End Your Story, Begin Your Life
The Revolutionary Practice That Sets You Free
by Jim Dreaver
156 pp. eBook, $10.95
Now Books. Sebastopol, California, 2008
Paperback release coming spring, 2009
Review by Jenifer Ransom
In Vibrance contributing writer Jim Dreaver's new book End Your Story, Begin
Your Life, he gives the key to inner peace and eventual enlightenment: disidentifying
with the "stories" that we think make us who and what we are. The basic
practice, which keeps us grounded in our true state of being, is stepping back
with our awareness. This reminder is given throughout the book in various forms,
i.e.: "Do it now. Step back with your awareness...Stay in this place of pure,
witnessing awareness, and the story loses its power over you."
The litmus test of awakening or enlightenment, he asserts, is in how we deal
with life's difficult changes and challenges—what Hamlet referred to as
"the slings and arrows of outrageous fate." The mantra given in the
book when facing such difficulties is: Ah, I welcome, or at least accept, the
presence of this conflict in my life. It is showing me where I am not yet free.
As an example, he relates his own experience of having three strokes within
several months (which according to him, came out of the blue), each worse than
the last. Rather than allowing himself to fall into fear, he was able to retain
his stability and inner peace, as he knew himself as pure consciousness that is
never born and never dies. Secure in this understanding, he was able to marshall
his energies and focus them on his healing. The book itself is a testament to
his success.
In the chapter on love ("Each Day Becomes Rich In Love"), Dreaver
also shares his journey through pain and anger after his girlfriend left him for
another man. She had lied to him about her affair, and he felt betrayed. But with
time and focused intention, he was able to let go of his story about her and their
relationship and move on, having reached a state of peace, understanding and acceptance.
Our suffering becomes something useful to us, an "agenda for being present,"
as he puts it. He writes: "The power in adopting a truly welcoming attitude
is that it indicates that you accept where you are right now. You may not like
it but you accept it. Acceptance, in turn, brings an immediate relaxation, an
ease of being and an allowing that may then open the door for the shift in perception
called awakening."
Dreaver studied with the Advaita Vedanta teacher Jean Klein, who he frequently
refers to throughout the book. The ultimate teaching of this path is that there
is actually no individual "person" or independent self: "The psychological
entity we take ourselves to be doesn't really exist, except as an idea, a story,
a fictional creation between our ears." Up until the age of two we were psychologically
free; the "fall from grace" equates to identifying with and believing
in our "self" and our stories (including our belief systems). Suffering
drops away when we return to our natural state as pure consciousness; in that
state, there is nothing in us to resist the flow of life, and there is literally
no "person" to suffer. It all comes down to freeing ourselves from duality
and experiencing our Oneness on a deep level. He quotes Kunihiro Yamate on our
oneness with all "others" who are actually mirror reflections of our
own self.
It's the latter part of that last sentence ("our own self") that keeps
me from embracing the book in its totality. Indeed there is an individual and
distinctive self, albeit one that is in a state of constant change. I feel we
can release attachment to the stories, while still experiencing them as "real"
in their own right. That's part of what makes life interesting, I think. At the
same time, I agree that for many, perhaps most of us, the ego has become a "counterfeit
self" and should never be taken as who we really are.
Dreaver's vision is that connecting with our essence, through disidentifying
with our stories and our egos, will ultimately lead to the much-prophesied shift
from separation to unity consciousness, from conflict to peace, from fear to love.
I fully agree with this perspective, and I am sure that those who practice the
teachings in the book will be among those leading the way in this transformation.
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