It's Real

A presence within you that has never suffered. It lives in joy that has no cause.
It is who you most deeply are.
~ Jan Frazier

“Enlightenment is an actual condition of consciousness. The enlightened state is not simply a heightened form of something on the spectrum of known experience, like wisdom or joy or compassion (though all of these are in abundant supply). Enlightenment is a condition of unwavering well-being that carries on independent of whatever is going on in the realm of familiar life. All endeavors are undertaken with clarity, effortlessness, and an absence of stress. There is a sense of needing nothing in order to be content, for life to be ultimately fulfilling.

Fear and desire, concern with past and future—these familiar occupations of the mind are gone. The mind has emptiness for its default. For lack of realizing that liberation is a real phenomenon, and that it is the fundamental condition of humankind, people suffer needlessly all their lives. Which leads to my secondary purpose: to make the case that ultimate freedom is a possibility for ordinary people leading ordinary lives. Liberation is not the sole province of spiritual leaders, of ascetics and saints. One needn't live in a cave in Nepal. There are growing accounts of the transformation of Westerners living regular lives.

I want to make it so that people can no longer move through their lives—through every precious day—without an awareness of what is possible for them. If only people realized how constantly available this ecstatic state is, how dearly close to the beating human heart! We all carry it around with us, everywhere, always: it sleeps all night in our very beds; it is with us in the grocery store, at the library, in a traffic jam, at work, in the midst of a fight with a friend.

It. What is it? It is who you most deeply are. It is who you are, apart from whatever else you believe yourself to be: mother, laborer, conservative, Jew, man, Christian, fool, intellectual. It is who you are in spite of every awful thing that has ever happened to you, every awful thing you have ever done. It is not subject to harm of any sort, nor even to death. It is fresh and innocent and profoundly wise. It is shot through with joy.

It's real. In fact, it is the most real thing there is...

Imagine this: whatever has weighed on you suddenly no longer weighs. It may still be there, a fact in your life, but it has no mass, no gravity. All that has ever troubled you is now just a feature of the landscape, like a tree, a passing cloud. Every bit of emotional and mental turmoil has ceased: the entire burden, some form of which has been with you as long as you can remember. A thing familiar as your closest friend — as much a part of you as the language you speak, the color of your skin — is utterly, inexplicably gone. Into the startling emptiness flows a quiet joy that buoys you morning, noon, and night, that goes everywhere you go, into any kind of circumstance, even into sleep. Everything you undertake happens effortlessly. You are happy, but for no reason. Nothing bothers you. You feel no stress. When a problem arises, you know what to do, you do it, and then you let it go. . . . Because your equanimity is disconnected from anything in your outer life, you know that no matter what challenge you are handed — for the rest of your life — the peace will sustain.”

~ Jan Frazier, When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening is Jan’s day-by-day account of the shift in consciousness and its alteration of her life.

"Until the summer of her fiftieth year, Jan Frazier lived a life typical for a well-educated, middle-class American woman. A divorced mother of two teenagers, she was making a modest living writing and teaching writing. Following a Catholic childhood in Miami in the 1960s, she had studied English in college and graduate school. In her late twenties, longing for hills and snow, she moved to New England, where she was active in the peace movement. But the inner peace she sought always eluded her. Then, in August 2003, she experienced a radical transformation of consciousness. Fear fell away from her, and she was immersed in a state of causeless joy that has never left her. While she has continued her life as writer, teacher, and mother, she has discovered it is possible to live a richly human life free of suffering. Her wish now is to communicate the truth that within every person is a pool of calm well-being that waits patiently to be stirred to life."