The Freedom of Being is a book that invites the earnest seeker to take an honest look at what motivates the spiritual life. Is the deepest longing to become radically free, to directly encounter the truth, to live in the real world without the limitation of mind-generated identity? Or is the longed-for thing simply to live a happier life, to feel better, to suffer less? This book helps the reader to sort out one from the other, and then offers clear, life-changing guidance toward each end.
The Freedom of Being
Paperback
$17.00
The Freedom of Being
Kindle Edition
“I heartily recommend Jan’s new book. The writing is clean, clear, and bright, giving us an articulate and detailed map of the territory of awakening. She describes in intricate detail the interplay between thought and outer circumstances. We don’t need to fix our circumstances in order to be happy. We awaken within whatever our circumstances are, giving us the opportunity to step into freedom in each moment.” – Alice Gardner, author of Finding Our Way Forward
“Rarely in the world of non-duality do you come across a book like The Freedom of Being. Seldom, if ever, has there been a book written with such remarkable clarity, gentle humour and outright in-your-face directness. A text that leads the reader through every avenue of what it means, not only to become awakened, but a road map illuminating the terrain and pitfalls along that journey-less road. Highly accessible, no matter where one finds oneself in the quest for realisation, direct and wonderfully potent, this small volume is without question a work created from the purest of sources. If you only ever purchase one more book in this genre, do yourself the biggest possible favour by making sure it is this one.” – Deon Ashton, UK
Excerpt:
“Begin with this, and end with this: the present moment is it. It’s all there is. It will never be otherwise. When you give yourself to the present moment, you sense the eternal that is your deep interior. Here, there is the felt oneness of the spiritual and whatever might have looked like the antithesis of the spiritual. Awareness in the act of feeling its aliveness, its beingness: that is the moment. That’s life. That’s you. That’s the whole thing. It’s the sensation of being awake. There’s not a perceiver and a perceived. There’s not a someone experiencing a something. It’s only in the mind that the whole can be teased apart into components, or that moments can be strung together into an image of ‘life’. See that you do not exist apart from your aliveness this moment. What better way to prepare the ground for awakening than to be alive to the present? What could be a more fertile field for transformation? Who would awakening come to, if not one who’s awake to this moment?”
Paperback: 288 pages / Weiser Books 2012