This is part one of a two-part series.
Stephan Bodian is a gifted spiritual teacher whose work has brought wisdom to countless contemporary seekers in an accessible and deeply transformative way. Founder of the School for Awakening and author of several influential books—including Meditation for Dummies (with more than half a million copies sold), Wake Up Now, and Beyond Mindfulness—Bodian is widely respected for his rare ability to bridge timeless spiritual insight with modern psychological understanding. Trained as a psychotherapist, Bodian has pioneered a uniquely skillful approach that integrates self-inquiry, non-dual realization, and practical psychological insight. We recently spoke from his home in the Canary Islands about his newest book, Infinite Awakening: A Guide to Nondual Wisdom and the Pathless Path, which offers a comprehensive guide to the “pathless path” of spiritual awakening.
Mark Matousek: In the preface to your new book, the spiritual teacher Adyashanti writes that there is “a spiritual potency within each of us, a drive to awaken to our true being, or reality, or God.” You go on to say that this potency seems to be hardwired into our DNA and deeply programmed into our nervous system. Can you say more?
Stephan Bodian: Yes, I totally agree with Adya on that. The Sufis say God is a hidden treasure and wants to be known. He—excuse the gender pronoun—created the world and human beings in order to know himself. I think there’s something innate about that. The mystery wants to be revealed.
We human beings are the vehicle for this process because of our advanced level of understanding and consciousness. As for how that translates personally for each of us, we experience it as a longing at the core of our being, which we often glimpse as children. We may even hang out there for a long time as children. Then there’s the reality that we encounter as we grow into adults. This discrepancy gets more and more pronounced, more and more painful, until we feel the desire to wake up out of the dream that we feel trapped in. That’s how the process unfolds in our human lives. Often it’s experienced as suffering; in the Buddhist tradition, it’s called samsara. In the Hindu tradition, it’s called maya. We sense that there’s something beyond this suffering, something deeper, and we long to be reunited with that.
MM: This process begins sometimes as a spiritual crisis, a deep absence of meaning. As a psychologist, what are some of the presenting problems you encounter with clients?
SB: A sense of being out of order in some way, feeling like you want to come back into harmony. Most of the time, we blame it on ourselves. We’re not good enough, we’re not accomplished enough, whatever that might be. I think at a certain point, you begin to realize that there’s maybe something wrong with the dream itself. Maybe it isn’t only my fault and that, in fact, there is something pure and real and true and beautiful inside of me and inside of all of us, and there are ways of contacting that. Then we set out on the path, which can often be what’s called a “pathless path.” There are traditional paths, like Buddhism, like Hinduism, which give you practices that have been pre-established for you. And there are less conventional approaches. The pathless path often involves wandering from teacher to teacher, book to book, teaching to teaching, the way we do so much in the West these days. We don’t have books that actually guide us on the pathless path. That’s what this book is intended to do.
MM: This path is not for the faint of heart. The potency that Adyashanti talks about tends to be ruthless and uncontrollable, like a wildfire that burns up everything in its path. What is getting burned up?
SB: Whatever is in the way of our realizing and embodying the truth of our being. So, falsehood, untruth, lack of clarity, obscurations, attachments. In the Buddhist tradition, they talk about the three poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance. Or attachment, aversion, and ignorance. Those get burned up in the fire, ultimately. For many of us, most of us, this includes some identification with a separate self. Obviously, it doesn’t happen overnight, although it may. Usually, there’s a journey, a process that we go through, which can be a lifetime’s work.
MM: Isn’t it also true that one can burn up a lot and then have major setbacks that thrust her back into ignorance and unknowing?
SB: Absolutely. I think that’s an essential part of the process. That’s one of the reasons my book is called Infinite Awakening, because we wake up out of the dream, and then another dream arises that we again wake up from. It’s an endless process of waking up.
MM: You talk about a fundamental shift in the locus of identity that comes with awakening. Could you say a bit more about this?
SB: Yes. I think that’s a crucial identifying characteristic of what I would call a genuine awakening. We can have glimpses into the truth and beauty and clarity of our essential nature, but until we’ve had this shift, we haven’t crossed over the threshold, you might say. This is my own experience. I practiced for a long time with Jean Klein, a beautiful teacher, and before that for many years as a Zen practitioner. I had many beautiful glimpses of this other state but then would fall back into old patterns, as you mentioned.
MM: Does this new state affect your emotional life?
SB: Over time, but that’s the process that occurs after awakening. On the journey of waking up, first we have that profound shift in the locus of our identity, and then the rest of our lives is the process of embodying that. In other words, learning to live our life as an individual in relationship to other individual people, but from that space. Mostly at the beginning, we keep falling back into old reactive patterns. That goes on for years and years, and I think to some degree for one’s whole lifetime. I think we need to acknowledge that and be compassionate with ourselves.
MM: How exactly did this shift in the locus identity happen for you?
SB: It was pretty inconsequential in a way. In the first year after meeting Jean Klein, I attended several of his retreats. He would often say, “The seeker is the sought. The looker is what he or she is looking for.” As I was saying earlier, we already are what we’re seeking. There’s a mystery and a paradox in that. At one point, I had an errand to do and went off in the car. As I was crossing a bridge, that phrase suddenly went through my head. I realized — strange as this may sound — that I was driving through myself, that the vast space in which I was moving was who I am. That I am that space and that openness. That this is my true nature. There’s this being I take myself to be, moving through the vastness of who I am. Of course, there’s a paradox in that, moving through yourself. That marked the shift into knowing that this is who I am. It’s not personal. It’s beyond the personal. It’s all-encompassing, and it’s all-welcoming. It welcomes everything that arises without judgment, without rejection. It was a beautiful moment. Then I had Kundalini moving through my body, which I’d never had before or since. [laughs]
MM: How does that feel?
SB: Like energy shooting out the top of your head. [laughs]
MM: Oh, really? Is that all? [laughs]
SB: Yes. I’d never had an experience like that. It was like, “Whoa, this is really interesting.” Eventually, it died down, but the depth of that experience continued for a number of days. Then it faded into the background but the realization itself never left. It’s so hard to describe. It’s unlike any experience that one could have, absent psychedelics. It really does completely fill you with a deep knowing, which in my case became, as it sometimes does, irreversible.
MM: Extraordinary. I can’t wait to hear more about this life-changing process in the next part of our interview, Stephan.
