Preface

From time to time during my life, I have experienced dreams of guidance and what my future holds. I will relate a couple of brief examples. When I was 30, a friend asked me if I had ever asked for spiritual guidance in my dreams. The idea had never occurred to me. That night, before bed, I asked to be shown if there was anything important for me to add to my life or let go from my life for my highest good.

For the previous ten years, I had been a dedicated practitioner of a meditation technique that had been brought to the West by an Indian guru. That night, I dreamed that this guru was coming out of a private room and was caught off guard with a cigarette in his hand. Whoa! That was huge! Shaken but not stirred by this dream, I continued my meditation practice the following day. The next night, I dreamed that this guru said to me directly, “(This meditation technique) will not take you where you want to go.” Whoa! I was more shaken, but I continued my meditation practice the following day. The third night in a row, I had a similar dream about this guru and meditation technique, the details of which I can’t recall 34 years later. I stopped my meditation practice from that day on.

In a second example of dreams of guidance, in the early 1990s I dreamed that I was waiting in a queue, and a voice said to me, “You need to do further study, about how the mind works.” Over the following 12 or so years, on and off, I did do a lot more study into the nature of human learning, knowledge and intelligence, and I discovered a surprising thing. What we think we know with our minds is not at all the reliable copy of reality that it is commonly assumed to be. Even more surprising was the discovery that all the peace, joy, love and creativity that people could want are closer than we ever imagine. They are our very nature, merely veiled by what we think we know.

I have recently experienced major changes in my consciousness and way of being in the world. Throughout 2017 and 2018, I was very focused on living the insights and practices I describe in this book. For most of 2018, I found myself living a very quiet life, and I experienced a flood of dreams about my spiritual awakening and about soon assisting others with awakening. In that year, I recorded more than four hundred such dreams. On September 23, six days after my sixty-fourth birthday, my spiritual awakening began in earnest.

In one of the dreams I had that night, I was standing in the middle of the sloped auditorium of a small theater. One after another, five or six groups of two or three male voices sang, “Who are you?” in beautiful, heavenly harmonies, a cappella, from different parts of the auditorium. Some groups were tenor pitch, others a bit lower, and the last was bass voices. The dream didn’t need any interpretation. My awakening was beginning. Following the dream, energy began to move in my body and to shake it intermittently for about half an hour.

I have wanted to write this book for quite a while, but I could not ignore the feeling, dreams and messages that said, “Not yet.” One time, early in 2018, I tried. I wrote down some key things I wanted to say on different sheets of paper which could become different chapters, and I lay them out on a table. Nothing would flow. I could not write the book from my mind. So, I accepted that life wanted me in downtime a while longer.

Then, in January of 2019, I came across a list of “things most people learn too late in life.” I thought it was cliched and completely inadequate, and again I felt the impulse to write this book. I had some thoughts about whether it might still be too soon, whether I might not be ready, but this time I couldn’t ignore the feeling, dreams and other messages that said, “Write it now!” As I began writing, I was surprised at how content was coming to me and flowing into the book. A week into writing, I experienced a strange sense. I looked back on the day’s writing and felt, “What I have written couldn’t have been different.”

While the practices I write about in this book are described in my own way and with my own emphasis, different ones have been recommended by various teachers over the centuries, including Eckhart Tolle and Noah Elkrief, to name a couple of present-day ones. Many of the particulars I discuss have been spoken of before, by one teacher here or another there. And yet, there is an overwhelming amount of conceptual and practical clutter, error and confusion in the world regarding spirituality, and many people are feeling frustrated. Through my long, deep and broad investigations in this area, I have finally been able to see through the muddle and pull the essentials together in a way that has served my own awakening well. Through intuitive inspiration, I have been able to present them here in a concise, unified and practical formulation that many will find makes things clear and gives their awakening the traction they are wanting. I hope that you are one of those.

Andrew Seaton
January 2019