult to access your own spiritual wisdom consistently without help. On a self-directed path, your progress is sporadic and regression is common. Why would you want to prolong your suffering? A deliberate path of study with an external Teacher is far easier.

Remember: you are not alone. The Absolute knows about you, is trying to reach you this very moment. Don’t think that it is up to your own limited, conceptual intelligence to figure a way out of the quagmire. Your own, limited, conceptual intelligence is the quagmire. That is why it is so challenging to find a way out by your own effort. The harder you struggle, the deeper you sink. You need leverage, a stable platform that doesn’t move when you grasp it and pull. You have such leverage, waiting for you to extend your hand so it can pull you out.

The platform is this book. Let it help you.

Tips for Getting Started

If you are serious about awakening, here are a few guidelines.

First, you cannot know what awakening is with your mind. Waking up is radical, not to be approached casually, as if it were a trifle. You cannot know what it is. If you assume you know what awakening is, you will miss out. Strive to be the person who admits he knows little or nothing, and you can go far—as long as you realize that even the little bit you think you know is next to go out the window.

Second, true Liberation does not come from anything of this world. Nothing of this world satisfies. To awaken, you must be profoundly dissatisfied with everything the world has to offer. No possessions will save you, no ideas will save you, and no feeling-states will save you. No matter what you own, no matter what you believe, no matter what you experience, it’s all temporary and ultimately unsatisfying. You must abandon looking for salvation in anything of this world. That doesn’t mean that you don’t own, think, or feel anything; it just means that you have given up looking for salvation in those things. It also means that looking for salvation in those things is painful.

Third, you are inflicting this pain on yourself. No one is hurting you but you. This is the best news you could ever receive. Since you are the cause of your pain, you are also its solution. Blaming others doesn’t work. You are the cause of all of your suffering as well as the only one who can free yourself from it. If you don’t free yourself, no one else will.

Fourth, and finally, you must want awakening badly to have it. A Zen parable tells of a monk and his Master who are fishing in a small boat on a lake. The monk asks his Master, “How badly must one want awakening to have it?” The Master answers by throwing the monk into the lake and holding his head under water. When the monk is near drowning and desperate, the Master lets him up for air. He then asks the drenched, sputtering monk, “When you were under the water, what was it that you wanted more than anything else?” The monk gasps, “Air!” Then the Master says, “You must want awakening this badly or you will not have it.”

You must want awakening this badly or you will not have it.