NEW BOOK! Awaken NOW: The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening

I’m happy to share with you that immediately after its release, Awaken NOW’s
Kindle Edition became the #1 Hot New Release on Amazon in Eastern Philosophy!

[Amazon links to Kindle & Paperback editions are at the end of this post.]

vine hand itself.

I’m happy to tell you that I have a major new book, and that it’s all fresh material, my first all-new book in three years. It’s available right now in the Kindle edition, and will be available in paperback later today or tomorrow. This book discloses all the secrets of The Living Method of Awakening. I have left nothing out.

Awaken NOW shares what goes on in a typical Awakening Session as I conduct them today, in 2016, 3 years after I disclosed the original methodology in The Book of Undoing. Other than the introduction, which I’m reprinting here, the entire book is the mock transcript of a single conversation where a student and I go all the way from A to Z–from our first “Hello,” to my welcome of their Self-Realization.

This book even includes the rather famous “Homecoming Story” a.k.a. “Void Story.” That story, within the context of an Awakening Session, has woken up hundreds of people around the world. Previously secret inquiries and investigations which form The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening abound throughout. Without question it is the most important thing I’ve written since The Book of Undoing, and like that book, I’m confident that Awaken NOW is going to have a serious impact on our Nondual community, and perhaps beyond.

I will be extremely grateful for positive reviews on Amazon, and first-person awakening experiences that I can print on the website. This book is going to awaken a lot of people, and reawaken a flood of others. I hope you’re one of them!

Thanks so much for your constant encouragement and support.

All love,

Fred

Awaken NOW

The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening

By

Fred Davis

Edited by John Ames

Introduction

About This Book
&
How to Read It

It’s been three years since I wrote The Book of Undoing, which first publicly presented the bones of what has now become The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening. It was some of my first how-to writing on the subject of enlightenment. A lot has happened since then.

Undoing had an immediate impact within the Nondual community. The Kindle edition moved into the top ten of Amazon’s Eastern Philosophy category the first day it was published and stayed there for nearly a year. A whole bunch of people have woken up from it. As a result, I became a go-to spiritual teacher quite literally overnight.

I went from doing a few sessions a week to doing several sessions every day. I’ve slowed down a bit in the last year, but I still conduct numerous sessions every week. My point is that in very short order I received and shared massive experience in helping people to come to initial Self-Realization. In many cases I then helped those people begin to orient within the new reality they discovered, so I also got a terrific amount of exposure and education on the wonders and hazards of the post-awakening experience.

Most of my teaching practice today is spent helping people in post-awakening. It’s not enough just to wake up; we have to clear up as well if our awakening is going to amount to something more than a wonderful, but transitory phenomenon. But you can’t get to post-awakening unless you’re a Self-Realized being, so helping people over the most difficult hurdle we ever face—initial awakening—is still a big part of what I do.

But how I do what I do has undergone radical change from the days when I had greater supplies of raw Shakti and enthusiasm than I did experience or skills. While my basic teaching has remained consistent since I outlined it in my first book, Beyond Recovery, my own level of clarity has significantly broadened and deepened in the light of this heavy dose of field experience, and so has the approach to my work.

This book is really an Awakening Session between two covers—as I conduct them now, which is quite different from how I conducted them three years ago. For one thing, the investigative dialogue track is a whole lot longer. The Book of Undoing’s “recording” took up seventy pages. Those pages covered not only the initial Awakening Session (about forty pages), but also two follow-up sessions. This book is a single, unbroken dialogue between teacher and student that goes on for well over a hundred pages.

I had no sooner published Undoing than new lines of inquiry—and numerous teaching stories—began to “arrive.” I don’t know a better way to put it than that. There was never an effort on my part to “develop” any kind of “technique.” As I worked, stuff came out of my mouth on its own and proved to be effective, so I adopted it.

I can only say that The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening has an energetic life of its own, and it constantly improves itself. That’s why I christen it a living method; it’s always changing. Consequently, there is almost no material in Awaken NOW that appeared in The Book of Undoing. Let me tell you about a standout example of that.

A couple of months after Undoing came out, right in the middle of an Awakening Session with a gentleman from the Carolina coast who was sitting in my living room, I was given a truly remarkable gift. During that session, for the first and thus far last time in my life, there came a point where I felt that I was truly “channeling.” I didn’t feel like I was channeling some other being, but rather some other knowing. It’s unexplainable.

The upshot is that an amazing story spontaneously fell out of my mouth. As Rumi says, “Do you think that I know what I’m doing? / That for one breath or half breath I belong to myself? / As much as a pen knows what it’s writing.” In that moment I was like Rumi’s pen; I had no control whatsoever over the workings of my mouth or lips.

At the conclusion of the story, my visitor came to Self-Realization with a shock. He looked at me in amazement and exclaimed, “Fred, what you’re doing is beyond Nonduality.” And he was right. This teaching is sort of beyond Nonduality, because in the end, while Nonduality is an incredibly sharp and skilled path, most of us still think of it as a path leading toward that ever-elusive awakening that we hope is going to occur sometime out in the future.

The Living Method is about waking up now. The Living Method is about your waking up today.

That spontaneous story, which I call the “Homecoming Story,” is included in this book. Having to transmit it to you through the written word naturally incurs certain limitations. Nonetheless, “Homecoming” is a powerful story, however it’s used, and it is one of the sharpest arrows in my quiver. Handle it with care.

