• Examines the direct perception of non-dual reality and shows its implications for navigating ordinary reality in an open, compassionate, and ever-maturing way

• Shares the author’s most significant awakening experiences and explores their psycho-emotional and psychospiritual foundations

• Offers practical teachings for spiritual understanding, emotional development, and the cultivation of compassion

Exploring the direct perception of non-dual, “non-ordinary” reality, Paul Weiss shows how it reveals guidance for navigating ordinary reality in an open, compassionate, and ever-maturing way. He affirms our shared human potential for “direct experience” of reality--unmediated by our more relativistic mental faculties--and that this experience is also an essential dimension of our conscious capacity for growth. He shares his most significant awakening experiences and the circumstances leading up to them, exploring the personal and transpersonal dimensions of the experiences and their psycho-emotional and psychospiritual foundations. He points to such experiences as part of our ongoing integration as human beings and the essential path of practice that supports our availability to them.

Interweaving perspectives from psychology and neuroscience with important lessons from spiritual traditions around the world, Weiss explores how to live a life of integrity, reciprocity, and openness to reality, offering practical teachings for spiritual understanding, emotional development, and the cultivation of compassion, viewed by ancient Buddhist sages as the true meaning of existence. He addresses such human qualities as vulnerability, empathy, reciprocity, openness, and intimacy and how they express and participate in deeper conscious truths. The author also examines practical wisdom teachings within both Buddhist and Christian paths to realization.

Combining engaged mysticism with transcendent humanism, along with thought-provoking poetry, Weiss offers a living vision of a non-dual way of experiencing the world, a path that supports our functional, emotional, and spiritual maturity.

Paul Weiss began serious practice in zen as well as tai chi in 1966 and spent years in several training and monastic settings, including in schools and clinics in China. In 1981 he founded The Whole Health Center in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he teaches, counsels, and offers meditation retreats and his True Heart, True Mind Intensive. A life-long poet, he is the author of two collections of poems and essays, You Hold This and Moonlight Leaning Against an Old Rail Fence: Approaching Dharma as Poetry.

PRELUDE
All Reality Begins with this Moment of Experience

INTRODUCTION
When Nothing Experiences Itself as Everything

PART ONE
Tripping over the Light
someone does
Early Foundations
jacob boehme
Inexhaustible Non-exclusiveness
it’s that simple
The District of Lu
0
The Pterodactyl
good news
A Feather on the Breath of God
the ecstasy of table manners
On the Subway
unwrinkled
Dancing at a Festival
spring morning
Neither Life nor Death
sign on the door
In the Arc of the Fountain
imagine beloved
I and My Father Are One
drink and you will see

PART TWO
When Our Life Becomes the Path
fairy tale

Memos to Myself
in me the universe
Vulnerability
Nurture and Nature
Reciprocity
genesis
Keep the Energy Circulating
whirling
Stories and States
the comedian
Identification and Intimacy
the blaze
Intimacy and Healing
go to her now
Intention and
Openness
buddha field
Transparency and Coherence
clearing

The Path of Practice
The Path within the Buddha Dharma
for our time
The Path within the Jesus Dharma
why didn’t anybody tell us?

The Reconciliation of Reality
Compassion, Integration, and Healing
Tonglen
The Twin Principle
The Activity of Love
Being at Home
at the edge of the great marsh

Embodying
Mantra and Mudra
your left palm
Comprehensive Detached Awareness
The Temple of the Body
Dimensions of Transparency
where the river widens

Epilogue
after the april retreat

Useful Terms

Index