This teaching offers no path to initial awakening, because there is no path to initial awakening. This teaching offers you the opportunity to simply notice that you’re already awake, which is what this book is designed to help you do. When the truth of your always-already-awakeness has been recognized and acceptance of that truth has actively begun, all of the authentic teachings you’ve previously been exposed to will suddenly begin to make sense. The complex puzzle of life begins to knit itself together automatically.

Here’s a good analogy. In Twelve Step recovery, they don’t teach alcoholics how to quit drinking. There is no path to quitting drinking. You simply “put the plug in the jug” as they often say. Twelve Step recovery is really about how to live a life that doesn’t require you to booze it up in order to endure it.

AA is an organization that gives members basic instructions on how to go sane.

That’s also what The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening is offering you: the chance to go sane, but sanity is not measured by the traditional stick of society. It is measured by its relationship to What Is.

Enough history. Let’s move on to practical matters of application. If you’ve read The Book of Undoing, then you already know how to read this one. If you haven’t, please listen up. These directions may be critical to your success. Give yourself a rare break and approach this opportunity exactly as directed.

Read this book as if you are actually in a live session with me. Take your time with it. Check in with yourself on every question, and where an answer is expected, answer to yourself. Allow yourself only two answering options, “Yes” and “No.” Anything else is dishonest weaseling that will get you nowhere.

Actually do every exercise—they’re not long or difficult, and you’ll find them to be surprisingly revealing. Forget that some of them seem silly—just do them. Everyone I work with is smart, but this is one area where that big brain of yours that you’re so proud of won’t help you! These exercises work, which is my only criterion and should be yours as well. I suggest you refrain from taking any shortcuts. Do the work.

Put your attention on your actual experience with each exercise here and now, and not on your thinking about that experience. Avoiding and denying the truth is our default position as unconsciously awake beings. The tighter you can hold your focus, the better this book will serve you.

If you wander, fine, everybody does. Simply come back, gently, again and again to right here, right now, and once again focus on the book. And no scolding yourself! It’s counter-productive. You’re doing the best you can, and if you’re sincere that will be good enough.

Sincerity is everything. If you’ve come to argue, challenge, or debate, then go suffer some more and come back here when you really want to wake up. Try it my way. If my way fails, you can always go back to your old way of thinking. Trust me, it’s not going anywhere.

Most crucially, trust the process. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat there with a client with my big brain saying, “There’s no way this one is going to get it.”  They then wake up with remarkable clarity just to give me a shot of humility.

So listen, trust me on this, if I can’t tell, you can’t tell. 

It’s going to take you a good while to go through this material. Be alert, but relax the best you can. You can’t power your way through this successfully. Be willing to surrender instead. Remain open to new possibilities, because no one is ever ready for the truth. In the end, all of us are surprised.

Truth is not “somewhere” in this book. Truth is presented all throughout it, and you can recognize your True Nature at any moment. Stay involved and pay attention.

If you’re really, really serious about waking up, then if it’s at all possible, I encourage you to take a day, or a night, and devote it to reading this book. Clear the deck of everything else. In a live session we take only one short break, right between the two “rounds.” See if you can keep a similar focus. Sit, read, do the exercises—and wake up.

Ultimately, of course, how you work with this book will simply happen, and whatever happens is what’s supposed to happen. That really is true. There is no alternative to the What Is. Ever. So relax and let it unfold. See what happens. Let your natural curiosity pull you in the right direction.

If for some reason you find that you can’t easily “get into” the book, then ego is scared and simply being uncooperative. We all have this reaction, it’s just a matter of degree. Resistance is covering for denial. The choice between freedom and suffering seems like an obvious one, but in practice it can prove to be more difficult than one might guess.

Just for now, let me be the teacher and you the student. Curiosity is great, but skepticism is death. Don’t go there. If you’re going to start out in doubt, then do it by doubting your own assumptions, not this teaching. Your core assumptions, as you’ll soon discover, are all wrong anyway, so you might as well start getting used to that idea.

This method sets up conditions in which most people can and will tell themselves the obvious truth. That’s the funny thing about this. You’re not somehow devoid of grace or mystically disconnected, or anything remotely akin to that. No one is. Everyone who is not consciously awake is in common everyday denial. You are lost in the dream of separation, and the idea here is to allow you, Awakeness, to snap that spell if you want to.

Here are the four stages of the dream:

• We make stuff up.
• We believe the stuff we make up.
• We suffer because we believe the stuff we make up.
• We come to spirituality to try and overcome the suffering we’re causing ourselves by believing the stuff we’re making up to begin with.

This book can help short out that unconscious circuitry.

Ever since you became a seeker, you’ve been like a dog that’s chasing its tail. Strangely, it’s possible for you to chase your tail for virtually forever. Most seekers do. Most seekers will live and die waiting for the grand day when they catch up with their tail.

Most doesn’t have to mean you. Yours can be a different path. In fact, it is already a different path. That’s why you’ve been drawn to this oh-so-sharp teaching.

What I know with 100% certainty is that at some point you are going to quit running in that circle. You can chase your tail almost forever, but not forever. We all (meaning all One of us) eventually wake up—in one so-called lifetime or another. Why not in this lifetime? In fact, why not quit running today?

Awaken.

NOW.

Fred Davis
Columbia, SC
February, 2016

Awaken NOW

The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening

Kindle Edition

Awaken NOW

The Living Method of Spiritual Awakening

Paperback Edition